From Russia

From Russia is an exhibition about international relations. Titled From Russia, presumably because all the paintings on show come from Russian museums, it is famously the exhibition that was almost ‘not from Russia’ because of the worsening state of Anglo-Russian relations in the political fallout from the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. The exhibition itself tells a story of the effect that Modern Art developed primarily in Paris had on the art of Russia, culminating, through the work of Kandinsky and Malevich, in Russian artists temporarily leading the newest avant-garde movements. As a result the exhibition could have been titled ‘From Paris,’ as that is the main direction of the influence traced.

Although the exhibition has been publicised as a blockbuster show crammed with Modern masterpieces, it is actually an exhibition of greater variation and contrasts that the pre-publicity would have us believe. True, major works by Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Bonnard, Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Kandinsky and Malevich are all being shown in this country for the first time and that is reason enough in itself to make a visit to this exhibition a priority. But alongside this retelling of the standard history of Modern Western Art movements, is another interesting and less well-known story; the development of Modern Art within Russia itself.

Curators are continually seeking new ways of retelling the story of Modern Art because of its box-office cache; in this instance by the exploration of its influence on national and regional art. This is pragmatic postmodernism; as the telling of a national art-story enables the showing of The Dance which in turn guarantees queues at the ticket office. While getting the crowds in is an essential element in planning a major exhibition, this does not mean that telling the national art-story is simply a hook on which to hang modern masterpieces. In this case, as in last year’s Piety and Pragmatism exhibition at the Estorick, a fascinating story emerges in which spirituality plays a significant role.

The brooding figure of Leo Tolstoy barefoot painted by Ilya Repin stands at the entrance to this exhibition. Repin was heavily influenced by Tolstoy’s treatise What is Art? in which Tolstoy argued that the task of art was advocacy of moral virtue and Repin’s image of the writer as prophet signals a contrast between the serious moral and spiritual content of Russian Art at the turn of the nineteenth century and the joie-de-vivre of French Impressionism with its light celebrations of the bourgeoisie at play. The story here is of the way in which Modern Russian Art comes to dress itself in the clothes of Modernism without losing its spiritual soul and thereby, in the expressive abstraction of Kandinsky and the minimalist abstraction of Malevich, for a short period leads the Modernist stampede towards new artistic movements.

The staging posts on this journey are both beautiful and mysterious. Mikhail Nestorov’s The Murdered Tsarevich Dmitry is a poignant lament for the lost spiritual soul of Russia. Mikhail Vrubel’s Six-Winged Seraph is a masterpiece of expressionist painting creating a Symbolist image designed to arouse Russian spirits from the trivia of the everyday to contemplation of the sublime. Nikolai Roerich’s landscapes, saturated with colour harmonies and represented here by Kissing the Earth, are meditations on the universality of the Russian soul. Natalia Goncharova’s naïve and monumental Peasants derive from a nine-part composition based on the Gospels celebrating the spirituality of the Russian people. Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, in his Virgin of Tender Mercy to Evil Hearts, responds to the horrors of the First World War with a Virgin who looks on us the viewer with a tenderness borne of her own experience of suffering through the birth and death of Christ, as depicted in blue dream-like cubist images behind her. A similar combination of sorrow and strength through spirituality also pervades Marc Chagall’s The Red Jew. These are paintings as prophecy, increasingly using the techniques of Modernism, to address the Russian soul and a strong contrast to other works which draw more closely on the French-influenced exploration of form and colour that initially appeared free of such existential angst.

In the exhibition’s final room, this sense of artists calling out to a spirituality held in check finally finds release in the differing abstractions of Kandinsky and Malevich. Kandinsky abstracts from the folk art and fairy tales that featured in the art of Goncharova and Chagall to create paintings such as Composition VII on which colour explodes along lines of spiritual force. Malevich, by contrast, pares his imagery and colour down to black on white, shape on background. He spoke of his Black Cross as an icon of the new time and hung it across the corners of a room in the space traditionally reserved for an icon in a home. His black shapes represent the weight and substance of humanity in the weightlessness and void of the universe.

In the exhibition’s catalogue Yevgenia Petrova writes, of Malevich, “the quest for one of the 20th century’s most innovative creators for new themes and a new artistic language had its source in the realm of his religious notions.” This sense that Modernism was fed, in part, by “religious notions” is one that is only recently beginning to be explored and acknowledged in exhibitions such as Piety and Pragmatism and now From Russia. In this exhibition, the phenomenon is dealt with as being a purely Russian characteristic despite the influence of the Nabi's and, in particular Maurice Denis, on the French art that was purchased by the two principal Russian collectors, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. The role of Denis and other Nabi's in developing a modern French sacred art is therefore overlooked and the opportunity to explore links between l'Art Sacré and Russian spirituality missed.

If one of the legacies of From Russia were to be a more widespread re-examination of the influence of spirituality on Modernism, then the impact of this exhibition could potentially equate to that which the legendary collections of French art assembled by Shchukin and Morozov, which form the heart of From Russia, had on the Russian art of their own day.

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Rachmaninoff Vespers - Rejoice, O Virgin.