The Zotov Centre for Constructivism in Moscow has opened a new exhibition ‘House 21. Visiting the Artists,’ shining a light on the creative daily lives of the avant-gardists.

One of the most remarkable avant-garde addresses on the map of Moscow is 21 Myasnitskaya Street. A block of flats from the 1910s housed the apartments of those who studied and taught nearby, at the principal forge of the masters of the Russian avant-garde – the Higher Art and Technical Studios (VKhUTEMAS). This legendary institution occupied a neighbouring address, once the celebrated home of General Yushkov. The building – a Classicist-style palace constructed under Catherine II and renowned for its balls and Masonic gatherings – was handed over after the Revolution for the needs of the new proletarian art, and from 1920 housed the VKhUTEMAS workshops.

The designer behind the exhibition at the Zotov Centre is neo-modernist architect Yevgeny Asse. He managed to find a way to evoke the image of this historical house of artists without resorting to theatrical props. Asse drew two circles – one large, one small. Into the large circle, which occupies the floor space of the third floor of the exhibition, he inscribed several modules forming a rectangular arch. From the centre, he drew a further small circle. The arch became an enfilade of five artist flats; the small circle is the courtyard of the house where they all lived. A committed proponent of rigorous constructive method, Yevgeny Asse, working alongside Kirill Shiryaev, has created a full-scale model of how this life was. The visitor walks along a corridor, opens a door with the flat number and name of the inhabitants like Rodchenko–Stepanova and enters a gallery consisting of two rooms. Photographs, paintings and drawings hang on the walls; there is a glass case resembling a wardrobe which holds everyday objects; tables are scattered with games and the paraphernalia of an artist’s studio. Nothing superfluous. No simulation, no game of reconstruction or naturalism.

This detached engagement with domestic family histories produces the impression of an intellectual adventure, a quest. Through the game and journey orchestrated by curator Anna Zamriy, we gain a broad sense of the creative processes of each individual artist, acquainting ourselves with the fascinating details of their daily lives and the friendships that bound together the families of the artists. At the same time, this estrangement confers a position of outsideness. The artists’ flats become memory cells – cells preserving a time that is not ours, one in which we are merely guests. We shall never coincide with it.

The dialectical principle governing the staging of the space intends to draw us into a circle of intimate connections and bring the era closer – whilst simultaneously presenting it as a hallucination, a somnambulant labyrinth. And so the rooms are felt as cells, as traps of time.

This dramatic apprehension of the history of the house of the Soviet avant-garde artists is an entirely honest approach. After all, many of these biographies ended far from idyllically. Take, for example, flat number 51, where the couple Nadezhda Udaltsova (1885–1961) and Alexander Drevin (1889–1938) lived. Canvases by both artists are on display in the two rooms. Visitors hear a recording of the couple in conversation about the art of objectivism – a method demanding austerity in the choice of compositions and subjects, yet allowing the world of things to be presented with weight, texture and collage. Udaltsova and Drevin were ascetics in their domestic life as well. Nadezhda Udaltsova was a pupil of the French Cubists, of Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) and Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935). Alexander Drevin was born and educated in Riga, Latvia, under the celebrated Latvian painter Vilhelms Purvītis (1872–1945). He moved to Moscow, exhibited with the Jack of Diamonds group, taught at VKhUTEMAS, and was a founding member of the Society of Moscow Artists. From 1933, both Udaltsova and Drevin were subjected to persecution as Formalists. On 17 January 1938, Alexander Drevin was arrested on suspicion of counter-revolutionary activity and shot.

The scale model of the two rooms in memory of Drevin and Udaltsova is unambiguously associated with a memorial cabinet honouring the victims of political terror. The rooms contain nothing that might distract or entertain – nothing to divert attention from the paintings and sketches. This accords with their manner of living: austere and restrained. Reserved and sparing with words, these artists became passionate disputants only in conversation about art – with each other and with their students. Now, in the rooms of Udaltsova and Drevin, it is the paintings themselves that possess an extraordinary eloquence. Gathered from various collections – both institutional and private – they show landscapes, the majority painted during the Altai and Armenian expeditions of the early 1930s. The painting is free of verbose detail: within landscapes of sky, sea, naïvely rendered cottages and herds of animals, the artists reveal a primal foundation, the primordial substance of the world. And light animates the canvases with a pure inner radiance.

