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The Ransom of Russian Art

Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374708487
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
John McPhee's The Ransom of Russian Art is a suspenseful, chilling, and fascinating report on a covert operation like no other. It offers unprecedented insight into Soviet culture at the brink of the Union's collapse. In the 1960s and 1970s, an American professor of Soviet economics forayed on his own in the Soviet Union, bought the work of underground "unofficial" artists, and brought it out himself or arranged to have it illegally shipped to the United States. Norton Dodge visited the apartments of unofficial artists in at least a dozen geographically scattered cities. By 1977, he had a thousand works of art. His ultimate window of interest involved the years from 1956 to 1986, and through his established contacts he eventually acquired another eight thousand works—by far the largest collection of its kind. McPhee investigates Dodge's clandestine activities in the service of dissident Soviet art, his motives for his work, and the fates of several of the artists whose lives he touched.

New Russian Art

Author: Donald Burton Kuspit
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Book Description
Showscases the work of 33 painters who have chosen to remain in post-communist Russia

What Isn't Remembered

Author: Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496229223
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in What Isn't Remembered explore the burden, the power, and the nature of love between people who often feel misplaced and estranged from their deepest selves and the world, where they cannot find a home. The characters yearn not only to redefine themselves and rebuild their relationships but also to recover lost loves--a parent, a child, a friend, a spouse, a partner. A young man longs for his mother's love while grieving the loss of his older brother. A mother's affair sabotages her relationship with her daughter, causing a lifelong feud between the two. A divorced man struggles to come to terms with his failed marriage and his family's genocidal past while trying to persuade his father to start cancer treatments. A high school girl feels responsible for the death of her best friend, and the guilt continues to haunt her decades later. Evocative and lyrical, the tales in What Isn't Remembered uncover complex events and emotions, as well as the unpredictable ways in which people adapt to what happens in their lives, finding solace from the most surprising and unexpected sources.

The History of Loot and Stolen Art

Author: Ivan Lindsay
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1906509573
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 665

Book Description
The author of this enthralling book aims to present a well-illustrated and documented alternative history of the Western World through graphic accounts of looting and art theft from the time of Sargon, ruler of Syria in 721 BC, to the present day. Almost all the principal players included appear on the stage of World history and many of them are known as conquerors, confiscators (the old-fashioned word for looters) and ruthless administrators of the regions they created as a result of their conquests. Featured here are emperors, kings, queens, popes, adventurers, explorers and those whose energies and expertise supported the greed and acquisitive ambitions of their masters. The different motivation of the greatest looters in history is a recurrent theme which is examined throughout.

Soviet Dissident Artists

Author: Matthew Baigell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813522234
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Book Description
If life was hard for all under the Soviet regime, how much more difficult was it to be a dissident artist? For those who did not belong to the dominant school of Socialist Realism, it could be a life of great risk. Often forced to scavenge for materials to use in paintings and sculptures, these artists led both a sometimes dangerous, illicit underground life, as well as an acceptable public life. In Soviet Dissident Artists, Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell interview nearly fifty former dissident artists to better understand their struggles under Soviet rule and their desires to maintain their sense of inner freedom. In these probing interviews, the artists chronicle their hardships and their friendships under the old Communist regime from the 1950s to the 1980s. They relate their confrontations with the KGB and other government organizations--sometimes with tragic consequences--and how they managed to survive and create subversive work in their spare time. Recording experiences largely unknown to Western artists, these interviews describe one of the great heroic stories of the last half of the twentieth century.

Art & Crime

Author: Stefan Koldehoff
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1644211203
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Book Description
A thrilling, eye-popping look at true crime in the billion-dollar art world. The art world is one of the most secretive of global businesses, and the list of its crimes runs long and deep. Today, with prices in the hundreds of millions for individual artworks, and billionaires' collections among the most conspicuous and liquid of their assets, crime is more rampant than ever in this largely unregulated universe. Increased prices and globalization have introduced new levels of fraud and malfeasance into the art world--everything from "artnapping," in which an artwork is held hostage and only returned for a ransom, to forgery and tax fraud. However, the extent of the economic and cultural damage that results from criminality in the global art scene rarely comes to light. The stories of high-stakes, brazen art crimes told by art experts Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm are by turns thrilling, disturbing, and unbelievable (the imagination for using art to commit crimes seems boundless). The authors also provide a well-founded analysis of what needs to change in the art market and at museums. From the authors of False Pictures, Real Money (about the Beltracchi art forgery case), Art and Crime includes a chapter on art owned by Donald Trump. It is a thoroughly researched, explosive, and highly topical book that uncovers the extraordinary and multifarious thefts of art and cultural objects around the world.

Beyond Memory

Author: Diane Neumaier
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813534541
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
Photography possesses a powerful ability to bear witness, aid remembrance, shape, and even alter recollection. In Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-Related Works of Art, the general editor, Diane Neumaier, and twenty-three contributors offer a rigorous examination of the medium's role in late Soviet unofficial art. Focusing on the period between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s, they explore artists' unusually inventive and resourceful uses of photography within a highly developed Soviet dissident culture. During this time, lack of high-quality photographic materials, complimented by tremendous creative impulses, prompted artists to explore experimental photo-processes such as camera and darkroom manipulations, photomontage, and hand-coloring. Photography also took on a provocative array of forms including photo installation, artist-made samizdat (self-published) books, photo-realist painting, and many other surprising applications of the flexible medium. Beyond Memory shows how innovative conceptual moves and approaches to form and content-echoes of Soviet society's coded communication and a Russian sense of absurdity-were common in the Soviet cultural underground. Collectively, the works in this anthology demonstrate how late-Soviet artists employed irony and invention to make positive use of difficult circumstances. In the process, the volume illuminates the multiple characters of photography itself and highlights the leading role that the medium has come to play in the international art world today. Beyond Memory stands on its own as a rigorous examination of photography's place in late Soviet unofficial art, while also serving as a supplement to the traveling exhibition of the same title.