Out of the red

Published 07 February 2008

Modernist art that refused to conform was suppressed during the rise of the Soviet Union. Now it forms the climax of a selection from Russia's national archives

On 9 January 120 paintings from Russia, scheduled for display at the Royal Academy under the financial patronage of the energy giant E.ON, were being loaded into container trucks in Düsseldorf. The drivers were waiting for the final word from Moscow, following threats to abort the exhibition in London unless H M Government came up with further legislative guarantees against seizure (it did) in the event of legal claims by the heirs of the Russian textile magnates Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. Their vast and brilliant private collections had been nationalised by the young Soviet state in 1918, driving both embittered millionaires into exile.

Legitimate Russian nervousness about legal claims in the west dates back to the mid-1950s, when the Soviet authorities, eager to garner prestige in France, wheeled out of their museum basements a fine collection of Picasso's early works, collected by Shchukin before the Great War. No sooner had they reached Paris than they encountered an action at the local courts, brought by Shchukin's daughter, a French citizen. The Soviet embassy panicked and hastily shipped the paintings back to Moscow. Half a century later the heirs of Shchukin and Morozov persist in laying claim to "a percentage of material benefits that accrue from exploitation of the works" - hence the stalling hearts at the RA until the container trucks finally headed westward.

All was resolved and the "From Russia" exhibition has opened as planned. Though its stated time span extends to 1925, one curious feature is that the Bolshevik Revolution, which set Russia's course and cultural isolation for the next 70 years, only shyly shows its face. The mindset among the country's museum directors and senior curators - who in hard fact controlled which paintings to release to London - has swung full circle since the first major exhibition of Russian art at the Royal Academy in 1959. (The then secretary of the RA penned a private memorandum of dread at the prospect of the Hammer and Sickle flying outside Burlington House in Piccadilly.)

At that juncture, Lenin's notorious disparagement of modernist "isms" still prevailed. Surrealism, expressionism, constructivism, suprematism, abstractionism, cubism - all were damned under the umbrella term "formalism". Editors of Mos cow's party-line art magazine Iskusstvo blasted London critics who "maliciously" complained about the non-appearance of Chagall, Malevich and Kandinsky at Burlington House.

But the dangerous deviants, Russian and foreign, previously confined to the underground gulag of the Pushkin and Hermitage Museums provide the most exciting dimension of the new display. The great expressionist theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, tortured and executed in 1940 and then wiped from the history books, is here found in a 1916 portrait by Boris Grigoriev, posing with his own double - a bold tribute to the cunning of theatre. Stunning is Nathan Altman's 1914 portrait of the poet Anna Akhmatova, whose son would twice be sent to the Gulag, her intense equanimity and aquiline beauty captured in a raging blue gown: a genius innocent of the silence and the long night ahead.

Artists associated with the "Jack of Diamonds" exhibition in Moscow pursued charmed avenues of experimentation, as in Natalia Goncha rova's Pillars of Salt or Ivan Mashkov's playful Self-Portrait with Pyotr Konchalovsky (both 1910). Here Mashkov and Konchalovsky pose as amateur musclemen in underpants and socks, one clutching a violin beside a piano aching for Spanish music, books on Cézanne and Giotto teetering off the shelf - in short, a picture bursting with clues and a kind of innocence of life beyond the studio. On the other hand, unease sets in at the self-absorption of Russia's modernists throughout the Great War, as the peasants - whom the artists delighted to present in neo-primitive stasis - went to their deaths by the million. Pavel Filonov's futuristically splintered figures in The German War (1914-15) provide an exception to the prevailing introversion, perhaps because he served at the front.

At the climax, one reaches Kazimir Malevich's triptych Black Square, Black Circle and Black Cross (all given as 1923), a precursor of Mark Rothko and American abstract expressionism 40 years later. The final rooms offer a feast of Malevich, including a moving photograph of him on his deathbed, eyes closed to the feats of his own incomparably fertile imagination hanging on his wall. Dominating the final room is Kandinsky's Composition VII (1913), considered so subversive in its sundering of "objective reality" that, as late as 1979, the Tretyakov's curator Lidia Romash kova fought a rearguard action not to send it to France to feature in that year's great "Paris-Moscow" exhibition at the Pompidou Centre.

