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Kandinsky's Odesa, Ukraine Context:
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Another Introduction Vernitsky’s 2023 article for this Kandinsky Anew series gives us a historical perspective, particularly as it pertains to Kandinsky and his cohorts. See that below.
Lissa Tyler Renaud *
Kandinsky's Odesa, Ukraine Context:
Introduction In her authoritative monograph, Kandinsky, Dr. Jelena Hahl-Fontaine (formerly Hahl-Koch) states: "Almost nothing is known about Kandinsky's school years" (p. 24). Nonetheless, confusion persists in the Kandinsky literature about his time in Odesa; for example it is fairly often said that he attended an art school there. Vernitsky, himself from Odesa, set out to see what might still be learned about this exceedingly slippery topic. With so many of the hoped-for facts seeming to be truly lost to history, Vernitsky has instead given us a texture, a train of thought, a collection of associations that create a context not only for what might have been for Kandinsky, but also for any information that still might surface. These in themselves offer some admirable clarification. Even more, Vernitsky shows us some of the Kandinsky paintings that, when threatened, were privately concealed; large collections of paintings were scattered and many were spirited away to provincial museums in Russia. This information is increasingly known. But I wondered: how remote was a "provincial" museum from Odesa? Today, Krasnodar is close to 1,400 miles by bus. Krasnoyarsk is 2,656 miles or 23-1/2 hours by train and then flight. The Tumen region is over 1600 miles from Odesa. What a feat it was to save those paintings. Gregory Vernitsky As a young student in Ukraine, the very first names I learned of modern artists were Wassily Kandinsky [1866-1944] and David Burliuk [painter-poet, 1882-1967]. I was walking into the Odesa Art School to take an entrance exam (which I failed), when I spotted their names, handwritten on the plaque listing Notable Alumni. Hours later their names were gone, wiped off. Someone told me they were famous artists who were prohibited, and that the students would simply write their names up there again.
It was 1968. The public could
see French art in Moscow and
Leningrad [since 1991, St.
Petersburg], but Soviet Russian
modern art was under constant
threat of destruction and kept
hidden. Such works were
protected by brave and selfless
people such as V. Pushkarev at
the Russian Museum, or I.
Savitsky at the Nukus Museum in
Central Asia. Just a couple of
years earlier, in Odesa, the
History Museum had burned some
of its Ukrainian art in the
courtyard: the political
leadership of this Soviet
republic, Ukraine, was being
criticized by the Soviet Russian
authorities for having a
nationalistic tilt and, sniffing
what was in the air, the
museum's administration
moved to destroy these artworks
to forestall Odesa was a normal Soviet city: there were only a few art books, about stale Soviet art and the major 19th century realists. In the stores open to the public, all the art materials together could fill only four feet of two shelves. The first color reproduction of a Kandinsky I saw was in the early 1970s; I treasured a book that I couldn't read, with a Chagall on the cover, and a Saudi stamp with a Modigliani on it: you could invite a girl to see your albums of Chagall, or Dali, or Picasso—not just listen to the latest music! * But Kandinsky was much less known. I still have a 1972 book about the fate of German artists in Hitler's time, The Art That Did Not Submit, full of letters and documents and even reproductions of works by Kathe Kollwitz, Ernst Barlach, and Paul Klee, along with other Expressionists. This book, printed in a 10,000-copy run, was unique for the USSR: a compilation of documents, printed in East and West Germany, that let the Expressionists speak for themselves. Information related to Kandinsky was (as the book was written by critics with social-realism leanings, aesthetics were secondary) very sparse—it came mostly from the political and social critics. Only one note stood out: Kandinsky was visiting Klee in Bern in 1939, to support his exiled, dying friend. Of course the editors of this book had a complicated task: how to show the Nazi persecution of "Degenerate Art" without drawing attention to the very similar actions of the Soviet Government, or to the conservative taste the Soviets had in common with Germany—the taste for the naturalistic and heroic in art? How to promote the left-leaning art of the antifascists without talking about their too-conspicuously less political Soviet contemporaries? Well, this book was never reprinted. Most books, available to the lucky and the persistent, were printed in Hungary, the DDR [the German Democratic Republic], Czechoslovakia, and other countries of the Eastern Bloc; there was a special bookstore called "Friendship." Once, in a secondhand store, I found a book about Modigliani (printed in Czechoslovakia), hidden behind other books and, after a huge uproar and struggle, was able to leave the store with it. Do not laugh—Modigliani was printed in Russian just once during the 1970s and early '80s, two copies of the books came to the Odesa libraries, and both were immediately stolen. From a cultural standpoint, only North Korea and Albania were worse than the Soviet Union. People do think of Odesa as having a great history in the arts—indeed, many artists, musicians, and writers started out in Odesa, then left and became famous elsewhere. To troll their school's administration, the students secretly adding the names Kandinsky and Burliuk to that plaque were choosing very well: a notorious abstractionist and a scandalous, romantic revolutionary, who had both left Odesa.
