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Artists in Revolution: Portraits of the Russian Avant-Garde 1905-1925 by Robert C. WilliamsReview by: Marylin R. BrownLeonardo, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Autumn, 1981), p. 339Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1574643 .

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the analysis of works of individual artists and of the broader issue of the political implications of their 'collective' efforts. Williams, in contrast to Clark, sidesteps the political issues of the original definition of avant-garde and opts instead for a psychological approach to artistic innovation.

He assembles much biographical and cultural material in essays on eight men: Lunacharsky, philosopher and administra- tor of culture after 1917; Dobuzhinsky and D. Moor, graphic artists; Meyerhold, theatre director; Mayakovsky, poet; Male- vich, painter; Tatlin, sculptor and architect; and Eisenstein, filmmaker. The focus of each essay is the 'moment of innovation' that, according to him, was invariably initiated by Occidental developments outside Russian culture. Each of these men is considered in one of three categories-aesthetes, futurists and constructivists-a potentially helpful division that provides chronological and some psychological but no overall ideological structure. Instead, the thesis that connects the eight in what he calls a 'collective biography' is the idea of 'death and immortality', which he sees as the motivating principle of their artistic efforts. According to this idea, the young members of the 'collective' eight gradually reached a mid-life crisis out of which developed a new concern for life and immortality. Aside from the fact that Williams frequently has to stretch the works of these men to make them fit his idea, I was left wondering what is particularly Russian and/or revolutionary about the psychology of aging. He somehow misses formulating a solid thesis about the lowest common denominator of his subject: the question of the political response of the eight, or lack thereof, to the Russian Revolution.

He frequently avoids the issue of ideology. One of the more blatant examples comes in the essay on Eisenstein. Here Williams briefly discusses Eisenstein's celebrated cinema mon- tage technique of the combining of two opposing objects in collision as a means of producing psychological tension in an audience but fails even to mention Eisenstein's claim to have provided through dialectics the only truly Marxist art form. According to Williams, 'Eisenstein made the Russian Revolution a metaphor for the passage to adulthood'. In another instance he even attributes the motivation of these eight to a 'desire for recognition in an increasingly sophisticated and competitive art market in Russia'. Elsewhere he makes an unqualified claim that the visual artists Gabo and Pevsner in their Realistic Manifesto called for a 'socially useful art'; they actually asserted that art is socially independent, an idea that caused the Soviet government to reject them as idealists.

In avoiding ideological issues he overlooks some fascinating paradoxes. For example, in discussing Malevich and Suprema- tism he concentrates on the history of the development of theosophy and of the concept of the fourth dimension but does not consider the apparent clash between Malevich's spiritual idealism and his somewhat contradictory decision in 1919 to venture into the applied or utilitarian visual arts. Nor does he explore the ramifications of Malevich's acknowledged Anarchism.

In tracing the generational shift from the aesthetes to the constructivists he does not address the ambiguous but nonethe- less perceivable shift from Idealism to Materialism. Nor does he explore the continuing tensions that emerge in Constructivism itself between verbalized theoretical intentions and practical visual results. The question remains: Is it possible for a 'non- objective image', no matter how materially architectonic, to communicate a political message to the general public? Is there a compromise possible between ideas of political collectivism and aesthetic individualism? Rather than seeking to elucidate the mutual lack of understanding that existed between these eight and politicians of the Russian Revolution, Williams explains the ultimate disappearance of their ideas with a broad metaphor of the aging process. His conclusion (that these eight achieved immortality through their art) sacrifices the political issues raised by their works to an easy but unsatisfying art-for-art's-sake solution.

But the paradoxes raised by these Russians have not disappeared. While the Soviet government attempted to sup- plant 'innovative' artistic individualism in the visual arts with Socialist Realism, art critics and dealers outside the U.S.S.R.

the analysis of works of individual artists and of the broader issue of the political implications of their 'collective' efforts. Williams, in contrast to Clark, sidesteps the political issues of the original definition of avant-garde and opts instead for a psychological approach to artistic innovation.

He assembles much biographical and cultural material in essays on eight men: Lunacharsky, philosopher and administra- tor of culture after 1917; Dobuzhinsky and D. Moor, graphic artists; Meyerhold, theatre director; Mayakovsky, poet; Male- vich, painter; Tatlin, sculptor and architect; and Eisenstein, filmmaker. The focus of each essay is the 'moment of innovation' that, according to him, was invariably initiated by Occidental developments outside Russian culture. Each of these men is considered in one of three categories-aesthetes, futurists and constructivists-a potentially helpful division that provides chronological and some psychological but no overall ideological structure. Instead, the thesis that connects the eight in what he calls a 'collective biography' is the idea of 'death and immortality', which he sees as the motivating principle of their artistic efforts. According to this idea, the young members of the 'collective' eight gradually reached a mid-life crisis out of which developed a new concern for life and immortality. Aside from the fact that Williams frequently has to stretch the works of these men to make them fit his idea, I was left wondering what is particularly Russian and/or revolutionary about the psychology of aging. He somehow misses formulating a solid thesis about the lowest common denominator of his subject: the question of the political response of the eight, or lack thereof, to the Russian Revolution.

