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Pure Red Color (Chistyi krasnyi tsvet), Pure Yellow Color (Chistyi
zheltyi tsvet), Pure Blue Color (Chistyi sinii tsvet). 1921.
Oil on canvas. Each panel, 24 5/8 x 20 11/16" (62.5 x 52.5 cm).
A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova Archive, Moscow
I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over.
Basic colors.
Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation.
--Rodchenko
Well, I guess that's that, then.
Dan Flavin's 'monument' 1 for V. Tatlin" (left) is the first of thirty–nine "monuments" to the Russian Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) that Flavin created between 1964 and 1990. The stepped arrangement of white fluorescent tubes is meant to evoke Tatlin’s colossal-but-unrealized Monument to the Third International (1920) [Right].
All is well that begins well and has no end
El Lissitsky's poster for a post-Revolution production the Futurist play "Victory over the Sun."
The original production sounds like an All Star event with a libretto by Aleksei Kruchonykh, music by Mikhail Matyushin, prologue by Velimir Khlebnikov, and stage designer by Kasimir Malevich. The opera, of course, has become famous as the event where Malevich made his first "Black Square" painting (in 1915).
Left: Cover of 1998 reissue of John Berger's Art and Revolution. Right: Original cover from 1969 edition.
I'm late to this--some 40 years late--but John Berger's Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny And the Role of the Artist in the U.S.S.R (1969) is a must-read for anyone seriously exploring Russian nonconformist Art of the post-Stalin or so-called Thaw period. I can't recommend it enough. The publisher’s (Vintage) own description for the book’s 1998 reissue on Amazon puts it about right:
In this prescient and beautifully written book, John Berger examines the life and work of Ernst Neizvestny, a Russian sculptor whose exclusion from the ranks of officially approved Soviet artists left him laboring in enforced obscurity to realize his monumental and very public vision of art. But Berger's impassioned account goes well beyond the specific dilemma of the pre-glasnost Russian artist to illuminate the very meaning of revolutionary art. In his struggle against official orthodoxy--which involved a face-to-face confrontation with Khrushchev himself--Neizvestny was fighting not for a merely personal or aesthetic vision, but for a recognition of the true social role of art. His sculptures earn a place in the world by reflecting the courage of a whole people, by commemorating, in an age of mass suffering, the resistance and endurance of millions.
That said, this is a case that proves the adage “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” If the reader was drawn to Art and Revolution based solely upon the pairing of the book's title and cover--I was not--he might be sorely disappointed. Now, I read it on my smartphone, so the "cover" of my edition was really nothing more than an icon. Nevertheless, the tiny image managed to give me pause: Two shadowy figures in trenchcoats leaning in as though one is disclosing a secret in the ear of other. The image is purposefully murky, nearly obscured, but the figures appear to be standing on a train platform in Paris (a portion of sign in the background reads "Quai." Another, below it says "Evian"). There is a whiff of political intrigue and no small suggestion of cloak and dagger espionage. The scene screams "Cold War" or probably more accurately, sometime earlier, during the French Resistance or even in the years just before the German occupation. It really could be the cover of a spy novel by Alan Furst, which are almost always set in those early years of Hitler's rise, in the late 1930s. At the very least, one expects spies. The original 1969 cover design is more true to the spirit of the book: a bold 1960s-style abstract rendering of an example of Neizvestny’s monumental work.
Books
Poems from Children's Island by Sasha Chernyi
(Lightful Press)
