Soviet Cartoons Mocking Modern Art on View at MoMUS
A collection of Soviet caricatures targeting modern art is on view at the Museum of Modern Art–Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Caricaturing Modernism: Soviet Cartoons on Art from the Collection of Yuri Albert presents 24 caricatures dating from 1930 to 1970. Published in Krokodil and other Soviet publications, the drawings reflect the cultural battles surrounding modernism, Socialist Realism and Western art.
The works come from a collection assembled by Moscow-born conceptual artist Yuri Albert, who began collecting Soviet caricatures during the final years of perestroika. His collection focused specifically on cartoons dealing with art.
One of the exhibition’s central ideas is the distance between the art being mocked and the people producing and reading the cartoons. According to MoMUS, cartoonists sometimes caricatured works they had never actually seen. Soviet audiences, in turn, could encounter modernism through these distorted representations.
The exhibition places those cartoons in a particularly relevant setting. MoMUS holds the Costakis Collection, a major collection of Russian avant-garde art. Visitors can therefore see caricatures attacking modernist ideas in proximity to works associated with the artistic movements that were being ridiculed.
MoMUS describes the exhibition as a confrontation between original avant-garde works and their satirical representations. It also considers how ideology shaped the way art was presented to and understood by the public.
Among the cartoons associated with the exhibition is a 1950 work by Mark Veisbord published in Krokodil No. 29, Look how the artist managed to capture the resemblance between me and my son Jack!
Another is Yuliy Ganf’s Mr Formalister’s Creative Success, or How to Turn Misfortune into Luck, published in Krokodil No. 23 in 1952. Works by Ivan Semenov are also represented in Yuri Albert’s collection.
Albert later returned to this material in his own art. From around 1992, he began enlarging anti-modernist cartoons he remembered from childhood and transferring them to canvas, turning images originally made to attack modernism into material for new works.
Caricaturing Modernism: Soviet Cartoons on Art from the Collection of Yuri Albert opened on June 20, 2026, and remains on view through January 10, 2027.
The exhibition is curated by Maria Tsantsanoglou, artistic director of the MoMUS Museum of Modern Art–Costakis Collection.
Sources
https://artfocusnow.com/news/cartoons-against-modern-art-yuri-alberts-collection-on-view-at-momus
