Lev Manovich

Alla Efimova

Lev Manovitch

University of Chicago Press

Fascinated by the myth of the Russian avant-garde and scornful of official art, the West has been selective in its engagement with Russian visual culture. Yet how do contemporary Russian scholars and critics themselves approach the history of visual culture in the former Soviet Union? Taking its title from a Russian word that can refer to the 'texture" of life, painting, or writing, this anthology assembles thirteen key essays in art history and cultural theory by Russian-language writers. The essays erase boundaries between high and low, official and dissident, avant-garde and socialist realism, art and everyday life. Everything visual is deemed worthy of analysis, whether painting or propaganda banners, architecture or candy wrappers, mass celebrations or urban refuse. Most of the essays appear here in English for the first time. The editors have selected works of the past twenty years by philosophers, literary critics, film scholars, and art historians. Also included are influential earlier essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, V. N. Voloshinov, and Sergei Eisenstein. Compiled for general readers and specialists alike, Tekstura is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Russian and Soviet cultural history or in new theoretical approaches to the visual.

Russian Essays on Visual Culture

Tekstura

Hannah Arendt

Anne Wagner

Monica Smith

Christopher Squier

Kathryn Barulich

Jackie Valle

A successful artist in Munich and Berlin and a member of the Communist party, Carl Heidenreich was deemed a degenerate artist after the Nazi rise to power in 1933. His exhibition in Munich was abruptly canceled and he was held by the S.S. at Berlin's Moabit prison. During the Spanish Civil War, Heidenreich joined an anti-Stalinist Spanish Communist Party's unit to fight against fascism. Following their defeat and his incarceration in Barcelona's Modelo prison, Heidenreich fled to the United States via Martinique, settling in New York. There, he was welcomed by the community of German Jewish intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher. Heidenreich became one of the most prominent and admired artists within this circle. Carl/Karl: Three Takes on Heidenreich is a compendium of new scholarship, important primary sources, and recent oral histories accompanied by previously unpublished images. This volume chronicles and interprets the exile artist's late work, focusing on his abstract paintings and works on paper produced in New York in the postwar years. New and historical essays offer perspectives on the role of exile and migration, anti-fascism and communist politics, and the nonvisual senses to aid in recuperating Heidenreich's unique work for the present. Contributions by Hannah Arendt, Kathryn Barulich, Alla Efimova, Rachel Schreiber, Monica Smith, Christopher Squier, Jackie Valle, and Anne Wagner.

Three Takes on Heidenreich

Carl/Karl

Alla Efimova

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