Avant-garde suggests an association of daring people who are the first to conquer new ground, and being a military metaphor it implies a battle. In the first decades of the 20th century, the Russian Avant-garde was a dynamic association of artists who fought on the sharp artistic, political, spiritual and philosophical edges of the society in which they lived. The battle was often fierce, both with the previously established artistic order and among members of the Avant-garde itself. The fantastic new visions and forms produced by the movement have continued to influence art to this day, but the Russian Avant-garde itself died. One can argue simply that the movement was murdered by the rise of Stalinism, or that it killed itself after it considered its work complete. In fact, many interesting developments contributed to the fate of the Avant-garde. It is my intention herein to examine what the reasons for these developments were, and the underlying issues which contributed to extinction after twenty years of vibrant artistic enterprise in Russia.

What came to replace the Russian Avant-garde during the 1920s is known as Socialist Realism, "Obtained by grafting a narrowly understood realistic tradition in art onto the mighty trunk of totalitarian ideology" (Golomshtok 104). Its name can deconstruct itself because if there is indeed a difference between Socialist Realism and just plain realism, then the concepts of a single reality and realist art(ifice) are immediately thrown into question. Nonetheless Socialist Realism, which concentrates on the glorification of state and industry, became the only official art of the USSR. The vast accumulation of insipid Socialist Realism succeeded in disseminating the worst kind of state sustained nationalist sentiment. "In more than one canvas you catch the note of Slavo-oriental life and labour, sober and static as in far-off, legendary days" (Brinton). It is analogous to and may well have done much to inspire other 20th century nationalist realism such as the official Nazi art, Italian fascist art, People's Art under Mao Tsedong, and the rose-tinted American genre of Norman Rockwell. "Such are a few random, impromptu subjects gleaned from the varied panorama of Soviet life..." (Brinton). Quixotic at best and outright lies at worst, Socialist Realism miserably failed to investigate the realities of its circumstances and offers nothing else to compensate. "By 1924...modernism as such was a dead issue in USSR" (Brinton).

The official theory used to justify Socialist Realism is aptly repeated in the catalogue for the Pennsylvania Museum of Art's 1934 exhibition The Art of Soviet Russia, sponsored by the then ambassadors of the USSR to the USA and the USA to the USSR. Catalogue writer Christian Brinton supports Socialist Realism and admonishes the modern dedication to formalism, "on the one hand to an inconclusive attempt at Cézannist `realization' and, on the other hand, to an abstract, subjective experimentation completely severed from any sort of healthy contact with actuality." Brinton admits that "...pre war Russia in fact boasted as vigorous and as vociferous a galaxy of avantgardists as could be found anywhere upon a sorely perplexed planet," but then asserts that the "younger generation...bred in the clarified atmosphere of post-October...had scant patience with an alien, exotic importation...". This assertion entirely ignores the fact that the Russian Avant-garde was very much Russian, and that its members exported at least as many innovations as they were able to digest. Further, they were avowed socialists and did their part in bringing about the 1917 revolution. In fact, the otherwise diverse and distinct groups and artists were only later defined as "The Russian Avant-garde" because of their generally shared conjunction of artistic innovation and political commitment. Especially problematic is Brinton's statement, "Unlike his [the social realist's] comrades in other lands, he maintains the primacy of the social over the merely personal....the general drift is away from the abstract and the subjective, and distinctly in the direction of a sound, normal, objectivity of vision and interpretation." This statement depends entirely on the puerile myth that abstract art is merely subjective, and conversely, that realist art is automatically objective and therefore the very definition of "normal". Members of the Avant-garde regarded abstract and non-objective art as liberating anti-elitist forces, and abhorred the established realist tradition associated with the aristocracy. As a case in point:

Malevich described his Black Square as a clear, decisive and economical break with the past, an iconoclastic act, a painting-out of all the constructions of the past, a reduction of the whole output of the world's accumulated pictorial traditions to as blank an image as possible, complete with the utter rejection of narrative content that this entails (Milner 14).

The official theory behind Socialist Realism is therefore deeply ironic, but the ironies run deeper still.

Neither Marx nor Engles had much to say about art and what they did express is vague. Likewise, Lenin seldom gave his views on art, but in her reminiscences Clara Zetkin made note of these interesting comments Lenin made during a conversation:

Every artist, and every one who regards himself as such, claims as his proper right the liberty to work freely according to his ideal, whether it is any good or not.... Nevertheless, we are Communists, and must not quietly fold our hands and let chaos bubble as it will. We must also try to guide this development consciously, clearly, and to shape and determine its results (London 66).

Lenin admitted that he did not understand modern art:

I have the courage to appear a `barbarian'. I cannot appraise the works of expressionism, futurism, cubism, and other `isms as the highest manifestations of artistic genius. I do not understand them. I take no joy in them... (London 66).

