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The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863-1922
The best single volume on the Russian avant garde movement is The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922, originally written by Camilla Gray (daughter-in-law of the composer Sergei Prokofiev), now revised by Dr. Marian Burleigh-Motley. When the original edition of this book was published, John Russell hailed it as a massive contribution to our knowledge of one of the most fascinating and mysterious episodes in the history of modern art. It still remains the most compact, accurate and reasonably priced survey of sixty years of creative dynamic activity that profoundly influenced the progress of Western art and architecture.
326 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
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October 15, 2018Camilla Gray's book takes a chronological approach to Russian art between 1863 and 1922. This works quite well.
Although political events like the emancipation of the serfs, revolutions in 1905 and 1917 or WWI can cut across our perspectives striking us as absolute breaks, endings or new beginnings, one of the common themes in this art history was the continuing impact of the rediscovery of older traditions.
An extreme example of this is Malevich's Supremacist painting "Black Square"
which the artist specified should be hung in the corner of the room opposite the door in the same way an icon should traditionally have been hung, do we then perceive it as a religious work - colour and form as a way of approaching God, or perhaps a piece to inspire mediation and reflection, or is Art the new religion? Is the artist God? This kind of reinvention is strongly visible in the use of colour and layout (and not just in it's mother with child motiv) in Petrov-Vodkin's "Petrograd 1918" 
.
The difficulty with a book like this is the increasing overlaps with wider European movements like the Futurists on the one hand but also with the non-visual arts in Russia. The spirit of Mayakovsky haunts the later chapters like a cloud in trousers...
Still a bold book that surveys a lot of work that is obscure.
Although political events like the emancipation of the serfs, revolutions in 1905 and 1917 or WWI can cut across our perspectives striking us as absolute breaks, endings or new beginnings, one of the common themes in this art history was the continuing impact of the rediscovery of older traditions.
An extreme example of this is Malevich's Supremacist painting "Black Square"
which the artist specified should be hung in the corner of the room opposite the door in the same way an icon should traditionally have been hung, do we then perceive it as a religious work - colour and form as a way of approaching God, or perhaps a piece to inspire mediation and reflection, or is Art the new religion? Is the artist God? This kind of reinvention is strongly visible in the use of colour and layout (and not just in it's mother with child motiv) in Petrov-Vodkin's "Petrograd 1918" .The difficulty with a book like this is the increasing overlaps with wider European movements like the Futurists on the one hand but also with the non-visual arts in Russia. The spirit of Mayakovsky haunts the later chapters like a cloud in trousers...
Still a bold book that surveys a lot of work that is obscure.
June 22, 2016
I've long been a super-fan of pretty much all Russian art, but especially this period whatever the medium. This was the time of Larionov, Serov, Malevich, Scriabin, Prokofiev, Roslavets, Mayakovsky, Brik, and numerous others. Futurists, Symbolists, Constructivists, Suprematists--all the ists you could possibly want! It was a rich time, richer even than similar syzygies in other European art centers because of the world-shattering political turmoil. This book centers on that exact idea: the role of art in an ever-changing society wracked by famine, war, and revolution. The basic argument finds a strand between "The Wanderers"and the Constructivists, the idea that art should serve society and be practical and accessible to everyone. Not just that though, the work discusses all the other potential strands of the time and how they related together. It can be sort of mind-bogglingly dense because of the richness of the moment, but that's part of its charm. Artists in different mediums worked together to create some of the most engaging art you'll ever see.
My only dithering over this book was the sparse amount of color plates, but perhaps a newer edition than mine had more.
My only dithering over this book was the sparse amount of color plates, but perhaps a newer edition than mine had more.
July 5, 2011
Published in 1962, Camilla Gray's book would have an enormous impact on an emerging generation of minimalist and conceptualist artists in the 1960s. In fact, the book is cited by numerous key figures in the New York avant-garde. A footnote in James Meyer's "Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties" (2001) records how Carl Andre, Hollis Frampton, Dan Flavin and Donald Judd all drew inspiration from both Malevich and the Constructivists as a result of reading Gray's book (290, n. 144). One can imagine Judd specifically encountering Tatlin's notion of a kind of painting that engages "real materials and real space" and taking from this the insight for his specific objects. In fact, the whole discussion of Objectness has an almost prescient aspect in light of the objecthood debates of the 1960s.
