A Slap in the Face! Futurists in Russia

The Estorick Collection is holding an important new exhibition on the interaction between the Russian Futurists and their Italian counterparts. The encounter between East and West was not entirely harmonious and even occasionally disruptive. In particular, Mikhail Larionov strongly opposed Marinetti's idea of setting up St Petersburg as a kind of outstation of his Italian movement. This exhibition is an important revision of many of the historical assumptions that have characterised Western narratives about the respective contributions of each side, their interaction and their differences.

The exhibition title derives from the title of the Russian Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (l912), which is itself itself bound in sackcloth. In Russia, there was a keen awareness, unlike Futurist interest from Italy, in Primitivism, the origins of language, and the study of the impact of "pure sound", which is sound stripped of any attached or accumulated meaning. There could be no equivalent in Italy of the Russian archetypal "Futurist peasant". This is not say that the Italian Futurists were not an influence upon the fermentation going on in St Petersburg.

The first sparking of Russian "Formalism" as such was a momentous event in l915, targeted primarily at the Symbolist idea that poetry lay in the images engendered without reference to any linguistic ideas. This was rather more rigorous than the ideas expounded by Marinetti in his first Futurist Manifesto, as published in Le Figaro, Paris, six years or so earlier. Indeed in 1914, Marinetti visited St Petersburg and had a hostile reception. Marinetti claimed that, "the Russians are false Futurists, who distort the true meaning of the great religion for the renewal of the world by means of Futurism." The great historian of The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922, the late Camilla Gray was in no doubt that "the name 'Futurism' is almost all that unites the Russian and Italian movements", although she admits that "Cubo-Futurism" is a happier term to describe this Russian Movement. Combining both painting and literature, it formed the basis of the Russian international centrality of ideas. It is true to say that the Russian leading figure, the poet Maiakovsky, as the late Pontus Hulten states, "modelled himself on Marinetti, becoming a great traveller, performer and public figure." By 1930, he had committed suicide, and Marinetti had burned himself out and was marginalised intellectually. So Marinetti was laughed at and ridiculed during his visit to St Petersburg in l914 and in some respects it could be said that he had been sprung. The Russian followers of Futurism were much more conscious of the determinacy of their convictions. The real link between Italy and Russia came through the latter's individual but formidable theatrical culture. Here was the core element which this carefully researched exhibition expounds so elegantly. The theatre culture, especially as centred on the brilliant Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, is summarised here by the Estorick's central message, "don't just look at the Italian paintings, but be aware of the role of music, or for that matter sculpture." But the exceptional composers of the time could centre on the Mariinsky. Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" (1913) was a dramatic synthesis of Futurist ideals. The costumes were also colourful and dramatic. In the show is one of the original costumes designed by the painter Nicolas Roerick. The exhibition re-emphasises how the Russian movement was underpinned by the strength and authenticity of the peasant culture, as in Mikhail Larionov's, "Spring", which became a defining image for Russian Futurists. In such a very different way, the Russians embedded Futurist concepts, against an atavistic drive for renewal rather than a romanticised adulation for machines as symbols of the future world. In Russia, the future, as Stravinsky showed, was inextricably linked cyclically to the past. In "Victory Over The Sun" (1913), produced by Mikhail Matyushin, Kruchenykh, and Malevich, the Futurists of St Petersburg performed an opera in which a team of budding astronauts attack the sun, no less, and so destroy it. From this very idea emerged the "Black Square" painting by Kazimir Malevich for the first time as the opera's backcloth - a world without sun, the antithesis of global warming, we might say today. In 1915 too there was a prevalent apocalyptic pessimism, in the throes of World War I. It was fittingly entitled, The Last Futurist Exhibition. With the coming of the Russian Revolution, despite Trotsky's support for the poets, many of whom he personally knew, the movement was split and many emigrated. It was left to Vladimir Tatlin to create their great monument, "Monument to the Third International" (l919-l920) a dramatic, spiralling structure, now world famous. Marinetti in l914 came too late to St Petersburg to experience the surge of Russian ideas, and too early for the connection between painting, opera and sculpture.

Futurist paintings from Italy are numerous, but their impact in Russia was slight. More attention was paid, and influence attributable, to Cubism from Paris. The Estorick exhibition is comprehensive enough to reveal the differences of approach, and explain how separate the two movements would remain. Just as in Italy the Romanticist adulation of the machine distorted the value and meaning of Futurist poetry, so in Russia the Formalists showed their difference from all that. There the ability of art to revitalise perception became evident again and again. Malevich's endorsement of intuition as such as most evident in his "Suprematist Construction" (l915-l916) recognised again the resurgence of colour, taking an avenue from Cubism towards a viable abstraction in painting.

The Estorick exhibition is comprehensive enough to do justice to the inherently serious convictions of the Russian movement, and yet to see past the apparently flippant approach of the Italian manifesto, the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting. This is not withstanding such masterworks as Luigi Russolo's "Music" (Estorick Collection, 1911) and Umberto Boccioni's famous "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space" (Tate Modern, l913). The Russians had found Marinetti, with his 'Poirot' moustache and exaggerated manners, a figure less than serious. This exhibition shows why.

Professor John Milner, Professor Emeritus in Art History at Newcastle University, is to be congratulated for the strength, range and perception demonstrated in creating this show, with the formidable network of contacts of the Estorick Collection. The exhibition moves to the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University, for the period 23 June-18 August 2007.

Michael Spens