What Is Artistic Form? Munich-Moscow Luka Skansi
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
WHAT IS ARTISTIC FORM? MUNICH-MOSCOW 1900-1925 LUKA SKANSI Munich was, at that time, the embankment that contained in Eastern Europe the influence of French painting with its barbaric ‘pontaventism’.1 Science is the materialization of the reality for the reason, art is the materialization of the reality for the eye.2 For a large part of Russian artistic culture at the turn of the century, Munich represented not only one of the most important centres of innova- tion in the artistic production in Europe, but rather an alternative to artistic events, subsequent to Impressionism, that spread slowly from Paris all over the continent. On closer inspection there is a fully-fledged pilgrimage towards the schools, the ateliers and the institutions of the Bavarian capital, starting from the 1880s and continuing until the outbreak of the First World War. The reasons for this migration are only partially cultural or scientific: it was a common practice for Russian middle and upper class families to send children to study in Germany, especially for Jewish families, due to constraints imposed by the Czarist regime on their access to higher education.3 In the winter semester between 1912 and 1913 there were about 5000 Russian students registered at German universities, while in Munich alone there were 552 of them.4 Il’ya Repin, one of the greatest painters of Russian realism, called Munich the “greenhouse of German art”, or the “German Athens”. Together with Pavel Chistyakov, the master of an entire generation of Russian painters at the turn of the century (such as Polenov, Vrubel’ and Surikov), he recom- mended their students from the St. Petersburg Academy attend painting schools in Munich, in particular, the private school of the Slovenian artist Ažbe Anton (1862-1905), considered in those years to be one of the most important pedagogues in Central Europe.5 Ažbe’s school was at the time the largest private academy in the city and one of the most popular destinations for young painters, together with the atelier of the Hungarian painter Simon Hollóssy,6 attended by Vladimir Favorsky, the future dean of the Vkhutemas. Since 1891, the year the school was founded, to 1905, the year of Ažbe’s death, a consistent number of Russian artists from different generations spent a formative period here. The most renowned among them were Valentin Serov, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Ivan Bilibin, Vasily Kandinsky, Aleksey Javlensky, Igor’ Grabar (who would be Ažbe’s first assistant for some years)7, Vladimir and David Burlyuk, Kuz’ma Petrov-Vodkin, Aristarkh Lentulov and Mikhail Matyushin. Some of these artists, once back in Russia, would join the Moscow faculty of arts (MUZhVZ), or would operate within their own private schools; others, such as the Burlyuk brothers, Kandinsky or Matyushin, would organise exhibitions, events and publications that would have a decisive role in promoting the avant-garde movements on the national and international art scene. Not all Munich art scene is linked obviously to Ažbe’s school. Munich was a complex cultural universe at that time, where various artistic trends coexisted, starting from the emerging languages of Secession, the birth of expressionist movement, the neoclassical review promoted by figures linked to the Werkbund and to the first hints of abstract art in the work of the artist-architect August Endell, and the painting circle of the Neu Dachau-Gruppe.8 In general, some of the crucial figures of the future Moscow avant-garde art scene spent a formative period in Germany. Lissitsky, for example, attended the Technische Universität in Darmstadt, and his entire career would be characterized by a strong relationship with German and Swiss contexts.9 The sculptor and author of the Realist Manifesto Naum Gabo studied in Munich starting from 1910. His education interests ranged from physics and theoretical physics – he atten- ded courses given by Wilhelm Röntgen and Arnold Sommerfeld – to art history and art theory: he was an assiduous student of Theodor Lipps’s and Heinrich Wölfflin’s lessons.10 Furthermore, Germany represented an attractive pole for the young Russian students of history and the theory of art and architecture. The main Russian art historians of the first half of the 20th century shared a formation experience in Germany, and particularly in Munich in the departments of Art History, Aesthetics and Philosophy, where they be- came acquainted with the theories of Konrad Fiedler, Theodor Lipps, August Schmarsow, Cornelius Gurlitt, Adolf Hildebrand, Heinrich Wölff- lin and Paul Frankl. The aesthetic theories of the German “formalist school”, the treatises on Raumkunst, the Einfühlungstheorie, as shall be explained later in the essay, would