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1914

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Marine Branland

Reconfigurations

The Russian Avant-Garde in 1914: Primitivism, Apocalypticism and Abstraction

Andrew M. Nedd

Résumé

With the outbreak of World War I Russian avant-garde artists contributed to their nation’s struggle by producing paintings, posters, postcards and prints. This essay examines three examples of Russian responses to the war in the visual arts: the posters designed published by Segodniashnii Lubok (Today’s Lubok, taking its name from a type of popular print or broadsheet), Natalia Goncharova’s lithographic album Mystical Images of War and Olga Rozanova’s cycle of linocuts and collage titled War. The posters of the artists of Segodniashnii Lubok, particularly those designed by Kazimir Malevich, were directly inspired by Russian folk art forms, particularly the lubok. Likewise, Goncharova’s and Rozanova’s war-time prints were inspired by the lubok, but these appropriations of a popular art form were tied to a view of war through the prisms of Apocalypticism as well as Byzantine artistic and spiritual tradition.

Texte intégral

  • 1  The lubok (plural lubki) is a traditional Russian popular print that first appeared in large numbe (...)

1With the outbreak of World War I Russian avant-garde artists contributed to their nation’s struggle by producing paintings, posters, postcards and prints. This essay examines three examples of Russian responses to the war in the visual arts: the posters designed by a small group of artists and published by Segodniashnii Lubok (Today’s Lubok),1 Natalia Goncharova’s lithographic album Mystical Images of War, and Olga Rozanova’s cycle of linocuts and collage that accompanied Aleksandr Kruchenkyh’s poem cycle War. I will examine what Russian folk art forms, particularly the icon and the lubok, meant to artists of the Russian war-time avant-garde, many of whom called themselves “Futurists,” “Primitivists” and “national” artists. All these objects were expressions of a nationalist discourse that defined “Russianness” through the artistic forms of their country’s pre-Petrovine, pre-industrial past. The posters of the artists of Segodniashnii Lubok, particularly those designed by Kazimir Malevich, were directly inspired by Russian folk art forms, particularly the lubok, and they manifest the deliberate “crudeness” and directness of Russian popular prints. Likewise, Goncharova’s and Rozanova’s war-time prints were inspired by the lubok, but these appropriations of a popular art form were tied to a view of war through the prisms of Apocalypticism as well as Byzantine artistic and spiritual tradition.

  • 2  Lloyd, Jill. German Expressionism, Primitivism and Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 19 (...)

2I argue that the wartime lubki produced by Russian avant-garde artists reveal the contradictory nature of early modernism: a tension between forward- and backward-looking tendencies. These patriotic works fit within the contradictory discourses of late-Imperial Russian society, including those that look to the West as a symbol of progress and those that look inward, or even “backward,” to rejuvenate society. While Goncharova and Rozanova appropriated native folk art forms for considerably different ends than those of the artists of Segodniashnii Lubok, all of these Russian artists participated in the same primitivist discourse that claimed to “rediscover” native culture in order to preserve its perceived simplicity, authenticity and uniqueness in the face of the falseness and superficiality of Western culture. Placing Goncharova’s and Rozanova’s images within these discourses, and contrasting them with the more “popular” posters published by Segodniashnii Lubok, illuminates the contradictory position of the avant-garde in modern society. As Jill Lloyd argues, primitivism in modernist art proposed “both an acknowledged to and engagement with modernity.”2 While Goncharova and Rozanova acknowledge the bloodshed of real war in their wartime prints, both artists also removed their work from this reality by viewing the war as a spiritual conflict. These attempts to elevate Russian artistic tradition took on a particular urgency following the outbreak of war in 1914 when artist began to use folk art forms to, in the case of Segodniashnii Lubok, mock Russia’s enemies while minimizing their threat and to, in the case of Goncharova and Rozanova’s prints, mythologize the war and raise it to an idealized spiritual level.

  • 3  Stephen M. Norris provides an excellent analysis of the role that popular imagery played in defini (...)
  • 4  Jahn, Hubertus F. Patriotic Culture in Russia During World War I. Ithica: Cornell University Press (...)

3War-time lubki (voennye lubki) can be traced back to the 1750s, and after Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 such lubki often took on a satirical tone that mocked the foreign invader and celebrated Russian values and experiences.3 By the eve of World War I popular interest in such images were in decline, but following the outbreak of war state-supported publishers produced thousands of lubki designs and these were printed in the millions.4 The styles employed in these prints were heterogeneous as they drew on a variety of traditions. Some lubki were inspired by the simple black and white prints that appeared in 1812 while others were modeled on the more elaborate color images printed from copper plates and colored by hand. One very successful Moscow publisher, Sytin and Company, produced lubki in the millions, and these images were largely realist in style and were meant to address popular interest in the latest news from the front.

