About

In the Spring of 1980, six years before Mikhail Gorbachev introduced “glasnost” to the Soviet Union, Modernism gallery brought Russian avant-garde art to the West Coast of the United States. Barely six months old and situated in a large, minimalist-designed, second-floor space in San Francisco’s then edgy South of Market district, Modernism defied censorship in the USSR and provincialism in San Francisco with a museum-quality exhibition that included works by Kazimir Malevich, Liubov Popova, Alexander Bogomazov and a dozen other seminal artists working in the teens and twenties.

The …