ART REVIEW : A Feast for the Eyes From Pre-Revolutionary Russia

They don’t make menus like they used to. At least, not like they used to in Imperial Russia.

In 1883, graphic artist Victor Vasnetsov designed a menu card for a dinner composed of clear beet root soup, pies, steamed fish, veal, aspic, roasts, chicken and game, asparagus, grains with fruit and honey, and ice cream. The list of edibles is neatly printed in a simple white space occupying the lower left quadrant of a rectangular sheet. The other quadrants are arrayed with a lavish procession of servants, courtiers and soldiers, clad in rich brocades and ermines, carrying sumptuous trays in a formal procession down a flight of stairs within an elaborately decorated palace, festooned with flags, swords and a heraldic shield.

And that’s just a detail.

Created for a feast in honor of the St. Petersburg coronation of Their Imperial Majesties, Alexander III and Maria Fedorovna, Vasnetsov’s menu is a flat-out spectacle-in-miniature, one whose intricacy and grandeur are commensurate to the highly organized pomp of the particular circumstance. Not what you’d expect to find at Lenny’s--er, Denny’s--or even in the state dining room of Nancy Reagan’s Imperial White House.

“Russian Graphic Design Before the Revolution, 1880-1917” begins with numerous such lavish examples of what quickly became known as the style russe --the Russian Style--and continues through a variety of motifs to the moment when all was swept away in the dangerously thrilling days of October, 1917.

Few if any of the more than 80 designs for posters, advertisements, product labels, book covers and visiting cards have been seen before in the West. The traveling show, organized by the American Federation of Arts and on view at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, has been drawn from the Lenin State Library in Moscow. It is accompanied by an exceptionally good catalogue, with beautifully printed illustrations and a fine text by Soviet scholar Elena Chernevich.

Given the remote complexity of the period, the book is an essential introduction to its subject. And coming as it does just before the opening of the retrospective of the great Russian avant-gardist Liubov Popova, later this month at the County Museum of Art, the timing is fortuitous. “Russian Graphic Design Before the Revolution” lays out many of the intertwined threads that Popova was to pick up and radically re-weave in her post-Revolutionary art and design.

Russia was in a period of unparalleled upheaval in the decades surrounding the turn of the century. With the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the country had been launched on a social and economic transformation of almost unbelievable scale and rapidity. Within a single generation, a brand new class--the industrial bourgeoisie--was both created and ushered into a position of dominance. Hitherto unheard of commercial uses of graphic design--a whole new patronage for visual art--were echoed by the sudden arrival of new printing technologies with which the designs themselves would be produced.

Stylistically, the exhibition divides its graphic designs into three basic groups: the Russian Style, in which literary and folkloric subjects were rendered with rigorous attention to traditional forms; the moderne , a nearly simultaneous Russian version of French art nouveau , in which sinuous, organic machine-forms meant to visually wed the industrial with the natural; and the World of Art group, centered around a magazine of that name and brought to public prominence by Serge Diaghilev. Autonomous, elitist, apolitical, universalist--the World of Art advocated a synthesis of the arts in which all the world would be an aesthetically well-considered stage.

Looking at the graphics at Art Center, you don’t need an intimate acquaintance with this dizzying and tumultuous period to be struck by a recurrent feature: Russia’s own past, from Imperial history to the landscape of the motherland, is the dominant image encountered at every turn.

The aristocratic trappings in Vasnetsov’s lavish menu seem more typical of the 17th Century than of the trembling dawn of our own age. Likewise, the fashionably new moderne style is an industrial twist on the traditional link between court life at St. Petersburg and the fashionable society of Paris (even its name, like that of the style Russe , is French).

Commercial graphic design also took advantage of historical subjects. An advertisement for rubber galoshes depicts a soldier, clad in medieval chain-mail and armor, holding the sturdy sole of a big rubber boot in place of his protective shield. And a poster hawking “A. M. Zhukov’s Soap” shows the soap-seller humbly bowing before Mikhail Fedorovich, the first Romanov czar (1613-1645), who points an Imperial finger at his purchase.

Although not evident in the dazzling coronation menu, Vasnetsov was the artist chiefly responsible for the introduction of a fateful innovation in graphic design. Highly influential and of diverse gifts (he even designed the architectural facade of Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery), Vasnetsov introduced themes from Russian folklore into visual art. The fairy-tale past joined the country’s historical one.

Russian history came to prominence in the period’s visual imagery for many reasons, including the widespread rise in nationalist fervor that was also contributing to the first true efflorescence of landscape painting throughout Europe and the United States. In Russia, though, the commitment to history also acted as a kind of psychological brake on the tumultuous and abrupt social alterations of the era. As the country was being furiously thrust into the future, a fervent embrace of the past lent a comforting image of continuity.

In the show, a dramatic transformation comes at the end, in an impressive face-off between images dating from 1914, at the dawn of the Great War. A large poster asking for donations of food and clothing for the war-wounded (“Give to those who gave all in war”) depicts, in dull realist style, that same chain-mail-clad soldier from the galoshes ad, here carrying a religious banner. This traditional Christian soldier, emissary of the unified church and state, hangs across the way from four wartime illustrations by poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and artist Kazimir Malevich. These four are shocking--and not simply for the violent gore of the blood-soaked battle scenes.

The images are anything but refined in the aristocratic manner of either style Russe , moderne or World of Art graphics. Straight-forward, bluntly colored and drawn with seeming rapidity, their stylistic power contrasts dramatically with all the elegant hyper-refinement or dreary realism that has come before. Mayakovsky and, especially, Malevich did something unheard of: Rather than “elevate” folkloric subjects by drawing them in an elegant and aristocratic manner, as Vasnetsov and other mainstream artists did, they employed a rough-hewn folk style in order to speak in the common visual language of the people.

Beginning with the sleek image of an imperially determined history and ending with a startling invocation of the people’s past, “Russian Graphic Design Before the Revolution” tells an important story. Indeed, the revolution was immense.

* Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, (818) 584-5144, through June 30, open daily.