However, even before she arrives at Tatlin and his post-1917 ideas, Gray narrates an earlier pre-revolutionary history of modern art in Russia. Very early on we find a persistent interest in theater as the idea space for working out a synthesis between different artistic media. However, as a performative space, the theatre situates the avant-garde in relationship to the social and the body of the performers; context and corporeality. Much has been made over the years of the important role of the theater in the early European avant-garde. Published in 1962, Gray's book is one of the first if not the first to make precisely that argument. By tracing the rise of modernism from a hobby among the idle bourgeoisie to the revolutionary utopianism of the Russian futurists, Gray weaves a constant thread of how theater remained a laboratory for innovative ideas. With the explosion of the October 1917 revolution, the factory, street and public square realize the theatrical.
Again, keeping in mind the impact Gray's history of Russian modernism would have in the 1960s, it is interesting to consider the importance of theatricality on the various strands of New York avant-gardism; from Cage's performative aesthetics to the theatricality of minimalism. However, every act of appropriation undertakes a simultaneous exclusion. And what gets excluded in that appropriation is the very notion of aesthetic innovation in the context of, and to the service of, political anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois revolution. Even Malevich at his most idealist, embraced entirely the events of 1917 and thereafter as the sweeping away of the old regime, the dominance of industry and the celebration of workers, as well as the integration of non-bourgeois artists into the mainstream currents of revolutionary society. Conversely, perhaps there is something about the appropriation of the Russian avant-garde that might be instructive about the limits of that historical moment. Here we can identify a third strand that connects Gray's study with the American avant-garde; that is, the notion of the artist as protagonist.
Early in Malevich, in 1913, the painter develops the idea of Alogism. A kind of pre-Brecht estrangement effect, this strategy involves injecting a signifier within the pictorial field that cannot be absorbed the dominant logic of the image. For Malevich, this rupture signifies the competition between a new representational logic and the vestigial remains of the old bourgeois order. Placing this remnant in the field is not out of some ambition to create a pictorial unity or to resolve the incongruity between the two logics but rather to, in effect, stage their violent antagonism. In this sense, Malevich is already conceptualizing in the Alogistic a kind of visual strategy is both grounded in the real work of social conflict but also that demands for the audience to read that antagonism, just as Brecht would dramatize a demand for the viewer to make decisions in the real world beyond the fictional space of the theater. Here Malevich begins to anticipate the terms of the revolution in ways that, when 1917 finally bursts upon history, he and the other Russian futurists see their early strategies as prescient and actionable in the theater of the revolution.
By the time of the New Economic Program in 1921, the combination of material forces and ideology divides the Russian futurists into two dominant camps. The first, Suprematism coalesces primarily around Malevich and the second, Constructivism, around Tatlin (even though rifts also existed within each of these groups). A debate emerges between the two camps over the relationship between the artist and society, specifically around the role of the artist as aesthetic innovator. For Malevich and the Suprematists, true innovation can only occur as long as no demand for utility be placed upon art, that is to say, as long as it not be asked to serve man. By serving man, art will always be in service to the status quo. Thus, when Malevich talks about the spiritual basis of art, he is not referring to human spirituality but something that is pure idea and manifest neither in nature nor in man. We most closely perceive this idea in the cult of the machinic -- not in its utiliarianism but in its anti-humanism. The Constructivists also celebrated the machine and a radical rupture with bourgeois ideas about art as serving their tastes. However for Tatlin and his colleagues, the most radical art embraces production; beauty exists in usefulness (counters to Malevich for whom beauty is uselessness).
Historically, how this debate between the two camps plays out, however, is that both tendencies despite their rhetorical differences presume a division between mental labor (design) and manual labor (mass-production). The role of the artist studio and even of the academy itself is to act as a laboratory for ideas separated from mass-production. Tatlin alone among the Constructivists understands and works against this division by pursuing an inductive relationship to materials. Conversely, Constructivists like Rodchenko, Popova, Stepanova, et al. force materials into a pre-determined "abstractly" formulated aesthetic style. Ironically, Tatlin is the same individual who early on distinguished himself from Malevich as a "professional painter" against the latter's more Dadaist provocations.
