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22 Апреля 2008
Ekaterina Degot
Different Things: Soviet Realist Painting in the Context of the New Objectivity of the 1920s
For the first time, Nikolaus Sagrekow -- a painter who left the USSR in 1922 and worked in Germany all his life -- meets his Soviet colleagues and contemporaries from the 1920s and 1930s. Although this meeting takes place after the deaths of the participants themselves and the artistic movements that they represent (German Neo-Realism and Soviet Socialist Realism), both sides are heavily dependent on one another. Only in what way?
There is a natural desire to add Sagrekow’s name to the context of Russian culture: a desire both logical and possible when this culture is understood, as it is today, in its extended form -- open to former compatriots. Ironically, Sagrekow followed a path more reminiscent of a Soviet, rather than a Western, artist. He remained indifferent to all the post-war avant-garde movements, retaining his loyalty to figurative painting.
Just as fascinating and absorbing is the task of fitting Soviet art into the context of world art, via Sagrekow, who has much in common with the German artists of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). Latching onto yet another Western movement and finding a stylistic analogue, we hope to retrospectively overcome the historical injustice of the long period of isolation of Russian Soviet art -- particularly as this isolation commonly appears not only political, but also aesthetic. An isolation resulting from a failure to correspond to the unbending modernist standard based on normative geometric abstraction.
The choice in favour of figurative or “realistic” art, taken in the USSR in the early 1920s, often continues to be regarded -- both inside and outside Russia -- as, firstly, the result of coercion; secondly, as a populist manoeuvre aimed at the uneducated masses; and thirdly, as an isolationist gesture, binding Russian art to the local tradition of nineteenth-century naturalism. Today’s consumer of Russian painting will be pleased to hear that inter-war neo-figurative painting might have been the result of something else -- the personal choice of the artists themselves, a bourgeoisie phenomenon, an international occurrence. Soviet art is awarded the right to be “like everyone else.” Whatever the case, it is already losing, possibly forever, the label of “Soviet” and becoming “Russian” -- by including such figures as Sagrekow in its orbit.
The geographic and historical map of art is being redrawn before our very eyes. This exhibition of Nikolaus Sagrekow and his contemporaries takes place in the wake of the victory of capitalism “on all fronts,” in a normal private gallery, the kind found all over the world -- and, now, also in Russia. Such galleries are orientated, above all, on easel painting. They are classical exhibition spaces, underlining the unique value of each individual object. Many visitors regard themselves -- if this is not actually the case -- as potential customers, consumers and buyers of a unique, rare, painterly original. Unlike in Soviet times, they are not passive objects of media propaganda, consuming painting only in the form of mass reproductions.
As a result, we now find ourselves more in a “Sagrekow context,” rather than a “Soviet art context.” As only one economic -- and, in essence, aesthetic -- order now reigns in the world today, in which the place of the easel picture has proved its immutability, there is a great temptation to regard everything shown at the exhibition as timeless “good art” or simply “nice things.” For some, this serves as evidence that both Neue Sachlichkeit and Soviet figurative painting are not art at all -- or, at least, not modernist art. In the normative American history of art, both phenomena are currently regarded as a temporary retreat: an anti-avant-garde démarche or regression -- albeit a not uninteresting specimen. [1]
In this essay, I would like to concentrate on the avant-garde -- or even the post-avant-garde -- radicalism of Soviet painting in the 1920s, something shared with several artists of the Weimar Republic. In comparison with the bourgeoisie picture, as it had become in the nineteenth century, a completely new status of the “work of art” lay at the heart of the laws governing this form of painting. The whole drama of the history of twentieth-century art unfolded around the establishment of this new “object of art” -- rather than the debates on abstraction and realism, as has commonly been thought up until now. The picture in the capitalist world, the picture exhibited for the private market, gives the viewer the opportunity, in the words of one German Communist artist of the 1920s, to “wear the title of owner.” [2] Soviet artists -- and many of their German colleagues -- saw their task, however, as being to defrock the viewer of this title. In the 1920s and 1930s, no matter in which country they lived, the oeuvres of the artists on show at this exhibition developed on the background of these grandiose aesthetic and social tasks.
From Non-Objectivity to “New Objectivity”
In the early twentieth century, Russian avant-garde art was exclusively correlated to the art of France. Even when Kazimir Malevich suggested not linking oneself to any one country or any art at all, his Suprematism was still a radical criticism of French Cubism and its failure to proceed to complete annihilation of the object.
Even after the revolution, French art was regarded as the norm in the USSR. All manifestos and critical writings, wherever there was any mention of “painterly culture” or “quality,” contained a hidden reference to the Cézanne-Matisse-Picasso tradition. Artists closely follow the evolution of this tradition, particularly as, in its movement from Impressionism to Cubism, which took Russian artists onto non-objectivity, it was understood, first and foremost, as evolution, as more or less history itself. Walking in step with this tradition meant keeping in step with time.
