Intro Level Reading on Supremativism and Constructivism

"At Footing, Constructivism Was Not And then Much A Method Of Artistic Organization As Of Social Regulation."

THE Evolution OF Modern RUSSIAN fine art often seems like a theatrical scenario, so stylized is the impression nosotros have of it. A lot that has reached u.s. appears detached from brownie, surreal, fictive even. Of course, we have the paintings to await at (or some of them), and the designs and plans—these are all concrete enough. Simply the difficulty isn't so much there (though I believe we are not notwithstanding looking at them hard enough) merely in the surrounding ethos. Once you get interested enough in the painting, sculpture or blueprint to want to know more than about its background everything becomes all of a sudden far more complicated than one could imagine. There are biomechanical and psychotechnical systems, confused relationships to the State, internecine warfare between different factions, and those more than specific instances in the plot where truth and legend seem compounded: the whole Caspian fleet transforming itself into a noise orchestra, that photograph of Tatlin by a home-made oven, Foregger's troop of machine-dancers, the peripatetic consumptive Lissitzky reforming Western fine art from a Swiss sanatorium, and so on. All of this—the polemicism, the histrionics, the activism—tin so enthrall united states of america that instead of illuminating the art it draws attending from it and offers itself, the human free energy, as the focal cadre.

This gene becomes particularly crucial when nosotros come to consider Constructivism, for at basis Constructivism was not so much a method of artistic organization as of social regulation inside which art, conceived of as a "social condenser," could part. Simply if Constructivism is a special case, the diversion of attention from objects to reasons for objects is no less in the case of near critical approaches to the pure art of that menstruum, and this because here too theory played a highly significant role. And by theory I don't merely mean artistic theory, the expression of formal methods relating to the creation of objects, merely a far more speculative interest in extra-creative affairs, social and spiritual, insofar every bit they impinged on art-making. This broad preeminence of theory in Russian abstract fine art has somehow tended to make it resistant to formal criticism; rather information technology appears too often as illustration for a life fashion the more remarkable the more we know about it. This is also pregnant for such other abstractionist movements as existed contemporaneously outside Russia and which also put much weight on extra-artistic (social and spiritual) theory; and indeed i is inclined to believe that the major obstacle to our understanding of this fine art is not then much the well-known slenderness of our background knowledge of it, rather that our keenness in piecing together text and illustration (equally George Kubler describes the iconological method) gives to the word an undue precedence, and the paradigm often escapes the rigorous visual scrutiny it requires.

This is non, of grade, to wish a moratorium on investigations of the groundwork of this period. Plainly we will never know such crucial things every bit simply how Malevich came to pure brainchild or what it was that transformed Kandinsky's painting in Russia, if nosotros have nothing more to rely on than at present. And it is most encouraging to anyone interested in Russian fine art to witness the contempo spate of scholarly and curatorial commitment to it.

Currently we have a pocket-size Rodchenko evidence, organized past Jennifer Licht, at the Museum of Modern Art, and at Cornell, "Russian Art of the Revolution," over sixty works brought together past Thomas Leavitt and Sarah Bodine. Every bit exhibitions, these last ii are not primarily educational in the sense of presenting any very new information or assessments. The Rodchenko show, almost entirely drawn from the Museum of Modern Art's ain collection, is really no more than than an introduction to his piece of work. At Cornell, there are some unfamiliar works shown, only the primary intention was to survey the period by and large, including representative works by the major figures. Though limited in its sources (with one exception) to American collections, it does this admirably. With a menstruum like Russian art where the availability of works is restricted and 1 is grateful to encounter annihilation and under almost whatever conditions, information technology yet comes as a special pleasure to see a survey like this: unpretentious in its ambitions, including enough "keys" to accept one through the catamenia and enough of the unusual to modify one's thought of it.. Although its scale inevitably means that one will miss certain accents according to 1's preference, its modest presentation seemed to me a model of what an exhibition of this kind should be. The organizational separation of pre-Revolutionary painting, Suprematism, Constructivism and theatrical experiment simply presents the evidence for our looking. What, and then, are the crucial issues here? They all relate, I suggest, to the essential non-purity of the art: the way in which its self-referential graphic symbol is modified past clan with factors from extra-creative areas, factors which are both the stimulus for its existence and however potential weaknesses to its formal integrity, of which the four well-nigh important are those of modernism and socialism, and machinism and theatricalization.

