Collective Body

Reviews / Votes

"Kiaer's Collective Body is promising to become a seminal publication on Deineka for years to come. The book is beautifully designed and features a broad array of rare illustrations, many of which are no longer accessible to Western scholarship. . . . the book effectively challenges pervasive stereotypes about Soviet art. With its wide range of themes, methods, and historical materials, Collective Body is not only a highly anticipated monograph on Deineka but also an excellent and intellectually stimulating study of Soviet art's formative period. Most importantly, it promotes a complex and nuanced approach to researching this legacy-an approach especially vital to preserve during a time of a violent political and cultural war."
* H-Net * "Collective Body is a tour de force: at once a history of a single artist, of Soviet art practice in the 1930s-and of Soviet culture more broadly. Kiaer writes with ease and sophistication, using brilliant close readings of artworks to illuminate her social and historical context in new ways. This is scholarship of a very high order." -- Emma Widdis, University of Cambridge "Aleksandr Deineka's depiction of sensual bodies was labeled by Russian critics 'lyrical socialist realism.' Traversing three decades of artistic debates and realignments, Kiaer elucidates this paradoxical stylistic label and gives us a new reading of the complexities of a Soviet and Stalinist world that remains as fascinating as it is disturbing. This highly original study puts the revolutionary avant-garde and its aftermath in a new perspective." -- Romy Golan, City University of New York