There are careers in the arts that epitomize the spirit of their time in so many salient respects that they attain a kind of mythological status in the eyes of posterity. The life and work of the ...

“There’s either democracy or there’s civil war,” a friend told me the other evening, as we sipped coffee at a cafe on the Nile. Later that night, an artist I was interviewing said, “I’m afraid. I ...

In September 1976, Shaomin Li got the art assignment of his life – it frightened the 19-year-old to death. China’s leader, Chairman Mao Zedong, had died a few days earlier. Li, a soldier in the ...

The centennial show, inspired by a 1932 Soviet exhibition that tracked the first decade and a half of Russia’s post-revolutionary art, was curated by John Milner and Natalia Murray, of the Courtauld ...

BRUSSELS — In 1931, the Russian Futurist poet Vasily Kamensky enlisted the help of Konstantin Bor Ramensky to illustrate the cover of his latest book, Youth of Mayakovsky. It was a complicated ...

“Revolution,” the exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts devoted to Russian art created between 1917 and 1932, is not, to be frank, a bundle of laughs. And thank god, for it to be otherwise ...

But no, the second gallery is dedicated to paintings, photographs and film glorifying the workers who sweated blood in factories and fields to bring to fruition the hopelessly unrealistic plans of ...