Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969) : an avant-garde for the proletariat

II. The Emancipation of Painting from Literariness and Illusionism

The French impressionists were the first revolutionaries in painting, liberating it 

from the paralyzing paths of naturalistic trends and pointing it in new directions. 

They were the first to give pre-eminence to work on form, among the artist’s skills. 

At the same time, their work was directed towards freeing painting from a content 

that was dependent upon ideology or subject matter, and from the “literary story” 

which usually prevailed over form in traditional canvases. For modern painters, 

the nature morte, which, as a subject, is devoid of this “literariness,” replaced the 

complex ideology of the classicists and the alluring anecdote of the naturalists. 

One might say that the focus on painterly content in a canvas was in inverse pro-

portion to the presence of subject matter.

This trend is not only characteristic of the visual arts, but it is also true for other 

forms of contemporary artistic creativity. Hence poetry, moving from the word as 

meaning to the word as sound, has replaced ideology and mood with an empha-

sis on the external structure of the poem, beginning first with symbolism, then fu-

turism, acmeism and imaginism. The theater has abandoned attempts at realistic 

and psychological interpretations of real life and concentrates its experiments on 

the formal laws of the stage. Music, which has essentially never been completely 

enthralled to naturalism or the dominance of subject matter (a program) goes 

further in exploring the laws of rhythm and composition.

But the formal tasks, henceforth undertaken by art, were only partially intended 

to liberate the work of art from subject matter. They were directed towards the 

purely professional exploration of the material elements integral to the forms of 

every artistic genre, in which the contemporary artist saw the incontestable basis 

for the work of art, subject to creative organization. As well as the gradual disap-

pearance of subject matter and all those attendant elements in painting, which 

do not arise from the material structure of the work of art, the painter’s struggle 

against every kind of illusionistic element in the construction of planar forms was 

already clearly manifest. Even during the flowering of impressionism, which was 

an essentially illusionistic trend, a reaction against it formed within its central core 

in the person of Cézanne, who gave more importance to color than to the illusion-

ism of light, which was the basic aim of impressionism. And from Cézanne on-

wards, the painter begins to focus his attention on the material and real structure 

of the canvas, i.e., on color, texture, construction and the material itself. 

And so illusionistic elements such as light, perspective, movement and space 

begin to disappear, or are treated in a completely new way in the canvases of 

contemporary young artists, who have decisively broken away from naturalistic, 

symbolic, eclectic and similar trends, and who are working primarily on the pro-

fessional and technical aspects of painting. Hence, for example, the problem of 

space, which in naturalistic painting the artist solved by means of illusionistic per-

spective and light, for the modern artist leads to material and real problems of 

color, line, composition and volume, which are not resolved in an illusionistic way 

but by means of the planar structuring of the surfaces of large and small bodies. 

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III. The Path to Realism 

Having moved from illusionistic representation towards realistic constructive-

ness, and gradually liberating itself from all external elements, not conditioned 

by the distinctive qualities of the plane as a point of departure for the form of 

a painterly object, Russian painting has gone through a whole series of stages, 

which have been entirely original and often completely independent of Western 

European influences. Passing quickly from Cézanne to figurative cubism,

1

 Russian 

painting split into a number of trends, united by a common direction. Among 

these, non-objective cubism,

2

 suprematism

3

 and constructivism

4

 should be men-

tioned. The basic stimulus for the creative aspirations of these trends was realism, 

which in the period of an upsurge in creative life has always been a healthy core, 

fertilizing the life of art, which has been littered with eclectic tendencies. 

I am using the concept of “realism” in its widest sense and do not identify it in any 

way with naturalism, which is one of the forms of realism, and the most primitive 

and naive in its expression at that. Contemporary aesthetic thinking has trans-

ferred the idea of realism from the subject to the form of a work of art. Hence-

forth, the aim of realistic aspirations was not to copy reality (as it had been for 

the naturalists), but, on the contrary, actual reality in any aspect ceased to be the 

stimulus for creative work. In the forms of his art, the artist creates its actuality, 

and for him, realism is the creation of a genuine object, which is self-contained in 

form and content, an object that does not reproduce the objects of the real world, 

but is constructed by the artist from beginning to end, outside any projected lines 

extending towards it from reality.

5

 If we look at the works of contemporary non-

objective artists

6

 from the point of view of this genuine realism, then we will see 

that in form and material they are just as remote from utilitarian objects as are the 

works of traditional art. In these, the materials (the pigments) and the form (the 

two-dimensional plane of the canvas) inevitably create convention and artificiality 

i.e., not authenticity, but merely projections of the forms of a work of art. There-

fore, the painter’s move from the plane of the canvas to the counter-relief was 

quite logically based on the search for realistic forms in art.