Information reached the USSR that, after the First World War, French art had taken a turn in the direction of greater “clarity” -- post-Cubist Purism, Neoclassicism and rappel a l’ordre (an appeal for order issuing from the former Cubist camp in the late 1910s and early 1920s). [3] The influence and charm of bourgeoisie Paris, however, had weakened. In the early 1920s, both aesthetic and political conjecture drew Soviet artists to the capital of the Weimar Republic, where Neo-Realist painting was more political and social, orientated less on aestheticising Cubism and more on the all-destructive Dada. Under the terms of the Treaty of Rapallo, signed on 16 April 1922, Germany was the first country to establish diplomatic relations with the USSR. Although this led to the instant removal of calls for world revolution in that year’s May Day posters, Germany still remained the chief hope for a “worldwide conflagration.” Even after the defeat of the November Revolution of 1918, there was a notion of the parallel development of the USSR and Germany, through the mid-1920s, right up until the Great Crash of 1929. The Weimar Republic pursued a policy of moderate social justice -- democracy, planned economy, social housing and class equality. As a result, relations with Germany were closer to class solidarity than formal international relations. The logic of linear history and tradition was superseded by the logic of the Internationale.
The very first major Soviet cultural event held in Germany was Die erste russische Kunstausstellung. Organised with the support of International Worker’s Aid (German abbreviation IAH), the exhibition was held in the showrooms of Van Diemen, a Berlin trading firm, in October and November 1922. The exhibition was financed by the People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkompros) and intended to be the triumphant international debut of post-revolutionary Russian art. Attracting contributions from around 180 representatives of different movements, the show was successful. The greatest success was enjoyed by the objects of Naum Gabo, Alexander Rodchenko and Konstantin Medunetsky, the post-Suprematist painting of Nathan Altman and the form-creative fantasies of Vladimir Krinsky and Nikolai Ladovsky. [4] Perhaps the most important contribution was played by El Lissitzky, who designed the exhibition catalogue and paved the way for the general success with the publication of Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet. Launched in spring 1922, this journal opened with the words: “The blockade of Russia is coming to an end.” The exhibition ostensibly entrenched the positions of Constructivism as a movement of non-figurative art creating new forms. Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet, which was published by El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg, affirmed in its first issue: “Every organised work -- whether it be a house, a poem or a picture -- was a practical object, not leading people away from life, but helping to organise it.” The lead article ended with the battle cry: “Abandon declarations and refutations, make objects!” [5]
This militant materialism should be understood in the context of the Constructivist arguments concerning the essence of art, which, in turn, continued the non-objective debate of the 1910s -- in its Russian version. The most specific aspect of this version was the active rejection of the term “abstraction” and the associated principle of the logical distancing from the object (this setting of the question was close only to Kandinsky). The Russian term for non-objectivity -- bespredmetnost’ -- did not accentuate criticism of “coherent” figurative representation as such. These tasks were addressed more by Cubism and were considered to have been already gone through. Here we see something far more radical -- the dethroning and, in perspective, the destruction of the traditional status of the work of art as an object, as something “dead and passive.” For Alexander Rodchenko and the Constructivists, this stance acquired the distinct outlines of criticism of the work of art (and objects in general) as prostitutes, commodities and things. [6] For the Constructivists, the perfect embodiment of this “sell-out” object was the easel picture, instigating a passive and individual possession of it. A special document of the Institute of Artistic Culture in November 1921 officially recorded its rejection by the Constructivists. Although Lissitzky did not publicly sympathise with the radicalism of this stance, the “object” was clearly, in his mind, the antithesis of the “picture” for the individual consumer. All the art of the early Soviet avant-garde can be regarded as an attempt to find a new type of artistic object, a “picture today.” Even his magazine -- the jotter on which Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet was written -- was, first and foremost, this new “thing”: an “organised work” made by “collective labour working according to a plan.” In those years, the main sphere of Lissitzky’s interests was polygraphy.
On an even deeper level, there was a criticism of the relationship between the artist and his subject as, in principle, an irreparably asymmetric and unjust relationship. [7] It is no coincidence that a magazine published in three languages was, in the German version, called Gegenstand -- an object not only in the abstract-material, but also in the philosophical sense: something opposing man; his counter-partner and counter-agent. The “living and active object” championed by the journal was itself supposed to become the subject, replacing the fetishised “individuality” of the artist. That was how the new Russian “things” -- the kinetic, transforming objects of Naum Gabo, Alexander Rodchenko and the Society of Young Artists -- appeared at the exhibition in Berlin. According to their ideology, they were objects stimulating creativity, rather than consumption -- “accustomed ... not to labour, but to admiring, for the eternal consumer, not producing anything, the object will seem boring and squalid.” [8]
The 1922 exhibition, however, did not usher in a golden age of Constructivist aesthetics. On the contrary, it was a turning point, followed by, if not a decline, then at least its transformation into ideological practices (in the USSR) and professional design (at the German Bauhaus). For Soviet art, the main result of the Berlin show was possibly not the triumph of Rodchenko (who had stopped creating abstract objects by that time), but the three albums of satirical drawings by George Grosz, which Vladimir Mayakovsky brought back from Berlin and presented to Rodchenko. A former Dadaist who was, by 1922, by Soviet measures, a “realist” and a caustic political and social critic, Grosz was the subject of material in LEF magazine in April 1923.
