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PAINTING REVOLUTION
Kandinsky, Malevich,
and the Russian Avant-Garde

July 22 - October 8, 2000
Mon-Wed: 10 AM-7PM;
Thurs 10 AM-9PM;
Fri 10 AM-6PM;
Sat 10 AM-5PM;
Sun 11 AM-5PM.

Chicago Cultural Center
78 East Washington Street
Chicago, Illinois 60602
Telephone: 312/ 744-6630
http://www.cityofchicago.org/Tour/CulturalCenter/

Part I

Skoro naschot Revolutsiya! (Soon -- The Revolution!) When the revolution came, it came with an intensity, a passion, a lithe changeability that no one could have anticipated. It recruited admirers and allies at home and spread its influence far abroad. It had been decades in the making and... lives on today. That first and lasting revolution -- the Russian Avant-Garde -- did welcome the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, and ironically -- tragically -- under Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, was devoured by it. At the end of this millennium, until October 8, 2000, the Chicago Cultural Center will host "PAINTING REVOLUTION: Kandinsky, Malevich, and the Russian Avant-Garde," an outstanding exhibition produced by the Foundation for International Arts and Education, Bethesda, Maryland, in cooperation with the State Russian Museum of Saint Petersburg and the State Museum-Exhibition Center (ROSIZO), Moscow. This traveling exhibit gathers important work from a seminal period for Modern Art, and it includes artists acclaimed in Western artistic centers, as well as a number who equally deserve wider recognition and appreciation.

"PAINTING REVOLUTION: Kandinsky, Malevich, and the Russian Avant-Garde" offers both: exceptional art -- an enduring aesthetic encounter; and a history of art's vulnerability and ultimate power in the larger world of men. It is an homage delayed by historical events for over seventy years, and all the more a revelation. Art scholar, John E. Bowlt, notes in his catalogue essay that these artists, their apologists and critics broke ground for "progressive, leftist or very new art, [they] rarely used the word avant-garde." Bowlt states: "Painting Revolution ... tells the story of Russian Modernism and provides a solid foundation upon which a critical argument and appreciation can be built." Many of these paintings have been retrieved from storage or provincial centers where they were sometimes protected, but more often neglected. Most have not been seen since their acquisition. All these factors underscore the importance of "PAINTING REVOLUTION."

This exhibition embraces a wide range of movements and styles in a period of intense artistic ferment. The distinctions of art historians are only useful in a general sense: tendencies crossfertilize and diverge. Art generates theories; artists rarely conform. Italian Futurist, Filippo Marinetti (who visited Russia, perhaps in early 1914) declared "the Russians are false Futurists...." [In Camilla Gray's The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863-1922.] Marinetti, welcoming the Machine Age, advocated a geometricized analysis in art, an analysis treating "dynamic sensation; that movement and light destroy the substance of objects." The Russian artists had sought a new metaphysics in art: their varying, more thoughtful developments are often called Cubo-Futurism. In Russia, Vladimir Tatlin and others emphasized movement in space, not volume, and until 1921 developed Constructivism. Kazimir Malevich, seeking a totally non-objective, transcendent art where forms "will not be copies of living things, but will themselves be a living thing," announced Suprematism in December 1915. And there were other directions, among them, Russian Neo-Primitivism. "PAINTING REVOLUTION" offers a wide view into the birth of Modern art.

Alexander Mikhailovich Rodchenko (1891-1956) is acclaimed among Western art circles, and a body of his work is familiar to all. This showing gathers several of his Contructivist/Suprematist canvases from 1917 and 1918. Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin are also represented in "PAINTING REVOLUTION," which allows a viewer to examine reciprocities and influences. Camilla Gray, in The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863-1922, noted of Rodchenko's development:

From Malevich he derived the dynamic axis which characterizes his work throughout, and his use of pure geometric forms first in two-dimensional compositions and later in three-dimensional constructions and mobiles of 1920. From Tatlin, Rodchenko gained an interest in materials which is reflected in his works of 1916-17 with their play with surface textures, at first artificially imitated, and then in real materials. Rodchenko evolved the system of Constructivist design in which he was a pioneer.

Formal genres and artists intertwine, although historians often single out particular artists as focal points. There are five canvases by Rodchenko in this showing and they cover the years 1917-1919. When Rodchenko came to Moscow in 1914, he shot through what Camilla Grey termed an ingenious "Italian-cum-Malevich school of Futurism" through entirely abstract 'compass and ruler' work to his own Constructivist system. "PAINTING REVOLUTION" offers a snapshot of Rodchenko's formative breakthrough. Rodchenko's striking Non-Objective Composition of 1917 displays a dynamic balance in the architecture of its forms. The formal reduction, already without reference to figurative source, evokes both projectile, a missile at launching, and a sense of International Style architecture. It foreshadows much of this artist's subsequent contributions to the Utilitarian idea: art applied to engineering, design, architecture. Among other Rodchenko paintings in this exhibit are Composition No. 61 from the Series the Color Sphere of the Circle (1918), and Discus and Top (1918); both fine examples of Rodchenko's focus on the circle and curved geometries. This artist's Suprematism (1918) further illustrates how he rapidly assimilated to his own distinctive voice the currents in art around him. He left the metaphysical interests of artists such as Malevich and Kandinsky, but learned vocabularies for his own expression. His work, true to the artist, gravitated toward social issues.

