The history of art in the Soviet Union is marked by an irony that even now, after the collapse of communism, is difficult to accept.
When the Revolution came in 1917, it had the support of artists who were among the most daring in the world. The Bolshevik regime gave them power over all the institutions that controlled the making and display of art, and many of the artists turned their talents toward propaganda.
As early as the spring of 1918, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin ordered the creation of 67 large-scale monuments, all heads or figures honoring revolutionaries of the past. As ominous as this was-Lenin had the most bourgeois of tastes-the first urging for state control of the arts did not come from leaders of the Communist Party; it came from artists.
”Just like heavy industry and the Red Army, art must be made into an effective statement that can be used as an integral State plan,” said painter Pavel Filonov. ”We would not refuse if we were offered the use of the power of the State in order to realize our ideas,” wrote theorist Nikolai Punin.
Such men believed that art of the new order would go further in changing lives than any art had before. Not only would it educate, it would restructure the human mind. But, first, pressure was necessary to bring reactionaries into line. So, out of the fullness of their idealism, some of the most advanced artists proposed the very thing that the state would use to crush them.
The roots of this irony stretch back over half a century to a period also strong in ideals. And, as biographies begin with stories of ancestors, so does the history of Soviet art.
The first great figure was Saava Mamontov, one of several tycoons who in the 1870s began to replace Imperial and aristocratic patronage with private support. At Abramtsevo, his estate near Moscow, Mamontov inspired and collected the works of three generations of painters who fought to establish new models of Russian culture.
The artists of Mamontov`s circle believed, as did an earlier group called ”The Wanderers,” that art should be a catalyst for social reform. To achieve this, artists had to turn away from international classicism to styles and subjects based on Russia`s own traditions.
Moscow was home for the nationalism that lay behind the beginnings of modern Russian art. But the international outlook of St. Petersburg also persisted and by the 1890s again became a powerful force. Here a key figure was Alexander Benois, a young painter and architect who gathered around him a group of schoolmate esthetes.
From this group eventually sprang a society, an exhibiting organization and a magazine, all known as the ”World of Art.” The leader was Sergei Diaghilev, a student of musical composition and law who envisioned a Russia open to international artistic currents but not dominated by them as it had been before.
For nearly three decades, Diaghilev, an impresario in exile, sparked the creation of more masterpieces of Russian art, music and dance than anyone in the homeland. His grandest project, the Ballets Russes, introduced the West to virtually every important artistic current in Russia and many European ones as well. When he died in 1929, Russia lost the century`s greatest promoter of its culture, Czarist and Soviet alike.
Among the artists who worked with him were Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, two of the most important influences in Russian painting prior to World War I. Their work hearkened to folk art and the most advanced ideas in Europe. Their synthesis of European ideas led to the most radical art in Russia.
Larionov organized many exhibitions, one of them (in 1910) bringing together Kasimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. Within five years, the artists had worked through figurative folk- and religious-inspired art to extremely spare abstractions. Malevich was the leader of this pathbreaking school of Russian painting. Tatlin carried some of its ideas into the third dimension.
At the outbreak of the war, several Russian artists who had worked in Europe-Nathan Altman, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, El Lissitsky-returned home, bringing a variety of inward- and outward-looking modern styles. The Revolution did not, then, make such art possible. But it did encourage the belief held by Mamontov 40 years earlier that art might be a catalyst for change, adding that the more advanced the art, the better.
”The events of 1917 in the social field were already brought about in our art in 1914,” Tatlin said. ”Cubism and Futurism were the revolutionary forms in art foreshadowing the revolution in political and economic life,”
echoed Malevich. Now that reality had caught up with them, it was time to abandon the tools of the artist and, as poet Vladimir Mayakovsky urged, create ”a living factory for the human spirit.”
The first four years of the Soviet regime, the period once known as
”heroic communism,” spawned so many different artists` organizations that it was difficult to keep track of them. Some directed energy to the streets, staging elaborate pageants of the sort that Jacques-Louis David created to celebrate the French Revolution. Others decorated trains and boats with propaganda meant to be carried to the farthest reaches of the country. Still others made posters and proposed monuments.
Posters by Lissitsky, Mayakovsky, Vladimir Lebedev and Dmitry Moor are some of the most enduring works of the period. But only one commemorative project in three dimensions, Tatlin`s ”Monument to the Third International,” was a major modernist achievement, and it never went beyond the stage of a model.
