The Ransom of Russian Art

by John McPhee

Overview

John McPhee's The Ransom of Russian Art is a suspenseful, chilling, and fascinating report on a covert operation like no other. It offers unprecedented insight into Soviet culture at the brink of the Union's collapse.

In the 1960s and 1970s, an American professor of Soviet economics forayed on his own in the Soviet Union, bought the work of underground "unofficial" artists, and brought it out himself or arranged to have it illegally shipped to the United States. Norton Dodge visited the apartments of unofficial artists in at least a dozen geographically scattered cities. By 1977, he had a thousand works of art. His ultimate window of interest involved the years from 1956 to 1986, and through his established contacts he eventually acquired another eight thousand works—by far the largest collection of its kind.

McPhee investigates Dodge's clandestine activities in the service of dissident Soviet art, his motives for his work, and the fates of several of the artists whose lives he touched.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374524500
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/30/1998
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	705,086
Product dimensions:	5.69(w) x 8.26(h) x 0.48(d)

About the Author

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written nearly 30 books, including Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Control of Nature (1989), The Founding Fish (2002), Uncommon Carriers (2007), and Silk Parachute (2011). Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Hometown:

Princeton, New Jersey

Date of Birth:

March 8, 1931

Place of Birth:

Princeton, New Jersey

Education:

A.B., Princeton University, 1953; graduate study at Cambridge University, 1953-54

Website:

http://www.johnmcphee.com/

Editorial Reviews

Mr. McPhee has created a style—blending detailed reporting with a novelistic sense of narrative—and a standard that have influenced a whole generation of journalists.” —Timothy Bay, The Baltimore Sun

“An excellent survey of the artistic worlds of Moscow, Leningrad, and other Soviet cities during the neo-Stalinist deep freeze.” —David Remnick, The New York Review of Books

From the Publisher

Dissident Soviet painters and sculptors-harassed and spied on by the KGB, their works shown clandestinely or in rare public exhibits-found an ally in Norton Dodge, a University of Maryland economics professor who smuggled their works to the West beginning in the early 1960s. On frequent trips to the Soviet Union, the awkward, gutsy Oklahoma-born art enthusiast visited the homes of underground artists and spent a fortune to buy some 8000 works by 600 artists. His collection, with styles ranging from Pop to abstract expressionism, was recently donated to Rutgers University. Interspersed with color art reproductions (not seen by PW), McPhee's engaging narrative sheds light on this suppressed creative milieu. The prolific author also tracked down migr Soviet artists now living in the U.S., and he ponders the West's relative indifference to their rebellious art. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

During the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years, nonconforming artists in the Soviet Union were deemed "unofficial" artists, which prevented their works from being sold or exhibited. McPhee (Assembling California, LJ 1/93), a prolific author and staff writer for The New Yorker, recounts the surreptitious activities of U.S. economist Norton Dodge, who, during the 1960s and 1970s, slipped by the KGB and smuggled out of the Soviet Union 8000 artworks by 600 dissident artists. Dodge spent his days researching the roles of women and tractors in the Soviet economy, but after hours, this rumpled, eccentric, absent-minded figure penetrated the networks of the underground artists, purchasing their works, shipping their art to his Maryland barn, and exhibiting it-exactly what the Soviets did not want to happen. Based on conversations with Dodge, McPhee's suspenseful narrative and anecdotes will enthrall general audiences.-Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago

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