BWW Reviews: Shape, Color, and Bliss in RUSSIAN MODERNISM at the Neue Galerie

Though not the most challenging or provocative show in the recent history of the Neue Galerie, Russian Modernism: Cross-Currents of German and Russian Art is assuredly among the most colorful and the most endearing. The museum that recently brought forward the charged politics of Degenerate Art and the neuroses of Egon Schiele: Portraits has now sent forth a motley of stuttered forms and stark hues, the output of a small army of artists from Germany, Russia, and a little beyond. There are a few undisputed masters on display -- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Natalia Goncharova, Vasily Kandinsky -- along with a miscellany of lesser-known contributors to avant-garde movements such as the Russian "Jack of Diamonds" and "Donkey's Tail" and the German "Bru?cke" and "Blaue Reiter." It's an exhibition that starts with a cosmopolitan premise and a few underlying themes -- particularly the fascinations of primitive art -- but that ends up being best remembered for its bursts of brick red, lightbulb yellow, and china blue. On the basis of this show, what Russian and German artists had to do with each other appears less remarkable than what the Russians and the Germans produced artist-by-artist.

Striking in its own right, such a spectacle fulfills a quasi-spiritual need for a certain kind of art devotee. Last year, museum-goers got more than enough of the delirious joy of modernist painting, with Italian Futurism at the Guggenheim, Cubism at the Met, Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs at MoMA. The list could keep going, and anyone who loves art on canvas could certainly keep going to exhibitions of radical beauty like these -- just not now, with New York galleries heavy on multimedia and light on modernism of the most seminal mold.

With its focus on the period between 1907 and 1917 -- the heyday of international Cubism, the first days of true abstraction -- Russian Modernism will keep the somewhat more conservative, decidedly more canvas-bound of us going this summer. Yet that "us" is no small category: already, the Neue Galerie entrance lines snake down the block. For such visitors, the underlying ambitions and upfront satisfactions of the art on display -- much of it taken from the private collection of Petr Aven and the Galerie's permanent holdings -- can probably compensate for this exhibition's various shortcomings. There is a loose genre-based structure to the installation, but not much real hierarchy or movement. There are a lot of paintings that are striving and endearing but, finally, not all that remarkable. There is a looming sense -- the organizers? mine? everyone's? -- that the whole show should have been turned over to its half dozen most powerful artists, with an alcove or two for the lesser-knowns. All these complaints would carry more weight if any other museum, anywhere else in Manhattan, were thinking as hard about the modernist revolution right now. No other museum is, so take Russian Modernism for what it is: conscientious, imperfect, and finally indispensable.

In the years that the exhibition covers, avant-garde art was still solidly representational. The subdivisions that curator Konstantin Akinsha has given his 53 paintings and 21 works on paper -- Urban Scenes, Still Lifes, Landscapes, Nudes, Portraits -- are the firmest possible evidence of these leanings. Where the artists began to take leave of tradition was in the handling of paint and the treatment of figure -- heavy strokes, grotesque faces, collapsed perspectives. Unless you pore over Akinsha's catalog essay, though, you will probably have trouble slotting these styles, figures, and artists into a solid narrative. You will remember, instead, turns of expression that arrest, pique, and sometimes entertain: Mikhail Larionov's Self-Portrait, with its terra cotta colors and woodblock style; Peter Konchalovsky's The Lover of Bullfights, with its mulberry-faced, cartoon-in-repose subject; and nudes from Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rotluff, yellow-skinned, tough-contoured, and oddly serene.

Would such encounters be possible in an exhibition that were more an orderly progression from artistic movement to artistic movement and less a crush of blushes and glances, bodies and buildings? Probably not, as I see it. Because of its magpie presentation, Russian Modernism has some of the romance of a 1907-1917 Paris art dealership: I kept imagining that Gertrude Stein or Ambroise Vollard, wondering what those folks from Moscow and Berlin have been up to, would put in an appearance. (Alas, wrong century, wrong continent.) But even if some of that romance dissipates, the fact that you are securely in the Neue Galerie, seeing some though not all of what the Neue Galerie does best, still has its attractions. Prime among those is the fact that this is one of -- no, the -- best place in New York to see Kandinsky. Three street-and-landscape canvases representing Murnau and its environs show the Russian master in command of one of this show's most original styles. Unlike the jagged urban scenes of German Expressionism, these Kandinsky vistas are lovingly shaped from pats and billows of paint. Always the cosmopolitan gentleman, he could also have a gentle touch.

Curiously enough, it's Kandinsky -- not that big group of lesser-knowns -- who winds up in an alcove. The historic endpoint of Russian Modernism is the rise of non-figurative art, a development that the organizers identify with Kandinsky and Vladimir Malevich. A smattering of drawings, watercolors, and small canvases from these two is on display in a narrow, black-painted room -- this show's epilogue, not its climax. For an artist as sensual as Kandinsky, the increasingly liberated shape and color of works like Black Form (1923) was a natural next step; for an artist with as little real knack for figuration as Malevich, the fundamentality of works like The Black Trapezoid (1917) was the only real outlet. And these were not the only changes. Within a few years of 1917, new cross-currents in German and Russian art -- Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and more -- would sweep through Europe. New ideas, new connections -- but the same celebration of form and effect that is everywhere in this show.

To post a comment, you must register and login.