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Modernism/modernity, Volume 17, Number 4, November 2010, pp.899-903 (Article)

P bl h d b J hn H p n n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/mod.2010.0027

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OUT OF THE ARCHIVE

Out of the Archive provides a regular forum for the publication of rare or little-known documents concerning the history of modernism and the avant-gardes. Its compass is global and its aim is to prompt critical reflection on how the past’s material remains shape present understandings.

modernism / modernity

volume seventeen,

number four,

pp 901–903. © 2011

the johns hopkins

university press

Introduction to Iakov Tugendkhol’d, “In the Iron Dead-end” (1915)

Elitza Dulguerova

During the 1910s and the 1920s, Iakov Aleksandrovich Tugendkhol’d (1882–1928) was one of the main connoisseurs and interpreters of modern Western art in Russia, and later in the Soviet Union. From 1902 to 1913, he lived in Munich and Paris, attended the studio of Alexej von Jawlensky and the Académie Ranson, became the Parisian correspondent for the literary and artistic journal Apollon, and published books on Puvis de Cha-vannes (1911), French art and its representatives (1913), and the Serge Shchukin collection of modern art. Upon his return to Russia, he reviewed attentively albeit often sceptically the contemporary Russian art scene, with a particular interest in the decorative and monumental values in Natalia Goncharova’s paintings,1 and an eager admiration for Marc Chagall that led to a monograph (1918).2 After the Bolshevik revolution, Tugendkhol’d was active as art critic and editor for Izvestiia and Krasnaia Niva, and as art history and heritage scholar at the Academy of Artistic Sciences and other state institutions. In 1925 he took part in the organisation of the Soviet section at the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris. In addition to a monograph on Alexandra Exter (Berlin, 1922), he continued publicizing modern Western art in books on Van Gogh (1919), Degas (1922), The First Museum of New Western Painting (1923, former Shchukin collection), and The Artistic Culture of the West (1928). Excerpts from Tugendkhol’d’s extensive writings have become available in English only very recently.3

The essay “In the Iron Dead-End” appeared in the summer of 1915 in the liberal literary and political monthly Severnye zapiski (Notes from the North) to which Tugendkhol’d had been con-

Elitza Dulguerova is

Assistant Professor at

the Université de Paris

I. She is completeing a

book on the utopian

stance in Russia avant-

garde exhibitions (Usag-

es et utopies. L’exposition

dans l’avant-garde russe

prérévolutionnaire,

forthcoming by Les

Presses de réel, Dijon)

and has edited a special

issue Exposer/Displaying

for the scholarly journal

Intermédialitiés (2010).

M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

902 tributing since 1913.4 While the general framework of the text is set by the First World War and its relation to Futurist aesthetics, its immediate topics originate in two 1915 events: the series of improvised and rather radical assemblage-based on-site interven-tions that disturbed the muscovite group exhibition The Year 1915;5 and the inclusion of several transrational (zaum’) poems by Alexey Kruchenykh together with a study of Vasily Kamensky’s “ferro-concrete” poetry6 in the new literary almanac Strelets [The Archer].7 Tugendkhol’d asserts his strong disagreement with the idiosyncrasy of the poems, as well as with the arbitrariness of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s, Mikhail Larionov’s, and—above all—Vladimir Tatlin’s post-Cubist constructions (and in doing so, provides the modern scholar of the history of exhibition practices with precious depictions of these ephemeral, little known yet significant actions).

The article sets forth an informed cross-cultural comparison between the develop-ment of modern art in Europe—since the impressionist dissolution of the pictorial unity via Cézanne’s quest of solidity up to the cubist investigation of shapes and volumes—, and the appropriation of these new trends in Russia.8 But its focus smoothly shifts away from the critique of the somewhat radical provincialism of Russian artists, to a discussion of the state of art and literature and their social functions. The object-like assemblages and futurist poems thus become symptoms of a crisis in the social relations between individuals. Hence the metaphor of the “iron dead-end” stands not merely for Tatlin’s constructions of everyday materials9 nor solely for Kamensky’s “ferro-concrete poems,” but for the loss of shared values in an eclectic urban society that evolves around indi-vidualism. In a similar way as the French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau had pleaded, two decades earlier, that emotions were the sole basis of a functional social network, and that the great mission of art and the artists was to affect emotionally their beholders in order to build and maintain a social space based on shared emotions,10 Tugendkhol’d mourns the loss of affect when confronting discrete modern artworks as the defeat of communication—and communion—between people. He finds an antidote to the dead-end of futurism in the figure of Aliosha, the youngest of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, whose innocence, piety, and love for the others he deems constituent of a “Russian soul.” Ultimately, the renewal of both art and the country seem to rely upon a conjunction of aesthetic, Christian, and national values grounded in the belief that artworks should lead to a quasi-transcendent experience; that art, like religion, should lead the viewer to salvation by engaging her feelings.11

