Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Margy Kinmonth, Revolution: New Art for a New World is a bold and exciting feature documentary that encapsulates a momentous period in the history of Russia and the Russian Avant-Garde. Drawing on the collections of major Russian institutions, contributions from contemporary artists, curators and performers and personal testimony from the descendants of those involved, the film brings the artists of the Russian Avant-Garde to life. It tells the stories of artists like Chagall, Kandinsky and Malevich-pioneers who flourished in response to the challenge of building a new art for a new world, only to be broken by implacable authority after 15 short years and silenced by Stalin's Socialist Realism. Yet these remarkable artworks survived and the Russian Avant-Garde continues to exert an influence over contemporary art movements. Revolution: New Art for a New World confirms this; exploring the fascination that these colourful paintings, inventive sculptures and propaganda posters retain over the modern consciousness 100 years on.
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00:00:00We all knew what to paint.
00:00:13Bread, work, vote.
00:00:19But the message was workers of the world unite.
00:00:22Everyone was going to have equal rights, and that included the artists.
00:00:35We are passing through one of the most critical, the most important moments of history.
00:00:54A moment when the world's socialist revolution is in the making.
00:00:58We need to mobilize the masses to progress fast.
00:01:02Art is the most powerful means of political propaganda for the triumph of the socialist cause.
00:01:11We are breaking with the past because we cannot accept its hypotheses.
00:01:16We ourselves are creating our own hypotheses, and only on them, as in our own inventions,
00:01:23can we build a new life and a new worldview.
00:01:27More than anyone else, the artist knows this intuitively.
00:01:32And believes in it absolutely.
00:01:35That is exactly why artists, above all, undertook a revolution.
00:01:43And we shall see you on behalf of Asgard Kranath.
00:02:20My search for the new art for a new world started here in St. Petersburg, where for centuries
00:02:34the vast Russian Empire had been controlled from the Winter Palace by the Tsars, who believed
00:02:42they had the divine right to rule with no elected government.
00:02:47They enjoyed a privileged life, while 80% of Russians were peasants.
00:03:02Despite the abolition of serfdom in 1861, they still had no rights.
00:03:09So in the early 1900s, the peasants flooded into the cities from all over the Empire, desperately
00:03:16seeking work.
00:03:20They formed the proletariat, and united with a revolutionary approach to politics, and
00:03:27to art.
00:03:29For over a decade, and through the First World War, discontent had been growing against Tsar
00:03:36Nicholas II.
00:03:37After the mass riots at the Women's Day march of February 1917, the Tsar was forced to abdicate,
00:03:50and power ceded to the provisional government.
00:03:53But despite this, the voiceless people grew angrier.
00:04:02So how did the artists respond?
00:04:08In July 17, photographer Victor Buller stood here at his studio window, and took one of the
00:04:14most iconic images of the 20th century, as the government troops opened fire on the crowd
00:04:24at a demonstration below.
00:04:33In this street, on that day, hundreds were injured, and dozens lay dead.
00:04:51With tensions rising, the Bolstvik party was gaining in popularity, and in October, the awaiting
00:04:58crowd paled the return of their exiled leader.
00:05:04Comrades, with all my might I urge you to realise that everything now hangs by a thread.
00:05:10We must not wait.
00:05:11We may lose everything.
00:05:13The government is tottering.
00:05:15It must be given the death blow at all costs.
00:05:20Many young artists were at the vanguard of the movement, and joined the optimistic crowds
00:05:24on the streets, looking forward to a new utopia.
00:05:31They were all revolutionaries.
00:05:33They fought at the barricades, fighting for the revolution.
00:05:37For them, the revolution was a breakthrough into the new world from the old world, which
00:05:43they were fed up with.
00:05:46It was the ambition of the young people.
00:05:48They were then 18 to 20 years old.
00:05:50Naturally, they were striving ahead.
00:06:00Finally, the Bolsheviks closed in on the headquarters of the provisional government, the Tsar's Winter
00:06:06Palace.
00:06:08The whole revolution was planned as an example of the French Revolution.
00:06:16So there was a storming of Bastille, a storming of Thurie, so you had to storm Winter Palace.
00:06:23So it was part of the performance, and then it was made a performance.
00:06:27The famous film of Eisenstein October, which shows the storming of the Winter Palace, is
00:06:34an absolute lie.
00:06:37Russia's pioneering film director, Sergei Eisenstein, would portray the version of events the Bolsheviks
00:06:43wanted remembered.
00:06:46This masterpiece, October, which has influenced filmmakers ever since, depicts the armed masses
00:06:53heroically streaming into the Winter Palace.
00:07:06Nothing of this time ever happened.
00:07:07There was no storming.
00:07:08Not only some very few armed people who just got in and arrested the provisional government.
00:07:14It was peaceful.
00:07:15The Winter Palace was taken by the revolutionaries without big fight.
00:07:21And they have been cutting the portraits of the Tsars, which have been hanging in some
00:07:24of the places.
00:07:25This was most of the damage that happened in the Winter Palace.
00:07:31With the Bolsheviks now in power, and Tsar Nicholas under house arrest in the Ural Mountains,
00:07:37the court photographer, Boesson, captures here an aristocratic era now at an end.
00:07:45The entire family were later executed by firing squad, and thrown down a mine shaft.
00:07:56In 1918, the capital was moved to Moscow.
00:08:03Successive layers of history have buried this extraordinary period of turmoil.
00:08:07To find out more about the life and death survival of the great avant-garde artists, I wanted to
00:08:15delve beneath the anonymous face of the metropolis, go into the archives, and meet surviving descendants.
00:08:23Many of whom are working artists in Russia today.
00:08:26Why don't you just start off by telling me who was your great-grandfather?
00:08:32My great-grandfather was an artist who lived in Moscow during the period of revolution.
00:08:42Fedor told me that his great-grandfather worked right here in this Moscow apartment a hundred
00:08:48years ago.
00:08:49Through the open windows, he heard the church bells, which inspired him to create his architectural
00:08:56pictures.
