Johnson's Russia List
#7274
2 August 2003
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A CDI Project
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#10
New York Times
August 2, 2003
An Earlier Revolution In Russia
By Alan Riding

ST.-PAUL-DE-VENCE, France - In the explosion of creativity that transformed
Russian art in the early 20th century, only a handful of painters --
Chagall, Kandinsky, Malevich, Tatlin and El Lissitzky among them -- gained
world renown before the Soviet Union clamped down on modern art and imposed
the creed of Socialist Realism.

Yet when Jean-Louis Prat, the director of the Fondation Maeght, began to
prepare a show on the era's two major abstract movements, Suprematism and
Constructivism, he was taken aback. During visits to Moscow and St.
Petersburg last year, he discovered many unknown or forgotten artists whose
work was kept from public view in the basements of government museums from
the 1930's until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

So he rethought his exhibition. As a result, with 150 works by 48 artists
representing a half-dozen often competing movements, "Russia and Its
Avant-Gardes" now offers a rare overview of the intense period between 1908
and 1928 when Russian and then Soviet artists revolutionized modern art.
"The Russian curators who came for the opening were impressed because they
had never seen all these works together," Mr. Prat said.

The show, on display at the foundation's hilltop museum here through Nov.
5, is indeed startling. The Provencal light works its magic, showing colors
at their richest, even with Kasimir Malevich's Suprematist masterpiece,
"Black Square on White." But still more striking is the extraordinary
energy and daring of Russian avant-gardes that seemed to appear from
nowhere and barely two decades later disappeared just as swiftly.

Here individual movements can be seen as part of a far broader drive to
create an entirely new visual language, one that led artists constantly to
experiment. "The show exposes the nonconformism of a society that looked
conformist," Mr. Prat said. "Artists were inventing an art of total
freedom, conceived before the 1917 revolution by people who didn't know
they were carrying out a revolution. They had freedom before the revolution."

One sign was the large number of artists who were women in St. Petersburg,
Moscow and Vitebsk. Prominent among them were Natalia Goncharova, Olga
Rozanova, Liubov Popova, Alexandra Exter, Varvara Stepanova and Nadezhda
Udaltsova, who are in this show and were also featured in "Amazons of the
Avant-Garde" at the Guggenheim Museum, Berlin, in 1999 and later in New
York. Several were married to other artists, adding to the notion of one
large family at work.

Still, the initial inspiration came from abroad. In the first years of the
century, Russian artists went to Paris to discover not only the
Post-Impressionism of Cezanne, Gauguin and van Gogh and the Fauvism of
Matisse, Derain and de Vlaminck but also the Cubist watershed of Picasso
and Braque. And thanks to the great Russian collectors Ivan Morozov and
Sergei Shchukin, works by many of them could also be seen in Moscow.

Italian Futurism, with its emphasis on speed and power, also influenced
some Russian artists. They in turn adapted it to create what became known
as Cubo-Futurism, a movement still linked to figuration that also sought to
embrace the dynamism of a new machine-driven industrial society.

Coincidentally, Russian artists were tapping their own roots in art known
as neo-Primitivism, which used the symbols and colors of Russian rural life.

Mikhail Larionov and Goncharova, who like many of their colleagues had
practiced both Cubo-Futurism and neo-Primitivism, led an ephemeral movement
called Rayonism, an attempt to deconstruct light. "We perceive a sum of
rays proceeding from a source of light," Larionov wrote in 1913. "These are
reflected from the object and enter our field of vision. Consequently, if
we wish to paint literally what we see, then we must paint the sum of rays
reflected from the object."

With works illustrating these overlapping movements, the first galleries at
the Fondation Maeght gradually prepare visitors for the great breakthrough
to abstraction in Suprematism and Constructivism. Suprematism is
inseparable from Malevich, who in 1915 presented the results of his
research into nonobjective representation: some 40 works of pure
abstraction, termed "supreme" in the sense of "total," with no reference to
anything realistic. Of "Black Square on White," which is displayed here
alongside "Black Cross" and "Black Circle," Malevich wrote that the black
square represented feeling and the white background "the void beyond this
feeling."

This show offers a score of works by Malevich and his followers,
distinguished by floating squares, rectangles, circles, half-moons,
triangles and lines. "Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art," Malevich
wrote. Yet when artists tried to apply it to architecture, it proved too
rigid. Instead, having exhausted its possibilities, Suprematism was
superseded by Constructivism.

This movement, originally called the Productivist School, had a more
lasting impact, not only adapting itself to the needs of the Soviet
Revolution but also making its influence felt on Germany's Bauhaus movement
and the Dutch De Stijl artists as well as on English sculptors like Barbara
Hepworth and Henry Moore.

Like Suprematism, Constructivism was abstract, but it sought "to construct
art" through what it called "real materials" -- collages, reliefs or
sculptures made of wood, metal, paper, paint and glass -- in "real space,"
that is, three-dimensionally. By the mid-1920's, however, with Chagall and
Kandinsky among a growing number of artists choosing exile, realistic
elements began to reappear in Russian art. In 1925 Kliment Redko, a former
Suprematist, painted "Insurrection," a geometric landscape with Lenin at
the center. Two years later Alexander Deineka's "Textile Workers," while
avant-garde in its execution, nonetheless carried a political message.

Perhaps most significantly, by the end of the decade, with Lenin dead and
Stalin in power, Malevich himself had returned to a form of figuration,
although applying some of the techniques of Suprematism to portraits of
peasants, including "Head of Peasant With Black Beard," in which the face
is a featureless white oval.

But the short life of the Russian avant-garde was ending. In 1932,
smothering the notion of artistic freedom, Stalin banned informal groups or
movements of artists and required everyone to join the Communist-run Union
of Artists. The role of artists was no longer to explore ideas but to
reproduce Socialist Realism. Many artists conformed and survived. Malevich
died in poverty in St. Petersburg (renamed Leningrad) in 1935. By then he
had become a nonperson.

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