Professor Hilton Presents Lecture in Moscow

Alison Hilton, Professor of Art History, Emerita, took part in a conference held in conjunction with the exhibition “Impressionism in the Avant-garde” in Moscow (June 7-8, 2018). Curators at the new Museum of Russian Impressionism brought together works by leaders of the avant-garde, Kazimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, and Wassily Kandinsky and many others along with several discoveries from museums and private collections throughout Russia. The sixteen speakers represented institutions in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Rostov, Omsk, Venice, London, and Washington. While most of the talks focused on the early 20thcentury, Hilton showed that the importance of Impressionism for avant-garde artists like Malevich who taught in the new State Art Schools after the 1917 Revolution might explain how some modernist ideas survived the repression of the avant-garde in the 1930s, and began to re-emerge with the Thaw in the 1960s. Her paper, “Avant-garde Impressionism and Late Soviet Modernism,” and other contributions are being prepared for publication.