00:08:57Lentodov loved very much Russian architecture, but especially at the time of revolution, and
00:09:08he depicted a crowd of moving people on the background of old Moscow churches.
00:09:16Long before 1917, a huge artistic revolution was already well underway, but it took the famous
00:09:28political events to unlock the massive outpouring of creativity in all fields of art.
00:09:34Russian art became, I would say, the most avant-garde in the whole of the world.
00:09:50A giant in the avant-garde was Kazimir Malevich.
00:09:56His anarchistic attitude coincided perfectly with the Bolsheviks and their promise of political
00:10:03change.
00:10:05Malevich, he is working on the theory of suprematism in Vycipsk.
00:10:14There were a group of people connected with Malevich, and he was a crazy man with his idea
00:10:20of suprematism.
00:10:21I have broken the blue boundary of colour limits.
00:10:27Come out into the white.
00:10:29Besides me, comrade pilots swim in this infinity.
00:10:33I have established the semaphore of suprematism.
00:10:36I have beaten the lining of the coloured sky, torn it away, and in the sack that formed itself,
00:10:43I have put colour and knotted it.
00:10:46Swim.
00:10:47The free white sea lies before you.
00:10:53The new step he did is trying to show ideas, not to show existing reality.
00:10:58His art is not about reality.
00:11:00He is very idealistic.
00:11:01The way the world can be structured.
00:11:04And this, obviously, comes from the cosmos.
00:11:23I mean, there are certain pieces that are wonderful, certain pieces that are completely
00:11:26absurd.
00:11:27And they're still absurd, but they're considered as a masterpieces, but they're absurd.
00:11:31Like Black Square, I think is absurd.
00:11:34So can you explain to me what is the Black Square all about?
00:11:38Well, Malevich had, of course, painted the Black Square in the summer of 1915 and exhibited
00:11:42it at the end of 1915.
00:11:44And he placed his Black Square in the corners of the room, across the corners of the room,
00:11:49in the position that an icon would have occupied in a Russian domestic interior.
00:11:55So he was imbuing his Black Square with the metaphysical and spiritual connotations of the icon.
00:12:03What is the Black Square?
00:12:04Religion is opium for the people.
00:12:18Religion is a sort of spiritual booze in which the slaves of capital drown their human image,
00:12:25their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.
00:12:31The yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society.
00:12:38The mass movement of denying God or church by the young generation was extremely strong.
00:12:51As Dostoevsky said, you know, if there is no God, everything is allowed.
00:12:57You can do everything if there is no God.
00:12:59So that was the basis of Russian Revolution.
00:13:03There were very young people that accepted the revolution immediately.
00:13:08And they fought White Guard.
00:13:10They fought church.
00:13:12They fought everything.
00:13:14Trying to, first of all, destroy the old without thinking what they're going to build instead.
00:13:25The Black Square is the end of the world and the beginning of the new world.
00:13:33Like the big deluge, the big end.
00:13:36It's the symbol of the new beginning.
00:13:40And to begin something new, you need to end everything that was before, but everything.
00:13:46And that's the Black Square.
00:13:48The communist ban on religion would result in the systematic destruction of architectural symbols of worship.
00:13:54They chose Russia's most prominent cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow and reduced it to rubble.
00:14:24For centuries, Russia's ruling classes had looked to Europe for cultural influence.
00:14:31And the artistic scene was dominated by the Imperial Academy of Arts.
00:14:36In the then capital, Petrograd, where teaching was traditional figurative art.
00:14:41The students, mostly they are coming to the academy to study classical art.
00:14:50And we are doing it from mid-18th century till today.
00:14:55And it's the system of academy.
00:14:57But, by the beginning of the 20th century, the young artists wanted to break all these rules.
00:15:03It was the conflict between the school and the new way of thinking and the new way of doing art.
00:15:11New strategy.
00:15:12Some of them came to change the world.
00:15:25Because I think there's artists, they think that they could change the world.
00:15:32The academy is a mouldy vault in which art flagellates itself.
00:15:38Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion.
00:15:41It no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners.
00:15:44It wants to have nothing further to do with the object as such.
00:15:48And believes that it can exist in and for itself, without things.
00:15:55I have transformed myself in the zero of form.
00:15:58And dragged myself out of the rubbish-filled pool of academic art.
00:16:03Well, artists were really confronting the academy and the powers that be with art which outraged them,
00:16:19which was simplified, which was dramatically kind of colourful, ignored perspective.
00:16:24Really did all the things that were against the academy.
00:16:28And because of the connection between the imperial household and the imperial academy,
00:16:35their rebellion against the academy had a political connotation from the very word go.
00:16:52They were trying to be more modern, more avant-garde than the West.
00:16:57And that was very typical for a Russian artist.
00:17:02That kind of extremist.
00:17:06I would say terrorist in art, in a sense, even.
00:17:11Painters flourished in this utopian period, including one of the greatest, Vasily Kandinsky.
00:17:18He was known as the father of abstraction and would change the course of painting forever.
00:17:23Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface is nothing to do with reality, next to the real world.
00:17:34Each colour lives by its mysterious life.
00:17:37In every painting, a whole is mysteriously enclosed.
00:17:41Kandinsky is a kind of a complicated story of a relationship with the Russian Revolution.
00:17:52Kandinsky created his own movement, abstraction.
00:17:57But Kandinsky's abstraction, in my view, was never separated.
00:18:02Unlike Malevich's suprematism, it was not removed completely from the image.
00:18:06He always mixed his abstraction with some kind of figurative images, similar to figurativism in his paintings.
00:18:19I let myself go.
00:18:22I thought little of the houses and trees, but applied colour stripes and spots to the canvas.
00:18:28Within me sounded the memory of early evening in Moscow.
00:18:32Before my eyes was the strong, colour-saturated scale of light and atmosphere which thundered deeply in the shadows.
00:18:41This era generated a massive number of very diverse artists, encouraged by the new freedom of expression.
00:18:50But not everyone was in favour of the revolutionary avant-garde movement.
00:18:55In 1917, the Moscow-based painter, Pyotr Konchalovsky, part of a cultural dynasty, was already a well-established and prolific artist.
