On their way to the blockbuster show on Degas, the crowds stop, puzzled, in front of a scale model of Tatlin’s unrealised Monument to the Third International placed in the Annenberg Courtyard, and relating to the RA’s current exhibition on Soviet art and architecture. Displayed in the Sackler Wing, drawings, paintings and architectural models made by Russian avant-garde artists between 1915 and 1935 are complemented by photographs of Soviet modernist architecture taken by British artist, Richard Pare in the 1990s. Among many fascinating works on display, Popova’s Spatial Force Construction (1920-21), with its strikingly tactile juxtaposition of soft plywood and oil paint mixed with marble dust, as well as the imaginative forms of Klutsis’s collage design for Exhibition Construction (1921-24), offer an insight into the poetic rather than heroic character of the art of that period. Other compositions, most evidently Korolev’s and Nikritin’s works, explore the issue of the human figure and its relation to architecture. The specific political context of those works is not strongly emphasised but some labels include information about the dramatic consequences of the artists’ refusal to adopt the vocabulary of Stalin’s Classicism.

The ambition of the curators of the show is to establish an alternative way of interpreting the works of such celebrated artists as Melnikov or Rodchenko. What is at stake in the show is the idea that the radical architecture of the East was in fact indebted to projects made in the West. Pare’s photograph showing the facade of MoGES designed by Zholtovski is described as proclaiming the architect’s ‘adherence to a classical language of architecture informed by his admiration for Andrea Palladio.’ What seems problematic is that photographs by a contemporary Western artist seem in fact to shift the focus of the exhibition away from the creative process of the building of the revolution.

Until Jan 22

ZUZANNNA ILNICKA