Art byCharles Darwent
When Jacques-Louis David set out to paint a portrait of the murdered Marat in 1793, he meant it to be revolutionary in more senses than one. The freshly stabbed ami du peuple was at the heart of the Terror: to paint Marat was to nail one's colours to the Robespierrean mast. But David's Marat a son dernier souffle was also revolutionary in an aesthetic sense. Eighteenth-century French painting had been all about luxury: that effulgence of undergrowth and tulle known as frisee, the concealment of letters read by aristocratic paramours. David's Marat was having no truck with it. Painted in a palette which the artist fondly imagined to be Roman and republican, the work is all about legibility. Pressed flat against the picture space and pruned of Fragonardian frou-frou, the dead Marat's last act is to turn the letter he was writing at the moment of his assassination towards the viewer. David's own signature is not a painterly squiggle but a foot-tall dedication occupying one side of his subject's wooden hip bath.
Where French painting had formerly been about shadow and deceit, David's portrait is lit by the full glare of liberty. Here, at last, was a revolutionary painting for a revolutionary era, Year One of the reign of the people. Or was it? Look again at Marat and his hip bath and something about it may strike you as familiar. You seem to have seen that pose somewhere before, and so you have: it is a Deposition. Marat's trailing arm and half-concealed torso were part of a visual convention used by every painter since Mantegna to portray the dead Christ.
Thinking of a politician as a kind of secular god was certainly revolutionary (if, perhaps, unwise). Appealing to viewers by covertly following a 400-year-old tradition, though, is not. It is possible to read David's portrait in two ways: as a political work, which is undoubtedly of the revolution; and as a work of art which, by contrast, is deeply reactionary.
That revolutionary art, like revolutions themselves, is seldom the neat thing historians like to make it is vividly borne out by the Barbican Art Gallery's current show, New Art for a New Era. Culled from a collection put together by artists such as Natalia Goncharova and Kazimir Malevich for the short-lived Petrograd Museum of Artistic Culture, most of these works spent the years between the proclamation of socialist realism as the one true revolutionary school in 1934 and the show-trial that led to its demise in 1988 locked away in the cellars of what is now the Russian State Museum. (Things could have been worse: David and his Marat ended their lives in exile in Brussels.)
Long before there was glasnost, the twin totems of Soviet art were ideinost and narodnost: roughly speaking, ideological high-mindedness and patriotic fervour, qualities that manifested themselves in half a century of pictures of strapping peasant girls and heroic tractor-factory workers. Even a decade ago, in the dying days of the USSR, apparatchiks of the Soviet Union of Artists would have viewed the works now in the Barbican's show as reactionary rather than as revolutionary: as "formalist" and - the ultimate term of censure - "cosmopolitan".
Might they have been right? What is commonly seen as the seminal text of Soviet revolutionary art - Malevich's Red Square of 1915, also in the Barbican's show - is, as its name suggests, a painting of a red square. So far, so formal. It is also extraordinarily cosmopolitan: suprematism, which the picture was intended to proclaim, was a Russian take on cubism as propounded by a Spanish-speaking Catalan living in Paris. So why did Malevich not just call himself a cubist?
Well, because cubism was foreign. Russian painters of the revolutionary period may have been busy flirting with every Parisian school from primitivism to post-impressionism, but they were also deeply suspicious of them all as being un-Russian. Thus Liubov Popova's Portrait of a Philosopher (1915), which Russianises Picasso's taste for collage by including snippets of newspapers printed in Cyrillic, or Ilya Mashkov's Portrait of a Boy in a Painted Shirt, which re-works Matisse as fauvism with a balalaika. This Russia-for-the-Russians tendency in art of the revolutionary period is traceable to the teachings of a group of St Petersburg theorists known as the Wanderers 20 years earlier, but it can equally be plotted forwards another 20 to the infamous 1934 edict on narodnost.
Even Malevich's formalism may not have been all that it seems. Red Square had another title, scrawled on the back of the canvas by the artist: Portrait of a Peasant Woman in a Red Dress, the kind of title beloved of socialist realist ideinostniks. Look at Boris Grigoriev's Land of the People, bought by Malevich for the collection, and you may fancy you can see the first stern twitchings of socialist realism itself. As with David's Marat, in other words, we are not looking at a process of thesis and antithesis in the Barbican's show so much as of plus ca change. So much for Hegel and artistic revolutions.
"New Art for a New Era: Malevich's vision of the Russian avant-garde" runs until 27 June at the Barbican Art Gallery, London EC2 (0171-638 4141)
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