00:19:06What about the politics? How did he fit in with the political events in Russia? Was he a political animal?
00:19:13At that time, the artists of left-wing, the artists of avant-garde, they want to go more left, more revolutionary than it's supposed to be.
00:19:28My grandfather was, you know, doing naked morts and portraits.
00:19:33I think he started to be regarded by that revolutionary part of artists as a conservative person.
00:19:44But he was very satisfied with this point of view.
00:19:48He didn't want to jump on this wagon of modern art that it was always far beyond even cubism.
00:19:58It started to go to abstract.
00:20:02And he stayed, basically he stayed with the truth.
00:20:09As he realised for him the truth was Cézanne.
00:20:13If you analyse the background, just the wall, you analyse the colours that I used in the grey,
00:20:22you realise that it's not a grey.
00:20:24It's a full rainbow of colours that gives you more grey than grey itself.
00:20:31That's Cézanne.
00:20:33A huge amount of art produced in this period was piled up in museum stores.
00:20:46Surviving for decades is only a myth.
00:20:54In St Petersburg, I was fascinated by this treasure trove of unique work by an individual called Pavel Felonov.
00:21:02Barely known outside Russia, he remains an enigma in the West.
00:21:12I was drawn in by the tiny little brushes Philonov used to show every atom in the human body.
00:21:22He created his own formula of the revolution in a new style which he called analytical realism.
00:21:32Philonov had a big following because he came from a very simple background as sixth son of a cabman.
00:21:39The workers felt he was one of them and they really liked his art.
00:21:44The Bolsheviks appointed the art critic Nikolai Poonin as their arts commissar.
00:21:56He was close to Malievich and one of the most passionate supporters of the avant-garde movement.
00:22:12He highly appreciated all of them despite the fact that they were very different.
00:22:24The attitude to the revolution was changing greatly throughout his life.
00:22:31Maybe in the first revolutionary years he was a romantic.
00:22:35He thought that the revolution could be some kind of cleansing.
00:22:38Maybe the revolution could be some kind of cleansing.
00:22:49Since the artists were on the breadline with no money for paint,
00:22:53they needed worker status to get food coupons.
00:22:56But Commissar Poonin could help them,
00:22:58and a new visual arts department was set up.
00:23:02The grand surroundings of the former Tsar was where they met.
00:23:07We're here to discuss art and art for the masses.
00:23:11I want to know what you all propose for the promotion of our glorious October 1917 revolution.
00:23:18Avant-garde artists were the ones who were young, they were keen,
00:23:24they wanted to participate in all the new artistic reforms.
00:23:29They were the ones who were at the right time, at the right place.
00:23:36They were artists from different sides of Russian avant-garde,
00:23:41and quite often they couldn't even agree on the same developments in Russian art.
00:23:48Is black square relevant for that?
00:23:50Because a black square can be shaped.
00:23:52You're saying it's like you created the shape.
00:23:54I didn't create the shape, I created the concept.
00:23:57You're asking somebody who wears clogs,
00:23:59who's never seen a picture in his life, to come and have a look at it,
00:24:01and actually take it seriously.
00:24:03Yes, that person understands a square, doesn't he or she?
00:24:06All people understand emotion.
00:24:08No one understands a black square on a white background.
00:24:11A black square can mean anything.
00:24:13You put forth a singular idea understood by a bunch of pseudo-intellections.
00:24:16But that's the point she did.
00:24:17A few pseudo-intellectuals that mean nothing to anyone.
00:24:21We have to be looking at the next hundred years.
00:24:23What's going to be hanging in the Winter Palace in a hundred years' time?
00:24:25Exactly.
00:24:26What do you think?
00:24:27Will it be the black square?
00:24:28I've got a pretty good idea it could be the black square.
00:24:30Thank you, Stanley.
00:24:31The Bolsheviks turned to the avant-garde artists, who were quite enthusiastic about this revolution,
00:24:45because this coincided with their concepts of the world, which is 400% changing.
00:24:55So, it was a kind of, a combination of circumstances, which brought them together.
00:25:02Lenin announced a decree for the immediate switch at the Institute of Arts in Moscow and Academy of Arts in Petrograd, from traditional to avant-garde art.
00:25:13So, it was the free, free artists' studio, then the Institute of Proletarian Art, then another one.
00:25:20After 1918, there were a lot of changes inside the Academy. New professors like Petrov Votkin.
00:25:28And he's from outside, he's not from Academy.
00:25:32I should say that Petrov Votkin was the first artist who used the spherical perspective in his paintings, in still lifes, in landscapes.
00:25:47It was the conception of three colors and spherical dimensions, spherical perspective.
00:25:54Respect and admiration, these are the feelings that I have towards Petrov Votkin, my grandfather.
00:26:03He was born in a small town of Kvalinsk on the Volga River, in a family of a maid and a shoemaker.
00:26:12Petrov Votkin reacted enthusiastically to the revolution, and it's known that he was one of the six cultural figures who came voluntarily to work with the Soviet authorities.
00:26:24He was confident that the creative powers of the Russian people would be able to rise and make a brand new country.
00:26:34Very soon after the October Revolution, Lenin announced his plan for monumental propaganda.
00:26:42Comrades, I intend to decorate Russia's squares with statues and monuments to revolutionaries,
00:26:48and the great fighters for socialism, the likes of Karl Marx, and the heroes of the French Revolution.
00:26:55These monuments will be street pulpits from which fresh messages will flow and inspire the consciousness of the masses.
00:27:03We must make a marriage of convenience with the artists who are keen and democratic.
00:27:08My plan for monumental propaganda needs to be executed fast and efficiently.
00:27:18At the time they couldn't afford to make sculptures out of bronze, for example, so it was all temporary materials, so they often were not very well preserved, especially with Russian winters.
00:27:29I uncovered this rare archive film in Moscow. It's about the only record of these propaganda sculptures, as barely any have survived to this day.
00:27:38They were mainly heroes from the French Revolution, Italian rebellions, because they didn't have enough really Russian heroes at the time.