  • 5  One example of this poster is in the Poster Collection of the Hoover Instiution, Stanford Universi (...)

4Many World War I lubki lampooned the German in the form of the Kaiser while others represented Russians with images of the motherland (rodina) or the medieval knight (bogatyr’), an age-old symbol of Russian fortitude that appeared in many lubki. One poster by an anonymous artist, The Great Battle of the Russian Knight with the German Snake, shows a mounted Russian bogatyr’ fighting a monstrous hydra whose heads are the personifications of Germany, Austria, and Turkey.5 The noble Russian warrior of this image has toppled the head of the Austrian Emperor and is about to give the final blow to the serpent Kaiser, as the fez-capped Turk recoils. While the artists of Segodniashnii Lubok participated in this same process of distinguishing Russia from her enemies, they did so by diminishing and lampooning the same foreign foes.

  • 6  Magula, G. “Voina i narodnye kartiny.” Lukomorye. N° 30 (1914), p. 17.

5Soon after the outbreak of war in 1914, Russia’s Imperial government organized an exhibition of patriotic posters called “War and Publishing,” which was held in Petrograd that summer. Many publishers were represented in this exhibition, but the series released by Segodniashnii Lubok was singled out by critics as, in the words of one commentator, “the most amusing and probably the most ingenious and boldly decorative in terms of color.”6 The Moscow publisher Mikhail Gordetskii established Segodniashnii Lubok to produce propagandistic anti-German posters and postcards in support of Russia’s war effort. The artists of Segodniashnii Lubok appropriated the formal properties of the lubok, or the Russian popular print, which at that time was considered the most uniquely Russian form of “folk” art. Today, the names of these artists are identified as leaders in the pre-revolutionary Russian avant-garde: Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Aristarkh Lentulov, Ilia Mashkov, David Burliuk, and Vasilli Chekrygin.

6One of the reviews of the 1914 exhibition which appeared in the journal Lukomorye was accompanied by three color reproductions of prints designed by Malevich, including one titled What a Boom, What a Blast, the Germans Made at Lomza [Fig. 24]. In this print Malevich drew upon many of the formal characteristics of the lubok, including simplified color patterns applied in flat areas, exaggerated sizes for the figures and a composition that, when read left to right, conveys the narrative without words. In this case, the Russian peasant in Malevich’s image swings his scythe at the German troops, reaping them as if he was harvesting wheat and leaving behind their fallen bodies.

  • 7  Isakov, S. “Otvet chitateliam.” Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh. N° 2 (1915), n. p.

7While the artists of Segodniashnii Lubok intended their images to be easily “readable” visually, the texts that accompanied the images, all written by Maiakovskii, are also meant to be easily comprehended by a popular audience. In particular, Maiakovskii’s verses resemble those that accompanied the raek, a traditional fairground amusement that consisted of a lubok mounted in a box with magnifying glasses and commented on by a narrator. Critics noted the way Maiakovskii’s texts complemented the popular style of the images. “Only the Futurists” wrote one critic in his review, “have created authentic lubki. Only in their work is there the coarseness and keen character of the lubok, only they could have united such sharp-witted language with pictures.”7 In a similar vein, Malevich, in a letter to his friend Mikhail Matyushin, who felt that one of their backers, the publisher Margartia Sabshinov, would be shocked by the content of Maiakovskii’s verses, justified the deliberate “crudeness” of the texts by arguing they were intended to have a direct appeal to “the folk.” Malevich wrote:

  • 8  Quoted in Povelikhina, Alla, and Yevgeny Kovtun. Russian Painted Shop Signs and Avant-Garde Artist(...)

I have come up with some popular prints that are purely folk, but if the words sound a little crude, tell her not to worry, for this is exactly what folk art is: the people have a different aesthetic concept.8

Fig. 24: Malevich Kazimir, Nu i tresk-zhe, nu i grom-zhe byl ot niemtsev podlie Lomzhi [What a boom, what a blast, the Germans made at Lomza], 1914, color lithograph on paper, 37,7 x 56 cm.

Fig. 24: Malevich Kazimir, Nu i tresk-zhe, nu i grom-zhe byl ot niemtsev podlie Lomzhi [What a boom, what a blast, the Germans made at Lomza], 1914, color lithograph on paper, 37,7 x 56 cm.
  • 9  Magula, G., p. 18.

