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Royal Academy of Arts Magazine Number 133 WINTER 2016 america after the fall revolution: russian art 1917–1932

Royal Academy of Arts Magazine No. 133 / wiNter 2016 / £4.95

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Royal Academy of Arts Magazine / No. 133 / Winter 2016

Contents 36

In the studio ‘An architectural project may take six to ten years and it is exposed to unforeseen forces, most of which can lead to new ideas’ farshid moussavi ra

Features

44 Back in the USSR

Martin Sixsmith presents the historical backdrop to the Academy’s monumental show of Soviet art

54 AbEx now

Two artists from different generations, Basil Beattie RA and Aimée Parrott, discuss the significance of Abstract Expressionism

58 Master and student

Debra N. Mancoff charts the influence of the leading Depression Era painter, Thomas Hart Benton, on Jackson Pollock

63 Painting like a dream

p h oto gr a p h b en ja m i n m cm a h o n . S tat e Russ i a n M us eu m / P h oto © 2016 , S tat e Russ i a n M us eu m , S t. P e t ers b u r g .

M u. Z EE , O os t en d e / P h oto M uZee © w w w. lu k as w eb . b e – A r t i n F l a n d ers v z w. P h oto gr a p h y: H u go M a er t ens/© DAC S 2016

Timothy Hyman RA reflects on James Ensor as a visionary figurative artist

44

Back in the USSR ‘The watchwords were novelty and invention, with pre-revolutionary forms raucously jettisoned from the steamship of modernity’ martin sixsmith

Regulars 10 Editorial 12 Contributors & Competition 09 15 RA 250 20 Preview UK

including artists’ self-portraits at the Queen’s Gallery; Piers Gough RA on London’s new Design Museum; rising star Rachel Maclean; and Simon Wilson on Robert Rauschenberg

31 Preview International

Claudia Pritchard on how Florence has coped 50 years on from the disaster of the floods

34 Preview Books

Bob and Roberta Smith RA selects the best children’s books for a merry Christmas

36 Academy Artists

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Painting like a dream ‘Ensor railed against the ‘art of cold calculation… dry and repellant’ timothy hyman ra

Inside Farshid Moussavi RA’s studio; Eva Rothschild RA’s new sculpture; Anne Desmet RA’s sketches of Italy; Anthony Green RA’s Academy display; artists in print on show

66 Short Story

‘The Longer View’ by Deborah Levy

68 Debate

Ian Ritchie RA and Hugh Pearman debate: are utopian ideas good for architecture?; Paul Nash’s changing viewpoint; Abstract Expressionism’s earliest commentators

74 Academy News

Forty years of the Friends; RA Schools interim show; John Partridge RA tribute

81 Listings 92 Readers’ Offers 98 What’s On at the RA

Events and lectures at the Academy

106 RA Exhibition Diary

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Introducing this issue

Editorial

Art history must not become a thing of the past On 19 October, a letter written by artists from the Royal Academy of Arts was published in The Times: We are profoundly disappointed at the decision by the examining board AQA to drop A-level art history from 2018.

As with the English baccalaureate’s narrow focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics at the expense of the creative arts and most humanities, this short-sighted decision denies the value of art and its appreciation both to the economic and cultural life of the nation, and to the individual.

Far from being a ‘soft’ subject, art history teaches rigorous analytical skills and requires students to engage not only with art but with history, literature, politics, languages and the sciences...

EDITORIAL Publisher Nick Tite Editor Sam Phillips Assistant Editor Anna Coatman Design and Art Direction Design by S-T Sub-Editor Gill Crabbe What’s On Editor Zoe Smith Editorial Intern Alice Primrose Editorial Advisers May Calil,

Richard Cork, Anne Desmet RA, Tom Holland, Fiona Maddocks, Mali Morris RA, Eric Parry RA, Greg Sanderson, Charles Saumarez Smith and Giles Waterfield Digital content Harriet Baker, Louise Cohen and Amy Macpherson To comment on RA Magazine

reply.ramagazine@royalacademy.org.uk Follow us online

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RA Magazine is published quarterly in March, May, September and November and mailed to Friends of the Royal Academy of Arts as part of their Friends membership

To become a Friend

£107 Standard Friends (£97 Direct Debit) £150 Joint Friends (£140 Direct Debit) £50 Young Friends (aged between 16 & 25; £45 direct debit) Friends enquiries 020 7300 5664 friend.enquiries@royalacademy.org.uk royalacademy.org.uk/friends To subscribe to RA Magazine

£20 for one year in UK (£30 outside UK) Magazine subscriptions: 0800 634 6341 (UK only) 0044 20 7300 5841 (outside UK) mailorder@royalacademy.org.uk Colour reproduction by Wings. Printed by Wyndeham Group. Published 14 November 2016. © 2016 Royal Academy of Arts ISSN 0956-9332 The opinions in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the RA. All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication

S tat e Russ i a n M us eu m / P h oto © 2016 , S tat e Russ i a n M us eu m , S t. P e t ers b u r g

Head of a Peasant, 1928–29, by Kazimir Malevich

The RA’s coming exhibition could not better prove this point.

Opening in the centenary year of the Russian Revolution, ‘Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932’ shows how closely art was entwined with politics, economics, social policy and technology during one of the most significant periods in modern history. Painters, sculptors, architects, filmmakers and designers were the crack troops of the revolution, encouraging a new order from both the streets and the studio.

‘It was 1917, with its promise of brave new worlds and liberation from the past, that set all the arts aflame,’ writes Martin Sixsmith in an article in this issue that explores the sheer breadth of artistic innovation that emerged, and the crackdown that followed from the mid-1920s, when experimentation was ‘deemed un-Soviet’ (page 44).

‘To further the cause of the revolution culture must be comprehensible by the masses; anything more complicated, innovative or original was by definition useless and potentially dangerous.’ Under Stalin, artists were forced to embrace Socialist Realism or face the horrors of the gulag.

This history is crystallised in the painting on our cover, Head of a Peasant (1928–29, above) by Kazimir Malevich. The geometry reminds us of Malevich’s earlier Suprematist works, which were entirely abstract paintings characterised by simple, colourful shapes. Forced to abandon abstraction, he has here returned to figurative painting, representing a suitable subject encouraged by the Soviet state – the heroism of the Russian peasantry. The peasant’s face fills the frame in the manner of a religious Russian icon. But the image is ambiguous, painted at a time when peasants who opposed collectivisation were either deported or killed. Does the absence of a mouth suggest the peasant is silenced?

The art of post-revolutionary Russia charts a journey of individual expression, collective aspiration and subsequent subjugation by the state. If we want to understand such stories, in all their complexity, then we need art history.

— sam phillips, editor

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Who’s who in this issue

Contributors WILL ALSOP RA is an architect and artist. His practice aLL Design’s projects include the Neuron Pod for Queen Mary University, London.

piers gough ra is an architect. His practice CZWG has designed the New Arts Complex, Southampton, which is due to open this winter.

MARTIN BAILEY is the editor of Anthony Green:

ALISON HISSEY is a writer and Project Editor

Painting Life (RA Publications) and author of Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence (Frances Lincoln), both published this winter.

at RA Publications.

CHRISTOPHER BAKER is Director of the

Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

TIMOTHY HYMAN RA is a painter, writer and

academic. His past books include Bonnard and Sienese Painting (both Thames & Hudson).

leonie bos is an illustrator. Her work has

BENEDICT JOHNSON is a photographer whose clients include the Courtauld and the Serpentine.

been featured in magazines including Monocle, Wallpaper and the Wall Street Journal.

DEBORAH LEVY has written six novels,

BASIL BEATTIE RA is a painter. His work is

included in national public collections such as Tate and the Arts Council Collection.

RICHARD DAVEY is the author of the monograph Anthony Whishaw (RA Publications).

RICHARD dawson is a portrait photographer whose clients include GQ and ShortList.

including the Man Booker-nominated Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton). Her short story collection, Black Vodka, was shortlisted for the BBC International Short Story Award.

FIONA MADDOCKS is a journalist, broadcaster and Classical Music Critic for the Observer. Her new book, Music for Life: 100 Works to Carry You Through (Faber & Faber), is just published.

include Habitat and Random House.

DEBRA N. MANCOFF is author of 50 American Artists You Should Know (Prestel). She is Scholar in Residence at Newberry Library, Chicago.

EDITH DEVANEY is co-curator of the Royal Academy’s show ‘Abstract Expressionism’.

BENJAMIN MCMAHON is a photographer who has worked for Vogue, Art Review and FT Weekend.

Bobby Evans is an illustrator whose clients

NAME THE ARTIST COMPETITION 09

Architect will alsop ra describes one of his favourite buildings (below).

Name who designed it and you could win two RA exhibition catalogues A church is often a place that creates a sense of awe, passion and peace, irrespective of an individual’s religious conviction. My chosen church is on the outskirts of a capital city.

It tends not to celebrate its existence to the tourist, but is well known by local people.

It was not designed by an architect, but by an artist who was primarily a sculptor.

Its bold and simple construction comes from a very direct way of working, which was maintained right through to realisation.

This directness, I believe, came from the artist’s discipline working in three dimensions. It is what it was intended to be, although its completion was carried out by another, but with huge respect for that

original aim – unlike the recent completion of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia, where few of Gaudi’s drawings existed, meaning its execution is a very beautiful and wellintentioned interpretation.

AIMEE PARROTT is a painter. Her exhibition at Breese Little, London, is on view until 26 Nov. HUGH PEARMAN is an architecture critic and Editor of the RIBA Journal.

CLAUDIA PRITCHARD is an arts journalist, and classical music and opera editor of Culture Whisper.

IAN RITCHIE RA is an architect. His memoirs and selected writings are collected in Being: an Architect (RA Publications).

PETER SCHMItT is a former Surveyor to the Fabric at the Royal Academy of Arts.

MARTIN SIXSMITH is a former Moscow correspondent for BBC TV who has written extensively about Russian history and culture.