00:27:49A lot of sculptures to Tsars and generals who were popular in Imperial Russia were removed and replaced by the new sculptures.
00:27:59So it was a victory of new art over the old.
00:28:04It was quite fascinating how in the first years after the revolution, at the time of starvation, when there was no electricity in Petrograd, people were freezing, starving.
00:28:14Huge funds were allocated for decorations of the city.
00:28:17The core thing of this square, that was the main square of the Russian Empire.
00:28:31Anton Altman, who was the artist of the revolution, he did several very nice designs of this square.
00:28:36Like using this column as a center and making a star around it, that's a red star, and also different slogans were appearing everywhere.
00:28:43I would say the revolution established this connection between art and politics.
00:29:04Because politics wanted artists to create its world, wanted artists to create the image of the new country.
00:29:17And that's why artists were engaged to play with the revolution.
00:29:22Another artist, the legendary Marc Chagall, was commissioned to decorate his hometown of the Tebsk, here at the celebration of the first anniversary of the Bolshevik uprising.
00:29:32He was liberated by the revolution.
00:29:37Previously, Jews were prohibited to move beyond the Pale, the line of settlement established by the Tsars, a hundred kilometers away from Moscow and Petrograd.
00:29:48The revolution gave all the Jews freedom to come, because they were just people of a new country.
00:29:54And they could come and go. And of course he was inspired by this new revelation that the revolution brought up.
00:30:00Much of Chagall's subject matter is symbolic of his Jewish roots in his hometown, where he and his wife Bella grew up.
00:30:09This important work is one of Russia's gems and shows the liberating power of art and imagination over oppression.
00:30:17This painting of floating figures is absolutely dream, is something that can't happen.
00:30:23And this is a dream that comes from this small village that is very, very prescribed life and very detailed everyday living.
00:30:31He's trying to fly out now, come to a dream, to love story. And that is, of course, the dreams that were given by the new reality that he was living in.
00:30:46I discovered that the Russian avant-garde flourished across all cultures, including the stage.
00:31:01And opened doors to brand new radical artists, who enthused each other with their ideas.
00:31:11Theatre director, Sevelot Meyerholt, was a member of the Bolshevik party.
00:31:15His quirky experiments in unconventional new Soviet theatre were very popular.
00:31:22Rarely practiced today, this technique for training actors, known as biomechanics,
00:31:28was used to learn movement and express emotion physically by assuming poses and gestures.
00:31:34The
00:32:34Another pro-revolutionary artist was Alexander Rodchenko, aged 26 at the time of the revolution and highly prolific. He taught at the same Moscow art school where his grandson lectures today.
00:32:52So can you please describe your grandfather, what kind of artist he was?
00:32:58I have the image of a very tall figure whom I definitely know that is my grandfather. Later on, after my mother, Barbara's stories, I learned a lot of him.
00:33:12We can consider Rodchenko to be the founder in many areas. Almost on every lecture we somehow remind our students of his heritage.
00:33:24Because he worked as a multifaceted artist in so many areas. We know that he laid down this concept of contemporary photography, valuing the real journalistic documentary view of events.
00:33:43His way of doing layout and graphic design is also very well recognized.
00:33:51Usually people don't pay attention to such things as different angles.
00:34:05He took this famous high and low angle with this absolutely silly, absolutely small and amateurish Kodak camera.
00:34:20You know, if he couldn't be a photographer, he would definitely be a filmmaker.
00:34:32Because everything that he did had this sort of kinetic background.
00:34:38The way we walk around the street, the way we get into the streetcar, the way we are standing in queues.
00:34:55And Rodchenko paid attention to such very tiny facts of everyday life and activity and he registered it all with his ability as an artist.
00:35:07So there are a lot of things that are important for us today, which were laid down by his talent.
00:35:30Rodchenko's design work included posters and set design for his collaborator.
00:35:35The revolutionary documentary filmmaker, the revolutionary documentary filmmaker, Chigar Vertov, who was aged just 22 in 1917.
00:35:44Vertov was pushing the boundaries of experimentation with editing and cinematography.
00:35:49heut everything really seems.
00:35:50Theiyor잡 cannot be for clients to perform any of the chapters, he is trained for someone.
00:35:52It is perhaps quite some moment.
00:35:54He won't be Phil and Justin, just some movement.
00:35:57Here or him see what NBA is about, kind of mitä weeks after his story.
00:35:58It is about kind of what vivir would be.
00:36:01The explodes of theraham blessings are also known as himself.
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00:36:17In Moscow, I met Maria Kulagina, an artist whose grandfather, for me, is a true hero
00:36:28of the Revolutionary period.
00:36:31Gustav Klutsus was a very well-known artist in his time.
00:36:36He knew and worked together with such people as Vrotchenko and Malevich.
00:36:44Klutsus was from a peasant background in Latvia and moved to Moscow before the Revolution
00:36:49as a fully paid-out member of the Communist Party.
00:36:52He is seen here, having taken part in the Battle of Moscow, in Lenin's car in the summer of 1918.
00:37:01Klutsus was one of the major figures of the generation.
00:37:04He was the inventor of the so-called photomontage.
00:37:14Now I have a whole family, Husset
00:37:32The whole family was in Argentina.
00:37:36The whole family was in Argentina.
00:37:40Our entire family is an artistic family.
00:37:45My parents, my grandma and granddad, my children and my husband too.
00:37:50Everyone is an artist.
00:37:54Maria told me about her grandmother, Valentina Kulagina, married to klutzes.
00:38:00She was also a pioneering artist.
00:38:04She also did a lot of posters where she worked independently, as an artist in her own right.
00:38:10First of all, they all believed in the new political regime.
00:38:15They absolutely believed that everything would be great, socialism would win, that communism
00:38:20would come, and it would be something totally new.
00:38:23And their art was in line with this.
00:38:26They wanted to destroy the old and create the new.
00:38:34The new political freedom won by Russian women after they got the vote gave them equality
00:38:40and a platform for their art.
00:38:48These artists flourished in the revolutionary climate.
00:38:55Non-objective creativity is a movement of the spirit.
