Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919), by El Lissitzsky. Wikipedia / Public Domain.The Royal Academy’s new blockbuster show “Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932” is a disorienting experience. Caught between bombastic propaganda — albeit made with irresistible avant-garde panache — and the works of great modernist painters like Chagall, Kandinsky or Malevich, one is never quite sure what the exhibition’s purpose is. Is it to showcase early Soviet art? Or to speak more broadly about modernist and avant-garde art in Russia in the years after the Revolution?
Of course, for some of the artists presented, this distinction is meaningless. Russia’s avant-garde and the October Revolution went hand in hand. Yet the label we use to describe this art is a matter that goes beyond an artist’s ideological affiliation with the Soviet state. It may also be worth interrogating the use of the term “Russian”.
One of the Royal Academy’s main attractions is a room full of paintings by Kazimir Malevich, an artist who made his name in Russia, but who was born to a Polish family in Ukraine — his parents would have known him as Kazimierz.