His new book, Ayesha’s Gift: A Daughter’s Search for the Truth about her Father, is published by Simon & Schuster in 2017.

CATHERINE SLESSOR is an architectural critic and former Editor of the Architectural Review.

BOB AND ROBERTA SMITH RA is an artist.

He is a patron of The Big Draw and the National Society of Educators in Art and Design.

SIMON WILSON is an art historian.

Internally, the experience is on a par with Van der Laan’s Abbey at Mamelis, near Vaals, in the Netherlands, where one can sit for hours absorbed in the ambience of changing light. My chosen example has similarities and is just as beautiful.

To enter

Send the name of the artist to reply.ramagazine@ royalacademy.org.uk or: RA Magazine, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BD,

by Friday 2 Dec 2016. Please include your contact details. Three correct entries chosen at random receive the books that accompany the RA shows ‘Abstract Expressionism’ and ‘Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans’. For full terms and conditions, visit http://roy.ac/catcomp

COMPETITION 08

For Competition 08, published in the last issue of RA Magazine, Terry Setch RA chose the painting Portrait of a Girl (1898) by Antonio Mancini.

Congratulations to the three winning entrants who have each received their prizes.

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The Royal Academy’s major redevelopment project

RA 250

P u b l is h ed by I l lus t r at ed N e ws/ F r o m: T h e I l lus t r at ed Lo n d o n N e ws , M ay 1870/©R oya l Aca d em y o f A r ts , Lo n d o n . dav i d ch i pp er f i el d a r ch i t ects . © f r a n cis wa r e

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Building work begins on the lecture theatre In 2018, the RA’s 250th anniversary, the Academy is reinstating a grand lecture theatre in Burlington Gardens, creating a hub for artistic debate 1. The original template

No 6 Burlington Gardens, which is now part of the Royal Academy, was designed by James Pennethorne and built for the University of London between 1867 and 1870. The original building featured a grand lecture theatre for the university’s students, which in later years was decommissioned and converted into two rooms on separate floors.

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2. The new design

David Chipperfield RA’s redevelopment plan for the Academy site includes the restoration of this space to its former glory, enabling an ambitious programme of lectures, debates, screenings and concerts. The room will be double-height once again, with semi-circular seating hosting more than 260 people. The original clerestory windows will fill the space with daylight.

3. Work in progress

Construction work on the new lecture theatre is now underway. Demolition began in March 2016 and both the floors, plus the basement, have now been removed. The ground-floor and first-floor slabs have been poured and the first mechanical and engineering installation is taking place.

To see how the work is progressing in an online image gallery, visit http://roy.ac/250

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What’s new this winter in London, the UK and abroad

Preview

Lives of the artists Artists have assumed many identities in paint, as a new exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery demonstrates. christopher baker selects four self-portraits from the Royal Collection’s who’s who of great artists

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The Courtier 1. Portrait of the Artist, 1623,

by Peter Paul Rubens

A dashing portrait of a gentleman this certainly is, but there is no hint that the sitter is a painter.

In the place of a professional man with palette and brushes we are presented with a courtier, superbly depicted with great verve and assurance – and that indeed is the point.

The work was commissioned by Lord Danvers and presented to Charles I when he was Prince of Wales, and it was intended as a display of virtuosity, conveying the impression intrinsically that Rubens could command unparalleled facility as a painter. This was especially important as he had earlier supplied the court with a depiction of a lion hunt, chiefly by members of his studio, which had been rejected as being scarcely ‘touched by his own hand’. The effort expended on the self-portrait proved well worth it. Royal commissions that followed for the Flemish master included the spectacular ceiling of the Banqueting Hall, and Rubens praised the King as ‘the greatest amateur of paintings among the princes of the world’.

R OYA L CO L L ECT I O N T RUS T/© H ER M A J ES T Y Q U EEN EL IZ A B E T H I I 2016

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The Autobiographer

The Allegory

The Animal

2. Self-Portrait in a Flat Cap, 1642,

by Rembrandt van Rijn

3. Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura), 1638-39, by Artemisia Gentileschi

4. The Connoisseurs: Portrait of the Artist with Two Dogs, c.1865, by Edwin Landseer RA

Rembrandt was a remarkably candid artist whose many studies of his own face in oil, ink and etching comprise a life-long visual autobiography.

Instruction, introspection and self-promotion often elide in these humane works, which form the most extensive series of self-portraits of the 17th century.

Here he presents himself with a degree of assurance and a touch of theatrical presentation.

At the age of 36 in 1642, when this study was painted, the artist was working on The Night Watch, the grandest of his group portraits; it was a moment of worldly achievement before the bankruptcy and trials in his personal life that were to come. His clothes, twinkling earring and gold chains are rather fanciful props; the light draws attention to his face and inquisitive, benign eyes, and he appears fundamentally as a man worth knowing. The painting was purchased for the Royal Collection in 1814, and when first catalogued five years later it was described as painted in the artist’s ‘best manner’.

Gentileschi chose here to not merely depict herself in the act of painting, but as an embodiment of the art itself. The composition was inspired by key sources for such emblematic imagery, including the work of the iconographer Cesare Ripa, who described Painting as ‘a beautiful woman, with full black hair’. But this is no dry exercise in symbolism: the lace and lush green, rippling silk of her dress, the golden chain around her neck and loaded palette in her hand enliven the image brilliantly.

The intense concentration on the artist’s face would presumably have been required to achieve such effects.

Gentileschi’s decision proved an elegant advertisement of her skills and ingeniously distinguished her from her male contemporaries, as none of them could of course inhabit such a female personification. Her ability to create a dramatically lit and arresting composition against a dark Caravaggesque background resulted in one of the finest self-portraits of the 1630s.

The acidic views of critics can easily dent an artist’s confidence; here however, their opinions are lampooned in a witty and warm manner

by Landseer, the greatest and most empathetic British animal painter of the 19th century.

This delightful image is related to a contemporary photograph of the artist at work, prints of which were sold to the public, much to his annoyance. For Landseer dogs were never merely domestic pets, but noble creatures who could convey qualities such as devotion or heroism. These romantic ideals were combined in his work with the brilliant rendering of anatomical and textural detail. The collie is probably Lassie, who was Landseer’s companion in his studio, and the other dog may be a retriever called Myrtle. Between them, the painter himself, with his severe stare and impressive sideburns, exudes something of a canine persona.

Portrait of the Artist The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, 0303 123 7300, royalcollection.org.uk, until 17 April 2017

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Preview UK

Inside the new Design Museum Architect piers gough ra gets a sneak preview of the museum’s new home, a reworking of the former Commonwealth Institute in London’s Holland Park

The restored exterior of London’s new Design Museum left A CGI visualisation of the interior view from the top floor of the museum

V IS UA L IS AT I O N: A L E X M O R R IS . P H OTO GR A P H: LU K E H AY ES

above

The hyperbolic paraboloid has great architectural appeal. It’s a curved ‘saddle’ shape that can be geometrically constructed entirely from straight lines, which obviates a lot of the cost of constructing curves. Hence in the 1950s and ’60s the plethora of those swoopy, pointy cornered roofs, usually in turquoise copper, over everything from car showrooms to churches.

The Commonwealth Institute in London’s Holland Park, designed by Robert Matthew in 1960, was just such a structure, a ‘tent in the park’ that sported a thin split hyperbolic paraboloid roof supported by a solid central concrete one underneath (above right). The non-hierarchical square-plan building, now listed Grade II*, housed multi-level displays of objects from the Commonwealth’s far-flung dominions around a central circular mezzanine like a suspended circus ring.

It has been the fate or duty of the arts institutions of this heritage country to eschew new buildings in favour of historic ones in need of TLC. Hence Tate Modern at Bankside Power Station, the Courtauld at Somerset House, the Whitechapel’s extension into an adjacent library, the Saatchi Gallery in former military barracks and the Royal Academy’s own Burlington Gardens expansion project are all redevelopments of historic buildings.

The Design Museum has done its bit, first colonising the old boilerhouse of the V&A, then moving trendily east by converting a modernist warehouse on the river at Butlers Wharf, and now moving trendily back west again by taking over the shell of the Commonwealth Institute.

The museum’s founder Terence Conran, who has brilliantly and generously steered it through all these manifestations, is himself a dab hand at revivifying gorgeous old buildings such as Michelin House on the Fulham Road.

Bringing the Design Museum to the Commonwealth Institute is a particularly felicitous fit, reusing an exhibition building for, well, exhibitions! With this in mind English Heritage has allowed interesting interior features to be repositioned, enabling a total gut and reconstruction inside the shell. Despite the swoopy roof, the exterior was rather austere with its all-round blanked-out curtain walling. The conversion makes full use of the glazing to provide light and give great views into Holland Park.

The famously minimalist architect John Pawson has restructured and transformed the interior of the building into a series of magnificent spaces for all aspects of a modern museum experience: looking, reading, listening, learning, eating, shopping or just fannying around taking selfies. Nearly half of the ground floor is one big seductive gallery, a double-colonnaded space like a modern version of the Venice Arsenale. The super-high new basement provides another gallery and a large raked-seating lecture hall – a great addition to the Design Museum’s ability to expand audiences and stage events.

The top floor (above) houses the permanent collection, but the bold designer Morag Myerscough banishes any whiff of stolid worthiness by arranging it as a super instruction kit on how to design good stuff. Suitably sandwiched on the first floor are a library,

learning centre and admin offices, with the aforementioned lovely views over the park.

All these spaces are accessed and visually held together by the spectacular centrepiece entrance space. This is a public square within the square building with no hint of monastic minimalism, rather a grand warmly oak-lined ziggurat of an atrium. Boulevard-wide internal terraces sweep around each floor and mezzanine, leading to all the functions. The now ubiquitous wide flight of sitting steps, watered by an adjacent café, attractively starts the journey upwards.

This extravagantly scaled, beautifully detailed space is topped off by Myerscough’s searing super graphics at the top floor, displayed on one of those rotating advertising billboards.

