“Collective Threads: Anna Andreeva at the Red Rose Silk Factory”

Looking at works from an unfamiliar world, we need the world as much as the work to understand what we are seeing. When Aleksandr Deineka’s grand-scale painting Textile Workers (1927) was exhibited in the Royal Academy in London in 2017, a critic described it as futuristic, likening the female factory workers to sci-fi robots. Criticizing the acute anachronism of this interpretation in the preface of her book on Deineka, art historian Christina Kiaer acknowledged the difficulty in reading Soviet paintings today: “To our eyes, unfamiliar with images of labor, these working women are strange harbingers of an unknown future imagined from the outmoded pasts of both Communism and modernist painting.”1 Placing Deineka’s paintings within their original sociopolitical context, Kiaer’s aim was to restore their legibility beyond the “prevailing visual codes of capitalism” and reveal something often lost on contemporary eyes.

A similar reconstructive logic underpins the first retrospective of Soviet textile artist Anna Andreeva, curated by Kiaer at the Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki. Lauded in the USSR, including with the prestigious Repin Prize for lifetime achievement in 1972, Andreeva was virtually unknown in the West until in 2018, ten years after her death, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired a dozen of her works. These include her designs for scarves commemorating the 1963 World Congress of Women, Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight (titled Glory to the First Cosmonaut), and the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Looking at some of Andreeva’s most experimental work—featuring orbs and cosmic patterns, architectonic lattices of urban landmarks, grid-based optical designs informed by radio waves and cybernetics—it’s easy to attribute them to an artist’s single-minded vision and exceptional capacity to bypass the forbidding diktats of the Soviet system. But tracing Andreeva’s work in parallel with the history of the factory collective she worked in, Kiaer proposes that it was precisely the postwar Soviet system, with all its constraints and opportunities, that allowed Andreeva to emerge as a distinctive voice.

Andreeva was no “Anni Albers at the loom,” as Kiaer remarks in the catalog, but a “textile technologist” fully immersed in her time and place. Born in Tambov in 1917, she belonged to a wealthy merchant family whose property was seized by the Red Army. Barred from studying architecture due to her class background, she instead enrolled in the Textile Institute in Moscow, the successor to the groundbreaking technical arts school VKhUTEMAS, where pioneers like Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova had taught in the 1920s, before its closure in 1930, amidst the Soviet Union’s shift towards socialist realism as the dominant cultural doctrine. Andreeva entered the Red Rose (Krasnaia Roza) silk factory in Moscow in 1944 as a fabric designer and drew patterns for industrial production on a mass scale, as well as for international exhibitions, national events, and gifts to foreign dignitaries, conditioned by ideological imperatives and the demands of the Soviet planned economy.

The exhibition opens with El Lissitzky’s talismanic gouache drawing Study for a Monument to Rosa Luxemburg (1919–20), after the German revolutionary who gave Krasnaia Roza its name (Red Rosa, as much as rose). As one moves through the reproductions of silk fabrics hung from the ceilings—allowing visitors to pull them and “try on” in front of conveniently placed mirrors—and fabric “passports” of different pattern designs, it becomes clear that the exhibition does not stem from a traditional archive. While the Red Rose was one of the most prestigious textile mills during the Soviet period, it was sold for real estate development after the fall of the USSR and its archive was dispersed or destroyed. In the absence of official institutional records, the exhibition is an exercise in “informed reconstruction,” built out of Andreeva’s family’s happenstance collection of the drawings, news clippings, and fabric samples she happened to bring home.

Despite some unclear authorship of the early works, Andreeva’s trajectory emerges as the exhibition unfolds. Traditional floral and folklore motifs from the more conservative postwar years give way to a broader shift towards experimentation during the post-Stalin thaw, with designs such as as Greetings, Moscow!, a check pattern interlaced with architectural landmarks, and Cheremushki (1958), a fabric celebrating Khrushchev’s housing reforms with an abstract pattern of trees and apartment blocks (after the mass-produced blocks called krushchevki), created for the Brussels Expo. After the 1960s, Andreeva’s designs reflect the broader desire for modernization. She embraced linear patterns, radio waves, electricity and cosmic imagery, including poetic depictions of lunar phases and eclipses. Still, even in her most established period, she kept cut-out flowers in her bag to add to any design that might be seen by relevant committees as too dangerously formalist or avant-garde, and defended some of her abstract patterns, such as those inspired by cybernetics, by claiming they were designed to create a slimming effect, in service of enhancing the beauty of Soviet women. (Raisa Gorbacheva, among many other women, was a fan of Andreeva’s designs.) Her work, simultaneously scientific and lyrical, demonstrates her ability to reconcile propagandistic briefs with a singular artistic sensibility that deserves recognition within and beyond the Western canon.

