Russian avant-garde through the lens of an American photographer

The new exhibit at the A. V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture – “The Russian Avant Garde through the Lens of an American Photographer. Celebrating the jubilee of William Brumfield” – coincides with the 80th birthday of a long friend of the Museum, the Professor of Slavic Studies at Tulane University (New Orleans), William Craft Brumfield – a person who has devoted his life to an understanding of Russian culture and to sharing it with the world.

In 1966 William Brumfield received a bachelor’s degree in the Russian language at Tulane University and, in 1973, a doctoral degree in Slavic languages and literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Brumfield’s first trip to the USSR occurred in the summer of 1970 as part of the teachers’ exchange with Moscow University. The 120 slides that he brough back represented his first experience in photography. From 1970 until the early 2000s, Brumfield photographed on film and then switched to digital cameras. Today the large part of his film work has been digitized and the entire photographic collection consists of over 150,000 images. William Brumfield’s photographic legacy is preserved at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and in Russia, at the A.V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture.

The exhibition is structured around the regions in which Brumfield photographed monuments of the avant garde: Moscow, Leningrad, the section “From the Urals to the Far East” as well as towns in central and southern Russia and the central Volga region.The section devoted to buildings of the Moscow avant garde is the most extensive; it occupies a greater part of the space. “Moscow always remained the center of my interpretation of the Soviet avant garde”, – said Brumfield. This section of the exhibit presents extended series of shots of the author’s favorite sites: the Narkomfin apartment building, constructed to project by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis; the Zuev House of Culture, by Ilya Golosov; the Proletarian District (A.I. Likhachev Automobile Factory) Palace of Culture, by the Vesnin Brothers; the experimental house and studio of the architect Konstantin Melnikov, as well as his workers’ clubs and garages. “I was intrigued by the architecture of Konstantin Melnikov and gave him prominent space in the final chapter of Gold in Azure: One Thousand Years of Russian Architecture, including color and black-and-white photographs of the Melnikov house and the Rusakov Club”, – William Brumfield. These series of photographs illustrate how the photographer returned again and again to many of the same buildings over a period of many years.

Photographs of the Leningrad architectural avant garde compose a separate section of the exhibition. The Leningrad architectural avant garde occupies a special place in the creative biography of William Brumfield. It was in that city in 1971 that the young American teacher of Slavic studies first turned attention to the architecture of the 1920s-30s and began to record it on film. The first photographs in William Brumfield’s “avant garde” collection were of the S.M. Kirov Palace of Culture (by Noah Trotsky), located next to the dormitory were William lived on Vasilevsky Island.