It’s like Conran’s cigar box got a Las Vegas lid.

The scale of the new building allows a matching scale of ambition for the Director Deyan Sudjic to run continuous and overlapping programmes of big exhibitions on design and architecture. It is with the latter that he will challenge the Royal Institute of British Architects, the RA and the V&A. It should demonstrate again the size of the untapped appetite for architectural as well as design exhibitions and discourse. Kensington High Street pretty much lost its mojo with the demise of Barkers, Pontings, Derry & Toms and then the Biba department stores. This hyperbolic Design Museum should go a long way to restoring its public paraboloid.

London’s Design Museum reopens on High Street Kensington on 24 Nov; www.designmuseum.org

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Preview UK

The real Rachel Maclean anna coatman meets the shape-shifting Scottish video artist, whose virtual worlds question the images and identities created in social media In a warehouse building in the East End of Glasgow, I’m watching two men transform huge lumps of polystyrene into yellow Emoji monsters.

Beside them, children’s dolls lie in a heap, waiting to be decapitated and turned into hybrid ‘data rats’, pests with a penchant for chewing through internet cables.

These strange creatures have been dreamed up by Rachel Maclean, the 29-year-old video artist I am here to meet. With just weeks to go before the opening of her solo show at Manchester’s HOME gallery, all hands are on deck. The men in her studio who are busy sculpting the polystyrene are artist friends of Maclean’s; the sculptures are inspired by, and will be installed alongside, her new series of large-format fabric prints, ‘We Want Data!’

(2016), and latest video It’s What’s Inside That Counts (2016).

Hyper-saturated and headache-inducing, Maclean’s films are set in digitally rendered, rainbow-coloured dystopias, combining looping narratives and musical interludes. Her aesthetic draws on Cosplay (fantasy role play often involving dressing up as a virtual character), music videos, social media sites and ‘happiness’ marketing, painting an unflattering picture of contemporary consumerist culture.

These works have also made Maclean a rising star in the art world. Her upcoming solo show is just the latest in a series of high-profile screenings, awards and exhibitions that have introduced her weird and wonderful art to ever wider audiences. She won the Margaret Tait Award at the 2013 Glasgow Film Festival; her film Feed Me was featured in ‘British Art Show 8’

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in 2015; she was one of this year’s Frieze Film artists; and she has been chosen to represent Scotland at the 2017 Venice Biennale.

For the HOME exhibition, having such a large gallery to herself will allow Maclean to present her art in a more multi-dimensional, immersive way than ever before. ‘I’ve always wanted to show sculptures with my videos,’ she explains, ‘because I always make a lot stuff, like props and costumes.’

As we inspect a rail of tiny, pink, scratchy polyester dresses that are in the process of being ripped and grubbed up (‘these are actually made for real babies’, Maclean says, appalled), Maclean’s dad walks in, wearing paint-spattered overalls. A recently retired art teacher, he has volunteered to help with the exhibition prep.

He’s not the only family member Maclean has enlisted. Her ‘wee team’ also includes her brother Colm (himself an artist), who is upstairs, in a room with a velvet curtain for a door, intently working on a Mac. This is where Maclean’s films are laboriously crafted.

In every video work she makes, Maclean plays all of the roles. Dressing up in outlandish costumes, she is filmed performing against a green screen. Then, as she explains, showing me an unfinished scene from It’s What’s Inside That Counts, the green is taken out of the footage and replaced with various maximalist ‘backgrounds’ – be it a rainy post-apocalyptic city or a bleachedout desert – using the Photoshop and After Effects programmes.

‘Is it strange to see yourself like this?’ I ask, as we look at an image from the ‘We Want Data!’ series (above). The image features Rachel

Rachel Maclean, photographed in 2015

modelled up as a kind of cyber-angel with big blue plastic breasts, wired up to a ‘happiness’ generating device, and taking a selfie. ‘I don’t really think about it at all,’ Maclean insists.

‘The characters are quite purposefully not self-portraits. They aren’t an exploration of me, or anything personal to me; more a splitting of a number of different ideas of identity and stereotype.’

This interest in identity – particularly in relation to gender – is key to Maclean’s work, and the way that she uses her body as a medium through which to explore this brings to mind the art of feminist artists such as Cindy Sherman and Lynne Hershman Leeson. ‘Most of the main characters in my films are women, and I’m interested in exploring female identity. At moments all of my characters fit into very clearly defined gender roles, but at others they seem to slip outside of them. I want it to feel like they are simultaneously working within stereotypes, and slightly undermining and complicating them.’

The way that people use social media to construct identity is also a major theme in Maclean’s art – particularly in the work she has produced for the HOME show. ‘I’m interested in cultures of narcissism and the selfie. You can create your own self through the images you upload, so you create this hyper-real version of yourself online.’

So, does Maclean use social media herself?

‘I keep liking the idea of it, but then I realise I’m not very good at it,’ she admits. ‘Some people use Twitter and Instagram in really interesting ways, almost like making them into art projects. But it always makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable really. Why should I expect or want people to be interested in what I’m eating for tea?’

Rachel Maclean: Wot u :-) about? HOME, Manchester, 0161 228 7621, homemcr.org, until 8 Jan 2017

© R ACH EL M ACL E A N /CO U R T ESY O F H O M E , M A N CH ES T ER /CO M M IS S I O N ED BY A R T PACE & H O M E . P H OTO GR A P H: CR A I G GI B S O N

Detail from the print series ‘We Want Data!’, 2016, by Rachel Maclean

Preview UK

Six degrees of separation

3. ROBERT ADAM

The 18th-century architect Robert Adam also made many paintings and drawings, producing evocative landscapes in watercolour and adding coloured washes to his studies in pen. Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, which holds the most comprehensive collection of drawings from Adam’s office, displays highlights related to his prestigious work in the capital (30 Nov–11 March 2017), which included interior decoration for Buckingham House (later Buckingham Palace; drawing for a clock bracket, c.1761–63, below).

sam phillips takes us from Victor Pasmore’s transformations to paintsmeared performers in six winter shows 1. VICTOR PASMORE RA

Victor Pasmore (seen with a suspended relief c.1963, below) turned towards abstraction after the Second World War, his figurative landscapes and still-lifes superseded first by swirls of colour, then by rectilinear shapes influenced by Russian Constructivism. Nottingham’s Djanogly Gallery (26 Nov–19 Feb 2017) and Pallant House, Chichester (11 March–11 June 2017), explore this radical shift in the British artist’s career.

P H OTO GR A P H BY J O H N PAS M O R E . © Z A H A H A D I D A R CH I T ECTS . CO U R T ESY S I R J O H N S OA N E’ S M US EU M .

CO U R T ESY CH R IS T CH U R CH P I CT U R E G A L L ERY. © A DAGP, PA R IS A N D DAC S , LO N D O N 2016 . CO U R T ESY P ER ES P R O J ECTS , B ER L I N .

2. ZAHA HADID RA

The geometry of Russian Constructivism also had a huge impact on Zaha Hadid RA. One of the late architect’s heroes was Kazimir Malevich (see pages 46 and 47); her buildings explored his ideas about ‘how space itself might be distorted to increase dynamism and complexity’, she explained in a 2014 article in RA Magazine.

London’s Serpentine Galleries present Hadid’s paintings and drawings (Metropolis, 1988, above), whose bold, fractured forms recall the Russian’s angular aesthetic (8 Dec–12 Feb 2017).

6. DONNA HUANCA

‘With regard to Klein, I don’t relate to a man wearing a tuxedo pointing a wand, directing the naked female body,’ says the Chicago-born performance artist Donna Huanca. In her show at London’s Zabludowicz Collection, her models covered in paint, latex and cosmetics (below) are in her words ‘symbols of power’ (until 18 Dec).

4. DRAWING IN RED

Drawing also takes centre stage at Christ Church Picture Gallery in Oxford, which displays a small but splendid show of works in red chalk, also known as sanguine (until 16 Jan 2017; Two Hands and a Bust of a Young Man, c.1525,

by Il Sodoma, below). From the 15th century onwards, the medium was embraced by Europe’s most important artists, including Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, who adopted sanguine in his Last Supper sketches for its suppleness, solubility and warm colour.

5. YVES KLEIN

From the possibilities of red to the power of blue, in an Yves Klein survey at Tate Liverpool (until 5 March 2017). The French artist and agent provocateur famously invented his own colour, International Klein Blue (Untitled Blue Monochrome (IKB 79), 1959, above), and, infamously, used naked female models as paintbrushes to produce his ‘Anthropometry’ series. The exhibition features major works by Klein rarely seen on these shores, such as his ‘Fire Paintings’, made with the assistance of Bunsen burners and flame-throwers.

winter 2016 | ra magazine 27

Preview UK

Getting the goat

Monogram, 1955–59, by Robert Rauschenberg

It is by very happy coincidence that the RA’s great Abstract Expressionism show (page 54) precedes and overlaps Tate Modern’s retrospective of the American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008). RA Friends are thus armed with essential context for an artist who, though considered a giant of recent art, has not had a major exhibition in this country since Tate’s previous retrospective in 1980–81, and may therefore be unfamiliar to many.

As we now know, Abstract Expressionism ranged from Pollock’s drips to the colour fields of Rothko. What all the artists involved had in common, however, was the belief that their art acted out on canvas their inner world of emotion and spirituality, and also that the result, to be truly of its time, had necessarily to be abstract.

Arriving on the New York art scene in 1949 just as Abstract Expressionism reached its peak, the young Robert Rauschenberg was having none of that high falutin’ stuff. He believed that art must directly engage with the nitty gritty of the real and indeed urban world. Yet he very shrewdly realised that modern art was at where it was at, and he must build on that. There could be no return to anything like traditional realist painting.

