#17 - JRL 7281
Financial Times (UK)
August 8, 2003
Visual arts: How the east coloured the west
By Jackie Wullschlager

A century ago, Henri Matisse travelled to Russia and saw icons which, in the
darkness of an Orthodox church, suddenly blaze up before the eyes like
flashes of lightning. "Nowhere", wrote the great French colourist, "have I seen such
a wealth of colour, such purity, such immediacy of expression".

The use of colour, bold, jewel-like, iridescent, shocking in its clashes and
contrasts, is the feature which instantly marks out 20th-century Russian
artists from their western contemporaries. In Russia and the Avant-Garde, a
landmark exhibition at the Fondation Maeght in the hills behind Nice, we
not only see the finest masterpieces from the high years of Russian modernism ever brought
together, but we experience the unnerving sensation of seeing these
startling, brilliant works against the Mediterranean light usually
redolent, for western art-lovers, of the balanced harmonies and luxe, calme et volupte of
the French tradition.

Not even in Russia has such an ambitious exhibition been mounted, and the
Maeght's achievement in gathering unfamiliar, fresh works of top quality from
regional museums across the Russian Federation, and showing them with the
best
from western galleries and private collections, cannot be overestimated.

Only in the past decade has research across Russia made such an all-embracing
display possible; only in the light of such shows can we grasp how essential
was the Russian contribution to European modernism. For just as Diaghilev's
and Stravinsky's Ballets Russes stunned the Parisian avant-garde in the first
years of the past century, so many lesser-known currents running between
Moscow,
St Petersburg, Paris, Munich and Berlin shaped the evolution of modern art.

Nothing prepares you for the thrill of finding the Maeght's vast white rooms
overwhelmed with enormous canvases bursting with byzantine forms and
intensified colours. The mosaic patterns, golden stars and shimmering
contrasts that
make up the myriad cupolas and domes of Aristarkh Lentoulov's "St Basil's
Cathedral"; the flurry of stormy waves, smoke and clouds in Olga Rozanova's
futurist
St Petersburg's harbour, "The Port"; Malevich's monolithic, metallic-sheened
peasant, "The Mower" against the red backcloth of Novgorodian icons: every
image here speaks of an alien tradition.

Now as then, it is endlessly seductive. To artists a century ago struggling
to break from stifling western academicism, Russia represented a labyrinth of
inspiration, and Russians who worked abroad - Tatlin visited Picasso,
Alexandra
Exter worked in Fernand Leger's studio - added lifeblood to the modernist
experiment. To today's viewer, however, the sense of Russia poised between
imperial grandeur and revolution in these early rooms is palpable.
Decorative pieces
such as Ilia Machkov's "Portrait of Varvara Vinogradova", confidently posed
against tumbling red roses on a yellow background, look across at works which
already idealise the common man, such as the white fishermen in an angular,
neo-primitive landscape of jarring blues and greens in Natalia Goncharova's
"The
Catch". Both pictures were painted in 1909; the artistic revolution predated,
in some sense heralded, the political one.

Russian artists effortlessly assimilated western developments. Among many
entrancing examples of cubism-with-a-heart, Alexander Chevtchenko's "The
Circus"
captures lightness of being, the miraculous performance of the circus itself,
with pink acrobat floating out of a mesh of shapes and twirls, while the
dynamic architectonic space of Popova's "Cubist Urban Landscape" is built on
eastern motifs, spherical domes, arched portals, cylindrical drums, and shot
through, icon-like, with bright rays which steal the forms from darkness to
compose
patterns anew.

Deriving its inspiration from icons, folk art and peasant embroidery, Russian
modernism perhaps inevitably became increasingly, self-consciously
nationalistic. "Long live the beautiful east! Long live nationality! We
march hand in
hand with our ordinary house painters," shrieked Goncharova's and Larionov's
rayonnist manifesto of 1913. Between 1914 and 1917 Russia was culturally
isolated
by the war, from 1917 onwards by revolution, allowing the abstract styles of
suprematism and constructivism to develop in isolation.

Few exhibitions have narrated the tragic unravelling of these idealistic,
poignant years as broadly as the Maeght's. The iconic "Black Square", "Black
Cross" and "Black Circle" are all here, along with the many works on the
path to
abstraction that Malevich influenced, and techno-futurist models ranging from
Jean Pougny's abstract mixed media "Composition" to a mock-up of Tatlin's
Soviet Tower of Babel, "Monument to the IIIrd International".

"Abandon love, abandon aestheticism, abandon the baggage of wisdom, for in
the new culture, your wisdom is ridiculous and insignificant", announced
Malevich. "Hurry! For tomorrow, you will not recognise us." If it is
heartbreaking to
watch Malevich return to figuration with the coloured rectangles in human
forms that constitute the faceless, non-individualised figures of "The
Athletes",
it is because we see in his dream of transfigured perfection the nightmare to
come: nearby hang Alexander Deineka's proto-Soviet Realist "Factory Workers",
grimly heroic in their drudgery, and Clement Redko's vision of humanity
marshalled into geometric order, "Insurrection".

These paintings tell the history of the 20th century, but also the story of
man's ability to survive and change. The excitement of the new, the
converging
strands of radical aesthetics, make this show so energising and revelatory.
Never have so many women been fundamental to a movement: we see them as
individuals, paired with their partners Goncharova/Larionov, Exter/Bourliouk,
Stepanova/Rodchenko - and as the driving forces behind the wonderfully named
exhibitions ("The Donkey's Tail", "The Jack of Diamonds") with which they
overturned
bourgeois preconceptions.

Thoughtful juxtapositions, too, catch unlikely parallels. Chagall's "Window
on the Country", for example, with profiles of artist and his wife placed
above
one another, looking out of the window, opens on to the swirls and patches of
colour that are the angels superimposed on one another in Kandinsky's
proto-abstract "The Last Judgement". Both painters are loved worldwide for
their
ability to express the spiritual; both discovered their own styles abroad,
returned to wartime Russia, fled in 1922 as individual expression grew
impossible, to
become, one upholding the figurative tradition, the other pioneering
abstraction, mainstream European artists. Yet Chagall wrote: "Not one
centimetre of my
canvases is free from nostalgia for my native land." Russia looking now
towards, now away, from Europe: this is the cultural debate which has
occupied the
country for three centuries; one of its most vital chapters is dazzlingly
brought to life here.

Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul, France. Tel +33 4 93 32 81 63. To November 5