photography review

A REVOLUTIONARY IMPULSE: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde

THE SHAPE OF THINGS: Photographs From Robert B. Menschel

ONE AND ONE IS FOUR: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers

Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53d St., New York, through March 12, May 7, and April 2, respectively,

212-708-9400, www.moma.org

NEW YORK — Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. What once seemed a determining event of the 20th century revealed itself to be a sclerotic dead end. That’s not unique among revolutions. What is unique was its fostering an artistic revolution, too, one of extraordinary dynamism and resilience.

Resilience isn’t quite right. Joseph Stalin’s promotion of Socialist Realism crushed artistic innovation in the Soviet Union. “A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde,’’ which runs at the Museum of Modern Art through March 12, extends from 1912 to 1935. The first date, preceding the actual revolution by five years, reminds us of how the work of such artists as Natalia Goncharova, Kazemir Malevich, and Lyubov Popova provided a kind of prelude, or reveille, for the upheaval to come. By the second date, a year before the Great Terror began, artistic innovation had become almost as foreign as freedom of speech. After a dozen years where daring was such an aesthetic constant it seemed as common as punctuation, the artistic norm had become weariness and — far worse — wariness.

Yet resilience isn’t wrong. So many of the works retain their freshness and novelty to an astonishing degree. The first thing a visitor sees are linoleum cuts from Olga Rozanova’s 1916 series “War.’’ Such is their vigor that the gouging feels almost palpable. Almost as palpable is an across-the-board sense of artistic ambition. Soviet artists didn’t want to change just art. They wanted to change everything. As the cultural journal LEF put it, the goal was “the production of a new human being through art.’’

The 260 items in the show include paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, films, architectural models, ceramics, stage designs, magazines, posters, postcards, even a sheet of stationery for a Soviet airline and three pins to be worn by flight attendants. Both paper and pins were designed by Aleksandr Rodchenko, possessor of perhaps the era’s most muscular imagination.

All of those 260 items come from MoMA’s permanent collection. There’s a reason that MoMA is MoMA. This is museum muscle-flexing as impressive in its way as those May Day displays of Soviet military might in Red Square. The richness of the holdings is such that a work as celebrated as Naum Gabo’s celluloid-and-metal sculpture “Head of a Woman,’’ stuck in a corner up near the ceiling, could easily be overlooked.

Artistic revolutions, almost as much as artistic traditions, are not discontinuous. Malevich’s 1913 painting “Samovar’’ is Cubism that’s as Russian as serving tea in a glass. Yet barely three years later, Malevich had graduated to abstraction and Suprematism. This was brave new territory, a world where color and geometry were slipping the surly bonds of previous art. The disjunction between the title of Malevich’s 1915 canvas “Painterly Realism of a Boy With a Knapsack — Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension’’ and what one actually sees — a black square above a smaller, tilted red square, on a white background — is so absurd as to verge on magnificence.

By the late teens and early ‘20s, El Lissitzky gave the world his “prouns’’ — that word being an acronym for Project for the Affirmation of the New (not a bad working title for the avant-garde project as a whole). These combinations in various media of geometric shapes and anglings and solid colors are alternately chilly, inscrutable, and beguiling.

Technology no less than politics drove aesthetic innovation. Painting “fell apart together with the old world which it had created for itself,’’ El Lissitzky wrote. “The new world will not need little pictures. If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema.’’ Lenin said something similar, albeit far more tendentiously: “Of all arts, for us the most important is the cinema.’’

Four screens in the same small space simultaneously show excerpts from a quartet of the greatest films ever made: Sergei Eisenstein’s “Potemkin’’ (1925), Vsevolod Pudovkin’s “Mother’’ (1926), Dziga Vertov’s “Man With the Movie Camera’’ (1929), and Alexander Dovzhenko’s “Earth’’ (1930). This is almost comically overwhelming, not that there’s anything comical about the Odessa Steps sequence, from “Potemkin.’’ The experience is akin to hearing “The Firebird,’’ “Petrouchka,’’ “The Rite of Spring,’’ and “Pulcinella’’ all playing at once. But being overwhelmed is very much to the point. As sheer cultural achievement, Soviet film of this era bears comparison to Elizabethan drama, say, or Dutch painting of the Golden Age. If only its era has lasted as long as those.

Thanks largely to Rodchenko, photography has rarely been as exuberant. He delights in odd angles, unexpected perspectives, and finding ceaseless surprise in something as mundane as a telephone call or a sheaf of files in folders. All too presciently, the title he gave the latter, in 1927, was “Down With Bureaucracy.’’

There’s a 1936 Berenice Abbott view of the George Washington Bridge in “The Shape of Things: Photographs From Robert B. Menschel.’’ With its up-to-the-metallic-minute subject and canted, foreshortened view, it could be a Rodchenko. The show runs through May 7. Except that somehow it lacks Rodchenko’s exuberance. Its stately restraint recalls Abbott’s artistic master, Eugène Atget. How to account for such similarity in subject matter and approach yet clear difference in feeling? That is the mystery of art.

The 100 photographs in “The Shape of Things’’ are drawn from more than 500 that MoMA has acquired over the years via Menschel, a trustee. Clearly, the man admires Harry Callahan (a dozen photographs), William Wegman, and Aaron Siskind (10) each. The show’s excellent catalog notes that Siskind taught Menschel in grade school!

A wall text declares the show “a compact and non-comprehensive history of photography.’’ Well, as history it’s awfully porous. But what matters is how often the images afford an opportunity to savor that above-mentioned mystery of art. How to account for the majesty of Charles Harry Jones’s pyramid of onions — or a Victorian woman’s full-fathom-five gaze in Hugh W. Diamond’s portrait — or the phenomenal variations of texture in the most famous photograph in the show, Alfred Stieglitz’s “The Terminal? You can’t, and that’s when mystery becomes miracle.

The Soviet avant-garde shows up directly and obliquely in “One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers,’’ which runs through March 12. The show consists of 16 of the 70 collages Albers made of his photographs between 1928 and 1932. Mounted on cream-colored boards, they’re strictly presentational (Teutonic, if you will, rather than Soviet), with no overlapping or cropping or skewing. Even so, a sense of quiet playfulness obtains throughout.

The collages can have as few as one photograph (not really a collage, of course) and as many as 22. The latter show Albers’s Bauhaus colleague Paul Klee. Other colleagues captured include Walter Gropius, Herbert Bayer, and Oskar Schlemmer. We also find a bullfight ring, surf at Biarritz, and a Swiss staircase.

The Soviet connection? El Lissitzky gets a diptych, and in his very different Malevich shared Albers’s passion for the rectilinear — evident in nine lithographs from his 1963 series “Day and Night: Homage to the Square,’’ currently on display at MoMA in “From the Collection: 1960-1969.’’

A REVOLUTIONARY IMPULSE: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde

THE SHAPE OF THINGS: Photographs From Robert B. Menschel

ONE AND ONE IS FOUR: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers

At Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53d St., New York, through March 12, May 7, and April 2, respectively, 212-708-9400, www.moma.org

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.