He frequently avoids the issue of ideology. One of the more blatant examples comes in the essay on Eisenstein. Here Williams briefly discusses Eisenstein's celebrated cinema mon- tage technique of the combining of two opposing objects in collision as a means of producing psychological tension in an audience but fails even to mention Eisenstein's claim to have provided through dialectics the only truly Marxist art form. According to Williams, 'Eisenstein made the Russian Revolution a metaphor for the passage to adulthood'. In another instance he even attributes the motivation of these eight to a 'desire for recognition in an increasingly sophisticated and competitive art market in Russia'. Elsewhere he makes an unqualified claim that the visual artists Gabo and Pevsner in their Realistic Manifesto called for a 'socially useful art'; they actually asserted that art is socially independent, an idea that caused the Soviet government to reject them as idealists.

In avoiding ideological issues he overlooks some fascinating paradoxes. For example, in discussing Malevich and Suprema- tism he concentrates on the history of the development of theosophy and of the concept of the fourth dimension but does not consider the apparent clash between Malevich's spiritual idealism and his somewhat contradictory decision in 1919 to venture into the applied or utilitarian visual arts. Nor does he explore the ramifications of Malevich's acknowledged Anarchism.

In tracing the generational shift from the aesthetes to the constructivists he does not address the ambiguous but nonethe- less perceivable shift from Idealism to Materialism. Nor does he explore the continuing tensions that emerge in Constructivism itself between verbalized theoretical intentions and practical visual results. The question remains: Is it possible for a 'non- objective image', no matter how materially architectonic, to communicate a political message to the general public? Is there a compromise possible between ideas of political collectivism and aesthetic individualism? Rather than seeking to elucidate the mutual lack of understanding that existed between these eight and politicians of the Russian Revolution, Williams explains the ultimate disappearance of their ideas with a broad metaphor of the aging process. His conclusion (that these eight achieved immortality through their art) sacrifices the political issues raised by their works to an easy but unsatisfying art-for-art's-sake solution.

But the paradoxes raised by these Russians have not disappeared. While the Soviet government attempted to sup- plant 'innovative' artistic individualism in the visual arts with Socialist Realism, art critics and dealers outside the U.S.S.R.

extent of German influence on English art during the first half of the 19th century and to determine what this cultural interaction implied. On the first of these issues, he is positively encyclo- paedic. He opens with a lengthy description of the numerous ways whereby the British public, but mainly artists and connoisseurs, came into contact with German art between about 1800 and 1850. In these decades the English became aware for the first time of the existence of a school of German painting exemplified by monumental historical works by Cornelius, Overbeck and Schnorr von Carolsfeld. At the same time, there arose in Victorian art circles a profound admiration for certain types of German print-making; here Moritz Retzsch's outlines and Gothicised wood engravings by such practitioners as Alfred Rethel played a singularly important role. These various manifestations of German Romanticism shared two basic features in common: a stylistic revivalism harking back to the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, and an underlying belief that art should be used as a moral and educational tool for the improvement of society. In the 1830s and 1840s especially, the didactic purposes and formal concerns of the Germans took some British artists by force, climaxing with the fresco decorations for the newly rebuilt Houses of Parliament. Vaughan shows how the leading Victorian history painters, including Eastlake, William Dyce and Daniel Maclise, adapted and transformed the German works to their own ends; furthermore, his detailed analysis also charts the profound effects of these works on English book-illustrators and draughts- men, the young Pre-Raphaelites among them.

Given the strong intellectual bias of these German artists, it is only appropriate that Vaughan provides as well a chapter dealing with the contributions made by their fellow-countrymen to the early development of philosophical aesthetics. This section embodies a clear introduction to the basic ideas of Kant, Schiller, Schelling and the Schlegels, but is not successfully integrated into the text as a whole. Certain other parts of the book, such as a chapter entitled The Depiction of German Subjects by English Artists, also seem to have been included more with a view to completeness than for the sake of strengthening Vaughan's basic arguments.

