Malevich and Interwar Modernism: Russian Art and the International of the Square 9781350204171, 9781350204201, 9781350204188

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Malevich and Interwar Modernism

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Malevich and Interwar Modernism Russian Art and the International of the Square Éva Forgács

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Éva Forgács, 2022 Éva Forgács has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page Cover design: Toby Way Cover Image: Malevic, Kasimir (1878–1935): Painterly Realism. Boy with Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, 1915. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Oil on canvas, 28 x 17 1/2’ (71.1 x 44.5 cm). Acquisition confirmed in 1999 by agreement with the Estate of Kazimir Malevich and made possible with funds from the Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by exchange). 816.1935 © 2021. Digital image,The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-0417-1 ePDF: 978-1-3502-0418-8 eBook: 978-1-3502-0419-5 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations

viii ix x

Introduction 1 1

The Sky Is the Limit: Malevich at the Vitebsk Junction, 1919 11 Malevich’s Road to Vitebsk 11 Taking Off: Victory over the Sun 15 Suprematism 18 Conceptualizing Suprematism 23 Entering the Soviet World 28 Vitebsk, 1919 32 Launching UNOVIS 34 Suprematism: The New Imagination 35

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The Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party and El Lissitzky’s Grasp of Suprematism, 1919 39 Lissitzky’s Road to Vitebsk 39 The Bolshevik Policy of Nationalities 43 Suprematism as Ultimate Redemption 51 Lissitzky’s Rationalized Suprematism 57

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Theo van Doesburg, Artist and Strategist 59 Van Doesburg’s Early Career 59 Elementary Dissent 65 The Antiauthoritarian Authorities of the Avant-Garde 65 Generational Issue in the Avant-Garde 70 The Russian-Dutch Connection 70 The International of the Square 72

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The Irreconcilable Conflict between Constructivism and Suprematism in Moscow 77 Postrevolutionary Moscow: The New State, the New Art, and the New Concept of the Artist 77

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Contents

The “Construction-versus-Composition Debate” at INKhUK 80 Lissitzky’s Attempt to Reconcile Suprematism and Constructivism 85 5

The Mirage of World Revolution: Postrevolution, Postwar Berlin, and Moscow, 1918–1922 91 The World Revolution Will Happen in Berlin 91 The Mirage of Internationalism and the Political Reality 97 The “Silent Majority” and the War Experience 100 Reins on the Avant-Garde in Russia 105 The Russian Emigration in Berlin 106 Concepts of Constructivism as Kinetic Structure versus Static Geometry in Berlin 109 The Magic of Words 112

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As Many Narratives as Narrators: Russian Accounts of New Russian Art in the West 115 The First Accounts 115 Veshch, Objet, Gegenstand 117 Ivan Puni’s Fierce Critique of Malevich 126 “New Russian Art”: A Talk by Lissitzky, Berlin, December 1922 127

7 The First Russian Exhibition in Berlin, 1922, and Its Reception 131 The History of the Exhibition 131 The Selection of the Artworks 135 Reception and Major Press Reviews of the First Russian Exhibition 137 8

Respectfully Challenging the Master: Lissitzky and Malevich 147 A Suprematist Tale of Two Squares: Surpassing Malevich 147 Proun Room, 1923, as a Further Riposte 152 Victory over the Sun on Paper, 1923 155 The Lenin Tribune, 1924 156 Malevich’s Lasting Influence 158

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The Book That Was Not. Van Doesburg’s Thumbs-Down on the Malevich Volume 161 Translating Malevich’s Writings 161 Van Doesburg Kills the Malevich Volume 164 Van Doesburg’s Reasons 167 Public Intellectual versus Prophet 169 The End of a Friendship 173 Personal or Cultural Issues? 177

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10 Enter Malevich: Exhibitions in Post-Utopian Warsaw and Berlin, and the Bauhaus Book, 1927 179 1923: A Watershed Year 179 Malevich in Warsaw 184 The Berlin Exhibition’s Context 188 Visit to the Dessau Bauhaus 192 Reception of the Berlin Exhibition 195 Volume 11 of the Bauhaus Books Series: Malevich’s The Non-Objective World and Suprematism 197 11 The Postwar Scene and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam’s Malevich Exhibition, 1957 201 Three Decades after the Berlin Exhibition 202 The Stedelijk Museum’s Tour de Force 205 The First Building Blocks of a New Narrative 211 The Manuscripts Left in Berlin 215 12 The New Left’s Role in Retrieving the Interwar Avant-Gardes and Reclaiming the Russian Avant-Garde in the 1960s 219 Reconquering Everyday Life 220 The Russian Avant-Garde in Galleries and Museums 225 “It’s Only a Beginning!” 231 Notes Bibliography Index

237 290 307

Illustrations 1.1 Malevich: Painterly Realism of a Football Player, 1915 20 1.2 Malevich: Suprematist Painting (with black trapezoid and red square), 191520 1.3 Malevich: Self-Portrait. Watercolor and gouache on paper, 1908–1910 29 2.1 UNOVIS group photo, Vitebsk, 1920 44 2.2 The first Soviet post stamp 48 2.3 El Lissitzky: “Had Gadya” (“The Only Kid”), illustration to Verse 10. 1919 48 3.1 Theo van Doesburg, photo, 1927 60 3.2 Theo van Doesburg: Design of Fountain, photo, 1917 64 3.3 Malevich: Architekton, 1924–1926 64 3.4 Theo van Doesburg: Study for Arithmetic Position, 1929 75 8.1 El Lissitzky: Tale of Two Squares, 1922 149 8.2 El Lissitzky: “New Man,” from Figurinen Cabinet Victory over the Sun, 1923 151 8.3 El Lissitzky, Ilya Chashnik: Lenin Tribune, pencil, photo on paper, 1924 157 9.1 El Lissitzky: MACHINE, MACHINE, MACHINE, Merz (Band 2, Nr.8/9), April–July 1924 176 9.2 Theo van Doesburg: Kazimir Malevich: BAZAR, BAZAR, BAZAR, De Stijl, 1926–1927 176 10.1 Welcome reception for Malevich in the Polonia Hotel, Warsaw, March 1927 187 11.1 Willem Sandberg, director of the Stedelijk Museum, 1945–1962 205 12.1 Cover page of Cimaise, spring issue, 1968 230

Acknowledgments Work on this book has taken many years of discussions with friends and colleagues who were willing and interested to discuss various details of it, on both sides of the Atlantic. The far from complete list of them includes Timothy O. Benson, Hubert van den Berg, the late Ákos Birkás, Margo Bistis, Ralf Burmeister, Pál Deréky, Marina Dmitrieva, Charlotte Douglas, Ljiljana Grubisic, Nina Gourianova, Luke Hartmann, Cornelia Klinger, Éva Kovács, Christina Lodder, Rose-Carol Long, Ádám Nádasdy, István Nádler, Klaus Nellen, Peter Nisbet, Krisztina Passuth, Carrie Paterson, Marjorie Perloff, Nancy Perloff, Jane Sharp, and the late Margit Szilvitzky. I received help from wonderful librarians like Wietse Coppes at the RKD, and Geurt Imanse at the Stedelijk Museum. I owe thanks to the grant of EURIAS - European Institutes of Advanced Study – that made it possible for me for almost a year to have no other duties than writing the first draft of this book at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, whose leaders and scholars created a vibrant intellectual environment, and its staff provided me with the space and library privileges that are hardly possible to overestimate. I am indebted to The Malevich Society’s generous grant, with which I could do research in archives in Holland. I am deeply grateful for the patience of my family during this work and all the help I received from Peter and Gyula, and the encouragement from Julia.

Abbreviations Andersen 1968:

Troels Andersen, ed., Malevich, Essays on Art 1915-1928, Vol. I, II. translated by Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillan, Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968

Andersen 1976:

Troels Andersen, ed., K.S. Malevich: The World of NonObjectivity. Unpublished Writings 1922-25. Vol. III. translated by Xenia Glowacki-Prus, Edmund T. Little, Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976.

Andersen 1978: Malevich, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism. Unpublished Writings 1913–1928, edited by Troels Andersen. Vol. IV., Copenhagen: Borgen, 1978. AK:

Akademie der Künste, Berlin

BW:

Timothy O. Benson, Éva Forgács, eds., Between Worlds. A Source Book of Central European Avant-Gardes 1910-1930, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press – Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2002

GRI:

Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

RKD:

Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague.

SMA:

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

VM:

Irina Vakar, Tatiana Mikhienko, eds., Kazimir Malevich. Vol. 1: Memoirs and Criticism, Vol. 2: Letters and Documents. London: Tate Publishing, 2015.

Translations,

unless otherwise referenced, are by the author.

Introduction

In the exceptional moment of history that followed the epic bloodshed of the First World War, unprecedented possibilities opened up for the generation that survived the Great War. No degree of radical innovation was unimaginable. The energy for restarting was as great as the losses and shock caused by the war. For the new imagination that was inspired by prewar radicalism and gained ground in the first years of the peace, not even the sky was the limit. The avant-garde of the early interwar years is not a rarely addressed topic in art history; nonetheless, there are still underexamined parts and unconnected dots in its narrative. This book reexamines a segment of the interwar avantgardes with emphasis on previously overlooked facts that arguably played an important role in shaping the art history of the period. Newly found documents reveal new aspects of what has already been known, urging a more detailed and more comprehensive history of the progressive arts of the early 1920s. It is rarely mentioned that the decade entailed dramatically different periods even for the avant-gardes: while its beginning featured universalist progressivism, the year 1923 marked a switch to a more pragmatic social commitment, new styles, and new media. The revival of the avant-garde after the Second World War and the delayed rediscovery of its Russian chapter are interrelated. Therefore, the 1950s and 1960s retrieval of the progressive art of the interwar period will be discussed in this book as part and parcel of the avant-garde project. The staple of this narrative is, to a great extent, the motif of the square as a highly charged form of choice for the post–First World War avant-garde. The square as the sole form to occupy the picture space was introduced by Kazimir Malevich and independently from him also by Piet Mondrian. The changing symbolism of the square by both artists and their followers throughout the post– First World War years indicated the level of the revolutionary disposition of the avant-garde. Whichever way it may be interpreted, Malevich’s 1915 Black Square, simultaneously familiar and enigmatic, sits in the history of twentieth-century

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art like some heavy stone, a meteorite out of the unknown or as if intuitively evoked from faraway cultures; the history of the square as symbol of the cardinal directions and the four seasons spanning several millennia; the Platonist symbol of harmony, a symbol of transfiguration in Byzantine tradition, a symbol which represents the four-letter name of God in the Cabbala as well as harmonious proportions in Eastern spirituality. Malevich in effect reinvented it. In his paintings, the square appears as a cosmic symbol and became a building block of the visual lingua franca of the post–First World War international avant-garde. In the wake of the cataclysm of the Great War and the 1917 Russian Revolution, artists felt responsible for the construction of a new culture and believed that a great deal of the world’s future well-being was in their hands. Major pre–First World War art trends merged with postwar and postrevolutionary concepts and artistic practices, involving a new awareness of technology in these new times. This was not only the new “age of mechanical reproduction” due to photography and film as Walter Benjamin stated but also the era of modern industrialism and a new kind of universalism. Simple and enigmatic, the square became an insignia of modernist progress, solidarity over borders and languages, and faith in a future of justice and equality in the early 1920s. Its display identified an artist’s work or a publication with the international avant-garde. Optimism notwithstanding, the post–First World War era was stained by the bitter, indelible experience that art and culture, no matter how highly elevated and respected, had not been capable to prevent an all-out war. Art and education may have failed to improve humans and the world—but that was now seen as the past. Having experienced the inevitable consequences of rampant nationalism and war profiteering, the artists of the post–First World War avant-gardes hoped to restore and further advance a humanist civilization. Relying on the culture of Enlightenment, the spectacular development of sciences, and inspired by the October Revolution in Russia, they dreamed up a universal fraternity and social equality. They felt compelled to imagine the opposite of what had happened between 1914 and 1918 and aspired to convert the rest of the world to that new imagination. As the Enlightenment inspired the progressive artists of the 1920s, that avant-garde in turn inspired the rebellious cultures of the 1960s in Europe. The Western reception of Kazimir Malevich is a case in point: in the early 1920s it was as enthusiastic as, in many cases, misunderstood. His personal appearance and exhibition in Berlin in 1927, however, came after the tidal wave of the avantgardes in Europe, at a time when the great utopian ideas were going downhill. His exceptional rediscovery after the Second World War made possible by the

Introduction

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body of works that survived in Germany was, to a great extent, due to the hunger for restoring the interwar avant-garde’s legacy. His art historic saga along with that of the Soviet-Russian avant-garde thus illuminates the continuity of an avant-garde that straddles the Second World War and connects the pre– and post–Second World War periods as well. It is a challenge to trace Malevich’s reception and perception west of Russia in varying political and personal contexts. In the following chapters, the pieces of the puzzle will be reassembled somewhat differently than they may be in a monograph, amounting to a different picture, and so allowing some hitherto un-interpreted pieces to fall into place. Since Malevich’s disciple El Lissitzky and Lissitzky’s one-time friend Theo van Doesburg played key roles in Malevich’s Western reception as well as in the shaping of the avant-gardes of the 1920s, I will address some crucial questions related to Malevich’s interpretation and reception to which we do not currently have sufficient answers in scholarship. There are pivotal questions which have gone entirely overlooked or been altogether unaddressed in the art history of this period. One of these concerns the reasons for El Lissitzky’s fascination with Malevich’s art. Why did he abandon his expressive style of Yiddish book illustration overnight for the abstract geometry of suprematism in the fall of 1919? Furthermore, once he had devoted considerable work to translating a collection of Malevich’s writings into German, why did that volume ultimately go unpublished? What did the plans for this volume include? Why was there confusion about constructivism and suprematism in Western Europe? Why did Malevich’s 1927 Berlin exhibition and his Bauhaus book not receive more praise and acclaim? What political factors and other circumstances played a role in the rediscovery of Malevich after the Second World War? This last question is all the more important because Malevich’s reappearance in museums and galleries about a quarter of a century after his death was the first significant step to the rediscovery of the entire Russian avant-garde, which until then had been abandoned to almost total oblivion. In an attempt to answer these questions, I will examine the original dramatic influence of suprematism on El Lissitzky. As Lissitzky was the first and most enthusiastic Russian artist in Germany who championed Malevich and laid the groundwork for his subsequent reception, it is important to understand why he saw suprematism as nothing less than an epiphany. El Lissitzky’s specific personal and historic reasons that have so far not been integrated into the narrative of the period must be considered, especially with regard to the Soviet politics affecting minorities, and Jews and Jewish culture in particular. Another aspect of Lissitzky’s activities on behalf of the Russian avant-garde abroad that

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has been hitherto underexamined, is his long absence from the Russian art scene during his study years in Germany before the First World War. This absence may have resulted in his rather naïve attempts to reconcile the Russian constructivists and suprematists. As Lissitzky was not part of the thriving Russian avant-garde art movements in 1912–1913, he was not familiar with the wide range of deeply rooted personal dynamics and conflicts of its protagonists. However, Lissitzky’s presentation of the young Russian art in the West shaped the international perception and narrative of the Russian avant-garde to a great extent for decades. While he may not have been the only source, he was, nevertheless, during the early 1920s, arguably the most vocal, most well connected, and most authoritative one. The narrative he presented was further complicated by his dramatically changing personal relationship with one of the most influential artists who was a masterful organizer of the avant-garde and to a great extent controlled the Western discourse and interpretation of Malevich and Lissitzky: Theo van Doesburg, the Dutch artist, author, and editor. Van Doesburg’s activity shaped the international reception of the Russian avantgarde in a definitive way. The conditions and the trajectory of Malevich’s extraordinary, posthumous comeback in the international art scene after an almost total eclipse of three decades that passed between his solo exhibition in Berlin, 1927, and his next one in Amsterdam in 1957 are so unusual in the world of art and the history of culture that they merit closer examination. Post–Second World War efforts to recover the interwar avant-gardes provided the preconditions to the exponentially growing public attention and scholarly interest toward the works of Malevich, and the Russian avant-garde in general, since the late 1950s, and the increasing visibility of their works in a number of exhibitions since then. Following the narrative of Malevich’s reception west of Russia during his lifetime, as well as in posterity, reveals both similarities and differences between the ambitions of the avant-gardes in the early 1920s and those of the radicals and reformists of the 1960s. Thus, Malevich’s rediscovery will be examined in the framework of post– Second World War antifascism and the New Left movements of that period. The fact that El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, and Theo van Doesburg shaped a significant segment of the interwar avant-garde and its legacy is in no way meant to imply that they were the only ones to have formed that history. Their activities and motivations were embedded in the context of their fellow artists’ work and that of interwar German and Russian history. Their legacy has become part of the post–Second World War and 1960s culture, a time in which Paris once again played a decisive role. One of the goals of this book is to reveal the

Introduction

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continuity between the aspirations of the arts and art concepts of the 1920s and the 1960s, going as far as to suggest that the artistic revival and the rediscovery of the political power of art in the 1960s could hardly have happened without inspiration from the 1920s. It seems hardly possible to address the history and concepts of the futurebound avant-gardes of the early twentieth century without first pointing out their relations to historical artistic tradition, especially that of medieval times. Recent scholarship has challenged the concept of the “originality of the avant-garde,”1 revealing that many radical modernists had studied and acknowledged the historic past of their respective cultures, seeking patterns and ideas of universal, cosmic validity, whether in religion, theosophy, or Russian cosmism. With the dialectics of radically transcending the past and constructing something new, many avant-garde artists proceeded on dual tracks, inventing radically new visual and poetic forms and syntax while also tracing their lineage from tradition.2 Both Russian and Western modernists who interacted with each other in interwar Europe rediscovered their respective medieval traditions with a sense of political dissent. The inconceivable horrors and losses suffered in the First World War, to which people saw no rational explanation, generated irrationalism across Europe as well as Russia. Post–First World War Germany’s medievalists—to whom the neologism Bauhaus was a nod of acknowledgment3—were adversarial to the Weimar Republic and its modernist efforts. Mysticism as well as the cult of medievalism abounded all over Germany including the early Bauhaus, where Johannes Itten and Lothar Schreyer resorted to religious and quasi-religious irrationalism. In a similar vein, many Russian avant-garde artists reached back to prePetrin, or pre-Enlightenment Russian tradition as the most valid source of their culture. While Malevich claimed an entirely new beginning with his 1915 Black Square on White Ground, which cleaned the picture surface of all vestiges of previous painterly image-making, historically speaking his thinking had roots in religion adopting the rich and varied Russian tradition of icons and spirituality. Enlightenment, imported to Russia by Peter the Great (1682–1725) as well as the persecution of those who rejected it, provoked a backlash among subsequent modernists. While they were intensely interested in modern Western art, they also asserted their Russian roots and identity. “Westernizing” and being a “Slavophile” were conflicting attitudes, sometimes even in one and the same person’s views. The great intellectual and formal variety of early twentiethcentury Russian art boldly mixed tradition and innovation, spirituality and

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pragmatism, and had room for the artist-prophet as well as the artist-engineer, even if on a collision course. Elements of Russian Orthodoxy were not only significant for artists; they were present in politics as well. Many members of the bolshevik leadership understood religion in a particular cultural sense. Elements of folkloric as well as Russian Orthodox traditions were tacitly approved by the atheist bolshevik Party that saw these traditions transformed into the quasi-religious cult of Lenin, turning, for example, the “red (or ‘beautiful’) corner” of the icon in the Russian house into “Lenin corner” after Lenin died in January 1924. As Nina Tumarkin relates,4 Stalin, who had been trained at the Tiflis theological seminary, purposely used religious symbolism to be recognized as the legitimate successor of the deceased leader on the popular level, too. The mythologizing of Lenin not only used motives from fairy tales but also was the foundation of the myth of Stalin as well. The committee responsible for Lenin’s funeral in 1924 consisted of individuals who had a deep commitment to religiousness as a Russian tradition. Exhibiting Lenin’s body in a mausoleum reflected their actual belief in physical resurrection. They merged belief systems and science: one of them, Leonid Krasin, shared the conviction of Nikolai F. Fodorov (1828– 1903) that science will make it possible to physically recreate deceased human organisms in the future. Another member of the committee was none other than Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933), commissar of the People’s Enlightenment. Lunacharsky, along with his brother-in-law, philosopher, physician, and writer Alexander Bogdanov, regarded Marxism as well as socialism as new, secular religions. He was convinced that the leaders of the revolution had to engage in a new “god building” (bogostroitelstvo).5 Thus Lenin’s corpse was in the hands of individuals who believed in the immortality of humans and actively propagated his emerging cult. Russian artists turned to icons with renewed interest even prior to the First World War. The icon, Oleg Tarasov6 and Nina Gourianova,7 among many other authors, attest, was the holiest object in Russia—not a representation of but a direct presentation of divinity. Enlightenment was particularly opposed by the “Old Believers” in Russia, who were persecuted by Patriarch Nikon (1605–1681) but were respected by the young avant-garde of the early twentieth century. Icons were beginning to be appreciated aesthetically rather than liturgically and seen as works of art only in the late nineteenth century.8 It was then, Tarasov argues, that the ornate frames of the icons “began to reflect new aesthetic conceptions, [setting] the icon face to face with the surrounding world, with poetry, philosophy, and the whole worldly culture.”9 Anatoly Strigaljov also underlines

Introduction

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that many differences between Russian artists who belonged to a wide array of groups in the early twentieth century were overwritten by their common interest in the “broadly understood Russian, or Eastern artistic tradition,”10 that they did not regard as past but very much as being a part of their present. As the Russo-Byzantine tradition gained new ground and became widely popular, many artists as prominent as Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov valued its legacy higher than that of Western modernism. Goncharova, who included religious motifs in her futurist book illustrations, confided: “At the beginning of my development I learned most of all from my French contemporaries. ( . . . ) Then I realized the great significance and value of the art of my own country.”11 Goncharova and Larionov launched Russian “neo-primitivism” and in their 1913 Manifesto of Rayonism, declared: “Hail beautiful Orient! We unite ourselves with contemporary Oriental artists for communal work. Hail nationalism! (. . . ) We are against the West, vulgarizing our Oriental forms, and rendering everything valueless.”12 Referring to folk art, for example the visual language of popular lubki (peasant woodcuts), they announced: “Our future is behind us”13—that is, the past history forecasts the future. Priest and religious philosopher Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), who combined theology and aesthetics in the study of Russian icons, directed attention to the “simultaneous planes” and what he perceived as “reverse perspective”14 of the icons in his 1920 essay Reverse Perspective.15 He claimed the absence of European renaissance one-point perspective as being specifically Russian. The topic of time and space in the visual arts was one of the central issues of the international art discourse in the early 1920s. A series of lectures was dedicated to it at the Psycho-Physical Department of RAKhN (Russkaia Academia Khudozhestvennykh Nauk, the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences) between 1921 and 1924. The department was founded by Vasily Kandinsky; the papers delivered in the series included Malevich’s talk on color, light, and pointillism in time and space.16 The sense of vocation of the artists that united religious, moral, and philosophical motifs had also been a long tradition not only in Russia but also in Germany, especially in the programmatic idealism of early German Romanticism. On the other hand, the new claim of the artist’s autonomy required that art be freed from serving or illustrating thought systems. The nineteenthcentury Russian painter Alexander Ivanov (1806–1858) represented the concept of the autonomous artwork, pioneering the idea of presentation rather than representation in art, pointing to the original function of the Russian icon versus its later concept as a piece of art.17 The rejection of the institutionalized and

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professional art world in order to validate inner, individual vision also originates from Romanticism’s aesthetic and political dissent in Europe that entailed scorn for the established institutions of art, while promoting high esteem for the depth of human emotion. Anti-institutionalism was also part of anarchism, the many varieties of which were ubiquitous in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe and Russia. Kandinsky, for example, labeled a “German Romanticist” by his fellow Russian artists,18 was also an anarchist, as was Arthur Lehning, publisher of the avant-garde journal international revue i 10, and many avantgarde artists who contributed to the short-lived Russian journal Anarkhiia in 1917–1918. As will be shown, Alexander Rodchenko, one of the regular artist contributors of Anarkhiia, kept on protesting against the new, postrevolutionary, centralized political power on its pages, as did several other members of the avant-garde, including Malevich and Alexei Gan. Political anarchism in Russia pervaded the communist movement and the factory committees that were formed after the revolutions. These committees took the bolshevik Party’s promise to put the working class to power at face value, expecting de facto selfgovernment. As a delegate at the First All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions held in Petrograd, January 7–14, 1918, expressed, “the very idea of socialism is embodied in the concept of workers’ control.”19 A strong anti-establishment stance was as vigorous in the political and artistic movements after the October Revolution as they were in 1960s France. Energizing the progressive artists of the post–First World War years was the unprecedented pace of development in human knowledge during the previous decades. Thinking on a cosmic scale and radically reimagining the universe rather than imitatively representing specific details of the given natural and man-made world encompassed modernism. Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and other members of Der Blaue Reiter and De Stijl groups, as well as a number of other thinkers and artists in Russia and the West, shared this concept. Many artists, including members of De Stijl as well as Kandinsky, drew inspiration from theosophy and Eastern spiritual currents with the ultimate goal to achieve “universal harmony.” Universal thinking in Russia entailed the expectation that art and the artists will be the agents of a radical universal and social re-creation of the world. Visionary thought-constructions that evaded scientific evidence such as the ideas of Fedorov who, as mentioned previously, believed in mankind’s future in the cosmos and the resurrection of every human being who ever lived inspired scientists as well as artists. Nothing seemed impossible. Russian space physicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) and, among others, mathematician Piotr Ouspensky (1878–1947) extended inquiry into

Introduction

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cosmic space and new, yet unknown dimensions, providing the preexisting broader context of Malevich’s ideas.20 Mathematicians challenged the pillars of rational modernist thinking such as Euclidian geometry, suggesting different models like Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792–1856) in his Imaginary Geometry and the resumé of his works, the 1855 Pangeometry,21 which may have inspired El Lissitzky’s 1924 essay “A[rt] and Pangeometry.” Investing art with the potential to be instrumental in the creation of a new, egalitarian society was also rooted in late eighteenth-century utopian socialist ideas.22 Soloviev, similarly to the Count Saint-Simon, anticipated art having a vanguard function as the propaganda task force of the future state that would sell the new values to the populace during the time lag between the establishment of the new state and the materialization of its promised benefits. In such anticipations, vanguard art was not seen as oppositional, as an art in permanent progress or “permanent revolution” in a later Trotskyite sense, but as the official art of the future state.23 Saint-Simon’s friend and correspondent Olinde Rodrigues (1795–1851) clearly stated: “It is we, artists, that will serve as your avant-garde; the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and the fastest. We have weapons of all sorts: when we want to spread the new ideas among people, we carve them in marble or paint them on canvas; we popularize them by means of poetry and music.”24 At this very first concept of the avant-garde as weaponized aesthetics, we cannot fail to see how far the merger of the artist and the political leader went in the cases of Mussolini and Hitler, in whose hands “the masses [were] like wax ( . . . ) to control the masses like an artist”25 and in what Boris Groys calls Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, the total artwork of Stalin.26 The interrelationship of the avant-gardes and the issue of power as well as the competition for the position of cultural hegemony are much discussed in the literature of art history and are manifest in many debates during the 1920s. The square secured a supreme standing to artists who, with the best intentions, used this emblematic motif as a sign of higher knowledge and future harmony. Aspiring to secure its undisputed, absolute validity, however, also implied the danger of working for a future dominated by an ersatz religion of superhuman order—that eventually registered with most of the avant-garde artists. A rapid succession of intertwined aesthetical and philosophical ideas circulated in the first decade of the twentieth century in both Russia and the West. The unprecedented wave of technological inventions since the last quarter of the nineteenth century directed attention to such invisible but tangibly efficient phenomena as electricity, the X-ray, and the microscopic world, awakening mankind to the power of previously unthought-of things like

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electric current and rays of newly explored potentials. Einstein’s special theory of relativity, constructed in 1905, informed the cubists as well as later generations of artists and expanded the imagination with more emphasis on cosmic space and time. Henri Bergson, whose works were translated into Russian by 1914, brought the concept of intuition into the fore27 as the tool to get a sense of the world beyond earthly existence. Inquiries into the infinity of the universe challenged Enlightenment rationalism and confronted it with the possibility of a new kind of thought system. New scientific and technological results, with special emphasis on flying, an age-old dream of humankind, and the successes of early aviation, also fueled the imagination, leading to a radical reassessment of the future perspectives of human knowledge.28 The ambition to conquer what has yet been unknown pervaded the nascent culture of progressive thinking and artistic expression. The avant-gardes of the early twentieth century opened a new era in the methods of interpreting artworks as well. Visual arts, throughout most of the history of Western culture, had been buttressed by the solid system of Christian iconography and the transparent subject matters of secular art, so verbal interpretation was not a new discipline. As Klaus van Beyme points out, however, the avant-gardes necessitated the explanation of the meaning of abstract paintings, which was not obvious to their viewers.29 The influence of the commentators increased, as did the pressure on artists’ groups to issue manifestos because verbal statements not only offered a clue to the artworks but also raised their ranking in the international hierarchy. Many artists had the ambition to double as theorists and manifestos abounded in the avantgarde movements. Thus, the artists’ own writings were soon regarded as the most, or the only, authentic interpretation of their works. Van Doesburg is straightforward in stating that it is impossible for the public “to lift itself to the artist’s level,”30 therefore “it is up to [the artist] to provide his own explanations”31 of his works. As van Beyme notes, in the absence of self-interpreting texts, other primary sources such as letters and various verbal paraphernalia like diaries or notes of artists were also coveted and, if it was possible, artists were interviewed to offer authentic interpretations of their own work.32 This feature of our current art history writing is informing the way we look for the actual truth of a narrative, and such research has been a substantial part of the present book, in which I am striving to balance historical facts and the artists’ own statements.

1

The Sky Is the Limit Malevich at the Vitebsk Junction, 1919

With the surprising inauguration of suprematism as early as 1915, Malevich claimed a superior position for his art and achieved a distinguished position for himself. Radically innovative, ambitious, and controversial, his work generated passionate debates. By the time he arrived in Vitebsk in the fall of 1919, armed with a shockingly new visual system and radical views, Malevich was a leading prophetic figure of the new Russian art. Aside from his groundbreaking work, he had expressed polemical views in a number of articles, pamphlets, and manifestos. He had teamed up with some of the most progressive artists and poets of his time, had scandalous conflicts with others, and already had many enthusiastic, deeply committed young followers.