00:38:58A protest against the narrow materialism and naturalism that has begun to control life.
00:39:05This has been particularly characteristic for Russia.
00:39:08Where our smart young painters have come to negate the object and painting.
00:39:14And this is understandable, since Russia has long been a country of the spirit.
00:39:25Varvara Stepanova, who came from peasant stock, was aged 23 at the time of the revolution and
00:39:32was married to Rodchenko.
00:39:35It's interesting how they could live together because it's always difficult to find peaceful
00:39:43coexistence of the two creative persons.
00:39:48In my compositions, geometric abstraction plays a key role.
00:39:56Color, sound, and form come together, arming the imagination.
00:40:01For more information, visit www.fema.org, visit www.fema.org.
00:40:31The
00:40:33Revolutionary politics and art also influenced architectural engineering.
00:40:39The constructivist radio tower in Moscow was designed to broadcast Lenin's propaganda
00:40:45to the masses.
00:40:47Tell me about the tower.
00:40:49This is a Moscow radio and television tower, but the main name and more, how can we say,
00:41:00the name of the engineer who upgraded Vladimir Shukhov.
00:41:05It was the dream of Vladimir Shukhov.
00:41:08Before the revolution, he started to make kind of the calculation
00:41:12and started thinking about the design of the broadcasting tower,
00:41:17because he understood very well the future of the human civilization
00:41:23started to transmit information to the big and long pistols.
00:41:30In a vast empire with a largely illiterate population,
00:41:45Lenin cleverly used the avant-garde artists again
00:41:48to spread the message of socialism.
00:41:52So they created these agitational trains
00:41:55which were covered with avant-garde paintings
00:41:58and they included some posters,
00:42:01and in the carriages they would have lectures and they would show films.
00:42:05The filmmaker, Chyga Vertov, was taking part in this propaganda programme
00:42:10and spent three years running a cinema car on the trains.
00:42:13They would go to all over the Soviet Union and tell them who Lenin was
00:42:28and why Marx was so important.
00:42:31And trains played a major role in this process.
00:42:34Alexander Rodchenko embraced this new artistic medium of agitational design.
00:42:46They were agitating for literacy.
00:42:49If you remember the famous poster with Lily Brick shouting books,
00:42:54you can understand what I mean.
00:42:58So it's a very strong image, a very strong agitational image,
00:43:04which is copied by now everywhere.
00:43:07So it turned to be an icon of agitation.
00:43:12In my exploration of the museum's stores, I found this rare agitational propaganda,
00:43:22kept out of the public eye in Russia since the 1920s.
00:43:25These prototype collages were developed for posters and festive street decorations.
00:43:31Revolution and art and politics are very much connected.
00:43:35So artist is not somebody who creates his own life,
00:43:39but he is on service on the revolution.
00:43:43You must obey the population and you must obey the party,
00:43:46you must obey the revolution.
00:43:57This new propaganda art brought many people to the Bolshevik
00:44:00way of thinking, but others disagreed with Lenin.
00:44:04So, with revolution, came civil war.
00:44:08The Red Army pitted against the whites.
00:44:20With the government over-requisitioning grain and two years of drought,
00:44:25another era of mass starvation developed across rural Russia.
00:44:30Cannibalism was rife and up to 10 million people died.
00:44:38The revolution was a big problem.
00:44:40Basically, it was a total disaster for many people.
00:44:43And artists only tried to build a new world and tried to feel themselves part of this.
00:44:48But the reality was very poor.
00:44:50What amazes me in Petrov Vodkin is that he was able to turn ordinary,
00:44:56simple subjects into some kind of symbols.
00:44:58Then he always felt the difference between what he expressed in the paintings,
00:45:04that is, the high notes of the revolution, and what was really going on.
00:45:16He was a deeply Russian person.
00:45:20That is what kept him in St. Petersburg, hungry and cold, during this twisted time.
00:45:29The conditions he had to work in at the academy, well, they caused dismay.
00:45:38This tragic deprivation fueled strong anti-Bolshevik feeling among the population.
00:45:44In 1921, after the suppression of a massive rebellion,
00:45:49there followed a wave of arrests across the country.
00:45:53The Red Terror was announced by Lenin because he realized that,
00:45:58in order to keep order in the country full of disillusioned people,
00:46:05hungry and cold, you had to scare them somehow
00:46:10and introduce some form of terror to make sure that they obey party orders
00:46:16and that another revolution, counter-revolution, doesn't occur.
00:46:20There was a cultural exodus across all fields of art.
00:46:25Russia would lose many of its most talented artists,
00:46:29who were forced to flee their homeland, some never to return.
00:46:37Kandinsky, his art of the post-revolutionary period,
00:46:42has more a tone of alarm, of anxiety.
00:46:46And so his works between the end of the 1910s, beginning of the 1920s, are not optimistic.
00:46:53This is, perhaps, the most important thing that defines Kandinsky's work before his departure from Russia,
00:46:59which was in 1922.
00:47:01The more frightening the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
00:47:08The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past.
00:47:16It holds the awakening soul still in its grip.
00:47:20When he fled to Germany, Kandinsky was forced to abandon some of his best and largest canvases in his Moscow studio.
00:47:32In 1923, Marc Chagall also emigrated.
00:47:37He joined many of his fellow countrymen in France, where he experienced more artistic freedom.
00:47:42But his Russian roots remained all present in his work.
00:47:46The Bolsheviks won the civil war, but the Russian economy was now in tatters,
00:47:59and industry was at a tenth of its pre-war level.
00:48:03Lenin needed to resuscitate the Russian economy, and the artists would be key.
00:48:09In 1921, Lenin introduced a new economic policy called NEP, trying to bring the small trade back.
00:48:19Cooperatives were opened again.
00:48:22Private tradesmen and state companies were competing to sell their goods.
00:48:26Many of the posters designed by artists like Rodchenko were marketing their products.
00:48:31This idea completely contradicted the principles of communism.
00:48:35They were literally selling peasants back the grain they'd grown.
00:48:39Workers, do not be afraid of high prices and new economic policy. Buy cheap bread.
