'Abstract Works In Secret’ By Russians

Press, Volume CI, Issue 30008, 18 December 1962, Page 15

'Abstract Works In Secret’ By Russians

ZP-A.-Reuter— Copyright) MOSCOW, Dec. 16. Painters studying “Socialist Realism” in a Moscow art academy were painting abstract works in secret, a Soviet academician said in an open letter to Mr Khrushchev published in “Pravda” today. The writer. Yevgeni Katsman. sa’d this applied to a •’few students” at the 'urikov Art Institute and the same thing was going co in the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. The letter was part of a S.w:e* nr-vpseanda campaign directed against abstract and o‘her non-approved kinds of art. which Mr Khrushchev criticised after viewing an exhibition of abstracts a fortnight ago.

Katsman said: “The fact that our art is not being guided has made a chink through which alien views on art are penetrating. Representatives of the bourgeois world are trying to put part of our youth in an ideological prison." He said: “In some places" in the Soviet Union a return to futurism and abstract art was being observed. These kinds of art were being brought in from America. France, Britain, West Germany and other "bourgeois" States. Foreign diplomats and journalists were attending shows of abstracts near Moscow together with some Soviet intellectuals, he said. “Pravda" also published an addres* to Mr Khrushchev from a meeting of the Soviet Academy of Arts, saying ft would devote all its energies to producing works "worthy <4 our time, of our heroic people.”