Gustav Klucis (1895–1938): a Complex Transformation from “Soviet Artist” to “Russian Avant-Gardist”

Abstract

Abstract The two main elements that render the case of Gustav Klucis unique among other Russian Avant-garde artists are: his nationality which was the cause of his tragic death during Stalin’s Great Purge but also what determined the fate of his creative legacy; and his political engagement in the development of mass (propaganda) art, which is behind the current controversial evaluation of his legacy today, and had influenced his own complicated career. Although both the circumstances of the artist’s life and the historical context are familiar to scholars, archival studies provide new materials, revealing less-known aspects of the artists’ creative biography. My paper addresses two topics. In the introduction I recall some notable facts about the “Riga Collection” of Klucis’ works, kept at the Latvian National Museum of Art, and discuss how its interpretation and interrelation to other collections of Klucis’ works were developed with an eye towards the artist’s reintegration in the context of the Russian Avant-garde. In the main part of my paper, I share some thoughts about Klucis as a theorist, related to the study of the second version of his manuscript “The Right to Experiment” and other less known materials, found in the Nikolai Khardzhiev archive.