. . . information technology is the same old story: in the beginning grade is always neglected for content
—Engels, 1893.

When Lenin was in exile in Zurich, the Dadaists were his most neighbors and one of their associates once challenged the degree of his radicalism. His reply: "I don't know how radical you are or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough. One tin can never be radical enough; that is, ane must always try to be as radical as reality itself"ⁱ One wonders, nevertheless, whether both parties were talking almost the aforementioned thing. The artists' insistence on radicalism was that of a complete break with the by and though they connected to apply formal devices inherited from tradition these were imbued with a novel direction, itself stimulated by their desire to be new men. And every bit for the Dadaists, the artists of revolutionary Russia tended to believe that "yesterday" (in Anatoly Marienhov's words) was beingness "crushed like a pigeon / By a motor / Emerging madly from the garage." Once more and once more in the writings of revolutionary artists we see the revolution represented every bit a chiliad and total dividing line to marking the kickoff of the nowadays. Marxism, however, cannot be so confronting the past. Although the present is seen to dominate the past, considering of the nature of dialecticism, the past is likewise the content of the present. Hence, the aggressively "modern" interpretation of art, although inflamed by political events, is in no sense an institutional response to them. Lenin, nosotros remember, felt inclined to point out that "We are much too much iconoclasts . . . Why worship the new equally a god to exist obeyed just because it is 'new'? That is nonsense, sheer nonsense. There is a great deal of conventional fine art hypocrisy in information technology, as well, and respect for the art fashions of the West."² His reference to Western fashions is apt, for when it comes to it, the "revolutionary" styles were imported bourgeois ones. What differs, however, is the intention of the artists who employed them.

In the tailoring of Western post-Cubist modes to the new state of affairs nosotros take an fantabulous reminder that what is of import in studying artistic developments is non so much the development of private elements or motifs per se as the development of the place of such elements or motifs inside the structural complex of the piece of work of art and hence within the milieu of artistic tradition. What to Picasso was an extension of Cubist painting into three-dimensionality was applied by Tatlin every bit a "civilization of materials" which stressed far more an inherent content of tangible realities. This evolution of functions becomes particularly significant for Russian revolutionary art when information technology attempted to prescribe a deterministic content system for itself in the Vkhutemas grade experiments. Here was a willingness to remold inherited forms, a deliberate intent to "fix" chemical element and office for all fourth dimension: and we see the awarding of such systems in painting, architecture, theater design and then on. This approach is, of course, anti-experimental, or, more than precisely, the rationalization of earlier experiment into a kind of eternal vocabulary. Merely as history was supposed to finish and the state wither, so art was to be transformed into containers of catholic quintessences, bones forms which would give "meaning" to the social contexts in which they were used.

The immediate source for this kind of Formalist experiment was not only architectural in origin merely derived as much from Malevich'ssystem of elements, that is, from a system decidedly a-temporal in its philosophical basis. While it is true that Malevich in his writings draws a line through Cubism and Futurism up to Suprematism, this is more to explain the developing purity of his method than to insist on its especially "modern" characteristics. In contrast, the fine art of Constructivism was "modern" in a polemical way, and that information technology was to develop into an anti-art was somehow inevitable. The far greater commitment of artists like Tatlin and Rodchenko to Communist ideals places them inside that category of modern art where progress was more than than a means to new forms but itself was the container of value. The sociological differentia in their definition of art meant that they could never simply maximize fine art's natural bailiwick to the extent that Malevich did, but rather looked upon it as an instrument for socialist construction "in the same class as the metallurgical industry," as Eisenstein put information technology.³ And the Constructivists were right that theirs was the true art of the Revolution. Information technology could never have flourished in the way information technology did had not the Revolution so impressed the fact that historical circumstances are non inevitable and natural but the man-made products of factors which can be swayed. In one case the Revolution made history thus accessible, the "modern" could become a critical ingredient in a quite new way. The "product" theories of the Art of the Commune which preceded Constructivism immediately following the Revolution made this more or less explicit. "Art is just work" wrote Kushner;⁴ and the concept of "the work of art," of art equally labor for producing textile appurtenances, followed. Rod-chenko's achievement showed both the possibilities and the limitations of such a stand. The truly modernistic artist turned out to be the one who left "fine art" behind, to whom art was a ways of changing environment by turning to the crafts and for whom manufactory production was the ideal. For an artist convinced of the virtues of collectivism anything which distinguished artist from masses, producer from consumer, intellectual from manual worker, could only exist an embarrassment. And high art makes all these distinctions.

