Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism 9780300162295

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BLACK SQUARE

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BLACK SQUARE MALEVICH AND THE ORIGIN OF S U P R E M AT I S M ALEKSANDRA S H AT S K I K H T R A N S L AT E D B Y M A R I A N S C H WA R T Z

N E W H AV E N A N D L O N D O N

Frontispiece: Kazimir Malevich. Black Square. 1915. Oil on canvas. 79.5 × 79.5 cm. © The State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College. Copyright © 2012 by Aleksandra Shatskikh. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz. Set in Futura and Galos types by Newgen North America, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shatskikh, Aleksandra Semenovna, author. [Chernyi kvadrat. English] Black square : Malevich and the origin of suprematism / Aleksandra Shatskikh ; translated by Marian Schwartz. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-14089-7 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich, 1878 [1879]–1935. 2. Suprematism in art. 3. Art— Russia—20th century—History. 4. Art—Soviet Union—History. I. Schwartz, Marian, translator. II. Title. NX556.Z9M3313 2012 709.47′09041—dc23 2012011866 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my sons Pavel and Mikhail Kyshtymov

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CONTENTS

Prologue, ix From the Author, xiii List of Abbreviations, xvii 1 THE BIRTH OF BLACK SQUARE, 1

Fevralism, Forerunner of Suprematism, 1. The Rise of Suprematism, 33. 2 ON THE THRESHOLD OF “0.10”, 54

Suprematism in Fall 1915, 54. N. M. Davydova and Suprematism’s Public Affirmation, 69. Russian and English Geometric Nonobjectivity, 81. The First Verbovka Exhibition, 85. The “Amazons” and Suprematism, 98. 3 FROM “0.10” TO “STORE”, 101

“0.10”: The Last Futurist Exhibition, 101. Vladimir Tatlin’s “Store” Exhibition, 123. “I the Apostle of New Concepts in Art . . . ,” 130.

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CONTENTS

4 THE SUPREMUS SOCIETY, 136

1916: Under the Sign of Supremus, 136. The Supremus Society in the First Half of 1917, 162. Supremus, 172. Kazimir Malevich and Nikolai Roslavets, 190. Aleksei Kruchenykh in Supremus, 217. “Azef-Judas-Khlebnikov,” 230. The Supremus Society’s Finale, 240. 5 THE END OF PAINTING, 251

Malevich’s Color-Painting in Late 1917 and the First Half of 1918, 251. “There Can Be No Question of Painting in Suprematism,” 266. Epilogue, 272 Notes, 275 Select Bibliography, 317 Index, 321

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PROLOGUE

Black Square, by Russian avant-gardist Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), is one of the twentieth century’s emblematic paintings, the visual manifestation of a new period in world artistic culture at its inception. The work of Giotto once signaled just as visibly a new era in civilization, when artists turned to reality. The revolution of the Florentine who provided the impetus for the Renaissance ultimately rid religious and mythological images of the conventional symbolic and canonical presentation inherited from Byzantium. For the next few centuries artists made verisimilitude— the mimetic reproduction of reality—the basis for their work. Black Square’s creator thought his painting would be the endpoint of the era Giotto had initiated, on the one hand, and, on the other, the point of departure for the art of the coming age. To use neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen’s formulation on man’s relationship to being, Black Square was not “given” to Malevich but rather “assigned.” The painting’s apparent simplicity conceals inexhaustible depth, and Kazimir Malevich devoted his entire life to explicating Black Square’s

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meanings. This process engendered a great legacy: the original abstract movement in painting and its theoretical grounding; philosophical treatises; architectural models; new art pedagogy; innovative approaches to theater, music, and poetry; and the creation of a new visual environment through the introduction of decorative applied designs. All of this together spoke to the tremendous potential for innovative shape and thought formation concentrated in Black Square. Of course, Malevich was not the only one to arrive at abstract art in the early twentieth century. However, none of his contemporary revolutionaries created a manifesto, an emblem, as capacious and in its own way unique as Black Square, which became both the quintessence of the Russian avant-gardist’s own art and a milestone on the highway of world art. Malevich’s understanding of Black Square also manifested itself in his resolute transformation of historical reality itself. By designating 1913 as the year of the painting’s birth, he logically constructed a picture of his own development “from Impressionism, Cubism, and Futurism to Suprematism,” which he reinforced by assigning mystified dates to some of his works. The cogency of his “correct” artistic autobiography was so great that for decades scholars did not question its veracity. This may be a unique phenomenon in the history of art. Malevich was both subject and object of his own art. The conception he constructed of his own path was not subjected to art historians’ scrutiny for a long time and was a lasting conceptual monument in and of itself. The multidimensional process of explicating Black Square’s meanings unfolded against the backdrop of world and civil war, social revolutions, and the establishment of totalitarian regimes and their repressive policies. Social cataclysms notwithstanding, the great artist was able to realize his creative potential fully. Destiny seemed to take its revenge on him for this by burying his innovative achievements for decades. From the mid-1930s to the late 1980s, there was no artist in the Soviet Union by the name of Kazimir Malevich. Up until the late 1950s and early 1960s, the West knew only the few works that had come to the United States in the 1930s. Quite a few outstanding artists of Europe and America—independently, but much later—arrived at the same artistic discoveries already made by the Russian avant-gardist. Virtually all of them were representatives of subsequent generations in art. Some of them (Barnett Newman [1905–70], John Cage [1912–92], Donald Judd [1928–94], and others), after seeing Malevich’s art in the second half of the twentieth century, recognized him as their unknown but like-minded predecessor. Others (Yves Klein [1928–62], Joseph Kosuth [born 1945], and participants in the Art and Language movement) had seen or had

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Only a few years passed from Black Square’s maturation and birth to the conclusion of Suprematist painting’s journey with the “white on white” canvases, and then with the blank monochrome canvas exhibited by Malevich in 1920 at his first one-man show. This was Suprematism’s heroic period. To this day, many circumstances and events of those years have remained obscure and have sprouted arbitrary interpretations and fictions. Close study of archival materials and testimonies of contemporaries contemporary with the events described has allowed me to establish the true genesis of Suprematism and its principal painting. The simultaneous existence of not just two but three historical realities—one transformed by Malevich’s creative approach, another founded on opportunistic legends, and a third that rests on genuine documents and facts—inevitably led to their complicated interweaving. One of this book’s themes thus became the complex counterpoint between the objective course of events and their subjective remaking by both Malevich himself and his opponents. Also illuminated in these pages is the revolutionary potential in Malevich’s works and theories and the revelation of their primogeniture and significance as confirmed in the works of many different artists of the second half and end of the twentieth century.

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at least a notion of Suprematist paintings, and because of this they did not and could not know that the revolution they glorified had taken place in Malevich’s art long before their own appearance.

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FROM THE AUTHOR

This book has a specific quality conditioned by the historical realities of the era of Suprematism’s conception, emergence, and development. All the dates to February 1918 have been cited according to the Old Style, that is, the Julian calendar, to which Russia officially remained faithful until that date. The Julian calendar lagged behind the Gregorian calendar— which had been adopted by the overwhelming majority of countries of Europe, America, and Asia by the twentieth century—by twelve days in the nineteenth century and thirteen in the twentieth. Usually, when books and articles on the history of the Russian avant-garde are published in the United States and Europe, the dates are cited only according to the Gregorian calendar, so as not to frustrate readers. In this book, this was not possible because transposing the dates to the Gregorian calendar would have distorted the sequence of the events described, first and foremost the epoch-making “Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 (Zero-Ten),” one of the most important exhibitions of the twentieth century, which took place in Petrograd in December 1915, thereby

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making 1915 a significant milestone in the history of Russian innovative art. The exhibition opened on December 19, Old Style; were this date transposed to the New Style, we would have January 1, 1916, which would automatically nullify the significance of the 1915 date. The author of this book, which sheds light for the first time on several very important circumstances surrounding the emergence of Suprematism and its emblematic painting, argues her positions using references to numerous letters and archival documents that were dated by the events’ participants themselves. To transpose their dates to a new style alien to the time when they were active would be wrong. An exception has been made in one instance only. Black Square’s date of birth is cited in the book according to both the Old and the New styles, that is both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. The dates of events after the Soviet government decreed the New Style’s introduction as of February 14, 1918, correspond in this book to the same Gregorian calendar used by the rest of the world. In the Russian empire, as we know, there was not only an Old Style but also an old orthography, which was reformed in October 1918. Due to this, as well as to the exceptional singularity of Malevich’s written language which played fast and loose with the rules of grammar, painstaking textological work was done in publishing his texts in their original language. The texts were printed in the new orthography, their suffixes were displayed, words of clarification and omitted words were inserted, grammatical errors eliminated, authorial bracket markings standardized, marks of punctuation inserted, and so on. All these editorial interventions were marked by appropriate signs, including angle brackets, square brackets, and curly brackets. These specific features of the textological processing of archival materials cannot be translated into another language. The translation of letters and archival texts in this book has been subordinated to the objectives of conveying meaning rather than the unintentional literary singularity of the written language employed by the Suprematist and some of his contemporaries. All Malevich’s bracket markings are reproduced here as parentheses. Deleted words and expansions of abbreviations, as well as my occasional explanatory interpolations, appear in brackets; so do ellipses indicating my omissions of text. The word “Supremus,” used by Malevich initially as a term in Latin letters, was quickly Russified. His supporters used it in two alphabets, Latin and Cyrillic; the artist wrote the Russian word with both an uppercase and a lowercase “S.” Both the Russian and the Latin designations were equivalent for Malevich

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Over the course of many years’ work, I have been rendered invaluable assistance by many people. I consider it my very pleasant duty to express my sincere gratitude to Troels Andersen, Andrei Krusanov, Aleksandr Parnis, Eugena Ordonez, Geurt Imanse, Charlotte Douglas, John Bowlt, Ingrid Hutton, Aleksandr Lavrentiev, Sergei Miturich, Vladimir Poliakov, Yulia Tulovskaia, L. Ye. Davydov (Klin), P. Ye. Vaidman (Klin), O. M. Varlamova (Klin), A. I. Kolpakidi, and Ya. V. Leontiev, as well as to the directors of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the administration and staff of the V. V. Maiakovsky Museum in Moscow, the directors of the P. I. Tchaikovsky State House-Museum in Klin, and the staff of the N. P. Litvinov Novosibirsk Foundation.

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and his fellows, but the titles of the society and the journal used the Russified form predominantly. In this book the word “Supremus” is cited without quotation marks when it refers to the name of the society of artists; the name of the eponymous magazine is given in italics.

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A B B R E V I AT I O N S

FKhCh GMII GRM GTG MOMA OR GTG RGALI RO GPB RO IRLI SMA

Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, New York Manuscript Department, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow Manuscript Department, State Public Library, St. Petersburg Manuscript Department, Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), St. Petersburg Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

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THE BIRTH OF BLACK SQUARE

CHAPTER 1

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Fevralism, Forerunner of Suprematism Malevich’s First Personal “Ism” For many long decades it was believed that Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square first appeared in 1913. The artist himself dated it to that year, and scholars trusted him implicitly. We know that superstitious people consider the number thirteen unlucky, and as fate would have it, the thirteenth year of the twentieth century was indeed an unusual year for Russia. On the eve of its demise, the huge empire had achieved a prosperity unprecedented in its history. After the establishment of Soviet power and over the many decades of its ascendancy, the Soviet Union’s successes would be compared with the level of development achieved by tsarist Russia in 1913. The cultural life in the two capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow, conceded nothing in intensity to the economic surge. It was in this context that the Russian avant-garde came stormily into being. 1

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Figure 1. Kazimir Malevich. Circa 1915. Author’s collection.

It was a long way to all the later glorifications of the historical milestone of the prerevolutionary era, nonetheless Kazimir Malevich, as if having a presentiment of and predetermining the significance of 1913, persisted in dating his principal work to it. By the end of the twentieth century, scholars had established the true date of the Suprematist monofigure’s creation: 1915. However, detailed research into the circumstances of Black Square’s appearance forces us to concede a certain validity to the artist’s assertions. This shift in dates, which specialists have come to call “Malevich’s mystification,” in fact rested on a profound, albeit subjective truth. Black Square’s biography had a prenatal period, which did indeed begin in 1913. In 1913 Malevich had behind him participation in the exhibitions of the innovative Jack of Diamonds society, the creation of the canvases of his first peasant series, and the building of bridges with the radical Union of Youth in Petersburg. He was the co-author of an opera, Victory Over the Sun, one of the “Futurists’ first productions for the theater in the world” (the other being the tragedy Vladimir Maiakovsky). The opera’s text was written by Aleksei

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Kruchenykh (1886–1968), the prologue by Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922), and the music by Mikhail Matiushin (1861–1934); the set design was Malevich’s. In essence, the production, created by opponents of tradition, put the durable traditions of the Gesamtkunstwerk into practice in a new way. Victory Over the Sun, which was performed twice in December 1913 in Petersburg, was a seminal event. In accordance with the still dominant Romantic paradigm but strengthened by the newborn twentieth century’s shared craving for renewal, the Russian avant-gardists felt they were demiurges and strove to create, if not a universally valid style, then an integral trend with developed artistic institutions: an association of colleagues with a shared ideological platform and a single name; the organization of exhibitions; the publication of journals; theatrical productions; educational lectures. These ambitious aspirations found powerful support in the deep-rooted characteristics of the national mentality. Russian culture’s mighty archetype, “communal truth,” gave rise to collective forms of activity among artists as well. Russia had always favored those forms over individual efforts. Yet another eternal dilemma of the Russian intelligentsia in matters of identification placed its stamp on the left-wing artists’ worldview: which to prefer as a spiritual reference point, East or West, Asia or Europe? For example, Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964), a distinguished painter and leader of left-wing artists, pointedly ignored French Cubism. Kazimir Severinovich Malevich—a Pole born in Ukraine who became a great Russian artist—by force of his origin and of having grown up in a multilingual environment, had a unique immunity to locking himself into any national framework; subsequently, sharing anarchism’s ideological platform, he spoke out as a passionate opponent of national demarcations in all spheres of life. Malevich the artist’s dimension was art as a whole; for him, French Cubism and Italian Futurism were but stages in an overall artistic process. After his 1913 Petersburg presentations, the avant-gardist focused on crystallizing a movement intended to consolidate his supporters and reveal the originality of the country’s art, its equality to European innovations. Suprematism, Malevich’s epoch-making discovery, had a forerunner which later its originator ruthlessly erased from his own biography. It was called Fevralism. This artistic phenomenon’s existence has remained unknown to the present day. Malevich succeeded brilliantly in expunging his first personal “ism” by declaring his journey a straight line “from Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism.” Fevralism’s original features gradually emerged from detailed research

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into Malevich’s works of the years 1914 and 1915 and analysis of his letters and the testimony of his contemporaries. Fevralism’s nature was exhaustively revealed during a study of the extensive archive assembled by authoritative literary scholar and connoisseur Nikolai Ivanovich Khardzhiev (1903–96). Pitilessly deformed by his difficult survival in Soviet society, to the end of his days Khardzhiev kept secret the manuscripts and documents he had acquired, without which it would have been impossible to reconstruct the full history of the Russian avant-garde.1 That portion of the archive which ultimately made its way into the Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation under the aegis of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam allowed me to reconstruct Suprematism’s real genesis without lacunae. Fevralism had all the potential for constituting a serious contribution to the history of the Russian avant-garde as an independent movement. In it we find an original ideology and aesthetic platform declared in texts, an identifying name and emblematics, a circle of followers, albeit small, and also an entire stratum of works created by Fevralists with a clearly expressed stylistics. Malevich needed a term, a banner, to define the vector of his own development and to consolidate his followers. He had always had a keen sense of the connection between signified and signifier; the new phenomenon had to be denoted by an appropriate word. The artist tried out the names “CuboFuturism,” “Painting Alogism,” and “Trans-Sense Realism,” but none satisfied him. They lacked rigorous specifics and in addition were also being used for self-identification by many left-wing artists, from some of whom— especially David Burliuk (1882–1967) and his circle—Malevich the radical had decisively distanced himself in the mid-1910s, considering them eclectics and opportunists. The word “Fevralism” appeared in the artist’s lexicon soon after the December 1913 Futurist performances. It derived from the month when a fateful announcement was made: “On Febr[uary] 19, 1914, I rejected reason in a public lecture.”2 This happened at a Jack of Diamonds debate at the Moscow Polytechnic Museum, where Malevich and his associate, the painter Aleksei Alekseevich Morgunov (1884–1935), spoke. Both respondents had attached wooden spoons to their lapels; Malevich spoke in the first person about the subversion of reason, while Morgunov performed a ruffianish prank to show blatantly how to explode the rules set by that same reason. His speech began by insulting the previous speaker, an influential critic: “I have a stomachache from Tugendkhold’s lecture, and he bored me, the fool. [. . .]”3 To avoid

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Fevralism’s strategic goal was the total destruction of the dominant rational worldview, which, according to Malevich, had over the centuries merely proved its bankruptcy by creating laws and rules that were quickly declared erroneous, only to be replaced by new laws and rules, and so on ad infinitum. In addition, traditional art, such as is encouraged by “reason,” merely duplicated and imitated reality’s outward features and therefore was not art at all. Fevralism’s tactical weapons were absurdism and provocative attacks against generally accepted taboos, that is, the disgracing of reason and its focus on logical order and cause and effect. By definition, the struggle against reason had to take on reason-less, trans-sense forms. Beginning with Fevralism, the irrationalism and global aspirations of the movement Malevich initiated expanded its creative territory far beyond the bounds of painting. Cubist and Futurist experiments bestowed on the Russian artist freedom to work with the picture plane and an understanding of the artist’s complete power over it. Cubism, while exploding traditions, remained wholly inside the plastic arts, and its creators were primarily elitist painters; as we know, they never retreated from the traditional genres of portrait, landscape, still life, and compositions that synthesized these genres, although they carried out a cardinal renewal of the plastic language. Futurism harbored creative aspirations akin to the Russian mentality in all vital spheres, but Malevich had other claims against the Italian artists. In his opinion, the Italians’ Futurist painting also obeyed all kinds of conventions, being wholly connected to visual, and hence naturalistic, effects. As we know, F. T. Marinetti (1876–1944), the Futurists’ leader, took up arms against subjectivism and individualistic emotion; however, one of Italian Futurist painting’s foundations was the “state of the soul.” Malevich found this, too, utterly

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any bodily harm, the chairman immediately shut down the gathering. In the second half of the twentieth century, all this would have been a provocational happening. This event gave Fevralism its name. When this term became firmly fixed in Malevich’s lexicon is not entirely clear. There is a gaping hole in the documents—primarily his letters to Matiushin— and events contemporary with his life at this time, there being no evidence from the period between March 5 and November 4, 1914. One thing is beyond a doubt, though. By fall 1914 Malevich was acutely aware of Fevralism’s characteristics, which he recounted to Matiushin in detail during a visit to Petrograd that took place between November 5 and 24, 1914.

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unacceptable because the “state of the soul” merely led the artist toward “sincerity,” whereas what art needed was “truth,” which is independent of psychological experiences: “What art needs is truth, not sincerity,” as he later formulated so succinctly.4

Fevralism’s Painterly Manifesto: Cow and Violin (1915) The initial sphere of material embodiment for Malevich the artist had always been painting; it was here that he demonstrated and reinforced the nature of Fevralism, distinguishing it from other European “isms.” Now considered among his Fevralist works are the well-known Englishman in Moscow (SMA), Aviator (GRM), Composition with Mona Lisa (GRM), and other canvases created in the second half of 1914 and the first few months of 1915. At first glance, Malevich used a specifically interpreted collage technique in them, “pasting onto” the surface independent, separate, painted images and their fragments. However, the paintings do not bear even a trace of the textural embellishments characteristic of the French masters’ classic collages, which move into three-dimensional space. Nor is there any question here of any Italian-style dynamic whatsoever, any fixation on the force lines of movement. The Moscow avant-gardist’s painting is intentionally poor and harsh. Fevralism marked the beginning of Malevich’s tireless battle against art’s “aestheticism” and “beauty.” His compositions were aimed primarily at a semantic comparison and contrast of specific painterly “nouns.” He believed that recognizable figures and objects and their details frustrated the viewer with the mocking meaning-lessness of their disposition. The artist turned his Fevralist canvases into “montages of attractions,” to use the later and more capacious expression of film director Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948). At the same time, the front-facing “aviator” and “Englishman” had a solemn representational quality that brought them closer to icons and folk art signboards. Indisputable as well was the fact that they belonged to a still common genre structure; they were a special kind of formal portrait. Fevralism’s policy manifesto was a small picture in which the objective world’s muddled “turmoil and jumble” (Malevich’s expression)5 were jumbled into a laconic but multidimensional statement. Cow and Violin was drawn on a wooden shelf taken from a broken-down bookcase, as is obvious from the round openings in the corners for attaching stanchions; the poor artist did not always have money for canvas and stretchers. In dating this picture, Malevich seems to have been rehearsing the shift in dates that he used subsequently with such success for creating his own

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Figure 2. Kazimir Malevich. Cow and Violin. 1915. Oil on wood. Recto and verso. 48.8 × 25.8 cm. © 2011, State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.

conceptual biography. As has already been said, to the end of his days, he persistently dated Black Square to 1913. Unlike Black Square, though, whose date now diverges from Malevich’s, the wooden Cow and Violin has to the present day been dated to 1913, following the artist. In fact, the picture was made in early 1915. Left-wing artists were drawing works specifically for exhibitions, inasmuch as this was their sole opportunity to present their art in public. Cow and Violin appeared for the first time at “Tramway V: The First Futurist Exhibition,” which opened on March 3, 1915, in Petrograd. Its title is not in the catalog, but it was reproduced along with his Aviator canvas in the tenth issue of Theater and Art (Teatr i iskusstvo), a Petrograd journal, announcing the Futurists’ current undertaking, with a caption, “View from the balcony.”6

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The next public appearance of Cow and Violin was in March 1916, at the “Store” exhibition in Moscow organized by Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin (1885–1953). Colleague Tatlin forbade colleague Malevich from exhibiting Suprematist works, and this repressive act, the reasons for which we will discuss below, played a positive role in the painting’s fate. It appeared before viewers under its own name, with the warning “Painting Alogism” and the artist’s date of 1913, which abides to this day in art history. At one point Khardzhiev said the picture was created in 1915, not 1913: “In March 1916 Englishman [. . .] and Aviator were exhibited at the Moscow Futurist exhibition ‘Store,’ where it was incorrectly dated 1913. In the ‘Store’ catalog Cow and Violin, which was created in the first half of 1915, was dated the same way.”7 The leading expert did not like to reveal the documentary sources for his assertions; he gleaned many but not all his facts from the hidden treasures of his assembled archive. As a younger contemporary of the avant-gardists, Khardzhiev had acquired quite a lot of information from personal contact with them. However, Khardzhiev’s words were discounted. Moreover, commentators on the Russian edition of his works felt they could correct the expert, and without any explanation whatsoever change the date he indicated to the commonly accepted one without paying any attention to the nonsense that resulted from their ignorant editing.8 This detailed elucidation of the true chronology of the creation of Cow and Violin is necessitated by the fact that in it Malevich, as has already been mentioned, rehearsed his future arbitrary construction of his own biography through the “correct” dating of program paintings. He intended that Cow and Violin be designated the beginning of trans-sense painting. In fact, the painting was absurdist Fevralism’s crown, not its source, and its declarative nature was the result of his thoroughgoing comprehension by spring 1915 of Fevralism’s more than painterly potential. Malevich had brought to life the Budetlyane formula of Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov’s “worldbackwards”;9 he had succeeded at turning time back—placing the end at the beginning—and his version of his own forward development was accepted as actual fact. (Budetlyane [Futurists] and its singular, Budetlyanin [Futurist], derived from budet, meaning “will be,” were the terms many Russian artists of that movement preferred.) The Fevralist manifesto was not only a “slap in the face of public taste” for the philistine public but also a challenge to Europe’s innovative art. Cubism’s lawgivers, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963), more than likely would not have understood the Moscow painter’s picture, at best

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considering it a belated barbarian mangling of Cubist devices. Today, in the introduction of “low” and “vulgar” materials in the form of words and letters from signboards, fragments of actual newspapers speaking to their political engagement, and so forth, scholars see Cubism’s classics penetrating and merging with life. However, the Cubists subordinated the inclusion of these kinds of “extraneous” phenomena into their works primarily to the laws of plasticity, that is, to the new artistic aesthetic.10 Malevich the radical did not care about aesthetics—refined couplings of textures and the fine harmonization of meager color scales, keen and “savory” in their crudeness. In contrast to the Cubists’ still lifes, Malevich’s “hunks of wood” cannot be assigned to an unambiguous genre. In Cow and Violin Malevich clashed plastic quotations from polar opposite contexts—one from the most highly professional and cultured, the other equally vulgar and simplistic. These made the layered planes of the background, reminiscent of the Cubists’ beloved exercises on the violin theme, refer to topical art. Meanwhile, also present was the very “queen of music,” made apparently without pretense and even with an imitation of the sounding board’s texture. The artist painstakingly painted the instrument’s “woodenness” on real wood, that is, he tautologically doubled the texture. The violin “hung,” and in front of it a naturalistic cow “stood” serenely, having wandered in straight from a butcher shop sign, which made it a ready-made object, a figurative ready-made, borrowed from raw existence and inlaid in the painting. The incommensurability of images inset with spatial scales underscored the demonstrative presentation of the conceptual thought-construction, the “clash of dissonances,” the picture’s primary idea-source, following the artist’s formula. In Fevralism, Malevich concentrated on developing the principle of presenting pictorial “nouns” where absurdist semantics emphatically dominated; this also sharply differentiated his “ism” from European ones, where the motif was primarily a pretext for plastic exercises. The Fevralists ended up having other “nouns,” too, not just “cow,” “violin,” and “aviator” but real objects, too: the thermometer and postage stamp in Reservist of the First Division (1914, MOMA), the neat pieces of lace in Lady at the Poster Column (1914–15, SMA), and the reproduction of Leonardo’s painting in Composition with Mona Lisa (1915, GRM). In Cow and Violin both “nouns” of the title were, I repeat, plastic quotations taken from different discourses, that is, the Fevralist manifesto already contained the germ of this vector of development, which would lead in the second half of the twentieth century to the concepts of art as language.

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The viewer of the mid-1910s would inevitably have had to be convinced that his reason was powerless to comprehend the meaning of the quotationmetaphors’ head-on collision. Transrational absurdism was the unconditional victor in this provocative struggle. For Malevich, the cow embodied the base, primitive level of reality. This patriarchal cloven-hoofed animal was used generally with great success in the Russian Futurist community, becoming its image incarnate. For Russian radicals, the strictly rural cow, a unique symbol of peasant Russia’s chronological provincialism and feudal survivals, became a beloved lowering mythologeme. Speaking on November 20, 1913, at a Futurist evening at Petersburg’s Troitsky Theater, the trans-sense poet Aleksei Kruchenykh audaciously proclaimed that the (non)rhyme of korova (cow) and teatr (theater) was preferable to all traditional rhymes. Khardzhiev saw in these words the source of Malevich’s picture: “It is curious that the idea for this alogical composition arose under the direct influence of Kruchenykh’s shocking rhyme of ‘cow’ and ‘theater’ (1913).”11 However, the effect was hardly so direct, even though the triumphant “cows” movement in left-wing art did begin with Kruchenykh. There were other “cows” in between his provocative declaration and Malevich’s picture. In 1914, in Moscow, a little book by Futurist poet Vasily Kamensky, Tango with Cows: Ferro-Concrete Poems, caused a stir.12 Malevich’s Fevralist manifesto continued the cows’ triumphal advance, inasmuch as it was written in 1915. Vladimir Maiakovsky’s collection Simple as Mooing (Prostoe kak mychanie), published in Moscow in 1916, metaphorically joined the leisurely procession. In historical hindsight, the Russian “cows” were the true avant-garde of the motley herd that strode so effectively over the earth later on, at the turn of the millennium within the framework of its “parade of cows”; more than likely, the Russian cows’ primacy was unknown to the illustrious project’s creators. The declarative significance of Cow and Violin was reinforced by the extensive commentary on its reverse: “An alogical juxtaposition of the two shapes ‘violin and cow’ as a point of struggle against logism, naturalness, philistine meaning, and prejudice. K. Malevich, 1911” (Figure 2). The large brick-red letters on a black ground and the thoroughness of the explanation give the caption an independent quality, lending the painting’s reverse a certain equality with its front. The verbal accompaniment and its invented date were written in the new orthography, which was introduced in Russia after the October 1917 revolu-

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Fevralist Word-images Fevralism was a current that flowed over barriers and was not only concerned with painting experiments. Creative acts, taking their cue from material painterly embodiment, were transposed into an extra-plastic, speculative sphere and became conceptual projects, while the assertion of sense-less thoughtconstructions was reinforced by shocking daily behavior. Herein lay the new integrity of the artistic personality; its expansion acquired both a vertical and a horizontal dimension. Malevich personally realized Fevralism’s potential in the poetic sphere. In early January 1915, bringing the young Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) to Matiushin’s attention, he noted, I had a new Futurist visit, he read his poems, on the one hand he sides with Kruchenykh, on the other with Khlebnikov, but at the center of his poems he is fine, and if he realized that, he would develop into an interesting form. He understands the word as such better than Kruchenykh himself, and it seems to me that he will get there, and if he gets to know our Fevralist poetry, then he just may become a Fevralist.14

Jakobson later recalled both this meeting and their discussions of Fevralism, though he did not explain what Malevich meant.15 In March of that same year, Aleksei Kruchenykh, speaking of his upcoming visit to Moscow and referring to Malevich, a native Pole, as pan (the Polish 11

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tion; that is, in 1915 it had not yet appeared. At the same time, the lines could have been added no later than 1919, when Malevich’s little book, On New Systems in Art (O novykh sistemakh v iskusstve), was published in Vitebsk with an epigraph illustration combining both subjects of Cow and Violin, front and back. Here the declarative statement was even more thorough: “Logic has always posed a barrier to new subconscious movements so to be freed of prejudices the alogism movement was advanced and the drawing shown represents a moment of struggle—the juxtaposition of two shapes, ‘cow and violin,’ in a Cubist construction.” However, the conscious presentation of a verbal statement in the form of a work of art arose in Fevralism specifically, about which more just below. Many decades later, people were able to appreciate Malevich’s conceptual message and even actualize it in an ingenious installation. At “Kazimir Malevich in the Russian Museum,” held on the millennium’s threshold, the picture was exhibited in a box with mirror panels that made it possible to see both sides of the manifesto simultaneously.13

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honorific), informed Matiushin with jealous irony, “On April 15 I will leave here for Moscow and visit the pan, though he has started writing poems.”16 The expression “our Fevralist poetry” leads us to assume that Malevich considered the alogical poems of his friend and associate Ivan Vasilievich Kliun (1873–1943), created in that same period and reflecting Fevralism’s absurdist formation, part of it.17 Isolated trans-sense works by Malevich himself have survived from those years, including “Boring for Papuans” (Skuchno popuasy) with its scatological and erotic subtext. A special place is occupied by the poem “I iu mane tor,” in which the lines consist of word-syllables made of a letter jumble, geometric elements, figurative imagery, and a stave; in the later ones there is an obvious echo of Victory Over the Sun.18 Malevich’s unique Fevralist word-drawings or verse-images demonstrated a truly revolutionary leap, in both trans-sense verbalistics and plasticity. The Russian avant-gardist had an amazing ability to bring his own discovery to full maturity and then himself take it as far as it could go, to its true end, beyond which only variations were possible. Malevich’s unique generative quality was manifested in Fevralism in his taking the principle of the plastic presentation of “nouns” to its exhaustive end: figurative ready-made objects were transformed into verbal ready-made objects. In Fevralist word-images, clumsy and illiterate phrases—verbal truisms drawn from vulgar use—were put in square frames and thus transformed into a synthetic work of art (ScufFle on the Boulevard, Purse Snatched in Streetcar, Peru Flights) (Figure 3). Malevich the Fevralist saw in the creative act a typological kinship with the serendipitous acts of the iconoclast Marcel Duchamp, who since 1914 had been practicing the “authorization” of functional objects bought in shops. The French avant-gardist signed his name to a bottle dryer and a fan and dated to 1917 his famous gesture of dispatching his sculpture The Fountain to a New York exhibition. The exhibition committee refused to recognize the recumbent porcelain urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt as a work of art . . . The “frame”—an actual frame for the Russian avant-gardist, and a conjectural exhibition dimension for the Frenchman—transformed the ready-made object taken from dense daily life—a banal phrase for Malevich, an ordinary urinal for Duchamp—into a “work of art.” Malevich and Duchamp demonstrated the mechanism for recoding an undifferentiated phenomenon into an artistic masterpiece independently of each other and in very different works. Soon after, the Russian Formalists would call this mechanism “estrangement,” although artists had discovered and perfected it before them.

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Figure 3. Kazimir Malevich. Purse Snatched in Streetcar. Circa 1914. Pencil on paper. 17.7 × 8.3 cm. Private collection.

The initial foundations for both great initiators were also cardinally different. According to the French radical’s idea, any object could be subjected to representation, but it had to be selected by a person who designated himself its creator. The result of the meeting of chance and intention was a work of art, and intention, preferably reinforced as well in a title, had to be the name of its bearer, which could be fictitious. Without its estranging title, The Fountain, and the “artist’s” signature on the chosen specimen, his urinals were just the same as the urinals in shop windows, no matter in what position—recumbent, hanging, or standing—they were advertised. By prescriptively designating meaning for ready-made objects and, most importantly, by “authorizing” that meaning, the founder of the twentieth century’s powerful mainstream showed himself to be the inventive successor of Arthur Schopenhauer, having realized in the new aesthetics the idea of “the world as will and representation.” The artist’s “will,” by submitting to its own “representation,” arbitrarily played with “representation,” which was already inherent in the object reality, and their difficult dialog gave birth

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to a new work of which the subject-manipulator considered himself the sole creator. Compared with the playful Duchamp works solidly tied to the world of things, Fevralist word-images possess the purity and rigor of a laboratory experiment; it is no accident that they became known many decades after Malevich’s death.19 Originally, as has been said, Fevralism had primarily deconstructive functions; however, destruction turned into the creation of something new on a cleared domain. The Russian avant-gardist’s minimalist verse-drawings also marked his move toward object-lessness. Absurdism, which was initially the Fevralist’s unique goal, slowly but steadily became merely instrumental. It played its part by revealing the illusoriness of outward appearances—but now Malevich was drawn to what lay beyond illusoriness, that is, beyond the world’s visible aspect. The Russian avant-gardist went from being a painter to being an ontologically oriented artist, which in the context of his life as a whole conditioned the unique breadth of his legacy, including original philosophical works, and which began in the era of Fevralism. One of Malevich’s most unusual works from this era remained under wraps until the late twentieth century (Figure 4). In it, the conceptual presentation of the word mentioned above was taken to its absolute form. The Fevralist placed a verbal object, the noun “Village” penciled in thick letters, on a piece of paper in a square exhibition frame, and under the “picture” he provided commentary: “instead of drawing the huts of nature’s nooks, better to write ‘Village’ and it will appear to each with finer details and the sweep of an entire village.” The swallowed word endings and the lines’ sweeping haste tell us that the idea came over the author instantaneously and he set it down just as instantaneously.20 By taking the figurative principle so important for traditional art outside the framework of plasticity, Malevich put a radical end to visual art and the object as such. By displaying the word as an object of art, the Russian avant-gardist anticipated by nearly half a century the conceptual acts of Josef Kosuth. In his commentary, the intuitivist-irrationalist showed himself to be an adherent of a philosophical tradition unknown to him at the level of conscious study: his “village” was born in the speculative world of Platonic ideas, a noumenon capable of engendering a multiplicity of phenomena. Malevich’s Fevralist discoveries had a unique integrity. His archaic “village” was the natural habitat of his “cows,” and all of this together bore a relation to the vanished “peasant culture” that the artist subsequently glorified to such an extent in both the pictures of his second peasant cycle (1928–32) and his biographical texts.

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Figure 4. Kazimir Malevich. Village. 1915. Pencil on paper. 13.4 × 10.4 cm. Courtesy The Cultural Centre “Khardjiev-Chaga Foundation”/Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

The artist’s signature—an invariable condition of the personal Duchamp transubstantiations—would be nonsense on the page with “Village,” for it would mean the authorization of this word-image, which for the Russian avant-gardist was least of all an expression of the individuum’s “will and representation.” Rather it was a matter of manifested principle, the idea as such, and thus not subject to replication and exploitation; it is foolish to discover and

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rediscover a discovered truth. Having disclosed the horizons and provided a direction, Malevich took another road.

Fevralism’s Proto-Suprematist Drawings After proclaiming his rejection of reason, the artist concentrated increasingly on the alogical transformations of things obvious. However, something arbitrary began to happen in his works that amazed Malevich himself. At the end of a letter to Matiushin dated March 5, 1914, a spontaneous postscript appeared: “Planes reveal themselves.”21 This lapidary sentence let it be known that “planes” basically possessed their own will. They arose on their own, and their self-generation took the newly fledged Fevralist almost by surprise. In his drawings he was freer from the absurdist desire to shock engendered by his strategic aims. Malevich had always loved the conversation with the paper, which could respond instantly to any impulse. Paper became the true home of his thought, artistic and philosophical. His drawings of the winter 1914–15 season show how deliberately and gradually his planes and regular geometrical outlines were gathering force, unconcerned with any struggle against “logism, naturalness, philistine meaning, and prejudice.” The drawings in Khardzhiev’s former collection include a work in which the modern viewer cannot help but see nearly mature Suprematism. A line thrusts contiguous frames together and then lops off a carefully hatched monolithic triangle. However, the collage paste-on and the head of the bald man attest that object-lessness is in fact not that close. The caption the artist erased under the drawing—“Little Russ[ian]”—adds yet another semantic accent to the schematic portrait of the mustached Zaporozhian Cossack’s shaved head and pipe (Figure 5).22 In a related drawing in the same collection, a line thrusts into subtended horizontal frames, now forming a trapezoid, hatched just as carefully by the artist.23 On it is a “Suprematist” element, a small rectangle, executed in black ink that erodes the regularity of the edges; the weight of the rectangle seems to be making a hole in the trapezoid’s silvery plane. Apart from the crude inconsistency of textures, unthinkable in weightless Suprematism, the silhouette of a saber, later erased, is distinctly visible on the drawing’s light ground. The page’s perforatedness and the saber’s contour, Fevralism’s migrating image, speak to the fact that at the time of the drawing’s creation object-lessness still lay ahead for Malevich the artist. For the time being he still had to present

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Figure 5. Kazimir Malevich. Cubo-Futurist Composition: Smoker with Pipe (Little Russian). First half of 1915. Pencil on paper, collage. 12.8 × 10.1 cm. Courtesy The Cultural Centre “Khardjiev-Chaga Foundation”/Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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a thing, inasmuch as the viewer had to understand the object of the struggle he was waging. Fevralism’s backbone was conceptual absurdism, but the absurd, while demonstrating its power only through the estrangement of familiar objects, is in essence dependent on them. In both compositions, nonetheless, broad geometrical patterns steadily suppress the tokens of things. Malevich’s astonished word—“planes reveal themselves”—express their quiet aggression quite appropriately. Planes, so successful in his drawings, fought for living space in his painting as well. Marvelous geometric figures seemed to lead a life of their own, surfacing out of the depths; later the artist would call these depths intuitive. Silent, selfsufficient rectangles and trapezoids, increasing in area, began to dominate the “turmoil and jumble” of the visible world’s fractured details. Huge areas of local color block and expel the flickering of trans-sense fragments in Reservist of the First Division (MOMA) and Lady at the Poster Column (SMA), the latter of which appeared for the first time at the “Tramway V” exhibition with an artist’s date of 1914. The language of persistent geometric planes did not become audible to the artist himself until the late spring of 1915.

Fevralism, Rayonnism’s Rival In a monograph long ago, I had occasion to write about how Composition with Mona Lisa was the final stop before the move into Suprematism: “Here we already have everything that a second later would become Suprematism: a white space-plane with an unfathomable depth, geometric figures of regular outlines and local coloring that are difficult to suspect of a connection to any particular object or phenomenon of reality. The planes enter into specific relationships with each other and with the white background.”24 The published memoirs of Aleksei Morgunov, Malevich’s closest associate during those years, reinforced this hypothesis: the picture truly was created just ahead of the discovery of nonobjectivity, in spring 1915; its traditional dating of 1914 is erroneous. Composition with Mona Lisa appeared in public for the first time at the “1915 Painting Exhibition,” which opened in Moscow on March 23 (Figure 6). The testimony cited below from patron and collector Andrei Akimovich Shemshurin (1872–1937) on its direct relation to Fevralism proves convincingly that Fevralism was that last stop before Suprematism.

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Figure 6. Kazimir Malevich. Composition with Mona Lisa. 1915. Oil on canvas, collage. 62 × 49.5 cm. © 2011, State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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Under the picture’s fragmentary reproduction of the Mona Lisa Malevich placed collage paste-ons that looked as if they had been clipped from a newspaper at random but formed a complete sentence with a subject, verb, and adverb of place: in one we read “apartment exchange” (literally in Russian, “apartment being exchanged”), and in the other, “in Moscow.” The first phrase had a hidden meaning that for the time being was concealed in the artist’s subconscious. Subsequently, fighting the ossified cliché, Malevich would write about natural and artificial containers (“apartment,” “cavity,” “bottle,” “cave”) and the unbidden “tenants” who penetrate them and presumptuously believe that without them these containers have no right to exist: “Life as social interaction, as a homeless wanderer, drops in on any form of Art, making it a dwelling.”25 The artist cited these examples to reinforce his idea about arbitrary causeand-effect connections that are established by reason and that subordinate anything and everything to their “convenience,” whereas phenomena exist in and of themselves, as such. After the classics of psychoanalysis we are doomed to consider the Freudian subtext in Malevich’s “containers” and to see in them an archetype that exists in the collective subconscious. The combination of the collage paste-on “apartment exchange” with the clipping “in Moscow” meant that this was taking place among left-wing artists in the old capital. It was they who were supposed to purge the “apartment” of their former renter, “old art,” symbolized in the image of the grande dame of the Renaissance. The Fevralist turned to Leonardo’s masterpiece because of its unprecedented popularity following the portrait’s sensational story. In August 1911 the picture had been stolen from the Louvre, and for two years Mona Lisa’s fate was unknown. People even wanted to ascribe its disappearance from the Paris museum to troublemaking radicals and attempted to charge Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) and Pablo Picasso. Mona Lisa was a fixture in newspapers and magazines; she appeared in caricatures and as the heroine of songs and advertisements. After the crime was solved, its motive was discovered and added literary features to the whole story: an enterprising Italian patriot working as a carpenter in the Louvre had decided to bring about the picture’s restitution independently, unaware, due to his lack of education, that Leonardo himself had brought his masterpiece to France. The Italian lady, four hundred years old at the time of the theft, became a topical figure, the first pop icon of emerging mass culture. This was what determined Malevich’s choice of it as a universally recognized symbol of traditional art. In his trans-sense composition he once again resorted to quotation, but unlike the painted “cow” from the Fevralist manifesto, this quotation was not

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only metaphorical but also strictly material. Malevich used a genuine reproduction, a ready-made in the full sense of the word; however, he reworked it, fragmenting it and crossing out the image with red paint. The Russian radical’s act was primarily iconoclastic, intended to dethrone and destroy artistic dogmas, but the devices he invented and used were seeds that later yielded the richest fruits. By appropriating the ready-made image of a famous persona and transforming it with his gesture, Malevich anticipated Andy Warhol’s (1928–87) future use of ready-made pop icons of consumer society and the subsequent transformation of documentary photo reproductions into works of art by means of transformative manipulations with color and tone. In time it became clear that Mona Lisa’s grandiose career in twentiethcentury innovative art began with Malevich, although for a long time precedence was assigned to Marcel Duchamp. In 1919, four years after Malevich, Duchamp also used a graphic-figurative ready-made, a postcard of the Mona Lisa. He drew a Musketeer mustache and beard on his beauty, marking all of it with the letters “L.H.O.O.Q.” The inscription yielded a scabrous French expression when read phonetically: “Elle a chaud au cul” (“She has a hot ass”). This shocking action, with its erotic, scatological, and homosexual underpinning, successfully subverted both the boundaries of art and one of the most powerful taboos of the day, the taboo on the admission of sexual attraction as a fundamental moving force of private, social, and artistic life. Through his creative acts, Marcel Duchamp, a young contemporary of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), not only summoned up aesthetic revolutions and initiated mainstreams, as we know, but also provoked, brought closer, and anticipated revolutions in social consciousness. Magnanimous Mona Lisa served a whole gamut of symbolic purposes, becoming the most mentioned and used image of all time and nations, a global icon to this day in daily life.26 Her five hundredth anniversary was widely marked at the start of the millennium. However, let us emphasize once again, she began her career in radical art in spring 1915, with Kazimir Malevich’s picture. To be fair, it should be added that not only Marcel Duchamp in 1919 but for many years afterward no one in the West knew of Malevich’s Composition with Mona Lisa. For many decades she was known only to the few visitors to the Leningrad apartment of Anna Aleksandrovna Leporskaia (1900–1982), who preserved her teacher’s great legacy. The painting was reproduced for the first time in 1967, in a Czech journal, Výtvarné umeˇní, and appeared briefly in public—and then only in Europe—in 1980.27 Having entered the State Russian

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Museum’s collection in 1991, the picture is now accessible to both domestic and foreign viewers. There was one other significant event at the Moscow “1915 Painting Exhibition,” apart from the appearance of the transformed image of Mona Lisa: the private rivalry between Mikhail Larionov and Kazimir Malevich spilled over into a public conflict. By this time, Larionov was the recognized head of Moscow’s left-wing painters and was extremely jealous of any infringements on his leadership. A superb colorist, in 1912 he invented his own movement in painting and called it Rayonnism. The artist seemed to weave images out of the thread-like rays emitted by objects and phenomena; in essence, through rational effort Larionov took the Impressionist understanding of light-and-color reality to its extreme. Due to their nature, rays can only be straight, and Larionov’s works became semi-abstract compositions comprising intersecting bundles of straight color lines. However, these works had a compulsive natural underlying impetus, and they always followed the traditional genre structure: there were Rayonnist portraits (Portrait of a Fool, Portrait of V. Ye. Tatlin [Balda], both 1913, Centre Pompidou, and so forth), Rayonnist still lifes (Rayonnist Mackerel, 1913–14), and Rayonnist landscapes (Rayonnist Landscape, 1912–13, GRM). Larionov actively promoted his “ism,” which in 1915 was already three years old, though his wife Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) was virtually his only strict follower, and even she did not consider Rayonnism her sole possible painting idiom. Rayonnism’s color strings were interfered with by the force lines that fixed the dynamic in Italian Futurism and the rhythmic vibration of lines in French Simultanism, and some of Larionov’s Russian adherents created their own unique symbioses (M. V. Le-Dantiu, Turn of the Automobile, 1913–14 [Orlov Museum of Fine Arts]; A. V. Shevchenko, Composition with Bathers, 1914 [GMII], and others). At the “1915 Painting Exhibition” Larionov, anxious not to lag behind the radical scandal makers, sculpted a disposable, mischievous “slap in the face of public taste.” Alongside the exhibit of Rayonnist painting, a fan was installed on the wall that turned on sporadically, stirring a woman’s lopped-off braid. Malevich and Aleksei Morgunov exhibited as members of a single group: the former presented his Composition with Mona Lisa; the latter, a collage-type work with a photograph of Chaliapin, a real spoon, a painted red square, and an inscription: “The barber went to the baths.”28 The works were accompanied by a manifesto that has come down to us in a letter of Shemshurin: “we are

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“Tramway V,” Malevich’s First Curatorial Project The “1915 Painting Exhibition” opened on March 23 in the old capital; twenty days before, “Tramway V: The First Futurist Exhibition” had taken place in Petrograd. Malevich’s various curatorial intentions were a constant theme in his letters to Matiushin in 1914 and 1915, when a money shortage was slowing his then-Fevralist plans. The wealthy couple Ivan Albertovich Puni (1892–1956) and Ksenia (Ksana, Oksana) Leonidovna Boguslavskaia (1892–1972) agreed to finance the exhibition. The beautiful Ksana had a sophisticated bohemian salon and among Futurists played the role of muse. For a long time her reckless admirer was, as we know, the brilliant Budetlyane poet Velimir Khlebnikov. Boguslavskaia knew a thing or two about effective publicity and with great eagerness participated in those undertakings which might, as she put it, “make a boo-mm.”31 The Moscow section of “Tramway V” was organized by Malevich, but he also oversaw the invitations for Petrograders; it was he who came up with the name for this, his first realized project. Malevich the curator considered exhibitions an “ideological matter” and took their organization very seriously. He motivated his rejection of some artists for invitations to “Tramway V” by the halfway nature of their position: “The Burliuks and Lentulov are very angry at me for not inviting them, but I think, let the fellows take the matter more seriously, instead of chasing two

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Fevralists, and February such-and-such we were liberated from reason.”29 He went on to comment: “Larionov’s stunt was destroyed by these works.” (Who could have imagined then the future technical thrill of Kinetism? The great colorist Larionov least of all.) Thus, at the “1915 Painting Exhibition,” Fevralism appeared as Rayonnism’s conscious opponent.30 On the whole, the two original national “isms” seem equal in status. In both there is a serendipity of plastic devices; in both a purely personal innovativeness; in both, a dialectical dependence on transformed (Larionov) and absurdistically prepared (Malevich) reality; in both, the invention of the artist’s own Russian-language term; for both, a minimum of supporters; and for both a brief life by historical standards. Only Mikhail Larionov was proud of Rayonnism and subsequently insisted that its invention was the discovery of abstractionism, whereas Malevich, on the contrary, himself consigned Fevralism to oblivion by trying to excise it from his biography.

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rabbits at once.”32 By “two rabbits” in this context he meant the conciliatory steps of D. Burliuk, who had built bridges with active opponents of left-wing art; thus, in February 1915, Burliuk and the poet Vasily Kamensky (1884–1961) paid visits to the illustrious “Wanderer” painter Ilia Repin (1844–1930), and the Realist writer Maxim Gorky (1868–1936). There was no coordinated statement by the Fevralists at “Tramway V,” nor could there have been. In fact, only Malevich, Morgunov, and to a great degree Ivan Kliun professed painting alogism with “planes.” Puni and Boguslavskaia made what were at first glance similar trans-sense collages; however, the Muscovite did not discuss a common platform with them, and without discussion with the interested persons he did not have the authority to add them to his invented movement; they stayed clear of Fevralism. Malevich kept this experience in mind during the period of the “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition and the creation of the Supremus society. As for the Muscovite exhibitors—Liubov Popova, Vladimir Tatlin, Nadezhda Udaltsova, and the cosmopolitan Alexandra Exter—the ideologue of “Tramway V” did not even attempt to win them over. At other people’s exhibitions Malevich the artist sowed strife by presenting Fevralism as Rayonnism’s rival, but at the curator’s own exhibition, while showing his own Fevralist works, as well as Morgunov’s and Kliun’s, he did not try to promote the new name, for the sake of solidarity. A few months later, while preparing his next exhibition, “0.10,” he would write Matiushin, speaking of his colleagues’ ban on the term “Suprematism,” “I bowed to them in this for the sake of the exhibition’s integrity. . . .”33 We should seize this opportunity to shed light on one legendary story in the history of the Russian avant-garde: the purchase at “Tramway V” of a counter-relief by Tatlin for three thousand rubles by prominent Moscow collector Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin (1854–1936). The Old Believer merchant had a phenomenal instinct for artistic innovation. Since the latter half of the 1900s he had been methodically buying pictures by the Fauves and then by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse, assembling the best collection of French modernism outside France.34 Shchukin’s collection became Moscow’s museum of modern art and functioned as a school for Russian radicals; on Sundays it was open to the public and frequently the owner himself provided explications for the paintings. By 1915 he was held in very high esteem in the innovative milieu, and for this reason his purchase of Tatlin’s work was a sensation, especially because of the three thousand rubles the Muscovite purportedly paid.

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The exhibition’s secretary, a nice young woman with shining black eyes and a somewhat ecstatic mood, graciously offered to “show me the exhibition.” [. . .] The exhibition’s highlight is Ivan Puni’s painting, Card Players. [. . .] She spends a long time explaining to me the full charm of this painting and then, glancing at my despondent face, obviously thinks that I am already full of respect for Futurism and leads me to see an untitled painting by Mr. Tatlin. The artist is right not to have given it a title. It would be hard to choose one, so now, take it for what you will. Before us is a small wooden board to which two more little boards have been screwed. That’s it. “This picture has already sold for three thousand rubles to Shchukin’s Moscow museum. You might not believe it,” she adds, and then goes on in a childish, pleading little voice, “I give you my word of honor, it’s the truth.” She so wants me to believe her. I dare not refuse her this little wish, and looking thoughtful, I say the picture certainly is worth that money. My guide leads me to her own pictures. She explains, a little out of breath, “This is Toilette, and this is Nature morte.” I can make sense of Toilette: a piece of mirror, a few flower sprigs, pasted-on bits from cosmetics boxes, and so on.37

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In a copy of the catalog for the “0.10” exhibition that once belonged to Ivan Puni, opposite the works, in his hand, are the prices the artists themselves set, so we can get a sense of the left-wing artists’ commercial demands.35 Boguslavskaia’s works were priced at 25–50 rubles, Malevich’s and Popova’s paintings at 50–200, Rozanova’s at 100–125 rubles; of Puni’s twenty-two works, fourteen cost 50 rubles apiece, one 75, four 100, two 150, and just one 300. By comparison, Tatlin set fantastic prices. Opposite his No. 132-a stands the sum of 1,500 rubles, and opposite No. 133-b, 2,500; for No. 144-m (Works of 1913–14), the artist’s appetite was moderated to 300 rubles. However, no one was in a hurry to buy what was “not art,” and the exhibition—like all the left-wing painters’ exhibitions—was not a commercial success. At that time, George Dionisovich Costakis (1911–90), the preeminent collector of the Russian avant-garde in the twentieth century, was all of four years old. The story of Shchukin’s acquisition of Tatlin’s counter-relief is based on a report in the press and has been accepted without the slightest skepticism by those writing about Tatlin and the history of the Russian avant-garde.36 Therefore we should shed light on this curious and instructive story. In his survey, “Nursery for Adults (At the Futurists’ Exhibition),” which appeared in Review of Theaters (Obozrenie teatrov), the reviewer, a certain S. Shevliakov, treated the matter comprehensively:

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The review concludes with a passage that lets us know that Mr. Shevliakov not only made a “thoughtful face” but in fact did believe his enchanting guide: “Also odd is the purchase of Mr. Tatlin’s painting by the Shchukin museum. Those unfortunate three thousand rubles might ruin for good the man who imagines that he is superior to all the artists in the world, since no one has ever been paid that kind of money for three pieces of wood.” In the “exhibition secretary,” the “nice young woman with the shining black eyes,” it is not hard to recognize the then twenty-three-year-old Ksenia Boguslavskaia, creator of Toilette and Nature Morte. The information conveyed to the reporter by the lover of “boo-mms” was calculated to create a sensation, a calculation that paid off brilliantly. The stunning newspaper canard kept on quacking all through the twentieth century and happily continued into the twenty-first. Ksenia Boguslavskaia was the author of one of the most successful and long-lived mystifications in the history of the Russian avant-garde.

The Loshkari Fevralists In inventing Fevralism, Malevich tried to use it as a basis for consolidating the people spiritually close to him. His lack of success in attracting Matiushin and Jakobson has already been mentioned; however, in those months the artist did have supporters who lived side by side with him: Aleksei Morgunov and his old friend Ivan Kliun. Malevich obviously thought that the Fevralists were a fact, insofar as he strove to legitimate the group. A line from a letter to Matiushin—“Tomorrow let’s talk about the soc[iety] of Futur[ists] and submit[ting a petition] to the may[or]”—attests to his intention to send the city council the documents to register the new society.38 To do this, as we know, he needed a name, a charter, an address, a list of members, and so on. Malevich considered equivalent to the Fevralists the group known as Universal Flowering, an equally small and officially unrecognized fraternity organized by Pavel Filonov (1883–1941), leader of the Petrograd innovators: “We [. . .] decided n[ext] year to organize with you and Univer[sal] Flow[ering] an exhibition of Fevralists and Univ[ersal] Flow[ering].”39 The unquestionable Fevralists were Malevich himself and Aleksei Morgunov, as was noted in the surviving letters between Roman Jakobson and David Burliuk. Thus, the latter reported on his visit to Kuntsevo, “the irreconcilable savage Futurist-Fevralists’ citadel.”40 Ivan Kliun was undoubtedly a “co-opted member” of the fraternity. Well known is a photo, published several times, showing Malevich, Morgunov, and 26

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Kliun. Taken by a professional artist, who composed the angles and poses of his models with artificial naturalness, it reminds you how nonrandom a photography session is. Participants in joint enterprises liked to display their unity in staged photos, and in this the left-wing artists were no exception. Famous were the trans-sense mise-en-scènes with the authors of Futurist performances immortalized in a Petersburg atelier in December 1913, against backdrops turned upside down. The hypothesis about the photograph of the trio being a group portrait of the Fevralists is prompted by the eloquent detail of wooden spoons embellishing Morgunov’s and Malevich’s otherwise absolutely ordinary attire. Much later Kliun attested: “Going out for a walk, they stopped by to see me and talked me into joining them in this demonstration stroll with spoons, and later, with the spoons in our lapels, being photographed together. I agreed to be photographed with them, but without the spoon, and I did not take part in the stroll along Kuznetsky. We were photographed at Art Photography, which was on the Arbat.”41 Agreeing with this reminiscence, the date of the trio’s photo has been determined to be March 1, 1914, the day of the shocking stroll along Kuznetsky Bridge by the newly fledged Fevralists, who just ten days before had “rejected reason.” Pasted into one of Aleksei Kruchenykh’s albums in the Maiakovsky Museum archive is a noteworthy page from the Trans-sense Boog (“Book”—in Russian, Zaumnaia gniga, instead of kniga), which he published with Aliagrov (Roman Jakobson) in July 1915. On it three crooked lines have been assembled with letter stamps in red ink: “After stealing everything / he steals a spoon, too, but / not vice versa.” Freely placed here, too, is a drawing of a large wooden spoon on a background of lightly hatched geometricized elements. Its creator, Aleksei Morgunov, signed the image with a painstakingly executed monogram, “A. M.” In red pencil, Kruchenykh added an inscription: “About the Loshkari: Malevich, Morgunov, Kliun.”42 The date this collective artifact was created cannot be determined with complete certainty. The drawing and pencil inscription may have been added to the page in summer 1915, or just as easily in the early 1920s. In any case, the page from Kruchenykh’s album confirms the hypothesis concerning the triple alliance of Loshkari (a trans-sense neologism derived from “spoon”; read: Fevralists). The above-mentioned letters between Roman Jakobson and David Burliuk imply that Aleksei Morgunov, Malevich’s associate, was a great enthusiast of Fevralism. However, Morgunov’s own memoirs make no mention of this. Actually, his reminiscences, like Kliun’s, were written much later, after many

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catastrophes and upheavals, in times of harsh persecution of avant-gardism as the “Formalist” art of “bourgeois poseurs.”43 The works of Morgunov and to some extent those of Kliun from 1914 and 1915 are characterized by features that led Malevich to invent the term “Fevralism.” Along with the juxtaposition of shocking alogical images we see those same planes with regular outlines whose silent gaze so disturbed the future Suprematist. Unlike the new movement’s initiator, Morgunov and Kliun subsequently locked in, although unconsciously for even themselves, the proto-Suprematist features of Fevralism, calling their own works of this period the “parents” of geometric abstraction. Morgunov’s Composition No. 1 (1915, Regional Art Museum, Krasnodar), with the dominant red square in the center, might have seemed to not only its author to be the “discovery” of non-objectivity appropriated by Malevich. Ivan Kliun valued no less highly the outward-fanning planes of his own Cubo-Futurist Landscape Passing By (1915, GTG), Ozonator (1914, GRM), and others. Much later he gave Sawyer, which he made in 1914, a second title, Nonobjective Composition, under which the painting figures to this day, so that it turns out that nonobjectivity appeared in Kliun’s art long before “0.10.”44 Obviously, the black square, known to have been used since time immemorial by Masons, alchemists, and representatives of various occult practices, did not make any of them Suprematism’s ancestor or even forerunner. The wooden folk spoon enjoyed a major career in radical art, so much so that the Fevralists transformed it into an emblem. They wore a large spoon on their clothing, used it as a collage ready-made, and depicted it in drawings and paintings. Malevich and Morgunov first appeared with spoons at the memorable Jack of Diamonds debate on February 19, 1914, as all the reports noted. This detail of their attire was recorded in a newspaper photo of Malevich and Morgunov’s provocative public happening, the above-mentioned stroll down Kuznetsky Bridge with spoons in their coat lapels, on March 1, 1914.45 In an amateur photo taken in spring 1914, Tatlin and Malevich’s brother-inlaw Yevgeny Mikhailovich Rafalovich are wearing elegant lilies-of-the-valley in their lapels, while Malevich poses with a spoon stuck under his tie. Spoons decorated the clothing of participants in “Tramway V.” In the account by S. Shevliakov cited above, we read, “Roaming through the hall are pipsqueaks with especially concentrated and serious faces. These are the administrators. Each has a pin in his lapel—a wooden spoon. [. . .]”

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More than likely, not all the exhibitors wore them, as some newspaper articles said, but primarily the Fevralists Malevich and Morgunov, who were joined, one assumes, by “administrator” Ivan Puni. Let us quote more fully an excerpt from Shemshurin’s letter: “Malevich and Morgunov have presented their coats of arms, since their paintings are in Petrograd. Something has been smeared on the coats of arms and real spoons stuck in. Under the coats of arms is a caption: We are Fevralists, since February such-and-such we have been freed from reason. Larionov’s stunt was destroyed by these works.”46 The spoons at the Fevralist exhibits of the “1915 Painting Exhibition” are mentioned in Morgunov’s memoirs: “My picture was assembled with a real wooden spoon on a red square, a photograph depicting Chaliapin, and an inscription in the background: ‘The barber went to the baths.’ Malevich also exhibited a picture with a square, a spoon, and a crossed-out reproduction of the Gioconda, and under it a newspaper clipping, ‘Apartment exchange.’”47 The Fevralists also liked another piece of cutlery, the fork, but still, based on frequency of quotation—only graphic, of course—only the saw rivaled the spoon. However, a saw could not be carried around in public, whereas a wooden spoon, mimicking a boutonniere, mockingly posed in the place of this elegant accessory of elegant attire; the popular idiom “hit him on the forehead with a spoon” also influenced the Fevralists’ preferences. In this first, hardly numerous alliance of supporters of the Malevich “ism” a piece of paraphernalia signified that one belonged to the community, however informal that community was. Perceptive Shemshurin correctly noted this fact when he called the friends’ displays “coats of arms.” The wooden spoon as the Fevralists’ emblem was the forerunner of Black Square as the that of the Suprematists. In Malevich’s estate there is a drawing that iconologically reinforces the connection between Fevralism and Suprematism: in the background (or foreground?) of a black rectangle hangs the contour of a wooden spoon surrounded by other geometric figures that have no inkling of their impending triumph (Figure 7).48 In painting, the most remarkable example of the bridge from Fevralism to Suprematism is the rigorous Black Rectangle and Blue Triangle (57 × 66.5 cm, SMA). On a white field, covered with paint, the capital letter “W” (the Russian “V”), so famous from the name “Tramway V,” can be easily seen, and through the triangle’s ultramarine appear the outlines of a red spoon that once accompanied the geometric elements. Now its round bowl can be read with the naked eye, but the entire spoon can only be seen clearly under instrumental

Figure 7. Kazimir Malevich. Alogical Composition. 1915. Pencil on paper. 16.5 × 11.2 cm. Courtesy of Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York.

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Abandoned by Its Own Creator In summer 1915, Malevich, Morgunov, and Kruchenykh lived and worked at a dacha in Kuntsevo, and Kliun spent time nearby. Malevich’s laconic lines in a letter to Matiushin—“I’m painting pictures and also choosing the literature of Fevralism for anthologies”50—tell us that such texts existed. One was even published, but while it was appearing the author underwent a cardinal change of attitude toward his progeny. Secret Vices of Academicians (Tainye poroki akademikov), which appeared in August 1915, was conceived and compiled by Aleksei Kruchenykh, who had originally invited Matiushin to participate in the edition. Ultimately, compositions by Kruchenykh, as well as brief texts by Kliun and Malevich, were published in the booklet, which came out under the three authors’ names: the trinity archetype held an irresistible fascination for Malevich’s circle.51 Kruchenykh’s position on Fevralism was probably close to that of Roman Jakobson, as expressed by the latter in a letter to Matiushin: “I barely care about names, but everyone else is mad for them: Filonov over his ‘universal flowering,’ Mal[evich] and Morgunov over ‘Fevralism.’”52 Moreover, narcissistic Kruchenykh always believed there was no better term than the one he invented, “trans-sense” (zaum). By all appearances, Malevich’s forceful text in Secret Vices of Academicians corresponds to the manifesto genre and, what is not insignificant, to the manifesto of Fevralism. His principal message is to proclaim absurdism and alogism as weapons in the expansion of the territory of art and as means for making contact with genuine reality and dispelling the illusoriness of actuality. Let us quote its most striking theses: The artist needs reason only for domestic use, whereas artists use it in painting. [. . .] I reject the soul and intuition as useless. On February 19, 1914, I rejected reason in a public lecture. I am warning of the danger—right now reason has shut art up in a fourwalled box of dimensions, foreseeing the danger of the fifth and sixth dimensions, I fled, since the fifth and sixth dimensions form a cube, in which art would suffocate. Run before it’s too late. [. . .] The highest work of art is drawn when mind is absent.

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inspection, as was demonstrated to participants in a seminar on Malevich’s art in 1990 in New York.49

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An excerpt from such a work: “I just ate calves feet. / It is amazingly hard to adapt to happiness after you’ve traveled all the way across Siberia. / I have always envied the telegraph pole. Pharmacy.” Of course, many will think that this is absurd, but in vain, for all you have to do is light two matches and supply a washstand.53

Fevralism’s magnificent irrationality made it kin to future Dadaist provocations, foretold the Surrealist hunt for the subconscious, and was a “reminiscence of the future”—the deliberately absurd and provocative art of the poets of the Leningrad OBERIU group in the 1920s and early 1930s, especially Daniil Kharms (1905–42) and Aleksandr Vvedensky (1904–41). However, Malevich the Fevralist, having anticipated the career of these mind-less manifestations in art, abandoned that path as well. The manifesto from Secret Vices of Academicians gives the precise date of the “ism’s” birth, lays out its foundations, and denounces its opponents. Except that the word itself and, consequently, the specific nature of the phenomenon it expressed had already been abandoned by the author: the book essentially establishes Fevralism’s death. By August 1915 there were already quite a few absolutely nonobjective works, and Suprematism’s creator had already pushed back its birth to December 1913. This meant that Fevralism, which is fixed in letters and the “1915 Painting Exhibition,” appeared chronologically after the discovery of Suprematism, something which, according to Malevich, should not have been. The artist sacrificed Fevralism to Suprematism by depriving it of its place in time and space. Fevralism was erased from its own biography under the powerful press of the “dictates of its time,” to use the artist’s own words. Malevich saw it as a movement toward abstraction, geometricized nonobjectivity. It was noted above that those artistic and intellectual phenomena which subsequently flourished independently and were perfected under the name “Dada” found expression in Fevralism. Dadaism, in turn, was a result of new artists protesting against the formal plastic orientation and sterility of pure art. According to their classification, metaphysical Suprematism—had they known of it—would have been the highest expression of abstract creation, that is, that which they were mercilessly fighting. So that proto-Dadaist Fevralism, having fallen victim to absolute abstractivism, would not have gone unavenged and in the future fully manifested the potential of its vanquishers’ “gravedigger.” Despite the Dadaists’ ignorance of developed Fevralism’s existence, its absurdist essence has been a topic of culturological analyses. John Bowlt very 32

The Rise of Suprematism May 1915 Today we know that Malevich the conceptualist convincingly backdated his works to construct a “correct” artistic biography for himself. With regard to Suprematism, he changed not only dates but the very sequence of events. To this day, most scholars subscribe to Malevich’s picture of Suprematism’s birth. In spring 1915, Matiushin was getting ready to republish Victory Over the Sun (which had first appeared in print at the time of the performances), and for

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properly entitled his inquiry “The Cow and the Violin: Toward a History of Russian Dada.”54 During the era of Fevralism, Malevich created not only proto-Dadaist masterpieces that blazed the way for future manipulations with ready-made images of mass culture, but also devised unique word-images and the conceptualist “Village,” in which a word is the object of art. However, in the context of his further artistic biography, Fevralism was a transient phenomenon. Nonetheless, on this transient path Malevich produced several discoveries of the first rank that subsequently manifested themselves in the trends and movements of twentieth-century world art, although their creators, as a rule, had no inkling of their Russian predecessor. This only adds to the value of Malevich’s accomplishments. Very soon after, in May 1916, he would write to Alexandre Benois, a denigrator of innovative art, “I did not obey my fathers and I do not resemble them. I too am a stage”—a stage in the artistic mastery of the world edifice. In fact, in historical perspective, his art—to use his own metaphor—turned out to be not a stage but a genuine threshold. During the Fevralist era, Malevich underwent a reorientation in his quest from plasticity to conceptual speculation to which everything on earth was subject: Fevralism erased the boundaries of what was customarily designated by the word “art.” This reconstruction of Fevralism has had as its goal, apart from reviving an unknown avant-garde “ism,” that of demonstrating the long, hard, and organic maturation of Malevich’s main discovery. With Fevralism restored, the picture of geometric abstraction’s birth acquires the chronological dynamic that its creator eliminated by shifting its dates in the name of asserting precedence. Malevich’s first personal “ism” cleared the way for his chief “ism.”

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this reason Malevich turned to old projects he still had, and there he discovered his “forgotten” graphic Black Square, supposedly created for the 1913 performance. The artist sent the drawing to Petrograd with the urgent demand that it be reproduced in the new book. According to Malevich’s version of events, first, Suprematism was born in 1913; second, Black Square was its initial figure; and third, the graphic Black Square preceded the painted one. Anticipating our exposition, let us note that Malevich did succeed in convincing people near and far that the graphic Black Square did appear in 1913. In an essay published in the twenty-first century, art historian I. A. Vakar wrote, “If it is true that in December 1913 he [Matiushin] was not interested in the drawing of Black Square (and who among us has reason to doubt this?), then it is obvious how far Suprematism was for him from being a plastic idea.”55 However, Matiushin “was not interested” in the graphic Black Square either in December 1913, when it simply did not exist, or in summer 1915, when he first saw the drawing, about which more below. In the final decade of the last century, a consensus emerged among scholars that the canvas Black Square was made in 1915. At the same time, there was no doubt that it followed a pencil “sketch,” was the first nonobjective picture, and was the first of a great number of abstract canvases, just as the Suprematist had always stated. For many long years N. I. Khardzhiev’s point remained axiomatic: “On May 27, 1915, sending M. Matiushin the drawing of a curtain, a depiction of a black square, Malevich wrote, ‘This drawing will have great significance in painting. That which was done unconsciously is now yielding extraordinary fruits.’”56 This opinion was shared by Yevgeny Kovtun (1928–96), a historian of the avant-garde, who wholly ascribed the famous statement just quoted to the principal Suprematist figure.57 The considerable authority of Khardzhiev and Kovtun led all Russian and foreign scholars to accept the statement without qualification. However, close analysis revealed it to be in contradiction with real events. Malevich’s laconic letter of May 27, 1915, is so important that we will cite it in full: Dear Mikhail Vasilievich. Kruch[enykh] told me you were publishing Victory Over the Sun and that you wanted to include my set design[s]. I would be very grateful if you would include my drawing of the curtain in the act where the victory took place. I found I had one design and think that it very much needs to be placed in the book. Remem[ber] that I drew the production. We should publish together again. This drawing will have great significance in painting. 34

Write to 7 Barish. Yours K. M. Kuntsovo, Aleks[androvskaia] R[oad]58

The persistent opinion that this letter referred to Black Square is refuted by documents that became accessible after the part of the Khardzhiev collection now at the Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation opened in 1997. A drawing with the cumbersome later title Suprematism: Large Black Trapezoid and Red Square Among Rectangles and Stripes (Preliminary Sketch), which Khardzhiev got from the Matiushin collection and kept hidden for many decades, shed light on important circumstances (Figure 8).59 On the basis of an analysis of this drawing and the Suprematist’s letters, I advanced the hypothesis, in “Malevich, Malevich’s Curator” (1998), that the artist’s first nonobjective picture was not Black Square but the canvas Suprematism from Amsterdam (Figure 10).60 A postcard dated May 27, 1915, accompanied this composition’s graphic analog; for greater persuasiveness, Malevich placed an amended inscription over the drawing’s frame confirming his message: “act’s 2nd sce[ne] backdrop for the victory over the sun itself.” What he said about the “great significance for painting” referred to this work, not to Black Square, the great, as yet unborn, primary form. Let us note in particular that on May 27, 1915, Matiushin was sent only one drawing from Kuntsevo. Matiushin, owner of the tiny Zhuravl publishing house, conceived a desire to publish “the opera with a full set of drawings” soon after the performances, in January and February 1914, but the undertaking stalled. Matiushin found a new project in early spring 1915; he intended to publish his score with the opera’s libretto. Matiushin discussed the republication in his correspondence with Kruchenykh during the first few months of 1915. In a letter dated March 18, 1915, Kruchenykh remarked, “By the way, I think by fall you should definite[ly] publish the opera, otherwise we’ll outgrow it too much.”61 Upon his arrival in Moscow from the village of Batalpashinsk, Kruchenykh listed his conditions: “You may, of course, print the opera, moreover I have only the following requests: 1) If there is ever a profit, shall we divide it in half? [. . .] 4) There m[ust] be a drawing on the cover. You have Malevich’s drawings—s[o] those on the cover and in the middle; or Filonov’s. 5) Text font no smaller than in The Three.”62 In spring 1915 the drawings Malevich did for the December 1913 production were in Matiushin’s possession; at the end of the year the art patron L. I. Zheverzheev displayed them at an exhibition, “Monuments of Theatrical Art 35

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That which was done unconscious[ly] is now yielding extraordinary fruits.

Figure 8. Kazimir Malevich. Suprematism: Large Black Trapezoid and Red Square Among Rectangles and Stripes (Preliminary Sketch). 1915. Pencil on paper. 15.7 × 10.8 cm. Courtesy The Cultural Centre “Khardjiev-Chaga Foundation”/Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

The Crystallization of Nonobjectivity Drawings had always been Malevich’s laboratory. The wealth of plastic ideas stored away in the many hundreds of pages he left behind is stunning; only a small portion of them were ever embodied in painting. At the end of Fevralism, the artist completed several graphic works that share noteworthy characteristics and can best be characterized as captured signs of reality. However, this reality had nothing to do with ordinary reality. Malevich was excited by the life of cosmic bodies and planets, magnetism and electricity— that which does not depend on conditions invented by people, with their selfish interests and psychological travails. For a while he thought that all this was still the development of Fevralism, which was gradually moving away from the absurdist negation of conventional illusions of the social milieu and toward the expression of sensations from the natural foundations of authentic being. 37

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from the Collection of L. I. Zheverzheev,” which ran from December 2 to 16, 1915, in Petrograd. The negotiations over the sketches’ acquisition by the merchant-collector were long and hard. The above-cited letter leads to a rather interesting conclusion: at first Malevich did not play any role in the republication of Victory Over the Sun, Matiushin did not even inform him of the proposed undertaking, and Kruchenykh asked to “share half the profit.” Neither co-author saw anything wrong in replacing the Suprematist’s sketches with works by Pavel Filonov in the new Victory Over the Sun. Matiushin, as we know, had collaborated closely with Filonov and in March 1915 published his “Chant of Universal Flowering.” On May 15, 1915, Kruchenykh sent written permission from Moscow to print his text: “I have sent you permission to print the opera—I don’t know whether you received it—sin[ce] it was an ordinary postcard. In any event, I repeat: I hereby give you the right unconditionally and gratuitously to print my text for the opera Victory Over the Sun. May 1915. A. Kruchenykh.”63 Evidently, Matiushin had instructed him to talk to Malevich about the new project. Kruchenykh did so. While staying with the artist at his dacha in Kuntsevo, on May 20, he reported, “The drawings the pan would like to submit for the cover [and] 2 costumes inside—the hatched engraving—let me know—can you send. The pan agrees, I think, to no honorarium, as [do] we.” Then a question: “Has the Victory typesetting begun?”64 What Kruchenykh says implies that on May 20 Malevich already had a plan to send other drawings for the opera. On May 27, 1915, he implemented this plan.

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Figure 9. Kazimir Malevich. Fevralism as Emotionism. 1915. Pencil on paper. 11.2 × 14.5 cm. Courtesy The Cultural Centre “Khardjiev-Chaga Foundation”/Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

In his drawings Fevralism as Emotionism and Sensation of Electricity, geometric fragments and pencil checkmarks are set out in lines as if under the effect of magnetic forces, the field is divided by a line that looks like a horizon, and round shapes are associated primarily with the lights of a daytime and nighttime skyscraper (Figure 9).65 Along with these abstract nonobjective compositions Malevich was also creating graphic images in which regular geometric elements were joined to schematic depictions of an arrow, a boat, a spoon, a man’s head, and so on, sometimes assembled into an anthropomorphic visage. The drawing What Effrontery (1914–15, private collection) is like the schematic “little men” in pedestrian crossing signs or the simplified pictograms that in the future would become widespread as icons in all kinds of public information materials.66 The rise of nonobjectivity in the art of one who was still a Fevralist is demonstrated by one highly noteworthy work from Khardzhiev’s former collection with the modern title Composition: Circle with Rectangles and Triangles.67 The

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Returning to the end of Fevralism, let us note that the plastic system that appeared to the artist was so original and incredibly simple that he thought others would be able to reproduce it easily. My further exposition will show how greatly Malevich erred in his concern. It was May 1915. The exhibition season was over, and organizing any exposition was in any case a difficult business for a poor artist. Presenting the city

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numerals in the margins establish the drawing’s horizontal dimension; inside the frame we can see traces of erased geometric elements. The work still did not reflect minimalist nonobjectivity, even though Suprematism supposedly already existed. Apart from the lengthwise format, later virtually rejected, which concealed the echoes of the earth’s gravity and enslavement by the horizon, the drawing is unique for the presence of abstract mini-compositions, nearly each of which would one day get its own separate oil painting. Never again, in Malevich’s art as cleansed by the economical figure of Black Square, would there be such a compendium of Suprematist topics concentrated in a single work. This drawing corresponded to a large painting known today only from photographs of Malevich’s one-man shows in Moscow (1920) and Berlin (1927), where the artist hung it vertically. Because this work was lost, we will never be able to solve the riddle of its dating; it may well have determined the appearance of Suprematism’s prototype. In late spring 1915, pre-Suprematist nonobjective drawings went hand in hand with the creation of canvases with complex, multicomponent groups of geometric elements. Here, too, anticipating my exposition, I should digress not only on the rise of Suprematism but also more broadly, on the rise of “high simplicity” in art and literature. Great artists’ legacies make it quite clear that in art they move not from simplicity to complexity but in the reverse direction, from complexity to simplicity. Aleksandr Pushkin’s prose, with its transparent simplicity, was preceded by his more complex and difficult, to the routine glance, poetic works, where the artist was supposed to wield numerous purely formal devices (rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, internal rhyme, broken meter, and so on). In Malevich’s case, the complex multicomponent “poetry” of his first nonobjective canvases also preceded the stern “prose” of his monofigures. Subsequently, however, when setting up his logically elegant system, the avant-gardist declared all his complex compositions to have been created after the “simple” monofigures; according to his theories, his multicomponent pictures appeared as a result of the dynamic development and disintegration of Black Square.

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and the world with their own discovery and reinforcing its precedence were always painful issues for avant-gardists, since what was new was supposed to prove that they were innovating Futurists. The publication of stunning works in a book connected with the 1913 production easily solved these problems. According to Malevich’s appraisal of the lay of the land, Matiushin could be a highly authoritative “witness” to nonobjectivity’s emergence in 1913. A graphic Black Square that had not been used before but was in the second edition of Victory Over the Sun would have been incontrovertible proof of Suprematism’s date of birth for both contemporaries and descendants (indeed, Malevich’s calculation proved accurate, even though the book failed to appear). The production’s co-creator had to be convinced of the existence of laboratory “discards” that the artist had retained. Matiushin sent the postcard and drawing after hearing the news from Kruchenykh of the opera’s republication then in the works. Here it seems essential to make a digression on the odious problem of priority in the discovery of nonobjectivity. During her work on “0.10,” Olga Rozanova nervously asked Kruchenykh: “Did you show Malevich my paste-ons and when exactly?” underlining her queries and preceding them with the assertion, “Now, furthermore: all of Suprematism is entirely my paste-ons.”68 Near the end of the twentieth century, scholars practicing gender discourse were eager to interpret the distinguished artist’s words as incontrovertible proof that Malevich had “borrowed” his female colleague’s discoveries. Thanks to documents from the FKhCh archive that became accessible only at the end of the twentieth century, we can now answer Rozanova’s questions. According to his letters to Matiushin, Kruchenykh did not arrive in Moscow from Batalpashinsk until the very end of April, and he probably moved to Kuntsevo, where Malevich had long resided, in the first ten days of May 1915; the first of his letters from Kuntsevo known to us was sent to Matiushin in Petrograd on May 12, 1915, and their correspondence was quite intensive. By this date Malevich already had a backlog of nonobjective works, to say nothing of the fact that Composition with Mona Lisa, with its completely extraneous rectangles, went on display at the “1915 Painting Exhibition” in Moscow on March 23, 1915. Rozanova’s 1915 collage paste-ons were applied art; they arose as book designs rather than independent works. The term “paste-ons” had been in existence since 1912–13, since the publication of Aleksei Kruchenykh’s lithographic booklets; their paper covers were adorned with pasted-on graphic works by his artist colleagues, usually unconnected in any way with the text.69 Roza-

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nova went further. Her paste-on on the cover of Trans-sense Boog by Aleksei Kruchenykh and Aliagrov (Roman Jakobson), which appeared—let me emphasize the date—in July 1915, was a witty collage, a heart crookedly cut out of crimson cardboard and decorated with a button (Matisse’s decoupage works, based on the same technique of cutting out colored paper, appeared much later). To this day the distinguished artist’s biographers cannot say precisely when the paste-ons that followed Trans-Sense Boog first appeared. The only reliable fact is that the earliest of those now known were connected to a commission given Rozanova in late June or early July 1915 by Moscow art patron A. A. Shemshurin for a book, War (Voina).70 Kruchenykh apparently had nothing to show Malevich in the days preceding May 27, 1915. At the same time, even if he had been able to show Malevich paste-ons by her that we do not know of before May 27, 1915, this would have changed nothing. The Fevralist’s arduous organic journey toward nonobjectivity had already been crowned by his own discovery, the outcome of long suffering, which in a profound sense had very little in common with the whimsical decorativeness of the Rozanova cut-outs, with their purely plastic reduction of the “object.” Malevich’s nonobjectivity had primarily visionary roots. The legend about Malevich borrowing Rozanova’s discovery has never had the slightest real foundation. Returning to the last ten days of May 1915, let us recall that a week after Kruchenykh’s report on the proposed republication, Malevich sent “the drawing of the curtain in the act where the victory took place” that he had “preserved.” The design that was rushed to Petrograd differed strikingly from the actual sketches for all six backdrops, five of which went into the collection of L. I. Zheverzheev, who financed the production, while the sixth remained in Matiushin’s collection (now in FKhCh).71 The sketches attest to the fact that in 1913 the backdrops were meant to lend an illusory depth to the theatrical stage and to neutralize the static bas-relief quality of the action, which unfolded on the narrow strip of the proscenium. By drawing a small square inside a large one and joining their corners with lines, Malevich was imitating the unique spatial perspective of the “Land of the Tenth,” where the opera’s events take place. The drawing sent in May 1915 has an extended vertical format, that is, it was created without any regard for the stage opening taken into consideration in the original 1913 sketches. The sketch of the new curtain is analogous in composition to the painted canvas Suprematism in the SMA (Figure 10); both the drawing and the canvas

Figure 10. Kazimir Malevich. Suprematism. 1915. Oil on canvas. 101.5 × 62 cm. Courtesy Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

The Birth of Black Square: June 8, 1915 Black Square materialized during the creation of another polychromatic and multicomponent abstract canvas. It happened suddenly and took Malevich unawares. He had neither a clean canvas nor time to prepare one. The artist had to use a canvas he was already working on: the black plane was painted over a variegated composition made up of geometric elements. In the Fevralist’s most representative canvases, Englishman in Moscow and Composition with Mona Lisa, as well as in some of his drawings from the period, a constant refrain is “partial eclipse”; in Composition with Mona Lisa it 43

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probably came about simultaneously. This canvas was not the only nonobjective picture the artist had by the end of May, but Black Square lay yet ahead. The deafening novelty of its strict geometric system and the fortunate pretext for its “correct” chronological positioning in history forced Malevich to rush and send off “the drawing of the curtain in the act where the victory took place.” He did not know that his principal work would emerge in a matter of days. Besides the Suprematism canvas in the SMA, another picture has survived that Malevich painted before his minimalist prototype: this Suprematism is preserved to this day in the Russian Museum (Figure 11). Both canvases have all the generic traits of pre-Suprematist Suprematism, if I may permit myself such a paradox. The previous production of Victory Over the Sun had been conceived of by its creators as a battle against the old, hardened way of thinking; outrage and negation were their main instruments of struggle. In spring 1915, the opera’s solar symbolism became filled by degrees with new meaning for Malevich. Along with its destructive aspirations, the Futurist masterpiece was discovered to possess utopian, constructive potential, which for Malevich was linked with the concepts of the Universe’s energetic being—electricity, gravitation, and the incorporeal, nonobjective power that so interested him. Both pictures, the one in Amsterdam and the one in Petersburg, were nonobjective, but this was a nonobjectivity that reminded us of the conventional signs of the physical laws of electricity and magnetism. Thus, the oval geometric element in the Russian Museum canvas is plastically akin to the electric shovel in the new Budetlyane Strongman (1915), and the painterly “checkmarks” seem to be repeated with the same rhythmic “electric charge” in the drawing Fevralism as Emotionism. Below, we will see how Malevich was able in an ambivalent form—as covertly but at the same time as overtly as possible—to give the two Suprematist pictures that came first chronologically their due.

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Figure 11. Kazimir Malevich. Suprematism. 1915. Oil on canvas. 80.5 × 81 cm. © 2011, State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.

is repeated more than once. The verbal leitmotif, which goes back to the discourse of Victory Over the Sun, had given Malevich no rest for months. Now he suddenly discovered the reason for his strange obsession. In his Fevralist canvases, irrational “planes” had only partially eclipsed elements of the objective world, but the details and fragments of it still showed through. With the appearance of the main figure, the “partial eclipse” was transformed in a single

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Figure 12. Kazimir Malevich. Black Square. June 8 (Old Style), June 21 (New Style) 1915. Oil on canvas. 79.5 × 79.5 cm. At right, X-ray image of the composition that underlies the painting. © The State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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instant into a “total eclipse”; the black square blocked nature’s lamp. “Things vanished like smoke”—and before Malevich arose the absolute, the world as nonobjectivity. The descriptions of his own feelings during those hours, subsequently repeated many times, leave no doubt as to their nature. The Russian avantgardist’s principal creation was revealed to him as the result of a powerful spiritual tension, in a moment of ecstatic illumination. Kliun left eloquent testimony to this in his memoirs. When asked by art historian A. V. Bakushinsky “how he drew his Black Square and what the impetus for it was, Malevich replied that when he was drawing Black Square ‘fiery lightning bolts’ were constantly crossing the canvas in front of him.”72 And Malevich’s pupil, Anna Leporskaia, recalling his words, “recounted that he considered Black Square an event of such tremendous significance in his art that he could not eat, drink, or sleep for a full week.”73 Black Square of 1915 allows the contemporary viewer to feel this tremendous tension as well. In the canvas’s texture, created in rapid, almost chaotic strokes, we can see the fingerprints of Malevich, who was in such a hurry that he outstripped his own brush. With time, through the craquelures on the square’s surface, the colors of the geometric elements that had been eclipsed overnight by its black figure began to show through (Figure 12).

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Returning to June 1915, let us note that the revolutionary significance of the “icon of our era” was clear to its creator instantly. A letter flew to Petrograd with the graphic version of Black Square, which was done in parallel with the painting; even then, in the “depths of his intuitive reason,” the artist had reached the signal essence of the Suprematist prototype, which was independent of the technique of its embodiment. Fortunately, we have both this and another note from Malevich that are contemporary with the fateful event in his life and, more broadly, with one of the principal events in modern art. Both letters ended up in the Manuscript Department of Pushkin House, but Matiushin kept the front of the envelope from the first of them (Figure 13). This document, which Khardzhiev acquired and which for decades was buried among his treasures, is of incalculable significance, inasmuch as the addressee considered it essential to write something on it: “Malevich’s sketches for the opera Victory over the Sun.” The postmark “Kuntsevo Mos[cow] G[ubernia] June 9, [19]15” finally allows us to date Black Square’s birth precisely. It appeared a week and a half after the letter dated May 27, 1915, and if we consider the incredible agitation that overtook Malevich, preventing him

Figure 13. Kazimir Malevich. Face side of the envelope of letter from Malevich to Matiushin from Kuntsevo to Petrograd, date-stamped June 9, 1915. Courtesy The Cultural Centre “Khardjiev-Chaga Foundation”/Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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Reading the letters about Black Square, it is hard to shake the impression that Malevich was not just writing them for Matiushin; intuitively, he was creating the great chronicle of a great discovery. His “plan of expression,” his resolute re-creation of history, shows through clearly in his letters; however, the “level of content,” the actual state of affairs, also reads well. Both levels shine through each other; even in Malevich’s case the famous axiom that life is more ingenious than any composition very much applies. First of all, some preliminary remarks about a few specific features of the letters, and their implications. The first letter is not dated, which is a rarity for Malevich, who liked to fix the time of important events in his own life, both personal and public. Whether there was a date on the second is hard to tell inasmuch as it has no conclusion. The loss of the last page, it must be said, is rather unusual for the careful Matiushin; actually, we will never know who lost the page or when—or whether it was removed and destroyed for specific reasons. Both letters have identical introductions and speak of the same works, that is, the second lays out even more formally the events illuminated in the first; this tautology is eloquent in and of itself. At the same time, in them Malevich constructs the hierarchy of his new projects differently and occasionally lets something slip. To begin with, I will comment on lines in the first letter: “Dear Mikhail Vasilievich, I am sending you 3 drawings in the form in which they were done in 1913.”74 Malevich’s explanations circle around the fact that the designs were made in 1913 and only the insidiousness and stinginess of Zheverzheev kept him from executing them. The artist worked on the designs independently, in Moscow, while Matiushin wrote the music in Petersburg. Naturally he might not have known about all the sketches that appeared for his distant associate, “the way they were done in 1913.” “Three back curtains.” “Back curtains” were what the artist called the theatrical backdrops; there really were three new sketches for “back curtains,” but Malevich held on to the third, about which more below. “The 1st curtain is a black square, which has served greatly for me, producing a mass of material, and I ask very much that you put it either on the cover or inside.” Malevich cannot curb his excitement, and Black Square is to be

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from eating, drinking, and sleeping, then—taking into account the spontaneity of its creation—Black Square came into being on June 8, 1915. According to New Style dating, Black Square appeared on June 21, 1915, and the graphic version was sent to Petrograd, accordingly, on June 22.

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put in the foremost place. The artist immediately gives his principal figure the title by which it would live in history; in its first public appearance, though, it would have another title: “Tetragon.” In this letter Black Square is still a “back curtain”; later it would be the curtain in front of the entire opera. Further: “No. 2—A Budetlyane strongman holding a terrible weapon that the Zheverzheevs did not make for me then. The weapon can collect elec[tricity] at one [end] and strike at the push of a button from the other.” There had been no martial features whatsoever to the Futurist knight of December 1913, Russia’s last peaceful year. The new Budetlyane strongman’s frightening appearance (in steel plate armor) was created under the influence of actual events: World War I was in progress. In spring 1915, as was stated above, Malevich was intrigued by the invisible and merciless force of electricity. He armed his Budetlyane “knight of mind-lessness” bearing the number “0” as a medal on his chest, and had him carry a bucket-shaped battery and a projectile in the form of a double-ended shovel. The faceless warrior with his rectangular black head possesses an impressive combination of peasant archaism, medieval romanticism, and metallic modernity. Further: “3d—a truncated black cone, the curtain, apparently, of the 2d act, depicted is the moment the sun is swallowed up, the trunc[ated] cone has swallowed up all the sun’s fire, and [(deleted:) 4th] that is all.” The third design is quite curious. In my 1998 analysis, I argued for the hypothesis that this design was the prototype that was reworked into the nonobjective graphic composition sent to Matiushin on May 27, 1915, and that in turn served as the sketch for the first abstract picture painted before Black Square. This was correct according to the logic of development, but in the case of the great avant-gardist, rational thinking can only lead one astray. The Fevralist could not help but remember that he had rushed to dispatch the nonobjective drawing with the “truncated cone” and the unambiguous inscription on May 27, all of about two weeks before; this false start had to be canceled. So Malevich resorted to his characteristic re-creation of the sequence of events. After duplicating the construction of the already-sent vertical drawing in the “correct” square format, he drew astronomical prompts around the geometric figures that were supposed to reinforce the words “at the moment the sun was swallowed up” in the dimensions of the Universe. (In Aleksei Kruchenykh’s text and the 1913 production, the victory over the Sun looked different: the Buriers carried it out on a stretcher, accompanied by a recitative from the Many: “We tore out the sun and its fresh roots / They plowed the rich [lands] with arithmetic / Look, there it is.”)

