Page 47 - Studio International - November 1967

Facing page lett
Bohumil Kubišta
Waterfall in the Alps 1912
oil on canvas
21+ x 18 in.
Coll: J. Zrzavý, Prague
Facing page right
Otto Gutfreund
Reclining woman with cup 1912-13
bronze
h. 8 in.
National Gallery, Prague

Top left
Kasimir Malevich
Suprematist construction 1919-20
watercolour
3+ x 3+ in.
Grosvenor Gallery, London
Top right
Marc Chagall
Still life 1912
oil on canvas
24½ x 13¼ in.

Left
El Lissitzky
Tatlin working on third international
monument c.1920
pencil, gouache and photomontage
13 x 9½ in.
Grosvenor Gallery, London
Right
Mikhail Larionov
The soldiers 1908
oil on canvas
28¼ x 36¾ in.
Grosvenor Gallery, London

Ferat, Popova, Malevich and Archipenko (a to Suprematist works in which the abstraction was was director of the Vitebsk school, where he colla-
sculpto-painting Still Life- Table and Nude of 1915) total. He was a devout Christian who believed that borated with El Lissitzky on book designs until
are shown at the Grosvenor, together with Rayon- a work of art was inevitably the product of an Malevich replaced him in 1919. The latter's de-
nist works by Larionov and Goncharova which individual consciousness. Tatlin, leader of the parture from Moscow left opposition to Tatlin's
illustrate their own distinctive if unoriginal version opposing camp, had been influenced by Larionov's materialism at the Vkhutemas to the Pevsner
of Cubo-Futurism. In 1914 a Larionov-Goncharova primitivist works of c. 1908-11 and then, early in brothers, Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo. Their
retrospective exhibition in Paris drew favourable 1913 on a visit to Paris, saw and was deeply affected Realist Manifesto, published on hoardings in 1920,
attention from Apollinaire, and the next year the by Picasso's cubist constructions. By the end of the declared that 'The realization of our perceptions
two artists moved for good to France, which was year he was making his own Painted Reliefs and of the world in the forms of space and time is the
perhaps where they belonged. Relief Constructions.1 The materialist par excellence, only aim of our pictorial and plastic art.' The
When the revolution came, the artists of the Mir Tatlin believed that art was 'the product of social materials were to be new, but the emphasis on the
Isskustva-the Symbolists and the belated Impres- life',2 and had a social purpose to fulfil. These rival personal nature of the creative process placed them
sionists-emigrated for the most part together with concepts clashed as early as 1915 when their works squarely behind Malevich.
their patrons, some of them, like Bakst and Benois, and those of their factions were shown in separate The fires of the decade 1910-20 were quenched
to join Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris, there to rooms at the same exhibition, but the main theatre when lack of support from the people and of
sustain, for the benefit of the West, the old Slavonic of war was the Higher Artistic-Technical Studios sympathy from Lenin hardened the intellectual
dream. The academic painters found themselves (`Vkhutemas'-a forerunner of later institutions climate against the Leftists, driving some into
ousted by younger men and withdrew to bide their such as the Bauhaus) established in Moscow emigration and others, like Malevich, into obscu-
time and incubate Socialist Realism, while the under the aegis of the first Commissar of Edu- rity. While the new regime was administering a
leaders of the new avant-garde, the Leftists, soon cation, Lunacharskii. Many such institutes were social revolution the artists had intuitively perceived
found positions in the host of new organizations and established at this period-it is a characteristic the deep need for a technological revolution to
schools that were created and as quickly merged or of revolutionary governments to dispense educa- sustain it, and wishing to assist in effecting the
dissolved. Among the younger men two factions tional largesse-and many famous names were latter fell foul of the authorities who saw the artists'
were already at war. Malevich had progressed involved. Kandinsky wrote the programme for the role as the propagandizing of the former. Perhaps
through Cubo-Futurism and near-abstract collage Institute of Artistic Culture (`Inkhuk'). Chagall the authorities were right in part. The artists had