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Painting
Revolution: Kandinsky, Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde
Portland
Art Museum,
1219
SW Park Ave., 226-2811.
Ends
Jan. 7, 2001
One
of Alexandra Exter's prize students was Boris Aronson, who
went on to change scenic design in America with work for
the Group Theater and his designs for The Crucible.
Aelita,
Queen of Mars plays at PAM's Whitsell Auditorium, 7
pm Thursday, Dec. 7.
"Our
life is a
theater piece,
in which non-objective feeling
is portrayed by objective imagery." --Kazimir Malevich
Popova
and Exter's contemporary Varvara Stepanova designed costumes
for Meyerhold.
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The Portland Art Museum's latest exhibition of Russian art,
Painting Revolution, is a tribute to the extraordinarily
fecund surge of visual innovation that seized Russia in the
early part of the last century. However, what's not evident
in this celebration of 2D radicalism is that two of the artists
included in the exhibition were also responsible for a revolution
in stage design that continues to provoke theater artists.
While most of the famous artists of the Russian avant-garde,
like Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, contributed to
the theater, the great innovators were to be found among
the movement's women. Paintings by Alexandra Exter and Liubov
Popova find a place in the PAM exhibition, but their greatest
contribution to Russia's artistic revolution came on the
stage.
The period between the popular uprisings of 1905 and the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917--the "years of reaction"--was
one of the most astonishingly fertile in the history of
Western art. Russian artists and writers infected by the
political radicalism around them became vectors of upheaval
in their own fields. Old ways and customs were trashed in
favor of experimentation and modernity in all the arts,
especially in the visual and theatrical. Even Stanislavsky's
landmark revolution in theatrical Realism fell under the
attack of those who demanded a new theater, forcing
the founding father of "the Method" to produce highly stylized
versions of Symbolist plays. Though the once-radical Stanislavsky
caved to the revolutionists, his Moscow Art Theater soon
lost its position as an innovator of stagecraft to two very
different radicals.
Vsevolod Meyerhold and Alexander Tairov violently rejected
Stanislavsky, seeking to create a synthetic theater that
combined the drive and movement of modern painting and dance.
But Meyerhold's approach became mechanistic, developing
a theory called Biomechanics where the actor became a well-trained
cog within the machinery of a production. Tairov, a ballet
enthusiast, saw the actor as a compositional component in
a work where drama, movement and design were all equals.
Both shared a desire to shift scenic design away from the
stage walls and onto the floor--in other words, to destroy
the scenic pictures that surrounded actors and create three-dimensional
worlds that actors inhabited. All they needed were designers
to realize their theories.
Though she's only represented by one still-life in the
PAM exhibition, Exter was one of the most important artists
in Russia's avant-garde. Her early travels to Paris quickly
made her a devotee of Cubism, and she became a conduit between
Russian artists and the febrile experimentation in Paris.
Exter also made friends with the Italian Futurists and managed
to fuse Cubism and Futurism into a potent hybrid of her
own. Tairov was an early admirer of Exter's Cubofuturistic
work, with its concern with color and space,
and invited her to submit designs for his production of
Innokenti Annensky's Famira Kifared in 1916. The
resulting design, including costumes and stage make-up,
was deemed "volcanic" by a contemporary critic.
Exter's design fully expressed the color, geometric and
spatial concerns of her painting, and her thoughts on "rhythmically
organized space" matched Tairov's balletic theory of performance
rhythm perfectly. Exter broke up playing areas within her
geometric set with a series of stairs and platform levels,
but, more importantly, she reinvented the raked, or inclined,
stage. Raking had been abandoned and forgotten after the
Baroque period, and it was Exter who reestablished the rake
as an important element in modern stage design. Her costumes
(elaborating on Malevich's ideas) also signaled a drastic
change, in that they served as an integral design feature.
One awe-struck British critic wrote, "In her costumes she
has an extraordinary capacity for preserving the flavor
of a place or an epoch in the midst of vigorous formal constructions."
In her next design for Tairov, Wilde's Salome (1917),
her experiment with form and color went further, creating
a set fashioned of dyed cloth hangs that rose and fell to
denote emotional transitions on stage.
In Paris in 1917, Gertrude Stein hailed Picasso's first
Cubist stage design for the Cocteau-Satie ballet Parade
as "revolutionary." But the revolution had been launched
in Moscow by Exter a year before. Interestingly, when the
Tairov/Exter Salome finally reached Paris in 1923,
Cocteau and Fernand Leger were overwhelmed by its power,
while Diaghilev went to watch each performance, viewing
every element "eagerly and jealously."
Exter's last Russian stage design, a production of Goleizovsky's
Satanic Ballet in 1922, was never realized. But her
design takes an interesting turn, as it includes hanging
platforms and cables. Had this mutation made it to the stage,
Exter would have been the leader of a second, quite different
revolution in stagecraft. As it is, her ideas presage the
constructivist installation Popova created for Meyerhold.
While Meyerhold was searching for a kindred designer to
interpret his theories, he discovered Popova's Constructivist
work at the 5x5=25 Exhibition in 1921 (Exter was
also a featured artist). Meyerhold was intrigued by the
non-representational quality of Popova's work, and invited
her to design his production of Crommelynck's The Magnanimous
Cuckold. Popova shared Meyerhold's belief that a set's
function was not to create an illusion of locale but to
create an entirely new way of interpreting stage space.
If Exter moved the stage from decoration to construction,
Popova mechanized it, taking the stage to the next
stage, banishing the traditional box structure along the
way.
Popova built a kinetic installation of flats, catwalks
and wheels topped by windmill blades that (like Exter's
cloth hangs) shifted with an actor's emotions. Though Popova's
fellow Constructivists placed her on a "comrade's trial"
for betraying the movement's principals by creating something
aesthetic rather than utilitarian and functional, this ground-breaking
revolt away from "the boards" still shocks today, in a way
that her paintings no longer can--a statement, perhaps,
on theater's undying conservatism.
Popova died young in 1924, the year that Exter went into
exile in France. Before leaving Russia, Exter managed to
synthesize her Cubofuturism with Popova's innovations in
designs for Yakov Protazanov's bizarre silent sci-fi film,
Aelita, Queen of Mars. She went on to teach theater
design at Leger's Academie d'Art Moderne, where she also
created some of the finest puppets of the last century:
stunning Cubist, kinetic sculptures that happen to be marionettes.
Kandinsky and Malevich are certainly revolutionary painters
to celebrate. But there were other revolutions happening,
too, and their reverberations echo still.
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