Art: Painting behind the Curtain

Until the Communists came along, Russia used to import most of its ideas about art.

Wandering Byzantine craftsmen first brought “eikons” (images) into Russia, and set the stage for Russia’s golden age (the 15th Century) of religious painting. Peter the Great hired Europeans to teach portraiture and allegorical landscape to Russian serfs (who were sometimes flogged for failure to produce a flattering likeness in good taste), turned 18th and 19th Century Russian art into a brackish backwater of the West.

Even when turn-of-the-century artists tried to get the dramatic realism of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky into painting, none got much closer than Painter Ilya Repin’s stagy Ivan the Terrible and His Son (see cut).

But modern art owes a lot to Russia, and especially, in a backhanded way, to Lenin. In 1921 Lenin found time for a campaign—much like Hitler’s later one—of “organized indignation” against modernists in Russia, which drove the incorrigibles from the country. In exile they contributed to the main stream of European art history. Among them: expressionist Marc Chagall; the late abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky.

A newly published picture-history of Russian painting (Art of Russia, Philosophical Library; $6) brings the record up to date, including little known Soviet art —little known partly because it was painted behind the Iron Curtain, partly because it was rarely noteworthy. Obviously Stalin may not know much about art, but he knows very definitely what he doesn’t like. Stalin goes for the stiffly illustrational sort of painting that made the late Academician Isaac Brodsky a Kremlin favorite. Among Brodsky’s best tries:

Lenin in Smolny, an intensely photographic portrait in which the furniture is painted with precisely the same sharp, disquieting focus as the man (see cut).