By 1921, Vasilii Vasilievich Kandinsky (1866-1944) had left for the Weimar Bauhaus, taking German citizenship in 1928, and French nationality in 1939-44; and thus his career is well known and documented outside of Russia. Despite numerous visits abroad, his formative years began in Russia and prepared the several stages of artistic development which followed. The exhibition catalogue quotes the painter: "I regard Moscow as the starting point of my researches." The five canvases in "PAINTING REVOLUTION" range from 1908 through 1919: what he described as the "controlled improvisation" of his "dramatic period" [c. 1915-1921]. Red Wall. Destiny (1909) reveals Kandinsky's interest at the time in Fauvism: but here is a counterpoint of Fauvist bright color contours with no shadowing against areas of textured, Impressionistic brushstroke. Certainly his admiration of Cezanne drew him into further analysis of form. In paintings such as Improvisation 209 (1917) and Improvisation 223 (1919), figurative reference erratically... fleetingly... lingers, but the artist's predominant concern with form and color as such are very much in evidence: already Kandinsky moves to color shapes bounded by harder edges. Kandinsky had published On the Spiritual in Art in 1911, and his Point and Line to Plane in 1926. His works in "PAINTING REVOLUTION" center within that formative period.

One impression strikes the knowing viewer in this exhibition: as significant as the achievement of those artists well-known outside of Russia may be, the fuller picture has yet to be resolved -- there are talents not as familiar to Western circles, some of whom leave a deeper impression than even the acknowledged names. Pavel Nikolaevich Filonov (1882-1941) is among the latter. Filonov, like Chagall, was one of those artists who stood apart from general tendencies. "PAINTING REVOLUTION" offers four canvases in what could constitute a chronological tracking -- from earlier Futuristic work toward highly individual figurative fantasy. Those Who Have Nothing to Lose (1911-12) is exemplary as Russian Cubo-Futurism (although the painter harbored an antipathy toward the foreign, and declared Russian art had nothing to learn from Picasso). German War (1914-15), another oil on canvas from the State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, reveals an even greater subtlety and complexity of conception. It is certainly not incidental. Art historian Camilla Grey noted: "a fanatical devotion to his work -- he would work eighteen hours a day on his paintings, which were minutely worked out in detail before being started on the monumental finished scale." In German War, Filonov translates his vision into a fragmentation of images: each fragmented image at once simultaneous and sequential. It is an active, dynamic painting with a refined depth of color and shadow. Untitled (1923), now in the State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, enters upon extreme abstraction. Within the logic of the composition, there is a strong flow of aligned banding, composed of small brightly colored rectangular elements: the artist's visual unit. In Goat (1930s), Filonov forges what seems an 'analytic Symbolism.' There is a chromatic and textural exposition of the image ground which lends a 'visual noise,' out from which the image of the goat resolves. These aspects which foretell the later developments of an artist like Paul Tchelitchew (who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s.).

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (1878-1935), the originator of Suprematism, is well known. Malevich, who first coined the term 'Cubo-Futurism,' went on to postulate in Suprematism an art without reference to the material world: a spiritual art, self-sufficient, a product solely of the artist's will and feeling. (Historian Charlotte Douglas reports that Malevich was being so secretive prior to announcing Suprematism that contemporary artist/writer Alexei Kruchenikh and others joked that Malevich probably "painted in complete darkness." This exhibition's catalogue notes that he brought to his art much of the spontaneity and mysticality of the Russian and Ukrainian peasants, a milieu he held dear. Indeed, many of his paintings rely almost exclusively on black, white, and red -- colors common to folk tradition. (Malevich was born near Kiev of Polish-speaking parents.) Camilla Gray noted that the 'Blaue Reiter' exhibition in Munich (1912) also included seven nineteenth-century Russian peasant woodcuts, and further commented that "Both Kandinsky and Malevich derive their colour combinations from Russian folk-art, in particular from such ['lubki'] woodcuts." In his pre-Suprematist, and much later, in his work after 1930, peasant and worker figure prominently; and Malevich welcomed the October Revolution enthusiastically. Gray quotes his endorsement: "Let us seize [the world] from the hands of nature and build a new world belonging to [man] himself."

