‘Art, it is said, is not a mirror but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes….’ Trotsky

It is a daunting task to try to write about and attempt to make sense of that period of great political, scientific, social and artistic change which encompasses the years roughly between 1900 and the 1930s. What happened in and to Russian Art and Design before, during and after the revolution and then under Stalinist totalitarianism is no small matter and the art in question by no means developed in a vacuum.

Therefore of necessity what follows really only skims the surface of the subject and I hope to strike a balance between readers who know little about developments in art and design, Russian or otherwise, and those (and there are many I’m sure) who are much more knowledgeable than me.

Every development and artist that I briefly sketch here has, of course, had many books written about them but in this article I can only give a general overview and flavour of a fascinating, exciting and also sometimes chilling period of art history.

“Remember that a picture – before being a battle horse , a nude woman or some anecdote – is essentially a flat surface with colours arranged in a certain order “  - Maurice Denis 1890

In the early twentieth century science presented ideas that replaced a fixed, ordered universe with constant change and disorder.

Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian painter, echoing the feeling of many artists remarked in 1913 “ the disintegration of the atom was to me like the disintegration of the whole world “.

Monet – Impression Sunrise  1872                           Matisse – The Dance 1909

A new expression in music, dance, literature and the visual arts was being built which sought to engage with life as it is lived in all it’s disorder and varied experience in a modern age, rather than trying to express an ideal of beauty and an ordered vision of reality which had been current from the time of the Renaissance until the Impressionists in the nineteenth century.

The invention of photography had already freed artists from literal interpretation and also led to new ways of seeing composition, light and space.

Subject matter also shifted radically away from the historical and mythological to that of the city and industrialising society. Depictions of kings and queens, generals, gods and goddesses gave way to attempts to show the experiences central to humanity and to try to deal with emerging ideas in science and psychology

James Ensor – Christ entering Berlin 1889

Kirchner – Potsdamer Platz 1914

The ideas of the German Expressionist painters which proposed a universality of mankind ran alongside those of the cubists in rejecting Renaissance ideals of perspective and proportion and instead found inspiration in Medieval and ancient Egyptian art and also especially in Cubism, in objects from non western traditions such as African tribal sculpture.

African  Mask

The logical progression of Cubism for many painters would be the abandonment of representation and the adoption of complete abstraction.

Picasso – Les Demoiselles D’Avignon 1907       Braques – Chess 1911

Mondrian – Composition 1921

Artists in Russia had access to developments in the west and until 1914 many had travelled to Europe. Painters like Rodchenko and Popova embraced Cubism wholeheartedly, although their work retained  few references to reality.

Rodchenko                                    Popova

However some of the most interesting and challenging work was being made from about 1915 by Kasimir Malevich who developed an art he would call Suprematism.

He advocated ‘the supremacy of pure feeling’ which had no reference at all to reality, believing that an artist could not attain any advance without breaking away from the dead weight of having to depict the mundane world around him.

Malevich - composition

He said “the object in itself is meaningless...the ideas of the conscious mind are worthless”

His images are perhaps more like signs and although they are totally unrealistic – in the technical sense - some of them seem to make references to a kind of mysticism which has its roots in Russian Orthodox icons and a reaching for a cosmic space beyond representation.

Malevich

Wassily Kandinsky was much influenced by Malevich although his work was more approachable and referential. Following the revolution Kandinsky worked for the Commissariat for Education and devised a programme of instruction for the new Soviet art workshops However by 1921 his work was considered too mystical and he left Russia for Germany where he joined the staff of the design school in Weimar known as the Bauhaus thereby carrying ideas of Modernism, much developed by artists such as Malevich, back where they would combine with others who were working along the same lines. In Germany this breadth of experience was translated into ideals of good affordable design for the masses.

Wassily Kandinsky                                                       

Breuer - the ‘ Wassily ‘ chair                Bauhaus poster

Later deemed dangerously modernist and ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis, the Bauhaus was closed down. Many of the designers sought refuge and found fertile ground in the U.S.A where their designs would flourish and become available to the general public albeit mainly the middle classes.

However in Russia, by as early as 1916, fissures were appearing between artists such as Malevich and others such as Vladimir Tatlin who were developing ideas which became known as Constructivism.

Tatlin, who had started out as a sculptor working on abstract compositions started to think more about materials, solving practical problems and  striving to make his ideas useful to the new Soviet society. He was assigned the task, by the Bolshevik government, of reorganising the art institutions. There he encouraged the students to deal with everyday problems and they were instructed about the use of materials so that they could go into the factories to develop new designs and new processes.

Practical issues were addressed and instead of using basic geometrical forms to give the appearance of modernity and efficiency they were encouraged to develop the potential of the materials available to enhance the purpose and function of the object.

The Commissariat of Enlightenment, the Bolshevik government’s cultural and educational ministry approved of the basis of teaching for this new movement while suppressing the old Petrograd Academy of Fine Arts and the Moscow school of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1918. From then on the focus for Constructivism in Moscow was Vkhutemas -the school for art and design established in 1919.

After international war, revolution, civil war and war against foreign troops sent to undo the revolution, every activity was assessed to determine whether it secured the revolution and strengthened the state. Many artists such as Rodchenko and Popova wholeheartedly embraced this, not only involving themselves in producing designs for industry, but also working on public festivals, graphic designs, advertising, clothes design, photography and cinema.

Artistic endeavour was seen by the Constructivists as a means of creating an entirely new culture which would benefit mankind both materially and spiritually.

Popova – Exercise suit                       Rodchenko - Poster

Art was already seen as a powerful tool for propaganda and in 1917 an institution called Proletcult  (the Proletarian Cultural and Enlightenment Organisation) was set up whose remit was to put arts into ‘the service of the dictatorship of the proletariat’. Moreover, avant –garde, non traditional art and poetry were to be seen at that time as complementary to revolutionary politics.

