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Modernism/modernity, Volume 17, Number 4, November 2010, pp.

899-903 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/mod.2010.0027

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OUT OF THE ARCHIVE

Out of the Archive provides a regular forum for the publication of rare or little-known
documents concerning the history of modernism and the avant-gardes. Its compass is
global and its aim is to prompt critical reflection on how the pasts material remains
shape present understandings.

Introduction to Iakov Tugendkhold,

In the Iron Dead-end (1915)

Elitza Dulguerova

During the 1910s and the 1920s, Iakov Aleksandrovich

Tugendkhold (18821928) was one of the main connoisseurs and
interpreters of modern Western art in Russia, and later in the
Soviet Union. From 1902 to 1913, he lived in Munich and Paris,
attended the studio of Alexej von Jawlensky and the Acadmie
Ranson, became the Parisian correspondent for the literary and
artistic journal Apollon, and published books on Puvis de Chavannes (1911), French art and its representatives (1913), and
the Serge Shchukin collection of modern art. Upon his return
to Russia, he reviewed attentively albeit often sceptically the
contemporary Russian art scene, with a particular interest in
the decorative and monumental values in Natalia Goncharovas
paintings,1 and an eager admiration for Marc Chagall that led to a
monograph (1918).2 After the Bolshevik revolution, Tugendkhold
was active as art critic and editor for Izvestiia and Krasnaia Niva,
and as art history and heritage scholar at the Academy of Artistic
Sciences and other state institutions. In 1925 he took part in the
organisation of the Soviet section at the Exposition internationale
des arts dcoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris. In addition to
a monograph on Alexandra Exter (Berlin, 1922), he continued
publicizing modern Western art in books on Van Gogh (1919),
Degas (1922), The First Museum of New Western Painting (1923,
former Shchukin collection), and The Artistic Culture of the West
(1928). Excerpts from Tugendkholds extensive writings have
become available in English only very recently.3
The essay In the Iron Dead-End appeared in the summer of
1915 in the liberal literary and political monthly Severnye zapiski
(Notes from the North) to which Tugendkhold had been con-

modernism

/ modernity

volume seventeen,
number four,
pp

901903. 2011

the johns hopkins

university press

Elitza Dulguerova is
Assistant Professor at
the Universit de Paris
I. She is completeing a
book on the utopian
stance in Russia avantgarde exhibitions (Usages et utopies. Lexposition
dans lavant-garde russe
prrvolutionnaire,
forthcoming by Les
Presses de rel, Dijon)
and has edited a special
issue Exposer/Displaying
for the scholarly journal
Intermdialitis (2010).

M O D E R N I S M / modernity

902 tributing since 1913.4 While the general framework of the text is set by the First World
War and its relation to Futurist aesthetics, its immediate topics originate in two 1915
events: the series of improvised and rather radical assemblage-based on-site interventions that disturbed the muscovite group exhibition The Year 1915;5 and the inclusion
of several transrational (zaum) poems by Alexey Kruchenykh together with a study of
Vasily Kamenskys ferro-concrete poetry6 in the new literary almanac Strelets [The
Archer].7 Tugendkhold asserts his strong disagreement with the idiosyncrasy of the
poems, as well as with the arbitrariness of Vladimir Mayakovskys, Mikhail Larionovs,
andabove allVladimir Tatlins post-Cubist constructions (and in doing so, provides
the modern scholar of the history of exhibition practices with precious depictions of
these ephemeral, little known yet significant actions).
The article sets forth an informed cross-cultural comparison between the development of modern art in Europesince the impressionist dissolution of the pictorial unity
via Czannes quest of solidity up to the cubist investigation of shapes and volumes,
and the appropriation of these new trends in Russia.8 But its focus smoothly shifts away
from the critique of the somewhat radical provincialism of Russian artists, to a discussion
of the state of art and literature and their social functions. The object-like assemblages
and futurist poems thus become symptoms of a crisis in the social relations between
individuals. Hence the metaphor of the iron dead-end stands not merely for Tatlins
constructions of everyday materials9 nor solely for Kamenskys ferro-concrete poems,
but for the loss of shared values in an eclectic urban society that evolves around individualism. In a similar way as the French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau had pleaded,
two decades earlier, that emotions were the sole basis of a functional social network, and
that the great mission of art and the artists was to affect emotionally their beholders in
order to build and maintain a social space based on shared emotions,10 Tugendkhold
mourns the loss of affect when confronting discrete modern artworks as the defeat
of communicationand communionbetween people. He finds an antidote to the
dead-end of futurism in the figure of Aliosha, the youngest of Dostoevskys Brothers
Karamazov, whose innocence, piety, and love for the others he deems constituent of a
Russian soul. Ultimately, the renewal of both art and the country seem to rely upon
a conjunction of aesthetic, Christian, and national values grounded in the belief that
artworks should lead to a quasi-transcendent experience; that art, like religion, should
lead the viewer to salvation by engaging her feelings.11
Rather unknown today, Tugendkholds complex and ambiguous text is just as
important in stance and position as Alexander Benoiss subsequent diatribe against
Malevich and his Black Square as the new icon of suprematism.12 While in both cases
art forms are conceived of as embodiment of values, In the Iron Dead-End offers a
rare focus on assemblage-driven art practices13 and a hitherto neglected avant-garde
exhibition. Both modern and conservative, it testifies to the overlap of artistic, moral,
political, and religious issues within the context of early capitalism. I hope it can appeal
to scholars interested in cultural transfers as well as in the history of beliefs prompted
by art practices.