8Malevich’s comment on the folk art’s “crudeness” reveals that his lubki were addressed to a particular audience, one that was different from the usual constituency of the artists and that would appreciate this “crudeness.” Specifically, Malevich and Maiakovskii sought to achieve the “primitiveness” of Russian folk art traditions that they appropriated, imitating both visual and textual forms, making them, in Malevich’s words “purely folk.” Indeed, the same critic quoted earlier noted that despite the boastful nature of these prints “the gay foolery and exaggeration in the spirit of folk tales and the curious primitiveness of these drawings amuse.”9

  • 10  Bowlt, John E.“A Brazen Can-Can in the Temple of Art: the Russian Avant-Garde and Popular Culture. (...)

9The circle of Russian artists working for Segodniashnii Lubok was not unique in its appropriation of folk art forms. Interest in Russia’s antiquities began in the eighteenth century when the Russian Academy of Sciences undertook archeological and ethnographic surveys of remote regions such as Siberia and the Caucasus. Then in the 1880s, the lubok was first recognized as a form of “folk art” when Dimitrii Rovinski published the first major reference work on the subject. A few years later Viktor Vasnetsov, a graduate of the Saint Petersburg Academy who made his reputation as a realist genre painter, discovered folk art traditions and employed them in high art painting. However, as John E. Bowlt has argued, artists such as Vasnetsov tended to “aestheticize” popular culture for their elegant and sophisticated patrons, whereas Russia’s Futurists and Primitivists used them as more direct attacks on the status of high art conventions.10 Increasingly, these attacks became part of an anti-Western discourse that challenged the authority of foreign cultural values through a search for Russia’s ancient, pre-Petrovine, past.

  • 11  Shevchenko, Aleksandr. Neo-primitivizm: ego teoriia, ego vozmozhnosti, ego dostizheniia. Moskva: 1 (...)

10At the center of this anti-Western artistic discourse were such “native” art forms as the lubok and the icon. Aleksandr Shevchenko, in his 1913 book Neo-Primitivism, affirmed the power of “the lubok, the primitive art form, [and] the icon” to inspire the avant-garde because in them artists discovered “the most acute, most direct perceptions of life.”11 To Shevchenko, and to other artists whom he identified as neo-primitives, the lubok and the icon distinguished Russia from the West and heralded a new self-consciously Russian school.

11Malevich fell under the influence of the nationalistic discourses that celebrated Russian “peasant art.” In the first chapter of his memoirs, Malevich described the impact that folk culture had on his own work and on the artists of his circle:

  • 12  Quoted in “Detstvo i iunost Kazimira Malevicha. Glavi iz avtobiografii khudozhnika.” The Russian A (...)

I felt something wonderful in them that was close to me. I saw in them all of the Russian people and their emotional creativity. I was reminded of my childhood: the cats, flowers, and roosters of primitive paintings and woodcarvings. I felt a connection between peasant art and icons--icon painting being the supreme cultural form of peasant art.12

12Malevich’s deliberate conflation of “peasant art,” or traditional folk crafts, with icons, a form which relied on literary sources and established guidelines, reveals an intentional reinvention of the Russian past. In fact, the neo-primitivist overlapping of such concepts as “national”, “folk” and “popular” in the term naraodnoe iskusstvo is the result of the belief that “primitive” arts should serve as a source of inspiration for Russian art.

13The artists of Segodniashnii Lubok were eager to celebrate the popular images of the past since in them they could see a form of Russian national identity that celebrated Russianness at the same time that they lampooned foreign values. However, after an initial outburst of patriotism, the public mood began to show disgust with the war. As enthusiasm for the war declined the tone of patriotic posters changed, particularly those that drew upon “folk” traditions like the lubok. Vladimir Denisov, a contemporary critic who wrote on the relationship of war and popular images, noted this change:

  • 13  Denisov, Vladimir. Voina i lubok. Petrograd: Novago zhurnal dlia vsekhex, 1916, p. 4-5.

The success of our army in the first months of the war provided rich material for lubki, and there wasn’t an event or advance which was not reflected in one or another sheet… but as soon as we retreated from Galacia, the lubki became reserved and then grew silent. Now many consider them superfluous and wrongly boastful.13

14The social unity that patriotic popular culture presented during the first months of the war turned out to be a fiction that hid the failures of the Russian army and the disunity of Russian social life.

