The Organics of the St. Petersburg Avant-Garde: From Matyushin to Kotelnikov

Modernization of the 20th century is usually associated with Constructivism and technical progress. However, the St. Petersburg Avant-Garde of 1912–1915 offered an alternative concept of art, revealing the world as a unique organic whole, but not a sum of standard replaceable parts. The organic Avant-Garde as an artistic tradition was first presented by Vladimir Sterligov in the symbolic drawing A Bowl (1962), emphasizing the analytical art of Pavel Filonov and the philosophy of the expanded vision of Mikhail Matyushin, that is, transrational practices aimed at creating a picture of the world that unites the objective and the nonobjective. The organic tradition in the last quarter of the 20th century was revived in the art of Vadim Ovchinnikov, Timur Novikov, Ivan Sotnikov, and Oleg Kotelnikov, contributing to the culture of transavantgarde. The transrational and seemingly marginal ideas of the 1910s and 1920s were revealed in the 1980s and 1990s as true assembly points of the worldview. The organic tradition shows the historical dynamics of the 20th century from the Symbolist dream about a new vision of a new man to the idea of a post-industrial world after the ecological catastrophe of the Anthropocene.