from the history of Soviet independent art

The exhibition “Group “13” opens at the Museum of Russian Impressionism. In the alleys of the era”: three hundred paintings, drawings and books from 17 museums and 13 private collections in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Russian regions will be shown. Curator Nadezhda Plungyan invites you to listen to the long echo of a group that existed for only three years, but left a deep mark on independent Soviet art.

Text: Anna Tolstova

“When you look at these Darans, Drevins, Mavrins, etc., you involuntarily ask the question: why does the Main Art Department provide funds for such art, why are these people still fed with Soviet bread?” – a review of the last exhibition of the group “13”, published in the magazine “For Proletarian Art” in June 1931, was not just the most scathing in the entire pogrom campaign – the author, between the lines, called for clearing the system of Soviet art education from “ardent Westernism and a formalist approach” (some members of the group taught, others were the fruits of VKhutemas education). Alexander Drevin (Drevinsha) was no longer fed Soviet bread in 1938 – he was shot at the Butovo training ground “for counter-revolutionary activities.” Drevinsky’s student Roman Semashkevich, also mentioned in the article, was shot a year earlier in the same place. The writer Yuri Yurkun, who participated in the “13” exhibitions as an amateur artist, was executed in 1938 in Leningrad – he was involved in the “writing case” and was shot along with Benedikt Livshits, Valentin Stenich and Wilhelm Sorgenfrey. Valentin Yustitsky was arrested in 1937; he spent the next 10 years in camps and died shortly after his release. Lev Zevin and Mikhail Nedbaylo died at the front. Zalman Lieberman and Cheslav Stefansky died in the early 1940s, still relatively young people—the persecution of the “formalists” did not contribute to Moscow’s longevity. “13” is also a widow’s group: Nadezhda Udaltsova, Drevin’s wife, managed to preserve her husband’s legacy – she signed his paintings with her name, saving them from confiscation; Olga Hildebrandt-Arbenina, Yurkun’s wife, hid some of the manuscripts and drawings during the search – she saved the drawings, the manuscripts left with friends were lost during the siege.

The group with the unfortunate name (based on the number of exhibitors at the first exhibition – later the composition changed, so that the circle of participants expanded to 20 people) arose in Moscow, but its core – Vladimir Milashevsky, Nikolai Kuzmin and Daniil Daran – was associated with the art schools of Saratov and St. Petersburg. Formally, “13” existed for only three years: from 1929 to 1931. We held two exhibitions, the first and the third (the second did not take place due to internal disagreements, but a catalog with a manifesto was printed for it). The first, the “exhibition of drawings” in 1929, was a success: critics praised it, and much was purchased by the same Glaviskusstvo. The third, the “exhibition of paintings” in 1931, was destroyed as “an attack by bourgeois artists.” The first success, especially among non-partisan critics and museum curators, was due to the fact that in “13” they saw a Moscow alternative to the then dominant Leningrad school of graphics: a sort of Baudelairean “artists of modern life”, outlining its elusive contours with a line that was brought up in the museum – both classical and modern art, both in the Hermitage and in the State Museum of Historical Art. They prepared for the first performance tactically competently: Milashevsky, a member of the most refined intellectual circles of Leningrad, a regular at Kuzmin tea parties, attracted members of the triple family of Mikhail Kuzmin – the self-taught geniuses Yurkun and Hildebrandt-Arbenina; to the artists whose youth remained in the Silver Age, they added the VKhutemas youth – classmates and younger comrades of Tatyana Mavrina, the wife of Nikolai Kuzmin and the first brush of the “13”. On the eve of the second, failed exhibition, the VKhutemas youth rebelled – a split occurred. Then they decided to strengthen the third, painting, at the expense of the old guard – they invited the heroes of the pre-war avant-garde: Drevin, Udaltsova, Antonina Sofronova, the “father of Russian futurism” David Burliuk himself sent works from America. Lunacharsky was invited to the third exhibition – he, apparently remembering his pre-revolutionary youth, when he was a fan of the Parisian school, that is, his tastes were quite similar to the “devil’s dozen,” approved and even recommended that museums purchase some of the works.

“They deliberately work for the Western consumer”, “continue reactionary traditions”, “mutilate and disfigure young people”, “play tricks” and “aestheticize”, “individualists”, “idealists” – whatever they were branded. Well, of course, idealists. Always talking about time, about plastic language adequate to the present time, about capturing the rhythm and color of time, directly according to the precepts of Stendhal, they – with their urban scenes, “nushies” and highly cultural retrospectivism in illustrations for the classics, with their late Fauvism and Westernism – they did not feel at all the spirit of the times of Soviet socialist construction. More precisely, stuffiness coming from all sides. Relying on Drevin and Burliuk, enlisting the support of Lunacharsky – in 1931, the ex-People’s Commissar was out of work and could not stop the persecution in the press. The “bourgeois formalists” tried to respond to the critics, but to no avail, the “13” did not speak out anymore, and soon the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks issued a resolution “On the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations” – all artistic groups and associations were dissolved. The further fate of many artists of the group with the unfortunate name is described above. Nevertheless, the “13” group continued to live – both as an informal friendly circle of aesthetes-intellectuals, connected to each other by family and comradeship ties, and as an aesthetic reference point in a terrain scorched by all ideological campaigns and political processes, as agents of influence of the “13-style” “Ti”, with which the guardsmen of the officialdom like Dementy Shmarinov continued to fight almost until perestroika.

