The brief but soaring flight of the Russian avant garde falls Both believed that art could have a purpose beyond itself, that it could help to remake an entire nation, from posters and murals to the uniforms of factory workers and even dainty Trotsky teacups. And their ambitions – quite possibly for the first time in history – were identical with those of the country’s rulers. It is the first time we have been able to see the art of the Revolution whole.Īfter the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917, no social group was more caught up in the revolutionary spirit than artists, composers and writers. Not just the Soviet dross – socialist realist utopias, hymns to mechanisation and films of peasants waiting gratefully for the arrival of the first steam train – but the art of the avant garde too. What makes Revolution such a momentous, even historic exhibition is that it brings together all of the art from that period. But this is no display of communist propaganda. That stands for Stalin and Trotsky too, though the latter is much less of a presence in the Royal Academy’s enormous Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 (his face, indeed, scissored right out of that headscarf). Photograph: © Burilin Ivanovo Museum of Local History, Ivanovo Nikolai Demkov’s Kerchief with portrait of Lenin in the centre and Trotsky’s corner portrait cut out, 1924.
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