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It “seems” to Malevich that the trans-sense work that he sent was the design for the curtain of the second “deima” or act, since he obviously “forgot” about the previous drawing and histrionic words that were rushed to Petrograd on May 27, 1915. Isn’t the absence of a date on the letter with Black Square intended to push back chronologically the letter that had already been fired off? The curtain drawing with “astronomy” was done after, not before the abstract composition; later scholars were delighted to see how Malevich had “purged” the geometric construction of the darting words and numbers! In his later years, the artist would draw several impressionistic Flower Sellers, date them to the early 1900s, and make hot reds of their skirts the blouses so intense that art historians would long be happy to contemplate this obvious anticipation of the colorful energy of Suprematism by the provincial painter from Kursk. Unfortunately for us. Returning to the first letter that mentions Black Square, let us expand on what was concealed behind the crossed-out number 4. The beginning of the letter talks about three curtains, but only two were sent, plus Budetlyane Strongman. Meanwhile, Malevich definitely wanted to send three works; a fourth did not fit into his beloved triad. The design for the last curtain was ready at the time the letter was sent. Later the drawing done in 1915, in pencil on vellum, turned up in Khardzhiev’s collection and went from there to Moscow’s Literary Museum; another version, in color, whose date is in need of more precise identification, was in the vanished collection of Benedikt Livshits, who was a victim of Stalin’s torture chambers.75 The duplicated composition was also in a representational drawing of 1928.76 In the 1915 pencil sketch for the “third curtain,” the scattered astronomical and trans-sense obliquities look as if they were covered by regular geometric figures, that is, it repeats the devices of the drawing with the “truncated cone.” However, Malevich absolutely had to send this latter to neutralize the effect of his recent haste; the more important (for him) “truncated cone” had pushed out the “third curtain,” that is number four, from the trio of works sent to Matiushin. Adding new designs to the opera created problems because Malevich had to figure out which scene they had supposedly been made for; as has already been stated, in his first letter he had hastily declared that Black Square was the “back curtain.” The jumbled correction on the original sketches with the crossed-out ordinal numerals of the acts and scenes, inserted later on in Malevich’s hand, demonstrate how hard it was for him to coordinate his new designs with those which had actually been drawn before December 1913.

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One other point from the first letter attests to the fact that before Black Square Malevich had had a certain number of nonobjective works: “We need to get together and talk. You might write something about my set designs in your book; I have something about the sets. But I need to talk that [over] with you, since I wouldn’t like to show the hole prematurely.”77 Malevich did not want to “show the hole” that his colleagues, hungering for the laurels of discoverers, might exploit. Consequently, there were already quite a few nonobjective works. Judging from context, the second letter, which talks about Black Square, was written by Malevich after Matiushin’s response to the previous one.78 Therefore the present tense of the verb in the first sentence of the message is at first glance rather puzzling: “I’m sending you three drawings of my first designs, which due to the ignorant attitude of the opera production’s entrepreneur, I was unable to execute.” However, the puzzle is solved by the fact that in the prerevolutionary era copyright was respected in Russia and not ignored in joint undertakings even by friends. Analogous to the way Kruchenykh, who beginning in March 1915 unconditionally supported the republication of Victory Over the Sun, only in mid-May—evidently at Matiushin’s request—sent official permission to Petrograd to publish his text, Malevich’s second letter was sent to Matiushin by way of permission to use his drawings: “Therefore I would like to place them in your book, this would be very good for complementing the score in the sense of the opera’s form.” Malevich has cooled off a little and closes the list with Black Square; on the other hand, he does describe its place in the opera itself: now it is “the 1st act curtain.” Henceforth and everywhere Black Square’s only position would be first place. Then follow stunning words that became the great artist’s program not only for the next few months but also, as history has shown, for his entire life: [. . .] the curtain depicts a black square[—]the germ of all possibilities accrues terrible power as it develops [this is the foundation, the prime basis of everything], it is the forefather of the cube and the sphere [the anticipation of volumetric Suprematism, within the limit of architectonics], its disintegrations bear an amazing culture in painting [the premise of his future theories of the construction of a Suprematist universe out of dynamic transformations of Black Square], in the opera it signified the beginning of the victory [that is, was an ambivalent symbol or sign of the end of the old life and the beginning of the new]. 50

Black Square’s creator found in it an inexhaustible store of significances and meanings, and the necessity of subordinating everything previously created to his new plastic absolute was very clear to Malevich. The great artist had great reasons for his resolute construction of the sequence of events. The principal Suprematist monofigure demonstrated to the artist himself its true significance, and he had no choice but to modify reality in the name of the higher truth.

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In the second fragmentary letter, fortunately, one other extremely important testimony has survived. Malevich is responding to a letter from Matiushin that is unknown to us. “If you remember my curtain, the depic[tion] of the square, you thought it the least interesting because in its disintegration you did not find an emotion that produces a new idea.” This phrase echoes—responds to and reflects—a future situation Malevich would encounter quite soon, in fall 1915, when Black Square would seem not only “less interesting” to his professional colleagues but basically like some dilettantish misunderstanding. The odd construction of this sentence, with its contradictory meaning, arose because of a linguistic confusion between Russian and Malevich’s native Polish. In his first language, zapomnie´c means “to forget,” and it sounds like Russian zapomnit’—which, however, means “to remember”; on the other hand, the Polish for “remember,” zapamenta´c , sounds like the Russian for “forget,” zapamiatovat’. It was characteristic of Malevich to confuse these words. In one of his texts, for example, he used the word zapamiatovat’ specifically to mean “remember”: “What is memory? I would say that memory is nothing but the photosensitive film of cerebral perception, I zapamiatoval [“forgot,” but sounds like Polish zapamiental, “remembered”], photographed meaning, in my mind the known impression formed on glass and was transmitted by the eye like a lens onto a brain cell, and my memory exists only until the depiction is wiped from the cell’s surface.”79 Therefore the native Pole’s sentence beginning “If you remembered my curtain” in fact meant: “If you have forgotten my curtain, the depiction of the square, you thought it the least interesting because in its disintegration you did not find an emotion that produces a new idea.” This construction of the sentence makes it clear that in his response Matiushin had commented that he did not remember Black Square as a sketch for the 1913 production of Victory Over the Sun, and Malevich is trying to convince his colleague that the sketch existed but Matiushin had not lent it importance, had forgotten it, because he had thought it “the least interesting.”

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Black Square was the end of his previous path; however, he had discovered a new one, and “by producing a mass of material,” it would be the father of all new compositions, the source of the nonobjective Universe. The ambivalence of the Suprematist prototype—the end point but also the zero point for the new era—would entrance the entire twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, Malevich’s sudden, head-spinning move into the Zero of shapes and the plastically visible embodiment of this Zero in Black Square would provoke amazed perplexity. In his voluminous Suprematism and Architecture: Problems of Morphogenesis, S. O. Khan-Magomedov, a historian of the avant-garde and an architectural scholar, never tires of repeating: As formal analysis shows, Suprematism did not in fact grow out of Cubism, Futurism, and Cubo-Futurism. It is an independent artistic system. It is an artistic discovery. Moreover, it is an enigmatic phenomenon. Suprematism is enigmatic because it appears almost without visual painting preparation as a fully formed style trend that departed sharply from its predecessors (Cubism, Futurism, Cubo-Futurism) [. . .] Suprematism’s absolute uniqueness consisted in the fact that morphogenetically it was not connected with previous trends. Here everything was primordial.80

The inexplicability and enigmatic quality of Suprematism’s rise have been spoken of by historians, connoisseurs, and scholars raised on the theories of art’s formal development; noteworthy are Khan-Magomedov’s key words: “as formal analysis shows.” The problem of the enigmatic rise of Malevich’s nonobjectivity had made itself felt by the mid-1930s, when Alfred Barr was preparing his epoch-making exhibition, “Cubism and Abstract Art,” for MOMA in 1936. The distinguished curator had been able to bring about twenty works by Malevich out of Nazi Germany. (Had he not done so, Malevich’s presence in world art would have been virtually nil until the late 1950s and early 1960s; the estate he left in Berlin did not make its way to the Stedelijk Museum until the late 1950s.) Barr was ambivalent toward Suprematism. Acutely perceptive about painting, he could not help but sense the nondeducibility of Suprematism from Cubism; however, his own approaches to art prevented him from finding the keys to resolving the problem. His professional training and mistrust for anything that smacked of obscurantist occultism forced him to ignore all ideas outside pure plasticity. As we know, this kind of formal, positivist approach to art reigned in American aesthetics for a long time, receiving its fullest ex-

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pression in the doctrines of Clement Greenberg, an advocate of purely plastic transformations. By asserting Suprematism’s specific originality and distinctness in the “Cubism and Abstract Art” catalog, Alfred Barr, in his own widely known diagram visualizing the concept, nonetheless made Suprematism derivative from Cubism, modernism’s grandiose “solar plexus.”81 Alfred Barr’s unambiguous diagram proved much more influential than his ambiguous verbal characterizations of Suprematism. People preferred to see Malevich’s move into absolute abstraction as analogous to Piet Mondrian’s, that is, the result of the development of the European plastic mainstream. However, the Russian avant-gardist had not moved toward geometric nonobjectivity down a homogeneous and even path “from Cubism to abstraction.” He had tirelessly appealed to “intuitive reason” and “intuitive Creation”; these words, borrowed from the Bergsonian-saturated “air of the era,” masked deeply private workings, a self-absorbed speculation concerned purely with his own inquiry into being. The result was a great inspiration. The birth of Black Square, a not merely plastic phenomenon that cannot be derived logically from plastic Cubism-Futurism, was in essence a leap across an abyss. As we know, even Malevich himself tried for many years to explain to his contemporaries that his nonobjectivity had arisen as a result of this logical progression, “Impressionism-Cubism-Futurism.” This was part of the work imperiously assigned to him by the discovered truth so that it could advance, and the artist strove conscientiously to make Suprematism’s genesis understandable, especially since it had jostled around for such long time in the “womb” of his intuition, puzzling its future parent by the appearance of strange, arbitrary, severe figures, indifferently distinct from everything that had hitherto been considered “art.” Malevich’s Suprematism was connected to Cubism-Futurism only by purely outward characteristics and its use of generalized, geometrized elements. Cubism’s legitimate offspring in the Russian avant-garde was not metaphysical Suprematism but another influential movement that received its impulse from Tatlin’s nonobjective material counter-reliefs, which will be discussed in more detail below.

ON THE THRESHOLD OF “0.10”

CHAPTER 2

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Suprematism in Fall 1915 September–October 1915 Abstract painting demanded to be fitted out verbally. We encounter the terminological definition “Suprematism”—with a capital letter—for the first time in a letter to Matiushin dated September 24, 1915: “I’m thinking that ‘Suprematism’ is most suitable.”1 The word had its roots in Malevich’s native language, Polish, to which it had come, in turn, from the Latin of the Catholic liturgy. Supremacia meant “superiority,” “dominance”; for the artist in the initial stage, “Suprematism” established the supremacy of color energy in painting. In time, Suprematism fully revealed its morphogenic power and the potential of its all-encompassing style, unlike the expressive biomorphic nonobjectivity of Vasily Kandinsky or Larionov’s Rayonnism, which were domestic approaches to and variations on abstract art. In the not too distant future—an entirely different era—Suprematism would find itself an 54

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influential opponent, Constructivism, the impulse for whose appearance was the “culture of materials” of Tatlin’s counter-reliefs, the direct heirs of Cubism’s textural designs. Due to the peculiarities of his psychology, the distinguished artist Tatlin would provide only a powerful impulse to this “ism,” whereas the masterpieces of Constructivism went down in history with other artists’ names. The scale of Malevich’s gift did not merely generate impulses, however. Suprematist designs in all spheres of artistic and theoretical activity, from ornament to architectural designs and philosophy, had their full-fledged embodiment in his own art. In 1915, these prospects were not yet in view, although, as is clear from his second letter about Black Square, Malevich had a presentiment of his discovery’s universal comprehensiveness. The Suprematist felt obligated to bring the truth revealed to him also to others and, in the extreme case, to all humanity. Above all, he needed a circle of like-minded people, “apostles” of the new worldview. Especially since, in the eyes of the painters themselves and their audience, the presence of supporters was a tested criterion for an artistic discovery’s significance. Suprematism’s founder now had to assemble them. The paradox was that initially the deafening originality of geometric abstractivism that made it genuinely difficult to perceive was not so obvious even to the artist himself. Malevich seriously thought that any colleague who had seen his new canvases could repeat them and thus rob him of his primacy. We know his panicked letter to Matiushin, written after Ivan Puni’s visit: “Dear Mikhail Vasilievich, I’m in hot water. I’m sitting, I’ve hung up my works and I’m working. All of a sudden the doors open and in walks Puni. This means the works have been seen. Now I need to put out a booklet on my work no matter what and christen it, thereby giving notice of my copyright.”2 Here is what underlies this Malevich passage. Avant-gardists saw their artistic substance in revealing to the world something absolutely new and unprecedented, something that proved their right to exist: “For the avant-garde, originality is authenticity in the direct sense of the word, it is primordialness, beginning from scratch, birth,” as Rosalind Kraus theoretically formulated it.3 Due to his wealth, the Petrograder Ivan Puni and his wife Ksenia Boguslavskaia could finance exhibitions; their first experiment was “Tramway V.” Exhibitions, as has been said above, were the sole opportunity for radical artists to present their art urbi et orbi. Malevich as organizer—as the late twentieth century approached, this activity came to be called curating—selected and invited artists, and in this way the new trends presented at the exhibition were firmly linked to his name in the eyes of critic and public. After the stir “Tramway V” created, primarily through the uncompromising Malevich’s curating,

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Puni and Boguslavskaia were even more eager to finance the next exhibition, which would be “0.10.” In September 1915 Malevich realized full well that the future exhibition would be a sensational presentation of Suprematism, and he was concerned about “copyright”; the nonobjective geometric trend had to be tied to its true initiator, not the organizer or sponsor. The publication of an authorial manifesto eliminated any vagueness or ambiguity in matters of priority. It is characteristic that Malevich was fully cognizant of the name’s importance, as he declared the need to “christen” his discovery. The signifier was supposed to lock in the signified; the phenomenon’s novelty gave rise to a neologism, “Suprematism,” which has gained citizenship in both Russian and the history of art. Here we must dwell on a topic quite odious among the Russian avantgarde, “spying,” which could result in the theft of “copyright.” The rivalry among innovators went back in large part to the dilemma of “East” versus “West” that so acutely engaged thinking Russians after the 1812 Napoleonic invasion. “Westernizers” saw the path to the country’s prosperity in joining Europe’s civilization processes; “Slavophiles” set their hopes on a special path for Russia’s development. Their ideological struggle determined the Russian empire’s intellectual climate so long as it existed, affecting the sphere of art as well. However, for nineteenth-century Russian artists, naturalistic realism, which rested on professional academic education, was a common language with Europe’s masters and did not give rise to any painful sense of being derivative. Moreover, the country’s nineteenth-century innovators, the Wanderers, regarded as paramount not a painting’s merit but its service to society, by which they meant the depiction of society’s sores and sins; they practiced “critical realism.” The cardinal plastic innovations whose homeland was France beginning with the Impressionists forced painters from other countries to study and master a new language, that is, to be imitators to some degree. Paris became the world’s art capital, and French painting became the highway for artists of all countries and peoples. Left-wing Russians, acutely aware of their dependence on Europe’s innovations, were overcome by a desire to create an art movement whose generative power and originality would be appropriate to Russia’s uniqueness as a geopolitical phenomenon belonging to both “West” and “East,” but at the same time being “not West” and “not East.” The rivalry with outwardly imposed Cubism-Futurism inevitably spread as well to an internal rivalry over which artists would be able to say something genuinely new. During the first ten years of

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the twentieth century, this situation was aggravated as well by a constitutional feature of modernism, the pursuit of novelty as such. The concept of “invention,” with its progressivist and technical vector, was very popular among the Budetlyane Futurists. Just think about how Khlebnikov divided humanity into “inventors” and “acquirers,” that is, producers and consumers. At the same time, the Romantic paradigm that defined Russian modernists’ world-view maintained a radical distinction between “invention,” the fruit of intensive mental calculations, and eidetic “creation,” that is, creation as an end in itself. According to then-dominant notions, these were engendered by different spheres of creativity, which, all the convention and inevitable crudeness of the generalizations notwithstanding, were called “intellect” and “intuition.” Their opposition largely defined the nature of “invention” and “creation” (Malevich called the latter “Creativity”). Invention is best produced by a trained intellect and can be approached by rationally calculated moves. The invention of a person significantly in the forefront can be spied upon, appropriated, and used by someone less advanced; spying, by economizing on a great deal of time and effort for the latter, helps him circumvent and vanquish his rival and take both a moral and official patent out on the invention as creator and innovator. Designers could say a lot about this kind of commercial espionage by competitors. However, no one, by spying upon someone else’s works, could ever assist in the difficult birth of an integral artistic worldview—true creation. Someone else’s discovery is subject to imitative reproduction and variation, but it can have no perspective. An artist must always mature to his own worldview himself. Only then can he draw the necessary conclusions and develop his own discoveries. When analyzing the “beginnings” and “ends” of the last century, one is constantly encountering the ambivalent games and links between modernism and postmodernism. Closer to the century’s close, spying in general and the use of someone else’s works in particular were interpreted as constitutional characteristics of new creativity. They acquired the status of full value in art, inasmuch as they were open declarative devices and accrued multifaceted theoretical equipment, as well as the respected terms “voyeurism” and “appropriation.” At the beginning of the century, Cubism’s founders, appropriating African art, used the grotesque deformation that they discerned in it to modernize European painting. The Cubists actively made it their own and, by subordinating the “alien” to their own goals, created a new plastic language. The postmodernists of the second half of the century not only did not conceal who and what had moved them to create their own masterpieces but did everything they could

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to thrust forward their sources. By playing them up, they eliminated the collision between “originality and imitation,” making a new work out of the dialog between “another’s” and “one’s own.” Although they took up arms against morality by shocking people, Russian modernists in fact had a heightened regard for intra-artistic ethics and honored the creative individual’s sovereignty, on the one hand. On the other, the concept of “invention”—the creation of something new—dominated in their notions of the creative act. As has already been stated, invention might be secretly “spied upon” and “borrowed.” Appropriating the “other’s” in order to pass it off as one’s own discovery was justly qualified by them as an admission of failure, as sponging off of someone else’s talent. In the competitive Russian artistic milieu, as in any European one, there were more than enough wounded egos. Many of his contemporaries could not forgive Malevich his epoch-making discovery. They chose a straightforward tactic. They had to prove that he had merely “spied upon” and “appropriated” someone else’s accomplishment. (Tatlin on Malevich: “Opposite these windows, on the same floor, across the courtyard, lives the scoundrel Malevich and he spies on what I am doing, he himself is incapable of coming up with anything!”)4 The discrediting of the Suprematist as a creator and human being began rather quickly, intensifying especially during the years Constructivism was coming into its own. The beginnings of the notions about Malevich “borrowing” Rozanova’s discoveries were laid by the still intrepid Aleksei Kruchenykh (see below) and were later picked up and actively adopted by Rodchenko and Stepanova, who were trying to de-Suprematize the Russian avant-garde. Even Malevich’s colleagues and contemporaries subsequently let it be known in no uncertain terms that they were the true creators of geometric nonobjectivity; here I have in mind primarily Kliun and Morgunov, although even Larionov had no doubt that “derivative” Suprematism derived from “original” Rayonnism. The behavior of the artists, each of whom wanted to be a genius, is perfectly understandable; what is inadmissible, however, is that to this day some scholarship views the subjective bias of Malevich’s enviers and despisers as objective testimony on the decisive moments in the Russian avant-garde’s history. For this reason we must sort out the true history of Suprematism during the heroic era of its public formation, fall 1915. Slightly anticipating the exposition, let us analyze the attitude toward Suprematism of Matiushin, who is usually considered Malevich’s apologist. Close

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The idea of the independence of the paint in a painting, the delineation of the independent quality of each material, has its own history, but Malevich has sensed this idea in a powerful new way. How he has dealt with the “New” is a different matter. The tremendous value of his aspiration is a plus. The minus is the unevenness of the “sign of concealment” with respect to the powerfully defended body and his poor understanding of the new measure’s terms. The whole difficulty of carrying out his idea lies in his rejection of form that detracts from coloring. Color should be so much above form that it is not poured into squares, triangles, and so on. Besides this difficulty, the paint’s dynamic, i.e., its movement, must be expressed. And if everything here has not been executed, then that is the fault of the artists’ Moscow, eager to sacrifice everything for a moment of primacy. There is nothing here to preserve. Whoever says something new the fastest is king! In addition, a couple of good friends are just about to dangle all your newness under your nose. What is there to preserve here, or nurture? If there is no value there, at least one can take an ignominious ride on it. Moscow is full of abortions of all kinds of “isms.” Preserve them in alcohol for purposes of edification.5

It does not take long to find the target of these statements. At “0.10” the only new “ism” was Suprematism, inasmuch as Tatlin had already shown his well-known achievement and appeared as an independent “creative unit” distinct from “Tatlinism.” In criticizing the “artists’ Moscow,” Matiushin made it unambiguously clear that the new Moscow “ism,” that is, Suprematism, was “not borne out,” “not manifested,” was represented by a kind of artistic ready-made—and all merely so that they could “dangle something new” and “take an ignominious ride.” By “abortions of all kinds of ‘isms’” Matiushin may also have meant Fevralism, which was well known to him. These passages betray Matiushin’s true attitude toward the exhibition, where the new ideas, in his opinion, had been released “powerless and unprotected”: “Does this not explain, with minor exceptions, the very weak level of intuitive creativity of the whole ‘Last’ association?”6 Matiushin was a biased artist, and he assessed Suprematism from the standpoint of his own forays into painting and theories of the “new measure.” To

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examination, however, makes it quite obvious that the authoritative master, beginning with the first news about nonobjectivity, unsparingly criticized its creator. As we recall, he thought Black Square “the least interesting.” Matiushin’s review of “0.10”—after the full-fledged appearance of mature Suprematism—speaks unambiguously to his negative, condescending attitude toward Malevich’s experiments, which were alien to him as an artist:

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him, the Malevich “ism” was merely a path to the new, with a “sportively superficial” pace, whereas “only that which is subordinated to profound concealment and difficult, gradual embodiment (Cézanne) lasts forever.” “Squares” and “triangles,” as is evident from the review’s subtext, were too artless for any “difficult gradual embodiment.” The Moscow Cubists’ claims against Suprematism’s “simplicity” were similar, as we will see below. The following lines from the Matiushin review are also noteworthy: “The absence of interesting literature on Futurism at the exhibition is explained by their dearth of professional culture and lack of understanding of the commonality of their purposes.” The “literature on Futurism” at “0.10” included the following print publications: Malevich’s brochure, From Cubism to Suprematism; leaflets with statements by Ivan Puni, Ksenia Boguslavskaia, Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Kliun, and Mikhail Menkov; and a booklet, Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin. The phrase “lack of understanding of the commonality of their purposes” referred to the Tatlin booklet with text by Nadezhda Udaltsova and the declaration by Tatlin himself about his singularity, his negative attitude toward all forms of collectivism, and his dislike of group interests. The phrase “dearth of professional culture” referred to Malevich’s first book, which had been published by Matiushin himself. The letters of Malevich preserved from fall 1915 show that the reviewer and editor was not acting against his conscience, that he did in fact consider the Muscovite’s texts primitive, calling them “Ourfathers” and “discovering America.” Stung, Malevich replied to an assessment by Matiushin that has not survived to the present: “truth be told, I am very much dismayed at you for knocking down that America. [. . .] And I don’t know what to do. Maybe not publish and drag you into the fuss over all my nonsense.”7 Matiushin’s assessment was evidently merciless, as Malevich again makes clear: “I apologize very much for the trouble and am thinking again of not publishing, when I come we can talk more.”8 Matiushin printed the brochure but did not alter his attitude toward the “Ourfather” and the consequence of the “dearth of professional culture.” Nonetheless, Matiushin could not help but feel the charisma of nonobjectivity’s founder: “Malevich is a major accumulator force that infects himself and others with the ‘New.’” While criticizing both him and other Muscovites, the artist felt he should soften his tone: “I declare that despite my reproaches against the artists mentioned, I fully believe that they are capable of major art.”

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The Moscow Circle Going back to the days when Suprematism was coming into its own publicly, we should clarify on whom Malevich felt he could rely. The union of radical Moscow painters took on precise outlines during 1914. The leading role in it was played by women artists—primarily Nadezhda Udaltsova (1886–1961) and Liubov Popova (1889–1924)—who had taken lessons in the latest art during many months of study in Paris with Henri Le Fauconnier (1881–1945) and Jean Metzinger (1883–1956). In her memoirs, Udaltsova noted an important feature of the Moscow situation: “1914. Our ‘Cubist circle’ was organized. We fought steadfastly for our ideas, wrote papers, and defended our positions.”10 When Malevich was executing his first curatorial project, the “Cubist circle” was his principal reference group. Its active members Popova and Udaltsova and the cosmopolitan Alexandra Exter (1882–1949), who was visiting Russia, were exhibitors at “Tramway V”; on the threshold of the “0.10” exhibition they were joined by Vera Pestel (1886–1952), who had also trained with French teachers. These artists comprised the core of the Moscow community. However, Malevich included a wider circle of Moscow avant-gardists in his plans. In that circle Malevich had close supporters—Aleksei Morgunov, Ivan Kliun, and Mikhail Menkov (1885–1926). To Malevich’s regret, in fall 1915 Morgunov dropped out of artistic life for a long time due to ill health; the outof-wedlock son of Russian painter and landscape artist A. K. Savrasov (1830– 97), he inherited not only his father’s gift but also his vice, severe alcoholism.

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The reproaches addressed to the participants were harsh and frank, and the praise courteous and formal. According to Matiushin’s statements, the “0.10” exhibitors might prove “capable of major art” in the future; however, right now what he saw was merely “a very weak level of intuitive creativity from the entire association.” Olga Rozanova never forgave Matiushin the passage devoted to her works at “0.10.” The key negative points in the Matiushin review are cited here not to debunk the friendship between the two associates in the “new ideas” but to show how uniquely and purely individually Suprematism was perceived (or rather, not perceived) by even the figures closest to Malevich in winter 1915–16. Malevich clearly felt the negative charge of Matiushin’s review; in a letter to his wife, Olga Gromozova, dated July 20, 1916, Malevich expressed its meaning with an accurate word: “Greetings [. . .] to Mikhail Vas[ilievich, who] reproached me [in his review in the journal Enchanted] Wanderer.”9

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Vladimir Tatlin, too, belonged to this circle, inasmuch as he was a Muscovite at that time; however, his position was distinct, and he was not a Malevich supporter but rather a zealous opponent, about which more below. Malevich the curator valued most what was radical and uncompromising in art, and he made those qualities his criteria for selecting exhibitors. This is why he refused to invite to the “Tramway V” exhibition Aristarkh Lentulov and the brothers Vladimir (1887–1917) and David Burliuk, and to “0.10” David Burliuk, who was very much put out by this. Malevich had great respect for the artists he had known since 1913 from their life-drawing sessions at “Tatlin’s Tower”—Tatlin’s studio on Ostozhenka. In a letter dated July 15, 1915, speaking about the future Secret Vices of Academicians, he wrote Matiushin, “I feel like dragging Popova and Udaltsova into this book.”11 In them the Suprematist saw potential supporters capable of perceiving the newness of his artistic system, which was breaking all boundaries and in which he included Cubism and Futurism as well. Here I should make a digression concerning the true nature of gender issues in Russian culture, which took on such great weight in the last few decades of the twentieth century. Historians and scholars of French Cubism—the basis for all innovative art of the new era—have dwelt especially on its gender dimension. They have seen a dichotomy between “male” and “female” art in the dichotomy of the “high” art of painting and “secondary” decorative art, defining the former as the sphere of dominance of the “male” creative gift and the latter as a sphere subordinate to it, for the application of “female” capabilities. In analyzing the relationship between well-known couples such as modernist artists Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) and Sonia Terk-Delaunay (1885–1979) and Louis Marcoussis (1883–1941) and Alice Halicka (1895–1975), as well as the place in Cubism of unmarried female artists, especially Marie Laurencin (1885–1945), scholars have come to the conclusion that male chauvinism, inherent in the Western European spiritual culture of the times, also pervaded Cubism. It covertly but powerfully pushed French female Cubists to the periphery of art, to the marginal sphere of decorative applied art, and to the eclectic use by female artists of Cubist plastic innovations for the creation of purely “female” chamber pictures depicting beautiful young women, mothers and children, enchanting little boys and girls, and so on. In the consciousness of contemporaries, the French female Cubists were deliberately counted among the “second rank” of artists, which corresponded, let us emphasize, to the existing reality, inasmuch as such was these artists’ self-identification, too.

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As one of the most vivid phenomena of the last century, the Russian avantgarde could not help but enter the field of vision of feminism’s academic champions, inasmuch as so many female artists were involved. However, the role of Russian women artists was subjected to analysis and consideration using the methodological tools that scholars had developed for the problems of the Western European and American social milieu. Due to their preconceived notions, the picture of the female presence in Russian innovative art was significantly deformed. The spectacular “Amazons of the Russian Avant-garde” exhibition, which was such a triumph between 1999 and 2001 in Germany, England, Italy, Spain, the United States, and Russia, was a sensation for the Western viewer because it demonstrated a free and high art whose creators were women of the Russian empire in the early twentieth century.12 Each of the exhibition’s curators and art historians was compelled in his or her text to shed light repeatedly on the utterly special position of women artists in Russia and somehow explain the absence of any evidence of a specifically “female” self-identification among the distinguished women artists, or of their “fight for equality.” These unique apologies for the absence of gender problems in the Russian avant-garde show how greatly European and American scholars were struck by the genuine equality among radical Russian artists. Equality was taken for granted, and the avant-gardists judged each other’s works without regard for gender. The sensational exhibition would scarcely have been to the taste of the “Amazons” themselves, inasmuch as it drove them into a sexual ghetto, figuratively speaking. Without going into a detailed analysis, it is essential to say that, broadly speaking, this special status of women avant-garde artists had its roots in the national mentality (in Russian the word chelovek refers to both men and women), in religious notions (the Virgin Mary as the protector and patron of all people in Orthodoxy, compared with the cult of the beautiful young Madonna in Catholicism), in Russian history (after Peter the Great, empresses ruled the country for nearly the entire eighteenth century), and in the Russian nonnoble intelligentsia (the heroine of its “bible,” What Is To Be Done? [1862–1863], a novel by writer and democrat N. M. Chernyshevsky, was the progressive Vera Pavlovna). Women in Russia knew how to make fateful decisions that reverberated loudly in society. High-society beauties followed their Decembrist husbands to Siberia, where they led a life of deprivation; there were quite a few women among the populist terrorist organizations, and they were imprisoned and executed without lenience, on a par with the men.

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Russian society in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was multilayer and heterogeneous, multiform as historians define it. In the intellectual way of life that arose in the nonnoble phase of Russian history, a woman was recognized as an independent person in fact as well as formally. Outside this way of life there were others, with class, ethnic, and property distinctions, which frequently masked the sharpness of the distinction between the sexes. A peasant woman was subordinate to her father, husband, and son, but before 1861 the lady of the manor alone was the omnipotent decider of her peasants’ fates. Jewish men had fewer rights than Russian women; the latter were not officially prohibited from living outside the Pale of Settlement. A wealthy representative of the female sex had a great many advantages over a poor representative of the male sex. Wealthy Alexandra Exter, Liubov Popova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova could study in Paris and travel through Europe for extended periods. Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin did not have those opportunities. Malevich’s dream of visiting Paris remained just that, a dream, and Tatlin, as we have seen, asked Popova to give him “lessons in Cubism.” Russian women artists were not inferior to their male colleagues in talent or public recognition. Critics and connoisseurs considered Anna Golubkina (1864–1927), who came from a peasant bourgeois family in the backwater of Zaraisk, in Moscow province, to be the best Russian sculptor of the early twentieth century. In the case of Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, neither of them can be given precedence. Elena Guro (1877–1913), who suffered an untimely death, surpassed her spouse Mikhail Matiushin in the scale of her innovative aspirations; the latter, being a good deal older than his wife, took up experiments in art specifically under her influence. No one in the Russian avant-garde could compare in a gift for color with Olga Rozanova, or in influence and authority in the artistic milieu with Alexandra Exter. This was the state of affairs, widely known to contemporaries. In the epoch-making “0.10” exhibition, there would be equal numbers of men and women artists—seven each. Suprematism’s founder was well aware of the scale of his discovery. Nothing in Europe, with which Russian talents had vied so desperately, could compare for newness and originality with geometric abstract painting. The artist began his propaganda work among Muscovites in September 1915, after moving from his Kuntsevo dacha. Malevich directed all his efforts toward opening his colleagues’ eyes to the potential of this unprecedented trend. Visually, nonobjectivity was already well known to artists (“many in Moscow already know of my works”), but its mean-

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ing was unclear—“only they do not know anything about Suprem[atism]” (September 28, 1915).13 The need to explicate the new system gave rise to many texts: “Now I have new works, with a more detailed exposition of what I am sending you in condensed form for publication.”14 Realizing his responsibility to what had appeared in art through him, Malevich initially thought of spreading his own experience: “I want to convey something to others of what I’ve done, to leave behind my idea that, once I am gone, the living should develop it. For the time being I am pleased that in my latest works [other artists] have found the correct real form and an indication of which way to go.”15 The artist wrote this letter on October 12, 1915; his “latest works” were Suprematism, in which his colleagues did find “an indication of which way to go.” In the light of what came afterward, the unfoundedness of the Suprematist’s hope was revealed. Here one more important stipulation is in order. The stories and memoirs of the exhibitors at “0.10” who offered stiff resistance to Malevich belonged to a time when they had already mastered nonobjectivity, a past stage in their own biographies. Their original, purely negative attitude toward geometric abstractivism had been completely forgotten by then; since Sigmund Freud, psychology has called this “displacement.” The Muscovite participants in “0.10” sincerely ascribed the tension around the new trend in fall 1915 to factors extraneous to art. According to their stories, the dislike for Suprematism, the ban on the name, and the reluctance to “be in Malevich’s group” were rooted in the artist’s resistance to power grabs; some biographers and scholars of our era have willingly interpreted this as the “Amazons’” desire to rebuff Malevich’s authoritarianism, intrigues, and insincerity. One reads all kinds of things, sometimes even in the works of experts.16 In fact, this tension was explained by the advanced women Cubists’ dismay at the “primitive” and “dilettantish” trend of “0.10,” which demeaned the dignity of “painting professionals.” The tension before and during the exhibition was primarily artistic in nature, though female memoirists subsequently attributed it to personal relationships. Malevich thought that the true innovators would immediately figure out that Suprematism, due to its utter originality, would provide them the muchdesired and long-awaited breakthrough into the avant-garde of world art. He was certain that his colleagues would not only understand but immediately unite around the fateful trend. In fall 1915 it did not occur to him that Suprematism would not be accepted easily, neither after chance spying nor even

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after intensive propaganda work. He himself had taken two years to arrive at Suprematism, yet he proposed that his colleagues comprehend nonobjectivity in two months’ time. His colleagues were enlightened Cubists who had spent a great deal of time and effort mastering innovative plastic systems in Paris itself, the art capital of the world. Malevich’s fiasco was inevitable.

Contact with Alexandra Exter Matiushin’s letters to Malevich have not survived, but we have to think that the “lack of restraint,” “lack of maturity,” “insufficient understanding,” and “incomplete break with ‘Cubo’” that the master from the capital discerned in the “squares” and “triangles” in which “not everything is executed” was expressed to the Moscow addressee straightforwardly. Matiushin’s criticism prompted the Suprematist to an increasingly profound understanding of and justification for his discovery. He sensed that “he has truth” behind him; however, he did not want to be the creator of a “wooden bicycle”—self-irony was characteristic of Malevich: “Because recently in Siberia some Siberian invented a wooden bicycle, hoping to astound people. And so will I.”17 Suprematism had to be tested in the Moscow circle, where for Malevich one of the chief figures, if not the chief figure, was Alexandra Exter. Exter occupied a special position in the community of Russian left-wing artists. A wealthy Kievan who spent most of her time in the West, she was directly linked to art’s main developments. This girlfriend of the Italian Futurist Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964) brought the latest news to her homeland, having become Europe’s authorized emissary to Russia. Exter was arbiter and judge, and her opinion was definitive. Malevich invited Exter to his studio in October 1915. In a letter to Matiushin in the third week of the month, he reported: “I have just written a new item for the catalog at the wish of the whole group about the conclusion of Futur[ism]’s mission, but they don’t know where to go now. My Suprematism is beginning to behave beautifully. That means it is the truth. Because I am no longer going to be the only one at this exhibition. Tomorrow Exter is coming to see my pictures, and there will be Supremative sculpture that had its start from my works at our exhibit.”18 Let us underscore that “Supremative sculpture” already existed in October 1915; these were creations by Kliun. On October 31, Malevich sent off a report on his contact with Exter: “When you wrote that this is an Ourfather, then I again took out my books on Cub66

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ism and read Exter my thoughts, and she unexpectedly found many new ideas. [. . .] In Moscow my idea is already clearly defined, and in our group there is discussion of coming out in public, [we want] at this exhibition to have a section for Suprematists.”19 The context implies that Malevich was encouraged by Alexandra Alexandrovna’s visit; as subsequently became apparent, he had taken what he desired for what was real. Nadezhda Udaltsova, who already had to her credit a period of her own decorative Suprematism, talked about those weeks a little more than three years later. Her stories were recorded by Varvara Stepanova, who fought Malevich ruthlessly. A comparison with testimonies, contemporary events, and “revelatory” reminiscences demonstrates a twofold opportunistic distortion—Udaltsova’s mistaken memory or omission, plus Stepanova’s distorted transmission.20 Stepanova briefly set forth Udaltsova’s reminiscences: “‘0.10.’ Malevich has discovered Suprematism, but until the exhibition he is keeping quiet, wants to undermine the exhibition, is trying to get it called the last Futurist exhibition, and he is aided by I. Puni and ‘Pun’ka’ (Boguslavskaia).”21 Thus, Malevich had “discovered” Suprematism—further in Stepanova’s notes it would be clearly set forth that he had “discovered” it in Rozanova— and “until the exhibition he is keeping quiet,” that is, until the actual opening of “0.10.” What attracts attention is the peremptory statement, “wants to undermine the exhibition.” Apparently curator Malevich, who had agreed to concessions to other participants for the sake of the “exhibition’s integrity,” had a desire, strange for its organizer, to undermine his own effort. (Malevich’s curatorial role in creating the epoch-making exposition, which has gone down as one of the ten most important exhibitions of the twentieth century, has not been adequately considered to this day.) Later, Malevich is incriminated by his “last Futurists.” Evidently, both artists in their revelatory passion either forgot or did not know that the “death of Futurism” had been propagandized back in 1912 by Ilia Zdanevich (1894– 1975), who put it in analogous words—“the last Futurists”—in his oral and written statements. By 1915, this was a truism in the country’s artistic life. The artists had every right to a subjective attitude toward their opponent; however, contemporary scholars have used their words to justify the accusation against Malevich of single-handedly and resolutely separating Russian innovators from Futurism: “Apparently the Russian Futurists were preparing an exhibition at which they were truly supposed to appear ‘as such’ for the last time, themselves having no inkling of this. [. . .] The Suprematist Malevich contrasted himself to the others, who were deemed “the last Futurists” (“last”

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in the same sense that newspaper reviewers greeted it: they had outlived and were repeating themselves).”22 The real circumstances will be set forth in detail below, as will the identity of those whom Malevich had in mind as the “last Futurists.” Further, according to Udaltsova/Stepanova: With Malevich the atmosphere thickens, and one senses he has found something, but he is silent. They are making every effort to find out what he will call his things. [. . .] The gathering at Exter’s (an elegant hotel room, her bric-a-brac, herself eccentric, smoking constantly, fruits, pastries)—Udaltsova, Popova, Malevich, and Kliun—time 12 midnight, we were able to learn nothing. [. . .] Kliun squeaks something, Malevich is silent. Udaltsova is pale. Exter’s face is covered in spots, Popova is striped . . . Malevich utters: “I have discovered Suprematism,” then he explains it. . . .”23

Either Udaltsova did not say or Stepanova did not record when and where this gathering took place, but from the context—“until the exhibition he is silent”—it must have taken place right before the opening, that is, in some Petrograd hotel in December. Let us emphasize the statement that the gathering’s participants were interested in the name of the things, consequently, the things themselves were already familiar to them. A separate paragraph of notes reports on the meeting’s result: “Exter is refusing to participate in ‘0.10’ since her things are almost nonobjective and she does not want to be in Malevich’s group.”24 The subtext implies unambiguously that Exter had basically discovered pure nonobjectivity but had seen that her new works were working to Malevich’s benefit, and she did not want to facilitate his vain self-assertion. Stepanova recorded Udaltsova’s stories at a time when Exter was already practicing to her utmost her own version of nonobjectivity; their self-interested modernization of their colleague’s biography is entirely understandable. The artist’s real art from the second half of 1915 had as yet nothing to do with nonobjectivity as such. Exter was developing her own colorful dynamic CuboFuturism with incrusted details of things that referenced not only the objective world but also the painting of her Italian Futurist colleagues. Her refusal to participate in “0.10” truly was provoked by the Suprematist paintings she had seen; however, the reasons for her refusal were quite different from what she claimed. Scholars have always taken the statement about how Malevich revealed his “secret” on the eve of the exhibition—a statement that does not correspond to reality—as proven fact.

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N. M. Davydova and Suprematism’s Public Affirmation Davydova’s Background and Circle After Malevich moved to Moscow from his Kuntsevo dacha in September 1915, he needed to unite innovators around the new painting he had discovered. He

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The foundation for these statements was laid by Yevgeny Kovtun, who wrote the following in a preface to the publication of his letters to Matiushin: “For two years, almost until the vernissage itself, Malevich kept his new artistic experiments secret.”25 At the Leningrad art scholar’s disposal were Malevich’s letters to Matiushin, which refuted this point; however, for certain reasons they did not attract his attention. The essays and publications by Kovtun, the country’s pioneer in the study of the Russian avant-garde, for a long time were treated as primary sources, inasmuch as the letters of Suprematism’s founder were inaccessible to other scholars. Donated by Matiushin in 1928 to the archive of the State Institute of the History of the Arts, and in 1936 transferred to the Manuscript Department of the Pushkin House,26 these letters were closed to study in the twentieth century; access to them for other scholars was permitted in 2002. The letters were not published in full until 2004, in the two-volume Malevich on Himself, Contemporaries on Malevich (Malevich o sebe, Sovremenniki o Maleviche). In fact, verification of the Udaltsova/Stepanova information makes the situation unambiguous: the gathering “in an elegant hotel room” took place in October 1915 in Moscow, after which Malevich made a decision to show Alexandra Alexandrovna his pictures, as he reported to Matiushin, just as he reported the fact that this meeting had taken place. Exter had no reason to break out in spots and make an effort to find out the name in November 1915, to say nothing of December, inasmuch as she had known both the pictures and the notes of the Suprematist since October. In any case, it is clear that the “exhibition circle” gathered not before the December vernissage in Petrograd but in fall 1915 in Moscow; at this meeting, according to Udaltsova’s own statement, Malevich explained Suprematism. On the whole, all the passages about the preparations for “0.10” recorded by Stepanova from what Udaltsova said go to prove the astonishing ability of human memory to deform real history in the name of one’s own version of the “truth.” Not one of the statements by contemporary witnesses to the events has been supported by the documentary evidence.

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was encouraged by the attention of Exter, to whom he had shown his works in October, believing that he had convinced her of Suprematism’s originality. In reality, Alexandra Alexandrovna’s true opinion was expressed in deed rather than words. After listening to Malevich, looking at his canvases, and even politely “finding many interesting ideas,” she categorically refused to participate in “0.10.” She could not accept the prospect of facing the public in the company of a Suprematist drawing “black squares.” In order to soften her refusal— Exter well understood her importance for Malevich—she recommended to him her close friend N. M. Davydova (1875–1933), owner of the Verbovka crafts artel. Exter was in charge of the artel’s artistic activities, and in the fall the two friends were preparing an exhibition of decorative art in Moscow; its opening was set for early November. Thus Natalia Mikhailovna Davydova, née Gudim-Levkovich, appeared on the Suprematist’s horizon.27 In Petrograd, on November 5—a day before the Verbovka exhibit was to open—a letter arrived from Moscow in which Malevich informed Matiushin in veiled form about hopes raised by a certain acquaintanceship: A great treasure is being disinterred, and as soon as the war is over, WE are on the crest of the wave. Throw down your brush and prepare the music. [. . .] Find new forms for sound, so as to be ready. I will write Kruchenykh to prepare new words for the productions. [. . .] This Treasure has already marked London, Paris-America, and there seems enough for us. I am very glad that they have me in strong form. My only regret is that we are far apart, while the matter is at hand and great.28

Malevich’s inspired words about the “Treasure” referred allegorically to Natalia Mikhailovna Davydova. Davydova played a pivotal role in introducing and affirming Suprematism, but her figure has never drawn scholars’ attention due to her tragic life, mangled by Russian history.29 We are thus obliged to restore justice to at least some degree and dwell on Davydova’s life work using archival and memoir sources. It is hard to find an analog to Natalia Davydova in Kazimir Malevich’s circle because such polar opposite aspects of spiritual and social spheres intersected in her life. To get a sense of the formation of the multifaceted individual who was Natalia Mikhailovna, we must look at the history of two unusual clans, the Gudim-Levkoviches and the Davydovs, and delve into the musical life of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, the development of handicrafts in the Russian empire and Ukrainian folk art, the processes under way in the

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Natalia Mikhailovna was born in 1875 (later, after her papers were lost, her year of birth was recorded as 1878) in the Gudim-Levkovich family—to Mikhail Vasilievich and Yulia Nikolaevna. Besides Natalia, there were two other sisters and a brother. On her father’s side she belonged to an old Ukrainian line that went back to the fifteenth century.31 Councilor of State Mikhail Vasilievich Gudim-Levkovich was among the organizers of the Kiev Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (1890–1896), which after several transformations gave birth to the Kiev

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Russian avant-garde and the organizing of various exhibitions, and domestic circumstances in the biographies of Russia’s Silver Age philosophers. In addition, Natalia Davydova’s activities cannot be defined unambiguously, inasmuch as one does not speak of a profession with respect to a wealthy lady from the elite of Russian society. Davydova should be called an artist—she studied art professionally, albeit privately—but this would be an artist about whose work we know little. At best, her works have yet to come to light, and at worst they were not preserved—the great majority of them perished when Davydova was arrested in December 1920. Natalia Mikhailovna possessed literary talent, as attested by her letters and diary written after the sufferings she endured,30 although writing was never as high a priority in her life. The owner of the Ukrainian estate of Verbovka, Davydova played an influential role in the development of handicrafts comparable to the role of other prominent figures in this sphere, such as Ye. D. Polenova (1850–1898) and Princess M. K. Tenisheva (1858–1928), but this work was not dominant for her either. Married to the nephew of Peter Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), Natalia Davydova belonged fully to the world of music due both to her family circumstances and to the role she played in the life of the distinguished Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937). In addition, as the spouse of one of the directors of the Kiev Assembly of the Nobility (a club), mistress of a mansion in Kiev, and mother of three sons, she had energy-intensive domestic and social obligations. Responses of her contemporaries leave no doubt that Natalia Mikhailovna was of that breed of distinguished women who were able to create around themselves a creative atmosphere of high intensity. Even a simple enumeration of events and her circle of ties demonstrates how beneficial her presence was in the life of the great artists with whom she associated.

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Museum of Ukrainian Fine Art and the Kiev Museum of Ukrainian Decorative Folk Art.32 Yulia Nikolaevna Gudim-Levkovich (1852–1918), née Bakhmetieva, the owner of lands at the village of Zozovo, was the creator and director of one of the most flourishing handicraft workshops in Ukraine. After her marriage to Dmitry Lvovich Davydov (1870–1928), Natalia Mikhailovna became related to several Russian noble families—the Davydovs, Raevskys, Lopukhins, and Tchaikovskys.33 Natalia Mikhailovna’s spouse was the grandson of the Decembrist Vasily Lvovich Davydov (1793–1855), a close friend of Aleksandr Pushkin (1799– 1837). It was the family of N. M. and D. L. Davydov that preserved the album of Aleksandra Ivanovna Davydova (1802–1895), who followed her Decembrist husband to Siberia.34 Dmitry Lvovich’s mother, Aleksandra Ilinichna Davydova (1842–1891), was the sister of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. In her marriage to the Decembrist’s son, Lev Vasilievich Davydov (1837–1896), she had three sons and three daughters. The lives of her children were indissolubly linked with the great composer’s life and art. To his favorite nephew Bob—Vladimir Lvovich Davydov (1871–1906)—the composer dedicated several works, among them his Sixth (Pathétique) Symphony.35 After Tchaikovsky’s untimely death, V. L. Davydov purchased the house the composer had rented in the town of Klin and made it a shrine to his idol’s memory. Before voluntarily leaving this life, he bequeathed the house to Modest Ilich Tchaikovsky (1850–1916), who continued to collect relics connected with the Russian genius’s life. The youngest of A. I. Davydova’s sons, Yury Lvovich Davydov (1876–1965), was for many years the guardian of the P. I. Tchaikovsky House-Museum in Klin and the author of books about his uncle.36 The Klin museum archive contains an extensive collection of letters, documents, and photographs of numerous representatives of the Davydov and Tchaikovsky families. Among them are the letters of Dmitry Lvovich Davydov and his detailed “Chronicle of the Davydov Family” (unpublished) and Natalia Mikhailovna’s letters to her brothers-in-law Vladimir Lvovich and Yury Lvovich Davydov, as well as to her husband’s uncle, Modest Ilich Tchaikovsky. (Figure 14) Dmitry Lvovich Davydov was somewhat overshadowed by his brilliant wife; however, he possessed indubitable artistic abilities, enjoyed poetry, and was involved in the creation of the libretto for his uncle’s opera The Queen of Spades. Three of his poems were set to music by Szymanowski.37

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Figure 14. Group photograph in front of the Davydov house in Klin, which later became the Tchaikovsky Museum. First half of 1900s. Left rear, V. L. Davydov (“Bob”); in front of him, N. M. Davydova. Archive photo, Tchaikovsky House-Museum, Klin.

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Dmitry Lvovich had a taste for the modern. Davydov contacted his neighbors by telephone, and a futuristic miracle, the automobile, raced down the provincial country roads, driven by the Decembrist’s grandson (subsequently, in Paris emigration, this ability provided his living as a nobleman–taxi driver). The branching Davydov clan also owned the estate of Kamenka, which in the prerevolutionary era was the home of Dmitry Lvovich’s cousin, Lev Alekseevich Davydov, and his wife Mariamna, née Lopukhina. Digressing, let us note that their daughter, Alena Lvovna Davydoff, ended her long life in a house on Long Island; she kept the album of her mother Mariamna, who had drawn touching watercolors with detailed commentaries, unique stopframes from the film of her life. Memoirs of a Russian Lady was published in New York in 1986 by Olga Davydoff Dax (1928–92), the Decembrist’s great-great-granddaughter.38

The Polish Musician’s Russian Muse Kamenka was the rail station for both Verbovka and Tymoszowka, where the estate of the Polish Korwin-Szymanowski family was situated. Numerous family members spent the warm months here, moving for the winter to their homes in Elizavetgrad. The well-born Polish gentlemen, who had inherited the trauma of the partitions of Poland and the cruel suppressions of national uprisings, for a long time did not maintain relations with their neighbors. The elder son, Feliks Szymanowski (1889–1933), was a gifted musician; one of the daughters, Stanisława Korwin-Szymanowska (1889–1938), had a successful career as an opera singer. The family’s most eminent member was composer and pianist Karol Szymanowski, who belonged to the pleiad of distinguished twentieth-century musicians. Karol Szymanowski had solid ties to the Davydov family. Judging from a few facts, the contact was at first secret, acquiring legitimacy only after the death in September 1905 of Stanisław Szymanowski, the father of the family, who could not abide Russians.39 For many years, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1894–1980), who in the future would be a famous Polish man of letters, visited the estate of his uncle Stanisław Szymanowski. He left behind quite a few anecdotal reminiscences about his cousin and composer and about Tymoszowka, its inhabitants and his friends. In the pages of his final Book of My Reminiscences, Iwaszkiewicz gave a remarkable portrait of Natalia Davydova. Szymanowski’s cousin was an attentive and engaged observer. Therefore we will allow ourselves to quote extensive passages from his book:

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In my uncle’s lifetime, Russians were not received at Tymoszowka, although our closest neighbors in that village were Russians. Now Karol’s home was in constant contact with numerous branches of the semi-aristocratic Davydov family, and through them the Szymanowskis were drawn into the ebullient life of southern Russia’s wealthy society. [. . .] The Davydov home, which was firmly linked by cultural bonds with Russian life by the artistic passions that reigned in it, was an unusually magnetic and attractive milieu. The Davydov family’s most distinguished member was the owner of neighboring Verbovka, pani Natalia, of the Gudim-Levkovich family. Combining in her person the traditions of the once great Ukrainian families, pani Natalia, who, speaking generally, was fully Russified, was what is called a high society lady. Her beauty and gracious manners and her special ease of talking to people, the self-confidence that comes with great wealth, betrayed her uncommon nature at first glance. When you came to know her character, her exceptional goodness, genuine intelligence, and responsiveness, you genuinely came to appreciate her. This woman played an important role in Karol Szymanowski’s life. I assume that Karol Szymanowski was the sole love in her unhappy life.40

Szymanowski’s neighbor created quite an impression on his other friends, too, who wrote about her at various times and independently of one another.41 The pianist Artur Rubinstein (1887–1982), after he had begun his triumphant career, paid a long visit to Verbovka during the prewar years; in his reminiscences he left vivid sketches from the life of the estate’s owners. Artur Rubinstein was the first performer of Szymanowski’s Second Piano Sonata, written in the years 1910–11 and dedicated to Natalia Davydova. According to memoirists’ recollections, she tried not to miss a single performance of “her” sonata in Europe’s capitals.42 Friends of the distinguished composer noted Davydova’s indisputable influence over his activities. Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, who had full knowledge of the matter, stated: “Pani Natalia exhibited a profound understanding of Karol’s artistic and life aspirations; she was, in essence, his friend and advisor and even for a few years guided his steps with regard to both his art and specific worldly advancements.”43 Karol Szymanowski’s own letters, both to Natalia Mikhailovna and to other correspondents, are sprinkled with numerous eloquent, although highly restrained words confirming the correctness of these observations.44 In fall 1916 Natalia Mikhailovna settled in Moscow, presumably for good. The elite of the Moscow intelligentsia gathered in her drawing room; Natalia Mikhailovna’s family ties and Kiev past were closely connected with the

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philosopher Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev (1874–1948).45 Davydova’s hospitable apartment, where the former Kievans, Berdiaev and his fellow philosopher Lev Shestov (1866–1938), met, were visited by a close friend of them both, the writer, historian, and literary scholar Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon (1869–1925). Natalia Mikhailovna was able to provide “a great many first-class introductions” for the people around her, as Szymanowski rightly remarked in one of his letters. Thanks to Davydova, a fateful “event of meeting” (a Bakhtinian expression) occurred between Kazimir Malevich and Gershenzon, who played an unappreciated role in the artist’s creative biography.46 During the revolutionary era, Karol Szymanowski wrote a long prose work, Ephebe, which has now been lost. Anyone who had the good fortune to read it had not a moment’s doubt as to the heroine’s prototype: “In Szymanowski’s novella Ephebe [. . .] the sole female character was a certain Princess Lanskaia— the spitting image of pani Davydova. On the pages of this novella there are several conversations between the novel’s hero and Princess Lanskaia against the backdrop of the grounds of the Grand Hotel de Russie in Rome, which were undoubtedly reproductions of Tymoszowka discussions.”47 We should clarify one circumstance not known to Iwaszkiewicz: Natalia Davydova spent many weeks at the Grand Hotel de Russie in late 1913 and the first half of 1914. Her letters to Szymanowski, sent from that hotel, imply that they had an agreement to meet in Rome, where the composer was supposed to give several concerts. The meeting did take place, and the days spent in the Eternal City “against the backdrop of the grounds of the Grand Hotel de Russie” remained the happiest time in the life of both. The Polish composer’s biographer, Teresa Chylin´ska, who was in touch with many of his relatives, friends, and contemporaries, considered it essential to insert the following information in the notes to the enormous volume of correspondence she published: “The ‘boys’ mentioned in the correspondence with Szymanowski were, according to Artur Rubinstein, the Davydovs’ three sons: Denis, Vasia, and Kirill (Kika). We can say with full confidence that the youngest of those named, Kika, was the son of the two [Natalia Mikhailovna Davydova and Karol Szymanowski].”48 In the traditions of aristocratic life of nineteenth-century Europe, the Polish gentleman and the lady from the neighboring estate corresponded in French. Natalia Davydova’s surviving early letters reveal her as a romantically inclined individual who bowed before the musician’s great talent. Her letters from 1918 and 1919 are filled with pain and horror. However, Natalia Davydova’s main tragedy lay yet ahead.

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After 1917, her husband, two older sons, and brother left Russia; Davydova and her youngest, Kirill, survived the death of her mother and the terrible months of 1918 and 1919 in the city and province of Kiev. In early December 1919, Davydova made her way to Exter in Odessa, and moved into her apartment. Still in Kiev, her son Kirill, at the age of fourteen, enlisted in the antiBolshevik Volunteer Army.49 Natalia Mikhailovna lost sight of him for a while but found him soon after; they lived in Odessa even after Exter left the city in April 1920. Davydova reported to Malevich about her difficult existence; thus, on January 1, 1921, the latter wrote to Gershenzon: “I’ve received a letter from Odessa, Natalia Mikhail[ovna Davydova] is working at IZO [the Fine Arts Section of the People’s Commissariat of Education]. She has suffered a lot, poor thing, I said she shouldn’t go.”50 Neither Malevich nor Gershenzon could have known that as of that day the Davydovs had already spent a month in prison. On December 1, 1920, mother and son had been denounced by their landlords and arrested by the Cheka at the train station just as they were boarding the train that was supposed to take them from Odessa. Long, agonizing days, weeks, and months of imprisonment followed. The arrested nobles’ property was confiscated and stolen; pictures, sketches, and other works by Davydova perished. The adolescent Kirill died a few weeks later in his cell from exhaustion and disease. Natalia Mikhailovna was moved to a prison camp and released in May 1921. A remarkable testimony has turned up in recently published reminiscences: “After her release, Natalia Mikhailovna lived for a while with Babel in Zhenia’s room.”51 This refers to the small apartment on Odessa’s Lanzheron where the writer Isaak Babel (1894–1940) settled in 1920 with his young wife, the artist Yevgenia Borisovna Babel (1897–1957), née Gronfain. Davydova was able to emigrate soon after. She spent a while in Berlin, and there, in 1923, with her own funds, published her poignant book, Half a Year in Prison: Diary 1920–1921. The magnanimity of which everyone who knew Natalia Mikhailovna spoke is felt with uncommon power in the concluding lines of her text: “In the name of my little boy, who was tortured in prison and now lies behind a wall, in the name of the person who lay next to him in the morgue, in the name of the young man who ‘cursed life,’ in the name of Khava and her children, who were thrown out the window ‘with the commode,’ in the name of these victims and all the thousands and thousands—regardless of which side they were on— soldiers, workers, and peasants—executed and tortured—we rest. Enough. We

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all choked. . . .” In the mid-1920s, Verbovka’s former owner moved to Paris, where she lived on her earnings from sewing and embroidering, working for the atelier of Coco Chanel. In 1933, Natalia Davydova committed suicide in her Paris apartment.

The Verbovka Artel of Artistic Labor Karol Szymanowski’s muse was fated to leave her own mark on cultural history. Beginning in the early 1900s, Natalia Davydova had actively participated in the development of South Russian folk art traditions, to which many members of her family lent support as well. Davydova and her mother, Yu. N. Gudim-Levkovich, were among the founders of the Kiev Handicraft Society, which arose in 1906 after a successful initial exhibition of traditional crafts.52 Yu. N. Gudim-Levkovich was on the society’s board, N. M. Davydova was elected its first chair, and beginning in the late 1900s she held the post of vice chair with all the responsibilities that implied—correspondence with officials in the Kiev municipal administration, reports on the society’s work, and so on. These reports show us that the artel at Verbovka, in Chigirinsky district, Kiev province, was organized under her leadership in 1900, not 1912, as is usually but mistakenly stated in the literature.53 In fact, the crafts workshop at Verbovka had already existed for more than a decade, and in 1912 its modernization had begun, the first step in which was the organization of a craft school. Artur Rubinstein noted in his memoirs, “Being a capable artist, pani Natalia organized a school for the development of folk art among the local peasants. One of the peasant women wore on a chain a gold medal she had been given at an exhibition in London.”54 A photograph of Davydova in the driver’s seat of an automobile calls to mind the noblewoman and entrepreneur’s great confidence in technical progress.55 This confidence manifested itself quite specifically in her practical artistic activity as well. In that same year of 1912, under Davydova’s direction, a dye works was created at Verbovka, equipped with modern machinery and serving many clients.56 Like other handicraft artels, for most of its history Verbovka engaged in the stylized modification of folk art traditions. This kind of conservative, museum direction in the rebirth of handicrafts in Russia was supported by the process’s participants themselves, the critics, and the public. Verbovka’s director would radically alter the established conservative situation when she invited left-wing artists to create designs for folk artists.

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A significant role in this reorientation was played by Alexandra Exter, Davydova’s closest friend since the beginning of the twentieth century.57 “Asia,” as those close to Alexandra Alexandrovna called her, was a frequent visitor at Verbovka and was in contact with its neighbors, and her name comes up several times in Karol Szymanowski’s letters. The Roman holiday for the Polish composer and his Russian muse in spring 1914 was enriched as well by the close friendship with Alexandra Exter, an exhibitor at the “International Free Futurist Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture” organized in Rome by F. T. Marinetti. Natalia Davydova and her friend took part in artistic life during the revolutionary years in Kiev, worked in a studio, and sketched theatrical designs. Their names stand side by side in an announcement about future classes at the State Free Art Studios in Moscow, where the artists were supposed to lead special workshops.58 As has already been mentioned, it was Exter to whom Natalia Mikhailovna went in Odessa in December 1919. Subsequently Alexandra Alexandrovna did a great deal to help Davydova in her Paris emigration as well. Rooted as she was in innovative processes, Exter largely facilitated activities at Verbovka in her capacity as an artist; also in this capacity Alexandra Alexandrovna took part in the reformist initiatives of Yevgenia Ivanovna Pribylskaia (1878–1948), who in the early 1910s became director of an artistic labor artel in Skoptsy organized by the landowner A. V. Semigradova. However, left-wing artists’ radical projects materialized only in the wares of Verbovka, credit for which must go to the artel’s owner, Natalia Davydova. Subsequently, Pribylskaia herself emphasized most decisively her colleague’s leading role in altering Verbovka’s course: “Davydova began to amass a gorgeous collection of peasant drawings. In addition to that she brought in many left-wing artists, such as Liubov Popova, Exter, Olga Rozanova, and Yakulov, to compose embroidery. They were searching for color and dynamics.”59 In all the processes around the cardinal reorientation of Verbovka’s craft workshops, a very significant role was played by the practical and commercial ties developed between figures in the Kiev Handicraft Society and the European capitals. The successful trade in exclusive goods in the European centers depended largely on demand and the market. If the society’s conservative figures specialized in folkloric embroideries and rugs that were exotic for the West, then Natalia Mikhailovna, innovator Karol Szymanowski’s muse and Alexandra Exter’s friend, could not help but respond to the new trends in art, to which Davydova paid close attention. Thus, her name is one of five Russian subscribers to the famous journal of French innovators, Les Soirées de Paris.60

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As we have seen, Alexandra Exter was an old friend of Sonia Terk (1885– 1979), a native of the Russian empire who married and became Sonia Delaunay. It would not be a stretch to suppose that Davydova, too, belonging as she did to the same social circle and frequently traveling to the European capitals, knew her close friend’s close friend quite well. Since the early 1910s, Sonia Delaunay had been embedding into the decorative design of domestic objects abstracted, irregular ornaments, synthesized folklore motifs, and the stylistics of Simultaneous Orphism initiated by herself and her husband Robert Delaunay. Nor was Exter alien to these experiments. Later, at the first Verbovka exhibition, the artist exhibited an umbrella girded by a colorful Simultanist garland. For Verbovka’s owner, apart from the Parisian trends, serving as an even more effective impulse were the innovations in decorative applied art propagandized by the London artists of Omega since summer 1913. They inspired Davydova to take what many enlightened compatriots saw as risks, for which they unsparingly criticized her. Here we should once again emphasize Natalia Mikhailovna’s independence. London never figured even on the periphery of Exter’s life, whereas one is constantly coming across the London trail in Davydova’s. In London the members of the Kiev Handicraft Society, headed up by Natalia Mikhailovna, had their own space where they sold wares executed in their artistic artels.61 The initiator of the London Omega was, as is well known, the distinguished figure Roger Fry (1866–1934), who acquired like-minded thinkers in members of the Bloomsbury group. Fry’s main goal in creating Omega was to aid young painters, although there was also the not unimportant aspiration to instill in the public a taste for modernity. Omega produced furniture, screens, textiles, clothing accessories, trays, fans, and much else. The workshop operated on the basis of anonymity, that is, it created the “collective art” so close to the Russian mindset. Artists did the sketches and designs, which experienced master craftsmen executed in wares marked by the Greek letter Ω. Omega’s trademark style was generalized geometric ornaments, flat abstract compositions with extensive patterns of local coloration and regular outlines. The same design could be used to decorate a variety of wares, from textiles to box lids. In time, Omega’s decorative sketches and wares ensured their authors a place of honor among the founders of twentieth-century geometric abstract art. Speaking about the London leitmotif in Davydova’s efforts, let us note that the British capital was a constant in her plans as the first city on the path toward advancing the Russian avant-garde in the West. Apart from the letter cited from Malevich about the “disinterred treasure” that marked the exhi-

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Russian and English Geometric Nonobjectivity The British capital’s presence in Russian innovators’ discussions and designs of the mid-1910s inevitably draws attention to issues in geometric abstraction’s appearance in English and Russian art. Scholars have noted striking visual correspondences and parallels in the Russian version of nonobjectivity and the London innovations of the prewar years—the work of artists of the Bloomsbury school and the Vorticist group.63 In an article on abstraction in Russia and England, art historian Charlotte Douglas analyzes the points of contact in the art of the Russian avant-gardists and British innovators, which were conditioned by similar mentalities and phases of artistic evolution.64 For the Bloomsbury artists who defined Omega’s features—historians include among them primarily Roger Fry himself, Vanessa Bell (1879–1961), and Duncan Grant (1885–1978)—flat geometric compositions were the result of a simplification and schematicization of the elements of figurative art. Painters

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bitions in London-Paris-America, London is mentioned in connection with Verbovka by Artur Rubinstein (see above), and on February 6, 1917, Nadezhda Udaltsova made the following entry in her diary: “Was at N[atalia] M[ikhailovna Davydova]’s, I think all the drawings will work. [. . .] She and I had a good talk about painting, she is doing quite decent things. After the war we will be able to do a lot. There is the possibility of having decorative exhibitions in London and Paris, and perhaps painting ones.”62 The path beaten by Omega truly did make London the most attractive place for presenting Russian nonobjectivity. Here, too, Natalia Davydova’s independence must be emphasized once again. Her friend Alexandra Exter was unquestionably an expert in innovative processes, but the grandiose plans for presenting and advancing Suprematism matured in Verbovka’s director; unlike the other “Amazons,” she had been flooded with Malevich’s ideas and the scale of his discovery from the very start of their acquaintance. Sentences in Malevich’s November letter that were supposed to rouse Matiushin to “prepare the music” speak to the fact that Davydova was ready to become the producer—to use modern terminology—of synthetic theatrical projects similar to Victory Over the Sun. The war raised insurmountable obstacles to the implementation of Natalia Davydova’s plans.

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reduced the real object, but it always played the part either of impulse or basis, even if transformed beyond recognition. In their understanding, the language of geometric abstraction facilitated a more profound mastery of rhythm, color, flatness, and compositional balance.65 For the artists of the Bloomsbury school, these painterly phenomena played an intentionally subsidiary role, inasmuch as they were supposed to strengthen the emotional effect of compositions where the spiritual plastic-semantic subject dominated everything. The London artists’ geometric patterns, in which the movement toward geometric nonobjectivity was so obvious, were frequently magnified and enlarged fragments of their paintings and latently preserved the impression of reality. Duncan Grant’s art seemed to bring about the final breakthrough to geometric abstractivism. From his painterly investigations of Bloomsbury house interiors, the artist seemed to isolate vertical and horizontal constructions and made them the leading theme of his flat geometric collages, which served as a laboratory for both his easel compositions and his Omega projects.66 A similar path of extracting vertical and horizontal lattice structures from nature motifs—depictions of trees—and their increasingly strict generalization and schematicization ultimately led Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) to the concept of plasticism, uncompromising abstractivism. Duncan Grant never aspired to extremes, and the iron logic of progressive development was deeply alien to him. In about 1914 he drew a vertical composition made up of regular rhythmic bands, but in 1918, returning to the picture, he transformed the lower edge into a tabletop ground on which he placed a white pitcher, a lemon, and the transparent contour of a vase. The once independent abstract painting became the background for a superb still life, White Pitcher.67 These manipulations of immutability demonstrated that for the Bloomsbury school artists the language of geometric abstraction remained an instrumental, auxiliary device that refreshed and modernized traditional portraits, landscapes, and still lifes with their psychological and emotional semantics. Returning to the era of prewar Omega, let us recall that very soon a schism developed among its members, and that Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), Cuthbert Hamilton (1885–1959), Edward Wadsworth (1889–1949), and Frederick Etchells (1886–1973) quit the workshops in fall 1913, dissatisfied with Roger Fry’s administrative and artistic policy. Acquiring an ideologue in the person of Ezra Pound (1885–1972), they worked out a common platform for which the poet invented the term “Vorti-

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cism.” Here, too, conceptions of energy as dominant in the universe that prevailed in the “spirit of the age” demonstrated their power. The Englishmen’s Vorticism absorbed the accomplishments of Cubism, but most of all they aligned themselves with the Futurist dynamic and rhythm of shapes. The Vorticists’ painting compositions, with their eddies of generalized geometric elements, beat a path to abstract art. The artists who quit Omega continued their decorative experiments. Unlike with the Bloomsbury painters, geometric nonobjectivity, having overcome its figurative elements, set deeper roots in their art. Since the early 1910s, Wyndham Lewis, the Vorticists’ artistic leader, had been studying the cardinal generalization of plastic form. Writer and translator Zinaida Vengerova (1867–1941) used a reproduction of his geometrically schematicized Portrait of an Englishwoman (1914) to illustrate her extensive essay, “The English Futurists,” in the Petrograd miscellany Sagittarius (Strelets), which came out in mid-February 1915.68 Some scholars would like to see this image as the decisive impulse for Malevich’s discovery. Charlotte Douglas rightly allots considerable space to this issue in her article. She quotes a statement from a book by English art historian Richard Cork where for the first time the opinion appears in print about how Lewis’s picture, reproduced in Russia in February 1915, “might have helped Malevich evolve his Suprematist vocabulary.”69 Douglas remarks on the contradiction between this statement by Cork and his view that Suprematism arose in 1914. She also clarifies the possible source of Cork’s assertion, which he does not cite: Susan Compton, an English historian of the Russian avant-garde, shed light on the possible influence of Lewis’s painting on Suprematism’s development at a 1974 lecture, which Richard Cork attended. However, Compton herself dated Suprematism’s birth to 1913–14, an obvious discrepancy in her hypothesis about the influence on Malevich of Portrait of an Englishwoman, which was not known in Petrograd until February 1915.70 In 1974 all scholars, led by Soviet specialists Nikolai Khardzhiev and Yevgeny Kovtun, who at that time possessed the fullest knowledge of Suprematism’s beginnings, also put its birth at 1913–14, wholly trusting Malevich’s assertions about the appearance of Black Square as a sketch for a curtain for the December 1913 performance of Victory Over the Sun. In the Sagittarius, the underlying figurative base of Lewis’s picture, the anthropomorphic features of an “Englishwoman,” was badly affected by the lowquality, monochrome reproduction, in which the shaky stacking construction

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of volumetric blocks looked like a virtually independent abstract composition. On this basis, Douglas, working from the revised dating of Black Square, expresses her conviction that Portrait of an Englishwoman, which appeared in February, could have been a bridge for Malevich’s transition to strict nonobjectivity, which occurred in mid-1915. However, even while maintaining this hypothesis, Douglas nonetheless speaks of Suprematism’s puzzling rise: “And while Suprematism is clearly a logical visual conclusion from Malevich’s earlier work, the final impetus for a sudden move from an alogical cubism into abstraction has gone without certain explanation or completely satisfying description.”71 Unlike the American scholar, S. O. Khan-Magomedov, a Russian historian of the avant-garde, categorically does not see in geometric nonobjectivity “a logical visual conclusion from Malevich’s earlier work.” On the contrary, he does everything he can, as cited above, to underscore Suprematism’s absolute independence and maturity from the very outset. Let us recall one more time: “planes reveal themselves” in Malevich’s pictures beginning in early 1914; in March 1915 Composition with Mona Lisa was already hanging in an exhibition; and irrational Fevralism was his long, difficult, and blind path to the total rejection of the object. This is why I do not think the reproduction in Sagittarius could have been “midwife” to Suprematism. The move to the abstract art of both the Bloomsbury painters and the Vorticists was essentially evolutionary because it was based on devices for transforming nature that were initiated by the art of the modern, actively developed by the Cubists, Fauvists, and Futurists, and latently active in the expressionistic biomorphism of Kandinsky’s symbolic compositions. The geometrical schematized ornaments known since remote antiquity only helped Omega’s artists to renew their artistic devices. As we will see below, the evolutionary move to geometricized extrafigurativeness was characteristic of the Moscow women Cubists as well. Malevich did not arrive at Suprematism after mastering the experience of abstracted, geometricized constructions in the marginal spheres of decorative applied art and using them to modernize painting through designers’ devices. On the contrary, it was after he had made his epoch-making discovery that he showed it for the first time at a “needlework exhibition”—for which there were substantial reasons, as the future showed. For Malevich there were no little bridges over the abyss between the objective—illusory—and nonobjective—conceptual, virtual—world either in the form of Lewis’s Portrait of an Englishman or in the paste-ons of Rozanova, which scarcely existed in May 1915.

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Suprematism’s Debut: November 6, 1915, Moscow All these processes—the end of Fevralism, the arrival at mature Suprematism, and the initial comprehension of its originality by Malevich himself—took place over the course of 1915. Beginning in September of that momentous year, he began to propagandize the new canvases among Moscow innovators, using every opportunity. Every opportunity. An impartial investigation of the situation in fall 1915 entirely refutes the prejudiced stories of Malevich’s opponents, who tried to prove that he had jealously kept his discovery secret all the way up to the “0.10” December vernissage in Petrograd. Suprematism’s public debut had in fact taken place a month and a half before, on November 6, 1915, when the “Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art: Embroidery and Carpets from Artists’ Designs” opened. This was the first major show in Moscow to be organized by the Kiev Handicraft Society, whose vice chair was N. M. Davydova (in the reviews she is sometimes referred to as the “chair”). Exhibited in the Moscow gallery were works completed in the workshops at Verbovka, Chigirinsky district, Kiev province, and Skoptsy, Pereyaslavsky district, Poltava province. The former was directed by N. M. Davydova and A. A. Exter; the latter by Ye. I. Pribylskaia and the estate’s owner, A. V. Semigradova. The exhibition ran from November 6 to 20, 1915, at the K. Lemercier Gallery. This date, November 6, 1915, would become the historic date of Suprematism’s public birth because it was then that viewers saw three geometric abstract compositions by Malevich for the first time.In 1993, Charlotte Douglas proposed the hypothesis that Suprematism’s debut was not the “0.10” exhibition, which opened on December 19, 1915, in Petrograd, but the November Moscow exhibit of decorative works. The perceptiveness of her hypothesis was confirmed by photographs discovered in the Moscow press of November 1915, which have allowed us to say which works the artists exhibited as designs for applied art works, about which more below. One of these photographs was published by Douglas without a source citation in her article on the rise of abstract art in England and Russia.72 Douglas unambiguously stressed that “It is known that he had been working on Suprematism since May, so it should not be surprising that Malevich’s new style actually made its debut not at “0.10” but as designs for needlework at the Modern Decorative Art exhibition in Moscow a month and a half earlier.”73 Questions about the confrontation in the Moscow circle and his colleagues’

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The First Verbovka Exhibition

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attitude toward Malevich’s discovery did not receive her attention, nor did the identification of the avant-gardist’s Suprematist canvases exhibited on November 6, 1915. The extensive reviews by Sergei Glagol (pseudonym of Sergei Goloushev, 1855–1920) and Yakov Tugendkhold (1882–1928) reflected how professional critics perceived the exhibit. Neither of them appreciated experiments in art, and they expressed their negative attitude to the works of the avant-gardists very clearly. Sergei Glagol felt even the very moderate innovation of the Skoptsy workshop to be inappropriate, to say nothing of Verbovka’s: These are, of course, handicraft organizations, but in their goals they differ drastically from what are known as handicraft schools and workshops. Usually any handicraft organization tries to support these types of work, seeks out their antique models, and attempts to revive them. The organizations at Verbovka and Skoptsy have taken a different route. They have attempted to translate the inquiries of various Russian Picassos into the art industry, the Messrs. Maleviches, Yakulovs, and other artists working in this vein; and it goes without saying that there ends up being almost nothing we could call folkloric in the final embroideries.74

Educated by Paris, Tugendkhold was more flexible in his perception. While praising Skoptsy for following traditions and for an imagination “moderated by respect for folk art,” the critic condemned Verbovka and its modernized wares, although he did see value of one of Exter’s exhibits: “The Poltava carpets have a calm infinity of melodies; Mrs. Exter’s ‘simultanist’ umbrella has the circular movement of color arabesques.”75 On the other hand, he came down hard on the other left-wing artists: “However, in the Cubo-high-relief compositions of I. Puni and K. Boguslavskaia there is a total failure to understand decorative composition. One cannot lean against their pillows, for these floral scraps jut out, fall apart in different directions, disturb, and cry out.”76 Judging from this description, the “Cubo-high-relief” pillows of Puni and Boguslavskaia were unusual textile counter-reliefs. In Tugendkhold’s review we encounter for the first time in written form the disdainful characterization of nonobjectivity as “simple” decorativeness that Malevich’s ill-wishers on both the right and the left would later play up so zealously. “Here, too, a question of principle arises. May we give peasant women the “last word” in modernity to embroider? Of course, nonobjective arabesques are much more appropriate in decorative art than in a frame under

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the name of a picture [. . .] here nonobjective brilliance seems to return to its original source, the patchwork quilt . . . of our cooks.”77 Tugendkhold’s final passage is illustrative not only for his perception of the innovations in Russian decorative art. Both when it was created and later on, the patchwork quilt by Sonia Delaunay-Terk (1911) now reproduced in many publications as a pioneering work of proto-abstract Cubism was considered to be an exclusively practical object created for the artist’s young son; her handmade appliqué work, which inherited the “nonobjective brilliance of the patchwork quilt of cooks” could not be viewed as “serious art.” Nearly all the works mentioned by the reviewers were real objects already executed in material. The availability of exhibits by left-wing artists—Georgy Yakulov, Ivan Puni, Ksenia Boguslavskaia—attests to the fact that Verbovka’s owner had brought these artists in well in advance, and from their sketches Ukrainian craftswomen had been able to embroider tablecloths, pillows, and belts, which took time. Malevich presented designs, and this confirms yet again the spontaneity of his invitation to the exhibition. The position of these designs speaks to how deeply Natalia Davydova was impressed by Suprematism’s originality. Malevich’s compositions preened triumphantly on the central podium of the Verbovka room, and newspaper reporters were simply compelled to record them in their most representative group photographs. The Moscow weekly Sparks (Iskry) reproduced several photographs from the “Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art,” and there the value topology of the Verbovka exposition is quite clear, although Malevich’s works on the podium were distorted in the reporter’s pictures of November 1915 due to the photographs’ technological imperfections (Figure 15). Some of the colors, primarily the yellow, green, and blue, as well as the light colors on light backgrounds, simply did not register on the glass negatives of those years; to eliminate these shortcomings, photographs were usually retouched, but a reporter’s photo would not have been. Without a doubt, Exter was present at the vernissage, nor, evidently, did the Moscow women Cubists miss the exhibition, which created quite a stir in the press by virtue of its originality.78 Thus, Suprematism’s first public appearance, let us emphasize once more, dates to November 6, 1915, a month and a half before the “0.10” vernissage. The legend about “Suprematism’s presentation” immediately before the opening and during “0.10” that can be found in every book and article about Malevich has had opportunistically biased foundations and does not correspond to reality.

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Figure 15. The main room of the “Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art (Verbovka)” in the Lemercier Gallery. Iskry (Moscow), no. 45 (November 13, 1915): 8. At center, in front of and on the platform, pillows by N. M. Davydova; on the platform at right and left from the pillow, projects by Malevich; above the platform on the wall, panel by G. Yakulov (?); at right of the platform, an umbrella by A. Exter, and next to it folding screens by Davydova; on the wall at right, a project by Malevich; at on the ottoman, a pillow by Davydova; at left, a folding screen by Exter, and in front of it, a pillow by E. Vasilieva.

Malevich’s Suprematist Works at Verbovka. 1915 Catalog of the Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art: Embroidery and Carpets from Artists’ Designs lists under Malevich’s name the following: “No. 90–91. For a scarf. No. 92. Pillow.” Photographs of the Verbovka exhibit speak for themselves. Malevich’s sketches—two on the podium and a third on the wall—look like space aliens next to lavishly decorated wares. Guessing which of the two were meant for scarves and which for a pillow is not all that easy, nor is it in the least mandatory. Their prospective uses were formal and could easily have been switched. At the first appearance of Malevich’s nonobjectivity the symbolic essence of the painting itself and of the new ornament had already been demonstrated.

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Later, Malevich exhibited all the pictures connected with the Verbovka sketches at the “Great Berlin Art Exhibition” of 1927; in both places they hung in direct proximity to each other. In 1927 the Russian artist left his exhibits behind in Berlin; he never was able to return to Europe and continue his exhibition tour. His large-format works went missing, but the majority of his compositions, after dramatic peripeties, ended in museum collections abroad.80 Suprematism: Construction No. 18 was in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam up until 2008. The other two pictures that correspond to the Verbovka

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That this caused a sensation is clear from the fact that today we know well all three of Malevich’s Verbovka exhibits, or rather, their plastic subjects. The composition of one of them was in fact executed in appliqué and embroidery on a real pillow exhibited at the next Verbovka exhibition in December 1917. In a 1915 photograph, this work is to the left on the podium with respect to the viewer. For ease of exposition, let us assume that the left-hand exhibit was originally called the pillow design and the other two—on the right and hanging on the wall—logically were intended for scarf decoration; later they may have become actual scarves, but we have no information about that. The Suprematist subjects of the Verbovka sketches derived directly from Malevich’s canvases. The pillow design was analogous in composition to Suprematism (1915), which is now in Venice at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum (Figure 16). The design “for a scarf” on the podium is based on a motif from Suprematism: Construction No. 18 (oil on canvas, 53 × 53 cm, formerly in SMA), which repeats the diagonal dynamic of Automobile and Lady, a canvas that has not survived. In Suprematist iconography, this was one of Malevich’s favorite plastic idioms (Figure 17).79 Particularly noteworthy is the other design “for a scarf” hanging on the wall: a unique variation on Suprematist Composition, about whose fate more just below (Figure 18). Anticipating the exposition, let us note that the Suprematist ornament on the real pillow is a mirror image of the design and the painting. This difference is explained by the fact that the Suprematist subjects of canvases had to be duplicated by the artist on paper; in the exhibitions, Davydova ordered, acquired, and presented the drawings alongside the finished wares. The purchased designs went to the Verbovka craftswomen, who embroidered the ornaments following the designs, which were transferred to the reverse of the fabric; the face side became a mirror image of the composition.

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Figure 16. Kazimir Malevich. Untitled. 1915. Oil on canvas. 53 × 53 cm. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. Acquisition confirmed in 2009 by agreement with the Heirs of Kazimir Malevich. 76.2553.42.

sketches went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Alfred Barr (1902– 81) having taken them out of Nazi Germany in 1935.81 However, at the present time MOMA does not have either one of them. One canvas (the prototype for the pillow design) adorns the halls of a Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal: in the early 1940s, passionate collector Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) acquired it in exchange for a picture by Max Ernst.82 The second picture plays a special role in the Suprematist’s legacy. In the photograph from the Verbovka exhibition it is clear that the scarf design was a diagonal construction made up of two wide intersecting stripes.

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Figure 17. Kazimir Malevich. Suprematism: Construction No. 18. 1915. Oil on canvas. Private collection (formerly Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam). Courtesy of the Heirs of Kazimir Malevich.

The Suprematist Composition that Barr took to America repeats the proportion between the widths of the intersecting stripes and their diagonal position on the surface of the canvas and observes their degree of inclination. At the same time the Suprematist Composition figure has a precisely expressed cross shape and the “cross” obviously dominates on the surface; the upper corner of the axis line almost touches the edge of the painting, whereas in the Verbovka sketch the fairly substantial distance between them is distinctly visible. Also drawing attention to itself is the two compositions’ polar opposite orientation with respect to top and bottom. The painting “relatives” of the Verbovka sketches were oriented differently depending on whether or not they

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Figure 18. Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist composition. Mid-1910s; motif from 1915. Oil on canvas. 80.3 × 80.3 cm. The picture is reproduced in same orientation as the scarf design at the first Verbovka exhibition in November 1915. Courtesy of the Heirs of Kazimir Malevich.

were hung by the artist, as well as in reproductions in books and publications; however, not one of the orientations can be called wrong, with the exception of the purely horizontal ones. “Weightlessness” was part of Malevich’s Suprematist world structure from the beginning; the pictures’ lengthwise placement inevitably gave him freedom because it demonstrated enslavement by the horizontal, that is, the power of earthly gravitation. Suprematist Composition, with its basic colors, white, black, and red, allows us to surmise that the Verbovka design may have had an analogous Suprematist combination of three colors.

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Returning to fall 1915, let us emphasize yet again that Malevich accepted Davydova’s invitation and exhibited Suprematist works as designs for applied art wares. As has already been said, Charlotte Douglas was the first to write about this significant act in her pioneering essays. At the same time, in accordance with her concept of the general move to abstraction through textiles, the scholar wanted to see the reasons for this in the following: [. . .] wasn’t the study of applied art one of the stimuli for Suprematism’s development of simplified abstraction? [. . .] But, on the other hand, we do not have information about Malevich’s interest in the applied arts before Suprematism,

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The picture has intrigued scholars because the white of the background— the “white abyss,” as Malevich said—that is so important for Suprematism was here laid down on top of an original black. The fluffy halo left intentionally around the red plane underscores this peculiarity. The atomization of color became a nerve of Suprematism in 1917 and 1918, more about which below. Hence the date of Suprematist Composition’s creation is in need of further research (in the literature, the canvas’s date is given in a broad range from 1919/1920 to 1927). As of today, it is hard even to say for certain which came first—the Verbovka sketch, the picture, or the picture reworked into a sketch for the appliqué embroidery. The only thing that is certain is that the motif of Suprematist Composition, with its cross-shaped intersection of diagonal planes, dates to 1915. Beginning with its genealogy as ancestor (or descendant?) of the Verbovka “scarf,” the picture’s own biography was akin to its plastic uniqueness. Since the 1990s, Malevich’s heirs have disputed the legitimacy of the acquisition by Western museums of compositions the artist was forced to abandon in the West in 1927. In the United States, the long struggle ended in 1998 with an official agreement between the heirs and the museums.83 MOMA returned Suprematist Composition to the family and paid compensation for the remaining works, which since then have belonged to the museum legally. Ten years later, in 2008, Holland, too, settled its conflict. In an amazing coincidence, both the United States and Holland returned to the heirs, among other works, the very two pictures that were connected with the Suprematist’s designs for Verbovka: Suprematist Composition from the New York museum, and Suprematism. Construction No. 18 from the Amsterdam museum.

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and we have always thought that this interest arose in him in connection with Suprematism’s nonobjective shapes. It is also possible, and this is what is most important, that he might have thought that the new style would simply go unnoticed in scarves and pillows and, what is also possible, he was right, since nonobjective ornament on textiles was already so generally accepted that it was not noticed.84

Here one might object that left-wing artists—and Malevich in particular— certainly did not display their works in exhibitions in order for them to go “unnoticed.” As has already been said, the exhibitions were the innovators’ sole opportunity to present their art. There was no other way in those days, and each appearance by left-wing artists was an important act: they called this “success with the public” and tried to win it by any and all means. Many gaps in the Russian avant-gardist’s artistic biography were filled in at the very end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century when information about Malevich’s interest in applied arts before Suprematism came to light. Documents have confirmed that it was he who created the Severny perfume bottle, which was produced in 1911 in the Russian empire, then in the Soviet Union, and in the 1990s in the Russian Federation, a bottle that broke all records for longevity and popularity.85 Also intriguing is one of the compositions Malevich displayed at an exhibition in provincial Kaluga in 1912. Apart from its title, “Carpet Motif,” we know nothing about this work; however, its very name attests that it was a design for a decorative art object.86 The Verbovka decorative exhibition at the Lemercier Gallery was highly significant. For the first time in the country’s artistic life the latest trends demonstrated how they could visually transform the everyday environment. It is remarkable that this process began with new decorative ornaments placed on traditional everyday objects, while the new ornaments themselves came out of experiments by left-wing artists. Looking back over the entire century, it is easy to see the organic nature— which contemporaries did not discern—of the move toward the major style of the twentieth century, not through architecture, as was traditional, but through abstract painting. The morphogenic plastic concepts worked out on the plane of the picture at first were in two dimensions and only later added a third. Malevich picked up on this call of the times on the intuitive level; he presented his epoch-making discovery at an exhibition of decorative objects, where it could be more easily accepted not only by the public but by his artist

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colleagues as well. Having presented his works to N. M. Davydova for public showing and having waged since October 1915 an active propaganda campaign among the Moscow women Cubists, he obviously was hoping for their positive reaction to his new forms. This calculation was intuitive; subsequently it proved accurate, with one exception: the trail of “simple decorativeness” followed Suprematism for a long time, and very few mature contemporary innovators proved capable of overcoming this error. In the academic hierarchy of the “fine arts,” decorative applied art genres had always been considered the sphere of craftsmen, however refined. Playing its part as well in the disdainful attitude toward the amenities of earthly life, the raison d’être of the applied artists, was neo-Romantic symbolism, with its cultivation of the human spirit’s celestial and earthly aspirations. The high art of architecture and painting was the principal sphere for a style that was obediently reflected in worldly ephemera—furniture, utensils, clothing, and so forth. The reverse influence was barely recognized even after William Morris’s pioneering activities. We have also spoken about how, in the light of Cubism’s and Futurism’s gender issues, decorative applied art openly and tacitly was considered a secondary sphere for the application of “feminine” talents. This attitude, as we know, found powerful sustenance in real life, in the traditional division of labor handed down from ancient times. Handwork, especially handwork using thread, needles, hooks, or knitting needles (embroidery, appliqué, knitting) was everywhere considered an exclusively female craft. Moreover, in the Russian empire representatives of all estates embroidered and knit, from empresses and ladies of the court to destitute peasant women. For this reason, in high— spiritual—culture “lady’s handwork” long remained a synonym for dilettantism and an optional, idle pastime. In his immortal Dead Souls, by referring to the “lady’s handwork” done by a man, the writer and moralist N. V. Gogol brands the utter uselessness of the philistine society’s marshal of “dead souls”: the governor of the town of “NN” “was a great good soul and himself even embroidered occasionally on tulle [. . .] rare is the lady capable of embroidering with such skill.”87 The uses of embroideries and appliqués were varied, but they shared one feature: they were decoration for utilitarian objects and daily life in general. The powerful movement to revive national traditions initiated and developed by the artists of the Abramtsevo circle and other figures helped attract prominent painters such as M. A. Vrubel (1856–1910) and V. A. Serov (1870–1911);

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however, in their designs for ceramics, embroidery, and furniture they in no way challenged the hierarchical division into “high,” or principal art, and “earthbound,” or secondary, auxiliary art.88 In the mid-1910s, national exhibitions of decorative applied art were primarily “ladies’ exhibitions,” and it was the women’s magazines that paid them the most attention, publishing reviews and photos along with patterns for fashionable hats and dresses and advice “on cutting and sewing.” Malevich’s act of presenting his epoch-making discovery at an exhibition of decorative applied art speaks once again to the astonishing freedom of the artist who created above and beyond barriers. It should be noted that his family upbringing lay at the source of this freedom. Thanks to Liudviga Aleksandrovna Malevich (1858–1942), her son had never felt any “male chauvinism” toward handwork. We know from Malevich’s reminiscences that as a youth he liked to embroider and tat, which he learned from his mother and which he was never embarrassed to admit: “My mother too embroidered and tatted. I learned this art from her and also embroidered and tatted.”89 The fact that Malevich for the first time showed his mature, Suprematist works now seen in any textbook at a “needlework exhibition” attested not only to the audacious freedom of the artist, who did not hold with the traditional hierarchy of the arts. This act tells us that he had already intuitively contemplated Suprematism’s morphogenic potential. As a Fevralist, his efforts had been aimed at demolishing stereotypes and destroying traditions. His many months of struggle against ossified conventions ended in total triumph over them not only in painting. Along with objects, each and every kind of boundary “vanished like smoke”; in the integral “new world order” there were no conventional value distinctions, no strict dichotomy in the form of “high” and “low,” “male” and “female,” “easel” and “applied” art. All this comprised the unified territory of creativity. The artist would be engaged in trying to understand and consciously reinforce this both in word and in plasticity for many years to come, but at the intuitive level Malevich sensed immediately that “Suprematism is a design for the stylistics of the world,” as Khan-Magomedov succinctly formulated it in the twenty-first century.90 For the Suprematist, not only pictures but also pillows and scarves were full-fledged representatives of the new art because they bore the “sign of the new world order.” The full extent of the November 1915 events has not been known to scholars. Malevich’s works for Verbovka were mentioned in passing, but no great

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role was assigned them and it was always assumed that to make money the Suprematist had simply allowed his painting constructions to be translated into embroideries; moreover, it was believed that the Suprematist ornaments appeared there after the “0.10” exhibition. This opinion initially seemed to gain support in documentary testimonies discovered by Charlotte Douglass at the end of the twentieth century. The photograph she published in 1995 with Malevich’s pillow, presented at the second Verbovka exhibition in December 1917, only confirmed the traditional view: Malevich “released” the composition of his 1915 picture for the 1917 “pillow,” adapting it to the ware’s dimensions. In 2006, Douglas reproduced a photograph of the first Verbovka exhibition (November 1915); however, as mentioned above, she did not make it her task to identify Malevich’s exhibits but rather concentrated on general issues of the influence of textiles on the rise of nonobjective art in Europe, where English artists played the leading role. Historians dated Suprematism’s conscious introduction into the “utilitarian world of things” to a much later period, linking it to the demands of the new Soviet state. However, the mechanism of this introduction was still the same for them. Malevich, they believed, after working out Suprematism’s stylistics in the material of “high art,” simply adapted it for the ornamentation of decorative wares. They began their count of the Suprematist era, after a hasty mention of his participation in the Verbovka exhibitions, from Malevich’s design of a folder for the congresses of poor peasants’ committees (1918). This folder unquestionably had its source in Malevich’s “bindings,” which have not survived and which were exhibited at the second Verbovka (“bindings,” that is, folders, had been extremely popular objects of daily use in prerevolutionary Russia). Later, art scholars viewed the activities of the Unovis group in Vitebsk in designing celebrations and interior decoration (1919–22) as Suprematism’s applied sphere. Suprematist porcelain, the sphere of Malevich’s “applied” activities beginning in the early 1920s, became classic; and in the works of most Western historians this episode is viewed as an activity Malevich was compelled to engage in solely to earn a living. However, Suprematism’s first appearance on November 6, 1915, at an exhibition of decorative art forces us to basically reconsider well-established positions. It attests irrefutably to the fact that Suprematism’s move into the “utilitarian world of things” took place not after nonobjective painting’s integral organic life (1915–18/19) came to an end but in conjunction with its birth. The substantive position, which Malevich understood only much later— regarding the effect of the transformation of real objects of real life by nonobjective compositions and hence the rise of a new integrity of art life and a

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“new plane of the world edifice”—was inherent in Suprematism from the very beginning.