What he did was to develop a new kind of art in which, in his own famous phrase, he operated in ‘the gap between art and life’. The most celebrated results of this were the ‘combine’ paintings of the mid-1950s. These were a mixture of painting with collage and assemblage using all kinds of found materials, ranging from torn pages from newspapers and magazines to junk gathered in the street – the debris of the city, as it has been called. This notably included discarded stuffed animals. Crucially, some of these elements projected or hung from the canvas to invade

28 ra magazine | winter 2016

the real space of the gallery and the spectator, occupying that ‘gap’. Some of the combines were completely freestanding.

Of course, these works picked up on a tradition of collage and assemblage going back to Picasso’s Cubist collages and constructions, as well as the work of the Dadaists and Surrealists who followed. But Rauschenberg carried it much further, completely reinventing it for a new historical moment. The combines are weird, astonishing, arresting visual objects.

And they are also powerfully enigmatic. They are made up of real things that the artist had reasons for choosing, yet the critical and curatorial consensus has always been to treat them effectively as more purely visual than they perhaps are.

Quite clearly these works have an iconography. A particularly intriguing case is the most arresting and astonishing of all the combines, Monogram (above). What we know of its creation reveals that it was very elaborately pondered. It took the artist from 1955 to 1959 to complete and went through several major changes, Rauschenberg making exquisitely meticulous drawings to plot these. And yes, he could draw!

Rauschenberg said two things about Monogram. Of the title, that he chose it because the merging of the goat and the tyre was like the merging of letters of the alphabet to form a monogram. And then that ‘they lived happily ever after’. The penetration of the tyre by the heavily horned goat suggests powerful symbolism of the consummation of that marriage, becoming a rich image of the basic act of the creation of new life.

With its simultaneous stark contrast and seamless blending of the industrial and the

natural, the piece might also be read as an image of the fraught relationship between the man-made and nature, its base an evocation of the urban dereliction of 1950s Manhattan. This potential ecological message – ahead of its time – is given support by Rauschenberg’s laconic comment on his use of stuffed animals: ‘Too bad they are dead.

I can do something about that.’

The goat in Monogram is now probably the most celebrated in art history. But it does have a predecessor in the English Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt’s Scapegoat of 1854–56, of which he made two versions, a first small one in Manchester Art Gallery, and a final large one, now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight. Both are among the most mesmerisingly strange paintings ever made and the final version was greeted with total bafflement when first shown at the RA. As Hunt made clear, it refers to the description in the Bible’s Book of Leviticus of the ritual, part of the Day of Atonement, of symbolically loading a goat with the sins of the tribes of Israel, then sending it out to die in the desert.

The 1950s was notoriously a decade of the most intense homophobia both in the US and in Britain, when gay men were actively persecuted, and indeed made scapegoats for currents of change that aroused the fear and anxiety of those in authority. Did Rauschenberg, a gay man, know Hunt’s picture? Or, brought up as he was in a fundamentalist Christian household, just the Bible story? Could he have intended his goat, with its oppressively heavy man-made burden, to carry some of the same symbolism?

Robert Rauschenberg Tate Modern, London, 020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk, 1 Dec–2 April 2017

M O D ER N A M US EE T, S TO CK H O L M . P U R CH AS E 1965 W I T H CO N T R I B U T I O N F R O M M O D ER N A M US EE TS VÄ N N ER / T H E F R I EN DS O F M O D ER N A M US EE T

simon wilson deciphers the enigmatic work of American artist Robert Rauschenberg, ahead of a Tate retrospective

Preview International

After the flood It is 50 years since Florence was hit by the floods that destroyed not only lives but invaluable art treasures. claudia pritchard reports

P H OTO: DAV I D L EES/ T H E L I F E P I CT U R E CO L L ECT I O N /GE T T Y I M AGES

The flooded Accademia Gallery in Florence, in 1966, with Michelangelo’s David at the far end

In the early hours of 4 November 1966, the River Arno rose over its banks and stormed into Florence, the city whose prosperity it had helped create centuries before.

The waters that had once rinsed the finely dyed fabrics that the world desired had, within hours, sometimes minutes, penetrated medieval buildings, and saturated the artworks and manuscripts they housed. The water level reached more than six metres in the eastern Santa Croce district, where the church and national library were early victims. And almost as quickly as the floods arrived, they receded, leaving the historic heart of the city with its innumerable monuments thickly spread with a sickening impasto of mud, splintered wood, sewage and debris. At Santa Croce, the 13th-century Crucifix by Cimabue was all but destroyed. Of the millions of documents destroyed or damaged, more than one million were in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, within a few steps of the river.

Today, many landmarks show the high watermark of 1966 and lovers of art and architecture who are old enough to remember the floods still grieve at the memory of water coursing through the streets. Those streets were remarkably empty, though, on that day in November: mass tourism was yet to come, and Florentines were waking up to a long weekend. That Friday was a public holiday, marking victory over AustriaHungary in November 1918. Where on any other weekday office and shop assistants would have been making their way to work, and where today streams of tourists follow the trail of the great sights, on that Friday empty vehicles bobbed and tumbled in the torrents, and householders watched terrified from apartments above street level.

All told, 100 people died in Florence or further upstream, and 10,000 were made homeless.

Franco Zeffirelli was among those who recorded the scenes, and his short film narrated

by Richard Burton helped to raise $20 million

towards the seemingly impossible task of restoration. Such generosity was among the many good things to come out of the devastation, and it manifested, in the first instance, in the selflessness of those who rushed from all over the world to the city’s aid.

Among these were the so-called angeli del fango, the mud angels – many of them young students and artists, who in shorts and wellingtons, waded in. Professionals poured in too: conservators and specialists in the rescue and restoration of paper, parchment, fresco, panel paintings and paintings on canvas, sculpture in wood and bronze, firearms and musical instruments. The world of conservation opened up, its once secret techniques urgently shared.

Behind the hands-on volunteers was an army of fundraisers, among them the US Continued on page 32

winter 2016 | ra magazine 31

Preview International ON SHOW IN FLORENCE THIS WINTER

an artist who bridged Gothic and Renaissance art. Exquisite work by Lorenzo Ghiberti, Paolo Uccello and Masaccio is shown alongside dal Ponte’s paintings, such as St Michael the Archangel and St Bartholomew (1400–37, left).

1. AI WEIWEI: LIBERO Palazzo Strozzi, until 22 Jan 2017

In the wake of the RA’s show of Ai Weiwei last year, the Chinese artist’s multi-disciplinary works now weave their way through Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi – and across its façade, in the form of Reframe (2016, below), 22 orange life rafts that draw attention to the plight of refugees’ trying to cross the Mediterranean.

3. DISCOVERIES AND MASSACRES: ARDENGO SOFFICI AND IMPRESSIONISM IN FLORENCE Uffizi, until 8 Jan 2017

The first exhibition on the Florentine painter Giovanni di Marco (1385–1437), known as Giovanni dal Ponte, after his workshop in Piazza di Santo Stefano al Ponte, and, aptly,

1 Reframe, 2016, by Ai Weiwei Hon RA

Continued from page 31 Committee to Rescue Italian Art, an umbrella organisation fronted by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, which focused on the restoration of frescoes. Individuals and indeed whole cities chipped in: Picasso donated a painting, which raised $100,000 for restoration; the city of Edinburgh lent a fleet of buses to fill the gap in Florence’s stricken public transport system.

And the Italian artists of the day, beyond their immediate efforts, hatched a remarkable plan that did not focus solely on the restoration of works from the past. Having witnessed centuries of fine art imperilled, they were determined to lay the foundations of the heritage of the future, with a collection of contemporary art that would encourage the art of the future.

The project got off to a vigorous start. Just three months after the flood, an exhibition opened in the Palazzo Vecchio to celebrate current art and as a curtain-raiser for a proposed museum of contemporary art for Florence, the Museo Internazionale di Arte Contemporanea. Exhibitors included Jean Arp, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Marino Marini and Robert Motherwell, and some of the works formed the basis of the city’s new

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2 St Michael the Archangel and St Bartholomew, 1400–37,

by Giovanni dal Ponte

3 Portrait of Maurice Barrès with View of Toledo, 1913,

by Ignacio Zuloaga

collection of modern art. The main protagonist was the art critic Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, minister of arts and theatre immediately after the Second World War, whose eloquent and passionate call to the world – dubbed his appello – launched a campaign for a new modern art collection in a city wedded to the Renaissance.

The call was answered with enthusiasm, and the collection grew quickly and impressively, until there were thousands of works, among them substantial gifts by private collectors and by living artists, including the sculptor Mirko Basaldella and the painter Corrado Cagli.

A major gift of works came in 1973 from the engineer and collector Alberto della Ragione; his acquisitions included still-lifes by Giorgio Morandi, portraits by Giacomo Manzù and a sculpture by Marino Marini, as well as works

by Mario Sironi, Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà and Renato Guttuso.

But while occasional shows were held, the collection was for decades without a permanent, publicly accessible home, until the opening in 2014 of the magnificent Museo Novecento.

The venue is across the piazza from the church of Santa Maria Novella, where the flood had coated the base of the north nave wall housing

Masaccio’s Trinity with mud, and water had with tragic irony reached Uccello’s fresco cycle Noah and the Flood. The museum houses art from 1900 onwards, but its long-awaited home is the former Ospedale di San Paolo, later known as the Spedale delle Leopoldine. This palatial institution dates from 1208 and was augmented over the centuries by Michelozzo. In 1495 Andrea della Robbia created a lunette of Saint Dominic embracing Saint Francis, who is said to have established an order there upon his return from Egypt around 1213. The historic building is in complete contrast to the 20th-century collection that has grown out of the determination to rescue Florence 50 years ago.

An exhibition at Museo Novecento this winter, ‘Beyond the Borders/After the Flood’, retells the story of the floods and of Ragghianti’s international appello. But as before, the emphasis is on the future, and alongside the exhibition, the gallery is launching a new appello – a second call to artists and collectors and heirs worldwide to dig deep and donate works that will take the museum, and Florence, into a new era.

