THE GREAT UTOPIA
THE RUSSIAN AND SOVIET AVANT-GARDE, 1915–1932
Massimo Vignelli [Designer]
Massimo Vignelli [Designer]: THE GREAT UTOPIA: THE RUSSIAN AND SOVIET AVANT-GARDE, 1915–1932. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1992. First edition. Thick quarto. Thick printed wrappers. 748 pp. 733 color plates. 135 black and white text illustrations. Cover illustration: Kazimir Malevich Red Square (Painterly Realism: Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions) 1915, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Light handling wear and a mildly stressed spine, but a very good or better copy of this shockingly comprehensive catalog.
9 x 11 softcover book with 748 pages and 733 color plates and 135 black and white text illustrations. With contributions by Aleksandr Lavrentev, Aleksandra Shatskikh, Anatolii Strifalev, Catherine Cooke, Charlotte Douglas, Christina Lodder, Elena Rakitin, Evgenii Kovtun, Hubertus Gassner, Irina Levedeva, Jane A. Sharp, Margarita Tupitsyn, Natalia Adaskina, Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky, Paul Wood, Susan Compton, Svetlana Dzhafarova, Vasilii Rakitin, and Vivian Endicott Barnett. The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932 originated at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in March, 1992, then travelled to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in June, 1992, and ended at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from September 25-December 15, 1992. Exhibition Design by Zaha Hadid with Patrik Schumacher.
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- The Politics of the Avant-Garde: Paul Wood
- The Artisan and the Prophet: Marginal Notes on Two Artistic Careers: Vasilii Rakitin
The Critical Reception of the 0.70 Exhibition: Malevich and Benua: Jane A. Sharp
- Unovis: Epicenter of a New World: Aleksandra Sbatskikh
- COLOR PLATES 1-318
- A Brief History of Obmokhu: Aleksandra Shatskikh
- The Transition to Constructivism: Christina Lodder
- The Place of Vkhutemas in the Russian Avant-Garde: Natalia Adaskina
- What Is Linearism?: Aleksandr Lavrent'ev
- The Constructivists: Modernism on the Way to Modernization: Hubertus Gassner
- The Third Path to Non-Objectivity: Evgenii Kovtun
- COLOR PLATES 319-482
- The Poetry of Science: Projectionism and Electroorganism: Irina Lebedeva
- Terms of Transition: The First Discussional Exhibition and the Society of Easel Painters: Charlotte Douglas
- The Russian Presence in the 1924 Venice Biennale: Vivian Endicott Barnett
- The Creation of the Museum of Painterly Culture: Svetlana Dzhafarova
- Fragmentation versus Totality: The Politics of (De)framing: Margarita Tupitsyn
- COLOR PLATES 483-733
- The Art of the Soviet Book, 1922-32: Susan Compton
- Soviet Porcelain of the 1920s: Propaganda Tool: Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky
- Russian Fabric Design, 1928-32: Charlotte Douglas
- How Meierkhol'd Never Worked with Tatlin, and What Happened as a Result: Elena Rakitin
- Nonarchitects in Architecture: Anatolii Strigalev
- Mediating Creativity and Politics: Sixty Years of Architectural Competitions in Russia: Catherine Cooke
- Index of Artists and Works
Includes work by El Lissitzky, Alexandr Rodchenko, Naum Gabo, Vladimir Tatlin, Wassily Kandinsky, Konstantin Malevich, Ivan Kliun, Liubov Popova, Marc Chagall, Georgii Yakulov, K. A. Vialov, Alexandr Vesnin, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Nikolai Suetin, Varvara Stepanova, Vladimir Stenberg, Ivan Puni, Olga Rozanova, Natan Altman, Yurii Annenkov, Mikhail Larionov, Ivan Kudriashev, Petr Konchalovsky, Gustav Klucis, David Burliuk, Vladimir Burliuk, Ilia Chashnik, Vasilii Ermilov, Vera Ermolaeva, Alexandra Exter, Pavel Filanov. Natalia Goncharova, Pavel Mansurov, Mikhail Matiushin, Kasimir Medunetsky, Petr Miturich, Alexei Morgunov, Vera Nikolskaia, and many others.