The political, socio-critical and satirical Neo-Realism (Verism in the German terminology) of George Grosz and such other members of the Rote Gruppe as Otto Dix, Rudolf Schlichter, Otto Griebel and Heinrich Maria Davringhausen dominated Die erste allgemeine deutsche Kunstausstellung. Held by International Worker’s Aid in response to the Russian show, the exhibition was curated by the artist Otto Nagel. It opened at the History Museum in Moscow in October 1924, before moving on to Leningrad and even, due to popular demand, to Saratov. [9] A year later, at the end of 1925, such art enjoyed success again in Moscow, at an exhibition of German art of the past fifty years in the Second Museum of Western Painting. Back then, the word Verism was often used. It was quoted in an article by Lunacharsky [10] and listed in the Dictionary of Artistic Terms compiled by the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (1925--26), though never actually published. [11]
The majority of critics, however, continued to refer to German “Expressionism.” “Expressionist Realism” was the term applied to the oeuvres of the young members of the Society of Easel Artists, who, more than most, were inspired by the German example -- above all in subjects linked to the First World War. Yury Pimenov’s Invalids of War (1926, Russ. Mus.) and On the Northern Front. Taking a British Blockhouse (1928, Lviv Pict. Gal.) were commonly regarded as having been painted under the influence of the Germans. This same influence was also ascribed to David Shterenberg, Andrei Goncharov, Pyotr Williams, Alexander Deineka and Nikolai Denisovsky (the latter worked on the 1922 exhibition in Berlin). As the years of the greatest closeness between the USSR and the Weimar Republic coincided with the NEP (New Economic Policy) period in Russia, criticism of the wide contrasts between wealth and poverty, which was a common feature at that time, also developed along “German” lines. Sergei Luchishkin’s Balloon Flown Away (1926, Tret. Gal.) and Famine on the Volga (1920s, unsurviving) and Fyodor Bogorodsky’s portraits of prostitutes from the Underworld series (Bogorodsky was a member of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, not the Society of Easel Artists), portraits of homeless urchins (Waifs Playing Cards, 1925, Tret. Gal.) and Europe. Invalids (1930) slot perfectly into the grating and “veritable” language of Neue Sachlichkeit.
The term New Objectivity, which did not become so widely known in the USSR, appeared in Germany in the summer of 1925, following a major exhibition of the same name, held at the Mannheim Kunsthalle by director Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub and critic Franz Roh. The contributors included such well-known names as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Alexander Kandolt, Carlo Mense, Kay Nebel, Georg Schrimpf and Rudolf Schlichter. Some of them were formerly Expressionists; others had been part of the Dada movement. Later, exhibitions of “New Objectivity” were held in other parts of Germany. This tendency embraced other painters, including the cold and frank Dadaist Christian Schad and even, to a certain extent, Hannah Höch, one of the founders of Dada, who painted Verist still-lifes in 1927. Unlike the Novembergruppe or Rote Gruppe, Neue Sachlichkeit was never a group or an organisation. It was a tendency, the crystallisation of which was the responsibility of the curator. Not all German artists of this period contributed to exhibitions of this name, though many were closely associated with the tendency.
Nikolaus Sagrekow belonged to the latter group. He regarded Neue Sachlichkeit as a style or Zeitgeist -- largely in the form of the fashionable costume and popular female type. Such portraits can also be found in Soviet art: female dress and hat fashions also reached the USSR in the 1920s. Some Soviet artists simply liked the austere and naturalistic style of painting, which was more typical of Germany than France. There are clear parallels between Sagrekow’s style of painting and the early portraits and still-lifes of Georgy Ryazhsky, Nikolai Dormidontov, Pavel Sokolov-Skalya and Nikolai Denisovsky, as well as lesser-known artists, mostly from the Leningrad school (Semyon Pavlov, Leonid Akishin). Some of these artists (Kliment Redko and Georgy Ryazhsky in particular) were, in their youths, associated with the avant-garde and even with abstract art. The loyalty of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Leonid Chupyatov, Vladimir Malagis and Alexander Samokhvalov to figurative painting was dictated by their interest in Old Russian art, icons and frescoes. Kliment Redko, who lived in France in the 1920s, represents a version of Neo-Realism orientated more on the French Neoclassical model.
