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June 2021: The Cruel Mother
Similar to the Russian historical avant-garde of the 1910s, which predicted the war and the social revolution of 1917, the late avant-garde of the 1920s anticipated the advent of the totalitarian terror and the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. In figurative painting, this manifested itself in a specific visual “lexicon” and modality (bodily violence and the fragmented body, frustration, motifs of loss, death and general catastrophe), as well as in the expressive style (that inherited but not duplicated the models of European expressionism). In addition to proposing an analytical classification of semantics and poetics of the painting of the 1920s, the present article discusses the issue of the representation of political power in visual art and the presence of archaic roots in the corpus patiens (lat.) motifs. It examines artefacts made by eminent as well as little-known painters of the late avant-garde, including Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Tyshler, Kliment Redko, Georgy Rublev, Aleksandr Drevin, Boris Golopolosov and others.
Hegel’s formula according to which art reflects life was in a simplified and perverted way hammered into the consciousness of the Soviet mass viewer from the 1930s, yet, in the very same years, it was refuted by the practice of the fine arts or, more specifically, their alternative trends in relation to the mainstream ideology. As one knows, text extends the meanings that it originally contained as the space and time of its functioning in culture expands (Toporov 1983). The text’s functions expand as well. The prognostic function of art comes to the fore in crucial historical epochs and times of social bifurcation. Fortune tellers, predictors of the future, and prophets meet with great demand in a society that seeks to get rid of the disturbing feeling of uncertainty about the future or at least to reduce its frustration. Art also acquires the function of anticipation–no matter whether the artists themselves are aware of it or not. In the history of literature, cinema and painting, one finds many cases of the anticipation of future events, both at the global historical scale and at the level of the life of individuals. The most striking textbook example is the date of the 20th-century Russian revolution that was predicted by Velimir Khlebnikov (whom Mayakovsky did not believe and mistakenly corrected the date in one of his poems: “The sixteenth year is coming in the crown of thorns of revolutions”). Khlebnikov deliberately looked for numerical patterns in historical chronology. At the same time, in certain Hollywood movies (Armageddon, 1998, dir. Michael Bay; Escape from New York, 1993, dir. John Carpenter; and others), the events of 11 September 2001—the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York—are foreshadowed not as an established law of time or as a mystical coincidence but as a real prophecy. Trends in art are also endowed with a prophetic gift: Russian symbolism of the turn of the 20th century, both in literature and in the fine arts, is imbued with a premonition of a civilizational catastrophe, as if foreseeing the collapse of Russian pre-revolutionary culture. The texts of Andrey Bely and Aleksandr Blok are full of vague allusions and gloomy predictions. The avant-garde—not only the historical avant-garde in Russia, but also Italian futurism and the early German expressionism—foresaw the horrors of the First World War: a blown-up world appeared in painting as fragmented polyhedrons, deviant corporeality, the attack of machines on the living organs of the human body, and borderline mental states. The meanings of Kazimir Malevich’s famous “Black Square” are saturated with a general sense of catastrophe which lowered the curtain on the stage of European art history while outlining a broader context-a premonition of the decline of Russian culture. Thinking about the future, writers voluntarily or involuntarily surmised the outlines of the coming totalitarian era in anti-utopias—whether German Nazism in Karel Capek’s novel The War with the Newts written in 1936 or contemporary events in Russia in Vladimir Sorokin’s story “The Day of the Oprichnik” written in 2006. The exposure of a social project doomed to failure in Andrey Platonov’s story “Foundation Pit” (written in 1930, first published in 1968) can be regarded in the same line. Although the genre of dystopia itself is still a by-product of the prognostic function, it is not so much about a critical look at modernity and its near future as about a kind of registration using the special sensory sensitivity of art of the seismic vibrations of upcoming social earthquakes. At the same time George Orwell’s dystopic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four written in 1948 demonstrated amazing insight into the Eastern European regimes that were to be established after the Second World War. The features of the carnival of death sweeping the world—the recent pandemic—can also be seen in the prophetic movie Joker (2019, dir. Todd Phillips). I should also mention personal foreseeing: Mikhail Vrubel predicted the death of his son, and Van Gogh—his own death. These are just a few examples.
