On Art

...On Art DESIGNING A NEW SOCIETY BY JAMES R. MELLOW THERE can scarcely be a more absorbing chapter in the history of modern art than the rise and fall of the Russian avant-garde in the decade following the Revolution...

...Two views emerged...

...Artists painted the huge street signs that sprang up in city squares exhorting the workers to increase their productivity...

...A number of the items—Tatlin's monument, Lissitsky's 1925 Wolkenbugel project done in collaboration with the Dutch architect Mart Stam—are familiar from histories of architecture and design...

...Constructivism, internationally the most influential style to emerge from the sometimes contradictory elements of the Russian vanguard, presented itself as a pragmatic effort to bridge the gap between art and industry...

...A spiraling, openwork ramp intended to be twice the height of the Empire State Building, its internal core was to consist of three variously shaped halls, each rotating at a different speed...

...Works range from paintings and sculpture (with additional examples lent by private and public American collections) through architectural models, industrial products, and examples of graphic and theatrical designs...

...Art in Revolution, the exhibition devoted to this brief, historic episode, is currently on view at the New York Cultural Center...

...The painted two- and three-dimensional geometric forms situated along the walls and cutting across corners do more—for me, at least—to define the actual limits of the room than to suggest an infinitely extendable area...

...Others considered that the communal way of life which had grown up during the war years provided an ideal for the new housing plans...

...Aside from Camilla Gray's more comprehensive and heavily illustrated study of the Russian vanguard, The Great Experiment, published by Abrams some years ago, the London catalogue strikes me as the most valuable document on the subject that we have...

...A. V. Lunacharsky, People's Commissar of Education, boldly proclaimed: "If revolution can give art a sword, then art must give revolution its service...

...To be sure, many of the designs for public monuments, office buildings and communal housing look suspiciously Utopian, particularly given the strained economy and the technological backwardness of the country during its early Bolshevik years of political upheaval, war and disastrous famines...

...Similarly, Lissitsky's Proun-Room, though designed to demonstrate his conception of an infinite architectural space, is really a work of pure art, an environmental construction...

...In the fervor of the moment, artists were among the first to consign the fine arts of painting and sculpture to the dustbins of history: The socially acceptable arts of architecture, design, film, and theater went out to meet the masses...

...Kandinsky, Chagall, Ga-bo, Pevsner and others went into exile in the West...

...By the mid-'20s, when Lenin's New Economic Policy began to bring some necessary order, increasing artistic conservatism and bureaucratic intervention became apparent...

...I think particularly of Rodchenko's worker's costume and some of his furniture designs, Po-pova's fabric designs and the posters of the Stenberg brothers, several of them advertising American films like Buster Keaton's The General...

...In its model stage—the closest it came to realization—it was a marvelous piece of Constructivist sculpture, but hardly a functional example of architecture...

...I do suspect, however, that the greater attention given to less familiar artists and architects may be due to their later orthodoxy, after the radical phases of the movement had been suppressed...

...They decorated the brightly painted agitprop trains and boats that, loaded with more artists, poets, filmmakers, went out to all the provincial cities, carrying the message of the Revolution...

...It was an era of optimism in the new society and in the political function of art...

...It is clear now, of course, that this brave new world of radically experimental forms of art (futurists like Kandinsky, Malevich and Lissitsky, having been initiated into Cubism, had already pushed on toward pure abstraction) owed its existence to the political chaos and economic instability of the period...

...There are scale models (constructed in English art schools for the London showing) as well as photographic blowups of architects' sketches...

...Available at the present exhibition is the very necessary catalogue of the London show (Art in Revolution, $2.50), containing essays by English and Russian writers...

...That exhibition ran into difficulty when the Russians objected to certain of the displays?notably, the reconstruction of Lissit-sky's Proun-Room, a three-dimensional illustration of the artist's theories on architectural space—and threatened to withdraw...

...The 1922 "Manifesto on the Disarmament of Theatrical Cinematography," reprinted in the catalogue, quaintly commends the "American adventure film, the film with apparent dynamism, the creations of the American Pinkerton film business, and the rapid change of imagery and the close-up," but goes on to state that the Americans' use of such techniques was too haphazard...