Our work must be based on a close and careful study of the program viewed in the light of our political and social conditions. Its essential goal must be the definition and cosmos of the SOCIAL CONDENSERS of our age.
—Moses Ginzburg, 1928.

To transform the nature of the social electric current: such was the appetite of the Constructivists. And following the tradition of social utopian artists they called themselves mechanics, to stress their anonymity of arroyo.⁵ If the nature of Marxism hadn't itself forced their path towards the industrial ideal, the tradition of modernism would take done and so. The high points of Revolutionary mechanolatry—Tatlin'due south tower, Lissitzky's Electro-Mechanical Show, and so on—are well known. But what seems as interesting is that relationship of machinism and the cult of efficiency which characterized post-Revolutionary society.

The ambition towards efficiency and economy is a mutual gene linking Suprematist painting, Meyerhold's biotechnics, Kuzmin's communal housing projects, indeed, the whole concept of the "work of art" and its organization. This is oneof the paradoxes of the Revolutionary art-life alliance. While the democratic or universalist pretensions of that period insisted on an esthetic of total application through either a highly reductive system of elementary forms or a cede of the separate status of fine art, the parallel technological idealism could not heip but foster an contrary anti-autonomous kind of rationality. The machine itself is oft presented equally being responsible for social fragmentation and breach just it is in fact in the concept of efficiency, which underlies the application of modern technology, that the crucial value factors are to be noted. It is not the factory itself but the aligning of human labor forth factory-formulated analogies, that is, according to measured units, which dictates stylized identities.^vi Information technology is not to exist wondered at, nonetheless, that when social identities were relatively undefined the pressure to manufacture simplified roles was considerable. Simply every bit a Malevich or a Lissitzky viewed his art every bit the isolation of variable units to exist controlled as raw material, and so the builder Kuzmin advocated a communal house wherein "supercollectivized" life was regulated for its inhabitants from intervals of two minutes ("to the cloakrooms") to eight hours ("work in the mine").⁷ And if this case is extreme, nosotros have but to think of what might exist called the Chicago-syndrome in Soviet life, the fanatical response to industrialized America which affected such fields every bit trip the light fantastic toe (Foregger's importation of the Fox Trot because he saw it as the unconscious realization of the rhythms of American auto life), theater (Meyerhold'south biomechanics were ofttimes dubbed "Taylorism" after that version of time-and-motion study) and music (the "engineerists" group, the jazz enthusiasm, etc.), too as architecture, literature and so on. This was actually looking to some outside ideal which seemed to have produced not only the kind of results but the kind of human beings worth emulating.

Two pairs of structures dependent on the thought of economical manipulable elements may be observed within Russian Revolutionary art. The first pair is best expressed through the dissimilarity of Malevich and Tatlin. Suprematism was in ground involved with the creation of a kind of diagram for associations, an illusionistic image of elements in complimentary space ("a color semaphore in its infinite abyss"), which would stand equally an illustration, or more than precisely a display (that Malevich'south abstraction derived from his theatrical work seems very significant when one considers his work as a kind of presentation of controlled artifacts, of substantially fictive character, inside a decidedly dramatic arena),⁸ this display of forms in an artificial space "serving to condense and organize a wide range of connotations, free of the irrelevancies, distractions, and qualifications of which daily life mainly consists,"^ix that is, intended to express cosmic, nonmaterialistic properties. In contrast, Tatlin, though similarly involved with the aligning of detached elements, wished to refute whatsoever illusionistic possibility and simply to express the latent nature of the materials he used: material would suggest form. Form would exist relevant to material. And the artist creating a new earth of material objects would wish to print the coordinating constructiveness and material economic system in everyday life.

