The story of art in the Russian Revolution
by Martin Sixsmith
In his 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak describes his hero’s and, by extension, his own response to the revolutionary fervour of 1917.
“Just think what extraordinary things are happening all around us!” Yuri said. “Such things happen only once in an eternity… Freedom has dropped on us out of the sky!”
Pasternak is talking about more than just politics.
Yuri Zhivago is a poet, and his artist’s sensibility (in Russian his name is a play on zhivoy, or ‘alive’) resonates with the visceral changes tearing through his native land. Pasternak’s imagery is febrile, hopeful, anticipating a new beginning and a new life.
You can feel the excitement in the Russian air:
“Everything was fermenting, growing, rising with the magic yeast of life. The joy of living, like a gentle wind, swept in a broad surge indiscriminately through fields and towns, through walls and fences, through wood and flesh. Not to be overwhelmed by this tidal wave, Yuri went out in the square to listen to the speeches…”
Pasternak’s reaction was not a one-off. A generation of artists, writers and musicians would greet the perception of bewildering, miraculous freedom bestowed by the revolution with the exhilaration of a nascent love affair. From 1917 up to 1932 – the rough span of the RA’s survey of Russian art – they would experience the whole gamut of emotions that love engenders. The initial, youthful passion that overwhelms caution and sense would lift them to heights of creation. They were inspired, rewarded, fulfilled.
“Then came love’s trials, the niggling suspicions, the dawn of mistrust. When doubts surfaced about the purity of their love object, they forced themselves to suppress them. When the faults of the regime became manifest, they looked away.”
In the end, the revolution turned against them. Some she consumed in the killing machine of the gulag; others fled, or renounced their art. More than one, some of the best succumbed to the despair of rejection. Spurned lovers, they found life was no longer worth living and they ended it.
Artistic innovation had smouldered before the revolution. Artists such as Lyubov Popova, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Alexander Rodchenko and David Burliuk had produced striking avant-garde works earlier than 1917, as had Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall.
Distracted by having to fight a world war and by domestic unrest, the Tsarist regime had let art slip the leash. The conflict had reduced Russia’s contacts with the West and native talent had taken new directions.
But it was 1917, with its promise of brave new worlds and liberation from the past, that set all the arts aflame. The poets Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely and Sergei Yesenin produced their most important work. Authors such as Mikhail Zoshchenko and Mikhail Bulgakov pushed at the bounds of satire and fantasy. The Futurist poets, chief among them Vladimir Mayakovsky, embraced the revolution while proclaiming the renewal of art.
Proletarian writers who brashly claimed the right to speak for the Party. Musical experimentalism broke through the barriers of harmony, overflowed into jazz and created orchestras without conductors. The watchwords were novelty and invention, with pre-revolutionary forms raucously jettisoned from the steamship of modernity.
Suprematism
In the visual arts, Malevich and his followers took painting to new regions in search of abstract geometric purity. The principles of Dynamic Suprematism, proclaimed in his 1926 manifesto The Non-Objective World, ring with the provocative self-confidence of culture in those years.
“By Suprematism I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in art… The visual phenomena of the objective world are meaningless; the significant thing is feeling. The appropriate means of representation gives the fullest possible expression to feeling and ignores the familiar appearance of objects. Objective representation… has nothing to do with art. Objectivity is meaningless.”
The Constructivists
The Constructivists Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Popova and Rodchenko (below) strove to square the circle between the concrete forms of architecture and photography and the values of art for art’s sake. Their structural designs were sharp and angular, a sort of three-dimensional Suprematism. They produced street art celebrating the revolution and denouncing its foes.
In 1919, they covered buildings in Vitebsk in vibrant propaganda, with El Lissitzky’s emblematic Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge reducing the complexity of Russia’s civil war to a red triangle piercing a white circle, in a geometric confrontation of good and evil that even the least educated could comprehend.
“The streets shall be our brushes,” said Mayakovsky, “and the squares our palettes”.
One of the most important works by Soviet director Dziga Vertov in which he applies the kino-eye method to describe reality in the Soviet Union
Art spills into every form of expression.
The Bolsheviks were quick to identify the potential of film in influencing the masses, and directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and cinéma-vérité pioneer Dziga Vertov became skilled exponents of politically charged cinema. The newsreel series, Kinodelia (Film Weekly) and Kinopravda (Film Truth), run by Vertov, used Constructivist-inspired intertitles designed by Rodchenko, who also produced their advertising posters.
The Artists’ Union of the USSR
The Bolsheviks at first were tolerant, preoccupied with more pressing matters. However, by the mid-1920s, the regime was looking disapprovingly at the radicalism and the abstraction, beginning to shape the doctrine that would subjugate all art to the aims of socialism.
On 23 April 1932, the Central Committee announced the formation of the Artists’ Union of the USSR, tasked with imposing Socialist Realism as the only acceptable form of artistic expression. From now on, it decreed, art must depict man’s struggle for socialist progress towards a better life. The creative artist must serve the proletariat by being realistic, optimistic and heroic.
The experimentalism that had flourished since the revolution was now deemed un-Soviet. To further the cause of the revolution culture must be comprehensible by the masses; anything more complicated, innovative or original was by definition useless and potentially dangerous.
Abstract art didn’t fit the bill.
The era of freedom for the avant-garde was over.
With consummately bad timing, a 1932 jubilee retrospective of trends in post-revolutionary art took the celebration of diversity as its keynote. When Artists of the Russian Federation over Fifteen Years 1917–1932 opened at the State Russian Museum in Leningrad, it filled 100 rooms with nearly 2,000 works, ranging from heroic statues and paintings of Lenin and Stalin to the striking paintings of Pavel Filonov, teeming with figures. A whole room was devoted to Malevich’s geometrical canvases and his plaster blocks known as arkhitektons.
By the time the exhibition was due to move to Moscow in 1933, diversity was a dirty word and many of the contributors were on the Kremlin’s blacklist. Malevich, who had already been interrogated by the NKVD secret police, was far less visible in the show.
“From the first days of the revolution”, he told his interrogator, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “I have been working for the benefit of Soviet art…” and “Art must provide the newest forms… to reflect the social problems of proletarian society”.
Neither was there much of Filonov’s work on view, and official disapproval would blight the rest of his life. Even his attempts to make acceptable paintings, including a portrait of Stalin, were rejected. He died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad in 1941.
From the Winter 2016 edition of the RA Magazine, a quarterly published by the Friends of the RA.