Art: Soviets Abroad

“What I can’t understand,” muttered one London art critic last week, “is that here’s a nation that has just launched the first satellite, and yet they have sent us an exhibition 50 years old.” Said a gallery manager: “It’s like opening up the pages of an issue of Studio from the Edwardian era.” The occasion was the first exhibition of Soviet graphic art in London since the honeymoon days of World War II. After critics had a good look at the 130 works by 14 artists, picked by the Union of Artists of the U.S.S.R., the consensus was: considerable competence, little fire. “There is no hint here,” said the Times, “of a Bakst, a Chagall, or a Kandinsky.”

The clue, which most critics seized on, is that Soviet art still stands where Western European art was at the turn of the century. Hints have reached the outside that younger Moscow artists are painting clandestinely in the manner of Cezanne; some are even reported to be secretly painting abstractions. If so, no samples were shown at the current exhibition. Instead, there were conscientious sketches of oil derricks, streaking red jets, power lines, blast furnaces, and a young Soviet woman standing fast with a lantern by a railroad switch box.

Most respected figure is the grand old man of Soviet graphic art, Book Illustrator Vladimir (Boris Godunov, The Lay of the Host of Igor) Favorsky, 71, whose prints have a turn-of-the-century, storybook quality but whose draftsmanship rated a “jolly able, jolly competent” from one British artist. Most original works were by Leonid Soifertis, staffer on the Soviet humor magazine Krokodil, whose casual hand turns out cartoons that rate a Soviet belly laugh, e.g., a dig at infant prodigies that shows a child with huge bull fiddle, both of which have to be carried on the stage. These were rare high points. The show was best described by British Artist Paul Hogarth, who said: “This is pretty dull.”