Eastern European Art & Culture

The book presents 170 images, mainly shop window displays, shot by artist David Hlynsky during the final years of the collapsing Soviet empire in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, East Germany and Moscow, using a Hasselblad camera to capture the slow, undramatic moments of...

When Darran Rees first drove northward toward Transylvania he felt he was being transported back in time. These remarkable landscapes were like visions of the past with such odd beauty and majesty that betrayed little of their recent history. Over the following fifteen years he...

In 1982, East Germany's fearsome secret police - convinced that writers were embedding subversive messages in their work - decided to train their own writers, weaponising poetry in the struggle against the class enemy. The Stasi Poetry Circle reveals how a group of soldiers and border guards gathered for...

When the original edition of this book was published, John Russell hailed it as a massive contribution to our knowledge of one of the most fascinating and mysterious episodes in the history of modern art.’ It still remains the most compact, accurate and reasonably...

This book is devoted to the complex relationship between Russian art and the East—be it the Russian East or the Far East—with special focus on the radical artists who shaped the development of modern art a century ago. The rituals of Siberian shamans, the...

There is surprisingly little, and certainly nothing comprehensive, written about the contemporary Russian art scene now. What appear in the West are mostly reports about so-called ‘dissidents’, not about what is happening in this vast culture, taken as a whole. Too often, these reports...

Viktor Koretsky (1909–1998) was a leading Soviet artist and the acknowledged master of the Soviet photographic poster. With a long and prolific career that spanned the early Stalin era through to the onset of Glasnost, Koretsky produced some of the most memorable images of...

At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) and Vzorval' (Explodity). Painters and poets-including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky-collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which...

This posthumous volume gathers Annette Michelson's erudite and incisive readings of the revolutionary films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, giving readers the opportunity to track her sustained investigations into their work. Michelson introduced American audiences to Soviet cinema in the early 1970s, extending...

he story of the experimental zeitgeist in Eastern European art, seen through personal encounters, pioneering dialogues, collaborative projects, and cultural exchanges. Throughout the 1970s, a network of artists emerged to bridge the East-West divide, and the no less rigid divides between the countries of...

In the mid-1970s, Andrzej Klimowski's fearlessly original artwork caught the eye of leading Polish theatre and film companies, for whom he designed some of the period's most iconic posters. The London-born artist, who moved to Poland at a time when many East Europeans dreamed...

Since about 2000, Ilya Kabakov has been slowly turning away from the installation pieces for which he is best known to return to his first medium, painting, with which he addresses personal experiences from the recent past as well as his childhood in Stalin's...

Russian-born conceptual artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are among the most celebrated artists of their generation. Known for their pioneering large-scale environments and installations, their work fuses the everyday with the conceptual. Deeply rooted in the visual culture of Soviet society yet speaking equally...

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was a Russian pioneer of abstract painting whose work has influenced generations of artists. His Sounds (Klänge) of 1912 is one of the earliest, most beautiful examples of a 20th-century artist’s book. These “sound poems” are alternately narrative and expressive, witty and simple...

Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1953) was a central figure in the Russian Constructivist art movement; a radical activist, a pioneer of photomontage, a theorist, and a teacher. This concise, comprehensive and informative work focuses largely on Rodchenko's graphic work in the form of book jackets, posters and...

Hana Jakrlová is a Czech photographer and film maker living in New York and Prague. Her work addresses issues of identity, belonging, intimacy and freedom. In the Meantime: Europe chronicles a personal photographic journey across Europe after the fall of communism. "My journey around...

These photographs were made across Ukraine between 2015 and 2020 in the spring and summer seasons and form a collective portrait of being young in Ukraine. They were taken on the way to the sea along the banks of the Dnipro River to the...

Rare & Collectible Russian artist Erik Bulatov (1933-2025) is known for creating fearlessly non-conformist works during the Cold War era. This beautifully produced volume features paintings and drawings linking Constructivist, Concrete and typographical elements with figurative portrayals of landscapes, people and buildings.  Bulatov's subject...

El Lissitzky, best known as an avant-garde artist, created this enchanting illustratedversion of the Passover song "Had Gadya" early in his career, while immersed in theJewish cultural renaissance that flourished in Russia from roughly 1912 to the early1920s. This edition offers not only a...

This publication provides an intimate portrait of the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky (c.1904–1948) whose paintings proved transformative to twentieth-century art in the US and beyond. Shaped by his experience of fleeing the Armenian Genocide, Gorky filtered influences of Impressionism and Post-impressionism, producing vigorous compositions that...