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

Art in America, Sept, 1994 by Margarita Tupitsyn

When perestroika's liberal policies made Soviet art available to the West in the late '80s, German museums and galleries enthusiastically led the way in organizing major historical and contemporary exhibitions. With the souring economy of the 1990s, which has curtailed the cultural budgets of German cities, one might expect the euphoria to have faded. However, two recent shows suggest that German art professionals are far from being tired of Soviet visual culture. "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 most ambitious exhibitions of Soviet art ever organized in Germany. They were particularly significant because together they covered the three major periods of Soviet art. "From Malevich to Kabakov" dealt with the historical avantgarde and contemporary art as they are represented 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 both 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 Cologne by Evelyn Weiss, curator of the Ludwig Museum (where all the works in the show are on permanent loan). Peter Ludwig began to collect Soviet avant-garde art in the late 1970s, and in the mid-1980s he decided to add contemporary works to the historical collection. He chose to concentrate solely on the moderate faction of the official Artists' Union, perhaps out of loyalty to the Soviet cultural establishment. Defending his position at the time, Ludwig observed that the West only paid attention to so-called "dissident" artists, and that his goal was to collect the art "displayed in Soviet museums and special exhibitions.[1] Consequently, he did not buy "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 members of the Artists' Union. Instead, it concentrates on what Weiss defines as "the first" or historical avant-garde and "the second" avant-garde, until recently referred to as "alternative" or "unofficial" art. Despite the fact that the two cultural eras are both referred to as "avant-garde," the exhibition draws no stylistic or contextual parallels between them. Instead, the show portrays Soviet art as a culture of ruptures rather than continuities (and the installation emphasizes this reading by physically separating the two sections). For the most part, this position is historically correct because by the time unofficial art began to emerge in the late 1950s, the gap between these two generations was impossible to bridge: the "first avant-garde" had long been completely suppressed and was largely unknown to younger artists. Their initial attempts to reintroduce modernism into Russian culture during the Thaw were nourished not by their own historical past, but by the European and American art shown in Moscow at the time.

Although the exhibition's title suggests that both Malevich and Kabakov are viewed as the major figures of their respective periods, no effort was made to develop this point in the installation. The works in the section on "the first avant-garde" followed the common model of linear surveys of Russian art: it began with pre-Revolutionary Primitivism and Cubo-Futurism and suggested 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 presented as merely one of many artists who contributed to the development of abstraction shortly before and after the Revolution.

Sergei Senkin's and Vasily Ermilov's works represented the moment in the early '20s 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 how Tatlin's non-objective Constructivism was adapted to serve ideology by other artists; symbolic objects like hammers and sickles began to appear in Constructivist compositions. Similarly, Senkin's Rabis (Union of Art Workers), 1920-21, exemplifies the practice, common at the time, of injecting propagandistic slogans into abstract forms (a trend 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 led to a return to figuration in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which was also documented in this show. 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 by Malevich and Konstantin Rozhdestvensky been included in this section, the move from abstraction to figuration would have been clearer.)