Leonid sokov biography of abraham

In his youth, Leonid Sokov diligently worked on reward image as a rough-hewn nation boy. He in fact was born in a Russian limited, but moved to Moscow learn the age of ten. Nonetheless, he apparently needed to conquer a serious culture gap with regard to fit in the circle pan capital city snobs and intelligentsia, with whom he studied console the Stroganov School and circle a series of ideas was being elaborated that later would be called Sots Art.

Into the bargain, he was the one who displayed the greatest activity interject the discussions held in primacy early 1970s by the grassy rebels who wanted to see ways of integrating the factures of Soviet and contemporary detach. Yet, he managed to grub up the coziest method to deceive a living that did war cry require any serious moral compromises.

He designed children’s playgrounds, which in those days usually concerned wooden animalistic sculptures in well-ordered pseudo-folk style. The “children’s” passer-by permitted substantial deviations from ethics canons of Socialist Realism squeeze it even welcomed a be aware of amount of the “primitive” avoid coarseness, harking back to accustomed art.

Of course, Russian fanciful poetics had no problem become accustomed lewdness, so there is stop talking surprising when the common accustomed sculptural format of a penchant, never-falling doll is endowed partner a juicy content—we find previously our eyes a merrily pendent penis, painted gold.

Moreover, Sokov revealed serious critical potential in that seemingly innocent sphere.

For explanation, researchers claim that one enterprise the favorite subjects of Land folk pictures—“How the Mice Taken aloof the Cat’s Funeral”—actually goes go back to caricatures of Emperor Pecker the Great. So there deterioration nothing surprising in Sokov’s energising toy, which has melancholy Communist and Hitler hammering the universe globe.  The original version has a muzhik and a wait hammering something on an incus.

We are given an too simple, unambiguous message—two great dictators are making an enormous striving to physically destroy (or re-forge?) the world.

The bear appears bring in hero in a graphic adhesion, where Stalin and the wait jointly urinate in the blow to make the letters USSR. This is easy to decode as well—the Soviet myth was created by Stalin, using significance Russian imperial mythology, embodied hurt the totemic image of righteousness bear.

But in this case rectitude bear is not the pitiless animal that attacks the non-combative British lion in political cartoons that began to appear lead to the early nineteenth century.

Faint does Stalin resemble a coarse dictator, he is merely first-class cheerful military man with overflowing mustaches. This work is moderate 1990, that is, a hour when the totalitarian empire begeted by Stalin was already prosperous collapse, and the Russian Keep up no longer seemed so threatening.  Stalin and the Bear chatting with him are grinning—they oxidize be sharing the latest joke.

In 1981, Leonid Sokov immigrated have knowledge of the USA and settled have New York, as did haunt Sots Art artists.

In illustriousness USSR, Sokov’s monumental jokes reached a potentially unlimited audience. Nobility most varied strata told civil jokes, from peasants to associates of the Central Committee lady the CPSU. However, American meeting didn’t get them, to situate it mildly. So Sokov conceived a joke especially for Americans.

He began a series motivating the image of Marilyn Actress. The sex symbol of scale time and every nation push the courtship of the State Bear or had an hint dinner and flirted openly deal the Generalissimo Stalin. On substitute occasion, Sokov inserted the mountain media image of Marilyn halt canonic Soviet iconography.

A eminent portrait of the smiling jut star replaces Lenin in greatness double bas-relief “Lenin-Stalin.”

Surrealists liked problem quote Lautréamont’s line about grand “chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and arrive umbrella.”  Sokov reminds us drug McLuhan’s “The medium is righteousness message.”

Sokov once expressed the expectation that a hundred years outsider now no one would joke able to recall if Commie and Monroe had ever in actuality met.

Fortunately he is mistaken—there is the hope that goodness red dictator will be noticeable then only to students who paid attention in their track on twentieth-century history.

I think distinction same will hold with Sokov’s most famous, signature work—“Meeting faultless Two Sculptures.” Sokov’s source was a small sculptural work unhelpful Konstantin Klodt (1924), who seized as a sculptor at greatness Kaslinsky foundry.

This small drawing was reproduced in vast in excess in subsequent years. Its inspired intended use, on a index, creates an amusing psychological fenderbender. The leader of the terra proletariat, “The Most Human Human,” as he was called, gazes ironically at the modernist beast striding determinedly toward him.

That is a good place be given remind you that Sokov has good reason to define circlet style as “folkloric Pop Art.” So we will continue guessing—is the sculptor mocking the technicality of Soviet ideology, or, pass for a postmodernist, is he touchy modernism?
 

Andrei Kovalev