Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Russian, Bryn Mawr College

“The Thrill of the Game: Modern Athletics in Russian and Early Soviet Avant-Garde Art”

This talk will explore the creative celebration of modern athletics in Russian avant-garde painting, design, and photography between 1908 and 1935.  Despite the evolution of sports from a playful, pre-revolutionary focus into an ideologically tinged preoccupation of early Soviet artists, works produced in the 1920s by Lissitzky, Rodchenko, and Malevich, among others, emphatically privileged the physical beauty and spectatorial thrills of modern athletics over politics.