[The tind of St. Petersburg (1927) - film…]

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The tind of St. Petersburg (1927) - film by Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893-1953) GEORGE COSTAKIS fell in love with "modern" art soon after World War Two. Living in the Soviet Union, where he had worked as an embassy official, he began collecting the art that Stalinist officialdom had rejected.

Costakis collected what he loved and what he loved were the bold ventures of the Russian avant-garde, the suprematists, the productionists, the cubofuturists and the constructivists.

The October Revolution had an explosive effect on Russian art, but the revolution in art was not a product of the October insurrection, it was a constant accompaniment to the revolutionary strivings of the Russian masses and the intelligentsia that stood on their side. And like those revolutionary strivings, the changes in art grew both out of the Russian soil and in connection with similar developments elsewhere in Europe -above all in France.

The turmoil in Russian art ANDREW HORNUNG reviews the exhibition 'Art of the Avant-Garde' which has been on show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

the turn of the century was such that one painter, Alexander Benois, was able to write in 1902 that 'the whole art of our time is deprived of direction... it is uncoordinated, broken up into separate individuals." During the next decade and a half every major western art trend found its admirers and adapters in Russia.

The artists of Russia - the avant-garde, at least - were part of the same international trends responding to conditions which were international in their origins.

Trotsky explained the phenomenon in the following way: •The backward countries which were without any special degree of spiritual culture, reflected in their ideology the achievements of the advanced countries more brilliantly and strongly. In this way, German thought of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries reflected the economic achievements of England and the political achievements of France. In the same way, Futurism obtained its most brilliant expression, not in America and not in Germany, but in Italy and Russia."

Certainly Futurism became the most important of the avant-garde movements in Russian art - in the visual and the literary arts — in the years before 1917.

The Futurist works in the current exhibition show the same preoccupation with time, speed, muscular movement and simultaneity as the more familiar Italian works of Severini, Boccioni and Balla that are in a number of this country's permanent collections.

The fate of Russian Futurism was quite different from that of the more limited Italian movement. Again Trotsky: 'Futurism originated in an eddy of bourgeois art, and could not have originated otherwise. Its violent oppositional character does not contradict this in the least ... The seizure of power by the proletariat caught (Russian) Futurism still in the stage of being a persecuted group." It is this, according to Trotsky that saved Russian Futurism from the fate of its international co-thinkers who became linked with reaction, and some with fascism.

But to the blast of Futurism came the counterblast of Suprematism and Constructivism. The complex forms and rhythms of Futurism and other trends, like Rayonnism, sharing similar aesthetic were abolish-; ed. The representation of objects was abandoned. For