In Art and Power, Andrei Sarabyanov and Natalia Strizhkova explore the historical period between 1917 to the early 1930s, when avant-garde artists and Bolshevik leaders worked hand in hand to forge new cultural policies and create a new visual language that would channel Soviet ideological values.
Based on formerly unknown and hitherto unpublished archival documents from the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the authors explore alliances and tensions that existed within the artistic community and analyze the roles played by such torchbearers as Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, and Vladimir Tatlin, and the challenges they faced in their collaboration with the Soviet state. Within just a few years, they founded new art schools and established numerous educational, research, and experimental laboratories and institutions throughout Russia, reaching even the most remote backwaters of the former Russian empire.