Out of Russia's Apron

By ROBERT HUGHES

The cultural-exchange show is a device with a long history. It originated with tribute--the bales of silk and beads, the slaves, parrots and bejeweled objects that envoys dragged into the foreign potentate's throne room as diplomatic lubricant. Over the centuries, gift became ritualized into loan. A cultural-exchange program has been part of U.S.-Soviet affairs for the past 13 years now, and whatever its actual effects on Realpolitik may be, the process is a harmless and edifying one. The latest manifestation of it is a huge compendium called "Soviet Union: Arts and Crafts in Ancient Times and Today," which opened last month at Washington's Corcoran Gallery. It is the largest collection of artifacts and craft objects ever sent abroad by Russia: some 2,000 pieces, dotted across a historical span of nearly 4,000 years.

It was a year late. Scheduled for 1971, the show was abruptly canceled by Moscow after an outburst of anti-Soviet demonstrations, chiefly by the over-activists of the Jewish Defense League. But the thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations caused by President Nixon's announcement of a May summit conference in Moscow changed Soviet minds, and the show was on again. It was accompanied by the U.S.S.R. Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Furtseva, who declared that "in our opinion we haven't come near to exhausting our potentials for cultural exchange."

The exhibition runs from prehistoric pottery to early 19th century silver samovars; from a 5th century B.C. Scythian wood-and-gold finial of a stylized griffin's head, to new figurines that are apparently the Russian equivalent of those excruciating ashtrays one is offered in Texas airports. Mother Russia has dumped the contents of her apron into the Corcoran, and the result is a heterogeneous pile of modern kitsch, late czarist elegance and early barbaric splendor, mingled with the beautifully wrought and unpretentious products of pre-Revolutionary folk artists. The less said about official post-Revolutionary folk art the better: it is characterized (except for some fine Baltic textiles) by an earnest garishness --in short, it is no better than the output of any other organized handicraft industry, and every bit as twee.

The high points of the show are the icons and the opulent czarist bibelots. But then the question of the limits of folk art comes up. Can the men who wrought a jeweled bowl, half boat and half bird, for Czar Michael Fedorovich Romanov in 1624 be called folk artists? Obviously not. This courtly paradigm of imperial extravagance is of an order quite different from the decorated spindles, distaffs and painted figures of the Russian provinces.

But what unites them is an impassioned love of ornamental detail. Russia's appetite for embellishment could almost be measured in pounds per square inch, as with the extraordinary red velvet saddle on which Ivan the Terrible rode, its seats and flaps uncomfortably encrusted with gold embroidery and pearls. Or with a less overpowering chalice--Italian in manner if not in taste--made for Peter the Great's mother in the 17th century.

The paranoid materialism of the czars had its spiritual aspect; gold in traditional icon painting had long been a symbol of eternity, and nobody could be less concerned with economic convertibility than the anonymous 14th century artist of the Pskov school who produced a tremendous, flattened image of Elijah ascending to heaven in his fiery chariot: the vehicle and its horses burn like vermilion coals, all earthiness gone, and one thinks of Yeats' lines:

Once out of Nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold, and gold enameling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake.

This show is not conceived as a historical statement, but rather as a provoker of curiosity, and as such it thoroughly succeeds. From the Corcoran it will tour the U.S. before winding up in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art some time in September.

The U.S. countershow in the "exchange" opened last week in Tbilisi.

Whether it will have the same euphoriant effect is questionable. Entitled "Research and Development in the U.S.A.," it includes such icons of U.S. culture as a Lincoln Continental, a pink telephone and an Apollo 11 command module.

sb Robert Hughes

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