Malevich’s Road to Vitebsk Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was born on February 26, 1879,1 near Kiev (the Russian name of Kyiv, capital of Ukraine), to parents of Polish descent.2 His father worked at a sugar-beet factory. From 1895 to 1896 Malevich studied at the Kiev Art School,3 and in 1898 he moved to Moscow where he studied at various art academies, including the Stroganoff School of Art. Since 1907 he was an increasingly active participant of the emerging new art scene in Russia. During 1908–1914, Malevich was intensely involved in the unfolding art movements and events. He joined Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova in their early naive-folklorist and cubist endeavors. Moscow artists, led by Larionov, formed the Bubnovii valet (Jack of Diamonds) group in 1910 to mark their difference from the new Western art, which was admittedly the model of the formerly dominant Mir iskusstva (World of Art) group. Larionov and his followers embraced both urban and popular culture. They drew on icon painting, but

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directly religious subject matter was censored from their shows.4 The group’s December 1910 exhibition was harshly attacked for being vulgar and even allegedly insane.5 Malevich participated in the exhibition along with Larionov, Goncharova, David and Vladimir Burliuk, Piotr Konchalovsky, Ilia Mashkov, Alexandra Exter, and others including contemporary French artists. Following the show’s controversy, a faction of the group spearheaded by Larionov and Goncharova that included Malevich as well as his later adversary Vladimir Tatlin split and launched a more radical program that materialized in March 1912 when they organized the provocatively named Oslinii khvost (Donkey’s Tail) exhibition—a tongue-in-cheek reference to the general public’s view that innovations of the modern painter were little better than the mindless wagging of a donkey’s tail throwing around paint on a canvas.6 In 1912, on his way to further radicalization, Malevich associated with the Petersburg-based Sojuz molodozhi (Union of Youth) movement and befriended its leader, painter, and musician Mikhail Matyushin, who would become one of his closest friends and mentor in the coming years. In this same year, the Hylea group of cubo-futurist poets Alexei Kruchenikh, Velimir (Victor) Khlebnikov, Benedikt Livshitz, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the multitalented Burliuk brothers David, Vladimir, and Nikolai also contacted the Union of Youth.7 Having chosen the ancient name of a Ukrainian province (Hylea, an estate near Kherson) for their modern group, they radically disrupted and reassessed the concept of art along with the elementary units of expression, dissecting the grammatical and semantic system of the aesthetic and the Russian language. Breaking the Russian language down to “the word as such”8 and further to “the letter as such”9 was the fundamental gesture of defying the existing culture and inaugurating a more innovative use of the language. These shifts reflected the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s parole in libertà (words-in-freedom), a deliberate bias from the application of the existing syntax and linear typography. The Russian cubofuturists’ 1912 almanac Slap in the Face of Public Taste10 opens with a manifesto of the same title in which they declare: “We alone are the face of our time,”11 and express “insurmountable hatred for the language existing before [their] time.”12 Kruchenikh and Khlebnikov’s 1913 pamphlet “The Word as Such” mentions Malevich among the new like-minded artists. In this same text, Kruchenikh’s transrational poem of non-existing words, “dyr bul shchyl,” similarly radical to Marinetti’s “Zang Tumb Tumb” (also known as “Zang Tumb Tuuum,” written between 1912 and 1914, published in 1914) was first published as an alternative “model for another sort of sound and word combination.”13 The consequent pamphlet “The Letter as Such” raises the stakes, and while breaking down words

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into letters, it brings into play the typeface as a graphic presence, pointing out that handwriting, as opposed to printing, conveys the author’s—and, as in the case of the Russian futurist books, the visual artist’s—mood “that changes during the process of writing ( . . . ) independently from the words.”14 In a process parallel to that of the poets, Malevich went through phases of painterly expression—from impressionism to Cézannian structure to Russianrevival-related neo-primitivism to cubism, until in 1912 he formed a closer friendship with the transrational poets Kruchenikh and Khlebnikov who, along with Matyushin, became his closest creative partners. Transrationalism— zaum, short for zaumennii, or “beyond reason,” in apt English translation “beyonsense”15—radically overthrew the relationship of form and content, the traditional use of which they saw as the literary materialization of the current power structure. The Russian cubo-futurists declared: We abolished punctuation marks, which for the first time brought to the fore the role of the verbal mass and made it perceivable. ( . . . ) We understand vowels as time and space ( . . . ) and consonants as color, sound, and smell. ( . . . ) We believe the word to be a creator of myth; in dying, the word gives birth to myth, and not vice versa.16

The concept of “verbal mass” forecast and inspired Malevich’s concept of “painterly masses” or the “color masses”17 of his suprematist work, in which he would have color detached from the object and handle the color as an autonomous entity which acts in a way similar to that in which sound detaches from meaning in zaum poetry in order to have its own independent vocal presence. In the summer of 1913, Malevich and Kruchenikh visited the recently widowed Matyushin in his dacha at Uusikirkko, in Finland. The three of them— Khlebnikov was also expected to join but had lost his travel money—ambitiously called their private meeting the First All-Russian Congress of the Poets of the Future (The Poet-Futurists). They issued a program that included, among other radical points, “To swoop down on the stronghold of artistic weakness—on the Russian theater—and decisively to reform it.”18 Following up on this Malevich, also on behalf of Mayakovsky, wrote to Matyushin asking him to solicit the Union of Youth’s support “for backing us in our first show”19—a move that proved instrumental in the realization of the stage performance of Victory over the Sun, as well as the production of Vladimir Mayakovsky. A Tragedy in the same year. Malevich at that time was eager to invent a term for his own endeavors. In 1914 he coined the term “fevralism,”20 inspired by an incident when, according

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to a memoir of his, “On February 19, 1914, I rejected reason in a public lecture.”21 Malevich thus engaged in “absurdism and provocative attacks against generally accepted taboos.”22 He transferred the concept of zaum into painting as “alogism”— the juxtaposition of motifs that had no logical connection. Malevich wrote on the back of his (probably) 1915 painting Cow and Violin, which followed (or rather paralleled) Vasily Kamensky’s alogical poem Tango with Cows, published in 1914: “Alogical comparison of two forms, ‘violin’ and ‘cow’ as a moment of battle with logism, naturalness, philistine meaning and prejudice.”23 Juxtaposing unrelated objects as a revolt against conventional linearity and straightforward meaning, Malevich preceded the surrealists’ methodology without the Freudian interpretation of such compositions’ connection to dreams and the unconscious. Deconstruction of the old aesthetic structure and appeal to “beyonsense,” the intuitive recognition or perception of different realities, were the backbone of the new artistic culture. “A work of the highest art is written in the absence of reason,”24 Malevich wrote in 1916 in the spirit of zaum—a statement he soon corrected as he invented, instead, the concept of “intuitive reason.” “The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason,” he wrote,25 creating an oxymoron in an attempt to reconcile opposing concepts so that neither intuition nor reason would be given up entirely: intuition must be controlled by reason, and reason is enriched by the instinctive. “Beyonsense” was meant to straddle the rift between the intuitive and the rational by a move tantamount to squaring the circle. Malevich’s alogism demonstrated that he considered himself above the perceived rules of thinking. Such transgression greatly contributed to the enigmatic perception of the Square. The cubo-futurist poets sought to deliberately reinvent and retexture the language to make it flexible in order to convey what they perceived to be radically new meanings. This was an all-out attack on linguistic clarity and the transparency of the fabric of rational, enlightened communication as Kant understood it, who pointed out that “Caesar non est supra grammaticos,”26 “not [even] the king stands above grammar.” Disregard for the rules of language was a rebellious anti-Enlightenment and anticultural stance. Jane Sharp points out that the Jack of Diamonds group’s attitude was already “in distinct contrast to the World of Art group, who invoked the aristocratic, eighteenth-century European Enlightenment as their cultural model,”27 and, consistently with this, the defiance of logic and systems of rules was at the core of the cubo-futurist agenda as well. In an anti-Petrine political gesture, Enlightenment rationalism was rejected— this time not for religion but in favor of occultism, intuition, or trans-scientific spirituality, each of which was considered as ranking higher than reason. As in

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early romanticism, only the artist of superior talent and sensitivity—a genius— could have access to such higher knowledge. Positioning himself in the virtual space of the future whence the existing culture could be seen as obsolete and underdeveloped, Malevich claimed to have superseded cubo-futurism, too. Using language acoustically rather than to convey meaning—similarly to the Italian futurists but predating Dada—the cubo-futurist poets inspired and encouraged Malevich to recreate visual language likewise, from the ground up. “We started to endow words with content on the basis of their graphic and phonic characteristics,” the cubo-futurist poets’ untitled manifesto declared.28 They held that existing bits of knowledge and cognitive methods barred real, free perception. Matyushin urged the development of new sensual and intellectual capacities laid out in his “zor-ved,” or “see-hear,” concept that aimed, through the training of the eyes and the eye muscles, to achieve 180- or ultimately 360° vision. The new program was immersion into the unknown. At the same time, the cubo-futurists aspired to own a new authority over the new language that would not be shared with the guardians of the old system. Malevich’s alogical paintings of 1912–1913 were followed by what Shatskikh calls his fevralist alogism, attempts to break free of all existing painterly systems. His new suprematist works, which he developed from early 1915 on, introduced an entirely new visual grammar and vocabulary. He had a keen interest in higher dimensions and the notion of space-time. Piotr Uspensky’s 1911 treatise Tertium Organum29 and studies in the fourth dimension and hyperspace,30 as well as the wonders of early aviation, opened up new perspectives for the cubo-futurists and specifically for Malevich who, in his suprematist works, claimed to have virtually relocated into the white space of the cosmos. Malevich gave up his neo-primitivist art—which was not unlike the German expressionism of the Die Brücke painters—for the painterly language of cubism and futurism around 1910–1911, and participated, along with Goncharova and Larionov, in the illustration of handmade books by the cubo-futurist poets.31

Taking Off: Victory over the Sun Malevich was one of the creators of the “first futurist opera,” Victory over the Sun— in Charlotte Douglas’s words: “Russia’s first absurdist spectacle”32—performed in St. Petersburg’s Luna Park Theater on December 3 and 5, 1913. Victory over the Sun was a quintessential Gesamtkunstwerk written by Kruchenikh, with music by Matyushin, costumes and stage settings by Malevich, and a prologue by

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Khlebnikov. This ambitiously, absurdly, and ironically titled opera outlined the utopia of a future without any memory of the past, integrating notions of the fourth dimension, space-time continuum, and an anarchist vision of uprooting the existing social and political system symbolized on stage by the defeat of nothing less than the center of the solar system. The simple and linear action of the opera is centered around the capture and defeat of the sun, the symbol of old energy and “traditional” three-dimensional existence, and, like Sarastro’s kingdom in The Magic Flute, a source of light and clarity, Enlightenment rationalism. As Matyushin and Malevich related to a journalist of a St. Petersburg daily, The futurists want to free themselves from this ordered quality of the world. ( . . . ) They want to transform the world into chaos, to smash the established values to pieces and from these pieces create new values by making new generalizations and discovering new, unexpected, and invisible connections. Take the sun—this is a former value—it therefore constrains them, and they want to overthrow it.33

Overthrowing the sun, intended or not, paralleled and complemented Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto “Let’s Murder the Moonshine,”34 where the moon is cast in the role of traditional, carnal feminine beauty, shunned by the futurists. Matyushin explained to his friend Nikolai Khardzhiev that [Victory over the Sun] had a profound inner content, that Nero and Caligula in one person represented the eternal esthete, seeking “the beautiful” or “art for art’s sake” outside of “life”; that the character of the Time Traveler was the bold poet, artist, and sage; and that Victory over the Sun symbolized victory over the conventional notion of the sun as “beauty.”35

The “New Man” in the opera who appears in the “tenth house of the future” is the representative of what seems to be a new species, speaking a strange new language that lacks emotions yet exudes poignancy. The main event of the opera, the defeat of the sun, happens offstage. Act Two opens with the musings of the “Elocutionist,” who declares: how extraordinary life is without a past with danger but without regrets and memories . . . Forgotten are mistakes and failures.36

Deleting the past was one of Malevich’s core ideas. Shortly before the performance of Victory over the Sun Malevich published an article titled “On the Museum,” where he combined the antihistorical stance of Italian futurism with a new vision of the future beyond the earth: “Our job is to always move towards what

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is new, not to live in museums. Our path lies in space. And if we do not have recollections it will be easier to fly away with the whirlwind of life.”37 Victory over the Sun was an attempt to negate not only the existing language but also to erase the entire cultural narrative the destruction of which, the anarchist hope would suggest, could open the road to a new world of new rules. Much could be said about the motif of defying gravity in Russian art and literature from Khlebnikov’s 1914–1915 fantasy drawings of flying houses inhabited by easily flying citizens;38 Pavel Miturich’s 1921 model of The Flyer and his subsequent airplane designs; Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1928 (but until 1966 unpublished) novel The Master and Margarita that ends with the two protagonists flying away; to Tatlin’s 1931 flying-aid structure Letatlin and Vasilii Zhuravlev’s 1936 film Cosmic Voyage, based on Tsiolkovsky’s 1920 novel Extraterrestrial; to Ilya Kabakov’s 1970s Albums, with drawings of flying citizens who easily walk in the air and his 1986 installation The Man Who Escaped into Space from His Room. The list does not include many paintings, further cinematic examples, or early historic fantasies of flying.39 Malevich’s fascination with aviation is not escapist, rather that of an explorer. “After me, comrade aviators!,” he calls in 1919,40 ready to depart into the space and time of the future. Picasso and Braque, who greatly inspired Malevich, had also been fascinated with aviation during their early cubist period. They admired the Wright brothers and were enthralled with the new vistas one can experience from airspace.41 During his own cubist period, Malevich shared the cubist painters’ admiration for floating mid-air and seeing both the earth and sky from above. This experience resonated as an anticipation of the future, and the borderline between the earth’s atmosphere and the cosmic void was blurred in this enthralled vision. Malevich’s fascination with the extraterrestrial void had been grounded in the suddenly futuristic phantasies of the early twentieth century. Victory over the Sun reveals the conflict between fascination with the future and the simultaneous anxiety of the changes it may bring. The play celebrates a new age so fundamentally different from that of its time as to be amnesiac, and the facilitation of travel in space and time, along with the new freedom of expression consisting of jumbled words that had already appeared in the texts of Kruchenikh, Khlebnikov, and other cubo-futurist poets. Malevich’s geometric stage sets and costumes for Victory over the Sun generalized the human figure in terms of geometric forms and used light to cut and reshape these forms. Fellow artist Benedikt Lifshitz, who attended the performance, described his experience of the play’s originality: The novelty and distinction of Malevich’s method lay primarily in the utilization of light to create form. [The] figures were cut up by the blades of light and were

18

Malevich and Interwar Modernism deprived alternately of hands, legs, head, etc., because, for Malevich, they were merely geometric bodies subject not only to disintegration into their component parts, but also to total dissolution in painterly space.42

Malevich designed a black backcloth to create complete darkness in the theater in order to mark the moment when the sun is cast down. About a year and a half after the performance, having absorbed the cubists’ elimination of onepoint perspective and the Hylea group’s radical deconstruction of the language, Malevich came to see the black rectangle as a visual concentration of futuristic contents. It would be logical to think that subsequently, in 1915, he created the Black Quadrilateral to reshape what may have been the rectangle of a stage curtain and turned it into the painting that became known as Black Square on White Ground, comprising the “zero of form,” or “the basic suprematist element.”43 This minimal form was, however, derived from earlier works such as 1915 drawings titled Fevralism as Emotionism and Sensation of Electricity, later realigned into Malevich’s own strategic system of chronology—“his characteristic re-creation of the sequence of events.”44 The act of creating the Black Quadrilateral, only later mentioned as the Black Square, has been mythologized by Malevich as well as his friends,45 and was seen as the actual point of origin of suprematism and what it meant to introduce: the new imagination of the future.

Suprematism Using the Black Square as the fundamental building block of a new imagery, Malevich started to develop a visual system and chart out a metaphysical path into an unearthly future world free of gravity or any sort of limitations altogether. However, as of early 1915, he was not yet ready to publicly reveal his plans and had no brand name for his new body of works. Malevich was concerned that his colleagues could easily appropriate the simple abstract language of his works. He gave an account of the following event to Matyushin with some desperation: 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 Puni46. 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.47

As organizer of the Moscow section of the show as well as an exhibiting artist, Malevich participated in the Tramway V (Streetcar “V”). The First Futurist

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Exhibition that opened in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was called from 1914 to 1924) on March 15, 1915, however, he chose not to show pieces of his new body of paintings there. He presented some of his fevralist paintings as rivals of Larionov and Goncharova’s Rayonism.48 His more recent works he perceived as being either too new for public display yet, or he was still preparing to paint them. Malevich first showed the paintings christened “suprematist” in November 1915 at an exhibition of decorative arts49 and then in December 1915 at the 0.10 The Last Futurist Exhibition, of which he was one of the curators, in Dobychina’s Gallery in Petrograd. This time, he declared that every art form other than his objectless (bezpredmetnii) painting was obsolete. As his paintings included an increasing number of geometric compositions against a bottomless white background, it became clear that Malevich attempted to explore a new kind of white space as the cosmic void, rather than place his forms on the picture plane or in the traditional one-point perspective box. Colored shapes floating in a white void not imitating any existing object presented artistic autonomy (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2). This was “pure creation,”50 unrelated to any segment of the visual tradition or vocabulary. Flat geometric shapes floating weightlessly in a gravity-free space shown at various angles exude lightness and freedom. The “stabs,” as the colored lines of the paintings are referred to in the Malevich literature, appear to be the edges of further flat shapes turned into space, perpendicular to the picture plane. Aware of the utter novelty of his work, Malevich proposed suprematism as a new “philosophy” or quasi-religion. He indicated this claim by placing the Black Square on White Ground at the 0.10 exhibition in the krasny ugol, the “beautiful” or “red” upper corner in the Russian house: the shrine, the place of the icon. Andrei Nakov argues that the World of Art movement’s Alexander Benois (1870–1960), who derided suprematism in his January 1916 review of the 0.10 exhibition, seeing the entire show as a sign of a “civilizational crisis,”51 is solely responsible for introducing a “Christian, fundamentally anti-modernist term” in the early interpretation of suprematism. “We should remember that Malevich was Catholic, not Orthodox [and his] philosophical attitude in 1915 was downright mystical,”52 Nakov writes. Benois critiqued the exhibition, and personally Malevich, on the grounds of his Enlightenment-bound views, reproaching Malevich for “arrogance . . . [aspiring] to some kind of divine accolades,” and for the Black Square which, he wrote, is “not a mere prank, not a simple challenge [ . . . ] but one of many self-assertive acts of a principle that should more properly be called the audacity of desolation.”53 In the same journal, critic Alexander Rostislavov (1860–1920) praised suprematism because, among other new trends in the exhibition, “In terms of ingenuity, the dynamism of the

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Figure 1.1  Malevich: Painterly Realism of a Football Player, 1915, oil on canvas. Photo: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Figure 1.2 Malevich: Suprematist Painting (with black trapezoid and red square), 1915, oil on canvas. Photo: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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latest trends is like a whirlwind: yesterday’s innovators—referring to the World of Art—are today’s ‘old-timers’,”54 including Benois. The white ground around the black square also appeared as the frame around traditional Russian icons. While Christina Lodder argues that this was “an iconoclastic action, annihilating the old values and shocking the public,”55 it was also a bold claim on renewed recognition of a new kind of icon in a futurist avant-garde context. Maria Taroutina suggests that Malevich was “parodying the sacred placement directly under the ceiling, parodying the sacred placement of icons in traditional Russian homes.”56 Whether parodying or partaking, with this gesture the Polish catholic Malevich assumed and addressed the Russian Orthodox tradition, claiming to have created the origin and first element of a new religious or mythic iconography while also acting as iconoclast and innovator. He may have claimed to inaugurate a new faith, but for announcing that he laid claim to the holy place of a thousand-year-old religion. A surprising turn in the historiography of the Black Square has been the Tretiakov Gallery’s curator Irina Vakar’s announcement in 2015 of a find achieved by digital technology that revealed an inscription by Malevich’s own hand around the black square: “Negroes’ fight in a cave at night.”57 This might be, Vakar suggests, a reference to a notorious 1897 joke attached to a black rectangle by French writer and humorist Alphonse Allais: “Combat de nègres dans une cave, pendant la nuit.” The cynically sounding sentence, if it can be considered authentic, something that Vakar, long familiar with Malevich’s handwriting, warrants, may question Malevich’s positioning himself as an almost holy man, nearly a prophet, as Alexandra Shatskikh relates.58 If Malevich added this hidden line with his own hand before over-painting it, both Lodder and Taroutina may be right about the Black Quadrilateral being iconoclastic and a parody of the sanctity of the icon. Thus, placing it in the shrine can be seen as an ambiguous as well as sarcastic message. Irony and sarcasm—especially self-deprecation—have not been typical features of Malevich’s, but, Vakar also suggests, they cannot be ruled out entirely.59 According to Shatskikh, not only was the Black Square positioned meaning­ fully, with a gesture that was simultaneously sacrosanct and sacri­legious, as the new icon, but Malevich designed the two walls he had at his disposal at the 0.10 exhibition clearly as an “installation,” dividing his paintings into “dynamic” and “static” groups,60 so that his intentionality of positioning each would be apparent. Fellow artist Ivan Kliun remembered Malevich as saying: “Perhaps I am the Patriarch of some new religion,”61 which, he may have inferred, would be above both Catholicism and the Russian Orthodox faith. Responding to the

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argument, that by addressing religion Malevich competed with Tatlin’s counterreliefs which equally occupied corners, though not upper ones, at the same exhibition, Shatskikh explains that nobody was able to see Tatlin’s works until after the opening of the show because, outsmarting all the other artists who also wanted to surprise their colleagues, he put them up at the last minute before the doors opened.62 However, as Taroutina remarks, Tatlin was no less innovative with his corner-counter-reliefs than Malevich because, she proposes, their rich materiality, including various metals, is also evocative of icons. Many scholarly studies point out Tatlin’s intense interest in, and familiarity with, Russian medieval murals and icons.63 Most of his corner-counter-reliefs, however, have been lost or destroyed, and among the few works left to posterity it is his model for the Building of the Third International, the “Tatlin Tower,” that has come to be seen as his emblematic construction. Tatlin opposed Malevich’s work, both the concept and the actual pieces of suprematism, holding it all “nonprofessional.” He was not willing to exhibit in the same rooms as Malevich: they even famously engaged in a fistfight before the opening of the 0.10 exhibition.64 Tatlin soon organized a counter-exhibition in Moscow in March 1916, titled The Store (Magazine) for its actual location, meant “to de-suprematize the Russian avant-garde.”65 He also gathered “The Store Group” around himself, as opposition to Malevich and his emerging suprematist group. Malevich, however, participated at the exhibition, but with markedly non-suprematist works. Scathed by the ban of the word “suprematism” from the 0.10 exhibition’s catalog by the organizers Ivan Puni and his wife Xenia Boguslavskaia, as well as the ban of his suprematist paintings from the Store exhibition, Malevich is remembered to have appeared at the opening of the Store with “0.10” written on his forehead and a declaration pasted on his back that read: “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.”66 As the sanctity of the word “apostle” hardly aligns with the profanity of “stable,” he thus insulted his fellow avant-garde artists, sarcastically calling them representatives of the Academy. As “apostle” of the new, Malevich persevered. “Malevich is a powerhouse that fills himself as well as others with energy for creating something new,” Matyushin recalled.67 Kliun had similar memories, and both remembered the extraordinary persuasive power that Malevich mustered.68 From most of the memoirs Malevich comes across as a figure of high personal charisma, fascinating and even mesmerizing others who may not have always clearly understood his utterances but were nonetheless ready to follow him.69 He had adversaries for the same

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reason: the intensity of personally or conceptually rejecting him had to match his own persuasive powers.

Conceptualizing Suprematism Malevich “gradually became aware that it was important to establish a philosophical basis for his own achievements in painting and to investigate the consequences of nonobjective painting,”70 Troels Andersen observed. When he coined the term “suprematism,” meaning the “supremacy of pure sensation,”71 Malevich accompanied his paintings at the 0.10 exhibition by a text, a published artist’s statement, “From Cubism to Suprematism” brought out by Matyushin’s publishing enterprise72 and perhaps cowritten by him as well. Aware of his own weakness as a thinker, in May 1915 Malevich turned to Matyushin for guidance: All the many things that I staged in 1913 in your opera Victory over the Sun gave me a mass of innovations, except no one noticed. I am collecting material concerning this, which ought to be published somewhere. But I need someone whom I could talk to openly and who would help me set out a theory on the basis of its origins in painting. I think that this someone could only be you.73

Matyushin was indeed of great help to him with “setting out a theory,” helping to put it in words, editing Malevich’s suprematist manifestos as well as publishing them.74 The creation of suprematism established Malevich as a leading representative of radically new art in Russia, as powerful as Tatlin, but antithetical to the latter’s use of material and spatial three-dimensionality. His contemporaries remember Malevich as a divisive figure. Nadezhda Udaltsova recalled him as “slyly political,”75 Mikhail Bakhtin remembered him as “ascetic, infatuated with his ideas,” and also “somewhat mad,” while he appreciated his writings on art.76 Malevich was seen as both a radically progressive revolutionary and a mystic— the latter feature costing him a rather early rejection by the Soviet officialdom. People’s Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky characterized him in 1927 as someone who “tried to make god and the revolution compatible but bungled it up.”77 On the other hand Alexei Gan, one of his main opponents in 1921, saw Malevich in a different perspective a few years later, when he reviewed his 1929 Moscow exhibition. This time when the avant-gardes declined, and the officially supported realism was on the rise, Gan recognized the innovative efforts of Malevich and his creation of a new, independent painterly direction “at

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a time of the sharpest opposition among various schools and directions [and] a war between the abstracts and the naturalists.”78 These words, positioning Malevich as a modernist hero and crediting him with being in opposition to mainstream establishment art, anticipate the stance of Malevich’s post–Second World War rediscovery. Malevich aggressively and efficiently revised the history of art, buttressing his artistic work with declarations claiming absolute freedom for the artist as well as infinite space for his vision. To secure solid ground for suprematism amidst the thriving and competing artists’ groups in Russia, Malevich made efforts to develop it into a wide movement and to this end he started to organize the Supremus group in 1916. Realizing how important it was to have a forum of his own as a communication platform and power base, he was preparing the publication of the Supremus journal. He hoped that it would be financed either by the wealthy Natalia Mikhailovna Davydova or, as both the Tramway “V” and the 0.10 exhibitions were, by Puni and Boguslavskaia. In a draft to advertise the planned periodical, he wrote: “Contributors to Supremus will be those who have turned aside the rays of yesterday’s sun from their faces. Kazimir Malevich, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Olga Rozanova, Ivan Kliun, Liubov Popova, Mikhail Menkov, Ivan Puni, Ksenia Boguslavskaia, Aleksei Kruchenikh, Vera Pestel, Yurkevich, Nikolai Roslavets, Mikhail Matyushin, Natalia Davydova.”79 Supremus was not Malevich’s first attempt to launch a journal. In May 1915, before coining the term “suprematism,” he planned a publication the title of which was to be Nul’, that is, Zero,80 centered around the Black Square as “the zero of form.”81 Neither journal became reality, but the organizational work invested in bringing to life a group of loyal artists reveals these efforts in retrospect to have been the anticipation of the 1919 UNOVIS group, Malevich’s ideological and artistic base. Malevich assumed to have achieved a work of nearly final reduction with the Black Square on White Ground and declared: “I have transformed myself into the zero of form”82—that is, he could mark a point of genesis in the universe of modernist art. The Black Square can be seen as the dense concentration of forms and meanings that were to unfold and issue forth from this point of genesis; or, by contrast, as the locus cleansed of all preexisting forms and motifs, a clean slate of point zero, which Malevich declared it to be. Whether it was one or the other—or both—remains an open question; and it is this lingering ambiguity of the Black Square and the subsequent suprematist works between committed revolutionary art and mystical-religious spiritualism that has differentiated Malevich apart from other artists of the Russian avant-garde.

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Malevich appears to have cherished the concept of an artist-prophet and had the ambition to assume a supreme position—hence, ultimately, his term “suprematism.” Poet and philosopher Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900) had urged artists to turn art into a “real force [ . . . ] enlightening and transfiguring the whole human world.” In this new role, he claimed, “Artists and poets must once again become priests and prophets; [ . . . ] not only will they be possessed by a religious idea, but they will themselves take possession of it and consciously control its earthly incarnations.”83 Limits and boundaries crumbled, and an unprecedentedly free realm of knowledge blending spiritualist tendencies and rigorously methodological scientific thinking opened up that was freely and largely extended by imagination. Malevich, for one, had gradually come to recognize and be fascinated by the enormous appeal of these new and unlimited horizons. The scale of this new freedom also corresponded to Malevich’s courage and ambition. Referring to Malevich’s ego, Charlotte Douglas observed: “underlying Malevich’s history of style is a fundamental psychological, rather than visual, absolutism.”84 Indeed, the sky was the limit: not only in the sciences but also in Malevich’s vision and ambition. The anticipation of imminent epochal changes in Russian society, the world, human thinking, and access to the cosmos met with Malevich’s own aspirations to create and own an all-encompassing new system of art that would correspond to the historically new concept of the universe and the emergence of a new human society. Malevich’s rich written oeuvre and ideational creativity unfolded in the framework of the artist’s increasing self-interpretation. The special feature of Malevich’s writings is that while most other artists sought to clarify their work through texts in order to articulate their message as clearly as possible to exclude all potential misunderstanding and preempt misinterpretation, Malevich sustained the ambiguity of his visual work even in his texts, as, for example, expressed in the term “intuitive reason.” The Black Square remained as enigmatic as his entire suprematist oeuvre, even in the light of his writings. His first manifesto, “From Cubism to Suprematism in Art to the New Realism in Painting, to Absolute Creation,” dating from 1915, is a declarative, poetic piece of writing. Its second version, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism. The New Realism in Painting”85 written in 1916, offers prophetic intonation and declares the fundamental parameters of his new art. Besides the already cited “zero of form,” Malevich claims to “have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things.”86 His mode of addressing the reader is that of a prophet: “And what I reveal to you, do not conceal”87—and the text includes an

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aphoristic and perfunctory history of the “savage” pre-suprematist painting heavy with “vulgar subject matter,”88 which not even the cubists and futurists could get rid of;89 while in the more concise 1919 text titled “Suprematism” he famously, and also poetically, announced: “I have torn through the blue lampshade of color limitations and come out into the white; ( . . . ) I have set up the semaphores of suprematism.”90 These statements, however, as Felix Philipp Ingold suggests, are not necessarily to be taken verbatim, as the claim for fundamental innovation that negates the past is “with Malevich, like Tolstoy, not the expression of the [predecessors’] incompetence or an iconoclastic barbarism; it results from the [intention] to transcend the culture, consciously rejecting the results of traditional education that is considered a burden,” so that the freedom from rationalism would allow a way of expression without the mediation of traditionally used language and Malevich could find “the image as ‘image’ ( . . . ) cleansed of representational function.”91 Malevich’s painted and written works were apparently meant to complement one another in the artist’s effort to transcend the accepted patterns and elementary units of meaning in both linguistic and visual expression. Although often described as a theorist, it must be agreed that Malevich was not a student of philosophy who would use clearly defined terms consistently, according to their function in a logically constructed system. Verena Krieger, for example, in her analysis of the Russian avant-garde, categorizes Malevich’s written work by four different philosophical approaches, according to what she considers to be the most important influence on his thoughts: neo-Kantianism; Schopenhauer’s philosophy, particularly The World as Will and Representation;92 scientific theories; and Russian religious philosophy. While Malevich may have been familiar with many intellectual currents of his time, possibly including some of the above, and was involved in discussions about spiritual, aesthetic, and social ideas with his erudite friends, he was not an avid reader and even less of a philosopher who would have applied the precision of that discipline. Malevich may have had many ideas and insights but no overarching and consistent theory. As Douglas points out, he never cited any thinker or philosopher,93 never referred to the origin or the exact meaning of the terms or categories he used. Former friend and fellow artist Pavel Mansurov is quoted to have declared at the 1976 MalevitchColloque in Paris that “Malevich did not know either Schopenhauer or the others ( . . . ) He was a simple peasant.”94 While Krieger, having quoted this statement, contradicts it, correctly arguing that Malevich was, in point of fact, not a “peasant,” and there is evidence of his reading some theoretical works, it is also important to hear Mansurov describe the impression Malevich apparently made on many and to distinguish between an artist thinker’s deliberately free handling of ideas

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and a philosopher’s rigorous use of philosophical terms and concepts in a system of thought. Alexandra Shatskikh, a close reader of Malevich’s writings, also notes that Malevich was “a-literate, and bookless, [who] 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.”95 This is supported by Igor Terentiev, who remembers to have lent Malevich “Lenin’s book Materialism and Empiriocriticism, suggesting that he read this book to better understand his own ideas (in particular, on ‘economy’). Malevich said that ‘he didn’t understand clever books’ and didn’t think he needed to understand them, believing that his own ‘teaching’ was closer to life, that is, he said paradoxically, ‘to death’.”96 Of course this does not mean that a critic or historian well educated in philosophy would be wrong to draw parallels between Malevich’s thoughts and certain philosophical systems or their elements, as long as it is clear that it is the critic’s insight rather than Malevich’s own theoretical contribution to the philosophy in question. It seems safe to position Malevich as a deep and imaginative, and at the same time freewheeling, thinker, intent on fathoming deeper connections of nature and ideas, and sensitive to the current concepts of his time. His ideas were as interconnected with his painterly practice as they were with his artistic and political strategies. As the reading of his essays and articles can convince us, he was often impressionistic, emotional, strategic, aphoristic, or simply vague. To a reader of our time, it should be emphasized in particular that he mostly wrote by hand—his student Konstantin Rozhdestvensky remembered him as one who “systematically worked and painted at his desk. His handwriting was composed of small letters that he wrote in small, thin notebooks”97—and, as is usually the case with handwriting, he did not edit his written works. Today’s reader, not quite unlike some of Malevich’s Western contemporaries who used mechanical typewriters with more regularity,98 is used to clarity in succinct, edited texts and a pointed formulation of ideas free of the kind of redundancy and repetitions that showed Malevich in yet another light to his contemporaries with his free, unedited flow of writing. He hardly looked back on his earlier articles for the sake of editing, or abridging, or avoiding repetitions— or even for the sake of simply remaining consistent. There is, for example, a fundamental contradiction between Malevich’s radically innovative ambition to break all continuity with previous arts and cultures in order to start suprematism from tabula rasa, or the “zero point,” and his teleological interpretation of art history, which claimed suprematism to be the pinnacle of the evolutionary process that had included cubism and futurism and had jettisoned the subject matter99 in the process.