Herein lies a deeper justification against avant-garde art in favour of Socialist Realism: if, as all things, art should be for the masses, then all art should be art that the masses can readily consume and appreciate at their present level of visual literacy.

We can no longer keep up with modern art; we just hobble along after it as best we can....May we offer a minority sweet, yes, exquisite cake, whilst the mass of workers and peasants wants for plain bread? (London 67).

In 1918, Lenin himself commissioned a project to adorn cities with monuments of socialist propaganda. They were for the most part painfully naturalist academic portraits which caught nobody's attention (Gray 244). Lenin was not the first or the last brilliant revolutionary leader to not understand revolutionary art, he did not even feel it intuitively (London 66).

The Proletkult, organized in 1906 to actively further proletarian culture, gained instant power in 1917.

By the spring of 1919 Proletkult claimed a membership in the tens of thousands, possibly even greater than the ranks of the Bolsheviks. Most members were not artist but ordinary workers. They edited a dozen separate journals, performed plays, wrote poetry, gave concerts, and organized revolutionary festivals. (Williams 56)

Its chief theorist, Bogdanov, believed that the Proletkult should be an autonomous body; but Lenin was determined that all organizations should be under central party control. In 1920 Lenin ordered the Proletkult to submit to the Fine Arts Department (IZO, established in 1918) of the Commissariat for People's Education (Gray 245, 228).

The IZO had been remarkably liberal, and was successful in having works of the Russian Avant-garde exhibited across the Soviet Union. Lunacharsky, the Commissariat of Education, defended conservative protests from Pravda (Gray 230):

Purchases are being made from all artists, but in the first place from those artists who were outlawed during the reign of bourgeois taste and who are therefore not represented in our galleries.

Through the achievements of the IZO, the USSR was the first country to exhibit abstract art officially and on such a large scale (Gray 230). Despite this brief accomplishment, the work of the Avant-garde failed to take hold or become widely popular. By 1922 the top Party leadership formed the Association of Artists of the Revolution with its slogan "art to the masses" (Golomshtok 83):

The Association declared that its main task was "to create memorials to the achievements of the Revolution by artistic documentation", and its instrument was to be a descriptive realism whose language was comprehendible to the masses.

Lunacharsky was quick to catch the drift and change his tune; he put an end to avant-garde experimentalism with the slogan "back to the Wanderers" (Golomshtok 83).

Where Lenin had been at least tolerant Stalin was adamant, such was the final blow to the possibility of any avant-garde movement in Soviet Russia. By 1932, all art production and distribution was effectively brought under one central body, the Union of Artists - otherwise known as the Central Art Committee (CAC) (Grey 245). Socialist Realism was by then the sole style permitted. The straight jacket put on all creative development in the USSR is well documented in The Seven Soviet Arts, Kurt London's 1937 book on the situation of the arts in the Soviet Union (89):

Brains are not factories.... Everything - education, higher studies, associations, social conditions - can be organized, with one exception: the brain of a creative artist. If this is offered violence it avenges itself with mediocrity.

Socialist Realism remained the only art of the USSR until a persecuted underground of subversive artists and critics of the 1960s defiantly began to produce and exhibit their "unofficial art" in Moscow and St. Petersberg (Golomshtok 107-120). After literally bulldozing an outdoor art show at the outskirts of Moscow in 1974, the People's Artist wrote (Golomshtok 116):

Here in Moscow we have seen trash substituted for art before at the beginning of the century [meaning Kandinsky, Malevich, Lissitzky, Tatlin and so on]. This kind of work it seems to me is in its very essence directed against the people.

After the revolution of 1917 and Stalin's counter-revolution were complete, the established power of the USSR neither demanded nor afforded a place for revolutionary art. But totalitarian intervention is not the whole story of the death of the Russian Avant-garde...

Key figures in the Avant-garde itself were opposed to elitist art. At Malevich's solo retrospective From Impressionism to Suprematism of 1919, he declared Suprematism dead (Gray 240). "He told Pevsner that `the cross' - which is the dominant symbol in many of his last works - `is my cross'..." (Gray 240). Malevich continued to work at his school in Vitebsk and later was appointed as a Professor at the Petrograd Museum of Pictorial Culture (Gray 240). He devoted much of his later to life to writing; but curiously he wore a pin of his Black Square until his death.

