Amazons of the Avant-Garde

National Review Online, October  22, 2000

Long, long before the NEA's chocolate-smearing Karen Finley, there was Natalia Goncharova. Tall, thin, and living in sin, the occasionally cross-dressing Natalia managed to scandalize turn-of-the-century St. Petersburg. She would cover her body with daubs and designs, a ziggurat, perhaps for the face, naughty drawings (why not?) for her breasts. Imperial Russia was not quite ready for this. Goncharova's "Pink Lantern" cabaret performances ended in riots, and her paintings were condemned as sacrilegious and obscene. They were neither. And, as we are reminded by a current exhibition at New York's Guggenheim Museum, in yet another contrast with the Finleys of today, her work was often very good. The exhibition, "Amazons of the Avant-Garde," is dedicated to Goncharova and five other women artists of early Twentieth Century Russia, Olga Rozanova, Liubov Popova, Alexandra Exter, Varvara Stepanova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova.

Mercifully, despite its name, the show is no work of feminist revisionism. The description of these painters as "Amazons" dates from their own era. It is a quote lifted from the writings of one of their (male) contemporaries. Despite this, Goncharova and her friends were not generally seen as specifically "female" artists. Nor did they seem to have viewed themselves in that way, a dereliction of duty that appears to have disappointed Charlotte Douglas, one of the contributors to the book that accompanies the Guggenheim show. As Ms. Douglas sadly explains, the Amazons " accepted and worked almost completely within the male exhibition-and-sales paradigm." What vulgarity. Ladies, presumably, are not expected to do anything as grubby as selling their paintings. Worse, these traitors to their sex "considered themselves artists first…In this, a gendered identity seems to have played hardly any role at all." How disgraceful.

What the exhibition does do, however, is remind us yet again of the vibrancy of the late-Romanov period, a time too often characterized as a Lara's theme park of troikas, palaces, and pre-industrial peasantry. In reality, it was an age of rapid, and generally positive, economic and social change, and it had the art to match. Strikingly, for those of us used to the Soviet-nurtured notion of Russian "otherness" it was a culture that, at least in its avant-garde, played a full part in the wider European cultural scene.

The Amazons traveled in France and Italy. They moved in the same circles as Picasso, Braque, and Leger. Their art reflects this. There are experiments in Futurism, Rayonnism and Cubism, all part of a dialog with their counterparts in the West. Often, delightfully, these are combined with elements of the painters' own national traditions. In Goncharova's marvelous "Mowers," we see hints not only of Gauguin, but also of Russian vernacular lubok prints, while her "Evangelists" owe an obvious debt to the icon painting of earlier generations.

But tradition was not really where the Amazons' interests lay. In keeping with the restless spirit of their age they wanted to be innovators, increasingly testing the limits of abstraction along with fellow members of the Russian avant-garde, if sometimes a little derivatively. Some of Olga Rozanova's Suprematist works of 1916 add little to what Kasimir Malevich was doing a year or so before. On the other hand her extraordinary "Green Stripe" (1917) anticipates Mark Rothko's color fields by more than thirty years.

1917, of course, was also the year of the Bolshevik Revolution. This was no coincidence. The red flag and the Green Stripe were connected, both of them symptoms of the collapse in the existing economic, political, and cultural order. It should be no surprise that the Amazons rallied in support of the Communists. For years, they had, like many others in the world of Russian arts, spouted a hysterical Susan Sarandon-style leftism. They saw themselves as part of a more general assault on the ancien régime. These people may have drawn on the rich resources of Russia's heritage, but, when the time came, they were quite prepared to join in its destruction.

Given this political orientation, and the usefully dehumanizing Implications of the Russian avant-garde's "scientific" view of painting, this was welcome support for Lenin's new administration. The parallels with Soviet ideology were obvious. Both these artists and the revolutionary authorities wanted an absolute break with the past. They were determined to impose their own supposedly scientific rules, whether it be at the easel or on the population. The squares, circles, and triangles of the new art became the typeface of the new regime.

To artists this was heady, flattering stuff. Now they could live their revolutionary dream, remaking society on the streets as well as on canvas. To her frustration, Natalia Goncharova was out of the country, but the other Amazons were quick to take up jobs within the new system. They were content, it would appear, to support the work of a government that was already beginning to slaughter any possible opponents including, in the case of Nadezhda Udaltsova, her father. Interestingly, it was not a government that Goncharova was ever to see at first hand. She continued to proclaim leftist beliefs, but at a safe distance. She never returned to the Soviet motherland, opting instead for the West and relative obscurity. It was a wise choice.

Staying in Russia, however, was not. Popova and Rozanova were both to perish of ill-health within a tragically short time, victims of the terrible living conditions that prevailed in the early Bolshevik years. Exter got out in 1924, but, as an emigre, was never to recapture her former glory. Udaltsova, who should have known better, persevered in the workers' paradise, even managing to survive the execution of her husband in 1938. She lingered on, miserably poor, into the Khrushchev years. Stepanova enjoyed a relatively successful career in the USSR, at least for a while, as a propagandist for the regimes of both Lenin and Stalin. However, as Party orthodoxy changed away from her own brand, she found herself increasingly marginalized. Unlike so many discarded activists, however, she avoided the Gulag and died, largely forgotten, but untouched, in 1958.

If there is a certain sadness about this fascinating show, it is because it is a tale of six tremendously talented individuals, each of whose lives were to end in failure, mediocrity and waste. Like many of the cruelest tragedies, it was, at least in part, self-inflicted. It is an irony apparently too awkward to be addressed at the exhibition, but each of these women played a part in the building of the system that was to ruin their lives. In a way they were even lucky. They died in their beds, and in their art they at least have a monument. Millions of Russians were not so fortunate.

This raises another question. It is not a comparison that you will find made at the Guggenheim, but were its Amazons really so morally different from Leni Riefenstahl, the warrior queen of another avant-garde, that of Hitler's Germany? Goncharova may have been a cheerleader from the sidelines, but the other Amazons were active participants in the cultural support system of a Soviet regime that was murderous from the start. Like Riefenstahl, they were brilliant innovators whose talents were put to the work in the creation of a vicious totalitarian state. And so, just as Leni Riefenstahl's work, however spectacular, can never, quite, avoid the stink of Auschwitz, nor should the art of the Amazons be shown without any reference to its Gulag taint.

Sadly, in this exhibition, the Guggenheim is doing just that.