The Russian avant-garde
In just a few years Russian artists moved from icons and folk art to pure abstraction. Malevich’s Black Square, Tatlin’s Tower and the Constructivists’ posters turned Moscow and Petrograd into the experimental workshop of art.
Around 1910 young artists in Moscow gathered in groups with provocative names such as the Jack of Diamonds and the Donkey’s Tail. Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova blended French modernism with icons, popular woodcuts and shop signs to create a Neo-Primitivism of their own. Wassily Kandinsky, working in Munich, painted some of the first abstract pictures.
At the 0,10 exhibition in Petrograd in December 1915 Kazimir Malevich hung his Black Square high up in a corner, where the icon hung in a Russian home. He called the new art Suprematism: pure geometric forms floating in a white space. At the same exhibition Vladimir Tatlin showed reliefs of wood, metal and glass that reached out into the room.
After the 1917 revolution the avant-garde was for a time given a leading role in the new state’s cultural policy. The Constructivists Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Lyubov Popova and El Lissitzky wanted art to build the new society through posters, textiles, books, architecture and film. Towards the end of the 1920s the state took ever greater control, and in 1932 all independent artists’ groups were dissolved.