From the very outset, there were two movements in Neue Sachlichkeit, mainly represented by portraiture and urban genre scenes. One was the grotesque and satirical social commentary of Verism. The other was more Neoclassical and Italianate and supported by Franz Roh, who gave it the name of Magic Realism. Although there were no such works at the Moscow exhibitions, retrospectively stylised Neoclassicism was well-known in the USSR, where it enjoyed a dualistic relationship. Some were drawn to its “madeness,” although the leading Marxist critic of that time, Alexei Fedorov-Davydov associated its claims to be timeless and trans-historical -- as manifested in this “madeness” -- with Fascism (a movement associated squarely with Italy, and not Germany, in the 1920s). [12]
Social realism, on the contrary, evoked interest. Lunacharsky praised the Verists for being anti-bourgeoisie and painting pictures that hit “simultaneously in the head and the heart of the viewer.” [13] (As we shall see below, Alexei Fedorov-Davydov did, however, write a harsh and motivated critique of the show.) Although the exhibition also included contributions from the Bauhaus, they did not go down well in Moscow -- and not because they were thought unbecoming or incomprehensible, as one might expect, but, on the contrary, because they were too comprehensible, too definite and formally complete. The critic Alexei Sidorov wrote: “A great prosperity reigned over one part of the exhibition, over the products of German Constructivism, where everything was so immaculate, exact, packed into one another, levelled out by a ruler, knitted together, illuminated by electric lights, transformed into the neatest toys.” [14] Sidorov was drawn more towards the distortion or “satirical grimace. Perhaps, grimace even without the satire. The face is distorted not only from indignation, but also from physical pain.” [15]
Objects did not suit because they were too much like “things” and only “things.” Fedorov-Davydov wrote in 1924: “We are unfavourable towards the formalism of the left wing [Soviet Constructivists] because this is purely formal quests, lacking any ideology and philosophy.” [16] In correspondence with this condition, the whole Constructivist issue of the “object” needed to be replaced by the “ideology and philosophy of the object.” Marxist dialectic criticism demanded from art not so much a rejection of its positions, but a transition to the next stage in self-cognition and self-investigation. Moreover, if the Constructivist “thing” could be an abstract object, machine, theatrical performance or magazine, its self-cognition -- the “philosophy of the thing” -- should be represented in figurative painting.
By 1925, such painting in the spirit of Neue Sachlichkeit dominated the Soviet art scene, where the majority of artists -- both the elder and younger generations -- had already abandoned abstraction for figurative painting. For many of them, including Malevich, who launched his second peasant series in those same years, it was not a return to the style of the nineteenth century, but a reflection of mimesis in the language of mimesis. The “object” was supposed to make way for “objectivity” -- even if the USSR was still not entirely familiar with the concept.
The German concept of Sachlichkeit requires separate linguistic commentary. The English title of the movement is traditionally translated as “New Objectivity” (or, sometimes, “New Sobriety”). This accentuates the dispassionate nature of the approach -- a nuance missing from the German name (something a Soviet critic would never agree with, insisting on the need for a passionate and engaged -- rather than objective -- approach). The German word Sachlichkeit, which already had a definite cultural history in the early twentieth century (it was the slogan of the architects of the Werkbund), can be translated as “objectivity,” “equanimity” or “sobriety.” The most accurate translation, however, would probably be “factuality.” Sache is, ultimately, not an “object” (not the Gegenstand in the title of Lissitzky and Ehrenburg’s magazine), but a “fact,” an idea, an abstract notion.
This allows one to see the essence of German Neo-Realism in a completely new light, uncovering new parallels in Soviet art. Neue Sachlichkeit stationed itself not only and not so much in the context of “realistic painting,” but more in the context of professional and scientific-technical literature. This was the Sachbuch, on which the leading German publishers were reorientating themselves at that time (up until then, they had brought out “high art” -- fiction illustrated by Expressionist engravings). [17] Ideologically, Neue Sachlichkeit was a direct analogue of the literature and ideology of “fact” among the post-Futurist avant-garde of the mid- and late 1920s (publicism and photography). It was a direct analogue of the “factography” slogan, the meaning of which lies not only in the need to closely follow facts, but also in the need to liberate oneself from art and undermine the foundations of “artisticness” as an autonomous bourgeoisie sphere. As Osip Brik wrote, “the bourgeoisie does not like facts.” [18] In German art and journalism -- and the parallel phenomenon in the Soviet proletarian public sphere -- Neue Sachlichkeit was, in its radical version, post-art and post-literature engaging in sociological analysis: technologically produced and mass distributed. The orbit of New Objectivity should include the prints and photomontages of John Heartfield and the photography of August Sander -- just as the orbit of Soviet realism should also include Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky.
