On the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, this lecture series brings to campus three internationally distinguished historians of modern art to discuss the role that artists and filmmakers played in the revolutionary reorganization of social relations in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s. How did their utopian imagination take on spatial and pictorial form? How did their work help to engender processes of emancipation and social transformation? And what role has their example played in the intersection of radical aesthetics and leftist politics ever since?

This series is offered in conjunction with the installation What about Revolution? Aesthetic Practices after 1917, on view in the University Teaching Gallery at the Harvard Art Museums through January 7, 2018. The installation presents three new models of avant-garde aesthetic practice that developed in the wake of the revolution and includes works by El Lissitzky, Sophie Küppers, Kazimir Malevich, and Aleksandr Rodchenko.

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