The time of experiments (The Vicebsk avant-garde)

In the first post-revolution years, the Belarusian city of Vicebsk turned it into a major centre of revolutionary art.

In September 1918, Vicebsk-born artist Marc Chagall, was appointed by the People’s Commissariat of Education its authorized representative for arts in the Vicebsk guberniya. He was the initiator of establishing the Vicebsk art school and invited teaching artists with avant-guard thinking. Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, a St. Petersburg artist, was appointed the first director of the Vicebsk People’s Art School. Chagall’s idea was to establish the school as free studios where students could choose teachers along with art trends. Due to various subjective reasons, it was the Vicebsk school (1919-1923) that became the site for creative experiments of world scale.

In 1919, Kazimir Malevich arrived in Vicebsk. He developed his own teaching system, founded the UNOVIS association (an abbreviation in Russian of ‘Utverditeli Novogo Iskussta’ or 'The Champions of the New Art'). In his opinion, the association had to become ‘a party in art', an organization of champions of new art ideas in creative work and life based on the principles of Suprematism. At the same time he directed in Vicebsk the reconstruction of the Futurist opera ‘Victory Over the Sun’ and a Suprematist ballet staged by N. Kogan, in fact one of the world’s first pieces of performance art (February of 1920). El Lissitzky was the most consistent adherent of K. Malevich. He founded in Vicebsk his first PROUNs (projects for UNOVIS).

The art phenomenon of post-revolutionary Vicebsk was closely related to the activities of outstanding artists of the 20th century Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich who cultivated and developed their artistic conceptions on the local soil. The Vicebsk successors of revolutionary experiments, searching for new ways in art, created the environment for free thinking, producing independent ideas. A genuine explosion of creative ideas that took place in post-revolution Vicebsk ranked this modest Belarusian town equal to the world’s major cultural centres.