From Russia with Abstraction

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Los Angeles, a fresh view of a vanished avant-garde

In many ways, Russian art around the time of the Revolution of 1917 was the supreme model of avant-garde activity. It was consciously radical and hopeful. The artists hoped for the collapse of the old and saw themselves as collective makers of the new. Radical politics and radical art, for once, went hand in hand.

The disappointment was as great as the hope. By 1930, Stalinist terror had set out to destroy all that was best in the visual culture of Russia: painting, sculpture, design, film. By 1950, the destruction was done. To this day the most brilliant moment of revolutionary aspiration in the history of Russian art remains not only unofficial but actively repressed within the borders of its own country. Last year the U.S.S.R. sent a mammoth consignment of modernist Russian art to the Pompidou Center's exhibition, "Paris-Moscow, 1900-1930"-- while at the same time ensuring, by the threat of cancellation, that no proper discussion of the relations between art and politics in postrevolutionary Russia could be raised in the catalogue. (Needless to say, the show could not be seen in the Soviet Union in any form.)

The appetite for information about early Russian modernism, however, grows daily in the West; and so the most interesting exhibition in the U.S. this summer is undoubtedly "The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930: New Perspectives" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This is the most intelligent survey of the subject yet done by any museum. It is not definitive, since its curators--Stephanie Barron and Maurice Tuchman of LACMA --decided to use material only from Western collections. But it is admirably precise in historical judgment and informed as to selection; and, strange to say, it is the first show of its kind in America. After closing at LACMA, it will be seen at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in late fall.

The astonishing thing about Russian art of this period is its sustained inventiveness. Artists who based their work on the available prewar styles of avant-garde art -- mainly Fauvism, cubism and futurism --were able to digest and develop them with tremendous speed and urgency, leaping beyond their prototypes like pole vaulters. To see this at work, one need only look at the development of Vladimir Tallin's sculpture after his first contact with Picasso's tin cubist Guitar, 1912, in Paris, or at the conviction with which Kasimir Malevich moved from cubism to a purely abstract painting.

If these artists' relation to the work of the immediate past was marked by an exhilarating sense of intellectual risk, their glimpses of the future seem wholly prophetic. Time and again in LACMA's exhibition, one sees paintings and sculpture, modest in scale though not in ambition, that anticipate Western artists by half a century. Ivan Kliun (1873-1943) had most of Ellsworth Kelly's best ideas by 1917. Olga Rozanova's Color Construction, Green on White, 1917, a vertical stripe down the middle of a field, is a Barnett Newman "zip" 30 years before Newman, and her exquisite collages in the suite entitled The Universal War, 1916, with their energetically dancing shapes of pure color on a plain ground, predict the chromatic intensity and drawing of Matisse's "Jazz" cutouts.

The presence of such women artists in revolutionary Russia--others, better known, included Alexandra Exter, Natalya Goncharova and Lyubov Popova--suggests that the Russian avant-garde was the only great movement of modernism in which women really did work on equal terms with men. For once, neither talent nor the will to show it seems to have been obstructed by notions, conscious or not, of sexual class. This sense of equality existed in advanced Russian cultural circles before 1917; it was in no sense a product of the revolution. But it remained a feature of revolutionary art's impulse to discard cultural hierarchies.

"No torture chambers of the academies will withstand the days to come," Malevich announced in 1915. "The void of the past cannot contain the gigantic constructions and movement of our life." Yet Malevich's pure abstract paintings, like Suprematism, 1920, are very traditional in one respect. He wanted them to work like Russian icons: spiritual emblems with the ideal forms of geometry (somewhat skewed) replacing the effigies of the Virgin and St. Basil. To make this clear, Malevich--whose part of the famous "Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures: 0-10" of 1915 in Petrograd is partially reconstructed in Los Angeles--went so far as to hang his suprematist compositions facing out from the "holy corner" of the room, the traditional spot for major icons.

Despite the intense spiritual yearnings of Malevich and Vasili Kandinsky (1866-1944), the weight of the Russian constructivist endeavor lay on the side of materialism. (Kandinsky made one of his rare concessions to that in 1922, by designing crockery.) Constructivism called for an art of clear substance--iron, wood, celluloid--put in clear, open relationships.

A key word was veshch, "the thing in itself," as opposed to metaphor and mystification. Such artists as Tatlin, El Lissitzky and Rodchenko saw themselves as social engineers. To them, the materials of modern production would make for an intrinsically democratic art whose speech would connect in a natural, inevitable way to mass labor. "A futurist picture lives a collective life, by the same principle on which the proletariat's whole creation is constructed," claimed Natan Altman. "Down with ART," cried Alexander Rodchenko, "the shining patches on the talentless life of a wealthy man!"

In pursuit of what their ally, Lenin's Commissar of Education Anatoli Lunacharsky, called "the art of five kopecks," Rodchenko and Lissitzky changed the history of typographic design, posters and book illustration. Most new developments in those fields for the next decade would owe a debt to their clean, urgent didacticism. Even when Lissitzky was at his most abstract, in his "Proun" paintings of the '20s, for example, the arrays of blocks and bars seem as much a product of the engineer as of the painter, as though they were blueprints--speculative, rigorous and infused with faith--for the New Jerusalem.

But the Russian modernists' work was too new, and repressed too early, to have any lasting social effect. The big building projects (Tallin's steel Monument to the Third International, or Alexander Vesnin's Palace of Labor for Moscow) could not be put up in a shortage economy. The avantgarde, Lenin pithily remarked, had to "live on its enthusiasm"; the state had nothing to spare, and red triangles had nothing to say to half-literate machinists from Magnitogorsk. To Stalin, the modern artists were bourgeois formalists: tiny specks of free imagination on the illimitable eyeball of his power. One by one, they were wiped away. They lost their studios and their jobs; their work was censored and ridiculed. Some, like Mikhail Larionov and Goncharova, died paupers in the West; others were claimed by the Gulag; most survived in the Soviet Union, their careers shattered along with their hopes. What they left was the last subterranean art, which, fragmented and decimated, still displays its fragile triumph over Stalin and his heirs. Whether its message can possibly survive the greed of the Western art market, however, is another question.

--By Robert Hughes

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.