The third of revolutionary Russia’s artistic trinity was the painter Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956). Fired by the spirit of the revolution, he created his own brand of futurism and agitprop. Beginning with a variety of constructions, part architectural models, part sculpture, he turned to the stark realism of photography and the immediate impact of the poster.130 He sought an art form that was, in the words of Robert Hughes, as ‘arresting as a shout in the street’:131 ‘The art of the future will not be the cosy decoration of family homes. It will be just as indispensable as 48-storey skyscrapers, mighty bridges, wireless [radio], aeronautics and submarines, which will be transformed into art.’ With one of Russia’s great modernist poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Rodchenko formed a partnership whose common workshop stamp read, ‘Advertisement Constructors, Mayakovsky-Rodchenko.’132 Their posters were advertisements for the new state. For Rodchenko, propaganda became great art.133
Rodchenko and Mayakovsky shared Tatlin’s and Lunacharsky’s ideas about proletarian art and about the reach of art. As true believers in the revolution, they thought that art should belong to everyone and even shared the commissar’s view that the whole country, or at least the state, should be regarded as a work of art.134 This may seem grandiose to the point of absurdity now; it was deadly serious then. For Rodchenko, photography was the most proletarian art: even more than typography or textile design (other interests of his), it was cheap, and could be repeated as often as the situation demanded. Here are some typical Rodchenko arguments:
Down with ART as bright PATCHES
on the undistinguished life of the
man of property.
Down with ART as a precious STONE
midst the dark and filthy life of the pauper.
Down with art as a means of
ESCAPING from LIFE which is
not worth living.135
and:
Tell me, frankly, what ought to remain of Lenin:
an art bronze,
oil portraits,
etchings,
watercolours,
his secretary’s diary, his friends’ memoirs –
or a file of photographs taken of him at work and at rest, archives of his books, writing pads, notebooks, shorthand reports, films, phonograph records? I don’t think there’s any choice.
Art has no place in modern life…. Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium.
Don’t he.
Take photo after photo!136
Taking this perfect constructivist material – modern, humble, real, influenced by his friend, the Russian film director Dziga Vertov – Rodchenko began a series of photomontages that used repetition, distortion, magnification and other techniques to interpret and reinterpret the revolution to the masses. For Rodchenko, even beer, a proletarian drink, could be revolutionary, an explosive force.
Even though they were created as art forms for the masses, suprematism and constructivism are now considered ‘high art.’ Their intended influence on the proletariat was ephemeral. With the grandiose schemes failing for lack of funds, it was difficult for the state to continue arguing that it was a work of art. In the ‘new’ modern Russia, art lost the argument that it was the most important aspect of life. The proletariat was more interested in food, jobs, housing, and beer.
It does not diminish the horror of World War I, or reduce our debt to those who gave their lives, to say that most of the responses considered here were positive. There seems to be something in human nature such that, even when it makes an art form, or a philosophy, out of pessimism, as Dada did, it is the art form or the philosophy that lasts, not the pessimism. Few would wish to argue which was the worst period of darkness in the twentieth century, the western front in 1914–18, Stalin’s Russia, or Hitler’s Reich, but something can be salvaged from ‘the Great War’.
* The hostilities also hastened man’s understanding of flight, and introduced the tank. But the principles of the former were already understood, and the latter, though undeniably important, had little impact outside military affairs.
PART TWO
SPENGLER TO ANIMAL FARM
Civilisations and Their Discontents
10
ECLIPSE
One of the most influential postwar ideas in Europe was published in April 1918, in the middle of the Ludendorff offensive – what turned out to be the decisive event of the war in the West, when General Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s supreme commander in Flanders, failed to pin the British against the north coast of France and Belgium and separate them from other forces, weakening himself in the process. Oswald Spengler, a schoolmaster living in Munich, wrote Der Untergang des Abendlandes (literally, The Sinking of the Evening Lands, translated into English as The Decline of the West) in 1914, using a title he had come up with in 1912. Despite all that had happened, he had changed hardly a word of his book, which he was to describe modestly ten years later as ‘the philosophy of our time.1
Spengler was born in 1880 in Blankenburg, a hundred miles southwest of Berlin, the son of emotionally undemonstrative parents whose reserve forced on their son an isolation that seems to have been crucial to his formative years. This solitary individual grew up with a family of very Germanic giants: Richard Wagner, Ernst Haeckel, Henrik Ibsen, and Friedrich Nietzsche. It was Nietzsche’s distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation that particularly impressed the teenage Spengler. In this context, Kultur may be said to be represented by Zarathustra, the solitary seer creating his own order out of the wilderness. Zivilisation, on the other hand, is represented, say, by the Venice of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, glittering and sophisticated but degenerate, decaying, corrupt.2 Another influence was the economist and sociologist Werner Sombart, who in 1911 had published an essay entitled ‘Technology and Culture,’ where he argued that the human dimension of life was irreconcilable with the mechanical, the exact reverse of the Futurist view. There was a link, Sombart said, between economic and political liberalism and the ‘oozing flood of commercialism’ that was beginning to drag down the Western world. Sombart went further and declared that there were two types in history, Heroes and Traders. These two types were typified at their extremes by, respectively, Germany – heroes – and the traders of Britain.
In 1903 Spengler failed his doctoral thesis. He managed to pass the following year, but in Germany’s highly competitive system his first-time failure meant that the top academic echelon was closed to him. In 1905 he suffered a nervous breakdown and wasn’t seen for a year. He was forced to teach in schools, rather than university, which he loathed, so he moved to Munich to become a fulltime writer. Munich was then a colorful city very different from the highly academic centres such as Heidelberg and Göttingen. It was the city of Stefan George and his circle of poets, of Thomas Mann, just finishing Death in Venice, of the painters Franz Marc and Paul Klee.3