Best of Russia --- Culture --- Soviet Era.

Before investigating Constructivism and other post revolutionary Soviet works of art and design a summary of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde’s history must be reviewed.

Specialists in art when writing about this period are unanimous in firstly assessing the situation in Russia at the end of the 19-th, beginning of the 20-th century as a very tense and complicated one. It is true: pre-revolutionary situation in the country was followed by a number of bourgeois-democratic revolutions, then the World War I and, finally, the October Revolution of 1917. The Civil war broke out thereafter, and changes of the post-war period brought in military communism, devastation, hunger and fear. This period was truly very complicated not only in Russia, and it influenced all the kinds of artistic life - literature, music, painting, architecture, ballet, etc.

This period in art is justifiably called The Silver Century. At that time Russia was the country of contrasts: big cities, industrial growth, development of all the capitalistic forms, on the one hand, and - dark, far away villages, sleepy provinces on the other. Chosen layers of society attained peaks in education, culture and sciences, whereas the destiny of other society layers was determined by illiteracy, drinking and miserable life. All civilization stages seemed to coexist at that time.

This was the period during which the Russian Avant-Garde reached its height, developing the radical new styles of Constructivism, Futurism, and Suprematism. Although the country still faced enormous challenges, there was a widespread sense of optimism and opportunity.

The rising influence of European culture in Russia during the 17th and 18th centuries brought Russian artwork closer to the familiar traditions of western painting. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that the next great body of uniquely Russian artistic styles arose, having developed in conjunction with liberal forces of social reform.

From the start, the modern art movement was concerned with breaking away from the classical tradition and creating a new kind of art that was intimately engaged with the daily life of Russian society. It developed a renewed interest in traditional Russian art forms, including both decorative folk art and, of course, icon painting. From decorative art it gained an appreciation of the power of abstract geometrical patterns - lines, shapes, and color were used to construct rhythms and energetic forms, not necessarily to depict objects or actual spaces. The re-examination of icon painting made painters more aware of the power of a flat, two-dimensional visual perspective. In other words, they realized that they could treat the canvas like a canvas, rather than trying to give the impression that it was a window into a space.

From the end of the nineteenth century until about 1910, the modern art movement remained most interested in traditional aspects of Russian life - religion and village life were as influential as the life of the great cities. As the forces of social reform became more closely linked to the rising population of industrial workers, Russia's avant-garde artists turned increasingly to the factory and the frenetic pace of urban life for inspiration. Brilliant colours, simplified and sharply angular forms, and an emphasis on the liberatory energy of the modern world became the basis for new and increasingly abstract compositions. Cubo-Futurism, Rayonnism and Suprematism were the most important of the styles and schools that emerged during this time. Among their most prominent artists were Kasimir Malevich, Vasily Kandinsky, Vladimir Tatlin, Mikhail Larionov, and Anna Goncharova.

The first few years of Soviet rule were marked by an extraordinary outburst of social and cultural change.

After the 1917 Revolution, the Russian Avant-Garde leapt into the service of the new Bolshevik regime. It seemed to promise just the sort of break into a new world, and sweeping away of the old, that they had been working for in art for years. They produced political posters, organized street pageants and fairs, and, most notably, carried out the design of the country's great public spaces for anniversary celebrations of the Revolution. Caught up in the new regime's emphasis on the importance of industrial power, they began to bring to composition a sense of the rationality and technological focus of industrial work and design. Constructivism, as this style is known, continued to evolve into the late 1920s, when the conservatism of the Stalinist state renounced the Avant-Garde in favor of Socialist Realism.

The term, Socialist Realism, probably first occured in print in an article in the Literary Gazette in May 1932. It stated: "The masses demand of an artist honesty, truthfulness, and a revolutionary, socialist realism in the representation of the proletarian revolution." In 1933, Maksim Gorki published an important article, "On Socialist Realsim", talking of "a new direction essential to us - socialist realism, which can be created only from the data of socialist experience."

At the break of the 1930s, the Soviet government has "terminated" the Avant-garde, formally. The hundreds of paintings purchased by various museums were hidden away in storage cellars or sent out to small provincial museums, where most perished, though some enthusiasts were able to save a few works. Drawings were destroyed. And as to the artists themselves, they had to either change their skin and proclaim the regime, or remove themselves to teaching, organizing exhibitions and other such peripheral jobs. And even that didn't always save their lives and their secret "freedom" of expression. Many have paid with their lives or their freedom for their will to create differently, to innovate. Many lived in poverty, on the verge of hunger, and the exceptions had to serve the lies and empty slogans, and pay the toll.

Repudiated by the Stalinist government and neglected in the west, the Russian Avant-Garde has only recently received the attention it deserves. The Russian Museum in St. Petersburg possesses the finest collection of its work.

Natalia Goncharova, "Colelcting Fruit", late 1900.

Vasily Kandinsky

Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was born in Moscow into a merchant family. While a student at Moscow University, in 1889, he got commissioned by the "Society for Natural Science, Ethnography and Anthropology" to go on a research expedition to Vologda.

The strong folk art of northern Russia made a lasting impression on him, and the results of his trip made an impression on the Society, which chose him their member.

In 1892 Kandinsky got his Law degree. He became a lecturer at the Moscow University. He pursued his academic career but at the same time paid more and more attention to art. Thus in 1895 he took the post of art director of a publishing house in Moscow.

The year of 1896 was a turning point in Kandinsky's life – he went to Munich and began his art studies at Azbe's art school.

Active creativity and organizational capabilities always attracted different intellectuals who were in search of new tendencies in art to Kandinsky.

Indeed, organization and teaching were to become the main strands that would run alongside Kandinsky's artistic activities throughout his life. He was never solely a painter, but a theoretician, and organizer at the same time. Gifted author he expressed his views on art and artistic activity in his numerous writings.

Vasily Kandinsky. In Blue. 1925. Oil on canvas. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany.

But it was his landscapes, built on color dissonances, which gradually took him to his most famous works, works of abstraction. The play of colored spots and lines in his landscapes gradually pushed out the images of the real world.

The outbreak of the First World War took Kandinsky by surprise, with his Russian passport he at once became a hostile alien in Germany. He immediately fled to Switzerland and after three months returned to Russia.

Kandinsky settled in Moscow, feeling the necessity to get new Moscow impressions. In February of 1917 he married for the second time; his new wife Nina Andreevskaya was 27 years younger.

In the 1920-30s Kandinsky's name became world famous. He was proclaimed the theoretician and leading figure of abstract painting. In addition to teaching courses, Kandinsky became actively involved in delivering lectures; his exhibitions took place almost yearly in Europe and America. Kandinsky died in France in 1944 at the age of 78.

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