be quickly absorbed and endorsed by Aleksandr Gabrichevsky, Aleksey Sidorov, Vladimir Favorsky, Igor’ Grabar, Mikhail Alpatov, art historians, Munich students and Germano- philes: in the years following the Revolution, these scholars have been particularly active in disseminating German texts and theories in Russia, and their scientific and cultural activity in the twenties and thirties is considered as a fundamental scientific endeavor in establishing a modern iskusstvovedenie [the discipline of art history] in the Soviet Union. In this context, it is important to note that some of the renowned and influential German essays in art and architectural history have been available in Russian in the first two decades of the 20th century: Heinrich Wölfflin’s Die Klassische Kunst, Renaissance und Barock and Kunstge- schichtliche Grundbegriffe, Adolf Hildebrand’s Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst, Albert Brinckmann’s Plastik und Raum.11 The aim of this text is not to enumerate all the experiences that Russian scholars had in relation to the German prewar context, but rather to demonstrate how rooted the German theoretical studies were in the formation of the Russian artistic, architectural and in a wider sense aesthetical culture, between the 1910s and 1930s: a repercussion that has often been neglected but, as will be made clear in the following analysis, was simply latent. There is no specific stylistic influence, no migration of “taste” for a specific trend or for specific artistic or architectural stylemes. On the contrary, this influence can be better traced by following a broader theoretical discourse that affects the same foundations of artistic produc- tion in a paradigmatic way. This is the reason why it is found in different fields of artistic expression, in aesthetic theories, manifestoes, teaching methods, often in seemingly incompatible environments, or in figures that apparently could not be assimilated to the same cultural milieu. It derives from one crucial epistemological problem that, in fact, arose in Germany starting from the last decades of the 19th century: the notion of space in figurative arts, or better, the problem of the spatiality of the artistic form [Raumkunst, prostranstvennost’ formy]. This notion represented an almost exclusive object of reflection and research for artists, architects, art historians, philosophers of this period; it was faced as a cultural “problem”, as an epistemological shift that helped to redefine the instru- ments for understanding reality and the relations that artistic and intellect- tual production establishes with reality. In other words, these intellectuals redefined the “coordinates” of the artistic object, its actual status: it was no longer solely observed, measured and judged by its material and linguistic component, but it was conceived as the result of both its volumetric and its spatial component. The spatial aspect took such a decisive role that it became the basis upon which to build a new definition of the aesthetic value of the artistic and architectural works. But what exactly is the spatial component of form, and why did this abstract concept become the object of reflection of such an important in- tellectual community between the end of the 19th century and the 1920s? And to which extent can an influence on Russian artistic, architectural or urbanistic practice really be discussed? The new critical category – Raum – introduced a key component into the sphere of artistic and architectural thought: a sensory, empathic relation between a human being and a work of art, or, speaking in architectural and urbanistic terms between man and his physical environment. Without going too deeply into the development of German aesthetic thought of the late 19th century, and trying to avoid in this discourse the complex nuances that differentiate the single theoreticians, we may assume that the notion of space is nothing but a way of defining the “irrational” aspects of the works of art and architecture. These aspects have been identified as essential in the distinction between an artifact and a work with artistic value. For German theorists, the artistic component of a form and the phenomenological quality of form cannot meet its physical, volumetric or utilitarian component: the analysis requires a different focus in order to comprehend the reasons behind its aesthetic “status”. Different theorists have proposed their own answers concerning this question: for example Vischer, with his definition of empathy (Einfühlung) – a process by which the mind tends to find its self-representation in art –, Lipps with his Raumästhetik – the idea that the psychology of the forms should convey a more general syntax of art forms –, Wölfflin with his interest in the visual aspect of architecture – the psychologising as a true