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The presence of such women artists in revolutionary Russia—others, better known, included Alexandra Exter, Natalya Goncharova and Lyubov Popova—suggests that the Russian avant-garde was the only great movement of modernism in which women really did work on equal terms with men. For once, neither talent nor the will to show it seems to have been obstructed by notions, conscious or not, of sexual class. This sense of equality existed in advanced Russian cultural circles before 1917; it was in no sense a product of the revolution. But it remained a feature of revolutionary art's impulse to discard cultural hierarchies.
"No torture chambers of the academies will withstand the days to come," Malevich announced in 1915. "The void of the past cannot contain the gigantic constructions and movement of our life." Yet Malevich's pure abstract paintings, like Suprematism, 1920, are very traditional in one respect. He wanted them to work like Russian icons: spiritual emblems with the ideal forms of geometry (somewhat skewed) replacing the effigies of the Virgin and St. Basil. To make this clear, Malevich—whose part of the famous "Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures: 0-10" of 1915 in Petrograd is partially reconstructed in Los Angeles—went so far as to hang his suprematist compositions facing out from the "holy corner" of the room, the traditional spot for major icons.
Despite the intense spiritual yearnings of Malevich and Vasili Kandinsky (1866-1944), the weight of the Russian constructivist endeavor lay on the side of materialism. (Kandinsky made one of his rare concessions to that in 1922, by designing crockery.) Constructivism called for an art of clear substance—iron, wood, celluloid—put in clear, open relationships.
A key word was veshch, "the thing in itself," as opposed to metaphor and mystification. Such artists as Tatlin, El Lissitzky and Rodchenko saw themselves as social engineers. To them, the materials of modern production would make for an intrinsically democratic art whose speech would connect in a natural, inevitable way to mass labor. "A futurist picture lives a collective life, by the same principle on which the proletariat's whole creation is constructed," claimed Natan Altman. "Down with ART," cried Alexander Rodchenko, "the shining patches on the talentless life of a wealthy man!"
In pursuit of what their ally, Lenin's Commissar of Education Anatoli Lunacharsky, called "the art of five kopecks," Rodchenko and Lissitzky changed the history of typographic design, posters and book illustration. Most new developments in those fields for the next decade would owe a debt to their clean, urgent didacticism. Even when Lissitzky was at his most abstract, in his "Proun" paintings of the '20s, for example, the arrays of blocks and bars seem as much a product of the engineer as of the painter, as though they were blueprints—speculative, rigorous and infused with faith—for the New Jerusalem.