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The decantation chamber of Soviet modernism: VKhUTEMAS projects from the 1920s

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Academic Conferences in the VKhUTEMAS

Iakov A. Kornfel’d
Sovremennaia arkhitektura
No. 5-6, 1926. Pgs. 135-137

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In November each faculty in the VKhUTEMAS had a conference and set itself the following aims:

  1. to establish direct links between the school and its main “consumers,” i.e. the state economic organizations and soviet society;
  2. to sort out the faculty’s own program;
  3. to take note of practical shortcomings in their training of specialists and to discuss proposals for correcting the teaching program appropriately, and to look at the ideological make-up of their curriculum.

The conference in the Architecture Faculty took place on Thursday 18 November. The first session attracted 70 percent of those invited. VKhUTEMAS Rector P.I. Novitskii was elected chairman and spoke on the change taking place in the social context of our lives, with its requirement that we give form to the new way of life and solve architectural tasks of a vast scale in the fields of social, industrial, and housing construction.

Dean of the Architecture Faculty I.V. Rylskii then reported on the academic life of the faculty and on the structure of the curriculum. He noted that of the 70 students who have left the school in the three graduating classes completing the whole course since the Revolution, only one has remained on the unemployment list at the Labor Exchange — which shows that architects emerging from here really are being trained to meet today’s practical requirements. Continue reading →

Training the Soviet architectural avant-garde II

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Various VKhUTEMAS projects

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For more posts like this, see also these previous entries:

  1. Space architecture: Training the Soviet avant-garde (1921-1930)
  2. Train stations, bread factories, and the “New City”
  3. Nikolai Ladovskii’s studio at VKhUTEMAS (1920-1930)
  4. Models and Sketches from Nikolai Ladovskii’s Studio at VKhUTEMAS-VKhUTEIN (1922-1930)
  5. Georgii Krutikov, The Flying City (VKhUTEMAS diploma project, 1928)
  6. Lidiia Komarova, architectress of the Soviet avant-garde
  7. Bauhaus color

Click any of the images below to enlarge them.

Sketches.

Continue reading →

German socialists assail U-Boat war

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New York Times
August 21, 1916

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In view of the revival of activity of German submarines and reports of the renewal of agitation in German for the unlimited use of the submarine, regardless of the attitude of the United States and other neutral countries, interest attaches to the arrival in New York via Switzerland of copies of an anti-submarine and anti-government leaflet that has been secretly circulated by thousands throughout the German Empire.

This pamphlet was put out by a minority group of the Social Democratic Party of Germany [SPD] that has consistently opposed the war from the very beginning, and which is labeled the “International Group.” In this group are Dr. Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Dr. Ernst Meyer, editor of the Berliner Vorwärts; Clara Zetkin, editor of Die Gleichheit; Franz Mehring, and Berta Thalheimer. At present Dr. Liebknecht is under sentence of thirty months in prison, and Rosa Luxemburg and Dr. Meyer are both under arrest.

Antiwar German socialists.

Franz Mehring
Spartakusbriefe, 1916
Bertha Thalheimer
Ernst Meyer
Karl Liebknecht
Clara Zetkin

The leaflet, which is entitled “Submarine Warfare, ‘International Law,’ and International Murder,” and which started circulating some time ago — when the German press and parliament were clamoring for vengeance upon the British for the alleged murder of the members of a German submarine crew (known as the Baialong case) — reads as follows:

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Submarine warfare, “international law,” and international murder

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The German government has incurred a sharp rebuff and has humbled itself before the United States. But the provocatory agitation continues, and it is necessary that we clearly understand what may still happen.

Submarine warfare was intended to force England to come whimpering and begging for mercy, and thus bring the war to an end with a glorious victory for German imperialism. Because the German people were hungry, the politicians “holding out” persuaded the nation that the people of England should be forced to be still hungrier.

German U-Boats, 1913-1918.

War started by imperialists

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Crazy imperialist agitators in the government and the ruling classes had stupidly provoked the world war, in spite of the fact that this would lead the German masses to run the risk of being starved out. To the crime of international murder they added that of stupidity, for they knew — they must have known — that nowadays a war against France and Russia might last for years, and that if at the same time the neutrality of England were not assured all exports all exports to Germany would be cut off.

