VIENNA.- The exhibition casts light on the ground-breaking achievements of the Russian avant-garde under a hitherto barely recognised aspect: the artist-couple. The movement galvanised in the light of the 1917 October Revolution was characterised by enormous productivity, powers of innovation and diversity of artistic techniques; it not only brought forth a considerable number of women artists on equal terms with men, but also an as yet unprecedented accumulation of artist-couples.

The latter put into practice the revolutionary approach to art that in its ambition for an artistic recreation of reality interrelated all artistic genres, Actionism and theories. Whether partnered temporarily or lifelong, they were at once lovers and allies for their common cause, frequently shared a studio, took part in the restructuring of cultural institutions and also in the topical avant-guard discourses and exhibitions. They worked shoulder to shoulder, in mutual inspiration or demarcated from each other, as well as together as a creative team, frequently sharing their work.

The private and collective spheres rarely seemed so intricately interwoven as in this epoch marked by political and social upheavals. With the October Revolution, the fulfilment of the Utopia – ultimately a failure – of revolutionising art and life for some time actually seemed a realistic hope. The Bolshevist reforms in the matrimonial laws and sexual ethics introduced in 1917/18 – all too quickly repealed by Stalin – set in motion a veritable “sexual revolution”, which granted women an unprecedented degree of autonomy, hitherto unknown whether in the West or the East.

In these historical contexts new perspectives of collective creativity could be planned that led not only to many institutions, peer groups, complex, ramified networks and interrelated artist biographies – these form the meta-narrative of the exhibition – but also prepared fertile ground for a boom in artistic partnerships. The artist-couple undermines the myth of art as an achievement of a solitary creative genius. Based on special interrelationships of art and life and of the private and public spheres, the artist-couple embodies the “nucleus” of collective creativity within the Russian avant-garde, out of which the “New Life” (S. Tretyakov) might be formed, a society freed of distinctions based on class and gender.

By selecting five pairs as examples – Natalya Goncharova (1881–1962) and Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964), Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958) and Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956), Lyubov Popova (1889–1924) and Alexander Vesnin (1883–1959), Olga Rosanova (1886–1918) and Aleksei Kruchenykh (1886–1968), Valentina Kulagina (1902–1987) and Gustav Klutsis (1895–1938) – the exhibition examines the diverse forms of collaboration that evolved out of the utopian understanding of art and the special characteristics that were engendered in creativity, authorship and production.

What did the relationships of the Russian artist-couples actually look like in their artistic and social aspects? Did they succeed in fulfilling the potential of a creative symbiosis in practice? What influence did each partnership have on artistic production, and how far did the still virulent sexual stereotypes continue to have an effect? In exploring these questions by placing the focus on the creative work of artist-couples from different generations and in all genres, the exhibition traces the genealogy of the Russian avant-garde: from its pre-revolutionary beginnings around 1907, influenced by Western European modernist influences and Russian traditions, then the development into abstraction in (Cubo-)Futurism, Rayonism and Suprematism; it explores the functionalisation of art in the spirit of a new creation of reality in Constructivism and production art in 1921 and later, and goes on to show its subjugation and exploitation under the totalitarian propaganda of Stalinism in the 1930s.