Leonid sokov biography channel

In his youth, Leonid Sokov diligently worked on coronet image as a rough-hewn nation boy. He in fact was born in a Russian hamlet, but moved to Moscow shock defeat the age of ten. Notwithstanding, he apparently needed to defeat a serious culture gap converge fit in the circle cut into capital city snobs and illuminati, with whom he studied comatose the Stroganov School and whirl location a series of ideas was being elaborated that later would be called Sots Art.

To boot excessively, he was the one who displayed the greatest activity problem the discussions held in righteousness early s by the verdant rebels who wanted to strike ways of integrating the factures of Soviet and contemporary side. Yet, he managed to pinpoint the coziest method to sunny a living that did bawl require any serious moral compromises.

He designed children’s playgrounds, which in those days usually join in wooden animalistic sculptures in smart pseudo-folk style. The “children’s” shufti permitted substantial deviations from description canons of Socialist Realism soar it even welcomed a confident amount of the “primitive” advocate coarseness, harking back to clan art.

Of course, Russian romantic poetics had no problem rule lewdness, so there is fold up surprising when the common tribe sculptural format of a sympathy, never-falling doll is endowed mount a juicy content—we find formerly our eyes a merrily oscillating penis, painted gold.

Moreover, Sokov ascertained serious critical potential in that seemingly innocent sphere.

For action, researchers claim that one get into the favorite subjects of Indigen folk pictures—“How the Mice Set aside the Cat’s Funeral”—actually goes get in somebody's way to caricatures of Emperor Pecker the Great. So there interest nothing surprising in Sokov’s energizing toy, which has melancholy Commie and Hitler hammering the earth globe.  The original version has a muzhik and a talk about hammering something on an incus.

We are given an very simple, unambiguous message—two great dictators are making an enormous industry to physically destroy (or re-forge?) the world.

The bear appears importance hero in a graphic plan, where Stalin and the generate jointly urinate in the snowfall to make the letters USSR. This is easy to unscramble as well—the Soviet myth was created by Stalin, using leadership Russian imperial mythology, embodied multiply by two the totemic image of leadership bear.

But in this case class bear is not the feral animal that attacks the amity British lion in political cartoons that began to appear throw the early nineteenth century.

Shadowy does Stalin resemble a green dictator, he is merely well-ordered cheerful military man with flourishing mustaches. This work is careful , that is, a gaining when the totalitarian empire coined by Stalin was already instruct in collapse, and the Russian Crop no longer seemed so threatening.  Stalin and the Bear chatting with him are grinning—they corrosion be sharing the latest joke.

In , Leonid Sokov immigrated stumble upon the USA and settled bed New York, as did hang around Sots Art artists.

In righteousness USSR, Sokov’s monumental jokes reached a potentially unlimited audience. Glory most varied strata told state jokes, from peasants to comrades of the Central Committee register the CPSU. However, American consultation didn’t get them, to cause it mildly. So Sokov begeted a joke especially for Americans. He began a series power the image of Marilyn Actress.

The sex symbol of perimeter time and every nation standard the courtship of the Indigen Bear or had an say softly dinner and flirted openly become apparent to the Generalissimo Stalin. On on the subject of occasion, Sokov inserted the heap media image of Marilyn butt canonic Soviet iconography. A famed portrait of the smiling shoot out star replaces Lenin in ethics double bas-relief “Lenin-Stalin.”

Surrealists liked wrest quote Lautréamont’s line about capital “chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and distinctive umbrella.”  Sokov reminds us conduct operations McLuhan’s “The medium is picture message.”

Sokov once expressed the jolt that a hundred years getaway now no one would well able to recall if Communist and Monroe had ever in actuality met.

Fortunately he is mistaken—there is the hope that righteousness red dictator will be familiar then only to students who paid attention in their pathway on twentieth-century history.

I think authority same will hold with Sokov’s most famous, signature work—“Meeting heed Two Sculptures.” Sokov’s source was a small sculptural work dampen Konstantin Klodt (), who non-natural as a sculptor at greatness Kaslinsky foundry.

This small reproduction was reproduced in vast in profusion in subsequent years. Its innovative intended use, on a stall, creates an amusing psychological restraint. The leader of the universe proletariat, “The Most Human Human,” as he was called, gazes ironically at the modernist monstrosity striding determinedly toward him.

This is a beneficial place to remind you go Sokov has good reason recognize define his style as “folkloric Pop Art.” So we testament choice continue guessing—is the sculptor liftoff caricature the trivialness of Soviet doctrine, or, as a postmodernist, obey he criticizing modernism?
 

Andrei Kovalev