Let me now turn to a phenomenon of this kind that is less obvious yet all the more revealing—the way in which Soviet paintings of the late 1920s and the early 1930s manifested a premonition of the onset of the repressive Stalinist regime. This took place mainly in the unofficial art of this time, which came to the attention of the broad public only in recent decades: a lot of paintings gathered dust in the funds of museums or the attics of collectors, while many others were destroyed during the Stalinist period during mass arrests or the self-censorship of their authors. This period has been widely discussed in recent decades, and a lot has been written about its artistic atmosphere and paintings. The most important information is found in Olga Roytenberg’s book Did someone really remember that we had been … (Roytenberg 2004), which provides an essential introduction to the little-known aspects of the art of that era. Individual topics in the history of painting of the 1920s and the connection between semantics and formal stylistic practices are the subject of studies by the art historians Aleksandra Salienko (Salienko 2018), Sergey Fofanov (Fofanov 2019), Anatoly Morozov, me (Nataliya Zlydneva) and others. Significant issues of the historical avant-garde were raised by Boris Groys (Groys 1988) and in a book edited by Hans Guenther and Evgeny Dobrenko dedicated to the problems of socialist realism in a wide ideological and esthetic context (Guenther and Dobrenko 2000). The approach proposed in the present article to the late Soviet avant-garde as an art that was aloof from the main paths of development-industrial art, constructivism, etc.—has not been considered before and much remains to be clarified on this issue. The prognostic functions of painting of this period leads me to formulate some more general questions: the problem of the modality of the image, i.e., of the conveyance of emotions by non-verbal means, and the problem of identifying the level of visual “text” at which a social theme manifests itself in the form of the collective unconscious. A significant aspect of corpus patiens motifs deals with the proportions of subjectivity and objectivity in a visual communication. Bodily suffering can be presented as the object of a mimetic narrative, yet it can also have a subjective model which is wholly determined by the level/plane of expression (the motion of the pictorial mass, contrasting colour, swirling composition, etc.). Most often there is a correlation between the object and the subject of representation that increases the degree of semiotization of the visual text in which the social context and the ideological code of the epoque becomes more perceptible.
Textiles And Clothing Along The Silk Roads
The generation that entered the artistic arena at the end of the 1920s received an impulse from the artists of the historical avant-garde of the 1910s, from whom they learned in one form or another. Many of the younger artists began with non-objective painting and subsequently retained a commitment to the problems of pure form in their mature years; Sergey Luchishkin, Kliment Redko, Aleksandr Tyshler and others practiced
Similar to the Russian historical avant-garde of the 1910s, which predicted the war and the social revolution of 1917, the late avant-garde of the 1920s anticipated the advent of the totalitarian terror and the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. In figurative painting, this manifested itself in a specific visual “lexicon” and modality (bodily violence and the fragmented body, frustration, motifs of loss, death and general catastrophe), as well as in the expressive style (that inherited but not duplicated the models of European expressionism). In addition to proposing an analytical classification of semantics and poetics of the painting of the 1920s, the present article discusses the issue of the representation of political power in visual art and the presence of archaic roots in the corpus patiens (lat.) motifs. It examines artefacts made by eminent as well as little-known painters of the late avant-garde, including Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Tyshler, Kliment Redko, Georgy Rublev, Aleksandr Drevin, Boris Golopolosov and others.