Beyond the Borders/After the Flood: The Artists’ Engagement Museo Novecento, Florence, museonovecento.fi, until 8 Jan 2017

CO U R T ESY A I W EI W EI S T U D I O/ P H OTO BY A L ES S A N D R O M O GGI . D I GI O N E , M US ÉE D ES B E AUX-A R TS . PA R IS , M US ÉE D ’ O RS AY

Another debut show, this time for artist and writer Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964), who helped organise the first Impressionism show in Florence in 1910, introducing to the public Renoir, Degas and others. Besides Soffici’s own work, highlights include Picasso, De Chirico and Zuloaga (Portrait of Maurice Barrès with View of Toledo, 1913, below).

2. GIOVANNI DAL PONTE Accademia, 22 Nov–12 March 2017

Preview Books 3 4 1 2

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Christmas for kids Start them early with artist bob and roberta smith ra’s pick of the best children’s art books My Dad was the parent who bought me art books for Christmas. He was a painter and he ran Chelsea School of Art in the 1960s and ’70s. His idea of a great Christmas present for a 10-yearold interested in art would be E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion. I still have it. Inside the front cover it reads ‘Happy Xmas 1973. One day, if you are a bright boy you might understand this… from Father Xmas.’

Kids art books have become a big theme with publishers. Some of them feel a bit devised for the market, but all of the books below have something genuine to offer and each caters for slightly different needs, from art appreciation to guides to art making, colour theory and logic puzzles. My favourites are the ones you could give to a baby, but which an adult could equally get lost in.

3. Seeing Things: A Kid’s Guide to Looking at Photographs

1. Squares & Other Shapes: with Josef Albers

4. Magritte’s Apple

Designed by Meagan Bennett Phaidon, £6.95, hbk Josef Albers was one of the great artist teachers.

He was a central figure in the Bauhaus – probably the most important school of art ever. Albers’ ideas about colour were complicated but his paintings were simple. This terrific book gets straight to the point. The most appealing aspect of what Albers had to say is all here: art is about pleasure and looking and what colour and rhythm does. Buy this for a child but also give it to your friend who says, ‘I don’t get modern art’.

Klaas Verplancke Thames & Hudson, £14.95, hbk The Surrealist René Magritte is a lot of fun. The man who painted a pipe and then said it was not a pipe but a ‘painting of a pipe’ is sympathetically brought to life through this investigation into his obsession with apples. The publisher recommends this book for children of five years plus. The best children’s books also get adults thinking and, as an introduction to philosophy and the nature of language, this one certainly does.

2. See the Stripes

Patricia Geis Princeton Architectural Press, £8.99, pbk This practical book aims to get kids making selfportraits in the style of modern masters. The back pages are there for you to cut out and use in collages. It is a modern version of a Victorian scrapbook where kids would cut out and create new scenes using pre-drawn printed elements.

I’m getting out my scissors and glue as I write this.

Andy Mansfield Templar, £9.99, hbk Hours of fun can be had trying to find the hidden coloured stripes in this ingenious pop-up book, ideal for lovers of the Rubik’s Cube. Proof, if it was needed, that art is about logic. Give your kids a unique entry into the understanding of Systems art. One day they could become code breakers.

34 ra magazine | winter 2016

Joel Meyerowitz Aperture Foundation, £15.95, hbk Joel Meyerowitz introduces us to some of the great street photographers of America – Bruce Davidson, Elliott Erwitt, and Garry Winogrand – as well as the Europeans Cartier-Bresson and Eugène Atget. What are the photographers trying to do and how does photography affect us? This clever and beautiful book has a strong humanistic undercurrent. Through the lens of the camera we understand that the past can communicate with us, that fleeting moments are poetic and meaningful, and that perhaps sometimes, when we think that life is a bit aimless, it’s also beautiful.

5. Draw Like an Artist

6. Bob the Artist

Marion Deuchars Laurence King, £10.95, hbk Bob is some kind of crow who has skinny legs.

If I were advising Bob I would say, ‘Don’t worry about your skinny legs. Your friends, an owl and a cat, are being mean!’ I like the image where Bob is inspired by Matisse cut-outs. But painting your beak as a diversionary tactic because you’ve got skinny legs is not wise. Bob, get some new friends.

7. SPLAT! The Most Exciting Artists of all Time

Mary Richards Thames & Hudson, £12.95, hbk Great tabloid newspaper-takes on the stories behind art. In this book artists are full of plots and plans to change the world and create small revolutions in how we understand what we see and experience. This would be a great gift to give to a family member before heading out to a gallery or a trip to Paris or Italy. The book is bang up to date, including modern-day artists such as Cornelia Parker RA and Pipilotti Rist.

8. Arnold’s Extraordinary Art Museum

Catherine Ingram and Jim Stoten Laurence King, £12.95, hbk Catherine Ingram and illustrator Jim Stoten take us on a fantastical journey into an esoteric museum run by Arnold, who is a bit of a controlling geek, armed with a chalk to draw a line over which one must not step. Oddly, we meet a cartoon Rachel Whiteread, who tells us she likes ‘forgotten spaces’, which she casts in plaster. Arnold’s museum houses key works in conceptual art that deal with bodily functions: Manzoni’s Merda d’artista; Duchamp’s famous fountain; and Yves Klein’s blue drinks, which made gallery goers’ wee turn blue. This book might give your kids nightmares about going to art shows but your angry pre-teenager will love it.

The RA’s painters, printmakers, sculptors and architects

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Academy Artists

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In the studio: Farshid Moussavi RA

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The grandeur of a Pimlico townhouse belies the architect’s cool minimalist studio within, writes fiona maddocks. Portrait by benjamin mcmahon Occupying the corner of a grand square in Pimlico, the white stucco building where architect Farshid Moussavi RA has her practice evokes a London long past: magnificent staircase, high ceilings, cornices, mouldings and fireplaces.

All is white and minimal, staff sitting quietly at computer screens, but the interior structure is rare in being unchanged, each room airy and spacious.

Perfect for a commercial developer to turn into luxury apartments and make a fortune.

That first impression proves accurate. ‘This was where Thomas Cubitt and his company worked – and this meeting room where we’re sitting was once his office,’ Moussavi explains. Cubitt (1788– 1855), one of London’s great master builders, left his imprint on Belgravia, including Eaton Square, Buckingham Palace and more. ‘We arrived here five years ago. I knew it had been Cubitt’s office, and I live in a flat next door – ideal, as I usually work late! We enjoy working here’ – she has a team of around 20 people – ‘and for a building in this area not to have been converted is amazing.’

The room we are in is dominated by a table made of two plywood doors propped on Moussavi-designed steel trestles. Images of current or recent projects are propped against walls, including a panel of nine photographs in shades of yellow (pictured far left) showing the inside of a double-decker staircase at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Ohio, that doubles as a sound-art gallery. The museum is a stunning, six-sided building clad in mirrored black stainless-steel, which opened in 2012.

Petite, stylish and energetic, Moussavi has a rapid smile, clear hazel-green eyes and formidable charm. Dressed in a black quilted shift and chunky wedge platforms, Moussavi is a match for any fashionista. She was born in Iran in 1965 and came to Britain at the age of 14. Her arrival was dramatic. ‘I was here with my parents on a summer holiday. Our visit coincided with the Iranian revolution, which forced the Shah into exile. There was a lot of turmoil in the country and it was unclear whether schools and universities would remain open.

My parents decided to get me into a school in Sussex, and left me while they went back. It was quite a big adjustment, but now I see it was so

brave and unselfish of them. I have a 15-yearold daughter. I can’t imagine doing anything similar myself.’

A make or break moment for the young Farshid? ‘Well yes, it was of course, but children are incredibly resilient. I already had a brother at school in England, so that helped. I spoke some English, but it certainly wasn’t good enough to understand maths or chemistry or physics. I had a lot of work to catch up on. My parents, both academics, came two years later.’

Moussavi triumphed at school, went to university in Dundee and University College London, then Harvard to study architecture, where she has been a professor since 2006. She worked for Renzo Piano in Italy, then for Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam, and after several years in a joint practice (she was co-founder of Foreign Office Architects) she set up her own, Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA), in 2011. Big completed projects include: a passenger cruise terminal in Japan; a John Lewis department store in Leicester; Ravensbourne College in Greenwich Peninsula; and, also in London, the Victoria Beckham flagship store.

‘Our buildings are more about assemblage than about trying to achieve an organic whole that unifies a building through a single “language”. I think this makes buildings monotonous. An assemblage leads to buildings as multiplicities, rich in diverse experiences.

Today, an architectural project may take six to ten years and it is exposed to unforeseen forces, most of which can lead to new ideas, complexity and unseen levels of refinement. Sometimes the process feels like sailing into choppy waters – but it’s a pretty amazing business.’

Unforeseen forces also mean Moussavi and her team will soon have to move. After a long planning battle, the building is being sold for development. She refuses to dwell on the anguish they all feel at the prospect. FMA’s new premises will be within one of her own projects, her tallest building so far, offices in Fenchurch Street. ‘Yes, it will be hard moving.

But how could I possibly complain about going to work in one of my own buildings?’ As a worldclass architect, she has a point.

winter 2016 | ra magazine 37

Academy Artists

How I made it TITLE Ruins, 2016 MEDIUM Jesmonite, resin, steel and paint ARTIST Eva Rothschild RA Can you describe this work?

The sculpture looks like a stack of polystyrene blocks that have been graffitied and scratched.

But these blocks are actually casts of the polystyrene cubes we use in the studio as supports while making other works. Why cast the thing when you could just have the thing?

Well, there’s something in knowing that the object isn’t what the eye is telling you it is; it destabilises your thinking about materiality, and that destabilisation is fundamental to the making of sculpture.