IV. Leaving the Plane

The artist abandons the brush and palette of artificial colors and begins to work 

with genuine materials (glass, wood and metal). As far as I know, the counter-relief 

as an artistic form first appeared in Russian art. Although Braque and Picasso 

were the first to use labels, papers and letters, as well as sawdust and plaster, 

etc., as a means of varying texture and intensifying its expressivity, Tatlin went 

further and created his counter reliefs from genuine materials. But, even in the 

counter reliefs, the artist was not free from conventional form or the artificiality 

of composition. In the corner counter reliefs, which like painting can also only be 

viewed from one position, i.e., frontally, the composition is basically structured 

according to the same principles as it would be on the plane of the canvas. In 

this way, the problem of space is not really solved, because the forms in it are not 

three-dimensional in volume.

The next stage in the evolution of artistic forms, in this general direction, was 

the central counter relief, which was also created by Tatlin, and which broke not 

only with the plane, but also with the wall to which the corner counter relief had 

been attached. Works of this type include the spatially constructive works by the 

OBMOKhU [Society of Young Artists],

7

 the volumetric, non-planar constructions 

of Rodchenko and the “spatial paintings” of Miturich. The term “spatial painting” 

can hardly be called apt or descriptive; I would have rather called it “volumetric,” 

because a painting on a flat surface is as spatial as any other form.

If traditional visual art was sharply diff erentiated into three typical forms—paint-

ing, sculpture and architecture—then in the central counter relief, volumetric con-

structions and “spatial paintings,” we have an attempt to synthesize these forms. 

In these works, the artist combines the architectonics of the construction of ma-

terial masses (architecture) with the volumetric constructiveness of these masses 

(sculpture) and their color, textural and compositional expressivity (painting). In 

these constructions, it seems as though the artist considered himself completely 

liberated from the illusionism of representation, because he is not reproducing 

reality, but aff irming the object as a completely self-contained value. In the spatial 

and volumetric constructions, the artist, working with wood, iron, glass, etc., is 

dealing with genuine and not artificial materials. In these, the problem of space is 

given a three-dimensional construction and consequently a real, and not a con-

ventional, solution as on the two-dimensional plane. In a word, in its forms, as in 

its construction and material, the artist creates a genuinely real object. 

V. The Crisis of Pure Form

But here the most bitter disillusionment and the most hopeless dead-end awaited 

the artist, and that fatal word for modern art, “crisis,” has never perhaps sounded 

as tragically as it does now. If a contemporary aesthetic consciousness is pro-

foundly dissatisfied with naturalism and its anecdotes in paint, impressionism 

with its attempts to create the illusion of an airy atmosphere, light and shade us-

ing color, futurism with its fruitless striving, a 

contradictio in adjecto, to convey a 

cinematic impression of life’s dynamic forms on the static canvas, then no more 

satisfying for that consciousness are the suprematists with their impenetrable 

black square on a white ground,

8

 the non-figurative texturists with their endless 

laboratory experiments on the surface of the canvas, the constructivists naively 

imitating technical constructions without that utilitarian eff iciency that justifies 

them, and finally all those working on materials for the sake of the material itself, 

creating aimless forms divorced from a life of creativity. Contemporary art, in its 

extreme “leftist” manifestation, has reached an impasse from which there is no 

way out. The artist working on “pure” form, and on form alone, has ultimately de-

prived his creation of all meaning, because an unadorned empty form can never 

satisfy us, who are always looking for a content in it. A work created by a tradi-

tional artist had its meaning in its aesthetic eff ect, on which its author relied. A 

construction made by a contemporary artist has lost this final meaning because 

the “aesthetic” was consciously banished, from the very first step that determined 

the path of the new art. 

VI. The Contradictions of Constructivism

Shunning aesthetics, the constructivists had to adopt a new aim, which logically 

arose from the very idea of constructivism, i.e., a utilitarian aim. By construction 

we normally understand a specific type of structure having some sort of utilitarian 

character, deprived of which it loses its meaning.

But consciously ignoring their identity as painters, the Russian constructivists de-

clared their approach to be “against art” in its usual museum form and entered 

into a collaboration with technology, engineering and industry, without, however, 

possessing any specialist knowledge for this and remaining artists par excellence 

in all their essential characteristics. Hence the idea of constructivism took the 

form of imitating technical and engineering structures, which was dilettante and 

naive, infused with our age’s exaggeratedly pious attitude towards industrialism. 

These types of construction should never have been called models, because they 

do not represent projects for buildings—they are merely self-contained objects, 

to which only artistic criteria can be applied. Their creators are quintessentially 

“aesthetes” and champions of “pure” art, however fastidiously they wriggle away 

from such epithets.