00:48:44I eat cookies from the Red October factory.
00:48:49It was successful, except that it meant that you had the danger, from the Communist Party point of view,
00:48:56of redeveloping capitalist elements in society.
00:49:00You are not a Soviet citizen if you do not invest in the national airline.
00:49:05One golden ruble makes everyone a shareholder.
00:49:12But it was a growing dissatisfaction with the leadership.
00:49:151922 saw an assassination attempt when Lenin was shot.
00:49:36Incapacitated, he was still leader but unable to exert power.
00:49:46Russia's next ruler was already waiting on the sidelines,
00:49:51bringing with him his own version of communism and his own ideas for art.
00:49:57When Lenin dies in January 1924, this is a great opportunity for the Bolsheviks to substitute a different kind of religion.
00:50:11That religion was the cult of Lenin and it was initiated by his successor, Joseph Stalin.
00:50:18The cross was replaced with the hammer and sickle.
00:50:22And Lenin's mausoleum in Red Square became the people's place of pilgrimage.
00:50:27Even Petrograd was renamed Leningrad.
00:50:31Russia's artists were put to work by Stalin, creating statues and imagery, this time of Lenin.
00:50:41But Stalin forced many painters to turn away from the avant-garde to the style of socialist realism.
00:50:51A new form of propaganda depicting an ideal world of industrious Soviet workers.
00:51:02The Bolsheviks had realised that there are artists around them,
00:51:06which could be more useful for them than those crazy avant-garde artists
00:51:13who were doing something which politicians didn't understand
00:51:19and didn't feel that this is explaining or transferring to the minds of the people the existing official ideology.
00:51:31Stalin was very keen on artists and he cared a great deal about them
00:51:34because he saw them very much as engineers of human souls,
00:51:38in a famous phrase that Marx had used.
00:51:40He thought that art could be used to persuade people to adhere to the system,
00:51:45to participate in public life.
00:51:48This portrait was painted by Pavel Filonov
00:51:51and marked a huge swing in his style from abstract to socialist realism.
00:51:59Censorship by the new regime also hit Sergei Eisenstein.
00:52:04On the day of October's premiere, Stalin came into the editing room
00:52:09and forced him to alter scenes that didn't fit his political agenda,
00:52:13including cutting out Trotsky, his political rival.
00:52:18There was a great period of inventiveness that came just before and after the revolution,
00:52:25but it was really that inventiveness that Stalin wanted to stifle.
00:52:29He didn't want people who were revolutionary and who would continue thinking creatively
00:52:34and who would come up with alternatives to what he was doing.
00:52:38What he wanted was unity and he wanted everyone to think the same
00:52:41and he wanted them to paint in the same way.
00:52:44And the avant-garde, because they were, by definition, people who thought creatively,
00:52:49were a problem for him from the very beginning.
00:53:01This shift in thinking saw the return of the Academy of Art in Leningrad
00:53:05to its centuries-old traditions.
00:53:10They understand that they need to have all these, you know, emblems of empire.
00:53:15Classical school, you know, with architecture, sculpture, traditional techniques
00:53:20or traditional style and traditional, you know, but...
00:53:25And then it changed.
00:53:27And for Academy at that time it was, you know, a very good period
00:53:31because they came back to the past.
00:53:40Either you want to become an official artist and get state commissions
00:53:43and richly paid by the state, you do official art.
00:53:47But if you want to be an individual, you become a non-conformist.
00:53:52If you're able to do it, you stay with us.
00:53:55If you're not, if you don't want, we don't care.
00:53:57You go to the other door.
00:54:00The ideological restrictions that the state imposed on the works of artists
00:54:08broke Petrov Vodkin.
00:54:11Subjects were strictly regulated.
00:54:14There was an agonizing search for a new type, which should appeal to the commissioner.
00:54:19This painful condition, it undermines the artist.
00:54:24His creativity runs dry.
00:54:27It was a big battle in the field of art, initiated by the party.
00:54:36And the realists, people who painted real objects from real life, the Academy, in the old sense, they won.
00:54:45And people like Malevich, they didn't.
00:54:49But he forced himself to do it, so he tried to paint realism.
00:54:52He turned into the area of figurative art, also understanding that he has in his hands the means, which are not abstract, but which are expressing something very similar to what his abstract works were expressing, and again expressing the drama and tragedy of time.
00:55:20And would you say the artists, the artists of the avant-garde were victims or vanguard to Stalinism?
00:55:38It's hard for me to say that Malevich himself was the victim of what he had invented.
00:55:45He had reflected the need of the time more than maybe any other artist in Russia.
00:55:53We need lots of letters from artists pointing out the incorrect bias in the artistic policy that is being pursued by many comrades and which is leading art in a fatal direction, despite the party's resolution that all trends have a right to develop.
00:56:12At the present time, during the building of socialism in which all the arts must participate, must art return to a backward position and become figurative.
00:56:25Malievich and two of his students, Suetin and Chashnik, who were both important avant-garde artists, worked in the state porcelain factory, but they weren't happy doing Stalin's socialist realism.
00:56:39Here alone, they were able to continue creating with their supremacist designs.
00:56:54When they didn't have money or anything else, this was the only place where they could create form, which they wanted to create.
00:57:02Malevich was making these teapots and cups, and Suetin as well was creating vases.
00:57:09These were practically all supremacist shapes, and it was the only place where they could calmly do it all.
00:57:21In decorative arts like porcelain, a certain leeway was possible, and there were abstract designs until quite late.
00:57:29Easel painting became the arena where government control was exerted most strongly.
00:57:35Other artists embraced this new socialist realism, like the painter Pyotr Kotov, whose style was known as Russian Impressionism.
00:57:48His work would be useful for the new regime.
00:57:52Normally, he painted rural scenes.
00:57:54But in the period of Stalin's five-year plan for industrialization, when they wanted to convince the world of Russia's industrial prowess, Kotov would gain many new state commissions.
00:58:09There were special trips organized for Soviet artists, artistic brigades, that were sent to different construction sites.