Kiaer has done an exceptional job at pulling in materials from press, exhibition catalogs, and newsreels that not only supplement Andreeva’s fragmented archive but also bring the period vividly to life: from clippings from the factory’s weekly newspaper Chelnok —the organ of “the Party Committee, the Factory Committee, the Komsomol Committee and the Director’s Office at the Red Rose Factory,” as per its masthead—to an incredible piece of archival footage, featuring a speech by a Red Rose weaver to a full auditorium of textile workers: “Hands off Congo! Free Patrice Lumumba! Get the colonizers out of Congo! This is the demand of the Soviet people,” ending with resounding applause.

The exhibition situates Andreeva within the legacy of the Constructivists of the 1920s, especially Popova and Stepanova, whose most emblematic textile designs are indisputable visual predecessors to Andreeva’s mature work. For Kiaer, the connection is not just visual but profoundly structural. The Russian avant-garde had envisioned a new kind of artist-engineer fully embedded in industrial production and participating in the creation of socialist everyday life (novyi byt). By the time Andreeva entered the Red Rose factory, this model of collective, industrially integrated artistic labor had become the norm. If Popova had been, as the journal Lef stated in 1924, “attempting in one creative act to unite the demands of economics, the laws of exterior design and the mysterious taste of the peasant woman of the provinces,” Andreeva brought that attempt to its realized conclusion.2

The show also comes at a time when textile exhibitions have become a contested site of contemporary discourse, and in some cases, a shorthand for a perceived evasion of modernity and retreat into the applied and handmade. While it joins other recent textile shows, such as the vast “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” and “Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art” in intentionally challenging the division between high art and craft and considering its gendered dimension, “Collective Threads” also reveals textiles as the artistic medium that most fully embraced the automated and industrialized future during the Soviet era.3 It was also one of the only mediums in which, as Julia Tulovsky argues in the catalog, precisely because of its perceived status as a woman’s domain, it was possible to conduct experiments that were untenable in the more closely scrutinized fields of fine art, film, and architecture.

The model of the single-artist retrospective sits uneasily with the collective reality of Andreeva’s work. Shared authorship was common at the Red Rose factory, and Andreeva often collaborated closely with fellow designer Natalia Zhovtis, who was jointly awarded the Repin Prize. Asked during the exhibition symposium why so little is known about the rest of the collective, Kiaer quipped, “They didn’t have an enterprising granddaughter,” a reference to Andreeva’s granddaughter Xenia Vytuleva-Herz, whose efforts brought the artist’s legacy to light. In her own catalog essay dedicated to her babushka, Vytuleva paints a singular triumph over unfavorable circumstances, quoting her grandmother that “everything in my life is despite.”

The idiosyncrasies of personal history run deeper than Andreeva’s particular case. All of the exceptional work by Lissitzky, Popova, Stepanova, Ivan Kliun, and Gustav Klucis included in the exhibition to contextualize Andreeva’s innovations is part of the Costakis Collection, which forms the backbone of Thessaloniki’s Museum of Modern Art. A Greek-Russian man who worked at the Greek and Canadian embassies in Moscow, as a driver and head of local personnel, respectively, George Costakis was the unlikely collector of some of the most emblematic Russian avant-garde artists from the first decades of the twentieth century. “A real collector must feel like a millionaire even when he is penniless,” he wrote in the catalog of the Guggenheim’s 1981 exhibition of his collection, which had Lissitzky’s Rosa Luxemburg on the cover. Prior to his emigration in the 1970s, when he donated a significant part of his collection to the State Tretyakov Gallery, Costakis’s apartment in Moscow had functioned as a private museum of works by Klucis, Malevich, Rodchenko, Rozanova, Tatlin and many other artists whose work was either suppressed or seen as socially useless or decadent.

While Kiaer, in her catalog essay, acknowledges the harsh conditions of shortages, labyrinthine bureaucracy and censorship in postwar USSR—Andreeva’s designs were often subject to alteration, whether by the factory’s artistic council or chemists and color technologists on account of quota fulfilment or lack of high-quality dyes—she is adamant that “Andreeva is an example of what the Soviet system, for all its drawbacks, made possible: an innovative Op artist and inheritor of the Constructivist avant-garde, who, at the same time, was an industrious participant in a highly surveilled system of mandated collectivity who diligently produced floral and folk designs on command.”

The show has a redemptive heart that vibrates with contradiction. It’s impossible to say what Andreeva’s artistic career would have looked like with fewer constraints, but it certainly challenges the calcified perception of postwar Soviet art as either coercively banal or ideologically overwrought. Kiaer affords the Soviet system and its ideals the kind of serious consideration that is vanishingly rare in Western art history and, through Andreeva’s trajectory, offers a window into the spectacular conditions of compromise and negotiation required to produce progressive work within a system that hems it in. Studying her, and the world Kiaer has brought to life, are connective threads to a time of unlikely creative breakthroughs, and a reminder of what—despite everything—remains possible.