Art in Revolutionary Russia
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 December 2017
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Russian Revolution of 1917 led not just to huge political and social change, but to a new artistic freedom. Russian avant-garde artists like Malevich, Kandinsky and Chagall flourished in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. One of their greatest supporters was art curator Nikolai Punin. Louise Hidalgo has been talking to Punin's granddaughter, Anna Kaminskaia, about how that freedom was gradually replaced with censorship and repression, and her grandfather ended his life in the Gulag.
Picture: 1920 painting by Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev (1878-1927), Bolshevik (oil on canvas), Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia
Transcript
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| 1:05.4 | Hello and thank you for downloading the Witness podcast. |
| 1:08.8 | I'm Louisa DALgo and today I'm taking you back to post-revolutionary Russia. |
| 1:13.0 | In 1917, the overturning of the old Tsarist order by Bolshevik revolutionary |
| 1:18.0 | ushered in not just huge political and social change, but a new artistic freedom. Gradually though that new freedom gave |
| 1:26.5 | way to censorship and repression. Today we look at that change through the life of one man, |
| 1:32.3 | the Russian art critic and scholar Nikolai Poonin, who |
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