The Museum of Tolerance spoke about the “Culture League”
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Jewish Vanguard in the Darkness
The focus of the exhibition “The Jewish Avant-Garde” at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, which includes works by Marc Chagall, Nathan Altman, David Shterenberg, El Lissitzky, Robert Falk and others, is a little-studied topic. It is dedicated to the phenomenon when Jewish artists, emerging from the shtetls into the big world after the abolition of the Pale of Settlement, first began researching their own roots and on their basis created a new Jewish art, and later this national artistic language merged (partially dissolving, while retaining its cultural code ) into the general, universal movement of the avant-garde. The short history of the Jewish association “Culture League”, created in Kyiv in 1918 and ending its existence in 1924, is located between two black abysses. The symbolism of the study was read by MK.
Despite the fact that the curators chose not to comment specifically on the architectural design of the exhibition, created by Evgeny Ass and Nadezhda Korbut, it is quite eloquent and, perhaps, is the core of the concept. At its center is a simulated reconstruction of a house in Moscow, where an exhibition of Nathan Altman, Marc Chagall and David Shterenberg was held in 1922. The exhibition was called “Kultur-League” – the same as the association founded by Jewish artists, writers, and directors in Kyiv in 1918. Inside the “reconstruction” there are bright walls on which works are presented that have great museum value and played their role in the history of art (however, the works of Marc Chagall are presented in projections: the originals, from the permanent exhibition of the Tretyakov Gallery, could not be obtained). On either side of it are two white halls, in the center of which are two black, like an abyss, ritual pools. More precisely, in these geometric podiums, covered with shiny paint, like oil, there is a hint of the mikvah, where, according to Jewish tradition, one should plunge in order to cleanse oneself of “impurity” (nida). But the metaphor, of course, is broader than a religious ritual and resembles a Suprematist work. At the same time, there is a connection with the historical context.
The fact is that before the revolution, Jews could only live in the Pale of Settlement, and they could leave the shtetl only with special permission. Marc Chagall, for example, received this, and the exhibition includes unique sketches for a sign for a trading store in the spirit of Pirosmani – round, almost popular print figures, an abundance of fruit, a table on which buns and bread are floating. He showed his work to a commission consisting of painters, and eventually was able to leave the place 40 km from Vitebsk – he went to study in St. Petersburg. It also tells about another native of the Vitebsk province – Semyon An-sky, who in the 1910s organized ethnographic expeditions to Jewish towns and collected a lot of material and exhibits that formed the basis of the Jewish Museum. It was opened in Petrograd in 1916. Items that can be found in this room could well be in that museum. For example, the central object – the top of the Aron Kodesh, decorated with an eagle in a crown, traditionally occupies an important place in the synagogue and must necessarily hang on the eastern wall facing Jerusalem. The semantic context of the presented materials is reflected in a quotation from an article by Abram Efros: “… finally this long-predetermined meeting of ours with folk (Jewish) art happened. A huge premonition of the approaching Renaissance grows inside us and fills our spiritual firmament. We are already intoxicated by the future.”
In this heady hope, the history of the “Culture League” was made, which from the Kyiv circle quickly spread to different cities and villages. In 1920, the State Jewish Theater moved from Petrograd to Moscow and received a building here in Bolshoy Chernyshevsky Lane (now Voznesensky Lane). The theater was patronized by the Moscow branch of the Culture League, organized in 1919. Abram Efros, who was on the theater board, recommended that director Alexei Granovsky invite Marc Chagall to work, which he did. During the year, the artist worked on the design of the first performance of the Jewish Theater in Moscow – “The Evening of Sholom Aleichem” – and on the panel “Introduction to the Jewish Theater”. Projections of these works occupy the central part of the exhibition in a conventional Jewish “house”. The compositions are built on geometry in the spirit of their avant-garde time, while the cosmic structure of the universe, as conceived by the Jews, is “hardwired” into them. In the two adjacent rooms there are the best works of Nathan Altman and David Shterenberg, where the same avant-garde geometry meets the Jewish context. They are presented on a bright yellow and orange background, which symbolizes the very rise that Efros spoke about.
But leaving the “house”, we again find ourselves among white walls and stare into the darkness of the conventional mikvah. Only in the final hall does a black wooden bust rise above the Suprematist abyss. There are many rare and famous works related to the Jewish Theater, created by members of the Kultur-League. There are, for example, the famous figures of El Lissitzky and little-known works of Alexander Tyshler – costume designs for the play “Shabtai Zvi” (a pseudo-messiah of the 17th century) based on the play by S. Asch and E. Zulawsky for the Jewish Theater (1922). The artist was only 24 at the time. But how powerful do pencil drawings look, made as if in one breath, in unconscious rage. In this expressive shading one can read a prediction of impending darkness. Very soon the Jews will again be persecuted, and all the artists of the Kultur-League will have to join the general ranks. Jewish art is assimilating, preserving some cultural codes that are understandable only to its own people. Some of the representatives of the “Culture League” will have to emigrate, others will take up socialist realism and hide their avant-garde experiences in order to avoid accusations of formalism.
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Jewish Vanguard in the Darkness
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