Dodge became not only the archivist of the Russian underground but also its patron saint, helping to support artists who had no official status in their country, no source of income and no chance to display their creations. Whatever survived tended to fall apart later, being subjected as it was to the daily abrasions of Soviet life. Such work was often destroyed, sometimes by the artists themselves. Most of the pieces he chose were produced in secret their manufacture was dangerous and their sale or export was usually illegal. While in Russia, he met and fell in love with the artists of the vanguard, and his collecting ventures, which began as diversions, became the true purpose of his visits. He later returned many times for a book on women’s contributions to the Soviet economy, a project, when he describes it, that sounds like a study in chaos. Dodge began his secret life in Russia when he went there in 1955 without revealing to the authorities that he was writing a dissertation on Soviet tractors. Most of the artists in the collection worked outside the mainstream in the Soviet Union and would probably have disappeared from view altogether if not for the visionary heroics of Norton Townshend Dodge, a retired professor of economics at the University of Maryland. The art, which until recently lived in barns on the Dodge farm in Maryland, is at last in a climate-controlled environment. Only about 350 pieces will be on rotating display the others are stored as a study collection, and about 3,000 have been photographed for a data base at Rutgers. The Dodge collection includes about 12,000 objects collected over 30 years. And it has a name as unwieldy as any created by a Soviet bureaucracy: the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art From the Soviet Union at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University.īut people interested in the world’s most important collection of Russian dissident art from the 1950’s through the 1980’s will have to come here to see it, starting next Sunday. An entire epoch in Russia’s cultural history now has its major repository in New Brunswick, N.J.
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