russia's "leftist art" in berlin, 1922

Russia's "Leftist Art" in Berlin, 1922Author(s): Eckhard NeumannSource: Art Journal, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Autumn, 1967), pp. 20-23Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/775187 .

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Eckhard Neumann

Russia's "Leftist Art" in Berlin, 1922

The author of this article, Eckhard Neumann, was born in K6nigsberg, East Prussia in 1933. Be- tween 1952 and 1957 he studied at the Advertising Institute in Berlin and received a degree from that school. He later studied at the Ulm Design School (Hochschule ffir Gestaltung) and, in 1966, became a visiting lecturer there in the field of communication. Mr. Neumann is presently advertising manager of Swissair. His chief interest lies in the relation between commercial design and art.

Mr. Neumann is founder and editor of the An- nual of German Advertising (Jahrbuch, Werbung in Deutschland). He organized the exhibition, "Func- tional Design in the Twenties" at the G6ppinger Gallery in Frankfurt am Main and a book by him of the same title will be published by Reinhold in 1967. Together with Theo Otto, he arranged a Bauhaus exhibition at the G6ppinger Gallery in 1964 and edited the catalog of that important show. The catalog was composed of statements on various phases of the Bauhaus by former teachers and students of the school. After his revision, with the inclusion of much new material, this catalog will be published in book form by Reinhold in 1967.

Mr. Neumann's article was originally published in the magazine, Visuell, No. 1, 1964. We have trans- lated the article from the German and are making it available to the American public because we think it is important. Little or nothing is known here of the significant exhibition of Russian art held at the van Diemen Gallery in Berlin in 1922. Mr. Neumann's comments knowledgeably on this exhibition which afforded the Western art world its first glimpse of the radical new developments in art which had taken place in Russia during the First World War and the Revolution.

Erdmann Schmocker Howard Dearstyne Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago.

Close ties have existed between the artists of Russia and those of the West for a very long time. Paris has al-

ways been the goal of the Russians and Berlin, as the

mid-point of Germany, was one of the centers along the cultural route between Moscow and Paris. The Russians

began to show their works in Germany very early-- around 1900 in the Munich Crystal Palace and in the

group exhibitions of the New Artists Association (Neue Kiinstlervereinigung) and the Blue Rider (Der Blaue Re-

iter), among other places. Later on Herwarth Walden in- troduced various Russian artists through one-man shows in his Storm (Der Sturm) Gallery. Chagall, Kandinsky,

Jawlensky, Werefkin and the other Russians of the NKVM (Neue Kiinstlervereinigung Minchen), although they derived their art from eastern sources, already iden- tified themselves with the western school.

Despite Kandinsky's discovery of nonobjectivity in 1910 which, by the way, was foreshadowed earlier than this in her writings by Marianne von Werefkin in Mu- nich, the Russians in Germany, unlike their colleagues behind Russia's borders, were not directly on the way to- ward absolute painting. After a blockade of ten years, however, the young "impatient ones," as Eberhard Stene- berg called them, were waiting in Moscow, St. Peters- burg, Odessa and Witebsk to demonstrate to the West their understanding and conceptions of a new nonobjective world.

Iwan Puni's exhibition in Der Sturm in 1921 (see the

August-September 1959 issue of Kunstwerk) afforded a preview of the temper and radicality of the new Russian art. Paul Westheim was at first very much shocked by so much "cubistic Futurism," as the text of a Puni portfolio later published by him indicates. After a trip to Paris, Puni had quickly associated himself with Malevich, his ideas and his artistic circle and as early as February 1915 he had organized and financed in St. Petersburg "the first Futurist exhibition-Tramway W." Iwan Puni remained until 1923 in Berlin where the large Russian colony par- ticipated actively in the preparations for the exhibition and in its aftermath.

