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Chapter Three: The Last Citadel: The Petrograd Museum of Artistic Culture and GINKhUK, 1919-1926
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Chapter Three The Last Citadel:The Petrograd Museum of Artistic Culture and GINKhUK, 1919–1926 There is no dearth of studies devoted to the Petrograd Museum of Artistic Culture (Muzei khudozhestvennoi kul’tury) or its more famous successor, the State Institute of Artistic Culture (Gosudarstvenny institut khudozhestvennoi kul’tury).1 Previous works have established the basic chronology of this organization’s evolution from art museum to research institute, described the various strands of Russian modernism that flourished within the walls of the building on St. Isaac’s Square, and identified the individual artists who worked there.However,very little attention has been devoted to the task of situating this institutional transformation as a whole within the specific political,economic,and ideological context of NEP Russia.Nor has it ever been seen through the lens of political clientism,which,as this chapter will demonstrate, is crucial for understanding how political maneuvering on the part of two successive networks of modernist artists shaped the transformation of the Museum of Artistic Culture into the State Institute of Artistic Culture. As in Chapter Two, the figure of Kazimir Malevich, as both Soviet arts administrator and political broker, looms large in this third and final example of the “sovietization” of the Russian modernists. For it is the members of the Vitebsk/UNOVIS network that made the most radical changes in the life of an institution that was initially imagined as nothing more than the Petrograd branch of Moscow’s Museum of Painterly Culture. Already under the directorship of Andrii Taran (1886–1967), the Petrograd Museum of Artistic Culture had begun to cultivate an independent identity and, more importantly, an independent operating budget, which allowed it to become a multifaceted Soviet art museum, dedicated chapter three to exhibitions and public education. In an expanded research wing, modernist works of art that had been taken out of the public domain served as research material in the various “scientific laboratories.” Just a year later,the museum became an official “institute” and received a new name that explicitly elided “artistic” and “state” priorities.The very fact that the founder of Suprematism formally assumed the job of running a government-funded art organization and personally oversaw its transition from museum to state institute bespeaks the great extent to which artists themselves participated in the standardization and ultimate homogenization of Soviet visual culture. The Origins of the Petrograd Museum of Artistic Culture The Museum of Artistic Culture began life in 1919 as the Petrograd branch of the Moscow Museum of Painterly Culture, a Soviet institution that as we saw in Chapter One was run by modernist artists who arrogated to themselves the task of directing the activities of branch museums throughout Soviet Russia and regularly used state funds to purchase works (largely) from their fellow modernists. Despite the financial irregularities and organizational chaos that plagued the Moscow Museum Bureau, by 1920 the Petrograd Museum of Artistic Culture had received several modernist works of art—including those by Natalia Goncharova, Rodchenko, Liubov’Popova, and Udal’tsova—from the collection of paintings in Moscow .2 More importantly, the Petrograd Museum of Artistic Culture was allowed to acquire works of art for itself, and was issued two million rubles’ worth of credits to do so.3 Although very little documentary evidence can be found relating to this early period of the museum’s existence,4 we know that by February 1921 there were 330 works of art in the museum, including paintings and drawings by Lev Bruni, Marc Chagall, Alexander Miturich, Alexandre Benois, and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, as well those by Sergei Chekhonin (1878–1936), a member of the Collegium of the Fine Arts Department of the Petrograd Narkompros, and Natan Al’tman, the head of the Petrograd Fine Arts Department, who was entrusted by his Moscow counterpart (David Shterenberg) with the task of supervising the newly founded museum and its growing collection. Although the resulting holdings did indeed reflect the stated policy of acquiring representatives of all trends in art, the modernists were clearly favored by the Petrograd artist-administrators who implemented it and who were some of its main beneficiaries.5 And records indicate that acquisitions would continue into 1921, despite the fact that as late as December 1920 the “museum [had not yet] managed to finish the necessary repairs” to the building, which was on a piece of prime real estate, in St. Isaac’s Square. 6 Although the new [35.173.233.176] Project MUSE...