The Russian Avant-garde by Skira editore

Fire and Ice The concepts of Fire and Ice at this exhibition are being used as a metaphorical description of Russia’s ideological and artistic acceleration towards the East manifest especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The expansion lay not only towards Siberia and the Far East, but also towards the scorched deserts of Turkestan (captured in the haunting evocations of Pavel Kuznetsov, Ruvim Mazel’, Aleksandr Nikolaev and Martiros Sar’ian) and the Arctic regions (pictured by Mitrofan Beringov, Aleksandr Borisov, Konstantin Korovin and Aleksei Stepanov). Moreover, as diachronic terms, Fire and Ice are also intended to subsume the more abstract associations of cool reason and passionate spontaneity, a duality which drove the creative talents of, for example, Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich. If, therefore, Ice comes to denote sobriety of intellect, Fire may also assume the qualities of pagan fervour as in Léon Bakst’s Siamese Sacred Dance, Nicholas Roerich’s Polovtsian Encampment and Vasilii Vatagin’s Procession with Fires (1913–14, oil on canvas, 100 x 75 cm; Tarusa, collection of the Vatagin family), or the fabulous transmutation symbolised by the firebirds in Sergei Sudeikin’s Oriental Carpet and the smoking hulks of the Russian and Japanese fleets in the cold waters of the Sea of Japan. Of course, not all works at this exhibition can be accommodated within this immediate framework, but the confrontation or collocation of the two conditions might help guide the visitor through the vast and difficult terrain of Russian art – from icy wasteland to torrid wilderness – along its Siberian, Caucasian, Arctic and Asian routes.

Works

1. Preface

The individual felt lost and bewildered in the vastness of the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Uncivilised space began just outside the front door. The subtle anxiety of impenetrable wilderness and the presence of the “other” – the vast expanses of winter snows, a bulwark against many invaders, the trackless forests of the taiga and the mirages of the boundless steppe – threatened the cherry orchards of country homes. It was from the steppe that the nomadic peoples had arrived, the slant-eyed hordes that were long to personify the Enemy in the Russian subconscious. In the melting pot of Eurasia, a vast diversity of peoples and races, including Scythians, Huns, Mongols and Eskimos, together with traces of even more archaic cultures such as those of China, India and Tibet, were, however, melded with the primitive rituals of initiation, ecstasy and self-abandonment taught by the shamans of the Northern peoples. The wolf, a sacred animal of shamanism that looks us straight in the eye from the endless snows, and the hyena, casting a dark blue shadow in the blinding light of the steppe, encapsulate the dreams and fears of the inhabitants of the Russian Empire, which this exhibition is designed to present. A kamennaia baba, one of the mysterious primitive megaliths found throughout the Empire’s territories, is the guardian of this anxiety, a more modern extension of which can be recognised in Natal’ia Goncharova’s Emptiness, Kazimir Malevich’s Black Circle and Wassily Kandinsky’s Black Spot.

Wassily Kandinsky Black Spot 1912 oil on canvas, 101 x 131 cm St. Petersburg, State Russian Museum, inv. no. ZhB-1323 (cat. no. 1.6)

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Preface

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2. Exotic Sources: From Greece to Siam

The future Tsar set off from Trieste on 26 October 1890 on a tour of the East intended to strengthen diplomatic relations with the peoples on the Empire’s Eastern frontiers. Greece was the first stage of the journey made by the Tsarevich in the company of his cousin, the son of the Greek sovereign. Sinologist Prince Esper Ukhtomsky (1861–1921), attached to the mission as official chronichler, imparted a specially ominous tone to his description of the visit to the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, while Karazin rendered its most dramatic moment with both panache and precision. The huge Doric ruins were illuminated by a flash of lightning in a sudden thunderstorm: “The air became heavy as thick cloud covered the heavens and we had to make haste. We made our way forward, sometimes stumbling over stones from the altar to Zeus, where priests once foretold the future in the smoke of sacrifices. Olympia was a mystic sanctuary”. Greece was thus seen not as the Apollonian cradle of the classical civilisation but as steeped in local colour, with dark archaic and primordial overtones. This sense still reverberates in Léon Bakst’s Terror Antiquus (1908). On arriving at Vladivostok in May 1891, the Tsarevich then spent two months on an overland journey westward through the vast expanses of Siberia. This second, homeward stage of the journey was evidently made for propaganda purposes, as shown by his symbolic inauguration of the still unbuilt last stretch of the Trans-Siberian Railway on his arrival at Vladivostok. The journey was also an initiatory experience for the 22-year-old Nikolai and served not only to acquaint him with exotic lands such as India, Ceylon, Java, Siam, Japan and China, but also to establish links between the future ruler, the still virgin territories and the supposedly primitive and minor peoples of Siberia. The exhibition follows the path of the mission not in a geographical sense but as a metaphorical trajectory proceeding in a circle from West to East and East to West.