Hegel’s formula according to which art reflects life was in a simplified and perverted way hammered into the consciousness of the Soviet mass viewer from the 1930s, yet, in the very same years, it was refuted by the practice of the fine arts or, more specifically, their alternative trends in relation to the mainstream ideology. As one knows, text extends the meanings that it originally contained as the space and time of its functioning in culture expands (Toporov 1983). The text’s functions expand as well. The prognostic function of art comes to the fore in crucial historical epochs and times of social bifurcation. Fortune tellers, predictors of the future, and prophets meet with great demand in a society that seeks to get rid of the disturbing feeling of uncertainty about the future or at least to reduce its frustration. Art also acquires the function of anticipation–no matter whether the artists themselves are aware of it or not. In the history of literature, cinema and painting, one finds many cases of the anticipation of future events, both at the global historical scale and at the level of the life of individuals. The most striking textbook example is the date of the 20th-century Russian revolution that was predicted by Velimir Khlebnikov (whom Mayakovsky did not believe and mistakenly corrected the date in one of his poems: “The sixteenth year is coming in the crown of thorns of revolutions”). Khlebnikov deliberately looked for numerical patterns in historical chronology. At the same time, in certain Hollywood movies (Armageddon, 1998, dir. Michael Bay; Escape from New York, 1993, dir. John Carpenter; and others), the events of 11 September 2001—the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York—are foreshadowed not as an established law of time or as a mystical coincidence but as a real prophecy. Trends in art are also endowed with a prophetic gift: Russian symbolism of the turn of the 20th century, both in literature and in the fine arts, is imbued with a premonition of a civilizational catastrophe, as if foreseeing the collapse of Russian pre-revolutionary culture. The texts of Andrey Bely and Aleksandr Blok are full of vague allusions and gloomy predictions. The avant-garde—not only the historical avant-garde in Russia, but also Italian futurism and the early German expressionism—foresaw the horrors of the First World War: a blown-up world appeared in painting as fragmented polyhedrons, deviant corporeality, the attack of machines on the living organs of the human body, and borderline mental states. The meanings of Kazimir Malevich’s famous “Black Square” are saturated with a general sense of catastrophe which lowered the curtain on the stage of European art history while outlining a broader context-a premonition of the decline of Russian culture. Thinking about the future, writers voluntarily or involuntarily surmised the outlines of the coming totalitarian era in anti-utopias—whether German Nazism in Karel Capek’s novel The War with the Newts written in 1936 or contemporary events in Russia in Vladimir Sorokin’s story “The Day of the Oprichnik” written in 2006. The exposure of a social project doomed to failure in Andrey Platonov’s story “Foundation Pit” (written in 1930, first published in 1968) can be regarded in the same line. Although the genre of dystopia itself is still a by-product of the prognostic function, it is not so much about a critical look at modernity and its near future as about a kind of registration using the special sensory sensitivity of art of the seismic vibrations of upcoming social earthquakes. At the same time George Orwell’s dystopic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four written in 1948 demonstrated amazing insight into the Eastern European regimes that were to be established after the Second World War. The features of the carnival of death sweeping the world—the recent pandemic—can also be seen in the prophetic movie Joker (2019, dir. Todd Phillips). I should also mention personal foreseeing: Mikhail Vrubel predicted the death of his son, and Van Gogh—his own death. These are just a few examples.
Let me now turn to a phenomenon of this kind that is less obvious yet all the more revealing—the way in which Soviet paintings of the late 1920s and the early 1930s manifested a premonition of the onset of the repressive Stalinist regime. This took place mainly in the unofficial art of this time, which came to the attention of the broad public only in recent decades: a lot of paintings gathered dust in the funds of museums or the attics of collectors, while many others were destroyed during the Stalinist period during mass arrests or the self-censorship of their authors. This period has been widely discussed in recent decades, and a lot has been written about its artistic atmosphere and paintings. The most important information is found in Olga Roytenberg’s book Did someone really remember that we had been … (Roytenberg 2004), which provides an essential introduction to the little-known aspects of the art of that era. Individual topics in the history of painting of the 1920s and the connection between semantics and formal stylistic practices are the subject of studies by the art historians Aleksandra Salienko (Salienko 2018), Sergey Fofanov (Fofanov 2019), Anatoly Morozov, me (Nataliya Zlydneva) and others. Significant issues of the historical avant-garde were raised by Boris Groys (Groys 1988) and in a book edited by Hans Guenther and Evgeny Dobrenko dedicated to the problems of socialist realism in a wide ideological and esthetic context (Guenther and Dobrenko 2000). The approach proposed in the present article to the late Soviet avant-garde as an art that was aloof from the main paths of development-industrial art, constructivism, etc.—has not been considered before and much remains to be clarified on this issue. The prognostic functions of painting of this period leads me to formulate some more general questions: the problem of the modality of the image, i.e., of the conveyance of emotions by non-verbal means, and the problem of identifying the level of visual “text” at which a social theme manifests itself in the form of the collective unconscious. A significant aspect of corpus patiens motifs deals with the proportions of subjectivity and objectivity in a visual communication. Bodily suffering can be presented as the object of a mimetic narrative, yet it can also have a subjective model which is wholly determined by the level/plane of expression (the motion of the pictorial mass, contrasting colour, swirling composition, etc.). Most often there is a correlation between the object and the subject of representation that increases the degree of semiotization of the visual text in which the social context and the ideological code of the epoque becomes more perceptible.