Dulguerova /

introduction to iakov tugendkhold

Notes
1. On Tugendkholds reading of Goncharovas work, particularly with regard to gender roles and
constructs of nationality, see Jane A. Sharp, Russian Modernism between East and West. Natalia
Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
2. The book was co-authored with the art critic Abram Efros. Tugendkholds chapter was first
published in Apollon, no. 2 (1916): 1121. English translation by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav in
Marc Chagall on Art and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 176204.
3. Excerpts from several texts ranging from 1910 to 1928 can be found in Ilia Dorontchenkov, ed.,
Russian and Soviet Views of Modern Western Art 1890s to Mid-1930s, trans. Charles Rougle (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2009).
4. See his important analysis of the relation between art and nationality (prompted by Natalia
Goncharovas work): Sovremennoe iskusstvo i narodnost [Contemporary Art and Nationality],
Severnye zapiski (Nov. 1913): 153160.
5. The Year 1915 took place in Klavdiia Mikhailovas Artistic Salon in Moscow from March 23
through April 23, 1915. Conceived by the artist and set designer Konstantin Kandaurov as a panorama
of all artistic trends, it gained fame as a futurist event. The official exhibition listed 237 works by 28
artists but Tugendkholds essay focuses mainly on the participants hors catalogue, merely giving a mild
mention to the members of the formerly provocative group The Knave of Diamonds (Ilia Mashkov,
Piotr Konchalovsky, Robert Falk).
6. Vasily Kamensky (18841961) was a poet, artist, and airplane pilot. In 19131914, together
with Vladimir Mayakovsky and David Burliuk he toured seventeen Russian cities performing futurist
poetry readings. He signed with the latter a protest letter against Marinetti during his visit to Russia
(Feb. 1914). On Russian literary futurism, see: Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: a History [1968]
(Washington: New Academia, 2006); Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, eds., Words in Revolution.
Russian Futurist Manifestoes 19121928 [1988], (Washington: New Academia, 2005).
7. Andrey Shemshurin, Zhelezobetonnaia poema [A ferro-concrete poem], in Aleksandr Belenson,
ed., Strelets, no. 1 (1915): 165170. The Archer published two more issues in 1916 and 1922; however
the first one offered the most audacious encounter of Futurist and Symbolist poets and writers.
8. For an in-depth discussion of the negotiation of the relation between East and West in Russian
modernism, see Jane A. Sharp, op. cit.
9. For a contemporary appraisal of Tatlins assemblage work, see Nikolai Punins 1921 study Tatlin
(Against Cubism); excerpts translated in Larissa Zhadova, ed., Tatlin (London: Thames & Hudson,
1988), 347348, 389392. For a recent discussion of the materiological determination in Tatlins
work, see Maria Gough, Faktura. The Making of Russian avant-garde, RES, no. 36, (Autumn 1999):
3259.
10. Jean-Marie Guyau, Lart au point de vue sociologique [1888], (Paris: Fayard, 2001). The first
Russian translation appeared in Saint-Petersburg in 1891.
11. See Eric Michaud, La fin du salut par limage (Nmes, Jacqueline Chambon, 1992).
12. Benoiss article was published six months later as a review of the Last Futurist Exhibition of
Paintings zero-ten (0.10) held in Petrograd in Dec. 1915Jan. 1916. See his Posledniaia futuristkaia
vystavka [The Last Futurist Exhibition], Re, no. 8 (Jan. 9, 1916): 3, and Jane A. Sharp, The Critical
Reception of the 0.10 Exhibition: Malevich and Benua, The Great Utopia. The Russian and Soviet
Avant-garde 19151932 (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1992), 3852.
13. In comparison, Benois ignores the assemblage-based practices as non-art and focuses on
painting (ibid.)

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