From Publishers Weekly
Sotheby's auction of avant-garde Soviet art, held in Moscow in 1988, introduced to the West a generation of painters and sculptors who for years had been unable to exhibit their works in public. Solomon, who covered the auction for a British magazine, offers an intimate, thoughtful glimpse of Moscow's and Leningrad's artistic vanguards, walking on ice in the unpredictable thaw of glasnost . Works range from Ilya Kabakov's obsessive re-creation of a Moscow communal apartment, citadel of misery, to painter Larissa Zvezdochetova's witty, kitschy demolition of communist propaganda. This community of artists realizes that the new freedom may be rescinded overnight. To Solomon, their work "is a warning, a sustained message . . . that says, simply, 'Beware, and remember.' " Illustrated.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Solomon, an American journalist living in London, attended a unique event in Moscow in July 1988: the Sotheby's auction of Soviet avant-garde art. During his week in Moscow, he befriended many hard-working artists whose lives he saw transformed as their art reached the West. Solomon's observations can be extremely keen, particularly when he describes seeing this art in the Western exhibitions: "As for their work--stripped of context, it was stripped of its immediacy and much of its meaning. Seeing their work was like seeing the artifacts of a lost or distant civilization." While he writes extremely well about art and its relation to Soviet society, Solomon is not an accomplished storyteller, and the reader is left swimming alone with a string of names, unable to fully distinguish one artist from another either through their work or their personalities. This could have been a fascinating book, yet one never gets a clear sense of what effects glasnost or capitalist society have had on the Soviet art world or the individual artists. Still, it is recommended for libraries with serious art collections.
- Amy Lewontin, Bentley Coll., Waltham, Mass.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
