Russia's Great Flowering

By ROBERT HUGHES

THE GREAT UTOPIA: THE Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932," the Guggenheim Museum's huge show of Russian art before, during and immediately after the 1917 Revolution, is meant to be received with extreme piety. These artists, all dead, now have a world audience they could only have dreamed of fitfully when they were alive. We gaze at their frail icons with reverence -- the replays of French Cubism with sturgeons, Cyrillic letters and Tolstoyan beards playing hide-and-seek among their facets; the posters exhorting us to "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge"; the constructions of workers' materials like tin and rope and painted wood; the disembodied black and red squares of now cracking paint. French gallerygoers 100 years ago never felt like this about the art of the French Revolution. Jacques-Louis David looked old-fashioned by then, whereas Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Liubov Popova and all their colleagues in the ism soup of the Russian artistic vanguard still look fresh and daring.

This was the one place and time in the 20th century (except, briefly, for the linkage of Italian Fascism and Futurism) when radical art actually did become the house style of a revolution. This would not have happened if the Russians had had TV to carry their political messages, but luckily for art history they hardly even had electricity. Hence the Russian artists satisfy our nostalgia for that lost phoenix of Modernist desire, an art that was both experimental and politically effective. To this day, one can't look at the Constructivist designs for agitprop events -- the red panels of Natan Altman's bold transformation of the huge Palace Square in Leningrad for the first birthday of the October Revolution, or the steel-truss tribune designed by Lissitzky to carry Lenin forward like a high diver over the heads of a crowd -- without a feeling of exhilaration: this, not the bureaucratic and murderous reality of institutional Marxism, is what it was meant to be like, that now closed chapter in Russian history.

Moreover, the artists' story is largely tragic. The revolution devoured its children. In the 1930s, after Stalin's seizure of power, the work of these artists was ruthlessly suppressed as "bourgeois formalism." It lacked the three nosts of Socialist Realism: ideinost, or belief in the class basis of truth; narodnost, or accessibility to the people; and partinost, or Party spirit. The artists now appear in the treble guise of visionaries, heroes and victims. Most art lovers probably believe, on this point, that Stalin betrayed the revolution and are unwilling to think of Lenin as the savage autocrat he was; they are apt to suppose, moreover, that Lenin (who had a stony immunity to visual art) personally evoked this creative surge, which is another myth.

The roots of the great Russian efflorescence go much further back than either Lenin or the 1917 Revolution. They lie in the liberal, high-bourgeois culture of Moscow and St. Petersburg, a culture that pullulated with avant- garde splinter groups and wild chiliastic claims, exquisitely attuned not only to Russian traditions of religious mysticism but also to Cubism, Futurism, Symbolism and other currents in Paris, Rome, Vienna. To imagine that the work of spiritually obsessed artists like Kandinsky or Malevich had any filial relationship to Marxism is to miss its meaning. Malevich, an egomaniacal genius who called himself "the president of space" and imagined that his art could translate all humankind onto a higher plane, was as far from dialectical materialism as a man could be.

Only by asserting that Marxism was itself a millenarian religion can one argue a link between such artists and the ideology of the revolution. The motor of new Russian art was its belief that the world was on the brink of inconceivable change. Sever the strands of the past, leap into the future. "Only he is alive," Malevich pronounced, "who rejects his convictions of yesterday." Lissitzky's "prouns" -- a term he coined from the Russian words meaning project of the affirmation of the new -- resemble plans or aerial views of Utopian structures, an abstract New Jerusalem in paint. They are a middle ground between Malevich's absolutism and the more pragmatic agitprop efforts of artists in the '20s.

But although the designs of Lissitzky and others were used quite often for hoardings, rostrums and so forth, there is no way of judging their actual political effect, if any. What really won a place in the Bolshevik propaganda effort was photography and the new art of photocollage, brilliantly deployed -- in combination with sharp, eye-rattling typographic forms -- in book jackets, handbills and movie posters. Anton Lavinsky's 1926 poster for Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, which grabs the eye with the staring authority of those two black cannon muzzles framing the whispering, mutinous sailor, is a classic of the genre.

This is the Guggenheim's first exhibition after the opening of its disappointing new tower galleries last summer. It is billed as a pioneering effort. This is true only in a bureaucratic sense: access to works in Russian museums has become a good deal easier since the collapse of communism. The organizers' ambition to shake the contents of every provincial museum in Mother Russia into the Guggenheim has produced more footnotes than masterpieces. Much of the best work in it will be familiar to visitors who saw "Paris-Moscow, 1900-1930" in Paris in 1979, or any of the exhibitions of the Russian avant-garde that have been held since. But a new generation of museumgoers is now on hand and must be served.

Critics have complained that "The Great Utopia" is too big, and it is. Inside the fat show flexing its institutional mass, a thinner one pleads to be let out. If you spent a minimal 30 seconds on each of its 800-odd paintings, collages, drawings, photomontages, architectural designs, photographs, posters, textile samples and costume sketches, you would be there six hours. It could have been cut by a third without aesthetic loss. Visitors must contend with a stupefyingly long-winded catalog written by 19 scholars, all seemingly addressed to other scholars rather than to any imaginable general public. The new, obnoxiously corporate-modeled, self-franchising Guggenheim may run on laptops, but what it really needs is an editorial pencil -- if not a knout. And the layout is so confusing that one needs to know quite a lot about the period and the art in advance in order to get through it.

This is due, in large part, to the installation by the architect Zaha Hadid, who saw her opportunity to go up against not only Russian Constructivism but Frank Lloyd Wright as well. The resulting argument is so contrived that it almost manages, except for a few moments of striking success, to annul the art. It is interesting, for instance, to see a reconstruction from photos, but with the originals, of part of the installation of the "0.10" exhibition held in St. Petersburg in 1915, with its flock of abstract pictures hovering like angels around Malevich's climactic black square, hung in the corner as Russians traditionally hung their icons. But it is a simulation, all the same, and not necessarily the best way to see the paintings themselves.

Hadid's best moment comes right at the beginning, where the first gallery is given over to two emblematic objects representing the two chief streams of Russian invention. On one hand, totalizing mysticism: Malevich's Red Square, 1915, the slightly off-kilter block of pure color on a white ground that, despite the subtitle the artist gave it (Painterly Realism: Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions), remains the true text of the primitive gospel of abstraction. On the other, Tatlin's tense structure of commonplace materials, Counter- Relief, 1914-15, the work that seems to predict the whole future history of constructed sculpture, rising out of the juncture of Cubism with Tatlin's own love of the stuff of common work. This is an eloquent confrontation. But in general, Hadid's design belongs to the realm of extravaganza; it superimposes chic on overload, thus unintentionally stressing how far we are from the world-transforming hopes of revolutionary Russia's avant-garde.