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thoroughly initiated into
the world of art. With the acquisition of his first avant-garde
paintings, Costakis found a focus and purpose for his collecting:
to bring out of obscurity the achievements of a pleiad of Russian
experimental painters who had been active
during the period 1910 to 1930. When Costakis began collecting,
only two of them - Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky - were at
all well known, and they because of successes achieved in the West.
The others were either unknown or forgotten. He took it as his task
to rescue them from obscurity.
Who were these
avant-garde artists? They certainly did not consider themselves
to be a movement or school. Some twoscore men and women in all,
they were drawn predominantly from the  families
of small time provincial merchants and tradesmen, were educated
in St. Petersburg or Moscow, studied abroad, and then came together
again in Russia between 1910 and 1923. Most of them
were ethnic Russians, many were Jews, and there was a sprinkling
of Poles, Latvians, Ukrainians, and Georgians as well.
Virtually from the moment the various groups emerged in Moscow,
St. Petersburg, and a few provincial centers, their members were
at odds with one another. The two leading figures, Vladimir Tatlin
and Kazimir Malevich, feuded incessantly, not with a standing their
similar ethnic roots in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands of western
Russia. So much at odds were these two giants that they actually
came to blows in 1915, at "The Last Futurist Exhibition of
Pictures: 0.10", and they never missed an opportunity to insult
one another thereafter. Malevich also engineered a coup against
Chagall at the Unovis school in Vitebsk, and managed to fall out
with Kandinsky as well.
Many other artists
to whom we now assign secure places within "the movement"
were among the most ruthless critics of its members. Nowhere did
Russian Futurism find a more scathing critique that among the Suprematists,
led by Malevich, and Suprematism in turn was attacked more savagely
by later Constructivists, with Tatlin at their head, than by the
conservative mutually antagonististic groupings within months after
the term was coined. In addition to these internal tensions, the
so-called avant-garde was also torn by apostasy. The band of  experimenters
was constantly under siege by those who had resigned from its ranks
and wished to justify their decision - beginning with Vera Pestel
about 1916 and extending from then until the full demise of abstraction
in Russia, in the early thirties. (Although Pestel's action is often
said to have taken place in 1920, Costakis learned from her daughter
and others that she had abandoned the avant-garde by 1916).
It's no wonder that the identity of the avant-garde as a movement
is more discernible to us in hindsight than it was to any of the
participants. The term "avant-garde" was applied to them
retrospectively by Western critics, and even the more politically
charged them "artists of the left" was applied to them
far more frequently by their opponents than by the artists themselves.
Theirs was a movement of movements, each seeking to define itself
against every other movement. Its characteristic organizational
format was the guppirovka (informal grouping) that arose around
a single exhibition. The Russian avant-garde was a composite of
antagonistic groups, each with its own aims. Symbolism, Cubo-Futurism,
Rayonism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Productivism, Concretism,
and Engineerism were all invented to prove that a minority of the
experimental artists were correct and the overwhelming majority
wrong. The few efforts at presenting a united front were weak and
ineffectual. A "discussional" exhibition organized in
1924 succeeded only in bringing forth eight new groupings, four
of them with their own manifestoes and none of them eager to collaborate
with the others.
Even the famed Vkhutemas schools (Higher State Art - Technical Studios),
which dwarfed the Bauhaus
in size and ambition and rivaled it in achievement, was an umbrell
organization comprising warring factions rather than the embodiment
of a single ideal.
Far form proving that the Russian avant-garde movement did not exist,
however, the massive evidence of factionalism attests to the presence
of a true avant-garde in Russia. "Each avant-garde movement
is always on the verge of going to war with itself", Harold
Rosenberg observed. The great volatility and fractiousness of Russia's
experimental artists of the era 1920-25 is the clearest proof that
they constituted an avant-garde.
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