The Russian Boy is like the alter ego of Frank, like his young brother or even like Frank himself when he was little, in a different -past- time and a different, in fact, antithetical in cold-war terms culture. Frank was created in 1969, in the midst of the cold war's period of high political tension between the US and the USSR. Frank has the look of the cool, aloof, yet scruffy, intellectual student who disapproves of the Vietnam War and his government's practices, somewhat like a dissident. The Russian boy has a very similar, serious yet aloof, piercing look; the look of a dissident in the making, the kind of citizen who, growing up, would come to criticize the practices or the authority of his own country's practices, of the Communist party. The juxtaposition of the two images reveals the similarity of the individuals within the antithesis of their contexts (cultural, political, spatial - geographical, and age).

Artist: Alexander Leventon
Date: 1929
Medium: Photographs, Photograph
Size: 9 1/8 x 7 1/2 in. (23.18 x 19.05 cm) (image)15 3/4 x 12 15/16 in. (40.01 x 32.86 cm) (mount)
Institution: Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Accession #: 2000.55