Revolution: Russian Art review from utopia to the gulag, via … – The Guardian

Marginalised Peasants, circa 1930, by Kazimir Malevich. Photograph: State Russian Museum

Lenin stands before a crimson curtain, his hand resting on some papers. It is 1919. A gap in the curtain reveals a demonstration in the street behind, banners aloft. Here he is again, in Petrograd, seated at a table, pencil poised, paper on his knee and more strewn over the table. And there is Stalin, yet more papers piled beside him. What is this thing about leaders posing with documents and pretending to write? Remind you of anybody?

And what do they write? Love letters? shopping lists? To what, in Isaak Brodskys paintings, must they put their names? Theyre writing the future, one supposes, their speeches and five-year plans, their goodbye signatures for the condemned, dead letters all.

Elsewhere in Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932, at the Royal Academy in London, we see Stalin resting in a wicker armchair, a dog outstretched at his feet. The mutt, in Georgy Rublevs informal 1936 portrait, looks much like a sturgeon. Maybe the leader is thinking of dinner as he glances up from Pravda. Nearby, scenes from Dziga Vertovs 1920s work Film Truth show footage of Lenins state funeral, while Sergei Eisensteins October recreates the revolution.

Photograph: State Historical Museum

It is all happening. Salute the Leader! is stencilled on the gallery wall, in this first section of an episodic, dense and sometimes bewildering show. This is not an exhibition about great art so much as a clamour of ideals and conflict, suppression, subjugation and totalitarianism. It takes us from the October Revolution in 1917 to the gulag, by way of food coupons and propaganda posters, architectural models, film footage, suprematist crockery (one teacup is decorated with cogs and pylons) and thunderingly bad sculpture. There are so many fascinating things here, largely drawn from Russian state collections, that the show might be seen as a corrective to the more narrow focus we often have on avant-garde art in revolutionary Russia.

In a wonderful series of photographs in the next section, Man and Machine, a muscular youth turns a great wheel of industry. Bolts are tightened, cables stretched. Photographs of oily crankshafts and vast generators turn up the tempo. In another of Brodskys paintings, sun catches the muscular back of a superhero worker on a hydroelectric dam. We visit tractor plants and textile factories. Women work at the new machines. Outside, a shirtless boy leads sheep along the street. Modernity and the old world are in conflict. Questions about arts purpose its freedoms and imposed responsibilities vie with one another throughout.

Among the photographs, the social realist and suprematist paintings, the folkloric scenes of Mother Russia and the death of a commissar, the exhibition embraces the contradictions of culture after the revolution, and before socialist realism was announced as the new and only true method in 1934. There is much to surprise, but less as visual pleasure than as a way of conveying the clamour, aspirations and contradictions of the times.

That said, this is a fun show, in spite of the density of the arguments that were waged in the new Russia. For every painting of a flag-bearing bearded Bolshevik, striding over onion-domed churches and crowded streets, there are Kandinskys abstract explosions and Pavel Filonovs crazed, teeming cityscapes, a wonderfully frightening world of boggle-eyed heads and tessellated skylines. One, from 1920-21, is called Formula for the Petrograd Proletariat. Whats the formula? The people look scared. Meanwhile, the thrusting, canted colour stripes of Mikhail Matiushins 1921 Movement in Space depict pure energy and urgency, irrevocable change. These artists, both the better and lesser known avatars of the Russian avant garde, were really going for it.

At one point, we come to a full-size mock-up of an apartment designed by El Lissitzky in 1932. Its clean, bare, multilevel spaces are a diagram for living. To encourage workers to go out and eat communally, the apartment has no kitchen, just a geometry of planes and steel handrails a hygienic machine for bare, uncluttered living. Later, I come to a painting of a man reading at his rustic table, a fish on a plate before him, a bottle and pipe at his side, somewhat different bare necessities to those proposed by Lissitzky.

Painting and film extolled collective farm labour and captured the astonishment that greeted the arrival of the first tractor. But modernity would not be bought so easily: there is nostalgia for disappearing ways of life, sentimental paintings of spring in the birch woods, troika rides in the snow, village carnivals and homely pleasures all contrasted with ration cards, food tax posters, the redolent ephemera of lean times.

Among the technological feats and heroic workers, the shock troopers of industry, the old peasant women and athletes, you find yourself looking for familiar faces in the crowd. They come at you as ghosts: Moisey Nappelbaums black and white portraits of the wonderful poet Anna Akhmatova; theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold in his leather coat in 1929, giving the camera a reproachful eye. Maybe he was hamming it up. In 1940, Meyerhold was arrested, tortured and killed. Akhmatovas first husband was also killed, while her second Nikolay Punin, the art critic and champion of the avant garde was sent to the gulag in 1949 after he described portraits of state leaders as tasteless. He died there, not long after Stalins death.

In 1932, Punin was one of the organisers of a huge exhibition, Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic, filling 33 rooms of the State Museum in Leningrad, as it was then. The exhibition was marked not only by its plurality but by the way the trajectory of art in Soviet Russia was skewed in favour of aesthetic and ideological conservatism. Vladimir Tatlin was excluded, while Kazimir Malevich was marginalised. Even so, the latter mounted an astonishing display of his own work, which has been largely duplicated in one of the high points of the exhibition.

Malevichs last version of the Black Square (the first was painted in 1915, this one dates from 1932) hangs high above our heads. Beside it is his Red Square (Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions, dating from 1915), above a symmetrical array of suprematist and figurative paintings. Even an early cubist work is here. Geometric painting jostles with faceless peasants, reapers and sportsmen clad in clothing designed by the artist. Malevich saw no distinctions between these different styles, his architectural ideas and his work in porcelain. He snuck his imagery in as and where he could, regarding his art as in service to his ideals. This display is a great counterpoint to Tate Moderns 2014 Malevich exhibition.

The plurality of Russian art was, by 1932, on the wane. Rather than suprematism, anodyne paintings of runners, soccer matches, a female shot putter, a girl in a football jersey became the acceptable face of Stalins utopia. Photographs celebrate parades and stadiums. Instead of a clean modernism, a heavy, overblown architecture was on the rise, with a gigantic Lenin towering over a Palace of the Soviets, which was planned to be the tallest building in the world.

At the very end of the show we come to a black box, a tiny cinema called Room of Memory. Inside is a slideshow projecting official mugshots of the exiled, the starved, the murdered in Stalins purges: housewife Olga Pilipenko, a Latvian language teacher, the former chair of the hydrometeorological committee, peasants, short-story writers, poet Osip Mandelstam, Punin the art critic.

It goes on. Beyond, in the gallerys rotunda, hangs a recreation of one of Vladimir Tatlins constructivist gliders, a prototype flying machine he worked on for several years. It circles the white space, part dragonfly, part bat. Tatlin saw it as a flying bicycle for workers, made from steamed, bent ash and fabric. It looks as light as air. It never flew or went anywhere, but turns in a room, endlessly.

Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 is at Royal Academy of Arts, London, from 11 February until 17 April.

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Revolution: Russian Art review from utopia to the gulag, via ... - The Guardian