Page 45 - Studio International - October1968

composition of the picture was to be found in facing page Montage from a group portrait taken
popular and icon-painting, in sign-painting, in at the Dada reunion, Weimar 1922
Persian and Indian miniatures, in Gauguin. In
contrast to the beauty and smoothness of the 'World left In the studio in Vitebsk, 1919
of Art' pictures, these of the Bubnovy Valet group
startled one by the intensity and brutality of their
lines and colours. This group was organized by
Larionov, Goncharova, Konchalovsky, and others.
The initial alliance of these young painters soon
fell into two natural groupings, the one inclining
to the problems of colour, plane and space, in other
words, pictorial construction, while the other
tended toward the fostering of the picture as such.
Whilst the former, in spite of their chaotic initial
experiments, carried on evolving and developing,
the latter gained strength at their starting-point,
which was the study of the problems raised by
Cézanne. He stepped in front of his canvas as if he
were surveying a field, which the painter tills,
ploughs, and sows, making the new fruits of
nature grow upon it. The museums still worried
him. 'I will create an art which is eternal, like the
art of the museums'. And yet his work shattered
the eternal passivity of museum art. Cézanne still
painted objects, still-lifes, landscapes, but for him
these were only the scaffolding, for his sky flourishes
in the same colours as his earth, his trees, his
people. The representatives of the Russian
Cézannists, Konchalovsky, Falk, Mashkov, and
others, differ from their master in respect of their
bold application of colour. This could have been
their strength, but remained no more than their
peculiarity. Some members of the Bubnovy Valet
group— Rozhdestvensky, for example—who had
not confined themselves to the study of the
Cézannian principles, tried to draw wider conclu-
sions.
After the first experiments, instinctual and chaotic,
there followed the necessity for an analysis. This
period saw the birth in the West of Cubism and
Futurism. Russian painters were approaching the
same problems at the same time. They began to
submit nature to analysis, dissection, deformation,
and this in the name of the independent existence
of the picture. Here starts the period of the over-
throw of the object. The tasks at which Russian
painters worked during those years have been taken
up at various times almost all over Europe. It can
be said that the analytical period was the first
illuminating example of the internationalization
of the new art.
In 1920 there began a series of polemical exhibi-
tions, arranged by groups with names like 'Don-
key's Tail', 'Target', '0.10', 'Tramway V', and
`Magazine' and so on. These exhibitions were
above Second exhibition room, 1928
platforms for those painters who had broken with
Cézannism. They were submitted to the most left Study for Proun G.7. c. 1922
severe ideological and administrative persecution.
Here the following facts have become clear:
Firstly: What is the painter? This is a man
through whom flows a colour-stream, so that he has
to create for himself, with the materials of his
profession, an organized form.
Secondly: This is a man who stands before his easel
and in that same time in which a carpenter makes
a table, a locksmith a lock, a weaver a fabric, a
builder a house, he creates his own particular
product. He creates something which has never
existed before, something which neither grows on
the trees nor blooms in the fields nor springs from
the soil, but is a new object; the picture.
Thirdly: He did not copy this picture, but started
creatively to form it. The metalworker takes a
sheet of metal, cuts out a circle, bends it together
into a cylinder, makes a handle, and solders every-
thing together. Thus an object is created according
to a definite plan. In this way the painter began to
select the elements which he required for his