Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism: A Charter for the Avant-Garde by Jeremy Howard, Irēna Bužinska, Z.S. Strother (review)

This volume, a collaborative project undertaken by English, Latvian, and American scholars, constitutes a foundational text in many respects, introducing the intellectual and photographic work of Vladimir Markov to the English-speaking world. Despite the significance of his work, Markov, or Voldemārs Matvejs in his native Latvian, is little known. This is in part due to his untimely death in May 1914 at the age of 37, which meant among other things that his groundbreaking 1913–14 project on African art, Iskusstvo Negrov (Negro Art), was not published until 1919. The turbulent politics of twentieth-century Russian history also kept from view much of the art and writings of its avant-garde until the 1990s.

This publication opens with five essays introducing Markov. All three authors contribute to the introduction, which provides an excellent foundation for the aspects of Markov’s life and work presented in this volume. Jeremy Howard follows with an essay exploring the key ideas that animate Markov’s primitivism and the ways in which it compares and contrasts with its better known counterparts in Western Europe. Irēna Bužinska addresses the development of Markov’s art theory and provides a much-needed context concerning Markov’s place within the innovative Russian avant-garde. Z.S. Strother’s essay looks closely at Markov’s study of African sculpture and the innovative photographic techniques he developed to convey what he saw as its salient features. Bužinska’s final essay takes up Markov’s photographic work, also from 1913, documenting the arts of the indigenous peoples of Northern Asia, which was to be part of another book he referred to as The Art of the Eskimos. The second half of this study comprises five major essays by Markov, translated by Jeremy Howard. The first three of these, dated 1910, 1912, and 1914, establish Markov’s originality as a theorist and brilliance as a writer, particularly in his extended essay, “The Principles of Creativity in the Plastic Arts: Faktura,” which deserves an important place in the history of modernism. These essays also provide the framework through which Markov interpreted African sculpture, as evidenced in the final two translations that focus specifically on such objects. In addition, there are forty reproductions of Markov’s stunning blackand-white photographs, twenty-three of African sculpture and seventeen of indigenous arts of Northern Asia.

Markov is still so little known that some background is useful. Born in Latvia, he was an artist, photographer, and art theoretician who was a leading figure in the Russian artistic vanguard, involved with the Union of Youth from 1910 to 1914. He began writing essays on art in Russian, under the name Vladimir Markov, in 1910. Few of Markov’s own works of art survive, but those illustrated here suggest that his most significant contributions were made through his writing and documentary photography. Markov’s ideas influenced Russian avant-garde artists such as Malevich and Tatlin and also share important commonalities with Der Blaue Reiter. Markov in fact traveled to Germany and Paris in the summer of 1912 and met Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, and Franz Marc to discuss possible collaborations. In 1913 he began his ambitious study of African art, a year before Carl Einstein began work on Negerplastik, traveling throughout Europe to study and photograph African sculpture in ethnographic collections. In his preface to Iskusstvo Negrov, Markov noted that his photographs were “collected by me during my travels to … museums in … Kristiania [Oslo], Copenhagen, Hamburg, London, Paris, Cologne, Brussels, Leiden, Amsterdam, Leipzig, Berlin, and St. Petersburg” (p. 222). As his colleague Varvara Bubnova pointed out: “This work was greeted by little understanding among those around him. The museum specimens of primal plastic art were in a state of neglect, lay disordered in cupboards and were covered in dust. Many curators … of...