Krens T. et al. The Great Utopia: the Russian and Soviet avant-garde, 1915-1932

New York: Guggenheim Museum: Distributed by Rizzoli, 1992. — 756 p. — ISBN: 0-89207-095-1.Even on purely stylistic and formal grounds, the Russian and Soviet avant-garde's contribution to Modern art merits the scale and depth of the present exhibition. Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, the avant-garde's leaders, brought Modernism to its logical conclusions even as they first fully internalized and reinvented it in a Russian context. Yet those ideas became starting points. The laboratory of Constructivist and Suprematist experiments yielded visual inventions that still influence art, architecture, and design.
In his Cbernyi kvadrat {Black Square, 1915), Malevich resolved the Modernist struggle to reduce form to its essence; and when, for the 0.10 exhibition (Petrograd, 1915-16), the artist hung the work in the place traditionally reserved for a religious icon, he aspired to replace the existing order with a new artistic ideal. Reinterpreting European Cubism, Malevich applied the abstracting process to reduce the substance of the world to primary forms, revealing an entirely other dimension — an absolute, non-objective world. With his Kontr-rel'ef {Counter-Relief, 1914-15), Tatlin took the fractured planes of Cubism in a different but still logical direction — into real tangible space.
Somewhere between the absolute spiritual idealism of Malevich's Suprematism and the dramatic reality of Tatlin's reliefs is that Utopian sensibility, within a historical context of political and social upheaval, which released Russian art from the studio and onto the street, and which endowed it with a desire to pervade every aspect of life — even to become an agent of social change.
The term "utopia" carries with it the spirit of the avant-garde's project to place art at the service of greater social objectives and to create harmony and order in the chaotic world around them. Given the course history has taken in Russia in the twentieth century, "utopia" also has connotations of impracticality; idealism is good in theory, but not in practice. Few images in the Russian avant-garde are more compelling than Tatlin's construction of an Everyman's flying machine, Letatlin (1929-32), intended to be the utilitarian marriage of art, science, and technology — now, as a historical relic, it recalls the legend of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun.
One thing that can be gleaned from the scant but growing critical analysis of the Russian avant-garde — the "Great Experiment," as pioneering art historian Camilla Gray called it — is that single interpretations are impossible to maintain. Essential questions persist, relevant to our own predicament: What is the potential for art — an essential ambition of the avant-garde — to infiltrate and transform everyday life? Have traditional painting and sculpture, as Rodchenko proposed, reached the end of their cultural development in favor of more utilitarian communications media and practical arts? What is the relationship between art and politics? Can an aesthetic pluralism be established and institutionalized?The Politics of the Avant-Garde
Paul Wood
The Artisan and the Prophet: Marginal Notes on Two Artistic Careers
Vasilii Rakitin
The Critical Reception of the 0.70 Exhibition: Malevich and Benua
Jane A. Sharp
Unovis: Epicenter of a New World
Aleksandra Sbatskikh
A Brief History of Obmokhu
Aleksandra Shatskikh
The Transition to Constructivism
Christina Lodder
The Place of Vkhutemas in the Russian Avant-Garde Natal "ia Adaskina
What Is Linearism?
Aleksandr Lavrent'ev
The Constructivists: Modernism on the Way to Modernization
Hubertus Gassner
The Third Path to Non-Objectivity
Evgenii Kovtun
The Poetry of Science: Projectionism and Electroorganism
Irina Lebedeva
Terms of Transition:
The First Discussional Exhibition and the Society of Easel Painters
Charlotte Douglas
The Russian Presence in the 1924
Venice Biennale
Vivian Endicott Barnett
The Creation of the Museum of Painterly Culture
Svetlana Dzhafarova
Fragmentation versus Totality: The Politics of (De)framing
Margarita Tupitsyn
The Art of the Soviet Book, 1922-32
Susan Compton
Soviet Porcelain of the 1920s: Propaganda Tool
Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky
Russian Fabric Design, 1928-32
Charlotte Douglas
How Meierkhol'd Never Worked with Tatlin, and What Happened as a Result
Elena Rakitin
Nonarchitects in Architecture
Ana tolii Strigalev
Mediating Creativity and Politics: Sixty Years of Architectural Competitions in Russia
Catherine Cooke
Index of Artists and Works