Volume 31, Number 2 · February 16, 1984
The Old New Wave
By John E. Bowlt
Kandinsky: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil-Paintings Vol. 1, 1900–1915
by Hans K. Roethel, by Jean K. Benjamin
Cornell University Press, 558 pp., $135.00
Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde
by John Milner
Yale University Press, 252 pp., $29.95
Russian Constructivism
by Christina Lodder
Yale University Press, 328 pp., $40.00
In March 1915 the poet and painter Vasilii Kamensky asked the jury of a Petrograd exhibition to allow him to contribute a live mouse in a mousetrap, but the jury rejected his proposal, arguing that it would lower the standard of artistic taste.[1] Kamensky was a member of what is now known as the Russian avant-garde and his attitude expressed the very essence of these 'hooligans of the palette'[2] who wished to 'throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoi et al., overboard from the Ship of Modernity.'[3] The term 'Russian avant-garde' is now almost a household word thanks to numerous recent publications, exhibitions, and allied events culminating in the production of the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun (original libretto by Alexei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, music by Mikhail Matiushin, and designs by Kazimir Malevich) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last November. This was first staged in St. Petersburg in 1913.[4]
Review, 4323 words
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