The second pair of class-space structures is best illustrated in the theater, where the two main directions of experiment involved the creation of stylized brandish areas for pseudo-mechanical movements or the structure of a kind of behavioral ecology space of participational involvement. While these two directions often overlapped, the first is best seen in the innovations of Tairov on the footing of the "stylistic" theater where the director was elevated to a total controller and shaper of materials who "exhibited" actors and settings alike in a consciously "theatrical" and conventionalized manner to make a cogently unified display. This too characterizes Meyerhold'south work prior to his interest with circus-based forms, when his ambitions become more and more than relevant to the idea of total theater, rejecting on the way Tairov'southward consistent esthetic structure for a far more turbulent and unresolved dynamic of contrasts, disruptions, and dialectic "editing." But the true realization of the total environmental space took place in such events as Evreinov'southward reconstruction of the storming of the Winter Palace or such projects equally Annekov's "The Liberation of Labor" and Meyerhold's Khodinskaia Field project, where thousands of actors and many tons of equipment from airplanes to armored trains played out a theatricalization of daily life. But what links the two directions is the sense that the theater should be transformed into a decidedly "conventionalized" medium. Post-obit those pioneers like Appia or Craig, the managing director became "a despotic drill-master" who "must play fictively with the scenic materials."" That actors and "extras" are so manipulated epitomizes how, in th evolutionary state of affairs, reality as such gave way to symbol. And symbol, as Maeterlinck understood, "cannot bear the agile presence of a man."¹¹

Amidst this depersonalization and idealist simplification one dissenting vox was that of a former Potemkin mutineer, Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose publication of a Utopian novel, We, led to his break with the revolutionaries. In a mathematically controlled earth of cubic houses and glass cities where the "tables of hourly commandments" map out life like Kuzmin's schedules he presented the potential dangers of uncritical modernism in a way never equalled: infinite rockets, concentration camps, brain surgery, electronic music, the Iron Curtain, and and then on. To Zamyatin the choice in such a world was simple: "Happiness without freedom, or liberty without happiness. They were not offered a third!"¹²

Our life is a theater piece, in which nonobjective feeling is portrayed past objective imagery.
—Malevich, 1927.

These groundwork factors have been discussed hither because the socialistic "modern" and the technologically "theatrical" are crucial to an understanding of the special premises within which Russian Revolutionary art operated. They as well go far to explain why much of this period's fine art may resemble diagrams for something non withal fabricated or be emotionalized symbols for states of reality rather than simply paintings or sculptures. This is what I mean by insisting that by and big this is not a pure art and cannot be this because its theory of art is not pure. The dependence on modernism as content rather than as vehicle inevitably means that art itself becomes the vehicle rather than the result. Similarly, the theatricalization of course in space might well get an amanuensis of persuasion instead of a self-referent entity. With this in mind we might appreciate the available options open to artists at this time, the kind of choices possible.

At Cornell, Kandinsky's Cherry Oval of 1920 is hung in a room mostly containing paintings and drawings by Malevich. This contrast of a single work by an creative person whose natural gifts were on the side of painterliness, of bear upon, atmospheric spaces and rich and heavy orchestration of color, literally surrounded by pictures dependent on ascetic linearity, explicitly prescribed space, programmatic color contrast and geometric drawing could not exist more than striking either in purely esthetic or in historical terms. Kandinsky's painting represents, of grade, the moment of his transition between these 2 sets of systems: an example of his willful tightening and flattening of his earlier manner to repudiate the last vestiges of natural allusion.^xiii But what in Malevich is a regulated play of dynamic forces based on definitive geometric forms, totally non-volumetric in implication, which depend for their consequence on flatness and contrast is in Kandinsky but a somewhat stilted and mechanical receptacle for forms whose interdependence and whose relationship to the picture surface and support is never clear. It seems foreign that 2 artists, both predisposed to a rather mystical estimation of the role of art, should display such very opposite understandings of their pictorial language. What is pertinent hither, however, is that Malevich'southward spirituality was ever tempered by an appreciation of fine art derived notfrom a philosophical foundation in quite the same way as Kandinsky'south but rather from a keen awareness of recent artistic developments.

A comparison of their respective theoretical writings only confirms this. Kandinsky refers of course to others' paintings, only has as much to say virtually music and spiritualism, and his formal pronouncements seem a priori and categorical when compared with the very remarkable mass of formal assay, criticism and classification with which Malevich's books are packed. Malevich'due south disquisitional ability still appears outstanding (when one has get accustomed to his oddness of way); and especially crucial is the fact that he responded so well to Cubism, which he recognized as being the real testing block for avant-garde art. Kandinsky, in contrast, owed far more to a combination of Jugendstil and Impressionism. He writes in his autobiography that the 2 most of import influences on his fine art were Monet'south Haystacks and Wagner'southward Lohengrin.¹⁴ While this appears quite natural to the antebellum Expressionist it is hardly a fitting preparation for the kind of rigorously controlled reductive practitioner he wished to be from the fourth dimension of his Russian interlude.

