Cezanne and the Emergence of a Modernist Aesthetic in Soviet Architecture

This article argues that the work of Paul Cezanne may have been a factor in encouraging young archi-tects in Russia to abandon the approaches and styles of the past and develop a new type of architecture in the years immediately following the Revolution of October 1917. The focus is on the early work of the architect Vladimir Krinskii, who in the 1920s worked with Nikolai Ladovskii in formulating the Rationalist approach to architecture. He later stressed how important the art of Cezanne and the avant-garde art had been for him and other young architects in developing a modernist aesthetic. This article examines Krinskii’s statements about Cezanne and relates them to the experimental sketches that the architect produced in 1919.