Unrealism in Moscow

A few young artists in Russia today are gluing together unrealistic collages, op artists are opting for eye-twisting geometry, and there is even a group of painters in their 30s and 40s who throw together unsocialist images just because they feel like it. The Western world sees precious little of their work, for the Moscow Union of Soviet Artists is dominated by middle-aged academicians who learned their trade in the heyday of Stalinist realism. Their ponderous paeans to Lenin and heroic bobbin tenders go into official displays such as the Venice Biennale and Expo 67. Only an occasional private exhibition affords Westerners a glimpse behind the red-tape curtain. One such view is offered by the new display of Russian painting at Manhattan's Gallery of Modern Art. Included in it are some 20 pictures from the collection of Nina Stevens, Russian-born wife of the CBS correspondent in Moscow.

Nina Stevens, as it happens, is not a partisan of Russia's equivalents to Rauschenberg or Julio Le Parc. Her preferences center around a group of Moscovites over 30 whose academic indoctrination was interrupted by World War II. They work as book illustrators or in publishing houses. Their paintings are frequently primitive, but often by design as well as accident, since many of them are familiar with the work of French Brutalist Jean Dubuffet and Mexican pre-Columbian art. Above all, they hark back to the powerful, stylized tradition of Russian icon painting that flourished between the 15th and 17th centuries.

Cruciform Mazes. The Moscow group is frankly nostalgic--and, since the past is most memorably represented in the Soviet Union by its cupolaed churches and moldering mosques, their imagery tends to be religious. This is particularly evident in the glittering panels of Dimitri Plavinsky, 30, a painter who has traveled extensively in Central Asia, where, he writes, "I came to know the magic voice of silence communicated by the crumbling walls of mosques, mazes of deserted cities and the intricate patterns of Asian mosaics."

One of Plavinsky's works in New York is in fact called The Voices of Silence. It is a semiabstract panel composed of fragments of Moslem designs, a hand print, a feather, a fish, cruciform mazes and futuristic line designs. Prayer is a pen-and-ink drawing of two hands pressed together, with passages lettered beneath in a Russian so archaic that it is said that even Slavonic scholars have been unable to decipher it. Coelacanth is a brightly colored portrait of the prehistoric fish, his wizened face gleaming like a phosphorescent fossil. Plavinsky, says Mrs. Stevens, is entirely unaware that a fish is the Christian symbol for Christ.

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