Margarita Tupitsyn's new book is the result of her decades-long work as a scholar of the Russian historical avant-garde and as an art critic and curator of exhibitions of contemporary Russian art; her role in acquainting audiences outside Russia with the unofficial art of the post-Stalin period is difficult to overestimate. Moscow Vanguard Art: 1922–1992 effectively bridges the two areas of Tupitsyn's expertise: the first two chapters of the book consider the Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde in its struggle to retain a niche in early Soviet culture; the subsequent chapters, three through seven, trace the story of unofficial, or nonconformist, Soviet art—more precisely, that of its Moscow branch—from the mid-1950s through the end of perestroika.

In Chapter 1, “In Defense of Nonobjective Art,” Tupitsyn provides a glimpse of the situation that non-representational, or nonobjective, art faced in the USSR between 1922 and 1932, with particular focus on negotiating links between nonobjective easel painting and production arts that helped align artistic quests with early Soviet social-political agendas. Chapter 2, “The Specters of Formalism,” looks at the time period from the early 1930s through the 1940s, when Russian experimental art, marginalized as it was, reconsidered its earlier commitment to graphic arts, photography, and production arts, and returned to painting—figurative as well as abstract—as a rediscovered medium of creative freedom. Relying on private letters and diaries of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich, Gustav Klutsis, and Valentina Kulagina—artists whose work has been central to Tupitsyn's research for a long time—she provides insight into their reflections on aesthetic and social choices made by avant-garde artists of their generation after 1917.

Critical for Tupitsyn's study is Chapter 3, “Reinventing Abstraction,” in which she retraces, step by step, the process by which the young post-Stalin generation of artists discovered western and Russian legacies of experimental art and explored new artistic venues in the context of significant, if temporary, loosening of state ideological control. Tupitsyn outlines the role of major exhibitions of western art in Moscow in this process, such as Pablo Picasso's exhibit in 1956, as well as American (1959) and French (1961) National Exhibitions. Against this background, smaller exhibits of such artists as El Lissitzky (1960) and Vladimir Tatlin and Malevich (1965) took place in the Maiakovskii Museum; works of contemporary Russian experimental art were accepted to a large 1962 exhibition organized by the Moscow branch of the Union of Soviet Artists; members of the experimental Movement group were invited to decorate the streets of Leningrad for the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution. It is during these years that new paths in experimental art were explored by the new generation: Vladimir Slepian, Lidila Masterkova, Vladimir Nemukhin, Lev Nusberg, Fransisko Infante, Mikhail Chernyshov, Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Vitaly Komar, and Aleksandr Melamid, among others.

The creative trajectories of many of these artists are further traced in subsequent chapters, where more names are introduced as well, such as Andrei Monastyrski, the leader of the Collective Actions Group, Irina Nakhova, and Aleksandr Kosolapov. Chapters 4 and 5 examine a variety of art forms and exhibiting practices explored by Russian experimental artists once public venues to display their work became unavailable. Be it easel painting, individual or collective actions, inclusion of physical objects of everyday life into art works, installations, or the phenomenon of Apt Art exhibitions, Tupitsyn's overarching goal is to understand these forms as products of the tense interaction of restrictive social context and creative freedom. She is equally interested in exploring the forms of self-organization of artists that made nonconformist art a viable project despite the absence of market, criticism, and traditional exhibition venues. At the same time, she shows in Chapter 6 how decades of isolated development made the first encounters of Soviet experimental artists and their work with western audiences an uneasy experience for both sides due to differences among the lenses through which aesthetic choices were perceived. In Chapter 7, Tupitsyn brings her story of Soviet nonconformist art to a close, aligning this closure with the emergence of the art market and freedom to exhibit.

While art historians will find in this book the most comprehensive critical survey of Russian experimental art of the Soviet period to date, Tupitsyn's study, thanks to its rich factual base and interpretative insights, will also be of great interest to scholars of Soviet culture at large.