Connecting an artist’s creative life to their human experience is a noble pursuit. While museums often isolate art from its original context, the exhibition ‘House 21’ restores a compassionate register and a deep sense of trust to the viewer’s experience.

Alongside Drevin and Udaltsova, the enfilade accommodates two more apartments of married artist couples – Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956) and Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958), and Pyotr Miturich (1887–1956) and Vera Khlebnikova (1891–1941) – as well as two apartments dedicated to individual artists considered within the context of the broader school they represent: Vladimir Favorsky (1886–1964), with his philosophy of graphic art, and Sergei Senkin (1894–1963) as a representative of Constructivism in print.

Each section has its own trump card to help unlock the art and the social world of the artist. In the case of the celebrated left-wing couple Rodchenko and Stepanova, the guiding image – the word or rather key – is ´Play´. At the centre of the first room stands a large table scattered with mahjong tiles, a Chinese game not unlike dominoes, in which one must assemble sets of matching themes and suits. Mischievous anecdotes are recounted of time spent at Rodchenko and Stepanova’s flat playing mahjong with fellow avant-gardists, including Vladimir Mayakovsky with his running commentary during rounds, and Alexei Kruchenykh, who perpetually refused to pay his losses. On display are tiles decorated by the couple themselves. Fittingly, the second room in the apartment is dedicated to the themes of festivity and the circus. Little-known paintings by Alexander Rodchenko depicting acrobats, clowns and jugglers, made in the 1930s and 1940s, are on display here. The artist's grandson, Alexander Lavrentiev, notes that this series is not a record of individual acts but a philosophical meditation on the nature of circus illusion – its miracles of light, acrobatics and flight, and the solitude of the performing artists.

For Sergei Senkin’s rooms, the key is ´Collage´. A master of the Constructivist book, of poster and advertising design, Senkin worked within the LEF, Vremya and Oktyabr groups and in close collaboration with the Latvian artist Gustav Klutsis (1895–1938), who was shot in 1938. Visitors are invited to take transfer sheets printed with modular sans-serif lettering, posters and slogans, and compose their own collage on a piece of card in the spirit of the Klutsis–Senkin originals hanging on the wall.

The visionary artist Vladimir Favorsky might fittingly be assigned the symbol of the ´Book´. Indeed, all the works on paper laid out on shelves – woodcut printing boards and printed impressions – along with the artist's inspired pronouncements on the nature of black and white paint, on depth of space and pictorial surface, are catalogued in folios given to the visitor in Favorsky's flat in lieu of labels. Thus the Book, the apotheosis of Favorsky's works on paper, becomes the guide through his worlds.

Finally, for the married couple Vera Khlebnikova and Pyotr Miturich, and their son Mai, I would propose the key ´Fairy Tale´. Magical worlds united the couple in the upbringing of their son, who became the celebrated illustrator Mai Miturich (1925–2008). In the rooms of their apartment, you see dancing silhouettes cast by a magic lantern, children's toys and a wealth of illustrations to fairy tales. The rooms are also inhabited by the sounds of the fairy tale of Till Eulenspiegel, ‘Till and Nelly,’ which Vera Khlebnikova wrote in 1938 on the basis of her observations of two young rooks who reminded her of the rogue and his companion from the novel by Charles de Coster. In 1953, Mai chose illustrations to ‘The Legend of Till Eulenspiegel’ as his graduate project at the Moscow Printing Institute.

The cosy idyll of the storytellers’ rooms is disrupted by an installation created by Pyotr Miturich and Vera Khlebnikova's great-granddaughter, Maria Sumnina (b. 1977). A multitude of black buttons – doorbells – are sealed inside transparent cases. They cannot be touched; they have fallen silent forever. There is no ringing back to reach the past. One can only endeavour to break the spell of this gifted, artistic world of Russian history.