Click on the headline to link to a “Wikipedia” entry for the Russian Constructivists.
March Is Women’s History Month Markin comment:The following is an article from the Spring 1982 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest- for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
The Russian Avant-Garde:
Art and the Bolshevik Revolution
by Vladimir ZelinskiTwo recent American exhibitions—"The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930—New Perspectives" 1980 national tour, and this winter's Guggenheim Museum show in New York City, part of the George Costakis collection—reveal an incredibly vital and heterogeneous movement. In the period from roughly 1916-17 to 1924, the paintings, constructions and industrial designs of a host of talented artists placed Russian art, before (and thereafter) a derivative and provincial backwater, at the leading edge of 20th century creativity in the arts. The whole Bauhaus school, in particular, is incomprehensible without the influence of the Russian Constructivists and "production artists," transmitted by such figures as Kandinsky and El Lissitzky.
This movement was largely ignored in the West for almost half a century until its first major Western exhibit in London in 1971. Today such exhibits are promoted and armed with a mendacious anti-Communist "message": the bourgeois media disappear the social relation of this art to the October Revolution and pretend that it was repressed in revolutionary Russia under Lenin and Trotsky. In fact the avant-garde was literally disappeared—but only under triumphant Stalinism. During the consolidation of Stalinist bureaucratic rule, the revolutionary artists were transformed into non-persons and then plucked from obscurity and subjected to frenzied attacks on their supposed degenerate "bourgeois formalism" by Stalin's culture boss Zhdanov.
The reason is simple: though art is not "political" in a direct sense, this art in its own way is political dynamite. It gives the lie to the equation of Leninism with Stalinism, connived at by capitalist ideologues and Stalinist hacks alike ever since the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky was smashed. Time has not defused the political impact of these fine works. Their exhibition in the USSR today would reveal the stunning mediocrity of "official art" (as well as the sorry state of "dissident" and "non-conformist" artistic production). It would also inevitably raise deeply embarrassing and (for the usurping bureaucrats) unanswerable questions. What happened to these artists? Why was genuinely great art possible in Russia in the early '20s, in the midst of incredible backwardness and massive poverty, but not now, under conditions of relative material plenty and technological progress?
Art and SocietySince bourgeois patrons were obviously lacking, clearly the government and cultural institutions of the infant Soviet workers state had to play a central role in supporting this art, an art whose abstractness and aura of airiness and radiant optimism place it at far remove from the dogmas and products of Stalinist "socialist realism."
Russian " revolutionary" art did not, of course, spring from the head of Lenin. The bourgeois media would like to suggest that there is little if any relationship between the Bolsheviks' successful October Revolution and the cultural explosion of 1917-25. But there are in fact numerous ties, going back all the way to the 1850s artistic revolt against the hitherto dominant neo¬classical tradition. This is not to say that Russian painters and writers were necessarily Marxist. Rather they inevitably mirrored the travail of a society groaning beneath the yoke of a tsarist autocracy incapable of effecting Russia's passage into the mainstream of bourgeois economic, political and cultural development.
The author of the main work leading to the founding of the Russian realist school, The Aesthetic Relation of An to Reality, was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, better known among revolutionaries for his seminal novel What Is To Be Done?, which so profoundly moved and influenced a generation of Russian revolutionaries, Lenin among them. Chernyshevsky's belief that it was necessary to forestall "the accusation that art is an empty diversion" through imbuing it with social content was characteristic of the radical intelligentsia.
Thus the "Wanderers" grouping of artists founded under Chernyshevsky's influence in 1870grew along lines strikingly similar to those of overtly political groupings. Many of its members, like the Populists, "went to the people" and elevated the Russian peasant, mired in his immemorial priest-ridden backwardness, as hero of the new art. Wealthy Slavophile merchants supported artistic colonies (Abramtsevo and Talashkino) whose residents sought inspiration in a William Morris-ish arts-and-craftsy revival of moribund Byzantine tradition or the primitive folk art of lubok (chapbook) woodcuts.
