After three centuries of autocratic Tsarist rule, popular uprisings in February, and then the Bolshevik seizure of power under Vladimir Lenin in October 1917 saw the collapse of the Russian Empire and the formation in 1922 of the Soviet Union. A century after the 1917 October Revolution the National Gallery has drawn on its significant collection of Russian avant-garde art to mount a display that acknowledges the importance of one the 20th century’s most politically contentious and artistically ambitious historic periods.
Dating from the first three decades of the twentieth century, this collection is the only one of its type in an Australian cultural institution. Largely acquired in the 1970s, it forms part of the founding core of the Gallery’s International art collections and includes works made in the years immediately preceding and during the Revolution by Russia’s leading artistic figures. Representing works made in all media, it illustrates the Russian avant-garde’s evolution from the western European influenced Futurist movement to Kasimir Malevich’s unique declarations of Suprematism in 1915 and the ascendancy of non-objective abstraction, through to the Constructivists’ extraordinary forays into industry and Socialism in the 1920s. Despite its specificity to a century old political event, the works created by the Russian avant-garde remain enormously important to the canon of 20th century International and Australian art history. Like the Revolution itself, its shockwaves and influence reached far beyond the borders of Eastern Europe.
