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Be selective

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 6th February 2008

From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg

Royal Academy, until 18 April

Sponsored by E.ON

If you’re already beginning to flag, take heart, there’s quite a lot coming up that can safely be edited out. The cynosure of Room 4 is a hideous nude portrait of Ida Rubinstein by Serov; Bakst’s portrait of the impressario Sergei Diaghilev looks on suitably unabashed. There are too many Russian daubs here, the best of which is the wonderfully vulgar ‘Peasant Woman Dancing’ by Philipp Malyavin, gaudy but intense and vital. The next room, optimistically entitled ‘New Directions in Russian Art’, is mostly dead-ends. Robert Falk’s ‘Steamboat Landing’ has some invention, largely through its use of green, and Alexander Golovin’s ‘Pavlovsk’ has curiosity of pattern, but much of the rest is third-rate. In room 6, a change of pace and quality is at once apparent, with Tatlin’s eloquently minimal ‘Female Model’, a good Chagall (‘The Promenade’), Goncharova’s emblematic and frieze-like ‘Peasants’ and Larionov’s pictographic ‘Winter’, recalling our own Alan Davie (born 1920, and currently showing new work in London at Gimpel Fils and James Hyman Gallery).

Gallery 7 holds only a few not very good paintings of the Cubo–Futurist persuasion, eked out by a wall of photos, in contrast to Gallery 8 which features three magnificent Malevichs on the end wall. They hang there like deeply reverberant gongs: a cross, a circle and a square, black motifs on grey canvas with white frames, against a warmer grey wall, luminous and magical. To their right is also a Malevich red square. For these radical paintings alone this exhibition is worth seeing. They may not look as revolutionary today as they did in 1915, or even in the 1920s, when so much since has taken their message, elaborated on it and parroted it mercilessly, but these are images which mark a new world-view. The other experiments here towards abstraction rather pale into insignificance, though I enjoyed Ivan Punin’s violin and the fascinating failure of Kandinsky’s ‘Composition VII’ which simply doesn’t hold together, but is so good in parts. Exit through the Central Hall where a 2001 model of Tatlin’s famous tower offers a final monument to Constructivism.

With such great things to see and marvel at, it may be thought that the contingent of mediocre Russian art which comes with the package is just the price we have to pay to enjoy the masterpieces. Unfortunately, this isn’t quite the case: there’s a hefty £11 admission charge as well. So you’re also paying for a high percentage of dud material. My point remains: at least be careful to avoid wasting time on it.