The Constructivists, even at their most doctrinaire, politically and institutionally associated themselves with Proletkult. The Organization for Proletarian Culture saw as its aim to literally invent and to organize through the arts a proletariat culture. The bourgeoisie have their culture, they argued. It was up to advanced (avant-garde) artists and writers to produce a culture for the proletariat. This is the very movement that Walter Benjamin, in his "Author as Producer" essay, rejects as acting like ideological patrons to the working class. For Benjamin, where the Productivism make its contribution to the dictatorship of the proletariat is when artists act as workers themselves; that is, when artists learn the actual existing mechanisms of production and invent on the basis of that knowledge rather than representing the aspirations of workers or giving the workers advanced culture.
It it's also worth noting the debates surrounding Proletkult among the Bolsheviks, namely between Lenin and Bogdanov (chief apologist for Proletkult). For the latter, the different sectors of culture, politics and economics experience their own autonomous revolution. The implication, for Gray, being that artists should be responsible for the cultural revolution just as the party should be responsible for the political revolution. Lenin considered this an untenable situation. All revolutionary currents needed to be brought within the party -- the legitimate apparatus of the aspirations of the working class. As Gray argues, while Lenin would eventually bring Proletkult into the party, with the advent of Socialist Realism as the official aesthetic doctrine, history would show that Bogdanov's original ideas shaped the positions taken by the party in terms of culture. In other words, the aesthetic of Socialist Realism would be determined wholly autonomously from the working class by cultural professionals independent of a consideration of the political revolution. Socialist Realism may have been party dogma, but it arose out of an emphatic separation of culture from politics and politics from the economic (this fact is further underscored by Stalin's decision to bring the petite bourgeoisie into the party and make their cultural tastes official dogma).
Like the artists of the 1960s, there are many lessons to be drawn from Gray's study -- if one can, in a way, read against the grain. One might entertain the possibilities of synthesizing Suprematism and Constructivism. But as we know from the example of El Lissistky (the last major Soviet artist Gray introduces in her book), a synthesis on the basis of aesthetics must jettison the militant uselessness of Suprematism for the aims of Proletkult; mass-producing advanced design for the popular classes. In this sense, while the most advanced artists of the time rejected "speculative art" as remnant of the old bourgeois regime, by defining the speculative as easel painting (which they did consistently) they failed to consider how the speculative functions ideologically and not just just in terms of media. In other words, as Tatlin himself insisted, the movement to "real materials and real space" remained a decided painterly and, therefore, professional art practice. Here, despite the move to theatricalize the everyday, most of the artists Gray discusses continued to approach theater as entirely speculative, a painterly practice where painting itself is less a fixed media than a specifically pre-revolutionary conception of the relationship between the artist and the popular classes.
However, even before she arrives at Tatlin and his post-1917 ideas, Gray narrates an earlier pre-revolutionary history of modern art in Russia. Very early on we find a persistent interest in theater as the idea space for working out a synthesis between different artistic media. However, as a performative space, the theatre situates the avant-garde in relationship to the social and the body of the performers; context and corporeality. Much has been made over the years of the important role of the theater in the early European avant-garde. Published in 1962, Gray's book is one of the first if not the first to make precisely that argument. By tracing the rise of modernism from a hobby among the idle bourgeoisie to the revolutionary utopianism of the Russian futurists, Gray weaves a constant thread of how theater remained a laboratory for innovative ideas. With the explosion of the October 1917 revolution, the factory, street and public square realize the theatrical.
Again, keeping in mind the impact Gray's history of Russian modernism would have in the 1960s, it is interesting to consider the importance of theatricality on the various strands of New York avant-gardism; from Cage's performative aesthetics to the theatricality of minimalism. However, every act of appropriation undertakes a simultaneous exclusion. And what gets excluded in that appropriation is the very notion of aesthetic innovation in the context of, and to the service of, political anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois revolution. Even Malevich at his most idealist, embraced entirely the events of 1917 and thereafter as the sweeping away of the old regime, the dominance of industry and the celebration of workers, as well as the integration of non-bourgeois artists into the mainstream currents of revolutionary society. Conversely, perhaps there is something about the appropriation of the Russian avant-garde that might be instructive about the limits of that historical moment. Here we can identify a third strand that connects Gray's study with the American avant-garde; that is, the notion of the artist as protagonist.
