Angelina Lucento

The National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia

The well-known Hungarian artist Bela Uitz arrived in Moscow for the first time in 1921. At the time, he was interested in socialism and Modernism. Uitz quickly became acquainted with the artists supported by the critics from the journal “Lef”, including Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Gustav Klucis. After this trip, Uitz completed two important paintings, which broke with his usual figurative style. The first is entitled “Icon Analysis” (1922), and the second “Struggle” (1922). The forms of the canvases of these works covered with flying squares and circles and painted with bright colors are similar to the surfaces of the pre-revolutionary futurist paintings. The first part of this presentation demonstrates that these works do not represent a complete turn toward futurism, but rather constitute a short experiment with futurist forms and the theory of constructivism, as it had been developed in Moscow in 1921.
For Uitz, the most important problem of socialist art was the problem of perspective. When these works are compared with his other paintings from the early 1920s, they indicate that Uitz was working to find a way to open for the spectator paths for new ways of perceiving the material world. Documents from his personal archive, as well as from the archive of the October Association show that in his view, as an artist and a theorist, the perception of the material world is always located within the beholder, as a part of his physical organism. Therefore, the figure always remained the center of his attention and the central subject of most of his paintings until the end of his life in 1972. In the second half of this presentation I demonstrate how Uitz, after moving to Moscow in 1926, tried to combine the constructivists and the futurists’ ideas about perspective in painting with his own understanding of the theories of perspective developed during the Renaissance, in order to create a new theory of monumental art and visual perspective for the new Soviet epoch.

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Igor Volkov

Lomonosov Moscow State University; Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Russia

The metro station “Mayakovskaya” designed by architect A. Dushkin and decorated with mosaic panels made from A. Deineka’s sketches was opened on September 11, 1938. In 1939, the design of the station received the Grand Prix at the New York World’s Fair. 34 mosaics survived (out of 35 which existed originally). They were united by a general theme marked by the author himself — “Day of the Land of the Soviets”.
One of the most striking features of the decorative cycle is the angle of view in the image: it’s due to the location of the mosaics on the ceiling of the station — the author simulates the upward look. However, this may be due to the fact that in the art of the 1920s — the first half of the 1930s, that especially in photography bold and forced perspective was considered to be the main innovation and characteristic feature. Moreover, many scenes in the mosaics are very similar to those in the photographs — in particular, a number of famous pictures by A. Rodchenko.
The other interesting characteristic of the monumental ensemble are the depicted scenes — bright, imaginative images — some derived from the past, some born by the era, peeped out of the constantly changing reality. Moreover, it’s characteristic that many of the motifs very similar in composition and set of elements can be found in the works of other authors of the epoch — in extreme frequency and almost in all art forms, but especially evident and often in photography, poster and applied art.
The art of A. Deineka is well studied; and the mosaics of the “Mayakovskaya” metro station are a landmark monument in the author’s work, the art of the epoch and in the ensemble of the Moscow Metro. It seems promising to explore the cycle of mosaics from a new angle — through the lens of photography, perhaps the most common, straightforward — democratic art form of the period. Furthermore, taking the ensemble as the case, by distinguishing its main themes and motifs and comparing them with a wide range of pieces of different types of art, it’s important to test the hypothesis that, firstly: in this period in the Soviet (or even global) art there existed common, typical for the time visual compositions or patterns. Secondly: that the photography along with poster and applied art represented these compositions in the most coherent and perspicuous way. And most importan­tly — replicated and distributed them, influencing people’s minds and visual culture in general.

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Allan Doig

Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, Great Britain

From 1918, the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg, editor of the avant-garde artistic journal “De Stijl”, had been in touch with the Russian sculptor Alexandre Archipenko, who at the time was living in Paris. Archipenko had a considerable impact on Van Doesburg and other artists within the orbit of the magazine. In 1920, Van Doesburg published El Lissitzky’s Constructivist fairy-tale ‘Suprematist Development of Two Squares, in Six Constructions’ in “De Stijl”. Van Doesburg excitedly wrote to a friend ‘that architects must surround themselves much more with these kinds of works… and through them to begin to sense the endless spatial possibilities at the same time as coming to realise these possibilities in practice’. Lissitzky had a liberating influence on Van Doesburg’s development of Elementarism, and the Dutchman desperately wanted to travel to Russia. He clearly felt an affinity with the Russian’s work and ideas, which was confirmed when they met personally in Berlin in April 1922. The next month, Van Doesburg, Lissitzky and Hans Richter formed an alliance as the ‘International Faction of Constructivists’ at the ‘International Conference of Progressive Artists’ in Dusseldorf, and in June Van Doesburg published Lissitzky’s article ‘Proun’ (dated Moscow 1920) in “De Stijl”.
The Dutch radical artist was strongly influenced both in formal terms by the ‘Cubism’ of Archipenko and theoretically by the Constructivism of Lissitzky. Over the next year this was very fruitful in terms of Van Doesburg’s increasingly architectural oeuvre. Yet very soon differences between them resulted in mutual criticism, some of it became very public by 1926. As Proun and Elementarism developed, fault-lines appeared, and those years from 1920 to 1926 were pivotal so it is essential to explore the works and the writings of both the Russians and the Dutchman to understand precisely what was at stake in the theory and practice that first drew them into such a strong alliance, and then quite as strongly pushed them apart. The result of this study will clarify our vision of these astonishing works produced in the crucible of artistic revolution.

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Alexandra Salienko

Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia

In October 1917 the Russian art was in a phase of crisis. It was obvious both for the art critics and the artists. “In the end of the war it was necessary to mention art crisis”, Efros wrote. The First World War did not become an impulse for the renewal of the Russian art with its Renaissance at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries and in the period of avant-garde. N. Punin wrote: “We do not know when the revolution has begun: the war had not an end”. The Revolution “finished” in the period of the Civil War in 1921. 1917 was a turning point in the evolution of the Russian art undergoing the reform of artistic education, emigration of the Russian artists, formation of the Soviet culture and birth of new mass audience.
After the Revolution an artist was under the hardest conditions among other representatives of the creative professions.
In 1924 A. Lunacharsky wrote: “Russian sculpture is in the greatest decline. The painting still exists, but on its last legs. The best artists strive overseas. Only orders from abroad can feed them. The state does not buy anything. The State art purchase fund is destroyed. May be the graphic designers have a better situation due to the illustrated editions, but our wonderful graphic is going through difficulties and conceptual disorder”. Artists and art historians proposed to “put a question point-blank: is an easel painting necessary in the USSR?”.
In the 1920s the art market was in a difficult situation, collecting was complicated and collector’s destiny vague. How did the Soviet art change in the next few decades? Could the Soviet art come to live again during the 20th century? What is “renaissance” in this context? The report based on archival materials and periodicals makes the new stresses in the artistic life of the 1920s and 1930s and about the Soviet art in general.

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