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As an artist, Malevich freely adapted philosophical and art historical terms in his own, often changing rosters of ideas, without necessarily considering the particular contents of the terms in relation to the respective theoretical systems of their origin. When, for instance, he introduced the already mentioned idiosyncratic notion of “intuitive reason,” in an attempt to marry two mutually exclusive operational modes, he blended the terms of Bergson and Kant; and in terms of art history, overlooked the meaning of intuition in expressionism and the role of color in the paintings of the fauves and expressionists as an independent entity that relates to the subconscious. Malevich often used the terms of the ongoing art discourse impulsively, freely attributing meaning to them. The artists of the Russian avant-garde were in fierce competition to seek and construct theoretical foundations in Western culture, which attached a high value to articulate verbal expression. Since, similarly to their Western contemporaries, they used new, mostly abstract visual languages, they were convinced that they themselves had to offer clues necessary to the adequate interpretation of their works in order to avoid misinterpretation. Self-interpretation, as previously mentioned, was also competitive. Articulate manifestos and articles gave gravitas to visual works and were instrumental in persuading fellow artists and audiences as well as political leaders that their respective thinking and artistic production was progressive, important, and relevant. It was the possession of the visual symbol that would be the face of the emerging new country and the new world of the future that was at stake in Russia. The efficiency of a visual symbol could be greatly increased by strong textual clarification. The battle, in the fields of visual and verbal expression as well as conceptually, was being fought not only for the new language but also for its validation by the politics of culture. Malevich was first recognized, then rediscovered posthumously by many as a painter of the revolution for his abstract language as well as his political activities, while others saw transcendental and mystical, spiritual dimensions as dominating his work. During his rediscovery in the 1960s, the latter dimensions were also attributed to the intellectual-spiritual power of the Russian Revolution (see Figure 1.3).

Entering the Soviet World After the February and October 1917 revolutions, Malevich plunged into organizational and political work. As early as November 17, 1917, he “was appointed commissar for the protection of the value in the Kremlin.”100

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Figure 1.3  Malevich: Self-Portrait. Watercolor and gouache on paper, 1908–1910, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

As Hylea’s Slap in the Face of Public Taste expressed the cubo-futurists’ claim to being the face of the future, Malevich in turn worked to establish suprematism as the face of the revolution. His activities in the politics of art reveal him as, his transcendentalist ideas notwithstanding, an ambitious and skilled cultural bureaucrat who learned “to speak Bolshevik” when needed.101 As president of the Art Department of the Moscow Council of Soldiers’ Deputies, Malevich wrote to Matyushin in September 1917, shortly before the October Revolution, about wanting to organize the First People’s Academy of Arts in Moscow. Malevich reported: “My idea was warmly received, and the ball is rolling—soon I’ll open several small department cells which on a broad scale will constitute the Academy.”102 Malevich was ready and eager to become part of the new establishment, which he was convinced was radically modern. In the wake of the revolution, however, Malevich was still part of the anarchist movement as well, the main venue of which was the journal Anarkhiia (Anarchy) where Malevich published articles that vehemently attacked the new order, soon after the October Revolution. It appears that “revolutionary” and “anarchist” were not entirely different concepts in the wake of the revolution. Both entailed, in the minds of many, dissent, revolt, and courage. Anarchism, however, soon became

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the target of the new political power, and the journal and its headquarters were raided on the order of the very same politicians whom Malevich had expected to support his Academy. Nina Gurianova points out that, as some of Rodchenko’s articles will demonstrate in the next chapter, the journal severely criticized the bolshevik regime’s tendency to “control culture through a centralized ministry, commissariats and state institutions,”103 already a few months after October. In April 1918, the Café Poetov (The Poets’ Café) was closed down. This café had initially served as the futurists’ meeting place as well as the mailing address of the equally short-lived Gazeta Futuristov (The Futurists’ Journal), published by Lev Grinkrug and edited by Mayakovsky, Kamensky, and David Burliuk.104 The bolshevik Party conducted an armed raid on Anarkhiia’s editorial office, and the journal was subsequently banned. It resumed publication, however, only to be banned yet again a few months later, this time permanently. Bengt Jangfeldt agrees with constructivist theorist Boris Kushner’s critique in Gazeta Futuristov that Anarkhiia used the prerevolutionary motifs of épater le bourgeois, or shocking and challenging bourgeois views and taste, without the new sensibility for solidarity with the revolutionary working classes,105 which, of course, should not have been a reason to ban it. Balancing these political gestures was a task for all postrevolutionary artists, including Malevich. The bolshevik leadership was uncertain about several points of its agenda when it came to practical action, and people were uncertain as to the parameters of the new freedom, so every subsequent curtailing of it seemed, at first, absurd. Outraged, young theater artist and later constructivist Alexei Gan wrote in Anarkhiia in June 1918 that the “Marxists” and “Socialists” are hypocrites, “That’s why we, anarchist artists, ( . . . ) together with the futurists and suprematists, destroy these new prisons of rotten ideas in the section of their Jesuit Education.”106 In the light of this sharp and passionate voice that referred to suprematism as an ally in the struggle against the new bureaucracy, Malevich’s pursuit to organize a new Academy sheds light on the many different ways in which these new developments can be assessed and the variety of strategies that were used in attempts to dominate or at least influence the new cultural scene. In spite of Malevich’s future rivalry with and opposition to Rodchenko, in a June 1918 issue of Anarkhiia the latter named almost the same artists as those whom Malevich had listed in the Supremus group as ”our true creators: Malevich, Rozanova, Udaltsova, Vesnin, Drevin, Rodchenko, Popova, Pestel, Davydova, Kliun.”107 A diary entry of Rodchenko’s on December 25, 1918, still indicated cooperation between Malevich and other “nonobjectivists.” Presumably Malevich’s 1918 White on White painting was already known

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to them. “Today there was a meeting of Suprematists and non-objectivists,” Rodchenko noted: We decided to hold an exhibition of just suprematist and non-objective painting. ( . . . ) Malevich paints without form and color. The ultimate abstracted painting. This is forcing everyone to think long and hard. It is difficult to surpass Malevich.

The latest announcement: We, artists-non-objectivists, inform everyone that we have definitively discarded limited form in painting as the last remnant of objectivity. “Long live free color and tone!” N. Udaltsova, A. Drevin, A. Rodchenko, L. Popova.108

Although the radical Gazeta Futuristov, published during the same months as Anarkhiia, demanded that “Art be separated from the state,”109 the art section IZO (izobrazitelnoe otdelenie, department of visual arts) of the February 1918-established NARKOMPROS (Narodnii Kommissariat Prosveshcheniya, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment) “became a bastion of the futurists”110 by the fall of 1918. Mayakovsky began to work there and, as Jangfeldt relates, “IZO belonged to, inter alia, David Shterenberg, its appointed head, Vladimir Tatlin, its vice-head, Natan Altman, Nikolai Punin, Osip Brik, ( . . . ) it was dominated by leftwing intellectuals.”111 This impressive list notwithstanding, Lunacharsky banned IZO’s most important journal Iskusstvo kommuny (Art of the Commune), practically dominated by Mayakovsky, in April 1919. It was interdependence, rather than the separation of the arts from the state, that now became recognized. “The futurists played the same role in cultural life as the bolshevik in politics: the role of the vanguard,”112 and indeed, many futurists now identified with the party that they saw as the leading progressive force and power. As a result of this new position of artists, the first anniversary of the October Revolution was celebrated by futurist artworks. The term “futurism” was then used in a very broad sense for all radically new innovative art and poetry, displayed in public places throughout the country, which was now named the RSFSR, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republics.113 Malevich himself was no less of a radical than the futurists. In an article published in Iskusstvo kommuny he urged to “strive towards the uncharted abysses of space,” declared that conservatives were “dead,” and discarded museums as much as the Italian futurists did.114 By the time he arrived in Vitebsk in the fall of 1919, Malevich had developed a powerful rhetoric for claiming that no art form other than suprematism was efficient and relevant for the bolshevik Revolution and the future.

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Vitebsk, 1919 The provincial People’s School of Art, located in Vitebsk, a small town in Belarus on the Dvina River, replaced the painter Yurii (Yehuda) Pen’s former private art school, the Artist Pen’s School of Drawing and Painting.115 A former pupil of Pen, Marc Chagall, was appointed by NARKOMPROS116 in September 1918 as the “authorized representative in artistic affairs of Vitebsk province” and was invested with the right to organize a school.117 The People’s School of Art was controversial from the beginning for promoting modernist artistic expression in a strictly traditional, small-town community. In the new communist spirit, however, the art school also kept up with national and international politics. The official opening of the school, planned for January 28, 1919, had been put off by two commemorations: the first was held in memory of those shot to death during the peaceful demonstration in Petersburg on January 9, 1905; the second was a response to the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, which reverberated through revolutionary Russia. Everywhere in the country huge rallies, funeral ceremonies, and public meetings were held.118 This episode was an early sign of the new communist state’s extraordinary interest in Germany, not only because of Germany’s tacit war-time cooperation with Lenin’s party but also because it was another newly declared republic with a Social Democratic government and a rather strong communist (“Spartakist”) movement that had been led by Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Lenin singled out this country as his closest possible ally, and particular interest was given to what was happening to communists in Germany. In his opening speech of the Vitebsk school, Chagall emphasized that unlike in the old days, the new art school will be open to all, and encouraged the proletariat of Vitebsk and its neighborhood to take advantage of this and enroll. A leading local representative of the communist Party attended the opening, demonstrating the officialdom’s support of the school.119 The most radical modernist among the early faculty of the new school was Ivan Puni (1892–1956), who had met many members of the Russian avantgarde in Paris, where he had lived from 1910 to 1912. Upon his return to Russia, he exhibited with the Union of Youth in Petersburg along with Malevich, the Burliuk brothers, Matyushin, Tatlin, Rozanova, and others; and generously supported exhibitions, including the 0.10. Puni and Boguslavskaia had a series of conflicts with Malevich at the time of their cooperation with him in Petrograd since they refused to recognize suprematism as a valid new tendency

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or even as a valid term. The Punis accepted Chagall’s invitation to teach in the People’s School of Art and promptly moved to Vitebsk, unaware that Malevich would soon arrive to join the faculty. Puni became chief of the school’s Agitprop (agitation and propaganda) Department, and painted vanguard, abstract pictures, often erroneously referred to as suprematist. However, Boguslavskaia thought it important to confirm that Puni’s abstract works had predated those of Malevich in Vitebsk. Remembering the controversies between themselves and Malevich, she emphasized Puni’s achievements in a letter from Berlin, years later: The role played by Ivan Puni was thus a unique one—he was a kind of John the Baptist in Vitebsk’s artistic life, initiating many future members of UNOVIS to the creative passions then seething in the two capitals, and proclaiming the victory of the Revolution in the arts. For many of the students in the Vitebsk school, it was from his lips that the epochal ideas and events that would soon be decisive in their lives were first spoken of. Thus, in the script written by history, the ground for Kazimir Malevich’s appearance in Vitebsk was prepared by the missionary activity of Ivan Puni.120

Three women appointees, familiar with Malevich’s circle of friends, also arrived from Petrograd: Nadezhda Liubavina, Nina Kogan, and the school’s designated director arriving mid-April 1919, Vera Ermolaeva, who had been active in the field of theater design. They happened to be instrumental in preparing the school’s spirit for Malevich’s arrival in the fall of 1919.121 It was actually El Lissitzky who had invited and brought Malevich to Vitebsk. In October 1919 the two met in Moscow, where Malevich was teaching at the time and was also director of the SVOMAS (Svobodnye gosudarstvennye khudozhestvennye masterskiye, the Free State Artists’ Studios), when Lissitzky arrived to buy material supplies for the Vitebsk printing workshop.122 Malevich had great authority among his students in Moscow and had already written several texts, but lived with his pregnant wife in a dacha without sufficient food or firewood. It was also out of question for Malevich’s writings to be published in Moscow for lack of paper and printing equipment. Thus, Lissitzky thought of accomplishing this task in the Vitebsk printing workshop, and it occurred to him to invite Malevich to come live and work there as well, under better conditions than in Moscow. Malevich accepted the invitation without hesitation and wrote a letter to his employers explaining his departure.123 He arrived in Vitebsk with Lissitzky on November 5, 1919, and was followed by one of his apprentices, Ilya Chashnik, who subsequently became a student in Vitebsk.124

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Malevich’s first appearance in the Vitebsk school was memorable for all who were present. He had clearly designed his entrée to mark the occasion. Based on direct accounts of witnesses, he staged his entrance: The entire school had gathered in the school’s main hall [ . . . ], a large open staircase led from this hall directly up to the second floor. Following Marc Chagall’s announcement that the school had a new instructor, a figure appeared on the landing of the second-floor stairway. Looking up, the audience saw a round-headed, sturdy-looking man who slowly began descending the stairs, waving his arms in wide circles as he moved. Reaching the bottom of the stairs he directly ascended the podium and, still without speaking, continued his gymnastic-like exercises; with his compact, thickset body he resembled a wrestler or athlete. The effect on the audience was staggering; in the minds—and memories—of these youths, the very way in which Malevich introduced himself expressed “suprematist” motion.125

Launching UNOVIS Malevich’s powerful personal presence played a great role in his de facto takeover of the Vitebsk school before he set to do any kind of organizing. Nikolai Punin recalled: “Malevich was convincing with a fascinating vigor that was hypnotizing and compelled his audience to listen to him.”126 With this instant authority, which amplified when he familiarized the students with his views printed in On New Systems in Art, Malevich immediately organized MALPOSNOVIS (Maladye Posledovateli Novogo Iskusstva, Young Followers of the New Art), soon renamed UNOVIS (Utverditeli Novogo Iskusstva, Affirmers of the New Art), dropping the word “followers” for “affirmers.” Suprematism, at this point, was not purely transcendental anymore, nor did it, as in 1915, advocate the “intuitive [that] should reveal itself in forms which are unconscious.”127 Nor did the term refer to “the supremacy of pure sensation”128 anymore. “WE ARE THE SUPREMACY OF THE NEW,” heralded an UNOVIS leaflet writ large. “The face of modernity should be our face. . . . We bring new cities. We bring the world new things. We will give them other names.”129 Suprematism’s original, 1915 cosmological transcendentalism morphed into community-building and organizing work that focused on the suprematist aesthetic and was morphing into suprematist ideology. UNOVIS was a collective identity. All works made by members of the group, including those of Malevich, were exhibited anonymously, as “UNOVIS”

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products. This was the case when the group participated at the 1923 Exhibition Pictures by Artists of All Trends, in Petrograd.130 The publication of “On New Systems in Art” by the Vitebsk school marked the beginning of the UNOVIS movement headed by Malevich. The Vitebsk People’s School of Art was almost instantly converted into an UNOVIS unit. “On New Systems in Art” was a text “whose ideas and conceptions were formalized, implemented, and disseminated by [Malevich’s] students and followers.”131 The programmatic pamphlet opens with a magic cult-chant: “I follow u-el-el-ul-elte-ka my new path”132 and an imperative: “Let the rejection of the old world of art be traced on the palm of your hands,”133 ordering to wear a sect-like signage of belonging to the movement. In this programmatic essay, Malevich leads his readers through recent developments in art: first and foremost, Cézanne and cubism. One of his central points is: “Intuition is the kernel of infinity. [ . . . ] the intuitive energy conquers the infinite.”134 Once again, hard-to-define, shifting, multifarious content is implied in a statement that addresses the movement’s adherents on an emotional level and engages them in pursuing the conquering of infinity. Moreover, UNOVIS was modeled after the communist Party (it was often called an “art party”): an UNOVIS Central Committee was set up for propaganda and organizational work, and several “creative committees” were designated for ideological and productive work. Slogans were approved by the Central Committee, and in June 1920 territorial committees were organized in several cities.135 Shatskikh points out that UNOVIS showed “many features of a sui-generis religious fraternity or a version of a masonic lodge.”136

Suprematism: The New Imagination As of 1919, Malevich was working on establishing suprematism as the visual language of the revolution with the intention to spread it—as the revolution was expected to spread— internationally. He stated: “All previous and contemporary painting before suprematism—sculpture, the word, music—were enslaved by the form of nature, and they await their liberation in order to speak in their own tongue and not depend upon the intellect, sense, logic, philosophy, psychology, the various laws of causality and technical changes in life.”137 These introductory words of Malevich to the first exhibition where he showed suprematist paintings in December 1915 discard all previous, centuries-old art as well as concepts which, in the next line, he characterizes as “the time of Babel in art.”138 Enter

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a new creative power, the already cited “intuitive reason” which, as opposed to the “intellectual creations” that Malevich held to be severely limited, “is ascribed a higher ability to prophesy and to anticipate time.”139 Intuition, for Malevich, warrants that his art should achieve higher levels than knowledge, craft, and reason can while still keeping the latter in operation in order to fortify intuition. Suprematism transcended that which was “already created in nature”; its higher quality was seen as something that “arises out of the painted mass without repeating [ . . . ] the primary forms of the objects of nature.”140 Suprematist images are claimed to be virtual transmissions from the future, visualizing the next step of humankind in the cosmos. Marrying geometry and the cosmic vision of the future indicated Malevich’s claim to the highest possible authority as an artist. Geometric abstraction, the “rhetoric of power,” as Anna C. Chave141 aptly characterizes it, was but one facet of this claim, geometry being unchallengeable and supra-individual, with an objectivity that no subjectivity can bend. As we saw in the brief chronology of Malevich’s road to Vitebsk, he distinguished himself from the other artists of the Russian avant-garde by adding a religious-metaphysical dimension to his suprematist work that he also proposed to be the face of the revolution, the new Soviet reality. Boldly placing the Black Square in the Russian shrine, the “beautiful (or red) corner”; using religious language in some of his writings; and urging the ritual marking of the palm of the hand with a black square, Malevich mixed religious gestures with political ones in his activities at the Vitebsk UNOVIS and on some occasions did not shy away from stepping up as a kind of holy man in possession of superior wisdom.142 Malevich’s shifting approaches between construing a painting as a matter of aesthetic creation with a political stance and painting as a divine message have been, most likely, the key factor in his unique position among his followers and subsequent rediscovery by posterity. At the same time, he blurred the boundaries between the above categories in a way that made it difficult for his fellow Russian artists as well as his Western contemporaries to pin down his artistic and conceptual message. Malevich based his claim to the higher authority of the artist on the artist’s supposed superior abilities, for example to travel into the future. He dismissed any criticism that operated with “intellect, sense, logic, philosophy, psychology,”143 all of which he assigned to the past. In doing so, Malevich barred external criticism to a considerable degree, implying that only those who are initiated are competent enough to interpret the new art. The relevant terms of the new discourse, however, had yet to be invented.

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In the great competition in both Russia and the international avant-garde, Malevich secured an exceptional position for himself as the inventor of a new visual language, the geometry of which could be interpreted as religious, originating from a new kind of icon, while it was also scientific in the sense that the objectivity of geometry suggests. It was as futuristic as the art of a coming age that will explore and conquer the cosmos, and as progressive as any art that had left behind the legacy of its representational function. All of these concepts were brewing in the artistic world of postrevolutionary Russia, and they resonated in the similarly diverse Western avant-garde as well. Most importantly, however, Malevich’s painterly work exudes the thrill of the initial invention of a new idea and new forms. The fact that he was shaken by his own invention comes across in his work, and ultimately it is this enigmatic experience that fascinates his viewers to this day.

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The Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party and El Lissitzky’s Grasp of Suprematism, 1919

El Lissitzky’s sudden discovery of suprematism appeared to be the obvious answer to his own torturing dilemmas in 1919, and it was to determine his perception and interpretation of Malevich’s work. His fascination with suprematism was deeply rooted in a personal and historic predicament, and it was his instantaneous conviction that the new course proposed by Malevich would resolve it.

Lissitzky’s Road to Vitebsk Eliezer Mordukhovich (or Lazar Markovich) Lissitzky1 was born on November 23, 1890, to a Jewish family in Pochinok, Smolensk Province, just east of the Pale of Settlement. He was raised in a middle-class family with an orthodox mother and an erudite father who spoke several languages, translated Shakespeare and Heine in his spare time, and traveled to America with the purpose of relocating the family there. His wife, however, consulted her rabbi about this plan and he advised her against it, so the family stayed in Russia. Lissitzky spent his high-school years in Smolensk, Russia, with his maternal grandparents and was trained as an artist in the nearby Vitebsk, Belarus, by Yurii (Yehuda) Pen. Turned down by the St. Petersburg Art Academy, either because he did not meet the requirements or because of the restricted quota for Jews,2 in 1909 he went to Germany and enrolled in the Technische Hochschule (Technical College) in Darmstadt to study architectural engineering. During his student years there he traveled to France, visited towns in Germany, and in 1912 he went hiking in Northern Italy. He made drawings of buildings in Venice, Ravenna, and other towns. Intermittently, between March and

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October 1912 he spent time in St. Petersburg working as an architectural draftsman,3 but then returned to Germany to continue his studies. Lissitzky later returned to Russia because of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. He worked in various architectural offices and completed his studies at the Riga Technological University, which was temporarily moved to Moscow during the war. He received his diploma of engineer-architect in 1918. It usually goes unmentioned that because of his extended stay abroad, Lissitzky missed out on the vibrant prewar art life in Russia: the rapid succession of modernist styles, exhibitions, and the network of relationships between their protagonists. Apparently, he did not know Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, and did not witness the increasingly visible presence of Tatlin, nor the turbulence of the lively and much-discussed shows that followed one another during the years Lissitzky spent in Germany. Even if he had had a chance to glimpse some of these exhibitions during his short visits home, he was not part of their eventful art scene, nor did he have any personal attachments to, or even conflicts with, the artists of his generation. Lissitzky was absent from Russia when the Jack of Diamonds group first exhibited in 1910 in opposition to the World of Art group, and he also missed the Donkey’s Tail exhibition in 1912, a passionate riposte to the Jack of Diamonds. He missed the vivid debates accompanying these shows and the events of the following year, 1913, which was, according to Elena Basner, “the most exciting year of Russian futurism,”4 including the original performance of Victory over the Sun. By the time Lissitzky returned to Russia in 1914, many important art exhibitions were already history; Larionov was about to depart to Paris to join Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes; and the personal rivalry among the progressive artists such as the intense controversy between Malevich and Tatlin, and their respective followers, had already turned into hostility. As he lived in Moscow upon his return, Lissitzky also missed the 0.10, The Last Futurist Exhibition in Petrograd. Accordingly, he did not know about the intense conflict between the Punis—Ivan Puni and his wife Xenia Boguslavskaia—and Malevich when he invited Malevich to Vitebsk in the fall of 1919 to strike up camaraderie between them as colleagues. During the period between 1916 and 1918, Lissitzky hardly participated in any exhibitions. In 1916, he was included in the World of Art show—not only a far cry from the progressive art of the time but an exhibition that had been clearly rejected by radical innovators for many years. Tatiana Goriacheva relates that Lissitzky participated at the 1917 reprise of the Jack of Diamonds group’s show5 as well.

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In 1917 Rodchenko, Tatlin and other progressive artists organized Profsojuz, a professional union of artists, which consisted of three federations: “Young,” “Center,” and “Senior,” with the futurists, cubists, suprematists, and nonobjectivists in the “Young” group, while the World of Art belonged to the “Center.” “Lissitzky was not listed among the ‘Young’, or leftist [federation that] saw themselves as prophets of the future.”6 At that point, his only appearance as an artist was at the Moscow exhibition of works by Jewish artists, where he showed one painting, in July–August 1918,7 that categorized him on the sidelines as representative of ethnic art rather than a mainstream young innovator. He had not been invited to participate either in the Streetcar “V,” or in the 0.10 exhibitions in 1915; nor was he on the list of Malevich’s Supremus group. He did not belong to Tatlin’s and Rodchenko’s circle of anarchists and future constructivists either, although he eventually got acquainted with them and was invited to join INKhUK (Institut Khudozhestvennoi Kul’tury, Institute of Artistic Culture). Despite his scarce presence at exhibitions, Lissitzky was commissioned to design the cover of the futurist poet Konstantin Bolshakov’s volume of verses, Solntse na Izlet’e (Spent Sun). His stylized geometric, semi-abstract futuristic cover design has the sun in its center, held by a stylized human figure surrounded by rhythmically repeated circular lines, drawn with a compass and details of a stylized cityscape, with a creature that is half-bird, half-airplane on its way to plunge into the sun. This cover appears to have been designed not unaware of Victory over the Sun, although Lissitzky did not see its original performance. Although Bolshakov was a major futurist poet, a member of the Mezzanine of Poetry and later the Centrifuge group, whose earlier book Le Futur (Future Tense) was illustrated by Larionov and Goncharova in rayonist style8 in 1913, this job of Lissitzky’s did not lead to similar commissions from futurist poets. He did not become part of any of the close-knit inner circles of those poets and artists who collaborated on publishing and illustrating volumes of cubo-futurist poetry. Lissitzky eventually caught up with and became informed about the Russian art scene, still he did not develop an intimate knowledge of its deep-rooted personal controversies and loyalties. Between 1916 and 1919 Lisstzky devoted himself first and foremost to the unfolding Jewish cultural renaissance happening in and around Kiev. In the summer of 1916, he embarked on an expedition to explore and document, in drawings and paintings, the old synagogues along the Dnieper River, in the company of the young artist Issackar Ber Ryback.9 This tour, which had an

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unexpected influence on him, was sponsored by the Petrograd-based Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society. Lissitzky was moved by the experience. “Searching for our identity, for the character of our times, we attempted to look into old mirrors and tried to root ourselves in so-called ‘folk art’. ( . . . ) [we discovered] a whole great world ( . . . ) This is the very opposite of the primitive; it is the product of great culture,” he wrote in retrospect.10 Lissitzky took up the illustration and graphic design of many Yiddishlanguage books. In 1917 he designed and illustrated Moshe Broderzon’s Sihes Khulin. Eyne fun di geshikhten (A Simple Story), also known as Prager Legende (The Legend of Prague), some copies of which were rolled up and packed in wooden boxes like Torah scrolls. He also illustrated children’s books published by the Yiddisher Folks Farlag.11 Lissitzky worked in a stylized, expressive figurative style with ornamental elements often derived from the graphic features of the Hebrew letters. His artistic connections included fellow Jewish artists such as Marc Chagall, Natan Altman, Boris Aronson, and Robert Falk. In 1917 he made watercolor illustrations for the Jewish Passover tale and song “Had Gadya,” a new 1919 edition of which was supported by the Kultur Lige in Kiev, with several newly made pictures of Lissitzky and a new geometric abstract cover. Founded in the postrevolutionary year 1918 by Natan Altman and the head of NARKOMPROS’ artistic division David Shterenberg, among others, the Kultur Lige was generally seen by the Jews as a sign that a better life awaited them after the October Revolution. The Kultur Lige, which was active in several cities besides Kiev, including Warsaw, was a secular, socialist organization associated with the Jewish Labor Bund12 and was “committed to education, teacher training, regular university courses, and publications”13 in Yiddish language. Its members and coworkers however, although fueled by strong loyalty to the Jewish tradition, were eager to step out of the ghetto. The creation of a secular Jewish culture—an oxymoron to orthodox as well as to pious Jews—was a major goal along this line. The young artists’ new ideal was to overcome the narrower concept of Jewish emancipation and cultural revival. As Avram Kampf observes, this generation had consciously divorced itself from the religious messianic ideal, which had been a keynote of Jewish religion, and transformed it into a secularized messianic yearning for the redemption of mankind. ( . . . ) Their leanings were strengthened by the dominant revolutionary and nationalist mood and the rise of the militant Jewish labor movement committed to cultural autonomy and freedom from tsarist oppression.14

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Lissitzky was strongly dedicated to the cause of Jewish emancipation and believed that the revolution would put an ultimate end to the oppression and persecution of Jews. He worked for the art department of the Kiev Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, and in 1918 he became its member and presumably held a (perhaps high) position in the national department of education of the RSFSR, within NARKOMPROS. No exact information is available about his position at that time, however. Kampf notes that after the February 1917 Revolution, and for a short while after the bolshevik Revolution in October, national cultures and the national arts of various minorities were encouraged by the Russian communist (bolshevik) Party, because The message of the Revolution could be most effectively spread through the channels of the various national languages and cultures, and thereby reach the broad masses of the people. [ . . . ] The majority of Jews were concentrated in the Ukraine, and the Ukrainian national movement strongly supported Jewish national tendencies and cultural institutions in order to counter the process of Russification among Jews [too], which the Russian schools enforced.15

This policy was temporary and contradicted what Stalin declared in his 1913 book Marxism and the National Question16 about the impossibility of the Jewish request to be recognized as a nationality, primarily because the Jews did not have any contiguous territory as a nation. When Kiev was occupied by General Denikin’s counter-revolutionary armed forces of southern Russia on August 31, 1918, and Marc Chagall invited Lissitzky to teach at the newly founded People’s Art School in Vitebsk, Belarus, Lissitzky “surely welcomed the opportunity to leave a dangerous city and return to a familiar place.” 17 (see Figure 2.1). Lissitzky joined the faculty in Vitebsk “as professor of architecture and the graphic arts.”18 Kiev was reconquered by the Red Army in December and the Ukraine was proclaimed the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Belarus was, from February to July 1919, part of the Lithuanian Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (Litbel), thereafter part of the RSFSR.

The Bolshevik Policy of Nationalities Already in March 1917, when the February Revolution’s Provisional Government granted equality to all the ethnicities and religions living in Russia and rescinded the tsar’s 1915 decree which forbade the use of Hebrew lettering in print (which was used in Yiddish), a period of optimism and cultural and political activity

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Figure 2.1  UNOVIS group photo, Vitebsk, 1920. Courtesy Lazar Khidekel Family Archives and Art Collection. Lissitzky is second from left in row 2, wearing a cap; Malevich is in the middle, holding a plate with suprematist decoration; student Lazar Khidekel is in the middle of the front row; Ilya Chashnik is the second from the right in row 2.

opened for Russia’s Jews.19 Change was on the way, bringing emancipation and modernization. The October Revolution had a great appeal to many Jews because it was the promise of ultimate freedom from segregation and as such, a potential safeguard from the pogroms that were so dreaded by the Jews even in the aftermath of the revolution.20 On the other hand, as a result of the new freedom, “The old Jewish community began to disintegrate in 1917 [in want of the external pressure] that had kept [it] tightly together.”21 However, the October Revolution was mostly seen as a form of secular messianism. A number of probolshevik Jewish organizations were formed to provide financial help and legal support to members of the communities. Lissitzky was so enthusiastic that he

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claimed to have designed the first new banner which was carried across Moscow’s Red Square on May Day 1918 (there is, however, no evidence that there was such a design), and in his 1926 autobiography he intimated how profoundly shaken he had been by the revolutionary upheaval: “In Moscow in 1918 there flashed before my eyes the short circuit, which split the world in two. This single blow pushed the time we call the present like a wedge between yesterday and tomorrow. My efforts are now directed to driving the wedge deeper. One must belong to this side or that—there is no mid-way.”22 While Lissitzky experienced the revolution from a progressive-humanistic, and also specifically Jewish, point of view, many of his fellow artists saw the fault lines in the new society elsewhere, for example between the new bureaucrats and the rest of society, including themselves. Many “Russian futurists”—an umbrella term applied to most modernists of the 1910s—had a different perception of the “old” and the “new” than Lissitzky, once again highlighting Lissitzky’s relative distance from the Russian avant-garde’s major groups and figures. They believed in the necessity of a third revolution, “the revolution of the spirit,” that would—long last—free people from “spiritual slavery”23 and thus mark the emergence of the truly new world. Malevich’s suprematism fit into this radical outlook well, as it aspired to totally discard and supersede all previous visual and thought systems in a single coup. Malevich announced: “it is absurd to force our age into the old forms of time past . . . we who only yesterday were futurists, ( . . . ) arrived at suprematism.”24 For Lissitzky, however, at that moment it was not so much futurism or certain painterly styles and forms that had to be left behind that urgently, but rather the political oppression of, and constant existential threat to, Russia’s Jews. The new world of zero gravity that he, inspired by Malevich, anticipated was less abstract and less transcendental than that of Malevich. Given his concern for the plight of the Jews, Lissitzky experienced the beginnings of Bolshevism differently than many other artists did, for example Rodchenko, who later in many ways became most similar to Lissitzky as a graphic designer, product designer, and photographer. The contrast in their outlooks is striking if we read Rodchenko’s article in the April 11, 1918, issue of Anarkhiia—just a few weeks before the May Day events that Lissitzky remembered as an illuminating and thrilling experience: Enough! ( . . . ) The new rulers put on us new chains: the Ministry of Art, Commissars of Art, Art Sections [as parts of Lunacharsky’s People’s Commissariat of Education.]