CO U R T ESY T H E A R T IS T, S T UA R T S H AV E / M O D ER N A R T, LO N D O N A N D T H E M O D ER N I NS T I T U T E , GL AS GOW/ P H OTO CR ED I T R O B ER T GLOWACK I . © A N N E D ES M E T/© 2016 R OYA L ACA D EM Y O F A R TS , LO N D O N / P H OTO GR A P H Y: P RU D EN CE CU M I N GS AS S O CI AT ES LT D, LO N D O N

What are the techniques and materials used?

The blocks were cast in fibreglass and Jesmonite, using silicon and rubber moulds. The paint was applied directly into the inside of the mould so that it transferred onto the piece in the casting process, which meant I had less control of the outcome. The original polystyrene blocks probably have a similar lifespan to many monuments from ancient civilisation, and certainly last longer than the materials that make up the work.

What is the work about?

Material transformation really interests me.

There’s an ecological anxiety around materials that we see as impermanent – we use them as if they were disposable but in fact they are not.

The work is partly about the idea of civilisation in decline, that some things are still standing and seem permanent, but that’s not guaranteed.

I made the work this year, and though it’s not polemical, it’s certainly influenced by recent political events. There’s a loss of confidence in

structures that we thought we could rely on, a sense of order that’s crumbling.

What was the starting point for this work?

I am interested in the column and ideas in classical architecture of permanence and power.

I was also thinking about the poem by Shelley, Ozymandias: the traveller seeing the remains of the colossal statue of the Egyptian pharaoh in the sand, and thinking at the time it was made, it seemed it would be there forever.

There’s pathos in the idea of permanence.

Were there any major challenges?

The material I used is heavy, messy and expensive. The ceiling in my studio is not high enough to accommodate the sculpture when its fully assembled – and that’s the case for many of the works I make. So I have to make decisions while installing the work. For the exhibition in Walsall I hadn’t decided the order for the blocks, for example. I could only try out a stack of three in my studio. You have to trust that it will come together – which is nerve-wracking – but it makes the work very alive and in the moment.

How do you feel about the work now?

I’m getting used to it. For me there could be ten more versions. I think that’s what I like about the modular format: the boundaries aren’t fixed.

I constantly refer to Brancusi and his Endless Column: a single symmetrical abstract shape stuck to another, repeated to produce a tower that could, in theory, extend to infinity.

There’s a possibility for growth or destruction: an unstable reality.

Interview by Alice Primrose ‘Ruins’ is on view in Eva Rothschild: Alternative to Power The New Art Gallery, Walsall, 01922 65440, thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk, until 15 Jan 2017

Impressions of Italy

A watercolour sketch of Urbino in 1994, from Anne Desmet RA’s book An Italian Journey

An Italian Journey (RA Publications, £9.95) gathers together sketchbook pages filled with pen, wash and watercolour landscapes from Anne Desmet RA’s travels in the bel paese. A limited edition of the book with a signed wood engraving by Desmet is also available (£350): visit http://roy.ac/sanseverino to watch a video of the artist producing the work. A major accompanying show of engravings and collages is at London’s Royal Overseas League (until 2 Dec). winter 2016 | ra magazine 39

Academy Artists

Mother of invention Anthony Green RA’s huge painting is shown with ephemera revealing his family history, writes MARTIN BAILEY Anthony Green RA’s forthcoming display at the Academy focuses around a single work, The Fur Coat: ‘Hazana’ (2014, right). As with nearly all of his pictures, it deals with his family story – this time his mother’s second marriage.

Green, who was 14 at the time of the wedding, describes the three-metre-high work as ‘an adolescent’s memory’.

His mother Madeleine Dupont is depicted life size in what is almost a sculptural painting, executed on board with irregular edges. The face was painted in 1963, as part of a larger picture that had dealt with the loss of their stillborn daughter of Anthony and his wife Mary. Green later destroyed the 1963 painting, but cut out the face of his mother. The mink coat, scarf and handbag in the work are real objects rather than painted images – items that belonged to Madeleine and were saved after her death 12 years ago. Her legs are painted on a slightly raised board, giving a three-dimensional effect.

The scene takes place in the sitting room of the north London house where Madeleine lived with Stanley Joscelyne, her new husband.

Madeleine had started taking Spanish lessons, and they named their new home Hazana, which means ‘achievement’. Madeleine is being admired

by Stanley’s poodle, Peter. ‘My mother loved Stanley and grew to love his dog,’ Green recalls.

The action in the upper section of the work takes place in the bedroom, where Stanley displays his prowess for the young Anthony by standing on his head. His mother lies on the bed,

with an even more intimate view reflected in a mirror hanging free of the painting’s main panel.

Items relating to The Fur Coat: ‘Hazana’, such as working drawings and ephemera, are also on display. Among these is a poignant letter from the young Anthony to his mother, saying ‘so glad you have seen a solicitor’ about divorcing his father.

Anthony Green RA: The Life and Death of Miss Dupont Tennant Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, 18 Jan– 30 April 2017. Anthony Green: Painting Life edited by Martin Bailey, is published Jan 2017 (£30, RA Publications).

The artist is in conversation with Timothy Hyman RA on 11 Feb 2017; see Events and Lectures page 102.

Anthony Green RA Chris Beetles Gallery, London, 020 7839 7551, chrisbeetles.com, 31 Jan–4 March 2017

© A N T H O N Y GR EEN R A . © VA N ES S A JACKS O N R A

Artists in print

Woodcut and linocut techniques, from laser cutting to traditional Japanese woodblock, are celebrated in the RA Keeper’s House selling show ‘Surface Cutting’ (until 20 Feb 2017), including Dwelling I and II

by Vanessa Jackson RA (2016, left).

Works are also available online and can be purchased with the help of Own Art, an Arts Council England initiative offering interest-free loans.

WINTER 2016 | RA MAGAZINE 41

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31/10/2016 15:20

As 2017 marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the RA mounts a momentous show on this pivotal period in art.

Martin Sixsmith charts the course of post-revolutionary Russian art, from euphoric creativity to eventual repression

Back in the USSR In his 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak describes his hero’s and, by extension, his own response to the revolutionary fervour of 1917.

‘Just think what extraordinary things are happening all around us!’ Yuri said. ‘Such things happen only once in an eternity… Freedom has dropped on us out of the sky!’

Pasternak is talking about more than just politics.

Yuri Zhivago is a poet, and his artist’s sensibility (in Russian his name is a play on zhivoy, or ‘alive’) resonates with the visceral changes tearing through his native land. Pasternak’s imagery

44 ra magazine | winter 2016

is febrile, hopeful, anticipating a new beginning and a new life. You can feel the excitement in the Russian air: Everything was fermenting, growing, rising with the magic yeast of life. The joy of living, like a gentle wind, swept in a broad surge indiscriminately through fields and towns, through walls and fences, through wood and flesh. Not to be overwhelmed by this tidal wave, Yuri went out in the square to listen to the speeches…

What Pasternak is describing, very powerfully, is the birth of love. Zhivago’s outpouring of passion

for the revolution coincides with the blossoming of his relationship with Lara. The two merge into the joy that only love can bring.

Pasternak’s reaction wasn’t a one-off. A generation of artists, writers and musicians would greet the perception of bewildering, miraculous freedom bestowed by the revolution with the exhilaration of a nascent love affair. From 1917 up to 1932 – the rough span of the RA’s survey of Russian art – they would experience the whole gamut of emotions that love engenders.

The initial, youthful passion that overwhelms caution and sense would lift them to heights of creation. They were inspired, rewarded, fulfilled.

RED PLANET

Konstantin Yuon’s New Planet, 1921, reflects the euphoric energy of the revolution’s early years, when the victory of 1917 led to hopes that Bolshevism would conquer the world and spawned literary fantasies about Communist colonies on Mars

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above

Then came love’s trials, the niggling suspicions, the dawn of mistrust. When doubts surfaced about the purity of their love object, they forced themselves to suppress them. When the faults of the regime became manifest, they looked away.

In the end, the revolution turned against them. Some she consumed in the killing machine of the gulag; others fled, or renounced their art.

More than one, some of the best, succumbed to the despair of rejection. Spurned lovers, they found life was no longer worth living and they ended it.

Artistic innovation had smouldered before the revolution. Artists such as Lyubov Popova,

Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Alexander Rodchenko and David Burliuk had produced striking avant-garde works earlier than 1917, as had Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall. Distracted by having to fight a world war and by domestic unrest, the Tsarist regime had let art slip the leash. The conflict had reduced Russia’s contacts with the West and native talent had taken new directions. Several significant works by Malevich in the exhibition, including Red Square – a red parallelogram, stark and challenging on a white ground – and Dynamic Suprematism Supremus, with its vortex of geometric shapes,

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date from the years before the revolution (below and right).

But it was 1917, with its promise of brave new worlds and liberation from the past, that set all the arts aflame. The poets Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely and Sergei Yesenin produced their most important work. Authors such as Mikhail Zoshchenko and Mikhail Bulgakov pushed at the bounds of satire and fantasy. The Futurist poets, chief among them Vladimir Mayakovsky, embraced the revolution while proclaiming the renewal of art. The Poputchiki or Fellow Travellers – writers nominally sympathetic to Bolshevism but nervous about commitment – clashed with the self-described Proletarian writers who brashly claimed the right to speak for the Party.

Musical experimentalism broke through the barriers of harmony, overflowed into jazz and created orchestras without conductors. The watchwords were novelty and invention, with pre-revolutionary forms raucously jettisoned from the steamship of modernity.

In the visual arts, Malevich and his followers took painting to new regions in search of abstract geometric purity. The principles of Dynamic Suprematism, proclaimed in his 1926 manifesto The Non-Objective World, ring with the provocative self-confidence of culture in those years. ‘By Suprematism I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in art… The visual phenomena of the objective world are meaningless;

the significant thing is feeling. The appropriate means of representation gives the fullest possible expression to feeling and ignores the familiar appearance of objects. Objective representation… has nothing to do with art. Objectivity is meaningless.’

