The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935 Author : Sjeng Scheijen ISBN-13 : 978-0500024553 Publisher : Thames & Hudson Guideline Price : £35 Art histories of the Russian avant-garde usually begin, for good reason, with Kazimir Malevich’s white frame and its square painted in the noncolour black, first exhibited in 1915. Scheijen likes narratives and genesis for him goes back two years to a happening of performance art on a Moscow street featuring painted faces. Whatever, the avant-gardists had arrived proclaiming their abandonment of traditional art before Dadaism took to the floor at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich or Duchamp’s porcelain urinal, “raised to the dignity of a work of art” as he put it, was submitted for an exhibition in New York.
Duchamp’s gesture took place in 1917 and, when the October Revolution enacted its own abandonment of the status quo, the political and the artistic interfaced in Russia in ways never seen before. A Marc Chagall painting from The Avant-Gardists The convergence of the aesthetic with the political was never seamless, and someone wrote to a newspaper to complain about workers being depicted with “sawn-off, triangular faces”, but Malevich, Kandinksy, Tatlin, Popova and others threw themselves into the revolution with the commitment of a Lenin or Trotsky and some were appointed to high office in the new Soviet state. Doubts and recriminations among the artists were legion, and Scheij.