Not many artists can claim to have totally embodied the countercultural spirit of their time. Even fewer can legitimately claim to have launched, led, and theorized a national conceptual art movement; to have had his name become a byword for aesthetic experimentation and the negation of repressive officious dogma; or to have been rewarded for his efforts by becoming a star of the international art market whose works are routinely auctioned off for tens of millions of dollars. Ilya Kabakov—the Ukrainian-born, Moscow and then New York Jew—can claim all these things. Along with his wife, Emilia, he became the leading figure of the Russian artistic underground of the 1970s and 1980s and a founder of the Moscow conceptualist movement. The innovator of the “Total Installation” assemblage and a practitioner of subversive and graceful opposition to the formal strictures of Soviet art, Kabakov died in May at the age of 89.
