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Jane Sharp

Jane Sharp

Avant-Garde Comrades

The two years and some months that I have spent at Rutgers (beginning fall semester 1999) have been extraordinary. My two roles, as a faculty member and Research Curator, slip into full-time jobs when exhibitions and catalogues are in production (usually in the middle of a teaching semester); it is a rare privilege in our discipline to integrate, as I am striving to do, teaching and curatorial research. My appointment at Rutgers has led to a number of exciting developments in my scholarship. Whereas I had previously published almost exclusively on the pre-revolutionary, Russian avant-garde, I am now expanding my work to focus on the aspects of avant-garde practices from the 1920s through the 1980s. My interest in the intersection of orientalism and modernism in the work, theories, and self-promotional activities of Natal'ia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, and their associates circa 1910-14 has broadened to include the work of Russian artists who migrated to Central Asia in the 1920s and founded local national schools, primarily in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and Almaty, Kazakhstan. 

One line of research that arises naturally from my preceding work is to determine the extent to which the orientalist mission of these Russian artists shaped the cultural views and formal preferences of regional artists in the 1920s and 30s. I am also working in the other chronological direction to understand the legacy of early Soviet modernist/
nationalist projects in radical Central Asian art of the 1960s through the 1980s. Having written extensively on Russian avant-garde artists who transformed representations of the East as exotic other into representations of self-identity, I am now investigating parallel strategies among contemporary Central Asian artists.  Due to decades of the suppression of artworks and archives, it was only in 1999 that I was finally able to view the paintings necessary to complete my book on Natali'a Goncharova and Russian Modernism. In that same year a major archive, holding vast troves of material on the Russian avant-garde, became available in Amsterdam. This unexpected coup provided important new evidence for several of my theses, which I advance in the book. Now, having completed the manuscript, I am also delivering the last lectures I intend to give on the subject (for a while). I lectured on Vsechestvo, a movement theorized by Goncharova and her colleagues in 1913 as an alternate expression of modernity, on a panel appropriately entitled "Other modernisms/modernities" chaired by John Clark and Oriana Baddeley at the Congrés internationale d'historiens d'art  (CIHA) in London in September 2000. It was extremely rewarding to be on a panel that included presentations on modernist movements in Brazil, Japan, Mexico, and Thailand.  At the same time I have been developing and directing a scholarship on the collection that drew me to Rutgers in the first place: the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. With over 20,000 objects in the collection, there are a number of compelling directions for scholars such as myself to take. No doubt, Norton would agree with me that he remains a compulsive collector; so one of my first functions was to address "gaps" in the collection.  

Following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, and consequently, of the monolithic Ministry of Culture, we have found great opportunities to collect regionally. The Dodge collection is rich in work produced in Moscow, Leningrad, and the Baltic States (Norton's long-standing area of personal interest). But the relative inaccessibility of the Caucasus and Central Asian countries made it more difficult to view and acquire works there. Because I had already established connections with artists and dealers in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, mainly through the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art, I chose to concentrate on developing our collection in these areas. In December 1999, I made our first purchases in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The works were by prominent unofficial (some aggressively nonconformist) artists and by several artists who, in fact, could be considered luminaries at the tail end of the historical avant-garde. Sergei Kalmykov and Pavel Zaltsman had careers that extended from pre-Revolutionary Moscow and St. Petersburg through the Soviet 1960s and 1970s in Almaty. Each exerted a major influence on contemporary art production from the 1960s thaw through the 1980s; during this last period political independence movements catalyzed the expansion of the art world in several Central Asian urban centers. Another trip to Kazakhstan in the summer of 2000 brought us new riches, including several major works by Kalmykov. It also provided my 11-year-old son, Sam, and myself with the opportunity to visit a number of Bronze Age settlements (archaeological sites) in the Tamgali steppe. In addition to seeing our first (and thankfully dead) tarantula, as well as the local wolves (the actual animals), we examined an amazing variety of petroglyphs, thousands of years apart in age, burial sites and, yes, the remains of walled Saka settlements. All this research and travel resulted in an exhibition about which we, art historians, tend to dream.  In Recent Acquisitions from Central Asia, I was able to display most of the work I had collected, including objects that arrived just in time for the opening. Now, having been awarded (in December 2001) an IPAM grant, based on my proposal to exchange research and programming with the Savitsky Art-Historical Museum in Nukus, Karakalpakistan (Uzbekistan), I will turn my attention to artists whose work is held in large quantity (and great quality) by that museum. The director of the Savitsky Museum, Marineka Babanazarova, will be our guest at Rutgers for the month of April 2002.  

This grant will also further research on my most immediate project, a book on late-twentieth century abstract painting in the Soviet Union. A number of fascinating abstract painters worked in Uzbekistan, continuing the revolutionary utopian traditions of the Russian avant-
garde. This material will form one chapter of the upcoming book. The exhibition, Realities and Utopias, which I organized at the Zimmerli together with Rutgers graduate students in November 2000, was a first step towards conceptualizing this project. A second exhibition is planned for the autumn of 2002; this one will constitute another thematic approach to abstract painting. The second exhibition was also organized in part based on a graduate seminar that I taught in the fall of 2001 and benefits greatly from the input of our students (who I hope will contribute essays to the catalogue). As the chair of a panel on late twentieth-century abstract painting for the next CAA convention held in New York City, I plan to learn the perspectives other scholars bring to the subject, especially in their various areas of expertise. During this semester I took my first sabbatical leave, where I look forward to delving into the contents of the Zimmerli's artists' files, archives, and new acquisitions, which will hopefully move me forward with my research. Happily, many of the artists I need to interview live throughout Europe -- in Paris, Bremen, Dusseldorf and Rome, for example. I hope to meet many of them for the first time within the next few months, but I won't say no to a trip to Georgia and Azerbaijan, that is if Norton insists that we need to fill a gap there...

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