Talking of constructivism, in this instance I am referring to constructions that are 

made from materials and are three-dimensional in volume. The planar realization 

of constructivist ideas took an even more absurd form. Fighting against represen-

tation, the constructivists remained figurative artists to a far greater degree, for 

example, than their predecessors—the suprematists—because their structure of 

a construction on the plane of the canvas was nothing other than the representa-

tion of a constructive system or a building that could actually be built. Every paint-

erly form is essentially figurative, whether it is objective as it is for the naturalists 

and the impressionists, or non-objective, as it is for the cubists and futurists. Con-

sequently, when we draw a decisive distinction between “old” and “new” art, it is 

not representation that is the defining feature, but the non-objectivity or objectiv-

ity of this representation. In this respect, the suprematists, who mainly posed and 

solved problems of color, moved further away from representation than all the 

other artistic movements, because the basic element with which they were work-

ing—color—by itself is not enclosed in any representational form and, like sound, 

is formless. The structures of sound and color (light) have much in common.

VII. The Last Picture

And so the constructivists, working with the surface plane, despite their inten-

tions, aff irmed the representational, of which their constructions were an ele-

ment. And when the artist really wanted to abandon representation, he achieved 

this only at the cost of destroying painting and himself as a painter. I am referring 

to the canvas that Rodchenko off ered to the attention of an astonished public 

at one of this season’s exhibitions.

9

 This was a smallish, almost square canvas, 

painted entirely in a single red color. This canvas is extremely significant for the 

evolution of artistic forms, which art has eff ected during the past ten years. It is 

not a stage that can be followed by new ones, but represents the last and final 

step in a long journey, the last word, after which painting must become silent, the 

Fundación Juan March

last “picture” made by an artist. This canvas eloquently demonstrates that paint-

ing as a figurative art—which it has always been—is obsolete. If Malevich’s black 

square on a white ground, despite the poverty of its artistic meaning, contained 

some painterly idea, which the author called “economy” and the “fifth dimen-

sion,”

10

 then Rodchenko’s canvas, which is devoid of any content, is a meaning-

less, dumb and blind wall.

11

 Nevertheless, as a link in the chain of development, 

and considered not as a self-contained value (which it isn’t) but as a stage in art’s 

evolution, it is historically significant and “heralds a new era.” 

This, once again, is confirmation that historical importance is usually given to 

works that at the same time do not possess any great “specific weight” artistically. 

Yet it is precisely on these that art historians base their conclusions. An objection, 

which could be raised by a zealous adherent of historical chronology (for which 

art historians have a weakness), is that Malevich had exhibited a similar canvas 

several years before. I do not, however, consider this relevant to my argument, 

because my task is not to determine the historical and chronological landmarks 

of Russian art, but to establish the theoretical foundation of a logically unfolding 

process. Even if Malevich’s canvas is an earlier work chronologically, Rodchenko’s 

similar canvas is logically more symptomatic and historically more opportune. 

The Tretyakov Gallery, which jealously takes care that there should be no gaps in 

the historical course of painterly trends displayed on its walls, must definitely ac-

quire this canvas. And it will acquire it (or a similar work—this is not so important), 

when “through the pressure of events” art critics come to see it as occupying a 

specific place in the “‘historical perspective.” Similarly, “with time” (when they 

were recognized by the newspapers), the gallery acquired canvases by Larionov, 

Tatlin and others, about whom “at the time” they did not want to hear, consider-

ing these canvases to be “profanations” of art. Suff ering from a sight disability in 

their approach to art, which could be described as “historicism,” these eclectics 

in charge of the gallery (and those who aren’t) are completely unable to reach any 

understanding of the phenomena of current artistic life and its immediate eff ect. 

They only begin to see, although even then not very clearly, when an unambigu-

ous “touch of time,” “a patina,” appears on the work of art (it is not by chance that 

the eclectics so adore green mould). The “historical perspective” and a, more or 

less, prolonged period of time are the invariable accompaniments to their aes-

thetic appreciation and “recognition.” 

This example of Rodchenko’s canvas convinces us that painting was, and remains, 

a representational art, and that it cannot escape from the limits of the representa-

tional. In traditional art, the representation was its content. When painting ceased 

to be representational, it lost its inner meaning. Laboratory work on naked form 

has enclosed art in a narrow circle, halted its progress and caused it to become 

impoverished.

