World: The Road to Jail Is Paved with Nonobjective Art

• Share

Since the Kremlin's sharpest barbs these days are aimed at modern art and "Western espionage," it was just a matter of time before the KGB's cops would turn up a victim whose wrongdoings combined both evils. He turned out to be a Leningrad physics teacher whose taste for abstract painting allegedly led him to join the U.S. spy service.

Police said they first spotted the teacher, one Rudolf Friedman, as he muttered uncomplimentary remarks about socialist realism while strolling through Leningrad's Russian Museum. A well-dressed U.S. tourist approached him, enthusiastically shared his sentiments, and promised to send Friedman reproductions of avant-garde paintings from America. The picture Friedman liked best, said the cops indignantly, was a "chaos of black, red and blue splotches captioned / Need You Tonight." Soon, they said, the teacher was getting messages from the U.S. written in invisible ink. Just as Friedman prepared to deliver information "very remote from theoretical arguments about abstract art," police moved in and hustled him off to jail.