The “Amazons” and Suprematism In fall 1915 Malevich was counting especially on Exter. At first he did come to believe in his success, inasmuch as he had was inexperienced in society etiquette, which did not allow for the baring of one’s true feelings. For example, the avant-gardist described in glowing terms the reception arranged for him in Germany in 1927. In fact, German intellectuals neither understood nor accepted the exotic “Russian professor,” with his grandiose modernist enthusiasm, a rejection for which there were a great many objective and subjective reasons. To Malevich, however, the mere assiduous attention of his German colleagues meant an utter triumph.91 In fall 1915 Exter quickly and irrevocably refused to participate in “0.10.” Popova and Udaltsova’s colleague would scarcely have hidden from them her impressions from her visit to Malevich’s studio, and after visiting the Verbovka exhibit they, too, were able to assure themselves just how “uninteresting” and “primitive” Malevich’s minimalist geometric compositions were in the context of the inventive ornaments of Exter, Puni, and Yakulov. These Suprematist “newcomers,” whose crude simplicity was perplexing, must also have contributed their mite to the artists’ notion of nonobjectivity’s “dilettantism” and “simple decorativeness.” In the brief time frame of October–December 1915, Malevich’s activity had an extremely negative effect on Suprematism’s propaganda among Moscow women artists. It would have been hard to expect anything else. Like Exter, the serious Cubists believed that his rectangles and stripes might yet be useful as unpretentious arabesques for embroidery; however, they were glaringly inappropriate and simply offensive “in a frame and called a painting,” to use Tugendkhold’s words. As a consequence, the Moscow group immediately formed a united front against the Suprematist’s attempts to “foist” his humiliating “ism” on them. On November 22, 1915, a day after “Verbovka” closed, Malevich wrote to Matiushin: Everyone was in an uproar. Our whole exhib[ition] circle lodged a protest over me leaving Futurism and wanting to write a few words in the catalog and call my things Suprematism. [. . .] So you see how our comrades, so to speak, are

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leagues] aren’t ready. [. . .] It’s really wonderful and magnificent. I yielded to them on this for the sake of the exhibition’s integrity. But on the other hand they will [have to] yield to me in my new form in the text.92

Some scholars have viewed the division and the embittered discussions among the exhibitors at “0.10” as a rebuff to Malevich’s hegemonic pretentions; in the Moscow women Cubists’ behavior they want to see confirmation of the artists’ “correct” negative attitude toward Malevich’s “lust for power.” If one analyzes the situation in fall 1915, one reaches the conclusion that the struggle and protests of the Moscow group in the persons of Exter, Popova, and Udaltsova were an honest attempt by the valiant “Amazons” to preserve their professional dignity. Suprematism—and especially its minimalist monofigures—were perceived by these advanced authors of intense and complex compositions as a profanation of painting: “squares” and “stripes” as independent compositions could only discredit high art in the eyes of authoritative critics and the enlightened public. Did one really need to study in Paris and master the very difficult arrangement of forms in order to create such “primitive” geometric elements as an ordinary rectangle or circle? In historical perspective it is not hard to see the global significance Malevich’s discovery had, although even in the twenty-first century, due to its stunning simplicity, the Suprematist masterpiece, Black Square, is perceived by many in his homeland, in Russia—educated academic painters above all—as a supremely “amateur” work and ruinous for “genuine art.” Independent and decisive Exter categorically refused to participate in “0.10,” but her friends’ desire to exhibit was stronger. They just did not want the viewers—each of whom could simply draw a black square—to mock them as totally unfit professionally. The Cubists forbade the name “Suprematism” as well, it seems, so that no one, God forbid, would be stuck with the insulting nickname “Suprematistka.” Immediately preceding and during work on the exhibition, they were in solidarity with the public in their perception of the geometric “arabesques.” Their heroism should be given its due: in fall 1915, the “Amazons” fought wholeheartedly with Malevich for the honor of true artists. At “0.10,” to save face, the Muscovites agreed to a desperate step. So that their works would not be confused with elementary “ornaments for needlework,” they hung over their exposition a poster with the notice, “Room of Painting Professionals.”93 In her notes Stepanova explains that they did so “in order to take revenge on Malevich”—that is, in order for him to realize

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behaving. I can’t even list my works in the catalog because they [i.e. his col-

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what his painting represented in the context of “authentic art” and “authentic innovation”? The artist Vera Pestel set forth with naïve ingenuousness an attitude toward Suprematism during the period of “0.10” that her friends soon preferred to forget: [. . .] the artist Malevich has simply drawn a square and colored it solid pink, and another black, and then a lot more squares and triangles of different colors. His room was stylish, very colorful, and it was pleasant for the eye to move from one color to the next—all of different geometric form. How peaceful it was to look at different squares, thinking nothing, wanting nothing. The pink was cheerful, and the black next to it was cheerful alongside it. And we liked it. It was pleasant to sit in that room and not think about any objects, and the colors made the room gay and cheered us. Finished geometric forms make it flowery, pleasant, and calm. We too became Suprematists (he calls himself that). [. . .] “But this is easy! Anyone can do this! Even a child could do this!” Yes, it’s not hard to work like that. But does it really have to be hard?94

Vera Pestel’s tone is idyllic, and she unintentionally reduces Suprematism to a simplified decorativism, demonstrating solidarity with the enlightened judge Tugendkhold. The accusation against Suprematism of superficial decorativism would be one of the central arguments in the struggle between the Constructivists and Malevich, and the first appearance of Suprematism at “Verbovka” virtually handed them this trump card. Behind the guileless narration of the “0.10” participant, who was a friend of Popova and Udaltsova, what shines through unambiguously is the notion, dominant in the Moscow circle in fall 1915, of Suprematism’s lack of seriousness, with its “just squares” and “cheerful colors.” This “it’s easy to work like this” and “a child could do this” was the Moscow women Cubists’ main pretension against Malevich. They did not want to be a part of what was in their eyes the lightweight dilettantism of his new painting.

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CHAPTER 3

•

“0.10”: The Last Futurist Exhibition Malevich’s Second Curatorial Project The “0.10” exhibition, as has already been said, is considered one of the ten most important exhibitions of the twentieth century and has been the subject of close analysis on several occasions.1 Let us look first at the title, with its unusual form of a fraction: “The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 (Zero-Ten).” The literature rigorously repeats the interpretation of authoritative art scholar Ye. F. Kovtun, who was guided by Malevich’s letter to Matiushin (“We are venturing to put out a magazine and are starting to discuss how and what, and in view of the fact that in it we intend to reduce everything to zero, we have decided to call it that, ‘Zero,’ and then afterward we will move beyond zero,” May 1915)2 and by the words on the “0.10” poster (December 1915) proclaiming that participating in the exhibition were the exhibitors of “Tramway V”—of whom there were ten. Bringing together 101

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these two mutually distant positions, Kovtun advanced the hypothesis that in the fraction “0.10” Malevich had been encoding the desired move of these same ten participants beyond the Zero of forms.3 Due to the authority of this Leningrad historian of the avant-garde and his striking formulation, this hypothesis became axiomatic for everyone writing about Malevich. No one was or is bothered by the fact that a rational explanation for the number “0.10” transformed an irrational, trans-sense title into a simple rebus, which fundamentally contradicted the Suprematist’s intentions. Malevich’s alogical trans-sense initially appeared in opposition to “reason,” and by using “skeleton keys” he was trying to establish his own conventional schemes. Also ignored then and now, for some reason, is the fact that the numbers “0.10” and “1.0,” in which combine the zero, unit, and comma that is used in Russia for decimal fractions, appeared in Malevich’s Fevralist drawings not only before Suprematism’s birth but even before the “Tramway V” project with its ten participants. The numeral “0.10” is present in the drawing Alogical Composition of late 1914 to early 1915, and the number “1.0” in the drawing Soldier of the Mortar Brigade from late 1914.4 By December 15, the ten artists who participated in “Tramway V” were for the most part neither supporters nor followers of Malevich. In the preceding pages it has been shown how the Moscow women Cubists, exhibitors in “Tramway V,” who banned even the name “Suprematism,” greeted his discovery. Anticipating the exposition, let us emphasize that only five people belonged to the Suprematist group in “0.10,” although according to the catalog fourteen artists participated in all. Kovtun’s ingenious but arbitrary assertion, which has been uncritically repeated by those writing about Malevich, never had any real basis. The great number “0,” a concept of human speculation, was continuously present in the works and thinking of the Fevralist Malevich, and his indefatigable irrational manipulations with zero and the unit seemed to anticipate the future career of this number pair in cybernetics, and later as a result of technical progress to be the basic condition for the computerization of the entire planet. The date of “0.10”—1915—served as a point of departure for another epoch-making exhibition in 1991–92, “The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932.” The irony of history lay in the fact that “Great Utopia,” which made a triumphant tour through the countries of Europe, winding up at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, not only summed up the development of the Russian avant-garde in the century just past but in fact was the final chord in the seventy-four years of Soviet power’s “great utopia.”

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[. . .] I decided to give it a try. I quickly got carried away, rolled a pink piece of blotting paper from my writing desk into a horn, attached it to the canvas on the diagonal with wire, sprayed the inside with black India ink, continued shading in gray over the canvas, attached a piece of anthracite, a piece of tin, squares of wood parquet, and something else. About an hour later the composition was ready and I presented it to Tatlin. He said, “I always knew you were capable, but stubborn. Here, you see, it’s a little worse than my naturally more thought-through things. But do a couple of more pieces, and tomorrow morning we’ll take it all to the exhibition.” I refused. Suddenly he got incredibly angry, gave me a dirty look, and said, “At the exhibition I want there to be Tatlin and his school—which is you. Malevich has his pupils and followers, after all, and there’s nothing shameful in it. [. . .]” I grew angry, too, and said I preferred keeping to myself.6

Tatlin’s compositions did remain his great individual accomplishment, which held powerful plastic potential that fertilized the art of new generations. The presence of other ways out of Cubist doctrines into volumetric-spatial constructions—Picasso’s papiers collés, Braque’s angular still life reliefs, Aleksandr Arkhipenko’s (1887–1964) sculptural painting—was superimposed upon Tatlin’s inability to reflect upon his discovery and convince his colleagues of his works’ value. All of this made Tatlin’s display at “0.10” yet another

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The pictures left Soviet museums in 1991 for a traveling exhibition from the Soviet Union and returned in 1992 to what was now another country, Russia. A detailed examination and attempt at reconstruction of the entire “0.10” exhibition were undertaken in an article by Moscow art historian Anatoly Strigalev.5 In it, he develops a thesis about how the potential for two lines in the Russian avant-garde’s development was presented at “0.10,” where Tatlinism and Suprematism announced themselves as competing original trends in the nation’s art. Herein lay the undeniable service performed by curator Malevich. It was his understanding of the exhibition as an “ideological matter” that led to this kind of concentration and intensity of artistic manifestation. However, Tatlin’s discovery was already a year and a half old—a long enough time for its unqualified assertion in artistic life and the formation of an alliance of supporters and adepts, against which, as is well known, Tatlin spoke out zealously throughout his avant-garde life; in fact, the situation was somewhat different. Artist Valentina Khodasevich (1894–1970), in whose home Tatlin stayed during preparations for “Tramway V,” described her recruitment as a supporter by the author of the “material selections”:

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demonstration of current works, as Matiushin noted in his mostly positive review: “Tatlin is unquestionably a great artist who has a strong sense of space, but his present works are weaker than last year’s, despite the intensity of his constructive idea.” We must give the reviewer his due for his perspicacity and the accuracy of his statements about the essence of Tatlin’s volumetric compositions as expressed in his closing words.7 In hindsight it has become even more obvious that neither a separate and integral “counter-relief” trend, to say nothing of Tatlinism as such, ever came to pass in the Russian avant-garde, despite the unconditional and huge influence of Tatlin’s epoch-making discovery denoted by the neologism “counter-relief.”8 The very word, whether invented or borrowed by Tatlin, remained his personal term: when we say “counter-relief” we mean “Tatlin” (the same situation in the Russian avant-garde would come about with the genre definition of “painterly architectonics,” which became the personal term of Liubov Popova). All the “material selections” constructed by other artists were, in essence, duplications of Tatlin works, that is, imitative in nature, and did not even come close to the magnificent textural “symphonies” by Tatlin himself. They remained brief episodes in their creators’ lives. A paradox can be seen as well in the fact that all of Tatlin’s closest supporters who practiced the manufacture of counter-reliefs—Lev Bruni (1894–1948), Petr Miturich (1887–1956), Sofia Dymshits-Tolstaia (1889–1963), and Iosif Meerzon (1900–1941)—nonetheless were not Constructivists. Tatlin’s great invention served as a point of departure for the movement toward Constructivism, a full-flowing art current in which outstanding individuals and schools appeared. Malevich’s Suprematism was the sensation of “0.10.” This was that rare instance when a sensation—in the broad sense—did not lose its significance over the decades.

Malevich’s Exhibit at “0.10” Ivan Puni and Ksenia Boguslavskaia were concerned that there be proper publicity for the exhibitions they were financing, therefore they paid for photographs and for placement of reproductions in the press. Photographs play an invaluable role in discussions of the Malevich exhibit at “0.10.” Today we know of three general photos: the first was published in a newspaper;9 the second in 1974 by Ye. F. Kovtun;10 and there is also a group photo—Olga Rozanova, Ksenia Boguslavskaia, and Malevich—taken in front of the latter’s exhibit.

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Figure 19. Malevich’s exhibit at the “Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures 0.10.” December 1915–January 1916. Author’s collection.

Kovtun published a photograph now held at the Petersburg State Archive of Photographic and Film Documents. A larger version of the second photo in which all the pictures hanging on the left ended up almost wholly in the frame was in the possession of L. A. Shadowa. In her 1978 book, it is reproduced with slight damage;11 a clearer photograph is in Charlotte Douglas’s 1994 album;12 the most complete version was published in 2007 in the catalog of a Moscow exhibition of Olga Rozanova (Figure 19).13 The photo shows canvases hanging on two adjacent walls; the other two walls in the room were always outside the frame. Without going into detail, however, let us note that on those walls there were supposed to be all the pictures known from postcards published for the exhibition; canvases reproduced in the brochure From Cubism to Suprematism; three pictures that were used for Verbovka designs; and a nonobjective canvas with a painted red spoon and the Russian letter “B.” Malevich brought to the exhibition even canvases that were not quite dry, that is, the entire existing Suprematist oeuvre. In the early 1970s, at a conference in the south of France, Boguslavskaia told John Bowlt that some pictures brought to the halls of the Art Bureau by N. Dobychina

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in Petrograd were placed in the corners on racks so they would not stain each other.14 Photographers inevitably bowed to Malevich’s intention: in the general photos, the main figure is Black Square, elevated to the “icon corner,” high up between walls and ceiling, where icons are traditionally hung in Orthodox homes. One is struck by the boldly drawn posters; repeated on them are the names of pictures and cycles that were cited in the catalog without any mention whatsoever of Suprematism, as the Moscow group had wanted. However, no one could stop Malevich from putting up sheets on the walls of the hall saying “Suprematism of Painting” and listing the works and author’s name. The measures to which Malevich was forced to resort performed an unexpected service. The hand-drawn banners themselves became conceptual exhibits at the exhibition. Canvas was stretched across the room’s walls, creating a homogeneous surface. The hanging of the abstract paintings was distinguished by its diversity, which spoke to how well it had been thought through. Some pictures were hung leaning outward; others were firmly attached to the surface. The works lacked frames; only one of those recorded in the photographs had a frame; all the others were simply on stretchers.15 All these particularities gave me grounds for writing in one of my studies that Malevich had consciously treated the walls as picture planes on which each work played the role of a geometric element. Their compositional connections and hierarchy of placement transformed the walls’ rectangles into unique nonobjective collages organized according to a plastic-visual principle.16 Malevich pondered his intuitive discovery later when developing his principles for the organization of museums of modern art. An active participant in the new museum construction that unfolded during the early Soviet years, he emphasized especially: “Therefore I think that a museum’s walls are planes on which works should be placed in the same order as the composition of forms is placed on a painting plane. [. . .]”17 The catalog and indications on the hand-drawn banners attest to the fact that Malevich divided his works into three groups. In the first group only Black Square had the laconic title “Tetragon”; the other canvases had trans-sense captions: “Pictorial realism of a soccer player— color masses in the fourth dimension,” “Lady—color masses in the fourth and second dimensions,” and so forth. The cumbersome verbal constructions, on the one hand, were a tribute to left-wing artists’ theoretical inquiries, above

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Twelve pictures in Malevich’s “0.10” exhibit were grouped under the heading “Painting masses in motion.” The most numerous, third group was called “Painting masses in two dimensions in a state of rest.” The catalog contains an explanation of how one should—or rather, should not—understand the titles: “In naming a few pictures I do not want to indicate that one should search for their forms in them, rather I want to show that real forms were discerned by me as heaps of formless painting masses on which a painterly picture was created that had nothing in common with nature.” A poster with this instruction was also probably hung on one of the room walls that we cannot see today. Very soon after, with the theoretical construction of Suprematism’s development, Malevich would prefer to define movement and rest using the strict terms “dynamic” and “static.” At “0.10,” static and dynamic compositions, verbally united into monolithic groups, hung interspersed on the walls, inasmuch as the exposition was defined by a plastic-visual principle. However, even without the number identifications under the pictures—especially since they are beneath far from all of them—it is not difficult to tell in which group a given composition was included. The organization of the wall plane according to the collage principle, the posters with numbers word, and sentences, the presence of a single intent, and the conscious reinforcement of this intent in the hierarchical segmentation and value topology of the exhibition space reveal the innovative nature of Malevich’s exhibit at “0.10.” It was an independent concept, not the sum of the

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all Matiushin’s, into new dimensions; on the other hand, they were a unique thread connecting Suprematism and Fevralism. Let us recall that a red spoon and Russian letter “B,” which is associated with the title “Tramway V,” was drawn and then painted on Black Rectangle and Blue Triangle, which was exhibited on the Field of Mars. The connecting thread was severed definitively at “0.10.” Here only eight pictures could boast lavish titles, but later Malevich drastically curtailed the trans-sense verbal rigging of his compositions, designating each of the pictures with a number and then bracketing them into two groups. Never again would Malevich return to a meaningful verbal differentiation among Suprematist topics in painting, which led to unnecessary and arbitrary “objective” associations. In the catalog for “Jack of Diamonds” at the end of 1916, canvases would have no titles whatsoever, just numbers.

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pictures presented. The Suprematist would be a pioneer in a type of art that in just a few decades would come to be called an installation. Black Square’s location demonstrates that Malevich was fully aware of the opportunities an installation presented for artistic statement. Today some people would like to ascribe the gesture, sacrilegious from the standpoint of Orthodox Christians, of elevating Black Square to the icon corner, to Tatlin’s spatial solutions; the texts of his authoritative biographer express the opinion that Malevich was roused to this unusual placement by Tatlin’s corner counter-reliefs: “The appearance of ‘corner counter-reliefs’ during the hanging of the ‘0.10’ exhibition undoubtedly suggested to K. Malevich the idea of hanging his Black Square in the corner (at the same exhibition).”18 This hypothesis of Strigalev lacks foundation in the light of historical realities. Malevich had an underlying objective in his placement of Black Square, and Tatlin’s purely plastic solutions did not have the potential to influence this objective, inasmuch as they came out of a different sphere, the worldview sphere. Moreover, the hanging of the counter-reliefs took place in public, that is, directly at the vernissage itself, when Malevich’s painstakingly balanced exhibit was already complete: “Setting up “0.10”—Tatlin is nervous, arguing with ‘Pun’ka’ [Ksana Boguslavskaia], hanging the Moscow ones, brings his own reliefs at four o’clock—the vernissage is at five—yelling at Pun’ka not to peek at what Tatlin has brought . . . five o’clock—the vernissage—Tatlin didn’t get his reliefs hung in time—he’s hanging them on a ladder in front of the public; the public’s attention and interest is attracted.”19 To this day the Tatlin counter-reliefs are separate, independent entities that shift from one exhibition space to another and work marvelously in any. They always “wrap” inert space around themselves and dominate in it aggressively, taking little account of what is around them. Tatlin’s methods and habits in setting up exhibitions immediately during a vernissage were expressively depicted by a contemporary eyewitness: Tatlin reserved a place in the first hall, which was surrounded by a nailed-up rope and for some reason started right at the floor. In the middle hung a piece of cardboard, on which it said, “V. Ye. Tatlin’s space—don’t take it!” [. . .] An hour before the opening Tatlin was crawling on the floor in the first hall. [. . .] The organizer—good-natured Kandaurov—was running from room to room with a distraught face. The hour of the exhibition’s opening was approaching. Kandaurov said to Tatlin: “I beg of you, finish up your arrangement,” and ran downstairs to greet the invited patrons and collectors.20

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Malevich verbally asserted the significance of Black Square as “the icon of our era” later, in May 1916, in a letter of reproof to Alexandre Benois. However, he understood this essence during the materialization of his prototypes on June 8, 1915, and presented it in the picture’s placement in the exhibit hall. For him, the hall’s space was not a simple container for compositions but possessed a value topology, which is what made it the most important component of the whole. Black Square’s sacred-sacrilegious meaning was apparent to all visitors due to the picture’s shocking positioning. Alexandre Benois’s vehement review was occasioned above all by the way Black Square was displayed. The venerable critic, correctly reading the Suprematist’s message, was the first to publicly call his main picture an icon: “Without a number, but in the corner high up, nearly to the ceiling, in the icon’s place, hangs a ‘composition’ [. . .] by Mr. Malevich depicting a black square in a white frame. Undoubtedly, this is the very ‘icon’ which Messrs. Futurists have been proposing to replace Madonnas and brazen Venuses [. . .]”21 Going far outside the framework of this book, it should be said that after the Suprematist’s recognition in the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century at various exhibitions, his gesture at “0.10” was reproduced several times and Black Square was placed in halls’ “icon corners.” In earlier Western exhibitions this was not done, inasmuch as an image in the icon corner is a feature specific to the Russian mindset.22 In museum buildings the object of the exhibition was the conceptual phenomenon, the value hierarchy of the space of residential interiors where a sacred zone was set off. Malevich’s shocking gesture was duplicated as an independent composition (we would add only that this act was scarcely understood fully by Soviet museum workers), and sterile exhibition halls quoted not only the topology of the domestic setting but also the Suprematist’s installation idea at “0.10.” At its first appearance the “icon corner” transformed Black Square into an icon, but in museum duplications of the original placement a momentous substitution occurred: ordinary corners became “holy” because an icon was there, Black Square.

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Tatlin hung his Analysis of Composition at the described “1915 Painting Exhibition” as the public was mounting the stairs. This egocentric self-sufficiency is quite visible as well in the photograph of Tatlin works at “0.10”: the artist used sheets of paper to create a personal enclosure exclusively for his reliefs, while Udaltsova’s pictures hung next to them as random elements.

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Western curators of exhibitions of the Russian avant-garde also liked to hang Black Square in any available corner in the hall, and this corner immediately became another exhibit, the “icon corner,” marking Suprematism’s national origin with an allusion to Russian domestic and religious culture and quoting Malevich’s installation idea at “0.10.” Returning to December 1915, let us single out a very important feature of the Suprematist exhibit. In addition to presenting the essence of Black Square as the “icon of our era,” Malevich to the highest degree both overtly and covertly gave Suprematism’s true first pictures their due. Underneath Black Square he hung two canvases that preceded the appearance of his main figure. Here the metaphor of “the pillars of Suprematism” gained visual embodiment.

Collective Painting: Futurism: Street Information in the “0.10” catalog was in alphabetical order. Listed between the names of participants A. M. Kirillova and I. V. Kliun, was “Collective [Kollektivnaia] painting, Malevich, Boguslavskaia, Puni, Kliun, Minkov [sic].” These meager data make it clear that the intent of the collective painterly creation arose not impulsively, impromptu, but existed originally, inasmuch as information about it was prepared for inclusion in the catalog. Digressing, it should be said that this significant composition was a unique predecessor to the works of the collective artist known as Unovis—such was the abbreviation from the name “Utverditeli novogo iskusstvo” (Affirmers of the New Art), the union of Malevich supporters and pupils in provincial Vitebsk, where he lived and worked from 1919 to 1922.23 The culmination of the creativity of this Vitebsk artist was a 1923 exhibit at “Exhibition of Pictures by Artists of All Trends” in Petrograd, where all the works, including those of Malevich himself, were exhibited anonymously, as the common creation of Unovis. It was mentioned above that Malevich initially strove to organize a “collective body” of new art. The creation of a common work was inscribed in the concept of the “intellectual cause” such as the exhibition was, an exhibition whose “wholeness” was so important for him. The procedure for listing the creators of the collective picture at “0.10” reinforced the initiative contributed by each to the painting canvas, and the primacy of the “idea-giver” Malevich (his neologism) was fair.

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In this case, however, the vexing label “last” held certain conceptual tendencies that emanated from K. S. Malevich. [. . .] The Russian Futurists had put together an exhibition where they were in fact supposed to appear “as such” for the last time, unbeknownst to them. [. . .] Suprematist Malevich contrasted himself to the others, who were qualified as the “last Futurists” (“last” in the same sense that the newspaper reviewers greeted it: outdated and self-repeating). Malevich [. . .] applied a great deal of effort and inventiveness in order, on the one hand, to supply his statement with an unprecedentedly active and developed propaganda-advertising campaign. On the other, as an egocentric and jealous man, he wanted all the success, such as the exhibition might have, for himself, down to the last drop, and the “last Futurists,” humiliated by their outdatedness, to pass as the vanquished, in the triumph of his victory.26

In light of the facts, the conclusion of this scholar, who for reasons outside his control did not have complete information, reveals his agenda. Even for

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Other than these catalog data, no information has survived about the topic or nature of the unusual composition. None of the exhibition’s reviewers or participants spoke of or recalled this unique artifact. The archival testimony discovered leads to a sensational conclusion. In the exhibition catalog that once belonged to Kliun, written in his hand above the line “Collective picture, Malevich, Boguslavskaia, Puni, Kliun, Minkov” is: “Futurism: Street.”24 The designation of the style and subject puts everything in its place. The five artists were consciously saying goodbye to Futurism in this very original way. They were indeed the “last Futurists,” having shut down one movement in order to open a new one and be the first in it. The ambivalence of “0.10” was expressed with maximum clarity by curator Malevich, but no one could read his message; this was not the first time his contemporaries simply did not catch on because to do so meant shedding the usual blinders. In the light of the Suprematist’s discreditation, his title “The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings,” as has already been said, was presented as his illintentioned humiliation of his colleagues. The Udaltsova-Stepanova notes, in addition to the already quoted “Malevich wants to undermine the exhibition and is trying to get it called the last Futurist,” specify: “With this exhibition Malevich has ruined the Futurists and Cubists with his Suprematism, calling the exhibition the last [. . .]”25 A contemporary scholar develops the point thoroughly:

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the great conceptualist Malevich, following himself as a defeated and humiliated “last Futurist,” in the train of his own triumph, seems excessively conceptual.

The Last Futurists and First Suprematists The “last Futurists,” who collectively drew the “last Futurist painting,” were the group that appeared under Suprematism’s banner at “0.10.” By the time of the “0.10” exhibition, the group of Suprematists included Malevich, Puni, Boguslavskaia, Kliun, and Menkov, who were listed in an advance press item about the opening.27 The alliance of Malevich’s first supporters had coalesced before the exhibition, inasmuch as all its participants, united under the identifying name “Suprematists,” already had proto-Suprematist compositions, which were exhibited at “0.10.” This proves yet again the error of the assertion about Malevich’s first presentation of Suprematism practically at the vernissage itself. The exhibition’s sponsors, the Puni couple from Petrograd, had joined the new movement unconditionally. Many decades later, Ksenia Boguslavskaia, for self-seeking considerations, retouched history and included among the exhibits of “0.10” Suprematist works by Ivan Puni which she had dated to 1915: Composition (oil on canvas, 94 × 65 cm, SMA) and Composition (oil on canvas, private collection).28 With respect to these works, her assertions are hardly fair. During those weeks, Puni still considered his main achievements to be his Cubo-Futurist compositions with elements of alogical trans-sense, inasmuch as he himself selected them to be photographed and placed in the press (after his emigration from Soviet Russia, it was these features that led the European Dadaists to recognize in Puni a fellow believer). At the same time, there were two sculptures by Puni at “0.10,” but we have reliable knowledge about only one of them. This was a truly innovative work, and its identification was aided by the same review by Matiushin in the miscellany Enchanted Wanderer (Ocharovannyi strannik). Matiushin categorized the ultra-laconic relief, White Sphere (today in the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Paris), as Cubism: “His sphere in a green box, the best of his things, but clearly Cubist.”29 The definition of Puni’s composition as Cubist underscores yet again how implicit Suprematism’s generative innovation was for Matiushin himself in the winter of 1915–16. By analogy with White Sphere—half a plaster “ball” attached on the diagonal to a wooden box-icon case painted in two colors—Ivan Puni soon created

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several works that joined real things to sterile-geometric elements taken from Malevich’s Suprematist painting. To be fair, the Fevralists Malevich and Morgunov had had the beginnings of this approach: identical spoons mounted in their paintings at the “1915 Painting Exhibition”; the ruined thermometer taken from daily use and posing on the backdrop of an irregular rectangle in Malevich’s Soldier of the First Division (MOMA); and so on. However, all these “found objects” crowded onto the Fevralists’ paintings among other collage elements to intensify the trans-sense effects, to the public’s greater irritation. In Puni, the clash between maximally abstract shapes and prosaic domestic objects seemed to reunite Russian nonobjectivity and Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades. At “Tramway V,” Puni exhibited “a hammer attached to a piece of paper.”30 This collage, in a modernized reconstruction undertaken after “0.10,” in Europe, in 1921, developed into a layered planar composition of regular figures on which a beat-up hammer was affixed upright (Still-Life with Hammer, private collection, Zurich). Presented here in a rigorous and elegant formula was “the new beauty—the energy of dissonances obtained from the encounter of two opposite forms,” to use Malevich’s words.31 This was an original variety of radical art. However, after creating several minimalist masterpieces of this type, including, unquestionably, White Sphere, Ivan Puni abandoned this path without further development. In December 1915, Ksenia Boguslavskaia, an enterprising and imitative personality, presented her abstract-collage and Suprematist works. Only two testimonies about them have survived. In Matiushin’s review we read: “Boguslavskaia. We bow politely to her cube made of compressed wadding and to its hat. (Malevich’s latest fashion).”32 Malevich’s latest fashion was his Suprematism. The volumetric cube made of compressed wadding clearly possessed geometric regularity and, obviously, was white; the hat, the readymade, had certain spatial ties to it. The cube with hat was listed as a sculpture; the catalog notes that among Boguslavskaia’s seven works she exhibited two “Sculptures.” Three more of the seven of her works in the catalog are designated as “Studies for the new painting.” They have not survived, but we do have information about the minimalist Suprematist appearance of one of them. Olga Rozanova, irritated by the behavior of “the viper Oksana [Boguslavskaia],” rendered an invaluable service; from her sketch alone, sent in a letter to Kruchenykh, we can get a notion of her adversary’s painting: “This is an exact copy of Oksana’s painting. A ring, a wedge, and a partial wedge on a white ground??”33 If this

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work survived it would now be touring with honor among the exhibits of the Russian avant-garde. Rozanova was not quite fair in her unkind evaluations of the Puni family. The wealthy couple financed photography of the works for propaganda in newspapers and magazines, and Rozanova herself had two works photographed and placed in the press, whereas Ksenia Boguslavskaia had just one. Ivan Kliun, Malevich’s very old friend, exhibited seventeen compositions. Some of them were already familiar to the public from “Tramway V.” Besides the collective farewell to Futurism, Kliun, in his sculpture Cubist Woman at Her Dressing Table (which has not survived), demonstrated his personal departure from his former priorities. Judging from the newspaper reviews, the shocking effect of a lady made up of racks and boards nearly surpassed the effect of Black Square. Another thirteen nameless compositions by Kliun, which were grouped— “Basic Principles of Sculpture,” “Flying Sculpture,” and “Sculpture in the Plane”—evidently constituted the “Suprematist sculpture” Malevich had written about to Matiushin in October 1915. On the backdrop of his exhibit, Kliun also placed a hand-drawn banner, “Suprematism: I. Kliun,” part of which is visible in the photograph of Cubist Woman at Her Dressing Table. Added to the list of “last Futurists”—who were the first Suprematists—was Mikhail Ivanovich Menkov (1885–1926; sometimes spelled “Minkov”), who debuted at “0.10.” During the Supremus era, this loyal comrade of Malevich remained on the whole a rather obscure figure in art; the young man, who suffered from tuberculosis, obviously could not work at full strength.34 Menkov’s four paintings, under the shared title “Painting in 4 Dimensions,” may have included symmetric crystal-shaped compositions reminiscent of a kaleidoscope’s mirror structures: his picture Symphony (Score), authentically dated 1915, and his canvas Newspaper, created on this same compositional scheme, may have been among them.35 Newspaper was given the date 1918 when it was purchased from its author in the postrevolutionary era. This date may have been added by Menkov himself in order to dodge reproaches of selling “old” works. The dating was repeated at the picture’s first exhibition and publication in the exhibit catalog for “Great Utopia” (1991), where it appeared along with Symphony (Score). For some reason the catalog’s compilers preferred shifting Symphony (Score) from 1915 to 1918, but not Newspaper from 1918 to 1915; both pictures were given the same later date.

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Olga Rozanova During “0.10” Rozanova’s extremely important letters sent to Kruchenykh during “0.10” (December 1915 to January 1916) have helped shed light on the artist’s attitude toward Suprematism in the first weeks of her acquaintanceship with it. We should set aside Rozanova’s reactions to those around her. The artist’s “restraint and good will” proclaimed in an article by a contemporary author notwithstanding,36 her letters prove the exact opposite; they are filled with venomous and unfair remarks about all her contemporaries with the exception of A. A. Shemshurin. About Khlebnikov she writes: “Khlebnikov has one major fault, in my opinion. He is academically dead and often repeats himself.” She reacts harshly to Kruchenykh’s list: “Please, don’t print my name alongside Matiushin and the others.” She qualifies the critic A. A. Rostislavov (1860–1920), who appreciated Rozanova, as “mediocre” and “a fool.” Ksenia Boguslavskaia is vouchsafed the title “viper”: “The degree to which Oksana is a viper—I had no idea. [. . .]” She lets slip a disdainful “lackey” with respect to Malevich: “Malevich is like their [the Punis’] lackey[. . .]” And she calls the group of Suprematists “those swine.” Throughout her brief life, Rozanova fought bitterly and hard for her existence and always felt injured, which came through in her opinions of her colleagues and contemporaries. It seems wrong to base far-reaching conclusions on them.37 At “Tramway V,” Rozanova exhibited Cubo-Futurist painting, and at the “Exhibition of Paintings of Left-Wing Trends” (N. Ye. Dobychina’s Art

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This arbitrary act stemmed from the utter obscurity of the artist M. Menkov and from unfamiliarity with his Suprematist works, which he began to create in about 1917. At least two of them have survived to the present day, one in the Krasnodar Regional Art Museum, the second in a private collection in Moscow. However, the catalog for the seventh “Jack of Diamonds” (1917), for example, implies that Menkov exhibited ten nonobjective works, numbered 291a to 300. The two minimalist compositions with atomizing elements known to us demonstrate that Malevich’s supporter had his own version of Suprematism. Returning to Menkov’s Cubo-Futurist art, let us point out that a comparison of Newspaper and Symphony (Score) makes their very close stylistic—and therefore chronological—kinship extremely clear. Hence the correct date for Newspaper is 1915, before the artist shifted to Suprematism.

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bureau, April 12 to May 9, 1915), which opened after that, she showed spatialvolumetric compositions. They bore the titles Composition of Brilliant Objects (on Tin) and Composition of Clay and Crystal Objects—and this is all that remains of them. Meanwhile, their eloquent descriptive headings give us a definite notion of their character. Her relief pictures were obviously of a collage sort and more than likely possessed features similar to Rozanova’s painting canvases, such as Desk (1915, GRM) and Work Box (1915, GTG). After the springtime Petrograd exhibitions, the artist left for her home territory and until late fall worked in Vladimir and Melenki, where she painted, and beginning in July 1915, after receiving an order from Shemshurin, made “color bonds” (or “paste-ons”) and “carvings” for an album, War, while in close written contact with Kruchenykh. She did not arrive in Petrograd to participate in “0.10” before late November; on November 24, 1915, she was still in Vladimir.38 And inasmuch as the “Verbovka” exhibition with its Suprematist works ran all of two weeks, from November 6 to 20, then even if she had stopped in Moscow Rozanova would not have had a chance to see Malevich’s new painting. She first encountered Suprematism in Petrograd. Unlike her “Amazon” colleagues, the artist immediately and without qualification comprehended the plastic innovation and invented term, proving yet again that she did not join the Moscow circle in obstructing Malevich’s group; more than likely, she did not even know about the struggle. In a December 1915 letter, Rozanova uses the words “Suprematism” and “Suprematist” as if they had always existed in the language. Udaltsova, as Stepanova related, set forth Rozanova’s separate position: “In all these peripeties Rozanova has landed in between—with neither Malevich nor Tatlin—it’s true, she too was going through a repulsive state, as she herself said, when she began to sense that Malevich had discovered something, but she quickly sensed what was going on and quickly drew several Suprematist works for the exhibition.”39 In a December letter to Kruchenykh, Rozanova reported: “I submitted only Suprematist reliefs (4), but did not submit painting (in pure form). [. . .]”40 Both Udaltsova-Stepanova and the artist herself categorize their volumetric constructions by the new term; consequently, she did consciously construct them as Suprematist. Rozanova truly did manage to create these works before the exhibition opened; two of them figure in the catalog under random “mysterious” titles

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(Automobile, Cyclist [Devil’s Panel]), and two others are concealed by the neutral designation “Still Life.” None of the Rozanova constructions has survived to the present. They were made hastily, in fact, inasmuch as the artist did not even have time to search for the necessary element, and the cobblestone contemplated for the Automobile design was hastily replaced by a brick. Having made her Suprematist reliefs, that is, having joined the group of innovators, as she saw them, Rozanova was quite vexed by the fact that in one of the friendliest reviews of “0.10” her name was not included in the list of Suprematists: “Under their pictures at the exhibition on the wall (but not in the catalog) they wrote ‘Suprematism,’ but I didn’t, which is why the fool Rostislavov did not include me in the group in his review.”41 Judging from the purely informational letter about the hand-drawn posters at “0.10,” the artist did not know what had necessitated their appearance and thought this was a previously contemplated decision, which proves yet again that she was not informed about the negotiations and scandals in the Moscow circle. However, it was not only the “fool” Rostislavov who did not include her in the group, despite her Suprematist reliefs. In her letter Rozanova responds even more harshly regarding the situation as a whole: “7) Now further: the whole of Suprematism is entirely my paste-ons, a combination of planes, lines, and discs (especially discs) and absolutely without the addition of real obj[ects] and after all this those swine are hiding my name.”42 In the context of the letter, “those swine” obviously referred to the five radicals, inasmuch as Rozanova’s name as a participant in the exhibition was not hidden from anyone but was not among the Suprematists. This is what wounded the creator of the Suprematist reliefs. After “Tramway V,” Rozanova and Malevich did not meet in person until December 1915, and they did not correspond, although, having managed to create abstract works and exhibit them at “0.10,” she was counting on the public establishment of her membership in the Suprematists’ group. The assertion that Rozanova “refused to join the Suprematists’ group”43 is untenable in the light of her offense at the critic and “those swine” for not including her in their ranks. Malevich’s pictures provoked an outburst of jealous feelings in Rozanova. Inasmuch as her paste-ons were nonobjective silhouette appliqués cut out of colored paper with scissors and placed on the page, the artist was inclined to consider Malevich’s new painting as derivative from her own discoveries. Let us

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cite once again her indignantly underlined words: “7) Now further: the whole of Suprematism is entirely my paste-ons.” [. . .] 8) Did you show Malevich my paste-ons and when exactly?” The circumstances and dates of Malevich’s possible familiarization with Rozanova’s works were set forth in detail in Chapter 1, which is based on historical realities and contemporaries’ letters synchronous to the events. However, ignorance of the real circumstances has not bothered Rozanova’s supporters, her biographer, or other scholars, who have tried at all costs to “dethrone” Malevich, to make these phrases fundamental in the fabrication of “accusations” against the Suprematist of directly borrowing the idea of nonobjectivity from Rozanova. According to Strigalev, in her letters to Kruchenykh she “uses extremely harsh expressions to assess the behavior of Puni, Malevich, and especially Boguslavskaia in the course of organizing the exhibition, and also—expressing her just indignation at the tacit use of her earlier plastic ideas by Malevich and the other first Suprematists.”44 The effort to introduce the notions and very definition of Malevich’s “use” of Rozanova’s “previous plastic ideas” began in the late 1910s, when a real battle unfolded over Rozanova’s legacy and the nonobjectivists Rodchenko and Stepanova invested titanic efforts into disengaging her art from Suprematism. That was when Malevich’s “theft” of her discoveries was proclaimed unambiguously for the first time: “What Malevich wanted to achieve, Rozanova already had, and he used her, as a painter, for his own philosophizing. [. . .] Malevich confuses the philosophy of the square with color in Suprematism and so now wants very much to pin Rozanova to the Suprematism of the square.”45 In their desire to de-Suprematize the Russian avant-garde, Stepanova and Rodchenko could go as far as they liked since they were Malevich’s contemporaries and opponents; for them the art of the deceased Rozanova was a springboard in their struggle against his authority for the assertion of their own. It is especially important to analyze what happened between December 1915 and January 1916. The materials that have survived—apart from the photographs—allow us to delineate what Rozanova called her “Suprematist reliefs” in December 1915. In the G. Costakis Collection, which has now become part of the Museum of the Russian Avant-garde in Saloniki, there is a page from a letter to Kruchenykh where the artist draws her works for “0.10” and gives a schematic translation of her volumetric constructions into planar Suprematism. On the recto and verso there are two compositions each; of them each upper one is a sketch for the relief recorded in the photographs of “0.10”

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in the press, and each lower one is known to us only in Rozanova’s letter (Figure 20). In total we see themes for the four Suprematist reliefs exhibited at “0.10,” as the artist herself wrote in her letter to Kruchenykh. For some reason this message did not engender trust in her biographer, who put only two in the catalog.46 In her sketches for Automobile and Cyclist (Devil’s Panel), Rozanova concentrated on static geometric elements and their coloring. However, both the sketches and the executed reliefs had discarded but nonetheless very tangible echoes and imprints of certain realities. The Rozanova volumetric constructions had an overall poetics connected with her own original nonobjective verse, where a conventional word, and sometimes an entire image, was frequently incrusted into trans-sense lines, which one would like to define as letter-sounds. The keen-eyed Matiushin picked up on this: “Rozanova in painting is a repetition of what has already been done, with marvelous technique; in sculpture, a carefree, daring bounce into space, with cheerful things for the younger Martians.”47 This last comparison was probably elicited by the sight of the brightly colored relief Cyclist (Devil’s Panel), where a ring and disk lowered onto a rod brought to mind the attributes of playing hoopla; the real rubber ball attached to the slanting panel in Automobile could also bring up associations with children’s games. The cobblestone that was supposed to be an appendage to Automobile’s geometric elements was replaced by a brick, as has already been said. By its very nature a cobblestone is not of human making, it is an a-object, a natural stone, unlike a brick, a practical product of technical progress. Judging from the ease of substitution of one for the other, this aspect did not attract Rozanova’s attention in the least. She wound the brick-colored, that is, reddish-brown, bar crosswise with rope and hung it from her Suprematist relief, weighing its nonobjectiveness down with a heavy collage object-“pendulum.” The primary role in Rozanova’s eloquent volumetric constructions was undoubtedly played by the plastic qualities of the juxtaposed elements, their texture, material flesh, and brilliance, which is obvious from the artist’s detailed descriptions of her projects. Therefore, her collage reliefs with their incorporated “ready-mades”—brick, rope, ball—were in their artistic conception entirely different from the neighboring exhibits by Ivan Puni and Ksenia Boguslavskaia, where minimalist abstract forms were harnessed to purely domestic objects, ready-mades as such, to create the effect of estrangement.

Figure 20. Letter from O. Rozanova to A. Kruchenykh with drawings for Suprematist reliefs, created for the exhibition “0.10” (recto and verso). Greek Ministry of Culture, State Museum of Contemporary Art—Thessaloniki, Costakis Collection.

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The Rozanova “panels” differed significantly from Tatlin’s volumetric creations because their component elements were subject to arbitrary artistic transformation with paint, saturation with artificial color, which cardinally contradicted the Tatlin concept of natural textures and natural materials. Let us return to Rozanova’s other projects mentioned in her letter to Kruchenykh. On the recto side of the page of drawings, she separates the upper composition with a line under the title, “Automobile,” and provides an explanation for her unnamed lower composition: “On a black (square) background a white circle a slit cut in a circle and a blue upright column pasted on.”48 In the photo of the Malevich exhibit at “0.10,” one of his pictures, now lost, clearly involved a coupling of volumetric painting cubes with a flat dynamic rectangle. In her sketch, Rozanova seems to pick up on this idea, translating the three-dimensional elements drawn by Malevich into the real volume of an “upright column” jutting into the planar “black square” and “white circle.” An important note was added to this side of the page: “(Malevich liked these 2 things a lot and he asked me for them for his room).” The sentence is first of all an irrefutable argument for identifying the sheet as the two pages from Rozanova’s letter informing Kruchenykh about her exhibits at “0.10”; and second, it attests yet again to the fact that all the drawings were sketches for the four Suprematist reliefs executed in material. Suprematism’s founder greeted two of them with enthusiasm and wanted to exhibit them with his own pictures. The sketch for the next unnamed Suprematist work by Rozanova at “0.10” is drawn under the upper sketch of the relief Cyclist (Devil’s Panel). The drawing of the relief is surrounded along its perimeter by labels: “painting top,” “painting bottom,” “white disk in profile,” “blue plate on rod,” “wood painted green” (the words refer to the entire work), “wood paint[ed] black” (referring to the added rectangle), and “orange plate on rod.” The Rozanova sketches and explanations taken as a whole look like a lexical study of a foreign language with a translation of concepts into one’s native tongue. The artist transposes Malevich’s plastic idioms specifically, accentuating, in essence, only outward forms: noteworthy is her indifference to the terminological definition of works—she uses both “relief” and “picture.” The nerve of her art, the art of an incomparable colorist, comes through only in her description of color and texture combinations—painted and unpainted wood, a piece of tin, contrasting green, orange, blue, white, and black.

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Vladimir Tatlin’s “Store” Exhibition The Suprematists, a New Artistic Group Five painters declared themselves to be a new artistic group, advancing under the flag of Suprematism, in December 1915, at “0.10.” The next milestone in the society’s development was a “public popular science lecture” in the last week of the exhibition’s run. On January 12, 1916, Malevich gave his lecture and Ksenia Boguslavskaia delivered a lecture by her husband, Ivan Puni, in his presence. The lectures shared a title, “Cubism, Futurism, and Suprematism,” and a subtitle, “On the Last Futurist Painting Exhibition ‘0.10.’” Malevich also held an experimental life-drawing session based on the principle of Cubo-Futurism; this public act was subsequently interpreted and added to his arsenal of educational-pedagogical methods. One of the evening’s posters listed a detailed program for each lecture. The list of points in Malevich’s speech allows us to identify the text, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism,” as a combination of his booklet From Cubism to Suprematism and his January lecture. The artist worked on the new text in the first half of 1916. Anticipating the chronology of our exposition, let us note that From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism was published in Moscow in October 1916.

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In 1915, Rozanova made six spatial-volumetric works. Two, as has already been said, were presented at the “Exhibition of Pictures of Left-Wing Trends,” and four at “0.10.” After creating her Suprematist reliefs for “0.10,” Rozanova never again returned to this genre. The variegated constructions made of geometrically regular elements following the same recipe remained isolated in her art, without conclusions or development; like any outwardly imposed solution, they were extraneous to her art. For Malevich, the combination of planar and volumetric elements later served as the impulse for the appearance of spatial-volumetric Suprematism and its subsequent realization in architectonics. He knew how to draw conclusions from his discoveries because they were the result of his own experienced and organic development. Olga Rozanova’s true Suprematism would have nothing in common with the artist’s “Suprematist reliefs” at “0.10,” with their cursory similarity to Malevich’s version of geometric nonobjectivity.

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On the cover, it said, “third edition,” that is, the booklet was supposedly the third edition of Malevich’s manifesto, From Cubism to Suprematism; the second edition consisted of the unsold copies of a December 1915 book that the publisher, following the universal practice of those years, had rebound in a new cover and issued as a reprinting, giving it the date 1916. “Third edition” was probably a polite gesture toward Matiushin, since the booklet, which was different in title and size, came out in Moscow. In the closing paragraphs, a new list of innovators and a declaration were printed with emphasis: “The group of Suprematists—K. Malevich, I. Puni, M. Menkov, I. Kliun, K. Boguslavskaia, and Rozanova—have waged a struggle for the liberation of things from the obligations of art.” Justice had triumphed for Rozanova, for there were now six Suprematists. Back in Petrograd the “0.10” participants were discussing a future exhibition in Moscow; Rozanova’s fragmentary message from her letter with the lost beginning does not permit us to outline this project in full: “ . . . they want to suggest to Popova, Udaltsova, and Pestel that they participate as exhibitors. But [they say] that so far the makeup of the Moscow exhibition has not been finally decided, that a lot depends on the space, and if the space is very small, the exhibition will be made up of only Suprematists.”49 In the literature, a poorly supported opinion has coalesced to the effect that Rozanova’s letter was talking about Tatlin’s future exhibition “Store,” although from the context it is clear that the exhibition was supposed to be Suprematist. This was another Malevich project; with Puni’s help he was counting on presenting the Suprematists to the Moscow public and suggesting to the Cubists that they “participate as exhibitors,” but if they rented a “very small space” he intended to present only the radicals.50 After he returned to Moscow, just before February 1916, Malevich plunged head first into propagandizing Suprematism. Exhibitions remained the new art’s most effective instrument of public assertion. The Moscow group, led this time by Vladimir Tatlin, was preparing an exhibition of left-wing artists. Space had been rented for it in a vacant store on Petrovka, so curator Tatlin, without further ado, called it “Store.” Invited to exhibit in “Store,” besides the participants in “Tramway V” and “0.10,” were new faces: Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891–1956), Valentin Yustitsky (1892–1951), Sofia Dymshits-Tolstaia, as well as the Petrograder Lev Bruni. Puni and Boguslavskaia were ignored. The creator of the counter-reliefs viewed “Store” as a manifestation of Tatlinism and a response-rebuff to his hated opponent Malevich. The choice of tactic was significant. The works allowed into “Store” were supposed to

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In her memoirs, speaking about the spring 1916 exhibition, Nadezhda Udaltsova remarked seemingly in passing, “Yes, Malevich and Kliun exhibited as well, but by agreement, not Suprematism.”55 The euphemism “by agreement”—the artist’s My Reminiscences (Moi vospominaniia) were, after all, written in the early 1930s—masks the direct prohibition that, as Varvara Stepanova’s notes imply, “painting professional”

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demonstrate, first, that despite the appearance of the “last Futurists,” Cubism and Futurism were alive, effective, and, most important, crowned by the counter-reliefs, and, second, that Suprematism was a chance and short-lived episode not supported by virtually anyone and already lost in the abyss of time. Tatlin’s real actions and behavior, as recorded in contemporaries’ reminiscences, somewhat shake our belief in the sincerity of his declarations about his distaste for leading or organizing supporters; that his personality did not lend itself very well to realizing his hidden desires is another matter. The master saw the group of supporters invited to “Store” as the core of a community. Tatlin’s plan did eventually come to pass and his associates did in fact close ranks as a group under his leadership. This fact was well known in the art world. In August 1916 Rozanova informed Kruchenykh, “Kliunkov writes that the Tatlin group has been organized,”51 and in her next letter she names one of its members: “I recently received an exceedingly strange letter from Kliunkov. Flattering and alarming. They’re afraid that the group of Bruni, Tatlin, and the others will emerge as more important than the Suprematist group in the scale and significance of their success with the public.”52 Tatlin enrolled in this group the “Store” exhibitors loyal to him, but in fall 1916 the Moscow women Cubists evidently did not seem very loyal, and he had come into conflict with Liubov Popova back in the spring. In her memoirs Udaltsova commented, “In the fall [of 1916] Tatlin disbanded the group. This term made us very angry.”53 Further facts imply that the creator of the counter-reliefs “disbanded” only the Moscow participants, whereas the Petrograd artists continued to be numbered in the “Store” group. In the first half of April 1917, in the course of a power struggle in the arts, the Bloc of Left-wing Artists was organized in Petrograd. Opposite the last names on the list of its fifty-five members are the associations to which each participant belonged. Lev Bruni, Artur Lurie (1892–1966), Petr Miturich, Sofia Tolstaia [Dymshits-Tolstaia], Vladimir Tatlin, and N. P. Yasinsky declared that they belonged to the “Store” group.54 Tatlin was the sole artist with a Moscow address on the whole list; the “Store” group did not have the right to exist without its leader.

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Udaltsova not only supported but even initiated: “At ‘Store,’ Malevich did not have Suprematist things; it turned out that this was thanks to Udaltsova, who insisted that Malevich not exhibit Suprematism at ‘Store.’”56 The organizer was grateful to his colleague for her solidarity: “Tatlin, as organizer of the exhibition, would not let Malevich exhibit Suprematist compositions.”57 In this context, the latitude and tolerance of Malevich the curator, who made his own exhibitions a truly representative show of radical art, stand out in even higher relief. Tatlin’s and Udaltsova’s repressive action was fully implemented. At “Store,” Malevich and Kliun presented Cubo-Futurist compositions already familiar to the public and later, hoping to draw attention to the situation, announced they were removing them. In a letter to Kruchenykh, Malevich remarked, “I removed my pictures from the exhibition,”58 and Udaltsova recalled, “Malevich and Kliun [. . .] hoping to undermine the exhibition, removed their things. We brought in our own, and no one noticed their absence.”59 However, Malevich’s and Kliun’s pictures were shown to the public at the vernissage, to judge from the response in the press. Kliun exhibited seven works, among them the same well-worn exhibits: he showed Running Landscape for the fourth time, Ozonator for the third, and Gramophone and Arithmometer for the second each. Malevich has four works in the catalog united by curly brackets and a shared vertical heading: “Alogism of forms. 1913.” These are the famous Englishman in Moscow and Aviator and the now unknown Chess Player; also brought into the fold was Cow and Violin. Six other unnamed compositions are grouped under the single date “1914.” Virtually all of them were familiar to the critics and his colleagues both. Actually, Tatlin himself, as well as Udaltsova and the other participants, were also showing many of their works for by no means the first or even the second time. “Store” did not just fail to compare with “0.10” in its effect but also faced reproaches for stagnation even in the official press: “Unusually conservative in essence is [. . .] ‘Store,’ organized by the Moscow Futurists. There is no movement here, no change. It’s all the same ‘ozonators,’ ‘gramophones’ [Kliun], simple reliefs [Tatlin, Pestel], triplanar [Bruni] and glass [Dymshits-Tolstaia], counter-reliefs [Tatlin], ‘alogism of forms’ [Malevich], and so on.”60 For the reviewer, who obviously followed left-wing art exhibits, the plastic innovation of the reliefs and counter-reliefs was an achievement of years past,

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Malevich’s Performance at “Store” “Store” was Aleksandr Rodchenko’s first Futurist exhibition; he underwent his baptism by fire here and subsequently enthusiastically carried on Tatlin’s cause to de-Suprematize the Russian avant-garde. The notes of his wife, Varvara Stepanova, recorded both Udaltsova’s stories and her own impressions of the artistic couple: “Malevich’s appearance at ‘Store.’ . . . He had ‘0.10’ drawn on his forehead, and pasted on his back was a piece of paper with the proclamation— . . . ‘I am the apostle’ . . . .” An editorial comment at this point in Stepanova’s published works states that she did not write down the actual contents of this poster.61 In this way Malevich twisted himself out (to use his word) of the Tatlin circle’s draconian conditions. The artist, who in fall 1915 had had his colleagues ban the name of his works and in spring 1916 feel that they could ban the showing of the works themselves, transformed “Store” into an arena for a shocking performance. (As we see, the practice of banning and removing unsuitable pictures, of which historians everywhere accuse the totalitarian Soviet regime, was conceived much earlier and among the artists themselves.) The Suprematist walked around at the vernissage with the numbers on his forehead and the hand-drawn poster with his manifesto attached to his back. The painting of his forehead went back to the “body art” long practiced by left-wing artists; in 1912–13 face painting by radical artists was one of the hottest topics of discussion in the press. Photos of the “tattooed” faces of Larionov, Goncharova, Ilia Zdanevich (1894–1975), David Burliuk, Vasily Kamensky, Mikhail Le Dantiu (1891–1917), and others acquired broad fame; in 1913 the journal Argus published an essay, “Why We Paint Ourselves: The Futurists’ Manifesto,” signed by Mikhail Larionov and Ilia Zdanevich.62 Eyewitnesses disagree on the number that adorned his brow. Malevich himself spoke of zero: “The Futur[ist] paint[ing] exhibit[ion] opened, I wrote

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and he saw the works of the Tatlin circle as repetitive variations on the leader’s already well-known devices. Vladimir Tatlin’s strategy and tactics had been aimed at abolishing Suprematism and at establishing Cubo-Futurism as the principal and sole movement, the mainstream, crowned by his counter-reliefs. They proved to be on the wane, however, inasmuch as the repeated display of well-known CuboFuturist works and counter-reliefs seemed to reinforce the opinion about the exhaustion of the lightweight “cheap posturing” of the left-wing artists, who had wound up at just the impasse the critics had so desired.

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aphorisms, ‘Battle with Kabardinians’ appeared. Smashed the Futurists’ minds, took my pictures from the exhibit. Zero on my forehead, conversation in Moscow, press beaten into fissures.”63 Stepanova wrote the number “0.10,” but the newspaper review mentioned the number “0.1” (see below). In any event, it is clear that the number Malevich wrote on his forehead combined a zero and a one, which goes to prove yet again that in the name of the “0.10” exhibition this pair of numbers did not mean “the ten innovators’ move beyond the Zero of forms.” In the FKhCh archive there is a page (26.5 × 15.1 cm) at the bottom of which is a fragmentary drawing and whose entire margin is given over to a provocative phrase executed in capital letters: “I the Apostle of New Concepts in Art and the SURGEON OF REASON sat on the throne of pride in art and declare the ACADEMY a stable of Philistines” (Figure 21). The first publication of this composition, in Legacy Regained: Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-garde, cites Aleksey Kruchenykh (text) and Olga Rozanova (drawings) as its authors; the original author is also identified: “Kruchenykh would seem to be quoting Malevich.”64 In the light of historical realities, the attribution of the work as the joint creation of Kruchenykh and Rozanova has shown itself to be erroneous. I have amassed a great deal of evidence in favor of Malevich’s sole authorship, but the discovery of a newspaper review of the “Store” exhibition has rendered other evidence superfluous: “Written on one of the pictures that is decorated with a wooden spoon: ‘I, the apostle of new concepts in art and the surgeon of reason, have sat on the throne of pride in art and declare the academy a stable of Philistines.’ The public reads this illiterate announcement indifferently and looks indifferently at the creator of the picture, who has decorated his brow with ‘0.1.’”65 Eyewitnesses’ contradictory reports about the location of the poster with the manifesto lead us to believe that first Malevich walked around with it on his back, as Stepanova asserted and Kliun confirmed in his memoirs: “I remember at the exhibition’s opening Malevich pinned a banner headline to his back that advertised our works and walked around the exhibition with it like that.”66 Later, more than likely, the artist hung the poster on the wall with his pictures, as at “0.10,” inasmuch as Stepanova concluded her paragraph with this report: “Tatlin is ejecting Malevich from the exhibition over his paste-ons and his propaganda for Suprematism.”67 Defunct Fevralism was reflecting on Malevich’s performance; the picture with the attached spoon was obviously Composition with Mona Lisa, hidden among the six unnamed exhibits in the catalog.

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Figure 21. Kazimir Malevich. “I the Apostle of New Concepts in Art. . .” March, 1916. Pencil, charcoal, gouache on paper. 26.5 × 15.1 cm. Courtesy The Cultural Centre “Khardjiev-Chaga Foundation”/Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Cobbling together participants’ testimonies, we arrive at the following picture. There were pictures by Malevich and Kliun at the “Store” vernissage, as noted in the reviews; later Malevich and his colleague were ejected by Tatlin—at which point Udaltsova and others had to bring in additional exhibits in order to cover up the “holes” on the walls. So it was not that “Malevich and Kliun removed their compositions” but that Tatlin and Udaltsova “ejected from the exhibition” Malevich for his propaganda for Suprematism, which was alien to Tatlin personally. Thus, the hand-drawn banner from Khardzhiev’s former collection is the very same artifact that had been created by Malevich for his provocative performance at Tatlin’s “Store.” Exhibited at the vernissage was his conceptual and

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at the same time living quotation from “0.10,” which both his colleagues and his opponents correctly perceived as “propaganda for Suprematism.” Malevich had achieved his goal. The “Battle with the Kabardinians” did take place, and he withdrew in triumph from the field of battle.

“I the Apostle of New Concepts in Art . . .” These words reflected the powerful surge that had borne along Malevich since spring 1915. Suprematism kept yielding more and more new revelations; the artist’s eyes were being opened to the great harmony of the cosmos, the Universe, in nonobjective compositions. Khlebnikov’s calculations only added to his confidence as to the correctness of his path and orientation: “Khleb[nikov] came to see me, took a few drawings for measuring their ratios, and found the number 317 and I think 365, I think those are the numbers on which he is founding his laws of the different causes,” the Suprematist informed Matiushin on April 4, 1916.68 The brilliant Budetlyane poet developed his observations of Malevich’s “shadow drawings” in an essay, “Head of the Universe: Time and Space” (Golova Vselennoi: Vremia i prostranstvo),69 which was supposed to come out in 1919 in the abortive Arts International (Internatsional iskusstv). As he approached his fortieth birthday, the artist felt himself to be a teacher aware of the truth and prepared to lead the younger generation. This selfimage was undoubtedly facilitated by the fact that Malevich was in fact much older than the other members of the Suprematist group; the age difference put them in a different generation.70 The hope he put in youth—in those who were young not in age but in their attitude toward the world—was fed by many participants in the artistic process of the early twentieth century. The name “Union of Youth,” chosen by Russian innovators, was far from coincidental. The concept of “youth” became a kind of cultural-social fetish. For a-literate Malevich, writing word-concepts with a capital letter was standard, but the word “Youth” was written histrionically counter to the rules of even the practical and educated merchant-collector Levky Ivanovich Zheverzheev (1881–1942), one of the union’s organizers.71 Hope in youth becomes a constant refrain of Malevich’s writing: “I may write a few letters to friends and Youth in general. [. . .] Disgust and desolation. But amidst this a large flame has starting burning in me, [. . .] which I want to use to light the entire awareness of the authorities among Youth since I see in their faces their authorities’ power to continue their life.”72 130

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By making sense of Suprematism, “bookless” Malevich tapped into traditions that he had never worked through and never could have worked through at the level of conscious study due to his lack of education, peculiarities of thinking, and dearth of academic habits. Plato’s postulate, “imitative art is far from reality,”73 was fundamental to Malevich’s struggle with the “objective world,” although the Russian battler with objective reality had no firsthand knowledge of the ancient Greek philosopher. The truth was revealed to Malevich the metaphysician and spontaneous neo-Platonist through revelation, and this truth authorized him to advocate as a missionary and to unite adepts. The Russian avant-gardist was a true son of his era and to the end of his life believed in the prophetic significance of the discoveries that initially appeared to him in painting and later grew into a philosophy. The artist was convinced of the inevitability of the world’s renewal through Suprematism. He had been called upon to bring this belief to humanity. The texts that Malevich could not help but write are filled with prophetic pathos that fuse biblical style and Old and New Testament images with Futurist rhetoric. The image of a purifying flame in which the old is supposed to burn up and a new world to be born was a constant in the texts of his prophetic stage; Malevich based himself intuitively on centuries-old archetypes of human civilization. In Eastern and Western cultures, as we know, the symbolic interpretation of the flame possesses similar features, attesting to their indisputable commonality. Thus, fire plays the role of the world’s first principle in Heraclitus; the descent of fire from the heavens in order to save the world is one of the basic themes of the teachings and philosophy of ancient Persia; the tongues of flame over the apostles’ heads in the Christian iconography of the “Descent of the Holy Spirit” attest to the invisible descent to them of a higher principle. The examples could go on and on. The fire of renewal consumes Malevich: “And I will shout to Suprematists to take the flame and light a fire at every corner. So that Youth can reveal their life’s face.”74 Wielding power over the artist along with the heroic flame and embodied dynamic is the archetype of the silent, static “wilderness” as a symbol of the omnigenerative principle. In prophesying about the “wilderness of colors” and the “wilderness of the Word,” he urges, “And so we are on our way to the new Throne of the Wilderness, which is protected by the guardians of darkness.”75 The tectonic shifts in art, science, and social life—the historic period of change in civilization—implacably shaped talented people’s worldview. The magnificent and tragic images of the eternal Book served as a buttress for them all, some as a promise, some as a balm for the pain. The former found in the

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Old and New Testaments heartening confirmations of the just inevitability of revolutionary shifts, inasmuch as they contained the renewal of life; the latter, who saw in the changes only a curse and catastrophe, gained support in the no less just words of condemnation of destruction ruinous to the usual order of things.

Response to Alexandre Benois Alexandre Benois (1870–1960), the brilliant critic and art historian, echoed the like-minded writer Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941), who branded leftwing artists’ life work as the “steps of the coming Boor.”76 In his article “On the Last Futurist Painting Exhibition,” published in the Petrograd newspaper Speech, Benois denounced Suprematism with biblical horror.77 For many years, both his article and Merezhkovsky’s statements would be for Malevich the quintessence of outdated views on art. The talented word of the World of Art movement’s eminent arbiter of artistic taste carried conviction not only for his opponents but also for people whose opinion Malevich valued: “Due to circumst[ances] that have come about in the art World in Moscow, I will have to write Benois a letter, I’ll send you a draft. I’ll write to him personally,” he told Matiushin.78 The last sentence implies that the artist had originally written a personal letter to Benois, although later, as is obvious from the postscript to the actual letter, he attempted but failed to make it public: “PS. In view of the fact that the doors [to] the press are shut for us, I am writing to you personally.”79 It is in this text that several of Malevich’s key points are given with formulaic precision. In it he called Black Square “the icon of my era, naked without a frame,” and himself a stage in the worldwide development of art. Malevich wrote a letter to Alexandre Benois in May 1916, five months after the latter’s review appeared (January 9, 1916). The reasons for such a belated reply were rooted in the circumstances of the Suprematist’s life. Here we return yet again to the role of N. M. Davydova in Malevich’s life. Thanks to Natalia Mikhailovna, by summer 1916 the Suprematist had new opportunities. Verbovka’s owner had put her business on a solid capitalist footing. She ordered and paid for designs for embroidery, appliqué, and printed cloth that were then executed by craftswomen at Verbovka.80 Because of this, Malevich now had at least some ground under his feet; actually, this financial prosperity was very relative by comparison with the indigence in which the great artist lived his entire life.

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A few things I didn’t get to explain to you and that it would take a long time to write have suddenly received new illumination for me. [. . .] There is this fellow Manevich [Aksenov does not quite remember Malevich’s name, but this is who he means, not the artist Abram Manevich (1881–1942)]. Not much of a draftsman but not bad colorist, and lately he has learned even to blow his nose in his hand (en matière de peinture ça va de soi [in painting, it goes without saying]). Send me his idiotic booklet Suprematism [Malevich’s first booklet; Aksenov accurately stresses the key word]. Fix up this someone with someone to be milked. Toss this beast into our turbine and maybe something will pop out. He can scribble something or other about the exhibitions (without fee, for now), we’ll correct his grammar and it will be excellent, tell him just to stick it to the Burliuks, he can do so even without any particular connection to the rest of his exposition.82

In his next letter, dated May 25, 1916, now not garbling Malevich’s name but continuing to have only a vague idea of who he is talking about, Aksenov continues to hold forth: Now about Malevich. [. . .] Standing behind him will be not Zheverzheev (who is his?) but a certain Nat[alia] Mikh[ailovna] Davydova (beginning with this letter communicated absolutely confidentially), a very rich lady, more tightfisted than she is rich, but even more conceited and ambitious. She is (well) over forty. With the new season she has begun to take painting lessons from Malevich, I just don’t know whether he knows this. This is being done, of course, not because the lady is inclined to believe in her painting abilities (which she once had), or because she is thinking of sleeping with Malevich (actually, what stripe is he? isn’t he a Jew? let me know, please)—she isn’t interested in that—the reason is her desire to occupy a dominant position in young painting (everything, of course, has an erotic underpinning, as always with women, but that isn’t important for now). After the first attempts the essential collaboration

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This opinion concerning the pragmatic material support rendered Malevich by Davydova finds indirect confirmation in letters from Ivan Aleksandrovich Aksenov (1884–1935) dated May 1916. In spring 1916 Aksenov, a writer of broad profile—dramatist, critic, poet— joined the Centrifuge poets’ association, which also published books. He possessed an outstanding organizational grasp and quickly became the association’s leader.81 In a letter dated May 12, 1916, Aksenov, who had been drafted into the army, informed his colleague, the poet Sergei Bobrov:

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of the press will become clear to her, so as to support herself and her people through reproductions and writing. [. . .] Malevich should play the part of a linking pretense. He has to be tamed and the notion created for him about the possibility of using C[entri]f[uge] for himself as a tribune and framework. For now he can be offered an account of last season’s exhibitions. We will look it over and correct his grammar. [. . .] If he can arrange for a color engraving on linoleum (or wood, but then only on woodblock), have him do it.83

Let us extract the rational kernel from Aksenov’s insinuations, leaving the overly free tone and smug ignorance of the affairs of “Manevich-Malevich” on his professional conscience even though he had had been involved in contemporary art issues since the early 1910s. First, the letter confirms yet again that all participants in the artistic processes shared a belief in the necessity of a print organ as a “tribune and framework.” Second, Malevich was the main figure among the left-wing artists for Davydova. Third, the wealthy lady was prepared to provide financial assistance for the Suprematist’s initiatives. Let us express cautious confidence that the information Aksenov received corresponded to reality. The first collection of his poems, Invalid Grounds (Neuvazhitel’nye osnovaniia), which appeared in Moscow in 1916, was adorned not only with two etchings by Alexandra Exter but also by the author’s dedication to her. In that same 1916, Exter was preparing for the Centrifuge publishing house an album of her gouaches, Rupture, Movement, Weight (Razryv, Dvizhenie, Ves), which was never published due to monetary difficulties. Exter also designed Aksenov’s book Picasso and His Environs (Pikasso i okrestnosti), which was published by Centrifuge the next year, in 1917. The artist and the writer were connected by ties of both business and friendship. Apparently, Aksenov got the confidential information about Davydova’s intentions at first hand, from Exter, Natalia Mikhailovna’s close friend. However, one should not doubt that the writer, in accordance with his own nature, drew his own conclusions from the private information entrusted to him. Digressing from our book’s theme, let us add that literally a week or two later, in June 1916, the enterprising Aksenov was able to “find the beast” for “our turbine” and “fix up this someone with someone to be milked.” The “beast” was Samuil Matveevich Vermel (1889–1972), publisher of the miscellanies Springtime Counteragency of the Muses (Vesennee kontragenstvo muz) (Moscow, 1915) and Moscow Masters (Moskovskie mastera) (Moscow, 1916), who then financed several issues of Centrifuge.

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Aksenov’s cynical instructions imply the following not uninteresting conclusion. Exter’s confidant received information about the alliance between Malevich and Davydova in spring 1916, in May; as has already been said, at this time the Suprematist found a need to respond to Alexandre Benois’s January review due to “current circumstances in the art world in Moscow.” Malevich’s now famous letter of May 1916, more than likely was inspired by the persistent need to give an all-out reproof, that is, to neutralize the devastating critique of Benois, the unquestioned authority for N. M. Davydova’s circle (Karol Szymanowski was not taken seriously in this circle due to his “modernism,” to say nothing of Malevich).84 What draws our attention in Aksenov’s letter is what he says about how Davydova was planning to take painting lessons from Malevich. There is no reliable information about this, but the artist himself later remarked “that he showed her [Rozanova] and Davydova how to make Suprematist ornaments.”85 Some of Davydova’s works, an idea of which we can get from photographs, attest to her shift to “Suprematist ornaments,” which took place between the first and second Verbovka exhibitions. Davydova may well have taken lessons from Malevich, as she had planned in spring 1916. Davydova’s nonobjective designs gave Malevich grounds for including her in fall 1916 among the Suprematists; we can say with a certain degree of probability that the plan for the Supremus journal rested largely on Malevich’s confidence in Natalia Mikhailovna’s financial assistance.

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CHAPTER 4

•

1916: Under the Sign of Supremus The Supremus Cycle Color as such was central for Malevich between 1915 and 1918. He originally contemplated Suprematism in painting as the dominance of color’s energetic essence consolidated into various geometric shapes. According to this logic, nonobjective pictures were immediately transformed into non-genre ones as well, acquiring, to use their creator’s terminology, the status of color-painting, that is, painting as such. In the art of the European revolutionary modernists the battle against traditions unfolded in the plane and in landscapes, portraits, genre scenes, thematic pictures with allegorical and symbolical subtexts, and, primarily, still lifes; still life–ization, as we know was one of the most characteristic features of early twentieth-century European painting. As has already been said, Larionov’s Rayonnism was indissolubly linked with traditional genres; Kandinsky’s biomorphic “Compositions” and “Improvisations” pos136

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sessed remote but nonetheless intensely felt features of expressive landscapes of “the spiritual in art”; by their own definition, the Futurists strove to create pictures of “the state of the soul.” The titans of modernism remained loyal to genres to the end, even if they synthesized them in a single picture. The only things competing on the level of Malevich’s non-genreness and nonobjectivity were Piet Mondrian’s abstract “gratings,” which came later; however, as has already been said, De Stijl’s founder arrived at his horizontal-vertical and inviolably planar constructions in an evolutionary way, by generalizing and abstracting the natural motifs of branching trees and formalizing the harmony of antiquity’s post-and-lintel architectural design. Malevich’s canvases are called compositions, even though during Suprematism’s heroic era artist did not use any such definition. We have already spoken of Malevich’s unexampled sensitivity to the connection between the signified and the signifier: he had always been looking for a new word for the new phenomenon. For him, this word was “Supremus.” Unlike “Suprematism,” the name of the new trend laying claim to inclusion among influential “isms,” the word “Supremus,” in both its Latin and Cyrillic forms, both capitalized and lowercase, became an umbrella definition for the avant-gardist’s painting, drawing, theoretical interpretation, and organizational activity between 1916 and 1918. The Latin word “Supremus” turns up for the first time in a letter to Matiushin dated April 4, 1916.1 Before this, in the documents that have survived, Malevich refers to the principal cause of his life by the Russified words suprematizm, suprematiia, and suprema. In one letter from the “0.10” era, he refers to his own texts in general as “operum meum.”2 The artist saw an extra-ordinary version of Latin, which had been the elevated language of sacred spheres for centuries, as appropriate to his discovery’s greatness. For the totality of his nonobjective works the ethnic Pole chose the loftily solemn “Supremus”: “I am working unstintingly on my ‘Supremus’” (April 4, 1916). In fall 1917 he repeated this definition: “my supremus is coming along, both the journal and the painting.”3 There were a few “concentrics” in this new form of creative activity; Malevich gave these pictures and drawing-designs the overall name “Supremus” and numbers attesting to their specific logic and the connections within the whole. While lacking any mathematical education, unlike Velimir Khlebnikov, Malevich did have an ineradicable attraction to the numeric—scientific!— revelation of semantic correlations. Irrationalist/positivist Malevich held basic science in high esteem, if we can allow ourselves this oxymoron.

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For him, the fungible development of artistic or philosophic ideas was constitutional. Profound meaning, the essence of his many graphic, painting, volumetric-plastic, and verbal inventions, was duplicated each time in another aspect or altered perspective, and sometimes simply expressed in other words, as Malevich admitted: “The second part of my discussion on nonobjectivity will have as its theme the same issue, perhaps conveyed in different words. [. . .]”4 In plasticity, in breaking up and harnessing regular geometric elements in a balanced way, he “talked around” one and the same artistic-philosophical “theme”: nonobjectivity. In his theoretical work, Malevich marked his texts with unusual headings, fractions that had the unit as the numerator and, as the denominator, numbers from 40 to 49 (treatises 1/40, 1/41, 1/42, 1/45– 1/49).5 The treatises with fractions were both independent compositions and unique volumetric “denominators” subordinate to the dominant central treatise, the “numerator,” his huge, fundamental philosophical text, Suprematism: The World as Nonobjectivity, or Eternal Rest, along with which he also invented the unique verbal “philosophical architecton.”6 The numerical marking reinforced the fungible development of his concepts. The numerical sequence “scientifically” argued for the presence of connections that the artist considered unconditional, “the clarity of the definite Law,” which dictated the harmony of the whole, the parts of which were numbered elements.7 At the peak of development for his painterly Suprematism, Malevich drew a magnificent series of “Supremuses”; the numbers that go with the pictures force us to acknowledge their specific cycle. In fact, there are a few drawings in the artist’s legacy whose signatures have added to them the word “Supremus” and numbers. The notion that the artist did not transfer of these titles to the canvases, even those of similar composition, does not seem legitimate. Malevich liked to draw titles, explanations, and numbers on the back of canvases; the absence of this kind of accompaniment means that he had his own reasons for refraining.8 Below we will discuss the pictures properly called “Supremus” and numbered by the painter himself; the drawings under the analogous Latin name with numerical designations will be referenced solely for support. The logic of assigning numbers and the resultant plastic-semantic correlation between the works has yet to be subjected to more than hypothetical and partial interpretation, inasmuch as there are relatively few numbered Supremuses in the artist’s legacy, scarcely ten; on the other hand, they are widely dispersed over the positive integers.

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Supremus No. 51 As was said above, the sole more or less intact sequence of Supremuses is formed by the surviving canvases numbered 50, 55, 56, 57, and 58; the details are cited in the notes.12 However, none of these canvases had such impressive lines devoted to them as did Supremus No. 51, lines Malevich wrote while he was working on it in April 1916.13 His words about the picture, dictated by his great excitement, speak yet again to his sacred “awe,” the mystical ecstasy that frequently overcame the

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The largest group of numbered Supremuses is in the fifties (nos. 50, 55– 58), whereas before and after there are isolated examples, and then only in his graphics. The drawing marked Supremus No. 67 was embodied in a painting with a similar composition outside the integral organic life of painterly Suprematism in the biography of the artist himself, which is limited to 1915–18/19; in the post-Suprematist 1928–29 season, Malevich executed a painting that he himself did not feel necessary to call “Supremus No. 67.”9 As we know, the Russian avant-gardist’s main primary forms have numbers. Black Square was always first, and number two was sometimes Black Cross and sometimes Black Circle, and when they changed places, their numbers changed accordingly; one of the monofigures became second and the other third. Thus, the triad of pictures painted for the 1924 Venice Bienniale that later went into the Russian Museum have on their reverse sides, among other inscriptions, these clarifications by the artist: “K. Malevich Square No. 1”; on Black Cross, “K. Malevich No. 2”; on Black Circle, “No. 3 Circle.”10 In World as Nonobjectivity, published by the Bauhaus in 1927, Malevich used pencil drawings in part two, “Suprematism,” to illustrate his points. Here the first illustration is Black Square, with the caption, “Basic Suprematist element. Square. 1913,” then Black Circle with the caption “Basic Suprematist element. First after the square, from which the Suprematist forms derive. 1913”; this is followed by Black Cross with the caption “Third basic Suprematist element. 1913.”11 The appearance of this numerical sequence, with the exception of Black Square, cannot be dated strictly; at “0.10,” as has already been said, the three primary forms were interspersed with other pictures. And although the artist’s definition of “Supremus” in connection with the monofigures’ titles has yet to be encountered anywhere, there is no doubt that the count began with these, Suprematism’s basic prototypes.

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artist while he was creating his nonobjective compositions. Even here, the upheaval experienced at the birth of Black Square took precedence, but Supremus No. 51 also arose before the artist as “a kind of table from which one could read the hidden mysteries for our I.”14 Even more amazing, the fate of Supremus No. 51, so valued by Malevich, is shrouded in obscurity; in addition, there are varying opinions on what this work looked like. On the basis of the letter to Matiushin and an analysis of the drawings and photos of exhibitions during his lifetime, as well as of the nature of the connections between the painterly Supremuses, arguments will be advanced below in favor of identifying Supremus No. 51 with a picture known only from a photograph. First, let us turn to the artist’s characterization of Supremus No. 51: “Right now I am drawing Supremus No. 51, in which I am discovering very complicated combinations, I am overwhelmed by awe, I feel the touch of the cosmos [. . .] the main thing [. . .], I am discovering something new in the picture, the law of the birth of forms as a function [of] their distance.”15 Malevich talks about “shapes’ mutual attraction, th[us] in my picture No. 51 the law of construction emerges clearly” and writes about Khlebnikov’s visit and his analysis of Malevich’s drawings: “Khleb[nikov]’s found numbers may speak to the fact that Supremus has something greater, something that has a dir[ect] law, even the first law itself of world creation. That through me is passing that force, that universal harmony of creative laws that guides everything, and everything that has been until now will not serve.”16 The Suprematist accompanies his letter with a few schematic drawings (Figure 22); two sketches are included in the second of the above quotations. One of them is a square where a large rectangle sweeps up to the left along the diagonal, and a small one down to the right. Alongside it, a second miniature also treats the correlation between similar large and small shapes, in this case the circle: in a narrow, horizontally elongated rectangle a large circle occupies the left edge; a small one the right. In discussing “shapes’ mutual attraction,” Malevich draws on the left in the wide horizontal rectangle a curved band, and far to the right along the horizontal axis a circle clearly connected by “attraction”—gravitation—to the band’s bend. Finally, in asking whether “there are such bodies in the world, in space,” the artist depicts a rectangle and an oval with pointed ends, that is, the contour of the flattened “body” of a sphere. In the context of this discussion, both draw-

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Figure 22. Sketches from letter of Malevich to Matiushin, April 4, 1916, from Moscow to Petrograd. Manuscript Department, Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), Saint Petersburg.

ings serve as planar projections of natural volumetric bodies that cannot in fact be found in nature or in space, as is confirmed by the end of this sentence: “it seems to me that they do exist, but we don’t know them.”17 An invisible diagonal tension is a constructive element in many of Malevich’s compositions from the very beginning, in the photograph of the “0.10” exhibition alone we see four such pictures. This tension is latent as well in Supremus No. 50, where a broad vertical of black magnetically holds four red bands and one black band; the geometric figures scattered over the left and right fields are drawn to it (Figure 23).18 Supremus No. 51 was obviously the next step after No. 50, moreover it was a breakthrough, lashing Malevich with the “awe” of ecstasy, as the letter to Matiushin attests. All the points expressed to his distant correspondent with respect to Supremus No. 51 on construction, structure, and the law “of that very same world art” find support in a picture quite visible in one of the photographs of his 1920 one-man show, hanging first on the right in the upper row. Here the diagonal dynamic that had long excited the Suprematist is suddenly concentrated into a visible axis: the black inclined vertical of the previous Supremus seems to have been transformed into a pointed rod piercing

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Figure 23. Kazimir Malevich. Supremus No. 50. 1915–1916. Oil on canvas. 97 × 66 cm. The painting is reproduced as oriented by Malevich at the Great Berlin Exhibition in 1927. Courtesy Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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Figure 24. Kazimir Malevich. Supremus No. 51 (?). 1916. Oil on canvas. Whereabouts unknown. Photo in author’s collection.

the geometric figures and securing their virtuosically balanced mutual “attraction.” In Supremus No. 51, we see the inevitable formalization of the diagonal force tension that had long been maturing (Figure 24). Apart from the construction, which is so expressive in Supremus No. 51, prominent among its elements is the oval disk with pointed ends, a rare geometric figure in Suprematist painting, which wholly corresponds to the schematic drawing in the letter, the spatial projection of the same “body” of the flattened sphere.19 Thus, all the points in Malevich’s letter, which he himself characterizes as his “impression of my No. 51,” find plastic reflection in a picture whose existence is established by the photograph of his 1920 one-man show (Figure 25). In this photo, the large central picture20 is flanked on the right by the presumed Supremus No. 51 and on the left by Supremus No. 55. Beginning in 1922, the latter is most often exhibited and reproduced in a different position, with the drop-shaped element—unique in Suprematist painting—flowing from the top down. In his 1920 one-man show, Supremus No. 55 was oriented by the artist himself, and the “drop” acquires the additional associative overtones of a unique kind of “rocket.” It should be stressed that in the Moscow hanging of 1920, the connection between the two Supremus pictures was indisputably clear due to the similar

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Figure 25. Exhibits from the first Malevich one-man show in Moscow. March, 1920. At bottom, left to right: Untitled Suprematist composition (1915; The Solomon R.Guggenheim Foundation, New York, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. Acquisition confirmed in 2009 by agreement with the Heirs of Kazimir Malevich. 76.2553.42.). Suprematism (1916; Wilhelm Hack Museum, Cologne); Suprematism (1916, Courtesy Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam). Top center non-objective (proto-Suprematist?) composition (1915, whereabouts unknown). Top left: Supremus No. 55 (1917). Top right: Supremus No. 51 (?) (1916, whereabouts unknown). Author’s collection.

vector of their diagonals. At the same time, no matter what position Supremus No. 55 is in, its construction is obviously wholly subordinate to the diagonal dynamic, which is also secured by the fixed axis. In the Supremus with the next ordinal number, No. 56, the developed diagonal-axis construction triumphs completely; what draws our attention in the picture is the amazing geometric figure, a blue half-moon in an unfathomable perspective (Figure 26). Supremus No. 57 manifests its diagonal tension both in the weightless soaring of the entire huge three-pointed figure and in the sum of the elements balanced along its right edge: it is distinguished by a unique shape, a large background triangle never encountered again anywhere in Malevich’s painting (Figure 27).

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Figure 26. Kazimir Malevich. Supremus No. 56. 1916. Oil on canvas. 80.5 × 71 cm. © 2011, State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.

Finally, in the already mentioned Supremus No. 58, the inclined axis accentuates the tense dynamic in the interaction between the regular geometric figures and the convex-concave plane of the sail-shaped cartouche (Figure 28). Thus, the surviving Supremus paintings, nos. 55–58, have as their main compositional characteristic the axial diagonal construction, which is occasionally established verbally as well. Thus, in the unnamed drawing reproduced in the guise of Supremus No. 58, the inscription, as quoted above, proclaims: “Color shield in motion based on the black axis contra color plane.”21

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Figure 27. Kazimir Malevich. Supremus No. 57. 1916. Oil on canvas. 80.2 × 80.3 cm. Tate Gallery, London.

The drawings for the second part of the German book World as Nonobjectivity were drawn by Malevich in Berlin.22 Among them as well is a work that varies the composition of Supremus No. 51, and which was given the descriptive title: Combined Suprematist Composition (sensation of metallic sound—dynamic). (Pale—metallic coloring.) 1914 (Figure 29).23 The fact that for Malevich the serendipitous constructive device in Supremus No. 51 became a visible axis is confirmed by yet another drawing of his executed much later, presumably during his trip to Berlin in 1927 (now in the SMA).24 The three Suprematist constructions connected with the diagonal axis soar in space; they inevitably give rise to associations with space satellites. The artist’s inscription explaining the “sketch” implies that Malevich was consciously

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Figure 28. Kazimir Malevich. Supremus No. 58 (Yellow and Black). 1916. Oil on canvas. 79.5 × 70.5 cm. © 2011, State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.

counting on these associations: “Passage of the Suprem across the surf[ace] of a white disk.” The “white disk” itself dissolves in a barely noticeable contour in the white space; it is analogous to the silhouette of the oval from the April 1916 letter and the oval from the presumed Supremus No. 51. On the field of this drawing, inside the frame, in the left corner, the artist placed an inscription with a corrected noun: “Suprematis[m] to No. 51,” and to the right indicated the date, first “1911” and later “1914”; below, under the frame, next to the sketch, he placed the phrase quoted in the previous

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Figure 29. Kazimir Malevich. Combined Suprematist Composition (Sensation of Metallic Sound—Dynamic). (Pale—Metallic Coloring). 1914. 1927. Malewitsch, Die gegenstandslose Welt, Bauhausbucher, 11 (Munich, 1927), no. 77.

paragraph; and on top in the right margin he noted: “truncat[ed] bottom of Suprem,” and in the middle: “Red.” This page absorbed features of Suprematism that arose much later than April 1916. By the time of its creation, Malevich had long since passed through the stage of white Suprematism with its diffusion of white on white and had also developed the planet designs schematically quoted in the drawing. However, without a doubt, the first impulses for the future planets were conceived in Supremus No. 51, with its diagonal construction conquering space. Malevich recalled the euphoria of his discovery in April 1916 and gave

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The Supremus Project’s Conception Suprematism arose against the backdrop of the twentieth century’s first world war, which ended for the Russian empire in social revolution and the demise of the old order. Marinetti, the Italian Futurists’ aggressive duce, who subsequently united logically with il duce Mussolini, extolled “war, the world’s hygiene.” In the front-line trenches, as we know, the view was not quite so ravishing. For the most part, the Russian Budetlyane saw the war for what it was, the merciless and savage extermination of millions of people. Subsequently Matiushin recalled the attitude toward war held by the nation’s most radical transsense Futurist: “Expressed especially harshly in Kruchenykh’s art is the poet’s protest against the senseless spontaneity of world carnage in his poem ‘War,’ published with Rozanova’s etchings, and especially in his drama War, which Kruchenykh gave me retyped.”25 As he approached his fortieth birthday, Malevich, a “second-class soldier,” that is, a reservist, waited anxiously to be drafted into the army. For him, the press of new ideas in all spheres was enormous, and the thought of his threatened physical demise compelled the Suprematist to search for ways to save those ideas: “And when I lay these bones down, I don’t want all to be instantly lost.”26 Malevich sent extensive letters to Matiushin and Kruchenykh, the rest of the former triumvirate that produced Victory Over the Sun. The texts, which fused features of treatises, manifestos, and prophesies, go far beyond the epistolary genre. In essence, these are testaments. The desire to reveal and reinforce “the sum of our days” impelled the Suprematist to “foist” his own views of painting and music on Matiushin, and of poetry on Kruchenykh. Matiushin remained indifferent, inasmuch as his own “sum of days” demanded just as insistent embodiment, whose contours did not coincide with Suprematism. Kruchenykh knew how to listen and respond, and he keenly echoed the impulses coming from Malevich the “idea-giver” (the Suprematist’s neologism). In the Malevich-Kruchenykh liaison the artist was obviously the leader and he

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its source its due by ascribing it “to No. 51” in the 1927 sketch of his cosmic diagonal construction. The formulaically honed construction of Supremus No. 51 would help shape many nonobjective compositions over the course of the prophetic period of Malevich’s life.

