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Two Russian Artists: The Aristocrat and the Revolutionary
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13628 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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8 / 1988 |
2,792 Words |
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Michail Makarenko
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One of the great art movements of the twentieth century came out of Russia. It preceded the Revolution of 1917 by some thirty years and was virtually consigned to the dustbin of history within five years after the revolution. For a brief, exciting period, the Russian avant-garde led the whole world in innovations in painting, sculpture, theater, ballet, film, photography, literature, design, and architecture.
The work of these artists combined aspects of early European Modernism with a distinctive Russian aesthetic, anticipating by as much as fifty years developments that were to take place in the West. The Russian avant-garde thrived, however, only until Lenin's death in 1924. With Stalin's coming to power, the Central Committee was soon calling for art "comprehensible to the millions." Socialist Realism became standard. Many of the artists died in the 1920s; many more fled to western Europe (see Gallery); others accommodated themselves to the regime, changing their style; still others were sent to the gulag.
This avant-garde movement was rooted in ideas of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, which in its desire to form a viable basis for a new Russian culture had given rise to several important but varied approaches to art. As early as the 1860s, a group known as the Wanderers broke with the academic style of the all-powerful St.Petersburg Academy. Condemning art for art's sake as "empty diversion," the Wanderers sought to make art "useful" to society. Foreshadowing in their own way the Socialist Realism that was to come later, they presented the Russian peasant as the national hero.
In the 1870s and 1880s, an artists' colony on the Abramtsevo estate near Moscow revived an interest in medieval Russian art. The flatness and linearity of icons was to have a lasting impact on the development of modern art in Russia. By the 1890s, the World of Art movement in St. Petersburg, rejecting the Russian Populist ideas of earlier decades, formulated the concept that art, being the embodiment of eternal truth and beauty, should be an instrument for the salvation of mankind. Forgoing close ties to the Symbolist and Art Nouveau movements of Germany, France, and England, the World of Art movement had as its aim the creation in Russia of an international center that would for the first time contribute to the mainstream of contemporary Western art.
Explosion of Innovation
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, there was a veritable explosion of artistic innovation in Moscow and St. Petersburg. One "ism" succeeded another as artists experimented in a plethora of styles; many artists would change styles often, taking an entirely different, new approach every few years. The Primitivism of 1908-1912 dovetailed into Cubo-Futurism--a unique blending of French Cubism and Italian Futurism in a Russian context. This led to several schools of abstract and semiabstract art in which the Russians emerged as pioneers in the Modern movement.
In 1913, Kasimir Malevich, who had progressed through Neo-Primitivism and Cubo-Futurism, developed an altogether new approach that he later dubbed Supermatism. The first systematic school of abstract painting to essential forms, to pure geometric shapes represented at first only in black and white, and later with increased color and combinations of shapes. His
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