This catalogue presents the artwork of three fictitious Russian artists, all inventions of Ilya Kabakov, and intervviews of Ilya Kabakov.

"Matthew Jesse Jackson's writing and quality of mind put him in the forefront of the next wave in modern art studies." Thomas E. Crow, Institute of Fine Arts --

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov was a galvanizing figure in Moscow's underground art community, ultimately gaining international prominence as the “leader” of a band of artists known as the Moscow Conceptual Circle. Throughout this time, he created texts that he would distribute among his friends, and by the late 1990s his written production amounted to hundreds of pages. Devoted to themes that range from the “cosmism” of pre-Revolutionary Russian modernism to the philosophical implications of Moscow’s garbage, Kabakov’s handmade booklets were typed out on paper, then stapled or sewn together using rough butcher paper for their covers. Among these writings are faux Socialist Realist verses, theoretical explorations, art historical analyses, accompaniments to installation projects, and transcripts of dialogues between the artist and literary theorists, critics, journalists, and other artists. This volume offers for the first time in English the most significant texts written by Kabakov. The writings have been expressly selected for this English-language volume and there exists no equivalent work in any language.

This is the first comprehensive monograph on an important contemporary artist, one who has come to represent the Russian avant-garde in the post-Stalinist era much in the way that Joseph Beuys was a stimulus for European art after World War II. In her fascinating text, Amei Wallach draws on extensive research and interviews with Kabakov and his circle over the past eight years, and puts the work in the context of the artist's life and the social, historical, cultural, and political forces that have shaped it - from his boyhood during Stalin's regime, to his obligatory career as a children's book illustrator in the official Artists' Union, to his involvement in Moscow's furtive and fertile underground avant-garde of artists and writers, to his more recent travels in the international art circuit. This groundbreaking volume also includes an introduction by Robert Storr, a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and commentaries by the artist himself that accompany the 290 illustrations, including paintings, drawings, albums, and sketches and photographs of installations.

Essay by Amei Wallach. Foreword by Amada Cruz.

The evolution of the close bond between the visual arts and opera starting from the nineteenth century up to the early twenty-first century. The intertwining of visual and musical arts at the beginning of the 20th century led to modernism, abstraction and in music, atonality. This meeting of the arts was never so intense as on the operatic stage. In her book Painting the Stage, curator and art and music critic Denise Wendel-Poray first examines historic productions beginning with Schinkel's iconic stage design for Mozart's Magic Flute, before exploring those of the 20th century with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes and the implication of avant-garde artists in opera up until World War II. Directly after the armistice of 1945, famous artists such as André Derain, Balthus, Dalí, André Masson, and Kokoschka reopened the theaters amidst ruins, thus ushering in a new era of optimism. The event of pop art, happenings, and experimental theatre with the collaboration of artists Robert Indiana, David Hockney, Robert Wilson brought on further developments in the realm of opera. Finally, interviews with world famous artists such as Anselm Kiefer, William Kentridge, Bill Viola, Robert Longo, Jonathan Meese, and Daniel Richter show how their contribution to the genre is making opera today more than ever a form of "total art" or "Gesamtkunstwerk" and a hotbed of contemporary creation.