In this sense, Neue Sachlichkeit continued, rather than rejected, the work of Dadaism, just like Sergei Tretyakov’s sparse and severe “factographic” essay did not reject, but continued the work of Futurist transrational poetry. There is no contradiction in the fact that, in the same year of 1925, George Grosz began to paint oil portraits, i.e. apparently broke with Dada, within the bounds of which he worked in graphic design. He and Wieland Herzfelde published a pamphlet entitled Art Is In Danger, which not only called for the death of art, but actually regarded this as something that had already happened. From Grosz’s point of view, the artist could do one of two things. He could either work in technology (architecture, engineering, advertising) or he could contribute to propaganda -- to which he includes the work of the “reporter and critic reflecting the face of our times.” [19]
There was, of course, nothing new about the slogan of “the end of art.” Compared to the first stage of the avant-garde, however, what was completely new was the claim that undermining art was possible inside the forms of art itself. The suggestion that realism and naturalism could be critical and subversive -- not only in relation to social reality, but also in relation to art. The idea that it was possible and necessary to “struggle inside art, using its own resources, towards its own downfall” (Sergei Tretyakov, 1924). [20] This is exactly what Neue Sachlichkeit is, like the Soviet realism of the 1920s, in its most radical and interesting examples. Different social and political conditions, however, gradually led these two realisms down two completely different paths.
Socialist Realisms
The German exhibitions had a great impact on Soviet artists, particularly because they themselves were seeking what Alexei Fedorov-Davydov called “a new realism.” [21] The indefinite article is of cardinal importance here. To Marxist minds, there was no “realism” or even “new realism” at all -- there was only the realism of a definite class and a definite social system. The quest for a name for this realism was, in this way, linked to the quest of a new country for its economic, social and class identity.
We now know that, in 1932, this new realism eventually acquired the normative title of “Socialist Realism.” The meaning of this term lies in the substitution of a class-based logic with the idea of a class-based world (a false idea). Immediately after the adoption of the Soviet constitution of 1936, a wave of repressions began in the USSR -- directed not against “enemies of the working class,” but against “enemies of the people,” and, on this basis, involving much harsher punishments. As “Socialist” was now a synonym for “Soviet” as “non-foreign,” this term also contained undertones of a xenophobic contrast with the West, something that lay at the heart of Stalin’s policy of the victory of “Socialism in one country.” Left-wing art initially preferred other terms, which still retained faith in the world revolution and class identity. Between 1927 and 1932, other versions of the name were bandied about -- “Communist,” “monumental,” “synthetic,” “collective,” “mass,” “production” (accentuating the active production of art by the artist and its co-production, rather than passive consumption, by the viewer), “proletarian,” “thematic” (implying “ideological”) and “dialectic,” envisaging an investigation of life “in its establishment” and “from all sides.”
The anti-bourgeoisie nature of this realism was evident to all its supporters. At the same time, everyone understood its modernist -- and not anti-modernist -- nature. Modernism was regarded at that time and in this context as an anti-bourgeoisie movement. As Matthew Bown correctly notes in his fundamental work on Soviet Realism, the word “realism” was employed in the Soviet critique when it was necessary to speak about the “spirit of modernity.” [22] Realism was supposed to be a new stage of Futurism: after the 1917 revolution, the future had become reality. “Realism” had more or less become a designation for Soviet “modernity.” In the 1920s and 1930s, being a “realist” meant to “belong to one’s time,” rather than to continue traditions. In order to express these ideas, the theorists of the LEF circle preferred the aforementioned word “factography,” which erased any link with the old aesthetics of “styles.” In the same way, in comparison with such “old-fashioned” terminology as “Verism” and “Magic Realism,” the term “New Objectivity” recalled such words as “Dada” and “montage,” which were intended not to verify, but to replace the artistic concept. As a whole, however, the word “realism” -- in the most radical versions of Soviet aesthetics in the late 1920s and early 1930s -- implied “post-art” or what was supposed to replace bourgeoisie individualist production and the consumption of aesthetic forms.
In the early 1920s, it was completely evident to virtually all Soviet masters that art, in the old sense of the word, had ceased existence -- or had to be “helped out” with a subtle push. The Constructivist slogan “we declare irreconcilable war on art” was shared not only by the most extreme left-wingers, but almost everyone, except the artists of the old school, who hoped for a revival of the private commission (soon, almost all of them left the USSR). The first group of young “former left-wingers” to arrive at the new realism -- the New Society of Painters, founded in 1921 -- indignantly rejected the idea of a return to nature or the old art. Artists strained to “fight against the professional prejudices and atavisms of art.” [23] Yet this struggle was supposed to unfold on the very territory of art, where all its prejudices and atavisms were clearly visible, and not in the white space of the Suprematist world. Georgy Ryazhsky -- formerly a Suprematist and consequently a leading realist -- depicts a couple posing for a photographer in Portrait of a Factory Committee Chairman and Wife. This same approach was employed by Saumil Adlivankin and, later, by Fyodor Bogorodsky, who started out in circles close to the New Society of Painters (the Existence group). In all cases, what we have is a purely avant-garde “art as a device” -- only this time not a device of the Cubist fragmentation of form, but a mimetic procedure.
