Sergei Chekhonin, The Union of Art Workers Aids the Starving. Poster, 1921. ‘In 1921 the Volga region was hit by a terrible famine – the result of an unprecedented drought. Posters, slogans, and newspaper articles called on people to help the starving and to share their last crust of bread with them. People did everything they could and more.’
Image: Art of the October Revolution, Compiler, Mikhail Guerman, Trans., W.Freeman, D.Saunders, C.Binns, Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad, 1986
Konstantin Yuon, ‘A New Planet,’ 1921. Tempera on cardboard, The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
‘…it is not difficult to see that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the labour of its own transformation. Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward. But just as the first breath drawn by a child after its long, quiet nourishment breaks the gradualness of merely quantitative growth – there is a qualitative leap, and the child is born – so likewise the Spirit in its formation matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at by isolated symptoms. The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.’
G.W.F.Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans., A.V.Miller, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977, 6-7
*
In beginnings and in ends,
artists, let your faith be strong.
Know where hell and heaven await us.
It is your gift to measure all you see
with dispassionate eyes.
Let your gaze be firm and clear.
Rub out the incidental details
and you’ll see the splendour of the world.
Find out where the light shines
and you’ll know where lies the dark.
Let all that’s sacred in the world,
and all that’s wicked, pass in unhurried flow
through the fire of your heart and the cool of
your mind.
Alexander Blok, from the poem ‘Retribution’
Art of the October Revolution, Compiler, Mikhail Guerman, Trans., W.Freeman, D.Saunders, C.Binns, Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad, 1986
Ignaty Nivinsky. Cover of the journal Tvorchestvo (Creative Work), 1920, Nos 5-6. The text states ‘Journal of literature, art, science and life.’
Vladimir Tatlin. Maquette of Tower or Monument to the Third International, 1919-1920
We are the wonder makers.
The sunbeams we shall tie
in radiant brooms, and sweep
the clouds from the sky
with electricity.
We shall make honey-sweet the rivers of the world.
The streets of earth we’ll pave with radiant stars…
Vladimir Mayakovsky, Mystery-Bouffe, 1918
‘…the spiral is the line of movement of mankind liberated. The spiral is the ideal expression of liberation. With its heel set against the ground, it escapes from the ground and becomes a sign of the renunciation of all animal, earthly and low ambitions.’
Nikolai Punin, 1920
Vladimir Tatlin. Letatlin, 1930-1933
Fiodor Fiodorovsky. Decor design for Bizet’s opera Carmen, 1922. Gouache, lead white and varnish. Museum of the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow
Isaac Rabinovich. Set for Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata, 1923. Bakhrushin Theatre Museum, Moscow
Ignaty Nivinsky. Decor design for Gozzi’s play Princess Turandot, 1922. Watercolour on paper. Bakhrushin Theatre Museum, Moscow
Liubov Popova. Set for Crommelynck’s farce The Magnanimous Cuckold, 1922. Bakhrushin Theatre Museum, Moscow
Varvara Stepanova’s set design. Photograph of performance of Tarelkin’s Death, 1922.
Top four images: Art of the October Revolution, Compiler, Mikhail Guerman, Trans., W.Freeman, D.Saunders, C.Binns, Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad, 1986
Bottom image: The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930: New Perspectives, Eds., Stephanie Barron and Maurice Tuchman, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980
Pupils of children’s communes taking part in a mass spectacle in Palace Square, Petrograd, 1918
‘We Russians are living through an epoch which has few equals in epic scale…
An artist’s job, an artist’s obligation is to see what is conceived, to hear that music with which ‘the air torn up by the wind’ resounds…
What then is conceived?
To redo everything. To arrange things so that everything becomes new; so that the false, dirty, dull, ugly life which is ours becomes a just life, pure, gay, beautiful…
‘Peace and the brotherhood of nations’ – that is the banner beneath which the Russian revolution is taking place. For this its torrent thunders on. This is the music which they who have ears to hear must hear…
With all your body, all your heart, and all your mind, listen to the Revolution.’
Alexander Blok, from the article ‘The Intelligentsia and the Revolution’ 1918
Art of the October Revolution, Compiler, Mikhail Guerman, Trans., W.Freeman, D.Saunders, C.Binns, Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad, 1986
Natan Altman, Design for Alexander Column celebrating the Red Army’s first anniversary, Petrograd, 1919
Natan Altman. Decoration for the Winter Palace, 1918. Collage and watercolour, Russian Museum, Leningrad
Natan Altman, The Alexander Column Lit Up at Night, Crayons and chalk on paper, The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Top: The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930: New Perspectives, Eds., Stephanie Barron and Maurice Tuchman, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980
Middle: The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change, Robert Hughes, British Broadcasting Corporation, London, 1980
Bottom: Art of the October Revolution, Compiler, Mikhail Guerman, Trans., W.Freeman, D.Saunders, C.Binns, Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad, 1986
‘Toward a Worldwide Commune’: mass performance on the steps of the stock exchange building, Petrograd, 1920
The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930: New Perspectives, Eds., Stephanie Barron and Maurice Tuchman, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980
Agit-prop steamer ‘The Red Star,’ Saratov, 1920
The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930: New Perspectives, Eds., Stephanie Barron and Maurice Tuchman, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980
Agit-prop cart with children, c. 1920
The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930: New Perspectives, Eds., Stephanie Barron and Maurice Tuchman, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980
materialism, mysticism and art 