For Russian Artists in 1917, Art Was the Thing, Not Revolution

MOSCOW — On Feb. 27, 1917, the artist Boris Kustodiev looked out the window from his wheelchair onto a square in Petrograd (today St. Petersburg) and watched a group of celebrating revolutionaries passing by.

He committed the scene he witnessed to canvas, documenting an event of extraordinary moment — the first of two Russian revolutions in 1917 that would transform Russia and the world.

It was the sort of painting the Soviets would later display on anniversaries of the revolution, along with heroic canvases of Lenin atop an armored car and sailors marching through the streets with revolutionary placards. After the Soviet Union collapsed, those were replaced with anniversary themes like “art and revolution,” celebrating the convulsions of 1917 as nourishment for Russia’s great avant-garde art.

Yet, in the most important art exhibition in Moscow dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Kustodiev’s “27 February 1917” is one of very few paintings that have anything to do with the revolution. In fact, though he was entranced by the February revolution, which was left in the dust by the Bolsheviks’ tumultuous October upheaval later that year, Kustodiev’s work through the rest of 1917 consisted largely of the same colorful and joyful landscapes and portraits he did before.

He was not alone: Amid demonstrations, bread lines, suffering, hatred and chaos, painters of every genre and political leaning continued doing what they had been doing, whether to mark time or to provide escape.

As the artist Alexandre Benois wrote in a 1917 letter, “In the last days I have been so drawn into my work that external events and even ‘personal danger’ (almost) don’t touch me.”

That, suggest the organizers of “Nekto 1917” (roughly “Someone 1917”) in the sprawling Tretyakov Gallery annex by the Moscow River, was the reality of art in the eye of one of history’s epic storms.

The exhibition has been a revelation for Russians accustomed to ritualized anniversaries. At this juncture in Russian history, neither the state, nor the church, nor much of society has managed to come up with anything close to a unified interpretation of an event so brutally destructive and ruthlessly idealized.

With virtually no official commemorations, it has been left to museums and other cultural institutions to take on 1917.

The goal of the curators of “Nekto 1917” was to strip away layers of mythology, analysis and ideology lathered onto a broad sampling of paintings done in 1917, before the terrible consequences of revolution became evident and while the future did not yet seem fatally irreversible.

The range is extraordinary: The exhibition opens with Mikhail Nesterov’s giant painting of religious Russians, “The Heart of the People,” and continues through the idealized peasants of Zinaida Serebryakova and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, and the decidedly non-idealized peasants of Boris Grigoriev; the sumptuous aristocratic sitting rooms of Stanislav Zhukovsky; the brilliant scenes of Jewish life by Marc Chagall; and on through cityscapes, portraits, self-portraits and still lifes until we get to the avant-garde works of Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Lyubov Popova.

Yet even these latter artists, the standard-bearers of revolution in art, seem more concerned with what is happening in their movement than on the streets. Why?

They knew the world was crashing down about them, and this was their way of making sense of it, argues Zelfira Tregulova, the director of the Tretyakov Gallery.

The events of the moment were less important to artists than the desire to express their sense of it.

“For some it was the myth of the ‘narod,’ the people,” Ms. Tregulova said in one interview; “for others it was the utopia of the avant-garde; others sought to escape from reality by creating sensitive aesthetical works. Some recorded the reality of the city, setting it against the idyllic images of the countryside.”

But none of them were oblivious to the breakup of their world, and none would escape the revolution for long. A few would embrace the new order (Kustodiev went on to paint children’s books on Lenin); most would be co-opted, silenced or exiled.

Yet to understand what happened to them, and to Russia, it is first necessary to clear the past of myths and lies, to start from the beginning.

In a nation in which rulers have long written history to meet their needs, cleaning the art of 1917 of a century’s worth of ideological claptrap has proved to be a most appropriate way to commemorate a revolution.