Paul Wood, Excerpts From

Paul Wood, excerpts from “Realisms and Realities,” in Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993): 250-333. Soviet Russia: Realism and the avant-garde Socialist Realism was a doctrine about figurative art and its relation to society that emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. What it emerged from, however, was a complex debate that ran throughout the 1920s about what was to constitute an appropriate revolutionary art. In this long- running debate, figuration gradually established dominance over tendencies associated with the avant-garde. It is beyond our scope here to survey these avant-garde tendencies in detail. Yet we must establish some brief sense of how they related to realism. The reason for this can be simply put. Conventional approaches to realism that identify it with figuration tend to treat the more abstract types of art associated with the avant-garde as foreign to realism, even as a threat to it. [...] Western theorists of the Modern Movement in art maintained this notion of polarity—that avant-garde art and realist art faced each other antagonistically across an unbridgeable gap. They, however, praised the avant-garde while criticizing “realistic” figurative art as retrograde. Neither side acknowledged that avant-garde art could be a form of, or could at least be illuminated by requirements of, realism. That possibility, which neither of the contending orthodoxies appeared to understand, was perhaps understood by a third, minority tradition. We will content ourselves here with two examples. Kazimir Malevich wrote of Suprematism, the abstract art movement he pioneered during the First World War, that “Painting is paint and color ... such forms will not be repetitions of living things in life but will themselves be a living thing. A painted surface is a real, living form” (K. Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: the new painterly realism,” pp.129-30). This is compatible with Modernist views about the autonomy of art. Yet note the word “Realism” in the title that Malevich gave to his article, which he published in 1915 to coincide with the first exhibition of Suprematist paintings. His position was essentially a philosophical idealism, in that primary forms discovered by the operation of what he called “intuitive reason”—notably the square—are not secondary to the actual forms of the world but constitute a harmonious equivalent to them. In contrast with the deficient “realism” of figurative painting, which for Malevich is a mere copy of an existing reality whose depth and richness it can never match, the forms of Suprematism exist alongside the forms of nature: “The new painterly realism is a painterly one precisely because it has no realism of mountains, sky, water” (Malevich, p.133). Malevich persistently referred to his pursuit of a pure plastic art as a quest for a transformed realism -”Cubo-Futurist Realism,” “Transrational Realism,” and later the “new painterly realism” of his Suprematist work. Furthermore, he adapted his practice to the collective ethos of the Revolution when in 1920 in Vitebsk he set up the group UNOVIS (translated as “Union of the New Art” or “Affirmers of the New Art”). UNOVIS supporters applied Suprematist techniques to the demands of the situation - in brochures for conferences, in street decorations and in such designs as a backdrop for a conference. This activity continued to be conceived as part of a “new realism,” as can be seen from a UNOVIS poster issued in November 1920, illustrating a design for a speakers” rostrum—of the kind referred to as a “Lenin” rostrum, originally designed by Malevich’s student and collaborator, El Lissitzky. Its caption identifies it as an example of the “new realism.” Malevich used a transformed concept of “realism,” a notion that art was its own reality and that only as such (rather than as a pale imitation) could it represent modern experience. This was tantamount to saying that it was the very autonomy of art that conferred the possibility of “realism upon it, a notion clearly at odds with prescriptions about the need for art to depict visible social reality. This may seem a strange and contradictory idea. It is, however, worth noting both that Malevich held it, and that it is not, despite its rootedness in abstraction and in an autonomy claim, an argument for art-for-art’s- sake. For Malevich, realism—albeit of this unusual and little-understood kind—was a goal worth pursuing, not something to be written off as irrelevant to the art he was making, either in his Suprematist phase or when he later returned to more recognizable subjects. A second example, referred to in Chapter 2, also suggests the possibility of an interesting relationship, rather than a gulf, between the avant-garde and realism. This example also bears, perhaps more closely, upon [Bertolt] Brecht’s argument mentioned above: as reality changes, ways of representing it must also change. Vladimir Tatlin’s ambitious Monument to the Third International may at first sight seem to have little to do with realism. Never actually constructed, it existed as a model about five meters high. It consisted of a double spiral of wooden laths containing in its centre a range of basic forms made from wooden frames covered with paper—a cube, a cylinder, a pyramid and a hemisphere. The fact that the monument proper was meant to be higher than the Eiffel Tower, and the geometric forms glass-walled rooms hosting conferences and other meetings, does not stop the model from looking more like a work of contemporary abstract art than a realistic monument. Yet in 1918 Lenin himself, impelled by the conviction that reality had indeed changed—with the Revolution—commissioned a range of propagandist monuments intended to replace the old images of princes, generals, tsars and so on with images of prominent figures from the socialist tradition. These monuments were obviously intended by Lenin to be “realistic” in a conventional sense. The project failed, however. Partly this was because many of the artists involved had been affected by avant-garde ideas and proceeded to produce distorted (“abstracted”) images that people found offensive. Partly it was because the maquettes, the models, were produced in cheap materials such as plaster and were simply unable to withstand the weather when put on temporary display in their proposed locations. There was also a deeper problem: the “realistic” statue is by its nature a monument to an individual, whereas the socialist or Communist Revolution, by its nature, was a collective achievement. Thus the form was at odds with the content it was supposed to represent. It seems that Tatlin’s plan for a monument, not to an individual but to an institution, was an attempt to resolve this problem. For the same reason it was not to be made by traditional methods of modeling or carving, and not from traditional materials such as clay or bronze, but “constructed” out of iron and glass. The Revolution, then, was a collective endeavor—a movement of classes and organizations, as distinct from the bourgeois preoccupation with the rounded, self-possessing individual. It was also international in scope. Accordingly, one of the most important decisions taken by the Bolsheviks was to inaugurate a new, Third International, an organization intended to coordinate and spread the Revolution abroad. Tatlin’s plan therefore had a dual aspect; while on the one hand intended as a monument to this new organization as opposed to some individual, it was also an attempt to escape the relative passivity of the role imposed by the traditional form of the “monument.” By attempting to put into practice the principles of a synthesis of painting and sculpture with architecture, thereby intervening in the lived environment rather than standing to one side of it, it was to be not merely a monument to the Third International but its working headquarters—the site of the world Revolution. Many avant-garde artists sought a role in the revolutionary process, whether that lay in furthering it, as in the Soviet Union, or in helping bring it about, as in Germany. Both Tatlin’s 2 ambitious project, and the wider conception of an art practice that it embodied became influential models. The tower and its maker seem to have constituted a particularly appropriate modern subject for representations by artists who themselves aspired to a “realist” imagery of the modern. As with Tatlin, the technique used in such images had its origins in avant-garde Cubism. Montage seemed to offer one of the most productive devices for representing the ‘simultaneous” or “fractured” aspects of modern experience Such aspects of modernity and technology are evident in a montage by Lissitzky, based or photographs taken during the actual making of the model of the tower. Another example is [Raoul] Hausmann’s Tatlin at Home. This formulates its “portrait” of the modern artist through the suggestion of mechanism and calculation rather than instinct and improvisation; and, through the substitution of a photograph of an anonymous “modern man” for Tatlin’s face, conveys his status as part of a collective rather than individualist process. [...I]t is possible to see Tatlin’s tower, like Malevich’s Suprematism, not as remote from artistic realism but as influenced by it. But, it is important to note, this approach sees artistic realism, not as a given, particular quality (such as “likeness”) but as something that needs to be transformed, just as art and reality themselves had changed so profoundly. Since its inception, the avant-garde had had an uneven relationship with social and political emancipation. Sometimes (in the case of Renoir, for example) it was indifferent.

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