Twenty-Fifth Annual Hilla Rebay Lecture at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
| October 09, 2012 |  |
 Gustav Klutsis,
Screen-Radio-Orator, 1922. © 2012 Estate of Gustav
Klutsis/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Kristopher
McKay.
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| In the early
1920s, the avant-garde artist Gustav Klutsis (Gustavs Klucis) proposed a
pioneering series of para-architectural communication structures for the
public diffusion of revolutionary speech, moving images, and printed matter
in Moscow's streets and squares. Known to us through a corpus of thirty-odd
drawings—a number of which had their first U.S. showing at
the Guggenheim
Museum in 1981—Maria Gough, Harvard
University, reconstructs the historical parameters and significance of
Klutsis's original project, and focuses on the ways in which the artist
utilized the medium of drawing, in the wake of the advent of radio and
film, in order to imagine new forms of revolutionary communication. The
talk concludes with a discussion of both Klutsis's recycling of the project
into his later work in graphic design and photomontage, and the ways in
which contemporary artists have recently cited or repurposed it in their
own endeavors. Maria Gough is Joseph Pulitzer Jr., Professor of Modern Art and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her primary area of research and teaching is European Modernism, with a particular emphasis on the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes. She also writes occasionally on contemporary art. Her research has appeared in October, New German Critique, Modernism/modernity, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Parkett, Artforum, and the Cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne, and her book on the Constructivist debates of the 1920s, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution, was published by the University of California Press in 2005. She is currently writing a book on the intermedia projects of El Lissitzky and Gustav Klutsis, and another on the photographic practices of foreign visitors to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. The Hilla Rebay Lecture brings distinguished scholars to the Guggenheim Museum to examine significant issues in the theory, criticism, and history of art. Marking its 25th anniversary, the lecture honors Hilla Rebay, the first director and curator of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which was founded in 1939 and renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1952. This annual program is made possible through the generosity of The Hilla von Rebay Foundation. A private reception and viewing of the exhibition Picasso Black and White immediately follows the lecture. Free to the public. No advance ticket registration. For more information visit guggenheim.org/publicprograms. Related Materials The Hilla von Rebay Foundation Archive contains 101 cubic feet of historic records created or collected by Hilla Rebay and/or The Hilla von Rebay Foundation. The collection reflects Rebay's work as an artist as well as her tenure as the first director and curator of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. Records include original artwork, architectural plans, photographs, art portfolios, writings, and more. For more information on the Hilla von Rebay Foundation Archive and other archival collections visit guggenheim.org/archives. In conjunction with the Hilla Rebay Lecture, this fall the museum will release The Guggenheim Reader Series: Russia, the inaugural title in a new e-book series that brings together scholarly essays on prominent themes. The Guggenheim has a rich history of exploring Russian art and the avant-garde in particular; this anthology collects the most insightful and influential essays from exhibition catalogues such as The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932 (1992) and Russia! Nine Hundred Years of Masterpieces and Master Collections (2005), as well as focused monographic studies of Russian masters like Vasily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich. For more information visit guggenheim.org/books.  |
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