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kept pushing the trans-sense Futurist toward positive creation, seeing in his realized compositions only the clearing of the Word’s territory for new creation. War catalyzed Suprematism’s swift maturation. In a few months’ time, the phenomenon, born in mid-1915, achieved unusually developed forms. Malevich’s might as the theoretician of the Suprematist worldview manifested itself for the first time in his spring and summer 1916 letters. Suprematism, which had been repressed by his colleague-opponents in fall 1915 and March 1916, nonetheless successfully recruited supporters even among them. His nonobjective pictures were well known to them, and the Suprematist’s exhortations had always been marked by their power, which even critics not inclined to crazes were forced to admit: “Malevich [. . .] convinced with an amazing hypnotic pressure that forced people to listen.”27 The artist, who was called up for the army at the very end of July 1916, had at his disposal now only a piece of paper. Even so Malevich devoted a great deal of time to it, and now this became his sole comfort. A return to canvases not only was not anticipated in the near future but remained in doubt in general. No end to the war was in sight, and increasingly older reservists were being sent from the rear to the front lines, creeping up toward Malevich’s age. In early October 1916, the second-class soldier was given a brief leave to go to Moscow; he returned to his unit on October 28. His October visit to the old capital had three very important results. First was the appearance of a new book; second was his public announcement of the Supremus project; and third was the Suprematists’ appearance within the framework of “Jack of Diamonds.” All these actions combined to shape the future of the Supremus society. His new book came out, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism. Black Square was placed on its cover, and a second reproduction of the monofigure was placed on a separate page inside. Malevich had realized a long-held idea: almost immediately after the appearance of his prototype he had asked Matiushin to print it on the cover of the proposed reissue of Victory Over the Sun. Black Square began its triumphal procession as a symbolic emblem in October 1916. The book came out just ahead of the “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition. On that occasion friction arose once again for the Suprematist: “The Diamonds’ meeting just now, a lot of unpleasantness, of course, and again over literature, I’m actually ashamed for them.”28 Black Square’s emblematic might would arouse rejection again and again, and not only among the primordial “diamonds,” moderate innovators who had become the art establishment.

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In Moscow, at the Art Salon, the “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition was held [. . .] with the participation as well of such artists as Lentulov, D. Burliuk, who published a separate brochure explaining his own pictures, and the “Suprematists.” Evidently the representatives of the latest trends intend to unite in a monthly journal, Supremus, which will begin (?) coming out in Moscow in December or January and will be devoted to painting, decorative art, music, and literature. The principal organizers and participants are Malevich, Rozanova, Puni, Exter, Kliun, Menkov, and others.31

The half-ironic, half-perplexed question mark in the middle of the paragraph was put there by the item’s creator, who justly had doubts about the publication’s readiness. Apollon came out closer to the end of 1916, but there was no word about Supremus’s appearance. In a letter to Matiushin, Malevich cited an expanded list of participants: “The monthly, participants will be I, Exter, Popova, Udaltsova, Yurkevich, I’ll write to Kruchenykh, Davydova, Roslavets, Menkov, we can inv[ite] the poet you wrote about, from Kharkov, Khlebnikov, and Kliun. I’m thinking of assembling people honest to Art.”32 In Apollon, basing himself on the list of Suprematists in the Malevich brochure, Rostislavov included Rozanova, whom he admired, immediately following the project’s initiator. However, she was not in Malevich’s letter, although from the nature of the enumeration it is evident that he conscientiously mentioned everyone, including the “poet from Kharkov” he did not know, that is, Grigory Petnikov (1894–1971), a friend of Khlebnikov, whose name he had heard only quite recently. Nor is Rozanova’s name in Malevich’s other papers connected with Supremus’s early stage; it appeared later.

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In the book’s final paragraphs, as has already been said, there was a refreshed list of Suprematists; later Malevich asserted quite truthfully that Rozanova had “subscribed” to Black Square by presenting the brochure to Rodchenko and Stepanova, who were trying to detach her from Suprematism.29 The experience of publishing a “third edition” inspired Malevich, who dealt personally with the Moscow press and printers. It turned out that a print publication—if you presented prepared materials—could come out very quickly. “I’ve grown a little and feel like putting out an Artistic and Literary journal entitled ‘Supremus,’” he informed Matiushin in mid-October 1916.30 He informed not only Matiushin; in the November–December 1916 double issue of Apollon an item appeared by A. A. Rostislavov:

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One of the fall declarations related to the Supremus project has a hasty pencil addition on the upper left: “In the event of my death, send the page to Mikhail Vasilievich Matiushin in Petrograd, 10 Pesochnaia, apt. 12.” The draft declaration itself (not published) is written in ink: “Man is the stamp of the era in which he passes [. . .]” And on the back of the page, in ink and pencil, Malevich, intending the same addressee, outlined: Synopsis f[or] Supremus No. 1 (section 1. Painting. Cubism and its relation[ship] to painting) 2. Literature 3. [Survey] of the Music by Roslav[ets] 4. Survey. Theaters part[icipants:] Rosl[avets], me, you, Yurkevi[ch], Nat[alia] Mikhail[ovna Davydova], Exter, Kruchenykh.33

Malevich’s contacts with the individuals enumerated in both letter and synopsis clearly gave him grounds for counting on them. On October 27, 1916, right before leaving Moscow, he confidently informed Matiushin, “I’ve got everything set up, the materials are being assembled, the printing is taken care of. Send articles for New Inquiries. First issue Cubism, with which I begin the further development. I will put myself only in issue 3 [. . .] I so want to create a joyous publication.”34 We will encounter this statement, “the printing is taken care of,” in a number of variations more than once in Suprematists’ statements in the course of preparing Supremus, which never did come out. The internal and external reasons for the journal’s failure to get published will be the topic of later sections. From the very earliest reports about Supremus we will extract the supporting information that will be essential further on. The idea of a print publication entitled “Supremus” was Malevich’s specifically. He had long dreamed of a public tribune analogous to World of Art (Mir iskusstva), Golden Fleece (Zolotoe runo), and the miscellanies of the Union of Youth. But the project did not crystallize even in the life of the initiator himself until October 1916. Thus, the journal’s concept was primary; the artists’ consolidation occurred on that basis, not vice versa. The Latin word “Supremus” was Russified fairly quickly. The publication’s conception was wholly Malevich’s at first. The first issue was supposed to shed light on the problems of Cubism, the second on Futurism (Cubo-Futurism), and only the third on Suprematism. The matrix

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In October 1915, as has already been mentioned, Malevich, by showing Exter his pictures and reading his notes, strove to lure her specifically as a supporter, an effort that ended in his first fiasco. However, over the course of 1916, Exter, a highly experienced artist and elegant lady, was able to appreciate the unique plastic character of the country’s new “ism.” Malevich’s Suprematism began little by little to restructure her Cubo-Futurist compositions with incrusted fragments of recognizable objects. In fall 1916 Alexandra Exter’s designs for Verbovka inspired unfounded hopes in Malevich for her complete turn to Suprematism. For the artist herself, nonobjective compositions for transfer to embroidery and appliqué were at first, in essence, fragments of her own Cubo-Futurist compositions, but separated out from the whole, enlarged, and made independent. As has already been mentioned, abstract compositions appeared in a similar manner among the Bloomsbury artists, who were drawing for the London Omega workshops.

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here was obviously the slogan-title of his newly released book, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, which presented Malevich’s favorite structuring triad. The words, “I’ve grown a little” referred not to the growth of Malevich’s inner self-assertion but purely to the external growth of his opportunities. In October 1916 he got his hands on start-up money, if I can put it that way. A few weeks later, in late November, Malevich regretfully told Petrograder that he had initially wanted to publish the journal “on his own,” and as for the money, “I thought I would pay it back gradually from the salary [that] I get working.”35 The situation changed when, according to Malevich, “the printers I had come to an agreement with in the material sense” were “taken,” that is, mobilized for the front. Without doubting the artist’s testimony, it should nonetheless be said that it was not only his army pay that gave the artist a certain confidence. That confidence was also thanks to the support and participation of Davydova. He could have initiated the undertaking himself. Previously he had always needed first to find a sponsor and then start a project. If a sponsor could not be found, the project failed before it could start even embryonically. The journal Zero (Nul’), the Fevralists’ spontaneously born and equally spontaneously ended idea in late spring 1915, was just such an instance. The band of enthusiasts did not even have ten rubles to chip in for the publication. Let me take this occasion to stress that not a trace of continuity has been discovered between the Supremus project and Zero other than the obvious commonality of being periodicals.

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The Verbovka designs turned out to be the road to abstract art for not only Exter but other women Cubists as well who were future members of Supremus. Nearly all of them arrived at geometric abstraction through models for the ornamentation of decorative wares. Charlotte Douglas’s chiseled formula—“the general move to abstraction through textiles”—is supremely true for the “Amazons” of the Russian avant-garde.36 While Supremus was coming into its own, Malevich felt an acute need for someone loyal. Matiushin was far away, in Petrograd, and in any case he was wholly absorbed in his own inquiries and developments; and Exter was firmly connected to the Moscow milieu. Malevich wanted to see in her that artistic “locomotive” which with Davydova’s help, in the event of a tragic outcome to his military service, could carry on the innovators’ cause. The Suprematist did not let up in his attempts to win Exter over, and in fall 1916 he once again thought they were successful. October and November were the peak of his hopes for a long-term alliance with Exter, whose name figures constantly in Malevich’s archival papers of this period. Anticipating the exposition, let us note that in the original plans to publish Supremus the journal’s second issue was supposed to be devoted to Futurism, and in it compositions by Exter’s Italian friends were supposed to appear. These plans arose obviously under her influence: “Placed [in] issue 2 will be works more associated with Futurism, for ex[ample], Dynamic Cubism and Divisionism, and will include Soffici, Boccioni, Exter, me, and oth[ers].”37 Subsequently, speaking of fall 1916, Udaltsova jealously remarked, “Exter and Malevich have begun to dominate.” At the “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition, the left-wing artists grouped themselves around these two centers in both the figurative and the literal topographic sense. Nadezhda Udaltsova and Liubov Popova exhibited their works with Exter, and in the last hall of the exhibition compositions by Malevich and the Suprematists were displayed. Alexandra Alexandrovna, however, an independent, talented, and strong person, despite her sensitivity to new trends, blazed her trail in art in accordance with her own nature. In 1915 she began her many years of collaboration with the director Aleksandr Tairov (1885–1950), creator of the Moscow Chamber Theater. Exter designed the curtain and painted the proscenium arch, foyer, and staircase of the building in her own Baroque-Cubist spirit. The production of Famira Kifared, by Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky (1855–1909) with the artist’s set design, was a rousing success. Critic and art historian Abram Efros (1888–1954), a master of elegant definitions, later called all of this the “grand parade of Cubism.”38

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For Malevich, initiator of the trans-sense neoprimitivist opera Victory Over the Sun, the theater was one of the most important spheres for asserting the new art. It is not hard to imagine his perception of the highly professional production based on a drama by an outstanding Symbolist poet referring to the great myths of antiquity, modernized by the poet, director, and artist, a production that raised a storm of ecstasy among the most enlightened critics, who by no means favored radical innovation. On November 2, 1916, the day of the Famira Kifared premiere, Malevich the reservist was with his unit. He learned of the production during his second visit to Moscow, which lasted from late November to December 9, 1916; Famira Kifared was being performed several times a week. The result was another painful disenchantment about the possibility of acquiring a supporter in Exter. All the philippics in the Suprematist’s texts aimed at the “academics” who were using modern makeup to revive the “Neros,” “Venuses,” and other “bones of antiquity” suddenly became relevant to the artist whom he had considered of like mind. After her triumphant success at the Chamber Theater, Malevich began to mention Exter’s name in a negative tone, restrained at first, and later increasingly harsh. The production of Salome (1917), which built on the achievements of Famira Kifared, exacerbated their differences. In essence, Exter had decamped to join opponents more malicious than the barefaced “academics,” inasmuch as she used the forms of the new art to “embalm the corpse of the long-dead Famira” and decorate “Salome’s boudoir.” In his drafts of “Theater,” one of the central articles in the proposed Supremus, Malevich did not spare his sarcasm to expose Alexandra Exter; subsequently this was repeated in his “18,941th Evgeny Onegin.”39 Nonetheless, ideological differences had never prevented the great artist from treating his colleagues with respect. At the last “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition (December 1917), whose chairman Malevich was officially, Alexandra Exter was offered the unqualified opportunity to celebrate the occasion by organizing a representative display of her art over the last ten years, which aroused quite a few laudatory responses in the press. Among the 314 exhibits at “Jack of Diamonds,” more than a hundred, that is a third, were Exter’s (nos. 190–291). Of these, twenty-six had been part of the Salome exhibition; seven drawings were probably designs for Verbovka; and two more were “Drawings for The Daughter of Jorio.” “Painting 1907–17” was reflected in sixty-seven pictures.

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This was a large-scale one-woman show inside “Jack of Diamonds” and the first and last such extensive monographic exposition during the distinguished artist’s life on earth. Concluding this excursion into the relationship between Malevich and Exter, let us note that nonobjective easel compositions did not appear in Exter’s work before 1917; she turned to their intensive creation closer to the turn of the 1920s, after the life of Supremus and her own sojourn in Moscow. On the whole, Exter’s canvases, with their “savory” paint element, were always a purely earthly mixing that anticipated and later coincided with the Constructivists’ aspirations. This sentence from Malevich’s essay for the catalog of the “Tenth State Exhibition” (1919), which defined the differences between the Suprematists and the nonobjectivists, could refer wholly to Exter’s color compositions: “Even if it is built nonobjectively but based on color relations, the will [of its artist] would be locked inside the walls of aesthetic planes instead of philosophical penetration.”40

Suprematism Recruits Supporters In November 1916, Supremus’s initiator already had a title, his own texts, a plan for publishing a journal, and even experience with the independent publication of a small book. He cherished the hope of bringing Matiushin in on the journal; he was confident of Kruchenykh. Malevich needed like-minded thinkers in Moscow. In October–November 1916 he and Exter were a double magnet in the Moscow milieu, and their joint domination among left-wing artists was visibly reinforced at the “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition, which had an “intimate vernissage” on November 5, 1916, and the following day opened to the public. Malevich, a board member of the society since April 1916, facilitated an invitation to the exhibition for the entire group of Suprematists from “0.10”; military service was evidently an obstacle to Mikhail Menkov’s participation. Khardzhiev, relying on the Suprematist’s oral statements, later attested, “The ‘Jack of Diamonds’ exhibition, which opened on November 10, 1916 [Khardzhiev’s error], was organized personally by Malevich, who used the by then fairly well-known ‘curtain’ (Malevich himself told me this).”41 Works by Malevich, Boguslavskaia, Kliun, Puni, and Rozanova showed the public and critics a quantitative and qualitative representation of abstract nonobjective art, new ground for Moscow. A review by Realist artist Ya. Tepin (1883–1953), Apollon’s Moscow correspondent, noted this integrity: “One senses at ‘Jack of Diamonds’ a definite agreement and if not a style than a gen-

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Most of the artists from whose sketches the embroideries have been executed belong to “left-wing” movements. It is curious that the public, which is outraged by their pictures, willingly buys up their cushions, bindings, and so on, which very often are nearly an exact copy of the “Suprematists’’’ pictures. This is “Suprematism’s” biggest most vulnerable spot. A picture that is easily adapted to the decoration of walls, and cushions, and bindings, and so forth. Where then is the picture’s inherent value?44

The unnamed reviewer has accurately identified the disintegration of the boundaries between “high” and “low” art, a disintegration to which the traditional consciousness had a hard time reconciling itself.

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eral tone. Nonobjective (Suprematist) painting and the painterly architectonics of ‘Jack of Diamonds’ do not have a strong expression here and are barely realized. What is exhibited is very homogenous, nonpainterly, and nonindependent, but one cannot deny that this section of ‘Jack of Diamonds’ is intriguing.”42 The works by Popova and Udaltsova, Malevich’s former opponents from the Moscow circle, were grouped, as has already been noted, in Exter’s hall. Up until the fall, Tatlin had counted both Cubists in his group. The abovequoted lines by Udaltsova from her reminiscences—“In fall [1916] Tatlin disbanded the group. This term [Tatlin’s own use of the word ‘disbanded’] made us very angry” —makes one think that she and her friends were not all that happy with the Tatlin lay of the land. Be that as it may, in the fall both Popova and Udaltsova underwent a crisis. The fact that the Cubo-Futurist idiom had been exhausted in their own works had become obvious for them, and each developed an acute need for creative transformation. “Unprofessional” Suprematism, which they had rejected in late 1915 and early 1916, had been demonstrating its power and depth for months, and gradually the artists saw in it the potential for a truly innovative trend. Paradoxically, the understanding of Suprematism’s morphogenic potential came to them through the back door, not the front, through their designs for decorative applied forms of art. Malevich’s statement about how he convinced Davydova and Rozanova to produce designs for Verbovka is highly significant.43 His sketches were models not only for these artists. The drawings for embroidery and appliqué by Popova, Udaltsova, and Pestel attest that in the marginal sphere of applied art compliance with new methods of morphogenesis played an unexpected role for the “Amazons” themselves. The new aesthetics’ penetration into life through decorative domestic wares was noted by contemporary observers as well:

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The new forms found it easiest to put out roots along the periphery of great art, where they had more freedom; the new morphogenesis penetrated life through the new experiment in visual perception. This, we repeat, is precisely how Suprematism entered the creative life of the Moscow Cubists. For Suprematism’s founder, the plastic “new world order” had not been demeaned initially by “pillows” and “scarves.” We have already spoken of the freedom Malevich won during his Fevralist months, his freedom to create above and beyond hierarchies, forms, and genres. We will encounter this freedom more than once during Suprematism’s heroic era, from 1915 to 1918/1919. Echoes of standard notions about “spiritual” and “decorative” art, that is, high and low, made themselves felt inside the left-wing milieu as well; thus, Ivan Puni’s designs for Verbovka lost their true origin due to its lack of prestige. They are not mentioned in the monographs about the artist, although they numbered in the dozens. In the case of Olga Rozanova, the truth can be restored in large part. Many compositions classified by contemporary scholars as the artist’s “colorpainting,” that is, “high” easel art, cannot conceal the circumstances of their birth; the eloquent inscriptions on the drawings serve as instructions for the designs’ subsequent embodiment in wares for Verbovka. Rozanova herself scarcely observed strictly the boundaries between morphogenesis in pictures and “transformed coloring” in her works on paper. Liubov Popova’s Suprematism, too, has no impermeable walls between her compositions’ “easel” and “applied” designations. And in the art of Nadezhda Udaltsova, virtually all her Suprematist compositions go back to her designs for Verbovka; the artist, like the Bloomsbury painters, never recognized geometric nonobjectivity’s right to a separate existence in the form of a picture with “inherent value.” Kliun noted quite fairly in his reminiscences that Udaltsova “at one time tried to shift to nonobjective art, but was unable to cope with and master it.”45 Going outside the framework of this book, let us note that the mechanism for the birth of cardinally new forms through design projects would function successfully all the way up to the sunset of the Russian avant-garde. In the first half of the 1920s, Constructivists Popova and Stepanova would create magnificent ornaments for textiles; their compositions would anticipate by decades the appearance of the plastic formulas of Op Art. Contemporary scholar Yulia Tulovskaia comments: Found in the textile sketches of Popova, Stepanova, and Delaunay were artistic forms and devices that not only revived the textile industry and influenced

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objectives of easel painting in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, Minimalism and Op Art. Moreover, the artists’ textile sketches of the 1920s for the first time manifested a new system of thinking, which became the basic concept of morphogenesis for the second half of the twentieth century.46

Unfortunately, the Russian “Amazons’” achievements can be assessed properly only by specialists, whereas very different artists were the inventors of opticalillusionist structures in the history of European art, as we know.

Liubov Popova’s Suprematist Experiments In his survey of Moscow exhibitions, Apollon correspondent Ya. Tepin noted the palpable commonality among the innovators, calling it “agreement.” His mention of nonobjective painting is somewhat obscure, but what draws our attention is the verbal construction “painterly architectonics,” a doubtless unconscious borrowing of the generalizing definition under which Liubov Popova exhibited her works at “Jack of Diamonds.” In 1915, lured by Tatlin’s experiments, Popova attempted to move into three-dimensional construction on the painting plane; however, these attempts did not bring her the desired satisfaction (Pitcher on Table, 1915, wood, cardboard, oil, relief, GTG). Popova, as we know, mastered real space much later and then independently, on the basis of her own Suprematist experimentation, which created the base for her Constructivist works. But in 1916 the Moscow Cubist moved away from her Cubo-Futurist still lifes, nudes, and genre portraits and toward the painterly transmission of grandiose spatial deployments of cultivated but at the same time natural landscapes, that is, architectural landscapes. The majority of her works from the cycle of canvases and drawings, connected with “painterly architectonics,” of the city of Birsk, where her beloved former governess lived, are dated summer and fall 1916. The Bashkir town, jagged with deep gullies, allowed the eye to survey from above the generalized volumes of the little houses with their trapezoidal roofs piled in rhythmic groups on a backdrop of cubized icon ledges in the gouaches, drawings, and canvases of her Birsk cycle. In November 1916, at “Jack of Diamonds,” Popova exhibited noteworthy compositions united, as has been mentioned, by the heading “Painterly Architectonics” but with the subhead “Shah-Zinda” (nos. 202–207; today spelled “Shah-i-Zinda”).

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other avant-garde experiments in textiles but largely anticipated the goals and

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Not one of the seven works has turned up to this day, nor is their technique known. Nor do we have the graphic studies so numerous in the “Birsk” series. However, the idea that the compositions from the “Shah-i-Zinda” cycle were similar in nature to the cubized architectural works from the “Birsk” series arises from the verbal descriptions of Popova, who was carried away by the exotic architecture of Turkistan, where she went in spring 1916. On April 15, she wrote to Aleksandr Vesnin (1883–1959), the artist and future architect: “I’m sending you greetings, dear Aleksandr Aleksandrov[ich], from Samarkand. Utter[ly] stupendous architecture. Frontal and exceptionally decorative. The façade does not at all express the floor plan or shapes of the whole building, but the sizes, balance of proportions, and decorativeness in color and ornament (all solidly faced in colored ceramics, although many have fallen off) create a singular impression of this type.”47 Her laconic text establishes the visual accents of the “painterly architectonics” of real architecture. As one can imagine, embodying her vision of Shah-iZinda became the plastic objective of the Moscow artist’s works. Oblique confirmation of the Cubo-Futurist appearance of the “Shah-iZinda” cycle is also the fact that the pictures were exhibited not with the Suprematists but in Exter’s room; consequently, visually they were in accord with the latter’s bravura but still Cubo-Futurist painting. Serving as impetus for purging and monumentalizing her compositions, her complete break with echoes of reality, that is, her arrival at “painterly architectonics,” were Popova’s nonobjective sketches for Verbovka, her closer relations with Malevich, and her joining of Supremus. The beginning of their practical collaboration dates to the organizing of the 1916 “Jack of Diamonds,” but their more or less close contact continued during the first half of 1917 while they were preparing the society’s journal and actions. For Popova, the move into nonobjectivity was organic; there was no “leaping the barriers,” inasmuch as she was not interested in soaring into space or theoretical clouds; she was working from plasticity, plasticity, and nothing but plasticity. Her path from Cubism to Suprematism was marked by its consistency and logic, that is, by what was not in the art of the initiator himself, with his irrational planes, which had been conceived separately within his Fevralist paintings and drawings. Popova derived her definition of “painterly architectonics” inductively from the Cubist arrangement of architectural landscapes. Under Suprematism’s influence, her art lost nearly all connection to natural motifs during the course of 1917, and this definition became the artist’s individual term. After crystallizing

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Those of her sketches for Verbovka that have survived—miniature collages made of colored and white, glossy and matt paper, glued to white or grey, imitation linen cardboard—were used by the village embroidresses. All the designs were suprematist, with a restrained centripetal treatment of the compositional elements characteristic of Popova’s paintings of the period. These designs are scaled-down models of larger, complete paintings, rather than fragments of something bigger, but it is difficult to see their decorative or applied intention. Nevertheless, it was in these small sketches that Popova moved from the easel to the object. The lessons she learned in these suprematist collages were obviously included in her textile designs six years later.49

Adaskina has correctly noted the connection between the paintings and the Verbovka sketches; however, the vector of movement seems to have been different. It was the not the sketches that were “proportionally reduced designs” for paintings but the reverse. The Suprematist canvases arose as result of a proportional increase in the compositions for Verbovka. The Cubist’s models

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into a genre definition, “painterly architectonics” now deductively shaped a cycle of canvases and drawings by the Suprematist Popova. Popova’s sketches for the Verbovka workshop are a significant help in clarifying her artistic evolution; they are all dated 1917. The initial model for yesterday’s Cubist, who had been a virtuoso at arranging her loud- and many-voiced Cubo-Futurist compositions in a colorful mosaic, were Malevich’s minimalist designs and white space-plane. In her own sketches, Popova’s attention was focused on groups of trapezoids and triangles and their internal connections, but the artist did not bend the relationships between the groups themselves and the space-plane well to her will: elements of randomness and uncertainty can be felt in the way they are placed on the page. Popova did not begin to feel good in Suprematism until she transformed the bottomless Malevich white into an impenetrable background, solid as enamel, on which she shallowly layered regular, intensively chromatic elements. The many emblems for the Supremus society created no earlier than late winter or early spring 1917 serve as testimony to the establishment, so difficult for Popova, of plastic connections between the single “simple” geometric figure and the space surrounding it. The artist emerged from this battle with honor and reinforced her triumph in her Suprematist masterpiece, Painterly Architectonics. Black, Red, Gray, for which the date of 1917 seems most correct.48 The role of the Verbovka sketches in Popova’s self-definition has been noted by art historian Natalia Adaskina:

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for embroidery and appliqué were a laboratory that allowed her to move on to representative easel paintings. Let us note as well that the Verbovka sketches were not only small collages but also easel paintings in gouache and watercolor; in the literature they are all given the title “Painterly Architectonics.” Liubov Popova possessed just as outstanding a gift and just as strong an artistic will as the other “Amazons” of the Russian avant-garde. We repeat that her evolutionary path through Cubism, Futurism, and Cubo-Futurism to Suprematism was supremely organic. This same organic quality subsequently characterized her move to Constructivism. Popova’s personal genre, “painterly architectonics,” held the potential for the plastic construction that in the future would be realized in full in her variety of Constructivism. Malevich sought and found cosmic revelations in art. For Popova, an artist who revered the great “painting work” (later simply “work,” read: “construction”), their parting of ways was inevitable.

The Supremus Society in the First Half of 1917 Left-wing Artists Join Supremus During his October 1916 visit to Moscow, Malevich intuitively and consciously constructed the situation in which a vitally essential person appeared in the Supremus project. This person was Nadezhda Andreevna Udaltsova, a painter of remarkable character, a born leader. There had long been a “Cubist circle” around her; it included Liubov Popova, Vera Pestel, and Sofia Karetnikova (1887–early 1930s), talented representatives of the same social circle who had trained in the academies of Paris. Actually, they had all been on an equal footing, but Udaltsova spent more time and effort than the others on common causes. The serious, sober-minded artist thirsted for a rational foundation for the “painting act.” It was she who was the author of the text in Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin that appeared at “0.10.” Udaltsova’s reminiscences show us incontestably as well that after the creator of counter-reliefs himself, she was the number two person in the Moscow “Tatlin circle.” Nonetheless, the artist made no attempt to move into real spatial constructions. By fall 1916 her own Cubism was virtually tapped out, but even in Tatlin’s counter-reliefs she saw an impasse: “Apart from his tricks, I cannot be

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Although work on material selections and counter-reliefs occupied Tatlin’s creative life for more than a year, his works constructed in a chronological chain create the impression less of development than of summation, the same experiment in different variations. They demonstrate a unique limit, the profound basis of an art in which only the thrill of live space is possible, not its development or movement. Of course, one can construct a scheme of development for Tatlin’s reliefs (from the planar Bottle of 1914 to his corner counter-reliefs), but within this scheme we are nonetheless going to be dealing merely with variations on the same experiment.51

By fall 1916, Tatlin thought he had decisively asserted counter-reliefs as leftwing art’s main path of development. His Petrograd supporters did indeed practice the textural-spatial arrangement of diverse materials with enthusiasm. The Moscow Cubists were in no hurry to make counter-reliefs. Not possessing the potential to provide a future for spatial Cubism’s further development, Tatlin preferred, as Udaltsova put it, to “disband the group” of “Store’s” Moscow members. Art wholly subordinated to touch, the lowest in the hierarchy of senses, without any “muddied” reflection, seemed a dead end and “foolish open-endedness” to Udaltsova. In fall 1916 she was at a crossroads. Malevich had invited Udaltsova to join him in his curatorial projects; she had participated in those projects but like Popova maintained a strict distance from the Suprematist. The obstruction at “0.10” and the ban on showing Suprematist pictures at the “Store” exhibition could largely be laid at Udaltsova’s door, as is obvious from her own memoirs and oral reminiscences as transmitted by Varvara Stepanova. On October 10, 1916, Udaltsova wrote this diary entry: “Asked to ‘J[ack of] D[iamonds],’ asked to embroidery society. A drawing is worth twenty rubles. I can submit five drawings a month, and if they take everything, then I could submit ten, more even. In a few months I could abandon painting and just earn money.”52

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with Tatlin because of his shapes; that is over now. He operates too much on his sense of taste.”50 As we know, Tatlin formulated the dominance of the “sense of taste” in his slogan, “The eye under the control of touch.” The artist himself orchestrated his textural-taste “symphonies” of spatial constructions like a virtuoso; however, they were in essence variations on the same tactile-plastic experiment. A present-day scholar, Ye. A. Bobrinskaia, while giving the innovator of counterreliefs his due, has been compelled to remark:

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Both invitations were initiated by Malevich, who in those days was in Moscow. And the fact that Udaltsova was “asked to embroidery society”—referring to the Verbovka crafts artel—played a decisive role in her turn to pure nonobjectivity. Malevich was not at the “Jack of Diamonds” opening on November 5, 1916, but he saw the entire exhibition during his second trip to Moscow, from late November through December 8 (the exhibition closed on December 11). It was during this one and a half or two weeks that Udaltsova’s creative rapprochement with Malevich came about. On November 29, surprising herself, she wrote, “Unexpectedly I am captivated by decorative drawings and Malevich. If he got rid of Menkov and Kliun, I could work with him. And we were able to get something done. We turned in the drawings, they came out pretty well, and I earned 230 rubles.”53 A month and a half had passed between Udaltsova’s first entry about “asked to embroidery society” and the entry about how the drawings had come out “pretty well.” In those weeks her perception of Suprematism underwent a cardinal change. By the end of 1916, nonobjective compositions, due to their originality, had set the tone for Verbovka’s innovative designs. Malevich’s From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, which came out in mid-November, also must have played some part in the rational “Amazon’s” realignment. Let us note also for the future that in Udaltsova’s first sentences, concerning, as we now know, the consolidation of the future members of Supremus, she expressed, first, her disdainful—and, we might add, unfair—attitude toward Kliun and Menkov and, second, her desire to drive out of Malevich’s circle individuals against whom she had pretensions of a personal or extremely subjective nature. It would not be a great stretch to conjecture that this sentence of Udaltsova’s might help explain those phenomena in the society which later she herself called “scandals.” Malevich and his newly acquired assistant laid out his top priorities: preparing the Supremus journal; consolidating, on its basis, artists who were “honest toward art”; and arranging for his public lecture, the income from was also supposed to be used for publishing Supremus. Malevich left to join his unit on December 8, 1916. All practical endeavors in his absence in Moscow were carried out by Nadezhda Udaltsova, who became the Suprematist’s alter ego. Udaltsova also took on the publicity for From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism. A public lecture was supposed to have been given on Malevich’s next trip to Moscow; but a general meeting in Udaltsova’s apartment was scheduled for December 15, 1916: “On December 15 we [will] have a General Meeting concerning the journal and concerning my lecture,

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which is proposed for late January.”54 Udaltsova’s diary entries also mention a meeting on January 6, 1917. At the meetings they were supposed to discuss questions about the publication of Supremus and the contribution of each person present, both financial and artistic. Comparing with Malevich’s lists from late 1916, we will list the participants who might have attended the meetings during wartime. Above all, these were the artists N. M. Davydova, V. Ye. Pestel, L. S. Popova, N. A. Udaltsova, and A. A. Exter. I. V. Kliun was serving in the army not far from Moscow and M. I. Menkov was serving in Moscow itself; more than likely they too participated in the meeting. One other member of Supremus whose name was always on Malevich’s lists, Yurkevich, remains an obscure individual; however, there is reason to think that during those months he was in Moscow and consequently might have been present at the gatherings in Udaltsova’s apartment. It is hard to deny Rozanova’s participation, but this is also hard to confirm; we can say reliably that she joined the project only later, in spring 1917. Malevich’s lists also included Aleksei Kruchenykh, who since August 1915 had been spending his time in the Caucasus, the Petrograder Mikhail Matiushin, and also the Muscovite Nikolai Roslavets. Composer Roslavets was firmly linked to Supremus directly through Malevich from beginning to end. Petrograder Matiushin’s vector of artistic development did not coincide with Suprematism, he was not a member of the society, and he only agreed to write for the journal. His long-time comrade Kruchenykh joined Supremus at long distance and was a corresponding member. Udaltsova ran their affairs successfully, and her correspondence with the initiator was steady, inasmuch as in January 1917 Malevich confidently informed Matiushin about the project’s progress: “Money for the journal has been collected. Send articles.”55 The “home guard soldier’s” next visit was on about February 13. After a few difficulties, he and Udaltsova obtained permission from Moscow’s mayor, V. N. Shebeko (1864–1943) to schedule a public lecture, which was held on February 25, 1917, in the Little Hall of Moscow Conservatory, a day before the February Revolution. The lecture, “A New Day in Art” (on the posters: “Betrothed by the Horizon’s Ring and New Ideas in Art: Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism”) gathered a full hall. The next day Udaltsova wrote in her diary: “no loss, but Malevich spoke badly.”56 Badly, inasmuch as after the lecture the audience asked questions which showed that the speaker had not been able to shake their aggressive distaste for left-wing art. The fiasco roused Malevich post factum to write several texts assessing the public’s ability to grasp innovative art.57

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In the literature, there is a ubiquitous but erroneous assertion that Malevich gave the lecture instead of Olga Rozanova, an assertion based on the incorrectly interpreted words of Rozanova herself. The art patron Shemshurin, hearing that one of the left-wing artists in Moscow was going to give a lecture, asked Rozanova whether this meant her. In reply, the artist described her life as an official in the Union of Cities organization, which collected and distributed supplies for the front, and added ironically, “That is why I’m not giving the February 25 lecture. Malevich will, if he manages to get permission in time. Now I prefer to paint pictures in the mornings rather than prepare lectures.”58 N. Gurianova, the artist’s biographer and a scholar of her art, reinforcing this point, even ascribed to Rozanova the very text of Malevich’s lecture: “Apparently Rozanova refers here to the lecture on color-painting given by Malevich in 1917. In the Culture Fund of the Khardzhiev-Chaga Center (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) there is a manuscript of this lecture, rewritten cleanly by Rozanova, but with Malevich’s signature.”59 In fact, the lecture, the full text of which was Malevich’s from beginning to end, was copied out not by Rozanova at all but by the artist’s wife, Sofia Mikhailovna Rafalovich (1889 or 1892–1925). Malevich had not replaced anyone; he had followed through on a long-held intention. From the very first days of his February stay, the artist took up Supremus affairs with tenfold force. Now meetings were held under his leadership. When the February Revolution broke out, Malevich’s departure for his unit was postponed and his final return to Moscow facilitated. At the end of February 1917, Udaltsova recorded in her diary: “Scandals in the society, nothing is likely to come of it. Either Supremus or nothing. That’s my decision. I’m sick and tired of it all, haven’t worked for a full ten days. I’m spreading the rumor that I’m tired and abandoning everything. I should work hard everywhere, but you can’t work with these groups.”60 Relying on testimonies and contemporary events, we can outline the causes and effects of the “scandals in the society.” Udaltsova’s words about “groups” give us the key to understanding the disposition of forces in the society. The most numerous group was, undoubtedly, Malevich’s: originally he saw it as consisting primarily of I. A. Puni, K. L. Boguslavskaia, I. V. Kliun, M. I. Menkov, N. A. Roslavets, and M. V. Yurkevich. The first four were, as we know, among the innovators who appeared under Suprematism’s banner at “0.10.” However, the Muscovites were not terribly fond of the “Futurists’ muse,” the elegant and sophisticated beauty Ksana Boguslavskaia; they considered her a talentless artist and gave her the insulting nickname “Pun’ka.” Battles broke out over “Pun’ka,” and since Ksana was in-

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separable from her husband, they drove out Ivan Albertovich at the same time. Malevich clearly fought for the wealthy couple, who, apart from everything else, were also capable of financing the project. The Muscovites won, and Puni and Boguslavskaia vanished from the list of Supremus members. Udaltsova could not convince Malevich to “get rid of Kliun and Menkov”; obviously, though, given her straightforward nature this wish was no secret for the Suprematist or for his “group,” which included those artists. Anticipating the exposition, let us note that on December 7, 1917, Udaltsova, who had come into sharp conflict with Malevich, wrote the following in her diary: “Foolish Malevich, really, why is he pushing us away? We will get along without him, but how will he without us? It’s only he and Olga Vladimirovna [Rozanova], the rest are a complete botch.”61 By “us,” Udaltsova was referring to herself, L. S. Popova, and V. Ye. Pestel; by “the rest,” all the other Supremus society members and the journal’s authors. In December 1917 this meant K. Malevich himself, the artists O. Rozanova, I. Kliun, N. Davydova, M. Menkov, and M. Yurkevich, the composer N. Roslavets, and the poet A. Kruchenykh. The artists from “Malevich’s group” left a notable trace in art, although in the case of Menkov and Davydova it is difficult to outline that trace in full due to the loss of their works. The artist Yurkevich, who always figures on Malevich’s lists of Supremus members, is an enigmatic figure. Insofar as archival research has made it possible to shed any light on the biography of this Malevich supporter, we will cite here the information obtained. Mstislav Vladimirovich Yurkevich (1885–after 1918) did not appear for the first time in literature under his own name, patronymic, and life dates until 2009. Suffice it to say that in all the previous literature he either lacked initials altogether, or they were wrong, or someone else, also unknown, was alleged to be him.62 Yurkevich’s name came to the historical surface for no more than a year and only in connection with the Supremus society. His works have yet to be uncovered today; all that remains of the artist’s earthly existence is a single text for Supremus. The untitled essay was written in a handwriting that was the product of penmanship lessons, that is, that belonged to someone who had attended either a nonclassical or a classical secondary school. The views expressed in the brief text are maximalist and demonstrate Malevich’s tremendous influence. The signature “M. Yurkevich” has allowed us to identify the author as Mstislav Vladimirovich Yurkevich, who once studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (MUZhVZ). The handwriting of the Supremus

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article and the handwriting in the applications in his MUZhVZ file belong to one and the same person.63 Yurkevich was born on June 13, 1885, in St. Petersburg; in 1906 he matriculated at MUZhVZ in the sculpture department. In the admission form filled out upon matriculation, opposite the “education” column it says “no information”; inserted in the file is a request to return the birth certificate issued by the chief of police in Vilna, where his mother lived. Judging by his last name, Mstislav Yurkevich may well have had Ukrainian-Polish roots. Yurkevich’s “personal file” in the archives is small, since in the 1907–8 academic year he was expelled from MUZhVZ for systematic nonattendance. Now the young man was threatened with the military draft, so he was forced to undertake efforts to get reinstated at the school. The explanatory section of his petition indicates the reason for his absence from classes as a “serious nervous illness” that forced him to go to Petersburg. However, Yurkevich’s petition was rejected, and he asked the office to return his papers to his Moscow address. Malevich may have met him when both were applying for admission to MUZhVZ—Yurkevich successfully and Malevich for the third time unsuccessfully. It was not an especially close friendship; in listing proposed members of Supremus its initiator wrote Yurkevich’s first name with ellipsis points because he either did not know or did not remember it. Nonetheless, Yurkevich’s name is invariably present in Supremus papers and documents from 1916 and 1917. Olga Rozanova’s letter also suggests that Yurkevich had decorative drawings, clearly executed for Verbovka, which were supposed to be placed in the journal’s decorative arts section: “I am also attaching decorative drawings by Yurkevich and oth[ers], you may find them useful.”64 Especially intriguing is Yurkevich’s presence in the triumvirate of proposed authors of the brochure, A New Day for Art (Novyi den’ Iskusstva). On the cover of the lecture, in Sofia Rafalovich’s hand, written calligraphically, is “A New Day for Art,” and below it these names: “K. Malevich, M. Menkov, Yurkevich.” However, the latter two were later heavily crossed out. The latter’s text for Supremus was written on the same quarto sheets as the manuscript for the brochure, with one exception. Yurkevich’s paper was lined; Malevich’s lecture was not. This suggests that Mstislav Yurkevich’s article was first intended for A New Day for Art but then switched to Supremus. The last time Yurkevich surfaced in history was in May 1918, when Malevich named him among the followers of Suprematism.65 Evidently, the young man did not survive the wars and revolutions.

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Udaltsova had her own “group.” Friendships of long standing connected her to Vera Pestel and Liubov Popova. At the same time, the latter held a special position. Popova could always dodge boring matters with impunity. Her participation in the society was expressed in her large financial contribution for the journal’s publication and in the creation of numerous sketches for the Supremus emblem. But Popova had no intention of confining herself to Supremus. Thus a one-day exhibition was organized at her apartment on Novinsky Boulevard on April 23, 1917, to aid freed political prisoners, and previous plans to the contrary, represented at it were not only Suprematists but a much wider circle of artists. This spoke unambiguously to the fact that Popova ignored Supremus’s “party nature.” However, she did belong to the society over the course of 1917 and considered herself a Suprematist.

Olga Rozanova in Supremus Olga Rozanova’s name appeared in connection with the Supremus project in late 1916 in an announcement in Apollon and in one of the drafts of Malevich’s declaration. Both were based on the list of Suprematists in the recently issued From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism. After “0.10” and over the course of 1916, Rozanova, who spent her time mostly in her native towns of Vladimir and nearby Melenki, was in very loose contact with Malevich, if at all. Thus, in the second half of August 1916 she wrote to Kruchenykh: “It looks now as though they’ll be taking Malevich on Aug[ust] 25, maybe Kliunkov and others as well.” That is, she was not in the loop about the fact that Malevich had been serving since late July.66

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Returning to a characterization of the “groups you cannot work with”— Udaltsova wrote this phrase in her diary on February 26—let us note that at that time one other “group” in the Supremus society comprised two other closest friends and comrades, Exter and Davydova. Here a long-simmering artistic conflict broke out between Malevich himself and Alexandra Alexandrovna: a painter who “was painting Nero’s bones” could not be a member of a radical community. Now one has to think that the “Amazons” fought for Exter. The situation deteriorated, obviously—also because, being a wealthy lady, Alexandra Alexandrovna had been putting money into the journal’s publication. Nonetheless, as a result of their discussions, Exter’s name disappeared from the list of Supremus members. Davydova, however, remained in the society to the very end.

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Her connections with the Suprematist group were made primarily through correspondence with Kliun; her letters to Kruchenykh suggest that she did not view the Kliun letters with any particular favor.67 The artist always treated Supremus’s initiator with caution; her personal prejudices and complexes led her to think that he was borrowing her discoveries. Like Matiushin, Rozanova was above all an outstanding artist, and an adequate understanding of the achievements of one’s contemporaries and colleagues has never been a virtue of masters focused on their own art and wholly absorbed in their own inquiries. The distance Rozanova maintained found a hidden reflection in the Malevich documents. Rozanova’s name is mentioned one or two times in October 1916 and then vanishes, and even in the most conscientious enumeration of future author-members of Supremus in the above-quoted letter to Matiushin, her name did not occur to Malevich.68 Rozanova arrived in Moscow in October 1916, bringing works for the “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition. Her material situation was the most deplorable among the left-wing artists; she had no means of livelihood, and her family could not help her. In late fall 1916, Malevich recommended her, as well as Udaltsova, to Davydova. Without a doubt, it was Malevich who took the initiative in luring both Muscovites to create designs for Verbovka. First, he was the indisputable authority in Natalia Mikhailovna’s eyes and, second, the artists’ invitation was made specifically during Malevich’s visits to Moscow. A few years later, forestalling attempts by the Rodchenko-Stepanova duo to wrest Rozanova away from Suprematism, Malevich, we repeat, cited the argument “that he had shown her and Davydova how to make Suprematist ornaments, and that Rozanova had tracings that were taken from his works.”69 As she was leaving to go home to Vladimir for Christmas 1916, Rozanova took with her an order from Davydova. She started doing the designs for Verbovka in Vladimir; upon her return to Moscow after the Christmas vacation, she set about their mass production beginning in the first ten days of January 1917. In a letter written before or during Shrovetide week 1917 (February 6–12), Rozanova informed her sister, “Since my arrival after Christmas I’ve done more than twenty decorative works for the exhibition and for them I will probably get about three hundred rubles, maybe even more, only not all of it at once, but half, and the other half next year.”70 Here she doubtless had in mind the next season. Davydova obviously had material difficulties. Udaltsova commented drily on her employer: “pays haphazardly for them [the drawings].”71

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The shaky hope of money for her Verbovka sketches and the burning issue of her daily bread forced Rozanova to seek any work. Finally, in February 1917, she found employment as a clerk at the Union of Cities organization. In the letter quoted, the artist informed her sister about her upcoming employment, which she would start “beginning the first week of Lent” and where her salary would be 105 rubles a month, and in addition they would provide her with a free “cooked dinner.”72 Rozanova began work, as she had intended, on February 13, 1917. In a letter to Shemshurin dated February 16, she described the shocking state into which the “outgoing” and “incoming” papers had plunged her on the first, second, and third day of her employment.73 After four to six weeks, as a result of the upheavals of the February Revolution, the staff was cut back at the Union of Cities, and Rozanova was temporarily out of work. She told Kruchenykh about this; Supremus and the society did not yet occupy a place in her life: “I’ve left my employment at the Union due to a staff reduction. Now I’ll be looking for another job. But first I think I’ll go see mama and rest for a month or two. I think I’ll leave at Easter.”74 In 1917 Easter fell on April 2, and the letter was obviously written shortly before that. The plan to “go for a month or two,” that is, for all of April and May, speaks to the fact that in March 1917 the artist had no immediate obligations. As secretary of Supremus Rozanova was snowed under with cares and woes and there could be no question of leaving for a month or two; at best, as we will see below, she could tear herself away and go home for a day or two. It should be said as well that this letter—like other Rozanova letters—attests to the extremely weak ties between Rozanova and Malevich at that time. “Malevich is staying at the dacha,” she informs Kruchenykh, “he says that in the summer he will have two rooms free there upstairs [. . .]” In 1917 Malevich did not move to his dacha until May and before that he was staying in Moscow. He informed Matiushin about his proposed imminent move on May 3, but he also asked him for the time being to send letters to his address on First TverskaiaIamskaia.75 In March 1917 Rozanova was obviously not informed of his whereabouts. An analysis of the March letters to Kruchenykh allows us to say that Olga Rozanova did not become secretary of Supremus before the latter half or even the very end of March 1917. Udaltsova finally got the chance to hand over some of her bureaucratic functions to the journal’s staff secretary. They were planning to pool their resources to publish Supremus; Rozanova, who could barely make ends meet, had no money. Her contribution was laborintensive work collecting materials and readying the journal.

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The secretarial work became yet another difficult employment for the artist, as implied by Rozanova’s letter to Shemshurin dated July 9, 1917: “The journal may come out in August, and then FREEDOM!!!”76 Freedom from all the long drawn-out matters connected with the printer, preparing photographs and plates, interacting with artists, and so on; as is well known, a great number of essential, exhausting, and anxious tasks rests on the secretary of any journal. When she first joined Supremus, Rozanova’s mood was joyous; on April 4 she informed Shemshurin with enthusiasm: “But in general the idea of this journal and the newborn Supremus society is a sheer delight for me!”77 The expressions “newborn society” and “sheer delight” make us think that the artist was a neophyte in Supremus’s organizational and other affairs. By April 1917 the journal project was already half a year old, and the Supremus society had begun to consolidate with meetings in late 1916 and early 1917 in Udaltsova’s apartment, meetings that Rozanova, to judge from the above, obviously did not attend.

Supremus The Supremus Archive and Its Fate The principal offspring of the Supremus society was its eponymous journal, which was virtually ready to go to press in mid-1917. For nearly the entire twentieth century, the journal remained a little-known phenomenon, and opinions about it were contradictory. For a while Kovtun thought that Supremus had come out and that at least one issue would surface somewhere. Other scholars, on the contrary, believed that the society’s members had only conceived of working on the journal. As it turned out, the lion’s share of the Supremus materials were in the Khardzhiev archive, as became known after the literary scholar’s death and the Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation’s cultural center found a home at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. After the appearance on the research front of new data between 1999 and 2004, a number of publications appeared that were connected with Supremus activities. Some of the journal’s materials were first published in the fifth issue of Experiment/Eksperiment (1999), a periodical of the Institute of Contemporary Russian Culture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles directed by John Bowlt. The issue’s compilers aimed merely to publish previously unknown articles and manifestos.78

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In 2004, Kazimir Malevich’s articles for the first issue saw the light of day in the fifth volume of his collected works, as did manuscripts of the Supremus circle, some of which the artist originally had proposed placing in the publication.79 An attempt to determine the composition of the first issue was made by art historian N. Gurianova in “The Supremus House-Laboratory: Toward a Reconstruction of the Journal.”80 In her article, Gurianova drew the general contours of the Suprematists’ journal for the first time. The merits of her work include a pioneering statement on the role of Supremus in the artistic life of those troubled years and a preliminary classification of the texts and their placement in the journal. However, the article was compiled quickly, and the artist’s haste led her, unfortunately, to make a number of questionable, unverified, and simply erroneous assertions; these were made worse by her aim to dramatize Rozanova’s role in the project, her superficial work with archival materials, and her decision to ignore colleagues’ publications. The most important of the incorrect points in Gurianova’s article will be stated below and in the notes. First of all, something should be said about how the Supremus archive came to be in the Khardzhiev collection. Gurianova proposed the following hypothesis: “The manuscripts may have been returned from the printers to Rozanova as secretary of the editorial office, and after her untimely death in November 1918 they may have gone in part to Kruchenykh and from him ended up in Nikolai Khardzhiev’s archive.”81 Gurianova did not take into account the fact that nearly three years passed between November 1918 and August 1921, the time of Kruchenykh’s return to Moscow. Her hypothesis did not explain the fact that quite a few of Malevich’s Supremus articles were published by the artist himself in the newspaper Anarchy, as Gurianova herself established. She never learned that some of the articles from Supremus appeared in Unovis Miscellany No. 1 (Al’manakh Unovis no. 1) in May 1920, in Vitebsk, as was analyzed in detail in T. V. Goriacheva’s article, “The History of the ‘Declaration of the Word as Such’ Based on Materials from the Correspondence of A. Kruchenykh,” which was published in the same Terentiev anthology as Gurianova’s own work.82 In reality, the situation with the journal materials came about in a different way. The printer returned the Supremus articles and illustrations to the editor and the decorative drawings were sent back to their authors, but Malevich held onto the bulk of the articles and some of the photographs. Rozanova’s text was returned to her, and in 1918 Kruchenykh’s drama Gly-Gly was still with Nadezhda Udaltsova, who was supposed to illustrate Kruchenykh’s play for publication in the journal (see below).

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After Rozanova’s death, her papers passed into the hands of Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova. A significant number of them are still held by the artist couple’s heirs. The only Supremus materials among them is the article by Rozanova herself and a collage of colored paper that had been proposed for reproduction in the journal. In the early 1930s, young literary scholars Teodor Solomonovich Grits (1905–59), Vladimir Vladimirovich Trenin (1904–41), and Nikolai Ivanovich Khardzhiev (1903–96) were preparing for an epoch-making publication entitled “The History of Russian Futurism”; even now, the plan for it in the FKhCh archive is impressively thorough.83 Khardzhiev, a born collector, actively collected materials for the book from Futurism’s then still thriving artists. Malevich, whom Soviet reality had pushed out of history and the present, greeted “The History of Russian Futurism” with tremendous enthusiasm because it would establish the scale of the artistic revolution left-wing artists had brought about. In an application to publish the book, indicated on a separate line was the following: “Book design and selection of illustrations by K. S. Malevich and M. V. Matiushin.” At Khardzhiev’s request, the Suprematist also wrote reminiscences of his life and of the heroic epoch when his innovative systems in art emerged. Between 1931 and 1934, the Moscow scholar acquired for his work and to illustrate his future “History” a large number of artistic and documentary materials both from Malevich himself and with his help. These may well have included some of the contributions for the first issue of Supremus. In the FKhCh archive there are several lists of works by the artist drawn up in the first half of the 1920s by El Lissitzky and Mechislav Malevich. A list compiled by the latter includes several Supremus materials: articles by Malevich himself and texts by Udaltsova and others. Only Kazimir Malevich himself could have sent Khardzhiev to see his Muscovite brother Mechislav, who was storing his works.84 One other source for additions to the Khardzhiev collection of Malevich manuscripts and drawings was the archive of El Lissitzky, who at one time had edited Unovis Miscellany No. 1 and had published compositions by the Suprematist in Europe. This archive was handed over to Khardzhiev by El Lissitzky’s widow for work on a monograph about the outstanding designer that had been commissioned by a Dresden publishing house. After the sudden rupture

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Texts by Kazimir Malevich Malevich had been working on Supremus materials since fall 1916. A perusal of the surviving articles, drafts, and sketches creates the impression that the texts’ inherent power actually forced the Suprematist to seek out ways to publish them. The common credo and names of the participants in Supremus are presented in several versions of declarations dating from the end of the year. All the lines, however, were written in Malevich’s hand, including the list of proposed members; subsequent deletions were made by the artist as well.86 The style of Malevich the wordsmith was always distinguished by its fungible development, the way his thoughts turned around pivotal positions, which he produced in his private correspondence, theoretical articles, and journalistic statements. His prophetic appeals to the younger generation to reject necrotic traditions and build a new life became central in his declarations, draft texts, and letters to Matiushin. It is not hard now to see a premonition of Unovis in the Suprematist’s appeals to “Youth.” However, in the Supremus era, Malevich had to convince not youth, who burned with enthusiasm, but mature artists of his truth. The tension that arose in trying to establish mutual understanding inevitably affected the dealings among these very different, talented, and strong personalities. Without question, the journal’s character and direction had to be discussed and agreed upon by all members of the community. Not an easy task. More than once, the journal’s initiator expressed his opinion that its first issue should be devoted to Cubism, the second to Futurism, and the third to Suprematism. As has already been said, the model for this was the slogan-title of his book, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism. By proposing to analyze the phenomenon of Cubism comprehensively, Malevich, on the one hand, strove to assert Cubism in the consciousness of the broad public; on the other

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in Khardzhiev’s relations with Sofia Kiuppers-Lisitskaia (1891–1978) and his inexplicable refusal to work on the book, many of Malevich’s materials that had previously been with El Lissitzky remained with the collector.85 Over the course of his nearly hundred-year life, Khardzhiev, who had been cruelly damaged by his difficult existence in the Soviet climate, felt he had to maintain silence about the documents from the legendary Supremus. Only after the scholar’s death, when some of his archive came under the care of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, did it turn out that the Supremus materials had not perished.

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hand, he wanted to construct a convincing genealogy for Suprematism for his opponents past and present. In late 1916, under the impression of the “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition, Malevich wrote a major article, “Supremus: Cubism and Futurism.”87 Subsequently, many of its formulas went into similar texts for the journal and also articles for the newspaper Anarchy. The artist was counting on Supremus’s coming out monthly. He announced the second issue, devoted to Futurism, for January 1917; according to his calculations, Suprematism awaited its own issue in February 1917. Malevich had a great deal of material, but in January 1917 he was still in the army. All February was overshadowed by preparations for his “Betrothed by the Horizon’s Ring” lecture. A steady ferment had begun in the art world that drew in everyone, left-wing artists above all. It was in this context that materials were assembled for Supremus. By spring 1917, radical artists saw Cubism, Futurism, and Cubo-Futurism as anachronisms. In December 1916, Udaltsova, speaking about Tatlin’s forms, commented, “That is well over.”88 In his manifesto “eko-eza,” a text from his “self-written” collection Nosoboika, which saw the light of day in May 1917, Aleksei Kruchenykh proclaimed, “Futurist paint[ers] have Shishkin’s same impassable forest, only skewed, where many have got lost and gone as far as universal flowering and Rayonnism.” Olga Rozanova responded to these attacks on Filonov, Larionov, and Futurism fairly harshly: “I think nosoboika is superfluous. The dissatisfaction with yesterday is expressed in it in grumbling. [. . .] Moreover, the book also has an ambiguous tone. Both the malice and the tone make it old and therefore unnecessary.”89 Cubism was much “older” than both Rayonnism and the “universal flowering.” In light of this attitude, Malevich’s plan to give the first issue over to it did not meet with his colleagues’ approval. Presumably this was the topic of unsparing discussions. As the result of debates and discussions, Supremus made a cardinal change in its orientation. Now it was decided to combine in it education about “yesterday” and propaganda for future-oriented, topical processes. An April letter from Malevich to Matiushin denotes the journal’s new direction: “Right now I am thinking over my articles for the journal and have decided to constr[uct] a [new] Supremative journal Supremis.”90 In April 1917, secretary Rozanova sent an official letter of invitation to Matiushin. It had obviously been written at Malevich’s insistence, since Matiushin

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had not been sending manuscripts, and they had to either hold or not hold a place for these in the nearly ready journal. From the very outset Malevich had worried that Matiushin, who had not joined in a single one of his projects, would not want to be among the journal’s authors: “Having received nothing def[inite] from you, I thought you might not want to join the group of journal particip[ants]. [. . .] And I don’t want to crowd you, you would not be rejecting me personally, I know that, but on the other [hand], I would not want to crowd you.”91 Malevich thought that, on the one hand, it would be easier for Matiushin to refuse to send an article to the journal’s secretary rather than to himself; and on the other, an official appeal from the journal’s official secretary demonstrated the undertaking’s solidity and should rouse the Petrograder to participate. Secretary Rozanova efficiently outlined the journal’s readiness to appear and its nature, which had crystallized as a result of collective creative work: “Dear Mikhail Vasilievich, The Supremus society of artists is in the near future publishing a journal of the same name. It is a periodical. Strictly party-based in nature. / Its program: Suprematism (Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Music, New Theater, etc.). Articles, chronicle, letters, aphorisms, poetry, and reproductions of Suprematist paintings and applied art. / Articles of a scholarly nature, artistic-scholarly, etc.”92 The Supremus secretary’s letter—which, we would point out, no longer contained any mention of Cubism-Futurism— worked, and Matiushin hastened to send in an article, “On the Old and New in Music.” The journal’s “party-based nature” had been relevant back in 1915–16, when conciliatory moods implanted by the energetic and enterprising David Burliuk had prevailed. These grew stronger with the expansionist policy of the reformist World of Art and the successful entry by moderate innovators from Jack of Diamonds into the art market. The tendency to compromise was strong before the storms and clashes of spring 1917. The “Ministry of Fine Arts” project that arose after the February Revolution and that inevitably entailed a “correct” old-new hierarchy, gave rise to a drastic demarcation in the art world. A precise self-definition was demanded of all actors; it had been stressed that each member of the Left-wing Bloc, which by the revolutionary spring in Petrograd had been consolidated, was supposed to indicate with which group he was allied. In the case of Supremus, the self-definition demanded of the left-wing artists by the times turned out to have been a subject of much consideration long

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since by its initiator and was reinforced in his establishment of the journal’s party-based—that is, radical and uncompromising—nature. Among Malevich’s papers that bear on the journal, our attention is drawn to manuscripts with specific marks consisting of numbers followed by a parenthesis before the titles. In the heading of the article “Salutation to Suprematists. Aim,” we find: “1) 3 pp.”; for “Futurism,” “2) 5 pages”; “Issues” also has a note “2)”; “Architecture as a Slap at Concrete-steel” (sic) has “5)”; “What Happened in February 1917 and March” has “7)”; and “Theater” has “8).” All the texts were written in early 1917; the ordinal numbers indicated how these works fit into some whole, which could only have been Supremus. However, not all the works were accepted for the journal, having been rejected, probably, by other participants after discussion. Supremus members also rebelled against Malevich’s idea of republishing in the journal articles by Alexandre Benois and Dmitry Merezhkovsky so that he could run his own reply to the new art’s persecutors. Malevich refined his introductory sentence in his drafts: instead of “By placing the two articles, by D. Merezhkovsky and Alex[andre] Benois” and separating them off with a horizontal line of ink, he began anew: “In placing the articles as two disgraceful pages by yesterday’s defenders [. . .]”93 This curious notion reflected a desire to offer the readers a genuine dialog for their judgment. Subsequently Malevich realized this in part, inasmuch as he prefaced his text in “To Men of State from Art” in Anarchy with expositions of the main positions of both opponents’ articles. Obviously, Supremus members felt that this kind of polemic was extravagant for the journal, inasmuch as Benois’s “Last Futurist Exhibition” and Merezhkovsky’s “Another Step of the Coming Boor” were of significant length, as was Malevich’s response. Moreover, this topic was central to Udaltsova’s article, “The Attitude of Critic and Society Toward Modern Russian Art.” This last circumstance suggests that, after discussion, Udaltsova either was asked or volunteered to write her article. Kruchenykh’s provocative article, “Azef-Judas-Khlebnikov,” about which more detail below, was the first to be submitted to the journal by another author. It was not included in Supremus, and one has to think that its exclusion was the result of far from sanguine debates among the society’s members. Service to the “old theater” discerned by Malevich in the decorative baroque Cubism of Supremus member Alexandra Exter, which he anathematized in “Theater,” was certainly discussed at meetings of participants. And just as

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They intended to publish Supremus lavishly: a considerable body of articles and its monochrome and, most importantly, color illustrations, would make it an extraordinary phenomenon of artistic life. It is difficult to say how knowledgeable Malevich was in printing matters, although to judge from his letters to Matiushin, he had had constant dealings with printers since fall 1916. Nevertheless, Rozanova remarked that her question about typeface size baffled him: “He was not so much ill intentioned as he was [. . .] in a helpless state and got everything confused. He could tell me nothing about typefaces and did not even understand whether they [remainder of page lost].”94 Unlike other Supremus participants, Rozanova, who for financial reasons had once worked at N. I. Butkovskaia’s zincography workshop in Petrograd, knew the printing business thoroughly, and she had rich experience, which she had paid for with her health, publishing books and albums in co-authorship with Kruchenykh. Bringing her in as secretary put matters on a practical footing. Overseeing the composition, taking pictures, and dealing with the zincography and collotype processes and so forth and so on were essential, energyintensive, and expensive undertakings. The frequent assertions by the journal’s editor and secretary about how the first issue was already at the printer and being printed were not untrue, as is now clear. The bulk of Supremus had indeed been assembled; the materials had started going to the printer in spring 1917. By summer 1917 the first issue was the fruit of collective collaboration under Malevich’s leadership. This too will be the subject of further examination.

Sections and Sequence Back in his fall 1916 “Synopsis of the journal,” Malevich had designated the section headings “Painting,” “Literature,” “Music,” and “Theater,” which were traditional for journals and miscellanies of the era. A letter from Rozanova to Matiushin also mentioned that Supremus would have “Sculpture,” “Architecture,” “Letters,” “Aphorisms,” and a “Chronicle.” While Supremus was in preparation, Malevich added to his knowledge of printing processes. The specific notations made in his hand at the top of the

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unquestionably, Exter had her supporters in the society. Nevertheless, as a result of the discussion, Exter’s name and works vanished from Supremus, as has already been mentioned, while all the passages in Malevich’s “Theater” branding the artist as a renegade remained.

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manuscripts contain useful information about his concept’s proposed implementation. At the head of each article intended for the printer, the editor wrote the instruction “To press” and “Body” and wrote down its issue number and type size. In addition to the sequence of large numbers made in blue violet pencil, the type size, 10 or 12, indicated the article’s hierarchical importance. Several of Malevich’s original materials had their numbers changed due to a change in Supremus’s structure. “Architecture as a Slap in the Face of Concrete-Steel” had had the number “5),” but it went to the printer with a blueviolet “15”; analogously, in the final version of “Theater,” the number “8)” was replaced by “16.” At the printer’s, the articles were distributed among typesetters, of whom there were at least two, Kostrov and Gak. These names were written at the top of the pages by an unidentified individual. The working condition of several of the manuscripts that have typographical markings and prints from ink-stained fingers attest unambiguously to the fact that at least the lion’s share of Supremus had been typeset. The FKhCh archive has the following articles from Supremus: K. Malevich. “Welcome to Suprematists. Aim.” (No. 1) Nik. Roslavets. “On ‘Nonobjective’ Art.” (No. 2) I. Kliun. “Nonobjective Art.” ([No. 3]) K. Malevich. “Cubism.” ([No. 6]) K. Malevich. “Futurism.” (No. 7) N. Udaltsova. “If Cubists Studied the Shapes of Things . . . ” (No. 8) M. Yurkevich. “There Is Art . . . ” (No. 9) Aleksei Kruchenykh. “Declaration of the Word as Such.” (No. 10) K. Malevich. “Architecture as a Slap in the Face of Concret[e]-Steel.” (No. 15) K. Malevich. “Theater.” (No. 16) N. Udaltsova. [Letter to Kazimir Severinovich Malevich]. (No. 19) N. Udaltsova. [Letter to Olga Vladimirovna Rozanova]. (No. 20) N. Udaltsova. “Thoughts on Painting.” (No. 21)

In 1971, Matiushin’s article “On the Old and New in Music,” which he had once sent to Supremus, went from Khardzhiev to the archive of the V. V. Mayakovsky State Museum via a secondhand bookshop. Also in Supremus was a work by Udaltsova, “The Attitude of Critic and Society Toward Modern Russian Art” (heirs’ archive) and Rozanova’s “Cub-

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In the body of surviving materials, the breakdown into sections can be traced through the blue violet numbers placed by editor Malevich. The first and largest section was given over to articles of a general nature and works on recent art. The journal opened with Malevich’s “Welcome to the Suprematists,” with the subtitle, “Aim.” The number “2” was written at the top of N. A. Roslavets’s “On ‘Nonobjective’ Art.” The first big gap in numbering in the FKhCh archive materials is numbers 3–6, which apparently denoted articles of a general artistic nature by I. Kliun, N. Udaltsova, and O. Rozanova. The sequence of the articles has been established by myself; the number three was attributed to Kliun’s text only because it is in the FKhCh, whereas the other two are not. Kliun’s typescript was given to the printer Kostrov,95 who marked it up and, judging from the fingerprints on the original, typeset it. Although the typescript does not have violet pencil numbers, the article undoubtedly went into Supremus’s first section. Despite all my efforts, I was unable to see for myself the original of Udaltsova’s “The Attitude of Critic and Society Toward Modern Russian Art,” which is held by the artists’ heirs, even though the text was created especially for the journal. It was published in Udaltsova’s Life of a Russian Cubist,96 but the editors did not indicate whether there are any marginal notes or markings on the manuscript. In a note enclosed with the submitted materials, Udaltsova informed Malevich of where she thought her “Attitude of Critic” should go in the journal: “[Kazimir Severinovich]. Order of printing: I first this article; II then ‘Attitude of Public and Critic Toward Mod[ern] Art’; III Letters; IV Thoughts on Painting.”97 The editor did not agree with the author, changed the order, and moved “The Attitude of Critic” closer to the beginning and, on the other hand, moved further back the untitled article that Udaltsova placed first in her note, giving it the number 8. Some difficulties have arisen in connection with Olga Rozanova’s work. Her “Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism” was written for Supremus, although her

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ism, Futurism, Suprematism” (private archive, Moscow), as confirmed by their authors’ own testimonies.

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biographers sometimes date its creation to summer 1916.98 They cite a letter from the artist herself, who in August 1916 really was working on some kind of text: “I am writing and rewriting the article endlessly on the ugly lithographic faces of German scholars. I am endlessly sick of it, but it’s getting better.”99 In the same letter Rozanova informed Kruchenykh, “It looks as though Malevich will be taken on Aug[ust] 25. [. . .] Kliunov writes that a Tatlin group has been organized. [. . .] The Suprematists also dream of organizing separate exhibitions. 3 people!” These lines and the skeptical, ironic words speak unambiguously to Rozanova’s alienation with respect to the Suprematists in summer 1916. Since late July, Malevich had been stationed with his army unit, but Rozanova did not know this because their contact was either minimal or nonexistent. Let us remember as well that in August 1916 the Supremus project did not even exist; it was born to its initiator in the late fall of 1916, and Rozanova joined it at a fairly advanced stage. “Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism” was not written before spring 1917; subsequently, three passages were taken from it for the catalog of the “Tenth State Exhibition” (1919) and published as the deceased Rozanova’s credo, with an unambiguous reference to “The Journ[al] Supremus No. 1.” Since the days of the Union of Youth miscellany (1913), where her “Foundations of the New Art and the Reasons for Its Misunderstanding” was published, Rozanova had been an authoritative writer on modern art. Her substantial “Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism” was to have occupied a significant place in Supremus. The exposition of innovative positions in Rozanova’s article was distinguished for its cogency, precision, and rigor. The three-step nature of the country’s modern art that Malevich was constantly declaring was the unique matrix for the Suprematist’s text. According to Malevich’s original plan, his “Futurism” was supposed to have gone into the second issue of Supremus. However, when everything changed and the journal, in essence, grew into a miscellany, the author planned to include the article in the first issue under number “2).” It should be noted that a fair copy was made of “Welcome to the Suprematists. Aim,” with the notation “1)” and “Futurism,” which was supposed to follow it, with the number “2),” on large sheets of lined paper not by Rozanova at all, as her biographer asserts without grounds, but by Malevich’s wife, Sofia Rafalovich.100 After some discussion, “Futurism” was moved back in the issue and given a blue violet number “7” and an indication of type size. The article was typeset,

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In this arrangement, number 6 remained open in the first section of the journal. I adhere to the hypothesis that Malevich’s “Cubism” was supposed to come under number 6 in the journal. FKhCh has the most complete version of it, which ends with the following sentence: “It is with these three worlds that we will explain our new objectives in subsequent volumes of Supremus!” This text was obviously intended for the journal; logically, its position in the publication should have preceded “Futurism.” “Cubism” and “Futurism” by Malevich himself and Udaltsova’s article on Suprematism lined up in the constitutive triad “from Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism.” The next section in Supremus was “Literature.” Originally, Malevich had had a plan to republish Victory Over the Sun; in late November 1916 he remarked: “we’re going to print Victory.”101 The prolific “momentalist” Kruchenykh loved the dramatic genre; in the Caucasus he had conceived of more than one play. The only one ever completed was Gly-Gly.102 It too was supposed to go into Supremus. Also included was new poetry, poems by Kruchenykh and Rozanova. On May 23, 1917, the latter wrote to Matiushin, “All the literary material has been

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as the typographical markings in the text, which are analogous to the same markings in other Supremus works, attest. All the notations at the top, except for the name, were struck out by Malevich when he handed the article over for publication to Anarchy, where it finally saw the light of day on May 12, 1918. Udaltsova’s article (No. 8), to which she did not give a title, sets forth the prospects for art that opened up after Cubism and Futurism, “which had outlived art and become part of life,” were outstripped. The artist defines art’s present with the Malevich term “color-painting”: “today’s artists have arrived at the fundamental principle of painting—color (color-painting)” (emphasis in original). The article shed light on the Suprematist revolution in art, a new phase in world art after Futurism; from this stemmed its placement in the journal, following “Futurism.” Mstislav Yurkevich’s article, which began “There is an art” (No. 9), was wholly influenced by Malevich’s theories. The author’s formulation draws our attention: “Suprematism relates to Painting’s past as [pure mathematics does to arithmetic], as philosophy does to journalism.” It transposes Suprematism to a higher intellectual level and speaks to the fact that Yurkevich, whom we have not identified, had penetrated the essence of the worldview of geometrical nonobjectivity.

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assembled.”103 In the note analyzed below to Udaltsova and dated May 20, 1917, Rozanova commented that she was enclosing two manuscript collections by Kruchenykh, “Balos” and “Blue Eggs,” from which poems could be selected for the publication, including her own two opuses as well.104 The journal’s literary section opened with Aleksei Kruchenykh’s “Declaration of the Word as Such.” The manuscript original of the declaration bears some fairly interesting notations. First, the editor wrote the number “2” at the top; thus, Kruchenykh’s manifesto was supposed to follow “Welcome to the Suprematists.” Then the emphases changed, and N. A. Roslavets’s general theoretical article was placed second in the journal. “Declaration of the Word as Such” was given a blue violet “10” and took its place following the articles of the first section to lead off the literary section. The play Gly-Gly and the poetry followed under their own numbers, one must assume. Gly-Gly must have had the number “11,” Kruchenykh’s poems presumably no. 12, and Rozanova’s no. 13. Matiushin’s “About the Old and New in Music” was placed in “Music,” the section following “Literature” (presumably no. 14). In one of his letters, Malevich requested, “And please also send a short snatch of music on one page, especially” (emphasis in original).105 In Supremus’s unique heir, Unovis Miscellany No. 1, Matiushin’s article was followed by “Budetlyane Score.” In a defective miscellany from the GTG that once belonged to El Lissitzky, this score is missing. The miscellany was manufactured by hand in a run of five copies, and its maker kept the last, fifth copy, which, in his haste, he had obviously not completed. However, the blank spread following the Matiushin text implies unambiguously that a fragment of the score had been pasted in here in the first display copies. More than likely, this was the score of Victory Over the Sun, which was published in a 1913 edition. It is logical to assume that in the miscellany the score fragment shifted around along with Matiushin’s article. In a letter to Petrograd, Rozanova mentioned an article about architecture in Supremus, by which she undoubtedly meant Malevich’s “Architecture as a Slap in the Face of Concrete-Steel,” number 15. The “Theater” section included Malevich’s article by the same name, marked with a blue-violet number 16. The final section in the body of surviving materials from the FKhCh comprises “Letters.” Here there were two letters from Udaltsova with the numbers 19 and 20 in blue-violet pencil.

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The journal has three more sections, but they can be reconstructed only approximately. The above-quoted letter from Rozanova to Udaltsova made it clear that Supremus had a section on decorative art: “I am enclosing motifs for three-color embroidery for the journal’s decorative section. I am also enclosing decorative drawings by Yurkevich and oth[ers], which may be useful.” Presented in this section, undoubtedly, were designs for Verbovka, to which most of the Supremus artists (N. Davydova, K. Malevich, V. Pestel, L. Popova, O. Rozanova, N. Udaltsova, and M. Yurkevich) contributed. The mention of “three-color” draws our attention. Decorative works were supposed to be reproduced in color. These same Rozanova lines imply that they were planning to send to the printer not photographs but the drawings themselves; therefore it is logical to assume that once the journal did not come out all the original artwork was returned to the artists. This hypothesis is confirmed by the presence in a Moscow private collection of Rozanova’s Nonobjective Composition (1917, paper, colored paper; 29.2 × 25 cm), which has a penciled inscription by the artist: “Include this paste-on as an example in the article on nonobjective painting.” This seems to have been addressed to Supremus editor Malevich, since the number “5+” is in his hand. The unique dialog between the two artists fixed in the marginalia and notations on this collage attest eloquently to the fact that Rozanova’s Suprematist projects frequently garnered the approval of Malevich, who valued them highly.107 Numbers 17 and 18 remain vacant in the journal’s reconstruction. To this day no one has uncovered any indications about the works under these numbers. However, Rozanova’s letter establishes the “decorative section” as already existing in the journal; presumably the contents of this section filled the gap between numbers 16 and 19, that is, before “Letters.” In the surviving body of Supremus texts, the last blue-violet number 21 was placed, as was mentioned above, on Udaltsova’s “Thoughts on Painting.” The artist’s laconic statements concerning recent painting and sculpture wholly correspond to the “aphorism” genre mentioned by Rozanova in a letter to Malevich.

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Her last text, “Thoughts on Painting,” no. 20, was the only material submitted by Udaltsova that was not written in her hand but rather in an elaborate handwriting with decorative flourishes. Presumably, the article was copied out by the artist’s younger sister, who assisted her in many matters.106

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We know generally that brief manifestos of a line or two were a favorite genre of all left-wing artists and were frequently published on leaflets timed to coincide with avant-gardists’ vernissages and speeches. Malevich had a passion for the lapidary formulation of his views. They opened his text in his first brochure, From Cubism to Suprematism, and appeared on a leaflet printed for “0.10.” The artist’s legacy included quite a few aphorisms concerning various aspects of art and life.108 Nevertheless, today only Udaltsova’s surviving brief “Thoughts on Art” can pretend to the role of aphorisms in the first issue of Supremus.

A “Chronicle” section was obligatory for journals and miscellanies, closing them out as a rule. In a fall 1916 draft of a Supremus announcement, Malevich noted, “Write to Roslavets which few of the editions of his music should be put in the chronicle.”109 Later, in a letter to Matiushin, he enumerated, “Survey, chronicle, bibliography, on new books.”110 In a letter to Matiushin, Rozanova also mentions a chronicle. There is a notation “Chronicle” at the end of one version of the article “Theater.”111 The text that follows this title does not correspond to the genre of chronicle notes and announcements customary in periodicals of the era. The word “Chronicle” was struck out in graphite pencil at the end of Malevich’s corrected manuscript of “What Happened in February and March 1917” with the number “7)”; this number coincides with the blue violet pencil one, that is, with the later number on the article “Futurism,” which was part of the final makeup. The text itself of “What Happened in February and March 1917” has an additional small section, “In May.” The manuscript does not have any notations concerning such details as type size. In the summer Malevich continued his public and social chronicle in his “What Happened in June and July 1917.”112 The Suprematist’s caustic, sarcastic comments about the politics of the Provisional Government can scarcely be qualified as a “Chronicle” in an arts miscellany. The assertion that “What Happened in February and March 1917” was part of the first issue as approved by the other Suprematists seems highly debatable.113 The absence of verifiable data makes a satisfactory reconstruction of the “Chronicle” section for July 1917 impossible. To sum up the reconstruction of the contents of Supremus, let us reproduce its table of contents in full with the authors’ names.

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I. Painting Kazimir Malevich. Welcome to the Suprematists. Aim. Nikolai Roslavets. On “Nonobjective” Art. Ivan Kliun. Nonobjective Art. Nadezhda Udaltsova. The Attitude of Critic and Society Toward Modern Russian Art. Olga Rozanova. Cubism. Futurism. Suprematism. Kazimir Malevich. Cubism. Kazimir Malevich. Futurism. Nadezhda Udaltsova. “If Cubists Studied the Shapes of Things . . .” Mstislav Yurkevich. “There Is Art . . .” II. Literature Aleksei Kruchenykh. Declaration of the Word as Such. Aleksei Kruchenykh. Gly-Gly. A drama. Aleksei Kruchenykh. Poems (from the “Blue Eggs” and “Balos” collections) Olga Rozanova. Poems (from the “Balos” collection) III. Music Mikhail Matiushin. On the Old and New in Music. Mikhail Matiushin. Budetlyane Score. IV. Architecture Kazimir Malevich. Architecture as a Slap in the Face of Concrete-Steel. V. Theater Kazimir Malevich. Theater. VI. Decorative section Decorative drawings and objects by Natalia Davydova, Kazimir Malevich, Vera Pestel, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova. VII. Letters. Aphorisms Nadezhda Udaltsova. Letter to Kazimir Severinovich Malevich. Nadezhda Udaltsova. Letter to Olga Vladimirovna Rozanova. Nadezhda Udaltsova. Thoughts on Painting

In conclusion, let us turn to the fate of the Supremus archive, inasmuch as there is one circumstance that could affect our conception of Supremus in the future. N. I. Khardzhiev dealt with the materials from his collection at his own discretion. He edited the “live” text, underlining and striking out sentences

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Supremus No. 1

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and lines; he expressed disdain for one author or another directly on the manuscripts; he added words he needed to other people’s compositions.114 In addition, he liked to separate related documents and papers, distributing them into different files or simply removing the last page of a manuscript and putting it elsewhere. Sometimes, on the contrary, he arbitrarily arranged a “whole,” assembling different texts written by an author on similar pieces of paper into one document.115 Admitting these manipulations in creating “heteroplacements” and “homoplacements,” Khardzhiev insisted, “I warn yet again that homoplacement is not proof of a textual connection between two items.”116 These characteristics of how the documents and manuscripts were preserved increased a hundredfold after Khardzhiev and his wife emigrated to Holland (1993) and after the scandalous export of his collection, when individual materials turned out to have been kept not just in different files but in different countries. After Khardzhiev’s death, his archive ultimately came to rest at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In accordance with Western museum law, the Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation under the museum’s aegis has allowed specialists to familiarize themselves with the archive’s documents. Eventually Khardzhiev always spoke unflatteringly about virtually all his contemporary colleagues. His particular targets were those researching the Russian avant-garde, whom he lumped together as “a cockroach-like swarm” engendered by “perestroika,” as poet and philologist Sergei Sigei reported.117 Having enjoyed the favor of the master from the capital throughout the 1980s and then innocently lost it, Sigei explains, “Khardzhiev’s distaste for them is connected as well with the fact that none of them knew about the materials in his archive and collection. He deliberately limited access to his treasures, believing that there should not be too many scholars.”118 The poet’s apophatic sentence is as expressive as can be. Khardzhiev did not like scholars because they did not know the archives to which he would not give them access. “Deliberately limited access” is Sigei’s euphemism. His wife, the poet Ry Nikonova, sketched out no less impressively the opportunities presented to trusted individuals as a mark of special favor: “Khardzhiev was a man who remembered and safeguarded. Like a tubby Kashchei, he sat on his treasure chest, taking out a page at a time and reading ‘something’ to Sigei, and then suddenly saying, ‘Nonsense!’—and tearing the manuscript, which was not his own, into little pieces.”119

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In 1993 the couple, Nikolai Ivanovich Khardzhiev and Lidia Vasilievna Chaga (1912–95), emigrated from what was now Russia, not the Soviet Union. As the collection, which was, in essence, a great national treasure, was crossing the border, an easily predicted catastrophe occurred: it was scattered and divided. The people who saw to the Khardzhiev collection’s export, in violation of Russian laws on protecting cultural treasures, were thinking primarily of profit. In the secret border crossing, some of the archive was taken to Amsterdam, where the couple lived, some was stolen, and some was left at Sheremetievo customs, confiscated, and handed over to RGALI. When it arrived in Amsterdam, the archive, after Khardzhiev’s death, became a part of the Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation’s cultural center, under the aegis of the Stedelijk Museum; the stolen papers’ whereabouts are unknown to this day. The part of the archive that ended up in RGALI was closed to scholars

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Khardzhiev’s privatization policy with respect to avant-gardists’ archives he had acquired cost Russian culture dearly. Documents and manuscripts of inestimable importance did not see the light of day even when all the conditions for this were in place. Foreign Slavists, for whom the younger contemporary of Malevich, Filonov, and Kharms was a living embodiment of the history of the Russian avant-garde, went to him in great piety many times with requests to publish what he wished to or found necessary.Rarely did Khardzhiev meet them halfway. To be fair it should be said that according to Khardzhiev, a major role in this was played by his extremely negative experience in dealing with the Swedish Slavist Bengt Jangfeldt (born 1948), who betrayed his trust and committed the “theft of the century,” as the scholar put it.120 Both then and afterward, in many letters, Khardzhiev asserted that Jangfeldt, taking advantage of Soviet citizens’ unprotected rights, acquired four of Malevich’s Suprematist pictures from his collection. The story came about as follows. In the mid-1970s, intending to flee the Soviet Union with his wife, Khardzhiev put his hopes in Jangfeldt, a pupil of Roman Jakobson, whom he deeply admired, and gave the Swede canvases to secure his future life abroad. Later, though, the Muscovite, who had a hard time obtaining permission to leave the Soviet Union, especially with his wife (the authorities preferred to have a hostage for his return), changed his mind and naturally asked that the works be returned. The response was profound silence, which Jangfeldt broke only after more than twenty-five years, that is, when the statute of limitations established by Swedish law for bringing criminal charges had run out.121

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in 1994 by the former owner for twenty-five years; that term will expire in 2019. Returning to the Suprematists’ legendary journal, I would like to express the hope that perhaps the part of the Khardzhiev’s treasure chest that ended up in RGALI will yield surprises after 2019 in the form of unknown materials from the Supremus archive. Some of the journal’s documents may well be in the part of the archive that has wandered off to parts unknown and will one day come to light.

Kazimir Malevich and Nikolai Roslavets Malevich’s Friend from Childhood and Youth The placement of Nikolai Roslavets’s “On ‘Nonobjective’ Art” second in Supremus underscored how important the composer’s presence in the society was and how highly Malevich valued his theoretical grounding for the new art. In addition, Roslavets could not be criticized or pushed out of Malevich’s group because he was a musician and so was shielded from the “Amazons’” biases. The story of the relationship between the Suprematist and the composer sheds light on a very significant aspect of Malevich’s art that has not been examined before in the literature: his views on the art of music. The distinguished and innovative composer Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets (1880/81–1944) was one of Malevich’s oldest acquaintances; almost the same age, they met as adolescents in Konotop. Subsequently, in his published reminiscences, the artist characterized their activities together in the provinces as follows: “I was active along the line of painting, but I had with me one other friend, the composer Nikolai Roslavets, who is now known throughout the music world. He was active in the musical line. This was the only friend I made in Konotop.”122 In his unpublished memoiristic sketch “Konotop,” Malevich described in a Gogolesque fashion their joint maturation in a town “where on the main street, if horses had a hard time getting out of the swamp, then the hogs frequently perished.”123 In this remarkable essay he cites hitherto unknown details from his daily life with Roslavets in the southern Russian provinces. In hindsight, the handmade magazine created by the Konotop friends, about which more below, has to seem like a “memory of the future”—of Supremus.

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After that, in our circle, I was a proper artist. Our circle was developing. We even ventured to put out an artistic journal on Literature, Music, and Fine Arts. This publication was entirely handmade, we sewed the notebooks ourselves, drew and wrote everything we thought up in pencil. In the music section, and also [in] the illustrations, one of the prominent comrades, like me, a violinist musician, contributed his own origin[al] drawings. His name is now known in many countries in the music world just as mine is in painting. This was Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets. This is the only person from the entire group who remained on the surface not circled by life’s waves, who could not be lashed by them and buried at the bottom of all the daily hubbub and narrow-mindedness. And so in Konotop Nikolai Roslavets and I had a beginning for our activities and moved ahead and fought with life inseparably, just as we are fighting right now to restore new forms of art.

Breaking off the quotation, let us point out that the words “just as we are fighting right now” were inserted above the line by the author, evidently upon rereading. Let us continue the quotation: “Kolia Roslavets was an outstanding, capable, and gifted fellow who developed his activities primarily along musical lines. He organized a choir in which I took a big part. The choir developed and achieved great size, until it had about forty people. Of course, as it should, each such choir sang and studied not only secular songs but also those of a religious nature. So that later on Kolia Roslavets’s choir sang in the main cathedral in Konotop.” Inasmuch as Malevich, according to his own words, “took a big part” in Roslavets’s choir, it follows that he sang with everyone else in Konotop’s main cathedral; this is a remarkable detail in the great artist’s biography. The parents of both Konotop adolescents worked for the Moscow-KievVoronezh Railway administration; in about 1896 the administration was transferred to Kursk, where the Malevich and Roslavets families moved. Here the future artists were again side by side: “My life in Kursk flowed tirelessly over my work on painting, while Kolia Roslavets developed his work along musical lines. He organized a large Ukrainian choir, and also later an orchestra as well. True, the purpose of this choir and orchestra was not to sing in cathedrals. They only sang for the sake of Art itself.”

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The adolescent Kazimir’s passionate devotion to painting yielded fruits both intangible and tangible. The former in the form of prestige among his comrades; the latter in the form of groshi, “money” in Ukrainian. Young Malevich’s landscape Moonlit Night was bought by a local fan:

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Roslavets, this offspring of former peasants, began his professional studies in the music classes of the Kursk branch of the Russian Musical Society. In 1901 he passed the entrance exams for the Moscow Conservatory. Malevich made his way from Kursk to Moscow for good in about 1907. Among his pictures from that period was his Portrait of the Composer Roslavets (ca. 1907), which decorated a public dining room opened by Malevich’s mother and sister in Moscow but perished in a fire that destroyed a few other Malevich canvases as well.124 Kliun’s memoirs describe the burned picture: “Malevich [. . .] in approximately 1908–[190]9 painted several symbolist and mystical pictures; all of them were on a golden background and in golden tones: Birth, Song to Blue Clouds, Angels Carrying the Soul of a Deceased Righteous Man to Heaven, and so on. [. . .] Song to Blue Clouds depicts a naked man (composer Roslavets) playing a violin, at the top are blue clouds and not far away are a few stylized trees.”125 A drawing has survived with the artist’s title: “Sketch for a Portrait of Roslavets: Song to Blue Clouds.” The artist called his portrait of Roslavets an allegorical composition; it had no tokens of the musician’s real appearance whatsoever. Music’s young genius, Kliun’s reminiscences notwithstanding, did not aspire to being depicted as a composer “naked playing the violin.”126 Subsequently Malevich did give a number of his first Suprematist pictures luxuriant titles: “Pictorial Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions,” “Self-Portrait in Two Dimensions,” “Pictorial Realism of a Soccer Player— Color Masses in Four Dimensions,” and so on. The trans-sense names of abstract compositions, apart from their shocking provocation of the viewers, appealed to concepts relevant at that time of “higher dimensions,” but not only that. This was the final echo of Malevich’s former predilection for allegorical subtext. With regard to Portrait of Roslavets, in the depiction of the boy violinist making music against the backdrop of an ornamentally rhythmic landscape one can see a certain associative connection to the facts of the composer’s biography. As an adolescent he taught himself to play the violin and built his own instrument.127 A photograph of “N. Roslavets playing a violin of his own making” imprints the musician on a backdrop of tall firs, a blooming garden, and small, low-slung houses.128 Evidently Malevich heard his friend playing in nature more than once; for both, the violin’s melody sounded like a pantheistic “song to blue clouds.” The nature of Roslavets’s early compositions convinces us of how appropriate and harmonious the musical and painterly images were of the two agemates, who were subject to the then indisputable influence of Symbolism.

