Drawn Reflections and Reflections on Drawing: the “Anti-perspectives” of Abstractionists and Figurativists at the VchuTeMas

The essay investigates some aspects of the “anti-perspective” – i.e. the drawing that tries to figure the intrinsic spaces of Things, to graphically translate them on the plane with effects of ambiguous, reversible, reflected spatiality, reversing the (topological) meaning of interior/exterior, centre/periphery, enclosed/enclosing – in the opposite formulations of the theme that coexisted in the framework of the Muscovite VchuTeMas. The difference between (Florenskij’s) “figurative” and (the constructivists’) “abstractionist” anti-perspective is studied by means of a comparison between coeval drawings, emblematic of the two opposite aesthetics. On the one hand (the abstractionist one) it mainly concerns the graphic genre of the unfolded and reversed axonometry, developed through El Lissitzky’s projects for the installations of the spatial Proun works, then spread as a visual theme in the abstractionist international in the 1920s and in its subsequent American diaspora. On the other hand (the realist one) it deals with Florenskij’s anti-perspective theory, as well as some examples that testify to it: the woodcut covers by Vladimir Favorskij (instructed by Florenskij) in which the techniques of reflection and inversion are highlighted. Translating the opposition between “abstractionists” vs. “figurativists” into the one between “palingenists vs. anachronists”, we clarify the difference between the two opposite “anti-perspectives” as a difference between two models of visual signification: the first excludes the “figurative” and allegorical dimension on which the second is based.