Zigzag of luck

“Fight for the Banner” in the New Manege

Did Soviet Russia of the late 20s of the last century have an alternative path to totalitarianism? Curator Ekaterina Degot is sure that there was. She connects it with the ideas of Trotsky, with the triumph of proletarian ethics, the principle of democracy, the ideology of world revolution and internationalism. Calls it a “left zigzag” of power. Chronologically, it frames 1926 (party opposition on the issue of NEP) - 1936 (adoption of the Stalinist Constitution). This period is poorly covered in art history. Ms. Degot explains the reason as follows: “For the program exhibition of the Russian avant-garde “Great Utopia” (1992), the art of the late 1920s and early 1930s was too “right-wing” in the formal sense, and for the normative exhibitions of art of the Stalin era - “Agitation for Happiness" (1994) and "Communism - Dream Factory" (2003) - too left politically." Therefore, most of the masters of the art of the “left zigzag” are forgotten, and their works are ostracized and languish in the storerooms of large museums (Tretyakov Gallery) and the ROSIZO exhibition center. From there they were dragged out for everyone to see into the New Manege hall.

This is not the first time Ekaterina Degot has turned to a tempting zigzag. In 2005, as part of the Europalia festival in the Belgian city of Liege, she showed the exhibition “Soviet Idealism. Painting and cinema. 1920--1939". The message was the same: using the material of paintings from the late 20s and 30s rescued from the archives of ROSIZO and the Tretyakov Gallery, to show the missed opportunities for an alternative to the totalitarian path of development of the leftist project. Frankly, the exhibition in a working-class Belgian town did not convince me. The Trotskyist line of “workers’ democracy” did not recognize itself either in the pompous socialist realist oryasins that decorated cultural centers and were then exiled to ROSIZO, or in the textbook works of Deineka, Labas, which have long been no longer correlated with anything radical, but convince precisely by what they by definition, they must be oppositional - with the quality of a museum, easel “madeness”. That is, the ideas of an alternative Trotskyist path were perceived as the tempting screen of an ordinary exhibition of Soviet art “for export.”

The second attempt to test the zigzag, made in collaboration with the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, many Russian museums and private collections, turned out much more successful. First of all, because the new exhibition “Fight for the Banner. Soviet art between Trotsky and Stalin. 1926-1936" turned out to be a premiere exhibition. Indeed, little-known material. Indeed, breathtaking iconography and subjects impossible either in the official art of the Land of the Soviets or in the avant-garde. After viewing the outlandish paintings of Georgy Rublev, Boris Gurvich, Yuri Shchukin, Boris Golopolosov, Sergei Koltsov in every sense, you understand: yes, this is exactly how it happens, when refined avant-garde form-making (methods of surrealism, expressionism, cubo-futurism, suprematism) are appropriated by “radically anti-intimate "worker's agitprop. Here is a model of the painting of the club of the OSNAZ OGPU division named after. Dzerzhinsky, by artists from the Vkhutein (Higher Art and Technical Institute) brigade, a childishly drawn figurine of Lenin with his left hand thrown forward floats in a sea of ​​scarlet banners. For some reason, behind Lenin is a proletarian of African-American origin. And in Yuri Shchukin’s painting “Water Festival”, in the fountain splashes and in the light of spotlights striping the sky, a mass propaganda “cracker” installed in the middle of the reservoir, installed in the middle of the reservoir, in the form of a capitalist in a top hat and with a swastika on his chest, spews out fire and water. And Dmitry Shestopalov painted the lackeys of imperialism in 1928, exactly the way Kostya Zvezdochetov paints today (that is, in the manner of the Krokodil magazine). And these lackeys obsequiously carry to the gray-bearded spider-capitalist models of constructivist factories and factories, the compositions of which amusingly rhyme with the fantastic enthusiasms of the great avant-garde visionary Yakov Chernikhov. And Leonid Chupyatov’s “Worker” covered his head with El Lissitzky’s suprematist red circle. And in Arkady Friedrich’s still life, white humanoids and small hares with bears (toys, apparently) crawl among tires and ladies’ shoes. And this conceptual opus of the early 1930s is called “From the nipple to the tire (All made of Soviet rubber).” And Filonov’s student Boris Gurvich has sailors dressed in gas masks running around the ship, like intergalactic creatures from the cartoon “The Secret of the Third Planet.” “General chemical alarm on a ship” was staged... And in general you agree with the curator that this is great art. First of all, by its plastic insanity, absurdity, and lack of integration into a recognizable cultural context. This avant-garde imagery, adjusted by the popular consciousness, is truly unique, because shows the return path of the refined art of modernism to the mother's womb, to where it was born - into a folk picture, popular print, signboard. And in general, these plastic mutations are the most valuable thing in this alternative “left zigzag”. They reconcile with the idea that the honest life of the avant-garde in an unfree country could only continue in naive and childish genres, such as cartoons, books for little ones and posters. Willy-nilly, the curator in the wonderful text of the wonderful exhibition catalog was carried away by the same infantile “honest genre for little ones”. The text is called “The Aesthetic Revolution of the Cultural Revolution.” There, it is stated in all seriousness that with the formation of the Union of Artists in 1932, “the norms of democratic pluralism - an integral part of the bourgeois picture of the world” were restored, and Malevich’s “Black Square” pales in comparison to the radicalism of the cultural revolution at the turn of the 1920s-1930s, the first critics of the avant-garde project on the left.” Critics, the curator clarifies, in the forms of anti-fetishistic opposition to market values ​​(apology for unprofessionalism) and the brigade method of organizing art labor. Well, very nice. The style of the paintings of one of the most touching heroes of the exhibition, the amateur painter Makar Korneevich Mukha, is 100% perfect!

Sergei KHACHATUROV