Early in Malevich, in 1913, the painter develops the idea of Alogism. A kind of pre-Brecht estrangement effect, this strategy involves injecting a signifier within the pictorial field that cannot be absorbed the dominant logic of the image. For Malevich, this rupture signifies the competition between a new representational logic and the vestigial remains of the old bourgeois order. Placing this remnant in the field is not out of some ambition to create a pictorial unity or to resolve the incongruity between the two logics but rather to, in effect, stage their violent antagonism. In this sense, Malevich is already conceptualizing in the Alogistic a kind of visual strategy is both grounded in the real work of social conflict but also that demands for the audience to read that antagonism, just as Brecht would dramatize a demand for the viewer to make decisions in the real world beyond the fictional space of the theater. Here Malevich begins to anticipate the terms of the revolution in ways that, when 1917 finally bursts upon history, he and the other Russian futurists see their early strategies as prescient and actionable in the theater of the revolution.
By the time of the New Economic Program in 1921, the combination of material forces and ideology divides the Russian futurists into two dominant camps. The first, Suprematism coalesces primarily around Malevich and the second, Constructivism, around Tatlin (even though rifts also existed within each of these groups). A debate emerges between the two camps over the relationship between the artist and society, specifically around the role of the artist as aesthetic innovator. For Malevich and the Suprematists, true innovation can only occur as long as no demand for utility be placed upon art, that is to say, as long as it not be asked to serve man. By serving man, art will always be in service to the status quo. Thus, when Malevich talks about the spiritual basis of art, he is not referring to human spirituality but something that is pure idea and manifest neither in nature nor in man. We most closely perceive this idea in the cult of the machinic -- not in its utiliarianism but in its anti-humanism. The Constructivists also celebrated the machine and a radical rupture with bourgeois ideas about art as serving their tastes. However for Tatlin and his colleagues, the most radical art embraces production; beauty exists in usefulness (counters to Malevich for whom beauty is uselessness).
Historically, how this debate between the two camps plays out, however, is that both tendencies despite their rhetorical differences presume a division between mental labor (design) and manual labor (mass-production). The role of the artist studio and even of the academy itself is to act as a laboratory for ideas separated from mass-production. Tatlin alone among the Constructivists understands and works against this division by pursuing an inductive relationship to materials. Conversely, Constructivists like Rodchenko, Popova, Stepanova, et al. force materials into a pre-determined "abstractly" formulated aesthetic style. Ironically, Tatlin is the same individual who early on distinguished himself from Malevich as a "professional painter" against the latter's more Dadaist provocations.
The Constructivists, even at their most doctrinaire, politically and institutionally associated themselves with Proletkult. The Organization for Proletarian Culture saw as its aim to literally invent and to organize through the arts a proletariat culture. The bourgeoisie have their culture, they argued. It was up to advanced (avant-garde) artists and writers to produce a culture for the proletariat. This is the very movement that Walter Benjamin, in his "Author as Producer" essay, rejects as acting like ideological patrons to the working class. For Benjamin, where the Productivism make its contribution to the dictatorship of the proletariat is when artists act as workers themselves; that is, when artists learn the actual existing mechanisms of production and invent on the basis of that knowledge rather than representing the aspirations of workers or giving the workers advanced culture.
It it's also worth noting the debates surrounding Proletkult among the Bolsheviks, namely between Lenin and Bogdanov (chief apologist for Proletkult). For the latter, the different sectors of culture, politics and economics experience their own autonomous revolution. The implication, for Gray, being that artists should be responsible for the cultural revolution just as the party should be responsible for the political revolution. Lenin considered this an untenable situation. All revolutionary currents needed to be brought within the party -- the legitimate apparatus of the aspirations of the working class. As Gray argues, while Lenin would eventually bring Proletkult into the party, with the advent of Socialist Realism as the official aesthetic doctrine, history would show that Bogdanov's original ideas shaped the positions taken by the party in terms of culture. In other words, the aesthetic of Socialist Realism would be determined wholly autonomously from the working class by cultural professionals independent of a consideration of the political revolution. Socialist Realism may have been party dogma, but it arose out of an emphatic separation of culture from politics and politics from the economic (this fact is further underscored by Stalin's decision to bring the petite bourgeoisie into the party and make their cultural tastes official dogma).
