In Los Angeles, a fresh view of a vanished avant-garde
In many ways, Russian art around the time of the Revolution of 1917 was the supreme model of avant-garde activity. It was consciously radical and hopeful. The artists hoped for the collapse of the old and saw themselves as collective makers of the new. Radical politics and radical art, for once, went hand in hand.
The disappointment was as great as the hope. By 1930, Stalinist terror had set out to destroy all that was best in the visual culture of Russia: painting, sculpture, design, film. By 1950, the destruction was done. To this day the most brilliant moment of revolutionary aspiration in the history of Russian art remains not only unofficial but actively repressed within the borders of its own country. Last year the U.S.S.R. sent a mammoth consignment of modernist Russian art to the Pompidou Center's exhibition, "Paris-Moscow, 1900-1930"— while at the same time ensuring, by the threat of cancellation, that no proper discussion of the relations between art and politics in postrevolutionary Russia could be raised in the catalogue. (Needless to say, the show could not be seen in the Soviet Union in any form.)
The appetite for information about early Russian modernism, however, grows daily in the West; and so the most interesting exhibition in the U.S. this summer is undoubtedly "The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930: New Perspectives" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This is the most intelligent survey of the subject yet done by any museum. It is not definitive, since its curators—Stephanie Barron and Maurice Tuchman of LACMA —decided to use material only from Western collections. But it is admirably precise in historical judgment and informed as to selection; and, strange to say, it is the first show of its kind in America. After closing at LACMA, it will be seen at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in late fall.
The astonishing thing about Russian art of this period is its sustained inventiveness. Artists who based their work on the available prewar styles of avant-garde art — mainly Fauvism, cubism and futurism —were able to digest and develop them with tremendous speed and urgency, leaping beyond their prototypes like pole vaulters. To see this at work, one need only look at the development of Vladimir Tallin's sculpture after his first contact with Picasso's tin cubist Guitar, 1912, in Paris, or at the conviction with which Kasimir Malevich moved from cubism to a purely abstract painting.
If these artists' relation to the work of the immediate past was marked by an exhilarating sense of intellectual risk, their glimpses of the future seem wholly prophetic. Time and again in LACMA's exhibition, one sees paintings and sculpture, modest in scale though not in ambition, that anticipate Western artists by half a century. Ivan Kliun (1873-1943) had most of Ellsworth Kelly's best ideas by 1917. Olga Rozanova's Color Construction, Green on White, 1917, a vertical stripe down the middle of a field, is a Barnett Newman "zip" 30 years before Newman, and her exquisite collages in the suite entitled The Universal War, 1916, with their energetically dancing shapes of pure color on a plain ground, predict the chromatic intensity and drawing of Matisse's "Jazz" cutouts.