Exter, Popova, Rodchenko, Stepanova, and Vesnin declared the death of painting at their 5X5=25 exhibition of 1921. What they opposed was not abstract or non-objective art, it was essentially easel painting which they believed to be an elitist medium. This might seem peculiar because anyone with a wall at their disposal can hang a painting, but privately hoardable paintings are not as egalitarian in spirit as public mediums such as murals, industrial design or performance. Such was the growing socialist intensity of the Avant-garde. In Stepanova's statement she declared that:

The "sanctity" of a work as a single entity is destroyed. The museum which was a treasury of this entity is now transformed into an archive (Gray 251).

In the same spirit, Papova absolved her paintings in the exhibition:

All the given constructions are pictorial and must be considered simply as a series of preparatory experiments towards materialized constructions (Gray 251).

All five artists abandoned their pre-revolutionary "speculative painting" for "practical work". Stepanova and Popova both went on to work in a textile factory where they designed dynamic fabrics (Gray 259). They also lectured on Constructivism. It is interesting that the neither the IZO nor CAC held any objection whatever to easel painting, the latter even encouraged realist portrait paintings of prominent figures.

Among the Avant-garde itself there was a dismissal of "pure art" in favour of Constructivism and its obvious ties with practical industry. Tatlin and the ardently communist Rodchenko insisted that artists must become technicians so that they may directly benefit the proletariat. "The new Constructivist ideology was above all concerned with a practical bridge between art and industry" (Gray 250). In 1922, based on Gabo and Pevsner's "Realist Manifesto" of 1920, Alexei Gan published the book Constructivism in which he articulated the group's extremist ideology (Gray 256):

Art is dead!...Art is as dangerous as religion as an escapist activity....Let us cease our speculative activity [painting pictures] and take over the healthy bases of art - colour, line, materials and forms - into the field of reality, of practical construction.

It is curious that Gan himself was never an artist (Gray 248).

Tatlin was a pioneer and vocal supporter of Constructivism. His 1920 design, Monument to the Third International, has come to represent the culmination and conclusion of the Russian Avant-garde, and continues to influence monumental architecture worldwide. Tatlin was a pioneer of Constructivism, specifically as it is ideologically compounded from socialism and industrialization (Arts 22):

Tatlin's tower was the initial symbolic crystallisation of a Constructivist aesthetic....The use of industrial materials, the expression of lateral movement, the emphasis on dynamic form, the exhibition of both structure and function, combined with the direct incorporation of information and propaganda to reflect the ethos of a secular era, dedicated to the rationalisation of human life through organized industrialization.

Construction of the monument, which was to be over twice the height of the Empire State Building, has yet to begin. Reconstructions of his publicly displayed model remain symbols of the Great Utopia the Constructivists wanted to build. More often than not, the supposedly utilitarian/ practical plans of the Constructivists were ironically romantic and impractical (Gray 226):

For though fired by the idea of actively taking part in building and organizing the new world, in dismissing the easel painting as an anachronism both in its tools and its social connotations, they were not equipped to become the artist-engineers of which they dreamed.

Engineers have since determined that Tatlin's tower would actually have collapsed under its own weight.

Kandinsky, Malevich, and the Pevsner brothers, did not so completely subscribe to the amalgamation of art and physical industry. They predicted that "In becoming useful, art ceases to exist....Malevich in particular felt that industrial design was necessarily dependent on abstract creation...such as his `Arkhitektonics' and `Planits'" - which were nonetheless meant to act as models for architecture. But Malevich was concerned chiefly with the spiritual, the practical application of his ideas were left to his followers such as Suetin (Gray 246-47).

During the first two years of the 1920s, many of the younger members of the Avant-garde devoted their energies to producing designs for the new society. They stood for an unmitigated socialist utilitarianism led by the fervent pronouncements of Gan. In this last phase of the Avant-garde, experimentation was largely abandoned for the greater cause of production for the masses.

Constructivism is the organisation of the given material on the principles of tectoniks, structure and construction, the form becoming defined in the process of creation, by the utilitarian aim of the object (Gray: Survey).

Unfortunately, the principles of tectoniks were what was already given while the materials were not. The formal order, described by Camilla Gray as an "ideal proportion" (260), was largely lifted much as it was from previous intellectual/artistic endeavour (Milner 5):

If they wilfully abandoned self-expression, it was to discover material laws for creative work and begin constructing the new society, in which culture was to play an active, unprecedented role, for every object made was an example of the new order.

To compound the relative sterility of this late phase, the fledgling state under Lenin had little capital at its disposal to materially produce the utopian designs of the Constructivists, even if it had any intention of doing so. Still, the Constructivists forged ahead with their fantastic socialist plans while in reality, like most Russians at the time, they were practically starving.

