Russian Realisms.
The Black Square launched the movement known as Suprematism which put simply was a form of pure abstraction consisting of geometrical shapes arranged in configurations; when viewed they recall architectural plans or engineering diagrams. Suprematism also inaugurated a debate about realism in painting which was exemplified in Malevich’s essay “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: the new painterly realism.” Not content with using the term “painterly realism” in his writings, Malevich used it in descriptions of his work. Hence compositions appeared with titles like Painterly Realism of the Footballer and Red Square: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions. Herein lay a problem: how could these abstract experiments be reconciled with realism in a more conventional sense? [1] This was a debate that rumbled on throughout the early days of the Russian Revolution during which art schools and art teaching were completely transformed within the country.[2] Tatlin would become head of the Petrograd branch of the Russian art organisation while Malevich would eventually take over at Vitebsk. It was here that great Suprematist clashed with the director of the School Marc Chagall whose art Malevich dismissed as “old-fashioned” and irrelevant.” After a temporary absence in Moscow, Chagall found himself the victim of a coup d’état and left for Moscow where he worked as a scenic designer for the State Jewish Theatre.[3] Malevich would eventually find his own art difficult to reconcile with the new ideological climate, but there were accommodations to the need for social art as opposed to avant-garde abstraction in the early days of the revolution. Kustodiev’s The Bolshevik of 1920 (above) shows a “Bolshevik Gulliver” (Wood) striding menacingly through a crowded townscape with factories and onion domes covered with powdery snow, a feature of many of his paintings including his self-portrait.[4] Then there was the gentler art of Aram Arikhipov’s Woman in Red (1919) though both “neither offered a long-term solution to the need to provide whatever it was thought the avant-garde wasn’t offering.”[5] A solution would only arrive in 1922 with the foundation of “The Association of Artists Studying Revolutionary Life” or AKhR who drew “traditional realists like Arkhipov, Mashkov and Kustodiev into its ranks. This sort of painting waged war on the supremacism of Malevich and the constructivism of Tatlin, and the symbolist salon painting of World of Art renegades like Kuzma Petro-Vadim though his most famous painting Bathing the Red Horse (1912) came to symbolise the coming ideological storm whose official style was to be Socialist Realism which is actually prefigured in the AKhR.
[1] Paul Wood lays out the terms of the realist debate in “Realisms and Realities” in Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars, (Yale University Press, 1993), 264f.
[2] For a brief survey of the changes in the structure, see Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922, (Thames and Hudson, 1962), 219f.
[3] Ibid, 240.
[4] Wood, “Realisms and Realities,” 272.
[5] Ibid, 273.
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