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Malevich and Interwar Modernism ( . . . ) And again, like pariahs, we are doomed to extinction from hunger, because we gave everything to the Ministries, Commissars, and Sections. It should not happen! We will organize ourselves and rise powerfully to defend our right to life and creativity! I address you, oppressed proletarians of the brush: come to the battle from your undergrounds and lofts! Let us unite into the “Free association of oppressed artist-painters”! Forward! Let’s build a new life!25

Lissitzky could have noted the mention of “sections” among the institutions of the new bureaucracy because the freshly minted “Evsektii,” short for the “Evreiskie Sektii,” or Jewish sections of the communist Party, were soon to betray precisely the Jews. Lissitzky, to some extent a member of the “new rulers” by virtue of his capacity as a NARKOMPROS employee, saw the choice between the past and the future mainly as a choice between the oppressed and marginalized status of national minorities like Jews and Jewish culture, and the new collective Soviet identity that, according to the party propaganda, was to be all-inclusive. Lissitzky must have been well aware of the fact that “anti-Jewish violence peaked in the year 1919,” but also that “the bulk of the atrocities were carried out by forces hostile to the revolution,”26 even if anti-Semitism among communists was also high and is amply documented.27 Nevertheless, the revolution’s original early rhetoric promised equality to all minorities. For Lissitzky the term “collective,” a later buzzword of international progressive art, had a very concrete meaning of Jewish emancipation in the new Soviet society—even if later “collectivity” grew into a more general concept for him, too. The fundamental change he saw and expected the new state to legislate was transition from the old world of threatened outsider existence for Jews to the new world of security, freedom, and cultural liberation—a nationwide and potentially worldwide new age of Enlightenment. In this anticipated new Soviet world, the rich cultural tradition of Judaism was to be preserved as an integral part of the entirely new culture of all nationalities and religions in the service of an improved human condition: no more quotas, no more religious discrimination, and the end of exploitation, social hierarchy, nationwide injustices. Secular Jewish culture, Lissitzky anticipated, could be as modern as any other component of the new culture and the new collective age. He did not perceive the new bureaucracy, already in its first phase, as posing a threat or itself becoming the new oppressor class, as Rodchenko did. About two weeks after that same May Day 1918 that Lissitzky experienced with a sense of history and high hopes, Rodchenko once again wrote acerbically in Anarkhiia:

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To you who have come into power, you, the victors, brothers in spirit, creators of the brush, the pen, and the chisel, to you, who only yesterday starved in attics and today are commissars of art, I say: Do not barricade yourselves behind the desks of your collegiums and bureaucratic offices, remember that time is passing, and you have not yet done anything for your brothers, and they are still hungry, as they were yesterday. . . . Remember the creative work of the rebels!28

As Rodchenko’s rant indicates, most avant-garde artists, including Rodchenko himself as well as Malevich, did not experience the dramatic improvement as a result of the October Revolution that Lissitzky had believed in. Lissitzky on the other hand experienced, at least in the wake of the revolution, tremendous relief and hope. The meaningful changes he made in his illustrations to the new, 1919 edition of the Jewish Passover song “Had Gadya” and its geometric abstract dust jacket, “one of the last works that he signed under his Hebrew given name Eliezer,”29 are generally and justly regarded as proofs of his faith in the October Revolution. Haia Friedberg observes that in this new version Lissitzky showed “support for the bolshevik victory, conceived of as the victory of the weak over the strong, the good over the bad, as the victory of amended justice.”30 The 1919 version features the defeated Angel of Death with the tsar’s crown symbolizing the old world’s demise. The Hebrew letters P.N. (pei nun), signifying “here lies” or “here is buried,” used on Jewish gravestones, appear above the angel’s palm in the lower right corner of the page, to mark the end of the era symbolized by the crown.31 Friedberg also observes that Lissitzky represented God’s redemptive hand as brandishing the sword with uncanny resemblance to the way in which the hand of the Soviet people was depicted to be cutting the chain of servitude on one of the first postal stamps issued in postrevolutionary Russia in 1918 (Figures 2.2 and 2.3). “The likeness between the two hands cannot be questioned,” Friedberg says, and this argument is supported, aside from the convincing evidence of the stamp itself, by Lissitzky’s entirely different 1917 version of the same scene, where the Angel of Death is defeated but not yet dead; so that by redesigning it in 1919, “Lissitzky is suggesting that the hand of the communist Revolution is propelled by the arm of divine justice and redemption.”32 Furthermore, Friedberg notes: On one side of the painting we see an old bearded man turning his head and hand to the sky, in an expression of amazement. On the opposite side, we see a kid waving its front legs in the air. The hand with the knife crosses between these two images, recalling traditional artistic compositions of the “Binding of Isaac.” Here, however, there is a twist: instead of Isaac being under the knife, in Lissitzky’s

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Figure 2.2 The first Soviet post stamp. Russi​a_191​8_CPA​_1_st​amp_(​Hand_​with_​ a_Swo​rd_Sp​litti​ng_a_​Chain​_agai​nst_a​_Risi​ng_Su​n).jp​g.

Figure 2.3  El Lissitzky: “Had Gadya” (“The Only Kid”), illustration to Verse 10. 1919. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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painting it is the Angel of Death who is being killed by the hand of god. One should not be mistaken in thinking that there is identification between Isaac and the Angel of Death; on the contrary: Isaac, and the kid are saved from the hand of death because death itself is killed. Recognizing young Russian Jews—raised traditionally and living in a revolutionary age—as his target audience, Lissitzky brilliantly chooses Had Gadya as the medium of his message. Through the story and characters of the Had Gadya, he offers the choice that he himself made: to leave the old ways paved with victimization in favor of the new redemptive path of the revolution and communism, a gift offered from heaven itself.33

Thus, Lissitzky’s message to the Jewish readership of the book was that communism brought freedom and justice to the Jews, and the revolution itself was God’s will. His poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge,34 dating also from 1919 or early 1920 in which he urged the Jews to support the bolsheviks in the Civil War, was already a more pronouncedly suprematist-style composition than the new Had Gadya dust jacket, as it was created after his encounter with Malevich and suprematism. Lissitzky’s choice of the words “Beat the Whites!” (Bei bielykh!)—supposedly on the advice of Ilya Ehrenburg35—recalled the dreaded pogrom slogan “Beat the Jews!” (Bei zhidov!). The wedge, as we have already seen, was a symbol for Lissitzky in visualizing the unbridgeable rift between the old and the new, which in his work now appeared, consistently with the symbolic colors of the fighting armies in the Civil War, as red versus white. It must be noted, however, that the Beat the Whites! poster was suprematist only in its formal language, while it fundamentally differed from Malevich’s concept of prohibiting any articulable message in a suprematist image, because suprematism was the art of “pure sensation” and as such was to remain untainted by narrative. Vassily Rakitin relates that a week after Malevich’s arrival in Vitebsk, the First State Exhibition of Paintings by Local and Moscow Artists opened at the Vitebsk People’s School of Art, where Malevich exhibited two 1913 cubo-futurist works and one undated suprematist composition, while “Lissitzky [still] showed works on Jewish themes.”36 This might have been the very last time for Lissitzky to exhibit such stylized figurative work, which was somewhat similar to Chagall’s, if less lyrical. It soon became clear to Lissitzky that although the first postrevolutionary months may have encouraged optimism, the October Revolution did not in fact deliver the Promised Land for the Jews. In fact, quite to the contrary, “Soviet Communism demanded an increasingly higher level of commitment to its own values and institutions which did not permit simultaneous adherence

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to alternative belief systems.”37 Both Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, the latter Commissar for Nationalities after October 1917, had already expressed that emphasis on national cultures was not compatible with the concept of a homogenous communist society. Like Stalin, Lenin had also argued as early as 1913 that “Whoever, directly or indirectly, puts forward the slogan of Jewish ‘national culture’ (whatever his good intentions may be) is an enemy of the proletariat, a supporter of all that is outmoded and connected with caste among the Jewish people; he is an accomplice of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie”38— connecting these two categories of people without batting an eye—however, this doctrine was implemented only after the victory of the revolution, when the bolshevik Party no longer needed the minorities’ languages for the mediation of its message. Now, the bolshevik Party saw Jewish as well as every other minority culture as a threat to Soviet unity and therefore labeled these groups the enemy of the working class—a view that was soon elevated to the rank of the party’s policy. The Eighth Party Congress, the highest forum of the RC(B)P, the Russian communist (bolshevik) Party, held between March 18 and 23, 1919, stated: “The aim of the Party is finally to destroy the ties between the exploiting classes and the organization of religious propaganda.”39 In the later well-known, somewhat coded language that, on its surface, insisted on equality, the resolution was The proletarian dictatorship must completely destroy the connection between the exploiting classes—the landowners and capitalists—and the organization of religious propaganda which keeps the masses in ignorance. The proletarian dictatorship must consistently effect the real emancipation of the working people from religious prejudices, doing so by means of propaganda and by raising the political consciousness of the masses but carefully avoiding anything that may hurt the feelings of the religious section of the population and serve to increase religious fanaticism.40

To put this party’s resolution into practice, the already mentioned Jewish Commissariat ‘Evkom’ (Evreiskii komitet) and the Evsektsii were organized mostly in the Ukraine after the Red Army reoccupied it. These organizations first appeared to support the Jews’ position in the communist Party, but it soon turned out that their function rather was to secure ideological control, and they were in fact created to “start the systematic destruction of traditional and national Jewish aspirations.”41 A decree dated April 1919, but published in JuneJuly of the same year, abolished the elected local communal units of Jewish life, the kehillas in the Ukraine. Moreover, Stalin, supported by Evsektsya leader

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Samuel Agursky (1887–1947), also demanded their money and inventories.42 The second conference of the Evkom and Evsektsya held in June 1919—only a few months before Lissitzky’s trip to Moscow and his recruiting of Malevich for the Vitebsk school—implemented the decisions of the Eighth Congress of the Party by designating all Jewish organizations as enemies of the revolution and ordering the shutdown of synagogues as well as Jewish cultural institutions, including the Jewish Historical Museum in Petrograd. Use of Hebrew letters was denounced as anti-communist.43 “On the night of July 5, 1919, the offices of all zionist organizations in the Ukraine, including even a sports club, were raided and closed. The zionist leaders and officials were arrested, questioned, and released.”44 Such scare tactics were designed to remind the Jews that communism was to be a melting pot, and every effort to revive national and religious cultures was regarded as bourgeois—the worst conceivable label, reserved for the enemies of the communist state and the proletariat. It was striking as well as deeply demoralizing for Russian Jews that anti-Jewish statements and decrees came, more often than not, signed by prominent Jewish communists and Evsektsya leaders, such as Samuel Agursky.

Suprematism as Ultimate Redemption Lissitzky must have been trapped by the dramatically divided loyalties that presented themselves unexpectedly after his great expectations from, and adherence to, the bolshevik Revolution. If he was to be true to the cause of Jewish culture, he would be untrue to the revolution; and if he was to support the policy of the communist Party, he would betray his own culture of Judaism. This was an irresolvable conflict: he must have seen the promise of the revolution as being betrayed by precisely the same people who had previously most championed its promises. His encounter with Malevich and his suprematist work in the fall of 1919 during Lissitzky’s visit to Moscow would have made all the difference to Lissitzky and prompted him to abruptly change his worldview altogether as well as his artistic style.45 By this time the abstract, transnational, future-bound visual vocabulary of suprematism, self-proclaimed as communist, was already the language of a quasi-political movement with quasi-religious overtones bolstered by quasi-theoretical writings. Lissitzky recognized suprematism as the apparent solution to his internal conflict, all the more since it resolved the antagonism between the revolution and Judaism by transcending both in its own

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right. But perhaps even more importantly for Lissitzky, suprematism united the cause of the revolution and the visual expression of the new collectivist culture of the future that would be inclusive of Jews, too, all symbolized by the universal validity of geometric forms. The soon-to-be organized group UNOVIS, which represented suprematism to such an extent that it was essentially considered to be synonymous with it, was pro-communist and competed first with “Tatlinism,” then eventually constructivism, for domination of the visual culture of revolutionary Russia. Each of these movements developed its own distinct geometric abstract vocabulary, and each of them stood for the new visual idiom of transnational modernity, as consistent with the perceived new Soviet identity. Suprematism, therefore, as Lissitzky saw it, straddled loyalty to the communist Soviet state and the desire to not betray Jewish culture: its vision of the future was distant and universal, projected far ahead into the cosmos while, at the same time, it claimed pragmatic efficiency in the very real, new context of the Russian Revolution, with the promise to surpass every imaginable vision of a new world order. Lissitzky thus believed that suprematism was nothing short of messianic and therefore it squared with his ultimate desire of an all-inclusive, redemptive, radically new and utopian culture of the future. Lissitzky certainly came to the understanding that the so-called Jewish question could be resolved only in the frames of an overall restructuring of Russian society and culture; and suprematism’s cosmic view not only pointed in exactly that direction of resolving that problem but went even further. The suprematism Lissitzky encountered in the fall of 1919 was not as free of political contents as the suprematism of 1915–1916 that had positioned the artist in the cosmic space of a timeless future.46 In 1919, suprematism was not only a concept that looked far ahead, but it was also politically committed to, and unmistakably anchored in, the cause of the revolution. It projected a futuristic vision when the term “future” was a code word for the positive, pro-communist attitude, pregnant with progressive, youthful, and left-wing overtones. During the first postrevolutionary years Lunacharsky, in his capacity of Commissar for the People’s Enlightenment, did not deny support for abstract art and the radically innovative art movements, even if with increasing restrictions and bans on their various forums. This early support also gave Lissitzky reason for optimism, as he himself was part of NARKOMPROS, and identified with the revolution, even if with slight and passing doubts, as its ideas impressed him more than its actual practice. Lissitzky may have encountered Malevich and his suprematist work as early as 1917, as Shatskikh suggests;47 but even if he did, he had not been sensitized

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to the conflict between Judaism and communism at the time. This must have dramatically changed by the fall of 1919, once the message of the Eighth Congress was made public, thereby making the burden and pressure of split loyalties heavy on Lissitzky. Suprematism’s vision of the future, its movement-generating potential that brought UNOVIS into existence, and its declared commitment to the revolution were all perceived as being clearly reflected by the imagery of supra-individual pure geometry. Lissitzky found that the unifying power of the suprematist language squared with the rhetoric of the revolution, promising both epochal liberation and a historical change that would be, seen from a broader perspective, favorable to all, regardless of ethnicity. Abstract art was compelling evidence of such a promise of the revolution, and suprematism was neither nation- nor religion-specific. Communism may have been unfolding in the present, but suprematism was nonetheless announced as being the imminent, inevitable future. Lissitzky was instantly convinced and clearly indicated the magnitude of this promise by ranking suprematism as token of a new world order—indeed, the new gospel—above every other fundamental, epochal idea in history—writ large, in all-capital letters, as he solemnly announced it in UNOVIS’ own journal: THUS THE OLD TESTAMENT WAS FOLLOWED BY THE NEW, THE NEW WAS FOLLOWED BY THE COMMUNIST, AND THE COMMUNIST IS FINALLY FOLLOWED BY THE TESTAMENT OF SUPREMATISM.48

As this statement emphatically indicates, in both typography and content, in 1920 Lissitzky ranked suprematism as a universal concept that was higher than communism. He apparently did not suspect that the communist Party would eventually condemn the positioning of any concept above communism, including artistic ones. This statement is a ringing announcement of the significance that Lissitzky attributed to suprematism on a scale that arguably few other artists or critics did. The reason was that he looked at suprematism from a particular vantage point: not primarily as a professional artistic issue, but rather as an epochal promise. To mark this moment of illumination and perceived historical change that he experienced as the promise of redemption, Lissitzky changed his given name from Eliezer (Lazar) to El (eventually El’). In this decision, which, coincidentally, reduced his Hebrew name to its initial (“El” for “Eliezer,” or as the spoken first letter “L”, for Lazar), the suprematist organization UNOVIS’ already cited slogan “U-el-el'ul-el-te-ka” may have also played a role,49 sealing the replacement of Lissitzky’s cultural heritage of Judaism50 by what he now held

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as the higher idea and more overarching formal vocabulary of the all-inclusive future: suprematism.51 Recalling these days in 1920, Lissitzky wrote: “Here stood revealed for the first time in all its purity the clear sign and plan for a definite new world never before experienced—a world which issues forth from our inner being and which is only in the first stage of its formation. For this reason, the square of suprematism became a beacon.”52 This statement, along with many others, leaves no doubt about the dramatic change Lissitzky was undergoing in thinking as well as in his artistic work following his encounter with Malevich’s suprematism. The divide was not between expressive figurative rendering and painterly abstraction, but rather between the before and after of recognizing the significance of suprematism resolving Lissitzky’s existential dilemma. Based on a 1919 painting titled Abstract Composition in Kiev’s Museum of Ukrainian Art, attributed to Lissitzky, recent scholarship53 claims that he had experimented with bringing together geometric abstraction and Jewish motifs already prior to his encounter with suprematism, probably under the influence of Alexandra Exter. This narrative defines Lissitzky’s career as a more balanced development toward abstraction than having a radical turning point late in 1919 under duress or Malevich’s sudden influence.54 However, there was an unmistakable turning point, due to the shocking political change brought upon the national minorities by the Eighth Party Congress, which resulted in Lissitzky’s change of name—an extraordinarily clear sign of a watershed moment. Even if Lissitzky tried his hand at coordinating cubism and Jewish art by inserting a piece of Hebrew writing in the middle of the cubist elements in Abstract Composition—provided that it is, in fact, Lissitzky’s painting—this does in no way contradict suprematism having been a major catalyst and turning point in his life and career.55 Lissitzky envisioned suprematism as the definitive art of the future that transcends and will thus resolve all the conceptual, historical, and political conflicts of the present, rather than as a gradual adaption of abstraction that he had clearly been familiar with. His own new brand proun, derivative of the suprematist UNOVIS—“proun” is most likely meant to be read as ProUNOVIS—was the radically new chapter in Lissitzky’s career reflecting his intellectual and political concepts. This is not to suggest that Alan Birnholz’s and Christina Lodder’s arguments regarding Lissitzky’s efforts to coordinate Judaism and the visual language of proun56 in subsequent years are incorrect. This tendency is clearly demonstrated by Lissitzky’s continued post-1919 geometric abstract designs for Yiddish books, for example the 1922 cover designs for Mani Leib’s Yngl Tsingl Khvat (A

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Mischievous Boy), published in Warsaw by the Kultur Lige, and Four Billygoats, as well as his illustrations to Ehrenburg’s Six Tales with Light Endings, most clearly among them the one for The Schifskarta (The Boat Ticket), also 1922, published in Berlin. The memoirs of the Polish painter Henryk Berlewi, who became Lissitzky’s friend during the latter’s visit to Warsaw on his way to Berlin in 1921, confirm the previous argument. I hoped to find a brotherly soul in Lissitzky, creator of the many wonderful illustrations in Yiddish books, but to my great disappointment and surprise I met a “renegade” Lissitzky. ( . . . ) He talked to me for long hours about suprematism and its founder Malevich. We had long discussions about the antagonism of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. His “conversion” to suprematism did not hinder him in remaining a good Jew.57

Berlewi adds that in the “mystical-chassidist” Jewish cultural world in the Warsaw of 1921, the “suprematist message resonated as false.”58 However, he came under its influence himself, as if it had been a drug—“hashish,” he wrote— in response to the “magic images of crystal clear purity,” so enthusiastically did Lissitzky speak about the “new religion.”59 Berlewi’s memoir makes it clear that he was not aware of the new bolshevik policy declared by the Eighth Party Congress, and Lissitzky did not disclose his disappointment and dilemma to him, so he regarded Lissitzky’s commitment to suprematism as a purely free spiritual-artistic choice. Berlewi is remembered to have been part of a great wave of Jewish awakening after the First World War, which thrived on the expectation of a Jewish cultural explosion in Europe. It was a year later in Berlin that Berlewi realized the contradiction and conflict between the Jewish nationalists and the cosmopolitan constructivists, many of whom also happened to be Jews. There he understood the choice that Lissitzky had made, even if still unaware of the political factors it was brought on by: “He who has not been through the inner drama to which we Jewish artists were exposed, namely resignation of a nationality in favor of a diametrically opposed universalist concept of art, will never be in the position to assess our sacrifice.”60 Nevertheless, Berlewi continued to misunderstand Lissitzky and believed that he was so fascinated by Malevich that he could simply not resist the “shock” of his “magnetic power”: I believe that Lissitzky and myself were the only Jewish artists who have sacrificed our love of this fantastic Jewish world we felt so profoundly attached to, on the altar of constructivism. Both of us have given up a universe full of

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Malevich and Interwar Modernism spiritual beauty, wisdom, and mysticism to turn ourselves to the cult of the machine, that is, to a universalist cosmopolitan and technical concept of art. This new path could be broken only at the price of resignation that was near to superhuman. We have committed ourselves to European constructivism with the same fanaticism with which we had served Jewish folk art.61

It must be emphasized that Berlewi misconstrued this, even if with good intentions: Lissitzky did not make a deliberate decision between two equally attractive life programs. Living in Russia, he had to clearly see the dead-end street into which Jewish culture, along with other national cultures, was forced, and that commitment to it had been propagated as being in direct opposition to the cause of an all-inclusive society that the bolshevik state promised and claimed to side with. Interpreting suprematism as the symbolic language of a utopian, imaginary collectivity62 was, at the same time, tantamount to limiting it to only a few of its aspects. Lissitzky undoubtedly had an idiosyncratic take on suprematism, bending it to his own wishes to resolve his own intellectual and existential predicament. He glossed over the “color masses,” and the particular colorcompositions of Malevich’s suprematist paintings and the similarly conceived “masses of sound,”63 and in his understanding of Malevich’s ideas, he disregarded “the fifth measurement,” or unknown dimension, that Malevich summed up as his quintessential concept in On New Systems in Art,64 the very article that Lissitzky printed out in Vitebsk. Apparently Lissitzky had a blind spot for many aspects of Malevich’s concepts and painterly work, even as he was fascinated by, and focused on, the universalist and futuristic features of suprematism, elevating it to the level of eschatology. From his point of view, the universality and simplicity of the suprematist geometric vocabulary and Malevich’s cosmic void visualized the positive expectations of a new world expanding into the cosmos, breaking free from the burden of history. A few years later, the Berlin-based Hungarian art critic Ernő (Ernst) Kállai had a similar, although more practical, take on the visual language of geometric abstraction that validated Lissitzky’s vision. He too regarded it as the lowest common denominator for the visual expression of a future internationalism. Kállai, as will be discussed, would cross paths with Lissitzky on several occasions during the latter’s stay in Berlin and would write the first essay on his work.65 After international constructivism66 peaked in the West in or around 1923 at the latest, Kállai characterized the new visual language as a hope for the emancipation of the artists active on the peripheries of European culture:

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It seemed that this construct would fit immediately, without the detour of evolution through national traditions, into the overall artistic framework of the longed-for new, collective world. For artists coming from the uncertain peripheries of this emerging international Europe, this was bound to seem as an extraordinary opportunity.67

This describes the case of Lissitzky, who, having been forced to seek higher education abroad and thus depending on all-inclusive universalism, was in a situation similar to East Europeans with regard to Western Europe. For him, too, an overall new beginning would have been within sight only “without the detour of evolution,” that is, preferably through an instant, general adaption of a common, supranational formal language. The radical elimination of cultural, ethnic, and religious differences, the reimagining of history in a new world of equality and fraternity, the specific rules of which had not yet been envisioned, had to happen all at once. It was the vision of a future without a past, as evoked in Victory over the Sun: pure utopia but the only hope. In this vision, the square, clean and equilateral, reigned supreme.

Lissitzky’s Rationalized Suprematism Lissitzky and Malevich cooperated on the design of a curtain for the Vitebsk theater in 1919, the sketch for which was, as Rakitin points out, perhaps the only common work by the two of them, and “was, if not the first, then one of the first for Lissitzky in the suprematist style.”68 Early in 1920 Lissitzky and Malevich designed the suprematist decoration for the building of the Commissariat for Unemployment in Vitebsk together, the final product being executed and mounted by students, including UNOVIS members Nina Kogan, Nikolai Suetin, and Ivan Chervinko. Lissitzky’s posters from 1919, the now lost The Factory Workbenches Await You and the well-known Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, demonstrate that, as already mentioned, he fully and abruptly appropriated the suprematist formal language in the fall of 1919. In fact, The Factory Workbenches poster, probably preceded by the more purely suprematist Beat the Whites . . . and another propaganda piece, Communication Workers, Remember the Year 1905, dating from 1919 to 1920, is already in his own proun style (if avant la lettre), with three-dimensional geometric bodies rather than flat shapes floating in space. Both versions of the Communication Workers poster,69 as well as Beat the Whites, include flat geometric shapes, similarly to Malevich’s

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suprematist paintings. Lissitzky, although he joined UNOVIS and was strongly devoted to it, took part in its activities, very soon—apparently still in the late fall of 1919—nevertheless asserted himself as a representative of proun, his own brand name, a further development of suprematism.70 A key difference between Malevich’s suprematism and Lissitzky’s proun is that Lissitzky added illusory three-dimensionality to the flat geometric shapes of the suprematist paintings. He adopted Malevich’s cosmic void, although he did not paint it white, but insisted on painting voluminous floating geometric objects, thereby rationalizing suprematism inasmuch as he tended to reveal the entire body of the geometric solids through foreshortening, even if he used several systems of perspective within the frame of a single painting. This feature detracts from the volition of the unlimited, free-floating weightlessness of Malevich’s suprematist shapes, just as the three-dimensionality adds gravity, or at least body and volume, to Lissitzky’s equally free-floating forms. UNOVIS dominated the Vitebsk school and had opportunities to decorate the town on the anniversaries of the revolution. When Sergei Eisenstein had a stopover in Vitebsk on his way to Moscow from Minsk in 1920, he depicted A singular provincial town. Built, like so many of the towns in the west of the country, of red brick. Begrimed with soot and depressing. But there is something very odd about this town. In the main streets the red bricks are painted white. And over this white background there are green circles everywhere. Orange squares. Blue rectangles. This is Vitebsk in the year 1920. The brush of Kasimir Malevich has gone over the brick walls. . . . You see orange circles before your eyes, red squares and green trapeziums. . . . Suprematist confetti strewn about the streets of an astonished town.71

Regardless of their differences, the enormous contrast between the reality, which was “begrimed with soot and depressing,” and the vision of an ethereal future of colors and unlimited expansion projected by the thin layer of “suprematist confetti,” it was this gap between the real and the imaginary that provided the virtual space in which both Malevich and Lissitzky could operate during their time together in Vitebsk in 1919–1921.

3

Theo van Doesburg, Artist and Strategist

There were striking similarities between the Dutch and the Russian avant-gardes in the 1910s that would be manifest in the artists’ views and artistic production through the following decade, despite the fact that the artists themselves were not in contact. By the time they established personal and professional connections in the early 1920s, they mutually saw great possibilities in cooperation based on their shared goals and ideas. It soon turned out, however, that their visually rhyming works were rooted in different concepts and perspectives.

Van Doesburg’s Early Career Born in Utrecht in 1883 as Christian Emil Marie Küpper and adopting the name of his stepfather Theodorus Doesburg (who may have been his biological father), Theo van Doesburg was the most controversial figure of the international avantgarde until his untimely death in 1931 (see Figure 3.1). Theo van Doesburg shaped Lissitzky and Malevich’s reception and interpretation west of Russia during the 1920s more than anyone else did. Van Doesburg devised the most comprehensive network of the international avant-garde, aspiring to, and eventually occupying, a top position in it. His monographer Evert van Straaten confirms what many of his contemporaries thought: “Theo van Doesburg wanted to control the international avant-garde of his day like a spider in its web,”1 which ambition, along with his temperament, caused dramatic changes in his loyalties and personal relationships to the other avant-garde artists throughout the decade. As Karel Blotkamp observed, “he moved in two different directions. He brought kindred spirits together, but he also drove them apart again.”2 Van Doesburg’s early intellectual development shows similarities to that of Malevich, similarities which have long remained underexamined, while, as we

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Figure 3.1  Theo van Doesburg, photo, 1927. Courtesy RKD, The Hague.

shall see, later van Doesburg emphatically distinguished himself from Malevich and singlehandedly prevented the publication of Malevich’s essays in German. A mostly self-taught painter, van Doesburg started his career as a writer and poet enthralled by spirituality. From 1912 on he contributed to the journal Eenheid (Unity), “a weekly that was aimed at theosophists, freemasons, rosicrucians, spiritualists, vegetarians, and teetotalers, ( . . . ) where he expostulated how art should be judged ( . . . ) on its ability to express pure, deep feelings”3—predating Malevich’s concept of “the supremacy of pure sensations.”4 Introduced to the visual arts by architect J. J. P. Oud, van Doesburg valued Kandinsky as a painter, ranking him highest among his fellow artists on a spiritual scale. When in 1915 he got personally acquainted with painters Piet Mondrian and Janus de Winter in Laren, he found, in Blotkamp’s words, “in his own country an abstract, spiritualized art that could stand comparison to Kandinsky,”5 and befriended both artists. He admired their work that he found to be a radically new beginning in art. Similarly to Malevich, van Doesburg also “repeatedly and emphatically distanced himself from his predecessors.”6 Aside from the two painters, he also met their neighbor in Laren, theosophist and mathematician Dr. Mathieu Hubertus Josephus Schoenmakers (1875–1944), who provided the theosophist framework of the De Stijl movement which van Doesburg cofounded with Mondrian in 1917, in a

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role similar to the one Mikhail Matyushin played in developing and articulating the aesthetic ideas and artistic program of Malevich. Schoenmakers connected the painters’ ideas to the perceived mathematical structure of the universe and to theosophy’s central idea of achieving ‘cosmic, universal harmony’ in art and life. According to Hans L. C. Jaffe, it was Schoenmakers’s views that were “the catalyst in the foundation of De Stijl, [making the founding members’ works] one unified, collective oeuvre.”7 While both the Dutch and the Russians were seeking solid scientific and conceptual grounds for the new art and the new aesthetics, the thinkers they followed were occultists rather than scientists. These thinkers responded to the artists’ desire to see their work in a cosmic context and on a cosmic scale, addressing a utopia to answer mankind’s ontological questions on a universal level. The Dutch artists, committed to theosophy, perceived their place within a universal framework, believing that their images conveyed the “new realism” in a cosmic sense: grasping the abstract essence of the universe rather than getting lost in concrete details. The occultist thinkers (“occult,” from the Latin occultus, meaning “hidden”) were seeking hidden laws and connections in the cosmos, freely selecting concepts from a mix of scientific theories, optical perception, poetry, and their own imagination. These ideas can best be regarded as poetic metaphors that belong to a nascent new imagination. Their universalism was parallel to the “cosmism”8 of the early Russian avant-garde. At the beginning of his artistic career van Doesburg was employed by architects to design stained glass windows for various villas. His geometric compositions, which he regarded as elements of a new collective art, featured reversed and repeated sets of motifs with hidden relationships between the design details he used. The window designs were conceived as parts of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or a total work of art: a house. Such works taught van Doesburg lessons about the relationship of parts to the whole both conceptually and materially. Parallel to the Russian artists, van Doesburg and Mondrian also took a fresh look at medieval and religious art in search of transcendental experience and tradition: “it is the task of modern art to make us experience the universe, and even god,”9 van Doesburg wrote, and he dedicated a poem to Mondrian, titled “Kathedraal I.”10 In a July 2, 1916, letter to his friend Antony Kok, he wrote: “Through ( . . . ) the medieval museum and the Saint Bavo church11 I have found my task: the crystal atmosphere. I have a positive plan for creation and what I shall create now will top everything.”12 This visionary program of “crystal atmosphere” is not fundamentally different from Malevich’s concept of cosmic space; and van Doesburg’s ambition “to top everything” perhaps best translates to “supreme” in Malevich’s language. Both artists had their sight on higher concepts and ultimate, universal answers to

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issues in art and questions of the world that were meant to encompass all previous artistic endeavors. They shared interest in nascent cosmology, ideas about the “fourth dimension,” non-Euclidean mathematics and geometry as well as natural sciences, all filtered through a mix of spiritual, theosophist, and occultist teaching. In 1916 van Doesburg published a poem dedicated to Dutch painter Janus de Winter in Eenheid, titled De Priester-Kunstenaar (The Priest-Artist), in which he, similarly to many poets and artists of his generation all over Europe and Russia, prophesied that “man will be born again”; “Art will be religion,” declared the artist a priest, “to whom we owe the new life.”13 Mondrian, too, saw religion as an integral part of the new outlook: “the new spirit comes strongly forward in logic, science, and religion,”14 he wrote in his “Neoplasticism in Painting,” published in twelve parts in the De Stijl journal’s first volume, edited and published by van Doesburg. This idea parallels Malevich’s announcing the Black Square to be a new beginning, occupying the place of the icon. As mentioned in the Introduction to this book, many modernist artists shared faith in art’s redemptive power all over the Western hemisphere, as well. One of them was the Hungarian poet and essayist Béla Balázs, whose vision of the coming new culture at the beginning of the twentieth century similarly discerned features of art as a new religion;15 and Lissitzky’s cited recognition of suprematism as a new persuasion is also a case in point. The term and idea of “religion,” which bolsheviks including Commissar Lunacharsky and author Bogdanov took very seriously, was understood in a broad sense, as a potential new faith whether metaphysical or materialist, including, besides the already existing denominations, a number of spiritualist currents that were seen as germinating new belief systems. Imagining art as vehicle of a new faith, especially after the breakout of the Great War, entailed the idea of an improved future, where the new art would have a uniting power, overwriting national, religious, and racial differences. Over the years, however, van Doesburg grew distanced from the concept of the artist-priest but continued to see the artist as a superior mastermind and spiritual leader of society. In his 1919 article “Van ‘natuur’ tot ‘kompositie’” (from “nature” to “composition”),16 he arrives at concepts similar to those we find in many of Malevich’s writings, stating: “Supremacy of mind over nature called for a fresh mental approach, with new scientific methods for acquiring greater objectivity.”17 In a 1916 survey of recent art tendencies, Malevich writes: “The art of naturalism is the idea of the savage ( . . . ) For art is the ability to construct. ( . . . ) Suprematism is the new non-objective creation,”18 where “non-objective” actually corresponds with what van Doesburg means by “greater objectivity”: the leaving behind of imitative representation of any concrete “object.”

