Lola Kantor-Kazovsky

Lola Kantor-Kazovsky graduated from the Moscow State University, worked in the Pushkin Museum. She lives in Israel since 1992 and teaches Art History in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2015 elected the Head of the Department. of Art History. She is the author of books and articles on Italian art and architecture of 16-18 centuries. She is also involved in art criticism, curates exhibitions and writes on non-official art in Russia. Member of the board of “Zerkalo” magazine (Tel Aviv).

Гробман ׀ Grobman

The research of the art of Michail Grobman and of the non-official art in Moscow of the 1960s provokes the author of the book to discuss Russian art of this period in global perspective. The modernist movement in post-Stalinist Moscow first received the stimulus from the exhibitions of modern art from abroad. The author’s major innovation is that her book embraces the two sides of the contact in a single narrative for the first time. She analyses how the complex multi-layered political and artistic message of these exhibitions was deciphered by Russian artists and comes to the conclusion that the “iron curtain” was not impeding but rather transforming the impulses in a certain way. The artistic and political messages thus deciphered and transformed brought about what she calls “cultural and political asymmetry” and the phenomenon of avant-garde art with “liberal” political inclinations, (as opposed to the “left”). In 1971 Grobman emigrated to Israel and this model was transplanted to the country where the art world was politically left. Here Grobman created his own model of conceptual art. His ideological configuration different from that of most Israeli artists made his art polyphonic and inherently political, which made his transition first to ironic postmodernist discourse (1980-90s) and later to political art really easy.