Perestroika meets Soviet art:
Sale of
the
century
THE SWISS financial daily, which regularly publishes a magazine for investments in art, sparkles with irony - like the gleam in the eye of a child who has played a trick on someone. In Moscow on July 7, the flower of international art brokers, Sotheby's, organized the first auction of work by Soviet artists: 18 works from the 1920s and 100 others by 29 contemporary artists. Special flights came in from New York, London and Zurich for the event, a reception and visits to what have been until now clandestine studios. MICHEL THEVENAZ A T THE HEAD of this veritable safari was Simon de Pury from Geneva, a Sotheby's auctioneer, He was previously the curator of the big Thyssen-Bornemisza private collection, which has just finished putting on the Lugano exhibition entitled "The revolutionary art of Soviet museums, 19101930". It is certainly ironic, this mixing of blue-blooded aristocrats with "new style" Gorbachevite bureaucrats for the purpose of running off with yesterday's revolutionary art and the today's dissident art!
The apparatchiks, won over to "reforms", have not been outdone in this affair. The Sotheby's sale, whose works can be exported tax-free, has supplied hard currency for the tills of the Soviet state, which still smothers and suffocates many artistic developments. Artists despised under Brezh-
ФОПРАВДА
nev find that their talents are now being praised, but they still only get the smallest share of the sale price. Obviously, it is the financial aspect that shocks Kristina Piwecki (see box p.16). She writes: "Only a tiny sum in hard currency has been given to the artists".
### Revolution liberated creative potential
In 1922, when the Van Diemen gallery in Berlin presented the young Russian artists for the first time, Pevsner, Gabo, Tatlin, El Lissitzki, Malevich and Rodchenko joined Kandinsky in the world of modern art.! The Russian revolution liberated a creative potential on which contemporary art has been largely dependent: Kandinsky's teaching; the thoughts of Pesner (who settled very early in the West) on art and architecture in the industrial era; and the Russian constructivists' studies (which influenced Le Corbusier, Mondrian and so on). All these influences have become part of the cultural inheritance of international modern art. Soviet art experiments in the 1920s2 sought to create a new representational language for a world that the revolution had put in a new light, both socially and through the sudden entry of industrial techniques into this, mainly peasant, society.
This is not the case today. In the era of perestroika and glasnost, new art has seen hardly any change in its marginalized status in Soviet society. Stalin condemned it to hell, Khrushchev threw it to the lions, and Brezhnev pushed it into internal or external
USSR "The picnic" by Oskar Rabine, c. 1970 - the herring wrapped in Pravda was evidence for the authorities of the artist's anti-Sovietism (DR) exile? As for Gorbachev, he is throwing it onto the market. He understands the financial (and diplomatic) value of this "cultural inheritance", denigrated by his predecessors, which Western collectors have fought over for 70 years! For all this, avant-garde art has still not found the place in its own country that it held briefly at the beginning of the revolution.
Since Stalin, bourgeois collectors have been smart enough to appropriate this cultural heritage, which decorates the salons, galleries and museums of Europe and America. The repression suffered by 1920s art is behind the high value of the market where Baron Thyssen has spun his webs, notably with the help of his blue-blooded aristocratic Swiss curator, Simon de Pury. De Pury is not just a connoisseur of Mos1. Kandinsky is of Russian origin. One of the creators of abstract art (in 1912), he had already worked at Blaue Reiter in Munich with Klee before returning to Moscow. Later, he taught at the Bauhaus (which was closed by Hitler), with Klee, Gropius and others. 2. Those reading French can find a passionate insight into this, plus numerous bibliographical references, in Changer la vie, changer la ville, by Anatole Kopp, Collection 10/18, 1975. 3. The exhibition of dissident art, called the Manège ("Merry-go-round"'), sounded the death knell of a timid liberalization. The bureaucrats deliberately authorized this exhibition in order to attack "decadent" art and the liberalism of Khrushchev, who agreed with them. Read his remarks in Karl Eimermacher's study on post-war
15
Moscow art in the catalogue of the Je vis — je vois exhibition, Kunstmuseum, Bere, 1988, p.182.
WHAT A WONDERFUL shop window display the
Kremlin Is offering for the next Sotheby's superauction. Capltallst commerce twinned with the com-
16 ИЗ ПЕРВЫХ РУК!
International Viewpoint #151 • November 14, 1988
USSR cow art, but of any art that can be exported. Used to flying to Moscow, he has been in contact for a long time with "dissident" artists (Kabakov, for example). He quickly grasped the possibilities of the new markets opened to him and his bosses at Sothemunist flair of Red Square Is a piquant mixture. The by's by perestroika — in other words, a
Marxist dialectic causes the strangest flowers to certain liberalization of exports and the bloom! Perhaps we'll ond up by writing a 'Capltallst need for currency.
In the following passing remark, Kristina manifesto' that will talk about the 'spectre of corrup-
Piecki shows that the discovery of these tion that is haunting Europe. The West's hard currennew Soviet "assets" certainly answers to the needs of criteria other than that of art:
y is tnus causine the retreat or more tuan one
"All this has an exotic charm for the jaded appetites of the Western bourgeoisie"
Their collections are already full, from Pi-
Kristina Piwecki, Schwizersche Handelszeitung, June 16, 1988 casso to Beuys, but their wallets are still bulging and they are looking for investments. This "demand" creates as much an attraction as the works themselves! The art market is a form of investment where originality and rarity, combined with the search for low-tax assets (safe investments), caus-
Advert for the state department store
Gum by Aleksandr Rodchenko, 1923 es incredible price rises. In a few days, artists who were previously hounded or ignored see their canvasses go for between $32,000 and $73,000 (Ivan Chuikov and Yankilevski according to Sotheby's estimate). At the same time, people are running off with works from the 1920s that are still lying around in Moscow. A canvas by deoloey 22
Aleksandr Rodchenko, that "fanatical communist" 4 is valued at between $360,000 and $480,000!
Knowing the expert traditions — not to mention the cunning — of Swiss financiers with investments, it is not surprising to find them in the front row of this cultural/ financial beanfeast. The "fashion" for new Soviet art was set off by Erik Bulatov's ex-
ХВОТАЙТЕСЬ зА этот
СПАСАТЕЛЬНЫЙ
КРУГ!
hibition in Zurich, followed this summer by the exhibition Je vis — je vois ("I live — I see") at the Kuntsmuseum in Bern. This latter was a presentation of work by Moscow artists in the 1980s. Auctioneers of the ilk of Simon de Pury are not the only ones at the origin of this "new popularity". Cultured Swiss diplomats are also in on the act.
"A tragic ordeal for Moscow artists"
Hailing "the return of the Russians to the international artistic community", Bertil Galland delighted in emphasizing the role of ambassador Paul Jolles, who, when he headed up Swiss external trade, "knew all about Russian 'clandestine' art. He infected
ВСЕ
ДЛя
BCEX successive Swiss diplomats in Moscow with his passion, many of whom became collectors." It's a sure bet that their diplomatic bags were not always full of just documents....
In Moscow, this sudden entry into the limelight is disorienting more than one artist. The interesting catalogue of the Je vis — je vois exhibition contains some interviews that point up this confusion. "The uniqueness of the Moscow artistic world has already been destroyed. We can no longer return to the past, and the future is unclear. The hour of temptation has arrived. People are already appearing and offering to buy up the harvest there and then.
ДОБРОКАЧЕСТВЕННО
ДЕШЕВО!
Who will survive?" (Vadim Sacharov). 4. This term comes from Camille Gray, L'avans-garde russe dans "'art moderne, L'Age d'Homme, 1962. Rodchenko, along with Tatlin, belonged to a group called "Art in life", revolutionary artists who wanted to incorporate modern techniques in order to change art and reconcile it with the world of work. 5. 24 Heures, July 30-August 1, 1988.
"Some artists — we know who they are — are profiting from this situation to become the "top artists'. I'm absolutely opposed to this... The new situation is a tragic ordeal for us." (Vladimir Yankilevski). "On principle, I have never sold my paintings. Because I think — and will always think - that those who start selling begin at the same time to wonder if their works will please others or not, whether they will sell or not. It's the beginning of dependance." (Trina Nachova.) "In the commercial atmosphere that rules today, relations between artists have become strained. In the past, we discussed all the time and visited each other. All that is over. In this sense, this new situation is a bad thing, above all for those of us who aren't used to it." (Ivan Chuikov).
Perestroika: changing the place of dissident art
Only Dmitri Prigov, a critical poet and author of a series of works entitled "Glasnost" (pages of Pravda superimposed with Gorbachev's reform slogans), admits to feeling "very happy with the success, the sales and the publicity".
But it would be wrong to put down this identity crisis only to the "temptations of the market". Perestroika is placing "dissident" art in a new context where it must win back space for itself and, at the same time, confront the public. Put under a sort of house arrest by the bureaucrats of "socialist realism", it has developed - under the pressure of events - a mentality that Yevgeni Barabnov describes as follows in his preface to the Je vis — je vois catalogue:
"In the absence of a normal artistic milieu and of a wide-ranging communication between the artist and the public, both artists and critics produce a particular type of artistic activity, a system that is closed off from the outside, internally stable like the monads of Leibniz [a philosopher who argued that the world could be split up into totally isolated units, whose inter-relations were just an illusion]. This is wellillustrated by the meditative and internalized scenes displayed in Bern, above all in the case of the older generation of painters such as Schwarzmann or Krasnopevtsev. Take Schwarzmann's highly stylized figures, that he describes (not without a prophetic presumption) as a new religious language of which he is the guardian. Or Krasnopevtsev, whose frozen still lifes in the style of the cubists continue the classical language of the painter's easel. Volkov, from the youngest generation, follows this tradition.
The generation who were 20 years old between 1955 and 1965 under Khrushchev (Bulatov, Faibissovich, Gorochovski, Yankilevski, Kabakov, Chuikov, Vasilyev) — precisely those who are selling at high prices via Sotheby's — take much livelier approaches. Often photography, montage and type are used to examine the real and the
Logo for the Epoch publishing house, Anonymous
1924 imaginary, to expose their ambiguities — a basically dialectical and profoundly realist notion that the hacks of "socialist realism" have never been able to tolerate. For example, Faibissovich's work, "That is the question", offers a startling image: a photomontage of a room where the patterns of light take the form of a question mark.
Many obstacles remain for Soviet art
These artists - influenced by the debates on "socialist realism" initiated under Khrushchev and by the discovery of Westem art (an exhibition of American art was held in Moscow in 1959) - have often also trained in the graphic arts or technical drawing and have had to earn a living in odd jobs as decorators or designers. They no longer have the positive and new approach of technique that you find among the artists of the 1920s, but they have taken on board a lot of their formal language, transforming it into a critical process. This is much more realist and rich (something that is not difficult) than the Stalinist eulogies of a world "without contradictions".
The youngest generation (Prigov, Orlov, Lebedev, Bruskin, Sacharov, Svesdochotov) also often come from graphic schools, especially because "dissident" art was partially tolerated under Brezhnev in the graphic arts section of the artists' union. But they embody a new spirit, a more rebellious one in terms of irony or means of expression (collective actions and "happenings"), and more independent from the norms of traditional painting (using coloured objects and montages). Rejecting all ideas of putting art onto a pedestal, something that he accuses his predecessors of,
USSR Prigov explains that, "the artist is simply a creator of cultures".
This brief outline - of necessity very schematic — shows something of the diversity of the approaches: from religious idealism to objects of pop-art, Moscow produces everything — so much the better.® But even so, between the lines one can see here the evolution of two or three generations of art and also of the whole of Soviet society. In this regard, the less meditative and internalized style of the young generation is revealing. In the post-war period, an industrial and urban world, a technological but also sadly reified one, developed in the USSR. Its preoccupations began to mesh with those of the capitalist world - including in the area of representational expression.
But what will art, artists and representational expression be like in this new Soviet Union? How are these artists going to meet their public? These questions remain unanswered after all the years that have gone by in a "closed system". But already there is a danger that the market appropriation — or, for the bureaucrats, the clearance sales — of this culture may cut it off, once more, from the Soviet society where it should have its place.
Soviet art still has many obstacles to surmount before it can reestablish itself - in the Soviet Union, of course, but also in the world at large. *
• This article was first published in La Brèche, bi-monthly French-language publication of the POS, Swiss section of the Fourth International. 6. Je vis - je vois only showed art from Moscow. It goes without saying that this diversity must be much 17 greater across the whole of Soviet territory.
International Viewpoint #151 • November 14, 1988