CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA.- The National Gallery of Australia presents the exhibit Revolutionary Russians Commemorating the centenary of Shostakovich through January 28, 2007. 2006 marks the centenary of the birth of the great composer Dmitri Shostakovich. He was born in St Petersburg on 25 September 1906 into a Russia wracked by revolutionary ferment. In the hundred years that followed, Russia endured continual upheavals and at least four revolutions. The first began in 1905 and lasted until 1907, while the year 1917 saw two in February and October. As well as the Civil War of 1918 to 1921, the new Soviet Union saw Stalin’s Great Terror of the 1930s, then invasion by Nazi Germany in the Second World War. This was followed by the turmoil of the Cold War from 1945, until a largely peaceful revolution saw the end of the Soviet Union and its empire between 1989 and 1992. Political and economic dislocation was mirrored by cultural and artistic advances and retreats, breakthroughs and stagnation.

In the visual arts, the twentieth century was distinguished by the adoption of new, modernist visual languages, especially the multiple images of printing, photography and film. These are all media where the aura of one original work is replaced by numerous identical versions. In Russia the idea of cheap and plentiful art objects mirrored the ideal of creating a new society, in fact a new human being: Homo sovieticus. The utopian idealism of the project lasted only a few years, but the form continued into the 1970s.

In 1905 the first Russian revolts of the twentieth century began as the Tsarist regime’s imperial adventure, the attack on Japan in 1904, began to fail. The shock of European defeat by an Asian nation was complete: Russia’s ambitions for a Pacific empire and a warm water port were crushed, along with its navy, at the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905. In contrast to the aristocracy’s leisured, luxurious life, peasants and workers suffered under appalling conditions, and were joined by the intelligentsia in opposing the autocratic and incompetent regime. On 9 January a peaceful demonstration at the Tsar’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg turned into the massacre of Bloody Sunday when troops fired into the crowd, killing and wounding more than a thousand people.

In the tradition of the lubok, the coloured folk woodcut print, and the unauthorised pamphlet, hundreds of savagely critical illustrated newspapers were published in the temporary relaxation of censorship when the government floundered between 1905 and 1907. The National Gallery of Australia’s collection of 167 issues includes some harrowing images of the poor, victims of the Tsar and his three agents (the nobility, the military and the church). Bloody Sunday altered the view of the Tsar as protector, the Little Father of the people: Nicholas II was now seen as an oppressor like the others. Radical, broad, and excoriating in their depiction of the forces of repression, most surprising perhaps is the hatred their artists and illustrators expressed towards priests. One extraordinary image shows a naked woman crucified – unusual in a prudish culture where nudity was banned apart from a few high art representations, and where the Orthodox Church controlled religious discourse. But a bare-breasted female Jesus? Even now it appears confronting.

In the years before the outbreak of war in August 1914, Europe was convulsed by modernism in the arts. Russia was industrialising rapidly, producing a larger and liberal middle class as well as some enlightened patrons. The painters Kazimir Malevich, Natalya Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov all produced original lithographic book illustrations in the style of Russian Futurism. In Gardeners over the vines 1913, for example, Goncharova develops the idea of Rayism, where bolts of lines and divided forms dissect images of the natural world. Radical verse and writing were accompanied by abstracted compositions, which could be produced in large, cheap editions to broadly disseminate radical artistic ideas. After the Bolshevik Revolution this became state policy, which would lead to criticism and then suppression of individual creation.