Rather unknown today, Tugendkhol’d’s complex and ambiguous text is just as important in stance and position as Alexander Benois’s subsequent diatribe against Malevich and his Black Square as the “new icon” of suprematism.12 While in both cases art forms are conceived of as embodiment of values, “In the Iron Dead-End” offers a rare focus on assemblage-driven art practices13 and a hitherto neglected avant-garde exhibition. Both modern and conservative, it testifies to the overlap of artistic, moral, political, and religious issues within the context of early capitalism. I hope it can appeal to scholars interested in cultural transfers as well as in the history of beliefs prompted by art practices.

DULgUEROvA / introduction to iakov tugendkhol’d

903Notes1. On Tugendkhol’d’s reading of Goncharova’s work, particularly with regard to gender roles and

constructs of nationality, see Jane A. Sharp, Russian Modernism between East and West. Natal’ia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

2. The book was co-authored with the art critic Abram Efros. Tugendkhol’d’s chapter was first published in Apollon, no. 2 (1916): 11–21. English translation by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav in Marc Chagall on Art and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 176–204.

3. Excerpts from several texts ranging from 1910 to 1928 can be found in Ilia Dorontchenkov, ed., Russian and Soviet Views of Modern Western Art 1890s to Mid-1930s, trans. Charles Rougle (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009).

4. See his important analysis of the relation between art and nationality (prompted by Natalia Goncharova’s work): “Sovremennoe iskusstvo i narodnost’ [Contemporary Art and Nationality],” Severnye zapiski (Nov. 1913): 153–160.

5. The Year 1915 took place in Klavdiia Mikhailova’s Artistic Salon in Moscow from March 23 through April 23, 1915. Conceived by the artist and set designer Konstantin Kandaurov as a panorama of all artistic trends, it gained fame as a futurist event. The official exhibition listed 237 works by 28 artists but Tugendkhol’d’s essay focuses mainly on the participants hors catalogue, merely giving a mild mention to the members of the formerly provocative group The Knave of Diamonds (Il’ia Mashkov, Piotr Konchalovsky, Robert Fal’k).

6. Vasily Kamensky (1884–1961) was a poet, artist, and airplane pilot. In 1913–1914, together with Vladimir Mayakovsky and David Burliuk he toured seventeen Russian cities performing futurist poetry readings. He signed with the latter a protest letter against Marinetti during his visit to Russia (Feb. 1914). On Russian literary futurism, see: Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: a History [1968] (Washington: New Academia, 2006); Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, eds., Words in Revolution. Russian Futurist Manifestoes 1912–1928 [1988], (Washington: New Academia, 2005).

7. Andrey Shemshurin, “Zhelezobetonnaia poema [A ferro-concrete poem]”, in Aleksandr Belenson, ed., Strelets, no. 1 (1915): 165–170. The Archer published two more issues in 1916 and 1922; however the first one offered the most audacious encounter of Futurist and Symbolist poets and writers.

8. For an in-depth discussion of the negotiation of the relation between East and West in Russian modernism, see Jane A. Sharp, op. cit.

9. For a contemporary appraisal of Tatlin’s assemblage work, see Nikolai Punin’s 1921 study Tatlin (Against Cubism); excerpts translated in Larissa Zhadova, ed., Tatlin (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), 347–348, 389–392. For a recent discussion of the “materiological determination” in Tatlin’s work, see Maria Gough, “Faktura. The Making of Russian avant-garde”, RES, no. 36, (Autumn 1999): 32–59.

10. Jean-Marie Guyau, L’art au point de vue sociologique [1888], (Paris: Fayard, 2001). The first Russian translation appeared in Saint-Petersburg in 1891.

11. See Eric Michaud, La fin du salut par l’image (Nîmes, Jacqueline Chambon, 1992).12. Benois’s article was published six months later as a review of the Last Futurist Exhibition of

Paintings zero-ten (0.10) held in Petrograd in Dec. 1915–Jan. 1916. See his “Posledniaia futuristkaia vystavka [The Last Futurist Exhibition],” Reč’, no. 8 (Jan. 9, 1916): 3, and Jane A. Sharp, “The Critical Reception of the 0.10 Exhibition: Malevich and Benua”, The Great Utopia. The Russian and Soviet Avant-garde 1915–1932 (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1992), 38–52.

13. In comparison, Benois ignores the assemblage-based practices as non-art and focuses on painting (ibid.)