Russian Avant-Garde. Evgueny Kovtun

      Pyotr Konchalovsky, San Giminiano, 1912.

      Oil on canvas, 92 × 72 cm.

      The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

      Olga Rozanova, Fire in the Town (Urban Landscape), 1914.

      Oil on metal, 71 × 71 cm.

      Private collection.

      Lyubov Popova, Composition with Figures, 1913.

      Oil on canvas, 160 × 124.3 cm.

      The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

      Alexandra Exter, The Bridge (Sèvres), 1912.

      Oil on canvas, 145 × 115 cm.

      National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kiev.

      The Unovis group in Vitebsk produced several plays. On 6 February 1920, the Suprematist Ballet was performed, with set designs by Nina Kogan; the opera by Alexei Krutchenykh and Mikhail Matiushin, Victory over the Sun, (a dramatic interpretation) was put on with sets designed by Vera Ermolaeva. On 17th September of that same year, thanks to the Unovis group, the productions of Mayakovsky’s Mystère-Bouffe and War and Peace were performed. Several exhibitions of the Unovis group took place in Vitebsk. Twice, in 1920 and 1921, the school of Vitebsk exhibited its work in Moscow at the Cezanne club of VKhUTEMAS. The work of Malevich, Ermolaeva, Lissitzky, and that of a group of students from the school of Vitebsk, was also shown in a Russian exhibition organised in 1922 in Berlin by the Soviet agency Narkompros. David Sterenberg, ‘curator’ of the exhibition, observed: ‘The work of the students from the VKhUTEMAS, the Vitebsk workshop and the Sytine’s school has been well received.’[29] The ‘Suprematist renaissance’ ended as quickly as it started. In 1922, Malevich left for Petrograd and with him the main members of the Unovis group. The Unovis group was the beginnings of the INKhUK group in Petrograd.

      Later, the idea of organising a museum for the new art in order to show the best work to the general public developed among the innovative painters soon after the Revolution. By the time the works were exhibited in official exhibitions, they had often lost their novelty and relevance. The organisation commission of the Museum of Artistic Culture, which included Nathan Altman, Alexei Karev and Alexander Matveiev, met on 5 December 1918. The Art of the Community (Iskusstvo Kommuny) newspaper published a list of painters whose work would be acquired by the Museum. Among the one hundred and forty three names representing the Russian Avant-Garde were: Malevich, Tatlin, Filonov, Rozanova, Larionov, Goncharova, Altman, Le Dantyu, Matiushin, Mansurov and Ermolaeva. The painting department of the Museum of Artistic Culture was set up in the Miatlev House in Saint-Isaac square, at the former location of the Commission on People’s Education, and opened to the public on 3 April 1921.

      Drawing, icon painting and industrial aesthetics departments were created afterwards. The Museum of Artistic Culture was the first Avant-Garde museum in the world to exhibit contemporary works of living painters, works that, if events had followed their usual course, could only have been exhibited years later. The Museum survived a few years. Its collections, admirably chosen and reflecting the whole spectre of the Russian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s, were then transferred to the Russian Museum in Leningrad where Nikolai Punin and Vera Anikieva organised a Department for the new movements in art, inaugurated for the sixth anniversary of the Revolution.

      David Burliuk, Bridge (Landscape from Four Different Points of View), 1911.

      Oil on canvas, 97 × 131 cm.

      The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

      II. Schools and Movements

      Kazimir Malevich, The Aviator, 1914.

      Oil on canvas, 125 × 65 cm.

      The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

      The Institute of Artistic Culture

      Research work was carried out in the Museum of Artistic Culture as early as 1921. Malevich gave lectures there: (‘Light and colour’, ‘The New Proof in Art’), by Matiushin (‘On the new space for the painter’) and by Ermolaeva (‘The System of Cubism’). This was how the idea of creating a research centre to study the new issues in art came about. On 9 June 1923, during the conference of the Museum taking place in Petrograd, Filonov made a report in which he proposed, in the name of the ‘group of left-wing painters’, to transform the museum into a Research Institute on the culture of contemporary art. But why did the creators themselves also want to play the role of researchers? To answer this question, one must highlight several points. Traditional art critics appeared helpless regarding the issues raised by the new art. For twenty years they had mocked the Russian Avant-Garde, making even deeper the divide created between the public and the painters. Even the most open-minded critics, such as Alexander Benois for example, tried to slow the development of the new artistic trends. Beginning in 1912, the Russian Avant-Garde started to ‘break free from Cubism’. Those who remained attached to Cubism missed out to some extent on the new developing avenues of art. These new directions needed a theoretical foundation, as had been the case at the outset of Cubism in France.

      The painters working within the organisation of a research centre considered the development of the visual form to possess an inner logic, in which nothing was arbitrary. On the contrary, there is a ‘universal line’ in the movement of art that is consistent and ineluctable. By studying the logic in the development of visual structures, one can not only observe a strict and objective law in the past but also define the ‘vector’ orientated towards the future. Thus, this vector cannot be invented or constructed, one can only ‘help’ this ‘universal line’ of development ‘going through’ by itself, in deleting anything fortuitous. There was still another motive inducing the study of ‘artistic culture’, a motive that was maybe less visible in the arguments of the founders of the Institute, but certainly the most important. Each artwork is a ‘small world’ in itself, the materialised result of the interaction of the spiritual movement of space and time. It is in the universality of this pattern of the Universe that resides the ability of art to pre-empt and anticipate science. That is why the ‘painting’, as Mansurov observed, ‘is a hymn to what has not yet appeared. There are limitations: art and science. Art is the first phase that anticipates a new form of technical and therefore, social relationship.’[30] The painters had observed the prospective significance of the spiritual structures and patterns embodied in works of art and understood the necessity of studying them, though not only for the needs of art.

      The Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) opened in August 1923. It was the first research centre in the world where one studied contemporary and living art through its new displays and exhibitions, instead of the art from the past. The Institute mainly intended to examine the Post-cubist phenomena in artistic culture. Malevich was elected Director of the Institute, Punin became his assistant and Tatlin, Matiushin and Mansurov managed various other departments.

      The Additional Element

      Malevich managed the Pictorial Culture department, Ermolaeva the Laboratory of Colour and Yudin the Laboratory of Form. The department was studying five movements of the new art – Impressionism, Cezannism, Cubism, Futurism and Suprematism – by conceiving the theory of the additional element in painting, an attempt to explain the logical succession of art forms. Kazimir Malevich possessed, in addition to his creative talent as a painter, the mind of a researcher longing to understand the causes for the creation of new forms in art and the logic of their development. The ‘Black Square’ required by Malevich’s intense efforts to demonstrate theoretically that Suprematism was not an isolated and rootless phenomenon but a whole new step in the development

29

‘Russian exhibition in Berlin. Extract of the conversation with D. Sterenberg’, Zrelichtcha, No. 19, 1923, p.15.

30

P. Mansurov. Letter to E. Kovtun of 3rd August 1970, E. Kovtun’s Archives, St Petersburg.