This is non, of grade, to say that Kandinsky's "cold catamenia" works could not be successful merely that one simply has the impression that his systemization of formal units seems at present strangely inappropriate in its subsuming of painting, that is, the art of painting, to an overtly didactic purpose. It cannot be said plenty that the critical dilemma in such work is to distinguish between pedagogical importance and artistic value. The point is that a critical fixation of tendencies, on uncovering theoretical or ideological systems, such as is demanded in a historical written report of an art which depended so much on such systems approves the systems information technology uncovers at its peril, for to corroborate (or dismiss) trends in the a particular is to judge intentions, not results. While any worthwhile historical criticism must scrutinize its subject to elucidate non but its firsthand individual structure but its place within tradition and the broader systems within which it operates, if fine art is seen as nothing only its place in tradition or system, history becomes more important than art and nosotros offset making judgments of "importance," not value; and, every bit crucial, nosotros show ourselves willing to effect a greater or smaller caste of value dispensation in the name of the tradition or system nosotros support. This may seem too obvious to exist said, simply is worth saying here precisely because the so integral human relationship of art, theory and society in this period may obfuscate our perception of value. Social and creative responsibleness are not identical, neither does convincing theory brand disarming art.

Malevich is a continual reminder of this. Compared to Kandinsky, his theoretical propositions are hard to decipher: his definitions of Suprematism waver alarmingly from one text to some other. In contrast,where Kandinsky'south pictures are confused, his are lucid and his theories seem comfortably redundant when confronting the work. The irrationality of his interpretation of the function of space in painting, his idea of a kind of cosmic continuum inside which bladder elemental forms, is indeed supported by the works themselves: their metaphorical implications are never absent; just what is more striking is the way in which these free elements are yet anchored to the film surface as frontal masses—and even their spatial overlappings cannot destroy this. Information technology has been suggested that Malevich'due south cognition of Leger's stressing of contrast in the development of Cubism was crucial to his germination of the Suprematist method.¹⁵ What, however, may have been as important is his "alogical" prelude where collaged elements were included in the paintings (Limerick 0.x at Cornell is an example of this manner).^sixteen Taking his atomic number 82 from Tatlin's reliefs of 1914, Malevich briefly experimented with the place of existent physical objects in their relationship to the plane of the piece of work. The very fact that in some paintings large objects were fastened to the surface, then removed and their images painted instead, seems to confirm that having first established the place of the object within a concrete syntax he could and so go on to create illusionistic representations of solid elements which accept all the weight (and sense of being "fixed" to the surface) of the "real" thing. Hence, though Malevich'southward work depends heavily on what is all-time called an effect of dramatic artifice, and although he drew back from a purely formalinterpretation of the art of painting because of his insistence on mystic consciousness, the paintings and drawings go on to print in their real physical substantiality.

Malevich'due south disciple, El Lissitzky, is represented at Cornell by his Chad Gadya "Jewish" lithographs, his Victory over the Sun suite, the famous photomontage of Tatlin working on his "tower," the Story of Two Squares book, and several of his Prouns. Nosotros have got so used to hearing Lissitzky called the great eclectic or the bridge between Suprematism and Constructivism that we sometimes tend to forget that while he was these things and while much of his importance was as a propagandist, the very inventiveness of his oeuvre makes him an artist very much to be reckoned with in his own correct. In 1 sense, Lissitzky accomplished that which Kandinsky plant hard: the system of related apartment and illusionistic elements every bit if floating in a controlled space; and he accomplished this precisely because his intentions were never primarily those of a painter. His infinite is decidedly architectural and volumetric within which he makes utopian images quite outside the limits of a painter's range. Proun was for e'er riot the system of surfaces but the control of space, in a full sense representing what I called before the theatricalization of course in space so every bit to become a persuasive agent, a kind of plan for hereafter activeness. Lissitzky himself says as much when he defines ("Proun'southward power is to create aims") and talks of its development from an invented diagram to the organization of life forms: "Proun begins every bit a level surface, turns into a model of three-dimensional infinite, and goes on to construct all the objects of everyday life."¹⁷ This itself accounts for his somewhat misleading estimation of Malevich's Suprematism, for he wished to insist that the only management for fine art was abroad from the integral plane toward an "irrational" illusionism of a plastic space which permitted "infinite extensibility into the background and foreground." This is exactly the effect of his Prouns, which give the impression of weightless elements forming themselves in centric combinations but momentarily arrested in their colloidal break, around which "the viewer must circumvolve like a planet . . . (while) the picture . . . remains immobile in the centre."¹⁸

