Art of the Soviet Avant Gard by Khan Megomedov 1996 Book
Modern Long Agone: The Improvement of Russian Constructivism
Meet the article in its original context from
Dec xxx, 1990
,
Section vii , Page
iiBuy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for domicile commitment and digital subscribers.
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an commodity from The Times's print archive, before the kickoff of online publication in 1996. To preserve these manufactures as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are standing to work to improve these archived versions.
The but design the Russian Constructivist Ivan Leonidov was ever allowed to build was a magisterial procession of terraces and stairs down a hillside at a provincial sanitarium. Leonidov, a messianic immature talent in the late 1920's, became a target and victim of reactionary Soviet politics in the 30'south every bit the avant-garde, which advocated a new auto-historic period architecture of abstract forms and social utopianism, collided with the increasingly totalitarian Stalinist state. Leonidov finally spent his career, and his brilliance, designing "for the drawer," equally Russians say about manuscripts that will never be published.
For an incandescent moment the Soviet advanced reinvented architecture to give the Russian Revolution livable form. The designers did non study tradition and history, merely bathetic such building basics as mass, residuum and space for application in socially progressive, egalitarian buildings, like workers' clubs, factories and housing.
But in the xxx'southward, when Stalin and the Socialist Realists denounced the modernist advanced for antirealism and decadent bourgeois formalism (form for form's sake), the brave new movement abruptly became a nonsubject, banished from serious written report, its works unbuilt. Publication of its ideas became unthinkable, archives inaccessible and research punishable. The brilliance that gave grade, visual rhetoric and considerable square footage to the new state lapsed into a cultural night. While the other nifty modernist movements in France, kingdom of the netherlands and Germany acquired a richly interpreted historical record, with books on secondary and tertiary figures, Soviet work suffered repression and neglect. Fear of the Stalinist country exiled the avant-garde non just from exercise simply also from histories. The silence, regrettably, lasted for decades.
Only over the final 10 years, and especially in the last 5, titles on such major avant-garde figures every bit Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, Kasimir Malevich and El Lissitzky have proliferated, mostly exterior the Soviet Matrimony -- some the culmination of a slow thaw starting during the Nikita S. Khrushchev years and some the products of major recent exhibitions traveling in the Soviet Union, the West and Japan, the fruits of glasnost. Last summer Leonidov'due south work was featured on the embrace of the catalogue accompanying the Museum of Modern Art'south testify, "Architectural Drawings of the Russian Avant-Garde" (distributed past Harry N. Abrams), and two years ago Rizzoli International published the sumptuously illustrated "Ivan Leonidov: The Complete Works," by Andrei Gozak and the architect's son, Andrei Leonidov.
Every bit books and catalogues multiply, these crucial works represent ane of the most of import categories of architectural books of the last decade, offer articulate manifestoes, stunning new images and saddening tales. The tragedy of talents and lives distorted and reduced lends these histories poignancy.
Inspired by Cubist notions of infinite and Italian Futurist studies of motion and time, the avant-garde created asymmetrically dynamic, geometrically powerful works, engineered for efficiency, conceived for utility and efficient product, and programmed to shape the new human being in the new society. The athwart, visually energized forms remain amidst the nearly arresting of our time, and the motility, comprising several strains, amid the nigh passionate and idealistic. Just for architectural historians the Soviet avant-garde has long been a Titanic -- alluringly in that location, but tantalizingly out of achieve. In the West, and particularly in America, compages is seldom treated as a political subject area, but is usually sanitized within the safe confines of esthetic discussions. In the Soviet Union, all the same, where architecture since Stalin has been a propaganda arm and symbol of the country and a product of the centrally planned economy, buildings make a strong subject: analyzing them leads directly to an analysis of ability and politics.
The history of this avant-garde is itself complex. In 1937 the First Congress of Soviet Architects erased the achievements of modernist Soviet architects by decree, condemning the piece of work and relegating information technology to biased histories that interpret the avant-garde merely every bit a stage in the evolution of Socialist Realism. These politically convenient accounts influenced treatments in the Due west (which itself kept a distance because of the committed Communist nature of the Soviet avant-garde's work). But in the late 50's, when the Soviet Marriage needed vast quantities of housing more than than bombastic state classicism, architects looked for a constructive rather than decorative basis of design -- which led them to reconsider modernism.
In 1962, seizing this moment of thaw, the Soviet scholar Selim O. Khan-Magomedov wrote a pivotal essay about the demand to reassess avant-garde piece of work of the 1910'due south and 20's. Coming merely a decade after Stalin'south decease, Mr. Khan-Magomedov's proposal was politically defiant. His stand helped open the door to the subject area and besides to the huge task of comprehending the piece of work: the avant-garde embraced several movements, numerous schools, a range of disciplines and many figures -- and all went through different phases equally they, the land and social conditions evolved.