15While the posters published by Segodniashnii Lubok were intended to appeal to a notion of “Russianess” that was inspired by Russian folk culture, the albums of Goncharova and Rozanova drew upon Apocalyptic motifs and Byzantine mystical traditions to express the idea that the war was a spiritual and universal struggle. Natalia Goncharova’s Mystical Images of War (1914), an album of 14 lithographs based on medieval religious imagery, and Olga Rozanova’s War (conceived in 1914 and completed in 1915), a series of linocut and collage images that accompanied a text written by the Futurist poet Alexander Kruchenykh, drew upon religious and popular artistic traditions.

  • 14  Goncharova’s image can be viewed here: http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=78283; Rozanova: (...)

16The title pages of these two albums demonstrate that both artists reinterpreted Russian folk-art traditions, including those of the icon and of the lubok, to connect their representations of war to national themes.14 In the case of Goncharova, the solemnity of the angel on the cover of her album, which recalls the conventions of traditional Russian icons, expresses the idea the war was a spiritual conflict. The minimally defined abstract forms on the cover of Rozanova’s album appear to have little in common with Russian folk art traditions; however, Rozanova’s search for an essential and universalized language to express the experience of war was inspired by Russian popular prints. In addition, both Goncharova and Rozanova viewed the war through the prism of Byzantine mysticism, which is reflected in the apocalyptic motifs found in both albums. In contrast to the “crude” images of Segodniashnii lubok the war-time cycles of Goncharova and Rozanova apply the bold graphic sense of the lubok to an allegorical and apocalyptic vision of the war based on Byzantine and medieval artistic traditions.

  • 15  Cork, Richard. A Bitter Truth. Avant-Garde Art and the Great War. New Haven, London: Yale Universi (...)
  • 16  Gurianova, N. “Voennye graficheskie tsikly N. Goncharovoi i O. Rozanovoi.” Panorama iskusstv. N°  (...)

17The title of Goncharova’s cycle, Mystical Images of War, “proudly highlights,” in the words of Richard Cork, “the religious conviction which inspired them.”15 The cycle is presented, as one Russian art historian notes, as a medieval mystery play or procession in which the characters “parade” past the viewer.16 Throughout the series of fourteen lithographs, war is represented as a symbolic struggle, fought not only by soldiers and machines but also by heroes from Russia’s medieval past and by saints and angels. Taken as a whole, these motifs express the idea that the war is the ultimate spiritual struggle between good and evil.

  • 17  Baburina, N. I. Russkii Plakat Pervoi Mirovoi Voiny. Moscow: Iskusstvo i Kul’tura, 1992, p. 18.
  • 18  See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Russian_poster_WWI_001.jpg.

18Goncharova begins her “procession” with St. George Victorious, which represents the saint heroically spearing the dragon and serves to open the cycle with the theme of symbolic victory of good over evil. In an expression of unity amongst the allies, the next three images that follow are emblems of Russia (the double-headed eagle), England (a lion) and France (the Gallic rooster). Goncharova’s decision to begin her album with the image of St. George was no accident since this saint was pictured on the official emblem of the city of Moscow.17 In addition, since the saint’s victory over the legendary dragon had for a long time served as a symbol of the triumph of good over evil, Goncharova ties this emblem of ancient Moscow to Russia’s struggle against its “evil” foes. The currency of this idea is testified by the fact that St. George appeared on numerous Russian patriotic posters between 1914 and 1917. For example, Nikolai Samokish, a well-known graphic artist, produced a poster announcing a fund raising event that was to be held on the day of the feast of St. George.18 Samokish, and Goncharova, succeed in aligning this religious and historical symbol with the contemporary struggle in which their country participated.

  • 19  Hilton, Alison. “Natalia Goncharova and the Iconography of Revelation.” Studies in Iconography.(...)

19Goncharova again turns to Russian religious tradition when she depicted the Archangel Michael, who appears halfway through her “procession” holding a censer, sacred book and trumpet as he triumphantly leaps over a burst of flames. Goncharova employed the image of Saint Michael four years earlier for the cover of the Knave of Diamonds Album, the exhibition which announced her interest in icons and popular prints. Lubki portraying saints and bogatyri were readily available for artist’s appropriation, but as Alison Hilton notes, this image of the Archangel was probably based on a specific icon that was carried in the war against Poland in the seventh century and which was regarded by many Russians as a powerful symbol of victory.19 The diagonal thrust of the horse’s motion, the leap over the flames, and the arch of the rainbow that connects the saint’s outstretched hands makes this image the liveliest of the series.

