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ARTS ALLIANCE presents
by Tremayne Miller
REVOLUTION - NEW ART FOR A NEW
WORLD
A Margy Kinmonth Film
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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 10th November, 2016
Writer © Tremayne Miller
Catch Tremayne on LifestyleMK tomorrow from 7pm speaking about "Norfolk"
Tremayne Miller writes for heyuguys.com and is a guest presenter on LifestyleMK, Tuesdays 7pm
