Russian Avant-Garde
Catherine Cooke

The revolutionary avant-garde of Russia in the Twenties was among the most fertile episodes of all Modernism. But the theoretical ideas underlying their challenging imagery and language have hitherto been only glimpsed. Since Stalin stamped out such enquiry in the early Thirties, key personalities were driven into obscurity. Soviet researchers permitted to touch this material could publish only circumscribed vignettes which neither mediated the cultural divide nor placed the ideas in their larger intellectual and political contexts.

Eight excellent articles, all in English: Russia’s First Architectural Books; The Costakis Collection; Form is a Function X; The First Exhibition of Modern Architecture in Moscow; Melnikov and the Constructivists; Iakov Chernikov 1889-1951; The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms; and Moscow Map Guide 1900-1930. Fully illustrated.