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Scriabinist Composer In May 1912, Roslavets graduated from the Moscow Conservatory. For his cantata—mystery play Heaven and Earth, to texts by Byron, he was awarded the Great Silver Medal.130 The innovative explorations of Alexander Scriabin (1871/72–1915), together with his cosmic, Symbolist aspirations, were the stimulus and main guideline for many young Russian composers whom a similar artistic genealogy has prompted music historians to call Scriabinists. Traditionally, this group includes primarily Roslavets, Nikolai Obukhov (1892–1954), Ivan Vyshnegradsky (1893–1979), and Artur Lurie (1892–1966), but they had virtually no connections with each other; after grasping the inspiration of the late Scriabin, each proceeded down a strictly individual path. In the Scriabinist set, Roslavets always held first place; he was immediately promoted to join the most talented composers of his generation. Marriage to Natalia Alekseevna Langovaia (1888–1957), the daughter of a prominent art world figure, the physician Aleksei Petrovich Langovoi (1857– 1939), brought the composer into the elite circles of the Moscow intelligentsia, who held traditional views. A physician and professor at Moscow University, A. P. Langovoi was a collector of Russian Realist painting and an influential member of the Tretiakov Gallery’s advisory council. This did not prevent the respectable collector’s son-in-law from being in close contact with Futurist poets, who preferred to shock respectable society. Roslavets wrote romances and songs to the poems of his friends, the poets Vasilisk Gnedov (1890–1978), Vasily Kamensky (1884–1961), and Konstantin Bolshakov (1895–1938). In this world, in line with its characteristically overthe-top phraseology, he was called a “supercomposer.”131 His friendship with Vasilisk Gnedov had a dramatic, worldly underpinning as well; both had tuberculosis and both spent a long time in treatment in Yalta and in 1914 were staying at the same sanatorium.132 Gnedov enlightened his friend about the latest explorations in the sphere of the word; in an album of Aleksey Kruchenykh’s there remains an excerpt from a letter Roslavets addressed to him from Yalta, which was used as a collage

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Thus, in 1907, the composer composed a major piece for violin and symphonic orchestra with the eloquent title Rêverie.129 The words that set the tone for his other compositions were, for example, “Dances of White Maidens” (for cello and piano, 1912) and “In the Hours of the New Moon” (symphonic poem for large orchestra, 1910s).

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paste-on: “[. . .] I have, I [edge torn off] today back with [edge torn off] I would most humbly ask to exchange these books for those you promised, Snarling Parnassus and The Letter as Such—those books I don’t have. Maybe you will be able to send me Mares Milk, wh[ich] Gnedov spoke of to me? Your humble servant Nik. Roslavets. 26 Autskaia.”133 The artists in Roslavets’s closest circle included the brothers David and Vladimir Burliuk, Aristarkh Lentulov (1882–1943), and through him other painters from Jack of Diamonds. The composer himself, since his youth, had loved to draw and write. Malevich mentioned his illustrations in their handmade Konotop journal. In his visual art Roslavets was a stranger to left-wing explorations. The watercolor landscapes preserved in RGALI, with their clearly tangible lyric intonation, speak to the artist’s staunch adherence to the realistic reproduction of nature. Artist and physician Nikolai Ivanovich Kulbin (1868–1917) included the young Scriabinist in his orbit.134 An instructor on the General Staff, he was a key figure in several innovative trends in the nation’s art. In 1909 Kulbin published separately his article, “Free Music,” which deals with, among other new freedoms, “close combinations”—as he called microchromatic intervals, quarter-tones and less.135 Anticipating the theoretical positions of the Italian Futurists about the “music of noises,” Kulbin’s work played a not insignificant role in propagandizing innovations among the country’s young composers. As we know, the Romantic worldview was one of the strongest roots of artistic ideology in the early twentieth century. Its full-fledged heirs were Symbolism and then Expressionism, which flourished in this era of endings and beginnings in European civilization. “Synesthesia” and “syncretism” became key words for characterizing the era’s innovative aspirations. The former was defined as the nature of works that synthesized the existing, centuries-old lifetimes of each artistic genre. The latter signified the undivided unity of artistic creations; in times of “presentiments and omens” (Vyacheslav Ivanov), it was as if their authors did not yet know the specifics of each genre of art in the coming new era. However, divorcing “synesthesia” from “syncretism” in the art of the outstanding modernists is just as hard as separating out the “endings” and “beginnings” in their era. In Russia the situation was intensified as well by the traditional merging, imposing, and juxtaposing of diverse domestic and borrowed stylistic approaches and chronological strata in art and social life. Silver Age Symbolist poets Innokenty Annensky, Aleksandr Blok, and Valery Briusov, composer Alexander Scriabin, artists Vasily Kandinsky and Nikolai

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Kulbin, painter-musicians Mikaelos Chiurlenis and Mikhail Matiushin—the list could go on—solidly developed the traditions of the Romantic-Symbolist perception of the world. The desire to testify appropriately to “the spiritual in art” (Kandinsky) compelled many of them to push back the traditional boundaries of types and genres, expanding the territory of art. The achievements of these superb professionals were primarily reformist in nature, but they also frequently transformed their works to the point of being utterly unrecognizable to the common eye and ear. The reformers carried out an evolutionary revolution, so it is logical that the processes of this ambivalent era are described most correctly by oxymorons and their paradoxicality. In basic science, the twentieth century’s agenda was to create a unified field theory, to which Albert Einstein devoted his life and his heirs continue to devote theirs. The era gave the modernist titans, the brilliant physicist’s contemporaries, the same task: to uncover the unified field of art, the new artistic integrity of the Universe. A sense of semantic commonality conditioned not only the interpenetration of the creators into “others’” genres, that is, it led to outward, horizontal expansion, but inevitably it also led to vertical, internal expansion as well, an immersion in the problems of their own languages. The isolation and disclosure of structural analogies was supposed to attest objectively to the unified laws of music, painting, poetry, and, in the ideal, architecture, science, and nature. Space and time, our basic foundations for perceiving the world, became the obvious or hidden, conscious or intuitively chosen subject of the new artists’ creative reflex, which searched for similar elements in the space-time organization of musical, painting, and verbal creations. Rhythm, subordinated to the laws of dynamics and statics, engendered a spatial image of time, while giving space a fourth dimension, temporal duration. Coloration (tonality and timbre in music, color in painting, emotional and lyrical “color” in the poetic word) could be coordinated and centripetal, with a single dominant axis, or it could be conflictual in nature, with acute conflict and dissonance among the various color, tonal, and meaning-forming harmonies. The point and the line, texture of diverse density and tactile qualities, were what everyone was talking about—painters, musicians, and poets. Findings and discoveries in one form of art quickly revealed their effectiveness for formal and semantic transformations in others. Taking precedence here nonetheless was painting. The Impressionism born in its depths infected musicians, poets, and philosophers alike (as in Henri Bergson’s concept of processual life).

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The term “composition,” having lost its purely instrumental significance, became common territory for once disparate forms of art. The musical overtones of Kandinsky’s painterly “Improvisations” and “Compositions,” the “visible music” of Chiurlenis, and the color-light score of Scriabin—the examples could be multiplied—were synesthetic/syncretic “mysteries of spirituality” that glorified the unity and mystery of the Universe. Nikolai Roslavets’s explorations and experiments had these mentalities as their ground. To set the tone for his own transformations the young composer selected a significant word, “sound-contemplation” (zvukosozertsanie), which was put into circulation by music critic V. G. Karatygin (1875–1925). The two roots, now merged into one, referred to different spheres of perception; the spliced neologism turned the transformation of sound into a kind of spatial object, which, logically, was subject to constructive and destructive manipulations. After absorbing and mastering Scriabin’s outrageous breakthroughs, Roslavets went even further, in accordance with the general movement of European musical thought in the 1910s. Atonal music, which had been stubbornly clearing a path for itself since the turn of the century, exploded the euphony of harmonic major-minor tonality that had dominated for centuries. However, atonality, which met with a hostile reception, did not bring chaos, and its comprehension by twentieth-century musicians led to the rise and organization of different systems of composition. The Austrian Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951) created the most influential of these, the twelve-tone row; the strict orderliness of dodecaphony crystallized in his art as a result of an extended period of atonal music. In the Russian artistic arena, Kulbin had since 1909 been the authorized representative of Kandinsky, who resided in Murnau and was immersed in developing his synesthetic discoveries. The Russian painter, in turn, acted as liaison for innovators not only from different countries but also from different types of creative activity. Like most of the great modernists, Schönberg was a multifaceted artist—musician, painter, theoretician, and man of letters; Kandinsky had been propagandizing the art of the deeply respected master in Russia since 1910.136 At Kandinsky’s initiative, the Austrian composer was invited to Petersburg by Kulbin and the musician A. I. Ziloti (1863–1945).137 His arrival in December 1912 had great significance for new Russian music. By this time, the authority and scale of Schönberg’s art was obvious even to many traditionalist professionals. Thus, at the composer’s invitation, the capital’s prima

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To a considerable degree, the intention of “verifying harmony with algebra” was characteristic of Nikolai Roslavets. In the history of Russia’s music, he has the status of being one of the first composers to make use of the atonal system and serial elements. In his 1913 sonata for violin and piano, specialists have remarked on the first glimmerings of his break with tonal logic.141 This opus and his 1914 cycle of romances were the start of Roslavets’s theoretical development of his main innovation, which he was contemplating up to around 1919 and then fixed in his term “synthetochord.” The development of synthetic-chords was one of the most promising offshoots of the new “harmony-shapes”—yet another of the composer’s neologisms, so akin to the verbal inventions of his contemporaries Khlebnikov and Malevich. In his autobiography, Nikolai Roslavets described his achievement: [. . .] my musical consciousness followed the path of feeling out certain independent, self-sufficient sound complexes, “synthetochords,” which were supposed to give birth to a composition’s entire harmonic scheme. In the composition’s overall constructive scheme, these “synthetochords,” which included six to eight or more sounds, from which the majority of chords that exist in the old harmonic system are easily constructed, were obviously supposed to play not only an external, sound-color role but also an internal role, as substitutes for tonality.142

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donna Sandra Belling, wife of Court Orchestra conductor Erast Belling (both died after 1925), was preparing to perform his opera monodrama Erwartung, whose composition in 1909 laid the foundation for Schönberg’s atonal period.138 Meanwhile, many authoritative Russian figures reared on the lyrical melodic classics demonstrated a frequently aggressive distaste for Schönberg compositions. For the younger generation of Russian composers, however, both mediated and direct contacts with the great reformer catalyzed the transformation of their musical language. Roslavets was one of his most acute and conscious followers in Russia. Despite his later declared “unfamiliarity” with Schönberg’s “abracadabra,”139 according to the testimony of his conservatory instructor S. N. Vasilenko, he “was in correspondence with young Western composers of whom I had never heard. He looked on Schönberg, who had just distinguished himself for the first time, as a god.”140

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Despite their rigor, their pure rationality, and they quest for logical laws in the construction of form—these aspirations, as we know, were definitive for the composers of the new Viennese school led by Schönberg—Roslavets’s synthetic compositions of the mid-1910s did not break with Symbolist-Romantic figurativeness, and this affected his much beloved harnessing of music and word, or rather, his explorations of the interconnections between music and word in an emotional and lyrical unity. The romance and song genres were the most traditional of all traditional music; the powerful “genre memory” could not help but manifest its power in his “romances for voice and piano,” as Roslavets preferred to define his compositions. He conceived of the romance as an integral composition and was concerned primarily with the relationship “between its ‘content’ and ‘form,’ between the image of the poetry given by the poet and the musical image created by the composer,” to use his own characterization.143 The choice of “content,” that is, someone else’s poetry, for the “form,” that is, his own music, was highly revealing in Roslavets, attesting to a contradiction in his artistic personality, which despite his desire for new sound-contemplation could still not renounce a worldview and artistic preferences rooted in the past. Despite his personal friendship with Futurist poets, the composer wrote the overwhelming majority of his vocal compositions to the verse of Silver Age poets—Aleksandr Blok, Igor Severianin, Zinaida Gippius, Fedor Sologub, Valery Briusov, and others. (Actually, the “romance” definition does not work well with the word “Futurism,” engendering a kind of parodic hybrid.) Subsequently, in a brilliant examination of Arnold Schönberg’s cycle Pierrot Lunaire, to the verse of Albert Giraud, Roslavets himself emphasized and analyzed the discrepancy between the anachronistic poetry of the Belgian “Parnassian” poet (“an aesthete to the marrow” who created “the most ephemeral poetic image, the flower of his morbid and surfeited fantasy”) and Schönberg’s music, with its rational organization of the musical fabric on the basis of a twelve-step chromatic scale, a system of composition that looked to the future.144 The Russian innovator never did overcome his own contradictions, due to circumstances both internal and external.

The Suprematist’s Musical Ideas Art taking place in time occupied a large place in Malevich’s Suprematist world-structure. In his opinion, modern music had still not been emancipated and was in thrall to the past; however, it did have potential for nonobjectivity that, due to its specific nature, exceeded even that of painting. 198

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The artist, who was not burdened by “book learning,” as he himself put it, had a reputation in the eyes of many contemporaries as a “barbarian.” For A. Benois and D. Merezhkovsky, the Suprematist remained forever the “coming Boor,” he was called a “savage” in Matiushin’s notes to himself,145 and the amicably inclined M. O. Gershenzon called him a “Papuan” with positive overtones, as he was also called, but with disdainful intonations, by his hostile opponents.146 The “barbarian” creator had access to intuitions to which other artists, who had spent years of life and labor mastering their professional culture, no longer had the freedom to aspire. This unfair freedom came from his primordial ignorance of boundaries, the “energy of delusion,” to use the words of the Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, whose source is genuine ignorance that “you cannot do that.” However, the boundary between what is essentially an anarchical freedom and ordinary dilettantism is thinner than a razor’s edge. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did it become clear that Malevich had successfully clung to that boundary. His sense-less musical projects were dictated by genuine freedom. The spirit blows where it will. His total rejection of the bonds of professionals held a tremendous advantage but also a tremendous minus for Malevich the “barbarian,” who was trying to introduce his new world-sensation into other spheres besides painting. He had no trouble grafting the new language onto the fine arts, although Russia’s Cubists at first opposed it, and then mastered it, but naturally drew their own conclusions, which did not entirely coincide with Malevich’s hopes. In poetry and literature Malevich had his own man in the 1910s, Kruchenykh; in music he was counting very much on Matiushin, but here, as has already been noted, there were difficulties due to the Petrograd artist’s individual development. The clannishness and elitism of musicians’ professional circles initially cut off any possibility of contact between them and the “wild” Futurist. It was hard for the indigent artist, who had borrowed a coat from Kliun in order to go out to pick up an order, to imagine himself at any concert.147 The storms around the performances of Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953), whom reviewers declared to be a “Cubist” and “Futurist,” and the distaste for the new sounds of Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) found no sympathetic response in Malevich; these events were taking place in another social and artistic dimension. Matiushin’s negative attitude toward their music must also have played its part.148 The springboard to world fame created for these giants by Serge Diaghilev (1870–1929) worked swiftly, and this in and of itself spoke to the vanquishing

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capacity of their music, which was half a step ahead of public taste and drew it along, making itself felt everywhere, making no distinction between past and present traditions. Music scholars number both of Diaghilev’s renowned protégés among the antipodes to Scriabin, with whom the history of the Russian musical avantgarde begins. His adherents were focused on searches for a new language, subordinating to laboratory experiments all other aspects of composition; recognition from the broad public comes hard to true radicals, often only posthumously. After a lengthy break, a new period in the relationship between Malevich and Roslavets came in fall 1915, and at first it was none too cheerful. The composer was friendly with poets and artists from whom the uncompromising Malevich had decisively distanced himself. A key figure in this circle was David Burliuk, ideologue of the reconciliation and friendship among all that arose in the first war year. “From Now On I Refuse to Speak Ill Even of the Art of Fools,” the declarative title of his essay proclaimed.149 We recall that it was David Burliuk and Aristarkh Lentulov—very close comrades of Roslavets—whom Malevich had refused to let participate in “Tramway V,” inasmuch as they “were chasing two hares at once.” In spring 1915, at the initiative of D. Burliuk and poet and director S. M. Vermel, a miscellany appeared, Springtime Counteragency of the Muses (Vesennee kontragenstvo muz), conceived of by its editors and publishers as a demonstration of tolerant artistic coexistence among diverse artists. The list of names, printed in large, stylized letters on the cover, served as a typographically declarative advertisement for the alliance. Roslavets appeared here as the author of an appended score. In the miscellany one encountered Symbolists and Futurists, very talented people and imitators. The publishers were intentionally forming their longedfor united front of art. In fall 1915 the pragmatic Vermel, relying on miscellany participants, organized the Tower Studio of Theater Art, which opened in Moscow on October 3. In accordance with the tactic of consolidation, at some point not before October 12, Malevich was invited to be a professor at the studio and selected to be a member of the committee. Since his move into Suprematism, the artist had been continuously refining his positions verbally. Informing Matiushin about his new texts, he dwelled in one fall 1915 letter on an important point:

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nection with the soul’s experience, which arises from the surrounding conditions of life. The “I” between the chaos of things and the emergence of musical melody. The transition to the stasis of musical sound and the dynamic of musical masses. The instrument’s liberation and the musical wave rising over one’s own I. This is what else has been stirring in my mind. I may survive the war, and then I’ll work it all out.150

The letter, dated October 12, 1915, establishes the vector of Malevich’s thoughts about music. The line about “the instrument’s liberation” and “the musical wave rising over one’s own I” was directly connected to his fundamental refrain of that period: “Art needs truth but not sincerity.”151 Malevich demanded from the “musical wave” emancipation from the “I,” that is, from the psychological and emotional life of the soul, the unshakable raison d’être of the nation’s music down to Scriabin. As is obvious from his own texts, Matiushin joined ranks as well against the “lyricism” and “subjectivism” of European and Russian classical music. A week later, in the Muscovite’s next letter, the conversation once again focused on music, but this time it concerned not only his demands on it. The newly chosen professor’s visit to a Tower assembly was more than likely unique. During the discussion of the concept for the new studio, Malevich came into conflict with those present, and this happened not over painting but over music: We have something new in Moscow, quite unexpectedly I received an invitation for the post of professor of new painting in the Studio-Theater that’s opened in Moscow. I get there and find the whole Jack of Diamonds and Roslavets, who was familiarizing the listeners with Solfeggio. Yesterday there were committee elections, where even I was invited and elected a committee member, everything was going beautifully until we came to the main definition of the studio’s idea. Moreover, with our idea, which you’re familiar with, i.e., about the concept of the new, I was alone, and my position was as if I’d advised crows in the field to eat grain instead of worms. . . . my stated views on music and decorat[ive] and theatrical art were receiv[ed] with perplexity and impossibility, since my form doesn’t express anything. I committed a great foolishness when I pointed out to Roslavets that modern music should move toward the expression of musical layers and should have the length and thickness of the musical

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And secondly. Musical analysis, i.e., from music[al] beginnings of forms in con-

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mass moving in time, moreover the dynamism of musical masses should be replaced by stasis, i.e., the delay of the musical sound mass in time. When they asked me where I graduated from in music, I simply quit the committee straight away and today I am refusing to teach. I curse the fact that I cannot share with you in this area, you should be speaking, not dribbling scribbles.152

In October 1915, Malevich was already going full tilt propagandizing nonobjective art. During the Tower meeting he emphasized decorative and theatrical art, but music took up most of his improvised speech. The Suprematist arrived at the meeting as Roslavets was demonstrating his compositions for voice and piano (“solfeggio,” according to Malevich), and evidently spontaneously he had the idea of possibly gaining support for or illustrating his own ideas with the help of his friend from youth. But if what he said about “form” that “expresses nothing” was greeted by committee members with nothing but “perplexity” and an indication of its “impossibility” in painting, then his statements on music—Malevich immediately sensed their “foolishness” in the eyes of the meeting—forced those present to object and put the artist in his place with the question about his professional training. The logic of this action is undeniable. Malevich developed his musical theses in a subsequent letter whose beginning has unfortunately been lost. Here he gave a description of Roslavets talking about the distance and alienation between the old friends in fall 1915: Roslavets understands a little more, but as an enthusiast he will think any rag hung up instead of a tie is something special; constitutionally, he is no Futurist. He publishes a lot of his scores for romances based on poems by Igor Severia[nin] and Gnedov. And damn it, it infuriates me that he writes this, and I think I myself might soon start giving concerts just to show that this is all wrong. More and more I keep imagining these musical masses, blocks, and strata of twenty chords hurled into space and the frozen mass of a musical cube. I can hear these strata flying, twenty-pood sounds, and also the alogism of instruments in the music.153

Malevich’s energy in October–November 1915 was spent on propaganda for Suprematism in the Moscow circle leading up to the “0.10” exhibition. The Tower fiasco only reinforced his sense of being right about the demarcation undertaken with the half-hearted conformists, the “Burliuks.”

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Malevich spent nearly two months, December 1915 and January 1916, in Petrograd in connection with the “0.10” exhibition. Here I should digress with respect to the musical experience he might have gained during those weeks. One of the most renowned avant-garde musicians of those years was Artur Lurie. The suave habitué of the artists’ wine-cellar called the Stray Dog, he performed both musical and verbal declamations propagandizing the new art.154 In the mid-1910s Lurie came to develop the methods of so-called visual music, in which specialists find analogies with the Futurist poets’ “visual poetry.” The composer’s best-known opuses based on the new musical shape-formation were his piano cycles Syntheses and Shapes in Air; the latter was dedicated to Pablo Picasso himself. Lurie’s approaches to the spatial-temporal arrangement of the musical fabric have definite parallels to Malevich’s positions on the new music. Thus, the “transition to the stasis of musical sound and dynamic of musical masses” proclaimed in the latter’s October 19, 1915 letter to Matiushin was consonant to a certain degree with the sound-perception in Lurie’s “Cubo-Futurist” cycle Shapes in Air. In the written texts of these pieces, on the “wires” of the staff, individual notes or dissonant chords framing the silence hung “statically”; that silence became almost more important than the sound. The impetus for looking at Artur Lurie in a chapter devoted to relations between Malevich and musicians and music came from a line from the same attentive Ivan Kliun, who wrote in his copy of the “0.10” catalog what not one

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During this period Roslavets was for him the pivotal representative of his opponents, and Matiushin as before was the sole musician on whom he laid his hopes. His contacts with N. M. Davydova led his hopes to dawn that she would support his projects, and this gave rise to the following passage in the above-quoted letter to Matiushin of November 5: “Throw down your brush and ready your music, in the ranks of Painting’s warriors there are quite a few. But in our idea you are the only one [emphasis added]. Find new forms for sound, in order to be ready. I will write to Kruchenykh to prepare new words for productions. Now the groups have been clearly defined: the BurliuksVermel-Roslavets and we with you. Let them delight in their scraps; we will in the true cause.” We should emphasize that Malevich constructed his group of opponents as a mirror reflection of the triad of his own associates.

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participant had written. At the very end of his list Kliun wrote: “Artur Lurie. Music[al] syntheses op[us] 31.” The composer had more than likely been invited by the Punis, the sponsors of “0.10.” They belonged to the same circle of the capital’s bohemia that spent nights of dissipation in artists’ wine-cellars. On the personal level, Malevich was deeply alien to this milieu’s way of life and pleasures; Artur Lurie was not just a native there but a key figure. Unfortunately, Kliun’s note is too brief for us to determine unambiguously the form of Lurie’s participation in the exhibition. We are not brought much nearer to a solution to the puzzle little by a sentence in the above-quoted review by Matiushin in his collection Enchanted Wanderer, where this episode of “0.10” is cloaked by the artist in an ironic statement: “Kulbinism has declared itself . . . Lurie, who played Malevich’s little squares musically.” What seems most likely nonetheless is a display at “0.10” of the sheet music from Lurie’s piano cycle Syntheses. Music scholars note that the graphics of his pieces from the mid-1910s anticipate the peculiarities of scores by avant-gardists in the second half of the twentieth century, with their conscious and cultivated visual expressiveness. Be that as it may, the meager testimonies by Kliun and Matiushin do speak to possible direct contact between Malevich and Artur Lurie at the Petrograd exhibition. However, to use Bakhtin’s capacious expression, this contact did not become a “meeting event.” From “0.10” onward, Malevich began to see his former friend Nikolai Roslavets as the new music’s dominant figure. Returning to Moscow in late January 1916, the Suprematist took definite steps toward a rapprochement with the composer. The artist’s letters to Petrograd, beginning in February, are filled with unusual reports on his meetings with Roslavets; he even sent Matiushin music, asking when he played it to pay attention to one passage or another: “In the ‘Prelude’ play the middle, and you’ll hear a powerful clank, this is the music itself.”155 One gets the impression that Malevich was pursuing a secret goal of rousing the musicians to artistic intercourse. If so, he did not succeed. No evidence of relations between Matiushin and Roslavets has ever been uncovered. That there even were relations seems problematic. It is not out of place to mention once again that the idea for the Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun had been Malevich’s, who brought the composer

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Renewed ties with his friend from his Konotop youth aroused in the painter hopes of acquiring an equally essential colleague in the new music. Malevich became a frequent guest at Roslavets’s house and attended house and public concerts, which occupied a significant place in his life. In a March letter to Aleksei Kruchenykh stylized as a telegram, two words fix the important event: “Roslavets concert.”158 The opinions expressed in his letters to Matiushin could not help but coincide with his topics of discussion with Roslavets. Malevich was strictly negative on his romances. “He, unquestionably a tremendous Russian composer, gets distracted by the insignificant words of ‘nice little poems,’ writes Romances, these are horrid settings, vile, defiling his pearls. His brilliant structure makes room for nice little words. God forbid anyone should ever sing his works.”159

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and poets together around it. The production’s innovative pivot was its visual aspect; with respect to the opera’s musical aspect scholars have been compelled to comment that “the musical material occupies an obviously secondary position and is included in the action episodically.”156 Malevich kept striving to arouse in Matiushin the composer the ambitions of an innovator called upon to discover in music the same horizons that he (Malevich) was finding in Suprematist painting. However, despite his constant appeals to Matiushin the musician, their joint work on the Futurist opera remained their sole episode of collaboration. Both at that time and in historical perspective Matiushin’s and Roslavets’s relative weights as composers were incomparable. Matiushin’s few opuses, in the opinion of music scholars, never went beyond imitative developments on a quarter-tone system known since antiquity that underwent a rebirth in the early twentieth century. In analyzing the epoch-making production of Victory Over the Sun, music scholar T. M. Levaia supported her harsh opinion with a reference to an article by a German scholar: “the author of the article published in 1984 considered it necessary to destroy the legend of the ‘composer prophet’ and point out the semi-dilettantish flaws in the opera’s score (the randomness of the writing for voices, the lack of justification for harmonic liberties, and so on). The critic links Matiushin’s contribution to Russian culture primarily to his mission as an artist, pedagogue, and thinker-organizer.”157 Even though music was Matiushin’s first profession, the scale of his artwork exceeded that of his work as a composer. Musical composition became optional in his synesthetic art. As has been emphasized several times above, his composing work did not coincide at all with the Suprematist nonobjectivity initiated by Malevich.

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On the other hand, Malevich’s responses to Roslavets’s instrumental compositions were ecstatic. His listening to the pieces, presumably, was reinforced by his conversations with their composer, when in dialog, a form so important for Malevich, the paths of exploration of the new sound-perception became clear. In an expansive letter dated February 14, 1916, the Suprematist set out his impressions from a concert by the pianists Ye. Ya. Lopuskaia and A. Miller. The young performer played Scriabin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and “also [. . .] certain composers.” Malevich felt that Scriabin was “astonishing” but, nonetheless, “feminine,” passing “through us evenly and smoothly, with a certain pleasantness even.”160 Mrs. Lopuskaia performed works by Roslavets. A description of one of them gives us grounds for speculating as to which piece Malevich heard. The pianist more than likely played one of Roslavets’s two sonatas for piano. Both were single-movement compositions, and each might well have seemed to the artist a “small thing.” Both the first sonata, written in 1914, and the second (1916) were mentioned by Roslavets, and in the late twentieth century were analyzed by historians as revealing of his new sound-perception. The late Scriabin’s “Promethean six-note” poured out here in six-, seven-, and eight-note chords with strict “dense combinations” of tones.161 The dissonances grated on the ordinary person’s ear, not only Malevich’s. He transposed their “powerful clank” into the visual image of an “armored horse” in a flowerbed under whose “firm hoof” the “pale forget-me-nots, pinks, and violets [. . .] and the chrysanthemum-turned-black” perish (the letter writer obviously did not sense the image’s comicality). Though he did not possess the professional terminology, the Suprematist nonetheless managed to characterize the vector of Roslavets’s innovative movement: “he arrives at musical forms as such that express nothing but sound. His small piece said a lot, you can see his great obstinacy, his energy concentrates [and] [harnesses] [his] intensity to sound for strength, you can see his great courage, the ominous clang of his chords, and his tread, bold and firm.” Let us compare this perceptive opinion with the words of the distinguished composer Nikolai Miaskovsky (1881–1950), who in analyzing Roslavets’s music wrote that “at its base lies a principle which is, moreover, built with steady, iron logic,” but “his incessant six-, seven-, and eight-note chords, with their unique positioning,” going back to the harmonies of Scriabin’s latest works, nevertheless consciously violate the “principle of harmonic overtones.”162 The discussion with Roslavets was so intense, and Malevich listened to so many of his compositions that the latter was inevitably pushed to compare his

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Hammer the nails cruelly into vulgarized souls [. . .] I now see even more hope in you and demand, demand [. . .] that you give me those nails because we need to crucify the contemporary vulgarized soul as quickly as possible so that it doesn’t dissipate. Let Roslavets trample the field, I will make demands on him, too, but you must prepare the nails. The time has come to tear the skin from young people’s faces, since the skin on them isn’t theirs but their authorities’.163

This last sentence set the tone for the artist’s declarations and texts during the Supremus era. In Malevich’s view, Roslavets’s innovativeness interfered with his thoughts about the nature of sound as such. For it to emerge, traditional instruments were useless, only the voice possessed the necessary flexibility, especially the inner voice: “I’ve noticed that inner hearing is superior to the ear, inner sound is superior to the sound of an instrument. Roslavets should be following his inner ear-sound in his writing.”164 The artist hoped that music had acquired an innovator capable of advancing it toward the Suprematist world-construction; the two composers, Matiushin and Roslavets, could join efforts in this movement: Oh yes, our ear has been besmirched and we need something new. It’s your turn again. You should be focusing on a point. Accumulate inside you more density of sound. [. . .] Oh more, denser and faster. [. . .] You and Roslavets, forgive me both of you. But you have a smashed or rather scatter[ed] pearl,

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composer friends, the Muscovite and the Petrograder. He expressed all his conclusions in the same letter to Matiushin: “He lacks what you have so much of, but you lack less, since this depends on your will, your injunction to yourself [. . .] to give yourself over to stubborn, diligent work, abandoning all else.” According to Malevich, Roslavets had not renounced completely and without qualification “the remnants of musical ‘nocturnes,’” whereas Matiushin had not fully recognized the new views in music due to his dissipation and his lack of diligence, which is to say, productivity. In fact, Roslavets’s creative intensity forced Malevich to admit the lack of the same intensity in Matiushin: “I’ve listened to you so little, though I’ve been with you so much.” Nevertheless, the Suprematist rejoiced to see that Matiushin was “not alone” in the new music, that the circle of his supporters was growing, and this led him to summon the Petrograder to further action:

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while he has gathered one. You have nothing but scattered pearls, though, while he has a pearl in a worthless setting. Forgive me, but that is what I feel, and as a fanatic devouring the desert, I demand the music of the desert. The desert of colors. The desert of the Word.165

Five years later, in a letter to the artist innovators of Holland, Malevich would write, “And so, the painting idea in Russia has taken the nonobjective path, but the idea of sound has also taken the path to the nonobjective word, at the head of which stands Kruchenykh, and in music Roslavets.”166 On the “nonobjective” music front, the only one for Malevich was Roslavets.

Roslavets, Supremus Society Member Contacts between Malevich and Roslavets were particularly intense during the Supremus era, as has already been said. The artist put tremendous emphasis on the composer as an avant-gardist capable of embodying the new worldperception in a new sound-perception. Aleksei Kruchenykh, who was constantly encountering the musician’s name in the letters from Moscow, made him the hero of his play Gly-Gly, calling him “Roslavets the soundmaker” (Figure 30). The composer is included as a Supremus member in all the lists compiled by Malevich. Their discourse beginning in August 1916 was mostly written, but none of their letters has survived. During his visits to Moscow, Malevich met with Roslavets; he was on friendly terms with the composer’s wife, Natalia Alekseevna, and even corresponded separately with her: “My little book has had an effect on Roslavets, his wife writes me that he is all fired up and is writing his own rebuff and wants to read it to people.”167 The “rebuff,” provoked by Malevich’s recent “little book,” From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, led Roslavets to prepare a lecture, “The Art and Psyche of the Masses,” information about which has survived in his archive, and a text “On ‘Nonobjectivity’ in Art.”168 An article with that title was the composer’s contribution to the society and the journal. Its shift by Malevich to second place after his own “Welcome to Suprematists,” that is, the lending to it of policy significance, attests to the fact that Roslavets had been allotted the honorary spot as theoretician of the new world-construction. Long left hidden away in Khardzhiev’s archive, the article is unique because it brings us Roslavets’s thoughts in the mid-1910s as a result of his dialog with Malevich.

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Figure 30. Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets. Mid-1910s. Photo. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow.

The musician’s text does not contain a word about music. Generally theoretical in nature, the article was inspired by the directives of Malevich the nonobjectivist. The composer, an educated and enlightened man, writes the word “nonobjectivity” in quotes, estranging the term—or rather, investing it with newness and non-habitualness. Roslavets’s delineation of the philosophical roots of Suprematism, which was being rejected by the public and critics, gave the journal the scholarly solidity it sought: The liberated artist replaces the “common sense” of naturalistic dogmatism with a belief in the inexhaustible wealth of primary image-ideas (in the Platonic sense) latent in his soul, from which he draws them out in moments of creative inspiration for intuitive embodiment in his art. This powerful belief in himself and his creative powers is what allows the new artist to enter into decisive conflicts with all the aesthetic dogmas of the past that are still firmly professed by the majority; this belief gives him the daring of impudence, so essential in art, capable of revealing the fullness of his own individuality.169

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Besides revealing the roots of nonobjective art in the world of Platonic ideas, Roslavets appeals to the theories of the dominant influence of the day, Arthur Schopenhauer: “The power of the thing, the ‘object,’ is the power of the image-concept, and therefore the state of the intellect enslaved by the will, and, as Schopenhauer rightly teaches, only the intellect, liberated from the will, pure intellect, is capable of rising to the height of intuitive insight that is the exclusive condition of the art of genius” (emphasis in original). Malevich’s discourse shows through distinctly in the comparisons made in Roslavets’s concluding paragraphs, where he quotes the Suprematist’s texts liberally: [. . .] not only have “things vanished like smoke” from the artist’s field of vision, but the rotted foundations on which they rested for entire centuries have vanished like smoke as well. Yes, humanity’s old, decrepit soul has died—died, for henceforth it is a corpse in the anatomical study of Psychology, the subject of scientific research; in the whirlwind of the catastrophic twentieth century a new soul was born, as mysterious and enigmatic as a “lump of pink flesh” squawking in the cradle! (emphasis in original)

Roslavets’s article attests to Malevich’s great authority for him during the Supremus period. Other proofs as well have been traced of the artist’s specific influence on the composer’s views. What is by no means a simple coincidence can be seen in the virtually total disappearance around 1916 of the “horrid settings” of “nice little poems” in Roslavets’s art. He returned to vocal compositions in his next period, after the revolutions. As follows from a letter to Matiushin, Malevich was able to open Roslavets’s eyes to his recent friends: “Roslavets writes me about the same thing as you have. About the Vermels, Aksenovs, Kamenskys, Lentulovs, and Burliuks as insignifi[cant] parasites. ‘How irritating, how bitter to live among scum. I must leave and not see the insult to the holy face of Art’—this is what he says. I’ve come to believe him as I believe you.”170 Roslavets’s interaction with Malevich helped him understand more clearly the nature of his own individuality. The composer’s contemporaries noted his rationality and nonemotionality, which are so obvious in his mature compositions: “He is not interested in emotion as such. For him music is by no means the language of emotions but the expression of an organized psychic world. Emotion in and of itself does not interest him but rather its comparison in the

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The Avant-Garde Composer’s Fate and Art Russian music scholars, following Western scholars studying Roslavets’s art at the end of the Soviet Union’s existence, mention Malevich’s name at best after a comma, in the middle or at the end of the list of men of letters and artists with whom the composer was personally acquainted. They have no inkling of the story of the relationship between Malevich and Roslavets, let alone the composer’s connections with the Supremus society and journal. N. A. Roslavets’s archives at RGALI and the M. I. Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture contain scattered musical compositions, pedagogical theoretical works written “for the drawer,” and official documents concerning his employment history. There are no private papers that would allow us to speak more definitively about the musician’s frame of mind and evolution during his most productive years; more than likely Roslavets destroyed them, fearing arrest. After the Supremus materials were discovered in the FKhCh archive, N. Gurianova quoted fragments of Roslavets’s article in the essay that has already been mentioned several times.173 However, she did not focus on Roslavets’s personality and art, or his relationship with Malevich, due to the article’s other objectives and the absence of any information on this subject in the literature.

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musical fabric with others, the ‘organization of emotions’ that inevitably accompanies the organization of sounds. Roslavets is a true master of sounds. [. . .] Everything is thought through and worked out to the ultimate degree.”171 Indeed, Roslavets called himself an “organizer of sounds.”172 This definition, with its rational engineering—Constructivist—emphasis, nonetheless contains an echo of Malevich’s calls to “lift the musical wave over one’s own ‘I,’” such as he propagandized in the mid-1910s. The composer’s rejection of acutely subjective symbolic poetry, which occurred in about 1916, during a period of close contact with Malevich, was not only a rejection of the “horrid settings” of the “nice little poems” but also the conscious crystallization of his nonemotional, nonlyrical approach to musical creation. During the Supremus period and up until the late 1910s, Roslavets concentrated on composing instrumental and chamber music—on “musical forms as such, expressing nothing but sound,” as Malevich put it. The composer’s experiments, which brought out the inherent worth of sound combinations and their developments, led to the creation of his own word in music in the literal and figurative sense. Roslavets’s theory of synthetic-chords, as has already been said, reached its maturity in the late 1910s.

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Because of the importance of the connections between Malevich and Roslavets, which have gone unnoticed by both music historians and historians of the avant-garde, it seems essential to set down as well the story of how their friendship ended. In the latter half of 1917, the connection between the two colleagues was no longer as intense, for perfectly understandable reasons. Each of them was engaged in major political work, Malevich in the capitals and Roslavets in Yelets, where he and his wife moved after the February Revolution. Subsequently the composer stated that with the beginning of the February Revolution he “left art in order to take an active part in the revolution, and with this goal joined the party of S[ocial] R[evolutionaries] (1917).”174 On the threshold of 1919 Roslavets made his way to Moscow, taking a senior post in the All-Russian Union of Art Workers and in 1920 becoming a member of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks); the next year, however, he left the party in order to devote himself wholly to music.175 From spring 1920 to 1923, Nikolai Roslavets was sent to work in Kharkov, after which he again returned to Moscow. His professional and public life took up all his time. In 1924 Malevich wrote a response to an article by music scholar and composer Leonid Sabaneev (1881–1968) in Musical Life (Muzykal’naia zhizn’), where Roslavets was editor in chief. We know the artist did not send it in because the top copy of the typescript with a line in ink—“For Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets”—is still in his archive.176 When he received a commission in fall 1925 to design the staging of the premiere of Sergei Eisenstein’s film The Year 1905 (subsequently Battleship Potemkin), Malevich wanted to bring Roslavets in as composer. His plan was never implemented, and the premiere was designed by other artists.177 This is the last surviving mention of their names in any joint undertaking. The paths of the former Supremus members never crossed again in any project. Roslavets’s dramatic life experience seems to have played the main role here. The distinguished composer had a hard life. A brilliant beginning, advancement to a leading position in his generation, considerable potential, attention from the critics—everything on the rise. He had a meteoric public career, and his wife, the above-mentioned Natalia Alekseevna Roslavets, exerted considerable influence on his public activities. Roslavets joined the Social Revolutionary party, the main rival of the Bolsheviks for popular support, in her wake and not without her active inducement. The composer’s wife turned out to have major public career ambitions, which the new state helped her realize following a timely shift in her political

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stance. In 1919, as an officer in the Moscow Cheka (the ancestor of the KGB), Comrade Nat. Roslavets was one of the investigators in the case against the anarchists and often traveled on business. Beginning in fall 1920 Chekist Nat. Roslavets served in Kiev for a while and then was promoted to head the Cheka in Kharkov.178 The spouses’ marriage took a bad turn. They officially divorced in the mid1920s, and beginning in 1927 Roslavets linked his life to a nineteen-year-old peasant girl, Maria Filippova.179 Persecution of the composer as a “formalist”—the disapproving Communist name for avant-gardists in general—had begun in the mid-1920s; neither his “March of the Soviet Militia” (1925), nor his oratorio October (1927), nor his letter of self-flagellation that prefaced the publication of his romances setting to music the poetry of Fedor Sologub in fall 1929 helped defuse that persecution. In the letter the composer felt he had to stigmatize the “outdatedness for our era of both the intellectual content of these compositions and the moods that come out of them, from which the author has long since been estranged.”180 In early 1930, Narkompros (the People’s Commissariat of Education), where Roslavets was employed as political editor of the Composers Department, that is, as a censor, was subjected to a general purge. The composer was fired “for the absence of a clear class line in his work” and banned from working in state organs as a political editor for two years.181 The prospect of imprisonment was becoming increasingly real for the “unproletarian” composer, who was also a former SR, and Roslavets took decisive measures to save himself. Overnight he disappeared from Moscow, voluntarily exiling himself in Uzbekistan. Among his extremely few private papers the musician kept a single postcard from his former wife: “August 20 [1931]. Greetings from Novy Afon and congratulations on your Uzbek plan, of which I very much approve. I am certain of its success and hope for its fruitfulness. We will be ‘almost neighbors.’ Greetings and all the best. Nat. Roslavets.”182 Comrade Nat. Roslavets, who had good connections in the competent organs, may well have warned her former spouse and then confirmed the correctness of his decision with her approval. Roslavets did in fact manage to avoid arrest. In Tashkent, the composer went to work at the Uzbek Opera and Ballet Theater. After laboring conscientiously in Central Asia for about two years and creating the ballet Pakhta (Cotton), he returned to Moscow. Roslavets earned his living by creating light music. In his other compositions, few in number, all traces of his former experiments were reduced nearly to the vanishing point.

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Malevich wrote Konotop, his reminiscences of his youth with Roslavets, in Leningrad in 1932 and 1933. As has already been noted, above the words “and we fought life to restore the new forms of art,” he wrote “and we are fighting right now.” He had no way of knowing that these words no longer had anything to do with composer Roslavets, with his broken spirit, who was composing a bureaucratically optimistic ballet, Cotton, in Tashkent. The name of Roslavets the innovator was so thoroughly forgotten that for a long time the date of his death was cited erroneously. As with the artistic avant-garde, interest in the Russian musical avant-garde was first expressed by foreign historians.183 The pioneering book by Detlef Gojowy, Neue sowietische Musik der 20er Jahre, published in Germany in 1980, facilitated the discovery and introduction into cultural circulation of the Russian Scriabinists, especially N. A. Roslavets. Around the time of the Soviet Union’s demise, the composer’s art began to win attention from the nation’s professionals and public.184 In 1992 the Roslavets Trio, now an ensemble of the Moscow Philharmonic and winner of the international Taneyev Chamber Music Competition, began its public performances. After perestroika, and during Russia’s time of troubles, the Briansk Institute of Music held a series of conferences, “N. A. Roslavets and His Era,” whose organizer was composer, musician, and Roslavets enthusiast M. Ye. Belodubrovsky; in the conferences’ wake, the proceedings were published in limited editions. As the initiator and artistic director of the N. Roslavets and N. Gabo Festival of Modern Art, M. Ye. Belodubrovsky also compiled an impressive anthology, The Russian Avant-Garde and the Briansk World (Russkii avangard i Brianshchina, 1998). Most of this book is devoted to articles and research about the art of Nikolai Roslavets.

Malevich’s Musical Projects During the Supremus Era Malevich’s statements about the new music, as set forth in his Supremus-era texts and letters, give us an idea of just how revolutionary his views on this area of art were. Both his friends—Roslavets more so, Matiushin less so—were intent on developing a relatively narrow segment of the new musical language. Because of their burden of professionalism, and because they were organically rooted in their “minor” historical era, it was hard, not to say impossible, for them to react to the Suprematist’s wild musical schemes. These high-level professionals

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could scarcely have taken seriously the statements by the painter “savage” on the “many-poodedness of musical blocks,” “the length and thickness of the musical mass moving in time,” the “inner ear” that surpasses external hearing, and so on. What Malevich the Suprematist imagined and what he prophesied with such grandiose clumsiness had been wrenched not only from the 1910s but in general referred to another stage in the development of all culture. Those who “heard” the nonobjectivist appeared half a century later, and even they “heard” not Malevich, whom at best they knew as a painter, but the dictate of their era. For Malevich himself, the dictate of his era was the indisputable engine of artistic processes: “Art has an obligation to realize its essential forms,” he wrote in May 1916 in his rebuff to Alexandre Benois. In the musical sphere, awareness of the “essential forms” proclaimed in the Suprematist’s wild schemes came decades after his death. Emancipated music seemed to lead its creators all by itself toward “the stasis of sound and the dynamic of musical masses,” “layers of twenty chords hurled into space,” “the frozen masses of the musical cube,” “the alogism of instruments in music,” toward “the inner ear”—that is, toward the technique of clusters, toward “prepared” and newly constructed instruments, toward reading instead of listening to scores, and much else. In the second half of the twentieth century, representatives of the cutting edge of the world avant-garde “were working out the technique of static resonant composition based on microchanges in the entirety of the fixed sound array,” where “in several compositions resonant stasis is combined with dynamic ‘bursts.’”185 This, for example, is how music scholars have categorized the morphogenic innovations of György Ligeti, who was born in 1923. Along about that time Malevich wrote on a blank sheet of paper: “The goal of music is silence.” John Cage was then about ten years old. The American avant-gardist spent four years nurturing his famous piece 4’33”, beginning in 1948. His system of notation for sound compositions on paper, which transformed randomness from various spheres of reality into music,186 leads us to contemplate the possibility of a sound performance of Malevich’s nonobjective drawings and canvases (Figure 31). Especially since one of his Suprematist compositions was “transposed” into music long ago: in the score for his 1960 composition Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, Krzysztof Penderecki (born 1933) indicated with a long black parallelepiped that covered the staff of both registers a long tutti from fortissimo to pianissimo for the whole orchestra, where each musician draws from his own instrument a cluster of simultaneous harmonies built on seconds.

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In his Supremus era texts, Malevich himself saw in Cubism “the rhythm of a sound construction” and declared that “a picture cannot be regarded merely / from the standpoint of color, it must be seen and heard, for / we bring sound and color and volume to Constructions of objects and nature.”187 Malevich’s close attention to the art of sound and the art of music has yet to be made clear to scholars. So much so that one erudite interpreter of the Russian avant-garde’s artistic legacy dwelt especially on the phenomenon of Malevich’s “antimusicality”: “Without doubt . . . Malevich, unlike Matiushin, Kandinsky, and Klee, was the most amusical and at the same time antimusical avant-gardist of his era.”188

Figure 31. John Cage, Variation II (1961). Sheet from the score (system of recording sound works on paper, transforming chance contingencies from different spheres of reality into music). Copyright © 1961 by Henmar Press, Inc. Used by permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. All rights reserved.

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Aleksei Kruchenykh in Supremus The Kruchenykh-Malevich Dialog, 1915–1916 In literature, Malevich found someone of like mind in the person of Kruchenykh, whose art most radically incarnated the expansion of poetry’s boundaries and the rejection of “moods” and “love mattresses.” Indeed, no one could equal the radical nature of the trans-sense Cubo-Futurist’s break with tradition.

Figure 32. Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist Composition (Sensation of Magnetic Gravity). 1914. 1927. Malewitsch, Die gegenstandslose Welt, Bauhausbücher, 11 (Munich, 1927), no. 81.

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In the light of the artist’s interaction with one of the most talented of innovative composers, as well as of the revolutionary nature of the Suprematist’s views on music, this opinion seems hasty and unfounded. The passage through Roslavets’s music and the interaction with him was very important for the Suprematist. The experiment in the new soundperception propagated by the composer intersected with Malevich’s theory of the new poetry—and here we will be focusing our attention on the interactions between the Suprematist and the corresponding member of the society, Aleksei Kruchenykh, the principal author of the “Literature” section in Supremus.

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An artist by professional training, in his autobiographical texts Kruchenykh analyzed how he came to poetry.189 He was born into the world as a man of letters with ink in his veins, and in the perspective of his entire life it became apparent that literature as such was for him more precious and real than any reality. Educated and well read, Kruchenykh committed himself to his experiments with eyes wide open. His artistic roots and his friendships with left-wing painters led to what are now highly valued monuments of Russian Futurism. In the lithograph books from the first half of the 1910s that the poet frequently published with his own money, the artists’ work was inextricable from the writers’. By the end of the twentieth century, Aleksei Kruchenykh’s key position among the Russian Cubo-Futurist Budetlyane, his enterprise and appropriations, his self-reflection, which became a creative device, and the calculated irrationality of his work, which often resembled scientific research, made his legacy one of the most studied pages in the history of the Russian avant-garde. A good deal of space has been devoted in domestic and foreign works to the connections between Aleksei Kruchenykh and Kazimir Malevich.190 In the literature, the accepted opinion is that Kruchenykh was an eyewitness to Malevich’s move to Suprematism because they were living together at his dacha; judging from Malevich’s correspondence with Matiushin, the poet arrived in Kuntsevo in the first ten days of May and did not leave until about August 15, 1915. At the same time, it cannot be said with utter confidence that Kruchenykh was all that familiar with the new canvases of summer 1915. Doubts about how well informed Kruchenykh was are aroused by surprising sentences in a letter from Rozanova. In January 1916 she responded to his questions: “To satisfy your curiosity, here are copies for you of Malevich’s pictures: Lady in an Automobile [drawing], Boat Ride [drawing]. I didn’t buy any postcards because I didn’t want to spend the money. I have so little. These pictures are in different colors, not black and white.”191 What Kruchenykh’s friend says here is simply puzzling because the drawings and descriptions explain what the Suprematist pictures looked like to someone who had no visual notion of them. The letter even states in particular that the compositions were not black and white but in color! Rozanova redrew both Malevich works from reproductions; the postcards, about five or so of which with Suprematist compositions had been printed for “0.10,” were too expensive for the impoverished artist.192 It is also curious that Malevich’s minimalist primary figures, his most radical creations, did not attract her attention.

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Roman Jakobson’s later reminiscences tell of how Malevich hid his new painting from him, the poet, during his visit to Kuntsevo, where the young Jakobson had gone with Kruchenykh.193 The latter joked that Malevich and Morgunov were painting in the dark so that no one would see their achievements. It is hard to demand documentary authenticity from friendly joking, nonetheless it does need to be said that associating the Fevralist-Loshkari Malevich and Morgunov in a single “conspiratorial” group was perfectly logical, except that Morgunov had no abstract compositions or anything in particular to hide. Kruchenykh apparently had no inkling of this. In summer 1915 Olga Rozanova executed a number of her superb collage paste-ons. As we know, she sent some of them to Kruchenykh and Shemshurin. The trans-sense poet snatched up the discovery of abstract geometrism specifically in Rozanova’s version. He had his first plastic experience in nonobjective art in Batalpashinsk. Kruchenykh’s first foray into geometricized abstractivism was his album, Universal War: Yat’, with paste-on collages, which came out in Petrograd in February 1916. In the album Kruchenykh combined the principle of paste-ons developed by Olga Rozanova and the use of regular shapes, which alluded to Suprematism. The paper cutouts’ capricious silhouettes and the flat composition made his collages vivid and stylish. Specialists disagree on the authorship of Universal War: Yat’. Some think that the pages with collages were the singlehanded creation of Kruchenykh; others, that Olga Rozanova played a significant role in the album’s appearance.194 I would advance the following hypothesis. The concept and subject matter of the pages were Kruchenykh’s, and he was the creator of the silhouette appliqués, producing them in Batalpashinsk and sending them on to Petrograd as registered letters along with general sketches. In Petrograd, Olga Rozanova pasted the elements she received (and may even have cut them out from a template sent to her) onto large sheets of paper, but her creative individuality had to have come through in this fairly mechanical work. The composition of the images—and it is their composition that is the Petrograd artist’s contribution to the album—is distinguished by its balance, freedom, and plastic cogency. These qualities are missing in the “color paste-ons,” the pages with collage appliqués, with their lack of rhythm, which can be proved to have been made by Kruchenykh alone and included in the miscellany 1918, published in 1917 in Tiflis.195 One other indirect confirmation of this hypothesis is what Rozanova said in her letter to Kruchenykh, reacting appropriately to his proposal at the end of

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summer 1916. “I [. . .] was taken aback when I received your friendly advice. ‘You know, it would be good to make a million paste-ons, that wouldn’t be such a bad little book, would it?!’ [. . .] You cannot drop my name to the level of an artisan working for a pittance. [. . .] I’m not going to paste. I would wither away.”196 Apparently, the most accurate definition of the authorship of the Universal War collages is the existing one: “Aleksei Kruchenykh with the participation of Olga Rozanova.” To this we should add, however, that the poet himself considered these pages his singlehanded accomplishment. At an exhibition organized in 1918 in the editorial offices of the journal ARS in Tiflis, he exhibited “paste-ons from Universal War (pub. 1916)” under his name alone.197 In the silhouette appliqués Kruchenykh made using scissors, long before Matisse’s decoupages, one color yielded effortlessly to another when there was a shortage of paper. For instance, on one copy of Victory Request, the large rectangle is colored dark and light blue, while the trapezoid is bright yellow, and in another the rectangle is deep purple, whereas the trapezoid is ochre brown.198 The color in the paste-ons was “ready-made”; it depended on the paper available. These features of the collage paste-ons from Universal War: Yat’ have been appropriately ascribed to the aesthetics of Kruchenykh’s trans-sense and the famed creative potentials of randomness. (In this the Cubo-Futurist poet, unbeknownst to himself, was of like mind with the intrepid initiators of Dadaism, who in turn were unaware of the Russian avant-gardists who had anticipated them). The use of abstract silhouettes did not nullify the literary and thematic burden of the schematized compositions, which dictated the figurativeness of Heavy Weapon, Treason, and Military State. In the collage Battle Between a Budetlyanin and the Ocean, the paste-ons have the silhouette of the letter “φ” (pronounced “f”), performing the function of symbolic allegory for the Futurists. Most of the white elements in the collages have a tangibly anthropomorphic look. The album’s publication was dictated not least by Kruchenykh’s desire, first, to proclaim himself chief in the chief innovative art, known as “trans-sense” and, second, to stake out Rozanova’s claim to priority in the discovery of geometric abstraction: These paste-ons were born in the same way as trans-sense language—through the liberation of the createds from unnecessary amenities (ardent nonobjectivity). Trans-sense painting is becoming predominant. Previously O. Rozanova gave us models of it, and now a few more artists are developing it, in220

Suprematism. However, I am pleased by the victory of painting as such to spite the Italians’ retrogrades and newspaper hacks. Trans-sense language (of which I was the first representative) extends its hand to trans-sense painting. Aleksei Kruchenykh

The level of understanding of nonobjectivity demonstrated in the Universal War collages convinces me that Kruchenykh did not in fact see the difference and so put an equals sign between Malevich’s Suprematism and Rozanova’s paste-ons, considering both to be followers of trans-sense, where he himself took precedence, naturally. It should also be said that the words about Rozanova’s priority in the creation of nonobjectivity, words which at first glance might seem like the kind of provocation the poet so loved, upon closer analysis only confirm the hypothesis that Kruchenykh did not see Malevich’s Suprematist canvases in summer 1915. Therefore, having first encountered pure nonobjectivity in the examples of the Rozanova paste-ons, he quite rightly wrote of her priority. The circle of radicals well knew how easily the trans-senser appropriated other people’s discoveries. (Khlebnikov on him: “How deftly you catch other people’s ideas in order to follow through, to the point of suicide.”) In a letter to Shemshurin, Kruchenykh emphasized, “this is the first experiment in the new (for me) style.”199 He impatiently kept trying to elicit his Moscow addressee’s opinion of his “createds.” In the perceptive Shemshurin’s response, Malevich’s name sets the tone and the trans-senser’s feeble imitation is delicately noted: No matter how interesting I find the shapes you have in the album, still I think that in the plastic arts you will not produce what you have been producing in literature. Besides its shapes, the album is also interesting for being a very practical development in Futurist publications. In your shapes you are a supporter of the rupture of line: your figures for the most part have broken outlines, whereas in Malevich, for example, as far as I remember, the figures are geometric, by which I mean an approximation of the figure to a rectangle and polygon.200

Here Shemshurin makes a special distinction: the album of cutouts is a step forward in publishing, since the artist no longer depends on the printer. By happenstance Kruchenykh soon after did develop his coerced achievement: dramatic life circumstances, as frequently happens, served the good of art. 221

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cluding K. Malevich, Puni, and others, having given it a name that says little:

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Saving himself from mobilization, the writer left for the Caucasus in midAugust 1915, and when he did have occasion to return to Moscow it was in a complete different era, August 1921. In his “Caucasian captivity,” Kruchenykh, who loved vaudevillish self-assertion, had been deprived of his bold bohemian milieu. “Most importantly, all my energy can go into writing booklets and now I will work diligently in my Vitebsk exile,” Malevich wrote to Gershenzon on November 7, 1919, during his initial Vitebsk days.201 Kruchenykh found himself in the same kind of situation four years earlier. His “exile” in Batalpashinsk and Sarykamysh also engendered the “writing of booklets,” only poetical ones, the trans-sense Cubo-Futurist’s original contribution to innovative art. Communication among the three comrades from the Victory Over the Sun production continued by post. In two surviving 1916 letters from Malevich— a June letter to Matiushin and a July letter to Kruchenykh—he sets forth his policy views on Suprematist writing. The discussions of sound-perception in poetic speech could not help but reflect the new sound-perception in music so intensively mastered by the Suprematist in his contact with Nikolai Roslavets in the first half of 1916. The “growling” sound of the name “soundmaker Roslavets” in Gly-Gly came to Kruchenykh obviously because the composer’s name came up constantly in the letters from Moscow. The main thing for Suprematist sound art, according to Malevich, was the move into the spatial construction of sound masses. The new genre was neither music nor poetry in the traditional sense. For the Suprematist, the discovery of material for this new genre and the interaction between the creator and the given material was based on unprecedented foundations. In an earlier letter, also written to a professional musician, Malevich put his stress on the “note-letter”: [. . .] this note-letter is perhaps more delicate, clear, and expressive than musical notes. Sound transitions more perfectly from letter to letter than from note to note. Coming to the idea of sound, we got note-letters that express sound masses. A new road may be found in the composition of these sound masses (formerly words). In this way, we rip the letter from the line, from a single sector, and give it freedom of movement. (The world of officials and domestic correspondence needs lines.)202 Consequently, we arrive at my third point, i.e., the distribution of letter sound masses in space similar to painterly Suprematism. These masses

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from the earth” (June 1916).203

Correspondence with the Caucasus was intensive: “Kruchenykh writes very often from Sarykamysh, the fellow has been preparing ever since the war to twist up a whirlwind, and I hope he does, I will be very happy for him. I am also sending him what he calls ‘wind-writing.’”204 Kruchenykh’s expressive definition seems to have imprinted in it powerful movement and a certain visual implication that clearly was present in Malevich’s letters; judging from the context, the “wind-writings” were poetological rather than poetic texts. The letter to Kruchenykh in Sarykamysh is dated July 5, 1916. Just before, Malevich had received a letter from the poet that has not survived that he called “pieces”; evidently it was similar to those scraps of paper with two or three lines of letter groups stamped on them that survive in Shemshurin’s archive.205 In his letter to Kruchenykh, Malevich sets forth even more extensively his points about sounding letters concentrated in groups, unique sound clusters. In one of his declarations Kruchenykh used the expression “close combinations,” which comes from the music sphere; Kulbin, we will recall, used this phrase to refer to ultra-chromatic intervals. The clash in the letter-chord among consonants whose articulation contrasted were just such “close combinations” in trans-sense poetry; in the wealth of their modulations they in fact surpassed everything that had existed until then in the cultural world of sounds. The only instrument for them could be the human voice, with its incomparable flexibility. In Malevich’s understanding, letter-soundings, performed energy and dynamics, necessarily provoked a special form of placement: The Letter Itself is a part of each sound, these are new sound symbols, and the transition of sound may be more delicate than the transition from note to note in music. Consequently, letters in the new poetry lack their own original designations, and the poet has to accumulate them [. . .] in these combinations in order to compose by ear, not with his a[ss] or head, groups of letters that could be collectors of sound masses, the more powerful these found groups are, the [more] capable they are of giving the greatest dispersal or a brief blow (a word must be found to name this new poetry, since we must reject poetry, as we must music). [. . .] So that Letter groups may appear on pages in various sectors, akin to painterly Suprematism.206

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will hang in space and allow our consciousness to travel further and further

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What draws our attention yet again in this passage is the energetic discourse that laid the foundation for the culture of the early twentieth century and was so important for Suprematism. As has been said, Kruchenykh knew how to respond unusually quickly to others’ discoveries. Malevich’s policy points swiftly went into the former’s letter clusters constructed along power lines and/or linked to regular geometric figures. Kruchenykh considered the speed and instantaneity of the creative act to be the first sign of brilliance, especially his own. In his “instant correspondence” he knew how to use impulses of diverse origin, arranging an improvisational— that is, absolutely arbitrary and therefore free—creative act. The trans-sense poet was conscious of the serendipitous nature of Malevich’s positions “on letter constructions [. . .] on pages [. . .] in various sectors.” Kruchenykh intentionally moved the date of Malevich’s letter forward a year, publishing an excerpt from it in response to the handwritten Nosoboika, which came out in May 1917.207 In July 1916 Kruchenykh quickly sent Rozanova a letter with Malevich’s new ideas (which he presented as his own) and sketched examples. Delighted by their novelty, Rozanova supplemented the letter groups “in various sectors” with color: “Your nonobjective pictures with rotating letters are terribly interesting, and in print they’ll be marvelous, it might even be good to print them in different colors or the letters in one color and the figures of the direction of their movement in another [drawing]. For ex[ample], letters in blue, the broken line in red, or in additional combina[tions]? I’ll redraw it in Vladimir.”208 Thus was born graphic poetry, visual poetry, which Olga Rozanova considered Kruchenykh’s independent discovery and which she actively encouraged her friend to make sure he got the credit for. Around mid-August 1916, a registered letter with the “new poetry” and the now widely known redrawings by Rozanova flew from Sarykamysh to Shemshurin in Moscow: I enclose: the lat[est] poet[ry], where the word and outline and draw[ing] intertwine, the impres[sion] from one and the oth[er] are not separated by time and space. What impression does it make on you? I’m sending sketches of pages for a future book. I myself jotted down just the approxim[ate] nature of how the draw[ing] should be linked to the letters. O. Rozanova painstakingly redrew this and colored it—and here for you are the sketches of my drafts (I redid the text later sever[al] times and even sent it to you, I think),209 but obviously O. R[ozanova] might, adding for herself, [in future] do draw[ings] that are even better. 224

If you don’t mind, hold onto these sketches until I show up for them, or return them registered.210

A few days later, on August 29, 1916, Shemshurin received a letter in which Kruchenykh impatiently demanded: “If only you could also soon have a chance to report on the color and noncolor poetry I sent you! [. . .] In a week you’ll receive my six paste-ons [. . .], please hold onto them and respond.”211 In their correspondence, the art of the Suprematist and trans-sense poet was enriched and mutually enhanced, forming remarkable hybrids. Kruchenykh would send Malevich “bits,” Malevich would respond to them, and Kruchenykh would take his responses into account and again vary the letter-sounds. Especially remarkable are the clusters that bounced from Moscow to the Caucasus and back; the differences in their sound and plastic interpretation in Malevich and Kruchenykh throw the individuality of each of them into relief. The chords are quoted in the same July letter from Malevich to Kruchenykh: “these groups of [letter] accumulations yield: ‘Bumg, mumomng, oloss, achki, oblyg, glamgly,’—in your last ‘oblyg’ there is a great mass of sounds that can be expanded upon, and the final letters yield a mighty blow, like a projectile striking a steel wall.” The Suprematist drew up his thoughts about the energetics of letterconstructions not only in words but also in a two-part drawing. Here, around a rectangular frame with “sounding” geometric figures, he wrote: “Prografachnik.” The word looked like a term for the new poetry with the emphasis on the root “graf” (graph) accentuating its plastic origin. The definition never took hold, though, and it remained the title of just this one composition (Figure 33). The letter-sounding “oblyg glamgly bol” appeared on a page with transsense opuses written by Kruchenykh using carbon paper and sent to Shemshurin in Moscow in August 1916 with a note in pencil: “I think the placement of the words and drawings will be different in print.”212 The note was obviously provoked by his integration of the impulses received from Malevich that conditioned the appearance “on the pages of Letter groups in different sectors similar to painterly Suprematism.” Commenting in detail on the artist’s letter, literary scholar Aleksandr Parnis remarked: “Evidently, following Malevich’s recommendations, Kruchenykh in his collection Nestroch’e [June 1917] placed his ‘oblyg’ group not horizontally but undulating. [. . .] Then he repeated this group of letters with different

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Maybe in that form (colored) it can somehow be printed.

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Figure 33. Kazimir Malevich. Prografachnik. 1916. Pencil on paper. 10.6 × 16. 8 cm. Courtesy The Cultural Centre “Khardjiev-Chaga Foundation”/Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

variations in his collection With All Out Book (Izo vsekh knig) (Tiflis-Sarykamysh, 1918) and in his collection Trans-Sense (Moscow, 1921)”213 (Figure 34). Let us stress that the modified group of these word-sounds always plays a role in the classic examples of Kruchenykh’s visual poetry. In Malevich’s “Prografachnik,” Suprematist “tablets” fly apart with mighty acceleration in the cosmic abyss, as if concentrated in them was the energy of those very same sound masses whose movement is supposed to give “our consciousness the chance to speed farther and farther from the earth.” There is no mention of space in Kruchenykh’s Nestroch’e. The letters and solidly packed rectangles rest on the surface of the page, like their neighbors, freed of frames. For the trans-sense poet the interpretation of plastic nonobjectivity, beginning with his collage paste-ons for Universal War: Yat’, differed from decorative flatness without making any attempt to achieve any other dimension. The stylistics of Rozanova’s nonobjective works defined the approach and understanding of geometric abstractivism characteristic of Kruchenykh. Herein, it seems, lay the unique plus of the “createds” of the poet who was born into the world a book lover. Subsequently Vladimir Favorsky (1886–

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Figure 34. A. Kruchenykh. Pages with “letter-constructions” from the book Nestroch’e (Sarykamysh, 1917). Author’s collection.

1964), a Russian theoretician and graphic artist, praised the inviolability of the paper’s plane as the first and main condition for great book art. Kruchenykh intuitively and consistently supported this principle; his transparent letterconstructions lie on the surface like weightless lace and do not disturb it despite the most acute dissonances. Kruchenykh himself was aware of and valued the plastic component of his pages of Suprematist poetry. At the 1918 Tiflis exhibition in the ARS editorial office he exhibited three works under the title “Trans-Sense Poetry (Word Compositions).” Kruchenykh’s visual poetry, like Malevich’s “Prografachnik,” cannot be called poetry or drawing; or, rather, both of them are at once poetry and drawing. In addition, avant-garde musicians of our era might not only recognize their kinship to “graphic music” but may also perform the “scores” of their radical Russian precursors. Kruchenykh himself, according to contemporaries’ reminiscences, with incomparable vocal virtuosity uttered his trans-sense “createds,” accompanying his performance with gestures, and this must have been a truly unique musical-poetic-bodily performance, which took place only in

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front of a tiny audience of trustworthy people. The shoots of a new and unknown type of art—synesthetic in scope—thrust upward here with blatant visibility and audibility; in Soviet Russia they had no chance of developing due to well-known sociohistorical circumstances.

Kruchenykh’s Materials for Supremus and Their Fate In his plans for the journal’s publication, Malevich devoted one of the first issues to Kruchenykh. In January 1917 the poet asked Shemshurin in a letter: “How is Malevich’s journal going? (in Moscow).”214 That same January Malevich informed Matiushin in a letter from the front: “Kruch[enykh] has sent me his arti[cle] ‘Azef and Judas’ on Khlebnikov.”215 The trans-sense Cubo-Futurist’s name is on nearly all the lists of journal participants. Kruchenykh and Roman Jakobson were seen by Supremus’s initiator as the pillars of the literary section. Kruchenykh did in fact become that, while Jakobson, immersed in other affairs, was unable to respond. Velimir Khlebnikov’s name arose in connection with Supremus only once and was never repeated. One has to think something other than the difficulty of contact played its part here. Later, in “V. Khlebnikov,” Malevich explained that the great Budetlyanin had never been a trans-sense poet in his eyes, merely a very clever man.216 In a letter from Rozanova to Udaltsova, one list of materials from Supremus’s “corresponding member” in the Caucasus is impressive: “Dear Nadezhda Andreevna, all this material is now ready to go to press: 1) my article 2) Kruchenykh’s play 3) Declaration of the Word 4) the collection of Balos poems and 5) Blue Eggs. From these two collections Kruchenykh has proposed printing whatever they can. Here there are also two of my poems, tell Malevich I have nothing against them being put in the journal.”217 The incorrect dating of this letter to 1916 even provided grounds for asserting that the materials of the Kruchenykh-Rozanova group outnumbered all the rest and therefore Supremus was supposed to have been their collection. Thus, in Udaltsova’s Life of a Russian Cubist, this letter, published with unqualified and incompetent textological corrections, as well as arbitrarily dated, is accompanied by the following commentary: Originally the first issue of Supremus, which would more accurately have been called a miscellany rather than a journal, was seen by its secretary O. Rozanova as a collection of her and A. Kruchenykh’s texts and illustrations. In a letter to Udaltsova, Rozanova reported on the material ready to go to press by late 1916: “1) my article. 2) Kruchenykh’s letters. 3) ‘Declaration of the Word as

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Kruchenykh has proposed reprinting whatever you can. Here there are also two of my poems. Tell Malevich I have nothing against them being printed.”218

This quotation contains several discrepancies from the more accurate version of Gurianova (see below). The second point contains a mistake: not “letters” but “Kruchenykh’s play.” Due to the importance of the chronological sequence in the stages of preparation for Supremus, let us linger on the dates of Olga Rozanova’s letters from her time as the journal’s secretary. The letters, which have been published several times, are dated differently in various publications, but always arbitrarily and inaccurately because the scholars involved for one reason or another did not analyze their context. Gurianova publishes this letter with the following heading: “[April 1917]. Archive of A. Drevin and N. Udaltsova, Moscow. 58 9th Line, apt. 21, Vasilievsky Island, St. Petersburg.” In 1915 Rozanova was living in Petrograd at 58 9th Line, apt. 47, Vasilievsky Island. The Petrograd address cited by Gurianova presents a puzzle; to this day no one has uncovered information about any spring 1917 trip to Petrograd by either Udaltsova or Rozanova. The letter’s dating by the same scholar to April 1917 is wrong. Rozanova’s letter contains several direct and indirect testimonies to when it was written. In April Malevich was still living in Moscow, and he moved to the dacha in Kuntsevo after May 3, 1917 (in the letter we read: “I sent Malevich a postcard at the dacha saying you had the material”). Rozanova’s letter to Shemshurin of May 26, 1917, helps us establish the precise date of the letter to Udaltsova: “I went to Vladimir twice to see Mama, who has still not recovered.”219 The letter to Shemshurin was sent in an envelope with the notation “municipal” and on it are two postmarks with the dates “May 26, [19]17,” attesting to the fact that it was sent and received on the same day. The two trips to Vladimir due to her mother’s illness were the following. The first time Rozanova left suddenly for Vladimir on April 29 and returned on May 8, 1917. The former date is established by the postmark “April 29, [19]17” on a postcard to Shemshurin, where the artist informs him of her immediate departure.220 The latter is from a postcard postmarked May 8, 1917, and written to her sister, A. V. Rozanova, immediately after her return from Vladimir.221 Her second brief visit to her home town was possible due to the “two holidays,” which fall in a row during the Orthodox Pentecost: Trinity Sunday (in

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Such.’ 4) the Balos poetry collection. 5) Blue Eggs. From these two collections,

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1917, May 21), followed by Monday of the Holy Spirit on May 22. Rozanova left on Saturday, May 20, 1917, for Vladimir, where she spent Sunday and Monday, returning to Moscow on Tuesday, May 23. Confirming the date of her departure as May 20 are Rozanova’s words in the postcard: “I waited for him [Malevich] until 6 and missed the convenient train, but he never came. I’m leaving and will telephone tonight when I arrive.” In those days the trains to Vladimir took several hours; missing the “convenient train” meant Rozanova arrived home in the middle of the night. The call “tonight when I arrive” must have come for Udaltsova late on the evening of Tuesday, May 23, 1917, after the journal secretary’s return to Moscow. Thus, Rozanova wrote the letter to Udaltsova on May 20, 1917, and left it along with the enumerated materials before her second, brief trip to Vladimir due to her mother’s illness. By comparing Rozanova’s detailed list and the early testimonies of Malevich, we can enumerate the materials Kruchenykh wanted to see in Supremus. First was his article “Azef-Judas-Khlebnikov,” received in Moscow in early 1917; then his play Gly-Gly, a new version of “Declaration of the Word as Such,” and also poetry from his handwritten collections Blue Eggs and Balos. All the proposed texts by Supremus’s Caucasus member had been collected for the journal by May 20, 1917, as the letter from Rozanova to Udaltsova implies.

“Azef-Judas-Khlebnikov” Kruchenykh’s article “Azef-Judas-Khlebnikov,” the first submitted to Supremus, is missing from Rozanova’s list. The poet began work on it in April 1916: “I am writing: Azef-JudasKhlebnikov.”222 In the fall Kruchenykh sent it to Matiushin; evidently he told Shemshurin about it in November 1916: “I sent one manuscript to Petrograd.”223 As we know, the intrepid Kruchenykh liked provocations and would stop at nothing for their sake (somewhere in her reminiscences, Marusia Burliuk noted that Kruchenykh treasured no one’s friendship in particular). The shocking title, which linked Khlebnikov’s name to despised names, was reinforced by the “dubious,” as a scholar later called it, content. As a whole, it shocked the community of left-wing artists.224 In December 1916 Kruchenykh asked Matiushin, “Why don’t you tell me your opinion of my article on Khlebnikov? Did you dislike it that much?”225

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Dear Mikhail Vasilievich, I haven’t answered you in a long time, I’m constantly reeling like a whirlwind. The front, the rear, and the rallies here and there, the various commissions, the Journal, the associatio[n] of art[ists], the schism, the new Bloc of Left-wing Artists, the struggle, I’m tired, I went to bed for 3–4 hours, in the morning back to the Printer, the front again, the rallies. Right now I’m thinking over my articles for the journal, we’ve decided to constr[uct] [a new] Supremative journal Supremis. Krucheny [sic] sent some good things for the stage and letter-poems, his first article, Judas Iscariot, has been read, but nothing has been [decided?].227

In late June 1917 Kruchenykh wrote to Shemshurin: “If you like, take from Malevich my article about Khlebnikov (you can through O. R[ozanova]), read it, and keep it. It’s foul overall, but there are details.”228 Shemshurin immediately asked Rozanova to help him get hold of the article.229 The article left Malevich’s hands, and a few days later Kruchenykh replied to the art patron’s letter, which has not survived: “I have sent a reply to your criticism of my article on V. Khlebnikov.”230 Kruchenykh particularly objected to the word “hooliganism,” which the Moscow addressee used as his assessment of what he had read. Judging from the facts that in May 1917 Rozanova’s list of readied materials did not mention Kruchenykh’s article and that in early July Malevich, through her, gave Shemshurin the only manuscript of “Azef-Judas-Khlebnikov” in

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After reading a dressing down administered by his Petrograd correspondent, which has not survived, he tried to justify himself: “I received your furious and deeply stylish letter! I apologize that my article on Khlebnikov came out rather crudely, but I know that in order to grab a wide audience, it has to be something like that, otherwise they’ll never recognize Khlebn[ikov], and now maybe they’ll throw themselves at him. In that sense I said: apotheosis.” 226 Kruchenykh well understood how publicity worked, even bad publicity. An unpublished letter from Malevich to Matiushin contains new details about the article’s fate. Judging from the context, this letter was written in the second half of April, since the Bloc of Left-wing Artists mentioned in it was not formed in Petrograd until the first half of the month; Kruchenykh’s play, which is also discussed here, was not received in Moscow before the middle of April (see below). The presence of “Azef-Judas-Khlebnikov” in the journal’s portfolio since January and the failure to have taken a decision on it in April leads one to think that it met with resistance among the members of Supremus:

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Moscow, Supremus had rejected it for publication. In all likelihood the discussion of this text by society members was not entirely free of storms. Although it was “foul” by its author’s own admission, he later published the article twice.231

The Futurodrama Gly-Gly In the list of Kruchenykh’s materials in Rozanova’s letters, first comes his play, his mysterious Gly-Gly. Its title’s origin lay in the “glamgly” letter cluster that Malevich and Kruchenykh had played with in texts and drawings.232 The poet keenly captured and used Malevich’s message. We quote once again the sentence from the artist’s July 1916 letter: “these groups of [letter] accumulations yield: ‘Bumg, mumomng, oloss, achki, oblyg, glamgly’—in your last ‘oblyg’ there is a great mass of sounds that could be expanded, and the final letters yield a mighty blow, like a projectile striking a steel wall.” The title “Gly-Gly” was a double “mighty blow” of the “final letters” of the trans-sense word “glamgly.” The futurodrama, which was written at the tail end of winter and early spring 1917, existed in either one or two manuscript originals, which were passed around. In March it was sent to Rozanova: “Sent the PLAY to O. Ro[zanova]. It would be good to publish it with draw[ings] (lithographs).”233 Further on, in clarifying the dates of the letters to Shemshurin, a somewhat confused story comes up about the sending and receipt of the play by the correspondents in Moscow. In a letter that he himself dated April 2, 1917, Kruchenykh sent Shemshurin additions to the play because he was concerned that the text was too short for a separate book: “If we allow that the play I sent is going to be printed, then I think that there isn’t enough text for one quire, therefore it would be good to add the attached after the speech of the four strongman warriors, that is, before the squeaking of the walls and so forth (people say now is no time to be printing! I think that even just before you die it’s the time!).”234 This preamble and addition are written in pencil, and then a vertical line is added in ink: “do not refuse to inform me of receipt. April 2, 1917. AK” and again in pencil: “there won’t be any more addi[tions]!” However, on April 10, Shemshurin is informed by registered letter: “I sent you my play registered mail. Please inform me of your receipt.”235 The additions to the play arrived ahead of the play itself. Nor is it entirely clear how the texts of the futurodrama sent to Rozanova in March and in April to Shemshurin were related.

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Kruchenykh printed a large excerpt from Gly-Gly in his collection Obesity of Roses (Ozhirenie roz), published in Tiflis in 1918. Judging from the apotheosic nature of the final lines, this was the finale to the whole drama. Here Malevich the character uttered among other things the trans-sense words of Malevich the correspondent from a real letter to Kruchenykh: “Gamlet el tetku tek.”239 As a character in the futurodrama, Olga Rozanova also spoke in the real verses of Rozanova the poet: “Olga Rozanova, the famous artist, gives interesting examples of trans-sense poetry: ‘Lefanta chiol: / Mial anta’ (her speech in A. Kruchenykh’s play Gly-Gly).”240 After Rozanova’s disappearance (departure?) from the journal in summer 1917, the worry of publishing it fell once more to Udaltsova, and now the duty of doing the drawings for Gly-Gly went to Nadezhda Andreevna. However, even in more peaceful times than 1917, it would have been hard for Udaltsova

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Malevich’s above-quoted fragmentary letter implies that in April 1917 Supremus members were already familiar with Gly-Gly and that the “good things” for the stage had been accepted by them without qualification. The play about Budetlyane heroes had both real people and allegorical characters. The former included Kazimir Malevich, Olga Rozanova, “soundmaker Roslavets,” and “soundmaker M. Matiushin,” Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Maiakovsky, Mikhail Menkov, and Igor Terentiev in the verbal disguise “Khryashch”;236 the latter, “young woman,” “lady with the golden face,” “woman,” “bird skeleton,” and “four strongmen warriors.” The latter clearly had some genetic kinship to the Budetlyane strongmen from Victory Over the Sun. Initially Kruchenykh had dreamed of publishing Gly-Gly as a separate edition with lithographs by Rozanova using Shemshurin’s money. This project was hard to carry off in the tumult of spring-summer 1917, especially since Malevich had already slotted the play for the journal in April. On May 26, Rozanova informed Shemshurin, “Regarding Kruchenykh’s play, the following: the Suprematists suggested putting it in Supremus, which is being published and the first issue has already been shaped.”237 Here she reported that Kruchenykh had sent additional insertions for the text. In his diary entry for June 15, 1917, Kruchenykh noted, “The journal where my big play and all my friends are is being printed.”238 The idea of publishing Gly-Gly in a journal whose authors appeared in its pages both as real people and as characters of an artistic text published exactly there was revolutionary in and of itself. The journal would blatantly show the total theatricalization (in the Futurists’ version, mythologization) of life, one of the mightiest instruments for expanding the territory of art.

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to produce the required illustrations; this type of art was utterly alien to her artistic nature. In spite of her sense of duty and obligation, Udaltsova could not do the drawings. The last time Gly-Gly surfaced was in 1919, when Varvara Stepanova completed a cycle of “portraits” of the cast of characters, adding to it their lines as well as lines from the drama, which would have been impossible to do without the original. The cycle was exhibited in April–May 1919 at the “10th State Exhibition ‘Nonobjective Art and Suprematism.’” In her diary Stepanova wrote, “Malevich liked Gly-Gly and the poems [of Stepanova herself], and he has told Anti [Rodchenko’s nickname] that we must appear together . . .”241 After 1919, all traces of the futurodrama’s original were lost in the gloom of oblivion.

“Eko-ez,” Practice and Theory Cited on Rozanova’s list as poetry contributions for the “Literature” section are two handwritten books: Kruchenykh’s Blue Eggs and Balos, the joint work of the artist and poet. Blue Eggs, as we know, was Kruchenykh’s first handwritten book. Its shocking title stood in contrast to the name of a Tiflis arts association, Blue Horns, which retained, in turn, echoes of Blue Rose. The term “Blue Eggs,” with its intentionally “indecent” subtext, led an independent life in Kruchenykh’s art. At first the poet used this heading to combine a suite of three trans-sense poems: the first untitled, the second under the heading “TFLIS,” and the third “MALOKHOLNYI” (Feeble). Typed with carbon paper on a large piece of cigarette paper, they were received by Shemshurin on April 25, 1916. In a handwritten insertion, in red pencil, Kruchenykh announced the title and asked Shemshurin to keep the poems a secret: “These are secret (for the public). / I thought of printing them / in a collection with Zdanevich— / but it froze / l[ike] a dead man’s navel (title ‘Blue / Eggs’).”242 The placement of these poems on the page still held no trace of visual poetry, which arose, as was stated above, a few months later, in mid-summer 1916. Blue Eggs was born in early spring 1917. This too is a collection, but there is not a single text in it from the April 1916 letter to Shemshurin; those saw the light of day in reworked form in other Kruchenykh publications. Under the title “Blue Eggs” the poet collected the tantalizingly erotic prose piece “Uail’distka blochit”; a trans-sense poem with the gentle “Olechka” in the middle; a short narrative poem, “End of Victory,” akin to works from

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Olga Rozanova, the Caucasian prisoner’s devoted friend, watched out for his interests on Supremus; together, as has already been said, they formed a united group. The artist not only guarded her primacy jealously but also tried to prompt the same attitude in her close friend: “It would be good if you had time to set forth theoretically and assemble all the principles of your art of recent times. This is something you need to do so that others don’t do it for you and don’t take credit for your achievements. Puni, Malevich . . . and oth[ers], Oksana.”244 Her dislike for the “hair-splitting” Malevich, whose Suprematism was, in her opinion, “entirely my paste-ons,” kept Rozanova from understanding or appreciating the degree of his influence on Kruchenykh, especially since the latter appropriated “his own” for himself with uncommon ease and had no intention of sharing the glory. During those years the trans-sense poet, in full accord with the psychology of creative people, felt himself to be grander than any of his contemporaries bar none. Noteworthy is his diary entry of June 15, 1917, which in all seriousness reminds us of a parody on the diary of Gogol’s Poprishchin: Apparently I am a kind of a god. Also my magnificent “like manuscr[ipts].” With drawings and lines. [. . .] I myself don’t know (no one does) whether my composi[tions] are in fact brilliant (as many people assure me). In any case I often believe it (that I am the sole, most important, necessary, and so forth and devour grace).245

Kruchenykh was free with the letters addressed to him, as was his indisputable right. The poet selectively kept just those pages he found useful; he cut off pieces for collage paste-ons, cut out quotations to send to other correspondents (in a letter to Shemshurin he sent complaints from Rozanova’s letter

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his War album; an untitled verse, “I walk with a woman’s breast,” which was associated with his long-past “Play in Hell”; and a scholarly literary analysis, “Interpretation of Khlebnikov’s Words.” Both Blue Eggs and the subsequent booklets “in their manuscript capacity,” produced by Kruchenykh in the Caucasus, were free of the slightest trace of anything mechanical. In the twenty-first century the American Slavist Gerald Janecek, with full justification, gave his article a spectacular title: “Kruchenykh contra Gutenberg.”243 Blue Eggs inaugurated a new era in the Cubo-Futurist poet’s art. Kruchenykh’s conceptual masterpieces anticipated an era by decades.

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about the unbearable working conditions at N. I. Butkovskaia’s zincography shop), and so on. The rest was dross and was discarded. Therefore it is hard to establish the date of the fragmentary letter in which Rozanova prompts Kruchenykh to assert his priority; it is clear only that it is from the first quarter of 1917, probably the very end of winter. Malevich had expressed the necessity of a “new word to call poetry” back in summer 1916, along with his thoughts on Suprematist writing. In his commentaries on the above-quoted lines, A. Parnis justly remarked, “Evidently, under the influence of this immediate task, Kruchenykh proposed a new term, the abbreviation ‘eko-ez,’ from the expression ‘ekonomicheskaia poeziia’ [economic poetry] or ‘ekonomiia-poeziia’ [economy-poetry].”246 His conceptual “self-written” books pushed Kruchenykh to work on his “eko-ez” theory, which he also tagged “eko-khud” [economic art]. Rozanova’s friendly insistence may well have functioned as a unique trigger. The authorial date, April 2, 1917, is placed under the already mentioned vertical notes on the letter to Shemshurin with additions for Gly-Gly: “all this is Futurism—or rather eko-khud and eko-ez (ekonomich/eskaia/-poeziia), supreme, definitive” (emphasis in original). Clearly felt in the word “supreme” here is the Suprematist discourse. The addition also makes it clear that the text of Gly-Gly was for the author “eko-ez,” just as all of Kruchenykh’s materials accepted for Supremus were “eko-ez”-“eko-khud.” On April 10, 1917, Shemshurin received a letter in which Kruchenykh underlined the syllables: “I WRITE (in poetry and theory) / eko-khud / and eko-ez— which means / (speed) ekonomiia-poeziia.”247 These creative aspirations developed under the catalyzing influence of Supremus activities. Kruchenykh saw “eko-ez” as the sound-word analog to painterly Suprematism; the term “eko-khud” covered the plastic arts, and all of it together was “supremus.” The first books “in the capacity of manuscripts”—Blue Eggs, Balos, and Nosoboika—were conceived of by Kruchenykh as manifestations of “eko-ez” and “eko-khud,” under the aegis of Supremus. Nosoboika included a declaration of “trans-sense (nonobjective supremus) poetry” harnessed to “Ekokhud, supremus” painting. Kruchenykh treasured the text so much that in July 1917 he was planning to publish it in a run of more than ten copies: “I’m thinking of sending Nosoboika, after I fix it up a little, to the printer.”248 It is essential to note the differences between the two colleagues, the artist and the poet, that emerge on the level of the new art’s terminological design.

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The poet cannot clarify the reasons for the Letter’s liberation. Words “as such” are Kruchenykh’s sally and it may give him a little more existence. The words “as such” have to be reincarnated “into something,” but this something remains obscure and thanks to this many of the poets who have declared war on thought and logic have been forced to get bogged down in the flesh of the old poetry (Maiakovsky, Burliuk, Severianin, Kamensky). Kruchenykh is still waging the struggle with this flesh, not letting his feet stay long in one place; but the “into something” hangs over him, and by not finding the “into something” he is going to be sucked into the same flesh.”249

In Kruchenykh’s poetic and theoretical texts from the Supremus era one observes the constant intrusion of the terms “trans-sense,” “futurism,” and “supremus,” which for him are virtually synonymous. Taking precedence among them nonetheless was “trans-sense,” his own invention. This concept remained dominant for Kruchenykh, and he subordinated all other definitions to it. The back cover of Balos was decorated with a vertical “scroll” of the dancing letters of “SUPREMUS.” It included two poems by Olga Rozanova. Starting in mid-1916 Kruchenykh started mystifying Shemshurin with the verse of a “new poet.” In Balos they were finally published under her own name.250 With her characteristic talent, Olga Rozanova plunged enthusiastically into her verbal sound art; her sound poetry possesses exceptional harmony and expressivity. The artist was most attracted by musical “enumeration,” where she considered that word a term: “Musicians can explain the term.” Judging from

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The poet used the word “supremus” in the same extended meaning that Malevich lent it, however he subordinated “supremus” to his term “transsense.” For Malevich, “trans-sense” remained a part of Fevralism; the very word demonstrated the connection between art and “sense,” which it was supposed to expose. In “trans-sense” what took precedence was the deconstructivist negative message and the removed but nonetheless significant connection to the conventional attitudes of the past. Unlike trans-sense, with its destructive energy, Suprematism bore a positive charge and was aimed not at rejecting the old, which had already been overcome, but at constructing the new. Herein lay the essence of Malevich’s claims against Kruchenykh, claims expressed back in June 1916:

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the invented neologism, in her poetry Kruchenykh’s friend consciously strove for a unique sound counterpoint, which proves as well her analysis of her own “formal verse,” an analysis that rested primarily on musical categories. Herein lay the axis of her disagreement with Kruchenykh’s graphic—descriptive—poetry. The title “Lefanta chiol . . . ” for a monograph about the distinguished artist’s art, published in the twenty-first century, feels amazingly accurate and natural. Returning to the literary section of Supremus, let us emphasize that both objective and nonobjective poems by Kruchenykh, as well as Rozanova’s poetry, undoubtedly found a place there.

“Declaration of the Word as Such” for Supremus Kruchenykh’s position on the “ultimate universality and economy” of transsense poetry was the novelty that he introduced into “The Declaration of the Word as Such” in spring 1917. This declaration, the cornerstone of his theory of trans-sense language and the new letters, was published for the first time in 1913 in a leaflet the poet put out with N. I. Kulbin. The changes that arose in the text under the influence of the trans-sense Futurist’s new attitudes have been closely studied in art historian Tatiana Goriacheva’s “History of a ‘Declaration of the Word as Such’ Based on Materials from A. Kruchenykh’s Correspondence.”251 The new points concerned primarily the theoretical design of “eko-ez” and “eko-khud.” The conclusions of Goriacheva, who defines the vector of the poet’s creative research between 1916 and 1918, are supremely convincing: Intrigued by Suprematism, Kruchenykh projects it on the theory of language and uses this concept as a synonym for intuitive nonobjective art. Kruchenykh’s poetics are invaded by the Suprematist artistic system itself: the Futurist device of visualizing scales acquires a clearly Suprematist modus. Graphically organized into a dynamic plastic structure, the lines of poetry take on the quality of audible Suprematist constructions, and Suprematist shapes appear in the text on a level with letters and syllables.252

Kruchenykh’s “economic” theory had one other impulse, which came from Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Device” in his Collection on the Theory of Poetic Language.253 The latter appeared in February 1917 and, as Goriacheva correctly notes, “Kruchenykh’s receipt of the collection coincides with the beginning of his work on his ‘eko-ez’ theory.”254

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Kruchenykh’s points about “economic poetry” later influenced the definition of the “economy of art” advanced by Malevich in 1919 as Suprematism’s morphogenic pivot.257 However, this influence was on the level of the word, not the essence of the phenomenon. The economy proclaimed by Kruchenykh held an obvious echo of the idea of “the economy of creative efforts” drawn from Shklovsky. This economy was related to devices and manipulations for cutting out anything “superfluous”; “the economy of forces as the law and goal of art” was merely an instrument. This kind of subsidiary “economy” could not be the essence of Suprematism. Suprematist “economy” was linked not to instrumental reduction, that is, the road, but to the concept of transformation. And transformation not

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Kruchenykh wrote many of his letters and texts with carbon paper and then sent them out to addressees with the addition of lines referring to each person; however, he wrote two versions of his new “Declaration.” One was sent to Matiushin in Petrograd (now in the GTG archive); the other to Malevich in Moscow (now among the Supremus papers at FKhCh).255 The texts of the Amsterdam manuscript and the manuscript in the GTG archive are virtually identical. However, Supremus received a declaration in which the three-syllable trans-sense word “kho-bo-ro” was cut to two syllables, “KHO-BO.” Kruchenykh tried to lend his letter-construction “kho-boro” the status of the famous line-declaration “dyr bul shchyl”; he constantly cited, played with, and emphasized “kho-bo-ro” for several years in various texts and publications. However, in spite of Kruchenykh’s many years of incredibly active efforts to publicize “kho-bo-ro,” it never even came close to the revolutionary “dyr-bulshchyl.” “Kho-bo-ro” sounded too much like the conventional “kho-ro-sho” (“good,” “fine,” “nice”), with the same three-stress rhythm and the same consonants “kh” and “r” rolling along on the round wheels of the “o.” It is hard to explain why in the declaration sent to Supremus Kruchenykh wrote “KHO-BO”; it cannot be blamed on haste or mistake since the author did reread the manuscript, as is obvious from the deletions and corrections in the text. Beginning in summer 1920 the word “KHOBO” in and of itself acquired a certain fame because this was what the Nothingists’ publishing house was called.256 However, here a definite meaning was invested in it, a meaning borrowed from the American “hobo.” The life of this “KHOBO” was independent of Kruchenykh, as was Kruchenykh of it.

