Futurism's Farthest Frontier

By ROBERT HUGHES

In the U.S.S.R.'s vanguard works, a story of talent betrayed

In some ways the history of art history is like the scramble for Africa. A few pioneers stumble on unexploited territory and stake it out, often forgetting to register their claims. Then the dealers arrive, and the collectors, carving up the area, reducing it to mining ground, a tangle of jumped claims and abandoned shafts, patrolled by trigger-happy art historians. Trade follows the flag. The original inhabitants, of course, are long gone. A few survivors get a job in the mines. So it has been with the big "rediscoveries" of the art market in the past 20 years, such as art nouveau, art deco, 19th century American art--and now Soviet vanguard art of the period 1900-30.

The art produced in Russia before, during and for ten years after the Revolution of 1917 was the last great efflorescence of the modernist spirit that is still not fully known about. This was partly due to the cold war. The main reason, however, was repression inside the Soviet Union. The work of artists like Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Lyubov Popova, Natalya Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Vladimir Tallin, Kasimir Malevich, Natan Altman, Naum Gabo and scores of others was a collectively ecstatic response to the possibilities of a new world, the Utopia that Lenin called "Marx plus electricity." It was international in range, drawing on the resources of the new movements in Italy and France--futurism and cubism--which the Soviet artists absorbed with extraordinary speed; and there was nothing provincial about their absorption. Moreover, it was wedded to the ideal of revolution. The energies of radical politics had called forth an equally radical state art. Many of its makers believed that they were at the climax of history, the establishment of the Marxist millennium; their faith was as absolute as Bernini's Catholicism.

But by 1930 the repression had begun. In Stalin's slow and terrible eye, such art was decadent and, because of its internationalism, bourgeois-formalist. The Gulag swallowed some artists, like Boris Kushner. Others, such as Larionov, Goncharova, Gabo and Ivan Puni, went into exile. Those who stayed, like Rodchenko or the architect Konstantin Melnikov, survived as ghosts, forgotten men in a culture of vindictive Stalinist toadies. Like Cronus, the Revolution devoured its children. As a wholesale trashing of a civilization, only Hitler's demolition of the German modernists compares with it. Inside the Soviet Union, the works themselves lay buried, invisible to the people and never exported--until now.

The exhibition that opened last month at Paris' Centre Pompidou, under the title "Paris-Moscow, 1900-1930," is therefore a cultural event of prime importance. There has never been a chance for anyone, in or out of the Soviet Union, to see this great subject treated in such depth. It is designed, in the words of the catalogue, as "the last panel of the triptych" of exhibitions illustrating the relationships between Paris and three modernist capitals: New York (1977), Berlin (1978) and Moscow. The sheer size of the Soviet loan--some 2,000 works in all media, from paintings to agitprop posters, from architectural drawings to teacups and chess sets--put the center's director, Pontus Hulten, at a disadvantage in bargaining. The Russian side of the show is wholly chosen and catalogued by Soviet experts, whose essays (as one might expect) gloss over the brutal fate of the culture they discuss and, as art history, are not pitched at the level of scholarship a European audience feels entitled to. But it is the work that counts, and must be seen, in all its energy and episodic magnificence: a vast panorama, from the haunted fin-de-siecle symbolist canvases of Mikhail Vrubel to the last attempts, by painters like Alexander Deineka, to combine a social message with a post-cubist idiom before the freeze of the '30s.

It is not true, of course, that the energies of this art sprang full-formed from the head of the Revolution. Moscow, before 1917, was one of the chief condensers of advanced cultural ideas--thanks not only to the artists themselves, but to bourgeois Maecenases like Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov, whose enthusiasm for modern French art (Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, in particular) is still evident in the great public collections of Moscow and Leningrad. There was a steady traffic of ideas, paintings and of the artists themselves between Russia, France and Italy.

