Solomon Borisovich Nikritin

Private Collection, Moscow

John Bowlt et al., Spheres of Light--Stations of Darkness: The Art of Solomon Nikritin, exhibition catalogue, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004
Charlotte Douglas, "Terms of Transition: The First Discussional Exhibition and the Society of Easel Painters," in The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1992, pp. 450-465
Susan Tumarkin Goodman, ed., Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change, 1890-1990, Munich and New York: Prestel, 1995
Irina Lebedeva, "The Poetry of Science: Projectionism and Electroorganism," in The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1992, pp. 441-449

Solomon Nikritin was a major avant-garde artist of the 1920s who, like many of his contemporaries, was persecuted and ultimately marginalized amid the tightening of Soviet cultural policy strictures in the late 1920s/early 1930s. Nikritin, who studied with Leonid Pasternak and Alexander Yakovlev in Petrograd, and subsequently in Alexandra Exter's teaching workshop in Kiev, completed his artistic training at the Moscow VKhUTEMAS (Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops, 1920-22). In 1922, Nikritin founded and became the chief theorist and organizer of the Projectionist group. Composed of VKhUTEMAS students and anticipating conceptual art of the 1970s, Projectionism proposed that the artist produce not things but "projections" of works of art or theatrical performances that could serve as the basis for the creation of objects or performances by others. In May 1924 the group presented the First Discussional Exhibition of Associations of Active Revolutionary Art in Moscow. Nikritin's work in the exhibition occupied a whole wall of the show. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Nikritin created work that diverged strongly from the idealizing state-approved style of Heroic Realism and its successor, Socialist Realism. The artist's independent creative stance--brave and bold given the tenor of the times--resulted in virtually destroying his career.