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The artistic development from impressionist, Cézanne-ist, and cubist to futurist art and beyond to abstraction was a surprisingly similar trajectory in both artists’ careers, as was the subject of their respective surveys of recent modernist art. Both saw their respective abstract art as the ultimate stage in a teleologically conceived art history with an inner logic that led from a formal analysis of the cubists to abstract geometry. Van Doesburg and Malevich also had similar ambitions toward organizing the artistic community. Van Doesburg was intensely active on the Dutch and European scene as a poet, painter, architectural draughtsman, typographer, graphic designer, stained glass window designer,19 and essayist, as well as publishing editor, with a great interest in theater, film, and mysticism—most of which square with Malevich’s interests and activities. Van Doesburg and Malevich did not know each other personally. Originally led by admiration for Mondrian and his adherence to theosophy, van Doesburg aimed at creating perfectly flat surfaces and harmony in painting, “equilibrium between the pictorial elements,”20 but he was not as firmly committed to this ideal as Mondrian was. Blotkamp observes that, also similarly to Malevich, “There is an anarchist undercurrent in van Doesburg’s ways [which was] becoming more conscious and stronger through the years.”21 Parallels—with a couple of years’ shift one way or another—also appear in their work. Although van Doesburg did not belong to a cubo-futurist circle of poets like Malevich did, between 1914 and 1916 he nevertheless wrote his own “cubist poetry.” As Hannah L. Hedrick demonstrates, these poems “reflect cubist painting techniques,”22 for example “simultaneous representation of different figures from different vantage points.”23 Moreover, van Doesburg’s 1917 Design for a Fountain, of which only a photo is known, happens to be remarkably similar to Malevich’s 1921–1922 Architektons (see Figures 3.2 and 3.3).   Van Doesburg was impulsive, rebellious, inclined to reject set rules, often generous, and, as van Straaten relates, “he was an intriguer, too.”24 Van Doesburg’s initial admiration for Mondrian and his balanced, timelessly metaphysical painting came to a breaking point in 1924 as his interests detached from Mondrian’s static horizontal-vertical, theosophist grids. Assuming dynamism to be the most important organizing force of life, van Doesburg applied diagonals in his compositions and positioned himself as permanently progressive, in opposition to Mondrian, who ignored considerations of time and space, the issue of the fourth dimension, new technologies, and the new dynamics in architecture. To keep his image of an artist engaged in geometric abstraction consistent, van Doesburg tripled his personality, so to speak, by choosing the pseudonyms of alter egos I. K. Bonset and Aldo Camini in order to cover, and to some extent control, activities in the fields of dada and futurism as well.

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Figure 3.2  Theo van Doesburg: Design of Fountain, photo, 1917. Courtesy RKD, The Hague.

Figure 3.3  Malevich: Architekton, 1924–1926. Photo of lost work. Published in Nova Generatsia No. 4, 1929.

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Elementary Dissent Elementarism, van Doesburg’s own “ism” that he launched in 1925,25 asserting his own standpoints independently from Mondrian’s neoplasticism, emphasized four-dimensionality—“plasticism in the field of time-space.” “Elementarism,” a term which announces the claim to a fundamental reconsideration of visual image-making from the ground up, “destroys radically the classical, optical frontality of the painting ( . . . ) it is always in revolt, in opposition, to nature.”26 Again, it is evoking Malevich’s line on art’s “domination over the forms of nature.”27 Furthermore, “Elementarism begins where philosophy and religion have said their last word [and it wants to] destroy completely the illusionist view of the world in all its forms (religion, stupor of nature and art, etc.), and construct an elementary world of exact and splendid reality.”28 These program points clearly indicate that elementarism has claims similar to those of suprematism to uproot the culture starting with its basic elements and introduce a radically new kind of culture that will transcend all existing systems of ideas and beliefs. Announcing the uprooting of the visual arts along with the concepts they are grounded in, as well as challenging their aesthetic dimensions, forms, and even indirect relations to nature, shows van Doesburg’s aspirations to not fall short of Malevich’s. This sheds some light on van Doesburg’s journal title and movement name De Stijl, with special emphasis on the definite article “De,” or “the”: it is not just a particular mode of style, but, as van Straaten points out, “the style, which would solely possess universal validity.”29 While Malevich progresses upwards, above the given world and up into the white space of the cosmos to transcend the boundaries of the known world and the culture, van Doesburg aspires to replace its very foundations—its root elements—in order to fundamentally renew it. Van Doesburg paid special attention to the square as a new, key motif of an international alliance in art. Early on he wrote an article in which he praised this “form of the formless,”30 the importance of which increased in his eyes as he encountered it in the works of Russian artists.

The Antiauthoritarian Authorities of the Avant-Garde In the early 1920s, van Doesburg fiercely competed for a leading position of the international avant-garde with other artists in an attempt to achieve control over the progressive art scene as well as recognition for ultimate originality. He united the spiritual engagement of Malevich and the pragmatism of the constructivists

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without actually being familiar, at that point, with either of them. While the avant-garde artists rejected the authorities of traditional art and its established institutions and forums, many of them laid a claim to becoming the authority of a new direction. A new and original concept with the potential to launch a tectonic change in artistic creation was as highly valued as its subsequent materialization in artworks, in both Russia and the West. In Rosalind Krauss’s analysis, originality implies the powers of renewing the self “safe from contamination by tradition.”31 The meaning of “tradition” shifted to indicate the legacy of the artists’ immediate predecessors whose work and views were to be surpassed, while medieval art was seen as being at the root of, and the nurturing original force of, the culture, tested and tried by time. Aside from genuine interest in new approaches and methods of artistic creation, what was at stake was no less than the authorship and ownership of the nascent new imagination in both Western Europe and Russia. In these years of faith in the future that the avant-garde artists believed to be actively shaping, this sense of cultural authority was an artist’s ultimate asset. The tradition of the new had to be established—a process to which the moral values of courage, experimental spirit, and radically progressive thinking were attached. The progressive art scene was accordingly competitive. When asked about authorship of, for example, the photogram, a new technical-artistic method of camera-less photographic image-making that was invented, probably independently, by Christian Schad, Man Ray, and László Moholy-Nagy at about the same time, Moholy-Nagy replied to the inquiry that “the time around 1922 was characterized by embittered proofs and counter-proofs of invention and influence,” because “in those days jealousies were in full bloom.”32 Lissitzky was also fully aware of this fact and acted accordingly. “Don’t engage in long conversation with the folks (Richter, Doesburg, and so on) in Berlin,” he advised his future wife, Sophie Küppers, in a letter. “Don’t say anything about me, say only that I work (don’t name anything), they will find out about this later. Be short and snappy.”33 The postwar years were a Gründerzeit—foundation time—during which many artists developed a sense of historical importance, convinced that they were laying the foundations of the next great cultural era. Van Doesburg was very much aware of this. Due to the inner dynamics of the art world, a new position emerged within the avant-garde of the early 1920s, that of the multifaceted and multifunctional avant-garde artist-leader with inexhaustible energy and genuine ideas, works, and multiple competences, functioning as an artist, author, editor, publisher, and organizer—and all as claiming authority in the antiauthoritarian sphere of the culture. In the supposedly free culture of the avant-garde that stood

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in opposition to the established authorities and traditionalism, this function entailed control over one or several forums of the emerging alternative cultural narrative. Almost each of these artists was eager to launch an independent forum that secured a certain amount of control over a segment of the emerging art scene. A little journal functioned as a public venue and its editor as a public intellectual who had a platform for his views on art and culture, even if he could enlist only a few of his fellow artists to join him. The profile of each of the “little journals” was independent and avant-garde,34 but they were no less legitimate than any other more established and respected publication. The international avant-garde was, nonetheless, spread thin: some of the groups had singledigit headcount of artists and critics among their members. As long as a “little journal” was in print, however, and its stationary with its letterhead was used in correspondence, it functioned as a validated forum. It helped these often shortlived publications that several established periodicals, which were respected by the avant-garde circles like Der Sturm, Die Weltbühne, Das Kunstblatt, Jahrbuch der jungen Kunst, Der Cicerone, the German Werkbund’s journal Die Form, among others, were sympathetic to and supportive of the new art, to the point of covering some of the avant-garde artists’ exhibitions as opening discussions about the new directions. Despite these efforts, however, most of these journals were factors in the art market as well and were not programmatically committed to developments in the latest art, while a journal of one’s own put its editor on the cultural map next to these and secured an actual, potentially efficient presence, often drawing attention with provocative articles. A network of the “little journals” thus emerged and can be seen as a “shadow establishment” of the art world. The “little journals” were short of funds and needed each other to exchange clichés (electrotypes) for the photos that were expensive, off of which they could print reproductions. Correspondence on official stationery went further, at least potentially, than those using private letterheads, vouching for the authority of the voice behind them. In the early 1920s, emblematic antiauthoritarian authorities included, aside from Theo van Doesburg, luminaries like László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Karel Teige, Lajos Kassák, Lubomir Micić, Henrik Stażewski, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters, as well as editors and publishers of other futurist, constructivist, and dada forums on the Western art scene. Indisputably, the largest playing field belonged to van Doesburg’s De Stijl, which, at least in the beginning, was printed in 1,000 copies and also served as home to van Doesburg’s aforementioned alter egos: dada poet I. K. Bonset and futurist Aldo Camini, “editor and publisher” of the short-lived dada-futurist-

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spirited Mécano (1922–1923) that was, in fact, also published by van Doesburg. Moholy-Nagy also commanded an international field as Bauhaus master/ professor, painter, photographer, author, and typographer, coeditor of the 1922 Buch neuer Künstler (Book of New Artists), editor of the bauhaus zeitung and the Bauhaus Bücher series between 1926 and 1928, as well as photo editor of the international revue i 10. El Lissitzky’s editorial and publishing activities, as well as his artworks and essays, also warranted for his significance in both Western Europe and Russia. Lissitzky edited and contributed to the trilingual Veshch, Gegenstand, Objet (Object), launched in order to generate a dialog between Russians and Westerners and familiarizing both parties with the art and art discourse of the other; as well as G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung (G: Material for Elementary Design) published between 1923 and 1926, of which Lissitzky was cofounder and coeditor; and later ABC Beiträge zum Bauen (ABC Contributions to Building) 1924–1928, which also provided forums for his views and activities; as well as the book he coedited with Hans Arp in 1925, Kunstismen (Art isms). Czech architecture critic, graphic artist, photographer, and typographer Karel Teige, editor and coeditor of the avant-garde anthologies and journals Devětsil (Butterbur, or Petasites), Život (Life), International Revue Disk, and Stavba (Building), managed to turn the magazine ReD (short for Revue Devětsil), which he edited in Prague, into an international forum well connected in the international art world and efficiently disseminating information. Hungarian poet, writer, and artist Lajos Kassák, editor and publisher of Ma (Today), Dokumentum (Document), 2x2, and Munka (Work), and coeditor of the Buch neuer Künstler, remarkably enlarged his field of activity and network during his 1920–1926 Vienna exile, often operating as a link between East- and West European groups in the fields of dada, constructivism, and surrealism. Yugoslav enfant terrible Ljubomir Micić, editor of Zenit, had a strong voice in the art world and monitored the developments of international progressive art by garnering interest with his alarming comments. Hans Richter, who was the editor of G and a contributor of many other journals, was a dadaist, and a participant of international conferences and group activities, as well as another energetic presence and organizing force throughout the period, including the medium of film in his various fields of avant-garde work. These multifunctional agents were all connected to van Doesburg. They asked for electrotypes of his works, which could not otherwise be obtained except from him directly. Illustrating an article with reproductions of van Doesburg’s works was proof of close personal and strategic contacts with him, just as having one’s own article or image appear in his De Stijl journal. As their correspondence indicates, artists’ mutual support of

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each other in the international avant-garde scene was realized, perhaps more so than in any other way, in the exchange of electrotypes and photos, so that every publication could visually affirm its own avant-garde identity. Collegial letters hardly mention conceptual issues: it was not necessary; publishable visuals and issues of journals were requested, offered, or exchanged.35 It is safe to say that between 1920 and 1924 van Doesburg assumed a position at the top of the hierarchy of artists-editors-publishers and organizers of this scene. His De Stijl journal was the steadiest and had the longest, fourteen-year run among similar publications; and van Doesburg commanded a shrewd, articulate voice in it. Journals that were similar but started later and were less widely circulated included Kurt Schwitters’s Hanover-based Merz (1923–1932) and Michel Seuphor’s Antwerp-based Het Overzicht (The Overview, 1921–1925).36 The antiauthoritarian authorities actively shaped the alternative art world of the era. Their position provided them with a broad perspective over the vanguard art scene; and even if they personally happened to be committed to one particular trend, they and their respective forums still functioned as a common ground for a variety of like-minded groups and artists. A case in point is the First Dadaist-Constructivist Congress that van Doesburg convoked in Weimar in September 1922 in an effort to bring the two, originally antithetical directions under the same umbrella, relying on their shared political leftism to create a dada-constructivism axis. The multitude of small avant-garde groups following a variety of guidelines and programs were interested in belonging to more inclusive formations, if compatible with their specific stances, and were eager to find ideas and forms that united them along with those that may have marked their differences. Thus, for example, cooperation developed among van Doesburg, Hans Richter, Lissitzky, and Kurt Schwitters, and, separately, between Kurt Schwitters and Lissitzky. Van Doesburg’s Weimar Congress—mustering unity at the same time as challenging the Weimar Bauhaus—was well attended by leading members of the international avant-gardes from a variety of different groups: dadaists, Hungarian left-wingers, surrealists, Dutch and Russian artists, and architects. Furthermore, being multimedia artists and editors, the authorities of the avant-garde constructed the nascent narrative of the current art scene according to their respective viewpoint or agenda in summary publications, such as Kassák and Moholy-Nagy’s 1922 Buch neuer Künstler and Hans Arp and El Lissitzky’s 1925 Die Kunstismen 1914-1924, both presenting the instant canon of the art of the present in a way that reflected their convictions and strategic positions by way of selecting artworks and trends in a survey format.37

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Generational Issue in the Avant-Garde Awareness of generational differences was part of the new leading avant-gardists’ relationship to their masters. Not unlike Lissitzky’s positioning Malevich as a forefather and important precursor, respectfully seen as a man of the past,38 Theo van Doesburg considered his master, friend, and rival Piet Mondrian also as the hero of earlier times: Mondrian as a man is not modern, because ( . . . ) although he has developed psychically towards the new, spiritually he belongs to the old. ( . . . ) He still sees the spiritual as a conceptual abstraction, thus something like the theosophists. Of life itself as reality he is in fact afraid. He thinks life but does not live it. He makes his conception, which is, of course, very good, but too much about an ideal image outside normal life.39

The generational differences and competition within the avant-garde, which included similar conflicts inside the Bauhaus,40 emerged, as van Doesburg’s earlier lines attest, along the fault line of a spiritually oriented older generation versus a more technology-friendly and science-oriented younger generation. The meaning of the term “progressive” shifted from bold new ideas to matterof-fact pragmatism: the recognition that concrete work will guarantee progress. Sciences and new technologies were considered the staple of improving the world: a move away from the purely, or predominantly, aesthetic concept of modernism and the avant-gardes, as Malevich’s disconnect with German architects during his 1927 visit also demonstrated.41

The Russian-Dutch Connection Like his German colleagues and many artists on the international scene, van Doesburg was curious and eager to establish contacts with the artists of the new Russia. He was dismayed to learn with years of delay that he had been left out of the group of Dutch artists that had initiated contacts with the Russians as early as 1919. Photos of works and articles had been sent from Holland to Soviet Russia42 to which, after some time, none other than Malevich sent a response in the form of an open letter to the Dutch artists, early in 1922.43 The main points of this letter were the rejection of “objective” (predmetnii) or figurative/representational art as “the ideology of an animal idea” and the declaration of suprematism as “the highest point in human thought revealing

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the human plan.”44 In language as shrewd as van Doesburg’s, Malevich depicted the “group of artists who call themselves ‘constructivists’, as slaves of the newly found object”—a derogatory reference to the technical-industrial motifs and materials in their work. Underlining their hostility to suprematism, he stated: “We, of course, are also against all that is constructive and objective, for the [real] constructiveness of art is non-objective.”45 It is not clear how many people, if any besides the recipients, knew—and if they did, could sort out—the contents of this letter that was sent in February 1922, a few months before the launching of Lissitzky’s Veshch, Objet, Gegenstand, and the First Russian Exhibition would open in Berlin in October and also travel to Amsterdam. Since Malevich’s letter was not made public, and was succinct and declarative rather than explanatory, it was not helpful in clarifying the differences between constructivism and suprematism west of Russia. Malevich defined the difference between the two directions as “constructive and objective” on the one hand and “constructiveness [that is] non-objective” on the other. Importantly, “objective” was understood as the opposite of “subjective” in the West, while Malevich used the word as the opposite of “figurative,” “representational” art that worked with visually concrete objects. With regard to the later confusion in the West about suprematism and constructivism, in this letter Malevich specifies himself as a “constructive” artist—if adding the term “non-objective,” translation of bezpredmetnii, or not object-representing artist. This happened almost a year after Malevich’s talk at INKhUK and Lissitzky’s attempt to encourage reconciliation between suprematists and constructivists in the same institution, to no avail.46 So Malevich must have been aware of the deep rift between his suprematist views and work, and the constructivists’ materiality, aesthetics, and utilitarian agenda. Malevich’s letter is vague about what exactly he means by “animal” and the “cosmos,” nonetheless strategically his message is clear and simple: figurative art is inferior to non-objective or nonfigurative art, and the future belongs to nonfigurative suprematism. He declares the non-suprematist artists his enemies and declares that “In order to carry on our teaching we organized UNOVIS, which leads through the system of suprematism to a new form of architectural world-building. UNOVIS accepts into its membership all those who vote for the new art.”47 Expanding internationally as well as expanding art into the field of architecture were program points that van Doesburg shared with Malevich. Malevich opened his letter with “Dear comrade innovators in Holland” and closed it with “Greeting to non-objective Holland and all the innovators living there.” This was the language of a fighter and an activist for a unified international front of progressive artists that would reject the visual language of the past just

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like van Doesburg had. Even if van Doesburg only had second-hand knowledge of this letter, at this point he likely considered Malevich as a potential ally, one who expressed his readiness to belong to an international front of nonfigurative artists. The creation of this front was precisely the project van Doesburg undertook. One aspect of Malevich’s gambit that van Doesburg did not suspect, however, was that the internationalism which the Russian artist proposed was, more than anything, the expansion of the suprematist organization.

The International of the Square Van Doesburg had a very favorable impression of Lissitzky when the two first met in April 1922.48 By this time, Lissitzky had already published van Doesburg’s article (Monumental Art) in the first double issue of Veshch, Objet, Gegendstand with the publication date March-April 1922, putting him in the common Russian-European context. They had an opportunity to become better acquainted at the First International Congress of Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf, May 29–31, 1922. “Lissitzky, who has recently come from Moscow, is an excellent guy of great integrity,” van Doesburg wrote to his friend Antony Kok.49 He could hear Lissitzky declare at the conference: “during a seven-year period of complete isolation from the outside world, we were attacking the same problems in Russia as our friends here in the west.”50 That was a public announcement of comradeship and a shared program between Russians and West Europeans, consistent with both van Doesburg’s and Lissitzky’s plans and hopes. The Düsseldorf conference organized by Das junge Rheinland 51 group was exploited by the more progressive artists for declaring their programs. The wellattended meeting was—even if it ended in disunity—a moment of hope for wider international cooperation of the progressive groups. The new Russian art was exposed at the conference as highly important for future progressive initiatives. Van Doesburg’s friendship with Lissitzky was at its best stage at the conference and during the following months. This, in turn, promised the construction of a common international platform of progressive artists—independently from the Bauhaus where neither van Doesburg nor Lissitzky was invited to work52— that would integrate all other previously scattered like-minded forces. Van Doesburg, Lissitzky, and Hans Richter joined forces to issue a “Statement of the Faction of Constructivists”53 that they established at the conference, although a footnote in the Statement explained that the term “constructivism” was used

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only to characterize their contrast with all “impulsivists”—most likely for the purpose of clarifying that fact that while they did not intend to appropriate the term “constructivism” form the Russian group of the same name, they did emphatically detach themselves from each version of expressionism. The Statement sharply criticized the conference’s organizers—various groups and individuals aside from Das junge Rheinland, such as the Dresdner Sezession, and the Novembergruppe—for lacking efficient ideas and clear goals, failing to offer a definition of “progressive,” and engaging in commercial activities, all of which was incompatible with the concept of the purity and anticapitalist idealism of the International Faction of Constructivists. The authors of the Statement claimed to stand on the solid ground of science and technology and ceased to see art “as an instrument to explore cosmic mysteries,”54 thereby clearly distancing themselves from all symbolists and expressionists, whom they held to be harmfully obsolete, along with the kind of art and thought system that, among others, Malevich and Mondrian represented and van Doesburg used to adhere to. Signing the Düsseldorf Statement, Lissitzky distanced himself from Malevich’s core ideas and adopted, even if with a caveat, the term “constructivist” that, as Lissitzky knew it in Moscow, was antithetical and hostile to Malevich. This conflict remained unresolved in spite of Lissitzky’s renewed efforts to bring himself and Malevich onto the same page in his journal Veshch, Objet, Gegenstand. Lissitzky still considered Malevich his master, whose visual language he both followed and appropriated in his soon to be published55 (but “constructed,” earlier, in 1920) A Suprematist Tale of Two Squares, which will be discussed in Chapter 8. The Statement of the International Faction of Constructivists firmly declared that the Düsseldorf conference had proved the impossibility of “building international progressive solidarity”56 based on the predominance of the individual. “Collective” was the broad new concept that every artist and thinker understood somewhat differently. Van Doesburg was leaning toward a new, universal, monumental architecture of geometric purity that he held for “collective”;57 Lissitzky imagined a new, widely shared, supranational cooperation using abstract-geometric language in all the visual arts; the Russian constructivists believed in a new communist society where creating utilitarian objects of utmost economy will be the sole task of the visual experts who will replace artists. Organizing the International Faction of Constructivists was a new starting point for a future group or movement, and perhaps meant to be the beginning of an institution that, the signatories hoped, could step up as an internationally recognized leading force of modern art that van Doesburg would raise to dominance over, among other things, the Bauhaus.

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Van Doesburg had also adapted, if with limitations, Mondrian’s overarching concept of theosophy-based neoplasticism, which professed the seeking of universal harmony in the world and positioned the artist as the vehicle of attaining this superior state. Van Doesburg was convinced that the “predominance of the individual (a Renaissance life concept) was broken,” and that the new era would be collective58 in that universal sense. Van Doesburg, like Malevich, singled out the square, a motif that the De Stijl also prioritized, as the most important new emblem of a coming new international art. News from Russia were still scarce, blurred, and left some room for the imagination. In a 1922 letter to his friend, the poet Evert Rinsema, van Doesburg relates the following apocryphal story: One of the most modern Russians, Malewicz [sic!] lectured in Moscow on cubism (in 1918). At the end he produced a red square, which he brandished above his head, shouting: “And that is the task of the future.” He was promptly arrested and on asking why, he was told: because you proclaimed the revolution. And indeed, the revolution did break out in Russia the very next day. Odd, isn’t it, that what we regard here as a sign of a totally new image of the world was the same for the most modern Russians. As I said to Mondrian at the time, what the cross was to the early Christians, the square is to us.59

The fact that van Doesburg passed on this hearsay, which was full of unsubstantiated information, including wrong dates and was framed by an imaginary context, indicates how hazy and distorted the news coming from Russia had been and the extent to which news were mystified. Such were the legends that enveloped the figure of Malevich and the square, the already mythic dimensions of which fit into van Doesburg’s concept of a heightened new, internationally shared art and kept Malevich in his distinguished interest and high esteem. Whether or not van Doesburg knew that the Black Square had been exhibited at the 0.10 The Last Futurist Exhibition as a new icon, his comparison of the cross and the square is an insight, nonetheless. It reveals his intense search for a new symbol of spiritual renewal as well as his ambition to own this new movement, anticipated as a secular quasi-religion. In a subsequent letter to architect Cornelis van Eesteren, van Doesburg wrote in reference to the International Faction of Constructivists: It suddenly dawned on me in Düsseldorf when I said to the Russian Lissitzky: “This ‘international’ is really a compromise. To give it its proper name, we ought to proclaim the international of the square.” Whereupon Lissitzky said: “that is exactly what the new faith is.”60

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Figure 3.4  Theo van Doesburg: Study for Arithmetic Position, 1929, pencil on graph paper. Courtesy Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands, Van Moorsel donation to the Dutch State 1981.

The square proved to be a strong visual emblem that held together artists of otherwise different persuasions, representing various aspects of the convictions they shared (See Figure 3.4). While the Polish catholic Malevich placed it in the Russian orthodox shrine to announce a new icon of a new faith, whether as an iconoclast or otherwise, it had undergone changes of symbolism in the West and had different connotations altogether. For Mondrian, squares and rectangles were part of the imagery of theosophy’s cosmic harmony in the sign of the right angle, while van Doesburg increasingly saw a streamlined technological future in the square rather than theosophy’s staple; and Lissitzky interpreted the square primarily as an element of all-inclusive geometric language, new and transnational, belonging to the society of the future in Russia as well as in the West. Based on Malevich’s near-legendary reputation and hearsay, van Doesburg thought highly of him as a kindred spirit and fellow fighter in developing and disseminating a universally valid geometric visual language that could potentially be shared by a large collective under the supervision of artists like himself. Publishing Lissitzky’s Suprematist Tale of Two Squares in De Stijl’s double issue 10/11 in 1922, van Doesburg recognized the significance of the contributions of

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both Lissitzky and Malevich. Van Doesburg demonstrated his commitment to them and to the art originating from the new Russia. He too advocated the new visual language they pioneered, including the square as an emblematic, central motif of an anticipated culture. Van Doesburg also played a crucial role in spreading news about the new Russian art and shaping its image in the West. Besides publishing reproductions of their artists’ works, van Doesburg dedicated exposure to the new Russian art in three issues of De Stijl between 1922 and 1924, in a series of articles titled “Assessment of the New. Plastic Russia.”61 In these articles he popularized, as well as commented on, both constructivism and suprematism. Much of what he knew about the new art in Russia in general, and Malevich in particular, came from El Lissitzky, with whom, as will be discussed in Chapter 9, van Doesburg would have a turbulent relationship in the years to come, which in turn greatly affected his views on Malevich. “It is clear,” Linda Boersma confirms, “that the way in which Malevich’s work was received in De Stijl depended directly on the relationship between van Doesburg and El Lissitzky.”62

4

The Irreconcilable Conflict between Constructivism and Suprematism in Moscow

While Western circles of progressive artists had received some information about both Moscow constructivism and suprematism by the early 1920s, they still failed to get clear enough ideas regarding the differences between the two movements and the deep conflict between the two directions and their representatives. The Moscow constructivists, conceptually as well as personally, were fierce opponents of suprematism and the suprematists. They were seeking art and the artist’s new function in the new society. They could not validate visual creation in the traditional sense, perceived as to be decorative or collectors’ luxury items. For the constructivists the very existence and legitimacy of the private space as such, where art could be created and appreciated in solitude, became questionable, while suprematism in turn claimed to be art of the highest degree; and UNOVIS a model of a community committed to that art.

