Ms. Bulanova, an independent scholar, is one of the curators of “In the Russian Tradition,” the inaugural exhibition at the new museum’s new location.
Following is the text from the seminar presented by Maria Bulanova at The Museum of Russian Art on Wednesday, May 11, 2005. Ms. Bulanova, an independent scholar,  is one of the curators of “In the Russian Tradition,” the inaugural exhibition at the new museum’s new location.

As one of the exhibition curators, I will do my best in this brief speech to explain the concepts of this premier exhibition in The Museum of Russian Art, entitled, “In the Russian Tradition.” It is important to state that for historical reasons Americans know little about Russian art, which includes icons, avant-garde art, socialist realist works that contain communist ideology and non-conformist art.

The goal for this exhibition was not to present Soviet art that was painted to promote communist policies. On the contrary, our approach is to show the scope of social realism, which extends well beyond the bounds of politics.

The organizers of this exhibition believe that Soviet art of the 20h century is part of the worldwide phenomenon called Modernism, defined as the world’s artistic culture of the 20th century. This term is often used in connection with modern and contemporary art as well as the avant-garde movement, which denies the basic principle of realism: an objective depiction of reality created by God and painted in narrative form.

In art, there is a basic philosophical dispute between modernism and traditional innovative art and between figurative and non-figurative images. Teophiles Gaultier, a 19th-century French writer, perhaps described it best in defining realism of his period: “I need only a frame, a nail and Koro’s signature to transform a real landscape into a painting.” Modernism unites all art of the 20th century; it is a manifesto that exists even before the work of art itself. Its function is to explain the artist’s intention and the semantics of the work. The 20th-century artist was convinced of his inability to express his intentions only through a work of art, and this made him dramatically different from artists of the 19th century. An artistic intention cannot be packaged into a work of art itself. That is why the greatest speakers and writers among artists worked in the 20th century. Not a single European knew anything about futurism when Marinetti published his manifesto in the Parisian newspaper, Figaro, in 1909. Salvador Dali wrote poetry and fiction, but in 1932 the ideology of socialist realism was proclaimed by the Communist Party in a document intended to regulate the arts. The proclamation banned all artistic organizations and established a single Union of Artists that was controlled by the government. During this period, a curator’s most important role was that of an ideologist. This was true for all styles and genres, from cubism to trans-avant-garde. The roles of an ideologist and an artist often coincide, as it happened with Kandinski and Malevich. But these roles can be different, as well. For example, Akille Bonito-Olivia, an Italian philosopher, in 1980 wrote his work, “Art’s Dream,” and established an artistic group. Similarly, in the Soviet Union, Soviet rulers played the role of curators in socialist realism.

Many artists established their own art theories in the 20th century. For example, Igor Grabar, who is represented in the exhibition with the painting, “March Snow,” with Benois, Malevich and R. Frai wrote new histories of art according to their own theories. These artists summarized the artistic experience of past centuries adding a new concept: the idea of style. Remember, surrealists published books illustrated with reproductions of paintings by predecessors whom they themselves had anointed, and then chose from these who they found useful. Salvador Dali thus proclaimed Courbet, Goya and Bosch true surrealists. Herein lies a paradox: Courbet was one of the founders of 19th century realism.

Similar to all avant garde movements, Soviet art offered its own ideological fundamentals and its own history of art. The latter was officially proclaimed in 1932: Bolsheviks chose artistic traditions that were “correct” from their point of view and these should have served as a basis for communist art. However, they chose the “wrong” ones, impressionism and avant-garde. As you may know, Russian avant-garde art became accessible to Soviet people as well as to Westerners only with perestroika. Fighting for the so-called “truth of the past,” paintings by Malevich and Larionov in Soviet times were removed from museum expositions. Larionov’s painting, “Prostitute at the Hairdresser’s,” is presented in this exhibition. So, from the point of view of socialist realism, “correctness” embodied the Itinerants’ critical realism, together with the traditions of Rubens and Rembrandt. Among the Itinerants, Repin was chosen as the finest example to follow. Two of Repin’s works are included in this exhibition: “Portrait of V.V. Stasov,” who was a noted critic and ideologist of the Itinerant movement, and “Portrait of Merci D’Arjanto,” painted a few days before the pianist’s death.