Around the turn of the century a symbolist school arose influenced by the fin-du-siecle "decadents" of the West. Although reflecting the increasing cultural sophistication of their patrons, such artists as Viktor Borrisov-Mussatov succeeded only in producing yet paler copies of the already effete Puvis de Chavannes, elegiac paintings of abandoned country mansions and empty-gazed demoiselles—works which with hindsight one is tempted to assert expressed (like much of Chekhov) the consciousness of a merchant/ landholding gentry lacking an historic future. And art-for-art's-sake withdrawal from social concerns also arose, partly reflecting Russian artists' sense of futility at the intelligentsia's failure to transform society by literary means.
This "World of Art," centered around the multi-talented Aleksandr Benois, nonetheless laid the foundations for future developments, mounting a series of exhibitions that introduced contemporary European art to Russian painters and young Russian artists to a wider public.
The Great ExperimentThe first expressions of the coming breakthrough appeared between 1905-1917, with the rise of a gifted and innovative younger generation of painters. Their openness to experimentation, derived partly from the German expressionists and French cubists, arose also from the sudden sense of release generated even in defeat by the great proletarian upsurge of the 1905 Revolution. (See "Before 'Socialist Realism' in the Soviet Union," W&R No. 13, Winter 1976-77, for a discussion of this burst of creativity in other artistic areas, notably dance and theater.)
This feeling that the whole anachronistic edifice of tsarism was crumbling inspired in these artists a will to radically reshape art and its relation to society. Seeking through scientific inquiry into the interaction of planes, volumes, color, overall structuring of the canvas and their effects on the viewer to discover laws inherent to art, they rejected the naturalistic tradition (in which even cubism remained based). This was the program that, despite factional differences, united the Russian avant-garde right down to their repression by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Hence the rationalism of this art, its tendency toward a radical geometricizing simplification.
The art of the Russian avant-garde thus to an extent anticipated the revolution to whose ideals it lent expression: a fundamental faith in man's capacity to rationally reshape society, doing away with the material and intellectual compulsion springing from the anarchy and inequality of capitalist class rule. Nor is this so strange as it might seem: tsarism had only gotten away by the skin of its teeth. And successful revolutions, just because they are so deeply rooted in the needs of
society, tend to cast their shadow before them. Thus that severe archetype of French revolutionary art, David's Oath of the Horatii with its celebration of stoic bourgeois civic morality, was painted in 1784-85, a period in which a whole crop of masterpieces in fact appeared.
New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer commented on the Guggenheim show (New York Times Magazine, 11 October 1981):
"In Popova's oeuve, as in that of many other members of the Russian avant-garde, we first encounter a Cubist vocabulary that looks more or less familiar But then
something happens. A vision—mystical or political or, as was more often the case, some combination of the two—intervenes to alter the inherited vocabulary and set it on a new course, and we are suddenly confronted with forms, textures, ideas that owe little or nothing to the styles that set them on their way."
Unlike the anti-communist Kramer, whose puzzlement results from ideological blinders, we Trotskyists know what the "something" was that seemingly just "happened." It was the October Revolution. Kramer cannot admit its profoundly liberating effect upon society from top to bottom, because to do so would dispel the assiduously cultivated bourgeois myth that the proletarian triumph of 1917 was a Bolshevik putsch from above. But indeed this cultural explosion affected not just Popova but a host of young artists, all of whom just "happened" to make their creative breakthroughs in the crucial years 1917-18. One must look to the great bourgeois upheavals—the Italian Renaissance, the French Revolution—for a parallel to this sort of artistic and societal self-confidence.
The Guggenheim ExhibitionOne came away from the powerful Guggenheim exhibit convinced of the viability of modernist "abstract" art. What is it about these paintings that produces so marked an effect? First there is the overwhelming vitality. This was a cultural explosion in the making, with an incredible variety of styles and techniques. Times critic Kramer has difficulty reining in his incredulity in the face of these artists' prescience: "Her" [Olga Rozanova's]untitled abstract painting of a vertical green stripe, dating from 1917, was produced more than 30 years before the American painter Barnett Newman began work on the paintings of a very similar design that won him a place of renown— Ivan Kliun
.vividly anticipated more recent developments—in this case, the kind of Minimal Art...that enjoyed a great vogue in the 1960s."