It is too interesting to note how Lissitzky was able at times to transform his method into a narrative ane: his body of Prouns seen as a whole function analogously to scenes in the life of forms (here once again, the theatrical comparing is appropriate) while the Story of Ii Squares and the Victory over the Dominicus lithographs illustrating his "Electro-Mechanical Show" does this explicitly. This latter work (stimulated by Malevich's interest in Kruchenykh'southward opera and probably owing much of its theoretical foundation to Prampolini's ideas)" is translated, notwithstanding, into a personification of what in the text itself is pure abstruse form. The result, in some ways like to Duchamp'due south malic molds, is a foreign celebration of the depersonalized Ubermarionette.

Such a affair as neutral fine art in a course society does not and cannot exist.
—Communist Political party Resolution on Literature, 1924.

The whole idea of Constructivist art is an anachronism. By the time Constructivism equally such was defined in 1920 information technology had abandoned its pretensions of existence an art form, and the full general tenor of its theorists' writings takes the class of warnings confronting making art objects as such. "Be on your guard confronting becoming just another esthetic school. Constructivism in art alone is cipher," states an editorial in LEF in 1923.²⁰ But the editorial also warns the Constructivists "against becoming practical-artist handicraftsmen." At that place was, however, little alternative to either of these choices. Constructivism was never in a position to "become the supreme formal engineer of the whole of life" equally it wished. Indeed, no sooner had it been created than the N.East.P. removed official support and left the "artists" to rely more than and more on private patronage. Information technology was somehow inevitable that the only non-art field open to Constructivism was applied-art handicrafts.

Its strength equally art is, nevertheless, considerable:both in the form of art objects before 1920 and in typographical, theatrical and architectural design after that date. Puni's 1915 Structure at Cornell is a vigorous aggregation in the Picasso-Tatlin tradition, and makes one wonder what became of this kind of art-making when Constructivism was disseminated into Europe. (I will return to this question shortly.) Similarly Rodchenko's early on works at the Museum of Mod Art have the same kind of uncompromising directness of arroyo. His famous Black on Black of 1918, in response to Malevich, is far more earthily tactile than any reproduction-tin convey. Fifty-fifty more than striking (though we exercise accept to rely on photographs for our knowledge of these) are his woods and metal constructions of around 1919–1920: rough, simple, even rather clumsy at times, they print in their transformation of unembellished materials into considered configurations of mass and space. (In this context it was surprising that the Rodchenko exhibition independent no photographic documentation of the very remarkable decorations undertaken by Tatlin, Yakulov and Rodchenko for the Moscow Café Pittoresque in 1917. While Rodchenko's specific role in the creation of what Ehrenburg called "the only café that all the 'artistic sewers' in Europe's capitals would envy" might accept been that of a probationer, it is surely of seminal importance for an understanding of his development.)

Post-1920 Constructivism is represented at the Rodchenko exhibition by his typographic work and photography. Here we discover what likewise occurred with Lissitzky: a tremendous vitality of invention—striking alphabetic character faces, photomontage, etc.—gradually giving way, or rather becoming disguised, in a purely propagandist format. Once art became the vehicle and not the terminate of the endeavor it could be used, it seems, to drive anywhere; in this instance to a commemoration of Stalin's gymnasts or to that era'due south fondness for deep dark-brown images of workers. And notwithstanding, 1 nevertheless recognizes what Rodchenko had hoped to repudiate: his dependence on the power of his artistic sensibility.