And when it really came to that, they began to shout bloody murder and assert that this constituted a violation of international law; that it was a crime against international law to expose a nation of 70,000,000 people to famine.

To this we may say: “In the first place the German government has forfeited every right of appeal to international law.” If [international law] is to be effective, then above all international treaties so solemnly entered upon must be binding. Such treaties guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium. Despite this, Germany attacked Belgium and thus gave British imperialism the excuse to incite the British people to war against Germany. In the second place, the blockade carried on by England, the cutting off of all exports to Germany, is not contrary to the law of nations. On the contrary, the halting of exports to an enemy in order to make the struggle harder, or quite impossible, is a method of warfare that has always been recognized.

The sinking and raising of U-Boat 110.

How submarines failed

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In the spring of 1915 our braggarts were cracking jokes. England would not starve us out, but we should starve her out. That was to be done by the submarines. Such talk was foolishness then, and it remains so now. In order to cut off exports to England it would be necessary to watch all the coasts of all her islands, and to do that would require a hundred submarines for every dozen that Germany is able to build. And even then the outcome would be in doubt, for there are means of defense and protection against these boats, too. Continue reading →

Biography is destiny

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Anne Boyer on Althusser
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Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, once infamously asserted that “biology is destiny.” (What he actually wrote was “anatomy is destiny,” but this is a trivial distinction. Either way, the statement was clearly intended as a provocation). Of course, Freud made this remark in connection with the subject of female genitality, with a sideways glance cast toward “the feministic demand for equal rights” — which he held “[did] not carry far here.”[1] It should thus hardly come as any surprise that the milquetoast lefty Kulturzeitschrift New Inquiry would reject this formulation. By all accounts, however, if Anne Boyer’s recent “review” of On the Reproduction of Capitalism by the late Louis Althusser is any evidence, the online journal has embraced an opposite but equally dubious dictum. According to this view, it would seem that “biography is destiny.” Her examination of this text, the first translation of Althusser’s writings to be published in years, serves as a mere pretext for her bizarre tirade against philosophers’ incorrigible habit of reproducing “patriarchy,” here nebulously conceived as a kind of timeless or perennial entity or institution.

Normally I’d be the last person to mount a serious defense of Althusser. Theoretical antihumanism, the outcome of Althusser’s misguided structuralist approach to Marxism, has proved deeply problematic in its subsequent influence on the Left. His notion of a sharp “epistemic break” dividing the Young Marx from the Old, laid the groundwork for a whole generation of bad scholarship. Even more ironic is the fact that Althusser would propose such a drastic rereading of Marx’s mature works, especially Capital, so soon after the rediscovery of the Grundrisse in the 1950s, which all but confirmed the persistent Hegelian underpinnings not just of the early works (The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology, etc.), but his broader investigations into political economy more than a decade later. Althusser could scarcely have chosen a worse time, Marxologically speaking, to advance such a hypothesis. Besides this, there are any number of objections one might legitimately raise: his ahistorical notion of ideology, his rejection of historico-critical self-consciousness as the foundation for both individual and group subjectivity, or his botched anti-Hegelian interpretation of Lenin (who’d written that “[i]t is completely impossible to understand Marx’s Capital, especially its opening chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic!”). One could go on. Continue reading →

History and the bomb

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PHOTO: Left to right — U.S. Navy Vice Admiral William H.P. Blandy, his wife, and Rear Admiral Frank J. Lowry cut a cake made in the shape of a mushroom cloud at a reception for Operation Crossroads (November 6, 1946). More information about the “atom cake” scandal can be found here. An extract from the Washington Post a week later details reactions to the photo in the Soviet press can be accessed by clicking here.

It should probably be said that I am personally in favor of nuclear energy, though I’m fully aware of the risks or dangers involved. Nuclear waste is a major problem, one for which no adequate solution has yet been found. Obviously, if any safer and more efficient energy source were to be discovered that might replace nuclear power, I would be in favor of that instead.

The following passages are excerpted from two texts by the German sociologist and critical theorist Theodor Adorno, and pertain to the problematic fact of atomic warfare in a philosophy of history envisioned as the progress of human freedom.

Bikini atoll copy
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No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.

