THE EARLY PERIOD OF UNOFFICIAL ART: LENINGRAD CONTEXT
The objective of this study was to analyse the existing view on the origins of unofficial art. The author pointed out that the consensus developed in science regarding these sources does not take into account the art of Leningrad in the first post-war decade. Leningrad artists who worked outside of socialist realism after the war continued prewar modernist art and often were direct students of modernists/avant-garde artists. Despite the similarity of social conditions of their existence to the conditions of Moscow artists, the origins and foundations of the art of Leningraders differed markedly. Nevertheless, from a global perspective, they are a part of the big picture of the art in the second half of the twentieth century. To unify the Leningrad and Moscow versions of the post-war “formalism”, the article suggested the term “second modernism”. In the final section of the article, the author made an attempt to compare the art of one of the artists of the Leningrad Second Modernism, Alexander Arefyev, with the Western European context contemporary of him, which he fits in quite naturally. This showed that the ground for the formation of Leningrad modernist art was different from the Moscow one. Moreover, it became the basis for the phenomena that are relevant in the general European context. The study showed that while talking about the history of Soviet unofficial art as the history of Russian art in the second half of the twentieth century, it is necessary to take into account the Leningrad context. This approach complements greatly the already existing picture.