Who Famously Outlawed Avantgarde Art When He Gained Power?

The advanced was banned in the USSR for over five decades. Betwixt 1932 and the finish of the 1980s, Soviet artists were compelled to abandon any creative experimentation. The work they had once done, held in museums throughout the country, was hidden away and sometimes destroyed. Yet at this fourth dimension, George Costakis (Moscow 1913 – Athens 1990) built upwards a unique collection of advanced art dating from the 1910s and 1920s, which he preserved aslope the antiquarian Russian and post-Byzantine paintings he had also assembled.

Today, it is widely acknowledged that the Russian advanced made a substantial contribution to uncovering the aesthetic significant of early on Russian icons. Academic studies analysing the icon as a source for the Russian avant-garde are extensively available. In this context, the historiography of Costakis'southward collection is of pregnant historical and cultural interest.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the collector'due south flat in Moscow (which consisted of eleven or twelve rooms) was considered past many as a project for a 'museum of the Russian avant-garde'. Alongside experimental objects d'art, it displayed traditional Russian icons and a collection of folk toys, while also offering a substantial library and archive. The numerous distinguished cultural and political figures who came to see the exhibits included Edward Kennedy, David Rockefeller, Michelangelo Antonioni, Marc Chagall and Igor Stravinsky. But it was not until 2014 that a sizeable part of the drove was shown to the wider public at an exhibition organized by the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, commemorating the 100^th anniversary of Costakis's birth.1

Symbols and connections

Overall, the collection was by no means exceptional, even for its fourth dimension. The items on display did non bear comparison with the pre-revolutionary collections of Ilya Ostroukhov and Stepan Ryabushinsky, for case. However, for the first time, Costakis' drove drew clear links between religious iconography and the paintings of early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde artists. Costakis introduced the Russian avant-garde to the West, while likewise making an important contribution to the study of connections betwixt the icon and advanced fine art more often than not. He demonstrated how folk art and iconography could enhance the understanding of specific features of the Russian avant-garde in the context of twentieth-century modernism.

Costakis described the beginnings of his fascination with icons in the following way:

I started by collecting icons alongside avant-garde works. Initially I wasn't particularly interested in the icons. I didn't sympathise them and had no feeling for their qualities as works of art. In general, iconography failed to move me. But advanced art opened my eyes to the meaning of icons. I began to run into that the 2 were intimately related and profoundly interconnected. I came to recognize elements of abstract painting and suprematism, and all kinds of universal symbolism, in iconography … Over time, I managed to assemble a large collection of icons – about a hundred and fifty painted panels dating from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.2

It is clear that Costakis saw icons every bit an integral part of his collection and, as the owner of a substantial library and annal, he must have been familiar with academic ideas virtually links betwixt the icon and the avant-garde. He had been collecting literature and documents on the bailiwick since the early 1950s. His library included Alexey Grishchenko's volume The Medieval Russian Icon equally an Art of Painting (Moscow 1917), which described, in some detail, the Russian avant-garde's preoccupation with the icon. The annal also included Alexander Shevchenko's famous manifesto 'Neo-primitivism: Its Theory, its Possibilities, its Achievements' (1913), besides every bit the catalogue for the Exhibition of Icon Painters' Manuals and Popular Prints, a brandish organized in Moscow by Mikhail Larionov in 1913.

The sources Costakis trusted well-nigh, however, were the surviving representatives of the early Russian avant-garde, who convinced him of the importance of links betwixt their work and iconography. In his memoirs, Costakis devotes special attending to his relationship with Marc Chagall, who had painted works influenced by icons and religious popular prints in the first decade of the twentieth century and, later, completed a series of paintings on Biblical subjects. The two men are very likely to have discussed 'the icon and the avant-garde' and corresponded on the subject.

An indirect confirmation of this tin can be plant in Costakis's account of his relations with the French cultural attaché, Alexandre Kem, who passed on messages from Chagall to him from 1952. 'We spoke almost Chagall's art,' Costakis writes, referring to a conversation with Kem. 'I drew parallels between the icon and his piece of work.' During his kickoff visit to the Due west in 1956, Costakis was introduced – through Chagall – to Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, in whose art the icon played a vital role.

