Eduard Steinberg

A key figure in the Russian avant-garde’s second wave, painter Eduard Steinberg has a permanent room dedicated to his work at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. As a member of the Nonconformist movement, Steinburg rejected socialist realism —the official artistic style of the Soviet state —in favor of geometric abstraction, and advocated for freedom of expression in the arts. Steinberg makes frequent use of the triangle, rectangle, and circle to create subtle arrangements of geometric forms, and is heavily influenced by Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist compositions and the Dutch De Stijl movement. Shortly after his birth, his father —a poet and translator —was arrested and imprisoned by Stalin’s regime. When he was released, the family moved to Tarusa, then a hub of the dissident intelligentsia, which helped shape Steinberg’s sense of creative independence.