About the archive

The archive of Lyubov Gurevich, devoted to the underground art of Leningrad, started coming together in the 1980, but includes materials that date back to the 1960s. The archive contains typewritten texts on underground art by artists and other authors, as well as invitations, posters, booklets, and photographs of exhibitions. Some of the materials are related to the research and organizational activities of Lyubov Gurevich: typewritten interviews with artists of different generations, chronicles of apartment exhibitions and official exhibitions, questionnaires, and lists of participants of exhibitions organised by the Cooperative for Experimental Visual Art (TEII). The archive also includes materials documenting the art of the 1990s and 2000s: a collection of over 800 articles about exhibitions and other art events published in Leningrad/ St. Petersburg periodicals, posters, and booklets.

The archive also contains documents that previously belonged to Rikhard Vasmi (1929–1998), an artist of the Arefiev Circle and a member of the Order of Non-selling Painters (one of the first groups of unofficial artists in Leningrad formed in the late 1950s). These include various certificates and documents confirming the transfer of works; several dozen letters, including from artists Anatoly Basin , Alexander Arefiev, and Valentina Gromova; several of Vasmi’s notebooks and manuscripts; a collection of typewritten texts by other authors; photographs-including of the 1950s and 1960s-related to the artists of the Arefiev Circle.

About the author

Lyubov Gurevich (b. 1946, Nevel) is a scholar specializing in the unofficial art of Leningrad, an art critic, and a writer. She has been writing on unofficial artists since the 1980s, with some of her texts published under the pen name L. Bert in the samizdat journals Chasy and Krasny Shchedrinets. She was the secretary of the exhibition committee of the Cooperative for Experimental Visual Art (TEII) in 1987 and 1988. In the early 1990s she worked with Leningrad Gallery Foundation. She edited the book Aref’evsky krug [The Arefiev Circle] (2002) and wrote Khudozhniki leningradskogo andegraunda. Biografichesky slovar [Artists of the Leningrad Underground: A Biographical Dictionary] (2007; 2nd edition, 2019) and Shemyakin v khudozhestvennom landshafte [Shemyakin in the Art Landscape] (2020). She lives and works in St. Petersburg.

Elena Figurina, Valentin Gerasimenko