In Pursuit of Soviet Art--Quality and Politics

Every few months we witness an art-as-media phenomenon--the Andy Warhol auction or the flap over Andrew Wyeth’s Helga paintings--that cause old-timers to wonder what the fuss is all about. Then, as suddenly as they emerge they change to tarnished cliches--like pennies in vinegar--and disappear.

The latest of these crazes is nonetheless fashionable but may prove more lasting and significant. It is the artistic manifestation of a general fad for things Russian. The drift reached apogee 10 days ago when Sotheby’s auction house scored a coup in the U.S.S.R.--the first-ever Western-style public sale of Soviet modern and contemporary art. Held in Moscow and unquestionably newsy, it was nonetheless puzzling to find an audience of foreign bidders paying very substantial prices for works by contemporary Soviet artists who are virtually unknown in the West.

Less than a week later the Hirshhorn Museum here opened “Russian and Soviet Painting 1900-1930,” an exhibition combining works from the Russian State Museum in Leningrad and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the two greatest Russian repositories of native art. These galleries have sent works here before, but this group of 90 pictures by 69 artists is unique in the weight given to innovators like Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich and other early radical abstract pioneers.

After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution such art was seen to reflect the spirit of the new order and officially embraced. By 1934 it was suppressed in favor of illustrative Socialist Realism. Avant-garde artists fled the country or fell into the shadows. Their works disappeared into museum basements.

By now a slow re-emergence of this art has turned to something of a flood. A massive survey of examples from the ‘20s and ‘30s is scheduled in Leningrad this fall. Planned retrospectives for Malevich and Kandinsky are supposed to travel to Europe. American curators and dealers plow the resistant aesthetic soil of Mother Russia for contemporary art to show and sell here despite the fact that most of what has turned up so far has been either hollowly slick or pathetically impoverished.

What does it all mean?

I think it means that somewhere along the line we became confused, losing track of what art is for and what it means. An observation in a catalogue essay for the Hirshhorn exhibition may reflect that revisionist muddle. It says, “Socialist Realism was perhaps the consolidation--not the rejection--of the experimental movements.”

Mighty odd proposition about two styles so long regarded as formal and ideological antithesis but apparently permissible in the present absence of any serious insistence on art’s inherent visionary, poetic and cultural values.

Art has become vulnerable to exploitation and transformed into a social commodity. It is treated like everything else. Artists are celebrities whose worth is measured by the prestige of their galleries and their ability to generate flashy publicity. Their products are valued for the elevation of their prices, their ability to confer social status and act as speculative investment. Like the airlines, the industry has been deregulated to exist in an anarchy of marketplace competition.

Thus art today is never free-standing. It is always art-as-something-else; art-as-economics, art-as-glamour. . . .

Russian Chic dramatizes art-as-politics. Purchasing an indifferent work of Soviet contemporary art is not only to acquire a souvenir of a sojourn to a glamorous and exotic event--like bringing home a dance mask from your trip to Bali--it is a gesture of approval for glasnost, a blow struck for free expression and against the bad old days when refusnik artists had their shows plowed under by the KGB.

That has to be a right-minded symbolic gesture even if some arch critic (played by Clifton Webb) sits satanically on the sidelines smirking, asking: “Ah, but what if it was bad art?”

Which is to say both that art people can appear a bit weird in their insistence on quality and that the present reigning confusion of motives can--like any period of chaos--stir up good things that have drifted into the silt of indifference. After all, political overtones also come from the excellent art of Anselm Kiefer currently on view at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art--but with the crucial difference that quality there allows topical questions to burrow deep into the German-and-human-soul.

Confusion, however, is still more likely to muddle matters than to clear them.

The present Soviet exhibition at the Hirshhorn (on view until Sept. 25 when it returns home) must be welcomed as a gesture of rehabilitation, on their part, toward some of the most original artists of the century and received, on ours, as a wonderful chance to see fine works never before shown in the West.

But the ensemble is a concatenation of mixed motives. For unclear reasons of its own, the Soviet Ministry of Culture was anxious to send a “balanced” group of works. This suited the museum under our entrenched notion of “pluralism.”

Thus we find an exhibition with a generous dollop of avant-garde works flanked on the early side by European-influenced Russian Impressions, Post Impressionists and Symbolists, on the late side by Socialist Realism all laced through with conservative modernists like N.P. Ulianov, whose cautiously Cubistic “Self-Portrait With a Barber” looks like something that won a purchase prize at the county fair in the ‘50s.

This impure organizational approach turns up some interesting works. Lev Bakst’s “Supper” is as decoratively decadent as an Edvard Munch. Yuri Annekov’s portrait of the artist photographer M.A. Sherling is a haunting, dandified hybrid of Italian Futurism and German New Realism. Even a Social Realist portrait of Lenin is serious about its space and atmosphere.

Decidedly the pluralistic approach has its questionable charms. It leans to something-for-everybody popular crowd pleasing. Under the guise of historical evenhandedness it saves the organizers the trouble of commiting themselves to an idea.

At a certain point, however, such surveys only serve to confirm things already known--such as the fact that Russian artists were influenced by the European vanguard and that every serious movement produces diluted, boringly professional, conservative followers as well as enthusiastic disciples whose art is more endearing than convincing. Great unfocused intuition resides in a pictures by votaries like Maria Ender and the shy, dippy folk-Dada compositions of D.P. Shterenberg.

Somehow this exhibition does not get down to business. But then, what should its business be?

What better than the distillation of the genius of modern Russia? Of course that spirit is based on the past. It has to be.

There are whiffs of the essential sensibility everywhere. A rather corny little painting of a Viking boat by N.S. Roerich bodies forth a fantastic idealism and love of spatial adventure that turn up purified in five Kandinskys, which take them into spiritual outer space as surely as the ascent of Sputnik.

A stubborn, humorous love of the land and peasant virtues shows up almost embarrassingly in Natalia Goncharova’s peasant paintings. Their attraction to direct solutions comes back as a passion for elemental and absolute ideology in the dynamic and surprisingly lyric abstractions of Malevich and Ivan Kliun.

Fragmented longing for concrete religious transcendence floats here as surely as in the flock of pigeons that ascends at the end of “The Brothers Karamazov,” so why object to the rest of the art?

It is a distraction from feelings that require delicacy of apprehension. It takes up space better devoted to fleshing out the main point. There is nothing here, for example, of the real Russian realism--the desire of the avant-garde to both unite with the other arts and to serve useful social purpose. The closest we get are hints in elegant Constructivist paintings by Rodchenko and Klutsis.

A 1922 painting by M.V. Matiushin is the perfect prediction of our color-field painting of the ‘70s except the Russian version retains a controlled passion our art has lost.

This exhibition is a fine beginning and a missed opportunity. The best of this art is so intense that it might help the West reform its own art while the Soviets restructure their society. We have lessons to relearn from this heartfelt abstraction.