The Late Soviet Charm of Kantianism: Wilhelm Matevosyan's Art History

Abstract

The wide range of political and cultural reforms launched in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in the 1950s affected every aspect of life in the country. As a result of the reformatory policies of this period known as the Khrushchev’s Thaw a broad and complex anti-Soviet discourse emerged in the Soviet Union that was retrospectively conceptualized as National Modernism. Art historian Wilhelm Matevosyan (1931-2001) is in the vanguard of the academic, art historical front of this discourse.

Taking up the cultural policies of the Thaw as a background, this thesis examines the appeal of Kant and neo-Kantian aesthetics for Wilhelm Matevosyan’s scholarship from within the complexity of National Modernism. It is argued that a vague Kantian horizon is discernible in the scholarship of the art historian formed in opposition to the late Soviet official art history. This horizon appears through the ideal of the autonomy of art and the defense of the individuality of the artist in Matevosyan’s works as well as the formalist method of art history he develops in his scholarship.