GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
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Progenitor of the Soviet avant garde
The activities of Vkhutemas — the pioneering art and technical studios in the Moscow of the 1920s — are brought thrillingly to life in a new book, says MICHAL BONCZA
CUTTING EDGE: (L to R) Georgy Krutikov, New City (Flying City) 1927-28; (top right) Nadezhda Kolpakova, Colour Solution for Architectural Volume, 1928–29 and Natalya Ganina, project for ‘agit-textile,’ 1920s
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
HENRY BELL is fascinated by the underlying curiosities and contradictions of one of the great poets of the Mediterranean
DAVID RENTON recommends a books that explores the ways in which disabled people are made to feel both of and not part of this world
Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space 1920-1930
Edited by Anna Bokov
(Verlag Park Books, £35.45)
THIS magnificent book demonstrates how Vkhutemas’s dynamics, mission, personalities — and particularly its achievements in design, art and architecture — have stood the test of time, unlike any other educational project in modern history.
With an unprecedented wealth of detail, the book is an extraordinary work of scholarship from editor Ana Bokov.
In 1923 Lenin, in Our Revolution, posed the question: “What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilisation in a different way from that of the west European countries?”
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