Marinetti, the leader of the futurists, who called himself the "caffeine of Europe," had such an impact in Russia that for decades afterward all advanced or difficult-looking art tended to be lumped, by officials, under the general title of "futurism"; and when Octobrist painters shouted the slogan, "In the name of our tomorrow, let us burn Raphael!" they were adopting Marinetti's febrile rhetoric against the art of the past. In those years, even Marc Chagall was the painter he would never be again: the delight in form rather than nostalgia as the stuff of poetry that pervades a work like Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, 1913, is very far removed from the flossy kitsch-Judaica of his past 30 years.

But it was the Revolution that focused the energies of Soviet art. The outsiders now became insiders; their opposition to the old order and its tastes was crystallized on a political level that, as artists, they could enthusiastically serve. But they were not content to be dandies like Marinetti. They wanted to construct. Hence their special relationship to the young Communist state. Today no revolutionary government that had just seized control of a vast, economically foundering country would bother with artists or art schools. The U.S.S.R. did so after the Revolution, thanks to two circumstances that hold true in no modern capitalist state. Print was thinly spread among the masses, radio almost unheard of and there was no television. Moreover, most of the proletariat was not only illiterate, but steeped in the tradition of the icon. So ideological control of static visual images was necessary to the party. One might even say that the Russian avant-garde was the last group of artists to work in a society where painting and, to a lesser degree, sculpture were still dominant mediums of discourse.

Lenin had already conceived of a mass culture, separate and distinct from the high culture of the salons and the Bolshoi; and in 1917 the Central Committee announced that "in art, the proletariat is drawn to ... strong, bright and clear forms, to what is complete and has definite meaning." This was probably meant to encourage agitprop poster design. The artists, however, took it as a stamp of approval for cubo-futurism, suprematism, constructivism and the other isms that the ferment of Western art had helped set off. In their enthusiasm to create a new culture that would be a synthesis of modernist fragmentation, folk art and dialectical materialism, the artists got more from looking at Lenin's works than he did from theirs. "I do not understand them," Lenin complained. "I do not experience any pleasure from them."

Nevertheless, Tallin's project for a Monument to the Third International, 1920, which would have topped out at 1,400 ft., dwarfed the Eiffel Tower and given the U.S.S.R. the greatest industrial metaphor in the world, was a euphoric paean to the marriage of "objective" material--girders and glass--with dialectics The idea of a necessary link between the nature of modern art and the aims of socialism was everywhere. "Each part of a futurist picture," Natan Altman argued, "acquires meaning only through the interaction of all the other parts"; its task was not to depict, but to explain dialectical relationships. Illegible in themselves, the fragments of form live "a collective life," like the faces in "a proletarian procession."

For artists like Tallin, Lissitzky and Rodchenko, industrial process itself--the substance of the real world--was the only metaphor art needed. Abstract art, like Lissitzky's Proun paintings, could reach the masses directly because it was not a representation, not "spiritual," but a thing among other things, no longer mystifying. The hierarchies dividing the fine and the applied arts melted before the enthusiasm of these Leonardos of socialist reconstruction; for Rodchenko, there was no difference in the order of imagination needed for painting or for designing a workers' communal reading room, complete with uncomfortable high-backed chairs of impeccably constructivist shape which served, presumably, to keep the workers from dozing over their edifying texts. Even Kasimir Malevich, whose painting of a slightly misshapen black square on a white ground was one of the most radical manifestoes of early abstract art, felt no embarrassment in the late '20s about repainting an abstract canvas of 1918 with a line of Red Army horsemen galloping across the horizon--a singular document of aesthetic pliancy, if not one of his major works.

In all, one cannot visit this show--the components of a failed Utopia, the relics of magnificent and betrayed talent--without emotion. It seems hardly possible that a group of artists of comparable talent will ever commit themselves so wholly to the service of an ideology again. It was the last moment of faith; and what stands between 1979 and 1920 is not only the Gulag, but the erosion of all belief in the political uses of aesthetic avantgardes.

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