"Sunny Street" (literally "street lit by the sun"), painted in Munich:
Besides, I do not think students in 1968 knew many other names (such as Nathan Altman, Boris Anisfeld, or Amshey Nurenberg), or were aware of their importance in the history of art, but they were longing for times they had never lived in: a world in which artists could live in Paris, travel to other countries—to Italy, or Morocco, paint what they wanted, not listen to the authorities, be poor but one morning wake up famous—that is, the fairytale world of Pre -WWI Europe. They may have felt, without actual proof, that Odesa used to be a part of it. * Before the Revolution of 1917, the Odesa Art School that Kandinsky is sometimes thought to have attended was a private establishment, funded by donations and student tuition; its teachers belonged to the Society of South Russian Artists. Also sometimes referred to as "Odesa Art College," it was a preparatory school for an art academy or institute, providing both art education and high school diploma. Neither Kandinsky nor Burliuk was Jewish, but it is notable that, to a unique extent, there were no restrictions at the Odesa Art School as to the number of Jewish students who could attend, and who by 1904 constituted more than 60% of the student body. There were reasons so many Jewish students famously continued their education in Paris or Munich: few were able to continue their education at the very conservative Academy in Saint Petersburg; the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture would not admit Jews at all.
"Improvisation 209" 1917, oil on canvas. Krasnoyarsk Art Museum, Russia Odesa was far more open to modern movements. One group of artists, expelled from a Moscow school for having "leftist tendencies," formed the famous Jack of Diamonds group, and initially exhibited in Odesa with independent artists hardly known in the West: A. Nurenberg, M. Gershenfeld, I. Malik, T. Fraerman, S . Fazini and others. They were supported by J. Pereman, an art collector, bookseller, and leader of an Odesan Jewish socialist movement. During the Civil War that followed the Revolution, Pereman took his art collection to Palestine. By the end of the Civil War in 1922, Odesa was empty. Some artists had fled, some had moved to Moscow where, for a short time, some modern art could flourish; some died or simply disappeared. Those who remained had to follow new Party requirements. In early 1930 the curtain fell, the fabric of cultural life sustaining the freedom of artistic expression was torn. It was a long dark night.
"Untitled," 1918, watercolor, ink, paper, 31 x 22cm. Private collection. *
Kandinsky was among those who left Odesa for Moscow, then
"Immaterial" (Subjectless), 1917, watercolor on paper,
In an all too common tale of the times, Burliuk's older brother
Vladimir, a painter, was killed in WWI; his younger brother
"Purple Wedge," 1919, oil on canvas, Tumen region, Museum complex. (A point of interest: Leonid Pasternak, father of the great Boris Pasternak [Dr. Zhivago et alia], did the same: after Odesa Art School, he continued his education at Moscow University, then Ažbe's art school and the Munich Academy.) It is important to note that, although their early life trajectories were so similar, one difference between Burliuk, Pasternak, and Kandinsky, is that the first two graduated from Odesa Art School, while Kandinsky perhaps did not, though he may have had a similar level of formal training nevertheless. But we continue to see "sources" related to Kandinsky list him as an Odesa Art School alumnus—including online—even while most books do not. * Today, there is also a darker reason to talk about the tragic fate of modern art in the Russian Empire: as Putin is denying even the existence of Ukraine and its language, the war is raging in the culture, too. The knowledge and understanding gained in the last 30 years— since the dissolution of the USSR—may be lost again, and our common cultural heritage divided by hatred and suffering. Hope it will not happen.
Kandinsky's memorial plaque in Odesa,
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