Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia

The Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (Russian: Ассоциация художников революционной России,

Assotsiatsia Khudozhnikov Revolutsionnoi Rossii, 1922-1928), later known as Association of Artists of the Revolution (Ассоциация художников революции, Assotsiatsia Khudozhnikov Revolutsii or AKhR, 1928-1932) was a group of artists in the Soviet Union in 1922-1933. Diverse members of the group gained favor as the legitimate bearers of the Communist ideas into the world of art, formulating framework for the Socialist Realism style. See also red cossacks.

Original founding members included Pavel Radimov (the last chairman of Peredvizhniki movement), Sergey Malyutin, Yevgeny Katzman, Pyotr Shukhmin and other realist painters, who already established themselves in artistic world before the Russian Revolution of 1917. The group formed within the Peredvizhniki movement, that held their last, 47th, public exhibition in 1922, and clearly placed itself in opposition to avant-garde art.

Their first public statement as a new entity was a 1922 exhibition in Moscow; all proceeds were used for the relief of Russian famine of 1921. By 1928, the group sponsored 10 nationwide exhibitions with high publicity. Despite its revolutionary title, it successfully united artists of the "old school" like Abram Arkhipov, Aleksandr Makovsky, Nikolay Kasatkin, Konstantin Yuon and the younger ones like Sergei Gerasimov and Isaak Brodsky. In a decade, it grew up from 80 to over 300 members. Broad membership and dominance of mature artists born in the 1870s and 1880s helped in establishing AKhRR as a reliable institution, far from ultra-revolutionary rhetorics.

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