Nikolai suetin biography definition
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CORPS CONCEPT: THE SOVIET COLLECTIVE
BY THE LAST DECADE of the Soviet Union’s existence, collectives were everywhere. As Oleg Kharkhordin tells us in his extraordinary study of the dialectic of collective and individual in Russia, the term kollektiv had come to designate the basic unit of Soviet society, “the most familiar and mundane reality of Soviet life.” Such groups, whether in factory, farm, or office, numbered some two and a half million in 1984. But it had not always been so. Far from an ordinary or universal feature of everyday life, the Soviet collective started out on the extreme fringe: Both before and after the October Revolution of 1917, it had a highly specific meaning as a “group linked to the proletarian revolutionary cause.”¹ And it is this revolutionary mode—rather than the ubiquitous collective of the Brezhnev stagnation—that has become a vital precedent for contemporary manifestations of collaborative authorship in the arts, including, perhaps most intriguingly of all, post-Soviet collectives eager to rescue a radical past repressed by the Terror of the late 1930s and later Soviet history. How can we understand the collective’s pendulum-like historical swings, and their significance for the pers
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The Charnel-House
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Il’ia Grigorievich Chashnik was born to an unremarkable Jewish family in Lyucite, Latvia on June 20, 1902. He spent most of his childhood in Vitebsk, leaving school at the age of eleven to work in a small watchmaking workshop.
From 1917 to 1919, Chashnik studied art with the local artist Iurii (Yehuda) Pen before moving to Moscow in 1919 to attend the newly-opened VKhUTEMAS [Higher State Art and Technical Studios]. Just a few months later, however, he transferred to the Vitebsk Art Institute in order to study under the Russian-Jewish folk painter and avant-gardist Marc Chagall. Soon he became enamored of the work of Kazimir Malevich, the mastermind of Suprematism. Malevich also happened to teach at the Institute, before receiving a promotion and taking it over during the winter of 1919-1920. El Lissitzky also mentored Chashnik briefly before departing to Western Europe.
Once his apprenticeship under Malevich began, Chashnik’s paintings underwent a radical change. Chashnik cultivated his own distinctive style within the Suprematist idiom, developing Malevich’s ideas of abstraction and non-figuration to produce floating geometric shapes with crossing planes. While Malevich composed white-on-white paintings wrapped in fragile stillness an
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Timestamp: Sat, 22 Feb 2025 03:22:04 UTC