At Britain's Hatton Gallery: Russia's hesitant flirtation with internationalism

By Souren Melikian
Friday, August 10, 2007
INternational Herland Tribune

LONDON: It is not easy for a nation of continental dimensions to be internationalist when it has misgivings about its identity and is consumed by nationalist passions. The cameo show put together by the Estorick Collection and the Hatton Gallery, "A Slap in the Face! Futurists in Russia," now on view until Aug. 18 at the Hatton Gallery, part of Newcastle University in northern England, eerily echoes the changing moods and reactions to the outside world of present-day Russia.
The book written by the exhibition curator, John Milner, deserves as much attention from political scientists as from art lovers.
The scene is set in imperial Russia almost 100 years ago. What the author does not discuss, because that is not the focus of the show, is that there were two equally important currents of internationalism in pre-World War I Russia, both oriented toward Western Europe. One, led by a very small establishment, was colored by a passion for things French - French was the language taught by hordes of imported "gouvernantes" (nannies) in the homes of the wealthy with a concern for refinement. And then, far less visible to the outside world, there was what might be termed the intellectual avant garde brand of internationalism, likewise fascinated by France, but more widely spread across Western Europe.
That included a German connection. The "gymnasium" in St. Petersburg was the high school where many a family of Jewish intellectuals dreamed of sending their sons (daughters were not much spoken of in those days). The connection went far back in time. Heine, after all, had rendered into German verse some of the poetry written by Pushkin, the greatest Russian poet of all time. When Expressionism broke out on the German scene, a young man called Wassily Kandinsky became one of its shining lights and was eventually lost to Russia.
Intellectual internationalism had another, less visible pole of attraction, Italy. Russian traditionalists loved it. Artists cast in the academic mold had long been contributing to the Venice Biennale. Filip Malyavin dispatched pictures of "dynamic dancing peasants" (in Milner's words), which were well received in 1901. Now came the turn of the intelligentsia to wake up to Italian art.
Enter Umberto Boccioni, who started out as an artist under the spell of French Pointillism. In 1906, the Italian painter went off to Russia, where he stayed with his pal Piotr Popov at his estate on the Volga. On returning to Italy, Boccioni undertook a portrait of Sofia Germanova Popova in the manner of French Divisionism. It delighted the Popovs and opened a Russian conduit for Boccioni.
Awareness of Italian artistic currents grew in Russian circles. When the poet Filippo Tomaso Marinetti proclaimed in Italy that it was necessary to break with the past and launched "Futurism" in 1909, the painters Giacomo Balla, Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini responded by releasing their "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting," and within a year Russian painters and poets in turn founded a Futurist group.
If the word was the same, reality wasn't. Italian Futurism was an art with a swirling movement that gave whatever it borrowed from French Cubism an irresistible dynamic thrust. In Russia Futurism covered pretty much anything the artists wished to fit under that heading.
True, there were exceptions. Kazimir Malevich produced in 1913 a small lithograph, "The Simultaneous Death of a Man in an Aeroplane and on the Railway," which conveys an impression of glass facets in motion and did, around that time in the same spirit, a large painting, "Blue Rayism."
On the whole, however, the dizzying swirl that runs through Italian Futurist pictures remained alien to the Russian artists who claimed allegiance to the movement. Cubism was their true source of inspiration. In a picture painted in oil on paperboard by Lyubov Popova, the word Futurism appears in large blue capitals while the word "Cubi-" is cropped by the edge of the canvas. Yet it is the Cubist component that is in evidence.
In Ivan Kliun's oeuvre, from his "Self Portrait With Bottle of Wine" of 1914 to a still life titled "Pitcher Glass and Bottle," the effect varies. In one, there is a trompe l'oeil suggestion of broken glass panes piled on top of one another. In the other, everything is reduced to neat geometrical facets as if the objects were looked at through a prism. Both, however, are equally static.
Some works, supposedly linked to Futurism, fell outside any recognized movement and these were among the most brilliant creations. In 1913, Natalia Goncharova painted "The Forest," a strange and dazzling composition in which splinters of trunks and branches pile up on the ground, then shoot up vertically with light bursting in the middle.
Perhaps the most astonishing of all is Mikhail Matiushin's "Painterly Musical Construction." Very small touches of floating blues, black and off-whites with some rusty maroons and acid yellows appear to be caught in ascending movements held within the confines of invisible intersecting lines.
Other artists indulged in graphic experimentation. Varvara Stepanova painted in 1919 a "Cubist Banjo Player" that does not remotely conjure up the idea of Cubist art, geometricized as the human figure may be. A touch of the surreal emanates from this stylized automaton, which seems to have come alive.
The wild diversity speaks of Russian turmoil and disorientation. While some artists were headed for the most extreme forms of geometrical abstraction under labels such as Futurism or Cubism, others resuscitated figural art in their attempt to reconnect with authentic Russian identity. That, they feared, was threatened by Western influence. The very artists who were prone to the boldest abstract experiments thus had a go at naïve figuration.
Mikhail Larionov painted a "Soldier on a Horse" in a clumsy figural style that is unconvincing. The very modern handling of green, yellow and black streaks in the foreground presumably meant to depict blades of grass clashes with the childlike handling of the horse.
There were other attempts at welding incompatible trends. El Lissitzky in 1921-22 associated spartan geometrical motifs - a circle and a sphere - with a human figure introduced in the form of a collage. The result is incongruous.
In 1924 Alexandra Exter tried her hand at designing costumes for a science fiction fantasy, "Aelita," and produced watercolors and gouaches that have a spoofy feel. "The Martian" in one of her designs is a female-looking character that looks like an old-fashioned wax dummy decked out in odd bits of clothing, as rigid and cheap looking as mail order patterns in fashion weeklies of the Art Deco age.
All this happened in the midst of considerable intellectual agitation and confusion, to which Milner's book does full justice.
Marinetti traveled to Russia in January 1914, triggering a flurry of contradictory reactions. Some were so hostile that the art critic Genrich Tasteven, who intended to welcome the Italian Futurist at the station, made sure precautions were taken against ill-intentioned hooligans. Larionov and Goncharova contemptuously dismissed the Italian as a has-been.
In a rambling speech Marinetti claimed that Futurism was the "poetry of the future." Only art and literature remain free from the raging tempo of life, he intoned. "We shall sing the progress of industry, skyscrapers and cinema, radio and X-rays, aeroplanes and electricity."
In Moscow, Marinetti paid a visit to Sergei Shchukin, the daring collector of Impressionist and Avant Garde French paintings, whose holdings, later rifled by the Communist regime, loom large in the Modern art collections of Russian museums. Larionov and Goncharova, magnanimously forgiving, took the Italian to watch the poet Mayakovsky giving one of his performances. Alas, Marinetti, Milner writes, saw him only as "a clown on stage with the red cloak, gold cheekbones and blue forehead. An imbecile in red arguing with four idiots in black."
The dialogue between Russian intellectuals and their Western counterparts was not going well. It was too late anyway.
World War I broke out, and then the Revolution. Some Futurists emigrated, others stayed, ardently supporting the new regime. Even they were soon doomed to silence - in the best of cases. Stalin was in charge, faceless terror ruled, millions died. Futurism was swept away without leaving a trace.