  • 20  Gurianova, N., p. 77.
  • 21  See Misler, Nicoletta. “Apocalypse and the Russian Peasantry. The Great War in Natalia Goncharova’ (...)
  • 22  Parton, Anthony. The Art and Design of Natalia Goncharova. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Ltd., 20 (...)

20The connection between physical and spiritual realms is expressed in the last image of Goncharova’s album. Goncharova depicted Saint Alexander Nevskii, the legendary warrior who defeated the Teutonic Knights at Lake Peipus in the thirteenth century and who since that time has been regarded as the patron saint of St. Petersburg. This last image, as one art historian comments, matches the vision of Saint George that opens the cycle, and “gives the effect of absolute circular closure.”20 The feelings of mystical ritual and monumentality of this last print connects Mystical Images of War with Goncharova’s earlier cycles of peasant scenes and of the harvest: the primitive, as it is represented in Goncharova’s image of rural Russia, is the ideal union of physical existence and spirituality.21 In addition, Goncharova expresses the idea that the war was both a national and moral struggle of good over evil by appropriating the symbols of Russia’s two great cities (St. George for Moscow and Alexander Nevskii for St. Petersburg). Finally, as one scholar notes, such appropriations were likely inspired by Vasily Koren’s Apocalypse (1692-1696), part of a bible illustrated with lubki that was widely admired by Russian avant-garde artists like Goncharova.22

  • 23  Revelations, XVIII.
  • 24  Tupitsyn, Margarita. “Collaborating on the Paradigm of the Future.” Art Journal. N° 52 (Winter 199 (...)

21Goncharova employed apocalyptic motifs in her album to declare the uniquely spiritual nature of her country’s struggle. For example, Angels and Airplanes and The Doomed City [Fig. 25] are the most explicitly apocalyptic images of Goncharova’s cycle. The motif of three powerful winged figures hurling stones on a condemned city is drawn directly from the Book of Revelations, which describes an angel who throws a huge stone into the sea and declares: “Babylon the great city shall be cast down like this, with violence, and nevermore be found.”23 The angels in Doomed City fulfill the prophecies of St. John by hurling down stones on a modern metropolis, which was perceived as the source of contradiction and conflict by the Russian futurists. Along with these apocalyptic motifs, Goncharova’s images articulate what Margarita Tupitsyn calls the clash between “two paradigms of the future”, one Western (exemplified by Italian Futurism) and one Russian. In Angels and Airplanes, three angels, “the iconic agents of the Tataro-Byzantine essence of Muscovite Russia” intervene with two airplanes, which the Italians considered the ultimate sign of the future.24

Fig. 25: Nataliya Goncharova, « Grad obrechennyi » [The Doomed City], from Misticheskie obrazy voiny [Mystical Images of War], 1914, lithograph on paper, 30,9 x 23,3 cm. Moscow, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

Fig. 25: Nataliya Goncharova, « Grad obrechennyi » [The Doomed City], from Misticheskie obrazy voiny [Mystical Images of War], 1914, lithograph on paper, 30,9 x 23,3 cm. Moscow, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

22Goncharova again refered to the condemnation of Babylon with Woman and the Beast, which represents the embodiment of that city’s sinfulness. While the title of this print does not identify the rider, the goblet that she holds identifies her as the Whore of Babylon. The figures of the rider and beast trampling upon the innocent serves to contrast the evilness of the foe and the purity of the Russian struggle. Recalling the words of Jill Lloyd, who characterized avant-garde primitivism as “both an alternative to and engagement with modernity,” Goncharova’s images celebrate the destruction of the “false” values of urban life and offer in its place the authentic and timeless values that were believed to characterize native Russian culture.

23While Goncharova’s manipulation of biblical motifs is remarkable for its conflation of primitivism with Apocalypticism, she was not the only Russian artist to view Russia’s folk art traditions in this way. Like Goncharova, Kandinsky was interested in folk and primitive depictions of religious subjects. Kandinsky expressed this interest in the Blaue Reiter Almanac that he and Franz Marc had completed in 1912. Alongside, the latest trends in music theater and art, Kandinsky and Marc included in their album examples of Bavarian glass paintings, reproductions of Russian lubki, African art, children’s art, and “Gothic” art, particularly examples of fifteenth-century German printed bibles. Significantly, many of the reproductions in the Blaue Reiter were of religious scenes. Kandinsky exhibited with Goncharova and her partner Mikhail Larionov in Moscow. In addition, Kandinsky owned several prints and drawings by Goncharova, and one of these drawings, The Grape Harvest, appears in the Blaue Reiter Almanac. Kandinsky’s inclusion of this drawing in the almanac demonstrates the affinity of Russian avant-garde primitivism, exemplified in Goncharova’s peasant “cycles,” with Kandinsky’s own views on the messianic mission of the artist.

