SELIM KHAN-MAGOMEDOV

RAKhN AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF ART HISTORY

During the late 1910s and early 1920s the artists of the Russian avant- garde and the academic establishment constituted two very different camps. On the one hand, this division granted the practitoners of radical art an essential freedom to develop their creative ideas, and, on the other, it enabled historians and educators to maintain a certain distance from, say, Suprematism and Constructivism. Classical art historians watched the development of the avant-garde as if from the sidelines, ana- lyzing the process, but rarely involving themselves in the polemics of the many groups - a disengagement, incidentally, that helped them survive the fragmentation and demise of the avant-garde and to make it through to the 1930s with minimal losses. True, there were a few theorists such as Boris Arvatov, Osip Brik, Boris Kushner, and Nikolai Tarabukin who did elaborate new concepts that coincided with what artists and architects such as Alexander Rodchenko and Alexander Vesnin were doing; and, as a matter of fact, they, too, fell victim to official censure and persecution. In some areas of creative endeavor, especially architecture and the performing arts, the practitioners were themselves the theorists and the critics - such as Sergei Eisenstein, Ilia Golosov, Vasilii Kandinsky, Nikolai Ladovsky, Kazimir Malevich, Vsevolod Meierkhold, Vladimir Tatlin, and A. Vesnin. Untethered by the weight of classical art history, the Russian avant-garde was able to accelerate its momentum and formuiate extremely radical theoretical conceptions. But, as we know too well, the respite was brief and the organizations, movements, and theoretical apparatus of the avant-garde were soon maimed or destroyed. While the leading representatives of classical art history were not members of the artistic avant-garde, they still lacked their own profes- sional incorporation, one that might have enabled them to enjoy psycho- logical protection from their more boisterous colleagues. RAKhN offered this protection, helped them to preserve a measure of independence from the internecine warfare of the various avant-garde groups, and also to retain a high level of art historical and critical professionalism. A para- dox, however, lies in the fact that it was one of the leaders of the avant- garde movement, Kandinsky, who was largely responsible for the incep- tion and establishment of this autonomous scholarly center for art history. Actually, RAKhN was not without precedent, since the first attempt to create a structure of this type had been INKhUK, organized in March 1920 out of the so called Soviet of Artists [Sovet masterov], which had begun its activities in January 1920. Some of the visual artists (led by Konstantin Yuon) who joined INKhUK emphasized the priority of practic- al activity, while others (led by Kandinsky) regarded the center as a scholarly and theoretical organization - and it was this viewpoint that gained ground. Kandinsky first developed a theoretical plan for INKhUK which was accepted as the program for the Theoretical Section and then, throughout the spring of 1920, contributed to six general meetings de- voted to basic issues of organization, almost all of which he chaired. The INKhUK personnel changed rapidly, becoming more a collective of like- minded intellectuals searching for new paths of artistic evolution and it soon became clear that the primary theoretical direction was to be the development of a science of art. In the spring and summer of 1920, therefore, Kandinsky's Theoretical Section (renamed Section of Monu- mental Art) was the focus of the major part of the research at INKhUK. The INKhUK Program, signed by Kandinsky and accepted on May 12, stated: "The aim of the Institute's research is to find a discipline whereby the basic elements of the individual arts, as well as of art in general, will be investigated. This will be carried out on both an analytical and a syn- thetic level."' A Section meeting on May 19 resolved that INKhUK should be part of IZO Narkompros. Kandinsky's Monumental Art Section worked intensively for seven and a half months, slating more than a hundred topics for discussion at its general meetings and sponsoring over twenty scholarly lectures. Kandinsky, always intent upon combining theoretical elaboration and laboratory research, tried to introduce scientific discoveries and strategies from the positive sciences into the Section and, with this in mind, encour- aged contact with scientific organizations, including the Institute of Psy- chology (so as to learn more about the laboratorial methods and appara- tus used in the experimental study of audio and visual perception) and the Institute of Physics (so as to learn more about experiments in the study of sound). In fact, after visiting the Institute of Physics, Kandinsky suggested - at a general meeting of INKhUK on December 20, 1920 - that the Section's research be coordinated with that of the Institute of

1. V. Kandinsky, "Programma Instituta khudozhestvennoi kultury' (1920). Translation in K. Lindsay and P. Vergo, eds., Kandinsky. Compfete Writings on Art (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), Vol. 1, p. 457.