The portraits themselves, however, are evidence of the changing perceptions. Verelst's Nell Gwyn, c.1680, is pure mistress, rouged and with an eye-snagging décolletage, but by 1775 some of England's grandest women including Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire and Viscountess Melbourne were happy to pose for the jobbing Daniel Gardner as the witches from Macbeth. This exhibition nicely highlights how by the high Georgian period both portraiture and acting were linked in a mutually beneficial publicity enterprise.
A more challenging link between art and changing society is the subject of Building the Revolution at the Royal Academy, which examines the brave new worldism of Soviet art and architecture from 1915 to 1935. The two disciplines were closely entwined in the formative years of the USSR with Con-structivist artists such as Malevich and Rodchenko producing mechanistic and geometrical drawings that fed into the work of architects such as Melnikov and Tatlin. The idea was to produce an art in three dimensions as well as in two that would symbolise the forward-thinking radicalism of the Soviet project. The great symbol of this fraternity was to be Tatlin's 400-metre high Monument to the Third International, a spiralling lattice of metal joists that would have stood over St Petersburg as the Eiffel Tower does over Paris. A scale model stands in the RA's courtyard. The structure itself was never built.
Architecture is not always the most emotive of art forms but this is a surprisingly moving show, and not just because we know of the price extracted in human lives by Stalin. Alongside the drawings and paintings there is a selection of documentary photographs from the Schusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow. These show the radio towers and workers' clubs, housing projects and factories that resulted from the artist-architect collaboration when they were new and shiny. There are also photographs showing some of the same buildings now in a state of decay. For a brief period Soviet art and architecture was the most radical in the world and Bolshevism's utopia was something in which these practitioners had a real stake. Its failure was personal.
