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Flying Goats and Black Squares, Charging Into the Future

NEW YORK — Big egos in small studios, high-pressure critiques and lowlife carousing: If you’re looking for creative drama, there’s nowhere quite like art school. Modern art is the product of trained students much more than of solitary geniuses, and whole chapters of art history were written in schools that became, sometimes just for a few years, epicenters of invention. It happened at the Bauhaus and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany, at Goldsmiths and the Glasgow School of Art in Britain, at Black Mountain College and CalArts in the United States — and, 100 years ago, in the bright first days after revolution, it happened at a short-lived art school in a provincial outpost of Russia. In its classrooms, far from the lights of Moscow and the raging civil war, professors and students got to work imagining art for the utopia to come.

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Jason Farago
, New York Times

NEW YORK — Big egos in small studios, high-pressure critiques and lowlife carousing: If you’re looking for creative drama, there’s nowhere quite like art school. Modern art is the product of trained students much more than of solitary geniuses, and whole chapters of art history were written in schools that became, sometimes just for a few years, epicenters of invention. It happened at the Bauhaus and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany, at Goldsmiths and the Glasgow School of Art in Britain, at Black Mountain College and CalArts in the United States — and, 100 years ago, in the bright first days after revolution, it happened at a short-lived art school in a provincial outpost of Russia. In its classrooms, far from the lights of Moscow and the raging civil war, professors and students got to work imagining art for the utopia to come.

“Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922,” a crisp and enlightening exhibition opening at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, reconstitutes the five years of instruction at the People’s Art School in Vitebsk, a small city west of Moscow in the republic of Belarus. The school was established by Marc Chagall in the excitement of the revolution, admitting its first class in 1919. But Chagall left after only a year, embittered by his students’ embrace of the bold abstract art of two other professors, Kasimir Malevich and El Lissitsky. A political chasm opened between Chagall's dreamlike, floating figures and Malevich’s red and black squares, and their students’ reactions spilled out of the school and onto the streets.

This show has been organized by Angela Lampe, a curator at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, where it appeared earlier this year at somewhat larger scale; Jewish Museum curator Claudia Nahson worked with Lampe to devise the New York version. Though its title puts three professors in the spotlight, “Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich” is really an exhibition about art education and the influence of schools. (Other recent standouts of this type include “Leap Before You Look,” an examination of the avant-garde Black Mountain College, at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art; and “Photographs Become Pictures,” a history of Düsseldorf’s fabled photography department, at Frankfurt’s Städel Museum.) At the Jewish Museum, these three teachers’ works hang alongside those of the Vitebsk academy’s sometimes gifted, sometimes derivative students, whose pamphlets, posters, drawings and watercolors offer an absorbing view of politics and pedagogy.

Chagall was born in 1887 outside Vitebsk, moved to Paris in the years before World War I, and returned to Russia as revolution took hold. We don’t think of him as a politically engaged artist, and this show includes familiar, color-saturated compositions of lovers by the waterside, revelers celebrating Purim, and goats and cows flying through the air. But Chagall was enraptured by the promise of communism — as you can see in “Onward, Onward” (1918), a rhapsodic painting on paper in which a jumping man in plaid trousers, his legs spanning the whole composition, bounds through a sky of brilliant blue into a glorious popular future. Look closely and you’ll see gridlines beneath the gouache; this work was enlarged to mural scale for Vitebsk’s celebration of the anniversary of the revolution, captured in a filmstrip projected here. Chagall, the city’s art commissar, was in charge of the decorations.

Chagall wanted Vitebsk to sponsor a new art academy with no student fees, and in early 1919 the city government requisitioned a banker’s mansion to host it. The People’s Art School would become the most important art school in Russia, at least for a few years, and its first students, many from working-class Jewish families in Vitebsk, studied under professors who had diverse, sometimes contradictory views of how art should serve the people. Chagall’s own teacher, figurative painter Yehuda Pen (also known as Yuri Pen), taught an introductory course; he is represented here by a proficient, conservative self-portrait and another of Chagall himself. Vera Ermolaeva, one of many women in the avant-garde of Russian art, was the school’s in-house Cubo-Futurist, and she also designed stage sets for operas and ballets. Unlike at the Bauhaus, where Walter Gropius would propound a single curriculum governed by a school manifesto, Chagall wanted the students at the People’s Art School to choose their own course of instruction. The students took him up on that liberty, and would soon give Chagall a revolutionary headache.

