76
This work distorts another famous work by Henri Matisse, La Danse, of which there are two versions. In this painting, the dancers are clearly male (Matisse’s dancers are women), and their dance appears painful and forced, with the figures violently grabbing each other’s hair rather than hands. The second version of La Danse by Matisse was painted in 1910 for Russian art collector Sergey Shchukin, who later bequeathed it to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The date painted across the bottom of the painting relates the painting to the chaos and uncertainty of life in the Soviet Union in 1990. V. Kavrigina, La Danse, 1990
77
Nine faces are crowded into the picture space, with more faces partly visible. They all have identical expressions and are wearing cloth blindfolds with eyes drawn on them. The uniformity of the faces, the blindfolds, and the expressionless eyes call to mind the repression and censorship of the Soviet masses, resulting in coerced conformism.
Alexander Lozenko, Unison View, 1988
78
A man wears a horse bridle, with the bit inside his closed mouth. The Russian text below reads, “Any sort of violence, even violence that is supposedly toward the greater good, against one’s will and consciousness is impermissible.”
A. Chebotarev, “Everything in the Name...”, 1990
28