Boris Ignatievich Arvatov (Russian: Борис Игнатьевич Арватов; 3 June 1896,

Vilkaviškis Vilkaviškis () is a city in southwestern Lithuania, the administrative center of the Vilkaviškis District Municipality. It is located northwest from Marijampolė, at the confluence of of and rivers. The city got its name from the Vilka ...

– 14 June 1940) was a Russian and

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...

artist and art critic. He was active in the constructivist movement. His father was a specialist in customs law. He had two brothers - Yuri Arvatov (1898–1937) and Vadim Arvatov. Arvatov was involved with the

Institute of Artistic Culture The Institute of Artistic Culture (russian: Институт Художественной Культуры abbreviated to ИНХУК/INKhUK) was a theoretical and research based Russian artistic organisation founded in March Moscow in 1920 and conti ...

(INKhUK) when it was founded in 1920 and was an active theorist and ideologist of the

Proletkult Proletkult ( rus, Пролетку́льт, p=prəlʲɪtˈkulʲt), a portmanteau of the Russian words "proletarskaya kultura" (proletarian culture), was an experimental Soviet artistic institution that arose in conjunction with the Russian Revolu ...

. Here he met fellow theorists Osip Brik, Boris Kushner and Nikolai Tarabukin with whom he developed the productivist approach to the role of the 'artist', which they wanted to be orientated towards a more industrial approach aimed at producing socially useful objects. He was one of the founders of LEF.

''Art and Production''

''Art and Production'' (russian: Искусство и производство) was published in Russian in 1926. An amended version translated into German as ''Kunst und Prodiktion'' was published in

Munich Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Ha ...

in 1972. Spanish and Italian translations appeared in 1973. An English translation was published in 2017. In 1940 he committed suicide after spending ten years in a psychiatric sanatorium.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Arvatov, Boris 1896 births 1940 suicides Russian art critics Artists from Kyiv 1940 deaths Suicides in the Soviet Union