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

Komar & Melamid's Stalin and the Muses (1981-82) and Erik Bulatov's Trademark (1986) are both Sots art oils which deconstruct the cliches of Soviet propaganda, and thus constituted the only direct link between unofficial art and Socialist Realism. Together with Kabakov's drawings, paintings and installation work, which are based on scenarios of Soviet communal life, they provide a multilevel interpretation of Soviet reality before perestroika. Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina's "re-creation" of a 1930s show, Fish Exhibition, a multi-part installation of found and artist-made objects and paintings, was a provocative but lonely example of post-Kabakov conceptualism.

Though "From Malevich to Kabakov" made no connections between the first and second avant-gardes, there are ways they could have been compared.[2] The inclusion of Lissitzky's designs for the Soviet Pavilion of the 1928 Pressa exhibition in Cologne as a frontispiece to Weiss's catalogue article offers one example. Had Lissitzky's designs been exhibited (they were among the first Soviet works Ludwig acquired), they would have provided an extraordinary counterpoint to Kabakov's Red

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Pavilion. (This piece was originally built for the Russian pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennale, and was installed outside near the entrance to the Kunsthalle, thus serving as an introduction to the entire exhibition.) If Pressa's hymn to the mass media, orchestrated by Lissitzky and a collective of Soviet artists, was exhilarating, Kabakov's Red Pavilion, a slapdash, Soviet-style structure, topped with speakers blaring music and slogans, metaphorically embodies the final exhaustion of the propaganda machine.

With the exception of Isaak Brodsky's and

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Aristarkh Lentulov's portraits of Stalin, "From Malevich to Kabakov" did not treat the Socialist Realist era at all. This exclusion is not due to Ludwig's antipathy to totalitarian culture. On the contrary, in the 1980s he noted that he "would like to buy examples of Stalinist art, but it is very difficult. You would have to go to artists' families and widows who think their husbands were Raphaels or Michelangelos. But I would like to establish some links between the earlier periods and now." These links were visible in "Agitation for Happiness: Soviet Art of the Stalin Era," organized by Evgeniia Petrova (a curator of the Russian Museum) and Hubertus Gassner, former director of the Documenta Archiv in Kassel, where the show appeared.

At the entrance to "Agitation for Happiness: Soviet Art of the Stalin Era" the viewer was greeted by a replica of Vera Mukhina's famous statue of the worker and the female collective farmer, one of the key icons of Socialist Realism.[3] To indicate the complexity of the transition to Socialist Realism, the first room in the exhibition displayed paintings by Malevich, Pavel Filonov, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and Alexander Shevchenko, some of them produced as late as the mid-30's. It would have been helpful if these late works by the avant-gardists had been accompanied by explanatory wall texts, since the cultural context is important and many viewers might have found it more interesting than the paintings themselves. The paintings in this room indicate