Russian avant-garde

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The term Russian avant-garde is used to describe an artistic era in Russia (from 1922 Soviet Union ) that took place between around 1905 and 1934. The integration of visual arts , literature , music and theater in stage , figurine and poster designs also came into their own.

Essence

The Russian avant-garde was a process of upheaval and renewal in all areas of Russian art. On the one hand, she orientated herself on the latest French art developments, while on the other hand she identified herself with her close connections to the artistic folk tradition. All artists of this era united the effort to create a synthesis of folk elements, modern trends and the contemporary tendency to do justice to abstraction. With the latter, an attempt was made to build on the technical achievements of that time. An art of great sovereignty arose between Western influences and Eastern traditions. A whole range of art movements such as Neo-Primitivism , Cubo-Futurism , Rayonism , Constructivism , but also analytical art , projectionism and cosmism shaped this development.

One of the highlights of this epoch is defined as the exhibition “Karo-Bube” from December 1910 to January 1911 and the artist group of the same name “ Karo-Bube ”, which was formally founded in October 1911 from the participating artists . The exhibition was organized by the artists Aristarch Lentulow , Michail Larionow , Kasimir Malewitsch and Natalija Goncharova . In 1912 the exhibition " Donkey's Tail " followed.

This development was initially promoted by the cultural policy of the Bolsheviks . The Suprematism that Malevich developed was even a form of mass agitation for a short time after the October Revolution of 1917. Malevich and El Lissitzky were appointed to chairs at the Moscow Art School. The Russian avant-garde understood the new communist rule as a promoter and pioneer of avant-garde art.

On April 3, 1921, the Museum of Painting Culture opened its doors in Petrograd and presented itself to the public with 257 works by 69 artists. Its most important organizational characteristic was that only avant-garde artists should have control of the museum themselves. According to their ideas, a work plan for a revolutionary new version of art history should be drawn up. All the leading figures of the Petrograd avant-garde took part in this experiment: Kandinsky , Tatlin , Malevich, Filonov , Matyushin , plus theorists headed by the art historian and writer Nikolai Nikolayevich Punin . In 1924, after violent internal disputes, the museum was integrated into the Institute for Artistic Culture (INChUK) , which in turn achieved the status of a “state” institute ( GINChUK ) a year later .

The influence of the Russian avant-garde on the recent development of Western art is now considered to be undisputed. Without The Black Square on White (1915) by Kasimir Malevich, his future Suprematist Composition White on white , or the series of Black Paintings (1917-18) Rodchenko and his primary colored triptych (1921) would be the evolution of abstract art of Yves Klein about , Barnett Newman or Ad Reinhardt are unthinkable; so also z. B. Works of American Minimal Art by Donald Judd and Carl Andre , which can be traced back to the materiality and functionality of early sculptures by Tatlin and Rodschenko.

After Stalin came to power, the theoretical approach of the avant-garde could not be reconciled with the political demands for a functional art. Malevich was banned from exhibiting and publishing. The composers were able to avoid further persecution by collecting folk music from the ethnic groups of the Soviet Union . Other artists migrated to the west. This was followed by a centrally controlled art of agitation, which is also known as socialist realism .

Visual arts

Among many other artists, Chagall , Kandinsky , Rodchenko , Popova and Malevich were the most famous representatives. While Kandinsky sought the spiritual in abstract art and wanted to express this in his pictures, Malevich, with his geometric formal language, was more oriented towards Suprematism. Both were united by the endeavor to bring the unity of the world into harmony between soul and cosmos. The ideas of theosophy and those of Rudolf Steiner influenced above all the work of Kandinsky.

The Russian avant-garde of art was ostracized in the age of Stalinism , even artists distanced themselves from their earlier works. From 1946 George Costakis began to specifically research and collect this epoch of Russian art. Numerous works could be saved from complete loss, part of his collection is now in the state Tretyakov Gallery . Costakis made the Russian avant-garde known again in the West.

literature

The most important literary representative was Andrei Belyj . Influenced by Solovyov and Nietzsche, he is one of the founders of symbolism in Russian literature.