Paintings like Girls in a Field (1928-30) and Head of the Peasant (early 1930s) well represent this last-named approach, but of the seven canvases by Malevich in "PAINTING REVOLUTION," Suprematism (1915), Suprematist Composition. Study (1920), and Suprematism. Non-Objective Composition (1915) are prime exponents of the artist's own unique contribution to Modernism. In Suprematism (1915), rectangles of different colors at upper right form a cascading sequence, an action, to which the sedentary ochre square functions as an anchor and basal focus. Four Squares (1910s) is as striking as is the date of its execution. One thinks of the 1960s -- Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Josef Albers, Richard Diebenkorn, so many others; and recalls Tom Wolfe's comments in The Painted Word (1975): that New York, London, Paris, Berlin... all had the publicists and Le Chic. Malevich was the wellspring. "PAINTING REVOLUTION" presents Malevich.

Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova (1881-1962: Represented by eight canvases) and Mikhail Fedorovich Larionov (1881-1964: Six paintings here) reveal still another aspect to "PAINTING REVOLUTION." Camilla Gray's The Russian Experiment in Art, still the best introduction and overview, noted that both: "selected and sifted turn by turn the most live and progressive ideas in Europe and Russia from the beginning of the century up to the First World War, when they left the country as designers for Diaghilev's ballet," and Gray adds that without them: "it is difficult to imagine how Malevich and Tatlin could have arrived at their historic conclusions." Whatever their historic place, both artists left a legacy of art which remains lively today. Camilla Gray did observe that: "...one can distinguish two streams in Goncharova's work: her vigorous and independent research in reviving national traditions, and her more timid and academic interpretations of the current European styles." And yet, Goncharova and Larionov ultimately sowed many of the fundamental traits for Futurist and Cubo-Futurist developments. Goncharova's Sheep Shearing (1907), as well as Bleaching Linen (1908), exhibit a Neo-Primitivist quality which recalls Gauguin (1848-1903), albeit a la Russe. Hers, and Larionov's turning to "simple, uncorrupted people" [quoted in the catalogue] produced a powerful, direct art, strong in color and contour, and in decorative, graphic values; an art which enlivens still, and which foresaw the advent of contemporary Pop and 'Outsider' art. In their own time, Goncharova and Larionov synthesized Cubism, Futurism and Orphism (a Cubistic approach divorced from natural referents and often employing more curvature in expression); and both participated in creating Rayonnism (an approach in which the artist interprets sight as the intersection of motioned, linear rays and reflections). They drew the Russian avant-garde into purer abstraction. [As H.H. Arnason noted in The History of Modern Art (Harry N. Abrams: 1986).]

"PAINTING REVOLUTION: Kandinsky, Malevich, and the Russian Avant-Garde" offers a treasurehouse of Modern Art at its inception: an insightful sampling, with variety.

And it offers an excellent catalogue. PAINTING REVOLUTION: Kandinsky, Malevich, and the Russian Avant-Garde is an important reference: 216 pages, 85 color plates, numerous black and white documentary photos, reproductions of publication design, illustrations, supplementary art, and full biographies for the artists. It contains essays by John E. Bowlt (Editor), Evgeniia Petrova (Associate Editor), and Andrei Sarabianov, as well as a glossary, notes, and bibliography (English works). It is well worth the $30.00: now, in viewing this exhibition, and as a lasting reference.

This showing appeared earlier at the Phoenix Art Museum, will run at the Chicago Cultural Center until October 8, 2000, and then proceeds to the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, Minnesota); and the Bass Museum of Art (Miami Beach, Florida). Chicagoans will have until October 8, 2000, to visit "PAINTING REVOLUTION: Kandinsky, Malevich, and the Russian Avant-Garde," an outstanding exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, produced by the Foundation for International Arts and Education, Bethesda, Maryland, in cooperation with the State Russian Museum of Saint Petersburg and the State Museum-Exhibition Center (ROSIZO), Moscow. There are 85 excellent works by 32 artists -- a truly exciting show; and an window into the birth of Modern Art. It should not be missed.

Finis Part I
GO TO PART II

--G. Jurek Polanski

Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net.

Editorial Note: Many of the books mentioned in www.artscope.net may be purchased through this website's Barnes and Noble Link. Particularly recommended is Camilla Gray's The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863-1922 (Thames and Hudson, Revised and enlarged by Marian Burleigh-Motley: 1986). It remains timely and comprehensive. John E. Bowlt, a contributor to this exhibition's catalogue has edited Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902-1934 (Thames and Hudson: 1988); and co-authored with Nicoletta Misler: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Twentieth-Century Russian and East European Painting (Zwemmer: 1993). Evgenia Petrova and Irina Karasik's catalogue New Art for a New Age (Barbican Art Gallery, London: 1999) should also be noted.