Field Trip: Red Dawn

A trip to The Museum of Russian Art yields remarkable insight into the battle over a utopian aesthetic (and which plates the tsars preferred).

Image credit: Courtesy The Museum of Russian Art

Recommended by the Editor

Intermedia Arts and Discover This! Host Third Annual 'Dimensions of Indigenous' Exhibit

By: Quinton Skinner |   June 2011   |  From the print edition

There’s a war taking place on the walls of The Museum of Russian Art in South Minneapolis—not of the literal variety, but rather a stark declaration of the battling sensibilities of Russian painters during the first decades after the revolution that produced the Soviet Union.

Curator Masha Zavialova walks us through “Shades of Red: The Evolution of Early Soviet Painting,” which occupies two floors of the museum’s lush, wood-accented interior. The Soviet Union lasted about as long as an average person’s lifespan, she explains, and in its idealistic infancy its artists tackled the thorny question of what constituted art for the masses—nothing less than a rethink of what painting for the people meant in a worker’s paradise.

The results were astonishingly varied. Alexsandr Deineka’s forbidding “Coal Worker” occupies its own space at the rear of the gallery; elemental and unsettling, it depicts a laborer who has literally become one with his work. Georgii Rublev’s “A Factory Meeting” shows a commonplace scene in stark, almost crude lines and shapes—along the way, to these eyes at least, giving a nod to Leonardo.

And here’s the thing: while so many eyes in these paintings are staring off to the horizon of a boundless future, and with a striking painted tractor extolling the utopian promises of mechanization, these painters had to look back while ostensibly gazing ahead. There’s a push-pull here between referencing Impressionism, even Dutch Realism, while striving to capture a style that would speak in an uncharted vocabulary (and, increasingly, keep its practitioners in good graces with the powers that be).

“Shades of Red” is a revelation, exposing artists of vast ambition whose works were for decades kept behind the Iron Curtain. And Zavialova finally points out that this period came to an abrupt end in 1932, when Stalin’s government dictated that Socialist Realism would be the only art tolerated by the state (Stalin went so far as to contribute to official guidelines, with trademark generosity).

To journey farther back in time, take a trip downstairs to “Dinner With the Tsars: Russian Imperial Porcelain,” a collection of dinnerware used by every tsar from Catherine the Great until the Revolution. Move around the room clockwise to witness the intricate, gorgeous custom designs that each ruler favored. And along one wall are actual invitations to tsars’ coronations—at one moment in history, beef barley soup was apparently truly fit for a king.

Before you leave, linger over the case displaying Nicholas II’s personal effects. There’s a small porcelain Easter egg, intended as a gift from the tsar to his subordinates. Painted in delicate letters is the year: 1917. By the time Easter arrived that year Nicholas was deposed, soon to be assassinated, and events were set in place that would affect millions of lives.

In silence, the exhibits running at TMORA manage to tell the best kind of story: epic in scale, impossible to summarize, simultaneously tragic and hopeful. This is the kind of war that, for better or worse, is never entirely won.

5500 Stevens Ave., S., Mpls.; 612.821.9045

“Shades of Red: The Evolution of Early Soviet Painting” runs through 9/15

“Dinner With the Tsars: Russian Imperial Porcelain” runs through 8/7

Docent-led tours: Saturdays at 1 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m.