Movie

The Russian avant-garde also included film producers such as Dziga Wertow .

music

The Russian avant-garde also found great expression in music. Inspired by the early achievements of Alexander Scriabin , Alexei Stanchinsky , and Vladimir Rebikov , highly progressive musical ideas developed. Arthur Lourié , who had a leading position in Russian musical life as the assistant to the cultural commissioner Lunacharsky , created the earliest examples of twelve-tone music with the syntheses and the forms in the air before he stylistically approached the ideas of the literary futurists. Nikolai Roslawez , who took over Lourié's position after his emigration, developed a system similar to Alexander Scriabin, but was able to lead it to even greater maturity. He developed "Syntet chords", ie chords consisting of six to nine notes, from which he obtained the sound material for small cells. The transposition of the chords in the following cells made this technique extremely flexible, so that in the end he mastered it with great virtuosity.

Other important composers were:

  • Alexander Mossolow , who incorporated tart urban sounds into his style and, with the iron foundry, also delivered an important work of futuristic machine music . In addition, his newspaper advertisements are an interesting collage work, as he set real advertisements to music as art songs.
  • Sergei Protopopow , from whose work particularly the second and third piano sonatas stand out, which most consistently and radically implemented the new ideas of Boleslaw Jaworskyj ("Theory of Gravitation").
  • Ivan Wyschnegradsky , who made the first experiments with quarter tones in Russia and, after emigrating to France, became one of the most important pioneers of quarter tone and mikto interval music.
  • Dmitri Shostakovich , from whose large catalog raisonné only a small number of the works can be assigned to Futurism, but who in Aphorisms Op. 13 comes up with his own ideas that deconstruct well-known musical forms (serenade, nocturne, funeral march). Furthermore, his 1st piano sonata op. 12 , his 2nd symphony op. 14 and the opera Die Nase op. 15 are important contributions to the Russian avant-garde.
  • Leonid Sabanejew , who on the one hand created sonorous pieces in the refined style of Scriabin, on the other hand, as a musicologist, published his observations of current Russian music in the West and thus became a chronicler of the avant-garde.
  • Other important composers were Leonid Polowinkin , Dmitri Melkich , Gawriil Popow , Joseph Schillinger , Alexander Kerin and his brother Grigori Kerin .

The main organization of the music was the Association for Contemporary Music, founded in 1924, which on the one hand provided institutional support, on the other hand brought western modern composers (Schönberg, Hindemith, Honegger) to Russia for concerts and in turn enabled the performance of Russian works in the West.

An important partner in the distribution of the sheet music was Universal Edition Wien, which from 1927 had a cooperation with the Soviet state publisher and thus made important works of the Russian avant-garde accessible in the West.

Important collections

Exhibition in Chemnitz (December 11, 2016 - March 19, 2017)

Under the theme: “Revolutionary! Russian avant-garde from the Vladimir Tsarenkov collection ” , on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Russian October Revolution , the Chemnitz art collections showed 400 loans from 110 Russian avant-garde artists from 1907 to around 1930.

Between 1905 and 1920, revolutions, war and civil war shook the Russian tsarist empire, but a young generation of artists dared the visionary departure into a new era. In addition to paintings, drawings and graphics, architectural models, preparatory work for theater decorations, drafts for book covers, textile drafts, preliminary drawings for posters, porcelain drafts and high-quality functional porcelains with constructivist decor from a time of visionary awakening by Russian artists, which ultimately resulted from Stalinist cultural policy, were shown in the exhibition was put to an end around 1930.

