Early Soviet theatre art on display in S.F

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"Theatre in Revolution Russian Avant-Garde Stage Design, 1913-1935." An exhibit at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, through Feb. 16, 1992.

"Today, for the artist in the theatre," the American director Lee Simonson wrote in 1934, "the road leads to Moscow and the theatres of the USSR." The Russian Revolution, the most momentous social overturn in history, had been accompanied by a revolution in the arts. Moscow was indeed the Mecca of artists worldwide.

The young Soviet artists used the theatres (which were subsidized by the revolutionary government and free to the public) as a laboratory to try out their innovations. During the early 1920s—the harsh years of the Civil War-over 3000 theatre groups flourished in the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, by the time Simonson was writing, the artistic avant garde already had been considerably housebroken by the Stalinist bureaucracy. In 1934, the government announced that "socialist realism" was to be the only acceptable form for artists and writers.

Now, in the current San Francisco exhibit, "Theatre in Revolution," it is possible once again to visualize many of the artistic creations of the Soviet Union's revolutionary years. The hundreds of drawings, paintings, photographs, and scale models in the exhibit were taken from the collection of the Bakhrushin State Central Theatrical Museum in Moscow.

The exhibit's brochure explains, "Today, these artists and their daring and radically new conceptions have been officially rehabilitated within the Soviet Union."

Placards in the exhibit point out that the early Soviet avant garde was heavily influenced by the latest movements in European art—such as cubism (centered in France) and futurism (centered in Italy). Having stated that fact, unfortunately, the exhibit hardly touches on the fervent theoretical debates that the partisans of those movements engaged in.

Even before the 1917 Revolution, artists in Russia were generally more politically conscious than artists in most other parts of Europe. The reason lay in their having to confront the extreme economic backwardness of the country and the overbearing autocracy that ruled it.

The Russian futurists, for example, shared the enthusiasm of their Italian counterparts for the Machine Age. Machines, they believed, would be a force to liberate human beings from the tyranny of nature. But whereas the Italian futurists welcomed the clock-like precision of Mussolini's tanks, the Russians embraced the Bolsheviks' promise of a world transformed by industrialisation—under a workers' government.

Another pivotal artistic movement of the period (virtually ignored in the San Francisco exhibit) was formed around the Proletkult group, which was founded soon after the overthrow of the Tsar in February 1917.

Proletkult members believed that art could be a prime RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE STAGE DESIGN