The Itinerants had two basic goals. The first was to enlighten the masses by establishing touring exhibitions around the country. During the 50 years of Itinerant activity, from 1863 to 1924, the group organized 45 exhibitions throughout Russia. These exhibitions contributed to the overall progress of the masses as well as to the establishment of provincial schools of art.

The second goal was to provide critical depiction of reality as opposed to the idealistic depiction of reality practiced by artists of the St. Petersburg Academy. Such critiques of social inadequacies should have helped to improve life. But the Soviet ideal did not see itself in “real time,” and critics were not allowed. The concept can perhaps be explained best by the words of a popular song of the period: “We shall completely destroy the world of violence and rebuild a world of our own. Those who were nothing will become everything.” These words were written by the French poet, Potier, and the song was first sung by French workers of Lilles, France, in 1888. From 1918 until 1943 it served as a patriotic hymn of the Soviet state.

Similarly, a radical approach to art was typical for the Russian avant-garde. Malevich’s call to burn all art and abolish the past was common among the avant-garde, and a struggle between various artists’ groups was so fierce that many artists wrote letters to the government asking that a common program be established for all. The belief was that new art, based on the synthesis of all artistic expression (architecture, poetry, design, music, etc.) would save the world. Meanwhile, technical progress – airplanes, trains, the metro, Mendeleev’s chemical elements, relativity, the cinema and a denial of God—frightened humanity. With technical progress wars became ever more cruel, and one war came after another.

Military casualties were incredibly high, and one of the major artistic issues of the early 20th century was the anticipation of a catastrophe. Artists who were called “decadents” or “symbolists” proclaimed a utopian wish to rebuild society through art. The avant-garde inherited this idea. Many artists were connected with anarchists and revolutionary movements based on the same idea.

For example, Pablo Picasso joined the Communist Party and Kamil Pissaro and his sons, Sera and Paul Sinyak, were enthusiastic about the ideas of Karl Marx and Duke Kropotkine, a Russian anarchist. All of them considered bombs and terrorist attacks as completely appropriate if used to destroy social inequities, a radical but effective method to attract public attention to society’s needs, as propaganda with action.

When the noted poet Mallarme was asked about violent acts, he said he could not discuss the actions of saints. As the artist, Tayad, asked, “Is someone’s death important if the gesture is magnificent?” Shortly after asking this question he lost an eye to a bomb thrown by a fellow anarchist. He made no accusations.

Those who thought of themselves as progressive wished to start a new life with what the philosopher John Locke called a “tabula rasa,” a blank slate. The slogan adopted by the communists, “The end justifies the means,” appeared long before Lenin and Stalin. At the time, the idea of communism and the establishment of social realism was not a radical idea, rather it was characteristic of the public mood. Therefore, art reflected real actions that were taking place around the world. Social revolution as an ideology existed everywhere in the 20th century, but it was realized only in Russia.

To start a new history required a new, idealized concept of man looking forward to a joyful future. An image of a young woman became a sign, an allegory. In this exhibition, Deineka’s painting, “Girl on a Chair,” from the 1930s, and a later version with the same theme, “Portrait of a Working Girl,” by Lomakin, in the 1950s, serve as examples of how life should be. It is interesting to compare Deineka’s painting, which incorporates avant-garde traditions, with Lomakin’s work, which relied on Repin’s traditions from the school of Russian realism.

A dream was often painted as if it actually existed. To illustrate, the still life painted by Yuri Katz depicted beauty and bounty on a tea table. The delicacies in the painting are in contrast with the great poverty among the masses in post-war Russia, although the Party elite undoubtedly lived very well. Yakolev’s masterpiece, “Soviet Canned Food,” can be compared to shop windows of the time, which displayed gigantic bottles of “milk” filled with tooth powder and huge plaster sausages. In reality, all these products were almost impossible to find. Andy Warhol appears almost childlike with his Coca Colas and soup cans. Pop-artists made unique object, which looked like common ones, and Soviet artists made common objects that looked unique. When an American, George Segal, first came to Russia, he said, “You all should be copied in plaster and then exhibited!”

When speaking of the dictates of the Communist Party to artists of the period, we cannot overlook the artists’ own “secret passion.” First, that passion is connected with the traditions of the Russian avant-garde, as well as with the traditions of the Moscow based Union of Russian Artists dating from the early 20th century. These traditions, in turn, were influenced by the French impressionists. This exhibition features three works that exemplify this influence: March Snow, Portrait of Mika Morozov and Wife’s Portrait. The artists who painted these works, Igor Grabar, Valentin Serov and Nikolai Fechin, together formed the basis of 20th century Russian art. Socialist realism was paradoxical because its major figures—Alexander Gerasimov, Vasili Efanov and the Tkachev brothers—were all students of Grabar, Repin, Serov and Fechin, among others.

Due to the fact that the Soviet state was isolated from the wider world, these artists continued the traditions of the Russian art school. Many of them showed a passion for the avant-garde before entering the socialist-realism stream. Among those are Konchalovski, represented in this exhibition with his painting, “Floor Polisher,” Williams with his “Nana,” Lentulov with his “Tower Gate. New Jerusalem,” Rozhdestvenski with his “Still Life with Green Bottle,” and Falk with his “Self-Portrait.” These artists belonged to the Jack of Diamonds, an avant-garde group founded in 1911 following an exhibition of the same name. The first avant garde artists’ group in Russia, it attracted every avant-garde artist with the exception of Filanov. Larionov invented the name: Jack to signify youth, and diamonds to mean color. As their contemporaries remember it, color impressed and lightened minds that had become accustomed to the plain, monotonous paintings of the Itinerants. Jack of Diamonds artists were followers of Cezanne who believed that content was of prime importance to a painting. One example of the school is Larionov’s “Prostitute at the Hairdresser’s.” These artists believed that primitive folk art was pure and untouched by civilization and served as a model of harmony in art. That is why they began using primitive art in their work. After the Revolution, Jack of Diamonds became part of AkHRR, The Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, which became the voice of socialist realism. To see how an avant-garde artist turned to the socialist realism platform, look at Piotr Konchalovski’s “Floor Polisher,” painted in 1946.

In general, art by any artist belonging to any style or group is defined by his or her approach to people, to nature, to life and to death. The goal of this exhibition is to demonstrate how artists considered the events of the period and then created great paintings that tell us today how people preserved their humanity in such trying times.

We chose the best known names of official artists close to the communist regime, but we intentionally present paintings that they painted for themselves rather than their official art. The paintings in this exhibition present art from the perspective of art itself, its quality and worldwide and national artistic tradition.

I would like to emphasize that Soviet art of the 20th century has already become a part of the past, and its aesthetic values present the past. As any era, it had positive and negative features. For those who lived during that time, basic human values remained the same as they were two or three centuries before. What they saw with their own eyes is, for us, history, and an independent, impartial artistic image can help us to understand it. Aleksandr Labas, an artist, wrote: “What I’m sur of is that my works will be more and more understandable with the passing of decades, and in 50 or 100 years they will gain their true power, and everyone will see our time in them.

Russian art of the Soviet period—I believe it is correct to refer to socialist realism this way—was one of the longest stylistic periods of the 20th century. As for its length and influence on other styles, it can be compared only to surrealism and abstract art. It went through various stages of development: romanticism in the 1930s, as evidenced by the works of Deineka, Pimenov and Williams, who were among those romanticizing the future, and using subjects such as speed, movement, enthusiasm for technical progress and the “ideal” human.

The 1940s and 50s was the period of classic socialist realism, the Stalin epoch. It is represented in this exhibition by works from Gerasimov, the Tkachev brothers, Ugarov, Kovalevskaya, Katz, Konchalovski and Gavrilov.

The 1960s were marked by “severe style” paintings by Popkov, Pimenov, Salahov, Bragovsky and Kabacheck. In contrast to works from Stalin’s “joyful” art, the “severe style” developed from the start of a new period in Soviet history. Stalin died, the USSR celebrated victory over fascism in the Second World War, and the mood of the 60s was summarized in the following statement: It is you—no one else—who is in charge of your future, the future of your friends and relatives, and your country. There appeared in art an image of a man who believed in beauty and romance. The image of Don Quixote as an allegory to understanding life’s purpose became popular.

At last, the 1970s and 80s were marked by a passion for the world’s intellectual as well as artistic heritage, especially of the Renaissance. Artists exhibiting such interests include Korzhev, Zhilinski, Mai Dantzig, Popov, Nechitailo and Stozharov.

