ABSTRACT
That the formation of the Moscow avant-garde milieu of the late 1950s and 1960s was stimulated by contacts with the West has long been recognized. However, the relations between this trend and Western art have yet to be mapped out. My approach will be first to adumbrate the ideology and structure of the Moscow avant-garde group (often called “underground” or “nonconformist”) as a response to impulses that came from the West, and then to analyze the ideas that this art induced in three major European art critics who visited Moscow in the mid-and late 1960s.