Nadezhda Plungyan’s initial interest in the “13” artists, on whom she defended her dissertation 15 years ago, was, presumably, of a programmatic-feminist kind: throughout the 20th century, the “13” group, a typical example of the so-called “silent art,” considered a marginal and insignificant phenomenon, but the feminist position precisely consists of distrust of history, made up of “the greatest geniuses” and “big names.” Today, the experience of the “13” is relevant as a life strategy of “do what you must, and come what may” – their amazing resistance and ability to survive is indicated by the polemical subtitle of the exhibition “In the Lanes of the Era.” It’s not hard to guess that it plays on the name of the exhibition “Behind the façade of the era”, held two years ago at the Ildar Galeev Gallery: it was dedicated to the memory of art critic Olga Roitenberg, the pioneer of the artistic generation of the 1920–1930s, crushed by the fight against formalism and long forgotten. One of the main genres of the “13” in painting and graphics was a city landscape that could be called “alleyway”. Not in the sense that they glorified the alleys of the Arbat, although this happened, but in the fact that their landscape, no matter whether it was Zagorsk or Smolensk, was Moscow in spirit, subtly opposed to the landscape of the Leningrad school: everything is different here – the atmosphere, the density urban fabric, alley tightness of buildings, intensity of street life. They saw their task in catching the pulse or, as they said, the “tempo” of this modern life, the time here and now, achieving sketch speed and accuracy of reaction, when the line and spot, which do not tolerate any corrections, are a snapshot visual impression and internal lyrical experience. This was the realism of the “13” – completely inappropriate in times of the “struggle for realism” between various versions of the avant-garde and conservatism, the struggle for the sole right to determine what the true art of the proletarian era should be. But the subtitle speaks not only about the specifics of the Moscow landscape in the group’s work – the curator proposes to abandon the historical model, according to which this lost generation was crushed under the Stalinist façade so that there was no wet spot left: those of the “13” who physically survived Stalin’s terror , alleys and back streets, bypassing the squares for rallies and demonstrations, they left the zone of fear and muteness, moved on, preserved themselves. That is, the story of the group “13” is a tragedy, but still optimistic, as it should be in the Stalinist system of genres.

Partly, this bitter optimism is due to the fact that the core of the “13” group – Milashevsky, Daran, Kuzmin, Mavrina – not only survived, but also continued to work, mainly in book illustration: although the golden age of their cooperation with the Academia publishing house was short-lived, and at the time of the struggle against cosmopolitanism, they, the cosmopolitan Westerners, had to bite their tongues, but after Stalin’s death they came to life. The best cover for Ehrenburg’s “The Thaw,” a “co-author” edition of 1956, was drawn by Daran, the most tender lyricist among the “13.” The exhibition will feature many later works, which show that the core of the “13” managed to remain true to themselves even in the most difficult circumstances. For example, during the war years – military deprivations and military mobilization of artists: Milashevsky through the “Windows of TASS” will see the air of Paris, Mavrina, drawing propaganda posters, will begin to practice stylization of the primitive, fortunately the Russian popular print suited thematically, and Moscow, grayed and depopulated, will still preserve their watercolors have their own intimate, side-street spirit, devoid of any pathos and patriotic elation. Of course, not everyone was able to avoid official engagement. Boris Rybchenkov, a fantastically gifted participant in all three “13” exhibitions, will not withstand the persecution, will repent, become like everyone else, but in his old age, having almost gone blind in the early 1980s, he will suddenly write a wonderful series “Moscow of the Twenties” – he will return to his Vkhutemas youth. Nadezhda Kashina, who participated only in the first exhibition of “13”, went on creative trips to Uzbekistan twice and decided to stay there forever – she then got a lot of trouble, she was properly “worked”, so that in the 1940s and 1950s she linear meters produced canvases about grain growers and cotton growers in the style of triumphal jubilation, but during the thaw years she thawed and returned to that melodic Fauvism for which she was called to “13”. Many of the artists of the “13” were literary gifted: Milashevsky left wonderful memoirs, Mavrina left wonderful diaries. And Kashina wrote poetry – she took her soul away. Here’s from one of her poems from 1943: “… just love and lie nothing, / And my flowers will bloom.”

“Group “13”. In the alleys of the era”. Museum of Russian Impressionism, until June 2

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