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                                                                                ART, Page 66

Russia's Great Flowering


A huge show surveys the heady moment early in the century when
radical art became the house style of a political revolution

By ROBERT HUGHES


     The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde,
1915-1932," the Guggenheim Museum's huge show of Russian art
before, during and immediately after the 1917 Revolution, is
meant to be received with extreme piety. These artists, all
dead, now have a world audience they could only have dreamed of
fitfully when they were alive. We gaze at their frail icons with
reverence -- the replays of French Cubism with sturgeons,
Cyrillic letters and Tolstoyan beards playing hide-and-seek
among their facets; the posters exhorting us to "Beat the Whites
with the Red Wedge"; the constructions of workers' materials
like tin and rope and painted wood; the disembodied black and
red squares of now cracking paint. French gallerygoers 100 years
ago never felt like this about the art of the French Revolution.
Jacques-Louis David looked old-fashioned by then, whereas
Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, El
Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Liubov Popova and all their
colleagues in the ism soup of the Russian artistic vanguard
still look fresh and daring.

     This was the one place and time in the 20th century
(except, briefly, for the linkage of Italian Fascism and
Futurism) when radical art actually did become the house style
of a revolution. This would not have happened if the Russians
had had TV to carry their political messages, but luckily for
art history they hardly even had electricity. Hence the Russian
artists satisfy our nostalgia for that lost phoenix of Modernist
desire, an art that was both experimental and politically
effective. To this day, one can't look at the Constructivist
designs for agitprop events -- the red panels of Natan Altman's
bold transformation of the huge Palace Square in Leningrad for
the first birthday of the October Revolution, or the steel-truss
tribune designed by Lissitzky to carry Lenin forward like a high
diver over the heads of a crowd -- without a feeling of
exhilaration: this, not the bureaucratic and murderous reality
of institutional Marxism, is what it was meant to be like, that
now closed chapter in Russian history.

     Moreover, the artists' story is largely tragic. The
revolution devoured its children. In the 1930s, after Stalin's
seizure of power, the work of these artists was ruthlessly
suppressed as "bourgeois formalism." It lacked the three nosts
of Socialist Realism: ideinost, or belief in the class basis of
truth; narodnost, or accessibility to the people; and partinost,
or Party spirit. The artists now appear in the treble guise of
visionaries, heroes and victims. Most art lovers probably
believe, on this point, that Stalin betrayed the revolution and
are unwilling to think of Lenin as the savage autocrat he was;
they are apt to suppose, moreover, that Lenin (who had a stony
immunity to visual art) personally evoked this creative surge,
which is another myth.

     The roots of the great Russian efflorescence go much
further back than either Lenin or the 1917 Revolution. They lie
in the liberal, high-bourgeois culture of Moscow and St.
Petersburg, a culture that pullulated with avant-garde splinter
groups and wild chiliastic claims, exquisitely attuned not only
to Russian traditions of religious mysticism but also to Cubism,
Futurism, Symbolism and other currents in Paris, Rome, Vienna.
To imagine that the work of spiritually obsessed artists like
Kandinsky or Malevich had any filial relationship to Marxism is
to miss its meaning. Malevich, an egomaniacal genius who called
himself "the president of space" and imagined that his art could
translate all humankind onto a higher plane, was as far from
dialectical materialism as a man could be.

     Only by asserting that Marxism was itself a millenarian
religion can one argue a link between such artists and the
ideology of the revolution. The motor of new Russian art was its
belief that the world was on the brink of inconceivable change.
Sever the strands of the past, leap into the future. "Only he
is alive," Malevich pronounced, "who rejects his convictions of
yesterday." Lissitzky's "prouns" -- a term he coined from the
Russian words meaning project of the affirmation of the new --
resemble plans or aerial views of Utopian structures, an
abstract New Jerusalem in paint. They are a middle ground
between Malevich's absolutism and the more pragmatic agitprop
efforts of artists in the '20s.

     But although the designs of Lissitzky and others were used
quite often for hoardings, rostrums and so forth, there is no
way of judging their actual political effect, if any. What
really won a place in the Bolshevik propaganda effort was
photography and the new art of photocollage, brilliantly
deployed -- in combination with sharp, eye-rattling typographic
forms -- in book jackets, handbills and movie posters. Anton
Lavinsky's 1926 poster for Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin,
which grabs the eye with the staring authority of those two
black cannon muzzles framing the whispering, mutinous sailor,
is a classic of the genre.

     This is the Guggenheim's first exhibition after the
opening of its disappointing new tower galleries last summer.
It is billed as a pioneering effort. This is true only in a
bureaucratic sense: access to works in Russian museums has
become a good deal easier since the collapse of communism. The
organizers' ambition to shake the contents of every provincial
museum in Mother Russia into the Guggenheim has produced more
footnotes than masterpieces. Much of the best work in it will
be familiar to visitors who saw "Paris-Moscow, 1900-1930" in
Paris in 1979, or any of the exhibitions of the Russian
avant-garde that have been held since. But a new generation of
museumgoers is now on hand and must be served.

     Critics have complained that "The Great Utopia" is too
big, and it is. Inside the fat show flexing its institutional
mass, a thinner one pleads to be let out. If you spent a minimal
30 seconds on each of its 800-odd paintings, collages,
drawings, photomontages, architectural designs, photographs,
posters, textile samples and costume sketches, you would be
there six hours. It could have been cut by a third without
aesthetic loss. Visitors must contend with a stupefyingly
long-winded catalog written by 19 scholars, all seemingly
addressed to other scholars rather than to any imaginable
general public. The new, obnoxiously corporate-modeled,
self-franchising Guggenheim may run on laptops, but what it
really needs is an editorial pencil -- if not a knout. And the
layout is so confusing that one needs to know quite a lot about
the period and the art in advance in order to get through it.

     This is due, in large part, to the installation by the
architect Zaha Hadid, who saw her opportunity to go up against
not only Russian Constructivism but Frank Lloyd Wright as well.
The resulting argument is so contrived that it almost manages,
except for a few moments of striking success, to annul the art.
It is interesting, for instance, to see a reconstruction from
photos, but with the originals, of part of the installation of
the "0.10" exhibition held in St. Petersburg in 1915, with its
flock of abstract pictures hovering like angels around
Malevich's climactic black square, hung in the corner as
Russians traditionally hung their icons. But it is a simulation,
all the same, and not necessarily the best way to see the
paintings themselves.

     Hadid's best moment comes right at the beginning, where
the first gallery is given over to two emblematic objects
representing the two chief streams of Russian invention. On one
hand, totalizing mysticism: Malevich's Red Square, 1915, the
slightly off-kilter block of pure color on a white ground that,
despite the subtitle the artist gave it (Painterly Realism:
Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions), remains the true text of the
primitive gospel of abstraction. On the other, Tatlin's tense
structure of commonplace materials, Counter-Relief, 1914-15, the
work that seems to predict the whole future history of
constructed sculpture, rising out of the juncture of Cubism with
Tatlin's own love of the stuff of common work. This is an
eloquent confrontation. But in general, Hadid's design belongs
to the realm of extravaganza; it superimposes chic on overload,
thus unintentionally stressing how far we are from the
world-transforming hopes of revolutionary Russia's avant-garde.