Free Art Studios

(full name State Free Art Studios), Soviet art educational institutions that existed from 1918 to the beginning of the 1920’s. The Free Art Studios were organized from local art schools in Moscow, Petrograd, Kazan, Saratov, Odessa and Kharkov for the purpose of reforming artistic education and relating it to the task of constructing Soviet artistic culture. Besides the followers of traditional methods of instruction, representatives of “leftist” art movements and industrial artists played important roles in the institutions. The pedagogical approaches failed to form a definite system. The Moscow Free Art Studios, created by merging the Stroganov School of Art (the First State Free Art Studios) and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (the second State Free Art Studios), were replaced in 1920 by the State Higher Art and Technical Studios.