Despite setbacks during the years of Leonid I. Brezhnev'due south concur on power, the painstaking background by a handful of people led to a ho-hum march of books in the early lxxx's, published mostly exterior the Soviet Wedlock. Five years into Mikhail S. Gorbachev's glasnost, writers who were once discouraged are existence pressed to satisfy the need (and assistance produce hard currency); now it is more than publish-or-perish than publish-and-perish. New problems include maintaining standards of quality and cooperation between Westerners and Russians, who seem increasingly territorial nearly source material.
Mr. Khan-Magomedov's career through a slalom of obstacles in some means typifies the careers of a generation of Soviet architecture writers, including Vigdariya Khazanova (whose work has not yet appeared in English), Anatoly Strigalev and Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova (Zhadova edited "Tatlin," a comprehensive tome on one of the founders of Constructivism, published by Rizzoli in 1988).
When Mr. Khan-Magomedov first called for a reassessment, he inconspicuous the message in a discussion of vernacular buildings in the Caucasus, his home region -- a protective bookish cloak he has donned, as needed, during his long, politically defensive career. His observations themselves were ambiguous. In his encyclopedic "Pioneers of Soviet Architecture: The Source for New Solutions in the 1920s and 1930s," the most comprehensive overview of the avant-garde available (published by Rizzoli in 1987), he never directly attributes the demise of the avant-garde to totalitarianism, for case, but to "a substantial shift in aesthetic direction in the early 1930'due south." Russians, reading betwixt the bland lines, understand the subtext. Even today, caution prevails amid many considering of fears of a return to totalitarianism.
But compounding the difficulties was the question of where and how to obtain basic information, specially given the political reluctance of libraries and archives holding the bulk of the original cloth. Mr. Khan-Magomedov personally amassed an archive of a score of smaller collections, traveling the country to see and secure papers and drawings still in private easily. He also caused firsthand data from surviving designers, mending a memory line severed in the 30's. Singlehandedly he conserved an endangered cultural legacy; his athenaeum are an equivalent in architecture of the unique private collection of avant-garde paintings gathered in the Soviet Union by the Greek connoisseur George Costakis.
By the tardily 60's Mr. Khan-Magomedov finished "Pioneers of Soviet Architecture" -- a descriptive more than analytic history of the whole movement -- only for years it languished, published finally in 1983 through a not uncommon cultural routing to East Germany. Rizzoli'south version appeared almost two decades after completion of the manuscript. But this invaluable overview has however to appear in Russian and is unavailable in Soviet bookstores, where prohibitively expensive foreign books are, in general, not even offered (a bizarre situation that deprives the land of its ain scholarship).
Almost any book on the avant-garde by Russians hints at this complex history of forced intellectual migration: the copyright page of Zhadova'southward posthumously published "Tatlin," for example, indicates it was originally published in 1984 by the publishing house Corvina Kiado in Budapest, in a Hungarian translation "based on a Russian manuscript that was written for Corvina." The page credits six translators for the English edition, and mentions a translation revision.
The fact that most principal material on the Soviet avant-garde is to be found only in the Soviet Union has added other complications to inquiry. The British scholar Camilla Gray introduced the avant-garde to English-speaking readers in 1962 with "The Smashing Experiment: Russian Art, 1863-1922" (Abrams). The wife of a son of the composer Sergei Prokofiev, she enjoyed privileged access to athenaeum (though her book provoked a mixture of disdain and jealousy among some Russians who raised the issue of archival protectionism. Who, asked some scholars, can understand Russian work amend than Russians?).
But in the 70's, at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, another British scholar, Christina Lodder, had to copy everything by manus like a medieval scribe, and was given only two files at any fourth dimension, without being able to anticipate their contents. Later on the publication of her "Russian Constructivism" (Yale Academy, 1983), now a classic respected by Soviet scholars, she was allowed greater, though still express, archival access.
Anatole Senkevitch -- the translator of Moisei Ginzburg'south seminal 1924 Constructivist manifesto, "Style and Epoch" (MIT Press, 1983) -- gained access to modernist fabric during research washed in the seventy's and 80's by framing his subject to include all Russian architecture from the 10th century to the nowadays. At times, he was given photocopies of only every other page in a document.
If institutions take been recalcitrant, the families and shut friends of the avant-garde architects have proved a helpful, infinitely more personable alternative for fabric on Malevich, Rodchenko, Konstantin S. Melnikov, Liubov Popova, Leonidov and others, though in a sometimes exasperating style. Receiving strange visitors at their own gamble, they would ordinarily bear witness scholars material only afterward repeated visits had congenital trust. If given to the state, these private collections might have disappeared, though there have also been calamities among family unit archives: the papers of Sergei Lavrov, a leader of Constructivism's rival advanced move, Rationalism, were merely tossed out by his family afterward his decease.