The initiative for the "First Russian Art Exhibition" (1. russischen Kunstausstellung) in Berlin came, obvious-

ly, from the Russian side. David Sterenberg writes the

following in the preface to the documentary catalog:... It is our purpose, with this exhibition, to show Western

Europe everything that will serve to acquaint it with the creative accomplishments of Russian art during the years of the War and the Revolution." Along with Kandinsky, Sterenberg was, in 1919, on the board of directors of the

People's Commissariat for Art and Science in Moscow, to which belonged a special "International Bureau of Rus- sian Artists" which helped to arrange the exhibition. Lu- natscharski, Tatlin, Malevich and Morgounow were members of this organization, in addition to Kandinsky. According to Konstantin Umanski (1920), Russian art was to be represented by "ambassadors" in West-Euro-

pean countries. Kandinsky apparently had his art-polit- ical activities in Moscow to thank for the possibility of

travelling, in December 1921, to Berlin, from which, in-

deed, he never returned. The question remains open as to whether or not the exhibition at the van Diemen Gal-

ART JOURNAL XXVII 1 20



lery furnished him the opportunity for flight. The exhibition program was astonisingly all-embrac-

ing and full of contrasts. Sterenberg, the exhibition chairman, states in his preface that all the art movements which have lately played an active role in the art life of Russia are represented. This excluded those artists, first and foremost, who had already, at this time, definitely decided in favor of the West. Of the nearly 600 objects in the exhibition, only a fraction belonged to the so-called "leftist art," as the work of the Cubists. Cubo-futurists, Suprematists and Constructivists was generally designated there. Among the works of other movements were those of the followers of the Impressionists, Expressionists, the World of Art (Mir Iskusstwa) artists, the Jack of Dia- monds (Karobube) group, the traditional artists (forerun- ners of the later Social Realists), as well as numerous works of craftsmanship and advertising art and also stu- dent work, which illustrated the state of recent art educa- tion. About all of this, Paul Westheim remarked laconi- cally: "The Russian exhibition is not so much a show of art as of art problems."

The most important experience for Berlin was the ideas of the nonobjective avantgarde who had developed a new world view of art from the Suprematism (nonobjective Cubism) of Kasimir Malevich. "The works of the leftists group reveal the laboratory work which has preceded the renewal of art," writes Sterenberg, in order to suggest that another movement had already passed be- yond this stage of development. The artistic revolution, like the October Revolution, had, by 1922, long since been concluded. The earlier influence of the French Im- pressionists and Cezanne was still evident only in the works of a few and furthermore the domination of Cub- ism had long since ceased to be a problem. The visits of the Futurist, F. T. Marinetti were forgotten. Malevich had, after all, created his celebrated Black Square as early as 1913 (1914) and had acquired through his pedagogical activity at the new state art schools, which were similar to the Bauhaus, a number of not-unimportant followers: Drewin, Alexandra Exter, Iwan Kliun, Alexander Rod- schenko, Olga Rosanowa, Liubov Popowa and Paul Mansouroff, all of whom were represented in the exhibition.

One could see there Malevich's well-known White on White of 1918 (now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York) and The Knifesharpeners of 1912 (now in the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven) and, next to them, the Proun constructions of El Lissitzky. Ac- cording to Camilla Gray whose exclusive book, The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922, provides many good illustrations on this subject, Lissitzky designed his own room in the van Diemen exhibition. As in the case of the Cafe Pittoresque in Moscow, done by Tatlin and Yakoulow in 1917, the pictures and space were to be welded together into a creative unity. Since the state-

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Fig. 1. El lissitzky, Cover of catalog of Russian Exhibition of 1922 in Berlin.

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Fig. 2. Wassily Kandinsky, Plate design, produced by the State Porcelain Manu-

factory at Saint Petersburg, 1918-1922.

21 Neumann: Russia's "Leftist Art' in Berlin, 1922



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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fig. 3. El Lissitzky, PROUN.

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ment, however, is made at no other point in the litera- ture on the subject, this precursor of Alexander Dorner's Cabinet of Abstractionists (Hanover 1927) seems dubious because [Camilla Gray's] photograph and text could relate to the Jury-less art exhibition held in Berlin in 1923, in which Lissitzky, Willi Baumeister, Erich Buch- holz and Huszar each designed a room.

