We are delighted to invite you to an evening talk with author Sjeng Scheijen, who will be discussing his new book, The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917–1935, with Elena Sudakova, Director of Pushkin House. The Avant-Gardists is a gripping narrative that traces the lives and activities of the key figures of the art movement that transformed the modern world.
October 1917. The Russian Revolution has wiped the old tsarist empire off the map. Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Lyubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, Vladimir Tatlin and other avant-garde artists have thrown themselves into the revolutionary struggle, transforming the visual landscape with their progressive murals, posters, installations and performances. Perplexing, loud and always delighted to offend the establishment, they gained endless notoriety but little official acclaim under the old regime.
Under the newly-established Soviet government, these former iconoclasts were given extraordinary responsibility to lead and reform museums, art schools and even the public design of inner cities. Some were appointed as high-ranking officials – Marc Chagall because head of culture in Belarus, and Kazimir Malevich head of the Soviet national museum department. Yet their moment was short lived. The new political leaders soon tired of these radical artists, and whilst their reputation grew in Europe, they fell out of favour, became marginalised and impoverished, and many were subject to repression, incarcerations and torture under Stalin.
Against a background of violent social and political change, Scheijen describes these events through the artists’ personal memories, drawn from existing and extensive new research in Russian and Ukrainian archives and museums and excerpts from diaries and correspondence. He reveals the extent of the avant-garde’s energy and determination to survive a totalitarian regime, civil war, hunger and terror, and provides exceptional insight into the lives of these avant-gardists, whose work left a legacy that transformed modern art.
Sjeng Scheijen is an internationally recognised specialist of Russian and Soviet art, residing in Amsterdam. He received his doctorate from the Slavic Department at Leiden University, and works as an independent author, curator and researcher. He has curated several important exhibitions, including Ilya Repin at the Groninger Museum, Netherlands; 19th-century Russian landscape painting at the National Gallery, UK; and Russian art from 1895 to 1917 at Bonnefantenmuseum, Netherlands. He was cultural attaché at the Royal Dutch Embassy in Moscow, and lived and worked in various cities in the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
Scheijen's first book, a biography of Sergei Diaghilev (Profile Books, 2009), was named one of the best books of the year in The New York Times and The Sunday Times. His latest book, The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917–1935 will be published in May 2024 by Thames & Hudson.
5a Bloomsbury Square London WC1A 2TA
