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This work conflates Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ from c. 1480, in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, with El Lissitzky’s 1919 propaganda poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, a reference to the Red (Communist) and White (Tsarist) armies in the civil war following the October Revolution of 1917. The red wedge penetrates the chest of the reclining Christ, suggesting that communism destroyed religion.
Andrei Kolosov, With the Red Wedge, Beat the Whites, 1990
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Lenin, on his knees, is consoled by Marx. Pictured with a footprint on his back, Lenin is portrayed as the “Prodigal Son” who remorsefully returns to father Marx. The painting mirrors the composition in Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1661–1669) in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg. The footprint might symbolize the various ways in which Lenin’s successors walked all over him, disrespected his beliefs, and discredited the socialist experiment.
Mikhail Rozhdestvin, The Return of the Prodigal Son, 1991
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This painting mimics Henri Matisse’s 1910 painting La Musique. In the original painting, five male figures are situated on a green hill with a blue sky as the backdrop. In this work, however, the five figures are placed on a black-and-white backdrop. Several of the seated figures are missing limbs, their arms or legs ending abruptly with cleancut stumps. A counterpart to the equally dystopian La Danse, the painting suggests that in 1990 in the Soviet Union, the idyllic world of Matisse was beyond reach. V. Kavrigina, La Musique, 1990
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