‘The Avant-Gardists’ Review: Russia’s Visual Revolutionaries
Four years before the revolt that overturned Russia’s political order, the painter Mikhail Larionov called for likeminded Muscovites to spurn convention and affect what we might today call “hipster style.” His 1913 “Manifesto for Man” encouraged the adoption of dubious beards and mustaches, beribboned hair, tattoos and sandals. True to his word, Larionov was soon to be found parading up and down Kuznetsky Most sporting dramatic blue and red face paint. “Life has invaded art,” he declared, “now it is time for art to invade life. Face-painting is the beginning of the invasion.”
The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935
Thames & Hudson
528 pages
The opening episode of the art historian and curator Sjeng Scheijen’s “The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935” is well chosen. Its effect, like the period Mr. Scheijen surveys in his rich, engaging narrative, is at once silly and serious. Such outbursts, the author remarks, “mark the arrival of the avant-garde in Russia, a movement encompassing a whole spectrum of artists who all had at least one thing in common: the desire to unite art and life.” The Russian and Soviet avant-garde is neither school nor style but “a mentality.”
Inevitably, such an interpretation makes categorizing the work of Larionov and his fellow avant-garde artists—Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich chief among them—difficult. Often referred to as “futurists” by contemporaries, they departed from their swaggering Italian peers Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini in their attitudes to war (the Russian avant-gardists opposed it) and technology (mostly ambivalent). They reviled the czarist autocracy “utterly and unconditionally,” rejected the bourgeois alternative and had an ultimately tragic relationship with the Bolsheviks.
An aversion to compromise did little to help the loosely ordered group’s ability to evolve or cohere; Tatlin and Malevich were bitter rivals. (Tatlin explored collective artistry but did not embrace it: “The only thing that three people can do together,” he said, “is sweep the floor.”)
Malevich was the movement’s essential member. Born in 1879 in Kyiv to Polish-speaking parents, he grew up in the Ukrainian countryside. Malevich’s lack of formal schooling did not dampen his intellectual curiosity, nor did the pockmarks he carried from adolescent smallpox diminish his physical charisma. His father’s view of the painter’s lot was grim and, in Kazimir’s case, unfortunately prophetic: “[They] lead a poor life and spend most of it in prisons.”
His brief experiments in postimpressionism and symbolism evolved, by way of formative visits to the industrialist Sergei Shchukin’s collection of masterpieces by Cézanne, Gauguin, Monet, Rousseau, Matisse, Derain and Picasso. These led to the shockingly spare, geometric aesthetic Malevich called “suprematism” and launched in the “0.10” show in December 1915.
The impact of the exhibition, which Malevich organized and dominated, cannot be exaggerated. His “Black Square”—an unembellished square set against white on canvas—was in Mr. Scheijen’s words “a metaphorical custard pie to the face of the intellectual and religious establishment.” Its placement in one of the gallery’s upper nooks evoked household icons, or objects “that served as the sacred portal to the divine in every Russian home.” Two decades later, after Malevich’s death—of cancer, in his late 50s—the artist David Shterenberg asserted that under Stalin, “It is just as well Malevich is dead. He would be skinned alive for his Black Square.”
Malevich could rarely abide Tatlin, despite their common hardships and ambitions. Tatlin, who romanticized his hardscrabble adventures on the sea, learned from and posed for Larionov. When Tatlin met Picasso in 1914, his contemporary Lyubov Popova recalled that Tatlin “was in seventh heaven.” He soon after produced the kinetic sculptural reliefs that won him fame and envy.
Tatlin’s detachment from the past was complete. “More than any other Russian avant-garde artist,” Mr. Scheijen writes, “Tatlin believed that the conquest of the future was the only valid legitimization for the life of a great artist. Every innovation invalidated whatever had come before.” Between 1911 and 1912, Tatlin completed some 16 paintings, only seven of which survive. A limited output was to be expected. “In a sense,” notes Mr. Scheijen, “it is logical that such a person as Tatlin produced little work, since inventors only need to demonstrate a new process once in order to be the first.” In this light, it is equally unsurprising that Tatlin and Malevich guarded their creations so jealously.
Art education was one thing the avant-gardists could agree on. Alexander Rodchenko became the director of Moscow’s Museum for Artistic Culture in 1920 (it had opened under the supervision of Wassily Kandinsky in 1919). Its lack of resources would be the subject of his ever-bleaker dispatches, which, Mr. Scheijen observes, “read for all the world like a Monty Python sketch.” The offices had no paper, light, hot water, telephones, packing materials or functioning toilets. Salaries were partially, tardily or simply not paid. And Rodchenko had no means to hang paintings, leaving them to languish in crates or dimly lit corners. He saved his direst report for last: “The secretary did not receive his promised rations, and so there is no secretary. There is no money, the typewriter is broken.”
Of the avant-gardists, Malevich was perhaps the most sensitive to and philosophical about life’s vicissitudes. A man who would not reach 60, he reminded students: “The most valuable thing in life is time.” When, in 1918, their friend Olga Rozanova died at 32, the sculptor Antoine Pevsner met Malevich at the head of the funeral procession. “We will all be crucified,” the painter murmured. “I have already made my own cross; you, of course, have seen it in my paintings.” But he was capable, too, of moving and, as it proved, prescient optimism. To El Lissitzky he inscribed his final major text, “On New Systems in Art” (1919): “Let our footprints appear like rainbows after the rain. Like clouds, we shall give birth to rainbows of footprints.”
Mr. Carter is vice chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art at Christie’s in New York.
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