Revolution: New Art for A New World is out on Limited Release this Thursday write LifestyleMK's Tremayne Miller

ARTS ALLIANCE presents by Tremayne Miller  REVOLUTION - NEW ART FOR A NEW WORLD A Margy Kinmonth Film

Margy Kinmonth
Created with the support of Alisher Usmanov,
Founder of the Art, Science and Sport Charity Foundation
Matthew Macfadyen (Anna Karenina, Frost Nixon, Ripper Street)
Tom Hollander (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Night Manager)
James Fleet (Sense and Sensibility, Love and Friendship)
Eleanor Tomlinson (Jack the Giant Slayer, The Illusionist)
Daisy Bevan (The Two Faces of January, Elizabeth)

Director:

Featuring:

The feature documentary “Revolution — New Art for a New World” looks at artists of the Russian Avant-Garde, such as Chagall, Kandinsky and Malevich.

It was filmed on location in Moscow, St. Petersburg and London, with access permitted to the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum and the State Hermitage Museum, in co-operation with the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Kinmonth says: “I was inspired as an artist to discover how many of the descendants of Russian Avant-Garde artists are themselves working as artists today. Access to their intensely moving stories brings to life this extraordinary period of artistic innovation, which continues to exert such a powerful legacy a hundred years on.”

Contributors to the film include museum directors Mikhail Piotrovsky and Zelfira Tregulova, and the film’s director Margy Kinmonth

The Tsar's were under threat from the late 19th century up until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and by the end of the World War the clouds broke and a revolutionary storm began, which brought an end to the 300 years of Tsarist rule.

During this period right up until 1916 Russia had no income tax, and so The Tsar regime raised money by taxing the produce of peasant farmers. As a consequence they protested, only highlighting the unhappiness of the vast majority. 

In the 1880s Marxist ideas circulated throughout Russia, ideas that were based on those of German economist, Karl Marx, which put forward the notion of the working class fuelling a rebellion in order to establish a fairer society. 

The Bolsheviks and other socialist parties campaigned for the conflict to be brought to an end, and militias under their control became The Red Guards.

In the October the Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government in Petrograd and the Russian SFSR was formed.

 ‘..artists undertook a revolution.’

Soviet film director, Sergei Eisenstein, a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage, made October (Oktyabr), recreating the final days of the Soviet Revolution, and despite its inaccuracy and simplistic stereotypical characterizations, the films visuals were brilliantly complex.

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (February 23, 1878 – May 15, 1935) was himself a pioneer in geometric abstract art and the creator of the avant-garde Suprematist movement. Malevich produced the iconic painting The Black Square (Black Square or Malevich's Black Square), often invoked by critics, historians, curators, and artists alike as being the “zero point of painting", where references are drawn from a whole host of catalogued historical events.

In 1918 Moscow became the capital, and new strategies came out of The Imperial Academy of Arts, some of which lead to individuals their thinking that they could change the world.

Atheism was like a state creed, as it promoted the idea of abolishing everything that was old, and The Black Square represented something new.

‘Art believes it can exist without things..’

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Imperial Academy went through a number of changes; formally it was abolished in 1918 and the Petrograd Free Art Educational Studios (or Pegoskhuma) replaced it. But in 1947 once the Academy had moved to Moscow, the building referred to then as Leningrad was given the name the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866 –1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist, credited for painting one of the first purely abstract works of art.

Kandinsk, born in Moscow spent his childhood in Odessa but

in 1896 Kandinsky settled in Munich, where he studied first at the private school of Anton Azbe and then the Academy of Fine Arts.

Kandinsky's creation of abstract work followed a long period of development. He referred to this devotion as “inner beauty;” that is to say ‘fervor of spirit.’ His abstracts were never completely removed but always connected to figurative images.

Kandinsky while in school studied a variety of fields, including law and economics. Later on he revisited his fascination in colour, within which he recognized a sort of symbolism.

‘each colour lives by his (or her) mysterious life.’

He then returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I.

The sun melts all of Moscow down to a single spot that, like a mad tuba, starts all of the heart and all of the soul vibrating. But no, this uniformity of red is not the most beautiful hour. It is only the final chord of a symphony that takes every colour to the zenith of life that, like the fortissimo of a great orchestra, is both compelled and allowed by Moscow to ring out.

— Wassily Kandinsky

The diverse artists around 1917 would make up part of a cultural dynasty.

Nikolay Punin, born in Helsingfors (now Helsinki), studied the history of art at St. Petersburg University ) from 1907 to 1914 under the guidance of professor Dmitry Aynalov. He completed his studies in 1914, when he embarked on a career in art critiquing and editing but it was Punin's involvement in the schools such as Acmeism, Constructivism, Formalism, along with other developments in art and culture, that would eventually make him one of the key figures in the Russian art world, despite barely being known outside of Russia.

Punin protected many western artists’ paintings. These particular works would acquire the name "decadent bourgeois art,” seen as communist propaganda. Punin was himself in danger as he rose his voice in opposition to the Soviet officials.  As a curator of the Hermitage Museum and the Russian museum he managed to recover many an important masterpiece.

Attitudes towards the revolution were changing, as a New Wave in Russian Art immerged. Artists’ work was deeply rooted in national identity, where a history of artistic oppression and enforced ideologies lay.

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin a Russian, later Soviet, painter and writer, was exposed to art as a child. After failing the entrance exams in college during his late teens, he took Art up again but this time under the direction of Fedor Burov.  And through taking up odds days, here and there, and help from his mother, he was then invited to study in St. Petersburg, from 1895 to 1897. 

The soviet government in support of Petrov-Vodkin’s works meant that Lenin could see the relevance of Art fusing together with Politics, a marriage of convenience, one might say.

Although the irony is that Petrov-Vodkin’s works were largely ignored immediately after he died, until a renewed gathered interest arose in the mid-1960s.

By 1921 Russia’s economy had been affected by the effects of War Communism, and Lenin was concerned. He responded to the poor economy with a new plan called the New Economic Policy, or the N.E.P.

But an assassination attempt of Lenin by Fanya Kaplan on August 30, 1918 helped pave the way for a new leader.

Soviet Artists found it impossible to sell pieces of Art, except to the state; and people feared for Petrov Kotov’s life when he refused outright to do a portrait of Stalin.

Many Artists were then classed as “enemies of the state,” every third family practically.

This also stretched as far as Poets, even Scientists.

Gustav Klutsis  (January 4, 1895 – February 26, 1938) was a pioneering Latvian photographer and a prominent member of the Constructivist avant-garde movement; known especially for the Soviet revolutionary and Stalinist propaganda he co-produced with his wife and Valentina Kulagina.

Despite his loyal service to the communist party, Klutsis was arrested in Moscow on January 17, 1938, just at the moment he prepared to leave for the World’s Fair in New York. For months Kulagina agonized over his welfare, and disappearance, until eventually in 1989 it came to light that he had be executed, order of Stalin.

Many a breathtaking piece came out of the Avant-Garde mouvement, from which inspiration can be drawn today.

From the mouvement an ideology spread, which transformed the world of art, where forms appeared to move, at the same time new ones were born. An absurdity of sorts, where The Black Square was no longer seen as a forbidden fruit but of a pivotal moment in history.

REVOLUTION : NEW ART FOR A NEW WORLD is in cinemas 10^th November, 2016

Writer © Tremayne Miller

Catch Tremayne on LifestyleMK tomorrow from 7pm speaking about "Norfolk"