Yet where is the Bolshevik Revolution? In room one a vulgarly satirical canvas by Ilya Repin mocks a crowd of well-dressed champagne socialists celebrating the first, abortive revolution of 1905, but the uprisings of 1917 and the terrible civil war (Repin himself emigrated) are worryingly offstage. The main exception is a reproduction of Tatlin's futurist 1919 model for a slanted spiral tower, the Monument to the Third International, which he intended to house the Comintern, rising in its final, utopian form taller than the Eiffel Tower and beaming the revolution from Petrograd to the world.

You have to poke about among the interesting photographs and short biographies in the later rooms to find indirect evidence of 1917. In fact, for some years thereafter, modernism was not yet the crushed pariah it became under Stalin; even Marc Chagall, dreamy defier of gravity, enjoyed a brief stint as a cultural commissar. A significant number of pre-1917 modernist artists did stay put in Bolshevik Russia and forge new careers, some receiving Soviet honours, among them Malevich, Tatlin, Filonov and Koncha lov sky. Meyerhold's theatre flourished in the 1920s - the great age of expressionist Soviet cinema, of Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, which leads one to note the absence from this exhibition of major paintings that reconcile expressionism with revolutionary fervour, notably Aleksandr Deineka's masterpiece The Defence of Petrograd (1928 - three years too late).

Frankly, the initial, pre-1900 sections of the new Royal Academy show lack coherence: here a small gem by Corot, there Mikhail Nesterov's whimsical art-nouveau The Murdered Tsarevich Dmitry (1899) or a curiously passive portrait by Repin of the barefoot "peasant" Tolstoy (1901). Spirits rise as a number of Cézannes collected by Morozov come into view, my favourites being Girl at the Piano (c.1869) and his tender view of loneliness and advancing years Woman in Blue (1900-1902). Passing Van Gogh's touching Portrait of Dr Félix Ray (1889), of the doctor who treated his rising madness at the hospice in Arles, one comes to Gauguin, the friend with whom Vincent had quarrelled. A series of Tahitian scenes confirms this artist's assured grasp of the timeless world of his becalmed islanders, yet the best canvas of the lot abandons his typically strong, flat coloration for a technique closer to impressionism: this is Man Picking Fruit from a Tree (1897). Look out for the two goats.

In this large room, the visitor is tossed from the sublime - Picasso's Dryad (1908), from his African mask period - to the works of Maurice Denis, too downright bad to be on display anywhere. A large-scale, sun-drenched landscape by Bonnard, Summer Dance (1912), is marred by confusions of perspective and focus, but delight returns with the comic skills of Henri Rousseau's neo-primitive Muse Inspiring the Poet (1909), a portrait of an anxious Guillaume Apollinaire, clearly bemused by his "muse", none other than the painter Marie Laurencin, found cheerily waving - as in a postcard by Beryl Cook - from somewhere inside a vast gown.

This brings me, reluctantly, to Matisse's celebrated centrepiece for the exhibition, the picture on the promotional posters: The Dance (1910). Five terracotta-red, naked figures, of whom four are women, prance with linked hands and frenetic joie de vivre across a violent green hillside (there are bumps) and an intense blue sky. Crude lines in brown convey anatomy. Matisse is often lauded as a "liberator of colour", but when one compares his use of colour with that of Turner, whom he studied while visiting London, is one witnessing "liberation" or, more likely, the modernist credo that art is mainly about itself rather than the servant of nature?

Facing Dance is Matisse's contrasting exercise in static decoration, Harmony in Red (1908). Sir Norman Rosenthal, who curated the exhibition with Ann Dumas, confides that this painting was in blue when Shchukin bought it in Paris, but red when it emerged from its crate in Mos cow. It is said that The Dance was some kind of "answer" to Picasso's five-figure Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), but that savagely shaming and originally undisplayable masterpiece of early cubism was evidently too much even for Shchukin, and now hangs in New York's Museum of Modern Art. A pity. Yet "From Russia" is an exhibition not to be missed. If you're a Matisse fan aged seven or under, you get in free.

"From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings (1870-1925) from Moscow and St Petersburg" runs until 18 April at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1. For more details log on to: www.royalacademy.org.uk

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