00:58:20Sometimes he stayed there longer than it was necessary, or he returned on his own accord if he wasn't able to finish something before.
00:58:29It was impossible, of course, to sell these works to anyone but the state.
00:58:36He, by the way, was among one of the first offered to paint a portrait of Stalin.
00:58:51He asked, and how many sessions can I expect? They replied, are you crazy? Which sessions? Photography and that's it. But I do not paint from photos, I paint only from nature.
00:59:04And he refused to make a portrait of Stalin. Afterwards, everybody was afraid that they will come for him.
00:59:09In 1937, Stalin addressed the Russian people.
00:59:17In 1937, Stalin addressed the Russian people.
00:59:22Can you imagine that Stalin is able to fulfill his will in front of the people?
00:59:27In 1937, Stalin's decrees actually resulted in what became known as the Great Purge.
00:59:50In the year that followed, hundreds of people would be shot every day.
00:59:54And the population of the Gulag prison system rose dramatically.
01:00:00The definition of who was a political criminal changed so much and changed and evolved over time.
01:00:05It meant that really almost anybody could go there.
01:00:07And the fact of his existence served to make people afraid.
01:00:12It made people cautious about what they say, what they thought, and of course what they did in this context, what they wrote or painted.
01:00:19There started to come the decrees assigned by the highest state authorities to destroy these collections of the art of the avant-garde.
01:00:28The specialists from the State Russian Museum, they kept them behind the door, which they painted and put plaster on it.
01:00:39So nobody knew that behind this wall is a real door and is a real storage.
01:00:44But many of the works which were in Moscow and many of the works which were in these regional museums were burnt and destroyed in the 30s and even as late as 1952.
01:00:56I heard some of the museum directors who worked at that time in those museums, what they were doing, that they were taking the canvases from the stretchers, hiding the canvases, putting them like sheets of paper and burning the stretchers.
01:01:13Secrecy still remains over how much of the avant-garde art was destroyed and how much the museum curators helped to save.
01:01:20But a lot of it survives in this store in Moscow. Here I found another treasure trove of art, much of which rarely sees the light of day, by artists like Gustav Klutsis.
01:01:40I think that Klutsis believed the new government very much. He hoped that the world would really change.
01:01:51Klutsis really wanted to save this painting, because the prosecution against the formalism began at that time, and he brought the work to the Tretyakov Gallery.
01:02:02We had that in storage for a long time, and strictly speaking, it has been preserved.
01:02:10It's not just the art that struggled to survive through the Stalin years. Many of the avant-garde artists themselves were declared enemies of the state and were victimized along with their work.
01:02:21What happened to the artists? Really, many of them, as well as writers, poets, scientists, went to Gulag or were executed.
01:02:33But you should understand that this had happened to every second or every third family in the country.
01:02:40Like, if you would ask me, the two grand-grandparents of my daughters were victims of the regime. One was shot in 24 hours as a German spy, another one, my grandfather, spent 20 years in Gulag.
01:03:00Stalin's purges lasted for decades, and many artists would not survive.
01:03:05Nikolai Poonin, the commissar who championed the avant-garde through the revolutionary years, was arrested and taken away.
01:03:23Many of the artists were exiled to Gulag camps in the frozen reaches near the Arctic Circle, making escape and communication almost impossible.
01:03:33There, they were put to forced labor, in the name of the socialist cause.
01:03:42On the way to Vologda, there is a transit point, and Nikolai Nikolaevich managed to send a letter from Vologda.
01:03:49He threw the letter from a window of the carriage.
01:03:51Somebody picked the letter up and, thank God, sent it to us.
01:04:02In this letter he wrote that he was at the transit point, and now there is the most difficult phase ahead, to the final destination.
01:04:10Where, he did not know.
01:04:15When he arrived to this village in October, the letters from there were arriving quickly enough afterward.
01:04:21But you could write only one letter in six months.
01:04:24Frosts are very severe there, snow falls up to seven meters high.
01:04:38And the harsh climate, of course, influenced the health of Nikolai Nikolaevich.
01:04:42He died on 21st August at 12.20 p.m.
01:04:58Others also suffered.
01:05:00There was the World's Fair of Arts in Paris, and Klutsis designed the Soviet art pavilion.
01:05:11He did beautifully, and after that it seemed that his career would only get better.
01:05:17But when he came back to Russia, the wave of repressions began.
01:05:23And, being Latvian by origin, he fell under the millstones of history.
01:05:33Gustav Klutsis, who depicted Stalin, in my opinion, in the best possible manner, ascetic, powerful,
01:05:43and suddenly he was arrested as an enemy of the people.
01:05:47This happened in January 1938.
01:05:54Along with the Klutsis' art, I was able to uncover these arrest files in KGB archives,
01:06:00and not made public until 1990's Perestroika.
01:06:04Klutsis, once driven through Moscow in Lenin's car,
01:06:08was now vilified for being the first generation of Bolsheviks.
01:06:11I saw his famous profile in the scary gulag photos, where he is shot from the front and from the side.
01:06:20Of course, my grandmother, Valentina Kulagina, did her best to help him.
01:06:25The life and art of those people were truly devoted to the revolution and Stalin.
01:06:31They couldn't understand what is going on, why this is happening to them.
01:06:35The documents from the Soviet era also reveal the full horror of suffering that prisoners were subjected to.
01:06:44In order to gain confessions to trumped-up charges, severe beatings were commonplace,
01:06:51as well as starvation, sleep deprivation, and psychiatric torture.
01:06:55There were very long interrogations. I actually read these documents. It certainly was horrible.
01:07:10If previously they were written by hand and signed, then they would just print it on the typewriter.
01:07:22And you can see how he signs it. It becomes physically hard for him to sign the papers.
01:07:28On the night of February 26, when they sent a group of prisoners to be shot, he, in fact, was not alive.
01:07:42Kluciz died during the interrogations.
01:07:46What saved Rochenko from my point of view was that in the 30s, when these political reasons were the main reasons for judging in art,
01:07:54What saved Rochenko from my point of view was that in the 30s when these political reasons
01:08:09were the main reasons for judging in art, he was doing such things that were absolutely
01:08:17needed.