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as a process but as a condition that ensues after the escape to the “desert,” the cleansing to zero. Malevich’s “economy” concealed the metaphysical message of minimalism. Kruchenykh used the word minimum in his declaration of “eko-ez” from Nosoboika: “Eko-khud and supremus give for the first time the measure (minimum) of colors and lines” but have gone past it. The minimalism of the second half of the twentieth century, whose spiritual father and precursor was Malevich, had nothing in common with instrumental “economy” from any perspective whatsoever. Summing up the results of Kruchenykh’s participation in Supremus’s activities, let us note his last mention of the uncompleted project: “How is printing going on Supremus? Will it come out?” It was not the poet’s friend Olga Rozanova but Shemshurin, who was, again, as in January, removed from journal affairs, who read this question in a letter received from Tiflis on December 23, 1917.

The Supremus Society’s Finale Public Activism in 1917 The world war exacerbated all the weaknesses and flaws of the state and public order of the no longer feudal but not yet capitalist Russian empire. The country was rushing headlong toward disaster. In light of the tsarist government’s feeble conduct of the war and the corruption so prevalent in the top echelons, the social shifts that had been making themselves felt since the late nineteenth century led over the course of 1917 to irrevocable results. After the bourgeois democratic February Revolution, the October coup, subsequently ennobled as the Great October Socialist Revolution, broke out. Supremus, a strictly party-line fellowship, brought together not only the most radical but also the most active left-wing artists on the public level. The activities, positions, and public posts of its members in 1917 were as follows. Kazimir Malevich: member, Jack of Diamonds, chairman as of October; chairman, Supremus, and editor of eponymous journal; member, Union of Youth; member, Left-wing (youth) Federation of the Professional Union of Artists-Painters of Moscow (later the Left-wing Federation); member, Leftwing Federation Council; secretary from the Left-wing Federation on the Council of the Professional Union of Artists-Painters of Moscow; soldier, 56th

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Reserve Infantry Regiment; deputy, Moscow Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies, and chairman of the Arts Section of its Cultural Educational Office; commissar for the protection of Kremlin monuments and treasures as of November 1917. Nadezhda Udaltsova: member, Jack of Diamonds; de facto secretary, Supremus society; as of March, member, Freedom for Art alliance in Petrograd; member, Union of Youth; member, Left-wing Federation. Olga Rozanova: member, Jack of Diamonds; member, Union of Youth; secretary, Supremus; delegate from Supremus to the Moscow Council of Arts Organizations; member, Left-wing Federation; member, Left-wing Federation Council; secretary from the Left-wing Federation on the Council of the Professional Union of Artists-Painters of Moscow; official in the Union of Cities. Nikolai Roslavets: member, Social Revolutionary (SR) party; chairman, Yelets Central Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies. Aleksei Kruchenykh concluded his tireless publication activities in the Caucasus. Public activities even caught up Liubov Popova and Vera Pestel, who considered painting their first, main, and preferably sole form of activity. They were among the organizers of the above-mentioned one-day exhibition to aid freed political prisoners held in Popova’s apartment on April 23, 1917. Supremus merged wholly with the Left-wing Federation, forming a faction of Suprematists. Five people were elected to the Left-wing Federation Council: Aleksei Grishchenko (1883–1977), Malevich, Rozanova, Tatlin, and Georgy Yakulov (1884–1928). As secretaries from the Left-wing Federation they joined the general council of the Moscow Professional Union of Artists-Painters. Two of them were Supremus members. The revolutions unleashed an incredibly broad front of activity for Malevich, a leader of a charismatic bent. Henceforth he could, on an apparently universal scale, inculcate his grandiose ideas of the Suprematist worldview. Supremus’s founder had found its framework constricting. The journal’s publication remained the connecting thread for the association’s members, but the thread was growing thinner by the week; in 1917 a week felt like months, if not years. In July 1917 Supremus had basically been assembled, although it was not complete. Aleksei Kruchenykh’s Gly-Gly was awaiting Rozanova’s illustrations. However, the artist, who was busy twenty-six hours a day, had neither the time nor the strength to do the illustrations. By all accounts, she felt she had met her obligations to the journal. After mid-summer 1917 her name did not appear in the surviving documents and

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papers, just as her surviving letters contain no mention of either the society or the journal. Publishing Supremus required not only typesetting and photographic work but also paper, paints, plates, a press, a binder, and so on. It was these production aspects that entailed the largest expenditures. The situation in the country was only deteriorating. Russia, rent by political parties, continued to wage war and kept taking older and older men for the front. The ruble was swiftly losing its value. By summer 1917 there had been an “outrageous increase in printing costs, tenfold.”258 These higher costs struck painfully at the Supremus project; the money collected by the participants for the publication was now insufficient. In August 1917 Malevich was elected to the Moscow Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies, where he was chairman of the Arts Section of the Cultural Educational Department. The chairman had many plans. His project for a House of Arts, created around that time, was a unique model for his future pedagogical and scholarly and artistic activities, which began soon after at the State Free Arts Studios and continued in Unovis (Exponents of the New Art), and then Ginkhuk (the State Institute of Artistic Culture).259 His letters to Matiushin in fall 1917 are overflowing with reports about his plans and actions: I have a lot of work now, I was elected Chairman of the Arts Department of the Mosc[ow] S[oviet] of S[oldiers’] Deput[ies]. [. . .] I’ve drawn a few pictures, and Supremus is moving along, both the journal and the painting. [. . .] I’ve devised many activities, specifically arrangements for the 1st Moscow People’s Academy of Arts. [. . .] Generally work has been very interesting. There’s an awareness that I’ll be able to leave a memory of my time. I do want to do an awful lot.260

His comment about the journal moving along was written in September 1917. Malevich had attempted to transform Supremus into a publication propagandizing the new art among the revolutionary soldier masses. It is difficult to say what steps were taken in a practical sense, though traces of this attempt were preserved in drafts from the FKhCh archive: Journ[al] for the soldier. As we start down the path of liberation [the journal (holds? for you?)], we start down not only [the path] of liberating ourselves from the burden of the old in the life of our improvement, but also, in art, the artist[-]maker of Art starts down more and more new paths discovered by his wisdom. 242

There is one path in Art, but its forms are various, and the difference comes out of the growth in the wisdom of its awareness as it learns its appropriate movement. The change of the state order is revolution, the change of forms and relations in art is a movem[ent].

In October 1917 Malevich was elected chairman of Jack of Diamonds, the longest-lived association of innovators, which contrasted itself to the Wanderers, academicism, and the classical World of Art movement (the reformed World of Art, on the other hand, absorbed many former Jack of Diamonds members). Supremus intended to assert its own truth without regard for anyone, pursuing an uncompromising policy through the “house-laboratory” of the journal and, ideally, exhibitions. As radical artists joined Jack of Diamonds, issues arose in relations with other left-wing artists, primarily Vladimir Tatlin, who was so active during the revolutionary months, and people of like mind who professed a categorically different artistic faith. Since spring 1916 Tatlin had been the leader of the Store group, which belonged to the Bloc of Left-wing Artists in Petrograd (Store, the first and last fellowship organized and headed by the creator of counterreliefs, lasted for more than a year; its history, as can be imagined, merits a separate study). In April 1917 Store’s leader was delegated to Moscow, where he became the initiator and developer of the concept of a Professional Union of Artist Painters divided up into factions based on aesthetic criteria. In Moscow Tatlin legitimately headed the Left-wing Federation, becoming its chairman, and named as secretary was his associate, Aleksandr Rodchenko.261 Malevich thought that the established activities of Jack of Diamonds would serve to inculcate all topical art and simultaneously provide a place for its representation. Tatlin and his newly acquired comrades-in-arms Udaltsova and Popova believed that Jack of Diamonds should undergo basic change: “This group’s dissatisfaction was expressed in the fact that they demanded change in the society’s name, and then a new election of its administration, which they felt had no authority. These demands were rejected, so they quit the society.”262 In essence, Tatlin and his comrades were suggesting that Jack of Diamonds commit organizational suicide, which is what changing its name and reelecting its administration would have meant de facto. The logical conclusion is that the participants in Jack of Diamonds could have made a counteroffer; the group of protesters was free to organize its own association, give it its own name, and elect its own administration. 243

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As in life each age replaces the order of the past age, so too in art artists have discovered paths and have set Art on the path of further movement.

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Seven people quit the society as a result of the debates. Of the seven artists who left Jack of Diamonds, the press and scholarly literature have always listed the avant-gardists Tatlin, Bruni, Popova, Udaltsova, “and others.” We will take this occasion to note that these “others” were Ivan Maliutin (1889– 1932), Aleksandr Osmerkin (1892–1953), and Valerian Pozharsky (life dates unknown). None of them was a radical and none of them likely shared the artistic platform of the first four. Among the discontented, two had a direct relationship to Supremus. Udaltsova, as has already been emphasized several times, was the number two person in the society. The demarche of the Suprematist women, led by Tatlin, Malevich’s zealous opponent, meant a schism in Supremus. The schism inevitably brought about the collapse of the association, which had been founded on a commonality of activities. The Moscow “Amazons,” who had been Malevich’s opponents between fall 1915 and fall 1916, became his opponents again in late 1917. After leaving Malevich’s camp, the former members of the group once again faced the problem of self-definition. In a memorable note on the back of a “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition catalog, Udaltsova listed the pertinent issues, including “the relationship between Supremus and the ‘nonobjective painting’ group.”263 The phrase appeared during work on an exhibition that ran from November 21 to December 3, 1917; during this same period, on November 22, Udaltsova noted in her diary, “Suprematism has come to a scandalous end. Malevich suddenly went mad and we quarreled, if the journal comes out and we get what we put into it, that’s good, but if the money isn’t returned—that’s horrible. Liubov Ser[geevna Popova] put in 1,100, 600, and 500 through us. Such faith in the journal, but it’s bogged down, but I think it will come out anyway.”264 Malevich’s gift for creating capacious and viable terminological neologisms was rare in the artistic milieu. Before the appearance of the umbrella definition “Constructivism,” the Suprematist’s opponents had had to make do with broad and neutral descriptive expressions—“nonobjective painting,” “nonobjective creation,” “nonobjective art”—which in addition had long been used by both Malevich himself and other artists.

Suprematists’ Exhibitions It was not Malevich’s first time initiating and waging a propaganda campaign to inculcate Suprematism in the consciousness of his colleagues and society. The Jack of Diamonds chairman had broad authority: for the first time in his

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life Black Square, as an emblem of victorious Suprematism supported by a brigade of painters, was placed on the cover of the 1917 “Jack of Diamonds” catalog. The display of Black Square on the booklet’s cover was the last of the arbitrary actions of the radicals’ marshal. Malevich allowed no discrimination whatsoever when it came to exhibitions. It has already been mentioned that the last “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition turned into a sort of one-woman show for Alexandra Exter with her retrospective, “Painting 1907–17.” The Supremus painters besides Malevich himself, showing twenty-nine works, included Davydova (ten works), Kliun (thirty-two), and Menkov (ten). All of them exhibited mostly nonobjective works. Apart from five works from her “Playing Cards” series, Rozanova (twenty-two works total) presented seventeen nonobjective canvases under the title “Color”; the artist herself did not apply the Malevich word “color-painting” to her own art. The last effort of Natalia Davydova, the owner of the artistic labor workshop, is seen as Supremus’s last full-fledged exhibition: at the “Second Exhibition of Contemporary Decorative Art,” in the salon of K. Mikhailova, held December 6–19, 1917, Verbovka designs and wares were shown, numbering about four hundred works.265 At the second “Verbovka,” Supremus painters had exhibited primarily Suprematist compositions, which numbered in the dozens: Davydova had had more than seventy, Malevich sixteen, Rozanova sixty, and so on. The exhibition’s innovative character found indirect confirmation in the fact that a day before it closed, on Sunday, December 17, a “lecture by the Futurist Maiakovsky” was held there.266 In contrast to the first “Verbovka,” which was documented by quite a few photos in the press, no such visual materials remain from the second “Verbovka”; its artistic triumph was quite modest inasmuch as the backdrop for it was another triumph, a public triumph that fractured history: the second “Verbovka” exhibition opened a month and a half after the October coup. By fortunate coincidence, some of the exhibits in the second “Verbovka” were photographed by an American journalist and theater critic, Oliver Sayler (1887–1956), who reached Moscow on November 12, 1917, and spent half a year here267 (Figure 35). Charlotte Douglas, who found the surviving collection of her compatriot’s photographic originals, has commented, “Today these photos are especially valuable. They are the sole visual testimony to the existence of these Suprematist compositions, since a large part of the embroideries have been lost.”268 Today not just a large part has been lost but so too have virtually all the wares from “Verbovka.” Russian life has seen too many disasters since 1917.

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Figure 35. Exhibits from the “Second Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art (Verbovka)” (December 1917). At center, pillow with Suprematist design by Malevich; at bottom, a ribbon by O. Rozanova; behind the pillow, a scarf by N. Davydova (?); top left, part of an item with design by Davydova; at right, appliqué and part of a ribbon by N. Udaltsova. Photo by O. Sailer, courtesy Charlotte Douglas.

With Douglas’s gracious assistance, I was able to view the photographs of the actual wares of Davydova, Malevich, Popova, Rozanova, Udaltsova, and also Boguslavskaia (the Puni-Boguslavskaia couple, who were subject to discrimination by the Moscow women artists, asserted themselves with Davydova’s assistance as belonging to the Suprematist group). From these photos we can judge the triumphant supremacy of nonobjective, mostly Suprematist, decorative elements in the applied art wares.269 Paradoxically, the exhibits at the second “Verbovka” were actively acquired by visitors, and this bothered an unidentified reviewer, compelling him—we quote once again—to state: “It is curious that the public, which was indignant at their paintings, eagerly buys up cushions, bindings, and so on, which often are nearly exact copies of the ‘Suprematists’’ pictures.”270

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The last bursts of Supremus activity date to 1918. On January 1, Udaltsova wrote in her diary, “I wish I didn’t have to go out on journal business tomorrow. I have to start the drawings for Gly-Gly soon. I won’t make it by the exhibition, if there is one.”271 The exhibition the artist was worried about at the end of 1917 and that was supposed to take place at the end of January (“If the exhibition does take place, then it will be soon, in late January”)272 no longer involved only Supremus but was to be held within the framework of Moscow’s Professional Union of Artist-Painters. Udaltsova, the number two person in Supremus, had completely new assumptions. Back in February 1917 she had first seen a firm colleague in the person of Rodchenko: “I saw Rodchenko today, now there is someone I can really work with.”273 In the Left-wing Federation she became even closer to Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova; great hopes were aroused as well by her old friend Aleksei Grishchenko: “Grishchenko arrived, and if he starts something, then he does it energetically, I have to bring him in as chairman for next year, or even now.”274 Her last words revealed unambiguously the powerful artist’s desire to overthrow the then chairman, Tatlin. At the same time, Udaltsova, with her strong organizational grasp, saw the overwhelming logic in Supremus coming out; she continued to oversee the publication’s practical affairs. Opposition to Malevich arose not only among his former critics and temporary colleagues. In early 1918 Ivan Kliun, who had always been numbered a Malevich champion, sensed in himself the strength and need to contrast his own art to Suprematism and its initiator. There is a remarkable document in the Supremus archive. On a quarter-page, in curly handwriting, the journal’s title is drawn in Latin letters, several authors are listed, and “Bk. 1” and the date “1918” are added. Below, in the same handwriting, but now in pencil, this caustic sentence: “The rooster that sings for three provinces.” This artifact, rife with obvious irritation, was executed by Ivan Kliun.275

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In essence this represented the victorious penetration of the new morphogenesis into life brought about by the Supremus society. History, as we know, does not know the subjunctive mood, but it is hard not to comment that the artistic restructuring through designs for Verbovka that proved so beneficial for the Moscow women Cubists might have been just as successful at educating the perception and then the assertion of innovative art among the broad public, had the life of the nation not been so calamitous.

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The artistic conflict between Kliun and Malevich went on for several years. What is most remarkable is that it did not damage the everyday friendship between the two old friends. On March 20, 1918, Udaltsova wrote in her diary, “How horribly insulting that our journal hasn’t come out. Right now we could do it well.” Three days later, on March 23, Malevich started publishing in the newspaper Anarchy. Quite a few of his texts written for Supremus saw the light of day on the pages of that publication. This was the Supremus project’s final act.

The Supremus Society: A Summary The first Suprematist society existed for somewhat more than a year including its latent period. The main events of its life unfolded during revolutionary 1917. The association included the most radical Russian artists in painting, letters, and music. Some of them belonged to the society from its beginning to its collapse; others were linked to it only at the initial stage. A consolidated list of Supremus members in alphabetical order includes the artists Natalia Davydova, Ivan Kliun, Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Menkov, Vera Pestel, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, and Mstislav Yurkevich; the composer Nikolai Roslavets; and the poet Aleksei Kruchenykh. The artists Ivan Puni, Ksenia Boguslavskaia, and Alexandra Exter were involved with the society only in late 1916 and early 1917. The Russian Parisian Aleksander Arkhipenko and the poets and men of letters Velimir Khlebnikov and Roman Jakobson were desired members of the society, however they could not or would not join, for various reasons. The Supremus painters were called Suprematists and as such showed their works in several exhibitions, especially the two last “Jack of Diamonds” (1916, 1917), the one-day showing in April 1917 in Popova’s apartment, and the second “Verbovka” exhibition. The “Verbovka” that opened in December 1917 was the Suprematists’ most representative exhibition; about four hundred works were displayed. Most of them were wares that embodied the new morphogenesis in designs for textiles and embroidery, as well as ornamental compositions on objects of daily use. Suprematism, which was shown publicly for the first time on November 6, 1915, in the form of examples for the Verbovka Artel of Artistic Labor, won the attention and later the understanding of its opponents primarily through its decorative designs. For the former Cubists who ultimately became Supremus members, the path to nonobjectivity lay through decorative drawings. The

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Verbovka artel under the guidance of Davydova, who was nurtured in artistic matters by Exter, played an invaluable role in the emergence and assertion of nonobjective art. The revolutionary nature of the new forms erased the boundary between creations of “high art” and decorative applied art works, which were traditionally classed on a lower level in the artistic hierarchy. Nearly all the Verbovka designs by Popova, Rozanova, Udaltsova, and Exter are classic examples of Suprematist color construction as refracted through the individuality of each artist. However, this circumstance was not given proper consideration by the artists themselves, the critics contemporary to them, or their biographers. These distinguished artists’ easel paintings, which unambiguously possess Verbovka roots, are viewed and analyzed most often without mention of the context that gave them birth. The construction of painting planes with emphasis on their color might have found appropriate reflection in the term “color-painting.” Malevich invented the term during the Supremus era as a synonym for “suprematism of painting,” which meant the domination, the supremacy of color conditioned by the strength of its implied energy. The color-painting works by Supremus members possessed great style-forming potential. However, fate granted some of the artists time to realize that potential and mercilessly deprived others by cutting short their young lives. Olga Rozanova, who died at thirty-two, was one of the most gifted colorists among the Russian “Amazons” and, indeed, in the entire history of painting in our country. She created unsurpassed examples of decorative abstract compositions that combined the collage nature of her cutout paste-ons and the rigor of regular elements derived from Malevich’s geometric abstractions. Her painting canvases with “transformed coloring” and her Verbovka designs were communicating vessels whose principal content was color-painting. Suprematism began its progress into life long before the arrival of Constructivism, with its inspiration of the visual aesthetic restructuring of reality under the leadership of artists; one of the most talented Constructivists, as we know, was Liubov Popova. Malevich’s minimalist monofigures had the greatest influence specifically on Popova; they monumentalized the composition of her classic “painterly architectonics.” Nadezhda Udaltsova and Vera Pestel broke their ties with nonobjective art voluntarily and relatively quickly; these artists conceived of Suprematism as a dead end that had nonetheless brought them significant plastic experience. Supremus gave unique plastic experience to all its members, but not only that. It also brought its artists immortality. What Malevich’s colleagues in the

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Supremus society created now comprises a golden treasury of our nation’s culture. The personal masterpieces of the painters of the first Suprematist society are at the same time widely recognized masterpieces of twentieth-century world art. The activities of the Suprematists’ association materialized in the preparations for Supremus, which never was published due to history’s cataclysms. The surviving materials, which allow us to reconstruct the publication to a certain extent, shed additional light on how the cutting edge of the Russian avantgarde functioned during an era of change.276 The Supremus project’s difficult progress brought significant experience to its initiator as well, experience subsequently put to use at Unovis and Ginkhuk. The archetype of the triad, so beloved by Malevich, seemed to shape the sequence of associations he created. The Supremus society was to become the first and fundamental platform in a three-step process of construction of Suprematist fellowships.

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CHAPTER 5

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T H E E N D O F PA I N T I N G : F R O M W H I T E

Malevich’s Color-Painting in Late 1917 and the First Half of 1918 “Dissolution of Shapes” Malevich maintained a tremendous creative tension throughout the revolutionary year of 1917. Despite his huge burden of public work, he kept drawing new pictures. His neologism for them, “color-painting,” expressed the content of his “supremus” canvases. Although similar in technique and materials to painting, color-painting, according to Malevich, had nothing to do with painting because painting was “charged” with goals, characteristics, and traditions extraneous to the life of color. The life of color as such seemed to the Suprematist of a piece with the laws of the Universe; nonobjective color generated the sensation of its nonobjective, extra-figurative being. These sensations could be perceived only by the “human skull” with its mental capabilities: “A system is being

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constructed in time and space; independent of any aesthetic beauties, experiences, moods, rather [it] is a philosophical color system for realizing the new achievements of my ideas as cognition.”1 Malevich was unwavering in his belief that no one before him had ever used this instrument, this “philosophical color system,” that he was the first in the world to have created it, and hence that his work—the realization of ideas revealed to him personally through his inward cognition—was the work of a prime-philosopher. The Suprematist’s moments of transformation and transcendence characteristic of the creative process in the prophetic stage were objectified not only in pictures but also in many texts from the second half of 1917 and 1918 that are difficult to categorize by genre. They merge features of philosophical lyricism and declarative manifestos, analysis of innovative painterly aspirations, and the fixing of moments of transformative spiritual vision. In one of his theoretical analyses devoted to poetry as such, Malevich himself defined the unknown quality of poetic creation as “liturgy.” The word does indeed correspond most appropriately to the spirit and form of his grandiose and clumsy blank verse, with its ecstatic speech, biblical style, and powerful rhythm.2 Looking back we can see that the “liturgies” played the part of prologues to the Suprematist’s philosophical texts. Over the period of his “supremus” pictures (spring 1916 to fall 1917), Malevich’s attitude toward color as Suprematism’s dominant element underwent a gradual transformation. The color elements derived from space revealed the indomitable influence of its non-figurative forces. Initially, the “white abyss” background was the manifestation of space on his Suprematist canvases. The “white abyss” of the Malevich canvases does not have the earthly characteristics of ordinary planarity or the illusory imitation of three-dimensionality using direct/reverse perspective; these are the material smearings of white paint on the surface of a canvas, which retain the dynamic of the artist’s brush (none of Malevich’s followers, to say nothing of the multitude of forgers, was ever able to achieve this effect of his canvases’ unfathomable flat-deep spatiality). The Suprematist saw his mission in being aware of and setting down the world-presentations revealed to him: “Back in summer, sitting in my room at my easel with bayonets hanging in my color brain, I thought about my grandeur in space, since I am alone inside it, after all. You will look at each grain sitting in the white canvas. [. . .] I saw myself in space; hidden in the color points and stripes, I am there among them moving off into the abyss. Back in summer I declared myself chairman of space.”3 The unlimited expansion of his speculation to include the entire Universe in itself and his focus on all-encompassing

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confluence with the cosmos, such as are achieved in moments of revelation, are basic elements, as is well known, for the mentality of mystic metaphysicians of both Western and Eastern civilization. In the religious practices of the East they lie at the base of meditations that plunge one into nirvana; by including man in the harmony of the absolutely nonobjective, extra-figurative cosmos, nirvana excludes him from the earthly world, leaving to the latter only his bodily shell. In Western culture, which is oriented toward productive relations with reality, the analytical expansion of speculation to the limits of the Universe has been a fundamental feature of many idealist philosophical trends. The truth—the sense of a single life in the Universe—was revealed to primephilosopher and color-painter Malevich, who rejected “book culture” and did not know the diversity of philosophical traditions and who was convinced of the utter inadequacy and hypocrisy of any path for knowing the world-edifice that had existed prior to him, through the development and comprehension of nonobjective color-painting. During the era of revolutionary upheavals, Budetlyanin and poet Velimir Khlebnikov, the Suprematist’s comrade and colleague, who was wholly immersed in quasi-mathematical calculations and the foundations of the higher laws of the world order, appointed himself “king of time.”4 Metaphysician and mystic Malevich, who was oriented toward the same universal wave, saw himself as “chairman of space.” The power of speculation transformed the worldview of both visionaries, including them in the being of the forces of and beyond the universe. Neither could fail to objectify this experience in their art, which was both the way to and the result of their transcendence. In the latter half of 1917, the geometric painted elements in the canvases of the “chairman of space” acquired an ever heightened dynamic. Their sharp edges cut into the whiteness, and toward the other extreme the concentration of color was drastically reduced to the point of the boundary between figure and background disappearing completely, inasmuch as the color plane, according to Malevich, possessed stupendous speed, which dissolved it in space (Figure 36). The Suprematist called this process “dissolution,” which has cosmic connotations. “The cosmos is dissolution. The earth is a small splitting.”5 Malevich showed his canvases with “dissolution of shapes” soon after their emergence, at the last “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition, which ran from November 21 to December 3, 1917. Through the dissolution of color by the “white abyss”—that is, the manifestation of the cosmos’s energy dynamic—the phenomenon of non-material time, indissolubly linked with extra-figurative space, materialized in Suprematism with increasing insistence:

Figure 36. Kazimir Malevich. Suprematism (Dissolution of Forms). 1917. Oil on canvas. 106 × 70.5 cm. Courtesy Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

and the coloration of colors is the power of the time’s oscillation, time’s movement creates shape simultaneously coloring it and consequently the speed of time can be defined by color.6

Malevich’s understanding of the philosophical aspect of plastic Suprematism matured gradually but with great determinacy. In June 1918, explaining the difference between “dissolution of shapes” and the painterly white around the geometric figures of nonobjectivists Liubov Popova and Aleksandr Vesnin, Malevich emphasized that his “dissolution of shapes” was evoked by a “material entering (breaking) into space, which is connected with my perhaps personal philosophical contemplation prompted by my ‘I.’”7

“Chairman of Space” The metaphysically oriented Suprematist was a paradoxical irrationalistrationalist not only in his art; his biography combined supra-earthly and suprauniversal inspirations with very earthly and intensive organizational activity in the same paradoxical way. In the above-quoted letter to Matiushin, which fixed his moments of ecstatic transformation, the “chairman of space” reveals an amazingly sober understanding of the real situation, although he cloaks it in the same overly dramatic Budetlyane mythologemes: “I will enter into an alliance with chairmen of lands alien to me. It’s strange, but I sense salvation, I sense solitude, although obscure alien chairmen of the Globe will be surrounding me.”8 At the same time, this kind of combination is paradoxical only at first glance, since the activities of the “chairman of space” were, deep down, the activities of a prophet-messiah, and the willing “alliance with chairmen of lands” was supposed to help advance his truth in life. Before the events of 1917, the radicals’ art was oppositional to all forms of “old” activity. The left-wing artists, who fought diligently against strict restrictive laws in art and who predicted the demise of the “old world’s” ossified traditions, became witnesses to the thoroughgoing destruction of that world’s societal and state structures. The revolutionary changes in art, whose initiators and creators they were, proved to be harbingers of revolutionary changes in reality. They had reason to feel like prophets and to be convinced of their art’s higher destiny. Art’s incursion into life and art’s leading role in the transformation of life had been favorite ideas of prominent artists since the days of Richard Wagner

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Each shape has a real type of time

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(1813–1883) and William Morris (1834–1896). For avant-garde artists, the highest form of humanity’s creative activity was art; hence art, according to their lights, should be life’s teacher, organizer, and builder. A life just as new and free as their innovative art was supposed to rise up on the ruins of the “old” life. Freedom—the cleansing freedom they had fought for years—was the key word for radical artists in the spring of hopes, the 1917–18 season. Revolutionary times seemed to have swept the territory clean for an unprecedentedly new world order, and unwaveringly, the left-wing artists took responsibility for realizing in this life, which they had predicted and had had a presentiment of, those new foundations for which they had fought in art. The assertion of the moral imperative—the individual’s effective responsibility for his own understanding of the world order—was the inspiration for “Art and Responsibility,” the first philosophical text of the young thinker Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), published in the miscellany Day of Art (Den’ iskusstva, 1919). Among original innovators, this kind of mentality was dominant and at odds with the age-old messianic, prophetic aspirations so characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia. As history has shown, without utopian aspirations and a focus on unattainable ideals, human civilization would not exist, although the cost of the “great utopias” has invariably proven excessively bloody everywhere. In March 1918 Kazimir Malevich began to collaborate with Anarchy, the organ of the Anarchist party. For the first and last time in his life he had a public tribune for regular statements. Over the course of three months, between March 23 and June 23, the artist published eighteen texts here, some of them written before the revolution for Supremus, but their relevance did not suffer from this. Anarchism’s rejection of any and all conventional restrictions, rules, and legal statutes was close to him in spirit; in this he saw the individual’s freedom and, most importantly for him, the artist’s. That freedom would never allow him to limit himself to the confines of any ideology or political party imposed on free art, even by a party of anarchists, who reject confines. However, the Suprematist messiah felt this same unrestricted freedom as the urgent need to bring to life the new foundations that appeared to him through his art. This conscious need aroused him to initiate innovative ideas in early Soviet cultural policy. Malevich developed the concept of the first museum of modern art in history, which, according to his idea, was supposed to be a museum of painterly culture; his hopes for “Youth” could now be realized through the free education of the younger generation, and he took an active part in constructing a new system of art education.

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Suprematism’s Final Stage: White on White Malevich subordinated the development of Suprematism’s color-painting to the logic of progressive and irreversible movement characteristic of the development of science, where a discovery cannot be canceled or ignored, cannot be sent back. In making sense of his metaphysical experience, the irrationalist Malevich showed himself to be a logical rationalist. After the “dissolution” of the materialization of unified space-time had begun, this experiment could not be canceled or ignored and in a white abyss there could be no return to precise multicolor figures. Malevich was once again on the threshold of discovery, in his art and in “the depths of intuitive reason,” and once again hidden arbitrary processes were under way that had yet to find an appropriate form. In one of his pictures from late 1917, barely noticeable on the white background are the outlines of dynamically deformed and diagonally oriented trapezoids with broken dissolved contours (Suprematism, 1917, 97.8 × 66.5 cm, MOMA). The entire composition is executed with a latent and powerful dynamic. Now, in the white silhouette melting in the white abyss, you cannot help but see a harbinger of Suprematism’s final stage. However, the message that had already appeared to Malevich the intuitivist was still not distinct to him, as happened during his Fevralist period, when geometric figures whose implications had yet to be pondered already dominated his pictures and drawings. Anticipating the exposition, let us note that this silhouette very soon would force its creator to devote a separate picture to it, and that Suprematism (1918, oil on canvas, 97 × 70 cm) is in the SMA. Thus Malevich gave proper due to his minicompositions from the nonobjective (proto-Suprematist?) canvas, making independent minimalist pictures out of them after Black Square’s birth9 (Figures 37, 38). The intense state of maturation of the phenomenon was dictated by the revealing-concealing words the artist wrote in his critical survey, “Exhibitions of the Professional Union of Artists-Painters,” published on June 20, 1918, in Anarchy. Most radical in it were the nonobjectivists from the former Supremus society; however, with the exception of Rozanova, they were by no means Suprematists, according to Malevich. In five points he enumerated the constituent features of Suprematist painting—“the legitimate foundation for

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This is the long and the short of Kazimir Malevich’s biography in 1918 and 1919. In his art during this same period, the artist advanced even further down his unexplored path—for now still in painting: the interaction between space and time.

Figure 37. Kazimir Malevich. Suprematism. 1917. Oil on canvas. 97.8 × 66.4 cm. © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 38. Kazimir Malevich. Suprematism. 1918. Oil on canvas. 97 × 70 cm. Courtesy Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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the construction of planes”—absent from the nonobjectivists. Then he added: “points 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 are in my color laboratory and take color beyond the limits of the established Suprematist radius.”10 These lines speak to the fact that the new phenomena of late spring and early summer 1918 had yet to be properly comprehended by their author and might explain the puzzling absence of works by Malevich, the recognized leader of the left-wing faction, at the union’s representative exhibition, which opened on May 26, 1918. His new breakthrough had yet to be realized in full, and the Suprematist felt no need to exhibit his “old” pictures, which had been shown half a year before at “Jack of Diamonds.” The materialization of his discovery came about a few days later, for the emergence of white Suprematism is dated to mid-1918. White Square on White Background—like Black Square once before—was drawn over an existing composition. Upon close visual examination, one of the picture’s corners looks as if it had been cut off because the white color is laid over an underlying dark color. It is obvious that the picture’s creation was accompanied by the ecstatic inspiration that visited the Suprematist so frequently during this period (Figure 39). In the extended “liturgy” written during those days and weeks, Malevich verbalized his plastic breakthrough: The very revelation of white is not a foundation evoked purely by paint like the vacillations of color, but is an expression of something more, serves as an indicator of my transformation over time my notion of color ceases to be color Merging into a single color—white. But even the color white is still white and, to show shapes in it, it must be created so that the shape can be read, so that the sign can be taken in. And so there must be a difference between them but only in the pure white form.11

Malevich the mystic interprets the all-conquering whiteness to be a sign of transformation, transcendence; this image is latently rooted in the eternal archetype of Christian speculation, “the Lord’s Transfiguration”—Jesus Christ’s appearance to the apostles on Mount Tabor in blindingly white raiment. Suprematism’s pictures possessed a symbolic substance that was distinguished at root from traditional symbolism, which was conventionally allegorical in its

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Figure 39. Kazimir Malevich. White Square on White Background. 1918. © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

essence, inasmuch as “squares” and “stripes” were just what they appeared to be. As was stated above, Malevich instantly sensed Black Square’s emblematic power. He found the symbol’s square shape elemental: “I did not invent anything, I merely felt the night in myself and in it saw something new, and I called this something new Suprematism, and it was expressed in me by a black plane forming a square [. . .]”12 In 1918, the degree achieved in his progress toward the absolute was reinforced in the form of “a plane that formed a square.” The white square on a white background was a symbol signifying the move of an artist transformed by

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transcendence into the “white world order.” The dynamic that had latently affected the tense irregular outlines of the similar centric figures of Black Square and Red Square victoriously tore the white square from its vertical-horizontal coordinates, breaking-destroying their grid with the weightless diagonal soaring of the quadrangular monofigure. In the “mechanical reproduction of works of art,” with its conceptually fostered abandonment of the distinctions between an original and copies, an original and replicas, Malevich’s “squares” demonstrate his constitutional ambivalence. In our era of art without borders, the squares both confirm and decisively refute the established presence (the Hegelian “everything existing reasonably”) and organic inevitability of the unknown quantity of abandonment consolidated in the theoretical insights of Walter Benjamin and the practice of Marcel Duchamp. The first Black Square, born on June 8 Old Style (June 21 New Style), 1915, implemented this paradox spontaneously: the picture-symbol drawn in a moment of ecstatic revelation possesses a unique character. It is an original demanding personal contact because its material appearance bears particular features that are not amenable to reproduction. Subsequently, while creating his second Black Square, long before Walter Benjamin and not knowing Duchamp’s iconoclasm, Malevich himself reduced painting to a matter of total indifference. As we know, the second Black Square, as well as his Black Circle and Black Cross, which were sent to the 1924 Venice Biennale, were drawn in 1923 by his pupils and Malevich only authorized them. And, as has already been said, from its very birth Black Square equated all techniques of execution. It remained Black Square whether it was on canvas, paper, or porcelain, and at the end of Malevich’s life it was a small icon-symbol in the corner of his figurative pictures. This serendipitous act once again throws into relief the Russian avant-gardist’s prophetic ability to feel out and embody in artistic expression one of the most paradoxical aspirations of all twentieth-century art. Returning to 1918, let us emphasize that White Square demonstrated in even more paradoxical fashion the ambivalence characteristic of the first Black Square. The relationship between the two white surfaces that exists in the original, to say nothing of the white’s vibration over the dark color, is not amenable to reproduction. To be fair, let us add that after the emancipation and expansion of art exacted by the great modernists, including Malevich, and after the all-triumphant procession of hermeneutics, each reproduction of White Square could well be viewed as a new original, inasmuch as it created its own relationship between the two white shapes; intellectual speculations con-

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Nonobjectivists’ Opposition to Suprematism The desire to construct a new world was common to Russian radical artists during the troubled times of social upheaval, but their notions of art’s role and place in this construction varied. The revolutionary months and years catalyzed the maturation of the positive materialist understanding of art’s goals, possibilities, and purposes that took shape soon after in the mighty mainstream of Soviet art. Rational and pragmatic Constructivism, Cubism’s heir, which moved into the third dimension and conditioned the “culture of materials” of Tatlin’s counter-reliefs, became the dominant system-shaping movement. According to the ideology, Russian Constructivism was also the unique heir to the starry-eyed utopias of the Renaissance about man’s central position in the universe and his superiority over nature. Hence the Constructivists’ main concern was the comprehensive satisfaction of and provision for the demands of the omnivorous “crown of the universe.” After declaring the “death of easel painting” and advancing the slogan “Art into production,” the Constructivists saw art’s purpose and meaning in the creation of new real thing-objects for the new social society.13 Constructivism crystallized—and the term appeared—about 1921, but between 1918 and 1920 the future Constructivists’ intensive self-definition was in progress, and in the meantime, in the absence of the right word, they used the broad definition “nonobjectivists,” which was inevitably associated with the discoveries of Malevich, who had long used it as a synonym for “Suprematism.” The nonobjectivists perceived Suprematism’s metaphysical orientation as “literature” and “philosophizing.” Their zealous opponent Rodchenko formulated it as follows: “What Malevich has is not painting, it is the philosophy of painting. [. . .] I have painting” (statements written to Stepanova on January 14, 1919).14 With his spiritual idealism and breakthroughs into the Universe, Malevich became for the materialist nonobjectivists an ideologically hostile opponent, in the struggle with whom their position as pure pragmatists matured and strengthened. The positivist and power-loving Rodchenko-Stepanova couple, through “denunciations” and the subversion of Malevich’s authority, were

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cerning “white on white” are also perfectly possible on the basis of the merely verbally perceived plastic concept. Nonetheless, the paradoxical nature of both Malevich’s entire art and his cult works makes personal visual contact with the “squares” essential, despite their conceptualism and speculative substance.

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actively continuing Tatlin’s party work to de-Suprematize the Russian avantgarde, which the creator of counter-reliefs began back in early 1916, as has already been said. In her 1919 diary, Stepanova records the peripeties of the brutal struggle with Malevich. After reading these candid entries, which were fearlessly published by the prominent couple’s grandson, one is forced to acknowledge that Tatlin was correct when he characterized the intrigue around removing the “unnecessary” people and promoting the “necessary” people into power as “the work of the hands of ourselves and Anti [Stepanova and Rodchenko themselves],” and therefore called Rodchenko the “master of the Union” and Stepanova the “mistress of the Union.”15 Digressing, let us note that everything worked out for the couple, who managed to push both leaders out of Moscow: “Now Tatlin and Malevich want to go to Petrograd. Maybe they can come to an understanding with Altman there “—Stepanova wrote triumphantly in her diary on March 27, 1919.16 The white pictures—about whose discovery the Suprematist informed his colleagues—became a red flag for Rodchenko, and their serendipitous power forced the latter to give Malevich his response: “Now he [Rodchenko, Anti] has drawn eight black things that have no light, color, or shape; Malevich has white things with a developed square shape; and Anti will use these things to beat Malevich. . . . Anti wanted to hang them at the exhibition next to Malevich . . . now he wants to reach an understanding with Malevich to organize an exhibition together and trump him, so these black paintings don’t go to waste.”17 Malevich’s cycle of five white pictures and Rodchenko’s cycle of eight black ones were exhibited for the first time at the “Tenth State Exhibition ‘Nonobjective Art and Suprematism,’” which opened on April 27, 1919. The name of the Moscow exhibition reinforced the watershed among avant-gardists. The Rodchenko pictures’ declarative pathos lay in their materially tangible contrast, the clash of contrasting figures—gleaming lacquered and rough matte surfaces—in compositions made of segmented, intersecting, and overlapping geometric figures and circles. They had shape, and color, and light reduced to white gaps; in her vehemence Stepanova characterized the works in a way that did not correspond to their nature. Unlike Malevich and his innovative breakthrough, Rodchenko had created nothing truly original. The arrangement of geometric elements in his pictures came in the wake of what was by 1919 traditional geometric nonobjectivity, his textural orchestration exploited the discoveries of Tatlin’s tactile “culture of materials,” and the conceptual combination of “black on black” came wholly out of Malevich’s idea of “white on white.”

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Returning to the early Soviet years, let us point out that the Constructivists’ sphere of activity would in the future be called design, and they themselves would be the first inventive and superb designers. These terms did not exist in Russia at that time, but the phenomenon itself was going through an intensive birth. Design, as we know, is wholly intertwined with existing reality, and its goal and inspiration are the creation of material objects of various functional purposes. Art in this case, according to Malevich, once again loses its freedom and independence, it becomes a “slave to reality,” since it is forced to “make art” and serve the State and Religion. (Malevich’s major treatise “From the Book about Nonobjectivity,” which he wrote over the course of several months after Lenin’s death in January 1924, illuminated and analyzed the emergence and assertion of the “Communist religion of Leninism.”)19 In proto-Constructivism and Constructivism Malevich views bitterly art’s inevitable return to “object enslavement,” to the struggle with which he had given years and the victory over which he had already celebrated in Suprem-

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However, in the light of further history, Rodchenko’s unoriginal pictures took on the significance of an original phenomenon. On the one hand, this was an unambiguous and integrated, inasmuch as it was painterly, formulation of the genuine contrast between the two lines in the Russian avant-garde; on the other, it was a laboratory demonstration of future methods of synthetic omnivorous Constructivism, which appropriated and used in a utilitarian way all plastic innovations, including the morphogenesis of what was for him an ideologically hostile Suprematism. Here I must make a digression that goes far outside the book’s chronological framework while being strikingly connected to it. On one wall at MOMA in New York hang emblematic pictures that were once exhibited at the “Tenth State Exhibition ‘Nonobjective Art and Suprematism’”: Malevich’s White Square on White Background and Rodchenko’s Black on Black (81.9 × 79.4 cm; acquired in 1936 as a gift from the artist through Jay Leida). Their presence in a single space and time seems to quote the principal pathos of the historic Russian exhibition in distant 1919. Due to the exhibits’ thought-provoking proximity, the traditional museum hanging additionally acquires the status of an original installation that exists only in the New York museum. In Russia, where the Russian Museum and Tretiakov Gallery both have a Rodchenko Black on Black, there is not a single White on White canvas by Malevich, and in Amsterdam, where there is a Malevich White on White, there is no Rodchenko Black on Black.18

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atism. Once again the avant-gardist metaphysician was forced to become the champion of art’s freedom and purity, denouncing the Constructivist materialists (“kharcheviki”), “slaves of life’s ugly face.” Years had been spent on this polemic, which possessed the supremely paradoxical nature so characteristic of Malevich’s art. His Suprematism had great style-shaping potential, which he himself realized in his planning for an all-encompassing “Suprematist order.” However, an analysis of all these processes, which unfolded in another period, falls outside the framework of this book, which is limited in time to the emergence, development, and conclusion of painterly Suprematism.

“There Can Be No Question of Painting in Suprematism” The First One-Man Show Lazar Lisitsky (1890–1941), the future El Lissitzky, was in Moscow from the middle to the end of October 1919, having come from Vitebsk to obtain materials and equipment for the studios at the People’s Art School. He was able not only to persuade but also to help Malevich to make the move to Vitebsk during those hard times. On November 5, 1919, a qualitatively new stage in the Suprematist’s life began in that provincial city. However, decamping to another geographical location was not the reason for this; the departure itself was internally motivated. A fateful event had occurred in the great artist’s life work: white Suprematism ended when Malevich made his exit from painting. In fall 1919, he personally prepared for his first one-man show in the former salon of K. Mikhailova on Bolshaia Dmitrovka in Moscow. It was held as the Sixteenth State Exhibition, organized by the Museum Bureau of Narkompros (People’s Commissariat of Education), and its opening was scheduled for early November. However, Malevich had to leave with Lisitsky, whose trip was over, and could not wait for the vernissage. On November 7, the Suprematist informed Gershenzon from Vitebsk: “in a week my exhibition will open on B. Dmitrovka. [. . .]”20 In December 1919 the freshly minted Vitebsk resident kept himself informed about his exhibition’s further fate through Stepanova, who worked in the Museum Bureau.21 However, due to the harsh winter and shortage of fuel, the exhibition did not open until March 25, 1920; its closing date is not recorded anywhere, but according to indirect information, it was still open in the summer.

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Apart from two reviews and photographs of a few walls with Cubo-Futurism and Suprematism, no official testimony contemporary with the exhibition has ever turned up. Its title has been fixed in the literature as “Kazimir Malevich: Journey from Impressionism to Suprematism”—a journey represented by about 150 paintings. As has already been said, exhibitions were a supremely “ideological matter” for Malevich. And so was his first solo exhibition. The exhibition prepared by the Suprematist was not a summary picture, an “overview of accomplishments,” but an integral and complete artistic statement. Here we encounter for the first time Malevich’s advancement deep into the history of art in constructing his own development. He calculates his road to Suprematism beginning not from Cubism, as he had previously, but from Impressionism, addressing his own early and rather homegrown Impressionism. Then Malevich’s journey, both in fact and in his self-presentation, passed through the pictures displayed at the exhibitions of left-wing art, beginning with the first “Jack of Diamonds” in 1910. The canvases of “painterly alogism,” which have long since lost their former terminological definition of “Fevralism,” should have been exhibited before those of Suprematism. In preparing the exhibition, Malevich constructed the development of his principal “ism” with increasing calculation. Although we know of no photographs from the exhibition with the monofigures, primarily Black Square, the triad of primary-shapes was certainly exhibited at his first one-man show. Color-painting’s move toward “white on white”—its most important move—was represented by several works. In them Malevich could not help but follow the logic of what had already happened in Suprematism: the “dissoluzation of shapes,” which dynamically destroyed color, implacably invaded the “distinction between the two white shapes,” eliminating this distinction as well. A year later, elevating to the “Suprematist canon” a series of nonobjective works in his Vitebsk book Suprematism: 34 Drawings (1920), in the last two lithographs—their significance is underscored by their much greater size— Malevich presented two diagonal compositions that retain echoes of the diagonal dynamics of Supremus No. 51. In the first of the large lithographs, tonally differentiated, that is, as yet still “color” elements are strung on an dissolving stripe bent under tension. In the second and final one, the dissolving stripe-axis along the diagonal passes through the dissolving segments of the circles. The significance of this work emerges also in the fact that it is the only one whose subject is reproduced in the book twice, first at the same size as the other small lithographs.22 This work, which concludes his Suprematist series, is a variation

Figure 40. Kazimir Malevich. Suprematism. 1918. Oil on canvas. 97 × 70 cm. Courtesy Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

The next and very last step was a white canvas where all distinctions vanished: “Suprematism [. . .] has moved [. . .] into a white colorless representation of space.”23 With this “white colorless representation of space” Malevich concluded the lengthy process of reducing the illusory diversity of phenomena— through nonobjectivity, noncolorness, and non-shapeness (non-genreness, non-visualness), and he, a man of vision, became a man of speculation: “Suprematism is the system of the new World consciousness [. . .]”24 Malevich concluded his exhibition, his journey in painting, and painting itself with his white monochromatic canvas. In twentieth-century art, this was the first conceptual monochromatic canvas. Due to the dominant whiteness in it, it was also an “empty canvas,” the new absolute Zero. Subsequently, Malevich himself frequently pondered his own act. In that same Vitebsk Suprematism: 34 Drawings, he concluded his statement with a famous passage: “There can be no question of painting in Suprematism, painting has long been outlived, and the artist himself is a prejudice of the past.” In another unpublished text he writes extremely clearly about the empty canvas drawn in only the one white paint: Usually the public says, “But the canvas is empty?” What do you mean it’s empty, when you can see that the canvas is painted with white paint? Consequently, it is not empty. If among Suprematist compositions made of color surfaces there is one painted a certain tone of white, then it obviously carries some meaning. If that meaning is not clear to someone, it is only because he is not well informed. But if this person sees two color spots on the surface, he begins to see some meaning in it. In reality, he is not clear at all either about the first or the second composition. Consequently, [he believes that the white canvas] is empty. But this is not the case. If the white canvas were empty, then it would not inspire any questions or indignation. For us scholars, on the contrary, it is of much importance within the entire ideology of Suprematism and its abstract essence.25 269

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on the appearance of the “white” picture that has fortunately survived to the present and is now in the SMA (Figure 40). Let us stress especially that in Malevich’s German book, World as Nonobjectivity (1927), its plastic subject under number 79 illustrates the “Suprematism” section and there is given the title Suprematist Composition: White in White (Sensation of White Silence). In line with the series set forth by Malevich himself in his Suprematism: 34 Drawings, let us express cautious confidence that this picture was the penultimate step in the painting of Suprematism.

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The radicalism of Malevich’s progress was so stunning that the reviewers Abram Efros and Aleksei Sidorov (1891–1978), subtle connoisseurs of traditional painting, did not record it in their reviews at all because they did not see it—and could not have seen or understood it—due to their own inviolable notions about art. It was Moisei Markovich Lerman (1905–93), a pupil at the Vitebsk People’s Art School who later became an architect, who told me about the “empty white canvas” that concluded Malevich’s first one-man show. Malevich himself guided him and other apprentices through the exhibition. This was an excursion of Vitebsk residents who had come to Moscow for the All-Russian Conference of Teachers and Students of Art in June 1920. The young apprentice’s memories proved accurate: the testimonies of contemporaries, about which more below, confirmed his story.26 Not only could Efros and Sidorov not understand the meaning of the “empty canvas,” even contemporaries more accustomed to innovation regarded its appearance as an irresponsible gesture intended merely to shock. In her memoirs, the artist Valentina Khodasevich remarked: “At one of the exhibitions, he [Malevich] displayed a painterly Suprematist work that ‘had nearly matured to perfection.’ This was a square canvas, well covered with white oil paint (approximately seventy by seventy centimeters) in a gilt frame. Later he exhibited an empty frame. In both cases there were many discussions and debates. In those instances, he was, of course, mocking us.”27 In 1921, at the “5×5=25” exhibition, Aleksandr Rodchenko, who skillfully appropriated others’ discoveries, presented as his own serendipitous achievement the “last pictures,” three rectangular canvases evenly painted in a single color: Pure Red, Pure Yellow, and Pure Blue (all of them 62.5 × 52.5 cm, private collection). However, because Malevich’s monochrome white canvas was still being discussed in the art world, according to Khodasevich, the influential critic Nikolai Tarabukin, who analyzed and welcomed Rodchenko’s “last pictures,” justly had to note his feeble imitation, indicating that “a similar canvas was exhibited by Malevich a few years ago.”28

“Suprematist Mirror” In 1923 Malevich accompanied the opening of “Exhibition of Petrograd Artists of All Movements, 1918–1923” with his last manifesto, which was published on May 22 in the Petrograd newspaper Life of Art (Zhizn’ iskusstva). This manifesto was his last not only because times changed very soon after; it was the “last” in the sense that it was the last blank canvas in painting. At the ex-

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The manifesto “Suprematist Mirror” crowned the huge mega-text that had been created over the course of several years by the no-longer-a-painter Malevich. The activity that was all-consuming for him from 1919 to 1922 was work “with a pen, not a brush [. . .] you cannot achieve with a brush what you can with a pen. The brush is worn and cannot reach the folds of the brain; a pen is sharper.” Vitebsk had become the homeland of the Suprematist’s philosophical treatises. What had been revealed to him through painting now demanded justification, clarification, and elaboration through words: “I have myself withdrawn into what is for me a new area of thought and, as best I can, I will be setting forth what I see in the infinite space of the human skull.”30 What the artist visionary “saw” in the “infinite space of the human skull” was deposited in a huge number of manuscripts with the central work Suprematism: The World as Nonobjectivity, or Eternal Rest. The philosophical creation of Malevich the metaphysician-monist, who in a variety of ways developed approaches and opportunities to achieve the extra-figurative nonobjective absolute, seem just as substantive and original as his artistic legacy.31 Suprematist philosophy—virgin, contradictory, figuratively poetic, irrationally logical, with stunning intuitions and foresights, distinguished by difficult stylistics and homemade, frequently extremely expressive neologisms, that is, possessing all the earmarks of the philosophical texts of mystical thinkers, a philosophy that grew out of Suprematist painting—makes Malevich a unique figure in the history of world culture.

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hibition of Unovis—the united Vitebsk “author”—the concept of Malevich’s first one-man show was repeated, and it also concluded with a monochromatic white canvas.29 This “blank canvas” bore the same name in the catalog as did the manifesto: “Suprematist Mirror.” The manifesto was a verbal and mathematical formula where “The World as Human Differences,” which included in brackets the full multivariousness and diversity of phenomena, was made to equal, using an arithmetical equals sign, a huge Zero, and the brief theses that followed etched the conclusions of Malevich, who had rejected the world of illusory distinctions in truth. At the same time, the tone-setting word “mirror,” used persistently in the title of both the painterly and the verbal and “mathematical” conclusion, concealed allusions to a unique Suprematist screen that both absorbed and reflected “knowledge of the absolute,” Zero, which was equal to Everything.

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EPILOGUE

Kazimir Malevich began his move toward absolute nonobjectivity in 1913. In the beginning, the entire process was hidden and pertained primarily to plastic art. Rebelling against ossified traditions, the avant-gardist tried to use his a-intellectual, irrational compositions to prove the meaninglessness of art’s established laws and frameworks. This led inevitably to the blurring and destruction of art’s boundaries and to an expansion of the field of creative activity. The dimension in which the destruction of old traditions occurred was absurdist Fevralism, Malevich’s first personal “ism.” During the era of Fevralism, which lasted from early 1914 until mid-1915, the avant-gardist’s sphere of creative activity expanded both to actions involving everyday behavior and to transcendence into the dimensions of speculation and conceptual art. On the one hand, his Fevralist canvases and drawings raged with negativism designed to shock and with his battle against art’s conventions and enslavement to the subject with the help of intellectual absurdism; on the other, the parallel germination of a new artistic reality came about and latently accumulated in them.

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In the face of this new reality, the entire deconstructivist pathos of absurdism vanished, inasmuch as what the Fevralist was battling vanished: in an objectless world, there were no previously existing subject-objects. Only space and time—positive, real phenomena that required comprehension and expression by the artist—were fundamental and unique. For Malevich, the instrument for attaining and manifesting them was color as such, “not flowing into any object,” as he put it. Color that manifested the dynamic tension of space had as its bearer rectangular geometric forms, the result of the strict analytic-synthetic work of speculation that equates man’s art with nature’s creations. In the first stage, “suprematism” meant color’s domination over all the other properties of painting. Accordingly, Malevich also called his Suprematist painting “new realism.” The appearance of Black Square on June 8 Old Style (June 21 New Style), 1915, was a seminal event for the Russian avant-gardist and for twentieth-century art as a whole. The birth of geometric abstraction was a revolutionary act. Black Square marked a change in artistic paradigms and in formulaic form crystallized the end and beginning of major epochs. The “zero of forms” closed the epoch of the immediate perception of reality and its mimetic-realistic reflection and heralded the beginning of a new era of civilization, with its allpowerful virtual reality subject only to the conceptual constructions of human speculation. For the Russian avant-gardist, painting became the means to a perceptualsensory grasp of the Universe and its fundamental parameters of being. Through color-painting, regular planes of color hanging in a white abyss, he strove to express the sensation of the life of the Universe and the confluence with its immeasurable spaces that came over him in moments of ecstatic inspiration. The mounting energetic tension connected with the dynamic of time, as comprehended by the as-yet-still-a-painter Malevich, gradually led the phenomenon of color in Suprematism to a new level, where ordinary earthly vision was no longer adequate to register changes and differences in speeds. The abyss of the cosmic dimension pulverized color and transcended it in the whiteness, but at the last stage of Suprematism there was still a shadow of the differences, a barely tangible boundary between the white form and the white space. Malevich, an irrational logician, could not fail to take the last step. The artist-metaphysician completed his journey in painting and painting as such with a new absolute, a monochrome white canvas that brought the unity of space and time right before one’s eyes. Malevich’s sensation-understanding of the “white world order” that had been revealed to him, which embodied the complete dissolving of his own being in the being of the Universe that he experienced in

EPILOGUE

moments of insight (“Everything is in me, and I am in everything,” as the poet Fedor Tiutchev said), coincided strikingly with intuitions and revelations unknown to him, of great mystics of both West and East, primarily Jakob Böhme, Meister Eckhart, Lao-tsu, and others. The no-longer-a-painter Malevich’s grasp of the “white world order,” which originally appeared to him in painting, gave rise to voluminous treatises. The philosophy of Suprematism was one of the conclusions that followed from the comprehension of Black Square. This conclusion was implicit in Suprematism’s primary geometrical figure along with other conclusions and findings concerning provision for present-day life in all its aspects, from architecture to ornament, from organizational activities to pedagogy. The artist himself was wholly cognizant of this: “In one of its stages, Suprematism has a purely philosophical cognitive movement, through color, but in the second [it has significance] as a form that can be applied, forming the new style of Suprematist decoration” (early 1919).1 For Malevich, Black Square remained forever both an object-less speculative sign and a graphic-visual sign, that is, the real, corporeal embodiment of human beings’ creative resources, which are capable of giving them genuine equality with Nature and, hence, necessity as part of the universe. It was the ambivalent Black Square that both concealed and revealed the eternal, paradoxical formula, “Zero = All” so beloved by the Suprematist. Painting Suprematism was a supremely organic phenomenon that had a prenatal state, a birth, a graduated, multifaceted development, and an inevitable end and transformation. The entire process fit into the space of a few years, from 1913 to 1919/1920. Kazimir Malevich’s lifework during this period compels us to recognize him as one of the most radical creators, if not the single most radical creator of the twentieth century. During the heroic years of Painting Suprematism, the Russian avant-gardist arrived at a profoundly original understanding, comprehension, and expression of such fundamental categories of being as space and time. The artistic and intellectual embodiment he was able to give them provided his legacy with a life that goes far beyond the context of modernism and the twentieth century. Black Square, with its unfading relevance, became the symbol of Kazimir Malevich’s art.

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NOTES

The following abbreviations are used throughout the notes. SS Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, 5 vols. (Moscow: Gileia, 1995–2004) (followed by volume number). Full bibliographical information for each volume is given in the bibliography. Malevich o sebe I. A. Vakar and T. N. Mikhienko, eds., Malevich o sebe, sovremenniki o Maleviche: Pis’ma, dokumenty, vospominaniia, kritika, 2 vols. (Moscow: RA, 2004).

Chapter 1. The Birth of Black Square 1. For more detail on the misadventures of N. I. Khardzhiev’s collection and archive, see below, pp. 187–189. 2. A. Kruchenykh, K. Malevich, and I. Kliun, Tainye poroki akademikov (Moscow, 1915 [on the cover, 1916]). See SS1:56. 3. Unsigned, “Na dispute ‘Bubnovogo valeta’: Futuristy ustroili skandal,” Nov’ (Moscow), no. 42 (February 20, 1914): 5. 4. K. Malevich, Leaflet distributed at “0.10 (Zero-Ten): The Last Futurist Exhibition,” December 1915. Subsequently the leaflet’s text served as the introduction to Malevich’s book, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu (Moscow, 1916). See SS1:35. 275

T O PA G E S 6 – 1 2 NOTES

5. Malevich to Matiushin, from Krivichi to Petrograd, August 3, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:95. 6. There were two illustrations in Teatr i iskusstvo (Petrograd), no. 10 (March 8, 1915): 178, with signatures and a separate caption: “K. Malevich. View from the Balcony. K. Malevich, Aviator. Futurist Exhibition Tramway V.” The catalog does not give the title “View from the Balcony,” just “Balcony”; no pictures with this name are known in the artist’s legacy. 7. N. I. Khardzhiev (preface, editing, and commentary), “Posledniaia glava neokonchennoi avtobiografii Malevicha,” Russian Literature 39, no. 3 (1996): 326. 8. The compilers edited this note as follows: “In March 1916 Englishman and Aviator were exhibited at the Moscow Futurist exhibition ‘Store,’ where they were incorrectly dated 1913. In the catalog, the painting Cow and Violin, which was created in the first half of 1913, is dated the same way.” See N. I. Khardzhiev, Stat’i ob avangarde, 2 vols. (Moscow: RA, 1997), 1:147. 9. A. Kruchenykh and V. Khlebnikov, Mirskontsa (Moscow: G. Kuzmin and S. Dolinsky, 1912). Aleksei Kruchenykh invented the principle of “worldbackwards,” where events unfold not from birth to death but from death, through old age, maturity, youth, and childhood, to infancy. Based on this principle they constructed an alogical poem, “Old pincers of sunset patches,” published in 1913, in an anthology, Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu (Slap in the face of public taste). At Kruchenykh’s suggestion, Velimir Khlebnikov gave the title “Worldbackwards” to a play he had already written in which the heroes, Polia the husband and Olia the wife, move from old age to infancy. The play, dated 1912, was published in an anthology: V. Khlebnikov, Riav! Perchatki, 1908–1914 (St. Petersburg: EUY, 1914). 10. M. Antliff and P. Leighten, Cubism and Culture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), pp. 159–96. 11. Khardzhiev, “Posledniaia glava neokonchennoi avtobiografii Malevicha,” p. 326. 12. Art historian Yu. A. Molok, in his preface to a facsimile edition of Vasilii Kamenskii, Tango s korovami: Zhelezobetonnye poemy, originally published by D. D. Burliuk, publisher of the Russian Futurists’ first journal, with drawings by Vladimir and David Burliuk (Moscow, 1914), remarked, “Finally, the full title of Kamensky’s poem, ‘Tango with Cows,’ was wholly in the new art’s taste for alogisms, if we recall the title of one of the pictures also by Malevich, Cow and Violin, of 1913 [. . .]” Iu. A. Molok, “Tipografskie opyty poeta-futurista,” in Vasilii Kamenskii, Tango s korovami: Zhelezobetonnye poemy ‘(Moscow: Kniga, 1991), p. 4. 13. Evgeniia N. Petrova, ed., Kazimir Malevich v Russkom muzee, (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000). 14. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, early January 1915, in Malevich o sebe, 1:65. 15. R. O. Jakobson, “Vospominaniia,” in Malevich o sebe, 2:126–28. 16. Postcard from Kruchenykh to Matiushin, from the village of Batalpashinsk to Petrograd, March 18, 1915, RO IRLI, f. 656, op. 3, ed. khr. 26, l. 14. 17. A. Sarab’ianov, “Ivan Kliun,” in Experiment/Eksperiment: A Journal of Russian Culture, no. 5: Iz arkhiva Nikolaia Ivanovicha Khardzhieva, khraniashchegosia v Kul’turnom fonde “Tsentr Khardzhieva-Chaga” pri Muzee Stedeliik v Amster-

276

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

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19.

NOTES

18.

dame (1999): 107. Trans-sense poems by Kliun were published in this volume on pp. 116–18. Malevich’s poetic compositions (1906–1920s) were published in K. Malevich, Poeziia (Moscow: Epifaniia, 2000). The drawing-word-images Purse Snatched in Streetcar and ScufFle on the Boulevard were reproduced for the first time in a Prague journal, Výtvarné umeˇní, nos. 8–9 (1967): 382, in an issue timed for the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution and devoted to the Russian avant-garde; the issue was prepared by Czech art scholars Jirˇ í Padrta (1929–78) and Miroslav Lamacˇ (1927–92). I discovered the drawing while working at the FKhCh archive in December 1999. Published for the first time in Malevich, Poeziia, p. 19. Postcard from Malevich to Matiushin, postmarked “Moscow, March 5, [19]14” and “St. P. March 6, [19]14,” in Malevich o sebe, 1:61. Published for the first time in Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935: Drawings from the Collection of the Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation, SMA Cahiers 9 (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1997), no. 18. The incorrectly read signature led to the mistaken hypothesis set forth in the catalog that this is a portrait depiction of M. Larionov in the form of a bald man’s head. The dating of the drawing to 1913 is unfounded as well; the drawing was done by Malevich during his Fevralism period, probably in the first half of 1915. Ibid., no. 19. The dating of this drawing, like the previous one, to 1913, is without foundation; the drawing was done by Malevich during his Fevralism period, probably in the first half of 1915. A. Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich (Moscow: Slovo, 1996), p. 45. K. Malevich, “Mir kak bespredmetnost’,” in SS2, p. 110. See D. Sassoon, Becoming Mona Lisa (New York: Harcourt, 2001). Malevich’s Composition with Mona Lisa was published for the first time by M. Lamacˇ and J. Padrta in the above-mentioned issue of the Czech journal Výtvarné umeˇní, nos. 8–9 (1967): 379. This picture was presented to the public for the first time since the prerevolutionary exhibitions at the 1980 “Kazimir Malevich” exhibition in Düsseldorf, where works from Soviet museums and private collections were displayed. We should note especially that due to the official sanctimony that existed in the Soviet Union, Malevich’s Fevralist and Suprematist paintings were not exhibited in Soviet museums because dangerous “formalist bourgeois” art was not shown inside the country, but was sent to foreign exhibitions, and then only beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The two works described by Morgunov were presented at the exhibition but were not in the catalog. The authorship of the latter picture, which was Morgunov’s, was erroneously ascribed to Malevich; see A. Nakov, Kazimir Malewicz (Paris: Adam Biro, 2002), F-464. A sketch for The Hairdresser Went to the Bathhouse was found in Khardzhiev’s former collection (A. Morgunov, Composition, 1915, paper, watercolor, gouache, 32 × 22.9 cm, FKhCh). This sketch was reproduced for the first time in Evgeniia Petrova, ed., A Legacy Regained: Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-Garde (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2002), p. 297.

T O PA G E S 2 3 – 2 5 NOTES

29. From a letter from A. A. Shemshurin to V. D. Polenov. Quoted in Malevich o sebe, 1:62. 30. In Moscow art scholar A. N. In’shakov’s essay, “Larionov i Malevich: Luchizm i suprematizm,” in N. S. Goncharova i M. F. Larionov: Issledovaniia i publikatsii (Moscow: State Art History Institute, Nauka, 2003), pp. 3–21, an attempt was made to compare, and thereby bring out in relief the specific characteristics of Suprematism and Rayonnism by presenting the latter as one national approach to abstract art. The author rightly emphasizes the distinction between the initial positions of Larionov and Malevich, which logically conditioned the cardinal distinction between their painting discoveries. Nonetheless, from my point of view, Suprematism’s proportionate weight in world culture is incomparable to that of Rayonnism; nothing prevented Malevich, who lived in the same historical conditions and circumstances as Larionov, from developing his discovery with exhaustive thoroughness, inasmuch as the discovery itself held powerful potential. What seems more proper and not without interest is a comparison of Rayonnism and Fevralism, with their equally great measure of abstraction and tie to the objective world; however, this topic requires separate research, for which there is no place here. 31. This was a favorite expression of Boguslavskaia, cited in M. Matiushin’s reminiscences about the stormy onrush of left-wing art. Quoted in Khardzhiev, Stat’i ob avangarde, 1:168. 32. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, February 1915, in Malevich o sebe, 1:66. 33. Ibid., p. 74. 34. N. Semenova, Zhizn’ i kollektsiia Ivana Sergeevicha Shchukina (Moscow: Trilistnik, 2002). 35. See H. Berninger and J.-A. Cartier, eds., Pougny (Iwan Puni): Catalogue de l’oeuvre, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Éditions Ernst Wasmuth, 1972), pp. 58–59. 36. Thus, the editorial comment in N. Udal’tsova’s book: “S. Shchukin collected mainly painting from the Paris school, but at the ‘0.10’ exhibition he purchased, contrary to Udaltsova’s assertion, a relief by Tatlin made ‘of three old dirty boards.’” N. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki: Dnevniki, stat’i, vospominaniia (Moscow: RA, 1994), p. 106. See also V. Rakitin, “Masterovoi ili prorok: Zametki na poliakh dvukh tvorcheskikh biografii,” in the exhibition catalog The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-garde, 1915–1932 (Bern: Bentelli; Moscow: Galart, 1993), pp. 27, 39, citing article no. 14796 in Birzhevye vedomosti, March 4, 1915. The authors of these comments were not bothered by the fact that in the reference to Shchukin’s purchase of the counter-relief at “0.10” they cite a newspaper article published on March 4, 1915—whereas the “0.10” exhibition opened on December 19, 1915. In a chronicle of the artist’s life, Tatlin’s biographer cites this information under 1915 as a fact: “At ‘Tramway V: The First Futurist Exhibition’ (Petersburg [Petrograd], opening March 3) [. . .] one of the ‘painterly reliefs’ was acquired by collector S. I. Shchukin.” See A. Strigalev, “Daty zhizhni V. E. Tatlina,” in Vladimir Tatlin: Retrospektiva, ed. Anatolii Strigalev and Iurgen Kharten (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1993), p. 387. 37. S. Shevliakov, “Detskaia dlia vzroslykh (Na vystavke futuristov),” Obozrenie teatrov (Petrograd), no. 2692 (1915): 7.

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279

NOTES

38. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, postmarked “Moscow, December 4, [19]14,” in Malevich o sebe, 1:63. 39. Ibid. 40. D. Burliuk to Shemshurin, dated August 27, no year; quoted from Khardzhiev’s handwritten copy in FKhCh, which gives the presumed date: “[1914?]”. 41. Quoted from Kliun’s text, “Kazimir Severinovich Malevich: Vospominaniia,” the manuscript of which was written by the artist shortly before his death, in 1941–42 (I. V. Kliun, Moi put’ v iskusstve [Moscow: RA, 1999], pp. 130–45). The elderly memoirist, who had been pushed out of art by the activists of Socialist Realism, was guided by a desire to assert his significance as a prominent artist (which he in fact had been). This led him to the twisting of facts, the silencing, the distortions, and the mistakes of memory that abound in the later manuscripts of Malevich’s associate. 42. Manuscript and Document Department, State V. V. Maiakovsky Museum, inv. no. 92 279, l. 65. Text published in Malevich o sebe, 2:107–8. 43. A. A. Morgunov, “Vospominaniia,” in Malevich o sebe, 2:103–4; I. Kliun, “Kazimir Severinovich Malevich: Vospominaniia,” in Kliun, Moi put’ v iskusstve, pp. 130–45. 44. See Kliun, Moi put’ v iskusstve, pp. 138, 201. I. V. Kliun, Sawyer (Nonobjective Composition), 1914, oil on canvas, 71 × 62 cm, B. M. Kustodiev Gallery, Astrakhan. 45. The photo ran in Rannee utro (Moscow), no. 51 (March 2, 1914): 7. 46. See above, note 29. 47. Morgunov, “Vospominaniia,” p. 104. There is no actual spoon on Composition with Mona Lisa today; when it was lost is unknown. 48. First reproduced in Výtvarné umeˇní, nos. 8–9 (1967): 380. 49. Reported by Tr. Andersen, a participant in a joint seminar surveying Malevich’s paintings, on September 8, 2005, at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 50. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, early January 1915, in Malevich o sebe, 1:65. 51. A. Kruchenykh, I. Kliun, and K. Malevich, Tainye poroki akademikov (Moscow, [1915] (on the cover, 1916). For Malevich’s text, see SS1:56–57. 52. Jakobson to Matiushin, 1915, in Malevich o sebe, 2:129. 53. See note 51. 54. J. Bowlt, “‘The Cow and the Violin’: Toward a History of Russian Dada,” in The Eastern Dada Orbit: Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Central Europe, and Japan, ed. G. Janecek and T. Omuka; “Crisis and the Arts,” in Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, vol. 4 (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), pp. 137–63. 55. I. A. Vakar, “K. S. Malevich i ego sovremenniki: Biografiia v litsakh,” in Malevich o sebe, 2:593–94. 56. N. Khardzhiev, “K. Malevich: Glavy iz avtobiografii khudozhnika,” in K. Malevich, M. Matiushin, and N. Khardzhiev, K istorii russkogo avangarda, vol. 1 (Stockholm: Hylaea Prints, 1976), p. 104. 57. E. F. Kovtun, the first to publish Malevich’s letters to Matiushin, dated all the letters devoted to the discovery of nonobjectivity and Black Square to May 1915; first in this category was this letter, sent by Malevich from Kuntsevo on May 27, 1915. See K. S. Malevich, “Pis’ma k M. V. Matiushinu,” published by E. F. Kovtun in Ezhe-

T O PA G E S 3 5 – 4 5 NOTES

godnik (1974): 179–80, 185–86; “Russkii avangard, 1913: Pis’ma i vospominaniia,” ed. A. V. Povelikhina and E. F. Kovtun, Nashe nasledie, no. 2 (1989): 135. 58. Postcard from Malevich to Matiushin, from Kuntsevo to Petrograd, postmarked “Kuntsevo May 27, [19]15.” Published for the first time by Kovtun in Ezhegodnik (1974): 185–86. See also Malevich o sebe, 1:66. 59. In what is not the artist’s title for the drawing, what attracts attention is the label “red,” given to a square executed in graphite pencil. 60. A. Shatskikh, “Malevich—kurator Malevicha,” in Russkii avangard: Problemy reprezentatsii i interpretatsii, ed. I. Karasik (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2001), pp. 149–54. 61. Kruchenykh to Matiushin, from Batalpashinsk to Petrograd, March 18, 1915, RO IRLI, f. 656, op. 3. Quoted from a copy in the FKhCh archive. 62. Kruchenykh to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, April–May 1915, FKhCh archive. 63. Postcard from Kruchenykh to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, postmarked “Moscow, May 15, [19]15”), RO IRLI. f. 656, op. 3, ed. khr. 26, l. 14. 64. Kruchenykh to Matiushin, from Kuntsevo to Petrograd, May 20, 1915, FKhCh archive. 65. Fevralism as Emotionism was reproduced for the first time in Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935, no. 38 (dated 1916). Sensation of Electricity was reproduced for the first time ibid., no. 40 (dated 1916). 66. K. Malevich, What Effrontery, 1915, paper, pencil, 16.3 × 11.1 cm, private collection. Reproduced for the first time in Výtvarné umeˇní, nos. 8–9 (1967): 381. 67. K. Malevich, Composition: Circle with Rectangles and Triangles, 1915, paper, pencil, 11.2 × 16.6 cm, FKhCh. First reproduced in Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935, no. 34. 68. Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Petrograd to Batalpashinsk, December 20–22, 1915, in Ol’ga Rozanova, Lefanta chiol . . . , ed. A. Sarab’ianov and V. Terekhina (Moscow: RA; Palace Editions, 2002), pp. 262–63. Emphasis in original. 69. On A. Kruchenykh’s lithographic books, see S. Compton, The World Backward: Russian Futurist Books, 1912–1916 (London: British Library, 1978); G. Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 70. Rozanova to Shemshurin, from Vladimir to Moscow, in early July 1915, in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, pp. 270–71. 71. Five sketches from Zheverzheev’s former collection are now in the State Museum of Musical and Theatrical Art in St. Petersburg. The sixth sketch, from Khardzhiev’s former collection, is in the FKhCh (K. Malevich, Sketch for the production of Victory Over the Sun, 1913, paper, pencil, 16.8 × 20.6 cm). 72. Kliun, “Kazimir Severinovich Malevich: Vospominaniia,” p. 145. 73. Kh. Vaitemaier, “Sobranie Lentsa Shenberga: Evropeiskoe dvizhenie v izobrazitel’nom iskusstve s 1958 po nastoiashchee vremia,” in Sobranie Lentsa Shenberga: evropeiskoe dvizhenie v izobrazitel’nom iskusstve s 1958 goda po nastoiashchee vremia, exhibition catalog, ed. Hannah Vaitemaier (Munich: Editsion Kants, 1989), p. 98.

280

1. Postcard from Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, postmarked “Moscow September 24, [19]15,” in Malevich o sebe, 1:69. 2. Postcard from Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, postmarked “Moscow September 25, [19]15,” RO IRLI, f. 656, op. 3, ed. khr. 31, l. 27. An excerpt from the letter is cited in the introductory essay by E. F. Kovtun in his “K. S. Malevich: Pis’ma k M. V. Matiushinu,” Ezhegodnik (1974): 180–81. Published in full in Malevich o sebe, 1:69. 3. See R. Kraus, “Podlinnost’ avangarda,” in Podlinnost’ avangarda i drugie modernistskie mify (Moscow: Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal, 2003), p. 159. 4. V. Khodasevich, Portrety slovami: Ocherki (Moscow: Galart, 1995), p. 177. 5. M. Matiushin, “O vystavke ‘poslednikh futuristov,’” Ocharovannyi strannik (Petrograd) (1916): 16–17. My emphasis. 6. Ibid. 7. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, October 1915, in Malevich o sebe, 1:72.

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Chapter 2. On the Threshold of “0.10”

NOTES

74. Malevich to Matiushin, from Kuntsevo to Petrograd, June 9, 1915 (dated from the postmark on the front of the envelope: “Kuntsevo Mos[cow] P[rovince], June 9, [19]15,” held in the FKhCh archive), RO IRLI, f. 656, op. 3, ed. khr. 31, l. 21. First published in full with the date “May 1915” in “Russkii avangard, 1913: Pis’ma i vospominaniia,” p. 135. See also Malevich o sebe, 1:67 (with the date and place of mailing “Early June? 1915, Moscow”). 75. The version from the B. Livshits collection is known from the reproduction in B. Livshits, Polutoraglazy strelets (Leningrad: Writers Publishing House in Leningrad, 1933), p. 189. 76. K. Malevich, Curtain for Victory Over the Sun, 1928, 1915 motif, paper, pencil, India ink, 47.5 × 32.5 cm, private collection, England. Reproduced in Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Kazimir Malévich, (Bilbao, 2006), ill. 61, pp. 168–69. 77. See above, note 74. 78. Malevich to Matiushin, from Kuntsevo to Petrograd, mid-June 1915, RO IRLI, f. 656, op. 3, ed. khr. 31, l. 22–23 (emphases added). First published in full with the date “May 1915” in “Russkii avangard, 1913: Pis’ma i vospominaniia,” p. 135. See also Malevich o sebe, 1:67 (with the date and place of mailing “Early June? 1915, Moscow”). 79. K. Malevich, “If there were no circumstances whatsoever . . . ” Manuscript from “Zapisnaia knizhka III, 1924,” Malevich archive, SMA, inv. no. 32, D. Sarab’ianov and A. Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich: Zhivopis’, Teoriia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1993), p. 271. 80. S. O. Khan-Magomedov, Suprematizm i arkhitektura (problemy formoobrazovaniia) (Moscow: Arkhitektura-S, 2007), p. 35. 81. For more on this discussion, see J. Lawrence, “Back to Square One,” pp. 294–313, in Rethinking Malevich, ed. Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder (London: Pindar Press, 2007).

T O PA G E S 6 0 – 6 8 NOTES

8. Ibid. 9. Malevich to Gromozova, from Kuntsevo to Petrograd, July 20, 1916, in “Neopublikovannye pis’ma Kazimira Malevicha,” ed. A. Krusanov, NOMI (Novyi Mir Iskusstva) (St. Petersburg) 66, no. 1 (2009): 64. 10. N. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki: Dnevniki, stat’i, vospominaniia (Moscow: RA, 1994), p. 11. 11. Malevich to Matiushin, from Kuntsevo to Petrograd, July 15, 1915, in Malevich o sebe, 1:68. 12. “Amazons of the Avant-Garde: Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova,” curated by John E. Bowlt, Matthew Drutt, and Zelfira Tregulova, Berlin (1999), London (1999–2000), Venice (2000), Bilbao (2000), New York (2000–2001), Moscow (2001). A catalog with the same title, edited by John E. Bowlt and Matthew Drutt, was published on the occasion of the exhibition (New York: Guggenheim Foundation, 2000). 13. Postcard from Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, postmarked “Moscow September 28, [19]15,” in Malevich o sebe, 1:70. 14. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, October 12, 1915, ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Thus, in a thorough article by art historian Irina Vakar, who has devoted many years to the study of the Suprematist’s art and life, one comes across the following passage: “Malevich provided sufficient grounds for condemnation. [. . .] How could an artist who called himself (and who in fact was) ‘The ideological warrior in art,’ stoop to petty connivances and intrigues; why did this resolute person, who carefully thought out his actions and rarely allowed his emotions to come out, betray these life principles?” It is not quite clear what these denunciatory sentences were based on, inasmuch as in the next paragraph, after analyzing briefly Malevich’s dialogical interaction with very different colleagues, from “rebellious pupils” to masters (Tatlin, Rodchenko, El Lissitzky), the scholar refutes her own words: “All this renders rather unconvincing the assumption about his irrepressible lust for power, intolerance for another person’s opinion or success, and innate authoritarianism” (I. A. Vakar, “Posleslovie: K. S. Malevich i ego sovremenniki. Biografii v litsakh,” in Malevich o sebe, 2:591). 17. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, late October 1915, in Malevich o sebe, 1:72. 18. Ibid. 19. Postcard from Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, postmarked “Moscow October 31, [19]15,” in Malevich o sebe, 1:73. 20. All the quotations below are cited from “Diary No. 1,” started by Varvara Stepanova on January 5, 1919, and completed on September 14, 1920 (see V. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” in Pis’ma, Poeticheskie opyty, Zapiski khudozhnitsy [Moscow: Sfera, 1994], pp. 59–133). 21. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” p. 60. 22. A. Strigalev, “O Poslednei futuristicheskoi vystavke kartin ‘0,10 (Nol’-Desiat’),’” Nauchno-analiticheskii informatsionnyi Biulleten’ Fonda K. S. Malevicha (Moscow) (2001): 19.

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23. Ibid. 24. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” p. 60. 25. Ezhegodnik Rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma na 1974 god (Leningrad: Nauka,1976), p. 177. 26. See B. N. Kapeliush, “Arkhivy M. V. Matiushina i E. G. Guro,” ibid., (1974): 3–4. I myself became acquainted with Malevich’s letters from the Matiushin collection at RO IRLI in December 2002. 27. In previous literature, N. M. Davydova has been frequently identified with Natalia Yakovlevna Davydova (1873–1926). This error crept into a book by L. A. Shadowa (L. Shadowa, Suche und Experiment [Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1978], pp. 33– 34, 121; published in the United States as Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910–1930 [Thames & Hudson, 1982], pp. 33, 121, 122). Confusion was also created by the fact that her namesake was engaged in similar activity. N. Ya. Davydova participated in the renaissance and development of handicrafts and was one of the organizers and directors of several handicraft enterprises in Russia: the Abramtsevo woodcarving workshops (1890s), the Tarussa embroiderers’ artel, and also weaving and furniture-making workshops. In the 1920s, N. Ya. Davydova worked with Ye. I. Pribylskaia, a longtime colleague of N. M. Davydova, at the Moscow Craft Export Association. The distinction between the names of N. M. Davydova and N. Ya. Davydova is dwelt on especially by N. L. Adaskina in her essay, “Konstruktivistskii tekstil’ i dizain odezhdy” (1987); see N. Adaskina, “Constructivist Fabrics and Dress Design,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 1875–1945, Russia/Soviet theme issue (summer 1987): 144. This essay also contains a brief but substantive description of N. M. Davydova’s activities as the director of Verbovka. 28. Postcard from Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, postmarked “Moscow, November 5, [19]15,” in Malevich o sebe, 1:73–74. 29. In 1994, the Barvy (“Colors”) publishing house in Lvov printed a tiny run of a booklet entitled “Prednaznachennia metelika” (“A butterfly’s predestination”), by Aleksandr Noga, devoted to the life of N. M. Davydova. The Ukrainian scholar’s opportunities were severely circumscribed due to the difficult times in the life of post-Soviet countries, and therefore he had to limit himself to a compilation of all the mentions of Natalia Davydova’s name in published essays and materials, which were very few. The booklet, unfortunately, also included unverified information, in particular ascribing to N. M. Davydova facts from the life of N. Ya. Davydova in the 1920s. One of the publication’s unquestionable merits is its genealogical excursions into the history of the branching Ukrainian family of the Gudim-Levkoviches, compiled by Oksana Okhrimovich, which was based on “Rodoslovnaia kniga Kievskogo dvorianstva, 9.X.1890” (whose upper limit is 1890). In 2005, a comprehensive article was published by G. F. Kovalenko: “Aleksandra Ekster: Pervye kievskie gody,” Iskusstvoznanie 1 (2005): 537–74. This work pays great attention to the Kievan cultural situation at the beginning of the last century; the article is abundantly documented with archival materials, contemporaries’ testimonies, articles from the press, and synchronous events. Quite a lot of space is devoted to Natalia Mikhailovna Davydova, wife of D. L. Davydov, honorary magistrate of Kiev and one of the three

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30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

284

directors of the Kiev Nobility Assembly-Club (D. L. Davydov was never marshal of the Kiev nobility), but in accordance with the goals of the investigation merely as the closest friend of Aleksandra Grigorovich, whose married name was Exter. The article also shed light on the activities of representatives of the Kiev elite in support and development of craft trades and the organization of societies and museums. See ibid., pp. 547–59, 561, 567–72. Natalia Davydova, Polgoda v zakliuchenii: Dnevnik 1920–1921 (Berlin: Privately published, 1923). In 1919 the portrait of the family ancestor, Kiev magistrate Councilor Ivan Gudima (1755), a masterpiece of Ukrainian portrait painting, was donated by his descendants to the Kiev Museum (now the Museum of Ukrainian Fine Art, Kiev). Landowner M. V. Gudim-Levkovich, Gentleman of the Bedchamber of the Most High Court, ended his life with the rank of Councilor of State. In the 1890s, he served for a time in the State Bank in Kiev together with Aleksandr Mikhailovich Berdiaev, father of N. A. Berdiaev (see Pamiatnaia knizhka Kievskoi gubernii na 1895 god, p. 25). The families of both officials were related. See Vasily L’vovich Davydov, Dekabristy: Biograficheskii spravochnik (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), pp. 61–62. The marriages of the sisters and their brother, Dmitry L’vovich Davydov, brought into the family circle representatives of well-known families and names (Lopukhiny, Rimsky-Korsakovy, fon Mekk, and others). The Davydovs’ genealogy spanning nearly the entire twentieth century appears as an appendix in Aleksandr Davydov, Vospominaniia: 1881–1955 (Paris: Al’batros, 1982). This genealogy has omissions and a few imprecisions resulting from the branching of noble families like the Davydovs and of the families with whom Davydovs married. The Davydovs’ genealogy partially intersects with that of the Tchaikovskys and fon Mekks; Galina fon Mekk (daughter of Anna L’vovna Davydova and Nikolai fon Mekk), Kak ia ikh pomniu, translated from English by B. Nikitin (Moscow: Fond im. I. D. Sytina, 1999), pp. 24–25. I was shown an unpublished genealogy of the Davydovs compiled by Dmitry Lvovich Davydov himself, by Lev Yefimovich Davydov, grandson of Yury Lvovich Davydov. L. Ye. Davydov is continuing work on the genealogy of the Davydov family; he has graciously shared the information he found, for which I express to him my sincere gratitude. In 1966, Denis Dmitrievich Davydov (1894–1967), elder son of Natalia Mikhailovna and Dmitry Lvovich, contributed a unique album to Russian culture. See I. S. Zil’bershtein, “Sibirskii al’bom dekabristki,” in Parizhskie nakhodki: Epokha Pushkina (Moscow: Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, 1993), pp. 163–74. Today A. I. Davydova’s “Sibirskii al’bom” is held at GMII. Relations between uncle and nephew and their role in the composer’s art are illuminated in monographs on P. I. Tchaikovsky; the authors of foreign books emphasize the delicate problems relating to the homosexuality of both and the attendant complications; see A. Poznansky, Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (New York: Schirmer, 1991); A. Holden, Tchaikovsky: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1996). Yury (Georgy) Lvovich Davydov (1876–1965), who married Margarita Nikolaevna Lopukhina, in the prerevolutionary era was marshal of the nobility in Chigirinsky

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District, Kiev province. He participated in the rebirth of handicraft trades and with his sister-in-law N. M. Davydova was co-owner of a woodcarving and doll-making workshop in the village of Bondurevka. From 1939 to 1961, Yu. L. Davydov was chief curator of the P. I. Tchaikovsky House-Museum in Klin. He was the author of Zapiski o P. I. Chaikovskom (Moscow, 1962); and Klinskie gody tvorchestva Chaikovskogo (Moscow, 1965). 37. Szymanowski, Songs to Words by Dymitry Dawydow, op. 32 (1915): 1. “Kak tol’ko vostok . . . ” 2. “Nebo bez zvezd . . . ” 3. “Osennee solntse.” 38. Olga Davydoff Dax, ed. Memoirs of a Russian Lady: Drawings and Tales of Life Before the Revolution by Mariamna Davydoff, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986). 39. See below, note 48. 40. J. Iwaszkiewicz, Ksia¸z´ka moich wspomnien´ (Krakow, 1957), pp. 53–54. 41. Artur Rubinstein, Moje młode lata (Krakow: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1986), pp. 418, 425–26, 459. S. Spiess, Ze wspomnien´ melomana (Krakow: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1973), pp. 61–62. 42. Premieres of Szymanowski’s Second Piano Sonata were held at his concerts in December 1911 in Berlin and Munich, in January 1912 in Krakow, Vienna, and Leipzig, and in December 1913 in Warsaw. 43. Iwaszkiewicz, Ksia¸z´ka moich wspomnien´, p. 54. 44. Karol Szymanowski, Korespondencja: Pełna edycja zachowanych listów od i do kompozytora, vol. 1: 1903–1919, ed. Teresa Chylin´ska (Warsaw: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1982). 45. In his reminiscences, Berdiaev calls N. M. Davydova “Natasha’s cousin.” N. A. Berdiaev, Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1989), 1:18–19. 46. On the relationship between Malevich and Gershenzon, see A. Shatskikh, “Malevich posle zhivopisi,” in SS3:38–45. Published in this volume for the first time were Malevich’s letters to Gershenzon (1918–24); see SS3:327–53, 369–87. 47. Iwaszkiewicz, Ksia¸z´ka moich wspomnien´, p. 54. In the reminiscences of various contemporaries of Szymanowski, Ephebe is sometimes referred to as a novel, sometimes as a novella. The composer wrote this text between 1917 and 1919 in Elizavetgrad. The manuscript of Ephebe burned in Warsaw in September 1939. All that survived was the title page, dedication, and copies of a few fragments. A brief retelling was published by J. Iwaszkiewicz, who had read the entire novella; see J. Iwaszkiewicz, Spotkania z Szymanowskim (Krakow, 1947), pp. 85–96. 48. Szymanowski, Korespondencja, p. 610. Kirill, Natalia Mikhailovna’s youngest son, was born in December 1905; his date of birth allows us to draw the above conclusion about the secret contact between Karol Szymanowski and his neighbors from the estate at Verbovka, inasmuch as his anti-Russian father Stanisław died in September 1905. Karol Szymanowski never married and left no direct descendants. 49. In a letter dated October 14, 1919, from Kiev to Elizavetgrad, N. M. Davydova informed Szymanowski: “Despite his fourteen years, Kika has just joined the Volunteer Army. I could not hold him back, so great was his determination to go. [. . .] The parting at his departure was sad, and it has been three days since he left. Asia [Exter] is in Odessa” (Szymanowski, Korespondencja, p. 594).

