Building a revolution

The curly tower in the Royal Academy’s forecourt is a model of something that was supposed to be 400 metres high. At about 30 feet, this is a reconstruction of a design by artist Vladimir Tatlin, commissioned straight after the Russian revolution to be erected in Petrograd (as St Petersburg then was).

It was never built. The RA’s model announces what might seem, alongside Degas’s ballet dancers (gleaming in the main gallery until December 11th), a rather dour, dead-end show, but I think it’s the most revelatory exhibition on in London at the moment.

“Building the Revolution” aims to display, mainly through photographs, both contemporaneous and recent, the utopian architecture of the first years of the Soviet Union.

Here, in crinkly old photos, are a water tower, a dam, blocks of flats, a sanitorium, factories. The architects and artists who made them were fired up by Lenin’s grisly experiment in social engineering, the 1917 revolution which gave way to mass murder by the end of the 1920s under Stalin. Richard Pare’s gorgeous, wide-angled prints of the structures as they look now, including Lenin’s Napoleon-gone-mad mausoleum in Moscow, depict vividly the Corbusier-like brick-and-steel legacy of the revolutionary vision.

But above all it’s the art of the period that I want to shout about. “The streets shall be our brushes, the squares our palettes,” Vladimir Mayakovsky proclaimed in 1917. The great poet of the revolution was heralding a decade and more of extraordinary pictorial activity, by turns imagistically inventive and geometrically concise, and often politically motivated—while feeding off cubism and anticipating surrealism.

The artists were as important as Braque, Klee and Mondrian. Together, El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Kazimir Malevich—they’re all here in the Sackler wing—were the fearless, chemical magi of constructivism. They believed profoundly in an art that would map the new world left after the convulsive storms of 1917.

They saw and hoped for order, logic and rationalism, and aspired to the limitless improvement of the human condition through technology. The Soviet Union did not bring these, excepting some technological advances. By the 1930s, art, especially abstract art, had been destroyed by communism. Millions began to be killed. Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy had fled west, and thrived.

The main constructivists vanished not into the Gulag but into obscurity and illness. Their exquisite legacy can be sampled here in, for example, a litho and three drawings with gouache from 1919 to 1921, by El Lissitzky. Their miniaturist draughtsmanship and mathematical neatness are almost painfully beautiful. “Sketch for Proun 6B,” a circle containing a collision of shapes which can be hung at any rotation, and which could be an eye or a Borgesian labyrinth, is alone worth a trip to the show.

So are the dynamic, full-hearted abstract oils by the short-lived and unsung Liubov Popova—a female Kandinsky with political fire and social concerns. Completely stunning is a canvas by the similarly unsung Solomon Nikritin. His “The Connection of Painting to Architecture” (1919-21) is a serene, vertical oblong which fuses blacks, dark blues and reds to make a notionally static structure, but which is in fact a human figure.

I could stand in front of it for an hour. I could stick around in this exhibition all morning, then do it all again the next day. Don’t miss it.

"Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935" runs at the Royal Academy from 29th October 2011 to 22nd January 2012