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Russia
Watching Russia and Britain behaving like a pair of squabbling schoolboys in
the weeks leading up to the arrival of From Russia at the Royal Academy may
have confirmed the impression that international diplomacy is a skill you
begin learning in the playground – “I’m going to kick out your British
Council representatives!”; “Yeah, well, I’m going to impound your
Matisses!”; “Yeah, well, how would you like some polonium210 in your tea?”.
But what it has not done is prepare us usefully for the thrust of the show,
which isn’t about Russia and Britain in any meaningful way, but exclusively
about Russia and France. And that is a completely different, and more
productive, relationship.
Wind back the European clock 150 years or so, to the date at which the
earliest pictures in the show were painted – by Corot and Daubigny – and you
have before you a cultural landscape in which Britain plays the tiniest of
roles and America no role at all. France and Russia, meanwhile, are cultural
giants standing on tiptoe and attempting to shake hands over the head of
their large common enemy: Germany. France isn’t just Europe’s cultural
superpower, it is the most fashionable country on the map, the world’s
style-setter and mode-maker. Even the Russian bear – big, bluff, boorish
beast that he is – feels his loins stirring at the delightful thought of
Mademoiselle France.
All this is worth trying to imagine in these old-style diplomatic terms,
because the fuss that has preceded the arrival of From Russia in London may
have led you to imagine that the show is merely a selection of masterpieces
that have been hidden away in tough-to-see Russian collections and are
finally being unveiled to a wider public in Britain. Certainly, that is one
of the things it is. But I liked it as much as I did not just because it
provides a chance to drool, at last, over Matisse’s The Dance – or Gauguin’s
astonishingly lovely Landscape with Peacocks, or all the Cézannes, or the
Picassos, or the Monets – but because it tries so hard to make some
genuinely useful observations about the artistic intercourse between Russia
and France. Another institution might have arranged the Matisses and
Gauguins in a fabulously desirable line and left it at that. But the
academy, under the indestructibly cussed Norman Rosenthal, seeks also to
understand a dramatic cultural exchange.
That is the good news. The bad news is that the French masterpieces therefore
wait their turn while some horrendous initial efforts are made to prepare us
for the Russianness of Russian art. The show opens cheekily with a mix of
pictures by a group of St Petersburg rebels who called themselves the
Wanderers, whose jingoistic aim was to revive their native tradition by
dispensing with foreign subject matter and concentrating exclusively on
Russian themes and sights. In some nearby countries (no names mentioned),
these kinds of ambitions led to fascism. In Russia, they led to silliness.
Thus, Ilya Repin paints Tolstoy as a biblically bearded woodland prophet,
standing barefoot in a forest, hands thrust gnomically into the waistband of
an angelic white smock, while Mikhail Nesterov comes up with an unusually
tremulous portrait of Ivan the Terrible’s son, whom he imagines as a
medieval tomb sculpture come to life, sporting a golden halo. It’s horrible
stuff: lightly and superficially progressive in its techniques, crudely
reactionary in its attitudes. The only appropriate response to Repin’s
Tolstoy is to giggle at his presumption. In exhibition-making terms,
however, these awkward opening salvos of Russianness are useful. First, they
make absolutely clear how much spiritual intensity was habitually
fuel-injected into Russian art. Second, they underline how far Russian art
needed to travel to become genuinely progressive. Third, they delay the
arrival of the French treats, thereby achieving what good foreplay always
achieves: the intensification of desire.
The show then moves on briskly to the real Russian heroes of the piece, a pair
of remarkable St Petersburg collectors called Sergei Shchukin and Ivan
Morozov, who altered the course of Russian art by collecting progressive
French painting on an industrial scale. So besotted was Shchukin by Matisse
that he commissioned The Dance to hang in the stairwell of his mansion,
alongside 36 other important Matisses, 50 Picassos, 16 Gauguins, four van
Goghs and a roomful of Cézannes. Morozov was the more conservative of the
two, but his Monets and Gauguins were particularly well chosen. And heaven
knows what might have happened to Russian progressiveness had Shchukin and
Morozov not come along.
