Associate Professor in Art History, Uppsala University. Adjunct Professor, Stockholm University. She defended in 2003 her doctorate on Russian art and artists, Coloured Universe and the Russian-Avantgarde. M.V. Matiushin on Colour Vision in Stalin’s Russia 1932. Main research interests concern art in the widest sense possible (including theory and practice of visual culture, design, architecture, media) in Russia, the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, applying interdisciplinary perspectives.
August 2024 Margareta Tillberg died at the age of 63 years.
Margareta Tillberg
Associate Professor in Art History, Uppsala University. Adjunct Professor, Stockholm University. She defended in 2003 her doctorate on Russian art and artists, Coloured Universe and the Russian-Avantgarde. M.V. Matiushin on Colour Vision in Stalin’s Russia 1932. It was translated into Russian. It is the first close study on practices of a so-called laboratory in an art- and science institute in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.
Main research interests concern art in the widest sense possible (including theory and practice of visual culture, design, architecture, media) in Russia, the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, applying interdisciplinary perspectives.
In 2010, visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
August 2024 Margerata Tillberg died at the age of 63 years. Read the memorial.
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Articles by Margareta Tillberg
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This text gives a glimpse of a hitherto unknown design discourse during the Cold War – from both sides of the Iron Curtain – by exploring the 1975 Congress of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), held in Moscow. Sweden sent a big delegation to Russia. More than forty of the small country’s top designers and influencers participated, which was more than twice as many as usual to these international design congresses. Thanks to reactions published about the events in journals on design in Sweden and in the Soviet Union, archival material, and the author’s own interviews with the delegates from Sweden who participated in Moscow, as well as one-off exclusive backstage witnesses from the local staff of the host organization during the ongoing congress, Moscow 1975 is experienced through the eyes of contemporary witnesses. The essay gives new insights into the world congress in design and illustrates the international atmosphere during the Cold War.
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VNIITE, once the world’s largest institute of design research, ceased to exist on June 14, 2013. It was once conceived as a marriage of engineering and aesthetics. Intellectual abilities and sensitivity were to be respected rather than viewed as problems.
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Soviet Design 1950–1980 was shown for two busy winter months and enjoyed great public success. Even if Soviet design was often — but far from always — based on originals borrowed from the West, the individual objects exude a personal charm, variation, and quirkiness that makes them well worth preserving, exhibiting, and discussing.
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The questions posed by this year’s Berlin Biennale are an expression of anger; over the lack of attention to issues that concern ownership of access to the public space, control of money, and frustration about how the art world is being controlled by increasingly few hands, even as events are increasing in number and being spread all over the world.
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In the 1960s, the Soviets took up a rivalry with the US in a hitherto new field, industrial design. ElektroMera was a grandiose effort to produce utilities for everyday use: an effort that nonetheless was never realized in the form of finished products.
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Issue 2024, 4: