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Angelina Lucento on Moscow Vanguard Art: 1922-1992

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Angelina Lucento on Moscow Vanguard Art: 1922-1992 Margarita Tupitsyn. Moscow Vanguard Art: 1922-1992. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. viii + 278 pp. $55.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-300-17975-0. Reviewed by Angelina Lucento Published on H-SHERA (July, 2019) Commissioned by Hanna Chuchvaha (University of Calgary) Anglophone scholars have expressed a deep principles despite a lack of state fnancial and in‐ interest in the Russian avant-garde since the 1962 stitutional support (p. 1). She demonstrates how publication of Camilla Gray’s The Russian Experi‐ artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Lidia Masterko‐ ment in Art. The canonical narrative, which va, Erik Bulatov, Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr stresses the creativity and radicality of the Rus‐ Melamid, the members of Collective Actions, Niki‐ sian and early Soviet avant-gardes’ abstract can‐ ta Alekseev, Ilya Kabakov, and Vagrich Bakhchani‐ vases and constructivist objects and denounces an managed to produce vanguard works despite Soviet “totalitarian” realism, began to develop the fact that most encountered difficulties with shortly after Gray’s introduction to the topic, at the Soviet state. These artists, Tupitsyn argues, the height of the Cold War. While recently a turned Moscow into the site of an alternative his‐ younger generation of scholars has begun to re‐ tory of socialist art, continuing modernism’s ex‐ consider the formal and political functions of periments while also questioning and reinventing modern realism, including its Russian and Soviet its forms. iterations, the narrative of the creative avant- The frst two chapters of Tupitsyn’s book, “In garde versus an oppressive state-sanctioned so‐ Defense of Nonobjective Art” and “The Specters of cialist realist style continues to maintain a promi‐ Formalism,” are devoted to the postrevolutionary nent position within the history of modern Rus‐ avant-garde. In these chapters, the author offers a sian art. In her latest book, Moscow Vanguard detailed discussion of the debates between those Art, 1922-1992, Margarita Tupitsyn works within early Soviet artists, such as Evgenii Katsman, who this narrative. She emphasizes in particular how supported fgurative realism as the most appro‐ the Moscow Artists’ Union (MOSKh)—the state in‐ priate form of socialist art and the avant-garde stitution that determined the “official” style of So‐ artists who preferred suprematist abstractions viet visual art—controlled what artists could and and utilitarian objects. Although Brandon Taylor could not produce from 1932 onward (p. 28). and Matthew Bown brought the significance of Tupitsyn seeks to provide the frst comprehensive these debates to light in the 1990s, they remain text that details how a small group of Soviet under-recognized. Tupitsyn’s discussion, together artists, whose art she calls “vanguard,” managed with other recent scholarship on the topic, pushes to produce innovative, creative works that re‐ them to the fore once again.[1] The author’s de‐ mained connected to modernism’s experimental scription of the Moscow art scene’s contentious at‐ H-Net Reviews mosphere during the period between 1917 and gument’s like Tupitsyn’s about the influence of 1932 is unique, however, in that it emphasizes the artists’ personal relationships on the fate of the significance of Evgenii Katsman’s role in the ad‐ avant-garde. vancement of fgurative realist painting as the Moving beyond the complex factors that led most appropriate form of Soviet art. Katsman was to Malevich’s eventual marginalization and a de‐ one of the founding members of the Association creased overall interest in the early abstract of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR). He works of the avant-garde, in her second chapter, was also an eloquent and vocal advocate of the Tupitsyn draws our attention to the founder of group’s platform. Tupitsyn devotes large sections suprematism’s late fgurative works. Recently, of her frst and second chapters to an analysis of Malevich’s oeuvre has become a topic of both Katsman’s role in the art debates, focusing on the public and scholarly interest on an almost global artist’s rivalry with Kazimir Malevich. Katsman scale. Despite this, however, the impressionistic and Malevich were married to the Rafalovich sis‐ portraits he produced after 1933, such as his mut‐ ters—Katsman to Natal’ia and Malevich to Sofia. ed 1934 Self-Portrait and his Portrait of Una, from For a time during the Civil War, the artists and the same year, have not yet been subjected to a their families lived together at their mother-in- multivalent scholarly examination. In 1934, the law’s home on the outskirts of Moscow. They ar‐ MOSKh members were beginning to establish so‐ gued bitterly about the most appropriate art cialist realism as the official style of Soviet art, forms for socialism, with Katsman advocating re‐ and Tupitsyn argues that Malevich turned to the alism and Malevich, suprematism. Based almost expressive freedom of impressionism, the exclusively on her reading of the artists’ respec‐ painterly phenomenon that many view as the be‐ tive memoirs, Tupitsyn argues that Katsman’s ginning of European modernism, in order to con‐ public denunciations of both suprematism and tinue his vanguard experiment with the forms of Malevich himself led the early Soviet art estab‐ modernist art. In so doing, she suggests that these lishment to turn against the abstract painter, ulti‐ late pictures be read as painterly innovations that mately pushing him to the margins. Apart from offer a new take on impressionistic form. They do the painters’ memoirs, the Russian archives con‐ not simply rehash what had already been tain many largely unexamined documents relat‐ achieved in the late nineteenth century. Tupitsyn ing to both Katsman’s and Malevich’s interactions also suggests that like Malevich, Aleksandr Rod‐ with the organs of early Soviet power. In her arti‐ chenko returned to abstract painting in the early cle “Staging Soviet Art: 15 Years of Artists of the 1940s in order to free himself from government- Russian Soviet Republic, 1932-33,” Masha Chleno‐ imposed constraints. In her view, Rodchenko’s va, for example, has already demonstrated rarely discussed late works, such as the line paint‐ through a careful analysis of archival documents ings in the Streamlined Ornament series, consti‐ relating to exhibitions and curatorial practice in tute a return to origins of the modernist experi‐ the early 1930s, that multiple factors contributed ment—a move she argues that Rodchenko made to the eventual marginalization of avant-garde in order to continue the project in creative inno‐ artists, including art debate discourse, sharp vation that he too had begun before the Revolu‐ changes in the political sphere, and the increasing tion, and thereby contributed in his own way to influence of public opinion on the meaning of so‐ the Moscow vanguard. cialist art.[2] It will be interesting to see what kind With the exception of Rodchenko’s linear ab‐ of nuanced dialogue about the complex history of stractions, Tupitsyn does not discuss works pro‐ early Soviet art will continue to emerge from the duced during the Second World War, so it is diffi‐ interplay of examinations like Chelnova’s and ar‐ 2 H-Net Reviews cult to speculate as to how or even if, in her view, ly medium as a “picture-object” (p. 88). According Soviet wartime art occupied a place within the to the author, Kabakov combined ready-made ob‐ state-mandated style/vanguard dichotomy that jects from Soviet everyday life with painterly sur‐ propels her argument. Chapter 3, “Reinventing faces to demonstrate that in the USSR “an aesthet‐ Abstraction,” begins instead with the Thaw ic object had no function outside of its ideological (1953-67, approximately). Here the author offers a exploitation” (p. 88). Tupitsyn argues that the “pic‐ detailed description of the Soviet turn to abstract ture-objects” that Kabakov produced throughout painting, which occurred during the years imme‐ the second half of the 1960s, together with Vitaly diately following Stalin’s death in 1953. She ar‐ Komar and Aleksandr Melamid’s humorous per‐ gues that artists such as Vladimir Slepain, formance-installation Circle, Square, Triangle Vladimir Nemukhin, and Lidia Masterkova took (1974-75 and 1978), which mocked suprematist up the experiment with the elements of painterly painting’s totalizing, utopian imperatives, marked form that Rodchenko had begun in the early the beginning of the vanguard’s turn away from 1940s. This younger generation of vanguard “the genealogy of non-representation” toward artists engaged in self-critical, modernist experi‐ new experiments in site-specificity and the lin‐ ments with line, fatness, color, and faktura, the guistic experience of the Soviet everyday (p. 97). tactile component of painting that according to In chapter 4, “Dangerous Luncheon on the the Russian-language concept of the medium ap‐ Grass,” the author shows how in 1974 The Bull‐ peals directly to sensate experience. Through a dozer Exhibition sounded the death knell for the careful examination of the artists’ personal ar‐ vanguard’s pursuit of the abstract. Relying not chives and a close reading of the Soviet and West‐ only on artists’ recollections but also on her own ern press, Tupitsyn also describes the abstract documentary photographs and personal experi‐ painters’ reaction to American abstract expres‐ ence of the moment when the Soviet police forces sionism, which they had the opportunity to see in quashed the large, open-air exhibition of mostly person during The American National Exhibition abstract painting that Oskar Rabin and other in Sokolniki Park in 1959. She demonstrates that artists whose work was not supported by the state the Moscow abstractionists did not simply copy organized in Moscow’s Beliaevo neighborhood, the Americans’ modernist techniques. They en‐ Tupitsyn explains that the results of the exhibi‐ gaged with them dialogically as they tried to de‐ tion were positive. Artists publicly protested the velop a form of communicative expression that vulgar actions of the Soviet authorities, and sever‐ could transcend, through their own understand‐ al unofficial artists were permitted to exhibit their ing of the means of pure painting, the Soviet works in small and unusual state-funded spaces.
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