October

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

October

 

(in Russian, Oktiabr’; full name, October Union of New Forms of Artistic Work), a Soviet art group founded in Moscow in 1928.

The group included artists, architects, art critics, and leading figures in cinema and photography: A. A. Vesnin, V. A. Vesnin, M. Ia. Ginzburg, A. A. Deineka, G. G. Klutsis, L. M. Lisitskii, I. L. Matsa, A. I. Mikhailov, P. I. Novitskii, D. Rivera, A. A. Fedorov-Davydov, B. Uitts, and S. M. Eisenstein. The members of October set as their chief tasks the development of mass propaganda art and the formation of Communist consciousness through improving the cultural level of the people. They worked on the problem of synthesizing the arts and sought to introduce artistic principles into industrial production and everyday life. At the same time, their work had vestiges of the ideas of production art. October organized two exhibitions, one in Leningrad in 1928 and the other in Moscow in 1930. The group existed until 1932.

REFERENCES

Izofront: Klassovaia bor’ba na fronte prostranstvennykh iskusstv; Sb. statei ob”edineniia “Oktiabr’.” Edited by P. I. Novitskii. Moscow-Leningrad, 1931.
Bor’ba za realizm v izobrazitel’nom iskusstve 20–kh godov: Materialy, dokumenty, vospominaniia. Moscow, 1962.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.