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50. See SS3:346. Malevich’s letters to Gershenzon make it clear that Natalia Mikhailovna was corresponding with him. Thus, a statement in Malevich’s letter of October 6, 1921, attests to the fact that the artist had received a message from Davydova after her release from prison: “Nat[alia] Mikh[ailovna Davydova] is planning to go to Moscow, has not arrived yet” (SS3:348). On February 11, 1922, Malevich asked Gershenzon, “Have you heard where Davydova is, she planned to write me from abroad, but I’ve had nothing yet” (SS3:351). 51. L. N. Livshits, “Iz neokonchennykh vospominanii o I. E. Babele,” in Isaak Babel’: Pis’ma drugu. Iz arkhiva L. N. Livshitsa (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi literaturnyi muzei and “Tri kvadrata,” 2007), p. 111. 52. At the first “Exhibition of Applied Art and Crafts,” held in Kiev, February 19 to May 1, 1906, the following awards were given, among others: a small silver medal for embroiderers to V. Prozorova from Verbovka and M. Sykalova from Zozovo; bronze medals to M. Khoinatskaia from Zozovo and D. Bondarenko from Verbovka; see B. M. Biliashivsky and Iu. P. Lashchuk, “Kiivs’ke kustarne tovarystvo,” in Narodna tvorchist’ ta etnografiia (Kiev), no. 4 (206) (July–August 1987): 39–40. 53. The catalog for the 1915 exhibition at the Lemercier gallery gave 1912 as the year of the artel’s founding: “The works in the ‘Modern Decorative Art’ exhibition fall into two groups, since they are connected with two arts organizations: the organization of embroidery work at Verbovka, Kiev Prov., Chigirinsky District, which arose in 1912; and the organization of rug and embroidery work at Skoptsy, Poltava Prov., Pereyaslavsky District, which has existed since 1910” (Katalog vystavki sovremennogo dekorativnogo iskusstva [Moscow: Gallery Lemercier, 1915]). This assertion was repeated in all the reviews and then went into works by scholars of the Russian avant-garde. 54. Rubinstein, Moje młode lata, p. 459. This information from Artur Rubinstein cannot be verified today; however, noteworthy is the mention of London, about which see below. 55. I was graciously shown this photograph by Aleksandr Noga during a conversation in Lvov on August 1, 2005. 56. Biliashivsky and Lashchuk, “Kiivs’ke kustarne tovarystvo,” p. 43. 57. See Kovalenko, “Aleksandra Ekster.” See also above, note 29. 58. The item “Svobodnye khudozhestvennye masterskie” (Free art studios) informed as follows: “The Fine Arts Department of the Commissariat of People’s Enlightenment is opening as of October 1 state free art workshops, which are intended to replace the now ineffective art school of the old type. [. . .] In charge of the special workshops will be, in addition to those listed above, also [. . .] O. Rozanova, Exter, Davydova [. . .]” Izvestiia Vserossiiskogo Tsentral’nogo ispolnitel’nogo Komiteta Sovetov (Moscow), no. 213 (477), October 2, 1918. 59. E. Pribyl’skaia, biography, private archive, Kiev. Quoted from Ukrainskie avangardisty kak teoretiki i publitsisty (in Ukrainian and Russian), compiled by Dmitry Gorbachev, Olena Papeta, and Sergei Papeta (Kiev: Triumf, 2005), p. 321. 60. This information, provided by G. F. Kovalenko, is cited in A. A. Babin, “O knige Ivana Aleksandrovicha Aksenova ‘Pikasso i okrestnosti,’” in Pikasso i okrestnosti: Sbornik statei, ed. M. A. Busev (Moscow: Progress-Garant, 2006), pp. 85, 97. The

286

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magazine Les Soirées de Paris, published by Guillaume Apollinaire, spotlighted the latest explorations and achievements in the art capital of the world. The other subscribers in Russia besides N. M. Davydova, were I. A. Aksenov, S. K. Makovsky, S. I. Shchukin, and A. A. Exter. 61. “For the purpose of expanding the sale and propaganda of the artistic culture of the Ukrainian people, V. N. Khanenko opened a special store in London where rugs and fabrics from the Olenevsk workshop were sold, as well as wares from elsewhere” (Biliashevsky and Lashchuk, “Kiivs’ke kustarne tovarystvo,” p. 41). 62. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki, p. 35. 63. Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1:128. 64. See Charlotte Douglas, “The Art of Pure Design: The Move to Abstraction in Russian and English Art and Textiles: A Meditation,” in Russia Engages the West, ed. Susan E. Reid and Rosalind P. Blakesley (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), p. 103. Douglas considers the creation of new ornaments for textiles to be defining and emphasizes the instrumental role of designs for applied art in the birth, assertion, and advancement of abstract art as such. Direct ties between the creative elites of the two countries—apart from those between Roger Fry and Russian painters—were effected by writer and translator Zinaida Vengerova. Despite the traditionality of her own tastes, Vengerova tried to inform her compatriots of the most important innovations in English literature and art. For more detail, see ibid., pp. 87, 96–100. 65. R. Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). This book was preceded by a successful exhibition in 1999–2000 at the Tate Gallery, London, the Huntington Center, San Marino, California, and the Yale British Center, New Haven, Connecticut. See Richard Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, catalog (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1999). 66. See Duncan Grant, Interior, 46 Gordon Square, 1914, board, oil, 40 × 32.1 cm, Tate Gallery, London, in Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury, no. 74; Interior on Gordon Square, ca. 1914–15, board, paper collage, 60 × 72 cm, private collection, ibid., no. 75; Abstract Collage, ca. 1915, board, oil, paper and fabric collage, Hoffman Collection, Berlin. ibid., no. 76. 67. Duncan Grant, White Pitcher, 1914–18, wood, oil, 106.7 × 44.5 cm, private collection. 68. Z. Vengerova, “Angliiskie futuristy,” in Strelets, no. 1 (Petrograd, 1915): 91–105. 69. Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age, p. 128, cited in Douglas, “The Art of Pure Design,” p. 98. 70. The fact that Sagittarius appeared in February 1915 specifically in Petrograd is by no means coincidental. Malevich and his family were so poor that there could be no question of any purchase or posting of the miscellany. For example, Malevich received the miscellany Ocharovannyi strannik (Enchanted wanderer), which came out in March 1916 and which contained Matiushin’s review of the “0.10” exhibition with passages about the art of Malevich himself, only in July 1916, after he had asked Matiushin to send him the miscellany and he only then familiarized himself

T O PA G E S 8 3 – 9 0 NOTES

with his colleague’s unsparing criticism. See Malevich to Gromozova, from Moscow to Petrograd, July 20, 1916, in Krusanov, “Neopublikovannye pis’ma Kazimira Malevicha,” p. 64. At best, Malevich might have seen Sagittarius in the hands of Aleksei Kruchenykh, a contributor to the miscellany, which published his verse. The poet moved to Malevich’s dacha more than likely in the first ten days of May 1915; Kruchenykh sent his first letter from Kuntsevo to Matiushin in Petrograd on May 12, and the correspondence, as has already been mentioned, was quite intensive. 71. Douglas, “The Art of Pure Design,” p. 98. 72. Ibid., p. 103. 73. Ibid. 74. S. Glagol’, “Vystavka ‘sovremennogo dekorativnogo iskusstva,’” Utro Rossii (Moscow), no. 305 (November 6, 1915): 5. 75. Ia. T, “Vystavka sovremennogo dekorativnogo iskusstva,” Russkie vedomosti (Moscow), no. 257 (November 8, 1915): 6. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. The exhibition was announced in the newspapers Utro Rossii, October 21 and November 6; Vremia, October 26; Russkie vedomosti, November 1; Rannee utro, November 6, 1915. Apart from the articles and reviews by Sergei Glagol’ and Ia. Tugendkhol’d cited in notes 75 and 76, Zhenskoe delo, no. 23 (December 1, 1915): 15–16, responded with an extensive review by V. Dudareva with photographs of several exhibits (by N. Davydova, A. Exter, E. Pribyl’skaia, and E. Vasilieva); M. Liakhovskaia’s review appeared in Mir zhenshchiny (see note 3); M. Virtin’s survey, “Prikladnoe iskusstvo,” appeared in Zhurnal dlia khoziaek, no. 23 (December 1, 1915): 1–2. The exhibition was noted by the newspapers Rannee utro, December 8 and 9, and Vechernee vremia, November 17, 1915. 79. See T. Goriacheva, “Kartina Malevicha ‘Avtomobil’ i dama’. Krasochnye massy v 4-m izmerenii: Rozhdenie znaka,” in Russkii avangard: Lichnost’ i shkola, ed. I. Karasik (St. Petersburg: Palace Edition, 2003), pp. 22–26. 80. The essay by J. Joosten, “Malevich v Steidlek Muzeume,” in W. A. L. Beeren and J. M. Joosten, eds., Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935 (Moscow: Ministerie van Cultuur; Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1988) catalog (Leningrad: Russian Museum; Moscow: Tretiakov Gallery; Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1988–89), pp. 44–54, is devoted to the story of the paintings’ acquisition by the Stedelijk Museum board. For many years Malevich’s heirs disputed the legitimacy of the acquisition from German architect Hugo Häring of paintings by Malevich that had not been sold or given to the latter but had been left in Berlin due to circumstances at the time and put in the care of Alexander von Riesen. A great deal of space is allotted to the legal invalidity of the Stedelijk Museum’s acquisition of Malevich’s compositions from Hugo Häring in a book by Dutch journalist and scholar Lijn Heyting, L. Heyting, De verdwaalde collectie (Amsterdam/Rotterdam: Prometheus/NRC Handesblad, 2006). In 2008, an agreement was reached between Malevich’s heirs and the SMA directors. Five pictures were returned to the heirs and the rest have since then legally belonged to the museum. 81. In 1935, Alfred Barr, MOMA’s director, traveled through Europe in preparation for the exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art,” held in 1936. Alexander Dorner 288

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(1893–1957), director of the Provinzialmuseum in Hanover, acquainted him with the Malevich works that had been in the museum’s keeping and in 1933 counted in Nazi Germany as examples of “degenerate art.” Barr secretly took four works out of Germany, wrapping them around an umbrella and presenting the theoretical charts as technical sketches; Alexander Dorner sent other works by Malevich to him in New York by various routes. Dorner himself, after emigrating to the United States with Barr’s help, brought a few more works and presented them for exhibition to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with the proviso that the works be returned to Malevich’s heirs should they ever turn up. There came to be twenty-one works in the United States: eight paintings, one gouache, five drawings, five of twenty-two theoretical charts, and two “planits.” See “On the Painting’s Provenance,” Kazimir Malevich: Suprematist Composition, circa 1919–20, lot 31, Phillips Auctioneers, 1999. 82. Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (New York: Universe Books, 1979), p. 259. 83. See “On the Painting’s Provenance,” pp. 36–37; C. Toussaint, “If Only Paintings Could Speak,” Kazimir Malevich: Suprematist Composition, circa 1919–20, lot 31, Phillips Auctioneers, 1999, pp. 38–40. 84. Charlotte Douglas, “Bespredmetnost’ i dekorativnost’,” Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia (Moscow), no. 2–3 (1993): 103. The essay appeared in reworked form two years later in an American journal; here, with somewhat more decisiveness, the author asserted: “We know that Malevich had been seeking broad application of his new style since the previous spring [ of 1915], so it is possible that Suprematist works first appeared in public not as paintings, but as needlework or sketches for needlework in the Modern Decorative Art exhibition” (Charlotte Douglas, “Suprematist Embroidered Ornament,” Art Journal 54, no. 1 [spring 1995]: 42.) 85. See A. Shatskikh, “Upakovka mechty,” Artkhronika (Moscow), no. 5–6 (2002): 46–54, and “Upakovka mechty 2,” ibid., no. 2 (2004): 44–45; republished as A. Shatskikh, “A Cologne Bottle by Malevich,” ArtChronika (Moscow) (autumn– winter 2008): 100–110. 86. “K. S. Malevich [. . .] No. 218 Carpet Motif,” in Vystavka kartin sovremennykh russkikh khudoznikov, catalog (Kaluga: Kaluzhskii khudozestvennyi kruzok, 1912). 87. N. V. Gogol’, Mertvye dushi: Poema, chaps. 1 and 2. 88. Alison Hilton, “Domestic Crafts and Creative Freedom: Russian Women’s Art,” in Russia, Women, Culture, edited by Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Wendy Salmond, Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 89. K. Malevich, “Glavy iz avtobiografii khudozhnika,” in N. I. Khardzhiev, Stat’i ob avangarde, vol. 1 (Moscow: RA, 1997), p. 114. 90. S. O. Khan-Magomedov, Suprematizm i arkhitektura (problemy formoobrazovaniia) (Moscow: Arkhitektura-S, 2007), p. 16. 91. For more detail, see A. Shatskikh, “Suprematizm na evropeiskoi stsene 1920-kh godov,” Russkii avangard 1910–1920-kh godov v evropeiskom kontekste, ed. G. F. Kovalenko (Moscow: Nauka, 2000), pp. 125–32. 92. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, November 22, 1915, in Malevich o sebe, 1:74.

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93. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” p. 61. 94. V. Pestel’, “Fragmenty dnevnika: Vospominaniia. ‘O khudozhestvennom proizvedenii.’ Iz dnevnika 1916 goda,” in Amazonki avangarda, ed. G. F. Kovalenko (Moscow: Nauka, 2004), p. 242.

Chapter 3. From “0.10” to “Store” 1. See B. Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 78–97; L. Boersma, The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1994); J. Milner, Kazimir Malevich and the Art of Geometry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 120–65; A. Strigalev, “O Poslednei futuristicheskoi vystavke kartin ‘0,10 (Nol’-Desiat’),’” Nauchno-analiticheskii informatsionnyi Biulleten’ Fonda K. S. Malevicha (Moscow) (2001): 12–38. 2. Malevich to Matiushin, from Kuntsevo to Petrograd, May 29, 1915, in Malevich o sebe, 1:66. 3. K. S. Malevich, “Letters to M. V. Matiushin,” ed. Ye. F. Kovtun, in Ezhegodnik Rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma na 1974 god (Leningrad: Nauka,1976), p. 181. 4. K. Malevich, Alogical Composition, late 1914 to early 1915, 1915, paper, pencil, 16.5 × 11.2 cm, private collection, first reproduced in Výtvarné umeˇní, nos. 8–9 (Prague) (1967): 380; K. Malevich, Soldier from the Mortar Brigade, late 1914, paper, pencil, 14.9 × 9.0 cm, private collection, first reproduced in D. Sarab’ianov and A. Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich: Zhivopis’, Teoriia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1993), p. 235. 5. Strigalev, “O Poslednei futuristicheskoi vystavke kartin ‘0,10 (Nol’-Desiat’),’” pp. 12–38. 6. V. Khodasevich, Portrety slovami: Ocherki (Moscow: Galart, 1995), pp. 120–21. 7. M. Matiushin, “O vystavke ‘poslednikh futuristov,” Ocharovannyi strannik (Petrograd) (Spring 1916): 17. 8. Expanding on the term “counter-relief,” (kontrrel’ef) Strigalev points out that it appeared for the first time in Malevich’s book, Ot kubizma k suprematizmu published in 1915 for the “0.10” exhibition. See SS1, p. 33. Tatlin’s biographer asserts: “The word was mouse out, naturally, from Tatlin himself” (Strigalev, “O Poslednei futuristicheskoi vystavke kartin ‘0,10 [Nol’-Desiat’],’” p. 16). A semantic analysis of the Tatlin term reveals its vagueness and ambiguity: the prefix kontr-(counter-), which comes from the Latin “contra,” had always meant “against,” that is, a kind of opposing vector of action; kontrataka (counterattack) and kontrrevliutsiia (counterrevolution) are examples of this. Malevich frequently used the prefix “counter-”; in a caption for a 1916 drawing, for example, he precisely expressed his plastic message: “A color tarcha [from the Polish tarcza, cartouche] in motion based on an axis of a black counter color plane” (K. Malevich, Supremus No. 58, paper, pencil, 10.6 × 15.5 cm, FKhCh). “Counter-relief,” in principle, means “against” a relief, whereas it obviously included the meaning of “supra-relief,” “over-relief.” In the notes to another article, “Retrospektivnaia vystavka Vladimira Tatlina,” Strigalev examined the Tatlin neologism, first explaining it “in accordance with the possible use of the prefix ‘counter’ as a mark of intensification: kontrabas [contrabass], kon290

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

291

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10.

NOTES

9.

troktava [contra-octave] and subkontroktava [subcontra-octave], kontrataka.” The word kontrataka is improperly included in this category because it means an attack undertaken against the enemy’s initial attack. Strigalev’s commentary ends with the following admission: “S. K. Isakov believed (or knew from Tatlin) that the term arose on the model of the word kontrataka,” citing “K kontr-rel’efam Tatlina,” Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh (Petrograd), no. 12 (1915): 50. See A. Strigalev, “Retrospektivnaia vystavka Vladimira Tatlina,” in Vladimir Tatlin: Retrospektiva, ed. A. Strigalev and Iu. Kharten (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, [1993]), p. 51 n. 22. A newspaper clipping with the photo was found in Malevich’s archive and is now held in Malevich’s archive at SMA. Von der Fläche zum Raum: Russland 1916–24, (Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1974). L. Shadowa, Suche und Experiment (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1978), no. 29 (in the documents section). Charlotte Douglas, Kazimir Malevich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), fig. 16. Ol’ga Rozanova: . . . uvidet’ mir preobrazhennym, Catalog, State Tretiakov Gallery (Moscow: Pinakoteka, 2007), p. 33. John Bowlt has graciously shared this information with me, for which I express my sincere gratitude. The absence of frames on the Malevich pictures photographed, with the exception of one, forces us to admit that Olga Rozanova’s claims are unfounded: “After promising to make me frames, Puni purposely did not do it, so that the pictures had a ragged appearance [. . .]” Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Petrograd to Sarykamysh, early January 1916, in Ol’ga Rozanova, Ol’ga Rozanova: Lefanta chiol . . . , ed. A. Sarab’ianov and V. Terekhina (Moscow: RA, Palace Editions, 2002), p. 265. See A. Shatskikh, “Malevich—kurator Malevicha,” in Russkii avangard: Problemy reprezentatsii i interpretatsii (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2001), p. 149. In the early Soviet era, as an active participant in museum construction, Malevich reported on June 21, 1918, to the First Conference on Museum Affairs of the IZO department of Narkompros, a report subsequently reworked into articles: “O muzee,” Iskusstvo kommuny (Petrograd), no. 13 (February 23, 1919), republished in SS1, pp. 132–135; and “Os’ tsveta i ob”ema,” Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo (Moscow), no. 1 (1919) see SS1, pp. 137–41. Malevich, “Os’ tsveta i ob”ema,” SS1, p. 141. Strigalev and Kharten, Vladimir Tatlin. Retrospektiva, p. 250. V. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” in Pis’ma, Poeticheskie opyty, Zapiski khudozhnitsy (Moscow: Sfera, 1994), p. 60. Khodasevich, Portrety slovami, p. 125. A. Benois, “Posledniaia futuristskaia vystavka kartin,” Rech’ (Petrograd), January 9, 1916, p. 3. An article has been devoted to Benois’s assessment of Malevich’s art: J. Sharp, “Malevich, Benua i kriticheskoe vospriiatie vystavki ‘0,10,’” in Velikaia utopiia: Russkii i sovetskii avangard 1915–1932, catalog (Bern-Moscow: Bentelli, Galart, 1993), pp. 41–54. On the origin of this tradition, see A. Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian AvantGarde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition (Burlington: Lund Humphries, 2008), pp. 142–45.

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23. See A. Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art 1917–1922 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 184–224. 24. A copy of the catalog with Kliun’s notes was in the Khardzhiev collection; now in the FKhCh archive. 25. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” pp. 60–61. 26. Strigalev, “O Poslednei futuristicheskoi vystavke kartin ‘0,10 (Nol’-Desiat’),’” p. 19. 27. Obozrenie teatrov (Petrograd), December 17, 1915. 28. Both works are reproduced in H. Berninger and J.-A. Cartier, eds., Pougny (Iwan Puni): Catalogue de l’oeuvre, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Éditions Ernst Wasmuth, 1972), pp. 78, 80. 29. See above, note 7. 30. See the review, Amateur, “Besstyzhie . . . (Na vystavke futuristov),” Birzhevye vedomosti (Petrograd): March 4, 1915. 31. K. Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu (Moscow, 1916); see SS1, p. 50. 32. See above, note 7. 33. Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Petrograd to Sarykamysh, between December 20 and 22, 1915, in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 263. 34. Mikhail Ivanovich Menkov (1885–1926) was a painter, graphic artist, and photographer. In 1912, after graduating from the Dvinsk nonclassical secondary school, he entered the sculpture department of the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (MUZhVZ); in 1914 he left MUZhVZ and entered the military institute, where he stayed briefly. He was an active member of the Supremus society; with his wife, photographer and artist Tereza Solomonovna Levinson, he prepared the art materials for the Supremus journal. For more detail, see A. Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo “Supremus” (Moscow: Tri Kvadrata, 2009). 35. M. Menkov, Newspaper, 1915, oil on canvas, 71 × 71 cm, Ulianovsk Art Museum; M. Menkov, Symphony (Score), 1915, oil on canvas, 63 × 60.5 cm, Samara Art Museum. 36. Strigalev, “O Poslednei futuristicheskoi vystavke kartin ‘0,10 (Nol’-Desiat’),’” p. 20. 37. Ibid. 38. In Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, the compilers note in the “Chronicle of O. V. Rozanova’s Life and Art”: “On November 20 [1915] Rozanova went from Vladimir to Petrograd” (p. 313). The date contradicts Rozanova’s postcard to her sister, sent from Vladimir to Viazniki and published in the same edition; the postcard is dated by the compilers November 22, 1915, evidently based on the postmark. Here Rozanova reports: “I am going to Peter [Petersburg] in mid-December, since our exhibition is opening on December 17. [. . .] On November 24 we are going to Katia’s name-day party” (p. 247). 39. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” p. 61. 40. See note 33. 41. Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Petrograd to Sarykamysh, early January 1916, in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 263. 42. Ibid.

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293

NOTES

43. Strigalev, “O Poslednei futuristicheskoi vystavke kartin ‘0,10 (Nol’-Desiat’),’” p. 20. 44. Ibid. 45. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” p. 61. 46. See “Katalog proizvedenii O. V. Rozanovoi,” in N. Gur’ianova, Ol’ga Rozanova i rannii russkii avangard (Moscow: Gileia, 2002). In her preface to the catalog— the first relatively complete catalog of Rozanova’s works—N. Gurianova specifically stipulates that in it “information is also given about some of the artist’s most important works [. . .] that did not survive (location unknown), but documentary information about them was found in the archives” (p. 264). However, in the section “Reliefs” (p. 284), Gurianova lists a total of four reliefs by the artist, of which two are the collage-object ones exhibited at the “Exhibition of Left-Wing Trends 1915” and two are the Suprematist ones from “0.10.” With respect to the latter two, the location of their sketches is indicated, that is, the drawings on the page from the letter to Kruchenykh we have analyzed, which is now held in Saloniki. Gurianova ignored the other two sketches on the same page, which are directly related to the two other Suprematist reliefs exhibited at “0.10.” The verso and recto sides of this page with Rozanova’s four sketches were reproduced for the first time in Angelica Zander Rudenstine, ed., Russian Avant-Garde Art: The George Costakis Collection (New York: Harry N. Abrams, [1981]), nos. 1036, 1038. 47. See above, note 7. 48. In Rozanova’s caption the word kvadrat (square) was added later; because it is different in tonal resonance, I decided to put the word in parentheses. 49. Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Petrograd to Sarykamysh, early January 1916, in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 263. 50. Some scholars (see ibid., p. 264) incorrectly refer this plan to the “Store” exhibition, where one of Tatlin’s advisors was in fact Udaltsova, and say it was they who decided whom to allow to exhibit which works. 51. Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Vladimir to Sarykamysh, before mid-July 1916, ibid., p. 264. 52. Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Vladimir to Sarykamysh, before August 25, 1916, ibid., p. 266. 53. N. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki: Dnevniki, stat’i, vospominaniia (Moscow: RA, 1994), p. 13. 54. Bloc of Left-wing Artists (list of members), typewritten on two pages, FKhCh. The identity of the last of the listed members of the “Store” society, N. P. Yasinsky, who lived at 49 Sredny Prospekt, apt. 32, Vasilievsky Island, could not be established, inasmuch as at that time there were several art figures with similar-sounding names but different initials. None of them was a radical artist. Naum Petrovich Yasinovsky (1868–1938), a member of the Bloc of Left-Wing Artists, an academic sculptor, resided in those days at a different address; Aleksei Alekseevich Yasinsky (1874–1943) was a Muscovite realist painter; and Yeronim Yeronimovich Yasinsky (1850–1931) was a conservative critic. 55. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki, p. 13. 56. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” p. 61.

T O PA G E S 1 2 6 – 1 3 0 NOTES

57. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki, p. 106. 58. Malevich to Kruchenykh, from Moscow to Tiflis, March 24, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:78. 59. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki, p. 13. 60. V. N., “Tri vystavki,” Russkoe slovo, March 30, 1916 (April 12 New Style), p. 6. 61. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” p. 61. 62. “Pochemu my raskrashivaemsia: Manifest futuristov. Ocherk dlia ‘Argusa’ Mikhaila Larionova i Il’i Zdanevicha,” Argus (Moscow), no. 12 (1913): 114–16. See also E. Bobrinskaia, “Russkii futurizm,” in Futurizm: Radikal’naia revoliutsiia: Italiia—Rossiia. K 100-letiiu khudozhestvennogo dvizheniia, publication prepared for an exhibition at the A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (Moscow: Krasnaia Ploshchad’, 2008), pp. 148–54. 63. See note 58. The expression “Battle with the Kabardinians” was associated with the title of a popular folk woodcut based on a popular novel by N. I. Zriakhov, Bitva russkikh s kabardintsami, ili Prekrasnaia magometanka, umiraiushchaia na grobe svoego muzha (Battle between the Russians and Kabardinians, or the Beautiful Mohammedan woman dying on her husband’s grave) (1840). 64. A Legacy Regained: Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-Garde, ed. John E. Bowlt and Mark Konecny (St. Petersburg: Palace Edition, 2002), p. 131. In a conversation in summer 2005, Professor John Bowlt reported that the attribution of the drawing as a composition by Rozanova was made by N. Gurianova. 65. Rannee utro (Moscow), no. 70 (March 26, 1916): 4. 66. I. V. Kliun, Moi put’ v iskusstve: Vospominaniia, stat’i, dnevniki (Moscow: RA, 1999), p. 82. The “banner headline,” as Kliun calls the declaration, contained no trace of publicity for “our works”; these lines provide an additional example of that aberration of memory resulting from the slant toward self-assertion at Malevich’s expense that distinguish nearly all his comrade’s later reminiscences. 67. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” p. 61. 68. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, April 4, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:80. 69. See V. Klebnikov, “The Head of the Universe: Time and Space,” in Larissa Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910–1930 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), p. 321. 70. Malevich considered his year of birth to be 1878 (in fact, as has now been established through documents, he was born in 1879; see Malevich o sebe, 1:382). He was seven years older than Menkov, eight years older than Rozanova, and fourteen years older than Puni and Boguslavskaia. The only exception was Kliun, born in 1873. 71. In an article on the merchant-patron’s activities, Moscow art historian V. S. Turchin comments especially: “Evidently, the very concept of ‘youth’ (and it was written, at least by Zheverzheev, with a capital letter) meant not their actual age, since many of them were already well past their gymnasium years, but ‘art’s youth,’ which they were creating.” V. S. Turchin, “L. I. Zheverzheev i khudozhniki ‘Soiuza molodezhi,’” in Vol’demar Matvei i “Soiuz molodezhi”: Sb[ornik], ed. G. F. Kovalenko (Moscow: Nauka, 2005), p. 228.

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NOTES

72. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, February 1, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:76. 73. Plato, Republic, 598s; quoted from Plato, Sochineniia v trekh tomakh, vol. 3, pt. 1 (Moscow: Mysl’, 1971), p. 425. 74. See above, note 72. 75. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, April 12, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:81. 76. The points made in Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s essay, “The Coming Boor” (the title essay in a book published in St. Petersburg in 1906), which were dictated by his horror at the death of culture, were developed in the 1910s; for the writer the “coming Boor” was embodied in the collective image of the Futurist, and radical art as a whole was declared “another step of the coming Boor.” D. Merezhkovsky, “Eshche shag griadushchego Khama,” Russkoe slovo (Moscow), June 29, 1914. 77. See D. Sharp, “Malevich, Benua i kriticheskoe vospriiatie vystavki ‘0,10,’” in Velikaia utopiia, pp. 41–54. 78. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, April 25, 1915, RO IRLI, f. 656, op. 3, ed. khr. 31, l. 47. Published in Malevich o sebe, 1:82. 79. Malevich to Alexandre Benois, from Moscow to Petrograd, May 1916, in Kazimir Malevich v Russkom muzee (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000), p. 393. This letter was not published until 1968, and then only in English translation: K. S. Malevich: Essays on Art, vol. 1, 1915–1928, ed. Troels Andersen (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968), pp. 42–48. It was published in full in Russian for the first time in the work cited here. 80. The Central State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg holds the papers of the Kiev Handicraft Society, which show that embroiderers in the craft workshops earned from three to twelve rubles a month; see B. M. Biliashievsky and Iu. P. Lashchuk, “Kiivske kustarne tovarystvo,” in Narodna tvorchist’ ta etnografiia (Kiev), no. 4 (206) (July–August 1987): 40. For a single drawing N. M. Davydova paid artists beginning at twenty rubles, as N. A. Udaltsova attested in her diary (Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki, p. 29). A few of O. V. Rozanova’s designs retain annotations indicating their price (thirty and forty rubles). 81. Centrifuge was organized in 1914 in Moscow at the initiative of N. N. Aseev, S. P. Bobrov, and B. L. Pasternak. The publishing house was officially created on March 1, 1914. See Literaturnye ob’edineniia Moskvy i Peterburga 1890–1917 godov: Slovar’ (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2004), pp. 251–54. On Aksenov, see N. Adaskina, “Ivan Aleksandrovich Aksenov: Eskiz k portretu,” Iskusstvoznanie (Moscow), no. 2 (1998): 525–39. See also I. A. Aksenov, Iz tvorcheskogo naslediia, 2 vols., ed. N. L. Adaskina (Moscow: RA, 2008). 82. I. A. Aksenov to S. P. Bobrov, May 12, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 2:143. 83. Ibid. 84. Author’s conversation with Lev Yefimovich Davydov, grandson of Yu. L. Davydov, August 29, 2005, Klin-Moscow. 85. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” p. 64.

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Chapter 4. The Supremus Society 1. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, April 4, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:79. 2. Ibid., 1:74. Malevich’s term breaks the rules of Latin grammar: “my work” is opus meum, and “my works” is opera mea. 3. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, April 4, 1916, ibid., 1:79; Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow (Nemchinov post) to Petrograd, September 8, 1917, ibid., 1:106. 4. K. Malevich, “Suprematizm: Mir kak bespredmetnost’, ili Vechnyi pokoi,” in SS3, p. 219. 5. The treatises with fractions, with the exception of 1/40, were published by Troels Andersen in the four-volume English edition of Malevich’s works; see K. S. Malevich: Essays on Art, ed. Tr. Andersen, vol. 3 (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1978). The treatises were published in their original language in SS2 (1/45) and SS4 (1/40–1/42, 1/46–1/49). 6. The treatise was published in German translation in excerpted and adapted form as K. Malewitsch, Suprematismus—Die gegenstandslose Welt, ed. Hans von Riesen (Cologne: Verlag V. DuMont Schauberg, 1962), and published in full in the original language in SS3. For more detail about the fungible construction of his works, see A. Shatskikh, “Organika filosofskogo arkhitektona,” in SS4:7–23. 7. Many of the artist’s Suprematist drawings have markings, lowercase Latin letters with numbers, on the reverse, as a rule. The marks were made at Malevich’s instruction by his pupil, Anna Leporskaia. See Troels Andersen, K. S. Malevich: The Leporskaia Archive (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2011), pp. 5–16, 84–154. 8. Thus, Suprematist Construction of Color (1928–29, plywood, oil, 72 × 52 cm, GRM) has been erroneously given the title “Suprematism No. 67,” transferred from a drawing from the mid-1910s with a similar composition, in A. Nakov, Kazimir Malewicz, Catalogue raisonné (Paris: Adam Biro, 2002), S-230, S-231. 9. See note 8. In the Russian Museum, the title “Suprematist Construction of Color” was given strictly on the basis of the authorial inscription on the picture’s reverse. The composition of this work is distantly similar to the composition of the drawing under which the caption “Supremus No. 67” and “white forms intro[duced] as counter color” appears. The drawing is in an album of Malevich’s drawings and sketches now kept at FKhCh, reproduced in Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935: Drawings from the Collection of the Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation, SMA Cahiers 9 (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1997), p. 106. 10. Kazimir Malevich v Russkom muzee(St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000), p. 325, nos. 17–19. 11. See SS2:109–10. 12. Supremus No. 50, 1915–16, oil on canvas, 97 × 66 cm, SMA; Supremus No. 55, 1917, oil on canvas, 80 × 80 cm, F. A. Kovalenko Regional Art Museum, Krasnodar; Supremus No. 56, 1916, oil on canvas, 80.5 × 71 cm, GRM; Supremus No. 57, 1916, oil on canvas, 80.2 × 80.3 cm, Tate Gallery, London; Supremus No. 58 (Yellow and Black), 1916, oil on canvas, 79.5 × 70.5 cm, GRM. The discrepancy between

296

19.

20. 21.

297

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

NOTES

13.

the pictures’ dating and their numerical sequence (No. 55 is dated 1917, whereas Nos. 57–58 are dated 1916) is a problem in need of further investigation. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, April 4, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:79–80. The letter is a miniature album of drawings. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Supremus No. 50 has a clear vertical orientation; its horizontal placement in the exhibition organized at a Warsaw hotel in March 1927 and known from a photograph was due to a shortage of space. The work was hung above a door, a unique dessus-de-porte. Malevich did not take part in the actual mounting of this exhibition. The picture was oriented vertically when the artist hung it at the “Great Berlin Art Exhibition” of May 1927. All the rectangular pictures were oriented vertically when the artist hung them, inasmuch as the other position created a visual pull to the horizon, that is, “weight.” In Suprematism, weightlessness and freedom from enslavement by the horizon were fundamental and plastic, as well as ideological, aims. An oval with “little holes” bordered with a contrasting stripe along the bottom edge was one of the important elements of the first Suprematist composition, Suprematism (oil on canvas, 805 × 81 cm, GRM); here, however, this plastic element had a completely different nature, as was shown above. We see the oval, albeit very rarely, in a few of Malevich’s drawings, his laboratory. See “The Crystallization of Nonobjectivity,” above, Chapter 1, p. 39. The drawing with the nonauthorial title “Supremus No. 58 (Yellow and Black)” (10.6 × 15.5 cm, FKhCh) was in Khardzhiev’s former collection; reproduced in Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935: Drawings from the Collection of the Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation, no. 39. In this catalog, the drawing is published as a sketch for Supremus No. 58 from the Russian Museum, whereas the sequence of creation was more than likely the reverse and the drawing appeared after the painting. It was sent to Germany, along with others, in about 1924, for placement as an illustration for a proposed collection of Malevich’s essays on which El Lissitzky (1890–1941) was working; prizing Malevich’s originals, Lissitzky copied his teacher’s drawings to give to the printer. In 1969, El Lissitzsky’s copy was presented as an original Malevich drawing at the “Aspects de l’Avant-garde Russe 1905–1925” exhibition, Galerie Jean Chauvelin, Paris, April 25–May 25, 1969, catalog no. 50, ill. The drawings reproduced in the catalog evoked harsh and just criticism from Khardzhiev: “These kinds of exhibitions can only damage the artist’s reputation. A small number of drawings, described quite inaccurately in the catalog, were exhibited. The only drawing whose location was indicated (Musée d’Art Moderne) is, unfortunately, not the original but a traced copy by El Lissitzky, who proposed including the drawing in a collection of Malevich’s articles (in German translation)” (N. I. Khardzhiev, Stat’i ob avangarde, 2 vols. [Moscow: RA, 1997], 1:101). Khardzhiev was relying on accurate information: he had the original drawing among Malevich’s manuscripts and works, which he had obtained as necessary materials for a book about El Lissitzsky in the first half of the 1960s from El Lissitzky’s widow,

T O PA G E S 1 4 5 – 1 5 7 NOTES

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

298

Sofia Kiuppers-Lisitskaia (1891–1978). Khardzhiev’s sudden, inexplicable, and irrevocable break with Kiuppers-Lisitskaia put an end to his work on the monograph and evidently prevented him from returning the materials he had obtained. Executed specially for the book’s publication by the Bauhaus publishing house and delivered by Malevich to Moholy-Nagy, the editor of the Bauhaus editions, the drawings are now held at the Kupferstichkabinett, Öffentliche Kunstsammlungen, Basel. SS2:114, ill. 77. K. Malevich, Suprematism, 1927, paper, pencil, 69.5 × 54 cm, SMA. M. V. Matiushin, “Tvorcheskii put’ khudozhnika,” typescript, p. 128, FKhCh archive. Malevich to Matiushin, from Smolensk to Petrograd, November 24, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:99. N. N. Punin, “Kvartira No. 5,” in Panorama iskusstv 12 (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1989), p. 183. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, early October 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:96. V. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” in Pis’ma, Poeticheskie opyty, Zapiski khudozhnitsy (Moscow: Sfera, 1994), p. 69. Ibid. A. R-v [A. Rostislavov], “Pis’mo iz Moskvy,” Apollon (Petrograd), no. 9–10 (1916): 84. See above, note 26. FKhCh archive. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, October 27, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:97. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, late November 1916, ibid., 1:100. Charlotte Douglas, “The Art of Pure Design: The Move to Abstraction in Russian and English Art and Textiles: A Meditation,” in Russia Engages the West, ed. Susan E. Reid and Rosalind P. Blakesley (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006). Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, late November 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:100. A. Efros, Kamernyi teatr i ego khudozhniki, 1914–1934 (Moscow: Vserossiiskoe Teatral’noe Obshchestvo, 1934), p. xxiv. SS5:134–39. SS1:151. N. I. Khardzhiev, ed., “Posledniaia glava neokonchennoi avtobiografii Malevicha,” Russian Literature 39, no. 3 (1996): 308. Ia. Tepin, “Moskovskie vystavki,” Apollon (Petrograd), no. 9–10 (November– December 1916): 89. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” p. 64. “Po vystavkam” (unsigned), Rannee utro (Moscow), no. 269 (December 8, 1917): 3.

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45. I. V. Kliun, Moi put’ v iskusstve: Vospominaniia, stat’i, dnevniki (Moscow: RA, 1999), p. 87. 46. Iu. A. Konstantinova (Tulovskaia), “Avangardnye opyty v tekstile 1920-kh godov: Rossiia i Zapad,” (diss., Moscow State University, 2005), p. 8. My sincere gratitude to the dissertation’s author for the opportunity to read the text. 47. Postcard from Popova to A. Vesnin, from Samarkand to Moscow, April 15, 1916. Quoted from a facsimile reproduction in D. Sarabianov and N. Adaskina, Liubov Popova (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), p. 105. In this monograph the postcard is erroneously dated 1915. 48. L. Popova, Painterly Architectonics: Black, Red, Gray, 1917, oil on canvas. 88.7 × 71 cm, GTG. In the Tretiakov Gallery, as well as in reproductions in numerous books and catalogs, the painting is dated 1916. 49. N. Adaskina, “Constructivist Fabrics and Dress Design,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Russian/Soviet 1875–1945 issue, ed. Pamela Johnson (summer 1987): 144, 146. 50. N. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki: Dnevniki, stat’i, vospominaniia (Moscow: RA, 1994), p. 30. 51. E. A. Bobrinskaia, Russkii avangard: Granitsy iskusstva (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006), p. 130. 52. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki, p. 29. 53. Ibid., p. 30. 54. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, December 8, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:101. 55. Malevich to Matiushin, from the front to Petrograd, January 1917, ibid. 56. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki, p. 35. 57. “Vokrug ‘Supremusa’ (1916–1918),” in SS5:33–88. 58. Rozanova to Shemshurin, both in Moscow, [February 16], 1917, in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 278. 59. N. Gur’ianova, Ol’ga Rozanova i rannii russkii avangard (Moscow: Gileia, 2002), p. 251. 60. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki, p. 35. 61. Ibid., p. 40. 62. In the name index, the compilers of the two-volume Malevich o sebe unfoundedly gave Yurkevich the name Nikolai, following erroneous information cited in the anthology Experiment/Eksperiment: A Journal of Russian Culture, no. 5: Iz arkhiva Nikolaia Ivanovicha Khardzhieva, khraniashchegosia v Kul’turnom fonde “Tsentr Khardzhieva-Chaga” pri Muzee Stedeliik v Amsterdame (1999): 92–93. 63. Iurkevich Mstislav Vladimirovich, personal file, RGALI, f. 680, op. 2, ed. khr. 2072. 64. See “Iz pis’ma O. V. Rozanovoi N. A. Udal’tsovoi,” in Gur’ianova, Ol’ga Rozanova i rannii russkii avangard, p. 262. 65. K. Malevich, “Gosudarstvennikam ot iskusstva,” Anarkhiia, no. 53 (May 4, 1918); see SS1:75. 66. Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 266. 67. Ibid., pp. 264–66.

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68. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, early October 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:96. 69. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” p. 64. 70. Rozanova to her sister A. V. Rozanova, from Moscow to Viazniki, before February 11, 1917, ibid., p. 248. In that volume the letter is wrongly dated by its publishers March 1917, a date contradicted in the letter itself. In it, Rozanova congratulates her sister on the upcoming Broad Shrovetide, which in 1917 began on Thursday, February 9, and culminated on Sunday, February 12, with the Orthodox Lent beginning on Monday, February 13. 71. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki, p. 13. 72. Rozanova to her sister A. V. Rozanova, from Moscow to Viazniki, before February 11, 1917, in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 248. 73. Ibid., p. 278. 74. Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Moscow to Tiflis, March 1917, ibid., p. 267. In this edition the letter is wrongly dated by its publishers February 1917. Rozanova began employment at the Union of Cities on February 13; in 1917 Easter fell on April 2, so the letter was written shortly before that, more than likely in the latter half (final third?) of March. 75. Malevich o sebe, 1:102. 76. Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 281. 77. Ibid., p. 279. 78. Experiment/Eksperiment, no. 5, pp. 84–104. Here, among works by the Supremus circle, articles were published that had gone into the journal’s first issue: “Cubism” (1918?) and “Theater [2] (1918?). Text preparation was done by I. Menshova; the proposed dates for the articles belong to her and the anthology’s compilers. 79. See “Vokrug ‘Supremusa’ (1916–1918),” in SS 5:33–89. 80. N. Gur’ianova, “‘Dom-laboratoriia’ ‘Supremusa’: K rekonstruktsii zhurnala,” Iskusstvoznanie (Moscow) 18, no. 2 (2001): 456–74. 81. Gur’ianova, “‘Dom-laboratoriia’ ‘Supremusa,’” p. 461. 82. In Terent’evskii sbornik vtoroi (Moscow: Gileia, 1998), T. Goriacheva’s publication “Istoria ‘Deklarazii slova kak takovogo’ po materialam perepiski A. Kruchenykh” (pp. 346–72) follows immediately after N. Gur’ianova, “Nevdannyi most, ili Teatr alogizma Alekseia Kruchenykh,” pp. 324–45. 83. V. Trenin and N. Khardzhiev, Application to publish Istoriia russkogo futurizma, 8-page typescript. The typescript is held at FKhCh. See V. Trenin and N. Khardzhiev, Application to publish Istoriia russkogo futurizma, ed. A. Parnis, in Vozvrashchenie avangarda: Materialy Mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii, posviashchennoi 100-letnemu iubileiu so dnia rozhdeniia N. I. Khardzhieva (Odessa, 2004) (Moscow and Odessa [forthcoming]). On Teodor Solomonovich Grits’s participation and role in the project, as well as the reasons for his name’s absence among the authors of the application, see the introduction and commentary by A. Parnis. 84. His brother Mechislav, who lived in Moscow, held onto quite a few pictures and manuscripts by Malevich. In the early 1920s the artist drew up a notarized proxy in the name of Mechislav Severinovich Malevich (1882–1962) to conduct business connected with his works. On one of the lists of Kasimir Malevich’s texts, there is

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a note in Khardzhiev’s handwriting saying that it was compiled by Mechislav Malevich (FKhCh archive). 85. I was told about the desk in Khardzhiev’s apartment piled high with materials from the El Lissitzky archive in conversations in fall 2000 with the poet Gennady Aigi (1934–2006), who enjoyed the friendly favor of the avant-garde’s historian during the preparation of his monograph. The monograph, which came out in 1967, contained just a translation of Khardzhiev’s old essay, “El Lisitskii—konstruktor knigi” (El Lissitzky—constructor of the book), which anticipated the publication he prepared of the text of Lissitsky’s Kniga s tochki zreniia zritel’nogo vospriiatiia— vizual’naia kniga (The book from the standpoint of visual perception, i.e. the visual book), in Iskusstvo knigi, no. 3, 1958–60 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1962), pp. 145–61, 163–68. See El Lissitzky: Maler, Architekt, Typograf, Fotograf. Erinnerungen, Briefe, Schriften, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1967), pp. 379–85. In the bibliographical notes of the two-volume edition published in Moscow in 1997, Khardzhiev’s reprinted pioneering article was dated by the compilers to 1957 (!), whereas in the early 1960s its appearance was a sensation. See N. I. Khardzhiev, Stat’i ob avangarde, 2 vols. (Moscow: RA, 1997), 1:235. 86. In her article, N. Gur’ianova notes, “This declaration was signed by the group’s participants” (see Gur’ianova, “‘Dom-laboratoriia’ ‘Supremusa,’” p. 463). This assertion is groundless. 87. SS5:40–53, 471–73. 88. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki, p. 30. 89. Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Moscow to Tiflis, July 1917, in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, pp. 267–68. 90. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, first half of April 1917. Quoted from a photocopy in a private archive. 91. Malevich to Matiushin, from the front to Petrograd, January 1917, in Malevich o sebe, 1:101. 92. Rozanova to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, [April] 1917, in Gur’ianova, Ol’ga Rozanova i rannii russkii avangard, p. 259. 93. On the back of the manuscript: “Responding to the old day . . . ” (first version). Manuscript, FKhCh archive. 94. Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Moscow to Tiflis, [circa May 20] 1917, in Gur’ianova, Ol’ga Rozanova i rannii russkii avangard, p. 240. Gurianova mistakenly dates this letter February–March 1917; however, the letter itself contains information that allows us to establish its correct date. Rozanova informs Kruchenykh of the address of the dacha where Malevich moved after May 3, 1917. In the letter she comments, “The letter was held up since I wanted to send it registered, and here we’ve had two holidays in a row.” The artist also spoke of these holidays in a postcard to her sister: “Maybe on May 21 I’ll come to Vladimir to visit mama, here there are going to be two holidays in a row.” She followed through on this plan. On May 21–22, 1917, she was in Vladimir with her sick mother (see below, “Aleksei Kruchenykh in Supremus”). Consequently, the letter, which was written before the holidays, that is, on about May 20, was delayed due to the above-mentioned two holidays on May 21 and 22.

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95. This name was erroneously interpreted as belonging to the artist N. I. Kostrov (1901–96) in Evgeniia Petrova, ed., A Legacy Regained: Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-Garde (St. Petersburg: Palace Edition, 2002), p. 242 n. 975. 96. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki, pp. 25–27. 97. Udaltsova’s note, enclosed with her materials for Supremus. Manuscript, FKhCh archive. 98. See Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 265, n. 45. 99. Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Vladimir to Sarykamysh, August 1916, ibid., p. 265. Presumably Rozanova wrote this unpreserved article, intending to time its publication to the opening of the “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition in November 1916. 100. See Gur’ianova, Ol’ga Rozanova i rannii russkii avangard, pp. 461, 462; ibid., p. 251. 101. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, late November 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:100. 102. On Kruchenykh’s dramaturgical plans, see Gur’ianova, “Nevdannyi most, ili Teatr alogizma Aleksei Kruchenykh,” pp. 324–45. The plays Nevdannyi most (Nevdanny bridge) and Voennaia opera (War opera) were in fact not finished; however, one cannot link Gly-Gly to them, as Gurianova does. Kruchenykh considered his future drama complete, as is evident from his journal entry of June 15, 1917: “The journal where my major play and all my friends are is coming out” (Malevich o sebe, 2:110). 103. Rozanova to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, May 23, 1917, in Gur’ianova, Ol’ga Rozanova i rannii russkii avangard, p. 259. This letter was erroneously dated June 23, 1917, in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 284. 104. See below, “Aleksei Kruchenykh in Supremus,” and note 217. 105. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, May 3, 1917, in Malevich o sebe, 1:102. 106. Ye. A. Drevina, telephone conversation with the author, January 3, 2006, Moscow. 107. In a similar manner, Malevich remarked on the particularly successful works of his followers in Vitebsk; in a private collection in Moscow there is a watercolor by K. A. Rozengolts (1870–1961) executed in Malevich’s class at the Vitebsk People’s Art School in 1920, with an analogous mark of “5+”; see A. Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art 1917–1922 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 133. 108. Some of Malevich’s aphorisms and sayings have been published; see K. Malevich, Zapisi i zametki raznykh let (1924–1927), in D. Sarab’ianov and A. Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich: Zhivopis’, Teoriia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1993), pp. 362–67; see SS5:383–416. 109. FKhCh archive. 110. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, late November 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:100. 111. K. Malevich, “Teatr,” manuscript, 1917, FKhCh archive. Published as “Teatr [2] (1918?),” in Experiment/Eksperiment, no. 5, pp. 100–104. The presumed dating was the work of the collection’s compilers. 112. “Chto bylo v fevrale 1917 goda i marte” and “Chto bylo v iiune, iiule 1917 goda” were published in SS5:72–73, 80–81.

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113. See Gur’ianova, “‘Dom-laboratoriia’ ‘Supremusa,’” p. 462. 114. In I. V. Kliun’s manuscript, “Pokhorony suprematista” (Funeral for a Suprematist) (now in the FKhCh archive), in Khardzhiev’s handwriting, added above the lines listing the individuals present at the artist’s funeral in Leningrad, is “and Khardzhiev.” However, Futurism’s historian did not go to Leningrad for Malevich’s funeral; he was only present at the ceremony at the Moscow crematorium. 115. See the history of “Usta Zemli i Khudozhnik” in Khardzhiev’s archive in K. Malevich, Poeziia (Moscow: Epifaniia, 2000), pp. 76–80, 162–63; republished in SS5:432–36, 574–75. 116. FKhCh archive, file no. 78. These words were taken from the headnote to the original inventory of the Khardzhiev collection in the FKhCh archive (the name of the inventory’s compiler is not indicated). 117. N. Khardzhiev, Pis’ma v Sigeisk, ed. Sergei Sigei (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Pegasus, 2006), p. 287. 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid., p. 295. 120. During work in the FKhCh archive in 1999, I familiarized myself with the drafts and author copies of Khardzhiev’s letters, who qualified Jangfeldt’s deed as nothing less than as the “theft of the century”; the Moscow collector from behind the Iron Curtain pleaded in vain with foreign Slavists for assistance in recovering the pictures. 121. See M. Drutt, “Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism,” in Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2003), p. 31 n. 30. The documents and materials concerning Jangfeldt’s conduct and Khardzhiev’s attempts to recover the pictures were published for the first time in a book by Dutch journalist Hella Rottenberg published in Amsterdam in 1999; see Hella Rottenberg, Meesters, marodeurs: De lotgevallen van de collectie-Chardzjiëv (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Jan Mets, 1999). Here Khardzhiev’s letter to Jangfeldt listing all four pictures and demanding their return is reproduced in facsimile. In 1978 one of the four canvases, Black Cross, was acquired by the Musée d’Art Contemporaine in Paris; the name of the middleman for the sale, as well as the amount paid, was kept in strictest secrecy, including from Khardzhiev. In 2004, after the scandal of the pictures’ illicit provenance broke in the Swedish press, Bengt Jangfeldt, attacked by journalists and colleagues, considered it his best act of defense to transfer one more as a gift to the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. All the more amazingly, the museum’s administration felt it could accept as a gift a work held with such dubious legitimacy by the Swedish Slavist. See N. Sipovskaia, “Chudesnoe obretenie, ili ‘Krazha veka,’” Antikvarnaia gazeta (Moscow), no. 3 (July–August 2004): 1–2. The fate of the two other Malevich canvases that ended up with Jangfeldt is unknown to this day. 122. K. Malevich, Glavy iz avtobiografii khudozhnika, in Khardzhiev, Stat’i ob avangarde, 1:120. As Khardzhiev attested, Malevich wrote memoir sketches at his request: “During one of our conversations I suggested to Malevich that he write his autobiography and reminiscences of the artistic groups of the pre-October decade (1907–17). [. . .] In late 1933 (soon after his first attacks of illness), Malevich gave

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123.

124.

125. 126.

127.

128.

129. 130.

131. 132.

304

me the typewritten text of his autobiography, as well as a draft manuscript of the chapters. [. . .] Malevich said he was instructing me to edit the entire text. And he immediately pointed out the places he felt were less successful and should be discarded” (ibid., pp. 108, 109). Without doubting Malevich’s sanctioning of editing for his manuscripts, it should be said that as an editor Khardzhiev made unjustifiably vigorous changes in the memoir sketches, cutting and contaminating the texts that came into his possession. K. Malevich, “Konotop,” manuscript, FKhCh archive. The manuscript was written without corrections on two large-format sheets of paper in pen and blue ink. The artist’s title is in the upper left-hand corner. It was not published. The text begins with the number 9: “9. Konotop, you might say, was the beginning of my ‘considerable artistic activity.’” We have to assume that this was the ninth section of a larger text. The sketch breaks off in mid-sentence. Some images and topics from this text were given in similar terms in other memoir sketches by Malevich. All following quotations in the text are taken from this manuscript without individual citation. Reported by Troels Andersen in a conversation with the author in August 2004 in Silkeborg; the Danish scholar was told about this occurrence in the 1960s by people close to Malevich. I. V. Kliun, “Kazimir Severinovich Malevich,” in Kliun, Moi put’ v iskusstve, p. 132. K. Malevich, “Sketch for a Portr[ait] of Roslavets: Song to Blue Clouds,” ca. 1907, paper, pencil, 11 × 12.3 cm, FKhCh. Reproduced for the first time in Kazimir Malevich. 1878–1935, no. 1. The reminiscences of Malevich’s sister, Viktoria Zaitseva (1895/96–1984), which are extremely unreliable with respect to the facts, state, “My mother bought N. A. [Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets] a violin, which he had so been dreaming of, and this was the beginning of his musical career.” To this statement, by way of commentary, the compilers have quoted what Roslavets said about the beginning of his interest in music, seemingly reinforcing Zaitseva’s highly dubious assertion. See V. S. Zaitseva, “Vospominaniia o brate,” in Malevich o sebe, 1:6 n. 15. This photograph was previously reproduced in mirror image, inasmuch as the original, now in RGALI, was once printed that way. The photograph is reproduced in its correct orientation in A. Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus (Moscow: Tri Kvadrata, 2009), p. 202. The score for Rêverie is held in RGALI, f. 2659 (Roslavets N. A.), op. 1, ed. khr. 1, 23 ll. N. A. Roslavets, Nebo i zemlia, cantata–mystery play for soloists, chorus, and symphonic orchestra, in three scenes, text based on Byron, 1912, piano, 60 pages, in RGALI, f. 2659 (Roslavets N. A.), op. 1, ed. khr. 49–50. V. Kamenskii, Ego-moia biografiia velikogo futurista (Moscow: Kitovras, 1918), p. 155. Money for Vasilisk Gnedov’s treatment was collected among Petersburg bohemia, who organized an evening and concert in the Stray Dog artists’ cellar; one of the initiators of the event, Benedikt Livshits, described it in his book; see B. Livshits, Polutoraglazyi strelets (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1984), pp. 518–20.

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133. Fragment of a letter from Roslavets to Kruchenykh, from Yalta to Petrograd, 1914, Manuscript Document Collection, V. V. Maiakovsky State Museum, inv. no. 92 279, l. 75. The letter is referring to Rykaiushchii Parnas (St. Petersburg, 1914) and the miscellany Moloko kobylits (Moscow [Kherson]: Lit. K˚ futuristov “Gileia,” 1914). Bukva kak takovaia was not published; we know only A. Kruchenykh’s manifesto by this title. 134. See L. Kazanskaia, “Khrabreishii boets za idealy molodogo russkogo iskusstva (Nikolai Kul’bin i Nikolai Roslavets),” in Russkii avangard i Brianshchina: Stat’i, Issledovaniia, Publikatsii, ed. M. Belodubrovsky (Briansk: Izdatel’stvo Brianskogo Gosudarstvennogo Pedagogicheskogo Universiteta, 1998), pp. 40–53. 135. N. Kul’bin, Svobodnaia muzyka: Primenenie novoi teorii khudozhestvennogo tvorchestva v muzyke (St. Petersburg: Voennaia tipografiia, 1909). See also the expanded version: N. Kul’bin, “Svobodnaia muzyka,” in Studiia impressionistov, book 1 (St. Petersburg: Izdanie N. I. Butkovskoi, 1910), pp. 15–26. 136. “Parallels in Octaves and Fifths,” a fragment of Schönberg’s Theory of Harmony, appeared for the first time in Russian in Kandinsky’s translation; see A. Shënberg [Schönberg], “Paralelli v oktavakh i kvintakh,” in Mezhdunarodnaia khudozhestvennaia vystavka: 2-oi Salon Izdebskogo, catalog (Odessa: n.p., 1910–11). (The exhibition opened in February 1911.) Note that the goal of Schönberg’s Theory of Harmony was to train future composers in systems of composition in the traditional tonal mode. An exhibition in Moscow and Vienna was devoted to the relationship between Schönberg and Kandinsky and was accompanied by a substantial catalog. See Arnol’d Shënberg—Vasilii Kandinskii: Dialog zhivopisi i muzyki. K 50-letiiu so dnia smerti Arnol’da Shënberga, State Tretiakov Gallery; Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna; Goethe German Cultural Center, Moscow, catalog (in Russian and German) (Moscow: Pinakoteka, 2001). 137. Ia. Bruk, “Arnol’d Shënberg v Rossii,” in Arnol’d Shënberg—Vasilii Kandinskii, pp. 45–54. 138. Sandra Belling’s story about her artistic relationship with Arnold Schönberg, which is part of her unpublished reminiscences, is quoted in full in Shatskikh, Vitebsk, pp. 276, 362. 139. “Nikolai Roslavets o sebe i svoem tvorchestve,” Sovremennaia muzyka (Moscow), no. 5 (November–December 1924): 136. 140. S. N. Vasilenko, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Sovetskii Kompozitor, 1979), p. 272. 141. Ie. Pol’diaeva and T. Starostina, “Zvukovye otkrytiia rannego russkogo avangarda,” in Russkaia muzyka i XX vek: Russkoe muzykal’noe iskusstvo v istorii khudozhestvennoi kul’tury XX veka, ed. M. Aranovskii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi Institut Iskusstvoznaniia, 1998), pp. 614–20 (the last section of chapter 17, devoted to the art of N. A. Roslavets, is by T. Starostina). 142. “Nikolai Roslavets o sebe i svoem tvorchestve,” p. 134. Emphasis in original. 143. N. Roslavets, “Lunnyi P’ero Arnol’da Shënberga,” K novym beregam, no. 3 (1923): 28–33; quoted from Belodubrovsky, Russkii avangard i Brianshchina, p. 109. 144. See above, note 143. In his essay, N. A. Roslavets refers to the author of the poems as the “French poet Albert Giraud.” 145. M. V. Matiushin, “Dnevnikovye zapisi, 1923–1924,” in Malevich o sebe, 2:125.

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146. K. S. Malevich to M. O. Gershenzon, in Terent’evskii sbornik vtoroi, pp. 263–72. 147. Kliun, “Kazimir Severinovich Malevich,” p. 131. 148. M. V. Matiushin, “O starom i Novom v Muzyke,” in Zhurnal “Supremus” No. 1: Rekonstruktsiia, in Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus. 149. D. Burliuk, “Otnyne ia otkazyvaius’ govorit’ durno dazhe o tvorchestve durakov,” in Vesennee kontragenstvo muz, ed. D. Burliuk and S. Vermel’ (Moscow: Izd. Studii D. Burliuka i Sam. Vermelia, 1915). 150. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, October 12, 1915, in Malevich o sebe, 1:70. 151. Leaflet distributed at “0.10” exhibition; see SS1:36. 152. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, October 19, 1915, in Malevich o sebe, 1:70–71. 153. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, November 1915, ibid., 1:73. 154. A. Lur’e, G. Iakulov, and B. Livshits, “My i Zapad,” in Gramoty i deklaratsii russkikh futuristov (St. Petersburg: “Svirel’ga”, 1914). On the art of Lurie the avantgardist, see T. Levaia, Russkaia muzyka nachala XX veka v khudozhestvennom kontekste epokhi (Moscow: Muzyka, 1991), pp. 149–52, and index entries; Pol’diaeva and Starostina, Zvukovye otkrytiia rannego russkogo avangarda, pp. 602–5, and index entries. 155. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, April 12, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:81. 156. Pol’diaeva and Starostina, Zvukovye otkrytiia rannego russkogo avangarda, p. 594. 157. Levaia, Russkaia muzyka nachala XX veka v khudozhestvennom kontekste epokhi, pp. 147–48, citing I. Allende-Blin, “Sieg über die Sonne,” in Aleksandr Skrjabin und die Skrjabinisten, vol. 2. Musik-Konzepte 38 (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1984). 158. Malevich to Kruchenykh, from Moscow to Tiflis, March 24, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:77. 159. See above, note 155. 160. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, February 14, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:76–77. All following quotations in the main text are taken from this letter without individual citation. 161. See N. Roslavets, Pervaia sonata dlia fortepiano. Vtoraia sonata dlia fortepiano, introd. Iu. N. Kholopov (Moscow: Muzyka, 1990). 162. These views of a “critic from the journal Muzyka N. M.”—Miaskovsky—are quoted from L. [Leonid Sabaneev], “N. A. Roslavets,” Sovremennaia muzyka (Moscow) (March 1924): 33–34. 163. See above, note 160. 164. See above, note 155. 165. See above, note 155. 166. Malevich to Dutch artists, from Vitebsk, September 7, 1921, in Malevich o sebe, 1:145. 167. Malevich to Matiushin, from Smolensk to Petrograd, November 24, 1916, ibid., 1:99. 168. Roslavets offered to deliver his lecture of “rebuff” in Moscow in February 1917 (RGALI, f. 2432, op. 1, ed. khr. 266, l. 69).

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169. Nik. Roslavets, “O ‘bespredmetnom’ iskusstve’, Zhurnal ‘Supremus’ No. 1: Rekonstruktsiia,” in Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus. 170. Malevich to Matiushin, from the front to Petrograd, November 6, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:97–98. 171. L. Sabaneev, “Russkie kompozitory: Nikolai Roslavets,” Parizhskii vestnik (March 1926): 31; quoted from Nikolai Roslavets, Izbrannye kamernye sochineniia, introd. M. N. Lobanova (Moscow: Muzyka, 1991), p. 4. 172. See Evg. Braudo, “Organizator zvukov N. A. Roslavets,” Vestnik rabotnikov iskusstv (Moscow), no. 2 (1925): 14. 173. Gur’ianova, “‘Dom-laboratoriia’ ‘Supremusa,’” pp. 467–68. 174. See statement by N. A. Roslavets, January 3, 1921, RGALI, f. 2659, op. 1, ed. khr. 94, l. 1. 175. On N. A. Roslavets’s public activities and positions, see also A. V. Krusanov, Russkii avangard 1907–1932: Istoricheskii obzor, vol. 2, Futuristicheskaia revoliutsiia 1917–1921, book 1 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003), p. 648. 176. K. Malevich, “Otklik na stat’iu L. Sabaneeva ‘Sovremennaia muzyka,’” in SS5:290–99, 540–42. 177. See “O prazdnovanii 20-letiia revoliutsii 1905 goda,” in Bronenosets ‘Potemkin,’” ed. N. I. Kleiman and K. B. Levina, Shedevry sovetskogo kino (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1969), p. 24. See also K. Malevich, “Proekty oformleniia prem’ery fil’ma ‘1905 god’ S. Eizenshteina,” in SS5:306, 543–45. 178. This information was provided by the historians Ia. V. Leont’ev and A. I. Kolpakidi, specialists in political associations of the early twentieth century, to whom I offer my deep gratitude. 179. See M. V. Babenko, “Moi vospominaniia o muzhe—N. A. Roslavtse: Zapisany Iu. S. Glazunovoi,” RGALI, f. 2659, op. 1, ed. khr. 99a. Filippova changed her name to Babenko following a second marriage. 180. N. Roslavets, song cycle Plameneiushchii krug (pesni proshlogo), to the words of F. Sollogub (Moscow, 1929). The original of the letter is held in the archive of the M. I. Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture, f. 373 (N. Roslavets), ed. khr. 11. 181. RGALI, f. 2659, op. 1, ed. khr. 94, l. 6. 182. Postcard from Nat. A. Roslavets to Nik. A. Roslavets, August 20, 1931, RGALI, f. 2659, op. 1, ed. khr.15. 183. D. Gojowy, Neue sowjetische Musik der 20er Jahre (Regensburg: Laaber, 1980); Aleksandr Skrjabin und die Skrjabinisten, vol. 2. 184. The first articles about N. Roslavets’s art, appeared in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s: M. Lobanova, “Tvorchestvo i sud’ba,” Sovetskaia muzyka, no. 5 (1989): 96–103; M. Belodubrovsky, “Nash Zemliak,” ibid., pp. 104–9. 185. “Ligeti (Ligeti) D’ërd’,” in Muzykal’nyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, ed. G. V. Keldysh (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1991), p. 304. 186. G. I. Suponeva, Problemy notatsii v muzyke XX veka (Moscow: Rossiiskaia Akademiia Muzyki im. Gnesinykh, 1993), pp. 58–63; N. K. Drozdetskaia, Dzhon Keidzh: Tvorcheskii protsess kak ekologiia zhizni (Moscow: Rossiiskaia Akademiia Muzyki im. Gnesinykh, 1993), pp. 85–94. Both studies were published in the same volume.

T O PA G E S 2 1 6 – 2 1 9 NOTES

187. K. Malevich, “V prirode sushchestvuet ob”em i tsvet . . .” in Malevich, Poeziia, p. 93. 188. A. Hansen-Löve, “Kazimir Malevich mezhdu Kruchenykh i Khlebnikovym,” Russian Literature 55, nos. 1, 2, 3 (2004): 229–58. 189. Kruchenykh, Nash vykhod (Moscow: RA, 1996), pp. 31–56 (chapters “Detstvo i iunost’ budetlian,” “Znakomstvo s Burliukami, Maiakovskim i Khlebnikovym. Pervye vystupleniia”). See also A. Kruchenykh, “Kak my perestali byt’ khudozhnikami,” in “Pamiat’ teper’ mnogoe razvorachivaet . . . ”: Iz literaturnogo naslediia Kruchenykh, ed. N. Gur’ianova, Modern Russian Literature and Culture, vol. 41 (Oakland: Berkeley Slavic Specialities, 1999), pp. 346–47. 190. The list of these works is extensive; we will cite the most important among them: V. Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Ch. Douglas, “Views from the New World. A. Kruchenykh and K. Malevich: Theory and Painting,” Russian Literature Triquarterly, no. 12 (spring 1975): 353–70; N. I. Khardzhiev, “Poeziia i zhivopis’ (Rannii Maiakovskii),” in K istorii russkogo avangarda, pp. 8–84; G. Erbslöh, “Pobeda nad solncem” (Ein futuristisches Drama von A. Krucˇenych) (Munich, 1976); G. Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); A. Flaker, Glossarium der russischen Avantgarde (Graz: Droschl, 1989), pp. 76–93; J. Bowlt, “Kazimir Malevich and the Energy of Language,” in Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935, catalog (Los Angeles: The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 1991), pp. 179–86; R. Crone and D. Moos, Kazimir Malevich: The Climax of Disclosure (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), pp. 83–110; N. Gur’ianova, “Aleksei Kruchenykh i Ol’ga Rozanova: O vzaimovliianii poezii i zhivopisi v russkom avangarde,” Europa Orientalis 11, no. 1 (1992): 48–108; T. M. Goriacheva, “Istoriia ‘Deklaratsii slova kak takovogo’ po materialam perepiski A. Kruchenykh,” in Terent’evskii sbornik vtoroi, pp. 346–72; V. Poliakov, Knigi russkogo kubofuturizma (Moscow: Gileia, 1998), pp. 220–27; T. Goriacheva, “K poniatiiu ekonomii tvorchestva,” in Russkii avangard 1910– 1920-kh godov v evropeiskom kontekste (Moscow: Nauka, 2000), pp. 263–74; A. Shatskikh, “Kazimir Malevich i poeziia,” in Malevich, Poeziia, pp. 9–61; Hansen-Löve, “Kazimir Malevich mezhdu Kruchenykh i Khlebnikovym,” pp. 229– 58; Hansen-Löve, “Malevicˇ zwischen Krucˇ enych und Chlebnikov,” in Kazimir Malevicˇ: Gott ist nicht gestürzt! Schriften zu Kunst, Kirche, Fabrik, ed. Aage A. Hansen-Löve (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2004), pp. 266–72. 191. Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Petrograd to Batalpashinsk, early January 1916, in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, pp. 263–64. 192. The location of both pictures by Malevich, redrawn by Rozanova, is now unknown; Lady with Automobile bore the artist’s title, “Automobile and Lady.” 193. R. Jakobson, “Vospominaniia,” in Malevich o sebe, 2:127. 194. See N. Gur’ianova, “Tsvetnaia klei,” Tvorchestvo, no. 5 (1989): 28–31; Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 20; Poliakov, Knigi russkogo kubofuturizma, pp. 223–27. For a summary of opinions on the authorship of the collages in Universal War: Yat’, see Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 20 n. 69. 195. Vas. Kamensky, A. Kruchenykh, and K. Zdanevich, 1918 (Tiflis, 1917).

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309

NOTES

196. Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Melenki, second half of July 1916, FKhCh, in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, pp. 260–61, where it is erroneously dated summer 1915. See also note 208. 197. See Vystavka kartin i risunkov moskovskikh futuristov: Redaktsiia zhurnala “ARS,” catalog (Tiflis, 1918). 198. For the first version of this collage, see A. Kruchenykh, Vselenskaia voina: Yat’. Tsvetnaia klei (Petrograd: Svet, 1916), copy from the collection of Judith Rothschild, now in MOMA, reproduced in Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye, eds., The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910–1934, catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), p. 105, ill. “k.” For the second version, see Kruchenykh, Vselenskaia voina, copy from the Maiakovsky Museum; reproduced in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 169. The differences in the various copies of the handmade album are noted in Poliakov, Knigi russkogo kubofuturizma, pp. 287–88. 199. Kruchenykh to Shemshurin, from Sarykamysh to Moscow, July 16, 1916, OR RGB, f. 339, op. 4, ed. khr. 2, l. 32. 200. Shemshurin to Kruchenykh, from Moscow to Sarykamysh, July 4, 1916, FKhCh archive. 201. Malevich to Gershenzon, from Vitebsk to Moscow, November 7, 1919, in SS3:328. 202. This sentence, inserted by Kruchenykh in Nosoboika, delighted Rozanova, who did not know of Malevich’s authorship: “And like the flick of a whip in the air simultaneously gay and offensive, but most of all sporting. Officials need the lines and so on” (Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Moscow to Sarykamysh, July 1917, in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 267). 203. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, between June 4 and 23, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:89. Malevich painstakingly honed the points of this lettertreatise, inasmuch as we have his draft; I was able to view a photocopy from a private archive. 204. Ibid. 205. RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 2, ll. 64, 65, 66. 206. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Sarykamysh, July 5, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:93, commentary by A. E. Parnis. 207. See commentary by A. E. Parnis in Malevich o sebe, 1:91. 208. Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Melenki to Sarykamysh, second half of July 1916, in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, pp. 260–61 (with the erroneous date “summer 1915”). In the FKhCh archive, the letter is dated by N. I. Khardzhiev as 1915; this dating was trusted by Lefanta chiol’s compilers. In publishing this letter, N. Gurianova rightly noted, “N. I. Khardzhiev dated this letter 1915. We suggest 1916, inasmuch as Kruchenykh sent the images of visual poetry discussed in the letter to Shemshurin in 1916” (Gur’ianova, Ol’ga Rozanova i rannii russkii avangard, p. 236). The mailing of “images of visual poetry” to Shemshurin in a registered letter sent not before August 5 and not after August 10, 1916 (see note 210) provides grounds for an even more precise dating of the Rozanova letter. It was written in the second half of July 1916, about which see more in the text. 209. Kruchenykh had earlier sent Shemshurin a small stack of paper where the following lines were letter-stamped in violet ink: “NA IAG BLEMAVAI / BLIAM

T O PA G E S 2 2 4 – 2 2 8 NOTES

210.

211. 212. 213. 214.

215. 216. 217.

310

MABARGAN ZH / t’BUZH” (Kruchenykh to Shemshurin, from Sarykamysh to Moscow, first half of 1916, RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 2, l. 65). To this day a more precise date cannot be ascribed to this letter. A letter with the same verse was sent by Rozanova; on a page written in her handwriting Kruchenykh’s verse is placed in a divided-off lower section and looks like this: “blemavai naiag / bliam mabaragan / zh / t’buzh,” and then comes a broken blue-green line around which “revolve” four letters (f, o, s, n); below on the left under the drawing the letter U in a rectangular frame (RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 2, l. 39). Kruchenykh to Shemshurin, from Sarykamysh to Moscow, between August 5 and 10, 1916, OR GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 2, ll. 38, 38ob. The letter is written in pencil on a large sheet of writing paper. The basis for the dating is an apology for a previous letter (“forgive me for my clumsy letter [the previous one]”), in which Kruchenykh tells despairingly of his huge gambling debt and asks Shemshurin for financial assistance; Shemshurin noted on the reverse of the request, in pencil, the date of receipt, August 7, 1916. Careful Shemshurin almost always noted the date of arrival of letters from Kruchenykh on their backs or margins; judging from the postmarks on the envelopes, ordinary letters in those days took about five days from the Caucasus and registered ones about three. More than likely, the registered letter with the request for money was written by Kruchenykh on August 3–4: the deadline for repaying his gambling debt was approaching. The next letter—with the apology for the previous one and the redrawings by Rozanova—could not have been sent before August 5; the upper limit—around August 10—is because in the letter Kruchenykh adds in green pencil: “conscription, it seems, will be on August 15 (15–17–20, maybe), that’s what the newspapers are writing, and when it becomes clear I’ll let you know.” Rozanova’s redrawings, which Kruchenykh never asked to get back, remained with Shemshurin and are now kept in his archive: RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 2, ll. 36, 39. Kruchenykh to Shemshurin, from Sarykamysh to Moscow, received August 29, 1916, RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 2, l. 49 rev. Kruchenykh to Shemshurin, from Sarykamysh to Moscow, August 1916, RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 2, l. 26. Malevich o sebe, 1:93. Kruchenykh to Shemshurin, from Tiflis to Moscow, January 17, 1917, OR GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 3, l. 2. The question Kruchenykh addressed to his patron speaks yet again to the fact that Olga Rozanova was very loosely connected to Supremus in early 1917; otherwise she would have informed her friend about the project’s progress. Malevich to Matiushin, from the front to Petrograd, January 1917, in Malevich o sebe, 1:101. See K. S. Malevich, “V. Khlebnikov,” ed. A. E. Parnis, Tvorchestvo (Moscow) 415, no. 7 (1991): 4–5, republished in SS5:202–5, 523–24. “Iz pis’ma O. V. Rozanovoi N. A. Udal’tsovoi. 1917,” in Gur’ianova, Ol’ga Rozanova i rannii russkii avangard, p. 262. Note to the letter: “Published according to the original.” On the precise dating and circumstances of this letter’s appearance, see below in the text.

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NOTES

218. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki, p. 113. 219. RO GPB, f. 339, karton 5, ed. khr. 14, l. 38. This letter from Rozanova to Shemshurin was erroneously dated May 6, 1917, by N. Gurianova; see Gur’ianova, Ol’ga Rozanova i rannii russkii avangard, p. 255. 220. RO GPB, f. 339, karton 5, ed. khr. 14, l. 35. 221. Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 248. 222. Kruchenykh to Shemshurin, from Sarykamysh to Moscow, received April 12, 1916, RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 2, l. 12. 223. Kruchenykh to Shemshurin, from Sarykamysh to Moscow, received November 12, 1916, RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 2, l. 61. 224. See R. Tsigler, “Poetika A. E. Kruchenykh pory ‘41˚’: Uroven’ zvuka,” in L’avanguardia a Tiflis, ed. Luigi Margarotto, Marzio Marzaduri, and Giovanna Pagani Cesa (Venice: Università degli Studi di Venezia, 1982), p. 239. Azef Evno Fishelevich (1869–1918) was one of the founders of the SR party (Social Revolutionaries), a secret informant in the police department, and a provocateur. 225. Kruchenykh to Matiushin, from Sarykamysh to Petrograd, December 1916, Ezhegodnik (1974): 175. 226. Kruchenykh to Matiushin, from Sarykamysh to Petrograd, January 1917, Ezhegodnik (1974): 176. Emphasis in the original letter. 227. Fragment of a letter from Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, second half of April 1917. Quoted from a photocopy from a private archive. 228. Kruchenykh to Shemshurin, from Tiflis to Moscow, received July 2, 1917, RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 3, l. 31. 229. Rozanova to Shemshurin, both in Moscow, July 9, 1917, in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 280. 230. Kruchenykh to Shemshurin, from Tiflis to Moscow, July 16, 1917, RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 3, l. 32. 231. A. Kruchenykh, “Azef-Iuda-Khlebnikov,” in 41˚ (Tiflis), July 14–20, 1919; A. Kruchenykh, “Azef-Iuda-Khlebnikov,” in idem, Milliork (Tiflis: 41˚, 1919): 19–32. 232. An extended fragment from the play was published in A. Kruchenykh, Ozhirenie roz: O stikhakh Terent’eva i drugikh (Tiflis, 1918), pp. 26–30. The fragment, with the participation of a character by the name of “Malevich,” was commented on by A. Parnis upon its republication in Malevich o sebe, 2:110. Parnis traces the play’s title Gly-Gly to the expression “Standing on the lump [glybe] of ‘we’ amid a sea of whistling and indignation” (the fourth thesis of the manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, [Moscow, 1912]), as well as to Kruchenykh’s neologism “glamgly.” 233. Kruchenykh to Shemshurin, from Tiflis to Moscow, received March 6, 1917, RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 3, l. 4 rev. 234. Kruchenykh to Shemshurin, from Tiflis to Moscow, writer’s date April 2, 1917, RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 3, l. 5. 235. Kruchenykh to Shemshurin, from Tiflis to Moscow, received April 10, 1917, RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 3, l. 6. 236. Identified by A. Parnis; see Malevich o sebe, 2:110. 237. Rozanova to Shemshurin, both in Moscow, May 26, 1917, in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 280.

T O PA G E S 2 3 3 – 2 3 9 NOTES

238. Malevich o sebe, 2:110. 239. Kruchenykh, Ozhirenie roz, p. 12. In his commentaries on the Malevich sentence, A. Parnis rightly isolates its “alimentary” subtext: “The impetus for the creation of this ironic rejoinder may have been a culinary dish—the omelet.” The name of the Prince of Denmark, an actual historical person, in fact does sound like “Omelet”; the sound of the name, odd to the Russian ear, was emphasized by the Danish art historian Troels Andersen in telling the author of this book about Elsinore, the castle of “Prince Omelet,” in August 2004, in Aarhus, Denmark. 240. Ibid., pp. 12–13. Rozanova’s speech, like Malevich’s rejoinders, is taken from a letter with verse she sent to Kruchenykh. 241. V. F. Stepanova, “Iz dnevnika. Zapisi o podgotovke i provedenii X i XIX Gosudarstvennykh vystavok,” in Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, “Budushchee—edinstvennaia nasha tsel’ . . . ”, catalog (Munich: Prestel, 1991), p. 125. 242. Kruchenykh to Shemshurin, from Sarykamysh to Moscow, April 25, 1916, RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 2, l. 15. 243. G. Janecek, “Kruchenykh contra Gutenberg,” in Lowell and Wye, The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910–1934, pp. 41–47. The article points out in particular that Kruchenykh’s art included a challenge that refuted the famous—at that time as yet unborn—concept of Walter Benjamin, who wrote his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in 1936. 244. Rozanova to Kruchenykh, from Moscow to Tiflis, late winter–early spring 1917, in Rozanova, Lefanta chiol, p. 266 (dated “winter 1917”). Emphasis in original. 245. Malevich o sebe, 2:110 (published and with commentary by A. Parnis). 246. See commentary by A. E. Parnis in Malevich o sebe, 1:93. 247. RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 3, l. 6. 248. Kruchenykh to Shemshurin, from Tiflis to Moscow, received July 11, 1917, RO GPB, f. 339, karton 4, ed. khr. 3, l. 27. 249. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, between June 4 and 23, 1916, in Malevich o sebe, 1:88. 250. See Gur’ianova, Ol’ga Rozanova i rannii russkii avangard, p. 96. 251. Goriacheva, “Istoriia ‘Deklaratsii slova kak takovogo’ po materialam perepiski A. Kruchenykh,” pp. 346–72. 252. Ibid., pp. 350–51. 253. Kruchenykh informed Shemshurin about the receipt of this collection in a letter dated April 2, 1917 (see note 234). 254. Goriacheva, “Istoriia ‘Deklaratsii slova kak takovogo’ po materialam perepiski A. Kruchenykh,” pp. 350–51. 255. T. Goriacheva assumed that the text of “Declaration [. . .]” sent to Matiushin with the suggestion of “exclaiming” somewhere in print was sent on by latter to Supremus; however, this declaration is now held in the GTG archive along with other materials that came from M. V. Matiushin himself. 256. On the activities of the Nothingist group and their proto-Dadaist platform, see “Dada Global. Rostovskii aktsent. I chast’—antikvarnaia. Nichevoki,” in Supremus: Gazeta, publisher A. A. Shumov (Moscow-Zurich), no. 3 (1991): 4–5; A. V. Krusanov, “Na puti k nichego,” Rodnik (Riga), no. 4 (1992): 22–29; A. T. Niki-

312

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NOTES

taev, “Nichevoki: Materialy k istorii i bibliografii,” De Visu, 0’92: 59–64; A. V. Krusanov, “Nichevoki,” in A. V. Krusanov, Russkii avangard, 2/1:395–405. 257. T. Goriacheva, “K poniatiiu ekonomii tvorchestva,” in Russkii avangard 1910– 1920-kh godov v evropeiskom kontekste, pp. 263–74. 258. S. A. Vengerov, preface, in Pushkinist (Petrograd) 3 (1918): v, quoted from Krusanov, Russkii avangard, 2/1:290. 259. See SS5:82–86. Malevich’s project was also called “First Moscow People’s Academy of Arts” (see below in text) and “Dom sovremennogo iskusstva” (see SS5:97–98). 260. Malevich to Matiushin, from Moscow to Petrograd, September 8, 1917, in Malevich o sebe, 1:106. 261. Petrograd’s Bloc of Left-wing Artists consisted of artists residing in the northern capital; on the list of bloc members, only one, Tatlin, had a Moscow address, so we must assume that the Petrograd association did not include Muscovite artists, inasmuch as Rodchenko, Tatlin’s loyal colleague, who debuted at “Store,” logically should have been in the society of the same name. 262. “Bubnovyi valet,” Vechernie novosti (Moscow), no. 172 (October 19, 1917): 4. 263. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki, p. 176. In this book, in the “Chronicle of N. Udaltsova’s Life and Art,” the compilers state on pp. 175–76: “In late fall and winter she participated in Moscow exhibitions: ‘Jack of Diamonds’ (November 16–December 26) and the second ‘Verbovka’ exhibition (which opened December 2).” The assertion here about the artist’s participation in “Jack of Diamonds,” like the dates the exhibitions were held, does not correspond to reality. “Jack of Diamonds” ran from November 21 to December 3, 1917, although the cover of the catalog, prepared before the exhibition opened, gives the dates November 16 to December 4; “Verbovka” opened on December 6. 264. Ibid., p. 39. 265. Participating in the exhibition from the Supremus society were N. Davydova, K. Malevich, V. Pestel, L. Popova, O. Rozanova, and N. Udaltsova; in addition, there were K. Boguslavskaia, I. Puni, and A. Exter, who had initially been connected to the Supremus project. The most thorough review appeared in the newspaper Rannee utro; see “Po vystavkam” (unsigned), Rannee utro (Moscow), no. 269 (December 8, 1917), p. 3. Photographs have survived of actual wares by N. Davydova, K. Malevich, L. Popova, O. Rozanova, N. Udaltsova, and also K. Boguslavskaia. The latter demonstrated the eclectic range of her artistic biases: her ornaments had connections both to stylized folklore motifs and to nonobjective arabesques. 266. See an announcement for the lecture in Vpered (Moscow), no. 235 (December 17/30, 1917). 267. See Charlotte Douglas, “Oliver Sayler in Russia,” Pinakoteka, no. 22–23 (2006): 284–87. 268. Ibid., p. 287. 269. I want to take this occasion to sincerely thank Charlotte Douglas for the opportunity to view and reproduce the photograph of O. Sayler. 270. See above, note 265. 271. Udal’tsova, Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki, p. 41.

T O PA G E S 2 4 7 – 2 5 5 NOTES

272. Ibid. 273. The artist made this note on February 27, 1917, on the decisive day of the February Revolution; see ibid., p. 36. 274. Ibid., p. 41. 275. In an article by N. Gurianova, this document, which was the work of Kliun, is incorrectly declared to be the title page of Supremus and its authorship is erroneously ascribed to Malevich and Rozanova: “On the manuscript draft of this title page, rewritten in Rozanova’s hand, Malevich added in pencil: ‘The rooster who sings for three provinces’” (Gur’ianova, Ol’ga Rozanova i rannii russkii avangard, p. 459). 276. A reconstruction of the journal is published as an appendix in Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus.

Chapter 5. The End of Painting 1. Malevich, “Suprematizm,” in Katalog Desiatoi Gosudarstvennoi vystavki. Bespredmetnoe tvorchestvo i suprematizm (Moscow, 1919); see SS1:150. 2. See A. Shatskikh, “Kazimir Malevich i poeziia,” in K. Malevich, Poeziia (Moscow: Epifaniia, 2000), p. 21. 3. Malevich to Matiushin, from Nemchinovka to Petrograd, November 10, 1917, in Malevich o sebe, 1:107. 4. During the revolutionary era Velimir Khlebnikov also proclaimed the creation of a World Government of the Chairmen of the Earth, among whom he included Malevich; see Velimir Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1986), p. 544. 5. A. A. Leporskaia, “Iz dnevnika: 1923,” in Malevich o sebe, 2:332. 6. K. Malevich, “No samym interesnym iz vsego sozdannogo, . . . ” in Malevich, Poeziia, p. 84. The poem is dated the first half of 1918. 7. K. Malevich, “Vystavka Professional’nogo soiuza khudozhnikov-zhivopistsev: Levaia federatsiia (molodaia fraktsiia),” in Anarkhiia (Moscow), no. 89 (June 20, 1918); see SS1:122. 8. Malevich to Matiushin, from Nemchinovka to Petrograd, November 10, 1917, in Malevich o sebe, 1:107. In her notes on this letter, art historian I. A. Vakar asserts that here “he is not talking about the Khlebnikov “chairmen [of the Earth],” but about political figures, the Bolsheviks, with whom Malevich was collaborating at that time” (ibid.). This statement is somewhat hasty. In 1917 Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies Deputy Malevich was collaborating with Soviet power, inasmuch as he himself was a representative of that power, but in 1918, SRs, Mensheviks, anarchists, and so on, as well as unaffiliated citizens, were still working in the various Soviets. Lenin (1870–1924) was a past master of the art of political intrigue, and for the time being his party was collaborating with everyone who could ensure its ascent to power, but later the Bolsheviks gradually finished off their former fellow travelers. It should be noted very specifically that Malevich never belonged to any party; it would be hard to expect anything else from an artist who was always opposed to frames of any kind that limited freedom.

314

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315

NOTES

9. See the chapter in this book, “Birth of Black Square,” and ill. 25. 10. Malevich, “Vystavka Professional’nogo soiuza khudozhnikov-zhivopistsev,” in SS1:121. In June 1918, Malevich published articles in Anarchy every few days, and over the course of the month he published seven; Anarchy ceased to exist on July 2, after the Bolsheviks routed the anarchists. 11. K. Malevich, “V prirode sushchestvuet ob’em i tsvet, . . . ” in Kazimir Malevich: Zhivopis’, Teoriia, ed. D. Sarab’ianov and A. Shatskikh (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1993), p. 371. 12. K. Malevich, “Suprematizm (Kvadrat, krug, semafor sovremennosti),” in SS5:111. The article was dated by the author February 12, 1919. 13. See Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). 14. V. Stepanova, “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda,” in Pis’ma, Poeticheskie opyty, Zapiski khudozhnitsy (Moscow: Sfera, 1994), p. 181. 15. Ibid., p. 87. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., p. 71. 18. At present we know four authentic pictures of Malevich’s “white Suprematism”: White Square on White Background (1918) (also known as Suprematist Composition: White on White), which was taken out by A. Barr, is at MOMA; the other three are at the SMA. These are Suprematism (1918, oil on canvas, 97 × 70 cm; with dynamic diagonally constructed trapezoids), Suprematism (1918, oil on canvas, 97 × 70 cm; with dissolving segments of circles); Suprematism (White Cross) (oil on canvas, 88 × 65.8 cm). According to indirect evidence, Malevich drew the last picture in Warsaw in 1927. The first three of those listed date to 1918; they unquestionably belonged to the cycle of five pictures exhibited at the “Tenth Exhibition.” In one of the photographs of Malevich’s first one-man show (1920), the four “white” pictures are distinctly visible; of them only White Square and the picture with the dynamically arranged trapezoids have survived. The location of the other two in the photograph is unknown, but they were unquestionably the other two pictures from the cycle of canvases of white Suprematism shown in 1919; thus we have a sense of all five “white on white” pictures exhibited at the “Tenth Exhibition.” Among the huge number of forgeries of Malevich’s pictures there are also “white on white” ones. 19. See SS5:206–41, 524–28. See also A. Akinsha, “Malevich and Lenin: Image, Ritual, and the Cube,” in Rethinking Malevich: Proceedings of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Birth, ed. Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder (London: Pindar Press, 2007), pp. 139–58. 20. Malevich to Gershenzon, from Vitebsk to Moscow, November 7, 1919, in Malevich o sebe, 1:110. 21. Malevich to Stepanova, from Vitebsk to Moscow, December 21, 1919, ibid., 1:119. This letter implies that a catalog was supposed to be published for the exhibition: “I strongly beg of you to answer me and send the catalog [. . .]” The catalog was not published. 22. K. Malevich, Suprematizm: 34 risunka (Vitebsk, 1920), unpaginated; see SS1:198 (reproduction at left).

T O PA G E S 2 6 9 – 2 7 4 NOTES

23. K. Malevich, “V Tsarskoe vremia, . . . ” in SS5:131. The article was written in spring 1919. 24. K. Malevich, “Zametki,” in SS5:108. The article was written in late 1918. 25. This fragment of the unpublished text was quoted for the first time in English translation in A. Shatskikh, “Aspects of Kazimir Malevich’s Literary Legacy: A Summary,” in Rethinking Malevich, p. 320. 26. Fragments of Lerman’s stories about Malevich’s first one-man show were published in A. Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art 1917–1922 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 185–86. 27. V. Khodasevich, Portrety slovami: Ocherki, quoted from Malevich o sebe, 2:140. The artist wrote her reminiscences in the 1950s, hence a certain aberration of memory. Malevich’s canvases at his first one-man show in 1920 were frameless, as can be seen from the surviving photographs; information about the gilt “empty frame” exhibited by Malevich has not turned up anywhere else. Malevich’s white monochrome canvas has not survived. 28. N. M. Tarabukin, Ot mol’berta k mashine (Moscow, 1923), p. 12. 29. The review by Sergei Yutkevich (1904–75), an artist by education and future film director, indicates two blank white canvases; see S. Iutkevich, “Sukharnaia stolitsa,” LEF (Levyi front iskusstva) (Moscow), no. 3 (1923): 183. 30. Both quotations are taken from Malevich, Suprematizm: 34 risunka; see SS1:188. 31. A list of articles and books devoted to Malevich’s theoretical legacy and philosophical views is given in the introductory essay to the third volume of K. Malevich’s collected works; see A. Shatskikh, “Malevich posle zhivopisi,” in SS3:7–67.

Epilogue 1. Malevich, “Suprematizm,” in Katalog Desiatoi Gosudarstvennoi vystavki. Bespredmetnoe tvorchestvo i suprematizm (Moscow, 1919); see SS1:150.