  • 25  Washton Long, Rose-Carol. Kandinsky, The Development of an Abstract Style. Oxford: Clarendon Press (...)
  • 26  “Then I saw heaven open, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True (...)
  • 27  “Ye may eat the flesh of kings and flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men.” Ibid.
  • 28  Weiss, Peg. “Kandinsky and the Symbolist Heritage.” Art Journal. N° 44 (Summer 1985), p. 140.

24Kandinsky expressed this vision of the role of the artist in society with the cover he designed for the Blaue Reiter Almanac. Kandinsky evoked the image of St. George, who was one of the most frequently illustrated saints in both Russian and Bavarian folk art. As Rose-Carol Washton Long notes, Kandinsky often represented St. George since he saw himself as a “Christian knight vanquishing materialism.”25 In addition, Kandinsky referred to the Revelation of St. John for the cover of the first edition of his famous essay The Spiritual in Art. In this design we see a leaping white horse with a rider waving a “cloak dripped in blood” as he is described in Revelations.26 Significantly, the same white horse appears in one of Goncharova’s wartime lithographs, Pale Horse, which represents the horseman who, according to St. John, rides over the bodies of the “kings of the earth, and their armies” after their defeat.27 Goncharova’s and Kandinsky’s conflation of Apocalypticism and primitivism was the product of an “apocalyptic world view” that, as Peg Weiss argues, permeated Russian culture at the time and manifested itself in the millenarian motifs employed by artists and poets.28 For Kandinsky, apocalyptic motifs suggested that the artist could overcome a decadent and materialistic civilization and lead society towards a better future. Similarly, in Goncharova’s apocalyptic images the modern metropolis is equated with ancient Babylon, and the destruction of this sinful city clears the way for a return to a form of life that is more purely Russian.

  • 29  Bowlt, John E., and Rose-Carol Washtonlong (eds.). The Life of Vasilii Kandisnky in Russian Art, A (...)

25Kandinsky expressed the same idea in The Spiritual in Art when he argued that abstraction, because it was untainted by materialism, had the greatest potential for expressing transcendental ideas. He asserted that painting could be a powerful instrument for social change, and that the artist, as messianic “prophet” or “invisible Moses”, would lead art away from materialism and bring about an “epoch of great spirituality.”29 Kandinsky viewed the avant-garde artist as “prophet” and thereby, like Paul Gauguin before him, participated in the problematic discourse that assumed that the artist’s role was to “rediscover” more direct, primitive forms of expression and appropriate them for the consumption of a sophisticated urban audience.

  • 30  Gurianova, Nina. Exploring Color: Olga Rozanova and the Early Russian Avant-Garde 1910- 18. Amster (...)

26While Kandinsky and Goncharova shared a common apocalyptic world view that was expressed in their mutual interest in Russian folk art, it was Rozanova who took up Kandinsky’s call to explore abstraction in art. Rozanova, like Goncharova, looked back to Russia’s artistic traditions when she illustrated Alexei Kruchenykh’s poem “War”. War comprised four sheets of linocut text and a series of ten linocut illustrations in which schematic and abstracted figures acted out the horrors of war that the artists read about in new reports from the front. Rozanova worked on the album during the winter of 1914- 1915, but the final work was not printed until 1916.30

  • 31  Kovtun, E. F. Russkaia futuristicheskaia kniga. Moskva: Kniga, 1989, p. 186.
  • 32  Bowlt, John E., and Rose-Carol Washton Long (eds.), p. 94.

27A measure of the influence of Kandinsky ideas upon Rozanova’s work can be seen in a number of her compositions that combine figurative linography with abstract collage cut outs. Like Kandinsky’s “equivalents,” in which the purity of musical notes found expression in graphic form, Rozanova uses geometric forms to evoke objects–in one case bright-blue patches, in the form of a triangles and squares, evoke the feeling of the sky on a sunny day, while the setting sun is represented by a round crimson cut out.31 Indeed, in The Spiritual in Art Kandinsky writes that “just as each word pronounced (tree, heaven, man) give rise to an inner vibration, so it is with each plastically represented object.”32

28The synthesis of the word and the image, between sound and form, that appears in Rozanova’s War was more directly inspired by Kruchenykh’s theory of Zaum, or “transrational” poetry. In an essay of 1913 entitled Declaration of the Word as Such, Kruchenykh maintained that the letters of the alphabet have their own visual meanings:

  • 33  Cited in Yablanskaya, M. N. Women Artists of Russia’s New Age. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986, (...)

