On the outbreak of the First World War Kandinsky returned to Russia, where, in 1917, he married a Moscow woman, Nina Andreyevskaya, and hoped to reintegrate himself into Russian life. His intention was encouraged by the new Soviet government, which at first showed itself anxious to win the favour and services of avant-garde artists. In 1918 he became a professor at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts, and further official appointments followed. But by the early 1920s, when it became clear that the Soviet government was veering away from avant-garde art towards socialist realism, he and his wife left Moscow for Berlin.
Invited to teach at the Bauhaus school of architecture and applied art, Kandinsky evolved in the general direction of geometric abstraction, but with a dynamism and a taste for detail-crowded pictorial space that recall his earlier sweeping- gesture technique. That Kandinsky was keenly interested in theory during these years is evident from his publication in 1926 of his second important treatise, Point and Line to Plane. In his first treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), he had emphasized in particular the supposed expressiveness of colours, comparing yellow, for example, to the aggressive, allegedly earthly sound of a trumpet and comparing blue to the allegedly heavenly sound of the pipe organ. Now, in the same spirit, he analysed the supposed effects of the abstract elements of drawing, interpreting a horizontal line, for example, as cold and a vertical line as hot.
His persona] trajectory continued to be directed in part by political developments. Although he had been a German citizen since 1928, when the Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close in 1933 he emigrated to Paris. During this final period his painting, which he began to prefer to call "concrete" rather than "abstract", became to some extent a synthesis of the organic manner of the pre-First World War Munich period and the geometric manner of the Bauhaus period. The visual language that he had been aiming at since at least 1910 turned into collections of signs that look like almost-decipherable messages written in pictographs and hieroglyphs; many of the signs resemble aquatic larvae, and now and then there is a figurative hand or a lunar human face. Typical works are Violet Dominant, Dominant Curve, Fifteen, Moderation and Tempered Elan. The production of such works was accompanied by the writing of essays in which the artist stressed the alleged failure of modern scientific positivism and the need to perceive what he termed "the symbolic character of physical substances". Kandinsky died in 1944. His influence on twentieth-century art, often filtered through the work of more accessible painters, was profound.
The visual arts took longer to recover from the Stalinist years than did literature. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that a new group of artists, all of whom worked "underground", appeared. Major artists included Ernst Neizvestny, Ilya Kabakov, Mikhail Shemyakin, and Erik Bulatov. They employed techniques as varied as primitivism, hyperrealism, grotesque, and abstraction, but they shared a common distaste for the canons of socialist realism.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, and thanks to the liberalization policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, artistic experimentation began a resurgence within Russia, and many Russian painters enjoyed successful exhibitions both at home and abroad. In the late 1980s the greatest works of Russian art of the early twentieth century were again made available to the public. But by this time a large number of Russian artists had emigrated, and many became well known on the world art scene. Particularly notable was the team of Vitaly Komar and
Alex Melamid, who became internationally recognized in the 1990s for a project in which they systematically - and ironically - documented what people throughout the world said they valued most in a painting. The early years of the twenty-first century saw the extensive re-emergence of contemporary Russian artists on the world art market scene, often fetching very high prices for figurative art, perhaps in part thanks to the emergence of an industrial and commercial nouveau riche in Russia.
Film
A glance at the development of Russia's film industry draws into focus some of the recurring issues in Russian culture, such as the relationship between art and politics, the advantages and disadvantages of state-sponsored artistic activity, and the native Russian vs. imported western debate.
Before the October 1917 Revolution, Russia for all practical purposes had no native film industry. In the industrialized nations of the West, motion pictures had first been accepted as a form of cheap recreation and leisure for the working class, but in pre-revolutionary Russia the working class was composed largely of former serfs too poor to support a native industry, and so the small movie business that did develop was dominated by foreign interests and foreign films. The first native Russian company was not founded until 1908, and by the time of the revolution there were perhaps 20 more; but even these were small, importing all their technical equipment and film stock from Germany and France.
From Russia's entry into the First World War in August 1914, its film industry came under government control. Since foreign films could no longer be imported, the tsarist government established the Skobelev Committee to stimulate domestic production and produce propaganda in support of the regime; when the tsar fell in March 1917 the Provisional Government reorganized it to produce anti-tsarist propaganda. When the Bolsheviks inherited the committee eight months later, they transformed it into the Cinema Committee of the People's Commissariat of Education.
The potential of film to communicate quickly and effectively was quickly seized upon by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the first political leader of the twentieth century to recognize the importance of film as propaganda and control. More specifically, Lenin saw the potential of film to unite the huge, disparate nation over which the Bolsheviks, then a minority party of some 200,000 members, had assumed leadership. He declared: "The cinema is for us the most important of the arts." His government gave top priority to the rapid development of the Soviet film industry, which was nationalized in August 1919 and put under the direct authority of Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.
With little to build upon (most of the pre-revolutionary producers had fled to Europe, taking their equipment and film stock with them), one of the first acts of the Cinema Committee was to found a professional film school in Moscow to train directors, technicians, and actors for the cinema. The Ali- Union State Institute of Cinematography was the first such school in the world and is still among the most respected. Initially it trained people in the production of agitki, existing newsreels re-edited for the purpose of agitation and propaganda (agitprop). The agitki were transported on specially equipped agit-trains and agit-steamers to the provinces, where they were exhibited to generate support for the revolution.