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Many museums now allow more opportunities for students to interact with their artefacts, often in store. At the same time, digital technologies now make it easier for those students to access information about those artefacts, interpret it, and construct and communicate their story in imaginative ways. The potential for learning about and through is evident. This article describes how this potential was realized in a collaboration between an Oriental museum and undergraduates studying a visual arts module at the University of Durham, UK. It describes some guiding educational principles, the students’ interaction with art objects, their research process and logs, and the presentation of their understandings in podcasts. Their responses achieved the aims of high levels of motivation, the construction of understandings (and their limits), imaginative communication, heightened information technology skills, and personal satisfaction. That this approach could be usefully applied elsewhere is indicated, along with some limitations.

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Personal memoirs and essays on the artist's relationships with contemporaries make up die final section of the. book. American friends, Muriel Gardiner, whose collection inspired the 1983 symposium on Konenkov, and Marjorie Bishop, an art student when she met the Konenkovs, offer tantalizing vignettes of daily life. A memoir by Sidney Monas of his 1961 visit to Konenkov and sculptor Ernst Neizvestny's recollections of Konenkov in the 1950s and 1960s make a good pair. For both the American scholar and the ex-Soviet artist, Konenkov was a symbol: "like Tolstoi," for Monas (200), and "a classic. .. a living relic of history" for Neizvestny (207). They describe meaningful, moving encounters with Konenkov but suggest that he remained somewhat elusive, unreachable. This inherent elusiveness affects die book as a whole. The writers present Konenkov in ways that offer new perspectives on Russian art within the international art world. Thanks to careful research, thoughtful choice of topics, and good organization, the book shows just how many aspects of the surrovinding cultures Konenkov touched. Yet in some ways die artist still seems to hover on die edge of key movements and developments, hard to identify with any tendency fully, impossible to pin down, enigmatic. This is praise rather than criticism; the editors' decision not to oversimplify was judicious. A note on the quality of production is in order. The book is handsome, though not lavish. The 125 illustrations, mainly black and white, are clearly captioned and integrated with the texts; the chronology, chapter notes, bibliography, and index are all well arranged and useful. One of a series of books on Russian and Soviet art co-published by Rutgers University Press and the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, this volume meets the standards of its predecessors.