ABSTRACT
Both American and Soviet art experienced significant changes in the late 1960s. American art provoked instability and new impulses for change, while Soviet art developed and refined Socialist Realism, with its references to the classical history of world art, with any exceptions confirming the basic line. The style of radical criticism that judged the new American art as fundamentally incapable of experiencing mimesis and reflecting images of the world, bears all the features of Marxist methodology as negative criticism. In its response to new American art in the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet critics and art historians kept aloof from up-to-date Western art experiments and were focused more on a synthesis than on acute critical observations. Following Perestroika and the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall, it became possible for exhibitions of the latest American art to travel to Russia: the panoramic exhibition New Horizons: American Painting 1840–1910, showing works by Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, and LeRoy Neiman.