The eager response in Britian to German Romanticism does indeed point toward a crisis in English historical painting during the early Victorian era. But Vaughan does not fully explain the reasons for this crisis, or why the Germans (e.g. opposed to the French) appeared to provide a way out of the impasse, or why their manner fell so rapidly from favour in Britain after 1850. Surely the religious factors that he mentions (like the rise of Anglo-Catholicism) do not tell the whole story behind such abrupt and profound reversals of taste. Instead, the answers must lie in the realm of social history; that this artistic crisis took place in a period of unprecedented social upheaval (which Vaughan ignores almost completely) cannot be merely coinci- dental. His failure to determine sufficient causes for the cultural phenomenon that he has studied in such depth makes his book seem curiously incomplete. In other respects, however, I praise him for having written a serious, eminently scholarly analysis of a neglected but fascinating phase of European art history. Vaughan's book will no doubt become, and deservedly so, a standard text on the subject of early Victorian art.

Artists in Revolution: Portraits of the Russian Avant-Garde 1905-1925. Robert C. Williams. Scolar Press, London, 1978. 242 pp., illus. Reviewed by Marylin R. Brown*

The title of the book is misleading. Williams is only incidentally concerned with the larger ideological issues that should be addressed in any consideration of the relationship between the arts and political revolutions. In recent years Tim Clark's studies of visual art and the French Revolution of 1848 The Absolute Bourgeois and Image of the People (Greenwich, CT; New York Graphic Society, 1973) are excellent examples of a synthesis of

extent of German influence on English art during the first half of the 19th century and to determine what this cultural interaction implied. On the first of these issues, he is positively encyclo- paedic. He opens with a lengthy description of the numerous ways whereby the British public, but mainly artists and connoisseurs, came into contact with German art between about 1800 and 1850. In these decades the English became aware for the first time of the existence of a school of German painting exemplified by monumental historical works by Cornelius, Overbeck and Schnorr von Carolsfeld. At the same time, there arose in Victorian art circles a profound admiration for certain types of German print-making; here Moritz Retzsch's outlines and Gothicised wood engravings by such practitioners as Alfred Rethel played a singularly important role. These various manifestations of German Romanticism shared two basic features in common: a stylistic revivalism harking back to the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, and an underlying belief that art should be used as a moral and educational tool for the improvement of society. In the 1830s and 1840s especially, the didactic purposes and formal concerns of the Germans took some British artists by force, climaxing with the fresco decorations for the newly rebuilt Houses of Parliament. Vaughan shows how the leading Victorian history painters, including Eastlake, William Dyce and Daniel Maclise, adapted and transformed the German works to their own ends; furthermore, his detailed analysis also charts the profound effects of these works on English book-illustrators and draughts- men, the young Pre-Raphaelites among them.

Given the strong intellectual bias of these German artists, it is only appropriate that Vaughan provides as well a chapter dealing with the contributions made by their fellow-countrymen to the early development of philosophical aesthetics. This section embodies a clear introduction to the basic ideas of Kant, Schiller, Schelling and the Schlegels, but is not successfully integrated into the text as a whole. Certain other parts of the book, such as a chapter entitled The Depiction of German Subjects by English Artists, also seem to have been included more with a view to completeness than for the sake of strengthening Vaughan's basic arguments.

The eager response in Britian to German Romanticism does indeed point toward a crisis in English historical painting during the early Victorian era. But Vaughan does not fully explain the reasons for this crisis, or why the Germans (e.g. opposed to the French) appeared to provide a way out of the impasse, or why their manner fell so rapidly from favour in Britain after 1850. Surely the religious factors that he mentions (like the rise of Anglo-Catholicism) do not tell the whole story behind such abrupt and profound reversals of taste. Instead, the answers must lie in the realm of social history; that this artistic crisis took place in a period of unprecedented social upheaval (which Vaughan ignores almost completely) cannot be merely coinci- dental. His failure to determine sufficient causes for the cultural phenomenon that he has studied in such depth makes his book seem curiously incomplete. In other respects, however, I praise him for having written a serious, eminently scholarly analysis of a neglected but fascinating phase of European art history. Vaughan's book will no doubt become, and deservedly so, a standard text on the subject of early Victorian art.

Artists in Revolution: Portraits of the Russian Avant-Garde 1905-1925. Robert C. Williams. Scolar Press, London, 1978. 242 pp., illus. Reviewed by Marylin R. Brown*

The title of the book is misleading. Williams is only incidentally concerned with the larger ideological issues that should be addressed in any consideration of the relationship between the arts and political revolutions. In recent years Tim Clark's studies of visual art and the French Revolution of 1848 The Absolute Bourgeois and Image of the People (Greenwich, CT; New York Graphic Society, 1973) are excellent examples of a synthesis of

*Dept. of Art, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118, U.S.A.

*Dept. of Art, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118, U.S.A.

have effectively removed the political connotation of the term avant-garde and use it to denote any artworks of a nontraditional kind.

have effectively removed the political connotation of the term avant-garde and use it to denote any artworks of a nontraditional kind.

Books Books 339 339

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