Russian Avant-Garde
The Russian Avant-Garde was one of those rare moments in the history
of art when the freedom of artists to create as they wish was not being
restricted by the state. In it’s post-revolutionary second-half the
movement was being actively encouraged by the politicians.
The images now so commonly associated with the Russian Avant-Garde
are the propaganda and film posters of the 1920s, but this was not
when the movement began. If one has to put a date as to when the
avant-garde first appeared in Russia, it would be the first decade
of the twentieth century, with the Jack of Diamonds artists’ group,
and when the millionaire Moscow merchants Shchukin and Morozov began
to buy the works of Matisse and Picasso.
This puts the Russian Avant-Garde in the middle of the reign of
Nicholas II, the age of top hats and hobble-skirts, of Faberge and
Pavlova. One cannot, however, describe Nicholas as an out-and-out
reactionary, but it is true that the avant-garde really got going
after the Revolution of 1905, when Nicholas was forced to agree to
a constitution, and censorship was relaxed.
At the same time – 1913 – that Serge Diaghilev was presenting The
Rite of Spring with his Ballet Russes company in Paris, with its
deliberately exaggerated presentation of Russia as a wild and exotic
land, the real wildness was happening in St Petersburg, the Imperial
capital, where some of the Tsar’s then lesser-known artists were
performing in a Futurist spectacle Victory Over The Sun. The music
was dissonant, the performers were dressed in three-dimensional brightly
coloured geometric costumes (made of cardboard), and speaking in
a “transrational” language. Kazimir Malevich had designed the costumes,
and he also created the abstract black and white sets. Two years
later his Black Square would decisively mark the beginnings of abstraction
in art.
The Russian Avant-Garde was a very theatrical movement, both in
the way that it presented itself, and also for the fact that so much
of it happened in theatres, not in art galleries. This is why I have
chosen to show here the designs made for the theatre.
And yet all the experimentation, the movements which followed one
after the other – Futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism – it was
all over by 1932, when Stalin began the first of his purges and repressions.
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