Page 30 - Studio International - September 1970

rotate suns and their systems.' We still don't Bukharin, the editor of Pravda, continued to directed is a natural conclusion from our
know enough about Malevich's philosophical resist Lenin's wishes for another two years, entire system of planning'. 21
position, but this sounds very reminiscent of in 1923 the organization was finally dissolved. In architecture the same pattern appeared.
the Proudhonian affirmation of 'incessant The 1929 'All-Russian Society of Prole-
metamorphosis'. And it was Malevich who III tarian Architects' ( W. 0 .P.R.A.) criticized lef-
wrote : 'the ensign of anarchy is the ensign of It was from this period that developed the tist groups for replacing content by function,
our "ego" '.19 official alternatives to the Proletkult's 'rightful' and began the move towards heavy, monu-
But, as with authoritarianism in general, it leadership of artistic affairs; and also the new mental design. The 1930 meeting of the Party
was the threat to organizational control as official styles of Socialist Realism in painting Central Committee endorsed their actions,
much as to theory which prompted action and monumentalist classicism in architecture. commenting that the 'harmful and utopian
against the autonomy of artists' organizations. In 1922 some 'previously leftist' pupils of schemes' of the left 'which take into account
Lenin had objected to an independent role for Tatlin and Malevich stated their dis- neither the material resources of the country
the trade unions, why should he allow it for satisfaction with 'further analytical scholastic nor the degree of preparedness of the popula-
the arts ? wanderings' in their first exhibition of the tion, would inevitably have led to an enor-
In the August of 1920 Lenin's enquiry of Pro- `New Society of Painters' (Nozh); and in the mous waste of means and to the complete
fessor M. N. Pokrovsky, Deputy Commissar same year the revived pro-realist Peredvizhniki discrediting of the very idea of the Socialist
for Education, concerning the jurisdictionial group gave the impetus to the foundation of reorganization of life'. But even at this late
status of the Proletkult was occasioned by his the 'Association of Artists of Revolutionary stage there seemed some hope: the projects of
fears that its autonomy was damaging to the Russia' (A.K.H.R.R.), within which painters Leonidov and Chernikov significantly ex-
`democratic centralism' formally established like Brodsky developed a Socialist Realism, tended earlier formalist spatial conceptions,
that month in the famous 21st Article of the whose ideological premises came to be not and the 1930 publication (in Vienna) of
conditions of admission to the Comintern. The dissimilar to those later developed in Nazi Lissitzky's Russland encouraged such foreign
admission of the Commissariat that it sub- Germany. 'Art belongs to the people', said architects as May and Taut to come to Russia
sidized the Proletkult led to action. Its 'special Lenin, 'it must be intelligible to the masses (though, of course, they were disappointed),22
ideas', Lenin felt, were a diversion from and loved by them'.20 By 1929, all artists and and probably helped to elicit the large foreign
Marxism, as was its wish to foster a national architects were organized into a single co- entry to the Palace of the Soviets Competi-
proletarian culture despite, as Louis Fischer operative, the Vsekokhudozhnik; and the April tion.23 And the Soviet press insisted that the
puts it, 'the non-proletarian nature of the 1932 resolution 'On Reconstruction of Liter- new Palace 'must not look like the works of the
majority and the non-cultured condition of ary-Artistic Organizations' specified that no past, must be specifically proletarian'. But the
the proletariat'. What was needed was 'not independent or unofficial groups were per- selection panel by-passed the submissions of
the invention of a new proletarian culture but mitted and that the party had the rights of Le Corbusier, Gropius, Lubetkin, Mendel-
the development of the best forms, traditions, and artistic direction. Lunacharsky, who had sohn, Perret, Poelzig and others, settling
results of existing culture from the viewpoint of switched his support to the right in 1924, eventually for the 'megalomaniac mode of
the philosophy of Marxism and the living con- commented : 'All the aims of the Soviet State scraped classicism' of B. M. Iofan, whose pro-
ditions and struggle of the Proletariat in the and of the Soviet State alone are creative ject was, however, elaborated up until 1937,
period of its dictatorship'. This was, in fact, a aims, emancipative and constructive aims in when it looked like 'a telescopic weddin
denunciation of the idea of a revolutionary art the widest sense of the word.... To point out cake'. Lunacharsky commented : 'The pro-
for a revolutionary state. Although the the direction in which the artistic forces, the letarians also have the right to colonnades'.
Proletkult, aided by Lunacharsky and by artistic attention, the artistic talents should be Thus the activist vanguardism of revolu-