Like the artists of the 1960s, there are many lessons to be drawn from Gray's study -- if one can, in a way, read against the grain. One might entertain the possibilities of synthesizing Suprematism and Constructivism. But as we know from the example of El Lissistky (the last major Soviet artist Gray introduces in her book), a synthesis on the basis of aesthetics must jettison the militant uselessness of Suprematism for the aims of Proletkult; mass-producing advanced design for the popular classes. In this sense, while the most advanced artists of the time rejected "speculative art" as remnant of the old bourgeois regime, by defining the speculative as easel painting (which they did consistently) they failed to consider how the speculative functions ideologically and not just just in terms of media. In other words, as Tatlin himself insisted, the movement to "real materials and real space" remained a decided painterly and, therefore, professional art practice. Here, despite the move to theatricalize the everyday, most of the artists Gray discusses continued to approach theater as entirely speculative, a painterly practice where painting itself is less a fixed media than a specifically pre-revolutionary conception of the relationship between the artist and the popular classes.
July 9, 2022
It's truly incredible how the author managed to write a hyper-detailed overview of pre-war Russian art while avoiding the politics that are inherent to it. Deciding to write in exhasparating detail who wrote what article in an art magazine and tutored this artist who is later going to become a teacher in one academy is an incredible choice in comparison to later on boiling down the ideas that dominated suprematism as overbearing 'leftie' propaganda that caused rifts in art groups, while calling futurism, an inherently fascist movement against any form of culture, just a celebration of industrialization that wanted to integrate art into every aspect of life is utterly insane. As if futurists didn't celebrate fascist mobs burning down museums! Not a single sentence about fascism in this entire thing.
Gets 2 stars because of how many artists are listed in here chronologically. Nothing else. Art doesn't't exist in a vacuum and a historian should know that. Do fucking better.
Gets 2 stars because of how many artists are listed in here chronologically. Nothing else. Art doesn't't exist in a vacuum and a historian should know that. Do fucking better.
April 12, 2020
Late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia was tailor made for the genesis of exciting and innovative developments in the arts. Modernising the economy but not the political system created chaos and revolution. In the world of art it created an historic opportunity, in which it seemed that everything was up for grabs.
From the morass emerged some of the twentieth century's greatest artists; Goncharova, Malevich and Kandinsky to name just three. This was a time of rapid change in artistic styles and big ideas. A new world was being born out of the decaying corpse of the old and art was reflecting this as never before.
Camilla Gray wrote this book in the early 1960s when she was in her 20s and it is brilliant. It is thoroughly researched and all the various movements are documented and potted histories provided for all the key players. So sad she died aged only 35. What else might she have gone on to achieve?
If you are interested in twentieth century art and/or Russia, or even if you're not, you should read this book.
From the morass emerged some of the twentieth century's greatest artists; Goncharova, Malevich and Kandinsky to name just three. This was a time of rapid change in artistic styles and big ideas. A new world was being born out of the decaying corpse of the old and art was reflecting this as never before.
Camilla Gray wrote this book in the early 1960s when she was in her 20s and it is brilliant. It is thoroughly researched and all the various movements are documented and potted histories provided for all the key players. So sad she died aged only 35. What else might she have gone on to achieve?
If you are interested in twentieth century art and/or Russia, or even if you're not, you should read this book.
May 2, 2025
An excellent study of one my favourite period in art history, and the story of Camilla Gray’s research and writing of the original edition is inspiring as she competed it as a young woman without a bachelor’s degree, travelling to the Soviet Union to research and interview surviving artists utilising her skills as a Russian interpreter. Any errors she made or corrections based on more recent research are explained in helpful notes at the back. This volume gives a thorough history of the development of the Russian avant garde from its 19th century origins to the early post-revolutionary period when socialist realism began gaining ground. Gray’s enthusiasm and passion for the art forms shines through and it gives detail on the artists’ lives as well as the theories underpinning their work.
March 20, 2021
Absolutely the best guide to Russian Art of the Silver Age/avant-garde period. Beautifully written.
January 30, 2016
pgs: 9, 10, 11, 27, 35, 69, 70, 76, 82, 90, 114, 116, 119, 138, 141
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