Before World War I the Russian artistic presence in Paris was extensive. Futurism, begun by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, in 1909, had been taken up by Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova in 1914. Its two central ideas were first, that machinery had created a new kind of humanity, in so doing offering freedom from historical constraints; and second, that operating by confrontation was the only way to shake people out of their bourgeois complacencies. Although it didn’t last long, the confrontational side of futurism was the precursor to that aspect of Dada, surrealism, and the ‘happenings’ of the 1960s. In Paris, Goncharova designed Le Coq d’or for Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexandre Benois worked for Serge Diaghdev’s Ballets Russes. Guillaume Apollinaire reviewed the exhibition of paintings by Larionov and Goncharova at the Galérie Paul Guillaume in Les Soirées de Paris, concluding that ‘a universal art is being created, an art in which painting, sculpture, poetry, music and even science in all its manifold aspects will be combined.’ In the same year, 1914, there was an exhibition of Chagall in Paris, and several paintings by Malevich were on show at the Salon des Indépendants. Other Russian artists in Paris before the war included Vladimir Tatlin, Lydia Popova, Eliezer Lissitzky, Naum Gabo, and Anton Pevsner. Wealthy Russian bourgeois collectors like Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov collected some of the best modern pictures the French school had to offer, making friends with Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and Gertrude and Leo Stein.115 By the outbreak of war, Shchukin had collected 54 Picassos, 37 Matisses, 29 Gauguins, 26 Cézannes, and 19 Monets.116
For Russians, the ease of travel before 1914 meant that their art was both open to international modernistic influences and yet distinctively Russian. The works of Goncharova, Malevich, and Chagall combined recognisable themes from the Russian ‘East’ but also images from the modern ‘West’: Orthodox icons and frozen Siberian landscapes but also iron girders, machines, airplanes, the whole scientific palette. Russian art was not backward before the revolution. In fact, ‘suprematism,’ a form of geometrical abstraction born of Malevich’s obsession with mathematics, appeared between the outbreak of war and revolution – yet another ‘ism’ to add to the profusion in Europe. But the explosion of revolution, coming in the middle of war, in October 1917, transformed painting and the other visual arts. Three artists and one commissar typified the revolution in Russian art: Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexandr Rodchenko, and Anatoli Lunacharsky.
Lunacharsky was a sensitive and idealistic writer of no fewer than thirty six books who was convinced that art was central to the revolution and the regeneration of Russian life and he had firm ideas about its role.117 Now that the state was the only patron of art (the Shchukin collection was nationalised on 5 November 1918), Lunacharsky conceived the notion of a new form of art, agitprop, combining agitation and propaganda. For him art was a significant medium of change.118 As commissar for education, an authority on music and theatre, Lunacharsky had Lenin’s ear, and for a time several grandiose plans were considered – for example, a proposal to erect at well-known landmarks in Moscow a series of statues, monuments of great international revolutionaries of the past. Loosely interpreted, many of the ‘revolutionaries’ were French: Georges-Jacques Danton, Jean-Paul Marat, Voltaire, Zola, Cézanne.119 The scheme, like so many others, failed simply for lack of resources: there was no shortage of artists in Russia, but there was of bronze.120 Other agitprop schemes were realised, at least for a while. There were agitprop posters and street floats, agitprop trains, and agitprop boats on the Volga.121 Lunacharsky also shook up the art schools, including the two most prestigious institutions, in Vitebsk, northwest of Smolensk, and Moscow. In 1918 the former was headed by Chagall, and Malevich and Lissitzky were members of its faculty; the latter, the Higher State Art Training School, or Vkhutemas School, in Moscow, was a sort of Bauhaus of Russia, ‘the most advanced art college in the world, and the ideological centre of Russian Constructivism.’122
The early works of Kasimir Malevich (1878–1935) owe much to impressionism, but there are also strong echoes of Cézanne and Gauguin – bold, flat colour – and the Fauves, especially Matisse. Around 1912 Malevich’s images began to break up into a form of cubism. But the peasants in the fields that dominate this period of his work are clearly Russian. From 1912 on Malevich’s work changed again, growing simpler. He was always close to Velimir Khlebnikov, a poet and a mathematician, and Malevich’s paintings have been described as analogues to poetry, exploiting abstract, three-dimensional forms – triangles, circles, rectangles, with little colour variation.123 His shapes are less solid than those of Braque or Picasso. Finally, Malevich changed again, to his celebrated paintings of a black square on a white background and, in 1918, a white square on a white background. As revolution was opening up elsewhere, Malevich’s work represented one kind of closure in painting, about as far as it could be from representation. (A theoretician of art as well as a painter, he entitled one essay ‘The Objectless World.’)124 Malevich aimed to represent the simplicity, clarity, and cleanliness that he felt was a characteristic of mathematics, the beautiful simplicity of form, the essential shapes of nature, the abstract reality that lay beneath even cubism. Malevich revolutionised painting in Russia, pushing it to the limits of form, stripping it down to simple elements the way physicists were stripping matter.
Malevich may have revolutionised painting, but constructivism was itself part of the revolution, closest to it in image and aim. Lunacharsky was intent on creating a people’s art, ‘an art of five kopeks,’ as he put it, cheap and available to everyone. Constructivism responded to the commissar’s demands with images that looked forward, that suggested endless movement and sought to blur the boundaries between artist and artisan, engineer or architect. Airplane wings, rivets, metal plates, set squares, these were the staple images of constructivism.125 Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), the main force in constructivism, was a sailor and a marine carpenter, but he was also an icon painter. Like Kandinsky and Malevich, he wanted to create new forms, logical forms.126 Like Lunacharsky he wanted to create a proletarian art, a socialist art. He started to use iron and glass, ‘socialist materials’ that everyone knew and was familiar with, materials that were ‘not proud.’127 Tatlin’s theories came together in 1919, two years after the revolution, when he was asked to design a monument to mark the Third Communist International, the association of revolutionary Marxist parties of the world. The design he came up with – unveiled at the Eighth Congress of the Soviets in Moscow in 1920 – was a slanting tower, 1,300 feet high, dwarfing even the Eiffel Tower, which was ‘only’ 1,000 feet. The slanting tower was a piece of propaganda for the state and for Tatlin’s conception of the place of engineering in art (he was a very jealous man, keenly competitive with Malevich).128 Designed in three sections, each of which rotated at a different speed, and built of glass and steel, Tatlin’s tower was regarded as the defining monument of constructivism, an endlessly dynamic useful object, loaded with heavy symbolism. The banner that hung above the model when it was unveiled read ‘Engineers create new forms.’ But of course, a society that had no bronze for statues of Voltaire and Danton had no steel or glass for Tatlin’s tower either, and it never went beyond the model stage: ‘It remains the most influential non-existent object of the twentieth-century, and one of the most paradoxical – an unworkable, probably unbuildable metaphor of practicality.’129 It was the perfect epitome of Malevich’s objectless world.