scholarly journals Everyday Life of Ukrainian Artists of the 1960s–1980s: Perspectives of Cultural Research

Author(s):  
Maryna Poliakova

Everyday Life of Ukrainian Artists of the 1960s–1980s: Perspectives of Cultural Research

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-28
Author(s):  
Victoria Donovan

This introductory chapter discusses the Russian Northwest and its role in imagining Soviet-Russian nationhood. Novgorod, Pskov, and Vologda here served as symbolic homelands for the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian nations, mediating between the local, national, and transnational. Following the war, the state marketed the region's cultural heritage to the nation as the symbols of Russified Soviet identity linked to myths of sacredness, sacrifice, and patriotism. The idea of the Northwest was placed at the center of everyday life, emerging as a center of tourism and cultural activity in the 1960s to 1980s. The region thus formed a vehicle for internalizing the impersonal nation by placing it within the familiar local world, or a site where local and national memory could be fused.


Author(s):  
Alexandra I. Strukova ◽  
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This article considers the phenomenon of the authors’ signatures of Vladimir Grinberg (1896—1942) and Alexander Vedernikov (1898—1975), two representatives of the Leningrad Landscape School community in the 1930s—1940s. During this period, they entered a single circle of friendly and professional communication and experienced mutual influences. The artists’ work is considered more broadly and goes beyond their participation in the community. The goal of the article is to single out the most significant periods of their activity, trace changes in the authors’ handwriting from decade to decade, pay attention to the period of apprenticeship and formation of the artists, and focus on controversial issues in the attribution of their paintings and drawings. A study of all the works by Grinberg and Vedernikov currently identified in museum and private collections, makes it possible to trace the changes in the authors’ styles and discover the artistic landmarks of the masters. Grinberg’s manner repeatedly transformed. The neoclassical stylistics of his works of the late 1910s and citation of paintings by the old masters gave way to modest still lifes in the 1920s. After landscapes and scenes of everyday life on a black background in the early 1930s, there was a lightening of the colour scheme during his work on the New Leningrad series in the middle of the decade. In the early 1940s, Grinberg began to paint very broadly, generalising and simplifying the images. This scandalising manner has parallels with the style of the 1960s. Vedernikov was influenced by the art of French post-impressionists. Also, he took interest in the art of Russian folk crafts in the post-war period, more particularly, in Gorodets painting. The article pays much attention to Grinberg’s and Vedernikov’s lithographs. A significant part of their works has been catalogued and published, which facilitates dating and attribution, but much remains unknown (for example, an episode in Vedernikov’s work associated with the unification of the Masters of Analytical Art). In the article, the author describes the marking of works in detail, the placement and outline of the signatures, and traces the changes in them, which will help determine the range of works and authorship more accurately.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 33-62
Author(s):  
SVETLANA Ya. SHCHEBROVA ◽  

The article studies the Soviet identity, which fell into a crisis in the context of globalization and ethnic localization, gradually intensifying after the collapse of the USSR. In response to the decay of the Soviet mentality, it is necessary to understand how to overcome the split in society and make the process of cultural transformation under modernization conditions less painful for people. One of the mechanisms of forming the cultural identity of peoples is an appeal to the positive experience in common history. Simply copying the previous forms and means of forming cultural identity is impossible, since socio-economic foundations change; therefore, the problem needs a different solution. Exploring the Soviet past, one can understand which ideological values contributed to the consolidation of society in order to use this experience in construction of Russian civilizational identity. The purpose of the article is to study the films by Elyor Ishmukhamedov Tenderness (1966) and Lovers (1969) as “texts” that construct Soviet identity by dint of the recognition and acceptance of the ideal life model by the society. Since humans transform themselves and the world around them through an imitation, the main research questions are as follows: what social interaction features can be identified in these films? What is the appeal of the Soviet discourse and how is it transmitted in such seemingly “non-ideological” films? Ishmukhamedov’s films were studied as a semiotic system, in which the main myths and archetypes were revealed that had a manipulative and mobilizing influence on the viewer, thereby creating an image of a Soviet person which is attractive to the masses. The everyday life captured in these films symbolizes the stability and reliability of living in the USSR and Central Asia in the 1960s. After analyzing the figurative system of the Soviet-time everyday life in Ishmukhamedov’s films, the author finds out that identity is a system consisting of ethnic, cultural, age, natural, social, professional, mental, artifact identities, as well as the identity of the genus and small groups, which set the models and patterns of behavior for a Soviet person, which patterns were accepted and copied by the people.


Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Zieleniec

Henri Lefebvre is now established as one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century. Over a long life (b. 1901–d. 1991) he wrote and published prodigiously more than sixty books and several hundred articles on a range of issues and themes. His legacy and lasting impact not only includes being the most influential and seminal theorist on the reprioritization of space in social and critical analysis but also recognition for his contribution to the analysis of everyday life, modernity, the Right to the City, and the urban. He continues to influence and inspire research across a number of disciplines and fields; these include rural and regional studies, sociology, geography, politics, philosophy, and urban studies. Lefebvre’s commitment Marxism; his nondogmatic and humanist approach to the definition, discussion, extension, and application of key concepts; and his integration of those concepts into his various analyses of the rural and the city, of the state, of space and politics, and of modernity and everyday life led him to a conflicted relationship and at times marginalization within the structuralist-influenced French Academy and the Communist Party of France in which he was a member for thirty years. His anti-Stalinist stance and nonconformist opposition to the structural determinism prevalent within the party led to his expulsion, but throughout the 1960s, as professor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg and latterly at the new university at Nanterre, he became one of the most respected teachers and intellectuals inspiring and influencing the May 1968 student revolt. Lefebvre’s work after that, still influenced and committed to Marxist dialectics and critique, increasingly focused on the urban, the social production of space, everyday life, modernity, and the survival of capitalism. Of these his introduction of the concept of the right to the city and the social production of space have been immensely influential for a range of urban scholars and theorists and his work as a whole is being increasingly adopted, adapted, and extended by a variety of researchers of the city in a range of disciplines. The works selected below reflect Lefebvre’s long career and extensive corpus of work. However, only those books and articles that have been translated into English are included here. They represent his exegesis of Marxism and its application to a range of themes that were applied or are important for urban analysis. The secondary literature cited is organized thematically and while not comprehensive provides an overview of the expanding literature on, about, and applying Lefebvrian analysis.


Author(s):  
Webb Keane

This chapter discusses the idea of ethical history, looking at situations in which hitherto taken-for-granted aspects of everyday life came to be the focus of attention, such as feminist consciousness-raising in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, the American feminist movement is the invention and promulgation of the technique of consciousness-raising. Consciousness-raising is interesting for several reasons: it took very seriously the effects of problematizing the habits of everyday life, it succeeded in changing the descriptions and evaluations of actions and persons that were available for many Americans, and it ultimately foundered, in part, on an unresolved tension between subjective experience and objective social analysis. The chapter then argues that processes like this play an important role in the historical transformations of ethical and moral worlds.


Author(s):  
Anneka Lenssen

Louay Kayyali was one of the leading painters of the emergent Syrian art scene during the 1960s and 1970s. His most admired works depict individual laborers as "types," illustrating the tragic humanism of everyday life. Kayyali began his career in Aleppo, exhibiting academic portraits and still life paintings locally. In 1956, he won a fellowship to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where he became interested in fresco and other traditional techniques. After completing his studies in 1961, Kayyali settled in Damascus and joined the faculty at the new College of Fine Arts. For a period of five years, he exhibited his portrait types, flowers, and architectural landscapes—rendered in simple lines and color stains on pressed chipboard—regularly, to acclaim from collectors. From 1965 onward, Kayyali began to struggle with mental illness. In this later period, he turned to more overtly politicized themes, including a series of dramatic charcoal drawings of citizens under siege, which was sponsored by the Syrian government as a touring exhibition in support of the Arab liberation cause. He also continued to produce paintings of fishermen, street sellers, and mothers as representations of the social themes then preoccupying him.


2021 ◽  
pp. 128-161
Author(s):  
Laura Carter

The second part of this book, of which this chapter is part, is about the ‘history of everyday life’ in practice. This chapter examines the ‘history of everyday life’ in local community settings. It argues that folk museums were the museological vehicles of popular social history in mid-twentieth-century Britain. The British folk museum movement is traced via museum case studies in Luton, Cambridge, York, and the Highlands. Collecting practices, curation, visitors, and the educational programmes within each museum are analysed. The practices of several curator-collectors of everyday life, notably Enid Porter and Isabel Grant, are explored in depth. The chapter argues that folk history, so often thought of as a talisman of the extreme right, was recast at a community level into a feminized and conservative ‘history of everyday life’ for ordinary people. The final part of the chapter connects the ‘history of everyday life’ to debates about the emergence of commercial and industrial heritage in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.


2021 ◽  
pp. 89-127
Author(s):  
Laura Carter

The second part of this book, which starts with this chapter, is about the ‘history of everyday life’ in practice. This opening chapter is about the broadcasting of history on BBC radio before the 1960s, drawing on programme schedules, scripts, and production documents. The ‘history of everyday life’ flourished as part of the BBC’s educational, citizen-making project, underpinned by the ethos of John Reith, the BBC’s first Director-General between 1922 and 1938. This chapter reveals how the ‘history of everyday life’ was bound up with the concentration of female talent within the inter-war BBC and the emergence of new radiophonic technologies during the 1930s. Sound effects, music, and femininity helped to construct a genre of ‘light’ social history broadcasting, designed to appeal to ordinary listeners across both schools and general programming. This trend is highlighted through a focus on the work of Rhoda Power, a BBC educationaist. A particular shift is identified during the period from the 1940s to the 1960s, when history content on the radio became stratified between the ‘expert’ and the ‘popular’ due to gendered and professionalizing impulses within the BBC. As a consequence, the ‘history of everyday life’ came to be regarded as history for leisure in the post-1945 period.


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