In addition to works by Wassily Kandinsky , El Lissitzky , Natalja Goncharova , Alexander Archipenko , Marie Vassilieff , Kusma Petrow-Wodkin and Alexander Deineka , a great variety of artistic motifs and manuscripts could be discovered. Kazimir Malevich, the inventor of Suprematism , who absolutely broke with all traditions, had a separate cabinet dedicated to the exhibition. His black square , to which a small drawing in the exhibition refers, has become an “icon of 20th century art”.

Vladimir Tsarenkov's collection also includes a huge bundle of art objects made of porcelain. A selection of 222 objects from the period from 1917 to 1930 was shown in the exhibition. After the nationalization of the imperial porcelain factory in 1917, the year of the revolution, there were still large stocks of white-fired, not yet decorated service parts. Once intended for the tsar's table of the Romanovs , functional porcelain has now been given cubist and suprematic decorations by avant-garde artists . The plates now decorated hammer and sickle , Soviet star and bundles of honor, but also sailors, athletes, landscapes and fairy tale motifs in artistic on-glaze painting. The imperial porcelain provided with these motifs thus became the bearer of revolutionary ideas and contributed to their spread. By presenting it at exhibitions all over Europe, the still young Soviet Union obtained urgently needed foreign currency . Among the porcelain art objects on display was a small, elegant figure of the poet Anna Akhmatova , which was painted according to designs by Natalja Danko , and the legendary chess game red and white . (See also: Chemnitz Art Collections → Cross-Genre )

literature

  • Klemens Gruber: The polyfrontal avant-garde - media and arts 1912-1936 , Sonderzahl Verlag, Vienna 2020, ISBN 978-3-85449-551-2 .
  • Marcel Bois : Art and Architecture for a New Society. Russian Avantgarde, Labor Council for Art and the Viennese Settler Movement in the Interwar Period , in: Work - Movement - History , Issue III / 2017, pp. 12–34.
  • Hans-Peter Riese: From the avant-garde to the underground. Texts on Russian art 1968–2006. Wienand Verlag, Cologne 2009, ISBN 978-3-86832-017-6 .
  • Yevgeny Kovtun: Russian avant-garde . Sirocco, London 2007, ISBN 978-1-78042-346-3 .
  • GF Kovalenko (Ed.): The Russian Avant-Garde of 1910-1920 and Issues of Expressionism. Nauka, Moscow 2003, ISBN 5-02-006374-6 .
  • Uwe M. Schneede (ed.): Chagall, Kandinsky, Malewitsch and the Russian avant-garde. Hatje, Ostfildern, 1998, ISBN 3-7757-0797-2 .
  • Susanne Anna (ed.): Russian avant-garde. Daco-Verlag Günter Bläse, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-87135-026-5 .
  • Detlef Gojowy: New Soviet Music of the 20s. Laaber-Verlag, Laaber 1980, ISBN 3-9215-1809-1 .
  • Detlef Gojowy: Shostakovich. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1983 (9th edition 2006), ISBN 3-499-50320-4 .
  • Larry Sitsky: Music of the Repressed Russian Avant-Garde, 1900-1929. Greenwood Press, Westport, CN 1994, ISBN 0-313-26709-X .

CDs to music

  • Miguel Molina Alarcón, Leopoldo Amigo: Baku: Symphony of Sirens. Sound Experiments in the Russian Avant-garde 1910–1942; Original Documents and Reconstructions of 72 Key Works of Music, Poetry and Agitprop. ReR Megacorp, London 2008, ISBN 978-0-9560184-0-3 .

Web links

Commons : Russian avant-garde  collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The scene of the avant-garde. In: Hans-Peter Riese: From the avant-garde to the underground. 2009, p. 103.
  2. ↑ Preface. In: Susanne Anna: Russian avant-garde. 1995, p. 5.
  3. ↑ a b Revolutionary! Russian avant-garde from the Vladimir Tsarenkov collection . Exhibition in the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz , December 11, 2016 to March 19, 2017.
  4. ↑ a b Ulrike Uhlig: A rapid start. In: Sächsische Zeitung , January 3, 2017, p. 8.