Sots Art

Sots Art, also written Soc Art and short for Socialist Art, was an artistic movement that arose in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, during the Brezhnev years that critics later called the Era of Stagnation. Often described as Soviet Pop Art, it answered the official doctrine of socialist realism by borrowing its heroic imagery, slogans and portraits of leaders and setting them beside the glossy look of Western advertising and mass culture, so that the state propaganda was mocked with its own language. The term is credited to Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, whose first Sots Art paintings date from the 1960s and include Portraits of the Artists Wives and A Double Self Portrait. Other artists linked with it include Ilya Kabakov, Eric Bulatov, Alexander Kosolapov, Leonid Sokov and Dmitri Prigov.