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Lamm's Way

This essay was commissioned for the retrospective exhibition of the Soviet dissident artist and now New York based modernist Leonid Lamm. It describes and celebrates his early training under the Constructivist architect Yakov Chernikov as well as the New Society of Painters (NOZh) artist Georgy Ryazhsky, to become one of the most talented painters of his generation - capable of artistic invention and philosophical reflection over an impressive range. The great experiments of the Constructivists and Suprematists in the Revolutionary period and the 1920s, filtered through the absurdist humour of the Russian Dada group Oberiu as well the transcendental mood of virtually all Russian art of the modern period, were interrupted in 1973 by Lamm's arrest in Moscow on charges of hooliganism and his incarceration in a labour camp, where he became camp artist and turned his hand to artistic labour of a different and obviously restricted kind. The essay discusses that work, and the continuing commitment of Lamm to post-Constructivist experiment in spatial and temporal structures, both during the years of imprisonment, to the time of his release and subsequent emigration via Israel to New York in the 1980s. Lamm is widely represented in post-Soviet artistic narratives, for instance at the Zimmerli Museum in New Jersey and elsewhere, and is now one of the elder statesmen of that complex and original scene. The essay is the opening text in this commemorative exhibition publication and provides insight into the work of a major figure of that era.