MoMA’s current exhibition “A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde is important and interesting (and enjoyable!) for several reasons. The show reminds us that a great museum has rich holdings in some (not all) fields, enabling major exhibitions without loans. This is not just about being cost-effective (when have museums ever cared about that). It’s also about plumbing the depth of collections to display works that may have been acquired primarily for the museum’s archival role, so now the public gets to see more than just signature works. This rich MoMA assemblage also quietly celebrates some major donors (e.g., McCrory/Riklis, Judith Rothschild Foundation), while providing an [unannounced] first NYC commemoration of the centennial of the Russian Revolution (I assume there will be others). It’s also a show of manageable size (whew!). And a wonderful followup to MoMA’s monumental (and exhausting!) 2013 exhibition “Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925”.
I was especially struck by set of Goncharova lino prints on the wall before entering the show; she fuses Cubist ideas with allusions to both Russian and Western iconographic ideas, and makes us especially aware of how imaginatively she cuts the linoleum (was it a newish material in 1914?) to create active spatial effects. Then we see her 1913 (0r 1911) Rayonism, Blue-Green Forest announcing (yet again) expressionist tendencies that would soon be declared null and void (as the exhibition continues). (Did Jack Tworkov ever see this painting?) Nearby a small Kandinsky watercolor (Improvisation 1914) is so delicious it’s in that special category of “don’t wrap it; I’ll eat it here!”
The exhibition creates a sense of excitement as we watch these artists in their rejectionist mode, believing that they can somehow start from scratch to both re-imagine and create art anew. Some of the works by familiar artists (Tatlin, Malevich) are almost icons of modernism, so it’s difficult to see them anew. But the exhibition contextualizes the familiar with works I hadn’t seen before, which is one of its strengths. Trying mightily to defy tradition, the most persuasive works still rely on conventional ideas such as space, color, form, balance (or attempts at denial of their importance). And this valiant fight against what came before (even worthy of a kind of high-school-poster diagram) ends up feeling amazingly sterile and lacking in emotion (if we get our “icons of art history” emotions out of the way). There’s passion here — but it’s the passion of rebellion rather than aesthetic passion. Evidently these guys are afraid to express feeling: that’s so yesterday.
But oh, how that changes when they get excited by technology. Passion re-enters with a vengeance for the adventure of exploring the possibilities of film. Clearly the excitement of playing with new mediums involved a depth of feeling that overwhelms spare abstraction. The gallery with the films (Eisenstein and more) makes this especially evident, as does the one with the Rodchenko photographs (definitely my favorite part of the show!). Lots of passion here! Along with subtlety in composition, focus, and printing. Photography doesn’t get any better than this.
The “passion” question stuck with me, so that this evening, at a Zankel Hall recital, I kept asking the same question. Jean-Guihen Queyras, cello, and Alexander Melnikov, piano, gave technically astute performances. But I wanted more. A new piece by Yves Chauris (b. 1980), commissioned by Carnegie Hall, explored cello techniques (use and abuse of the instrument?) beyond anything I’ve ever heard, and it was sort of interesting, but also somewhat bloodless and theoretical. I kept thinking of Russian constructivism. Beethoven’s A Major Sonata (one of my all-time loves) followed that and sounded a tad antiseptic, despite the competence of the playing. But after intermission things changed (do performers tipple in the Green Room?). Anton Webern is still a stretch for me, but “Three Little Pieces for Cello and Piano” (all of 3 minutes long!) was rich and romantic (and written in 1914, when that delicious Kandinsky watercolor was done) — and without pause they seguewayed right into Chopin’s G Minor Cello Sonata with a passion that was lacking in the first half of the concert, providing richly felt sounds. It made me think of Jerry Lee Lewis and Kris Kristofferson: “Once More With Feeling.”