The Formula of Grief

Vadim Sidur

1972

Monument depicting curved, stylized figure with head in hands set among flowers in a grassy park with a house in the background.
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Vadim Sidur was sometimes called “the Soviet Henry Moore” because of the similarities between his aesthetic and those of the British artist. In Sidur’s native Soviet Union, however, his work was suppressed for much of his career because of its nonconformism. In the 1960s, he created a series called Monuments, in which the artistic form was refined to a symbol or formula. Today, some of these sculptures serve as monuments in public squares in Russia and elsewhere. In the 1980s, Sidur’s The Formula of Grief (designed in 1972) was erected in the town of Pushkin by the Leningrad Holocaust Research Group as a memorial to the between 250 and 300 Jews murdered by the Nazis there.

Credits

www.panoramio.com. Anna Pronenko.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 9.

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Visual and Material Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

1939–1973

Jewish visual art flourished and diversified in the postwar period, reflecting the social and political transformations taking place in the world.

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