VIII. The Painterly Meaning of the Concept of Construction

But in planar and spatial-volumetric painting, the idea of constructivism found 

a solution, which arose from the precise meaning of the very idea, understood 

not technically, but in a painterly way, as it has to be understood in painting. The 

painter could only borrow the general structure of the concept from technology, 

and not all its elements by any means. The concept of construction in painting 

consists of entirely diff erent elements than the same concept in technology. By 

the general concept of construction, independent of its form and purpose, we 

mean the whole complex of elements that are united into a single entity by a cer-

tain kind of principle, and which, in its unity represents a system. When applying 

this general definition to painting, we should consider the elements of a painterly 

construction to be the material and real elements of the canvas, i.e., the pigments 

or other material, the surface texture, the structure of the color, the technique 

used for working the material, etc., united by the composition (the principle) and, 

as a whole, forming the work of art (the system).

Clearly, these elements are not dependent on the representational aspect of the 

work of art, but constitute a category sui generis, inherent in the artistic object, 

as the product of a specific kind of professional skill.

The problem of constructivism as a purely painterly concept was first explored 

consciously by Cézanne in his works. Before Cézanne, this idea only existed in a, 

so to speak, potential state in the painter’s consciousness. But we are now discov-

ering it even in old art. A prophetic master in many respects, in this instance, as in 

many others, he anticipated an idea, which he realized empirically and sowed the 

seed for the future. In Cézanne’s canvases, we see the well-knit surface, the paint 

applied with a firm hand, the beautifully worked texture, the strict structuring of 

the colored whole, the absence of dilettantism, and, on the contrary, the highest 

professional skill, behind which we perceive a substantial culture. All these fac-

tors provide grounds for considering his canvases to be painterly and construc-

tive, i.e., they are well structured from the point of view of the organization of the 

material elements within them.

From this point of view, in old Russian painting, I find several constructively made 

works by Levitskii and Antropov, and perceive a complete lack of constructive-

ness in the canvases of both Russian and French impressionists.

In their textured canvases, the Russian cubists, suprematists, objectivists and 

constructivists, whom I have already mentioned, worked with the same elements 

that I have included as the constituents of painterly construction. Consequent-

ly, they worked, and worked a lot, on the constructive aspect of painting, in the 

sense in which I have tried to clarify this concept. Their work on the professional 

and technical aspect of painting represents the great service that Russian artists 

have rendered to art. We can confidently assert that in stating and solving many 

artistic problems, we have, with our purely professional approach, outstripped 

Western European art, in both theory and practice.

One only needs to mention the influence that the Russian painters Kandinsky and 

Chagall are exerting in Germany, in order to understand how far removed German 

artistic circles still are from those tasks that Russian avant-garde art has been 

confronting for a long time. For us, avant-garde Russian artists and critics, the 

interest shown in painters whom we consider at best to be “literary” in painting, 

in whom we do not recognize any value, and who we do not regard as masters, is 

completely incomprehensible. Without exaggeration, one can say that at present 

the young Russian art of the non-objectivist is not “lagging behind” the West, but, 

on the contrary, represents the progressive element in European artistic culture. 

IX. The Social Basis of the Crisis of Art

But the problem of the crisis of art, which I have presented in this essay, does not 

reside only in this professional and narrowly technical and painterly aspect of the 

question. It embraces broader issues and has roots, which are not only formal in 

character but also ideological and social.

Abstracted from all content, “pure” form, around which art has evolved during 

the past decade, has finally revealed its insubstantiality; it has exposed the steril-

ity of an art divorced from life and the inability of the usual forms of creativity, fit 

only for the graveyards of the museums, to survive in contemporary conditions. 

In the past, “the picture” was figurative and possessed meaning within the milieu 

of a particular class or social group, as an individualistic expression of the aes-

thetic consciousness of that class or group. Now, when class and related divisions 

are losing their foundation in all essential characteristics, making aesthetic con-

noisseurship futile, “the picture,” as the usual form of visual art is also losing its 

meaning as a social phenomenon. Confirmation of this idea can be found in the 

presence of facts, which cannot be denied. The exhibitions of last winter’s season 

(1921–22), even after the quiet of the past four or five years, did not enjoy what is 

called “success.” They passed completely unnoticed. From being “events” in artis-

tic life, they are becoming occasions that no longer arouse any interest, are badly 

attended, are rarely talked about, and to which people are indiff erent.

The democratization of the social structure and social relationships in Russia has 

had a fatal eff ect on the forms of creativity and the masses who appreciate art. We 

are seeing a radical structural change in the psychology of aesthetic perception. 

In a period of class groupings, the form of easel painting is natural; it tolerates 

limitless variations, fragmentations and individualization, responding to those 

varied requirements of a diff erentiated social milieu. In contrast, during a period 

of social democratization, the mass viewer, who demands from art forms that will 

express the idea of the masses, society and the people as a whole, replaces the 

class consumer and patron of aesthetic values. Influenced by the requirements of 

this new viewer, art has adopted a democratic form.