Robert W. Cherny. Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. 360 pp. Ill. $36.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-08230-6.
Reviewed by Juliette Milbach (Research Associate at École des hautes études en sciences sociales)
Published on H-SHERA (May, 2018)
Commissioned by Hanna Chuchvaha (University of Calgary)
Despite having produced some outstanding paintings and murals and leading a thrilling life, the painter Victor Arnautoff (1896-1979) remains fairly unknown in both the public and academic spheres. Born and raised in what is now eastern Ukraine, Arnautoff emigrated to the United States in 1925. He became an active participant in the New Deal programs initiated by the Roosevelt administration to give work to artists during the Great Depression. A brief summary of Arnautoff’s life can only provoke further curiosity in the reader. Arnautoff, the son of an Orthodox priest, served as a cavalry officer in the First World War and later lived in China for nearly five years. When Arnautoff arrived in California, he attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and then spent two years in Mexico. By the end of the 1930s, he had become a member of the Communist Party of the United States. After retiring from the faculty of art at Stanford University in 1963, Arnautoff decided to return to the Soviet Union, where he resided until his death in 1979. Throughout his life he acted as an important cultural ambassador between the USSR and the USA. Arnautoff traveled to Mexico a year before Diego Rivera’s first creative trip to California. He subsequently played a leading role in the establishment of mural art in San Francisco. The artistic exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union, however, have often been overlooked by scholars. Moreover, film and cinema tend to receive more attention than painting in the few studies that do exist, while monographic works on some of the key figures are almost completely absent. This comprehensive biography by Robert W. Cherny is intended to address this gap in the literature devoted to this pivotal period, and represents a tribute to Arnautoff and his artistic and cultural contribution.
Cherny's work on Arnautoff began with a lecture delivered in spring 2011, in which the scholar summarized various documents from the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art; the monograph devoted to Arnautoff's biography soon appeared in print. The archival materials that Cherny had access to is extensive, ranging from the National Archives to FBI files, and include some from Russian archives. Oral interviews with Arnautoff’s close circle of family and friends were also conducted by the biographer between 1986 and 2014. In addition, letters written by the artist as well as his 1965 autobiography offer readers an intimate insight into his personal life. Eleven chronological chapters situate Arnautoff in the historical context of the twentieth century, and an appendix lists his public murals in both Ukraine and the United States Reproductions of both his paintings and murals are also included.
As he explains in his preface, Cherny set out to answer two questions: "What explains Arnautoff’s 180-degree shift in his political perspective from serving as a White officer [in the Russian Civil War] to joining the Communist Party? How did Arnautoff’s politics affect his art, or, put another way, how did his art reflect his politics?" (p. xi). Therefore, one of the main topics of the book is Arnautoff's artworks created in the 1920s and early 1930s. In particular, the author discusses the spectacular murals at Coit Tower (the biggest muralist project of San Francisco ) in order to argue with the assumptions and conclusions of Anthony Lee in Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco's Public Murals (1999).
The first three chapters provide the details of Arnautoff’s life in Tsarist Russia, his stay in China, and his emigration to California. Arnautoff was born in the village of Uspenivka (Ekaterinoslav Province) and grew up in Mariupol. Intertwined is context of the massive colony of Russian émigrés in China during the Civil War. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are particularly fascinating for art historians, as they present rich details on the beginning of Arnautoff’s career in San Francisco. Cherny invites the readers to look into the way of life of Russian immigrants on the West Coast. He also draws attention to the leading role that Diego Rivera played in constructing a definition for American muralism. Cherny explains how Arnautoff and Rivera collaborated, referring to the writings of Ilya Ehrenburg and Vladimir Mayakovsky, who were Rivera's friends. Cherny quotes a funny remark by Rivera about Arnautoff’s paintings: "Your landscapes are Mexican, but the spirit of them is Russian" (p. 75). Chapter 6 is devoted to the Coit Tower history. If in chapter 7 we can still find some details of Arnautoff’s murals (for the hall of the new George Washington High School in San Francisco and for some post offices), the last four chapters are almost completely related to the muralist’s personal life and his political activities. In chapter 9, Cherny attempts to explain the growing sense of isolation experienced by Arnautoff, who was affected by the beginning of the Cold War and anticommunism but also by the "rapid and far-reaching changes in the San Francisco art community" (p. 149). After several attempts to return to the Soviet Union, Arnautoff finally succeeded in the early 1960s. Although he was readmitted back to his homeland, he experienced political tensions with the Soviet government—ironically, just as he had in the United States for being a communist.
As mentioned by Cherny in the preface, yet which remains unexplained, there is quite an imbalance between the treatment of the 1920s and that of the 1930s. The remaining chapters of the book also focus more on Arnautoff's political life as opposed to offering an art-historical analysis, which thus sheds little light on Arnautoff’s involvement in the world of art during the Cold War. Moreover, the extensive reproduction of easel paintings in the book suggests that readers will learn more about his art than his political and social activities, but unfortunately, this remains understudied. Due to the greater use of the American archives than Russian ones, there is some unevenness in the case studies. Thus, in some chapters, it seems that the author has emphasized the complexity of the political context over the importance of Arnautoff's artworks. Putting this criticism aside, this monograph is a useful tool for scholars who want to pursue further work on Arnautoff's legacy and Russian émigré art in the United States.
Editorial note: Several inaccuracies in the original review have been corrected. These include the name of the art school Arnautoff attended; the length of time he spent in China; and the name of the San Francisco high school where one of his murals is located.
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Citation:
Juliette Milbach. Review of Cherny, Robert W., Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art.
H-SHERA, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=50809
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