The Influence of Pop Art on the Non-conformist Underground Artists of the USSR

The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a political monolith that plunged USSR into years of economic stagnation, a stale, decaying, old conservative with a speech impediment, caused by smoking and excessive drinking. A beautiful, enigmatic movie star, a “blonde bombshell”, a woman who wore Chanel No. 5 in bed and nothing else. What on earth could possibly link Erik Bulatov’s Leonid Breshnev, Soviet Cosmos, 1977 and Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, 1967?

Well, for starters, neither of these works are portraits, although they both depict faces of specific people.

Therein lies the genius of Pop Art – it dismantles the idols. Both works are irreverent commentary on what was ubiquitous in each society at the time. Pop Art is magnificently ironic in its ability to call out the rampant consumerism on both sides of the Cold War seesaw: because it does not matter what one overconsumes – movie icons or political propaganda. The result is the same – immunity, desensitisation, the desire to purge.

Erik Bulatov never directly aligned himself with the Pop Art movement but often remarked in interviews that he felt a kind of kinship, specifically with the American Pop Art. He refers to the figure of Brezhnev as decorative and completely inert – a fictional icon, an illusion of deity, completely hollow inside.

Bulatov credits Pop Art for allowing him to embrace the suffocating, stagnant Soviet reality and incorporate that reality into his art. But he also notes that while American pop artists were quite happy with remaining and reveling within the ambiguous space of Pop Art irreverence, the Soviet non-conformists went much further in their desire to break boundaries, challenge the status quo and tirelessly seek freedom.