The main rooms of the show are devoted to their purchases, and constitute some
of the most exciting displays ever to arrive at the academy. The Dance,
which is nearly 13ft long, dominates the central gallery; and, even though I
have seen it before, at the Hermitage, in St Petersburg, I was ambushed
again by the intensity of the reds Matisse has chosen for his daisy chain of
naked dancers. This is paint behaving like stained glass. The dancing
figures seem to glow from the inside like Hallowe’en pumpkins.
Joyous tone-setter though it is, The Dance strikes you as a dumber and simpler
painting than the real Matisse masterpiece in this room, his Harmony in Red,
a picture the Russians call The Red Room. It shows a maid arranging fruit on
a table in a room that has been invaded – taken over, possessed – by its
crimson wallpaper. Have you ever come across a field of poppies on a
summer’s day in France? That is the delirious red we are talking about.
It was Gauguin, celebrated nearby by a beautiful wall of his Tahitian
paintings, who slipped French colour off its leash. So spectacular are these
Matisses and Gauguins that they successfully diminish everything else in the
gallery, including an array of comparatively dour Picassos. And it must have
been a trick of the light, but The Dance, in this company, manages somehow
to feel like a Russian painting. The simplicity of its outlines, the
intensity of its colours, the folksiness of its subject matter, are
qualities that become common in the show ahead as it returns from its
fabulous French detour and resumes the weird business of charting the
progression of Russian progressiveness.
From Russia lurches forward, rather than glides, in a series of awkwardly big
steps, and the feeling persists that, having secured the loan of its
masterpieces, the organisers sat down and asked themselves: how can we make
a show out of them? A section devoted to Diaghilev and his circle looms up
abruptly and proves, should proof be needed, that Russian theatricality is
particularly OTT. I did, though, enjoy Leon Bakst’s portrait of Diaghilev
and his nanny, chiefly because of the glorious contrast noted here between
the dapper impresario, in Hercule Poirot mode, and the thoroughly
dishevelled babushka at the back, whose task it was to bring him up.
The first Russian experiments in cubism and fauvism – the two great
experimental isms that Shchukin and Morozov introduced into Russian art –
are surprisingly tame. And the inability to hit the right note that
characterised the output of the Wanderers affects the fledgling fauves and
cubists, too, resulting in more moments of ghastliness. A personal low for
me was a shared self-portrait by Ilya Mashkov and Pyotr Kon-chalovsky, in
which they strip down to their shorts and pose full length as a pair of
circus strongmen performing a musical duet for voice and violin. If
paintings made noises, this one would sound like a car crash.
Then, suddenly, the Russians find their way. One moment they can’t do fauvism
or cubism. The next they can. And, before you know it, they’ve left them
both behind. Art-history textbooks habitually insist that Natalia Goncharova
and Mikhail Larionov were the key transitional figures, and the two of them
can be seen here borrowing dollops of radical simplicity from Russian folk
art. But I found their paintings relatively conventional. The real
brilliance in the show’s transitional room comes from the young Chagall and,
especially, from Vladimir Tatlin, who went on to become the most radical of
Russia’s revolutionary futurists.
While the rooms with Matisse and Cézanne are the first high spots, the final
galleries, with Kandinsky, Tatlin and, above all, Malevich, are just as
impressive. Those of us who never expected to see The Dance in Britain were
doubly certain that the State Russian Museum would never part with
Malevich’s heroically simple Black Square and its famous partners in
sparseness, the Black Cross and Black Circle. Once Malevich had reduced art
to these beautiful basics, there was nowhere simpler to go. But the lovely
arrangement of the triptych at the show’s end succeeds also in presenting it
as a triumph of Russian spirituality: the same spiritual fierceness that had
disfigured Repin’s portrait of Tolstoy is now empowering Malevich’s
abstraction. And a particularly telling photograph of the artist on his
deathbed shows his paintings clearly taking the place of icons and
crucifixes on his wall. It’s an exceptionally touching ending to a
particularly exciting show.
From Russia is at the Royal Academy, W1, until April 18
