Whatever my feelings about the late and monstrous Soviet Union's government, anyone who knows me also knows of my (sometimes infuriated) love for Russia.
And one of the things I love is a certain strain of Russian art that ran beside and under the godawful "Socialist Realist" style, and has survived the Soviet Union (I hope to write soon and at length on my friend VadimGorbatov, Russia's finest wildlife artist). A style of drawing and painting that mixes classical skills of drawing and painting with bold graphic innovation, demands the mastery of technique, and that seems dead or dormant in the US and the rest of the west, still exists there.
It seems it always has-- Russians, despite the environmental horrors of places like Norilsk , are a nation of nature lovers, hunters, mushroomers, nature artists and poets. So I was delighted when Jonathan Hanson sent me links to this site featuring the art of early Soviet childrens' books..
The best images are in In the Animal World and in The Soviet North .
Despite the propaganda in many (though apparently many were created by artists already unwilling to work in the propaganda machine) what beautiful images!
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