Getting to the Russian Avant-Garde

I’ve been hooked on the Russian avant-garde ever since the New York Guggenheim displayed the collections of a Greek tobacco man who stashed away the forbidden art for decades knowing it was too important to be lost. There was a serendipity at that exhibition the night they did a fashion show of the avant-garde dress related to the paintings and sculpture. The assigned photographer didn't show up so they asked me to shoot in his place. So my slides are in the Guggenheim collection! And when the show moved to Indianapolis, the Star printed a batch of them in a Sunday color feature. But that was just dumb Irish luck. In the summer of 1981 I signed on for a three week Art Tour of the Soviet Union mainly because I wanted to see the exhibition Paris/Moscow that explored the interactions between their diverse avant-gardes.

So the first thing I did when I checked into my Moscow hotel was to go down in the lobby and buy tickets from Intourist. Yikes. The lady said they were all sold out. No way. Sorry. What a bummer. That meant that the ten days I was booked to spend fighting the sands of Tashkent, Bukhara, and Samarkand were all I was going to get of Russian art. (As it turned out, that wasn't half as bad as I feared.) The next morning I thought I try another Intourist functionary.

She was just as encouraging as her colleague had been dismissive. Of course, she enthused, handing me a ticket--dated, alas, for three weeks after we would have left Russia. She laughed at my worries. As long as the date has not been passed you'll be all right. Skeptically, I showed up the next morning at the Pushkin Museum where two soldiers who had majored in Nasty at the Military Academy showed the premature ticket to each other, laughing uproariously. Hmm.

They told me curtly to come back on the appointed date, pointing to it with gestures which implied I was a moron. Not about to give up my date Liubov Popova and her mates without a fight, I came back the next morning to find the soldiers replaced by a mere guard who waved me through without even looking at the date! Strange country, I began to conclude. Since the Cyrillic alphabet is simply gibberish to me I had gone to the trouble of buying the French edition of the catalog so I could get the most out of my visit. Now I began to be plagued by Russian visitors who wanted to know where I got the catalog.(They weren't selling the Russian one because the authorities didn't like the politics behind the decades-long suppression of the art works!)

The next day I came back to continue my looking, and collared a man who looked like a curator to see if he'd let me in again with my post dated ticket. I spoke to him in French. He begged off because of an important meeting. I stood at the entrance looking in vain for another official who might fall for my sorry story. None came. But the first curator, apparently stricken with guilt, quietly waved me in, secretly almost. I had still one other angle to play. The Evening Bulletin's art editor, Nessa Forman, had agreed to look at a review on spec before I had flown off to Russia. So I wanted to palaver with the woman director of the museum. I decided this was a back door job.

The babuskas at the front entrances were looking at me more and more suspiciously. So I had to deal with the guard at the back door. I tried French on him. No go. Maybe he had been a German prisoner of war. BINGO. He understood my German, itself a miracle, given my pitiful one year of instruction at the University of Detroit thirty years before. He picked up his phone to convey my request for an interview to his boss, then put it down. Then picked it up. And put it down again. Finally, he just waved me through. I had just had a crash lesson in how authority worked in the Soviet Union. If I turned out to be a chump, he'd get the lumps. So he just put me on my own. The director was not all that helpful. But she did want to look at my copy of the catalog! She thumbed through it full of curiosity as she answered my questions without any real enthusiasm.

I loved the St. Petersburg stop on our itinerary most of all. Except that I had the trots the day we were assigned the Hermitage. I got to see a lot of Andre Derain and Henri Matisse between pit stops. I swear I tried out all the bathroom facilities in that great far flung building. Not a word of Russian was needed for the babuskas to comprehend my distress. They hurriedly accompanied me to the nearest facilities the minute they saw my panicky eyes. Thankfully, there was a bucket in the bus with which I finished my ordeal minutes before the rest of the group piled back on the bus. I was sitting in the front seat as far from the mess I had made as possible.

I mentioned our trek into Central Asia. The silliest part was the beginning of our flight from Moscow. We hung out at the airport for several hours, with nary an idea of when the flight was scheduled. Then suddenly, having dozed off mercifully in abominably uncomfortable sofas, we were herded into the dark across the tarmac to the now waiting Ilyushin. It was my first long term encounter with Islam, except for transitory episodes in North Africa and Turkey many years before.

The mosque architecture was as dazzling as the surroundings were run down. But one night I shall never forget happened in Samarkand. There was a full August moon in the outdoor jazz café. The quartet was headed by a jazz violinist who was a dead ringer for Joseph Stalin physically and played as well as Joe Venuti. We went crazy with applause after the first set. Before you could say Shazam, we were blessed with a cold bottle of vodka as a gesture of fraternity. From Joe Venuti Stalin himself. It more than compensated for those stupid moments trying to get into and at the Pushkin.