Decorative Art of the USSR as Taxonomy of Soviet Design

A lecture by Yelena McLane (Florida State University)

Decorative Art of the USSR (Декоративное искусство СССР) was an influential monthly magazine dedicated to art, design, and material culture that was published in Moscow from 1957 to 1991. The premier publication of the Union of Artists of the USSR, it functioned as a platform for industrial design, interior decor, crafts, folk art, and monumental and decorative architecture, tracking the evolution of mid-century modernism and late-Soviet brutalism through the unique cultural lenses of fifteen ethnically and stylistically diverse Soviet republics. Its editorial synthesis of progressive ideation and applied art over more than three decades—from postwar practicalism to Perestroika-era conceptualism—forms the basis for a new taxonomy of Soviet design informed by the theorists and practitioners whose work fueled the official art economy of the late USSR.