Textiles And Clothing Along The Silk Roads
The generation that entered the artistic arena at the end of the 1920s received an impulse from the artists of the historical avant-garde of the 1910s, from whom they learned in one form or another. Many of the younger artists began with non-objective painting and subsequently retained a commitment to the problems of pure form in their mature years; Sergey Luchishkin, Kliment Redko, Aleksandr Tyshler and others practiced
Similar to the Russian historical avant-garde of the 1910s, which predicted the war and the social revolution of 1917, the late avant-garde of the 1920s anticipated the advent of the totalitarian terror and the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. In figurative painting, this manifested itself in a specific visual “lexicon” and modality (bodily violence and the fragmented body, frustration, motifs of loss, death and general catastrophe), as well as in the expressive style (that inherited but not duplicated the models of European expressionism). In addition to proposing an analytical classification of semantics and poetics of the painting of the 1920s, the present article discusses the issue of the representation of political power in visual art and the presence of archaic roots in the corpus patiens (lat.) motifs. It examines artefacts made by eminent as well as little-known painters of the late avant-garde, including Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Tyshler, Kliment Redko, Georgy Rublev, Aleksandr Drevin, Boris Golopolosov and others.
Hegel’s formula according to which art reflects life was in a simplified and perverted way hammered into the consciousness of the Soviet mass viewer from the 1930s, yet, in the very same years, it was refuted by the practice of the fine arts or, more specifically, their alternative trends in relation to the mainstream ideology. As one knows, text extends the meanings that it originally contained as the space and time of its functioning in culture expands (Toporov 1983). The text’s functions expand as well. The prognostic function of art comes to the fore in crucial historical epochs and times of social bifurcation. Fortune tellers, predictors of the future, and prophets meet with great demand in a society that seeks to get rid of the disturbing feeling of uncertainty about the future or at least to reduce its frustration. Art also acquires the function of anticipation–no matter whether the artists themselves are aware of it or not. In the history of literature, cinema and painting, one finds many cases of the anticipation of future events, both at the global historical scale and at the level of the life of individuals. The most striking textbook example is the date of the 20th-century Russian revolution that was predicted by Velimir Khlebnikov (whom Mayakovsky did not believe and mistakenly corrected the date in one of his poems: “The sixteenth year is coming in the crown of thorns of revolutions”). Khlebnikov deliberately looked for numerical patterns in historical chronology. At the same time, in certain Hollywood movies (Armageddon, 1998, dir. Michael Bay; Escape from New York, 1993, dir. John Carpenter; and others), the events of 11 September 2001—the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York—are foreshadowed not as an established law of time or as a mystical coincidence but as a real prophecy. Trends in art are also endowed with a prophetic gift: Russian symbolism of the turn of the 20th century, both in literature and in the fine arts, is imbued with a premonition of a civilizational catastrophe, as if foreseeing the collapse of Russian pre-revolutionary culture. The texts of Andrey Bely and Aleksandr Blok are full of vague allusions and gloomy predictions. The avant-garde—not only the historical avant-garde in Russia, but also Italian futurism and the early German expressionism—foresaw the horrors of the First World War: a blown-up world appeared in painting as fragmented polyhedrons, deviant corporeality, the attack of machines on the living organs of the human body, and borderline mental states. The meanings of Kazimir Malevich’s famous “Black Square” are saturated with a general sense of catastrophe which lowered the curtain on the stage of European art history while outlining a broader context-a premonition of the decline of Russian culture. Thinking about the future, writers voluntarily or involuntarily surmised the outlines of the