Shaping Soviet art - two German exhibitions; various artists; Doucumenta-Halle, Kassel, and Kunsthalle, Cologne - Report From Germany

When perestroika's liberal policies made Soviet art available to the West in the late '80 German museums and galleries enthusiastically l the way in organizing major historical and contemporary exhibitions. With the souring economy of the 1990 which has curtailed the cultural packages of German cities, one might await the euphoria to have faded. However, sum of two units recent shows suggest that German art professionals are far from being tired of Soviet visual agriculture "From Malevich to Kabakov: The Russian Avant-Garde in the 20th Century" and "Agitation for Happiness: Soviet Art of the Stalin Era" were among the greatest in quantity ambitious exhibitions of Soviet art at any time organized in Germany. They were particularly significant because together they overspreaded the three major periods of Soviet art. "From Malevich to Kabakov" dealt with the historical avantgarde and contemporary art as they are exhibited in Peter Ludwig's collection; "Agitation for Happiness" featured, for the first time in the West, the Russian State Museum's holdings of Socialist Realism. And in one as well as the other cases, the curators sought to interpret and give coherent shape to the still amorphous history of Soviet art.

"From Malevich to Kabakov" was organized for the Kuntshalle in eau-de-cologne by Evelyn Weiss, curator of the Ludwig Museum (where all the works in the display are on permanent loan). Peter Ludwig began to gather Soviet avant-garde art in the late 1970 and in the mid-1980s he decided to add contemporary works to the historical collection. He chose to concentrate solely upon the moderate faction of the official Artists' Union, perhaps on the outside of loyalty to the Soviet cultural establishment. Defending his position at the time, Ludwig observ that the West solitary paid attention to so-called "dissident" artists, and that his goal was to bring together the art "displayed in Soviet museums and special exhibitions.[1] Consequently he did not purchase "dissident art" until perestroika, when it could finally be seen publicly in the USSR.

Nevertheless, "From Malevich to Kabakov" ignores Ludwig's vast collection of works by the agency of members of the Artists' Union. Instead, it concentrates upon what Weiss defines as "the first" or historical avant-garde and "the second" avant-garde, until lately referred to as "alternative" or "unofficial" art. Despite the fact that the sum of two units cultural eras are both referr to as "avant-garde," the exhibition draws no stylistic or contextual parallels between them. Instead, the exhibit portrays Soviet art as a tillage of ruptures rather than continuities (and the installation emphasizes this reading by dint of physically separating the two sections). For the greatest in quantity part, this position is historically correct because by means of the time unofficial art began to rise in the late 1950s, the gap between these sum of two units generations was impossible to bridge: the "first avant-garde" had drawn out been completely suppressed and was largely unknown to younger artists. Their initial attempts to reintroduce modernism into Russian agriculture during the Thaw were nourished not by dint of their own historical past, on the contrary by the European and American art shown in Moscow at the time.

Although the exhibition's title put in mind ofs that both Malevich and Kabakov are viewed as the major figures of their respective periods, no effort was made to unravel this point in the installation. The works in the section upon "the first avant-garde" followed the for the use of all model of linear surveys of Russian art: it began with pre-Revolutionary Primitivism and Cubo-Futurism and put in mind ofed that the roots of the Russian avant-garde are located in Western modernism. Malevich, whose post-Black Square oils like Dynamic Composition (1916) were logically placed in the Suprematism section, was at handed as merely one of many artists who contributed to the disclosure of abstraction shortly before and after the Revolution.

Sergei Senkin's and Vasily Ermilov's works exhibited the moment in the early '20 when practitioners of non-objective art first experienced difficulty in using abstract language in the highly politicized Soviet environment. Ermilov's Experimental Composition (1922) showed by what mode Tatlin's non-objective Constructivism was adapted to work for ideology by other artists; symbolic existences like hammers and sickles began to appear in Constructivist compositions. Similarly, Senkin's Rabis (Union of Art Workers), 1920-21 exemplifies the practice, for the use of all at the time, of injecting propagandistic slogans into abstract forms (a run also evident in the work of El Lissitzky, Malevich, Natan Altman, Varvara Stepanova and Gustav Klutsis).

This distancing from non-objective art continued apace and eventually l to a turn back to figuration in the late 1920 and early 1930 which was also documented in this present to view Here we found such diverse manifestations of representational art as Konstantin Vialov's and Piotr Williams's renditions of industrial and rural labor, and Alexander Tyshler's painterly, neo-Surrealist dream images. (Had the post-Suprematist paintings through Malevich and Konstantin Rozhdestvensky been included in this section, the put in motion from abstraction to figuration would have been clearer.)