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Y ou may not know it, but the Russian avant-garde movement has had a decisive and lasting influence on international art, design and architecture. The artist and theorist Kazimir Malevich’s radically non-objective abstract movement, Suprematism, prepared the ground for American and European post-war abstraction and minimalism. The ideas developed by the Constructivists following the 1917 Revolution—spread via the Bauhaus—had a significant impact on some of the most important architects, designers and artists of the 20th century. Constructivist founders, Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, revolutionised typography, graphic design, advertising and photography.
However, with most of these works in museums, and many others lost to the upheaval of revolutions and wars, today there are very few opportunities for collectors to acquire well-documented and exhibited Russian avant-garde paintings and works on paper. On 24 June, two important early avant-garde works, both from 1911, by two key artists, will come to market in London. Head of a Peasant is a rare work from Malevich’s peasant cycle, a first high point in his career, when he was closely associated with Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. Their form of primitivism, known as Neo-primitivism, put the idea of a national school of modern art front and centre, and set Malevich on a new course. This would eventually lead him towards non-objectivity and abstraction. Larionov’s Head of a Soldier is part of his soldiers series, and the culmination of his Neo-primitivist period. It also anticipates his semi abstract and abstract Rayonist paintings, and their preoccupation with purely painterly elements such as texture, line and colour.
The term “Russian avant-garde” covers a variety of art movements which flourished in the Russian Empire and Soviet Russia in the first decades of the 20th century. In the context of rapid economic and political changes, young artists challenged the artistic establishment and scandalised the public with their radical work, provocative exhibitions, and manifestos. Artistic groups and different styles appeared in quick succession, and often in opposition to each other. These artists were influenced by the latest developments in French art, well-known in Moscow thanks to the collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, which included works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso.
Russian artists also looked at their own artistic heritage, such as icon painting and folk art. Larionov, Goncharova and Malevich turned to subjects drawn from life in the provinces, developing their own highly original idioms of modernist art. In the early 1910s, Wassily Kandinsky, Malevich, and Larionov pioneered non-objective painting and abstraction. The October Revolution of 1917 brought new urgency to the function of art and the role of the artist. As a result, Constructivists abandoned easel painting in favor of production art. They wanted to be artists-engineers, shaping the material world, and therefore society itself.
After the Revolution, many avant-garde artists initially helped shape art education and cultural policies of the new Soviet state. But the rise of Stalin and the imposition of Socialist Realism as the official cultural doctrine in the Soviet Union put an end to the formal experiments of the avant-garde. Artists were accused of “formalism”, their work deemed elitist and inaccessible. The Communist Party wanted “realistic” and idealized art to be used as propaganda. The many important avant-garde paintings which had already been acquired by the State in the 1920s were confined to the storerooms for decades to come.
Meanwhile, outside the Soviet Union, museums were collecting avant-garde. In 1927, Alfred Barr, who would become the Museum of Modern Art’s founding director, travelled to Moscow to learn more about the Russian avant-garde and meet its artists. In the 1930s, he acquired several works by Malevich which had been exhibited in Berlin in 1927, and smuggled them out of Germany on behalf of the MoMA. In the 1950s, the Stedelijk Amsterdam acquired 36 works by Malevich from the same Berlin exhibition for its collection. Other important holdings of Russian avant-garde art are at the Centre Pompidou, the Ludwig Museum, as well as the Museum of Modern Art in Thessaloniki, home to the Costakis collection.
Larionov’s Head of a Soldier left Russia early, most likely already in 1913 for an exhibition in Berlin at the gallery Der Sturm, which alongside the Bauhaus was an important bridge to Europe for the Russian avant-garde. In 1927, Malevich brought Head of a Peasant to Berlin as part of a retrospective exhibition. Later, the Malevich was in the collection of the author Roald Dahl, while the Larionov once belonged to art historian Waldemar George, and then to Leonard Hutton Galleries, who pioneered the market for the Russian avant-garde in the United States. Both now appear on the market for the first time in over three decades.