The story of Suetin's ceramics is illustrative. As a follower of Malevich's Suprematist explorations and a worker at a porcelain factory, Suetin developed a series of exquisite Suprematist tableware in 1920. It was intended for mass production and consumption as per his socialist ideals. The state, however, rejected the non-objective and non-traditional Suprematist design as too enigmatic and therefore elitist. Ironically, Suetin's non-objective revolutionary design can now only be examined through glass cases at prestigious museums. Doubly ironic is the fact that modern ceramic design in the capitalistic West, influenced by Russian Constructivism via the Bauhaus, has been embraced by the proletariat as a standard household fixture - some was even handed out as an incentive to buy gas at BP stations.

It was in the Constructivist marriage of socialist ideals and industrialization that much socialist propaganda was produced. Lissitzky had already pioneered the production of Constructivist-propaganda posters in 1919 (Gray 254). Many previously abstract artists turned their energies in this "practical" direction which, under the Proletkult, afforded them a regular income and contacts with industry (Gray 259):

Rodchenko began cooperating with Mayakovsky on poster-propaganda work and developing a Constructivist method of design in typography, introducing photography as an expressive medium....Artists began designing emblems, stamps, slogans, posters....

In a notable way, the ideology of radical Constructivism was in agreement with both the late 19th century Russian Wanderers and Socialist Realism. All three denounced "art for arts sake" as a worthless occupation (Gray 271). The earlier artistic orientation of Constructivism became superfluous.

Another area in which the new Constructivists found employment during the first years of the 1920s was on stage. There, a number of Constructivists were in what ironically was their true element: fantasy. Prominent among them were Exter, Papova, Stepanova, and Yakulov. Their Constructivist set designs, costumes, and accompanying posters were a radical break from the realism associated with traditional theatre and performance. The revolutionary new designs were tremendously successful both in Russia and abroad; they changed the face of modern theatre to this day.

Despite these late Constructivist productions, the majority of Russian Avant-garde artists emigrated to the West between 1920 and 1924, the year Lenin died. "After 1924 there were no significant exhibitions of the Revolutionary Avant-garde in Soviet Russia, and its representatives were squeezed out of the top jobs in artistic life and deprived of the chance to work" (Golomshtok 84). Between poverty and the rise of Stalinism, the reality of life in Russia became increasingly inhospitable and disillusive. Most of the emigrants had travelled or lived in the West before, and had many contacts there. Larionov and Goncherova had already left in 1914 for Paris, London, and New York. Anton Pevsner went to France, Gabo went first Europe then America. Kandinsky developed his theories in Moscow then left for the Bauhaus. Lissitzky left for Germany, Burliuk for Japan then America, and Chagall for France. Rosanova died of illness in 1918, as did Papova in 1924. Mayakovsky killed himself in 1930. Tatlin's studio was closed down in 1922 on Party orders (Williams 141). He was permitted to work in isolation on his "aesthetically perfect" but inoperable glider Letatlin; he was denied creative communication, information, and above all an audience. The Russian Avant-garde "...with its bias towards collective creativity and a radical re-creation of the material world, with its spirit of freedom and bold daring, quickly faded in such circumstances" (Golomshtok 85). Its art sat in museum basements of the USSR for decades (Williams 188).

In 1935 Malevich died of cancer. With the help of Suetin, he prepared a coffin with Suprematist symbols for his corpse (Williams 188). Malevich had been preoccupied with mysticism and immortality throughout his radiant career (Williams 126):

No phenomenon is mortal" he wrote, "and this means not only the body but the idea as well, a symbol that one is eternally reincarnated in another form which actually exists in the conscious and unconscious of a person.

This belief, when applied to the phenomenon of the Russian Avant-garde, is certainly true. Born in protest to pre-revolutionary society, it became mangled in its own radical ideology and crushed under the weight of the new society it had helped to empower. At the same time it is immortal. The Russian Avant-garde was a most valuable contribution to the human world, and thereby won its victory over death through art.

Works Cited

Arts Council of Great Britain, Art in Revolution, Shenval Press: UK 1971.

Brinton, Christian, The Art of Soviet Russia, The Locust Press: Philadelphia 1934.

Golomshtok, Igor, and Glezer, Alexander, Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union, Secker & Warburg: London 1977.

Gagnon, Paulette, Constructivisme et Avant-garde Russe, Musée d'Art Contemporain: Montréal 1982.

Gray, Camilla, The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863-1922, Thames and Hudson: London 1962.

Gray, Camilla, Futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism, article in Soviet Survey:

London, Kurt, The Seven Soviet Arts, Greenwood Press: Westport, Connecticut 1970.

Milner, John, Russian Revolutionary Art, Oresko Books: London 1979.

Nakov, Andréi, Russian Pioneers: At the Origins of Non-Objective Art, Green and Company: Lowestoft, UK 1976.

Williams, Robert, Artists in Revolution: Portraits of the Russian Avant-garde, 1905-1925, Indiana University Press: Bloomington 1977.