Reviews and Creative Seminars of Amateur Artists in Soviet Cultural Policy – МЕЖДУНАРОДНЫЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ

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Tatyana A. SINELNIKOVA
The All-Russian Museum of Decorative Arts
3, Delegatskaya street, Moscow, Russian Federation, 127473
Head of the Sector of Naive Art
e-mail: dekorart3@mail.ru
ORCID: 0000-0001-9732-7648

Reviews and Creative Seminars of Amateur Artists in Soviet Cultural Policy

Abstract: Amateur creativity is a product of Soviet cultural policy aimed at replacing traditional everyday creative practices with controlled and institutionalized leisure. The organization of leisure was in many ways a new phenomenon that developed in the USSR as a result of housing, pension and socio-economic reforms. Work with amateur artists in the USSR was connected, first of all, with all-Union amateur performance shows. The organizer of the shows was the Ministry of Culture, the responsibilities for holding them were distributed between the Union of Artists and the All-Union House of Folk Art. Gradually, a three-stage form of holding reviews emerged, including the regional, zonal and final stages. At the initial stage, a search and registration of non-professional creators took place through a network of Houses of Folk Art. Then the artists could be prepared to participate in the show and were encouraged by trips to a creative seminar. At the zonal level, members of the review commission selected works for display at the final exhibition in Moscow. Most often, a catalog was published for the All-Union Exhibition of Amateur Artists. After its completion, the works remained in the temporary exhibition fund of the House of Folk Art as part of traveling exhibitions, and after two years they were returned to the owners. The article analyzes archival materials of the State Russian House named after V.D. Polenov and the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, some documents were introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. The peculiarity of the historical study of this subject is that the products of amateur creativity were not considered as valuable (the activity itself, the increase in the number of participants in exhibitions, members of associations, etc., were significant). This explains the lack of information about the mechanisms of working with this area of creativity. Gradually, art historians identified naive art in amateur fine art as a direction that has independent high artistic value; most of the studies of domestic art historians are devoted to it. The works of amateur artists are a reflection of the worldview of their era, part of the culture of everyday life; these images reflect the worldview of the rural and urban intelligentsia of the USSR.

Key words: naive art; amateur art; Soviet art; amateur performance reviews; creative seminars.

References:

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For Citation:

Sinelnikova, T. (2023) Reviews and Creative Seminars of Amateur Artists in Soviet Cultural Policy. International Journal of Cultural Research, 3 (52). 62–77. DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2023_3_62

DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2023_3_62