During the years 1915-32, Moscow and Petrograd (from 1924, Leningrad) witnessed revolutions in art and politics that changed the course of Modernist art and modern history. Though the great revolution in art — the radical formal innovations constituted by Vladimir Tatlin's "material assemblages" and Kazimir Malevich's Suprematism — in fact preceded the political revolution by several years, the full weight of the new expressive possibilities was felt only after, and to a large extent because of, the social upheavals of February and October 191J. As avant-garde artists, armed with new insights into form and materials , sought to realize the Utopian aims of the Bolshevik Revolution, art and life seemed to merge.
In this volume, which accompanies the largest exhibition ever mounted at the Guggenheim Museum, twenty-one essays by eminent scholars from Germany, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States explore the activity of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde in all its diversity and complexity. These essays trace the work of Malevich's Unovis (Affirmers of the New Art) collective in Vitebsk, which introduced Suprematism' s all-encompassing geometries into the design of textiles, ceramics, and, indeed, whole environments; the postrevolutionary reform of art education and the creation of Moscow's Vkhutemas (Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops), where the formal and analytical principles of the avant-garde were the basis of instruction; the debates over a "proletarian art" and the transition to Constructivism, "production art, " and the "artist-constructor"; the organization of new artist-administered "museums of artistic culture"; the "third path" in non objective art taken by Mikhail Larionov; the return to figuration in the mid- 1920s by the young artists — and former students of the avant-garde — in Ost (the Society of Easel Painters); the debates among photographers, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, on the superiority of the fragmented or continuous image as a representation of the new socialist reality; book, porcelain, fabric, and stage design; and the evolution of a new architecture, from the experimental projects of Zhivskul'ptarkh (the Synthesis of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture Commission) to the multistage competition, in 1931-32, for the Palace of Soviets, which "proved" the inapplicability of a Modernist architecture to the Bolshevik Party's aspirations.
More than seven hundred of the finest examples of Russian and Soviet avant-garde art are reproduced here in full color. Drawn from public and private collections worldwide — notably, from Baku, Kiev, Moscow, Riga, Samara, St. Petersburg, and Tashkent in the former Soviet Union — these works are by such masters as Natan Al'tman, ll'ia Chashnik, Aleksandra Ekster, Gustav Klutsis, El Lissitzky, Liubov' Popova, 01' ga Rozanova, Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg, and the Vesnin brothers.
Russia's Fling With the Future By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN, Published: September 25, 1992:
"THE GREAT UTOPIA," the survey of Russian and Soviet avant-garde art opening today at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, intends to overwhelm the viewer, and unfortunately it does. With more than 800 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, textiles, ceramics, furniture and architectural models, occupying almost the entirety of the newly renovated building, it must surely be, as the museum boasts, the largest show in the history of the Guggenheim. At least, it feels that way.
One retreats from it like Napoleon from Moscow, bedraggled and confused. It includes compelling works, many of which have been extracted for the first time from provincial Russian museums, where these objects languished for the better part of this century because of the indifference, if not outright hostility, of the Soviet authorities. Yet the impact of the many remarkable things on view is hopelessly diluted by the exhibition's sheer size, seesawing quality, and its gimmicky and self-indulgent installation.
The opposite impression is made by a related display of Marc Chagall's 1920 murals for the Jewish Theater in Moscow at the Guggenheim's SoHo outlet. A small show of what may well be the artist's crowning achievement, a suite of delicate, witty, fanciful paintings, accompanied by text panels that put them in a clear context, it is precisely what "The Great Utopia" is not: a focused, manageable, lucid presentation.
The period under review in "The Great Utopia" encompasses the years 1915, when Suprematism was introduced to the Russian public in the exhibition called "0.10," through 1932, when Stalin prepared to bring artistic experimentation in his country to a violent and irrefutable end. The principal figures of those years, including Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova and Aleksandr Rodchenko, have long been known in the West; and especially during the last several years, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening up of its archives, the works of these artists have been frequently and widely exhibited.
But these works form only part of a far larger, and more complex, story; the avant-garde included numerous adherents who divided themselves among competing factions, which today can be hard to distinguish visually and which the exhibition, although it includes dozens of lesser-known artists, does an inadequate job of sorting out and defining.
The show does make all too apparent, with so many similar works in gallery after gallery, that the avant-garde could be as doctrinaire and authoritarian as the old guard against which it was reacting. Change, yes, but only within the boundaries established by the new artistic leadership. Chagall was driven from his post as commissar of art in the city of Vitebsk by the Suprematists. And not long after Wassily Kandinsky organized an institute in Moscow for the study of art, he was also run out of town, by the Constructivists who considered his paintings too subjective, too spiritualistic. A very beautiful group of Kandinskys, with their soft, swimming, brilliantly colored shapes -- like Suprematist paintings submerged in water -- stand out in this context for their unmistakable and inspiring individuality.
It was not on the individual but rather on the multitude that the avant-gardists concentrated their energies. Yet they failed to win over the Soviet masses, and despite their claims to the contrary, remained an elite. Even the marvelous geometric designs for textiles that artists like Popova and Stepanova conceived as symbols of the new classless society, to replace the old floral prints, found few takers. Likewise, it was partly in response to the public's attachment to realism that many artists by the early 1920's had abandoned abstraction and returned to figuration. The story of the avant-garde may be one of tremendous creativity, intense energy and lofty aspirations, but it is also one of misguided ideas and contradictory impulses.
"The Great Utopia" is at its best when it does not merely celebrate the avant-garde or rehash the standard events, like "0.10" or the later "5 x 5 = 25" exhibition, but instead when it points up the unsteadiness and factionalism of the era. The last part of the show, particularly the final gallery with its figurative works, is the most remarkable because it is the least familiar, even though, like the rest of the exhibition, it is in serious need of trimming. To see the crisp, dark, brutal works of Aleksandr Deineka, the George Grosz-like watercolors of Yuri Pimenov, and even the pathetically painted fantasies of Aleksandr Tyshler is to get a broader feel for the period than is typically served up.
There are other highlights in the show. One of them is the work of Lev Yudin, whose Cubist canvases and drawings are remarkably subtle and alive. Another is the work of Pavel Filonov, the best of whose crystalline compositions, derived from nature, are seemingly illuminated by an inner light. They are interestingly juxtaposed with the later figurative paintings of Malevich, with which they share a certain otherworldliness and spiritual intensity.
The section on photography is memorable for its description of the conflict between the so-called October group, which favored fragmentary, disorienting images, and the Revolutionary Society of Proletarian Photographers, whose more straightforward pictures conformed to the realist tastes of the Soviet rulers. The photographs of El Lissitzky, and especially those of Boris Ignatovich, with their vertiginous views of Leningrad harbor, seem to capture perfectly the avant-garde's idea of a world of dynamic forms and rhythms.
Still, these are isolated works in an exhibition that overall fails to hang together. A team of 14 not always like-minded curators from three countries put together "The Great Utopia," and it shows. There is no clear unifying vision or purpose, no obvious reason why yet another examination of the subject was necessary. The event seems ultimately to be about nothing so much as its own intimidating size and the museum's diplomatic wheeling and dealing in obtaining lots of obscure works from lots of obscure places. The installation by Zaha Hadid, a kind of avant-garde theme park, is clever in the single case of a red zig-zagging wall that divides part of the museum ramp, but otherwise underscores the impression of superficiality. Time after time, as when Rodchenko's black-on-black paintings are hung on black walls, the design vies for attention with the art.
The show's grandiosity and its insensitivity to what is on view inevitably reinforce persistent doubts about the Guggenheim's direction. Once more, the notoriously overcrowded and underedited survey of contemporary German paintings, organized several years ago at the museum, comes to mind.
The Chagall exhibition suggests something else. It not only highlights the murals but also tells in extensive text panels about the Jewish Theater itself, which in the early years after the Revolution thrived under Government support as a place of raucous comedy and political satire.
Chagall's blend of Jewish imagery and modernist forms, influenced as they were by Cubism, is nowhere more sensitively and intricately realized than in these paintings. They are complemented by a room of preparatory sketches and other works, including later canvases done in Paris, which demonstrate how much his art, despite its lightheartedness, dealt in cultural memory and loss.
Between this modest show and "The Great Utopia," there is surely a satisfying middle ground for ambitious exhibitions. The Guggenheim has yet to find it.