— Theodor Adorno, Negative
Dialectics (1966), pg. 320

It is not my task…to enter into the detail of the way in which history is constructed. Even so, I believe that, if we are to treat certain fundamental questions of the philosophy of history, we cannot ignore such matters entirely; and I believe further that the knowledge of historical matters is in the first instance a question of distance. If we approach details too closely and fail to open them up to critical inspection, we will indeed find ourselves in the proverbial situation of not seeing the wood for the trees. On the other hand, if we distance ourselves too much, we shall be unable to grasp history because the categories we use themselves become excessively magnified to the point where they become problematic and fail to do justice to their material. I have in mind concepts such as the progress of freedom, about which I [have] offered some critical comments…

So I would say that we need to keep a certain distance. This will enable us both to dissociate ourselves from a total theory of history and equally to resist the cult of the facts which, as I have explained, have their own conceptual difficulties. We can illustrate this by saying, for example, that we cannot really speak of something like progress in general, as indeed I have already argued. Incidentally we shall take a closer look at this concept towards the end of the section in which we discuss the philosophy of history.
Continue reading →

Graham Greene’s infamous review of Wee Willie Winkie (1937), starring Shirley Temple

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Shirley Temple passed away a little over a week ago. Now that some time has gone by, though, I thought I would take this opportunity to repost a hilarious 1937 review written by Graham Greene of her movie Wee Willie Winkie. Greene, one of the great British authors of the twentieth century — and there were many — wrote with such searing cynicism and shocking innuendo that Temple’s guardians ended up suing him. He was practically forced to leave the country.

This reposting should not be seen as some sort of final dig at Temple shortly after she died. Indeed, it’s more of commentary on the whole Hollywood industry of the child star, which has claimed so many over the years. And in fact, Shirley Temple is one of the very few who did successfully transition into adult life without completely losing it (an all-too-familiar story for child actors who the studios chew up and spit back out).

Many thanks to Angela Nagle for bringing this to my attention, in any case. She writes:

Graham Greene on Shirley Temple’s pedo-y fans and promoters, for which he got in a lot of trouble and had to emigrate. Although I dislike how Greene’s cynical view here has become standard today, his bloody minded writing style is perfection. You can imagine how scandalous this must have been in 1937.

Enjoy.

Shirley Temple in Poor Little Rich Girl

Shirley Temple in Poor Little Rich Girl

Wee Willie Winkie

Graham Greene
Night and Day
Oct. 28, 1937

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The owners of a child star are like leaseholders — their property diminishes in value every year. Time’s chariot is at their backs: before them acres of anonymity. What is Jackie Coogan now but a matrimonial squabble? Miss Shirley Temple’s case, though, has peculiar interest: infancy with her is a disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece — real childhood, I think, went out after The Littlest Rebel). In Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a [Marlene] Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing short kilts, she is a complete totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant’s palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep. Continue reading →

Robert Mallet-Stevens and Fernand Léger, modernist set designs for L’Inhumaine (1924)

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Some remarks by Italian architecture critics on the architectural significance of the movie.

The elegant and refined works of Mallet-Stevens, beginning with the De Noailles villa of 1923 in Hyères, were yet another product of an intimate converse with the Cubist vanguard that nonetheless kept its eye on the latest modes and fashions, as in the house on Rue Balzac in Ville d’Avray (1926) or the apartment block of the next year on the street in Paris named for the architect himself. In the sophisticated world of the avant-garde, Mallet-Stevens moved at his eclectic ease: his villa for the Vicomte de Noailles was used as the setting for Man Ray’s film Les Mystères du Chateau du Dé. Already in 1923-24, Mallet-Stevens had collaborated with Léger, Chareau, and Alberto Cavalcanti on a film by Marcel L’Herbier, L’Inhumaine, in which the house of the leading character is one of the finest examples of that scenographic and eclectic synthesis of Cubist, Neo-Plasticist, and Art Deco details of which Mallet-Stevens’ architecture is compounded. (Pg. 233)

— Manfredo Tafuri
& Frencesco Dal Co
Modern Architecture

The human being as inventor and as machine was even transferred to the stage in ballets such as Parade (1917), Alexander Exeter’s L’homme Sandwich (1922), and the Triadische Ballet of Oskar Schlemmer and plays an obvious role in the rhythmic sequencing and montage used as compositional techniques in films such as Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique and Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine. Photography and the cinema are in fact the two new and popular mechanical figurative arts. If photography offers an alternative to the pictorial representation of nature, cinema provides art with new materials in a new harmony of space and time in movement and a new simultaneity. These were themes that Walter Benjamin was to treat in the 1930s. (Pg. 20)