Léon Bakst Terror Antiquus 1908 oil on canvas, 250 x 270 cm St. Petersburg, State Russian Museum, inv. no. Zh-8135 (cat. no. 2.2) Nikolai Karazin Amidst the Ruins. The Temple of Zeus in a Tempest (Olympia) 1880–90 ink and whitening on board, 33.1 x 24.7 cm St. Petersburg, State Russian Museum, inv. no. R-18150 (cat. no. 2.1) Sergei Konenkov Eos 1913 painted marble, 34.5 x 32 x 34 cm Moscow, State Tretiakov Gallery, inv. no. SkS-3049 (cat. no. 2.3)

Bakst took up Karazin’s image, associating it with the unfathomable aspect of a still barbaric form of classicism and relating it to his own experience of the ruins of Delphi during a storm one night on a trip to Greece in 1907: “Huge bolts of lightning blinded us with their great jagged blades and the bottomless precipice of the valley opening out below us seemed still more velvety and wild”. In the impenetrable night, “somewhere in the depths of the valley, beneath the blinding flashes of violet-blue lightning, lay the white marble temples, fairytale houses scattered by the monstrous hands of Cyclopes”.

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Exotic Sources: From Greece to Siam

Nikolai Karazin Temples, Spires and Watchdogs 1880â&#x20AC;&#x201C;90 ink and whitening on board, 33.1 x 24.7 cm St. Petersburg, State Russian Museum, inv. no. R-18250 (cat. no. 2.5)

LĂŠon Bakst Siamese Sacred Dance 1901 oil on canvas, 73.2 x 109.5 cm Moscow, State Tretiakov Gallery, inv. no. 6098 (cat. no. 2.4)

Exotic Sources: From Greece to Siam

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Every stage of the Tsarevichâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s journey was marked by an exchange of gifts with the highest local authorities. An exhibition inaugurated at the Hermitage on 28 October 1893, at the end of the mission, displayed the gifts to the public, including the precious silver Tara shown here. While the most valuable gifts are now in the Hermitage, objects of purely ethnographic importance were later donated to the St. Petersburg Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, as were the numerous souvenir trinkets. Other major works of Eastern art were given to the Hermitage by Ukhtomsky, a keen collector of Buddhist works who shared with contemporary artists and scholars the interest in Theosophy then fashionable in the cultured circles of St. Petersburg.

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Exotic Sources: From Greece to Siam

Buryat people, Eastern Siberia, Mongol school, North China White Tara nineteenth century silver, 36 x 38 x 26 cm St. Petersburg, Russian Museum of Ethnography, inv. no. 3030-484 From Esper Uchtomskyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s collection, donated by Tsar Nicholas II in 1902 (cat. no. 2.6)

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Exotic Sources: From Greece to Siam

In contrast to Benois with his colonialist interpretation of Asia, Kandinsky regarded the East as an alternative territory of mystery and spiritual flight and hence as a vital source of abstraction.

Alexandre Benois Asia 1916 tempera, graphite pencil, gouache on paper on canvas, 108.5 x 100 cm St. Petersburg, State Russian Museum, inv. no. Zh-5647 (cat. no. 2.7) Wassily Kandinsky Exotic Birds 1915 watercolour on paper, 33.4 x 25.2 cm Moscow, State Tretiakov Gallery, inv. no. 9887 (cat. no. 2.8)

Exotic Sources: From Greece to Siam

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Nikolai Kalmakov Woman with Snakes 1909 oil on canvas, 215 x 106 cm St. Petersburg, State Russian Museum, inv. no. Zh-10380 (cat. no. 3.2)

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