Malevich’s canvases had moved from early realism via a flirtation with Cubism to the ultimate abstraction of shape and colour. His Red Square (1915, below) is also titled Visual Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions; her ‘meaningless’ visual phenomenon had been distilled into ‘pure feeling’. Like Kandinsky, who had returned to Russia from Germany in 1914, Malevich’s paintings in the decade following the revolution are alive with the rhythmic manipulation of form and space, packed with dynamic shapes that fly precipitously towards the viewer, full of the energy of the age of flight.

The Constructivists Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Popova (Space-Force Construction, 1921, pages 48 and 49) and Rodchenko (Pioneer with Trumpet, 1930, page 52) strove to square the circle between the concrete forms of architecture and photography and the values of art for art’s sake.

Their structural designs were sharp and angular, a sort of three-dimensional Suprematism. They produced street art celebrating the revolution and denouncing its foes. In 1919 they covered buildings in Vitebsk in vibrant propaganda, with El Lissitzky’s emblematic Beat the Whites with the

MALEVICH QUITS ABSTRACTION

Kazimir Malevich’s Red Square, 1915, was a milestone in his quest to attain ‘pure feeling’ in his art, distilling the ‘meaningless’ reality of objective phenomena to their inmost essence. Dynamic Suprematism Supremus, c.1915, added rhythmic movement to geometrical abstraction. But the Bolsheviks’ determination to subjugate art to the demands of the state curbed Malevich’s innovation. Woman with Rake, 1930–32, and Portrait of Nikolai Punin, 1933, suggest an enforced return to realism

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from left to right

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Red Wedge reducing the complexity of Russia’s civil war to a red triangle piercing a white circle, in a geometric confrontation of good and evil that even the least educated could comprehend. ‘The streets shall be our brushes,’ said Mayakovsky, ‘and the squares our palettes.’

Art was spilling into every form of expression. The Bolsheviks were quick to identify the potential of film in influencing the masses, and directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and cinéma-vérité pioneer Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929, page 50) became skilled exponents of politically charged cinema.

The newsreel series, Kinodelia (Film Weekly) and Kinopravda (Film Truth), run by Vertov, used Constructivist-inspired intertitles designed

by Rodchenko, who also produced their advertising posters.

The Bolsheviks at first were tolerant, preoccupied with more pressing matters. But by the mid-1920s, the regime was looking disapprovingly at the radicalism and the abstraction, beginning to shape the doctrine that would subjugate all art to the aims of socialism.

On 23 April 1932, the Central Committee announced the formation of the Artists’ Union of the USSR, tasked with imposing Socialist Realism as the only acceptable form of artistic expression. From now on, it decreed, art must depict man’s struggle for socialist progress towards a better life. The creative artist must serve the proletariat by being realistic, optimistic and heroic.

The experimentalism that had flourished since the revolution was now deemed un-Soviet.

To further the cause of the revolution culture

must be comprehensible by the masses; anything more complicated, innovative or original was by definition useless and potentially dangerous.

Abstract art didn’t fit the bill. The era of freedom for the avant-garde was over.

With consummately bad timing, a 1932 jubilee retrospective of trends in postrevolutionary art took the celebration of diversity as its keynote. When ‘Artists of the Russian Federation over Fifteen Years 1917–1932’ opened at the State Russian Museum in Leningrad, it filled 100 rooms with nearly 2,000 works, ranging from heroic statues and paintings of Lenin and Stalin to the striking paintings of Pavel Filonov, teeming with figures. A whole room was devoted to Malevich’s geometrical canvases and his plaster blocks known as ‘architectons’.

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CHAGALL GOES HIS OWN WAY

Promenade, 1917–18,

by Marc Chagall, was painted when the artist was serving as Commissar for the Arts in Vitebsk.

By 1923 he was disillusioned with the poverty and violence of the Bolsheviks’ brave new world and emigrated definitively to Paris

By the time the exhibition was due to move to Moscow in 1933, diversity was a dirty word and many of the contributors were on the Kremlin’s blacklist. Malevich, who had already been interrogated by the NKVD secret police, was far less visible in the show. (‘From the first days of the revolution,’ he told his interrogator, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, ‘I have been working for the benefit of Soviet art…’ and ‘Art must provide the newest forms… to reflect the social problems of proletarian society.’) Neither was there much of Filonov’s work on view, and official disapproval would blight the rest of his life.

Even his attempts to make acceptable paintings,

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including a portrait of Stalin, were rejected.

He died from starvation during the siege of Leningrad in 1941. ***** A great joy of the RA’s exhibition is that it reconstitutes large sections of the original ‘Artists of the Russian Federation’ show, including the Malevich and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin rooms almost in their entirety. It presents the abstract and the avant-garde alongside art that overtly champions the regime. If we had tended lazily to assume that the former outstrips the latter in both brilliance of conception and quality of

execution, this exhibition might make us think again. Socialist Realism spawned much hackery, but also much to admire.

The most visible face of official art was on the streets, where statues of the revolution’s forerunners and leaders proliferated, ever bigger, ever more heroic. Lenin was portrayed in the throes of revolutionary fervour, his arm extended in a dramatic appeal for commitment to the cause or striding purposefully forward towards the radiant Communist future. In paintings, he is also seen in more intimate settings, working at his desk; hearing petitions from peasants who have appealed to his infallible wisdom; constantly alert,

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PURE GEOMETRY

The Constructivists applied Suprematist ideals of geometric purity to architecture and design.

Lyubov Popova’s painting Space-Force Construction, 1921, heralded three prolific years in textile, typography and stage design before the artist’s death from scarlet fever aged 35 left

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always on guard to protect the Soviet people.

Alongside the accomplished realism of artists such as Isaak Brodsky, others brought a quirkier vision. Petrov-Vodkin, who trained as an icon painter, depicts Lenin in his coffin with a glow of preternatural divinity about him (below).

As the Lenin myth grew, so did the intimations of saintliness. Lenin was a holy martyr, presiding Christ-like over the destiny of the nation. A party that had destroyed religion in a deeply Christian country needed something to replace it and holy Lenin, dedicated, ascetic and self-denying, was the answer. Russian peasants maintain a shrine in one corner of their home known as the krasny ugol – the beautiful corner – with a holy icon and a candle.

The state was driving out the icons of Christ, replacing them with icons of Lenin.

Portraying Stalin was a tougher ask. Scarred by smallpox, with a withered arm and short of stature, he was not naturally heroic. But just as they turned a blind eye to the faults of the regime, there was no shortage of painters ready to gloss over the imperfections of the leader. Statues made him as tall as the powerfully built Tsar Alexander III and photographs were retouched to disguise his pockmarks. There were artists who persisted

in loving the revolution, and some forms of love can make you blind.

It can’t have been easy to look away in the months after 1917. The structures of the state had collapsed under the pressure of world conflict, revolution and civil war. Law and order had broken down, millions were homeless and people were starving in the streets. In the name of War Communism – harsh, enslaving and repressive – Russia was subjected to militarised dictatorship.

Challenges to Bolshevik rule, including a failed attempt to assassinate Lenin in August 1918, resulted in the launch of the Red Terror against political opponents and class enemies.

The writer Yevgeny Zamyatin described Petrograd as ‘a city of icebergs, mammoths and wasteland… where cavemen, swathed in hides and blankets, retreat from cave to cave’. People bartered their possessions and family heirlooms for firewood. Dogs and cats disappeared from the streets to be made into ‘civil war sausage’.

Even the proletariat was fed up with the Bolsheviks. ‘Down with Lenin and horsemeat,’ said the graffiti. ‘Give us the Tsar and pork!’

Mayakovsky and other leading cultural figures produced billboards and slogans promoting state food stores. My favourite is his witty Nigde kromye kak v Mosselpromye – ‘You’d have to be dumb not to shop at Mosselprom’. But food coupons on display in the exhibition tell another story. Hunger was everywhere. Members of the former middle class, denounced as ‘bourgeois parasites’ and ‘non-persons’ were placed on starvation rations and forced to do cruel, often deadly labour. City streets were filled with war orphans and child thieves. Begging, black-marketeering, crime and prostitution were rife. Bolshevik power was teetering on the brink.

A REVOLUTIONARY ICON

By Lenin’s Coffin, 1924,

by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, who trained as an icon painter, gives the dead Bolshevik leader an aura of radiant sainthood.

A whole room was dedicated to the painter in an important Leningrad exhibition in 1932 right

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a retreat from socialism, but the NEP, which ran from 1921 to 1929, was effective. Its tolerance of limited personal gain encouraged people to work harder and the peasants to produce more food.

And it threw up a new class of speculators similar to today’s oligarchs.

The NEP years saw a rise in the urban population; cities were straining at the seams.

The state squeezed workers into smaller and smaller spaces, evicting members of the former bourgeoisie to make way for them. To maximise space, a system of communal living was introduced with multiple families billeted in one apartment, sharing kitchens, bathrooms and even bedrooms. The kommunalka concept was in line with the Bolshevik rejection of bourgeois values such as private property and the nuclear family. But in practice it was a nightmare. Feuds broke out between residents, property was stolen and murders committed.

With police informers everywhere, people felt spied on in their own homes. Mistrust was rife; tensions rose.

CUT TO THE ACTION

Dziga Vertov’s documentary on Soviet life, Man with a Movie Camera, 1929, experiments with double exposure, fast motion, split screens and jump cuts above

DOWN ON THE FARM

The ambiguous expression in the peasant’s eyes in Pavel Filonov’s Collective Farm Worker, 1931, seems to capture the pain of Stalin’s ruthless collectivisation of agriculture opposite top

REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s flaming red horse in Fantasy, 1925, first appeared in a 1912 painting of his that created much controversy. By 1925 it has gained an élan that invites identification with the spirit of the revolution

opposite

P H OTO GR A P H: B F I

In March 1921, the Bolsheviks were holding their Tenth Party Congress in Petrograd, when 30,000 sailors in the Kronstadt fortress, 50 kilometres away in the Gulf of Finland, rose up in revolt against the regime. The Party was in panic.

