Coda: Between Russia & America.
While researching her The Avant-Garde Experiment in Russian Art, the young scholar Camilla Gray supported herself by working at the New York Public Library. Working in NYC, she was able to gain access to the director of MOMA, Alfred H. Barr who- outside Russia- was the leading authority on twentieth-century Russian art. Barr had visited the Soviet Union during the 1920s, and had spoken to many of the deceased members of the avant-garde as well as Grabar who he thought was the scholar most responsible for saving Russia’s icons; Gray however would have to make do with interviewing surviving artists in Paris like Larionov and Goncharova. Less than a decade after Barr visited Russia, a loan exhibition of Russian icons opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on 14th October 1930. This was the first ever exhibition of Russian icons in America; over the next nineteenth months it travelled across the country to nine cities.[1] Billed as the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Loan Exhibition” it opened the eyes of the American museum-going public to the beauty of these images. The cynic however might see the exhibition as a propaganda initiative designed to offer a more favourable view of a society that was perceived by the American public as “atheistic” and “iconoclastic”, to use Salmond’s words; and as she does say, “these secularized icons were pulled into the Soviet Union’s ideological battle with the West.”[2] As Salmond also explains, a hidden agenda was to “create a market demand for icons in the bourgeois West,” though ultimately it failed.”[3] This initiative actually originated in the pre-revolutionary period, back in the days when Anisimov and Grabar were organising the recovery and restoration of icons. However, Grabar went much further and advocated exhibitions abroad designed to draw attention to the icons (and the work of his restorers) with a view to selling some of them on the world art market. Against prevailing opinion in the Russian museum world, Grabar was adamant that twelfth, thirteenth and fifteenth- centuries icons should be shown in Europe and America; but only copies of the Vladimir Mother and Christ and Rublëv’s Trinity were shown as the originals were too fragile to travel.[4] One year after this exhibition in Boston, Malevich was arrested and told that his art (above) was bourgeois and not suitable for Stalin’s vision of Russia. To this and his other critics Malevich responded that art could advance and develop for art’s sake alone: “art does not need us, and it never did.”
[1] Information taken from Wendy R.Salmond, “How America Discovered Russian Icons: The Soviet Loan Exhibition of 1930-32 in Alter Icons, 128-143.
[2] Ibid. In this era of the Cold War, America would send abstract expressionist art around the world as a way of stressing the US’s creativity compared to the stylized Soviet Realism of the Stalinist era. This was part of the C.I.A.’s cultural propaganda programme begun in 1947 which was admitted by the organisation recently as explained in the work of Frances Stonor Saunders, “Modern Art was CIA’s Weapon,” Independent, 21/10/95.
[3] Salmond, “How America discovered Russian icons,” 129.
[4] The show was seen at the V & A in London where 30,000 visitors (in one week). It was Roger Fry who had advised the museum to take the show, ibid, 132.
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