The problems being confronted here are those which non-objectivist painters have faced right up to the present, while the solutions advanced by the Russians are both elegant and convincing. These paintings really work. They convey a sense of life and vitality, the result of a concern for painterly texture and the most subtle color gradations. Virtually all these artists cultivated a bright palette that, along with the sheer elegance of their works, their clarity and subtlety of structure, the sense of artistic problems being met and solved, makes them the tangible conveyors across 60 years of the vigor, hope and optimism of revolutionary Russia.
The large number of women artists in the Guggenheim exhibit is itself a powerful index. Kramer comments:
"The Russian avant-garde was the only art movement of its kind in which the achievements of women were unquestionably equal to those of their male colleagues, a circumstance that appears to owe more to the enlightened attitudes of the pre-Revolutionary liberal intelligentsia than to any measures initiated by the Soviet regime after the Revolution."
Kramer's liberal banalities beg the question. But the fact remains: the only artistic movement in which women were, in Kramer's words, "unquestionably equal" was associated with the only proletarian revolution in history. In the atmosphere of the triumphant Revolution women, many of whom might have remained Sunday painters, their art an ornament on their role as dutiful mothers, had the confidence to devote themselves wholly to art. For every Natalia Goncharova, well-known before the Revolution, there are a half dozen who were unknown at its outset and who would, without its liberating effect, in all likelihood have remained so.
The Bolsheviks and ArtWhat the Bolsheviks did after 1917 was basically to provide the material/organizational framework and then leave artists and writers to work out artistic problems on their own. In the face of decades of bourgeois propaganda to the contrary, it cannot be sufficiently stressed that this was the standpoint of literally all authoritative Party leaders. Trotsky's "Communist Policy Toward Art" thus simply voices the standard attitude:
"Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian methods are not the same as the artistic. The party leads the proletariat but not the historic processes of history. There are domains in which the party leads, directly and imperatively. There are domains in which it only cooperates. There are, finally, domains in which it only orients itself. The domain of art is not one in which the party is called upon to command. It can and must protect and help it, but it can lead it only indirectly...."
Anatoly Lunacharsky, head of Narkompros, the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment, and thus directly in charge of cultural affairs, held identical views: "Of course the state does not have the intention of imposing revolutionary ideas and tastes upon artists. Such compulsion could result only in fake-revolutionary art, since the prime requisite of genuine art is the honesty/sincerity of the artist" ("Revolution and Art," October 1920).
Lunacharsky sought to prevent the dominance of any one artistic clique, which meant above all in post-1919 Russia combatting the influence of the "Proletkult," led by one-time God-seeker and now arch-workerist Bogdanov. Against the Proletkult insistence that art be immediately relevant and comprehensible to Russia's incredibly backward masses (a movement which fed straight into Stalinist "socialist realism"), Lunacharsky insisted "... we cannot adapt our literature to the low cultural level of the broad masses of peasants or even to that of the workers themselves. This would be a mammoth error." Like Trotsky, he refused to accede to the workerists' obscurantist rejection of all past art as simply "bourgeois' insisting that "new proletarian and socialist art can be built only on the foundation of all our acquisitions from the past." This debate mirrored the crucial battle being waged by Lenin and Trotsky, in war-ravaged and starving Russia, for the need to learn to develop and wield the techniques of advanced capitalist production, as against the primitive and Utopian sloganeering of groups like the "Workers Opposition."
Of course, for many members of the Russian avant-garde, such was the attractive power of the Bolshevik-led transformation of society that pure art was not enough. Many became Agitprop artists, creators of revolutionary posters and decorators of the brightly-painted propaganda trains that brought the message of liberation to the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union. Essentially these artists' task was political propaganda, attempting first of all to raise the political, and not primarily the artistic, consciousness of their viewers. Another group of artists, at the Institute of Artistic Culture founded by Kandinsky sought to create an overall environment in which the most everyday objects (the ubiquitous Russian tea service, textiles, chairs, clothing, Popova's elegant designs for cigar and cigarette cases) would have worked along with a new architecture and constructivist theater to educate and raise the taste and perceptiveness of Russia's culturally deprived masses. The intention was not a debased "proletarian" art a la Proletkult, but to create the conditions for a classless art, as the workers overcame their decades of material and cultural want, and the achievement of plenty allowed the attainment of socialism.Still many avant-garde artists in post-Revolution
Russia eschewed any effort at direct political relevance. In the scant decade from the October Revolution to the consolidation of Stalinist bureaucratic rule in the late '20s, many Russian artists felt themselves, for the only time in their history, free to devote themselves to art pure and simple, without the imperative need to voice an overt social message. Yet in the manner that great art captures the social matrix from which it springs/ the works of these artists are imbued with optimism and are animated by the hopes of an entire society.