Postrevolutionary Moscow: The New State, the New Art, and the New Concept of the Artist The constructivists achieved a consolidated program by the spring of 1921 in Moscow, buttressed by gradually developed, articulate concepts and artistic practice. Their first initiative was the forming of the group “Suprbezy,” suprematists and non-objectivists1 that still included Malevich. The “Manifesto,” penned by Alexander Rodchenko in preparation for the Tenth State Exhibition in Moscow, announced: “Objects died yesterday. We live in abstract spiritual creativity. We are founders of non-objectivity. Of color as such. Of tone as such.”2 The wording of the last two sentences echoes the cubo-futurists’ “The Word as Such” and “The Letter as Such.” The “Manifesto” ends in a revolutionary confession: “Young, strong, we march with the flaming torches of the revolution.”3 The inevitable

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efforts to assert a movement that jettisons rivals were soon underway. Varvara Stepanova noted in her diary on April 10, 1919, that her husband Rodchenko painted black pictures “as a way out of color suprematism,”4 and she started to see Malevich and Rodchenko in a competition with one another. She compiled an inventory of the current trends in Russian art,5 herself not mentioned and Lissitzky conspicuously absent from it, while noting Kandinsky as being a problematic artist who is too emotional and little else.6 As soon as Kandinsky founded INKhUK in Moscow in 1920, a conflict began to develop between his views and those of his friend and former student Rodchenko. Kandinsky favored working on a synthetic artwork that would unite painting, music, and dance, and which would, without ever specifying it in so many words, continue the prewar Der blaue Reiter’s expressive-psychological and spiritual Gesamtkunstwerk approach. Rodchenko, according to INKhUK documents, believed that subjective artistic expression, a vestige of individualism, was not adequate in the new state championing collectivism and so was in opposition to it. The new state required solutions to new challenges and it was not the “artist” as they had known it that was up to the task. The individual self-expression attempting to fathom the depths of the human soul appeared to be meaningless in the new world. There were urgent tasks and immediate needs in the new society that required addressing. Rodchenko wanted to explore the idea of “the interaction of painting with architecture and sculpture,”7 that is, working with material, volume, and space rather than psychological and spiritual creativity. This program entailed work that would be embodied in three dimensions: a shift from the flat picture plane and virtual space to three-dimensional objectmaking. A core group including Rodchenko, Stepanova, art writer Alexei Gan, architect Nikolai Ladovsky, and eventually joined by Konstantin Medunetzky and Karl Joganson from the OBMOKhU (Ob’edinenie molodykh khudozhnikov, Union of young artists) group emerged as an opposition to Kandinsky. They formed a platform of rigorous analytical approach against the concept of the artwork as an individual form of expression and organized debates8 that were attended by a wider circle of INKhUK members. They first called themselves the Working Group of Objective Analysis, positioning themselves in sharp opposition to subjective expression, and had their first meeting on November 23, 1920.9 Underlining the word “objective” in this first name of the group indicates where the fault line between them and Kandinsky ran. Like the objective tendencies that Kállai discerned in Berlin around the same time,10 announcing that the time of expressionism was over, they sought the opposite of aestheticism and

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subjectivity in visual works. The term “objective” was derived from “object”—a physically substantial, functional, useful product that should be created instead of paintings, which were perceived as being useless for the society. Sorting out the not-quite organized and previously unpublished documents of the INKhUK Archives, Selim Khan-Magomedov collected transcripts of many of the 1920–1921 debates during which the ideas of the direction that became constructivism were hammered out. The participants were working on specifying the criteria that would define the presence or absence of objectivity in artworks. Khan-Magomedov points out that during the period between January and April 1921, it was architect Nikolai Ladovsky11 who, by putting forward his own definition, propelled the debate onto new ground. According to Ladovsky’s definition, “technical construction is the whole set of material elements in accordance with a precise plan, i.e. a scheme that is required to attain a forceful effect.”12 In his opinion, construction was marked by the total absence of superfluous materials and elements. “The fundamental difference, with respect to composition, is hierarchy [of the parts] and [their] subordination.”13 “Construction” was the keyword and key concept of the argument and, starting March 18, 1921, the group was renamed the First Working Group of Constructivists. According to Ladovsky’s proposal, the “objective” criteria of an artwork to qualify for “construction” were, to a great extent, ideological. The transcripts of the debates indicate that when it came to deciding whether certain elements were superfluous or necessary in an artwork, it was often a personal judgment that led to a verdict, although each participant tried to offer specific, “objective” arguments. In one of the debates, Rodchenko said: “Composition ( . . . ) is an aesthetic choice and not an aim. If you compare construction and composition, they turn out to be two completely different things. ( . . . ) Now that the question of an objective has emerged, construction has eliminated composition.”14 With these words Rodchenko declared with certitude what he had not hitherto been able to prove with arguments: that there has to be a fundamental differentiation between composition and construction; furthermore, that the right direction, in fact the only possible one to go, is that of making constructions. The idea of “composition” served as contrast in relation to which the definition of “construction” could be hammered out with more precision. Kandinsky found himself and his program losing traction, and in January 1921 he quit INKhUK, ceding it to the constructivists. As one of the theoreticians of the constructivist group, Nikolai Tarbukin summed up the group’s new stance:

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Malevich and Interwar Modernism Neither the creative process, nor the process of perception, the defined aesthetic emotion, is the object of analysis, but those real forms which, created by the artist, are found in the already finished work. Consequently, the form of the work and its elements are the material for analysis and not the psychology of the creation, not the psychology of aesthetic perception, nor the historical, cultural, sociological, or other problems of art.15

Thus, the constructivists defined concrete form and tangible material as being the only acceptable constituents of the new product.

The “Construction-versus-Composition Debate” at INKhUK There are several excellent accounts of these debates.16 What makes it necessary to offer an overview of them here is the role that the outcome of the constructionversus-composition debate played in shaping Lissitzky’s views and actions concerning both suprematism and constructivism. These views affected the way he presented both directions abroad, and through this, their reception outside Russia for decades. With Kandinsky and his painting program having vanished from INKhUK, Rodchenko and the First Working Group of Constructivists, committed to objectivity, had to build a conceptual framework for distinguishing and defining “objective” and “subjective” creation—that is, to determine what constitutes “construction” as opposed to “composition.” Construction, it was decided, was organized rather than painted. Lodder remarks: “To Rodchenko it was the same process that had previously produced communist Russia. It was its artistic equivalent. ‘As we see in the life of the RSFSR, everything leads to organization. And so in art everything has led to organization’.”17 In fact, as the title of the constructivists’ essay collection From Figurative Art to Construction, dating from the fall of 192118 indicated, they constructed a teleology similar to that of Malevich, but while the latter put suprematism as the highest stage of the evolution following cubism and futurism, Rodchenko’s group did the same with constructivism, which they presented as the direction that transcends all previous two-dimensional, representational, or abstract art forms. The group examined various paintings in order to develop definitions of the newly adapted categories. When it came to a work of Malevich for the first time, it was consensually categorized as being a composition. Ladovsky stated: “In suprematist works there is no construction, in cubist ones there is a moment of construction,” in response to which Rodchenko declared: “There is composition

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in both cases.” Other participants of that same debate—Stenberg, Popova, Medunetsky, and sculptor Alexei Babichev—concurred with Rodchenko, albeit without going into specifics, condemning both suprematism and cubism.19 At the following debate the arguments were more systematic, with more effort at fathoming the actual difference between construction and composition. Ljubov Popova remarked that in Malevich’s works, the color, flat shapes, and movement are prepared with a purpose. Rodchenko disagreed, arguing that color was merely enhancing the surface of Malevich’s paintings while forms were stronger, so that nothing would change if one color would be replaced by another one.20 Popova replied that there are constructive lines in Malevich’s pictures, whereupon Rodchenko proposed to make “a precise and detailed selection of works from the point of view of construction; not a general analysis but probing deeply.”21 Ladovsky then spoke of the pure construction of the engineer, relating that in contemporary paintings there is no pure construction yet insofar no definition of pictorial construction exists. He suggested to define construction in the technical and engineering sense. A lively debate unfolded, in the course of which Nadezhda Udaltsova proposed to understand construction as a force running inside the object or painting, whereupon Alexander Drevin attempted to specify that the term “construction” cannot be applied to colors, only to forms. The suprematist painter Ivan Kliun countered that “Even in color there can be construction. . . . The strength of color contributes to construction, along with form, giving it a precise force. . . . The purpose of an object defines its type, construction gives the impression of forces, as a result of the combined action of different forces.”22 Rodchenko, in attempt to offer an ultimate definition, proposed that a constructed object “may not even [have] a purpose. Construction is not a fixed thing. Construction is the appropriate utilization of the properties of materials, that is to say, end and not just means ( . . . ) In construction neither color, nor form, nor technique can be separate.”23 Self-contradictions may follow from the fact that the transcripts recorded the spontaneous, improvised thoughts of the participants, not their controlled and edited ideas formatted for publication. The transcripts reveal the process in the course of which an idea invites its own opposite—for example, in the same debate Rodchenko clearly accepted that the same feature that is called construction in engineering “is defined as composition in art,”24 that is: composition in painting is the equivalent of construction in actual building work, only to continue with the inverse of the argument: “As a matter of fact, construction does not exist in painting. In reality a construction is a precise object and in painting we cannot depict a construction.”25

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Already in the summer of 1921 Malevich wrote to painter Ivan Kudriashev that “Suprematism should adopt a more constructive approach,”26 and in December of that same year he was invited to give a talk at INKhUK, in which he was offered an opportunity to explain the ties of suprematism to “reality.” The constructivists—Rodchenko, Stepanova, Gan, Ioganson, Medunetzkii, and the Stenberg brothers Vladimir and Georgii, along with constructivist theorists Osip Brik, Boris Kushner, Boris Arvatov, and Tarabukin—were, however, determined not to allow constructivism to be “colonized” by suprematism. As it may have been foreseeable, Malevich did not manage to convince them that paintings could be relevant creative works which were adequate to the new society in any justifiable way; and the constructivists, thumbs down on suprematism, continued to see his works as artistic compositions, now a derogatory term, diametrically opposed to their own constructions. At a meeting following Malevich’s talk, Varvara Stepanova, in evaluating it, declared that the word “construction” signified an object “purged of esthetic, philosophical, and religious excrescences”27—that is, the constructivist object had to be free of everything that Malevich charged his works with. A few days later Georgii Stenberg, member of the OBMOKhU group, confirmed the rejection of Malevich’s transcendentalism when he emphatically declared: “We do not erect ideas around form.”28 The nascent concept of constructivism, as demonstrated, was probed specifically against Malevich’s works on several occasions. Constructivists were viscerally opposed to Malevich’s work and persona and sought rigorous arguments to exclude him from the group that claimed to create new art in and for the new state. Malevich and his followers laid a claim to designing “the future” as the focus of their work, while Rodchenko, Stepanova, and their fellow constructivists claimed to shape “the present,” with all the pragmatism that was required, according to their assessment, to resolve the material and political problems they experienced. Suprematist universalism was confronted with down-to-earth constructivist materialism and utilitarianism, while both confirmed their respective methods and works as being the most suitable to serve as the visual face of communism. Moreover, while Malevich launched a tendency with the artist at the top of the spiritual hierarchy in the position of a kind of priestly highness, the constructivists rejected even the very idea of such a hierarchy and regarded the artist as a worker among other working people: one who just happens to have a different specialization, while they nonetheless believed in hierarchy with respect to the parts of a constructed structure. Malevich set out to offer the blueprint of a spiritual future society with the artist at its top as a “clairvoyant,” knowing even the future, while the constructivists

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were ready to design the material objects for use to be implemented in the present as masters of the tangibly existing physical world. Thus, they rejected the very idea of intellectual excellence as an inherently elitist concept. In Malevich’s suprematism, by contrast, the artist was a visionary and a prophet. The suprematist artist had particular sensitivity, capable of experiencing what ordinary people could not. The power of his spirit enabled him to leave behind physical and social reality and send “back” visual reports from the realm of the zero-gravity freedom of the future to dare others to imagine that future of unlimited spirituality and possibilities. The constructivists, on the other hand, in opposition to being visionaries, regarded themselves as humble but important parts in the machinery of society and its statewide production and construction system, and assumed it their duty to design usable objects for a better life for all in the actually existing world. Malevich’s strategic idea was to win over small, devoted groups to his concept and then see the exponential growth of suprematism as these hard-core groups would disseminate the idea and gain over further groups in circles of increasing radius; while the constructivists intended to immediately turn to the widest possible public forum, the platform of nationwide industry, in an effort to satisfy everyone’s material needs along with providing as many people as possible with up-to-date, functionally designed, much-needed objects. Suprematism and constructivism respectively aspired to elaborate and develop two vastly different concepts, both of which were inherent in the idealized program of communism: that of the collectively shared, ideal future of unlimited freedom and that of the materially satisfying, livable present. The impossibility of attaining both at the same historic time was already clear to the utopian socialists of the early nineteenth century; and the communist state was also struggling to keep both ideas alive in the hopes and imagination of the population, blaming any failure of their realization on the Civil War and the ever-stubbornly existing vestiges of capitalism. After an initial overlap of some of their ideas and adherents, the conflict between suprematism and constructivism achieved a breaking point late in 1921. The two movements crashed at the Moscow INKhUK. In their carefully crafted group name, the constructivists took very seriously the words “working,” “objective,” and “analysis.” These words were directed not only against subjective elements in art and thinking but also against any deliberate interpretation of these terms. The focus of their program was the creation of economically designed objects—that is, with the economic use of material and work, the focus on function as opposed to paintings that they altogether dismissed as unnecessary.

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The core of the construction-versus-composition debate was this antagonism between the concepts of an artwork as “fiction” and an object as “reality.” The constructivists stated that Malevich’s paintings included free-floating elements which could be taken away or rearranged without substantial consequences to the whole picture,29 whereas a construction, as Stepanova ultimately defined it, “demands the absence of both excess materials and excess elements.”30 Composition, she said, “is a contemplative attitude, passive and introspective,” diametrically opposed to “construction, an active principle.”31 Ioganson insisted that “there is only construction in real space ( . . . ) with the use of specific materials,”32 opposing those, with Lissitzky among them, who found the idea of a “painted construction” acceptable. The meaning of “reality” for the constructivists was the “communistic expression of material structures,” that is, “the conversion of ( . . . ) tectonics, construction, and faktura into volume, plane, color, space, and light.”33 Even during the “laboratory phase” of the constructivists’ activity, while their objects lacked any real, concrete function, the constructivists insisted on having a close grip of “reality,” and they radically opposed “art.” Concerning the constructivists’ antagonism to Malevich, the definitive statement came from Rodchenko: “All new approaches to art arise from technology and engineering and move towards organization and construction.”34 That is, the highest development of the arts is beyond “art” and is therefore not suprematism but material construction. Central to the composition-construction debates was the strategic use of terms, that is, the issue of power in the new socialist political system and political self-positioning. Not that the sincerity of the aspiration to find the valid new rules for a valid new art would be questionable. While the constructivists were devoted to finding the new truth about the socially relevant new art, they appealed to precision, as, for instance, with the exact rules of engineering, the application of which would elevate their work beyond every similar effort. Committed to the communist state, the constructivists clearly aspired to become the visual representatives of that state. In a 1922 Manifesto titled Who Are We, signed by “The Group of Constructivists,” they put this boldly (lettering unchanged): The first working-group of CONSTRUCTIVISTS (ALEKSEI GAN, RODCH­ ENKO, STEPANOVA) proclaimed: THE COMMUNIST EXPRESSION OF MATERIAL STRUCTURES and UNCOMPROMISING WAR ON ART.35

Moreover, and not insignificantly to the elaboration of the conditions and the outcome of the debate, Rodchenko had longtime personal antipathy toward

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Malevich. “I did not like Malevich,” he wrote remembering the opening of the Store exhibition in March 1916 in Moscow. He was square built, had unpleasant eyes, was disingenuous, too self-assured, one-sided and narrow-minded. ( . . . ) He came up to me and said ( . . . ) You know, everything that you all do, is old and epigone. All this has been done already. Now the new is coming, our Russian thing. And I am doing it, come to see me once, it is there in your work already, intuitively. ( . . . ) He gave me his address.36

Attempting to appropriate the niche of “our Russian thing” as well as attempting to monopolize supreme art, Malevich invited personal controversy at INKhUK, on top of visceral antipathy to himself and ideas of his, which the constructivists rejected. The constructivists suspected a deliberately self-styled subjectivity in Malevich’s “objectlessness” that lacked utilitarian goodwill to the wider community and allegedly any kind of discipline altogether. Suprematism, to them, was an uncontrollable territory. At many points of the construction– composition debate, it appears that the constructivists were seeking theoretical justification to reject Malevich and his ideas with an authority equal to his. They felt a need to free the theater of the unfolding new art in Russia of his presence. So, the constructivists disqualified Malevich with the full armor of their conceptual force and rhetoric. Boris Arvatov summed up their aesthetic, strategic, and visceral opposition to suprematism after the debate was already over: I have continuously pointed out that suprematism is the most detrimental reaction under the banner of the revolution, i.e., a doubly harmful reaction. Leftwing art in the form of its truly revolutionary group (constructivism) should not hesitate in snipping the cord still linking it to suprematism. After Malevich’s candid thrusts, even the doubters, even the short-sighted, will discern the black face of the old art behind the mask of the red square.37

Lissitzky’s Attempt to Reconcile Suprematism and Constructivism As suprematism and constructivism deployed competing strategies for achieving the same strategic goal—becoming the leading art group and uniquely valid visual language of the new Soviet state—both used the rhetoric of power, a declarative language from the position of possessing superior vision and

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force in order to own the new discourse. Malevich and Rodchenko’s respective roads from the once-shared anarchism had forked, but both experienced that it was in the power of the bolshevik Party to make and break art movements, the public presence of artistic concepts, and creative work altogether. Publicly expressed loyalty to communism and the communist state was high on both groups’ agenda. While Malevich organized the “art party” UNOVIS with local committees that were meant to further the cause of suprematism and convert more and more adherents to the “supreme” art, Rodchenko organized INKhUK as the conceptual and pragmatic headquarters for his art group that prioritized social usefulness. Malevich’s “artist as high priest” concept was confronted by Rodchenko’s “artist-engineer” or “artist worker” concept. Highly principled and convinced of their competence, each offered his work to the political power, and they competed for its exclusive approval and support. In this duel, Lissitzky found himself, once again, in a double bind. As architectural engineer he was in agreement with many of the constructivists’ theses and pragmatic purposes, but he had already sworn loyalty to suprematism, which he firmly believed would in fact be the ultimate solution to all problems of society and culture, including his own dilemma. Thus, appealing to mathematics, a field highly respected by the exactitude-driven constructivists and the visionary suprematists alike, Lissitzky made an effort to reconcile the two sides. He trusted mathematics as it unites science, rationalism, imagination, irrationalism, pragmatism, and vision.38 As member of UNOVIS and sincerely indebted to Malevich, in his September 23, 1921,39 talk at INKhUK, Lissitzky appealed to the constructivists’ partiality to scientific thinking as well as to the suprematists’ vision of infinity. He made efforts to demonstrate that his own proun was actually both suprematist and—as a form of “architectural suprematism”—constructivist, and thereby prove that these two tendencies were by no means as mutually exclusive as the constructivists positioned them to be. To this end, Lissitzky had to bring painting and material construction, imaginary and real space, to a common denominator. Following Malevich’s predating of his Quadrilateral, Lissitzky claimed that the actual origin of the new era was 1913,40 the moment when Malevich claimed he had created the first version of the Black Square, the “zero point of painting, the absolute contrast to the old concept of art and painting.”41 Putting it into the historic context of the development from plane to space, Lissitzky pointed out that the Black Square floating in white void opened up new spatial dimensions for perception as intermediary between painterly culture and material culture, inasmuch as it transcended traditional painterly standards and traditional painterly space. Suprematism, he

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said, opened up the possibility of “growth in real space,”42 referring to Malevich’s statement that suprematism “tore through”43 the illusory blue skies of traditional perspectival representation and created, instead, its own infinite white space. Lissitzky tended to propel his proun work closer to the constructivists’ ideas by pointing out the presence of space and dynamics in his own, ultimately suprematism-inspired paintings: We have made the canvas rotate. And as we rotated it, we saw that we were putting ourselves in space. Space, until now, has been projected onto a surface by a conditional system of planes. We began to move on the surface of the plane towards an unconditional distance. ( . . . ) If futurism put the spectator inside the canvas, we take him via the canvas into real space; we put him in the center of a new construction of distance.44

He spoke about virtual space, of course, but did not manage to prove that either suprematist or proun imagery would be capable of conquering real-life, threedimensional space. Deliberately skipping the years during which suprematism had entailed colorful paintings—and, on that account, had been much debated by the constructivists—Lissitzky interpreted the suprematist limitation of the picture to black-and-white, and then to white-on-white, as a purely collective, anti-individualist stance that was not at odds with the constructivist concepts because “in fact, it takes the most stubborn individualism to wish for colors in these days of steel and coal.”45 He discussed suprematism, however, only as a prelude to proun. Suprematism, he said, was still bound to traditional painting, since its virtual space, even if innovative, was still perpendicular to the horizon. The real breakthrough, he claimed, was made by his own work. Proun pictures do not feature space as perpendicular to the horizon. Instead, they dive into a warped, elliptical, non-Euclidean space46 and “lead the viewer beyond the image, out into real space.”47 Proun paintings were created “through the economic construction of material,” a phrase Lissitzky borrowed from the constructivists, and these paintings indicated “the pure way of action,” that is, “reality.” “Proun forms had to be conceived of not as aesthetic, but as material, since color is materialized energy”48—a statement inconsistent with his previously quoted view of color as “stubborn individualism.” Responding to the crucial role that materiality played for the constructivists at INKhUK, Lissitzky added that in proun, the colored surfaces of works were increasingly replaced by three-dimensional materials—a point he later demonstrated not in his paintings but in some details of his 1923 real-space work Proun Room. Lissitzky suggested that proun paintings were

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models, which relate to material reality the same way as architectural models made of paper, wood, and canvas relate to real structures. But real structures, as the constructivists understood it, “contained a utilitarian imperative”49 and were economical, even if constructivism was undergoing its “laboratory” period, when actual utility was still only a distant goal. Lissitzky contended that proun, which infused space with dynamism and created new types of images with the use of geometric solids in multiperspectival picture-spaces, was both material and structural. Thus, it was solely the proun images, he claimed, that responded to the “utilitarian imperative.” Lissitzky stated that proun leads the creator out of contemplation and into reality, since proun is architectural, and as such, is the synthesis of artistic and engineering creativity. Finally, to address the issue of commitment to the cause of communism, he declared that proun was the “communist foundation of steel and concrete for all the people of the earth.”50 Lissitzky went a long way to attempt to reconcile not only suprematism and constructivism but also constructivism and proun, derivative of suprematism: Construction implies an aspiration to create an independent and concrete object. In contradistinction to composition (which merely discusses a theme in its various formal possibilities), construction confirms. The compasses function as the chisel of construction, the brush as the tool of composition. (  . . .  ) Construction germinates in suprematism and moves along the straight lines and curves of aerospace. It advances through the new space. Proun constructs within it.51

Not only did Lissitzky use key constructivist terms such as “space” and “construction” in his talk, he went further and characterized his proun paintings, in accordance with the constructivists’ anti-painting—in their expression, “antieaselist”—stance, as being “no longer pictorial” but “like a geographical map, like a design” (emphasis added).52 He also attempted to eliminate the difference between form and material by the concept that “In creating a new form, proun creates new material.”53 The question presents itself: Why did Lissitzky try to reconcile suprematism, proun, and constructivism in Moscow once he had already stated in 1919 that “the Testament of suprematism” reigned supreme “and was insurmountable”? Why was he not satisfied with remaining truthful to suprematism? A tentative answer may be that, as already mentioned, he misjudged the actual abyss between the suprematists and the constructivists, in particular the personal antagonism between the constructivists and Malevich, particularly on behalf of the former, and looked at both from an unbiased point of view,

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perceiving the differences as being less dramatic than the two parties saw them. He was, as mentioned, a relative newcomer to the Russian art scene, which is why he may have had a better grasp of its ideas than its personal histories. Also, convinced of the relevance of his argument, Lissitzky assumed that no one with common sense would reject them. Originally an architect-engineer, Lissitzky shared many of the constructivists’ concepts and thought it a matter of course that the other artists, on both sides of the divide, would also be convinced that they were closer to each other than they had thought themselves to be. Also, as we could see, when confronting conflicting loyalties, Lissitzky tended to attempt to overcome the conflict. Thus positioning proun as a bridge over the adversaries was also an act of hope that the transitional period of antagonism would soon be over, and everyone would find themselves on one and the same side, since they basically shared, at least in broad outlines, an image of the future that they wanted to realize. Lissitzky desired and proposed a unified new, collectivist, left-wing abstraction to be accepted by all as the new, all-inclusive visual language in progressive Russian art. Lissitzky wanted to be included in that agency of the new era, as opposed to being previously excluded from mainstream culture, while both Malevich and the constructivists pursued exclusive leading roles. The depth and force of the rivalry between Malevich and the constructivists contradicted Lissitzky’s hopes of eliminating the deep fault lines between them. Both sides, having arrived from an anarchist outlook to laying claim to exclusively valid mainstream visual language, took ample use of language to manifest their power. The constructivist emphasis on “objectivity,” “forcefulness,” “hierarchy,” as well as Malevich’s emphasis on “superiority,” spelled an aspiration to gain ultimate control. Control over material, form, and the spectator entailed power in the art scene as well as in the politics of culture. It was clear to all that ultimately only one direction would prevail. The polarization between the constructivists and those who considered the aesthetics of painting—that is: composition—acceptable was complete by November 1921, when “Brik proposed that artists who had rejected easel painting should commence ‘real practical work in production’.”54 Thus, before his departure to Germany at the end of 1921, Lissitzky had to know how adamant the constructivists at INKhUK were and how unbridgeable the gap between them and their one-time guest speaker Malevich was, regardless of Lissitzky’s attempt to build a bridge between them.

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The Mirage of World Revolution Postrevolution, Postwar Berlin, and Moscow, 1918–1922

Defying the theoretic formulae of centers and peripheries,1 post–First World War Berlin became the cultural epicenter of the continent, the meeting point of Easterners and Westerners and the theater of intense debates between adherents of very different cultural persuasions. Although in theory, strong political and economic power is the precondition of a leading role in culture, Berlin was nonetheless the opposite of this: the capital of a defeated empire just turned into a fledgling and chaotic republic with neither political nor military power and a wretched economy. Against these odds, however, Berlin emerged as the new cultural capital of Europe and the center of the new, post–First World War political and cultural discourse.

The World Revolution Will Happen in Berlin The international avant-garde that settled in Berlin in the wake of the Great War had illusions about the new historical perspectives, while political reality, both internationally and in Germany, was strikingly different from their expectations. It is not clear whether the progressive artists of the early 1920s were unaware of this or wishfully disregarded reality. Articles and accounts of both the “silent majority” in Germany and the actual Soviet developments were as accessible in books as in the press. The writing was, in this sense, on the wall. The faith in a desired future, however, was apparently overwriting it as long as that was possible. Indeed, Germany had imploded in 1918, with no economic or political expansion in sight, with a leadership that was both struggling with and exploiting extremist political forces on the left and right. Berlin’s cultural rise was not

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relative to other European capitals’ decline, however. The prewar cultural center, Paris, even if experiencing relative downturn, abounded in art exhibitions and was about to launch surrealism, and swinging twenties London was vibrant with a wave of new, especially literary activities. Still, it was palpable that the new, postwar Europe’s latest ideas and future were being discussed, projected, visualized, performed, and written about in Berlin. Berlin, as a number of memoirs and scholarly studies attest, was the hot spot of the early1920s. Former Bauhaus student Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack mentioned a conversation he had with Fernand Léger in Paris in 1923 about the Bauhaus, asking the French artist, “Why don’t you develop a modern art school such as the Bauhaus? You have the best artists in the world, you have won the war, you have the means to develop such an institution.” Whereupon Leger, in spite of just having opened an art school of his own, “answered bitterly and sadly that the atmosphere in victorious France was chauvinistic, reactionary, and conservative, that no new way of life could be the outcome of this situation.”2 What can explain the enormous international appeal of the capital of the new German Republic hurriedly declared on November 9, 1918? How could Berlin attract the tremendous creative energies that were released after the Great War, and drive artists, writers, and intellectuals from Eastern Europe, Russia, Austria, the Balkans, Switzerland, Holland, Scandinavia, and eventually even from the United States and Japan to settle there or at least visit? The Russians who escaped from the bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War, and the Hungarians who fled their country after the August 1919 defeat of the Hungarian Soviet Republic were only part of the colorful international community in Berlin. How could the capital of such a politically powerless country, even the economic recovery of which was plagued with inflation, unemployment, and other occasional setbacks, shape the cultural face of the West during the best of the interwar years? In spite of the chaos and riots at various parts of the country and the rightwing paratroopers murdering the leaders of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, the communist Party of Germany), Germany gradually became consolidated as a Social Democrats-governed republic referred to as the Weimar Republic, after the town where its constitution was constructed. From the earliest days of the existence of the new state, progressive artists—by no means representing the entire artistic population—stepped up and established the November Gruppe and the Arbeistrat für Kunst (the “work council” of art) in Berlin, both with a name allusive to the expectations inspired by the “November Revolution” in Germany and the Russian system of councils (or Soviets), respectively. Contacts between German and Russian artists—citizens of former

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war enemies—were initiated early on. The Moscow Collegium of Art that operated within IZO sent an appeal to German artists, delivered by Ludwig Bähr, a former German officer-turned-artist who left Moscow to relocate to Germany in December 1918. According to Kandinsky, who returned to Russia from Munich in 1914 and worked at IZO, Bähr was “charged, along with other artistic missions of international scope, to convey [this appeal] of comradely greeting and a call to international unity in the creation of a new artistic culture.”3 The Arbeitsrat in Berlin responded “with warmest sympathy” to the appeal in a letter “signed by Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, Cäsar Klein, and Max Pechstein.”4 Aside from these organizations, a Baden Organization of Fine Arts was set up, as well as the equally Baden-based West-Ost Group, which enthusiastically responded with greetings to the appeal by Russian artists to their German comrades. ( . . . ) Within us burns anger and hatred. ( . . . ) The faint-heartedness of the government, the present siege conditions, general strikes, unemployment, the sound of machine-gun fire—we see all this as heralds of a new age, burning and seething, when in our country too, the mighty red image will be carried through the streets.5

This brings to mind Lissitzky’s vision of Moscow’s Red Square on May Day 1918. Kandinsky, who acknowledged these groups’ responses to the Moscow appeal, mentioned further German artists’ organizations that, according to Bähr, did not manage to have their welcoming responses delivered to Russia due to the deficiencies in the postal service, as Russia was still under blockade. These included the Dresden Artists’ Association, the Baden Workers’ Council, the Weimar Bauhaus, the Marées Gesellschaft in Dresden (headed by art historian Julius Meier-Gräfe), as well as the Worpswede Artists’ Union.6 Such signs of instant interest in taking up relations with Russia indicate extraordinary curiosity and enthusiasm among Germany’s left-wing artists, workers, and intellectuals who put their hopes in the new communist country. The interest of the German working class in Russia indicates their belief that workers in Soviet Russia were significantly empowered. Berlin was vibrant with the increasingly vigorous and popular culture of cinema, photography, modern theater, product and graphic design, book publishing, new literature, and the continuing allure of the universities, research institutes, philosophy and essay writing, periodicals, busy art life, concerts, museums, the emerging international style—at least in designs—in modern architecture, with cutting-edge technologies in mind, and the resonating influence of the Bauhaus—and the list goes on. Against the dark background of a

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frustrated population and proletariat, as described in Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, the city’s life offered, as depicted in many artworks, fun and entertainment in cafés, cabarets, nightclubs, galleries, and street life. A cultural boom followed the trauma of the First World War. Intellectual energy was tremendous and spectacular. In the immediate aftermath of the war, there was little construction happening for want of money and material, but architects, for example those who formed the Gläserne Kette (Glass chain) including, among others, Bruno and Max Taut, Walter Gropius, Hans Scharoun, and Hermann Finsterlin, were feverishly planning, sharing, and discussing their designs. There was no money for art, but dada collages were made out of newspaper, manifesting disdain for commercial art and art trade, satirically commenting on politics; and during this time of material and technological setback, the new medium of radio launched its regular broadcasting. For those who chose to settle there, Berlin offered many advantages on a pragmatic level, too. In the midst of postwar poverty due to the favorable exchange rates, the city was affordable for foreigners.7 Moreover, German was widely spoken as a first or second language in parts of Western and Northern Europe; in the successor states of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire in Central and Eastern Europe; in the Saxon parts of Romania; and also in some circles of the Russian upper and upper-middle classes as well as by the Baltic Germans—all of which made adjustment to a German-speaking city easily possible for many artists and professionals. Centered in Berlin with satellites in Weimar, Dessau, Leiden, Rotterdam, Prague, Vienna, Zagreb, and other further outposts, most of the Berlin-based avant-garde artists were exiles, expatriates, or visitors—in Peter Gay’s term “Wahlberliner”8—those who chose to live in the city. Feverish as the Berlin atmosphere was, however, not even cosmopolitan Berlin was entirely conquered by these émigrés. Amazed by Berlin’s capacity to absorb most of everything going on in the city, count Harry Kessler noted in his diary: Not until the Revolution did I begin to comprehend the Babylonian, immeasurably deep, chaotic, and powerful aspect of Berlin. This aspect became evident in the fact that this immense movement within the even more intense ebb and flow of Berlin caused only small, local disturbances, as if an elephant had been stabbed with a penknife. It shook itself but then went on as if nothing had happened.9

Kessler found the contrast between the dramatic historic events that could have led to fundamental changes in the lives of the city’s residents and the city’s undisturbed daily routine so compelling that he also mentioned,

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Noteworthy is that during the days of revolution the trams, irrespective of street fighting, ran regularly. Nor did electricity, water, or telephone services break down for a moment. The revolution never created more than an eddy in the ordinary life of the city. ( . . . ) The colossal, world-shaking upheaval has scurried across Berlin’s day-to-day life much like an incident in a crime film.10

All the above notwithstanding, the capital that accumulated and concentrated in Berlin in the immediate wake of the First World War was not pragmatic or monetary, but rather a vision of the future of the “left-wing intellectuals” who, in István Deák’s words, “appointed themselves the conscience of Germany [as] the most vociferous and consistent opposition to the nationalists.”11 In an unprecedented and unparalleled way, their vision, at that particular moment, even if briefly, proved to be an internationally attractive asset appealing to the progressive artists and intelligentsia Europe-wide and beyond. What Berlin offered in 1919–1924 was the anticipation of a new, collective era of justice and equality—the sense of the dawn of a new era. Berlin, as far as this vision was concerned, was not representative of Germany, where the “silent majority” did not share such ideas and expectations. But with the left-wing groups, the Russian Revolution resonated as the possible and desirable future path of mankind. With the bloody and brutal war just behind them, the leftist workers, artists, and intellectuals were convinced that division along national borders had proved lethal and therefore it had to be overcome by a new world of internationalism. Vladimir Lenin expected the worldwide victory of the bolshevik Revolution and had famously predicted that Germany would be the second country in the world to succumb to communism as the weakest link in the chain of capitalist countries.12 The international left-wing crowd in Berlin took this for a prophecy; and Lenin and his party actively worked on redeeming this prediction. The international organization of the communist Parties, the Comintern, was organized in Moscow in 1919, designed for the worldwide export of communism. Military wings of communist Parties were secretly organized, for example the “M-Apparat” of the communist Party of Germany, whose purpose was to prepare for the Civil War that the communists believed was impending in Germany and to liquidate opponents and informers who might have infiltrated the party. A paramilitary organization, the Rotfrontkämpferbund (Red front fighters’ association) was also organized,13 and the Comintern was allegedly behind attempted terror acts in Germany in 1918–1919.14 Left-wing intellectuals, however, were mostly idealists and were thinking in more broad philosophical terms such as the “forces of history” rather than the secret deployment of military and paramilitary fighting units.15 Hungarian philosopher György Lukács, who

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was involved in editing the new journal Communism during his Vienna exile after the defeat of the Hungarian Commune, in which he had been a commissar with heavy responsibilities, recalled in an interview that in the early 1920s, “there was a widespread belief that we were at the beginning of a vast revolutionary wave which would flood all of Europe within a few years. We labored under the illusion that within a short time we would be able to mop up the last remnants of capitalism.”16 Reports about the actual reality in communist Russia were available in the print press, but did not abound. The “Art Program of the Commissariat for Enlightenment in Russia” was obtained by the German monthly Das Kunstblatt and printed in its March 1919 issue.17 The “Program” included the founding of new museums and art schools; and with respect to the latter, as if taking a page from the book of the Bauhaus, it encouraged “bringing the handicrafts to fruition in the hands of artist innovators.”18 Among the artists appointed as the leaders of the new Russian art, Tatlin is mentioned as president of the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and Malevich as one of the leaders of the Art-Construction section. Die Aktion published a devastating account by Otto Ruhle, a delegate of the KAPD (Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, communist Workers’ Party of Germany), about his visit to the preparatory session of the second congress of the Third International in Moscow in the summer of 1920.19 Ruhle describes the bolshevik Party as an “authoritarian organization,” “dictatorial and terroristic” that wanted to force the KAPD delegates to obediently comply, as a result of which they demonstrated their independence from Moscow and left before the conference took place. Disillusion with Moscow, however, did not mean for Ruhle that communism was altogether a bad idea, and he trusted that “the German workers would be in the most decisive opposition” to Russianstyle politics, because “Russia isn’t Germany, Russian politics aren’t German politics.”20 That is, trust in Russia may have devolved, as far as its ruling party was concerned, but not trust in communism. As the theater of the ongoing battle between conservative Germans and the internationalist avant-gardes, Berlin was, most importantly, the site of the expected showdown between the East and the West, communism and capitalism. The core question to which all others boiled down was whether Germany, and subsequently Europe, would succumb to communism. As, for example, the West-Ost Group’s passionate message indicated, the Russian Revolution was apparently such an epiphany for the adherents of the anticapitalist political and cultural currents from anarchism through Social Democrats to communists in

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Germany that the radical change in the social system to communism was, until about 1923, generally shared and hoped for as the most likely and most desired future. These groups did not witness the Russian reality firsthand, but they were energized and inspired by the news coming from the revolutionary country. It was in Berlin that the world revolution was expected to happen and soon; and many progressives wanted to be where the action would be.

