The course examines the history of 20th century art in Russia with a focus on its connections to artistic developments in Europe and the United States. Throughout the century, conditions ranged from dynamic and intensive cross-cultural exchange during the rise of the historical avant-gardes in the early 1910s to isolationism during the two World Wars. Yet even during the years of drastic stand offs between Soviet Union and the West – during the Stalinist 1930s-40s and the Cold War years 1950s-70s - there were fascinating connections between the cultural fields of the East and the West, which sheds light on the cultural history of both sides of the Iron Curtain. We will study the rise of the Russian avant-garde of the 1910s and '20s, the establishment of a range of Soviet realisms in the 1930s and '40s, the re-discovery of Western modernism in the 1950s, the diversification of Soviet art into "official" and "unofficial" in the 1960s-80s, the provocations of the political art of the 1990s and the contemporary. Throughout the course, we will also focus on major figures who enabled transnational exchange, including the artist El Lissitzky, MoMA’s director Alfred Barr, the Greek-born Soviet collector George Costakis and the American collector Norton Dodge. Class instruction will be supplemented by study visits to MoMA, the Zimmerli Art Museum and pertinent exhibitions in New York, as well as by guest visits of contemporary artists and curators. For LVIS majors, this course also fulfills the LVIS 2010 Exhibitions as History or LVIS 3250 Practicing Curating requirement.