A Classic(al) Russian Freeze: Timur Novikov and the New Academy of Fine Arts

This paper examines the concept of and discourse about Classical beauty as central to Russian art in the 1990s. By this time, Classicism, the principal aesthetics of Socialist Realism, had been denounced and was considered as retrograde. When founding his New Academy of Fine Arts in Leningrad in 1989, however, Timur Novikov announced the return of Classicism into contemporary Russian art, ultimately turning conservatism into another avant-garde. At a time when historically repressed avant-gardes were finally allowed to inspire and impress, a group of artists in Leningrad were recovering the values of ancient beauty. This movement would have remained an artistic ruse or marginal conceptual tendency, had these aesthetic principles not been adopted on a national scale. For Novikov and his colleagues, Classicism and “beauty” became synonymous with Russian art and acquired a nationalistic character which later found scandalous continuation in the works of Aleksey Belyaev-Gintovt. How did it happen that the seemingly exhausted and forgotten aesthetics of Classicism and Socialist Realism were not only recovered by the avant-gardists of the 1990s, but also continue to impress and inspire Russian artists today? In this paper, I focus on how the rhetorical construct of “Russian beauty” formed in the 1990s united both aesthetic and political discourses and led to the steady growth of conservatism in Russia in both cultural production and politics.