The Mirage of Internationalism and the Political Reality Beneath the optimistic internationalist outlook of the international avantgarde stationing in Berlin and other European centers lay the troubled reality of the actual international relationships of the postwar years. As emissary of Germany, Kessler participated in the 1922 Genoa Conference, which had been convened to sort out the monetary economics of post–First World War Europe, now including the newly minted countries of Central- and Eastern Europe (the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), as well as Russia. Germany and Russia’s two-party contract, which was signed in Rapallo and mutually secured the two countries from laying claims to each other’s territory or finances all while the Genoa Conference was in session, infuriated the other European participants who saw it as betrayal of the allegedly common cause that needed to be achieved in multilateral agreements. In the wake of the Congress, Kessler noted in his Diary: “Amateurism and petty, particularistic political egotism are the two reefs on which the Conference has foundered. ( . . . ) Nothing whatever is gained for the rehabilitation or reconstruction of Europe. Inhibited nationalism, hardly less fatal than the open sort.”21 Kessler and many politicians saw the actual reality for what it was and called the Versailles Peace Treaty a mere armistice. The international avantgarde, however, insisted on visions that were increasingly unrealistic. Driven by faith and optimism as well as ambition to change the world for the better, they continued with their plan to create and control the culture of an emerging new collective age, even as that vision kept drifting away. Their ideas of an international, collective future failed to attract the majority of the population in Europe. Most of the small groups of the avant-garde artists, often in exile, had been in opposition to their respective home countries’ mainstream culture, already before and during the war. Now they established a network and relied on each other to sustain their dreams and struggle. Even their like-minded supporters back home were limited in number. Under the duress of exile, they

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often split into factions that weakened their position even further—but not their faith. Lissitzky, Theo van Doesburg, and the German artist Hans Richter assessed their position with great accuracy in the 1922 “Statement” after the First Congress of International Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf: “Today we stand between a society that does not need us and one that does not yet exist.”22 Still, they upheld the hope that the line of the communist anthem, “The International unites the human race!,” was to be taken at face value as historical prophecy and historic necessity. This faith blurred the perception of the actual reality of, among other things, the German majority’s heightened nationalism, sense of humiliation after the defeat in the war, and desire to retaliate. Dominant was a clearly antirepublican attitude, and the citizens of the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire shared most of these sentiments. The representatives of Russian, Dutch, Hungarian, and other art groups living or staying in Berlin in the early 1920s created an international network that overlooked or failed to notice not only the international political scene but also the reality of a deeply divided Germany under their very eyes. They operated on the basis of the perceived concept that the intellectual scene in Berlin was the true face of the country as well as the harbinger of a new Europe or even a new world. They failed to take the anti-Bauhaus sentiments seriously, even as those were highly articulate in the old iconic cultural town Weimar itself, reflecting the residents’ anti-modernity and xenophobia. Hostility against the school was palpable in the town since the moment director Gropius revealed himself as a republican and an internationalist by his first appointments of expressionist artists to positions in the Bauhaus and recruited an international faculty and student body. As early as December 12, 1919, a public meeting was convoked by the local Freie Vereinigung für die Verteidigung städtische Interessen (Free Union for the Protection of the Town’s Interests) called specifically for expelling the Bauhaus from the town, where the presiding Dr. Kreubel called the Bauhaus not only “insane,” but also “a Spartakist-bolshevik institution of alien and Jewish art”; and a Bauhaus student, Hans Gross, read, to resounding applause, a prewritten talk demanding that true German art be taught at the Bauhaus, attacking the “internationalist reign [as a] wolf thirsting for the blood of the German people.”23 Following this event when Gropius, apparently caught unawares by these ideas, rebuffed him, Gross and, in solidarity with him, a group of Bauhaus students coming from old and prestigious Weimar families manifestly quit the school in protest against its alleged “anti-German-ness.”24 The euphoric postwar moment in Berlin notwithstanding, even with all the lively curiosity in and receptivity to foreigners, Russians in particular, Berlin still

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had a social fabric that was hard to penetrate for visitors and newcomers. Layers and layers of German history and culture, Wilhelmine and earlier, had shaped the city and its residents’ social hierarchy, views, tastes, emotions, and thinking. Powerful personalities like writer Bertolt Brecht, art dealer and publisher Herwarth Walden, gallerists Albert Flechtheim or Ferdinand Möller, theater directors Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator, controversial journalist and editor Maximilian Harden, prestigious economist and sociologist Werner Sombart, to only mention a few from different walks of life, were emblematic figures of the vibrant intellectual and social life of the city, only a segment of which was accessible to immigrants and visitors. The outsider–insider dynamics enhances a nation or even a city being a community that is the arbiter of its own definition, thus creating a constantly shifting consensus as to who is “in” and who is “out.” The artists who came to Berlin in the wake of the First World War arrived from different realities, different pasts; and even if they did get acquainted with many Berliners, they still inhabited parallel realities, that of the Russian circles or other international networks. As historian Robert C. Williams remarks, “The [Russian] philosopher S.L. Frank knew only Max Scheler with any degree of intimacy, and later recalled from Paris that Germany remained a kind of wilderness for him. The same was true of the young writer Vladimir Nabokov. Few émigrés were able to assimilate easily into German intellectual life, and most remained quite alone.”25 Post–First World War internationalism, even if it was a thin veneer over more massive currents in German society, was different from the idealistic spiritual internationalism such as Kandinsky’s prewar Neue Künstlervereinigung (New Association of Artists) or its splinter group Der blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) and also differed from the desperately sarcastic supra-nationalist anticultural stance of Zurich dada during the war or the cosmopolitanism of postwar Berlin dada. Avant-garde artists in the wake of the First World War gave voice to their outrage for having seen nation pitted against nation while the big industrialists had financially profited from the death of great masses of soldiers and the misery of the survivors. Nonetheless, the inconvenient truth that the new spirit of internationalism was an illusion was to be experienced at every step of the way. The outpour of hostility against the Bauhaus in Weimar, for example, continued, and one of its triumphal results was the restoration of the conservative Grand Ducal Academy of Fine Arts in Weimar in 1921—that is, the reconquering of traditional landscape painting as opposed to Bauhaus modernism. The relentless, orchestrated activities of the Weimar population to oust the school from the town achieved their goal after the first postwar parliamentary elections in Thüringen

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in 1924. Opponents of the Bauhaus kept on accusing the school not only of cosmopolitanism but also of being communist, the greatest unpatriotic sin in the eyes of the conservative majority. Dada, according to direct witnesses, hardly fared better—even in the eyes of many left-wing intellectuals, who were divided by their preference of “proletkult,” a realist propaganda-art for proletarians, and modernist art such as abstraction or expressionism. As communist “poet and powerhouse”26 Franz Jung characterized the far-left outlook in his autobiography, “If the Zurich dadaism of Arp and Tristan Tzara had represented any aesthetic reform in the arts, none of it landed in Berlin. ( . . . ) Richard Huelsenbeck ( . . . ) had not the slightest impact on us. He remained a foreign element.”27 That is, even a German artist could be perceived as foreign, or outsider. Although Jung does not mention such leading Berlin dada artists as Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, or John Heartfield, this statement suggests that the category of the “outsiders” was further layered and subdivided along the fault lines of party affiliations, group agendas, and personal sympathies. Jung’s personal interpretation of the Berlin presence of dada may be based on biases from the general consensus about the significance of dada in Berlin, but it is nonetheless indication that there were more diverse authentic stances and perceptions than consensually acknowledged in the scholarship of the cultural history of this era. Moreover, Jung, from his populist-communist point of view, considered dada— generally seen as far-left-wing in scholarship—as bourgeois and described it as a tendency that had captivated a thin upper crust of the intellectual elite only, and even that for a short while, without leaving any lasting trace even on that thin geistige Oberfläche (spiritual veneer) of society.28 Although dada was, besides expressionism, the most important vehicle of protest, and glued together many radical artists, from 1922 on it gradually embraced, or gave way to, the more inclusive and optimistic trend of the “international constructivists”29 in Berlin.

The “Silent Majority” and the War Experience Progressive left-wing intellectuals attempted to sever ties with the past and what they considered to be its residue, the existing culture, as they believed that they were at the beginning of the construction of a new international world that would be built from tabula rasa, leaving behind the burden of history as Victory over the Sun had anticipated it (even if it is unlikely that they knew the opera). But most Germans who had lived through the years of the war and the subsequent turbulent events in Germany had experienced changes in the

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progression of everyday life that Kessler described, which through the years became increasingly fraught with confusion, frustration, and anger. They had more insight into many specific factors rooted in German history that shaped the postwar conditions than the newcomers did. The differences between the dominant Left parties—the Socialist Party (SPD), the Independent Socialist Party (USPD), the communist Party (KPD), its offspring the communist Workers’ Party (KAPD)—and the deep divide between Weimar republicans and conservatives had provided an explosive rather than solid ground for the new democracy, let alone for any dreams of a new internationalism. Locals were more aware of the fragility of the Weimar Republic than most foreigners who were out of touch with its actual realities and tended to ignore its past for the sake of the mirage of a shining future. On the other hand, a progressive Berlin intellectual like Wieland Herzfelde,30 strongly committed to the idea of communism, director of the communist Malik Verlag, and brother of the dada artist John Heartfield (Helmuth Herzfeld), confided to his friend count Kessler on several occasions that he was thoroughly pessimistic about the future of the German democracy. Released after a week in prison, he told Kessler on March 21, 1919, concerning the utterly inhuman prison conditions that “the prisoners’ bitterness is so great ( . . . ) that should their side come to power they want to exterminate the middle class, one and all.”31 On August 7 of the same year, Kessler noted that Herzfelde was “depressed and thinks that the revolution is probably over. The downfall of the Soldiers’ and Workers’ Council Government in Hungary ( . . . ) and the bad news from Moscow make him very pessimistic. ( . . . ) In his view the revolution has been postponed for fifty years.”32 Left-wing progressives were, in point of fact, an extremely thin crust of the society. George Grosz, for example, recalls in his Autobiography that “foreigners who visited us at that time were easily fooled by the apparent light-hearted, whirring fun on the surface ( . . . ), the so-called freedom and the flowering of the arts. ( . . . ) But that was really nothing more than froth. Right under that short-lived, lively surface of the shimmering swamp was fratricide and general discord, and regiments were formed for the final reckoning”.33 In stark contrast to the small groups of left-wing artists that kept up an international network of journals and organizations, most Germans remained conservative, leaning völkisch (or populist), religious, and in denial of having lost the war.34 According to historian Sebastian Haffner,35 it was due to the successful manipulations of General Erich Ludendorff, General of the Infantry and second in the German High Command, that the majority of the population blamed the catastrophic losses of the country on the Social Democrats, who were put

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in power by the schemes of the military precisely in order to own the defeat. Moreover, the Social Democrats were divided into factions themselves and their leader, the country’s new president Friedrich Ebert, did not want a socialist revolution although that was, in the midst of chaotic activities, underway in 1918 and, sporadically, into 1919 and 1920. Social-psychological responses to the war experience were apparently similar in various countries, including Russia and Germany. As everywhere, the Great War put the personal-individual and the collective-national in a new perspective. Tragic individual losses had to be seen as a sacrifice for the higher good of the nation, but in order to accept this, one had to have faith in the rationale of the war and the mission of one’s nation in it. Responses we can trace in artworks were diverse. In Italy, most futurists abandoned their initial pro-war enthusiasm already during the war and returned to realism, rendering sad red cross-marked trains that carried the wounded in bunk beds. Many German expressionists displayed personal outrage rather than submission, while Russian artists, Gurianova states, were “intent to avoid any individual, purely psychological accents”36 about the war. The changing of the boundaries between private and public, or private and national—if not communal—was also discernible in Germany. Munich historian Karl Alexander von Müller writes that while before the Great War people in Germany, among his acquaintances, had lived “as private persons,”37 the war destroyed the boundary between the private and the public spheres, so that, historian Peter Fritsche concurs, “more and more people quite self-consciously put their own lives in a national perspective, and [the ongoing war] intensified the individual’s awareness of and participation in a dramatic process of national jeopardy and reconstruction.”38 There are similar accounts from Russia—for example writer and theorist Victor Shklovsky’s mentioning his personal war experience of meeting many in the army who “fiercely loved Russia and nothing more than Russia.”39 The tendency to willingly give up the private for the public, a collateral effect of the war on masses of people, had certainly played a role in fostering disapproval for individual pursuits and preparing great masses of the populations of Italy, Germany, and Russia for collective submission to a central will that would later morph into totalitarian rule. Opposed to this mass mentality were those among Germany’s left-wing intellectuals whom the conservatives saw as being subversively individualistic and accused them of putting their individual concerns before those of the country, thus slandering them as traitors to the nation. Film historian and sociologist Siegfried Kracauer reconstructs the psychological map of “the

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Germans,” if one may, hypothetically, lump an entire population in a general formula, seen through the evolution of the German cinema throughout the existence of the Weimar Republic. He supported his views with observations in his sociological essays on the German middle classes.40 Kracauer pointed out that in spite of the new form of state, not much had fundamentally changed in the German society, including the judicial system and bureaucracy, after 1918, but a shift was taking place in outlook nonetheless. One sign of this, he argued, was the postwar disappearance of the detective film that had been very popular prior to the war as a German “national counterpart of Conan Doyle’s archetype ( . . . ) who makes reason destroy the spiderwebs of irrational powers, and decency triumph over dark instincts ( . . . ) believing in the blessings of enlightenment and individual freedom.”41 As opposed to this pattern, postwar films like Passion (1920) and All for a Woman (1921) poured balm on the wounds of innumerable Germans who, because of the humiliating defeat of the fatherland, refused to acknowledge history as an instrument of justice or Providence any longer. By degrading the French Revolution to a questionable adventure in both [films], that nihilism moreover revealed itself as a symptom of strong antirevolutionary, if not antidemocratic, tendencies in postwar Germany [where] the majority of people lived in fear of social changes and therefore welcomed films which defamed not only bad rulers but also good revolutionary causes.42

A culmination point of storytelling for the purpose of appeasing the mass audiences was the modified version of Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), 1920. In the screenwriter’s original story side-show performer Dr. Caligari, who hypnotizes a somnambulant to commit murders, turns out to be also the director of the psychiatric institution where the somnambulant is supposedly treated—that is, a madman of absolute power and authority with no superior authority to keep him in check. In stark opposition to this, the storyline was changed into being a character’s mere hallucinations, so that the asylum director’s being identical with Dr. Caligari is nothing more than a sick phantasm. Thus, Kracauer notes, the truly revolutionary original story of the film, where the hypnotized somnambulant portrayed “the common man who, under the pressure of compulsory military service, is drilled to kill and to be killed,”43 was turned into the mass-pleasing story of a merely imagined horror. Thereby the film, albeit in harrowing expressionist style, subliminally satisfied both the eagerness for thrilling horror and the desire of cheap escape from it. Such concessions to audiences, Kracauer confirms, aptly characterized the nature of mass culture already in the early years of the Weimar Republic.

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This was the background against which both the German and the Russian progressives shared the dream of a vaguely outlined collective future of a global, classless society, inhabited by a new, “collective individual.” Some of the hottest debates about the new Russian art actually took place in Berlin, in the Russian art world’s German headquarters. Ideas of the future society were drawn from a mix of past philosophies such as eighteenth-century Enlightenment and utopian socialism’s concepts of communality married with modern technologies and advanced sciences. The confusion that followed the Great War had deep roots in nineteenth-century redemptive reform movements and theories such as anarchism, syndicalism, anarcho-syndicalism, and various versions and blends of these in both Germany and Russia. A wide political range of the Deutsche Jugendbewegung (German youth movement)44 experimented with communal living before and after the war. Concepts of a new, improved society were germinating in Europe and Russia before they forked and solidified as politically left and right directions, respectively. The neoconservative, regenerative visions of the future were represented by, for example, the French Nabis’ conversion to neo-Catholicism starting in the 1890s, and many back-to-nature movements overlapped and blended with the ideas of utopian socialists, anarchists, and communists in Germany, as well as in the East European countries’ workers’ movements. Several fascist leaders like Mussolini and right-wing political theorists like Georges Sorel in France had their roots and original political education in left-wing syndicalist movements. According to Zeev Sternhell, “Sorel himself signaled his shifting allegiances by replacing his earlier anarcho-syndicalist myth of the general strike with the myth of an integral nation-state as the ideological motor of social regeneration.”45 We see later examples of unintended overlap of the populist vocabulary of left-wing avantgarde manifestos and fascist rhetoric, bringing to attention that borderlines were often tenuous between them, and they often used the same phrases.46 Berlin was also the city where, in the framework of shared utopias and mutual interests, the new Russian art and culture received more visibility than in other European artistic centers. Lissitzky, first to introduce Malevich’s painted and written work in the West, was active in Berlin during the early 1920s; the First Russian Exhibition was organized in Berlin in the fall of 1922; the first reviews and interpretations of Lissitzky and Malevich’s work as well as surveys of the new art in Russia were published in Berlin; and finally, besides the short, semiprofessional exhibition in Warsaw’s Polonia Hotel, Malevich had his only oneman show outside of Russia in Berlin in 1927. Thus, in Malevich’s lifetime the initial Malevich-image west of Russia was to a great extent shaped in Berlin, and

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to a much lesser extent and confined to a narrower circle of artists and critics, in Poland, Holland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.

Reins on the Avant-Garde in Russia Turning from radicalism to a degree of conformism was a gradual process not only in Germany but in Russia as well. The radical left-wing artists’ “conversion” from futurism and anarchism to working for the IZO NARKOMPROS and publish in Iskusstvo kommuny (Art of the community, Petrograd, December 1918–April 1919) and Iskusstvo (Art; Moscow, January–December 1919) could entail different stories in each case. Some may have, at least for a time, identified futurism with NARKOMPROS, particularly when so many progressive artists worked within its organizational boundaries. Personal and political dynamics were in constant flux, but the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, controlled the entire cultural scene. However, as Sheila Fitzpatrick writes, NARKOMPROS’s style and methods were often criticized for their lack of toughmindedness. Lunacharsky’s commissariat—and Lunacharsky himself— were believed by many bolsheviks to be too permissive ( . . . ) [during the Civil War years] the natural tendency of a communist government to give preference to communist artists was counterbalanced by the instinctive dislike which most communist politicians felt for the artistic avant-garde.47

Lunacharsky, highly erudite, and the committed apostle of a new, secular religion, tried to handle both the cause of Enlightenment and party politics. The fundamental fault line ran between the “futurists,” a term loosely used for all nonconformist artists, and the conformist realists—similarly to the situation in Germany, where rebels were generally characterized and lumped as “expressionists” versus mainstream realist artists. In Russia, as Jangfeldt writes, “the terminological confusion was so great that the word ‘futurist’ lost all precise meaning.”48 There was strong opposition to “futurism” inside the communist Party, even against its own IZO.49 The increasingly bureaucratic Soviet leadership shifted more toward the conservative majority, seeing Russia’s young “futurists” as individuals who believed that the communist revolution was their own personal breakthrough to a brighter future only rather than the entire nation’s road map to a better world. As early as 1922 the organization of realist artists, the AKhRR (Assotsiatsia Khudozhnikov Revolutsionnoi Rossii, Association of Revolutionary Artists of Russia), was formed, championing “heroic realism,”50 “speaking Bolshevik,” and pointedly opposing all

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modernist tendencies represented by NARKOMPROS and INKhUK. AKhRR positioned realism as the only true style that serves “the people.” They suggested that the actual community—“the people”—was made up of those who confirmed the well-known traditional idioms in art. Russian artists and intellectuals, like their German counterparts, “acted as the collective conscience of the Russian nation,”51 historian Robert Service writes; therefore, they were influential and gave the bolshevik Party cause for concern, which in turn had a double-edged policy toward them. “On the one hand, intellectuals were subjected to the threat of censorship embodied in the Decree on the Press52; on the other hand, the party appealed to them to lend their support to the revolutionary regime—and material benefits were offered to those willing to comply.”53 Parallel to Herzfelde’s disillusionment, art historian, critic, and head of the IZO NARKOMPROS in Petrograd, Nikolai Punin wrote in his diary in August 1919 that “my despair and my bitterness [are great]. . . . Together with lost faith in the revolution, my energy is lost, and here I symbolically cry out over the expanses of the earth.”54 One of the reasons of Punin’s pessimism was that in April 1919 Lunacharsky banned Iskusstvo kommuny, a journal of which Punin was an editor. The political and emotional ups and downs, hardly communicable beyond Russia in their complexity, come across in Punin’s diary entry a few months later about an evening at the theater: During intermission Lunacharsky was in the wings with his court. Leschenko, Lourie, Andreeva, Shterenberg, Altman, Lapitsky, Rapoport, Shklovsky, and myself. He saw me, extended his left hand, and said, “Now here’s someone I like a lot; he is the most intelligent man I have met in Soviet Russia.” ( . . . ) He was drunk and happy. A strange person, I feel sorry for him, to the point of liking him. ( . . . ) that he is a People’s Commissar is bad luck in the extreme, at least for him. And what intrigue surrounds him, and how petty. Melancholy, tender melancholy, because of this.55

This tells us about the tenuous and capricious personal dynamics of the Russian cultural scene that both Malevich and Lissitzky inhabited, as well as the unpredictable nature of the leadership they were supposed to trust and on which they so depended.

The Russian Emigration in Berlin Russian émigrés were a special colony in the midst of the many multinational groups settling in Germany in the wake of the war. Due to the special relations of

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Germans and Russians through the centuries and their geographical proximity, Germany, most of all Berlin, was the main center of Russian emigration in the years 1919–1923. The number of Russians in Berlin fluctuated: it was estimated 70, 000 at the end of 1919, but jumped to 560, 000 by the fall of 1920; and it was estimated to have dropped below 300, 000 by spring 1921, because many just transited Germany on their way to France or the United States.56 Williams points out that émigrés—a term used in most cases for those who escaped the bolshevik rule but not for the pro-Soviet travelers who intended to return to communist Russia, even if many were uncertain about their future decision— were mostly coming from the upper classes and the intelligentsia of Imperial Russia. “The Russian emigration in Berlin was a pyramid whose point was the only part which remained. The lower and middle classes were missing, along with the workers and peasants, craftsmen, and shopkeepers. Instead, there were army officers, bureaucrats, artists, financiers, politicians, and members of the old court society.”57 Mostly concentrated in the southwestern part of the city Charlottenburg, the name soon russified as “Charlottengrad”; Russians had their cafés, newspapers, journals, shops, restaurants, and, as Williams adds, “hundreds of other signs of a flourishing and independent existence.”58 Café Leon on Nollendorf Platz, regarded as the temporary location for the Russian Haus der Künste (House of the Arts), was a meeting and debating place for Russian artists and writers of various political and aesthetic trends and convictions, as well as the scene of meetings held by the Union of Russian Writers and Journalists in Germany.59 Literary personalities, who were in transit even if Soviets, were regulars. The crowd included Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Blok, Alexei Tolstoi, and Ilya Ehrenburg; the poet Marina Tzvetaeva, formalist critics and writers Andrei Biely, Viktor Shklovskii, and linguist Roman Jakobson; painters Ivan Puni and Xenia Boguslavskaia; sculptors Naum Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner; and, eventually, Vasily Kandinsky on his way to Weimar. Others like Vladimir Mayakovsky, Lily and Osip Brik, or Sergei Esenin visited or stayed for shorter periods of time.60 The more markedly pro-Soviet artists, on the other hand, met at the nearby Landgraf Café on Kurfürstendamm. This location also served as one of the temporary locations of the House of the Arts and was “frequented mainly by the writers around the pro-Soviet Berlin daily Nakanune (which translates as the eve of an important, epochal event that brings change) and other left-leaning intellectuals like Bely, Alexei Tolstoi, and Ehrenburg.”61 As the lists indicate, several writers and artists attended both places. Launched

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in March 1922, Nakanune was designed to win over the émigrés to the Soviet regime. It was part of the efforts of its editors to exploit Russophilia in Berlin and confirm the image of Russia as the young, up-and-coming power that would defeat the old and declining West—a vision agreed upon by a variety of otherwise often disagreeing cultural groups, both Russian and German. Among them were the Smena Vekh (marked turning point, or landmark) group and the Skifi (Scythians), with Alexander Blok, Bely, Esenin, and their chief theorist Ivanov-Razumnik. Scythianism, the publishing house of which, Skifi, brought out Lissitzky and Ehrenburg’s art journal Veshch helped channel the messianic enthusiasm of Russian intellectuals for the east into political support for the Soviet regime. ( . . . ) Ivanov-Razumnik62 [was convinced that] the revolutions of 1917 in Russia represented an event of global significance superseded in historical importance only by the birth of Christ, to which it was not dissimilar. ( . . . ) The new ecumenical idea now incarnated into the world through “backward,” “uncultured,” “dark” Russia, resembles the birth of Christianity twenty centuries ago in dark, uncultured and backward Judea, rather than in advanced, cultured, brilliant Rome.63

Whether Malevich knew Ivanov-Razumnik’s ideas is not certain, but Malevich’s article on Lenin64 reflected similar views to Razumnik’s concerning the magnitude of the revolution and its leader. Nakanune, the publication of which almost coincided with that of Veshch, Objet, Gegenstand, also appealed to revolutionary romanticism as well as to national and religious emotions. This journal interpreted the revolution as the ultimate victory of the Russian intelligentsia that now, it was suggested, was in control of state power and thus was in the position to achieve centuries-old ideals. The Nakanune circle, the smenovekhovtsi, and the Scythians shared a strong sense of history regarding the fundamental, epochal significance of the changes underway in Russia. This same scale of historical meaning resonated in Malevich’s works and writings, affected Lissitzky’s vision, and pervaded the thinking and artistic output of vanguard art in Russia. This new dimension of possible changes that might affect life and society throughout the whole of Europe fascinated Berliners, too, and kept them interested in the political and cultural developments in Russia. Lissitzky’s presence in Berlin, against such background, appears to be a (perhaps self-imposed) mission to spread information and bring German and Russian artists closer to one another. Lissitzky made efforts to reconcile the Russian émigrés in Berlin to communist Russia by presenting a positive, young,

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modernist, and unified image of the new Russian art that could become popular in Germany. One of the clearly set goals of the 1922 First Russian Exhibition in Berlin, meant to be a “nonpolitical event,” was to break the “émigrés” dominance in shaping the image of Russia in Germany. Lunacharsky’s article in Izvestia (News) praised the exhibition for “wiping out the émigrés.”65

Concepts of Constructivism as Kinetic Structure versus Static Geometry in Berlin Search for a new art that transcends expressionism was underway in Berlin prior to the onset of constructivism. A new terminology to describe this new art was being hammered out since as early as 1919–1920. Those familiar with the cyclical nature of changes in art had long predicted the demise of expressionism. Hungarian artist and theorist Leo Popper, György Lukács’s closest friend, who traveled all over Europe and died at the young age of twenty-five, wrote him in a letter as early as 1910 that the emergence of “a new tectonism”66 was a necessity to counter-point the overflow of subjective expression by solid objectivity. Soon after his arrival in Berlin in the spring of 1920, Kállai pioneered the term “the newest classicism” in a highly positive sense to describe recent works of Carlo Carrà, George Grosz, and the Paris Section D’Or (Golden Section) that offered a geometric-purist alternative to cubism. Kállai praised the solidity and self-contained forms of these artists as opposed to what he held as inchoate expressionist individualism. In these works, he wrote, “the creative power was not arrested as an irresponsible deluge of lyrical impulses, but deepens and widens factual statements into collective, and even cosmic truth. ( . . . ) It is not adventure, but knowledge; not emotion, but action; not a process, but a result. Objectivity.”67 Certainly independently from Kállai, the term “modern classicism” was used in Tatlin’s and his colleagues’ manifesto “The Work Ahead of Us,” dated December 31, 1920: “The investigation of material, volume, and construction made it possible for us in 1918, in an artistic form, to begin to combine materials like iron and glass, the materials of modern classicism, comparable in their severity with the marble of antiquity.”68 That is, quest of a new, technology-validated solidity that implied widely shared ideals of order was a modernist pursuit that did not contradict avant-garde radicalism; use of iron and glass was seen as a major artistic innovation by both the Russians and the Bauhaus.

