Körperkultur und Sport in Werken sowjetischer bildender Künstler
(Body Culture and Sport in Works by Soviet Visual Artists)
organized by the Ministry of Culture of the USSR, Moscow, on the occasion of the XX Olympiad in the framework of the Olympic Summer, Munich 1972.

July 11 – August 13, 1972

In 1972, as part of the olympic summer, Kunstverein München hosted the exhibition Körperkultur und Sport in Werken sowjetischer bildender Künstler (Body Culture and Sport in Works by Soviet Visual Artists). The exhibition was arranged and financed by the Soviet Ministry of Culture within the framework of a cultural agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and the USSR.

“The exhibition ‘Body Culture and Sport in Works by Soviet Visual Artists’ at the Kunstverein München offers observers of the art scene between West and East an approach to assessing Soviet art today. Already in its title, it betrays the immediate factuality of ‘socialist realism’. Art here is not free-floating creativity in the field of tension between representational and abstract fantasy. Here, art is service to a cause, to the community, to an idea for the future, performed with good craftsmanship. Pictures like Andrei Yakovlev's ‘Winner of a Kolkhoz Competition’ or the touchingly naive group picture ‘The deserving coach of the USSR P. Korkija with his protégés’ are meant to spread faith and optimism. ‘This truthful art, an art of pictorial generalisations, is called upon’, says the catalogue preface, ‘to make work and leisure, indeed the whole life of the Soviet people more beautiful and meaningful, to contribute to the aesthetic knowledge of reality by the masses and to the education of high spiritual and moral qualities’.”
(Mittelbayerische Zeitung, July 1972)