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Wandering Stars: Soviet Jewry in Prewar Art
Avant-garde Center on Shabolovka
2021
2021
The theme of Soviet national development is often seen as a realm of propaganda, initially animated by the experiments of national avant-gardes. The embodiment of the Jewish avant-garde, the Artistic Section of the Kultur-Lige (League for Jewish Culture), was dismantled by the Communist Party in the mid-1920s. From that point on, the image of Soviet Jewry and its associated themes came under increasingly strict control. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, Jewish themes in the USSR were pushed into the shadows, subordinated to the rhetoric of a "supranational" Soviet identity fused with anti-religious fervor.
The "integration" or "acculturation" of Soviet Jewry was part of a modernist project, where universalism was set against nationalism, tradition was turned into a museum artifact, and religion became a private family memory, hidden from the collective gaze. Modernism sought to sever ties with the 19th century, and the artists featured in this exhibition saw themselves as figures of a new era, distanced from the "old" Jewish world. Each of them navigated this distance in different ways, and the exhibition’s structure plays on these shifting perspectives, revealing the evolving interactions between Soviet and Jewish narratives, which themselves were continuously being redefined.
The exhibition brought together three interconnected spaces: visual art, publications from the 1910s to the 1940s that reflect the evolution of Jewish public life in Russia, and objects of Jewish religious life and folk art. The display included set and costume sketches for GOSET (the Moscow State Jewish Theater), drawings and murals inspired by expeditions to Jewish collective farms and communes, landscapes and portraits of Soviet shtetls, as well as film stills and posters. However, the exhibition’s central focus was the intimate paintings of the late 1930s and early 1940s, where artists sought to define and understand their own Jewish identity within the Soviet context.
The early 1940s serve as the exhibition’s upper boundary—not only as the end of the Soviet Jewish modernization project but also as the final chapter of pre-war Leningrad’s culture, which still retained a living connection to Russian modernism.
The "integration" or "acculturation" of Soviet Jewry was part of a modernist project, where universalism was set against nationalism, tradition was turned into a museum artifact, and religion became a private family memory, hidden from the collective gaze. Modernism sought to sever ties with the 19th century, and the artists featured in this exhibition saw themselves as figures of a new era, distanced from the "old" Jewish world. Each of them navigated this distance in different ways, and the exhibition’s structure plays on these shifting perspectives, revealing the evolving interactions between Soviet and Jewish narratives, which themselves were continuously being redefined.
The exhibition brought together three interconnected spaces: visual art, publications from the 1910s to the 1940s that reflect the evolution of Jewish public life in Russia, and objects of Jewish religious life and folk art. The display included set and costume sketches for GOSET (the Moscow State Jewish Theater), drawings and murals inspired by expeditions to Jewish collective farms and communes, landscapes and portraits of Soviet shtetls, as well as film stills and posters. However, the exhibition’s central focus was the intimate paintings of the late 1930s and early 1940s, where artists sought to define and understand their own Jewish identity within the Soviet context.
The early 1940s serve as the exhibition’s upper boundary—not only as the end of the Soviet Jewish modernization project but also as the final chapter of pre-war Leningrad’s culture, which still retained a living connection to Russian modernism.
Curator
Nadezhda Plungyan
Exhibition Design
Aleksandra Selivanova
Photography
Olga Akhmetieva
Nadezhda Plungyan
Exhibition Design
Aleksandra Selivanova
Photography
Olga Akhmetieva
