Page 48 - Studio International - November 1967

V. Ivanov Victory 1917-1967 1966
Poster;
orange, black and white with white text.
Editor: G. Shchetkin.
Publisher: Sovetsky Hudozhnik.
67 x 22¾ in.
Lords Gallery, London
seen themselves as technologists, but the real need Tatlin and Rodchenko, seeing themselves as
was for a new generation of technologists who technologists first and artists second if at all, were
would see themselves as artists. able to participate as equals in a society that needed
The emigrations of the early twenties brought to them and used them not as gods but as men.
the West many of the major figures of experimental It is unfortunate that the exhibition at the Gros-
art in Russia. Kandinsky left for Berlin in 1921 and venor Gallery contains no single work that can be
was followed by Chagall, Archipenko, Puni, Zad- taken to represent the peak of any one of the
kine and many others. The Pevsner brothers left in several truly creative developments in Russian art
the mass exodus of 1922 on the occasion of an during the period in question. Nothing of signi-
exhibition sponsored by Lunacharskii at the VAN ficance by Tatlin, nothing by Rodchenko, no
DIEMEN GALLERY in Berlin. Kandinsky's writings suprematist oil by Malevich, no early construction
had already spread the gospel of abstract art as a by Gabo. And yet we must be grateful for any
personal expression of spiritual values. The Pevs- crumbs that fall from the Russian table. There is
ners brought to Europe with them their concept of no questioning the importance of Gabo nor, for
an art in which new and universal materials were those who have visited the Stedelijk, of Malevich.
to be used for the realization of personal percep- In the Grosvenor exhibition there are enough
tions and intellectual insights. In 1958 the Stedelijk works of real interest to whet our appetites, even if
Museum in Amsterdam bought thirty-five paint- there is also much to show that the age of the
ings and a collection of drawings left behind in Great Experiment carried as much dead weight as
Germany by Malevich in the early twenties. The any other revolutionary era.
spiritual-abstract tendency in Russian art thus At the LORDS GALLERY an exhibition of 'Contem-
gained a firm foothold in the West where its porary Russian Posters', some chosen in Moscow
influence has been and still is very considerable. by the director of the gallery and some sent by the
Interest in Malevich's work and in his writings3 has Soviet authorities, shows an altogether more at-
grown recently with the realization of his true role tractive aspect of the art of Socialist Realism than
as the first protagonist of an art independent of the the one presented to us at the Royal Academy
visual world; an art in which, starting from a basic recently.
vocabulary of the most simple abstract forms, the They fall into two main categories, propaganda
artist progressively 'elaborates' (a word often used posters and circus posters. The best of the former
by Malevich) as the forms become meaningful by have considerable strength of composition and
virtue of the situations in which they are used, until, serve to remind us that if abstract art is unpopular
ideally, he has at his command a wide range of in the Soviet Union, good design is not. The circus
totally non-objective forms for the complete posters are brightly coloured, imaginative and
expression of his own singular consciousness. wholly delightful. It is tempting and certainly not
But Tatlin stayed behind. For him there was no necessarily mistaken to see in some of these de-
frontier to be crossed between art and life (his signs the latest products of a tradition which has
reliefs had had no frames to separate them from benefited from the participation of Lissitsky, of
the world around) and if art had a social function Tatlin or of Rodchenko. This, I am quite sure, is
then the materialist artist was committed to not what the Soviet authorities had in mind when
materialist society and to its needs. Rodchenko they sanctioned the export of these posters; the
remained with him. His first three-dimensional heroic muscled workers and the brightly coloured
constructions were made in 1919 and in 1921 he clowns are intended to tell quite another story.
promoted at Inkhuk a declaration to the effect that
easel painting was dead and that artists should
become artist-engineers in the new society. These
two were continually employed in teaching, design
and film work in the Soviet Union until their
deaths in 1953 and 1956. It is this, the materialist
socially-orientated side of Russian experimental The sculptural/constructive development from Cubism
stood art, that has been so little seen and so little under- has yet to be fully explored. There are crippling handi-
caps, to its full appreciation. The recent exhibitions in
few people who
in the West. There are very
Paris and London gave the majority of Picasso's cubist
have seen significant works by either Tatlin or Rod-
constructions their first public airing; many of Boc-
chenko except in photographs and yet their names
cioni's constructions were destroyed; and those of
have come, in the last few years,4 to symbolize Tatlin's reliefs that may have survived are hopelessly
certain aspects of the artist's relationship to society. inaccessible in Russia. For want of better material we
Tatlin's self-dedication to Soviet society was as have accepted Lipchitz, Archipenko and Gutfreund as
extreme a position in its context as Malevich's the international ambassadors of cubist sculpture, and
elimination of the visual world. There must be yet none of them was able to exploit to the full the
many practising artists in the West who would possibilities which the cubist analysis had created for
dearly like to know whether the course adopted by the imaginative dissolution of volume and the breath-
less revelation of space. What an exhibition it would
Tatlin and Rodchenko leads to fulfilment or to
make if the constructions of Picasso, of Boccioni and of
frustration. So far as we can tell from the photo-
Tatlin could be assembled together under one roof.
graphs these artists were more than designers, they
2 Alexe Gans in Konstruktivizm 1920-Trans. in Camilla
were men of vision. In the West we are at the
Gray The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922.
moment approaching, from the other end of the 3 See the article Malevich on 'New Art' by Troels Ander-
scale, a situation in which the artist will have to be sen in Studio International September 1967.
sustained not for what he produces but, like the 4 Particularly since the publication, in 1962, of Camilla
shaman of a new race of primitives, for what he is. Gray's pioneer study.