Trotsky, for example, had a great interest in the Arts and wrote books on the subject such as ‘Culture and Socialism ‘and ‘Art and Revolution ‘.He felt that art had to continually renew itself and guard against indulging in false academic mannerisms which stifled creativity and new ideas .He wrote this about Impressionism, which although it had flourished in the 1870s and 80s was ,even after the revolution and the advances of cubism, still regarded as modern art.  

“Naturalism transcended itself and became Impressionism , which did not give up it’s fidelity to nature and it’s truth to life , but on the contrary precisely in the name of this truth, in it’s eternally changing forms, and demanded freedom for the truth of subjective perception. Whilst the old academic style said ‘here are the rules [ or images ] according to which nature must be depicted’ and naturalism said ‘here is nature’ , then Impressionism said ‘ here is how I see nature.’ But this ‘I ‘ of Impressionism is a new personality in new circumstances but with a new nervous system, with new eyes, a modern person, and that is why this painting is modernism, not fashionable painting, but modern, contemporary, emerging from contemporary perception”.

However he condemned the idea of ‘art for art’s sake‘ and the hanging of pictures in bourgeois art galleries and advocated that art should  be a more organic part of society as in, for example, fusing together art , sculpture and architecture in new and inspiring ways.

Tatlin’s Tower - model

In 1919 – 20 Tatlin planned to put these kinds of ideas into practise and made a model of a huge structure which was intended to stand across the river Neva in Petrograd (St. Petersburg ).  Norbert Lynton, in the story of modern art describes this revolutionary project.

“Commissioned as a monument to the Third International, an organisation established in March 1919 to bring international socialism back into one co-operative brotherhood after the enmities required by war, Tatlin’s Tower was to be a sort of answer to the Eiffel Tower in Paris . That was built for advertisement and pleasure and rose to 300 metres. Tatlin’s, rising to 400 metres, would symbolise the energy and aspirations of the world wide association but also serve as the Comintern’s headquarters. The spiral structure, in part supported by a vast lattice girder rising at about sixty degrees to the horizontal, would in turn support three cells -  a cubic one housing the assembly or debating chamber, a pyramid one [lying on one side] housing the secretariat, and a cylindrical one with a hemisphere above it serving as an information centre and broadcasting station.

This fusion of symbol and functional building was to be built of steel and glass. Lifts would move up and down the spin; it’s two spiral or strictly helical , ramps would afford vehicle and pedestrian access. The structure as a whole would look a little like an astronomical observatory, and it has recently been suggested that it’s slanting axis would have been aimed at the pole star. The whole structure was to spring out of the earth, and it is by no means fanciful to see it as a part of a project global , indeed, cosmic, in it’s function and meaning. Like the bridge on a ship, or the command module of a spacecraft, Tatlin’s tower would have served to steer the course of humanity on earth. Flags and radio masts at the top, as well as the proposed site, suggest ships. The mouth of the Neva at Petrograd was and is a major port. Petrograd was also a centre for astronomical studies. The cells within the structure would rotate in harmony with the cosmos; the assembly would rotate once a year , echoing the earth’s annual movement round the sun; the secretariat once in 28 days , like the moon around the earth; the information centre once a day, with and like the earth. Thus the tower served as an annual clock, symbolizing and also representing man’s existence in time.”

Unfortunately, however, it was never built due mainly to lack of resources in Soviet Russia. Moreover, Lenin regarded it as an artistic folly and Trotsky, despite being a champion of creative ideas, thought the rotating cells a step too far.

Film, of course, became a cutting edge area of activity in the constructivist movement and was used as a major propaganda tool to try to weld together the many citizens of this vast country.

Eisenstein made ‘Battleship Potemkin’ in 1925 which exploited the use of montage in the re-telling of historical events. Romance was discarded and documentary was seen as the best means of connecting with the proletariat.

Vertov –‘The man with the movie camera ‘

Dziga Vertov made many films and wrote in his manifesto ‘We ‘ in 1922

“We discover the souls of the machines , we are in love with the worker at his bench , we are in love with the farmer on his tractor , the engineer on his locomotive. We make peace between man and machine .We educate the new man.”

The developments in Constructivism especially in design and film provoked much excitement and interest in the West and many of its principles and ideas were carried to Europe by Russian artists who were emigrants from the Soviet state.

Increasingly through the twenties, as the Soviet state moved towards a more totalitarian model, modern styles were rejected by the Communist party. Impressionism and Cubism were viewed as ‘elitist’ and ‘decadent’ since they were thought ‘too difficult for the proletariat to understand’. Styles which had been developed before the revolution were considered ‘bourgeois’ and useless as a propaganda tool.

Malevich, who, in the twenties, had started to construct architectural models was allowed to put on an exhibition and lecture at the Bauhaus in 1927. However in the last years of his life, under increasing pressure from the Soviet State, he painted portraits of his friends and family.

Banal portraits of friendly Uncle Joe were in. The revolutionary period of Soviet Art was well and truly over. Anything that was non representational was deemed totally unacceptable and Socialist Realism, which should more truthfully be named Totalitarian Realism, became state policy in 1932.

Art had to be ‘socialist in content and realist in form’ and there were four categories of unacceptable art:’ formalist’ art which covered abstraction, conceptual art and expressionism, political art, and erotic and religious art.

As a result many avant garde artists who struggled against this regime went into exile, were murdered, or were sent to the gulag.

This control , of course, did not only apply to the visual arts but also extended to literature and music, and although some restrictions started to ease after Stalin’s death in 1953, this hostility to the avant garde continued into the 1980s and Socialist Realism was the official state style until the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.