The consonants mean everyday life, nationality, weight. Vowels are the opposite- - they are the language of the universe. The consonants are colors, the vowels are lines. A word is visible. The first thing is its image and not its semantic meaning.33

29Thus, Rozanova’s and Kruchenykh’s collaboration is an attempt to achieve this equivalence between word and image.

30While Rozanova’s wartime album can be distinguished from Goncharova’s by its exploration of linguistic and visual abstraction, War also employs apocalyptic themes to express the idea of war as spiritual struggle. In one print, entitled The Destruction of a City, a metropolis is “condemned” to destruction, recalling Goncharova’s illustrations of the prophetic verses in Revelations [Fig. 26]. Rozanova’s condemned city, however, is not destroyed by the intervention of angels, as we saw in Goncharova’s vision of Babylon. In this case, the composition is dominated by very real and very powerful cannons. If Rozanova’s images of war are seen to be apocalyptic, then the destruction she represents may be viewed as the dismantling of traditional forms of linguistic and visual representation. In fact, Rozanova later claimed that the war had reinforced the need to purge art of all archaism and superfluity:

  • 34  Ibid., p. 97.

In everything that was done, in all our works and searching their was severity. For a long time we had been aware of an oncoming crisis and we lived on, either blindly or hungrily. The war did its business for us: it tore away the pieces of the past for us, changing the world to a new speed, it gave a malignant background to our lives, against which everything seems tragic or insignificant34.

Fig. 26: Olga Rozanova, « Razrushenie goroda » [The Destruction of a city] from Voina [War], 1916, linocut on paper, 36,4 x 26,8 cm. Amherst, Mead Art Museum.

Fig. 26: Olga Rozanova, « Razrushenie goroda » [The Destruction of a city] from Voina [War], 1916, linocut on paper, 36,4 x 26,8 cm. Amherst, Mead Art Museum.

31Recalling the words of Kandinsky, Rozanova saw the war as an opportunity to liberate art from the past and bring about an “epoch of great spirituality”. Whether Rozanova viewed the war as a spiritual struggle between good and evil or as an opportunity to break with representational forms of the past, it is clear that she did view the war as a universal struggle.

Notes

1  The lubok (plural lubki) is a traditional Russian popular print that first appeared in large numbers as woodcuts in the seventeenth century and evolved into mass produced engravings and ethchings. They were generally inexpensive and could be found in many peasant homes.

2  Lloyd, Jill. German Expressionism, Primitivism and Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, p. 187.

3  Stephen M. Norris provides an excellent analysis of the role that popular imagery played in defining Russian national identity: Norris, Stephen M. AWar of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812-1945. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006.

4  Jahn, Hubertus F. Patriotic Culture in Russia During World War I. Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1995, p. 13.

5  One example of this poster is in the Poster Collection of the Hoover Instiution, Stanford University. It is reporoduce in Norris, Stephen M., fig. 7.4, p. 148.

6  Magula, G. “Voina i narodnye kartiny.” Lukomorye. N° 30 (1914), p. 17.

7  Isakov, S. “Otvet chitateliam.” Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh. N° 2 (1915), n. p.

8  Quoted in Povelikhina, Alla, and Yevgeny Kovtun. Russian Painted Shop Signs and Avant-Garde Artist. Leningrad: Aurora Publishers, 1991, p. 134-35.

9  Magula, G., p. 18.

10  Bowlt, John E.“A Brazen Can-Can in the Temple of Art: the Russian Avant-Garde and Popular Culture.” Modern Art and Popular Culture, Readings in High and Low. Gopnik, Adam, and Kirk Varnedoe (eds). New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1990, p. 136.

11  Shevchenko, Aleksandr. Neo-primitivizm: ego teoriia, ego vozmozhnosti, ego dostizheniia. Moskva: 1913, p. 46.

12  Quoted in “Detstvo i iunost Kazimira Malevicha. Glavi iz avtobiografii khudozhnika.” The Russian Avant-Garde / K istorii russkogo avangarda. Khardzhiev, Nikolai (ed.). Stockholm: Hylaea Prints, 1976, p. 117.

