Unofficial art

Unofficial art.
A term for art produced in the Soviet Union that did not conform to the ideals of Socialist Realism, which became officially sanctioned by the state in 1932. Any form of artistic independence was virtually impossible under the tyrannical rule of Stalin (1924–53), but there was a slight thaw under his successor Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1956 denounced Stalin's abuse of power. Unofficial art began to appear in public a few years after this, in about 1960, and in 1962 one of its leading figures, the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny (1926– ), had a public confrontation with Khrushchev about the validity of modern art. The authorities could still be highly repressive, however, and in 1974 an open-air exhibition of Unofficial art in a field near Moscow was broken up with water-cannon and bulldozers, causing it to be dubbed the ‘Bulldozer Show’. Unofficial art was stylistically varied and individualistic, often reflecting avant-garde Western movements, but from about 1970 a distinctive strand emerged within it—Sots art, in which the conventions of Socialist Realism were mocked. During the 1970s such art began to be seen in the West (for example at an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1977); several Unofficial artists were allowed to leave the Soviet Union and a few achieved success in Europe and the USA, notably Neizvestny and Komar and Melamid (see Sots art). During the late 1980s the much more liberal policies of Mikhail Gorbachev (Soviet leader 1985–91) brought great changes, and by the time the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 there was even a company called Sovart that placed Soviet artists with Western galleries.