...Espousing the cause of modern technology and the use of modern materials, its hero was the "artist-engineer...

...Yet his 1920 monument to the Third International was purely visionary and symbolic...

...Then the Stalin era made Socialist Realism the ruling esthetic dogma...

...But there was no clear idea at this early stage of what the new society required...

...The early experimental efforts of the vanguard artists were viewed as the borrowed and decadent forms of capitalist societies...

...And several, including Ginsburg's 1927-28 communal housing scheme, point up the difficulties encountered by the Soviet architects: How, for example, to create an architecture for a new society when its social forms have not been established...

...the poet Mayakovsky announced, "Let us make the streets our brushes, the squares our palette...

...Among the more intriguing displays is the Vesnin brothers' 1923-24 design for the Pravda newspaper offices, a modestly scaled square tower sheathed in glass...

...As Khan-Mahomedov explains in the catalogue: "During the second half of the '20s, many towns published plans for building complexes consisting of schools, shops, laundries, nursery schools, etc...

...But then, recognizing the conflict between radical aspirations and the crude realities of the situation is basic to an understanding of the Russian vanguard's fate...

...But many, like Shukhov's tall, graceful 1926 Moscow radio transmitter, are unfamiliar and impressive...

...THE ARCHITECTURE section is, I think, the most interesting and informative in the show...

...The New York edition, comprised of some 300 items, does include the Proun-Room, as well as the remade 1915 corner-construction by Tatlin to which the Russians had also objected...

...Some architects believed that the basic format for a proletarian home was a small individual house with a Russian stove as opposed to the multistoried flats of the bourgeoisie with their lifts and bathrooms...

...It is a striking piece of transparent Cubist architecture, surmounted by an audiovisual center: loudspeaker, searchlight, numerical clock, rotating billboard...

...The theater, under Meyerhold and Tairov, attempted to break free of the box-stage, reaching out into the audience...

...The essays by O. A. Shvidovsky and S. O. Khan-Mahomedov, both from the Moscow Institute of Art History, suggest that Soviet writers can now afford to take a more relaxed view of some of the extreme phases of Russian avant-garde art than I had supposed...

...Vanguard artists, designers, architects—Tatlin, Rodchenko, Lissitsky, Malevich, Pevsner, and Kandinsky among them—rose to positions of prominence in the cultural affairs of the Soviet government, directed the art and technical schools, decided on matters of artistic doctrine...

...The lowest, cube-like chamber, for legislative sessions, was to turn on its axis once a year...

...It was also an era of heady slogans...

...The Proun-Room was therefore closed off from public viewing...

...The show thus affords a more comprehensive view of the movement in all its phases than do most histories of modern art, where attention is usually given to the early abstract paintings and sculpture of artists like Malevich, Tatlin and Rodchenko...

...Tatlin's slogan was "Neither to the right nor to the left, but to the needed...

...Like Tatlin's tower, it indicates the importance given to communications and propaganda...

...I get the impression that one of the reasons for the later bureaucratic disaffection with the avant-garde was that it was forever making visionary demands the state was in no condition to fulfill...

...Probably the most awesome theatrical spectacle of the period occurred on the third anniversary of the Revolution when, on the actual site in Petrograd, a cast of literally thousands reenacted the storming of the Winter Palace and the overthrow of the Kerensky government...

...Above that, a pyramidal-shaped room for assembly meetings was to revolve once a month...

...One wonders, too, about its practicality, in view of the cold climate, the heat-loss involved, the technical inadequacies of the times...

...One wonders about the liberal use of glass in these early plans: The material seems almost to have assumed a symbolic significance, demonstrating that there was nothing to hide in Soviet society...

...What the exhibition and the catalogue illustrate rather impressively are the speed and vitality of the entire vanguard's response to the new social needs of the moment, and the level of much of the design, which still looks surprisingly modem and up-to-date...

...And the cylindrical-shaped room at the top, an information and propaganda center, was to rotate once daily...

...It is a revised version of last spring's controversial show at London's Hayward Gallery, organized by the Arts Council of Britain with the collaboration of the Soviet government...