Since the Constructivists never had the chance to develop their architectural interests in the fashion they desired, many of them went into the theater; and the room of theater designs at Cornell shows something of the vitality of that area, with examples by Exter, Tatlin, Popova, Vesnin and Yakulov. In addition models of the Gabo-Pevsner La Chatte and the Vesnin Homo Who Was Thursday sets are to exist displayed. I figure to whom attention should exist drawn is Alexandra Exter, whose structure blueprint for Scene Plastique et Gymnastique (previously seen at the Museum of Modern Art's "Machine" show) confirms one'due south impression that here is a very gifted artist, also little known, around whom some futurity exhibition should certainly be based. Perchance as renowned equally anything for her role as referee in the Malevich-Tatlin fist fight, she was Tairov'south principal designer andwas as responsible equally the more than well-known figures for the great advances in the Kamerny. Moreover, her painting of white ladder-like forms enclosing a fragmented composition of sections of interiors, still lifes and architecture which is shown in the company of Larionov and Gon-charova at Cornell certainly puts the latter Rayonnist to shame. While Exter surprises with a tightly organized dynamic painting, Goncharova appears very much a prettifier of surfaces and altogether overrated.

The impact of the Cornell bear witness (to exist at the Brooklyn Museum in June and July), every bit with any assembly of Russian Revolutionary art, must finally leave i with a strange sense of loss—that the tremendous promise of that era never had a proper opportunity to run its course. Moreover, when i looks at what became of the Abstractionist-Constructivist fashion when it was exported into Europe in the mid twenties information technology is with frustration that especially the pioneering efforts of Malevich and Tatlin—the future promise of their achievements—was allowed to degenerate. The piece of work of their heirs, of Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus painters, and their followers through to Vasarely or Biederman, show an ever-increasing sterility and flatly mechanical parody of what was one time a truly revolutionary art.

———————-

NOTES

1. Quoted in Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets, New York, 1951, xviii.

two. V. Clara Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin, New York, 1934, 12.

3. From -a statement in: J. Freeman, 1. Kunitz, L. Lozowick, Voices of Oct, New York, 1930, 231.

iv. Cf. Richard Sherwood, "Introduction to LEF," Form, 10, October 1969, 27–thirty.

five. Shaker craftsmen-artists were also called "mechanics" to ex-' press their lack of distinction betwixt fine and applied arts. Cf. E. D. & F. Andrews, Shaker Furniture, New Oasis, 1937.

6. Cf. Daniel Bong, "Work, Breach, and Social Command," Dissent, Summer 1959; reprinted in Irving Howe, ed., Essential Works of Socialism, New York, 1970, 291–296.

7. The complete schedule is listed in: Anatole Kopp, Boondocks and Revolution, New York, 1970, 153 & 155.

8. Also worth noting in this context is that Gordon Craig visited Moscow in 1911 to put on a production of Village at Stanislaysky's Moscow Arts Theatre and there constructed a setting of his famous "screens" and promoted his Ubermarionette theories. We know of Russian directors' enthusiasms for Craig and for Appia and considering Craig'south highly "spiritual" tone in propagandizing his ideas ( 'the identify is without course—one vast square of empty space is earlier us .. . and from that nothing shall come life . . .' etc.) Malevich might well take been receptive towards them, and his 1913 move into brainchild via theater possibly have been motivated from this management. Cf. Craig's "Hamlet in Moscow: Notes for a Curt Address to the Actors of the Moscow Art Theatre," The Mask, Vii, May 1915, 109–110.

ix. Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics, Urbana, Sick., 1967.

10. Adolph Appia, Music and the Art of Theatre, Coral Gables, Fla., 1962, 41.

11. Maurice Maeterlinck, Menus propos, Le Théâtre, Paris, 1890.

12. Cf. the business relationship of Nosotros in: Jürgen Rühle, Literature and Revolution. A Critical Study of the Writer and Communism in the Twentieth Century, New York, 1969, 36–39.

xiii. Cf. Cloudless Greenberg's notation on Kandinsky in: Fine art and Culture, Boston, 1965, 111–114.

14. In: Hilla Rebav, ed., In Retentivity of Wasilly Kandinsky, New York, 1945, 53.

15. Cf. Troels Andersen, "Malevich on 'New Art'," Studio International, CLXXIV, 892, September 1967, 100–105.

xvi. The provenance for this work is not known and the exhibition organizers would appreciate any information relevant to it.

17. "Proun" (1920), De Stijl, 5. 6, June 1922; reprinted in S. Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, Greenwich, Conn., 1968, 343–344.

18. "Suprematism in world construction" (1920) in: El Lissitzsky, 327–32B (referring in fact to Malevich.)

19. Cf. Prampolini'south remarkably similar manifesto on "Futurist Scenography" reprinted in E. T. Kirby, ed., Total Theater. A Critical Anthology, New York, 1969, 95–98.

20. Reprinted in Class, 10, Oct 1969, 32.