Paradoxically, this is a moment that is normally considered as the point of emergence of an international avant-garde. ‘Russian Berlin’ was overlaid onto the Berlin of International Constructivism, which linked together sites such as Moholy-Nagy’s studio on Lützowstrasse, Hans Richter’s apartment on Uhlandstrasse and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s home on Am Karlsbad. Berlin Dada, which trumpeted the arrival of Tatlin’s ‘machine art’ at its First International Dada Fair in 1920, also located itself in West Berlin, in sites such as Otto Burchard’s gallery on Lützowufer, which hosted the fair, Richard Huelsenbeck’s apartment on Kantstrasse, the Malik publishing house on Kurfürstendamm and Johannes Baader’s Blue Milky Way Club in Café Austria on Potsdamerstrasse. The Russian artist Serge Charchoune’s Dada journal published in Berlin from 1922-4 was called Perevos (Across Borders), which suggested global dissemination, but this was actually something occurring in a very confined geographical area.

This brief tour will hopefully contribute to our understanding of what attracted Archipenko to Berlin in 1921 but also what may have encouraged him to leave just two years later. It is clear that, in Berlin, the Ukranian sculptor became just another Russian. Something of his émigré status was actually lost in this experience, both his connection to an actual home country and his separation from a particular nationality. The more we understand about the urban dynamics of ‘Russian Berlin’, the more we see how questions of art and nationality were formulated after the First World War in connection to real historical circumstances.