He also met Nina Kandinsky, who endemic Russian folk icons from the nineteenth century, previously belonging to Wassily Kandinsky and now held by the Kandinsky Fund at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Several icons from this collection were first shown in 2011, at the 'Chagall and the Russian avant-garde' exhibition in Paris.

In Moscow, Costakis was in touch with many icon collectors, scholars, writers and art historians. He was non solitary in seeing the influence of iconography on the Russian avant-garde – the specialists who advised him on assembling his pieces were equally enlightened of the link. The most of import figures included Russian scholars Nikolai Khardzhiev and Dmitry Sarabyanov, as well as the Western art historian Alfred Barr.three Withal, the connections that had a special significance for Costakis were with artists themselves – peculiarly representatives of the and so-called 'second wave' of Russian avant-garde art in the 1960s and 1970s.

This grouping of artists saw icons as 'pure art', in exactly the way they had been interpreted by the early Russian avant-garde in the 1910s and 1920s. Pocket-size collections of icons, housed in the flats and studios of artists such as Dmitry Krasnopevtsev or Vasily Sitnikov, created the impression of a world apart, a free private infinite, independent of Soviet life with all its restrictions. While Krushchev or Brezhnev were in power, the beauty and reverse perspective of medieval icons seemed to counter the dogmatism and monotony of the Soviet system in the minds of people associated with unofficial creative circles. At the time, Costakis was also collecting paintings by artists of the 2d Russian avant-garde, including Dmitry Plavinsky, Dmitry Krasnopevtsev and Vladimir Nemukhin.

Liturgical fine art and folk primitivism

At the cease of the 1980s, equally perestroika took hold in the USSR, the history of the Russian avant-garde ceased to exist a banned topic. This was reflected in a serial of exhibitions on Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyubov Popova and Pavel Filonov, as well as in the appearance of new research on the subject. The writing of Nikolai Khardzhiev, the leading specialist on the Russian advanced at the time, was particularly influential. In 1976, Khardzhiev had succeeded in publishing a collection of articles and documents entitled Towards a History of the Russian Advanced, which appeared in Stockholm. For the first time, his book offered an assay of Kazimir Malevich's autobiographical comments on the icon and ended that: 'At the end of 1912, Malevich completed a serial of works, in which the traditions of early Russian art and folk primitivism intersect with "metallic" forms derived from Cubism'.

Dynamic Suprematism No 57 by Kazimir Malevich (1916). Photo by Arturo García from Flickr

A significant amount of cloth in Khardzhiev'south personal annal also confirms the view that Russian Cubo-Futurism was influenced by iconography. Khardzhiev knew many avant-garde artists personally, and at the kickoff of the 1930s, while working on his History of Russian Futurism, he asked Malevich to write a memoir for his archive. In his autobiographical notes, Malevich openly acknowledged the influence of the icon on his work: 'Icons made a strong impression on me, despite my naturalistic training and the way this divers my responses to the natural world. For me, icons seemed to reveal the Russian people as an entity, a whole with an emotional creativity of its own.'iv

In 1995, Khardzhiev gave an interview to the Russian journal Zerkalo, in which he emphasized one time once again the significance of the icon for understanding the language of the Russian advanced and its specifically national features:

The art of the avant-garde was international, but in that location was still a national accent. There was such a affair as Russian primitivism – and this is not widely acknowledged in the Due west. Take Larionov – his work is primitivist: consider a Russian popular print or an icon … The icon is unbelievably monumental. The Russians followed the Greek tradition, but they created their ain iconography … The icon and primitivism transformed western artistic influences, their furnishings confronted Cubism and, as a result, a new form of Russian art appeared – non imitative, but unique and original.5

Later, in his introductory article to the catalogue of the Malevich exhibition, shown in Saint petersburg, Moscow, and Amsterdam in 1988-1989, Dmitry Sarabyanov wrote: 'To a certain extent, the Suprematist canvases Malevich created gravitated toward the icon. They "aspired to be" reflections on the nature of being, thoughts in "form and colour".'6

The perestroika years also saw the appearance of an early on article I wrote on this bailiwick, entitled 'The Icon in the Russian avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s'.vii It was a short piece, but the offset specialized publication to focus exclusively on the topic of 'the icon and the avant-garde'. The commodity was written in response to the interest in primitivist art and Russian popular consciousness prevalent at the time. It offered an assay of Malevich'southward autobiographical notes, and the way in which they revealed elements of iconographic language in paintings by Goncharova, Larionov and other artists.

