ANN: New Publication by Julia Tulovsky: Avant-Garde Textiles: Designs for Fabric

ANN: New Publication by Julia Tulovsky: Avant-Garde Textiles: Designs for Fabric

Julia Tulovsky, Avant-Garde Textiles: Designs for Fabric

ANN: New Publication by Julia Tulovsky: Avant-Garde Textiles: Designs for Fabric

Book talk: Thursday, October 27, 2016, 6:00pm
Marshall D. Shulman Seminar Room (1219 International Affairs Building)
Columbia University, Harriman Institute, NYC

In the mid-1920s, several great avant-garde artists in different artistic centers simultaneously began explorations in fabric design. Their designs, united by striking visual similarities, put forward a new artistic language that, in principle, anticipated future experiments in modernism, in particular op art and minimalism. Avant-Garde Textiles: Designs for Fabric provides an overview of these designs and argues that the reasons for their similarities lay in common influences from visual sources and theoretical writings of the time.

Tulovsky draws special attention to work by two Russian constructivist artists in Moscow, Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova, and that of Sonia Delaunay in Paris. The book analyses common features that link the artistic projects of the Russian constructivists and Delaunay, and explores how the new geometric patterns, very similar in style, were adapted to the drastically different social and economical conditions of Bolshevik Moscow and luxurious Paris of the Art Deco epoch. By the end of the 1920s, the new geometric style in textiles had grown into an international movement. The penetration of these fabrics directly into everyday life influenced people’s tastes, and prepared a firm ground for future developments in modernism.

Julia Tulovsky is the Curator for Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is a specialist in Russian art and holds her PhD from Moscow State University. Before coming to the Zimmerli she worked at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and since 2001 has served as executive director of the Malevich Society in New York. She has published broadly on Russian avant-garde and contemporary art, both in Russian and in English. She is co-editor of a special Russian-American issue of the Pinakotheke journal (Vol. 21-22, no 1-2, 2006), editor of Claude and Nina Gruen Collection of Contemporary Russian Art (Zimmerli Art Museum, 2008), a contributor to Moscow Conceptualism in Context (Prestel, 2011) and Sokov (Kerber, 2012), and editor of Oleg Vassiliev: Space and Light (Zimmerli Art Museum, 2014).

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