Abstraction & revolution

Utopias are an expression of aspirations that cannot be realized, of efforts that are not equal to the resistance they encounter.
—Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star (1908)

A revolution strengthens the impulse of invention. That is why there is a flourishing of art following a revolution. . . . Invention is always the working out of impulses and desires of the collective and not of the individual.
—Vladimir Tatlin, International Iskusstv (1919)

The reality principle—la force des choses—will, in the end, always prevail over utopian passions.
—Irving Kristol, “The Adversary Culture of Intellectuals” (1979)

The fate of abstract art in Russia in the decade following the Revolution of 1917 proved to be one of the most tragic chapters in the annals of twentieth-century modernism. Its only near rival among the political calamities that beset the modernist movement in the early decades of the century occurred in Germany in the 1930s with the unleashing of Hitler’s war on “degenerate” art. There was this important difference, however, between the Nazi campaign to abolish modernist art in Germany and that of the Soviet Union under Lenin. Hitler never pretended to set up as a patron of modernist art. However grudgingly, Lenin—or the regime over which he presided as dictator, anyway—did so pretend for a very short but crucial period, thus inducing the illusion among members of the Russian avant-garde that modernism in the arts would be embraced by