Utopia revisited - Guggenheim Museum's exhibit of Russian avant-garde painting

Since the publication in 1962 of Camilla Gray's pioneering application of mind of the Russian avant-garde, The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922 above 130 books and catalogues upon the subject have appeared in English, French German, Italian and Japanese. And since comprehensive exhibition "Paris-Moscow, 1900-1930" organized through the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1979 and then entertainered by the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow sum of two units years later as "Moscow-Paris, 1900-1930" there have been above 100 exhibitions devoted to the Russian avantgarde in public and private venue quite through the U.S., Europe, the Soviet Union and Japan.

These statistics alone indicate that the Russian avant-garde -- the mosaic of personalities and circumstances that transformed the face of Russian art, literature and music in the 1910 and '20 -- has already received wide coverage. pure a decade or so ago, the subdue was still fraught with the difficulties of territorial access and political bias, on the other hand the early and mid '80 witnessed the general recognition in the Soviet Union of the avant-garde as a valuable constituent of the Russian cultural heritage, and the be the effect was a series of major exhibitions in Europe and Japan that drew substantially upon Soviet holdings. Among the latest and greatest in quantity successful of these was "Art into Life: Russian Constructivism 1914-1932" shown at the Henry Art Gahery in Seattle and then at the Walker Art Center in 1990 This promotion of the Russian avant-garde as an entity was paralleled by dint of important examinations of individual artists, including Malevich, Popova, Rodchenko, Stepanova, Klucis and Filonov.(1)

The greatest in quantity recent in this astonishing series, the Guggenheim Museum's "The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932" -- the first of the major views to be shown in of recent origin York -- was born with all earthly blessings. It had the social imprimatur of three prestigious museums (before coming to the Guggenheim, it showed at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam); it had curatorial support from an international team of scholars, a certain quantity of of whom know the subject; the organizers were able to draw on almost any relevant collection in the world, public or private -- and the exhibition had generous sponsorship from Lufthansa and other patrons.

upon a practical level, "The Great Utopia" fulfilled the admirable goal of reintegrating a disbanded and fragmented artistic heritage by the agency of bringing together related works from numerous collections, metropolitan and regional, Eastern and Western. from one extremity to the other of the last 75 years not sole have many works of the avant-garde left Russia for European, American, and now Japanese destinations, on the contrary also, in the 1920s and '30 many works were dispatched from Moscow and Leningrad to provincial center for a like reason that today important works are to be lay the foundation of in the most distant and unexpect museums -- in Ekaterinburg, Samara, Saratov. Beginning with "Art and Revolution" in Tokyo in 1982 a certain number of of these works were recalled for major exhibitions in Russia and the West, and "The Great Utopia" maintained this impetus showing more works from far-flung collections, of the like kind as Alexandra Exter's Color Construction (1922) from the Dagestan Museum in Makhachkala, Valentin lustitsky's early 1920 painterly constructions from the Radishchev Museum in Saratov, Pavel Mansurov's Non-Objective Composition (1918) from the Art Museum, Omsk and Olga Rozanova's 1916 nonobjective compositions from the Museum of Visual Arts in Ekaterinburg. by what means exciting it is to diocese side by side the sum of two units versions of Alexander Drevin's 1921 Painterly Composition (one from Yale, the other from the Tretiakov) or the sum of two units versions of Ivan Kliun's 1914 Landscape Rushing Past (one from the Regional Art Museum, Kirov, the other from the Tretiakov). The replete account of this pictorial diaspora has notwithstanding to be written, but it is single of the most interesting chapters in the history of Russian art, whose narrative continues to unfold

In the wake of the intense exhibiting and pubhshing activity of the last five years, individual expected the Guggenheim's huge exhibition to work for as a summation of the avant-garde period. In a certain quantity of ways, it did just that: "The Great Utopia" ranged across genre and mediums to include painting, collage, Constructivist plastic art photography, photocollage and architecture, as well as cerarnic, fabric, dres and theater design. For the greatest in quantity part, however, the ambitious display of above 800 experiments chose to support and sanction long-standing assumptions and prejudices. For example, the exhibition did not question the familiar argument that Malevich's Suprematism and Tatun's refiefs -- i.e., "abstract art" -- were the primary idiom of avant-garde experiment; it avoided asking whether other pictorial combination of parts to form a wholes (e.g., Filonov's or Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin's) could not also be regarded as equally important. It also ratified conventional chronology and explanations of the avant-garde, tracing a linear path from the later Cubo-Futurism of Ivan Kliun and Liubov Popova [i]or[/i] part of to the other Malevich's Suprematism and Tatun's "culture of materials," the esthetic constructions and constructive esthetics of Gustav Klucis, Alexander Rodchenko and the Stenberg brothers, and finally the fresh figuration of Alexander Deineka, Konstantin Vialov and their colleagues.