That spring, Chagall invited El Lissitsky, another native of Vitebsk and a former student of Yehuda Pen, to lead the graphic design workshop. Before that year, in Kiev, El Lissitsky was occupied mostly with illustrating Jewish books, but in 1919 he wholeheartedly embraced a Communist aesthetic, with new forms for a new society. Back in Vitebsk he produced abstract agitprop, like the classic poster “Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge,” or else a propaganda billboard for Vitebsk’s Committee to Combat Unemployment, whose bold graphics of circles and rectangles were light-years from Chagall’s soaring jumpers. The same new orientation came through in El Lissitsky’s Prouns: abstract compositions of floating geometric shapes whose name was an acronym for “project for the affirmation of the new.”

By year’s end, Lissitsky had invited another abstract artist to join him — Kasimir Malevich. Why did Malevich leave Moscow for a provincial town whose population was less than 100,000? He was starving in his unheated garret, and the offer of sustained employment far from the upheavals of the civil war would have been hard for him (and his pregnant wife) to refuse. Moreover, Malevich was turning away from painting by the late 1910s. He advocated for suprematism, with its simple geometric forms in solid red and black, in his 1919 essay “On New Systems in Art,” which Lissitsky’s students printed on the Vitebsk academy’s presses and circulated nationwide. And his lessons on abstract painting and spiritual and political regeneration became the academy’s hottest course.

The kids loved Malevich. They plastered the sides of Vitebsk’s buildings and streetcars with geometric forms, and started to wear black squares sewn on their jackets. They established a collective called Unovis, or “Affirmers of the New Art,” and designed posters, stage sets, and also practical materials for the revolution, such as a speaker’s rostrum in the form of a diagonal elevator, topped by a billboard shouting “PROLETARIANS.” Other professors, too, began to align their art with the new instructors, as this show proves through fascinating works by lesser-known artist David Yakerson, born in Vitebsk. We meet him in this show’s first gallery, where his illustrative watercolor of Red Guards marching past smoke stacks won Chagall’s approval as decoration for Vitebsk’s celebrations of 1918. But by 1920 he was painting watercolors of circles, squares and triangles gliding through seas of gray.

Poor Chagall, once so encouraging of pedagogical diversity, found himself sidelined at his own academy. He left for Moscow in 1920, where he made sarcastic stage designs that poked at the suprematist usurpers. (A composition for a drop curtain placed two floating blue circles alongside one of Chagall’s signature goats.) But Lissitsky and Malevich’s moment would fade quickly too. By 1922, the victorious Bolsheviks started meddling in the school’s affairs and funding dried up. Malevich left for Petersburg, Lissitsky for Berlin — and the Vitebsk academy quickly closed.

I saw this show in its initial presentation at the Pompidou, and although it looks great here in New York, it is smaller, for sensible reasons and frustrating ones. Sensible: Lampe has recalibrated the show as it migrated from the Pompidou’s unadorned spaces to the Jewish Museum’s Beaux-Arts mansion, and the elegant hang justifies a few abbreviations. Frustrating: thanks to a long-running restitution dispute, Russian state museums are prohibited from lending works of art to American exhibitions. (There are no such restrictions in Belarus, the last dictatorship in Europe, and this show includes little-seen works on paper from the small Vitebsk Regional Museum of Local History.) States put art to their own uses, and the Vitebsk students’ confidence in the social power of art looks unlikely to convince again. Still, not every art school needs goals as grand as nationwide revolution. Art school is also a place to dream together.

— Event info:
Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922, through Jan. 6 at the Jewish Museum, Manhattan; 212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org.

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