coming totalitarian era in anti-utopias—whether German Nazism in Karel Capek’s novel The War with the Newts written in 1936 or contemporary events in Russia in Vladimir Sorokin’s story “The Day of the Oprichnik” written in 2006. The exposure of a social project doomed to failure in Andrey Platonov’s story “Foundation Pit” (written in 1930, first published in 1968) can be regarded in the same line. Although the genre of dystopia itself is still a by-product of the prognostic function, it is not so much about a critical look at modernity and its near future as about a kind of registration using the special sensory sensitivity of art of the seismic vibrations of upcoming social earthquakes. At the same time George Orwell’s dystopic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four written in 1948 demonstrated amazing insight into the Eastern European regimes that were to be established after the Second World War. The features of the carnival of death sweeping the world—the recent pandemic—can also be seen in the prophetic movie Joker (2019, dir. Todd Phillips). I should also mention personal foreseeing: Mikhail Vrubel predicted the death of his son, and Van Gogh—his own death. These are just a few examples.
Let me now turn to a phenomenon of this kind that is less obvious yet all the more revealing—the way in which Soviet paintings of the late 1920s and the early 1930s manifested a premonition of the onset of the repressive Stalinist regime. This took place mainly in the unofficial art of this time, which came to the attention of the broad public only in recent decades: a lot of paintings gathered dust in the funds of museums or the attics of collectors, while many others were destroyed during the Stalinist period during mass arrests or the self-censorship of their authors. This period has been widely discussed in recent decades, and a lot has been written about its artistic atmosphere and paintings. The most important information is found in Olga Roytenberg’s book Did someone really remember that we had been … (Roytenberg 2004), which provides an essential introduction to the little-known aspects of the art of that era. Individual topics in the history of painting of the 1920s and the connection between semantics and formal stylistic practices are the subject of studies by the art historians Aleksandra Salienko (Salienko 2018), Sergey Fofanov (Fofanov 2019), Anatoly Morozov, me (Nataliya Zlydneva) and others. Significant issues of the historical avant-garde were raised by Boris Groys (Groys 1988) and in a book edited by Hans Guenther and Evgeny Dobrenko dedicated to the problems of socialist realism in a wide ideological and esthetic context (Guenther and Dobrenko 2000). The approach proposed in the present article to the late Soviet avant-garde as an art that was aloof from the main paths of development-industrial art, constructivism, etc.—has not been considered before and much remains to be clarified on this issue. The prognostic functions of painting of this period leads me to formulate some more general questions: the problem of the modality of the image, i.e., of the conveyance of emotions by non-verbal means, and the problem of identifying the level of visual “text” at which a social theme manifests itself in the form of the collective unconscious. A significant aspect of corpus patiens motifs deals with the proportions of subjectivity and objectivity in a visual communication. Bodily suffering can be presented as the object of a mimetic narrative, yet it can also have a subjective model which is wholly determined by the level/plane of expression (the motion of the pictorial mass, contrasting colour, swirling composition, etc.). Most often there is a correlation between the object and the subject of representation that increases the degree of semiotization of the visual text in which the social context and the ideological code of the epoque becomes more perceptible.
Textiles And Clothing Along The Silk Roads
The generation that entered the artistic arena at the end of the 1920s received an impulse from the artists of the historical avant-garde of the 1910s, from whom they learned in one form or another. Many of the younger artists began with non-objective painting and subsequently retained a commitment to the problems of pure form in their mature years; Sergey Luchishkin, Kliment Redko, Aleksandr Tyshler and others practiced
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