Nonconformists in Bratislava
Russian avant-garde 1955-1988
MúzeumCafé 10.
At first sight the expressions ‘nonconformist’ and ‘National Gallery’ do not seem to go together, since the former conjures up concepts alien to institutionalised structures. Yet in recent years this particularly exciting slice of Soviet-Russian art has been highlighted all over the world. The Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava recently held a large-scale exhibition of such work. As elsewhere, the exhibition presented Soviet-Russian contemporary art in its unusual and varied contexts, as well as its appearance in various locations, Russian and European private collections, commercial galleries, private and state museums, in effect demonstrating events developing within art, as well as the annually changing focal elements of reception. The exhibition in Bratislava deserves attention particularly because it also featured those who already in the earliest times, in the 1960s, played a great role in letting the world know about these works of art during the decades of dictatorship. Those people’s lives were decisively influenced by Nazi dictatorship, knowledge of which contributed to understanding about the relation between a totalitarian regime and art. The exhibition included the collection of the German and Ukrainian-Jewish Bar-Gera couple, who moved from Israel to Cologne a few years after the world sensation when, in 1960, Soviet leader Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev banged the table with a shoe during a General Assembly of the United Nations. What is not so well known is that about two years later Khrushchev also wrote his name into art history when he expelled from Soviet art life avant-garde artists presenting their work at an exhibition held in Moscow’s Manege.