BPictures from the war: since the Russian troops invaded the Ukraine, we have seen them every day, raw, close, often unbearable. They show bombed buildings in Kharkiv, mass graves in Bucha, smoke rising after a rocket hit in Kyiv and the ruins of residential buildings in Mariupol. We’ve seen footage of people seeking protection in subway stations, people fleeing and the wounded, dead soldiers and massacred civilians, a Ukrainian president in an olive-colored T-shirt, and a Russian warlord posing as the conductor of a “special operations” humiliating his counterparts grotesquely long table.
In Putin’s Russia there can be no talk of war – at least not in connection with Ukraine. Far away, however, on Spain’s Costa del Sol, where holidaymakers from all over the world as well as Russian oligarchs enjoyed the Mediterranean lifestyle, Russia presents itself to everyone as a thoroughly warlike nation that owes its existence and size to the constant struggle. The State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg has a branch in Málaga and has been showing a now highly controversial exhibition there for a year. “War and Peace in Russian Art” is the title of the show, which brings together different images than those that dominate our news.
Large format battle paintings
The exhibition course is designed as a glorious march through history, as a history of the geopolitical expansion of an empire, in which political system changes are more of a footnote. Wall texts anticipate the historical horizon of interpretation. The points of reference: Russia, born Christian in the form of Kievan Rus, defeats the Tatars in the east, gains access to the Baltic Sea in the Baltic States, defends itself against Napoleon, defeats the aggression of National Socialist Germany, becomes a superpower. The collapse of the Soviet Union as a result of democratic reforms is hastily reported in three sentences. This anticlimax remains invisible in the exhibition. The last painting shows an idyll on “Victory Day”, painted in oil in 1975 by Gleb Sávinov, an artist of the Leningrad School. His genre work shows a peasant family at a meal under the open sky in the style of socialist realism infused with the legacy of the European avant-garde – a picture of peace. This is followed by large-format military history paintings in half a dozen halls.
One canonized national hero after another in action, imagined retrospectively for the purpose of patriotic reassurance: Alexander Nevsky after repelling the Teutonic Knights, painted by Vladimir Serov in 1945; Ivan the Terrible, first tsar and conqueror of the Mongols, also painted in the Stalin era like King Arthur by Pawel Sokolov-Skalya. Naval battles of the Northern War, the war against the Grande Armée (without burning Moscow), the Russo-Ottoman War and the Crimean War are invoked as well as ecstatic storming in World War I.
Collected are courtly commissioned art and Soviet propaganda, but also pictures by Wassily Wereshtschagin with a pacifist touch and ambiguous ones like Kazimir Malevich’s “Red Cavalry” from 1932 – it looks true to the line, but lets the revolutionaries gallop into abstract nowhere. Nevertheless: the war as the father of all things Russian, it is celebrated here without making us think of Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and the annexation of Crimea. The exhibits were also suitable for illustrating Putin’s understanding of history.
How can that be? Long-time conservative Málaga mayor Francisco de la Torre ensured that the Russian Museum opened a branch in Andalusia in 2015. Since then it has housed a former tobacco factory owned by the city with temporary exhibitions from St. Petersburg’s inventory. Prestige, promotion of tourism, a gift for the rich Russians in nearby Marbella – that was probably the calculation, and as a thank you de la Torre personally accepted the Pushkin Medal for the Promotion of Russian Culture from Putin’s hand. After the invasion of Ukraine, however, the case was actually clear: no cooperation with Russian state authorities.
But de la Torre has been tackling for weeks whether the war and peace show in the “Museo Ruso” or the entire museum should be closed or whether it shouldn’t build a bridge – until the city council these days at least end the exhibition decided. A provincial farce, one might think, but an instructive one. Anyone who has eyes to see could have noticed before the attack on Ukraine what a questionable message the state museum was sending with the exhibition in Málaga. It ends on May 3rd. Until then, admission is free.
#Art #Propaganda #Heroic #Empire