Sir Norman Rosenthal – One hundred Years ago: The future languages of art in Russia around 1917

galerie
gmurzynska
art basel
miami beach
2016

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO: THE FUTURE LANGUAGES
OF ART IN RUSSIA AROUND 1917
If 1915 was the magic date for the future language of art in
Russia, 1917 was the magic date for Russia as a whole –
the moment when out of the turbulence of war the old order
definitively collapsed, and a new optimistic Soviet world was
born that promised equality and freedom for all.
Culturally, there were three short, rapidly evolving decades,
affected, in no small measure, by the energetic promotion of
that legendary impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Russian artists
were working through all the great Western movements
of art, including Symbolism, Fauvism, Futurism, Cubism,
Expressionism, Orphism, and last but not least, Primitivism, but
always included distinct elements that betrayed their cultural
obsessions and traditions. In 1915 Kazimir Malevich made that
BIG MOVE which was to change the course of Western art in a
way that reverberates to this day.
Thus on 19 December 1915 near the very centre of St. Petersburg
- then because of the great War known as Petrograd and within
a few years to become Leningrad - and still at that moment
the Westward looking capital of Russia - in a large first floor
apartment called the “Art Bureau” that belonged to Nadezhda
Dobychina, an energetic wealthy woman promoter of the new
art, opened the historic exhibition called “The Last Futurist
Exhibition 0.10”. Some fourteen artists gathered around
Vladimir Tatlin as well as Malevich himself - leading rival camps
- took part in this show. But it was here too that Malevich was
able to mount his own ground breaking display that announced
the new art of SUPREMATISM. At its apex high up in the corner
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ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO
of his room like a Russian ikon - a fact immediately noted by his
peers - was hung the BLACK SQUARE. As already an outstanding
and well known painter, Malevich had himself worked through
all the “isms” before arriving at this most radical and defining
moment that was instantly a sensation for all the radical artists
and their supporters. The exhibition itself was to close on 19
January 1916.
In 1917, the moment of the Soviet Revolution – it should be said
that since 1905 there had been much anticipatory turbulence
that was intensified after the onset of the Great War in 1914
– consolidated the position of all the radical artists of Russia.
Even those who were abroad, such as Chagall and Kandinsky,
came home to take over the art schools, to bring the new radical
art into all aspects of life: architecture, design, theatre, and
progressively radical street propaganda. This was to be the
realization of the most Utopian of Dreams that may of course
have ended in tears and far worse, but while it sustained
itself in spite of all the terrible difficulties brought on by the
realization of the new order it was a period of elation and
bottomless optimism.
Vladimir Tatlin’s project for the “Monument to the Third
International” (1919/20) was a slowly rotating tower designed to
loom, much, much higher than the Eiffel Tower, over the Nevsky
Prospect in Petrograd. From here radio would broadcast to all
about the coming world communist revolution. Many, many artists
in Petrograd, Moscow and famously in Vitebsk in Belorussia, but
all over the vast lands of Russia, were making contributions to
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this new radical constructive order of art that had come into
existence and was somehow being encouraged.
Just to list alphabetically some other great, now immortal, names
demonstrates the achievements of this new cultural elite who
wished nonetheless to serve the new society: Marc Chagall, Ilya
Chashnik, Wassily Kandinsky, Lazar Khidekel, Gustav Klucis, El
Lissitsky, Mikhail Larionov, Ivan Puni, Alexander Rodchenko,
and Nikolai Suetin. There were many other male artists too,
but one of the most amazing phenomena of Russian radical art
in the three decades leading up to 1915/17 and beyond was the
integral role played by women in this new world, in ways surely
unprecedented in the history of Western visual arts.
This is not to separate women artists from their male
counterparts, far from it, something they above all would
have utterly rejected. But the full and equal part played in this
cultural revolution by Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova,
Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, Nadezhda
Udaltsova, and the sisters Maria and Xenia Ender, was something
utterly new, even if there had been distinguished women
artists in the past. Often the revolutionary artists married
or had relationships with their counterparts. The Goncharova
and Larionov liaison is well known, generally less so those,
for example, of Stepanova and Rodchenko, Rozanova with the
great Russian Zaum poet Aleksei Kruchenykh whose books
were so beautifully illustrated as here in the book “Poison” by
Stepanova, and others too.
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ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO
It was Kruchenykh who had written the words to the famous
“Victory over the Sun” operatic Gesamtkunstwerk with a
prologue by his compatriot Vladimir Khlebnikov with those
famous costume designs by Malevich and music by the
composer-artist Mikhail Matyushin, recently re-constructed
and performed at Art Basel in 2013. We should not forget this
was a radical world involving all the arts – literature, poetry
especially, theatre, cinema, and music, all of which changed
world culture for good. Where the political revolution failed
horribly, the Russian cultural revolution left large marks that
can be felt to this day in all the arts. In spite of the rise of
Dada and even of De Stijl and the Bauhaus, the tendencies of
Europe in the years after 1918/19 were towards a new ordered
conservatism, even a “Rappelle à L’Ordre”. For those years
the truly farsighted ones, like the artists of no other nation,
were working in Russia looking forward to our very own day
in so many ways.
For all the obvious reasons this was a fragile time, which is
why each and every “survival”, whether on canvas or on paper,
drawn or printed, not to mention three-dimensional objects,
are such precious witnesses to those heady days when, among
so much formal innovation, once and for all women made their
mark. It reminds us that all sectors of society, not just white
men, have the inalienable right to participate in the serious
and beautiful human activity we call ART that can even indeed
manifest itself, as here in the head and hand of the great artist
Olga Rozanova, in the design of a satchel!
Norman Rosenthal
London, November 2016
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Editors
Krystyna Gmurzynska
Mathias Rastorfer
Concept and Production
Verena Andric
David Khalat
Printed by
Grafiche Step, Parma, Italy
ISBN
3-905792-34-6
978-3-905792-34-8
© Galerie Gmurzynska, 2016