The liberating event of glasnost has added rich ironies to this historiography. Now Soviet publishers want to publish all of Mr. Khan-Magomedov'south manuscripts (for two decades he simply continued writing undeterred, whether or not a publisher was in sight). The decentralization of official culture has also bred publishing entrepreneurs and several blunders. Paul Gottlieb, the editor in primary at Abrams -- and a Russian federation mitt since he attended the "kitchen debate" in Moscow in 1959 between Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon as a guide -- has published Russian advanced books and catalogues for a decade; but since the perestroika campaign began, Russian freelancers have called with proposals and fifty-fifty flown over for meetings. The decentralization, he says, has caused confusion and broken contracts as, in some instances, the aforementioned material has been promised for competing publishing ventures.
Glasnost has also liberated museums from the central command of the Ministry building of Civilisation. As museums realize in that location is a sizable market for avant-garde material and profit in lending it, they are cooperating directly with Western institutions. The resulting shows are reuniting works from both sides of the quondam Fe Curtain, and the catalogues are much more comprehensive than those few from pre-glasnost days. The Malevich exhibition now at the Armand Hammer Museum of Fine art and Cultural Center in Los Angeles and coming in Feb to the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art combines works still in the Soviet Union with a large collection from Amsterdam'south Stedelijk Museum. Previous regimes strength-fed Socialist Realist works into shows, just the new shows are gratis to treat the advanced without having to distort it through the perspectives of Socialist Realism.
"Fine art Into Life: Russian Constructivism 1914-1932" -- the Rizzoli catalogue accompanying an exhibition mounted this year at the Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington in Seattle and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis -- offers a broad visual and analytic explanation of the motility's origins and influence, and exemplifies the cooperative efforts possible between Russian and Western scholars and institutions. Two Russians, i Czechoslovak and iv American and British scholars contributed well-co-ordinated essays.
The United States seems awash in exhibitions, and the expectation is that "Fine art Into Life" is just the first in a series of catalogues adding detail and analysis to our withal incomplete agreement of the period. Also the Malevich show and "Fine art Into Life," there will be a full retrospective of the painter and gear up designer Liubov Popova in Feb at the Museum of Modern Fine art, to travel to the Los Angeles Canton Museum of Art side by side year; and in November 1991, there will be a blockbuster evidence of over 800 works, 60 percent from Soviet museums and collections, dramatically displayed in the newly refurbished rotunda of the Guggenheim. The massive catalogue (to exist published in 3 languages) volition incorporate two dozen essays by Russian, English, German and American scholars, and the show will travel to Frankfurt, Moscow and St. petersburg. And the Columbia Academy Graduate School of Architecture has just published a catalogue, "The Logic of Fantasy," for its new bear witness on the latter-day Constructivist Iakov Chernikhov.
Simply major areas of the Russian advanced remain obscure or oversimplified. We know the Bauhaus and today unremarkably sit in its chairs, merely Moscow'due south bully equivalent, the multidisciplinary schoolhouse with the inscrutable acronym Vkhutemas (the State Higher Artistic and Technical Studios) remains unknown and even unpronounceable (v-who-temaas). No history for the Moscow plant notwithstanding exists (though the indefatigable Mr. Khan-Magomedov is finishing i). Anatole Senkevitch has washed seminal work on distinguishing Rationalism from Constructivism. The latter expression erroneously serves in the West as an umbrella term for the entire Soviet advanced. (The Rationalists based their designs on findings in perceptual psychology, while Constructivists were concerned with the nature of materials, the making of things and an emerging industrial civilization).
Equally late as 1985, a guide at the Hermitage Museum in Petrograd described Wassily Kandinsky -- who preceded Rodchenko as chairman of the Moscow Institute of Artistic Civilisation -- every bit "the counterrevolutionary who deserted the Soviet Union for Germany." The establishment's nervousness about this advanced legacy may still linger, but scholars and architects are yielding to pride and even to chauvinism. Recently, when a Western scholar argued at a conference this year in Dusseldorf, Frg, that Tatlin -- who created the unbuilt merely historic pattern for a spiraling and leaning monument to the 3rd International -- had done a pre-Revolutionary painting supporting the Czarist government, she provoked strenuous denial. Tatlin has not just been rehabilitated but canonized.
With decreased state and institutional interference, and the legitimization of the advanced, Western scholars are hoping for increased cooperation with Russians (who themselves are anxious for a more international role). But whether the changed climate will open archives or stir a protectionism fueled past academic competitiveness and possible xenophobia remains an open question. "Now Soviets tin work with the material and publish it," reports Christina Lodder. "They have priority."
Asked by Westerners at the Dusseldorf conference if Tatlin material would now be more bachelor, a Russian expert neatly responded that because all the important source material was already known, there was lilliputian need for further admission.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/30/books/modern-long-ago-the-comeback-of-russian-constructivism.html
0 Response to "Art of the Soviet Avant Gard by Khan Megomedov 1996 Book"
Post a Comment