13  Denisov, Vladimir. Voina i lubok. Petrograd: Novago zhurnal dlia vsekhex, 1916, p. 4-5.

14  Goncharova’s image can be viewed here: http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=78283; Rozanova: http://museums.fivecolleges.edu/browser.php?m=objects&kv=165434&i=3289922.

15  Cork, Richard. A Bitter Truth. Avant-Garde Art and the Great War. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1994, p. 49.

16  Gurianova, N. “Voennye graficheskie tsikly N. Goncharovoi i O. Rozanovoi.” Panorama iskusstv. N° 12, Moskva: Sovremenii Khudozhnik, 1989, p. 74.

17  Baburina, N. I. Russkii Plakat Pervoi Mirovoi Voiny. Moscow: Iskusstvo i Kul’tura, 1992, p. 18.

18  See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Russian_poster_WWI_001.jpg.

19  Hilton, Alison. “Natalia Goncharova and the Iconography of Revelation.” Studies in Iconography. N° 13 (1989-1990), p. 248.

20  Gurianova, N., p. 77.

21  See Misler, Nicoletta. “Apocalypse and the Russian Peasantry. The Great War in Natalia Goncharova’s Primitivist Paintings.” Experiment. N° 4 (1998), p. 62-76.

22  Parton, Anthony. The Art and Design of Natalia Goncharova. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Ltd., 2010, p. 258.

23  Revelations, XVIII.

24  Tupitsyn, Margarita. “Collaborating on the Paradigm of the Future.” Art Journal. N° 52 (Winter 1993), p. 19-20.

25  Washton Long, Rose-Carol. Kandinsky, The Development of an Abstract Style. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, p. 81.

26  “Then I saw heaven open, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war… He is clad in a robe dripped in blood.” Revelations, XIX.

27  “Ye may eat the flesh of kings and flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men.” Ibid.

28  Weiss, Peg. “Kandinsky and the Symbolist Heritage.” Art Journal. N° 44 (Summer 1985), p. 140.

29  Bowlt, John E., and Rose-Carol Washtonlong (eds.). The Life of Vasilii Kandisnky in Russian Art, A Study of ‘On the Spiritual in Art’. Newtonville: Oriental Research Partners, 1984, p. 97-98.

30  Gurianova, Nina. Exploring Color: Olga Rozanova and the Early Russian Avant-Garde 1910- 18. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2000, p. 75.

31  Kovtun, E. F. Russkaia futuristicheskaia kniga. Moskva: Kniga, 1989, p. 186.

32  Bowlt, John E., and Rose-Carol Washton Long (eds.), p. 94.

33  Cited in Yablanskaya, M. N. Women Artists of Russia’s New Age. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986, p. 88.

34  Ibid., p. 97.

Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 24: Malevich Kazimir, Nu i tresk-zhe, nu i grom-zhe byl ot niemtsev podlie Lomzhi [What a boom, what a blast, the Germans made at Lomza], 1914, color lithograph on paper, 37,7 x 56 cm.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pupo/docannexe/image/15745/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 41k
Titre Fig. 25: Nataliya Goncharova, « Grad obrechennyi » [The Doomed City], from Misticheskie obrazy voiny [Mystical Images of War], 1914, lithograph on paper, 30,9 x 23,3 cm. Moscow, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pupo/docannexe/image/15745/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 88k
Titre Fig. 26: Olga Rozanova, « Razrushenie goroda » [The Destruction of a city] from Voina [War], 1916, linocut on paper, 36,4 x 26,8 cm. Amherst, Mead Art Museum.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pupo/docannexe/image/15745/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 100k

Auteur

Teaches art history at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). He specializes in the art of Russia, particularly the late-imperial period. He received the Regional Scholar Exchange Program grant (U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs) and was short-term residential fellow at Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C. Nedd read papers and organized sessions at a number of conferences including the College Art Association (CAA), the Modernist Studies Association (MSA), Southern Conference of Slavic Scholars (SCSS) and Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC). Since 2004 he has served as the chair of the SCADArt History Symposium. In recent years Nedd travelled to China and published articles dealing with contemporary art of that country in the journals Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and Artpulse. He contributed essays to anthologies, including Picture This!: Reading World War I Posters (University of Nebraska Press, 2008). He curated the exhibition Builders, Bolsheviks, and Bulldozers: Facets of 20th-Century Russian Art in 2010 for SCAD. Nedd recently co-edited and contributed an essay to Political Censorship of the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Arresting Images (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), an anthology that deals with censorship of the image in nineteenth-century Europe.

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