01:08:18He was taking photography because the magazine U.S.S.R. in construction with which he cooperated,
01:08:25it was an international magazine printed in five languages.
01:08:30You know, the Rochenko photographs were meant to be propaganda photographs and they show
01:08:35men hard at work and interesting, new-looking, sort of modern angles on this canal construction
01:08:42and there are people playing instruments and so on.
01:08:44But the White Sea Canal was publicized as a kind of socialist project.
01:08:48You know, this camp is going to reform criminals and capitalists and it's going to make them
01:08:54into good Soviet citizens.
01:08:56And it was really a propaganda response to criticism that came from the West and from inside the
01:09:01Soviet Union about the camp system.
01:09:03It was a show camp, if you will.
01:09:04It was designed to be photographed and artists were sent to paint it and writers were sent to
01:09:09describe it.
01:09:10The quality of his work helped him to find jobs.
01:09:15But what was evil in all this situation, it was that not artistic reasons were announced
01:09:23for separating good from bad, but political and ideological reasons were announced.
01:09:31That was a great harm to art and to artists because nobody could feel himself safe.
01:09:44I often say that I am a nighttime person because since my childhood all my life happened at night.
01:09:54My parents, father and mother, lived at night because all the arrests happened at night.
01:10:00And when at night it was all quiet, if someone walked in hard-heeled shoes, you could hear him very well.
01:10:11That is why we always listened whether someone was coming or not.
01:10:16By 1949, Suyetin's time had come and his name appeared on the list of people to be arrested.
01:10:26But first, the chair of the Union of Artists was consulted.
01:10:31There was Suyetin's last name and when he saw his surname, he said,
01:10:37You've gone completely mad and crossed his name out. And it saved my father.
01:10:56Today, we might think that there was no real threat for Petrov Vodkin because, first of all, he was seen as socially equal.
01:11:06He wasn't an aristocrat, but he was one of the workers and peasants.
01:11:12Secondly, he was always quite cautious in political statements.
01:11:16He never made any political declarations.
01:11:19Several times, in 1933 and 1934, he applied to the authorities for permission to go abroad for health reasons.
01:11:25But they never let him go.
01:11:28Pyotr Konchalovsky also survived the purges.
01:11:32You know, before I thought that he made a mistake.
01:11:35I thought he should have gone to Paris, he should have gone, he should have stayed there and he'd have been known in the West.
01:11:43And now I realise I was wrong.
01:11:46He thought if he would stay here, he would be more free to stay where he is than to go in the West and be unable to sell himself.
01:11:59Another artist who finally remained in Russia was Kazimir Malevich.
01:12:06Despite his work being banned, he escaped the purges, dying instead of cancer in 1935.
01:12:15Mayerholt was strongly opposed to socialist realism.
01:12:23And in the early 1930s, during Stalin's repressions, his theatre was closed down.
01:12:30He was arrested in June 1939, brutally tortured and finally put to death by firing squad.
01:12:40The photographer, Victor Buller, fell victim himself to political change when he was shot by firing squad, falsely charged with espionage.
01:13:08Other artists who'd collaborated closely with the regime were lucky and survived.
01:13:17In 1953, Pyotr Kotov was to gain his final state commission, that portrait of Stalin.
01:13:25They came to pick up Kotov and they said, get ready, Pyotr Ivanovich.
01:13:31He basically gathered all his paints, and they took him to the pillar hall of the House of the Union, together with several other artists.
01:13:40So in the end he painted Stalin from nature, but in a coffin, and he was, if the word fits, glad.
01:13:47The art, produced in the revolutionary era of Russia, has outlived both the artists and the politics.
01:14:06I think the legacy was that it existed. It was wonderful art. It's a young art which didn't feel that any borders do exist.
01:14:23And so they presented wonderful examples of this. It's a change, but it's a great example, which brought wonderful masterpieces in the collection of Russian art and made Russian art once again famous and good.
01:14:39Avant-garde always fights classical museums, but Avant-garde inside always wants to be part of this museum in the future.
01:14:46Even one of the most iconic works was once mothballed, hidden away in a potato crate.
01:14:52It's now worth millions and hangs in the state hermitage, alongside da Vinci and Rembrandt.
01:14:58Malevich was, Black Square was a story, an anecdote. Nobody really knew who he was, and it was all hidden and destroyed, and only in intelligentsia circles it was known.
01:15:12So he was the myth, he was a mythological figure himself, as well as many other people, like Kandinsky and so on.
01:15:19In contemporary art, of course, when it was possible, when the Soviet Union was starting to collapse, the artists trying to come back to these stories and, you know, non-conformists became now official art, like the best art of the country.
01:15:41It's not anymore a prohibited fruit that you have to strive for. It's just part of the history now.
01:15:49All this big exhibition of Russian Avant-garde in New York, or London, or Paris, of certain period was connected with some ideas of changing in Russia.
01:16:04It was connected with these changes.
01:16:07The country is not changed totally, but it were some changes and Avant-garde was on the banner of these changes.
01:16:15What the artist created over a hundred years ago was far more than just a utopian dream.
01:16:28It's outlived Russian socialism, and its influence surrounds us today.
01:16:34It was a generation of artists who produced some of the most breathtaking images, and who went through and experienced some of the most terrible times.
01:16:47And, in a sense, their heroic struggle, both with the past and with the present, as they experienced it in Soviet Russia, is an inspiration today.
01:17:00Maybe, as such a concept, it could be, and it is of interest, but also I think that everybody understands that that was a political coincidence, that the state supported this, because at that moment that was the only way of spreading the ideology around.
01:17:27So, I don't think that anybody wants this to be repeated again.
01:17:34In their pursuit of a new art for a new world, the artists of the Russian Revolutionary Period have left a lasting legacy, which has transformed the world of art.
01:17:45I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon ring which confines the artists and the forms of nature.
01:17:58Forms move and are born, and we make newer and newer discoveries, and what I reveal to you do not conceal, and it is absurd to force our age into the old forms of time past.
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