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The relationship of Bolshevism and avant-gardism: it's a radicals' Camelot the only real example of a revolutionary politics in

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The relationship of Bolshevism and avant-gardism: it's a radicals' Camelot, the only real example of a revolutionary politics in alliance with a revolutionary art, and so soon cut short. It's startling that any government, with a lot of grass-roots work to do, should look to post- Cubist art for a helping hand in geeing up the populace Of course, this confidence didn't last. Stalin sponsored a cultural turn-around under the name of Socialist Realism, and the art-conservatives were back in business.Then again, it's not obvious that advanced art should be politically progressive. But the Russian avant-garde was actually quite prepared for the revolution - or some sort of revolution They could hardly avoid the issue.

If you think your society is on the verge of total disintegration, which had been all too thinkable in Russia for some time, and if in the studio you're turning out absolutely unprecedented visions of chaos, energy and strange new orders, you only needed to be a little bit of a megalomaniac to start making connections and thinking about the shape of things to come.This exhibition is good at showing how staggering these visions must have been - simply because some of them haven't been seen much in the West before, and their strangeness really is still new to us; Pavel Filonov's work, for instance. Two pictures here, Flowers of Universal Blooming and The German War, both 1915, are derivatives of Cubism, but they make Cubism look bizarre again, by breaking its normal habits: using lurid colours, fragmenting the image into tiny slivers, packing them claustrophobically tight, and then doing it all on a very large scale. The effect is horrible, I think, but you have to admit you've never seen anything like it. The catalogue says, without elaborating: "Filonov's idea of a universal flowering led him to seek in his painting a way of showing the concept of a lost harmony in human existence." It doesn't sound very Leninist.

But after the Revolution, he was doing ideology work for the Museum.The art points in wildly divergent directions Sometimes its back to the folk. Mikhail Larionov's Venus (1912), is a folky-primitivist image, with a bright yellow woman in a bold wonky outline, and the title, date and artist's first name written in big letters on the picture Larionov was into icons, sign-painting and popular prints. The subject is "classical", but he's trying to come across as a kind of peasant-artist.And sometimes it's "Forward with Industry" Take this manifesto from the following year. "We declare the genius of our days to be: trousers, jackets, shoes, tramways, buses, aeroplanes, railways, magnificent ships - what enchantment - what a great epoch unrivalled in world history. We deny that individuality has any value in a work of art." That was Larionov, too, now being a techno-crazy Rayonist. And that "down" on individual creativity certainly came on in force after the Revolution. Chagall got heavily criticised for it.Or it can be hard to say precisely what's being envisaged.

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