Artistic devices from another age

Costakis' estimation of the effect of the icon on the avant-garde is besides likely to have been influenced by the American art historian Alfred Barr, who saw his drove during a visit to Moscow in 1956. Barr was the leading western specialist on the Russian advanced at the time and the former showtime manager of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMa).

Later on examining the items Costakis had assembled, Barr persuaded him to focus as much as possible on abstract painting. Following the encounter, Costakis jettisoned the figurative works by representatives of the Jack of Diamonds motility, and began to collect abstruse pieces past Alexander Rodchenko, Lyubov Popova, Vladimir Tatlin and other hitherto forgotten artists, as well equally early works by Malevich, Kandinsky and Chagall.

In the 1950s, abstract art had go increasingly fashionable in Europe and American Abstruse Expressionism was coming to dominate the art market place. Barr'southward favourite Russian painters were Malevich and Rodchenko. He had shown their work in his celebrated exhibition 'Cubism and Abstract Art', held at MoMA in 1936. Certainly, Barr appreciated the possibility of links between icons and the avant-garde works in Costakis' collection, particularly the abstract pieces. Barr had start visited Moscow in 1928 and he had seen Ilya Ostroukhov'due south individual Museum of Early Russian Painting (in existence from 1911 until 1928). His love and admiration for the Russian icon cannot be in doubt.

On the basis of her detailed report of Barr'south Moscow diaries, the American scholar Sybil Kantor remarks: '1 of the most important reasons for Barr's trip to Russia was his desire to report medieval icons for his dissertation … In Barr's diary, there is near every bit much written almost icons as there is nigh contemporary artworks.'

We also learn from Barr'due south diary that, in improver to Malevich, Rodchenko and the constructivists, he adult an interest in the paintings of Larionov, Chagall and Goncharova: 'Barr wanted to plant links between the work of these artists living in Paris at the time, and the tradition of icon-painting.'8 In other words, Barr's Moscow diary, also as letters and articles written in this period, point that he was the offset western researcher to highlight the connection between icons and the avant-garde.

This context helps clarify the remarks in Camilla Greyness's archetype book The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922, concerning the influence of Russian folk art and icons on the work of Larionov and Goncharova. Greyness had consulted Barr and seen Costakis' drove. She likewise had access to the shop-rooms at the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum, where she familiarized herself with medieval Russian painting and works by Russian advanced artists, banned from public view at the time. In her book, Gray concludes that a rethinking of Russian icon-painting techniques and elements of folk ornament constituted 'the major independent contribution' Goncharova fabricated to Russian advanced art.9

Contemporary scholarship has touched on many aspects of this topic, from the poetics of language and formalist art theory to political, ideological, and philosophical analyses of links betwixt the icon and the avant-garde.10 The discipline became the theme of a special exhibition held at the Museum of Icons in Frankfurt and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki in 2004 (in 2017 renamed the Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Drove). The prove was entitled 'When Chagall Learned to Fly: From Icon to Avant-garde' and publicized equally follows: 'This large-scale exhibition on Russian advanced artists, Russian icons and Lubok is a co-production between the SMCA and the Ikonen-Museum in Frankfurt. It explores the spiritual and primitivist sources of European modernist inspirations, stressing the Byzantine influences on Russian advanced art and its relations with pop prints (lubki).'11

Aslope all this assay and scrutiny, the history of Costakis' collection of icons and avant-garde paintings withal awaits the serious academic attention it deserves.

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Source: https://www.eurozine.com/icons-and-the-avant-garde/

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