2/8/2017 Revolution: Russian Art review from utopia to the gulag, via teacups | Adrian Searle | Art and

ian Searle | Art and design | The Guardian

Revolution: Russian Art review from utopia to

the gulag, via teacups
Royal Academy, LondonIt was a new dawn. Tractors caused uproar and muscular workers got to the
factory on ying bicycles. Then came the purges

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

Adrian Searle
Tuesday 7 February 2017 07.00GMT

L enin 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 ve-
year plans, their goodbye signatures for the condemned, dead letters all.
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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.

Signatures for the condemned VI Lenin and Manifestation,

1919, by Isaak Brodsky.

Photograph: State Historical Museum

It is all happening. Salute the Leader! is stencilled on the gallery wall, in this rst 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 conict, 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, lm 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 conict.
Questions about arts purpose its freedoms
and imposed responsibilities vie with one
another throughout.

Suprematist crockery A Cup for Serving Tea, 1931, by Lyudmila

Protopopova. Photograph: Petr Aven Collection

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Textile Workers, 1927, Alexander Deineka. Photograph: State

Russian Museum/DACS

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 ag-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.

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Blue Crest, 1917, by Wassily Kandinsky. Photograph: State Russian

Museum

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 sh on a plate before him, a bottle and pipe at his side, somewhat dierent
bare necessities to those proposed by Lissitzky.

Painting and lm extolled collective farm labour and captured the astonishment that greeted
the arrival of the rst 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 nd 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 rst 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, lling 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
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astonishing display of his own work, which has been largely duplicated in one of the high
points of the exhibition.

Bolshevik, 1920, Boris Mikailovich Kustodiev. Photograph: State

Tretyakov Gallery

Malevichs last version of the Black Square (the rst 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
gurative 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 dierent 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 ocial 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 ying machine he worked on for several years. It circles the
white space, part dragony, part bat. Tatlin saw it as a ying bicycle for workers, made from
steamed, bent ash and fabric. It looks as light as air. It never ew 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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