Stalinist DegenerationWhat happened instead was the bitter disappointment of those hopes: Stalinist degeneration, the result of the conjuncture of Russian backwardness with the devastation first of World War I and then the civil war, plus—critically—the failure to extend the revolution to advanced Europe, as in Germany in 1923. The work of the avant-garde artists began to disappear from public view, just as the Bolshevik opposition to Stalin disappeared from view. The artists were fortunate even to survive.
That supreme genius of abstraction, Kasimir Malevich, was reduced in the '30s to painting sacchar¬ine landscapes and insipid portraits of smiling village maidens. One can imagine the despair and self-loathing with which this artist must have had to contend. Such surviving members of the Russian avant-garde as Costakis was able to meet in the late '40s and '50s were then either bitter or demoralized. This is not the least of the crimes of the Stalinists: the deliberate destruction of a whole generation of outstanding painters and writers, the transformation of "socialist" (as in "socialist realism") into a term of opprobrium among artists. Under tsarism Russian art and literature had suffered profoundly from the compulsion to make social, not artistic, concerns central. Today, in the deformed and degenerated workers states under the rule of a parasitic bureaucratic caste, any work of art or literature that does not confront this central problem—the need to oust the usurping bureaucracy— is felt to be inherently mendacious. It lies by omission, the artist knows this, and it shows in his work. For literature this has meant that virtually the sole genre open to serious Soviet writers is satire, for which the opportunities certainly are legion. But even here the works, with a few exceptions like Voinovich, tend to be heavy-handed and obvious, like Aleksandr Zinoviev's aptly named The Yawning Heights. They too are massively deformed, presenting a black-and-white view of society profoundly at odds with the multivalent complexity of great art: socialist realism with the plus and minus signs reversed.
Polish film director Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron, currently being shown in the U.S., is a striking case in point. As a piece of hack propaganda for the clerical-reactionary Solidarnos'c', Man of Iron necessarily lies at its heart. It falsely portrays the movement which led to Solidarnos': as the continuation of previous working-class struggles against the Stalinist regime and celebrates the marriage of the workers and intellectuals as presided over by the Catholic church. Unlike the talented director's Man of Marble, a serious work of art probing the contradictions of post-war Polish society, Man of Iron expresses simply the anti-Communist lies of Solidarnos"— and not surprisingly, this has also severely hurt Wajda's art. As we said in Workers Vanguard: "Wajda rejected what Stalinism has done to truth and art, but Man of Iron embraces the lies of anti-Communism and of the church. Of Polish youth, he has said, 'People who are 20 today need to know, and to understand, why their parents are lying.' That is so. They also need to know why one of their leading artists cannot tell the truth" ("Man of Iron: The Gospel According to Solidarnos's"," WV No. 297, 22 January).
The Struggle for SocialismIt is essential to understand that something precious remains of the social gains, the great inspiring goals, which made the explosive, if brief, flowering of art in the Soviet Union possible. Despite its Stalinist degeneration and the line drawn in blood of revolutionaries and workers that separates it from the Soviet Union of Lenin, the USSR today still rests on the foundations of socialized property established by the working class when it took state power. That these foundations are in every sphere massively undermined by the Stalinist usurpers only heightens the urgency of the international working class taking up the defense and extension of this historic victory. To truly defend the socialized property forms of the USSR, and to drive the liberating force of authentic communism forward, it, is necessary to forge an international vanguard party of the proletariat to overthrow capitalism worldwide through socialist revolution and oust the Stalinist bureaucracies of the deformed workers states through political revolution.
It is of course impossible to say what forms art would take in a genuinely socialist society, one freed of bureaucratic misrule and building on the foundations of technological plenty, not the generalized want of Russia in the '20s—and not in a few countries surrounded by hostile imperialism, but in a world socialist order. Nonetheless it seems safe to predict that whatever its form, the art of a triumphant socialism will partake of the radiance and optimism so triumphantly captured by the Russian avant-garde in the short time granted it."