— Vittorio Gregotti
The Architecture of
Means and Ends

And now for an article by Mallet-Stevens.
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Architecture and Geometry (1924)

Robert Mallet-Stevens

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Architecture is an art which is basically geometrical. The cube is the basis of architecture because the right angle is necessary. In practice, walls are generally vertical, floors are horizontal, columns, pillars and posts are vertical, terraces and the ground are horizontal, stone blocks are parallelepipeds, windows and doors are rectangular, the steps of a staircase consist of vertical and horizontal planes and the corners of rooms are nearly always right angles. We need right angles.

A house, a palace, is composed of a set of cubes. At all stages in the history of art the house has been cubical. Each country, each century, each fashion has made its impression on the cube, with sculptures, moldings, pediments, capitals, ornamental foliage, scrolls — so many decorative details which are often of no use to the structure but which give the charm of the play of light and shade. Building in stone, in fact, only allowed a block to be made, composed of various elements, to which the decoration was related as if glued on. Continue reading →

Ivan Kudriashev’s interplanetary-dynamic abstractions (1917-1928)

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Cosmism and
communism
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Click images
to enlarge
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Biographical notes

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Born Kaluga, 1896; died Moscow, 1972.

From 1913 to 1917 Kudriashev attended the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and from 1918 to 1919 studied with Kazimir Malevich at the SVOMAS [Free State Art Studios]; there he met Ivan Kliun, Antoine Pevsner, and Naum Gabo. From 1918 on, under the influence of the ideas of the space scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovskii (conveyed to Kudriashev by his father, a carpenter who made rockets and other devices for Tsiolkovskii), he turned to the problems of cosmic abstract painting, as filtered through Suprematism. After the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary seizure of power in October 1917, Kudriashev worked for about a year on propaganda designs for automobiles to celebrate the first anniversary of the Revolution.

Ivan Kudriashev, photographer unknown (1940s)

In 1919, he was sent to Orenburg to establish the SVOMAS. That same year Kudriashev participated in the city’s inaugural State Exhibition, showing sketches for the mural of the First Soviet Theater along with other abstract works. Over the next year he worked on the interior to the Summer Red Army Theater and organized a branch of the UNOVIS group in Orenburg.

Kudriashev arrived in Smolensk in 1921, while serving as the supervisor of a train for the evacuation of starving children. There he met Katarzyna Kobro and Wladyslaw Strzeminski, two Polish followers of Malevich. Later on Kudriashev returned to Moscow, and from late 1921 onward worked as a designer. In 1922 he sent work to the “Erste russische Kunstausstellung” (First Russian Art Exhibition) at the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin. Between 1925 to 1928 his abstract works were displayed at the first, second, and fourth OST exhibitions.

After 1928, Kudriashev stopped exhibiting in the Soviet Union.

Early works.

Ivan Kudryashov Faces and Masks Gouache on paper (23.2 x 26.4 cm) [Signed and titled in Cyrillic on verso] Omsk, Private Collection

Planets

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Ivan Kudriashev is one of the lesser-known painters of the Soviet avant-garde. Not for lack of talent, however. Brilliant, brooding, and celestially driven, Kudriashev was often given to interstellar flights of the imagination. He dreamed of nighttime passages between the Earth and other planets. This of course reflected the gravitational pull of Tsiolkovskii’s cosmism, which always held extraterrestrial ambitions.

Many of his darker paintings from the 1920s convey this sense of cosmic loneliness — that of a solitary mind launched and set adrift in a cold vessel, wandering through the black expanse of space. Kudriashev’s career was brief, but blazed a path fed by rocket-fuel. Continue reading →

Violent turns of the imagination

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Mariann Tihane from Tartu Ülikool writes:

Where do you dig up these stunning photos?

Being from the milder western corner of the Soviet Union, these post-apocalyptic shots simultaneously trigger a hyperreal sense of nostalgia and stir uncanny feelings in me. An almost ethereal sort of distance-closeness. Some of the photos resemble my own back-alley streets. Others take still more violent turns in the imagination.

An amazing assortment.

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Спасибо большое, Марянн! Thanks, but for now the secret to my #doomporn database must remain classified.