Soviet Art in London

Eric Estorick, Brooklyn-born manager of London's fashionable Grosvenor Gallery, has a quixotic goal: he wants to bring modern Russian art to the West. In four years he has journeyed 15 times to Russia, searching for paintings and cajoling authorities for permission to export the works. Last week he put his acquisitions on show, the first major commercial exhibit of Soviet art in the West since 1922, when the young Russian revolutionary regime sent to Berlin and Amsterdam works by Kandinsky, Pevzner and Gabo--who all later went into exile.

Estorick's modern artists seem mostly pre-Kandinsky in style. Hardly a trace of surrealism, cubism or abstractionism shows; the most obvious influence is

French impressionism. Yet, except for Lenin Prizewinner Aleksandr Deineka's husky peasant girls, which Estorick probably bought for diplomatic reasons, the show is not a dismal display of the Russian Tractor Style. Instead, the rest of the exhibition is heavy with still lifes and landscapes, competent, vaguely Western, strangely empty of invention. Perhaps half a dozen of the 82 artists are important.

One is Anatoly Nikitch, 46, who will show at the Venice Biennale this season. His seven still lifes are perfectly balanced compositions and painters' paintings; in one, provocatively, a postcard by France's Bernard Buffet is visible stuck to a background wall. Pavel Nikonov's somber Still Life with Pestle and Mortar, with its Braque-like greys and browns, and Aleksei Tyapushkin's still life with flowers on table are also painterly achievements. Sculptor Ernest Neizvestny, who was personally scolded by Khrushchev for his modernism, draws dynamic nudes.

The only painter who might be much at home in any Western city's modern museum is Oskar Rabin, an outcast painter who enjoys no official patronage at home. Rabin's four fantasy cityscapes are semiabstractions: a City and Moons balances glowing oval shapes against the dark grid of hazy architectural forms; an American Landscape shows giddy skyscrapers in a land he has never visited. Visions of London and Paris both depict painfully precise, oversized postage stamps (one with Queen Elizabeth) that boldly refute the perspective.

Singularly absent are the spunky, if not necessarily accomplished, avant-gardists who are much whispered about in Russia. As Entrepreneur Estorick puts it, "We don't want to make martyrs of these guys."

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