Art & Exhibitions
Aleksei Kruchenykh Added Content to Collage
THE DAILY PIC: The Russian poet appropriated imagery, as most French artists didn't.
Blake Gopnik
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This collage was made after the Russian revolution by Aleksei Eliseevich Kruchenykh, much better known as a poet. It’s in a show of works from the Russian avant-garde at Gallery Shchukin in New York. Amazing to think that the first-ever fine-art collage was made only a few years earlier than this one, but thousands of miles away in Paris. The Shchukin show makes clear that the roots of the Russian avant-garde were broad and deep, stretching out to many artists you’ve never heard of. The Kruchenykh collage makes clear that Russian abstraction, rather than being about pure color and form, was closely connected to the “semantic” concerns of poets, and was in close connection to the real world. Maybe that connection explains one of the most compelling details from Kruchenykh’s collage: its appropriated image of a little sail boat, the kind of representational borrowing one doesn’t often find in Braque or Picasso.
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