Nearly twenty years after the demise of the Soviet Union, Views and Re-Views invites a post-Cold War assessment of Soviet graphic arts and presents a stunning array of images spanning more than six decades from the time of the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) – during which period the Bolsheviks and their western-backed opponents struggled for control of the new state – to the late Soviet period.

Drawn from an extensive private collection of Soviet propaganda, this exhibition includes posters, cartoons, and photomontages. It suggests that artistic merit may be found in the service of political belief and subject to state regulation, and demonstrates stylistic diversity within works that are often characterized as Socialist Realism. It also exposes uncomfortable truths in Soviet views of the U.S. that can be evaluated anew, due to historical distance. In short, the exhibition asks viewers to view and re-view the relationship between the art of the high Soviet Union and that of the West, and perhaps to re-assimilate the art of the twentieth-century Soviet world into the mainstream of European and Western modernism.

This exhibition was organized by the Davi Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University.

The Robert Hull Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont is located in Burlington, the Fleming Museum is Vermont’s leading museum of art and anthropology. Since its opening in 1931, the Fleming Museum has brought world-class art and diverse visual culture to the University of Vermont and to the people of northern New England. With a collection of 20,000 objects from cultures worldwide and nine special exhibitions annually, the Museum attracts visitors of all ages from throughout the region.

Fleming Museum 61 Colchester Avenue Burlington, Vermont 05405 USA

www.uvm.edu/~fleming

Image: Mikhail Baljasnij, Communism means Soviets, plus the electrification of the whole country, 1930. Lithograph, 9 1⁄4” x 27 3⁄4”. Courtesy private collection

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