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Russian Avant-Garde: A Romance With the Revolution
VHS color video.
55 minutes
Quadrat Films, produced by Alexandre Krivonos.
Available from Films for the Humanities and Sciences at 800-257-5126 or www.films.com.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50613-0362, U.S.A. E-mail: ballast@netins.net
This is a well-made, disturbing account of the fate of the Russian Constructivists, the artists, designers and critics who worked on behalf of the Russian Revolution. Illustrated by historic photographs, eyewitness reports, and experimental abstract art from the current State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, its primary subject is the art critic Nikolai Punin. Quoting from his letters and diaries, it also ventures out to show his affiliation with three well-known avant-garde artists-Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin and Pavel Filonov-who were among founding participants in the Institute of Artistic Culture (called INKHUK), the Russian equivalent of the Bauhaus. Using candid newsreel footage from the early years of the revolution (including shots of Punin's tick; of Malevich's Black Square; of Tatlin standing in a crowd, and of his Monument for the Third International, called "Tatlin's Tower"), it presents both a factual and chilling review of the terrifying consequences of the shift by the Stalinist government from abstract innovative forms and applied graphic design to propagandistic social realism. In 1921, four months after he began the Museum of Artistic Culture, Punin was arrested for subversive activities, then released, while 60 others were executed. "My romance with the Revolution is over," he wrote. Arrested again in 1933 for threatening Stalin, he was freed in response to appeals by the poet Boris Pasternak. Arrested yet again in 1949, he was condemned to a Siberian gulag, where he died in 1953. Filonov, Malevich and others were also reigned in, accused of betraying the government by promoting Western styles of art, and either discredited or exiled.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review 16, No. 2, Winter 2000-2001.)
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