Christina Kiaer is the Arthur Andersen Teaching and Research Professor of art history at Northwestern University. She is the author of Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism, coauthor with Robert Bird and Zachary Cahill of Revolution Every Day: A Calendar, and coeditor with Eric Naiman of Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside.
“Collective Body is a tour de force: at once a history of a single artist, of Soviet art practice in the 1930s—and of Soviet culture more broadly. Kiaer writes with ease and sophistication, using brilliant close readings of artworks to illuminate her social and historical context in new ways. This is scholarship of a very high order.” -- Emma Widdis, University of Cambridge “Aleksandr Deineka’s depiction of sensual bodies was labeled by Russian critics ‘lyrical socialist realism.’ Traversing three decades of artistic debates and realignments, Kiaer elucidates this paradoxical stylistic label and gives us a new reading of the complexities of a Soviet and Stalinist world that remains as fascinating as it is disturbing. This highly original study puts the revolutionary avant-garde and its aftermath in a new perspective.” -- Romy Golan, City University of New York