Around 1920, almost all representatives of the Russian avant-garde had turned away from abstract painting, sensing that, by repeating and varying the same forms, they were engaging in fetishisation, which inevitably recreated the context of a market -- despite its virtual absence. One possible antithesis to the market was the research process and so Kazimir Malevich and Mikhail Matiushin submerged themselves, in the words of the former, in the “realms of thought.” The new generation saw the possibility and the necessity of immanent criticism of the picture within the forms of the picture itself. They considered it correct to “carry out work, inside art, analysing its self-sufficient position” (Sergei Tretyakov). [24] What was exhibited acquired a completely different status, no longer enjoying the former straightforward solidarity of the artist. At the First Discussion Exhibition of Unifications of Active Revolutionary Art in 1924, young Solomon Nikritin showed his Tectonic Research. Today, it would be called an installation including a picture painted in the traditional oil manner, with a notice that the artist considers the picture reactionary and rejects it. [25]
Such an inscription is invisibly present beneath many realistic canvases of the 1920s. The motif of undermining the image inside the image itself lies at the heart of such key subjects in European Neo-Realism (Giorgio de Chirico, Neue Sachlichkeit, Surrealism) as the automatic gun and artificial limbs. Solomon Nikritin’s Parting with the Dead and the early drawings of disabled people by his comrade Alexander Tyshler, which shocked viewers at the early exhibitions of the Society of Easel Artists, demonstrate more than just a post-Cubist, fragmented body. They also demonstrate a post-Cubist “fiasco of figurativeness.” The painting seems unable to be fully and finally constructed. This was not, we reiterate, an attempt to prove the supremacy of one style over another (to which the whole history of “-isms” was reduced in Europe and Russia in the early twentieth century). This was about the radical subversion of the very foundations of the production and consumption of a new work of art, after which the actual stylistics became completely unimportant.
The first attempts to create a “living and active” picture -- a picture and not a “commodity,” appealing to the masses and coming to the consumer, instead of summoning the consumer to itself as an absolute value -- led to the murals on tramcars and agit-trains of the Civil War. Whether what was drawn on them was abstract or figurative was less important. Another anti-bourgeoisie channel and reservoir was the independent art of workers, on which the new left-wing aesthetics placed great hope as unprofessional, free, potentially Communist labour. This criticism of the “commodity” is the reason for the unexpected demand for both “weekend artists” (Niko Pirosmani, Henri Rousseau) and their aesthetics in the early-twentieth-century art world, which largely shared anti-bourgeoisie ideals. Another way of criticising the status of the commodity was by appealing to technological means of production as a source of representation (photography) and a method of reproduction. The new picture, according to Isaac Brodsky, the leader of this documentalism, “has emerged from its prison, from the four walls of the collector and patron, into the wider viewers’ arena, serving the popular masses. Its role is not limited to merely showing. It is also a grand muet, just like its confrere -- cinema. It brings culture to the masses, by way of millions of reproductions, finding its way into the most distant corners of our Union.” [26]
Other artists adhering to such views -- they comprised the nucleus of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, which upheld “documentary” aesthetics [27] -- went even further. They either included the texts and slogans in the composition of their pictures -- see Worker Correspondent (1925, Tret. Gal.) by Victor Perelman, a journalist and director of the publishing house of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, which specialised in postcards -- or showed them directly alongside pictures with the exact same status. [28] Another version of the “regeneration” (rather than just the destruction, as in abstract art) of the easel picture was the orientation on monumental art, aimed primarily at the collective, the masses and the workers’ club. The early paintings of Alexander Samokhvalov, Vladimir Pakulin, Vladimir Malagis and other members of the Circle group in Leningrad, who studied Old Russian frescoes, are examples of an original, socially orientated, modernising art, aimed at the construction of a national identity on the basis of popular visual culture. They mostly painted series of portraits depicting the new peasant communes -- works reminiscent of Mexican Muralism.
In the late 1920s, on the wave of rapid industrialisation, Soviet art experienced one last surge of left-wing ideology, leading to a bitter struggle against the fetishism of the unique work of art. The Exhibition of the Revolutionary Art of the West (1927), which showed many German artists already familiar to the Soviet viewer, included reproductions, magazines, posters and autobiographies of artists on the same rights as original paintings. In art, the accent had shifted in the direction of cinema, photography and polygraphy. The slogan in painting was “easel-production art,” by which artists came together in teams or “brigades,” collectively joining in the production process. Soviet art saw the formation of elements of a proletarian visual culture alternative to capitalism and an institutional artistic system, based on the non-professional creativity of workers and the democratic process in general.
