ARTH 443

Credit: 3 OR 4 hours.

What happens to art's forms and institutions in a socialist society? What kind of patron is the working class, the public, or the state? Can art be revolutionary? If so, how so? What does it look like? In this course, we will look at the ways that artists strove to answer these questions in the decades surrounding the Russian Revolution of 1917. Examining formations across a broad range of media—including painting and sculpture, mass festivals and monuments, theater, design, architecture, photography, and cinema—we will attempt to understand how art was redefined in terms of collective forms of authorship, common spaces, and shared things.

3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours.