Читать книгу Russian Avant-Garde - Evgueny Kovtun - Страница 8

Wassily Kandinsky experienced a high level of creative activity during the years of the Revolution. He published articles and gave lectures; he was also one of the organisers of The Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow (INKhUK). One of the first books published by the Visual Arts department of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment was a monograph by the painter, W. Kandinsky. Ten years later, Kandinsky was purely and simply crossed out from Russian artistic culture and linked to German Expressionism. If, in the publication before the war of Masters of Art on Art, Kandinsky’s texts are part of the Russian section, in the last edition (1969) they are featured in the ‘German’ segment, the pretext being that his art would be an exotic flower in Russian soil. Justice must be restored. His pictorial experiments originated from popular Russian art, from the polychromy of the lubok, as the artist himself said. One can hardly find a painter at the beginning of the century that had such a strong interest and emotion for lubki as Kandinsky. Having heard that Nikolai Kulbin had sent him a lubok, The Last Judgement, Kandinsky wrote to him: ‘Truly, when I think about it, my heart beats faster.’[20] He tried to hunt out lubki each time he was in Moscow. The painter Mansurov talked about his explorations for lubki, often in the company of Larionov: ‘He and Kandinsky would roam the bazaars to dig out lubki painted by Mujiks. Bova Korolevich and the Tsar Saltan, and with them the angels and archangels, roughly painted in aniline from top to bottom: it was these objects and not Cezanne that were the source of everything.’[21] Kandinsky reproduced some lubki in the Blue Rider Almanac and was to organise in 1912, before Larionov, an exhibition of lubki at the Holtz Gallery in Munich. It was at the beginning of the 1890s that Kandinsky discovered the popular art of Russia. Having graduated in law at the University of Moscow (1892), he was sent by the government to Vologda to carry out a study on farming. It was there, in the country, that the ‘miracle’ occurred to him and became later, as he wrote, an element in his work. The impression of his first visit to an isba would stay with him for many years: ‘I remember clearly how I stopped on the threshold in front of this unexpected sight. The table, the benches, the enormous and imposing stove, the cupboards, the dressers, all were decorated with large multi-coloured ornaments. On the walls, ‘lubki’: a valiant character represented symbolically, battles, a song transmitted by colours. The end of the room was covered from top to bottom in painted and printed icons, in front of which a small red, night-light burned dimly; it seemed to withhold a secret, living by itself, a humble and proud star, whispering mysteriously. When I finally entered the room, the painting surrounded me from all sides and I entered into it.’[22] It is certainly in these early impressions that one can find one of the many sources in Kandinsky’s work.

Mikhail Larionov, A Cock, 1912.

Oil on canvas, 69 × 65 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Mikhail Matiushin, Composition for Elena Guro’s Death, 1918.

Watercolour on paper, 27 × 38.1 cm.

Private collection.

Pavel Filonov, Faces, 1940.

Oil on paper, 64 × 56 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.