All this encountered the popular sympathy of many left-orientated artists in Germany. It was at this exact point in time, however, that the paths of Soviet art and Neue Sachlichkeit began to diverge. In 1928, George Grosz was forced to defend himself on the pages of Projector, a Soviet magazine, claiming that he was not planning “to meet the requirements of a ‘Hurrah-Bolshevism’” and would continue to depict the proletariat “as oppressed, at the bottom of the social scale, badly dressed, badly paid, in dark, stinking housing and very often dominated by the bourgeois desire to ‘get to the top’” in order to “help the workers to understand their oppression and suffering, force them to admit openly to themselves that they are wretched and enslaved.” [29]
Grosz and other German artists were accused of a deficit of optimism. This was linked to the fact that the Weimar Republic -- nearing the end of its existence -- provided grounds and a traditional cultural platform for a critical artist. It continued to remain bourgeoisie: the logics of profit and class were not questioned, whereas the USSR moved inexorably towards a classless society, in which status and the necessity of critical statement were uncertain.
This was not merely a matter of ideology. The representation of oppression in the oeuvres of German artists evoked the protest of Alexei Fedorov-Davydov as early as 1924, on the basis that it led, in the Soviet critic’s opinion, to the sadistic fetishisation of suffering. This placed the issue of a work of art in the context of the entire modernist discussion. Fedorov-Davydov complained that “the whole social protest of German artists is directed, almost entirely, against prostitution,” accusing the Germans of positively relishing this theme. [30] This was within the bounds of the criticism of the modernist project, in which the prostitute, ever since the days of Manet’s Olympia, represented an allegory of the commodity value of the picture itself. For Western modernism, the only resolution of this “tragedy of the commodity” was to again and again, increasingly grotesquely, demonstrate this commodity value, flatness or “exhibition-value” -- to employ the term of Walter Benjamin. Regarding such criticism as impotence and capitulation, Soviet modernism offered its own, utopian path -- complete liberation from the function of the commodity. This was, of course, easier in the presence of a state system without private property and means of production.
As a result, any expressed stylism -- even naturalistic stylism, as in some versions of Neue Sachlichkeit, all the more so in the Soviet aesthetic discussion -- was regarded as “fetishising” the device, a rudiment of odious, hated art and, ultimately, as Formalism. It was this uncompromising anti-commodity utopianism that finally led to the break between Soviet art and even the most progressive Western art (such as the Communist artists of Cologne, contributors to the Exhibition of the Revolutionary Art of the West). In the USSR, painting witnessed the ever-increasing triumph of “coherent” realism, a non-fragmented, wholesome body and the optimistic subject. Although ostensibly intended to counter-oppose the “negative fetishism” of Western art, it now functioned as the element of a totalitarian media apparatus.
The unique Soviet position of “criticism of criticism” continued to form inside -- and not outside -- the modernist world. When Walter Benjamin, in his classical text The Author as Producer (1934), laid the accusation that the photographers and writers of Neue Sachlichkeit “make human misery an object of consumption” and even make “the struggle against misery an object of consumption,” [31] he was virtually repeating the Soviet argument.
German realism was indeed “destruction of the bourgeoisie system using the resources accessible to art” [32] -- for which it was highly rated in the USSR. But, it might be added, it was also the “destruction of art using the resources accessible to the bourgeoisie system.” In the country that had already destroyed its bourgeoisie system, these artistic resources proved to be too radical -- so radical that they isolated Soviet art from the rest of the world for many decades to come.
Notes to the Text
1. See Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900. Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, London: Thames and Hudson, 2004, pp. 202--207.
2. Z. S. Pyshnovskaya, “Khudozhestvennyi internatsional (po materialam arkhiva GMII im. A. S. Pushkina)”, Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie-27, Moscow, 1991, p. 190.
3. The expression rappel a l’ordre was first used in the essay of the same name by Jean Cocteau, although the idea of a return to classicism had already been formulated by Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in Après le cubisme (1918).
4. See C. Olbrich, “Sovetskaya vystavka 1922 goda v Germanii. Ee predystoriya i uroki”, Vzaimosvyazi russkogo i sovetskogo iskusstva i nemetskoi khudozhestvennoi kul’tury, Moscow, 1980, pp. 162--175; V. P. Lapshin, “Pervaya vystavka russkogo iskusstva. Berlin. 1922 god. Materialy k istorii sovetsko-germanskikh khudozhestvennykh svyazei”, Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie-16 (1982, Edn. 1), Moscow, 1983, pp. 327--362.
5. El Lissitzky. 1890--1941. K vystavke v zalakh Gosudarstvennoi Tret’yakovskoi galerei, Moscow: State Tretyakov Gallery, 1991, p. 76.
6. See E. Degot, “Ot tovara k tovarischu. K estetike nerynochnogo predmeta”, Pamyat’ tela. Nizhnee bel’e sovetskoi epokhi, [Exhibition catalogue] Moscow, 2000, pp. 8--19; Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions. The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism, Cambridge-London: MIT Press, 2005, pp. 198--241.
