When propaganda can also be great art
Red Star Over Russia: A Revolution in Visual Culture 1905-55 Tate Modern, London SE1
The creative explosion that coincided with the Russian Revolution was once modern art’s best-kept secret. Not any more. Kazimir Malevich’s The Black Square – simply a black square – now rivals Picasso’s Demoiselles d’avignon as the most influential painting of the 20th century, while Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky’s graphics have been endlessly pastiched by everything from fashion magazines to indie-rock album covers.
Indeed, you’d be forgiven for wondering what this, the last major show this year marking the revolution’s centenary – following on from exhibitions at the British Library, the Design Museum and a mammoth survey at the Royal Academy – could bring to the table that hasn’t been seen many times before.
Yet, where the RA show focused on painting and sculpture and the Design Museum on architecture, this exhibition looks principally at graphic design. It is drawn almost entirely from the vast collection of posters, photographs and other ephemera amassed by the late British designer David King, acquired by Tate following his death in 2016, and this tight, personal focus gives the show a feel quite different from its rivals.
Among the splendid array of posters opening the show, only one corresponds to the severely abstract constructivism that’s become the stereotype of Russian revolutionary design, though it is probably the most famous example: El Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, from 1920, in which the civil war is portrayed in stark graphics, the Red Army a slicing red triangle. Stereotypical maybe, but it still looks like genius.
Alongside, an exuberant collection of art nouveau and folk art-influenced imagery demonstrates the diversity of what was happening on the ground, with the striking art deco-flavoured cubism of Adolph Strakhov’s 1926 Emancipated Woman: Build Socialism! reminding us that women’s liberation was a cornerstone of the revolution. Indeed, a poster in the Uzbek language in which an unveiled woman urges her sisters in black burkas to go out and vote – and by implication bare their faces – still feels relevant today.
But it’s the work of the two constructivist giants Lissitzky and Rodchenko – and their respective partners Sophie Kupper and Vavara Stepanova – that best exemplifies the idea of revolutionary politics and revolutionary art going hand in hand. Russia’s industrial achievements and social progress are projected – in highly idealised form, of course – via a dazzling array of photographic imagery (all dynamic angles, dizzying collaging and layering) in magazines and in books that employ endless flaps and extensions to unfold into sweeping, quasi-cinematic narratives.
Another master of photo-montage, Gustav Klutsis, became a sort of unofficial brand manager for Joseph Stalin, with his carefully manipulated images of the dictator facing vast seas of smiling workers. Not that it did Klutsis much good in the long run: he was arrested and executed in 1938, at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror.
Where exhibitions on this subject have a tendency to politely – and shamefully – downplay its more troubling aspects, this one makes no bones about the civil war, famine and internecine political conflict characterising the revolution from the outset.
Alexander Deneika’s monumental paintings from the 1937 Paris World Fair – seen in Britain for the first time – couldn’t be bettered as examples of the Socialist Realism that dominated Russian art after Stalin crushed the avant garde in 1932. Low viewpoints give the white-suited workers a towering, heroic appearance as they march into the future. If Deneika was prevented from travelling to attend its unveiling, he was one of the lucky ones. The show’s organisers were all arrested and sent to the gulag on their return.
Just because an image is blatant propaganda, doesn’t mean it can’t be great art: that’s the message of this exhibition. From photographs of NKVD execution squads in training to a selection of quasi-feminist Second World War propaganda posters, it succeeds in taking us to the mood of the era in all its most euphoric and appalling aspects.