Cosmos vs. Kitchens

In the late 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev ushered in a new era in the Soviet Union, commonly known as the Thaw, dialing back the brutalities of life under the previous ruler, Joseph Stalin. In this period, as the political climate softened, new possibilities for cultural development and international exchange emerged.

In 1957, the First International Festival of Youth was organized in Moscow, opening the country to foreign visitors for the first time in several decades. In 1958, despite political tensions and the space race, the United States and Russia signed an agreement for collaboration in the spheres of science, technology, education, and culture. The following year, the countries exchanged large exhibitions demonstrating their own successes: the Exhibition of Achievement of Soviet Science, Technology and Culture, which opened in New York’s Coliseum in June, and the American National Exhibition, which opened in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park in July.

While the Soviet exhibition did not garner significant American attention, the American show in Moscow became a groundbreaking event. It featured the latest American cars, early computers, Coca Cola, and a recreation of a “typical American home” with state-of-the-art kitchen and household equipment. It was here that the famous “kitchen debates” between Khrushchev and then-Vice President Richard Nixon took place, with the former proudly touting the results of the Soviet space program and Nixon bragging about the comfort of every American housewife.

Part of the American National Exhibition was devoted to American contemporary art. Thousands waited in line to see examples of abstract expressionism, which was a sharp contrast to socialist realism, the only art style openly allowed by the Soviet government. The American art show had an enormous influence on the development of underground art in the Soviet Union, while the kitchen debates prompted the Soviet government to establish a network of organizations to advance Soviet design.

Photo McKay Imaging

Photo Peter Jacobs

The fascination of Soviet nonconformist artists with abstraction and the cosmos also found its expression in the metaphysical painting of Nikolai Vechtomov, another member of the Lianozovo Group. He created surrealist cosmic landscapes of endless flickering spaces and thick, black organic spots. Artist Lev Kropivnitsky wrote that Vechtomov’s canvases are “windows open to an unknown world—not a transcendental world or even a world of dreams or the subconscious, but a world of the cosmos, yet not the cosmos of science fiction writers.” Vechtomov once told his friend Vladimir Nemukhin, “We live in the dark and have already got used to it; we can even see things in it. But we get the light from up there... It gives us energy...”

Photo Jack Abraham

In the late 1950s, Yuri Zlotnikov developed a “signal system” in which he combined an artistic approach and scientific methods. He tried to create an artificial language or a certain thesaurus of defined signs that caused the observer’s equally defined reactions. The artist discussed his ideas with scientists and even subjected the results to purely experimental correlations. His faith in reason, in an “exact formula” which could arrange the world logically, foreshadowed the decade of the Soviet 1960s, with its almost religious attitude to science and its capacities.

Photo McKay Imaging

Photo Jack Abraham

After viewing the works of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and others represented at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, a number of Soviet artists started to experiment in the abstract expressionist style. Some of their works made reference to the cosmos, inspired by the U.S.S.R.’s launch of the world’s first artificial Earth satellite in 1957. Thus, American abstract expressionism and Soviet space program both strongly influenced the development of nonconformist art and design in the U.S.S.R. One clear example of this dual influence is this painting by Lev Kropivnitsky, which was the first work acquired by Norton Dodge in the Soviet Union.

Photo McKay Imaging

Photo Jack Abraham

Evgenii Rukhin was a Leningrad-based nonconformist artist closely connected with the Lianozovo group in Moscow, and specifically with its leader Oscar Rabin, who had a strong influence on the artist's oeuvre. The hallmark of Rukhin’s aesthetics is the application of found objects on the surface of his paintings. In this work, he combined a piece of burlap with a painted zipper. At that time, a zipper was hard to find, while burlap was a fabric commonly used as a floor rag. By imitating a zipper sewn on this kind of fabric, Rukhin was commenting on the constant deficit of the simplest household items and the precarious state of life in the Soviet Union.

Photo Peter Jacobs