Trotsky set out with 45,000 troops to march across the ice. Thousands died, but the Kronstadt rebellion was put down and its leaders executed.

It was a warning that Lenin could not ignore.

He admitted the Bolsheviks were ‘barely hanging on’. The people were sick of War Communism, weary of hunger and economic meltdown, no longer willing to suffer in the name of some future utopia. Six million people had died in famines across the country. A 70,000-strong peasant army was preparing to challenge Bolshevik power. Military force and mass terror were no longer enough to keep the lid on.

The New Economic Policy (the NEP) was Lenin’s crisis response to this existential challenge. It would loosen the control of the state and reintroduce some elements of private enterprise. Hardline Bolsheviks denounced it as

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The grim reality made El Lissitzky’s plans for the perfect apartment look desperately utopian. As a 1927 model reconstructed for the RA exhibition demonstrates, his design is clean, spare and beautiful. It reflects the Constructivists’ insistence that functional houses could also be pure art. But with the economy falling apart and the new leader Stalin consolidating his power through militaryindustrial projects, such ideals were never going to be taken seriously.

When Stalin launched the first Five Year Plan for industrialisation he said it was a matter of national survival. ‘We are a hundred years behind the capitalist West,’ he told Soviet industrialists in 1931. ‘We must catch up with them in just ten years… or they will crush us!’ A continuous working week was introduced, wages cut and harsh penalties introduced for slackers. Millions of labour camp prisoners, and members of the Komsomol (the Young Communist organisation), were used as unpaid labour, their efforts captured in the innovative photography of Arkady Shaikhet (page 106) and others. Women were nominally accorded equal status with men and were expected to work to the same norms. Alexander Deineka’s paintings of all-female production lines foreshadowed the changed social role that women would play throughout the 70 years of the USSR. The Five Year Plans set punitive timetables, but at first the Soviet people rose to the challenge.

Output more than doubled and gigantic new industrial centres were built from scratch. The River Dnepr was harnessed by a hydroelectric dam that fuelled plants employing half a million people, an achievement celebrated in Isaak Brodsky’s Shock-worker from Dneprostroi (1932), with its towering backlit cranes rising from the earth under the command of the herculean figure of the New Soviet Man. The lightning-fast construction of the blast furnaces of Magnitogorsk in the Urals inspired Time, Forward!, a novel and a feature film about the world record for pouring concrete.

The drive to modernise Soviet industry made machines and technology obligatory subjects for the nation’s culture. The jagged, pounding rhythms of Alexander Mosolov’s overture The Iron Foundry (1926) caught the urgency of the times; Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement (1925) and Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel was Tempered (1936) became instant bestsellers.

Soviet propaganda was creating its own national mythology with the workers themselves as gods.

A new breed of superheroes known as shockworkers would spearhead the charge, and the bard of the revolution, Vladimir Mayakovsky, was on hand to deify them. His poem March of the Shock Brigades (1930) is agitprop at its best, marvellously inventive with a powerful, intoxicating message.

Onwards, shock brigades!

From workshops to factories!…

Puff out our collective chest, And deep into the Russian darkness Hammer in the lights Like nails …

Onwards, with no rest days; Onwards, with a giant’s steps.

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The Five Year Plan Complete in four!

Now socialism will rise, Genuine, real, alive.

The successes didn’t last. I remember going with my parents in 1970 to the great Exhibition of the People’s Economic Achievements in Moscow. It seemed then to be the posthumous vindication of Stalin’s vision. Proud guides showed us around extravagant pavilions showcasing the achievements of Soviet industry and technology. But the whole thing was a sham.

As we later discovered, the Soviet economy had been hamstrung by a central command system that replaced enterprise and initiative with duplication, inefficiency and waste. ‘We pretend to work,’ ran a popular joke, ‘and they pretend to pay us.’ The gleaming boasts of success were a façade built on lies and pretence.

A key pledge that helped sweep the Bolsheviks to power was that the land would be given to the peasants. It was a promise they had no intention of keeping. The collectivisation of Soviet agriculture in the years from 1928 to 1940 caused human misery on an unprecedented scale.

It unleashed the worst excesses of Communist social engineering and millions died because of it.

Stalin announced that forcing the peasants into large-scale collective farms, sharing labour and equipment would ‘solve our [food] problems… and remould the peasants’ mentality into the ways of socialism’. But for the peasants the land was a sacred inheritance bestowed by

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WE CAN BE HEROES

Girl with Putting Stone, 1933, by Alexander Samokhvalov is typical of the artist’s female figures depicted as intrepid amazons. It was made a year after the Central Committee declared that art must serve the revolution by being realistic, optimistic and heroic left

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God, not the Bolsheviks. They hid or destroyed their crops, and killed their livestock sooner than have it requisitioned. Pavel Filonov’s Collective Farm Worker (1931, page 51) expresses the sorrow and bewilderment that collectivisation caused.

Disastrous harvests followed, yields plummeted and a two million-tonne shortfall in grain supplies caused waves of famine. The state sent troops to seize peasants’ crops and execute those who resisted. ‘We must smash the kulaks [peasants who oppose collectivisation],’ Stalin declared. ‘We must eliminate them as a class…

We must strike so hard they will never rise again!’

The rhetoric was unhinged because the regime’s very survival was under threat. Soviet culture was told to glorify the shock-troops who were smashing the kulaks and to cover up the misery that existed on the ground. Paintings, poetry, songs and movies overflowed with burgeoning wheat fields and happy peasants on their new collectivised tractors. Malevich, too, complied with the Kremlin’s instruction to return

The louder Yesenin expressed his doubts, the more his work met with official disfavour. In 1925 he wrote a poem in his own blood and hanged himself in a Leningrad hotel.

Even more shocking was the death of the regime’s own lyricist, Mayakovsky. His poetry is a vigorous, inventive call to arms, a fervent appeal to rise up against the old world and hurry on the advent of the new. But the leaders of the revolution were cultural conservatives. Lenin dismissed Mayakovsky’s work as ‘nonsense, stupidity, double stupidity and pretentiousness’.

By the late 1920s, Mayakovsky was out of love with the revolution, writing plays attacking the philistinism of Soviet society. In April 1930, he shot himself in his Moscow apartment. His suicide note is a poem lamenting the unrequited love that had overwhelmed him:

PROPAGANDA MACHINE

Pioneer with Trumpet, 1930, by Alexander Rodchenko combines the political content demanded by the regime (the Pioneers were the Communist youth organisation) with the Constructivist credo that photography and architecture can achieve artistic purity of form. left

INDUSTRIAL CHIC

Andrey Golubev’s fabric design Red Spinner, 1930, with its images of cotton mill workers, is an example of the kind of industrial imagery that was brought into mass production, as new art forms spilled into all areas of Soviet life below

It’s past one o’clock. You must have gone to bed.

The Milky Way streams silver through the night.

I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams I have no cause to wake or trouble you.

And, as they say, the incident is closed.

Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind.

Now you and I are quits. Why bother then To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts…

More writers, poets and artists died in the gulag. They were charged with ludicrous offences such as spying for foreign powers, but in reality their ‘crimes’ were artistic. The work of the great theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold was experimental and avant-garde. He was opposed to the restrictive dogma of Socialist Realism and made a speech saying so. Tortured by the NKVD, Meyerhold wrote wrenching pleas for clemency from his cell in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison.

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They are torturing me. They make me lie face down and beat my spine and feet. Then they beat my feet from above… I howl and weep from the pain. I twist and squeal like a dog. Oh most certainly, death is easier than this. I begin to incriminate myself in the hope I will go quickly to the scaffold. to agriculture as a subject, although his faceless figures of peasants hint at the loss of individuality (Woman with Rake, 1930–32, page 47).

Even the Bolsheviks, with their genius for manipulating the truth, could not pretend that all was rosy. They promised instead that present sacrifices would be rewarded by future happiness in an ideal socialist world. It followed that the task of Socialist Realism was to show the workers what they were working for. Deineka’s sports paintings are resolutely heroic, while Alexander Samokhvalov’s amazons (Girl with Putting Stone, 1933, opposite) have much in common with those of 1930s Germany. Socialist Realism helped to create the ethos of hope in those years, when first Lenin then Stalin spoke of the utopia that was on the horizon (prompting jokers to point out that the horizon is an imaginary line that recedes into the distance as you approach it).

Not everyone was convinced. Pasternak’s fictional poet Yuri Zhivago falls out of love with the revolution as completely as he fell in love

with it, revolted by Bolshevism’s destructive disregard for human values. Real poets and artists became disillusioned, too. Kandinsky and Chagall, both of whom had played public roles in the Bolsheviks’ cultural institutions after 1917, emigrated definitively in the early 1920s.

Under political pressure, Malevich adopted a new enigmatic realism that seemed to contradict many of the fundamental values he had striven for (Portrait of Nikolai Punin, 1933, page 47).

In Sergei Yesenin’s poems, you can hear the writer trying to love the new order (‘I want to be a poet/And a citizen/In the mighty Soviet state’), but unable to sing the words dictated to him: I am not your tame canary!

I am a poet!

Not one of your petty hacks.

I may be drunk at times, But in my eyes Shines the glorious light of revelation.

Meyerhold went to his execution in February 1940, reportedly shouting ‘Long live Stalin’, believing, like many others, that the Father of the Nation could not possibly be aware of the crimes being committed in his name. But Stalin, and Lenin before him, were certainly aware. Art, poetry, music and love meant nothing to the Bolshevik zealots. As the critic Viktor Shklovsky wrote in the 1930s, ‘Art must move organically, like the heart in the human breast; but they want to regulate it like a train.’

‘I’m no good at art,’ Lenin famously said.

‘Art for me is a just an appendage, and when its use as propaganda – which we need at the moment – is over, we’ll cut it out as useless: snip, snip!’

Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 Main Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7300 8000, royalacademy.org.uk, 11 Feb–17 April 2017. Supported by LetterOne. Supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation.

See Events and Lectures page 102

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