Russian set and costume design had caused a sensation in the West ever since 1909 when Diaghilev introduced the decors of Leon Bakst to Paris. That capacity to astonish revealed itself in Russia through the early 1920s in designs by Sergei Eisenstein, Alexandra Exter, Malevich and Liubov Popova.
Apart from sculpture and photomontages by Alexander Rodchenko, the finest works from the late `20s and early `30s were in the applied arts: textiles, porcelains, furniture, book designs. Some of the most brilliant pieces are by Popova, Varvara Stepanova, Nikolai Suetin and Tatlin. They are at once utilitarian and demandingly modern.
But in 1932 all artistic groups were brought under a single organization, the Union of Artists, and two years later Socialist Realism became the official Soviet style. The restless exploration that characterized modern art virtually ceased in favor of a vision that seemed to fulfill nearly a century of socio-artistic longing.
At the beginning of the `30s, before the edict, many Soviet painters and sculptors retreated to more conservative styles on their own, as did artists in Europe and the United States. However, the enforcement of Soviet Realism caused such repugnance in the West that, even today, there has been no thorough scholarly study and we do not know if it produced equivalents to American Regionalist masters of the period.
During World War II, when Joseph Stalin allowed religious worship, the artistic atmosphere also became more relaxed, permitting a surprising degree of violence to emerge from war posters. After the war, however, the State again exercised strong repression, forcing even the closure of museums showing art from other countries.
The thaw that slowly came after Stalin`s death in 1953 ended nine years later when Nikita Khrushchev visited a non-conformist art exhibition and, outraged by the ”formalist” art he saw, threw a tantrum. But, for once, the ire of a political leader came back to haunt him, as Khrushchev had been baited by subversive agents and the spectacle he caused contributed to his downfall.
The Ministry of Culture, Academy of Arts and Union of Artists outlived Stalin, Khrushchev and Breszhnev as well, maintaining power over artists`
lives. Dissidents generally showed works only in each others` apartments. When they ventured into the open, as they did in Moscow in 1974, the KGB used bulldozers to disperse them. The first independent galleries opened-and, in six months, closed-as recently as 1987.
It may be hard to imagine, then, an auction house from the West conducting a sale in Moscow of Soviet contemporary art or a group of Russian artists who work in abstruse conceptual styles. Both have happened since the first days of glasnost and perestroika, and many now will hesitate before saying the most provocative Russian art is found only among such emigres as Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid.
Today, the achievements of ”heroic communism” are firmly established. But it is too early to say where Russian contemporary art will go or who will lead it. Nevertheless, the collapse of the Soviet Union has forced artists to reconsider their Russian heritage once more, and if the past is any indicator, that process will again lead them inward or back to the soil.
Where to look
Recommended reading: ”The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863-1922,” by Camilla Gray (Thames and Hudson, $9.95). The classic 1962 history, which has been expanded upon and embellished but never surpassed. A model of research, clearly written.
”All the Empty Palaces: The Merchant Patrons of Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Russia,” by Beverly Whitney Kean (Universe, $29.50). The best single volume on the evolution of 19th Century Russian art and Russia`s most famous private art collectors.
”Theater in Revolution: Russian Avant-Garde Stage Design, 1913-1935,”
by Nancy Van Norman Baer (Thames and Hudson, $24.95). The catalogue for the first major American exhibition of this material, at the IBM Gallery of Science and Art in New York from April 14 through June 13.
”Russian Decorative Arts 1917-1937,” by Vladimir Tolstoi (Rizzoli, $125). The most comprehensive treatment of the subject ever written, from posters, paintings and murals to tableware, ceramics and textiles.
”Revolutionary Textile Design: Russia in the 1920s and 1930s,” by I. Yasinskaya (Viking, $15.95). A volume full of unfamiliar achievements.
”Totalitarian Art,” by Igor Golomstock (Harper Collins, $50). A brilliant history that compares art of repression in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People`s Republic of China.
Exhibitions: Russian Propaganda Posters 1918-1968. Continues through April 17 at the Maya Polsky Gallery, 311 W. Superior St.
Soviet Propaganda Plates from the Tuber Collection. Opens late September at the Art Institute of Chicago.
