Soviet engagement of the Jewish artist: Solomon Yudovin in Leningrad (1920s – early 1940s)

Abstract

The article examines graphic works created in the late 1920s – early 1940s, by a well-known Jewish artist Solomon Yudovin (1892–1954), primarily within the framework of Leningrad museum projects, in particular: the “Anti-religious Exhibition of the Academy of Sciences” in the Winter Palace (1930–1931), the “Judaism” section of the permanent exhibition in the State Anti-religious Museum, the former St. Isaac’s Cathedral (1931 – ca. 1937) and the exhibition “Jews in Tsarist Russia and in the USSR” in the State Museum of Ethnography (1939–1941).

Particular attention is paid to Yudovin’s use in his graphic works of the photographs taken by him during Jewish historical and ethnographic expeditions to Volhyn, Podolia and Kiev provinces, organized by the writer and ethnographer Semyon Akimovich An-sky in 1912–1914.

The authors show how the artist’s work was influenced by political and ideological attitudes associated with a dramatic change in the paradigm of Soviet culture in the 1930s, how Yudovin turned out to be a prisoner of Stalin’s ideological blinkers and a supporter of a new direction in Soviet aesthetics. As the most illustrative example of such a turn in the artist’s work, the ceiling lampshades made according to his sketches for the halls where the exhibition “Jews in Tsarist Russia and in the USSR” was located are considered. The decor of these lampshades embodied Yudovin’s experiments in creating a “Soviet-Jewish” ornament.