Realities and Utopias: Abstract Painting in the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union

The present exhibition is the first of three planned at the Zimmerly Art Museum to highlight the work of Soviet painters who from the early 1960s through the 1980s worked within the tradition of abstract painting. It highlights artists who through their painting have consistently explored systems of abstract representation, often by reflecting on the utopian goals of the historical avant-garde.

Some seek more narrowly to elaborate a structural principle that either supports or otherwise ironically engages the various hermetic procedures of abstract painting. While most are interested in geometry as an expressive vehicle, this aspect only superficially unifies the work on view. The question here lies in how abstraction makes sense in terms of a dispersal of identity and historically determined categories despite claims by artists that might at first appear to shore up both. 

The works assembled here ask us to reconsider familiar concepts of periodization, the continuity of avant-garde traditions, and the boundaries that divide official and unofficial or nonconformist art. Yet they also stand as quintessential expressions of the culture of the Khrushchev thaw. Most of the painters whose work is shown here experienced the 1950s and 1960s as a new opening to the past and the West and responded by exploring nonobjective visual traditions. This "window" out on the world gradually closed after Khrushchev's challenge to nonconformist artists at the Manege exhibition of 1962 and the reaction that followed. 

Although we commonly identify abstract painting with the Russian avant-garde tradition, in the postwar period it was not the vehicle of a primarily Russian group of artists. Artists in other cultural centers made equally refined and historically grounded contributions. The web of connections, claims, appropriations, and disavowals can only add to the visual pleasure we take in viewing the paintings themselves.

Organized by Jane A. Sharp.