The Magical Chorus

With the blessing of the Bolsheviks, they did away with the old Academy of Arts in Petrograd and instituted Free State Art Studios—first in Petrograd and then in Moscow and other cities. Their goal was to attract the broad masses to art, preferably of the avant-garde kind. There were no exams or requirements for admission and students could invite anyone they wanted to teach.

An astonished realist painter described the situation: “In Tatlin’s studio, instead of easels, palettes, and brushes there were anvils, carpenter’s benches, a lathe, and corresponding tools. They built compositions out of various materials: wood, iron, mica, bast, combining them without giving thought to meaning. The works were incongruous but bold.”⁶ According to him, Tatlin would say, “Who needs anatomy, who needs perspective?”⁷

The walls of the Free Studio in Moscow (the former Stroganov School) were covered with Malevich’s slogans: “The downfall of the old world of art is in your hands,” “Let’s burn Raphael.” Raphaels were not burned, but valuable plaster casts that generations of young artists had used in their study of the craft were thrown out on Punin’s orders. A huge canvas by Mir Iskusstva artist Nikolai Roerich, The Taking of Kazan’, was removed from the storeroom of the Academy and cut up into pieces for students to use as they saw fit “in class work.”

At that moment, both the regime and the avant-garde gained by their symbiosis. Living conditions after the revolution had become much harsher, with destruction and hunger at a peak. The Bolsheviks tried to control the situation using the policies of “War Communism”: they nationalized industry, monopolized trade, and introduced a barter system of food parcels and coupons.

Serving the Soviet system gave the avant-garde artists not only a chance to survive but to promote their radical views in official media and to publish books, a great luxury in those days. Kandinsky managed to print his monograph “Steps: An Artist’s Text” under the aegis of the People’s Commissariat of Education in early 1919, when the catastrophic paper shortage (it was available only for Communist propaganda) and shrinking printing capacities had brought about the “cafe period” in literature: writers and poets unable to publish their works gave readings in various seedy, semi-underground establishments proudly dubbed “cafes.” This was how they earned their keep and managed to reach an audience.

The Soviet government was the dominant sponsor of culture. It gave Kandinsky, Malevich, Tatlin, and other recent outsiders the opportunity to head commissions that bought paintings for the new museums of contemporary art (the first of the kind in the world) and selected works for exhibitions that were now free both for participating artists and viewers. For the Soviet regime this was a way of warning off the sabotage of eminent traditionalists; in fact, the Bolsheviks used the energetic radicals as effective strike-breakers.

The avant-garde artists were also brought in to do propaganda for the new regime, and the most visible projects were statues of famous revolutionaries of the past (this was the personal pet idea of Lenin) and the decoration of cities for revolutionary holidays. The artist Natan Altman did the most radical work (which subsequently found its way into every anthology of avant-garde design): he remodeled the symbols of the tsarist regime in Petrograd—the Winter Palace and the square in front of it. In October 1918 the Winter Palace and the other buildings that made up the famous classical architectural ensemble were covered in gigantic propaganda panels depicting workers and peasants in a Futurist manner.

The tireless Punin urged the revolutionary designers to obliterate the historic buildings and monuments, not merely ornament them. “Blow up, destroy, and wipe the old artistic forms from the face of the earth—how could the new artist, the proletarian artist, the new man not dream of this?”⁸ In realizing Punin’s ideas as much as the cautious Bolsheviks would permit, Altman placed a tribune made up of red and orange sections in the center of the square by the Roman-style Alexander Column, creating a visual metaphor: the column was burning in revolutionary flames.

I’ll never forget Altman’s reply to my question in 1966: where did they find the apparently substantial funds needed to transform the Winter Palace, Hermitage, Admiralty and the many other palaces of the city in the lean year of 1918? “They weren’t stingy then,”⁹ the old artist replied enigmatically, the thin line of his Parisian mustache twisting in a smile.

One of the notable events in the celebration of the first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution was the premiere of Mystery Bouffe, a play by the twenty-five-year-old leader of literary Futurism, Mayakovsky. The actress Andreyeva, the politically involved wife of Maxim Gorky, had become a cultural big shot under the Bolsheviks. She gave the young poet the idea of writing a topical satirical review. On October 27, 1918, at 8 p.m., at the Petrograd apartment of his mistress Lili Brik, Mayakovsky gave the first reading of the play to an elite group that included Lunacharsky, Altman, Punin, Lourie, Levky Zheverzheyev, and most importantly, the director Vsevolod Meyerhold, at the time in charge of all theaters in Petrograd. (Mayakovsky had invited the poet Alexander Blok, but it was a rainy night and Blok did not go, writing in his notebook: “No will, no me.”)¹⁰

The tall and handsome Mayakovsky read impressively in his lush bass voice (Andreyeva believed he would make a brilliant actor). Mystery Bouffe—an avant-garde and ironic retelling of the story of the Flood and Noah’s Ark from the Old Testament, in which the flood becomes the metaphor for world revolution —made a profound impression on the audience and the very next day a delighted review by Lunacharsky appeared in the press, announcing that Meyerhold would stage a production as part of the anniversary celebrations. Malevich, who had proclaimed the triumph of Suprematism (a term he invented for his austere concept of abstract art) over “the ugliness of real forms” back in 1915, took on the design. He defined Suprematism as the “purely painterly art.”¹¹

For Malevich, Mayakovsky’s Futurist play looked too conservative. Later he would explain, “I perceived the staging as the frame of a painting and the actors as contrasting elements…the actors’ movements had to complement rhythmically the elements of the sets.”¹² Mayakovsky was trying to present an avant- garde propaganda play, but the visionary Malevich wanted more: “I considered it my task not to reproduce the existing reality but to craft a new reality.”¹³

No designs by Malevich for Mystery Bouffe, which was performed only twice, nor have any photographs of the performance survived. According to members of the audience, Malevich construed Hell as red and green “Gothic” stalactite caves; the devils’ costumes were in two halves, red and black. The Promised Land that the ark reaches at the end of the play looked like a large Suprematist canvas. The audience did not comprehend the scenic design, and Mayakovsky himself was not very pleased with Malevich’s work, as Zheverzheyev (who later became the father-in-law of George Balanchine, a great admirer of Mayakovsky) remembered.¹⁴

Mayakovsky was a jack-of-all-trades for the November 7 premiere: some of the actors, frightened by the play’s apparent blasphemy, skipped the performance, and the playwright had to appear as Methuselah and even as one of the devils (in a red and black leotard). The influential critic Andre Levinson, who later as an emigre in Paris berated both Diaghilev and Balanchine for their break with tradition, declared that Mayakovsky, Malevich, and Meyerhold “need to please the new master, which is why they are so crude and vehement.”¹⁵

Surprisingly thin-skinned, the ruffian Mayakovsky immediately demanded that Levinson be condemned “for filthy slander and insulting my revolutionary feelings.”¹⁶ Punin and other Futurists also denounced the hapless critic in the press for “covert sabotage.”

For Meyerhold, meeting Mayakovsky was a blessing; as the director recalled, “We immediately found a common ground in politics,