Art: Beyond The Wildest Expectations

At a remarkable auction, Soviet artists come into their own

Stalin despised it as "decadent bourgeois formalism" and had it locked away. Khrushchev called it excrement and branded its creators "pederasts." Brezhnev ordered bulldozers to smash it into the ground at an outdoor exhibit. Such has been the fate of Russia's modernist art at the hands of dictators bent on enforcing their philistine tastes with the whole armamentarium of the totalitarian state. Even Mikhail Gorbachev has found that the tradition of putting down avant-garde art dies hard among cultural bureaucrats. As a result, the visual arts have been far slower than literature and music to benefit from glasnost.

Until last week....

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