The reason for Soviet art was not to depict real life, but to present an optimistic dream. Artists painted what the Soviet state should have been. They used realism because it has always been the easiest style to understand and the most persuasive. The so-called truth in Soviet art became part of the myth created for viewers. All these features allow us to see Soviet art as a logical continuation of avant-garde traditions. Moreover, both avant-garde and Soviet art have a common source: art nouveau and symbolism of the late 19th century. This is the reason we begin our exhibition with “The Bathing of the Red Horse” by Petrov-Vodkin and “Village Girl” by Malyavin.

Petrov-Vodkin was one of the finest symbolist artists of the 20th century. Born in the small town of Khvolynsk near Samara city, he studied icon painting in Samara. Soon he moved to Moscow to study with Serov. According to the artist himself, he was influenced also by Vrubell, Gaugin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Pauvis de Shavagnne. “The Bathing of the Red Horse” is the artist’s major pre-Revolutionary work. It was first displayed at the exhibition of the famous World of Art group in 1912, placed above the entrance to mark the group’s symbolist theme. Petrov-Vodkin had made many nature sketches for the painting and destroyed his first variant.

What we see now is an image of a boy riding a horse, meaningfully marked with mystic features. The red horse appears spirited and, at the same time, as a dream of supernatural beauty that frightens, yet gives hope. The red color expresses the artist’s mythological approach. The boy, rendered in light yellow, is a small and isolated figure, hovering between reality and illusion. The traditions of Russian icon painting are revealed in the artist’s understanding of color.

Now consider Phillip Malyavin. In his childhood he studied icon painting at Afon monastery. A well-known sculptor, Beklemishev, was amazed with the boy’s talent and took him to St. Petersburg where he helped him enter the Academy of Arts in Repin’s workshop. According to the memory of some contemporaries, Malyavin’s paintings astonished the Academy people. From the mid 1890s, the artist worked on subjects titled “Whirlwind” and “Laughter.” Among those painted during this period, in 1903, is “Village Girl.” We can see neither action nor any explanation of what is happening in the painting, which is done with energy and temperament. Malyavin uses neither light nor shadows, so the image does not seem three-dimensional. The mottled face contrasts with the figure, and his outrageous colors render the woman somewhat unreal, creating the impression of a certain mystery.

Both works demonstrate the influence of modern and symbolist art. Symbolism and all its variants were based on the concept of theosophical creativity. All art that developed later in Europe, the United States and Russia were based then on the philosophy of E. Blavatskaya, R. Shteiner and D. Papius. Secret and legal religious and philosophical unions were founded in all developed countries. Theosophy influenced the group Nabi, young Petrov-Vodkin, E. Munk, K. Malevich, V. Kandinski, R. Delone, Picasso and almost all educated people worldwide.

Theosophy proclaimed belief in enigmatic forces that rule the universe, in people’s psychic energy, in the possibility of traveling through time and space. All this led to the establishment of a planet-wide religion and a new utopian society where everyone would lead happy lives. Theosophy was closely connected to mystics and masons enthusiastic about the occult sciences, spiritualism, etc. One of the theosophy founders, Blavatskaya, lived in New York and wrote books, saying that the texts she created were given to her through spirits as an insight, and she is, therefore, not their author but a medium.

The prime tenet of theosophy held that art should change society, and a full harmony on Earth would be achieved through a synthesis of all arts. It was this idea that formed the basis of the avant-garde movement. Its aggression in destroying old art is also connected to the idea of establishing a completely new society and worldwide harmony.

A similar intention can be seen in the theory of socialist realism: reestablishing society, changing people’s minds, rituality in artists’ actions and passion to act; i.e., demonstrations on Red Square and physical training parades. These factors allow us to see socialist realism as a continuation of the early 20th century avant-garde movement and shatter the myth that style is an exotic and completely politically engaged phenomenon.

In this brief lecture, one is unable to cover everything. My goal is to demonstrate the complexity of the development of Soviet art. Today we have spoken about styles, the place of a style in the worldwide artistic context, and the traditions on which it is based. Tradition in art is the continuation of art itself.

Keeping this in mind, we titled the exhibition “In the Russian Tradition.” It is important to repeat that an artist can hardly develop professionally without artistic freedom. That’s why we show no “official” paintings, but only those that the artists painted for themselves, with God playing the role of the strictest judge.

I would like to express my gratitude to The Museum of Russian Art for the opportunity to speak here, and to thank the audience for listening to me so attentively. Establishing a museum of Russian art in Minneapolis is astonishing, and it proves once more that the language of art is international and is the heritage of all humanity, not separate countries.

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