In addition, one could see in the exhibition contre- reliefs and a stage design, Forest (Wald, now in the Tretjakov Gallery, Moscow) by Vladimir Tatlin and, by Naum Gabo, among other things, his Constructivist Head No. II, 1916 and a Kinetic Construction, with the catalog notation: "Time as a new element of the plastic arts." One also saw a close-to-nature still life by his brother, Antoine Pevsner. Kandinsky, opposite pole to the Suprematists and having painted little during his Moscow years, showed three oils and three watercolors. Chagall also came forth with three pictures, among which was the Streetsweeper, and several unimpressive drawings. Several sculptures by Archipenko, who no longer belonged to the Russian school, were exhibited. Works by Nathan Altmann, David Sterenberg, Kasimir Medunetzki and Kluzis were shown under the title, "pro- duction art" (product design).

One learns from the meritorious exhibition, "The Contribution of the Russians to Modern Art," held in Frankfurt in 1959, that everything but unanimity existed behind the scenes in this "First Russian Art Exhibition," which, for Germany, was the only complete demonstra- tion of the modern art of Russia. Power struggles of rival movements and artists, the involutions of which today,

after more than 40 years, can no longer be untangled, ac-

companied this show in Berlin. Even Ilja Ehrenburg has

only a vague recollection of the Russian clash: "There was a storm after a lecture by the painter, Puni; Archi-

penko, Altmann, Majakowskij, Sterenberg, Gabo, Lis-

sitzky and I went after each other hammer and tongs." But what about the effect of the exhibition? Will Groh- mann states in his Kandinsky biography: "The echo of the event is strong but contradictory. The experts are full of enthusiasm for Kandinsky, Gabo, Malevich and Tatlin, the others for painters of the incipient Social Realism." Nevertheless the exhibition was of basic importance for the artistic avantagarde who, after 1920, were heavily concentrated in Berlin. It was the renunciation of Ex-

pressionism and the creation of a constructivist sentiment

(de Stijl) in Central Europe which developed, with its own point of view, out of this meeting between East and West. The impression of Erich Buchholz, who quickly recognized the signs of the new art in the convolution of

post-revolution work, may have been a subjective one but it illuminates the tensions of the year 1922: "In 1922 the Russian Suprematists appeared with an exhibition on Unter den Linden. And if the opening of the Crown Prince's Palace (Kronprinzen-Palais) had already been a sensation, this second event far surpassed it. For it brushed aside with a single stroke the previous work of the Expressionists and brought to light the Abstraction- ists, whose work paralleled that of the Suprematists." Ac-

cording to Buchholz, the Russians were astonished by the works of the Berlin painters: "We believed that we were

presenting something quite new but we discovered that

ART JOURNAL XXVil 1 22



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Fig. 6. Naum Gabo, CONSTRUCTIVIST HEAD NO. II1, 1916, iron.

exactly the same thing was being done here." This ad- mission, by the way, is supposed to have come from Lis-

sitzky. However individually its contemporaries may have

interpreted the event, it became a turning point in the

development of art. The hectic epoch of the first two de- cades was followed by a brief decade of constructivist

thinking, the application of which in the realm of functional design was accomplished especially by the Bauhaus masters.

In 1923 a part of the Russian exhibition travelled to Amsterdam where it was displayed in four rooms of the

Stedelijk Museum. The wish of Dr. Redslob, Art Curator of the Reich, that "Russia would now, in turn, ask to see

examples of German art," as he writes in the catalog in- troduction [to the Berlin exhibition], was fulfilled in 1924 when a German exhibition, which documented our

twentieth-century art from Emil Nolde to Walter Dexel, was held in Moscow.

The importance of the first Russian art exhibition, especially for functional design in the second half of the twenties, should not be underestimated. Lissitzky, partic- ularly, in his Hanover period, made a decisive contribution to the renewal of advertising design and transmitted a strong impulse to Moholy-Nagy in Berlin, who, after his appointment to the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1923, fur- ther exploited this and advanced significantly the typog- raphy and photographic design of the twenties.

23 Neumann: Russia's "Leftist Art" in Berlin, 1922

BARNARD

(Continued from page 19)

As for the original and controversial "Barnard's Lin- coln," its creator had never weakened in his well-justified conviction, expressed in writing to Mrs. Barnard in the autumn of 1917, when the work was being buffeted by tornadoes of critical abuse: "Don't worry over talk about the Lincoln statue. It is a great work and nothing can

change it."



russia's "leftist art" in berlin, 1922

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