The Russian Institute held a next-generation humanities lecture for Russian language students at the audiovisual room on the first floor of Seoyeon High School in Dongtan New Town, Gyeonggi-do at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, November 8, 2023. At this event, which was held as part of the HK+(II) <Regional Humanities Center> project, Dankook University Department of Russian Studies Professor Kyu-yeon Cho gave a lecture on the topic of “Russian art, creative ideas, and moments of artistic innovation.”

In his lecture, Professor Cho Gyu-yeon emphasized that the moments that changed human perception of the world through creative thinking and changes in ideas were mainly embodied through art. He explained that a ‘great’ artist is someone who breaks away from the existing framework and creates something new, and that if the new world view presented in their creations is listed in chronological order, that is art history.

Professor Cho Kyu-yeon looked at the overall characteristics and influence of early 20th century Russian art in relation to European painting. In addition, starting from Impressionism, European art shifted from a history of ‘representation’ centered on ‘content’ to a history of ‘distortion’ centered on form, and he mentioned that the tendency that responded most sensitively to this change was the Russian avant-garde during the revolutionary period. Appreciate the various works of artists representing the Russian avant-garde, such as Kandinsky, who painted emotions through abstraction, Malevich, who excluded form and color and presented the limits of painting, and Chagall, who laid the foundation for surrealism by painting dreams, as revealed in 20th-century Russian art. It was a valuable time to look for mechanisms of subversion and critical moments of creativity and innovation, and to point out the meaning of these creations in the history of painting.