Queer(ing) Art of the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and Emigration, 1890-1940s

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture, Room 206. Coffee/tea and cookies at 3:45 pm.

media release: About the lecture: This talk will explore Russian art through the lens of gender and sexuality studies. It details how artists navigated the complex interplay of societal norms, personal identification, and creative expression and how the shifts in political and cultural landscapes influenced the representation and perception of themes and subjects in art referring to same-sex love, desire, and sexual identity from the late 19th century to the 1930s. The focus of the lecture stands on key artistic movements and notable figures whose work challenged conventional norms during a time of significant sociopolitical upheaval, such as Konstantin Somov, Leon Bakst, Alexander Nikolaev (also known as Usto Mumin), Pavel Tchelitchew, and many others.

About the speaker: Pavel Golubev joined the University of Pennsylvania Department of History of Art as a Visiting Research Scholar in 2021 after leaving Ukraine following the Russian invasion. He previously served as Chief of the Exhibition Department at the Odesa National Fine Arts Museum. Research interests of Pavel Golubev center on the representation of sexuality in Eastern European art of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. His explorations in this area have resulted in seven books, including a multivolume edition of the private diaries of the queer symbolist artist Konstantin Somov. Golubev has also authored a monograph on Somov and homosexuality in early modernism (2019), which explores the representation of same-sex desire in art and literature during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He curated the exhibition "Konstantin Somov: Uncensored" at the Odesa Fine Arts Museum in 2019, for which he also authored the monographic catalog.

Pavel Golubev defended his Ph.D. dissertation in Art History at Moscow State University in 2018, focusing on the history of queer art—a pioneering study in Russia.