7. See Еkaterina Degot, “Creative Women, Creative Men and Paradigms of Creativity: Why Have There Been Great Women Artists?”, Amazons of the Russian Avant-Garde, ed. John E. Bowlt and Matthew Drutt, [Exhibition catalogue] New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1999.
8. El Lissitzky. 1890--1941. K vystavke v zalakh Gosudarstvennoi Tret’yakovskoi galerei, Moscow: State Tretyakov Gallery, 1991, p. 76.
9. See N. V. Yavorskaya, “Pervaya vseobschaya germanskaya vystavka v SSSR (1924). Publikatsiya dokumentov i kriticheskikh statei”, Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie-77, Edn. 2, Moscow, 1977, pp. 317--334.
10. A. V. Lunacharsky, “Germanskaya khudozhestvennaya vystavka (1924)”, A. V. Lunacharskii ob iskusstve. V 2-kh tt., Tom 1. Iskusstvo na Zapade, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1982, p. 325.
11. Slovar’ khudozhestvennykh terminov. Gosudarstvennaya Akademiya khudozhestvennykh nauk. 1923--1929, ed. and foreword by I. M. Chubarov, Moscow: Logos-Altera, Ecce Homo, 2005, pp. 88--89.
12. A. A. Fedorov-Davydov, “Vopros o novom realizme v svyazi s zapadnoevropeiskimi techeniyami v iskusstve (1925)”, Russkoe i sovetskoe iskusstvo. Stat’i i ocherki, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975, p. 25.
13. A. V. Lunacharsky, “Germanskaya khudozhestvennaya vystavka (1924)”, A. V. Lunacharskii ob iskusstve. V 2-kh tt., Tom 1. Iskusstvo na Zapade, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1982, p. 325.
14. N. V. Yavorskaya, “Pervaya vseobschaya germanskaya vystavka v SSSR (1924). Publikatsiya dokumentov i kriticheskikh statei”, Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie-77, Edn. 2, Moscow, 1977, p. 329.
15. Ibid., p. 328.
16. A. A. Fedorov-Davydov, “Khudozhestvennaya zhizn’ Moskvy (1924)”, Russkoe i sovetskoe iskusstvo. Stat’i i ocherki, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975, pp. 15--16.
17. John Willett, The New Sobriety. Art and Politics in the Weimar Period. 1917--1933, London: Thames and Hudson, 1987 (first ed. 1978), p. 74.
18. O. Brik, “Blizhe k faktu”, Literatura fakta. Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa, ed. N. F. Chuzhak, Moscow: Zakharov, 2000 (original ed. 1929), p. 82.
19. See A. V. Lunacharsky, “Iskusstvo v opasnosti”, A. V. Lunacharskii ob iskusstve. V 2-kh tt., Tom 1. Iskusstvo na Zapade, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1982, pp. 333--341.
20. Sergei Tretyakov, “Otkuda i kuda?”, LEF #1, 1924, p. 200.
21. A. A. Fedorov-Davydov, “Vopros o novom realizme v svyazi s zapadnoevropeiskimi techeniyami v iskusstve (1925)”, Russkoe i sovetskoe iskusstvo. Stat’i i ocherki, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975, p. 24.
22. Matthew Cullerne Bown. Socialist Realist Painting. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998, p. 185.
23. Bor’ba za realizm v izobrazitel’nom iskusstve 1920-kh godov, Moscow, 1962, p. 105.
24. Sergei Tretyakov, “Otkuda i kuda?”, LEF# 1, 1924, p. 200.
25. See Charlotte Douglas, “Period perekhoda. 1-ya Diskussionnaya vystavka i Obschestvo stankovistov (OST)”, Velikaya Utopiya. Russkii i sovetskii avangard. 1915--1932, Berne: Bentelli/Moscow: Galart, 1993, p. 195.
26. I. A. Brodsky, Isaak Izrailevich Brodskii, Moscow, 1973, p. 213
27. Bor’ba za realizm v izobrazitel’nom iskusstve 1920-kh godov, Moscow, 1962, p. 120.
28. Ibid., p. 179.
29. Art in Theory. 1900--1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Oxford-Cambridge, Blackwell, p. 393.
30. A. A. Fedorov-Davydov, “O nekotorykh kharakternykh chertakh nemetskoi vystavki (1924)”, Russkoe i sovetskoe iskusstvo. Stat’i i ocherki, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975, p. 20.
31. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer”, Art in Theory. 1900--1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Oxford-Cambridge, Blackwell, p. 485.
32. A. A. Fedorov-Davydov, “O nekotorykh kharakternykh chertakh nemetskoi vystavki (1924)”, Russkoe i sovetskoe iskusstvo. Stat’i i ocherki, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975, p. 18.
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