316

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Works in Russian Experiment/Eksperiment: A Journal of Russian Culture, no. 5: Iz arkhiva Nikolaia Ivanovicha Khardzhieva, khraniashchegosia v Kul’turnom fonde “Tsentr KhardzhievaChaga” pri Muzee Stedeliik v Amsterdame (1999). Ezhegodnik Rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma na 1974 god. Leningrad: Nauka, 1976. Goriacheva, T. “Istoriia ‘Deklaratsii slova kak takovogo’ po materialam perepiski A. Kruchenykh.” In Terentievskii sbornik vtoroi, pp. 346–72. Moscow: Gileia, 1998. ———. “K poniatiiu ekonomii tvorchestva.” In Russkii avangard 1910–1920-kh godov v evropeiskom kontekste, pp. 263–74. Moscow: Nauka, 2000. Gur’ianova, N. “Aleksei Kruchenykh i Ol’ga Rozanova: O vzaimovliianii poezii i zhivopisi v russkom avangarde.” Europa Orientalis 11, no. 1 (1992): 48–108. ———. “‘Dom-laboratoriia’ ‘Supremusa’: K rekonstruktsii zhurnala.” Iskusstvoznanie (Moscow) 18, no. 2 (2001): 456–74. ———. Ol’ga Rozanova i rannii russkii avangard. Moscow: Gileia, 2002. Hansen-Löve, A. “Kazimir Malevich mezhdu Kruchenykh i Khlebnikovym.” Russian Literature —55, nos. 1, 2, 3 (2004): 229–58. Karasik, I., ed. Russkii avangard: Problemy reprezentatsii i interpretatsii. (Anthology based on materials from a conference on the exhibition “Muzei v muzee: Russkii 317

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avangard iz kollektsii Muzeia khudozhestvennoi kul’tury v sobranii Gosudarstvennogo Russkogo muzeia” [Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, 1998; research director E. Petrova].) St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2001. Khan-Magomedov, S. O. Suprematizm i arkhitektura (problemy formoobrazovaniia). Moscow: Arkhitekura-S, 2007. Khardzhiev, N. I. Stat’i ob avangarde. Compiled by Rudol’f Duganov, Iurii Arpishkin, and Andrei Sarab’ianov. 2 vols. Moscow: RA, 1997. Kliun, I. V. Moi put’ v iskusstve: Vospominaniia, stat’i, dnevniki. Edited by A. D. Sarab’ianov. Moscow: RA, 1999. Krusanov, A. V. Russkii avangard 1907–1932: Istoricheskii obzor. 3 vols. Vol. 2: Russkii avangard: Futuristicheskaia revoliutsiia 1917–1921. Book 1. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2003. Malevich, Kazimir. Poeziia. Edited by A. S. Shatskikh. Moscow: Epifaniia, 2000. ———. Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh. Moscow: Gileia, 1995–2004. Vol. 1: Proizvedeniia 1913–1929. Edited by A. S. Shatskikh (1995). Vol. 2: Stat’i i teoreticheskie sochineniia, opublikovannye v Germanii, Pol’she i na Ukraine 1924–1930. e Edited by G. L. Demosfenova and A. S. Shatskikh(1998). Vol. 3: Suprematizm. Mir kak bespredmetnost’, ili Vechnyi pokoi. S prilozheniem pisem K. S. Malevicha k M. O. Gershenzonu (1918–1924). Edited by A. S. Shatskikh (2000). Vol. 4: Traktaty i lektsii pervoi poloviny 1920-kh godov. S prilozheniem perepiski K. S. Malevicha i El’ Lisitskogo (1922–1925). Edited by A. S. Shatskikh (2003). Vol. 5: Proizvedeniia raznykh let: Stat’i. Traktaty. Manifesty i deklaratsii. Proekty. Lektsii. Zapisi i zametki. Poeziia. Edited by A. S. Shatskikh (2004). ———. “Stat’i v gazete ‘Anarkhiia’ (1918).” Edited by A. D. Sarab’ianov. In Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, vol. 1. Poliakov, V. Knigi russkogo kubofuturizma. Moscow: Gileia, 1998; 2d ed., 2007. Rozanova, Ol’ga. Ol’ga Rozanova: Lefanta chiol . . . . Edited by A. Sarab’ianov and V. Terekhina. Moscow: RA; Palace Editions, 2002. Stepanova, V. “Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda.” In Pis’ma, Poeticheskie opyty, Zapiski khudozhnitsy. Edited by V. A. Rodchenko and A. N. Lavrentiev. Moscow: Sfera, 1994. Strigalev, A. “O Poslednei futuristicheskoi vystavke kartin ‘0,10 (Nol’-Desiat’).’” Nauchno-analiticheskii informatsionnyi Biulleten’ Fonda K. S. Malevicha (Moscow) (2001): 12–38. Strigalev, Anatolii, and Iurgen Kharten. Vladimir Tatlin: Retrospektiva. Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, [1993]. Udal’tsova, N. Zhizn’ russkoi kubistki: Dnevniki, stat’i, vospominaniia. Edited by E. A. Drevina, V. I. Rakitin, and A. D. Sarab’ianov. Moscow: RA, 1994. Vakar, I. A., and T. N. Mikhienko, eds. Malevich o sebe, sovremenniki o Maleviche: Pis’ma, dokumenty, vospominaniia, kritika. 2 vols. Moscow: RA, 2004.

Other Works Altshuler, B. The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

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Andersen, Troels. K. S. Malevich: The Leporskaia Archive. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2011. Antliff, M., and P. Leighten. Cubism and Culture. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001. Berninger, H., and J.-A. Cartier, eds. Pougny (Iwan Puni): Catalogue de l’oeuvre. Vol. 1. Tübingen: Éditions Ernst Wasmuth, 1972. Bowlt, John E., and Matthew Drutt. Amazons of the Avant-Garde: Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2000. ———. “‘The Cow and the Violin’: Toward a History of Russian Dada.” In The Eastern Dada Orbit: Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Central Europe, and Japan, vol. 4: Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, pp. 137–63. Edited by G. Janecek and T. Omuka. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. ———. “Kazimir Malevich and the Energy of Language.” In Kazimir Malevich, 1878– 1935, pp. 179–86. Catalog. Los Angeles: The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 1991. Chadwick, W., and I. de Courtivron, eds. Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership. London, 1993. Crone, R., and D. Moos. Kazimir Malevich: The Climax of Disclosure. London: Reaktion Books, 1991. Douglas, Charlotte. “The Art of Pure Design: The Move to Abstraction in Russian and English Art and Textiles. A Meditation.” In Russia Engages the West. Edited by Susan E. Reid and Rosalind P. Blakesley. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006. ———. Kazimir Malevich. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994. ———. “Suprematist Embroidered Ornament.” Art Journal 54, no. 1 (spring 1995): 42–45. ———. “Views from the New World. A. Kruchenykh and K. Malevich: Theory and Painting.” Russian Literature Triquarterly, no. 12 (spring 1975): 353–70. Douglas, Charlotte, and Christina Lodder, eds. Rethinking Malevich: Proceedings of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Birth. London: Pindar Press, 2007. Hansen-Löve, Aage A. “Malevicˇ zwischen Krucˇenych und Chlebnikov.” In Kazimir Malevicˇ: Gott ist nicht gestürzt! Schriften zu Kunst, Kirche, Fabrik. Edited by Aage A. Hansen-Löve. Munich: Carl Hanser, 2004. Henderson, L. The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Janecek, G. The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900– 1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. K. S. Malevich: Essays on Art. Edited by Troels Andersen. 4 vols. Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968–1978. Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935. Drawings from the Collection of the Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation. SMA Cahiers 9. Catalog. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1997. Lodder, Christina. Russian Constructivism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Markov, V. Russian Futurism: A History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

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Milner, J. Kazimir Malevich and the Art of Geometry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Petrova, Evgeniia, ed. A Legacy Regained: Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian AvantGarde. St. Petersburg: Palace Edition, 2002. ———, ed. The Russian Avant-Garde: Representation and Interpretation. Academic Papers from the Conference Accompanying the Exhibition Museum in a Museum: The Russian Avant-Garde from the Former Museum of Artistic Culture in the Collection of the State Russian Museum (Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, 1998). St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2001. Rowell, Margit, and Deborah Wye, eds., The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910–1934. Catalog. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002. Rudenstine, Angelica Zander, ed. Russian Avant-Garde Art: The George Costakis Collection. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981. Sarabianov, D., and N. Adaskina. Liubov Popova. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990. Shatskikh, A. “Malevich, Curator of Malevich.” In Petrova, The Russian Avant-Garde, pp. 149–54. ———. Vitebsk: The Life of Art 1917–1922. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Spira, A. The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition. Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2008.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abramtsevo circle, 95, 283n27 Abstractionism and abstract art, 23, 81, 83, 84, 287n64. See also Suprematism Absurdism: and Dadaism, 32–33; and Fevralism, 5, 8, 9, 12, 14, 18, 23, 31–32, 37, 272 Adaskina, Natalia, 161 Aigi, Gennady, 301n85 Aksenov, Ivan Aleksandrovich, 133–35, 287n60 Aliagrov. See Jakobson, Roman All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 212 All-Russian Union of Art Workers, 212 Alogical Composition (Malevich), 29, 30, 102 Alogism, 4, 8, 10–12, 16, 24, 28, 31–32, 267 “Amazons.” See Moscow “Amazons” “Amazons of the Russian Avant-garde” exhibition (1999–2001), 63, 282n12 Analysis of Composition (Tatlin), 109 Anarchy newspaper, 173, 176, 178, 183, 248, 256, 257, 260, 315n10

Andersen, Troels, 279n49, 304n124, 312n239 Angels Carrying the Soul of a Deceased Righteous Man to Heaven (Malevich), 192 Annensky, Innokenty, 154–55, 194–95 “Another Step of the Coming Boor” (Supremus, Merezhkovsky), 178, 199 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 20, 287n60 Apollon, 151, 156, 159, 169 Applied art. See Decorative art Appropriation, 57, 58 Argus, 127 Arithmometer (Kliun), 126 Arkhipenko, Aleksandr, 103, 248 ARS journal, 220, 227 Art and Language movement, x “Art and Responsibility” (Bakhtin), 256 Arts International, 130 “Aspects de L’Avant-garde Russia 1905– 1925” exhibition (1969), 297n21 “Attitude of Critic and Society Toward Modern Russian Art” (Udaltsova), 178, 180–81

321

INDEX

Automobile (Rozanova), 116–17, 119, 122 Avant-garde: archive on Russian avantgarde, 4; and art as highest form of creative activity, 256; artistic institutions for, 3; and copyright issues, 55–58; and freedom and responsibility, 256, 265–66; and gender issues, 62–64; and originality, 55; persecution of, 28; and “spying” resulting in theft of copyright, 55–58. See also Fevralism; Suprematism; and specific artists Aviator (Malevich), 6, 7, 126, 276n8 “Azef-Judas-Khlebnikov” (Kruchenykh), 178, 228, 230–32 Babel, Isaak, 77 Babel, Yevgenia Borisovna (née Gronfain), 77 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 204, 256 Bakushinsky, A. V., 45 Balos (Kruchenykh), 184, 187, 228, 230, 234, 236, 237 Barr, Alfred, 52, 53, 90, 288–89n81, 315n18 Barvy publishing house, 283n29 Battle Between a Budetlyanin and the Ocean (Kruchenykh), 220 Battleship Potemkin, 212 Bauhaus, 139 Belling, Erast, 197 Belling, Sandra, 197, 305n138 Belodubrovsky, M. Ye., 214 Benjamin, Walter, 262, 312n243 Benois, Alexandre, 33, 109, 132, 135, 178, 199, 215 Berdiaev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich, 76 Bergson, Henri, 53, 195 Biomorphism, 54, 84, 136–37 Birth (Malevich), 192 Black Circle (Malevich), 139, 262 Black Cross (Malevich), 139, 262, 303n121 Black on Black (Rodchenko), 265

322

Black Rectangle and Blue Triangle (Malevich), 29, 31, 107 Black Square (Malevich): compared with White Square on White Background, 260, 262; on cover of Malevich’s From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, 150; creation of, 34, 43–53, 262, 273; dating of, x, xiv, 1–2, 7, 34, 35, 46–49, 51–52, 84, 262, 273; different versions of, 46, 262; ecstatic illumination in creation of, 45; emblematic power of, 261; as icon-symbol in corner of figurative paintings, 262; on “Jack of Diamonds” catalog, 245; and Malevich’s letters to Matiushin, 47–49, 132; “Malevich’s mystification” regarding, 2; meanings of, ix–x, 274; museum duplications of original placement of, 109–10; negative reactions to, 99; nonobjective works by Malevich preceding, 35, 48, 50; and original production of Victory Over the Sun, 83; and reissue of Victory Over the Sun, 33–35, 40, 46, 49–51, 150; reproduction of, 45; and Rozanova, 151; significance of, 34–35, 45–46, 51–52, 109, 139, 274; and solo exhibitions by Malevich, 267; texture of, 45; title for, 48; at “0.10” (“ZeroTen”) exhibition, 106, 108–10. See also Malevich, Kazimir Bloc of Left-wing Artists, 125, 177, 231, 243, 293n54, 313n261 Blok, Aleksandr, 194–95, 198 Bloomsbury group, 80–84, 153, 158 Blue Eggs (Kruchenykh), 184, 187, 228, 230, 234–36 Blue Horns arts association, 234 Boat Ride (Malevich), 218 Bobrinskaia, Ye. A., 163 Bobrov, Sergei, 133 Boccioni, Umberto, 154 “Body art,” 127

exhibitions, 23, 62, 200; on Futurists-Fevralists, 26, 27; and “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition, 151; Malevich on, 237; Malevich’s relationship with, 4, 23; as publisher of Kamensky’s poetry, 276n12; and purpose of Supremus journal, 177; and Roslavets, 194 Burliuk, Marusia, 230 Burliuk, Vladimir, 62, 194, 202 Butkovskaia, N. I., 179, 236 Cage, John, x, 215, 216 Card Players (Puni), 25, 29 “Carpet Motif” (Malevich), 94 Central State Historical Archive, 295n80 Centrifuge, 133, 134, 295n81 Centrifuge (magazine), 134 Cézanne, Paul, 60 Chanel, Coco, 78 “Chant of Universal Flowering,” 37 Chernyshevsky, N. M., 63 Chess Player (Malevich), 126 Chiurlenis, Mikaelos, 195, 196 Chylin´ska, Teresa, 76 Cohen, Hermann, ix Collage technique: by Boguslavskaia, 24, 113; and Fevralism, 6, 16, 20, 22, 113; by Malevich, 6, 16, 20, 22; by Puni, 24, 113; and wall plane of “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 106, 107–8. See also Paste-ons Collection on the Theory of Poetic Language (Shklovsky), 238 Collective art, 3, 80, 110–12 Color: “color-painting” in Suprematism, 93, 166, 183, 195, 245, 249, 251–52, 273; Exter’s color compositions, 156; in Malevich’s paintings in late 1917 and first half of 1918, 251–57; musical coloration, 195; in poetry, 195; Rozanova as colorist, 64, 122, 158, 245, 249 “Color” (Rozanova), 245

323

INDEX

Boguslavskaia, Ksenia Leonidovna: age of, compared with Malevich, 294n70; compared with Rozanova, 119; counter-reliefs by, 86; exclusion of, from “Store” exhibition, 124; financing of art exhibitions by, 55–56, 104, 112, 114; and First Verbovka Exhibition, 86; and “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition, 156; lecture by, on Suprematism, 123; in list of Suprematists, 124, 246; and Lurie, 204; Matiushin’s review of, 113; paintings and sculptures by, 113–14; photograph of, 104; price for artwork by, 25; Rozanova on, 113, 115, 118; and Supremus society, 166–67, 248; and “Tramway V” exhibition, 23–24, 26, 55–56; Verbovka designs by, 246, 313n265; and “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 25, 56, 60, 67, 104, 105–6, 108, 110–14, 119 Böhme, Jakob, 274 Bolshakov, Konstantin, 193 Bolsheviks, 212, 314n8, 315n10 Book of My Reminiscences (Iwaszkiewicz), 74 “Boring for Papuans” (Malevich), 12 Bottle (Tatlin), 163 Bowlt, John, 32–33, 105–6, 282n12, 291n14, 294n64 Braque, Georges, 8–9, 24, 103 Briansk Institute of Music, 214 Britain. See London Briusov, Valery, 194–95, 198 Bruni, Lev, 104, 124–26, 244 Budetlyane formula, 8, 57, 149, 218, 228, 253, 255 Budetlyane Strongman (Malevich), 43, 48, 49 Burliuk, David: body art of, 127; conciliatory attitude of, toward opponents of left-wing art, 24, 177, 200, 202; exclusion of, from “Tramway V” and “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”)

INDEX

Combined Suprematist Composition (Sensation of Metallic Sound–Dynamic). (Pale–Metallic Coloring) (Malevich), 146, 148 “Coming Boor, The” (Merezhkovsky), 132, 199 Composition: Circle with Rectangles and Triangles (Malevich), 38–39 Composition No. 1 (Morgunov), 28 Composition of Brilliant Objects (on Tin) (Rozanova), 116 Composition of Clay and Crystal Objects (Rozanova), 116 Composition paintings (Puni), 112 Composition with Bathers (Shevchenko), 22 Composition with Mona Lisa (Malevich), 6, 9, 18–22, 19, 40, 43–44, 84, 128, 277n27, 279n47 Compton, Susan, 83 Constructivism: and design, 265–66; and Exter, 156; first use of term, 244, 263; goal of, 263; Malevich on, 265– 66; and “nonobjectivists,” 263–66; and Popova, 156, 158, 159, 162, 249; and Roslavets, 211; and Stepanova, 156, 158; Suprematism versus, 55, 100, 263–66; and Tatlinism, 104 Copyright and appropriation, 40–41, 55–58 Cork, Richard, 83 Costakis, George Dionisovich, 25 Costakis (G.) Collection, 118 Counter-reliefs: Bobrinskaia on, 163; coinage of term, 290–91n8; by Puni, 86; and “Store” exhibition, 125, 126; by Tatlin, 24–26, 53, 55, 86, 104, 108–9, 124–27, 162–63, 243, 263, 264–65, 278n36, 290–91n8; by Tatlin’s supporters, 104; Udaltsova on, 162–63 Cow and Violin (Malevich), 6–11, 7, 126, 276n8, 276n12 Cow imagery, 10, 276n12 Crafts artel. See Decorative art

324

Critical realism, 56 Cubism: and African art, 57; Fevralism versus, 8–9, 11; French Cubism, 3, 8–9, 24, 62; and gender issues, 62, 95, 125; Malevich on, 3, 199; Moscow Cubism, 60, 61–66; and Puni, 112; and Russian art, 5, 56; and “Store” exhibition, 124, 125, 126; style of, 5, 9, 57; and Suprematism, 52, 53, 62; Supremus journal’s proposed issue on, 152, 175–76, 179–87; and Tatlin, 55; and Vorticism, 83; women artists in “Cubist circle,” 61, 162, 169; and “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 99 “Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism” (Rozanova), 180–82 “Cubism and Abstract Act” exhibition (1936), 52, 53, 288n81 Cubist Woman at Her Dressing Table (Kliun), 114 Cubo-Futurism: and Exter, 68; and Kruchenykh, 217, 220, 222; and Lurie, 203; and Malevich, 123; and Popova, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162; and Puni, 112–13; radical artists’ view of, as anachronism in 1917, 176; Suprematism compared with, 52; Supremus journal’s proposed issue on, 152; and Tatlin, 127; and Udaltsova, 157. See also Cubism; Futurism Cubo-Futurist Composition: Smoker with Pipe (Little Russian) (Malevich), 16, 17, 277n22 Cyclist [Devil’s Panel] (Rozanova), 117, 119, 122 Dadaism, 32–33, 112, 220 Daughter of Jorio, The, 155 Davydoff, Alena Lvovna, 74 Davydov, Aleksandr, 284n33 Davydov, Denis, 76, 77, 284n34 Davydov, Dmitry Lvovich, 72, 73, 283–84n29, 284n33 Davydov, Kirill (Kika), 76, 77, 285nn48–49

Dax, Olga Davydoff, 74 Day of Art, 256 Dead Souls (Gogol), 95 Decembrists, 72, 74 “Declaration of the Word as Such” (Kruchenykh), 184, 228–29, 230, 238–40 Decorative art: and gender issues, 95–96; high art versus, 95–96, 157–58, 249; and Malevich’s family background and youth, 96; national exhibitions of, 96; prices for decorative designs, 295n80; in Supremus journal, 185, 187. See also headings beginning with Verbovka Delaunay, Robert, 62, 80 Delaunay, Sonia. See Terk-Delaunay, Sonia Design, 265–66 Desk (Rozanova), 116 De Stijl, 137 Diaghilev, Serge, 199–200 “Dissolution of shapes,” 251–55, 257, 267 Dobychina, N., 105–6 Dorner, Alexander, 288–89n81 Douglas, Charlotte: on abstraction in Russia and England, 81, 83, 84; on Malevich’s interest in applied arts, 93–94; on relationship of applied art to abstract art, 287n64; on Suprematism’s debut at First Verbovka Exhibition of decorative arts, 85–86, 289n84; on Verbovka Exhibitions, 85–86, 97, 245–46, 289n84; on “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 105 Drutt, Matthew, 282n12 Duchamp, Marcel, 12–14, 15, 21, 113, 262 Dudareva, V., 288n78 Dymshits-Tolstaia, Sofia, 104, 124–26 Eckhart, Meister, 274 Efros, Abram, 154, 270 Einstein, Albert, 195

325

INDEX

Davydov, Lev Alekseevich, 74 Davydov, Lev Vasilievich, 72 Davydov, L. Ye., 284n33 Davydov, Vasia, 76, 77 Davydov, Vasily Lvovich, 72 Davydov, Vladimir Lvovich (“Bob”), 72, 73 Davydov, Yury Lvovich, 72, 284–85n36 Davydova, Aleksandra Ilinichna, 72 Davydova, Aleksandra Ivanovna, 72 Davydova, Natalia Mikhailovna: arrest and imprisonment of, 71, 77–78; as artist, 71; background and circle of, 69–74; biographical materials on, 283–84n29; death of, 78; emigration of, to Berlin and then Paris, 77, 78, 79; and Exter, 79, 249; financial assistance for Malevich by, 132–35, 153; Half a Year in Prison: Diary 1920–1921 by, 77–78; and “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition (1917), 245; and Kiev Handicraft Society, 78, 85; letters of, 71, 72, 76; and London, 80–81; Malevich’s concern about, 286n50; and Malevich’s musical ideas, 203; marriage of, 71, 72, 77; and Moscow intelligentsia, 75–76; and music, 71, 72, 74–76; and painting lessons from Malevich, 133, 135; personality of, 75; photographs of, 73, 78; and prices for decorative designs, 295n80; and Les Soirées de Paris, 79, 287n60; sons of, 76–77, 285nn48–49; and Suprematism’s public affirmation, 69–81, 87, 95; Suprematist ornaments created by, 135, 170; and Supremus journal, 151, 152; in Supremus society, 165, 167, 169, 248; and Szymanowski, 74–76, 78; and Verbovka crafts artel, 70, 78–81, 132–33, 157, 170, 185, 187, 249; and Verbovka Exhibition (First), 85, 88; and Verbovka Exhibition (Second), 245, 246, 246, 313n265 Davydova, Natalia Yakovlevna, 283n27

INDEX

Eisenstein, Sergei, 6, 212 “Eko-ez” theory, 176, 234–38, 240 Electricity, 37–38, 43, 48 Enchanted Wanderer, 61, 112, 204, 287–88n70 England. See London Englishman in Moscow (Malevich), 6, 43, 126, 276n8 Ephebe (Szymanowski), 76, 285n47 Ernst, Max, 90 Erwartung (Schönberg), 197 “Estrangement” mechanism, 12 Etchells, Frederick, 82 Evgeny Onegin (Malevich), 155 “Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art: Embroidery and Carpets from Artists’ Designs” (1915), 85–89, 88, 100, 286nn52–53, 289n84 “Exhibition of Paintings of Left-Wing Trends” (1915), 115–16, 123, 293n46 “Exhibition of Petrograd Artists of All Movements, 1918–1923,” 270–71 “Exhibition of Pictures by Artists of All Trends” (1923), 110 “Exhibitions of the Professional Union of Artists-Painters” (Anarchy article by Malevich), 257, 260 Experiment/Eksperiment, 172, 300n78 Expressionism, 194 Exter, Alexandra Alexandrovna: and Aksenov, 134–35; color compositions by, 156; in “Cubist circle,” 61; CuboFuturism in art by, 68; and Davydova, 79, 249, 284–85n29; and First Verbovka Exhibition, 80, 86, 87, 88; and “International Free Futurist Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture” (1914), 79; and “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition, 154, 155–56, 245; leaving Odessa by, 77; Malevich’s relationship with, 66–70, 98, 153–56, 169, 178–79; and Malevich’s statement on discovery of Suprematism, 68; and Moscow Chamber Theater, 154–55; in Moscow circle, 61, 99;

326

nonobjective easel compositions by, 156; refusal of, to exhibit at “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 68, 70, 98; Rupture, Movement, Weight by, 134; and Les Soirées de Paris, 287n60; study in Paris by, 64; and Supremus journal, 151–54, 169; in Supremus society, 165, 169, 178–79, 248; and Sonia Terk, 80; and “Tramway V” exhibition, 24, 61; Verbovka designs of, 70, 79, 85, 153–54, 155, 249, 313n265 Famira Kifared (Annensky), 154–55 Fauvists, 24, 84 Favorsky, Vladimir, 226–27 February Revolution, 165, 166, 171, 177, 212, 240, 314n273 Fevralism: and absurdism, 5, 8, 9, 12, 14, 18, 23, 31–32, 37, 272; alogism and, 4, 8, 10–12, 16, 24, 28, 31–32, 267; beginning of, 272; and collage technique, 6, 16, 20, 22, 113; compared with Dadaism, 32; connection between Suprematism and, at “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 107; and destruction of stereotypes and traditions, 5, 23, 96; end of, 23, 31–43, 85, 272; as forerunner of Suprematism, 3–33, 273; goals and characteristics of, 5, 6, 14–16, 23, 28, 29, 33, 37; group photograph of Fevralists, 26–27; influence of, 33; leaders of, 26–28, 31; literature for anthologies of, 31; Loshkari Fevralists, 26–31; manifesto on, in Secret Vices of Academicians, 31–32, 62; and “montages of attractions,” 6; and “1915 Painting Exhibition” (Moscow), 18, 22–23, 29, 32, 40, 113, 277n28; origin of name of, 4–5; painterly manifesto of, in Malevich’s Cow and Violin, 6–11, 7; and principle of plastic presentation of “nouns,” 6, 9, 12; and proto-Suprematist drawings, 16–18,

art movement, 56; Russian Futurism, 67–68; in Springtime Counteragency of the Muses, 200; and “Store” exhibition, 8, 123–30, 276n8; and Suprematism, 52, 53, 62; Supremus journal’s proposed issue on, 152, 154, 175, 176, 182; and Vorticism, 83. See also “Tramway V: The First Futurist Exhibition” (1915); Victory Over the Sun; “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition (1915) “Futurism Street,” 110–12 Gak printer, 180 Gender issues: and Cubism and Futurism, 62, 95; and decorative applied art, 95–96, 157–59; in Russia, 63–64. See also Moscow “Amazons”; and specific women artists Geometric abstractivism. See Suprematism Gershenzon, Mikhail Osipovich, 76, 77, 199, 222, 266, 286n50 Ginkhuk (State Institute of Artistic Culture), 242, 250 Gioconda, 29 Giotto di Bondone, ix Gippius, Zinaida, 198 Giraud, Albert, 198, 305n144 Glagol, Sergei, 86, 288n78 Glinka (M. I.) State Central Museum of Musical Culture, 211, 307n180 Gly-Gly (Kruchenykh): characters in, 208, 222, 233, 311n232; compared with Victory Over the Sun, 233; dating of, 232–33; “eko-ez” text of, 236; illustrations for, 173, 233–34, 241, 247; origin of title of, 232, 311n232; for publication in Supremus journal, 183, 184, 187, 230, 231, 232–34 Gnedov, Vasilisk, 193–94, 304n132 Gogol, N. V., 95, 235 Gojowy, Detlef, 214 Golden Fleece, 152 Goloushev, Sergei. See Glagol, Sergei

327

INDEX

17; Rayonnism versus, 22–23, 24, 29, 58, 278n30; and spoon imagery, 4, 27, 28–31, 30, 107, 113, 279n47; and trans-sense works, 5, 8, 10, 12, 18, 20–21, 24, 27, 31, 237; and word-images, 11–16, 13, 15, 33; Zero journal of, 101, 153. See also “Tramway V: The First Futurist Exhibition” (1915) Fevralism as Emotionism (Malevich), 38, 38, 43, 280n65 Filippova, Maria, 213 Filonov, Pavel, 26, 31, 35, 37, 176, 189 Fishelevich, Azef Evno, 311n224 Flame imagery, 131 Flowers Sellers (Malevich), 49 Folk art. See Decorative art; Verbovka crafts artel Formalists, Russian, 12 “Foundations of the New Art and the Reasons for Its Misunderstanding” (Rozanova), 182 Fountain, The (Duchamp), 12–13 4’33” (Cage), 215 “Free Music” (Kulbin), 194 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 21, 65 From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism (Malevich), 123, 150, 153, 164, 169, 175, 208 From Cubism to Suprematism (Malevich), 60, 123, 133, 186 “From Now On I Refuse to Speak Ill Even of the Art of Fools” (Burliuk), 200 “From the Book about Nonobjectivity” (Malevich), 265 Fry, Roger, 80, 82, 287n64 Futurism: and Budetlyane formula, 8, 57, 149, 218, 228, 253, 255; and cow imagery, 10; end of, 67–68, 111; and gender issues, 95; goals and characteristics of, 5–6, 22, 137; Kruchenykh on, 176; Malevich on Italian Futurism, 3, 5–6; Matiushin on literature on, 60; and “music of noises,” 194; and poetry, 11, 198, 203; and Russian

INDEX

Golubkina, Anna, 64 Goncharova, Natalia, 22, 64, 127 Goriacheva, Tatiana, 173, 238 Gorky, Maxim, 24 Gramophone (Kliun), 126 Grant, Duncan, 81–82 “Great Berlin Art Exhibition” (1927), 89, 297n18 Great Britain. See London “Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932” exhibition (1991–92), 102–3, 114 Greenberg, Clement, 53 Grishchenko, Aleksei, 241, 247 Grits, Theodor Solomonovich, 174 Gromozova, Olga, 61 Gudima, Ivan, 284n31 Gudim-Levkovich, Mikhail Vasilievich, 71, 284n32 Gudim-Levkovich, Yulia Nikolaevna (née Bakhmetieva), 71, 72, 78 Guggenheim, Peggy, 90 Guggenheim Museum, New York, 102 Gurianova, N., 173, 211, 229, 293n46, 294n64, 301n94, 302n102, 314n275 Guro, Elena, 64 The Hairdresser Went to the Bathhouse (Morgunov), 22, 277n28 Half a Year in Prison: Diary 1920–1921 (Davydova), 77–78 Halicka, Alice, 62 Hamilton, Cuthbert, 82 Handicrafts. See Decorative art Häring, Hugo, 288n80 Heaven and Earth (Roslavets), 193 Heavy Weapon (Kruchenykh), 220 Hegel, G. W. F., 262 Heyting, Lijn, 288n80 High art versus applied art, 95–96, 157–58, 249. See also Decorative art “High simplicity” in art and literature, 39 House of Arts, 242

328

“I the Apostle of New Concepts in Art” (Malevich), 127–30, 129, 294n66 “I iu mane tor” (Malevich), 12 Impressionism, x, 22, 53, 56, 195, 267 In’shakov, A. N., 278n30 Installation, 108 Institute of Contemporary Russian Culture, University of Southern California, 172 “International Free Futurist Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture” (1914), 79 Invalid Grounds (Aksenov), 134 Isakov, S. K., 291n8 Italian Futurism. See Futurism Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław, 74, 75 “Jack of Diamonds” exhibitions: artists in, 151, 154–57, 245, 248; Black Square on catalog cover of, 245; catalog of, 107, 115, 244, 245, 313n263; dates of, 313n263; and Exter, 154, 155–56, 245; and Malevich, 2, 115, 155, 156, 176, 253, 260, 267; and Popova, 154, 157, 159–60; review of, 156–57; and Rozanova, 156, 170; and Udaltsova, 154, 157, 163–64, 313n263. See also Jack of Diamonds society Jack of Diamonds society: and debate (1914) giving Fevralism its name, 4–5, 28; and Malevich, 4–5, 28, 240, 243–45; members of, 240–41; Roslavets’s friends in, 194, 201; sale of works by moderate innovators from, 177; and Tatlin, 243–44. See also “Jack of Diamonds” exhibitions Jakobson, Roman: and Fevralism, 31; and Malevich’s painting, 219; and Matiushin, 11, 26; pupil of, 189; and Supremus journal, 228; and Supremus society, 248; Trans-sense Boog by, 27, 41 Janecek, Gerald, 235 Jangfeldt, Bengt, 189, 303nn120–121 Judd, Donald, x

Rozanova on, 115; and Supremus journal, 151; and Supremus No. 51 by Malevich, 140; and Supremus society, 248; and Victory Over the Sun, 3; and “worldbackwards” as term, 8; “Worldbackwards” (play) by, 276n8 Khodasevich, Valentina, 103, 270, 316n27 Kiev Handicraft Society, 78, 79, 80, 85, 295n80 Kiev Museum of Ukrainian Decorative Folk Art, 72 Kiev Museum of Ukrainian Fine Arts, 71–72 Kiev Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, 71–72 Kinetism, 23 Kirillova, A. M., 110 Kiuppers-Lisitskaia, Sofia, 174–75, 298n21 Klee, Paul, 216 Klein, Yves, x Kliun, Ivan Vasilievich: artistic conflict between Malevich and, 247–48, 314n275; birth year of, 294n70; on Black Square by Malevich, 45; and Fevralism, 12, 24, 26–28; and geometric nonobjectivity, 58; and “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition, 156, 245; in list of Suprematists, 124; on Lurie, 203–4; on Malevich, 45, 192, 279n41; Malevich’s relationship with, 61, 199; and Malevich’s statement on discovery of Suprematism, 68; military service of, 165, 169; poetry by, 12; Rozanova’s correspondence with, 170; sculpture by, 114; and “Store” exhibition, 125, 126, 128, 129; in summer of 1915, 31; Suprematist sculpture by, 66; Supremus journal article by, 151, 180, 181, 187; in Supremus society, 165, 166, 167, 248; and “Tramway V” exhibition, 114; and Udaltsova, 158, 164; and

329

INDEX

Kamensky, Vasily, 10, 24, 127, 193, 237, 276n12 Kandinsky, Vasily, 54, 84, 136–37, 194–95, 196, 216, 305n136 Karatygin, V. G., 196 Karetnikova, Sofia, 162 “Kazimir Malevich” exhibition (Düsseldorf, 1980), 277n27 “Kazimir Malevich in the Russian Museum” installation, 11 Khanenko, V. N., 287n61 Khan-Magomedov, S. O., 52, 84, 96 Khardzhiev, Nikolai Ivanovich: archive of, 4, 8, 35, 38–39, 40, 49, 129, 172–75, 180, 187–90, 208, 277n28, 301n85; and dating of Suprematism’s beginnings, 83; death of, 188; emigration of, from Russia and loss of part of his archive, 189; exhibitions, 156, 297n21; illicit provenance of Malevich pictures acquired by Jangfeldt from, 189, 303nn120–121; and Lissitzky archive, 301n85; and Malevich’s artworks, 8, 10, 16, 34, 35, 38–39, 49, 189, 297–98n21, 303nn120–121; and Malevich’s memoirs, 303–4n122; plan for “The History of Russian Futurism” by, 174–75; on scholars of Russian avantgarde, 188; and Supremus journal, 172–75, 180, 187–90; and Victory Over the Sun, 49 Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation, 4, 35, 40, 128, 166, 172, 174, 183, 188–89, 211 Kharms, Daniil, 32, 189 Khlebnikov, Velimir: Budetlyane poetry by, 8, 11, 23, 253; education of, 137; on “inventors” versus “acquirers,” 57; as “king of time,” 253; on Kruchenykh, 221; Kruchenykh’s article on, 178, 228, 230–32; in Kruchenykh’s Gly-Gly, 233; on Malevich’s “shadow drawings,” 130; during revolutionary era, 314n4;

INDEX

Kliun, Ivan Vasilievich (continued ) “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 60, 110, 111, 112, 114 Kliun, Ivan Vasilievich, artworks by: Arithmometer, 126; Cubist Woman at Her Dressing Table, 114; Gramophone, 126; Landscape Passing By, 28; Ozonator, 28, 126; Running Landscape, 126; Sawyer/Nonobjective Composition, 28; Secret Vices of Academicians, 31–32 Konotop (Malevich), 190–91, 214, 304n123 Korwin-Szymanowska, Stanislawa, 74 Kostrov, N. I., 302n95 Kostrov printer, 180, 181 Kosuth, Joseph, x Kovalenko, G. F., 283–84n29 Kovtun, Yevgeny, 34, 69, 83, 101–2, 105, 279n57 Krasnodar Regional Art Museum, 115 Kraus, Rosalind, 55 Kruchenykh, Aleksei: autobiographical texts by, 218; Budetlyane formula of, 8, 149, 218, 228; in Caucasus, 183, 222, 223, 225, 235, 241; and conception of Supremus Project, 149–50; correspondence between Rozanova and, 169–70, 182, 218, 224, 235–36, 301n94, 310n214; and cow imagery, 10; and Davydova’s support of Suprematism, 70; dialog between Malevich and (1915–1916), 217–28; on economic poetry, 238–40; “ekoez” theory of, 176, 234–38, 240; and Fevralism, 31; gambling debt of, 310n210; and “I the Apostle of New Concepts in Art” by Malevich, 128; in Kuntsevo in summer of 1915, 31, 40; lithograph books published by, 40–41, 218; Malevich on, 208, 237; and Malevich’s drawings, 218; on Malevich’s poetry, 11–12; Malevich’s relationship with generally, 199, 218; and Morgunov, 219; paste-ons

330

by, 219–21, 225, 235; personality of, 235; poetry by, 10, 11, 149, 183–84, 224–26, 230, 237, 238, 276n9, 288n70; and Roslavets, 193–94, 205, 208; and Rozanova at “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 115–19, 122; Rozanova on, 176, 309n202; and Rozanova’s comments on Suprematists, 113, 118; and Rozanova’s paste-ons, 219–21; and Sagittarius, 288n70; on speed and instantaneity of creative act, 224; and “Store” exhibition, 126; and Supremus journal, 151, 152, 156, 173, 310n214; as Supremus journal contributor, 151, 152, 173, 178, 180, 184–85, 217, 228–40; in Supremus society, 165, 167, 187, 217–30, 248; and suspicions about Malevich for appropriating Rozanova’s paste-ons, 58, 117–18; and Tatlin, 125; and trans-sense, 10, 31, 217, 219–26, 232, 237; visual poetry by, 224–28, 232, 238, 309–10n208–209; on “worldbackwards,” 8, 276n9; on World War I, 149; and “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition (1915), 40, 118, 119 Kruchenykh, Aleksei, works by: “AzefJudas-Khlebnikov,” 178, 228, 230–32; Balos, 184, 187, 228, 230, 234, 236, 237; Battle Between a Budetlyanin and the Ocean, 220; Blue Eggs, 184, 187, 228, 230, 234–36; “Declaration of the Word as Such,” 184, 228–29, 230, 238–40; Gly-Gly (futurodrama), 173, 183, 184, 187, 208, 222, 230, 231, 232–34, 236, 241, 247; Heavy Weapon, 220; Military State, 220; Nestroch’e, 225–26, 227; Nevdannyi most, 302; Nosoboika, 176, 224, 236, 309n202; Obesity of Roses, 233; Secret Vices of Academicians, 31–32; Trans-Sense, 226; Trans-sense Boog, 27, 41; “Trans-Sense Poetry (Word Compositions),” 227; Treason, 220; Universal War: Yat’, 219–21,

Lady at the Poster Column (Malevich), 9, 18 Lady in an Automobile (Malevich), 218, 308n192 Lamacˇ Miroslav, 277n19, 277n27 Landscape Passing By (Kliun), 28 Langovaia, Natalia Alekseevna, 193 Langovoi, Aleksei Petrovich, 193 Lao-tsu, 274 Larionov, Mikhail: body art of, 127; French Cubism ignored by, 3; marriage of, to artist, 64; mistaken identification of, in Malevich’s drawing, 277n22; and Rayonnism, 22–23, 29, 54, 58, 136, 176, 278n30 “Last Futurist Exhibition” (Supremus article by Benois), 178 “Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 (Zero-Ten)” exhibition (1915). See “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition (1915) Laurencin, Marie, 62 Le Dantiu, Mikhail, 22, 127 Le Fauconnier, Henri, 61 Left-wing Bloc. See Bloc of Left-wing Artists Left-wing Federation, 241, 243, 245, 247 Legacy Regained: Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-garde, 128 Leida, Jay, 265 Lemercier (K.) Gallery, 85, 94, 286n53 Lenin, V. I., 265, 314n8 Lentulov, Aristarkh, 62, 151, 194, 200 Leonardo da Vinci, 9, 20 Leporskaia, Anna Aleksandrovna, 21, 45, 296n7

Lerman, Moisei Markovich, 270 Letter-soundings and note-letter, 222–26, 232 Levaia, T. M., 205 Levinson, Tereza Solomonovna, 292n34 Lewis, Wyndham, 82, 83–84 Liakhovskaia, M., 288n78 Life of Art newspaper, 270 Life of a Russian Cubist (Udaltsova), 181, 228–29 Ligeti, György, 215 Lissitzky, El, 174–75, 184, 266, 297– 98n21, 301n85 Literary Museum (Moscow), 49 Livshits, Benedikt, 49 London: Bloomsbury group in, 80–84, 153, 158; geometric nonobjectivity in, 81–84; Omega in, 80–83, 153 Lopukhina, Margarita Nikolaevna, 284n36 Lopukhina, Mariamna, 74 Lopuskaia, Ye. Ya., 206 Loshkari Fevralists, 26–31. See also Fevralism Lurie, Artur, 125, 193, 203–4 Maiakovsky, Vladimir, 10, 233, 237 Makovsky, S. K., 287n60 Malevich, Kazimir: accomplishments of, 33; as apostle of new concepts in art, 127, 128, 129, 130–35; birth year of, 294n70; as “chairman of space,” 253, 255–57; educational-pedagogical methods of, 123, 242, 250, 256, 302n107; family background and youth of, 3, 11–12, 96, 190–93; finances of, 132–35, 153; funeral of, 303n114; heirs and estate of, 52, 93, 288n80; as idea-giver, 110, 149; and Jack of Diamonds society, 4–5, 28, 240, 243–45; in Kuntsevo dacha, 31, 40, 69, 218, 229, 301n94; lectures by, 123, 164, 165–66, 176, 245; letters by generally, 46, 46, 69, 279n57, 283n26; memoir sketches by, 190–91,

331

INDEX

226; Victory Over the Sun (opera), 2–3, 35, 40, 48, 50; Victory Request, 220; Voennaia opera (War opera), 302; War (drama), 41, 149; “War” (poem), 149; With All Out Book, 226 Kulbin, Nikolai Ivanovich, 194–95, 196, 238

INDEX

Malevich, Kazimir (continued ) 214, 303–4n122, 304n123; military service of, 149–50, 153, 154, 164, 169, 176, 182; in Moscow, 69, 192, 229; neologisms by, 56, 110, 149, 244, 249, 251, 271; personality of, 65, 68, 99, 282n16; photographs of, 2, 26– 27, 28, 104; public posts of, 240–41, 242, 243, 314n8; rejection of “book culture” by, 130–31, 137, 199, 253; in Vitebsk, 110, 266–71; writing style of, 175. See also Fevralism; Suprematism; Supremus journal; Supremus society; and other Malevich headings below Malevich, Kazimir, artistic techniques and projects: appropriation of others’ works, 40–41, 58; artistic mission, 252–53; artworks abandoned by Malevich in the West in 1927, 89, 93, 288n80; artworks brought out of Nazi Germany by Barr, 52, 90, 289–90n81; attraction to numeric and scientific, 37–38, 43, 48, 137–38, 271; “bindings” (folders), 97; body art, 127–28; captions for artworks, 106–7, 139, 290n8; collage technique, 6, 16, 20; collective art, 110–12; “color-painting,” 93, 166, 183, 195, 245, 251–52, 273; “dissolution of shapes,” 251–55, 257, 267; drawings generally, 37; early artistic career, 2–3; and Fevralism, 3–33, 43–45, 84, 96; flame imagery, 131; Khardzhiev’s plan for “The History of Russian Futurism,” 174; markings on reverse of paintings, 138, 296n7; Matiushin’s critique of, 60–61, 199; missing artwork, 89; movement from complexity to simplicity in his art, 39; museum construction, 106, 291n16; musical compositions, 205; musical ideas, 198–208, 215–17, 222–23; opera Victory Over the Sun, 2–3, 33–35, 37, 40–41, 43, 44, 46, 155, 183, 204–5; poetry, 11–16, 13, 15,

332

260, 277n18; premiere of The Year 1905/Battleship Potemkin, 212; price of artworks, 25; rise of Suprematism, 33–53; and Rozanova’s paste-ons, 40–41, 58, 84, 117–18, 235; Severny perfume bottle, 94; titles of artworks, 106–7, 138, 192; “white abyss” of paintings, 252–55, 257 Malevich, Kazimir, exhibitions: ejection from “Store” exhibition, 126, 128, 129; “Jack of Diamonds” exhibitions, 2, 115, 155, 156, 176, 253, 260, 267; solo exhibitions in Moscow (1920) and Berlin (1927), xi, 39, 144, 266–70, 315n18, 316n27; “Store” exhibition, 123–30; “Tenth State Exhibition” (1919), 156, 234, 264, 265, 315n18; “Tramway V” exhibition curator, 23–26, 55–56, 62; Venice Bienniale (1924), 139, 262; Verbovka Exhibition (1915), 88–98; “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition curator, 67, 101–4, 118; “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) participant, 104–10, 105 Malevich, Kazimir, ideas on: art needing truth, not sincerity, 6, 201; art’s essential forms, 215; color-painting, 93, 166, 183, 195, 245, 249; creativity, 57; design, 265; economy of art, 239; “empty canvas,” 269–70; hope in youth, 130, 256; letter-soundings and note-letter, 222–26, 232; memory, 51; “planes reveal[ing] themselves,” 16, 18, 84; poetic creation as “liturgy,” 252; shapes’ mutual attraction, 140, 143; “Zero = All,” 271, 274; zero of forms, 102, 128, 273 Malevich, Kazimir, paintings and drawings by, 297n21; Alogical Composition, 29, 30, 102; Angels Carrying the Soul of a Deceased Righteous Man to Heaven, 192; Aviator, 6, 7, 126, 276n8; Birth, 192; Black Circle, 139, 262; Black Cross, 139, 262, 303n121; Black Rectangle and Blue Triangle,

269, 315n18; Suprematism: Construction No. 18, 89–90, 91, 93; Suprematism (Dissolution of Forms), 254; Suprematism: Large Black Trapezoid and Red Square Among Rectangles and Stripes (Preliminary Sketch), 35, 36, 280n59; Suprematism: 34 Drawings, 267–69; Suprematism (White Cross), 315; Suprematist Composition, 89, 90–93, 92; Suprematist Composition (Sensation of Magnetic Gravity), 217; Suprematist Composition: White in White (Sensation of White Silence), 269; Suprematist Composition: White on White, 315n18; “Suprematist Construction of Color” (drawing), 296n8; Suprematist Construction of Color (oil painting on plywood), 296n8; Supremus canvases, 138–49; Supremus No. 50, 139, 142, 297n18; Supremus No. 51, 139–41, 141, 143, 143, 144, 146–49, 267, 297n19; Supremus No. 55, 139, 143–44, 144, 296–97n12; Supremus No. 56, 139, 144, 145; Supremus No. 57, 139, 144, 146, 296–97n12; Supremus No. 58, 139, 145, 296–97n12; “Supremus No. 58 (Yellow and Black),” 297– 98n21; Supremus No. 67, 139, 296n9; “Village,” 14–16, 15, 33; What Effrontery, 38; white-on-white paintings, xi, 148, 257–64, 266–70, 273–74, 315n18; White Square on White Background, 260–63, 261, 265, 315n18. See also Black Square (Malevich) Malevich, Kazimir, writings by: in Anarchy newspaper, 173, 176, 178, 183, 248, 256, 257, 260, 315n10; biographical texts, 14; Evgeny Onegin, 155; “Exhibitions of the Professional Union of Artists-Painters,” 257, 260; From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism (Malevich), 123, 150, 153, 164, 169, 175, 208; From Cubism to Suprematism (Malevich),

333

INDEX

29, 31, 107; Boat Ride, 218; “Boring for Papuans,” 12; Budetlyane Strongman, 43, 48, 49; “Carpet Motif,” 94; Chess Player, 126; Combined Suprematist Composition (Sensation of Metallic Sound–Dynamic). (Pale–Metallic Coloring), 146, 148; Composition: Circle with Rectangles and Triangles, 38–39; Composition with Mona Lisa, 6, 9, 18–22, 19, 40, 43–44, 84, 128, 277n27, 279n47; Cow and Violin, 6–11, 7, 126, 276n8, 276n12; Cubo-Futurist Composition: Smoker with Pipe (Little Russian), 16, 17, 277n22; Englishman in Moscow, 6, 43, 126, 276n8; Fevralism as Emotionism, 38, 38, 43, 280n65; Flowers Sellers, 49; “I the Apostle of New Concepts in Art,” 127–30, 129, 294n66; “I iu mane tor,” 12; Lady at the Poster Column, 9, 18; Lady in an Automobile, 218, 308n192; Moonlit Night, 191; peasant cycle (second), 14; peasant series (first), 2; Peru Flight, 12; “Pictorial Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions,” 192; “Pictorial Realism of a Soccer Player– Color Masses in Four Dimensions,” 192; Portrait of the Composer Roslavets, 192; Prografachnik, 225, 226, 226, 227; Purse Snatched in Streetcar, 12, 13, 277n19; Red Square, 262; Reservist of the First Division, 9, 18; ScufFle on the Boulevard, 12, 277n19; “Self-Portrait in Two Dimensions,” 192; Sensation of Electricity, 38, 280n65; “Sketch for a Portrait of Roslavets; Song to Blue Clouds,” 192; Soldier of the First Division, 113; Soldier of the Mortar Brigade, 102; Song to Blue Clouds, 192; Suprematism (1915) paintings, 35, 41–43, 42, 44, 89, 90, 297n19; Suprematism (1916), 144; Suprematism (1917), 257, 258; Suprematism (1918), 257, 259, 268,

INDEX

Malevich, Kazimir, writings by (continued ) 60, 123, 133, 186; “From the Book about Nonobjectivity,” 265; Konotop, 190–91, 214, 304n123; A New Day for Art, 168; On New Systems in Art, 11; Secret Vices of Academicians, 31–32, 62; “Suprematist Mirror” manifesto, 207–71; “Supremus: Cubism and Futurism,” 176; Supremus journal articles, 178, 180; “To the Men of State from Art,” 178; World as Nonobjectivity, 138, 139, 146, 269, 271 Malevich, Liudviga Aleksandrovna, 96 Malevich, Mechislav Severinovich, 174, 300–301n84 Malevich on Himself, Contemporaries on Malevich, 69 Maliutin, Ivan, 244 Manevich, Abram, 133 “March of the Soviet Militia” (Roslavets), 213 Marcoussis, Louis, 62 Marinetti, F. T., 5, 79, 149 Matisse, Henri, 24, 41, 220 Matiushin, Mikhail: artwork by, 205; attitude of, toward Suprematism, 58–61, 66, 149, 199, 287–88n70; and Benois, 132; and Black Square, 34–35, 47–51; and copyright issues of Malevich, 55; and Davydova’s support of Suprematism, 70, 81; and Exter, 66–67; and Fevralism’s characteristics, 5; and first use of term Suprematism, 54; and From Cubism to Suprematism by Malevich, 124; and Jakobson, 11; and Khardzhiev’s plan for “The History of Russian Futurism,” 174; and Khlebnikov, 130; and Kruchenykh on Fevralism, 31; Kruchenykh’s correspondence with, 40; and Kruchenykh’s “Declaration of the Word as Such,” 239; in Kruchenykh’s Gly-Gly, 233; and literature of Fevralism for an-

334

thologies, 31; on Malevich’s artistic abilities, 60; Malevich’s letters and envelope addressed to, 46, 46, 69, 279n57, 283n26; and Malevich’s musical ideas, 200–201, 203–5, 207, 215; and Malevich’s plans and actions in 1917, 242; and Malevich’s proto-Suprematist drawings, 16; and Malevich’s sketches for reissue of Victory Over the Sun, 47–51, 150; and Malevich’s word-images, 11–12; marriage of, to artist, 64; music by, 205, 207–8, 214; and original production of opera Victory Over the Sun, 3; on Puni, 112; refusal of, to join Fevralist movement, 26; and reissue of Victory Over the Sun, 35, 37, 40, 47–51, 150; and Romantic-Symbolist perspective, 195; and Roslavets, 204, 210; and Rozanova, 58, 115; significance of, 205; and Suprematist sculpture, 114; and Supremus journal, 151, 152, 156, 165, 176–77, 186, 231; Supremus journal articles by, 180, 184, 187; on Tatlin, 104; and “Tramway V” curated by Malevich, 23; on World War I, 149; and “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 24, 61, 104, 107, 112, 113, 287–88n70; and Zero magazine, 101; and Zhuravl publishing house, 35 Mayakovsky (V. V.) State Museum, 180 Meerzon, Iosif, 104 Memoirs of a Russian Lady (Dax), 74 Menkov, Mikhail: age of, compared with Malevich, 294n70; biographical information on, 292n34; and “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition, 245; in Kruchenykh’s Gly-Gly, 233; in list of Suprematists, 124; marriage of, to artist, 292n34; military service of, 156, 165; A New Day for Art by, 168; Newspaper by, 114–15; as supporter of Malevich, 61; and Supremus journal, 151, 292n34; in Supremus society, 165, 166, 167, 248, 292n34; Sym-

Moscow circle, 61–66, 98–100 Moscow Craft Export Association, 283n27 Moscow Masters, 134 Moscow Philharmonic, 214 Moscow Polytechnic Museum, 4–5 Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, 167–68 Musée Art Moderne, 297n21 Musée d’Art Contemporaine, Paris, 303n121 Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Paris, 112 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 289n81 Museum of Modern Art, New York (MOMA), 52, 90, 93, 113, 257, 265, 288–89n81, 315n18 Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, 303n121 Museum of the Russian Avant-garde, Saloniki, 118 Music: atonal music, 196–97; by Cage, 215, 216; coloration of, 195; and Davydova, 27, 71; Kulbin on “Free Music,” 194; by Ligeti, 215; by Malevich, 205; Malevich’s musical ideas, 198–208, 215–17, 222–23; by Matiushin, 205, 207–8, 214; by Penderecki, 215; by Prokofiev, 199–200; by Roslavets, 186, 192–93, 196–98, 200, 202, 205–7, 210–11, 213–17, 222; by Schönberg, 196–97, 198, 305n136; by Scriabin and Scriabinists, 193–98, 200, 201, 206, 214; by Stravinsky, 199–200; Supremus journal on, 152, 177, 180, 184, 186, 187; by Szymanowski, 71, 72, 74–76, 285n42; by Tchaikovsky, 71, 72; visual music by Lurie, 203–4. See also Victory Over the Sun Musical Life, 212 Mussolini, Benito, 149 Naturalistic realism, 56 Nature morte, 25

335

INDEX

phony (Score) by, 114–15; Udaltsova on, 164; and “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 60, 110–12, 114–15 Menshova, I., 300n78 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 132, 178, 199, 295n76 Metzinger, Jean, 61 Miaskovsky, Nikolai, 206 Mikhailova, Klavdia, 245, 266 Military State (Kruchenykh), 220 Miller, A., 206 Minimalism, 159, 240, 257 “Ministry of Fine Arts,” 177 Minkov, Mikhail. See Menkov, Mikhail Miturich, Petr, 104, 125 Modernism, 57 Molok, Yu. A., 276n12 MOMA. See Museum of Modern Art, New York (MOMA) Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci), 9, 20–21 Mondrian, Piet, 53, 82, 137 “Monuments of Theatrical Art from the Collection of L. I. Zheverzheev” exhibition, 35, 37 Moonlit Night (Malevich), 191 Morgunov, Aleksei Alekseevich: Composition No. 1 by, 28; drawing of wooden spoon by, in Trans-sense Boog, 27; and Fevralism, 4, 24, 26– 29, 31; and geometric nonobjectivity, 58; The Hairdresser Went to the Bathhouse by, 22, 277n28; health problems of, 61; and Jack of Diamonds debate, 4, 28; and Kruchenykh, 219; in Kuntsevo in summer of 1915, 31; and Malevich’s Composition with Mona Lisa, 18; and “1915 Painting Exhibition” (Moscow), 22–23, 29, 113, 277n28; and “Tramway V” exhibition, 24, 29 Morris, William, 256 Moscow “Amazons,” 63, 65, 81, 98–100, 154, 157–59, 162, 169, 190, 244, 249. See also specific artists Moscow Chamber Theater, 154–55

INDEX

Nature Morte (Boguslavskaia), 25–26 Nebo i zemlia (Roslavets), 304 Nestroch’e (Kruchenykh), 225–26, 227 Nevdannyi most (Kruchenykh), 302 New Day for Art, A (Malevich, Menkov, and Yurkevich), 168 Newman, Barnett, x Newspaper (Menkov), 114–15 New Style, beginning of, xiv Nikonova, Ry, 188 “1915 Painting Exhibition” (Moscow), 18, 22–23, 29, 32, 40, 113, 277n28 No. 132-a (Tatlin), 25 No. 133-b (Tatlin), 25 No. 144-m (Tatlin), 25 Noga, Aleksandr, 283n29 Nonobjective Composition (Rozanova), 185 Nonobjective Composition/Sawyer (Kliun), 28 Nonobjectivity: opposition to Suprematism by nonobjectivists, 263–66; Russian and English nonobjectivity, 81–84; Suprematism and crystallization of, 37–43. See also Constructivism Nosoboika (Kruchenykh), 176, 224, 236, 309n202 Nothingist group, 239 OBERIU group, 32 Obesity of Roses (Kruchenykh), 233 Obukhov, Nikolai, 193 October (Roslavets), 213 Omega, 80–83, 153 On New Systems in Art (Malevich), 11 Op Art, 158–59 Opera. See Victory Over the Sun Orthography, reform of, xiv, 10–11 Osmerkin, Aleksandr, 244 Ozonator (Kliun), 28, 126 Padrta, Jirˇí, 277n19, 277n27 “Painterly architectonics,” 104, 157, 159–62, 249

336

Painterly Architectonics. Black, Red, Gray (Popova), 161 Painting Suprematism. See Suprematism Pakhta (Cotton) (Roslavets), 213, 214 Parnis, A., 236, 311n232, 312n239 Paste-ons: by Kruchenykh, 219–21, 225, 235; Malevich’s appropriation of Rozanova’s paste-ons, 58, 117–18, 170, 235; by Rozanova, 40–41, 58, 84, 116, 117–18, 185, 219–21, 235, 249 Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice, 89 Penderecki, Krzysztof, 215 Peru Flight (Malevich), 12 Pestel, Vera: in “Cubist circle,” 61, 162, 169; public activism of, 241; and “Store” exhibition, 124, 126; on Suprematism, 100, 249; in Supremus society, 165, 167, 248; Verbovka designs by, 157, 185, 187, 313n265 Petersburg State Archive of Photographic and Film Documents, 105 Petnikov, Grigory, 151 Picasso, Pablo, 8–9, 20, 24, 103, 203 Picasso and His Environs (Aksenov), 134 “Pictorial Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions” (Malevich), 192 “Pictorial Realism of a Soccer Player– Color Masses in Four Dimensions” (Malevich), 192 Pierrot Lunaire (Schönberg), 198 Plato, 131, 210 “Playing Cards” series (Rozanova), 245 Poetry: color in, 195; economic poetry, 238–40; and Futurism, 11, 198, 203; by Khlebnikov, 8, 11, 23, 253; by Kliun, 12; by Kruchenykh, 10, 11, 149, 183–84, 224–26, 230, 237, 238, 276n9, 288n70; by Malevich, 11–16, 13, 15, 260, 277n18; by Rozanova, 183, 184, 237–38; visual poetry by Kruchenykh, 224–28, 232, 238, 309–10n208–209 Polenova, Ye. D., 71, 159

Professional Union of Artists-Painters, Moscow, 241, 243, 247, 257, 260 Prografachnik (Malevich), 225, 226, 226, 227 Prokofiev, Sergei, 199–200 Provinzialmuseum, Hanover, Germany, 288–89n81 Psychoanalysis, 20 Puni, Ivan Albertovich: age of, compared with Malevich, 294n70; collage technique of, 24, 113; compared with Rozanova, 119; counter-reliefs by, 86; Cubo-Futurist compositions by, 112–13; and Dadaism, 112; emigration of, from Soviet Russia, 112; exclusion of, from “Store” exhibition, 124; financing of art exhibitions by, 55–56, 104, 112, 114; and First Verbovka Exhibition, 86; and “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition, 156; in list of Suprematists, 124, 246; and Lurie, 204; and Malevich’s concerns about “spying” by, 55; Matiushin on, 112; price of artworks by, 25; sculptures by, 112; and Supremus journal, 151; and Supremus society, 166, 167, 248; and “Tramway V” exhibition, 23–24, 55–56, 113; and Verbovka designs, 158, 313n265; and “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 25, 56, 60, 67, 104, 110, 111, 112, 118, 119, 291n15 Puni, Ivan Albertovich, artworks by: Card Players, 25, 29; Composition paintings, 112; Still-Life with Hammer, 113; White Sphere, 112, 113 Pure Blue (Rodchenko), 270 Pure Red (Rodchenko), 270 Pure Yellow (Rodchenko), 270 Purse Snatched in Streetcar (Malevich), 12, 13, 277n19 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 39, 72 Pushkin House, 46, 69 Queen of Spades, The (Tchaikovsky), 72

337

INDEX

Popova, Liubov: “Birsk” series by, 60, 159–60; and Constructivism, 156, 158, 159, 249; in “Cubist circle,” 61, 162, 169; and Cubo-Futurism, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162; “dissolution of shapes” in Malevich’s paintings compared with, 255; and Exter, 98; and “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition, 154, 157, 159–60; Malevich’s respect for, 62; and Malevich’s statement on discovery of Suprematism, 68; in Moscow circle, 61, 99; one-day showing of Supremus painters (1917) in apartment of, 241, 248; and “painterly architectonics,” 104, 159–62, 249; Painterly Architectonics. Black, Red, Gray by, 161; “Painterly Architectonics” paintings by, 162; price of paintings by, 25; public activism of, 241; “Shah-i-Zinda” cycle of paintings by, 159–60; and “Store” exhibition, 124; study in Paris by, 61, 64; Suprematist experiments by, 157, 159–62; and Supremus journal, 151, 160, 169; in Supremus society, 165, 167, 248; and Tatlin, 64, 125, 159; textile sketches of, 158–59; and “Tramway V” exhibition, 24, 61; Verbovka designs by, 79, 157, 158, 160–62, 185, 187, 246, 249, 313n265; and “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 25 Portrait of a Fool (Larionov), 22 Portrait of an Englishwoman (Lewis), 83–84 Portrait of the Composer Roslavets (Malevich), 192 Portrait of V. Ye. Tatlin [Balda] (Larionov), 22 Postmodernism, 57–58 Pound, Ezra, 82–83 Pozharsky, Valerian, 244 Pribylskaia, Yevgenia Ivanovna, 79, 85, 283n27 Prices: of artwork, 24–26, 295n80; for Verbovka designs, 163, 164, 170–71

INDEX

Rafalovich, Sofia Mikhailovna, 166, 168, 182 Rayonnism, 22–23, 24, 29, 54, 58, 136, 176, 278n30 Rayonnist Landscape (Larionov), 22 Rayonnist Mackerel (Larionov), 22 Ready-mades, 9, 12–14, 21, 33, 113, 119 Realism: collector of Russian Realist painting, 193; critical realism, 56; of Gorky, 24; naturalistic realism, 56; Socialist Realism, 279n41 Red Square (Malevich), 262 Repin, Ilia, 10, 24 Reservist of the First Division (Malevich), 9, 18 Réverie (Roslavets), 193 Review of Theaters, 25–26 Riesen, Alexander von, 288n80 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 206 Rodchenko, Aleksandr: black paintings by, 264–65; and Kruchenykh’s Gly-Gly, 234; “last pictures” by, 270; in Left-wing Federation, 243, 247; on Malevich, 263–65; and Rozanova as Suprematist, 151, 170; and Rozanova’s papers, 174; and “Store” exhibition, 124, 127, 313n261; and suspicions against Malevich for appropriation of Rozanova’s works, 58, 118; and Udaltsova, 247; on whiteon-white paintings by Malevich, 264–65 Romanticism, 3, 57, 194 Roslavets, Natalia Alekseevna (née Langovaia), 193, 208, 212–13 Roslavets, Nikolai: archives of, 211; death of, 214; divorce of, 213; drawing by, 194; employment of, as censor, 213; exile of, 213; fate and art of, 211–14; on Giraud, 305n144; on harmonyshapes, 197; influence of Symbolism on early compositions of, 192–93; in Kruchenykh’s Gly-Gly, 208, 222, 233; lecture by, 208; and Malevich’s musical ideas, 201–3; Malevich’s por-

338

trait of, 192; Malevich’s relationship with, during their adulthood, 202–8, 211–12; Malevich’s relationship with, during their youth, 190–93; marriage of, 193, 208, 212–13; and Matiushin, 204; as Musical Life editor in chief, 212; music by, 186, 192–93, 196–98, 200, 202, 205–8, 210–11, 213–17, 222, 304n130; music education of, 192, 193; “On ‘Nonobjectivity’ in Art” by, 208–10; persecution of, by Communists, 213; photograph of, 192, 209; public posts of, 212, 241; romantic relationship between Maria Filippova and, 213; scholarly conferences and publications on, 214; and Scriabinists, 193–98; on “soundcontemplation,” 196; Supremus journal articles by, 151, 152, 180, 181, 184, 187, 190, 208–11; in Supremus society, 165, 166, 167, 208–11, 248; on “synthetochord,” 197–98, 211; and tuberculosis, 193–94; as violinist, 192, 304n127 Roslavets, Nikolai, music by: Heaven and Earth, 193; “March of the Soviet Militia,” 213; Nebo i zemlia, 304; October, 213; Pakhta (Cotton), 213, 214; Réverie, 193 Roslavets Trio, 214 Rostislavov, A. A., 115, 117, 151 Rottenberg, Hella, 303n121 Rozanova, Olga: age of, compared with Malevich, 294n70; on Boguslavskaia, 113, 115; as colorist, 64, 122, 158, 245, 249; death of, 249; departure of, from Supremus journal, 233, 241–42; employment of, 166, 171, 179, 235– 36, 300n74; exclusion of, from list of Suprematists, 117; and “Exhibition of Paintings of Left-Wing Trends,” 115–16, 123, 293n46; finances of, 170–71; and “I the Apostle of New Concepts in Art” by Malevich, 128; and “Jack of Diamonds” exhibi-

116; Nonobjective Composition, 185; “Playing Cards” series, 245; Universal War: Yat’, 219–21, 226; Verbovka decorative designs by, 79, 157, 158, 170–71, 187, 245, 246, 246, 249, 313n265; War, 116; Work Box, 116 Rozengolts, K. A., 302n107 Rubinstein, Artur, 75, 76, 78, 286n54 Running Landscape (Kliun), 126 Rupture, Movement, Weight (Exter), 134 Russia: All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in, 212; art movement in generally, 56–58; civil war (1918) in, 77, 149; collective art in, 3, 80, 110– 12; Decembrists in, 72, 74; economy of, in 1913, 1; February Revolution in, 165, 166, 171, 177, 212, 240, 314n273; gender issues in, 63–64; Moscow Cheka in, 213; October coup in, 240, 245; politics of Provisional Government in, 186; Social Revolutionary party in, 212, 311n224. See also Soviet Union Russian Avant-Garde and the Briansk World, The (Belodubrovsky), 214 Russian Museum, 21–22, 43, 139, 265, 297n21 Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow (RGALI), 189–90, 194, 211 Sabaneev, Leonid, 212 Sagittarius, 83–84, 287–88n70 Salome, 155 “Salutation to Suprematists. Aim” (Supremus, Malevich), 178 Savrasov, A. K., 61 Sawyer/Nonobjective Composition (Kliun), 28 Sayler, Oliver, 245 Schönberg, Arnold, 196–97, 198, 305n136, 305n138 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 13, 210 Science, 37–38, 43, 48, 137–38, 195, 218

339

INDEX

tion, 156, 170; and Kliun, 170; and Kruchenykh, 176, 219–20, 224, 235, 309n202; and Kruchenykh’s Gly-Gly, 233, 241; and Kruchenykh’s visual poetry, 310n209; lecture given by Malevich (February, 1917), not Rozanova, 166; and Left-wing Federation, 241; in list of Suprematists, 124, 151; on Malevich, 58, 115, 218, 235; Malevich’s relationship with, 170, 171, 182, 185, 235; Matiushin on, 61, 119; Moscow exhibition (2007) of, 105; negative review of, 115; and painting lessons from Malevich, 135; papers of, 174; paste-ons by, 40–41, 58, 84, 116, 117–18, 185, 219–21, 235, 249; photograph of, 104; poetry by, 183, 184, 237–38; prices for artworks by, 25, 295n80; public posts of, 241; and “Store” exhibition, 124; and Suprematism, 116–24; Suprematist reliefs by, 116–23, 120, 121; on Suprematists, 113, 115, 117–18; Supremus journal article by, 180–82, 187; and Supremus journal generally, 151; as Supremus journal secretary, 171–72, 173, 176–77, 179, 183–84, 186, 228–30, 232; in Supremus society, 165, 167, 169–72, 248, 310n214; as suspicious of Malevich for appropriating of her paste-ons, 58, 117–18, 170, 235; on Tatlin, 125; and “Tramway V” exhibition, 115; travels by, 292n38; trips to Vladimir by, 229–30, 301n94; and visual poetry by Kruchenykh, 224–25; and World War I, 166; writings by, on modern art, 179, 181–82; and “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 25, 40, 61, 104, 115–23, 291n15, 293n46 Rozanova, Olga, works by: Automobile, 116–17, 119, 122; “Color,” 245; Composition of Brilliant Objects (on Tin) by, 116; Composition of Clay and Crystal Objects by, 116; Cyclist [Devil’s Panel], 117, 119, 122; Desk,

INDEX

Scriabin, Alexander, 193, 194–95, 196, 200, 201, 206 ScufFle on the Boulevard (Malevich), 12, 277n19 Secret Vices of Academicians (Kruchenykh, Kliun, and Malevich), 31–32, 62 “Self-Portrait in Two Dimensions” (Malevich), 192 Semigradova, A. V., 79, 85 Sensation of Electricity (Malevich), 38, 280n65 Serov, V. A., 95 Severianin, Igor, 198, 237 Shadowa, L. A., 105, 283n27 Shapes in Air (Lurie), 203 Shchukin, Sergei Ivanovich, 24–26, 278n36, 287n60 Shebeko, V. N., 165 Shemshurin, Andrei Akimovich: archive of, 223; commission for Rozanova for War (book), 41; on Fevralism, 18, 22–23, 29; and Kruchenykh, 225; and Kruchenykh’s article on Khlebnikov, 231–32; and Kruchenykh’s gambling debt, 310n210; and Kruchenykh’s Gly-Gly, 232, 233, 236; and Kruchenykh’s paste-ons, 221, 225; and Kruchenykh’s poetry, 225, 234, 309–10n208–209; and lecture given by Malevich, not Rozanova, 166; Rozanova on, 115; and Rozanova’s employment, 171, 172; and Rozanova’s paste-ons, 116, 219; and Rozanova’s trips to Vladimir, 229; and Supremus journal, 172, 228, 240; and Supremus society, 172 Shestov, Lev, 76 Shevchenko, A. V., 22 Shevliakov, S., 25–26, 28 Shklovsky, Viktor, 199, 238, 239 Sidorov, Aleksei, 270 Sigei, Sergei, 188 Simple as Mooing (Maiakovsky), 10 Simultaneous Orphism, 80

340

“Sketch for a Portrait of Roslavets; Song to Blue Clouds” (Malevich), 192 SMA. See Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (SMA) Socialist Realism, 279n41 Social Revolutionary party, 212, 311n224, 314n8 Soffici, Ardengo, 66, 154 Soirées de Paris, Les, 79, 286–87n60 Soldier of the First Division (Malevich), 113 Soldier of the Mortar Brigade (Malevich), 102 Sologub, Fedor, 198, 213 Song to Blue Clouds (Malevich), 192 Soviet Union: demise of, 214; Lenin in, 314n8; museum construction in, 106, 291n16; persecution of avant-gardism in, 27–28, 277n27; Suprematists’ recognition in, 109; traveling art exhibition from, 102–3. See also Russia Sparks, 87 Speech, 132 Spoon imagery, 4, 27, 28–31, 30, 38, 107, 113, 128, 279n47 Springtime Counteragency of the Muses, 134, 200 SR party. See Social Revolutionary party Stalin, Joseph, 49 State Free Arts Studios, Moscow, 79, 242 State Institute of the History of the Arts, 69 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (SMA): Khardzhiev archive at, 4, 166, 172, 174, 175, 188–89, 208, 211; Khardzhiev-Chaga Center in, 166, 172; Malevich’s artworks in, 15, 17, 36, 38, 41, 42, 43, 46, 52, 89, 91, 129, 142, 144, 146, 226, 254, 257, 259, 265, 268, 269, 288n80; Supremus journal archive at, 172–75, 187–90, 208, 239, 242, 250 Stepanova, Varvara: Constructivist works by, 156, 158; and drawings for

and geometric abstractivism generally, 55, 273; and geometric planes, 16, 18; in June, 1915, 43–53; Lewis’s influence on, 83–84; and Malevich as apostle of new concepts in art, 127, 128, 129, 130–35; and Malevich as “chairman of space,” 253, 255–57; Malevich’s backdating of dates and sequence of events on beginnings of, 33–37, 48–49, 51–52; Malevich’s color-painting in late 1917 and first half of 1918, 251–66; and Malevich’s mission, 252–53; and Malevich’s nonobjective pictures before Black Square, 35, 48, 50; Malevich’s statement on discovery of, 68–69; manifesto of, titled “Suprematist Mirror,” 207–71; Matiushin’s attitude toward, 58–61, 66, 149, 199, 287–88n70; in May of 1915, 33–37; and Moscow Circle, 61–66, 98–100; negative responses to and stereotypes of, 65–66, 86–87, 95, 98–100, 157, 263–66; nonobjectivists compared with, 156, 263; nonobjectivists’ opposition to, 263–66; origin of term, 54, 56; propaganda campaign for, 65–66, 85, 95, 98, 124, 128, 129–30, 202; rise of, 33–53, 84; and Rozanova, 116–24; and Russian and English nonobjectivity, 81–84; style of, 54–55, 257, 260–61; Supremus journal’s proposed issue on, 175; Tatlin’s opposition to, 58, 62, 126, 128, 129, 243–44, 264; trans-sense versus, 237; uniqueness and significance of, 52, 53, 55, 64–65, 85, 99; utilitarian/applied sphere of, 97–98; and “weightlessness,” 92; white-onwhite Suprematism, xi, 148, 257–64, 266–70, 273–74, 315n18. See also Black Square (Malevich); Malevich, Kazimir; “Store” exhibition; Supremus society; Verbovka crafts artel; Verbovka Exhibitions; “0.10” (“ZeroTen”) exhibition (1915)

341

INDEX

Kruchenykh’s Gly-Gly, 234; in Leftwing Federation, 247; on Malevich’s appropriation of others’ works, 58, 118; and Malevich’s statement on discovery of Suprematism, 68–69; opposition to Suprematism by, 264; and Rodchenko on Malevich, 263; and Rozanova, 116, 151, 170; and Rozanova’s papers, 174; and “Store” exhibition, 125–28; textile sketches of, 158–59; Udaltsova’s oral reminiscences transmitted to, 67–69, 111, 116, 163; and “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 67, 99–100, 111 Still-Life with Hammer (Puni), 113 “Store” exhibition (1916), 8, 123–30, 163, 276n8, 293n50, 313n261 Store group, 157, 163, 243 Stravinsky, Igor, 199–200 Stray Dog, 203, 304n132 Strigalev, Anatoly, 103, 108, 118, 290–91n8 Suprematism: artists involved in, 112–15, 117, 124, 135, 151; and atomization of color, 93; ban on name at “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 24, 65, 98–99, 102, 127; beginning and ending of, 244, 274; Benois’s denunciation of, 132, 135; and birth of Black Square, 43–53; and “colorpainting,” 93, 166, 183, 195, 245, 249, 251–52, 273; compared with Cubism-Futurism, 52, 53; Constructivism versus, 55, 100, 263–66; and copyright issues, 55–56; and crystallization of nonobjectivity, 37–43, 263; dating of beginning of, 33–37, 83, 85, 87; Davydova and public affirmation of, 69–81, 87, 95; and “dissolution of shapes,” 251–55, 257, 267; and economy of art, 239; and “empty canvas,” 269–70; and Alexandra Exter, 66–69, 98; in fall of 1915, 54–69; Fevralism as forerunner of, 3–33; and flame imagery, 131;

INDEX

Suprematism (1915) paintings (Malevich), 35, 41–43, 42, 44, 89, 90, 297n19 Suprematism (1916) (Malevich), 144 Suprematism (1917) (Malevich), 257, 258 Suprematism (1918) (Malevich), 257, 259, 268, 269, 315n18 Suprematism and Architecture (KhanMagomedov), 52 Suprematism: Construction No. 18, Malevich, Kazimir, paintings and drawings by (Malevich), 89–90, 91, 93 Suprematism (Dissolution of Forms) (Malevich), 254 Suprematism: Large Black Trapezoid and Red Square Among Rectangles and Stripes (Preliminary Sketch) (Malevich), 35, 36, 280n59 Suprematism: The World as Nonobjectivity, or Eternal Rest (Malevich). See World as Nonobjectivity (Malevich) Suprematism: 34 Drawings (Malevich), 267–69 Suprematism (White Cross) (Malevich), 315 Suprematist Composition (Malevich), 89, 90–93, 92 Suprematist Composition (Sensation of Magnetic Gravity) (Malevich), 217 Suprematist Composition: White in White (Sensation of White Silence) (Malevich), 269 Suprematist Composition: White on White (Malevich), 315n18 “Suprematist Construction of Color” (drawing by Malevich), 296n8 Suprematist Construction of Color (oil painting by Malevich), 296n8 “Suprematist Mirror” manifesto (Malevich), 207–71 Supremus canvases, 138–49 “Supremus: Cubism and Futurism” (Malevich), 176

342

Supremus journal: archive of, 172–75, 187–90, 239, 242, 250; artwork in, 174, 185, 292n34; “Azef-JudasKhlebnikov” article by Kruchenykh for, 178, 228, 230–32; beginning of idea for, 182; contents of first issue of, 187; contributors to, 151, 152, 180–81; “Declaration of the Word as Such” by Kruchenykh for, 184, 228–29, 230, 238–40; decorative art in, 185, 187; erroneous and questionable statements on, 173; failed publication of, 152, 250; financing of, 135, 153, 164, 165, 169, 242; first issue of, 152, 175–76, 179–87, 228–29; form of title, xv; and Kruchenykh, 151, 152, 156, 173, 184, 187, 217, 228–40; literary section of, 152, 183–84; Malevich’s articles for, 173, 175–80, 184, 186, 187, 248; Malevich’s reply to articles for, 178; and Matiushin, 151, 152, 156, 165, 176; as monthly publication, 176; plans for, 151–54, 156, 160; printers and printing process for, 152, 153, 172, 179–81, 182–83, 185; production costs of, 242; publications connected with, 172–75; purpose and focus of, 176, 177, 242–43; Roslavets’ articles for, 151, 152, 180, 181, 184, 187, 190, 208–10; Rozanova as secretary of, 171–72, 173, 176–77, 179, 183–84, 186, 228–30, 232; Rozanova’s article for, 180–81, 187; Rozanova’s disappearance/departure from, 233, 241–42; second issue of, 152, 154, 175, 176, 182; sections and sequence of, 179–90; synopsis of, 152, 179; Udaltsova’s administrative duties for, 164–65, 166, 171, 172, 247, 248; Udaltsova’s journal articles for, 151, 174, 178, 180–81, 183–87; Verbovka designs for, 168; and Yurkevich, 151, 152, 167–68, 180, 183, 187. See also Supremus society

Syntheses (Lurie), 203, 204 Szymanowski, Feliks, 74 Szymanowski, Karol: Davydova as muse of, 74–76, 78, 79; and Davydova’s circle, 135; Ephebe by, 76, 285n47; and Exter, 79; modernism of, 135; music by, 71, 72, 74–76, 285n42; son of Davydova and, 76, 285n48 Szymanowski, Stanislaw, 74, 285n48 Tairov, Aleksandr, 154 Tango with Cows: Ferro-Concrete Poems (Kamensky), 10, 276n12 Tarabukin, Nikolai, 270 Tatlin, Vladimir Yevgrafovich: Analysis of Composition by, 109; and Bloc of Left-wing Artists, 313n261; booklet on, 60; Bottle by, 163; compared with Rozanova, 122; counter-reliefs by, 24–26, 53, 55, 104, 108–9, 162–63, 243, 263, 264–65, 278n36, 290– 91n8; counter-reliefs created by supporters of, 104; and Cubo-Futurism, 127; disbanding of Store group by, 125, 157, 163; and Jack of Diamonds society, 243–44; in Left-wing Federation, 241, 243, 247; life-drawing sessions at studio of, 62; Matiushin on, 104; opposition to Malevich by, 58, 62, 126, 128, 129, 243–44, 264; on own singularity and negative attitude toward collectivism, 60; photograph of, 28; and Popova, 64, 125, 159; price of artworks by, 24–26; and “sense of taste,” 163; Shchukin’s purchase of art by, 24–26, 278n36; and “Store” exhibition, 8, 123–30, 293n50; and Store group, 125, 157, 163, 243; and “Tramway V” exhibition, 24–26, 103; and Udaltsova, 60, 125, 162–63, 176; and “0.10” (“ZeroTen”) exhibition, 25, 103–4, 108–9, 122, 162 Tchaikovsky, Modest Ilich, 72

343

INDEX

Supremus No. 50 (Malevich), 139, 142, 297n18 Supremus No. 51 (Malevich), 139–41, 141, 143, 143, 144, 146–49, 267, 297n19 Supremus No. 55 (Malevich), 139, 143–44, 144, 296–97n12 Supremus No. 56 (Malevich), 139, 144, 145, 296–97n12 Supremus No. 57 (Malevich), 139, 144, 146, 296–97n12 Supremus No. 58 (Malevich), 139, 145 “Supremus No. 58 (Yellow and Black)” (Malevich), 297–98n21 Supremus No. 67 (Malevich), 139, 296n9 Supremus society: conception of Supremus Project, 149–55; creation of, 24; emblems for, 161; end of, 244; exhibitions by, 244–48; Exter in, 165, 169, 178–79; Kruchenykh in, 217–30, 248; left-wing artists in, 162–69; list of members of, 151, 165, 166–67, 169, 248; meaning and form of name, xv, 137–38, 236–37; meetings of, 164–65, 166, 172; merger of, with Left-wing Federation, 241; Popova’s Suprematist experiments, 159–62; public activism in 1917 by, 240–44; public posts of members of, 240–41; Roslavets in, 165, 166, 167, 208–11, 248; Rozanova in, 165, 167, 169–72, 248; scandals in, 164, 166–67, 244; and self-definition of left-wing artists, 177–78; significance of and summary on, 248–50; Udaltsova in, 162–67, 169, 172, 241, 247, 248; Yurkevich in, 167–68, 248. See also Supremus journal Surrealism, 32 Symbolism, 154–55, 192, 193, 194–95, 200 Symphony (Score) (Menkov), 114–15 Syncretism, 194–96 Synesthesia, 194–96, 205

INDEX

Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilich, 71, 72, 284n35 Tchaikovsky (P. I.) House-Museum, 72, 285n36 Tenisheva, Princess M. K., 71 “Tenth State Exhibition” (1919), 156, 182, 234, 264, 315n18 Tepin, Ya., 156, 159 Terentiev, Igor, 233 Terk-Delaunay, Sonia, 62, 80, 87, 158–59 Theater. See Gly-Gly (Kruchenykh); Moscow Chamber Theater; Victory Over the Sun Theater and Art, 7 Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (Penderecki), 215 Tiutchev, Fedor, 274 Toilette (Boguslavskaia), 25–26 “To the Men of State from Art” (Malevich), 178 Tower Studio of Theater Art, Moscow, 200–202 “Tramway V: The First Futurist Exhibition” (1915): artists excluded from, 23–24, 62, 200; artists exhibiting at, 24–26, 28–29, 61, 101–2, 113, 115; criteria for exhibitors of, 23–24, 62; exhibitors of, in “0.10” (“ZeroTen”) exhibition, 101–2; financing of, 55–56; Malevich as curator of, 23–26, 55–56, 62; Malevich’s paintings at, 7, 18; prices of artworks at, 24–26; sale of Tatlin’s painting at, 24–26, 278n36; spoons decorating clothing of artists in, 28–29, 107; Tatlin’s preparation for, 103 Trans-sense: and Boguslavskaia, 24; and captions of Malevich’s works, 106–7; and Fevralism, 5, 8, 10, 12, 18, 20–21, 24, 27, 31, 237; and Kruchenykh, 10, 31, 217, 219–26, 228, 232, 237; and Malevich, 8, 12, 18, 20–21, 49, 106–7, 149–50, 192, 237; and opera Victory Over the Sun, 155; and Puni, 24, 112; and staged photos of Futur-

344

ist performances, 27; Suprematism versus, 237; and title “0.10,” 102; and Trans-sense Boog, 27, 41 Trans-Sense (Kruchenykh), 226 Trans-sense Boog (Kruchenykh and Jakobson), 27, 41 “Trans-Sense Poetry (Word Compositions)” (Kruchenykh), 227 Treason (Kruchenykh), 220 Trenin, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 174 Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, 193, 239, 265, 299n48 Tugendkhold, Yakov, 86–87, 98, 288n78 Tulovskaia, Yulia, 158–59 Turchin, V. S., 294n71 Turn of the Automobile (Le-Dantiu), 22 Udaltsova, Nadezhda: on collecting by Shchukin, 278n36; in “Cubist circle,” 61, 162, 169; and CuboFuturism, 157; and Davydova, 81; on end of Suprematism, 244, 249; and Exter, 98, 154; and Jack of Diamonds, 244; and “Jack of Diamonds” exhibition, 154, 157, 163–64, 313n263; and Kruchenykh’s Gly-Gly, 173, 208, 233–34, 247; in Left-wing Federation, 241, 247; Life of a Russian Cubist by, 181, 228–29; Malevich’s relationship with, 62, 154, 163, 164, 244; on Malevich’s statement on discovery of Suprematism, 68–69; and Moscow circle, 61, 99; and nonobjective art, 158; on prices of artworks, 163, 164, 295n80; public posts of, 241, 247; and Rodchenko, 247; on Rozanova, 116; and “Store” exhibition, 124, 125–27, 129, 163, 293n50; study in Paris by, 61, 64; Suprematism’s potential for, 157; and Supremus journal administration, 164–65, 166, 171, 172, 228–30, 247, 248; Supremus journal articles by, 151, 174, 178, 180–81, 183, 184–87;

Vakar, I. A., 34, 282n16, 314n8 Variation II (Cage), 216 Vasilenko, S. N., 197 Vasilieva, E., 88 Vengerova, Zinaida, 83, 287n64 Venice Bienniale (1924), 139, 262 Verbovka crafts artel: and Davydova, 70, 78–81, 85, 132–33, 157, 170, 185, 187, 249, 313n265; Exter’s designs for, 70, 79, 85, 153–54, 155, 249, 313n265; founding of, 286n53; Popova’s designs for, 79, 157, 158, 160–62, 185, 187, 249, 313n265; prices for designs for, 163, 164, 170–71; Rozanova’s designs for, 79, 157, 158, 170–71, 185, 187, 249, 313n265; Udaltsova’s designs for, 157, 158, 163–64, 170, 185, 187, 249, 313n65, 313n263; Yurkevich’s designs for, 168, 185, 187 Verbovka Exhibitions: first exhibition (1915), 85–98, 88, 100, 245, 248, 286nn52–53, 288n78, 289n84; second exhibition (1917), 245–47, 246, 248, 313n263, 313n265 Vermel, Samuil Matveevich, 134, 200 Vesnin, Aleksandr, 160, 255

Victory Over the Sun: and Black Square, 33–35, 40, 46, 49–51, 83; compared with Gly-Gly, 233; critique of, 205; Davydova’s interest in theatrical projects similar to, 81; Malevich’s involvement in reissue of, 35, 37, 150; Malevich’s sketches for reissue of, 41, 43, 46–51, 150; and Malevich’s wordimages, 12, 155; original production of, and artists and musicians involved in, 2–3, 47, 48, 83, 204–5, 222; reissue of, 33–35, 37, 40–41, 43, 44, 46, 50, 150, 183; score of, published in Unovis Miscellany No. 1, 184; set design and theatrical backdrops for, 3, 47–49; and verbal leitmotif, 44 Victory Request (Kruchenykh), 220 “Village” (Malevich), 14–16, 15, 33 Virtin, M., 288n78 Vitebsk People’s Art School, 266, 270, 302n107 Vladimir Maiakovsky, 2 Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin, 162 Voennaia opera (War opera, Kruchenykh), 302 Vorticism, 82–84 Voyeurism, 57 Vrubel, M. A., 95 Vvedensky, Aleksandr, 32 Vyshnegradsky, Ivan, 193 Wadsworth, Edward, 82 Wagner, Richard, 255–56 Wanderers, 24, 56, 243 War (commission for Rozanova), 41, 116 War (drama) (Kruchenykh), 149 “War” (poem) (Kruchenykh), 149 Warhol, Andy, 21 What Effrontery (Malevich), 38 What Is To Be Done? (Chernyshevsky), 63 “White abyss” of paintings, 252–55, 257 White-on-white Suprematism, xi, 148, 257–64, 266–70, 273–74, 315n18 White Pitcher (Grant), 82

345

INDEX

in Supremus society, 162–67, 169, 172, 241, 247, 248; on Tatlin, 60, 125, 162–63, 176; and “Tramway V” exhibition, 24; Verbovka designs by, 157, 158, 163–64, 170, 185, 187, 246, 246, 249, 313n263, 313n265; and “0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition, 67, 109, 111, 163 Union of Cities, 166, 171, 300n74 Union of Youth, 2, 130, 152, 182 Universal Flowering, 26, 31, 37 Universal War: Yat’ (Kruchenykh), 219–21, 226 University of Southern California, Institute of Contemporary Russian Culture, 172 Unovis, 110–12, 175, 242, 250, 271 Unovis Miscellany No. 1, 173, 174, 184

INDEX

White Sphere (Puni), 112, 113 White Square on White Background (Malevich), 260–63, 261, 265, 315n18 With All Out Book (Kruchenykh), 226 Women artists. See Gender issues; Moscow “Amazons”; and specific artists Word-images, 11–16, 13, 15, 33 Work Box (Rozanova), 116 World as Nonobjectivity (Malevich), 138, 139, 146, 269, 271 “Worldbackwards” (as term), 8, 276n9 “Worldbackwards” (Khlebnikov), 276n8 World of Art, 152, 177 World of Art movement, 132, 243 World War I, 48, 81, 149–50, 153, 166, 240, 242 Yakulov, Georgy, 79, 88, 241 Yasinsky, Aleksei Alekseevich, 293n54 Yasinsky, N. P., 125, 293n54 Yasinsky, Yeronim Yeronimovich, 293n54 Year 1905, The/Battleship Potemkin, 212 Yurkevich, M. V.: biographical information on, 167–68, 299n62; A New Day for Art by, 168; on Suprematism, 183; Supremus journal article by, 151, 152, 167–68, 180, 183, 187; in Supremus society, 165, 166, 167–68, 248; Verbovka designs by, 168, 185, 187 Yustitsky, Valentin, 124 Yutkevich, Sergei, 316n29 Zaitseva, Viktoria, 304n127 Zdanevich, Ilia, 67, 127

346

“0.10” (“Zero-Ten”) exhibition (1915): artists exhibiting at, 64, 101–2, 108–9, 110, 112–23; ban on term “Suprematism” at, 24, 65, 98–99, 102, 127, 163; Black Square at, 106, 108–10; catalog of, 25, 102, 106, 107, 110, 116–17; collective painting at, 110–12; earlier experiences influencing, 24; Exter’s refusal to exhibit at, 68, 70, 98; financing of, 56, 67, 104, 112; hand-drawn banners and posters at, 106, 114, 117; as last Futurist exhibition, 67–68, 111–15; lectures at, 123; and Lurie, 203–4; Malevich as curator of, 67, 101–4, 118; Malevich’s exhibit at, 104–10, 105, 291n15; Matiushin’s review of, 61, 104, 107, 112, 113, 287–88n70; meaning of name of, 101–2, 128; negative reactions to, 109; opening date of, 85, 278n36; organization of wall plane at, 106, 107–8; photographs of, 104–6, 105, 114, 118–19, 141; prices of artworks in, 25; print publications at, 60, 186; publicity for, 104, 114; “Room of Painting Professionals” sign in, 99; and Rozanova, 40, 115–23, 291n15, 293n46; significance of, xiii–xiv; and Tatlin, 25, 103–4, 108–9, 162 “Zero = All,” 271, 274 Zero journal, 101, 153 Zero of forms, 102, 128, 273 Zheverzheev, Levky Ivanovich, 35, 37, 47, 48, 130, 133, 280n71 Ziloti, A. I., 196