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Kállai seems to have logically arrived at the term in search of the antithesis of expressionism. Having discussed the classicism inherent in the new “objective” trend, he remarked: Let us not go as far as art. How much classicism: clear, transparent order, delicacy, and the beauty of form and dynamism manifests in modern machinery! How much earthly, human solemnity in the proud verticality of the factories, skyscrapers, in the slow movement of steam liners, in the flight of airplanes, and in the span of bridges!69

This description, as well as much of what follows in the article, anticipates what will soon be known as constructivism in Europe. Based in Berlin and supporting the international avant-garde, Kállai played a connective role between East and West similarly to Lissitzky. He sent articles to Hungarian journals published in Vienna, Budapest, Arad, and Novi Sad. While Kállai’s enthusiasm was reminiscent of the Italian futurists’ fascination with modern technology, it also squared with Larionov and Goncharova’s excitement about real objects as tangible achievements of the new, modern times, listed in their 1913 Rayonist Manifesto.70 Kállai even uses the term “construction” in the second part of the essay as he surveys the contemporary art scene, very similarly to but predating the constructivists of INKhUK: “In terms of purely form-related issues, objectivism has got rid of painterly effects. It emphasizes linearity or volume. Eschewing expression as well as academic composition, it achieves integrity and law in constructions.”71 Constructivism, as this statement indicates, had been anticipated in Germany prior to its arrival from Russia. The progressive international art scene was ready for both a new, anti-expressionist formal idiom and a collectivist ideology, but this was still very far from the Moscow developments, particularly the ideology and the personal subtext of the INKhUK debates. Kállai employed the terms “constructive” and “construction,” as opposed to “expression” and “composition” independently from the Russians. “The construction of geometric and technical forms” is a phrase that comes up in relation to Archipenko’s nudes, and Kállai, as of the summer of 1921, also writes about the “constructive force of cubism.”72 The duality of “dynamic” versus “static” in the early European concepts of constructivism reverberated until the late twentieth century. On the one hand, pragmatic, three-dimensional objects were created or paintings evocative of such structures—as in the works of Moholy-Nagy, Gert Caden (pseudonym of Gerd Kaden), or Katarżyna Kobro. On the other hand, artists like Erik Buchholz, Sándor Bortnyik, and Lajos Kassák painted strict, planar geometric shapes.

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Kassák labeled his paintings “picture-architecture,” using Liubov Popova’s term, charged with anticipation of utopian order, purity, and architectural structure. Representatives of this trend admired Malevich’s work as a post-technological but inherently visionary, high-tech image of the future. By the summer of 1921, Kállai had overcome the rhetoric of expressionism by coining terms that were antithetical to it. Thus, a decade after Popper’s insight— of which he could not be aware, as it was included in Popper and Lukács’s private correspondence—Kállai came to the concept of a “new tectonic,” “objective” future art based on forms and gestures that refer to constructing, whether architectural or painted. He instantly found artworks that illustrated this concept, in which he could demonstrate the validity of his new terms. Kállai’s short article on Moholy-Nagy—also written before he could have heard about constructivism from Alfréd Kemény—celebrates “cosmic harmony” along with “the mechanism of the modern machine,”73 thus inadvertently bridging the gap between suprematism and constructivism—the Moscow conflict of which he was equally unaware. Kállai discovered Moholy-Nagy’s works as the first to corroborate the vision of a self-contained, mechanically constructed model universe, describing them as a new universe in the making: [in Moholy-Nagy’s pictures] the anarchy is being visibly organized towards a concentric system. New particles emerge and form new systems in the place of disrupted conglomerates, although they do not evolve into closed and concentric constructions. The newer constructions are still open-ended, but they are more articulate, and more concentric. Here, the mechanism of the modern machine and its kinetic system has been converted into art through the processes of a fruitful coalescence of concentric pictorial factors with the creative principles drawn on cubism and dada.74

Kállai's description of the “constructive” picture culminates in the exalted statement: “Moholy-Nagy declares freedom and law, which illuminates the infinite perspectives of the future.”75 By contrast to “the dynamism of the modern machines” in the geometric abstract works of Kassák, who made his debut as an artist in 1921, Kállai envisioned a different new, static model for “objective” art: Architectonic articulation is all the more severe, and its forms all the more abstract and simple, the less self-secured the social and economic order of the collective spirit is. For every new collective indicates the elevation of a victorious, objective historical will into an accomplished fact. The launching of

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every collective involves the welding together of various forces into the most solid agglomeration of power—thus it is construction, in the most inexorable sense of the word.76

These descriptions anticipate the concept of constructivism as understood at the Moscow INKhUK in 1921 and indicate the context in which Russian constructivism and suprematism will be interpreted in the West. Lacking a society undergoing as rapid a transformation as Russia’s, or a society with the advanced technology of Germany, even despite the postwar setbacks, Kassák deviated from both models and understood constructivism as a redemptive doctrine. The force of a new revelation pervaded the version of constructivism that Kassák developed in the early 1920s. He demonstrated preference for timeless classicism and invested the geometric vocabulary with a majestic and authoritative aura, in contradistinction to the pragmatism of both Russian and international constructivism, both of which gave a relevant response to the need for sustainable new standards in art after the war, not altogether different from Kállai’s and Tatlin’s quoted concepts. The double interpretation of the term “constructivism” in Berlin was instrumental in blurring the contrast between suprematism and Russian constructivism. Kállai as art critic was closely tied to the circle of “objectivist” artists in Berlin who regularly gathered in the studio of Gert Caden throughout 1921–1923. MoholyNagy, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, El Lissitzky, van Doesburg, Max Burchartz, Erich Buchholz—whose studio was also a meeting point—were among the regulars who readily adopted the term “constructivist,” which was most likely introduced to them by Kemény and Lissitzky.

The Magic of Words “Futurism” and “constructivism” were not just descriptive terms of certain artistic trends. Both were particularly inspired and inspirational, future-bound, imperative, and energetic, calling for activity and participation, and thus programmatic. “Futurism,” as it traveled from Italy to Russia, lost its specific claim to the future of Italy—Marinetti’s homeland which futurism was meant to shake up and urged to be emancipated to the modernized industrial nations. Its main aspect that resonated the most in Russia was the sense of a speed- and technologybound future, writ large—a new beginning with modern machines that will

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make human life easier and sizzling with modernity. “Futurism” for the Russians spelled modernity comprising the whole of mankind—unlike in Italy where the future of the country was inherently anticipated to the point of Italians not shying away from fighting wars for it. The concept of war as the “hygiene of mankind,” as it stands in Marinetti’s 1909 Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, was entirely overlooked in Russia. It fell into a blind spot, while the magic concept of the future loaded with airplanes, fast trains, and utopian architecture was ringing aloud. Evoking the future in verse and image was fascinating and harbinger of the new imagination. “Future” spelled freedom and the will to change the world from the syllables and words of the language to the utopian reconceptualization of society and the entire universe. Futurism entailed the cult of youth, and its dynamism proved to be an extraordinary inspiration. That is why various groups of Russian poets—the Mezzanine of Poetry and the Centrifuge groups, the Ego-Futurists, and others who gathered in the Café Futuristov—insisted on calling themselves one or another kind of futurists: everyone, in Italy, Russia, and elsewhere, saw themselves in progress to a future that was to be shared, and so the term ‘futurism’, which illuminated the road to it, was a magnet. Another magnet was constructivism, traveling in the opposite direction, from Russia to the West. Some of the original political contents were also lost in the process, as the Russian constructivists’ original commitment to communism, which was modified in the West to a more general left-wing social consciousness. Constructivism had a mobilizing power, inviting positive action to build and construct, and implied a moral imperative to do so. “To construct” was an appeal to not just “build” but become engineers of the future both socially and physically. Constructivism advocated the use of new technologies in collective action to shape the new human environment. Both “futurism” and “constructivism” had claim to the new imagination of the future world of technology, progress, and speed. Suprematism, on the other hand, similarly to neoplasticism, prefigured a timeless, supreme state of the universe that cannot be superseded. In contrast to futurism and constructivism, suprematism and neoplasticism did not have the ring of a call to action. Both lacked the future-bound velocity of futurism and the engineering-bound agency of constructivism. Suprematism and neoplasticism sounded as more of an epiphany than a process. “Supreme” is a numbing adjective: bow to it. Both futurism and constructivism urged progressive artists to join forces and actively create a better, if vaguely outlined world. Suprematism, by contrast, sounded majestic, which is why Malevich had to invent terms like the “Affirmers

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of the New,” which were more inclusive and inviting to join a community, while the term “suprematism” was used as an iconic symbol of the artistic style and direction. Futurism and constructivism were movements, in the actual sense of the word: urging their adherents to move ahead and work as activists, while suprematism commanded admiration, even if expanding the circle of adherents happened to be the program; and neoplasticism was simply announced as a new order. Words, needless to say, have power. Both futurism and constructivism were tremendously energizing, often regardless of their original programs. The mere ring of the words—both of Latin origin and thus easily traveling across national and cultural borders—evoked the desire for activity and participation, and therefore had great international appeal, popularity, and renown, even if their meaning varied slightly in different locations. The equally Latin-based term “suprematism,” on the other hand, implied supremacy—the artist being superior to others and having power over them—a kind of mastery which implied the artist’s privilege in having achieved it—and which, in turn, instantly alienated some artists from it. This was the original, inherent disadvantage of Malevich in comparison to the constructivists. In spite of a wide array of followers, he remained, even when admired, a lonely visionary, thought by some a genius, inviting some to follow him, but not someone to launch a movement. His followers were, to a great extent, his imitators. When inventing, and perhaps hesitating between, the terms “supremus” and “suprematism,” Malevich aspired to the highest possible goal; but even UNOVIS, the community he organized for the “affirmation” rather than construction “of the new,” fell shy of the attractive invitation to participate in actively building that new. UNOVIS was Malevich’s idea of the collective: a community each member of which is branded, in terms of working for the common goal with no individual ambition. That goal would be identified by Malevich. Unlike the potentially all-inclusive constructivist program, suprematism appeared to be elitist. When tracing the international trajectory of suprematism, proun, and De Stijl’s neoplasticism and elementarism—art directions that had the form of the square as their emblem or central motif and invested it with symbolic power, if each in a somewhat different sense—we must be aware of the contrast between the engagement in actively shaping the world proposed by constructivism on the one hand and the spiritual commitment to affirm an idea proposed by suprematism on the other.

6

As Many Narratives as Narrators Russian Accounts of New Russian Art in the West

The 1914–1921 allied blockade of Russia notwithstanding, information about the new culture of Soviet Russia was available in Germany as early as 1919, when Alexander Bogdanov’s Die Kunst und das Proletariat (Art and the Proletariat) and Anatoli Lunacharsky’s Die Kulturaufgaben der Arbeiter Klasse (The Cultural Tasks of the Working Class) were published in German.1 Intense interest in the communist state and its new culture, however, could not be adequately satisfied as the image that resulted from the various firsthand accounts was contradictory. It failed to give a relevant survey of the multiple, competing trends in the new Russian art.

The First Accounts The first authentic but incomplete overview of the new artistic developments in Russia was given by an eighteen-year-old student, Konstantin Umansky,2 who traveled to Germany and had a stopover in Vienna in the fall of 1920. He delivered a slide-illustrated lecture to members of the Hungarian Activists’ circle in Vienna in November 1920,3 and on his arrival to Germany, published a series of articles on new Russian art in the Munich journal Der Ararat. Umansky’s book Neue Kunst in Russland (New Art in Russia) was published in Potsdam and in Munich in 1920.4 “Tatlinism” was the focal point of his account. He helped create a myth of Tatlin coining the misleading term “Maschinenkunst” (machine art) that became part of the slogan “Die Kunst ist tot—es lebe die Maschinenkunst von Tatlin” (art is dead, long live the machine art of Tatlin), advocating Tatlin’s corner counter-reliefs “with their constructions and logic, rhythm, components, material, and metaphysical spirit.”5 He traced back “Tatlinism” to French cubism and claimed that it embodied the current Zeitgeist of Russia.

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Umansky forged a relationship between Kandinsky and Malevich, telling his German readers that these two representatives of “absolute expressionism” stand out in Russia: “the solitary Kandinsky group and ( . . . ) the Malevich group that adapted the ‘so-called’ [sic!] suprematism.”6 He discussed Kandinsky as a “Russian messiah” who, albeit not popular among his Russian peers, “has prepared the victory of absolute art—even if non-objective art is going in a different direction today.”7 Umansky presented Malevich as a painter who had further developed cubism and painted consistently planar images, whereas “the artists of this trend are convinced of the danger of decorativity and ornamentality, or other confusions of applied art. They go in a different direction seeking the zero point of art,” by which, his footnote explains, “Malevich understands the nearly total rejection of the means of artistic expression (color, form, etc.)—thus, for example at the Tenth State Exhibition in Moscow, 1919 [Malevich] exhibited a painting ‘White on White’, the utmost nihilism of Russian art.”8 Having skipped Malevich’s period of colorful suprematism, and with “nihilism” as the last word, the introduction of Malevich to the reader was wrapped up, and his name does not come up again in the text. The illustrations of the book include, aside from reproductions of nineteenth-century painters’ works, reproductions of works by a variety of avant-garde artists, including Rozanova, David Burliuk, and Chagall. Lissitzky is not mentioned at all—in Umansky’s survey, he was not part of the new art in Russia. Contradicting to Umansky’s account, Ivan Puni stepped up in Berlin as an actual representative of the new Russian art. He had an exhibition of abstract compositions at the Der Sturm gallery in February 1921. Puni used part of the interior of the gallery as an extended artwork, as an artistically organized space. Paul Westheim published an album with reproductions of eight paintings by Puni for the occasion. More information arrived directly from Russia. In the fall of 1921 Hungarian painter Béla Uitz, who had attended the Third Congress of the Comintern in Moscow, chose to travel to Berlin before returning to Vienna where he lived in exile. In Berlin he met fellow Hungarians: critics Kállai and Alfréd Kemény, and artists László Moholy-Nagy and László Péri. According to Uitz’s account, he argued with them “for two days and two nights”9 in an effort to make a convincing case for the values of nascent Moscow constructivism. In the same year, 1921, the German communist Party sent Kemény—who, under the pen name Durus, was a regular contributor of the party’s newspaper Die Rote Fahne (Red Banner)—to attend the Comintern Congress in Moscow. Kemény, thus, had gathered direct information about the latest developments in Russian art.

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Both Kemény and Uitz met Jolán Szilágyi, the widow of one of the leaders of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, who had fled to the RSFSR after the August 1919 defeat of the Commune and studied at the Moscow VKhUTEMAS along with her compatriot painter, Sándor Ék (Alex Kiel). Ék remembers having met El Lissitzky, his teacher at VKhUTEMAS, at Szilágyi’s, where Kemény and Uitz met other VKhUTEMAS faculty as well, including Rodchenko and, through him, other constructivists. Kemény also became acquainted with Naum Gabo, who “supplied him with photographic material and texts, including the Realist Manifesto.”10 Kemény, who returned to Berlin from Moscow a few months later than Uitz but not long after Lissitzky’s arrival in Berlin, brought more accurate and detailed information than Umansky. Kemény had more recent, and more in-depth, information about the developments at INKhUK, where he was invited to give two talks about the latest artistic developments in Europe. On December 8, 1921, Kemény spoke about “The Latest Trends in Contemporary German and Russian Art.” According to the minutes,11 he compared and contrasted suprematism and constructivism and, similarly to Umansky’s account, described “Malevich’s suprematism as a kind of organized expressionism,” while he stated that constructivism, by contrast, “supported a kind of art that proceeds forward into life and turns against all kinds of aesthetically driven art.” Contrary to Lissitzky, he declared that suprematism had nothing to do with the “material-constructive direction of Russian art.” With this sharp division, as the minutes indicate, Kemény was confirming INKhUK theorist Boris Arvatov’s views regarding the deep fault line between Malevich and Tatlin. Acknowledging the latter as being close to the constructivists, Kemény also pointed out the actual personal hostility between Tatlin and Malevich. On December 26, the title of Kemény’s talk was “Concerning the Constructive Work of the OBMOKhU,” in which he critically stated that the young constructivists’ works had a tendency toward “technical naturalism.” Although his accounts on the new Russian art were informative and thorough, they nonetheless failed to reach a wide enough readership in Germany and, likely due to this, were ultimately of little help to Westerners in sorting out the actual differences between suprematism and constructivism in Russia.

Veshch, Objet, Gegenstand El Lissitzky arrived in Berlin at the very end of 1921 and offered a very different view on Malevich than Umansky or Kemény, albeit without clarifying the real

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conflicts and disputes in Moscow. How his journey, an apparently open-ended stay in Germany, was organized remains unknown, although speculations abound. It has been suggested that with the Civil War’s end in 1921 and the blockade of Russia being over, Lissitzky, who had a command of the German language as well as previous experience living in Germany, was deployed by NARKOMPROS, for which he had already been working, as an emissary to establish personal contacts with German artists and develop cultural relations between Russia and Germany. There is, however, no evidence of such government assignment.12 A more acerbic view originates from the sculptor Naum Gabo’s wife Miriam, who recalled that her husband had “once visited Lissitzky’s Berlin studio and was horrified to see a CHEKA (the Soviet secret service) seal lying on the desk, and thus Gabo identified Lissitzky as an informer in the employment of the Soviet secret police.”13 Besides multiple examples of Gabo’s failing memory,14 notorious rivalry with, and dislike of Lissitzky, this allegation was not even put in by Gabo himself, let alone in writing. It was not found even in Gabo’s private correspondence, only mentioned by Miriam Gabo in conversation with the authors of Gabo’s monograph. One fragile speculation against this equally fragile allegation might be that had Lissitzky been on the CHEKA payroll, he might have been better funded to continue the journal Veshch, Objet, Gegenstand, which was in the service of establishing the cultural ties he was supposed to promote in Germany and which he would not have had to terminate after a mere three issues for want of funds.15 Also, Lissitzky’s continued illustration of Jewish books in Warsaw and Berlin in the early 1920s would have been antithetical to the Soviet policy against Jewish culture, since the use of Hebrew lettering of the Yiddish language was officially regarded as cultural separatism. Had Lissitzky been responsible to the Soviet secret police for every move of his, as a CHEKA affiliate or informer would well have been, he would not likely have ventured into creating such works. Moreover, CHEKA’s agent David Maryanov was present in Berlin as one of the organizers of the 1922 Russian Exhibition officially representing the institution. Since Lissitzky designed the catalog, he might have been contacted by CHEKA on account of that particular business, as he was requested to change the original catalog cover with the Soviet red star into a more neutral design, which he did.16 Such work may well have involved some official correspondence, which is not to say that rational patterns should be necessarily sought in early Soviet bureaucratic operations; nevertheless, some evidence would likely have already emerged to prove such contentions were they actually grounded. Whether or not he was officially entrusted with establishing Russian-German relations in art, Lissitzky worked in the Berlin and the wider German and Dutch

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art scene with amazing speed and results. His address book was soon filled with the phone numbers and addresses of most of the progressive artists, critics, and publishers in Berlin, Weimar, the Netherlands, Vienna, Hanover, and even Paris.17 He certainly sensed the excitement that he raised by being a non-émigré Russian; and his writings, correspondence, and activities reveal that it was his ambition to exploit the great opportunity that came his way in order to move freely in the European avant-garde art world, as well as to attempt to integrate the emerging Russian art into the contemporary European trends, and vice versa. To accomplish this, Lissitzky followed his own idiosyncratic strategy of constructing a narrative that reconciliated the antithetical tendencies in the new Russian art. One of the forums for promoting this unified image was the aforementioned short-lived trilingual journal Veshch, Objet, Gegenstand, which Lissitzky edited with writer Ilya Ehrenburg and published in the spring of 1922 through the Skify (Scythian) publishing house in Berlin. Unlike many other Russian journals in Berlin, Veshch, subtitled “An International Review of Contemporary Art,” was not a venue for the Russian émigré community. Modeled on De Stijl, it was, linguistically as well as in its contents and targeted readership, an international bridge between Russians and Westerners, even if the majority of the articles were in Russian. The title Object was chosen with a nod to the constructivists’ anti-easel-painting stance, the Bauhaus, as well as the now-international cult of “objectivity.” In spite of choosing the word “object” for the title of the journal and underlining the imperative of constructivism with the ending of the first issue’s introductory editorial in all-capital letters: “AN END TO ALL DECLARATIONS AND COUNTER DECLARATIONS! Make objects!”18 Veshch did not champion constructivism more than any other trend it presented. Lodder points out that Lissitzky was said to have taken a copy of The Program of the First Working Group of Constructivists along with photos of their works with him19 to Berlin, but he did not reproduce them in Veshch. The fundamental concept laid out in the opening editorial—regardless of its cited ending—was to make it clear that “Basic utilitarianism is far from our thoughts”20 and, to broaden the concept of art as well as the intended meaning of the term “object,” Lissitzky added that “poetry, plastic form, and drama [are also] essential ‘objects’.”21 Consistently with the spirit of this statement, Lissitzky continued to paint in Berlin. Along with the Western reinterpretation of Russian constructivism as a new aesthetic trend, there was sustained interest in, and market for, geometric-abstract, oil-on-canvas paintings. The deep divide between suprematism and constructivism was blurred in Germany, and it was El Lissitzky who made conspicuous efforts to eliminate the

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visibility of conceptual and strategic differences between the two in his accounts of the new Russian art. Lissitzky, a painter himself, and a more informed and articulate author than Umansky, was to a great extent responsible for the misrepresentation of this antagonism and the subsequent ignorance of it outside Russia. That Lissitzky did indeed confuse the two sharply opposed tendencies, both in Veshch and a talk he gave in Berlin at the end of 1922, is a documented fact. But we may well ask: Why did he do so? Did he want to deliberately mislead Western audiences? Was he irresponsibly light on the facts? Did he desire friendly relations between suprematists and constructivists to the extent that he projected their union as a reality? The misrepresentation of the actual conflict between the two sides was so blatant on Lissitzky’s part that it is more than likely that it was intentional and conceptual. However, rather than deliberately misleading his Western audience, Lissitzky appears to have believed that a desired, anticipated unity of the young progressive Russian art was imminent. On the one hand, he had no intention of betraying either Malevich or the constructivists by siding with either one of them; but, having joined the new art with significant delay, he could imagine their imminent union much more easily than those who had been familiar with the histories and deep roots of the bitter personal conflicts and fights. Lissitzky believed that Malevich’s suprematism was first and foremost a vision of the future rather than being “composition” in stark opposition to “construction.” The future, Lissitzky was convinced, held the promise of the ultimate unity of the two directions and—at least as far as a goal—the union of all artists, art groups, and tendencies. Considering Lissitzky’s great relief in the wake of the revolution, when he believed that finally everything he held vitally important was coming together in the new, all-inclusive state and its culture—a faith he transferred to suprematism—it stands to reason that he was intent on mending every crack that emerged on what he saw as a desirable new, general consensus. After all, one way or another, every artist was committed to the future good of the country and the world, thus they were “communistic” and “futuristic,” whichever way they understood the exact meaning of those terms. In the light of this view, every conflict was temporary; and therefore, it could seem a waste of time to attribute too much importance to them. If “collectivity” was indeed a shared ideal, then it was only logical that eventually everyone would fall in line accordingly. However, as Lissitzky had been wrong about the bolshevik state’s politics regarding Jewish culture, he was, once again, wrong in underestimating the depth of the rift and opposition between Malevich and the constructivists as well. We must bear in mind that Lissitzky’s

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strongest desire was an ­all-inclusive art and culture in Russia. As previously demonstrated, Lissitzky did indeed attempt everything within his power to reconcile the opposing parties while still in Moscow. When it came to the big picture of the new Russian art in Germany, Lissitzky apparently considered the inner differences to be temporary and discussing them as fouling one’s own nest. Following both his inclination to adapt the constructivist social agenda and his still-deep indebtedness to Malevich, Lissitzky tended to minimize the differences between the two sides—first in INKhUK, and then in Germany, while he hoped that time would also be on the side of reconciliation, and something unified might emerge in Russia that could be simply called, as it stands in the title of his account in Veshch, “New Art in Russia.” It was also easier to represent the concept of a unified, more or less homogenous new Russian art abroad, where barely anyone was familiar with the finer, more complicated and local details. Lissitzky interpreted the multifaceted new Russian art in sync with the dominant internationalist, rationalist, and pragmatist stances of the progressive Western art scene. He appears to have been convinced that the most he could do in the service of Russian art, as well as himself, was to take up a position that was not antithetical to anyone, emphasize the similarities rather than the differences between Western and Russian art. Disregarding the extensive background of the international avant-garde of 1922 that included the post–First World War renaissance of German medieval mystics, along with the still-continued popularity of such priestly presences as Johannes Itten and Lothar Schreyer at the Bauhaus, Lissitzky, consistently with his idealist views and historical expectations of communism in Russia, joined the progressive internationalist art community in Germany. He proudly wrote in the first editorial in Veshch: The appearance of Objet is another sign that the exchange of practical knowledge, realizations, and “objects” between young Russian and West European artists has begun. Seven years of separate existence have shown that the common ground of artistic aims and undertakings that exists in various countries is not simply an effect of chance, a dogma, or a passing fashion, but an inevitable accompaniment of the maturing of humanity. Art is today international, though retaining all its local symptoms and particularities. ( . . . ) Objet is the meeting point of two adjacent lines of communication.22

Lissitzky, as previously mentioned, joined the editors of G. Material zur elementaren Gestaltung in 1923 (he was said to invent the name of the magazine “G,” for Gestaltung, or design) and also worked for the left-wing ABC Beiträge

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zum Bauen (ABC Contributions to Building). When he participated at the Congress of International Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf in May 1922, Lissitzky, representing Veshch, made a statement on Russian art, once again streamlining Russian artistic culture and adjusting it to Western concepts: [Russian] thinking is characterized by the attempt to turn away from the old, subjective, mystical conception of the world and to create an attitude of universality–clarity–reality. That this way of thinking is truly international may be seen from the fact that during the seven-year-period of complete isolation from the outside world, we were attacking the same problems in Russia as our friends here in the west, but without any knowledge of each other.23

This characterization, along with the editorial, was not only meant to serve the Russian artists’ interest of being accepted in the contemporary Western art scene as familiar rather than foreign and exotic—despite many Russian artists’ persuasive aspirations at emphasizing their distinction,24—but also satisfied the progressive Westerners’ keen interest in un-problematically embracing their Russian counterparts. In his effort to facilitate the understanding of Russian art for Westerners, Lissitzky simply left out what the constructivists judged as being too subjective or mystical. Quite consistently with van Doesburg’s ideas, in fact, here Lissitzky reduced the new Russian art to the “objective, universal, and formative”25—where “universal” could equally refer to the geometric abstraction of the constructivists as well as to that of Malevich. Suprematism was thus, once again, bundled together with constructivism, while “objective” and “'formative” were concepts that, as we have seen, had different meanings for the suprematists than for the constructivists, as they stood for spiritual illumination versus the transparent organization of an object, respectively. Instead of pointing out the conceptual differences, Lissitzky relied on the formal similarities of the two tendencies—namely, that both were abstract and used geometric forms—thus encouraging Westerners to focus on the surface rather than study the deeper ideas that may not have been as readily accessible to them. The fact that in the person of El Lissitzky it was an innovative Russian artist, one of the very few known in Europe in the flesh, who confirmed similarities between Russian and Western art, was of the greatest importance in Berlin where the progressives wanted to forge community with the Russians at a point when little was known about them, and the First Russian Exhibition was still several months away. After all, not only did both suprematism and constructivism use abstract visual language, but Malevich had already created three-dimensional “architectons,” models of futuristic, suprematist architecture, so not even the picture versus

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object distinction applied any longer. Malevich’s “architectons,” however, are not reproduced in Veshch, while Tatlin’s Tower is, on page 22 of the first double issue. The fine web of personal and conceptual differences, emotions, and biases; the conflicting views rooted in personal ambitions and animosities; and the different interpretations of Russian history, philosophical and religious tradition, as well as different views on the new state would include many details beyond the reach and understanding of outsiders who would not see the entirety of the old and new Russian context in and around the key terms themselves. Just as foreigners were not able to fully fathom Berlin even if they were living there, Westerners were not equipped to fully fathom the layers of Russian culture that underpinned the discourse between various Russian artists and groups. To present and explain the details and introduce many new characters of distinct positions and views to a foreign audience would have constituted such a challenge that Lissitzky apparently bypassed it. He decided on a streamlined, simplified summary instead, one that could be easily delivered and comprehended abroad. It can be suspected that this approach may have been mutually desired: after all, audiences wanted to hear a transparent story they could grasp without much difficulty. To this end, in Berlin Lissitzky apparently adjusted the interpretation of the new Russian art to the roster of ideas and political debates of the non-Russian world. Moreover, in the early 1920s, artists and intellectuals west of Russia were also interested in, aside from similarities, the quintessential revolutionary message. They were curious to see a new radicalism as the road map to the future rather than hearing about the conceptual shenanigans and personal quibbles between the various visual and ideational trends of competing artists and tendencies.26 This is not to imply that left-leaning Western critics were superficial: they were intent on spelling out the decisive features of Russian art in search of a model. In the years 1919–1923 the critics needed to chart out the culture of the future in their own respective countries, as well as internationally, which was an urgent task. Critics, art writers, and artists in the West needed prompt supplies of ideas and visual works from the revolutionary country that they saw, or wished to see, as a model. Communism was still a shared positive dream for leftists, and actual information about Russia was still scarce in the West. Lissitzky had entertained the idea of publishing an international journal of modern art already in Moscow before he traveled to Berlin. When Veshch, the first double issue of which came out in April 1922, was already in press, Lissitzky wrote a letter to Rodchenko reporting that “here we have finally realized an idea that we had invented in Moscow a long time ago—the publication of an international journal of modern art. ( . . . ) We are asking you to send us

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everything you have”27—meaning texts and photos of his works to be included in the journal. Having Rodchenko in Veshch would have documented friendly, collegial relations between Lissitzky and the constructivist artist, and would have supported the image of a unified Russian art scene, as well. However, Rodchenko did not ultimately appear in the journal. Coediting Veshch, Objet, Gegenstand gave a distinguished position to Lissitzky in Berlin just a few months after his arrival in the city. Now he had a platform that gave him the possibility of inviting international as well as Russian artists and authors with the prospect of a much-coveted exposure to both Russian and European audiences and presenting the new Russian art in an attractive way. He included news of the latest French art as well as pieces of French literature. Lissitzky’s article “Exhibitions in Russia”28 bundles together the “new Russian art schools” that are united in their goal to bring “art into life” and are unified in their faith that “Art is one with production.”29 Eliminating the deep rift between the suprematist Malevich and the constructivist Rodchenko, Lissitzky juxtaposes them as each other’s counterparts in his account of the 1919 exhibition Non-objectivists and Suprematists, where “Malevich exhibited White on White; Rodchenko Black on Black.”30 Veshch received immediate international attention and, perhaps more than anything else, established Lissitzky as an active member of the international community of progressive artists, ranking him with other prominent editors and organizers. Thus, for example, Lissitzky found himself on equal footing with Theo van Doesburg when the two met at the Congress of International Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf, while Veshch was still in production, and the two, as van Doesburg accounted for it, became friends and allies. Being editor of such an important venue made Lissitzky a very desirable and commendable partner. Contributors to the first issue of Veshch included, besides Russians, Blaise Cendrars, Le Corbusier, van Doesburg, Viking Eggeling, Carl Einstein, Fernand Léger, Lajos Kassák, and Ljubomir Micić. Lissitzky had already established close contacts with a number of German artists with whom he cooperated, including Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann, Hans Arp, Gert Caden, Erich Buchholz, and Hans Richter. He knew Herwarth Walden and his Der Sturm gallery and journal, and met architecture critic Adolf Behne, who introduced him to Walter Gropius with the suggestion that Lissitzky be hired to teach in the Bauhaus.31 In the summer of 1923, Lissitzky visited the Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar and kept up his relationship with Gropius via correspondence. Aside from van Doesburg, Lissitzky became friends with fellow architect J. J. P. Oud of the De Stijl group. Lissitzky met Hungarians in Berlin as well, including Kemény, whom he had

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known from Moscow, Moholy-Nagy, Péri, and Kállai, who was the first to review his work.32 They put him in contact with Lajos Kassák, the Vienna-based editor of the Hungarian avant-garde journal Ma, for which Lissitzky designed a cover page.33 Veshch, which Lissitzky certainly hoped would have a longer run, secured for him the opportunity to reciprocate the attention he received, providing his peers with visibility on the international scene of progressive art. Also in the first editorial titled “The Blockade of Russia Is Coming to an End,”34 which reads as the prequel to the above quoted “Statement of the Editors of Veshch, Objet, Gegenstand,” Lissitzky, likely the sole author, makes further efforts to unite constructivism and suprematism, without even naming the latter. For example, the concept of economy in Malevich and Kruchenykh’s thinking was not used in the sense of production, distribution, and consumption of goods— the sense in which Lissitzky used the term “economy” in Veshch. As Gorjacheva points out, Malevich meant “pure sensation,” in the sense of the philosophy of empiriocriticism,35 considering the artistic sign as the most concentrated and thus the most economic, intuitive, and ultimately unconscious expression.36 Lissitzky, however, came up with a personal, idiosyncratic interpretation of the term “constructive” and used this term as well as “economy” at face value, the way in which the Western reader was likely to understand them very differently from how the Russian artists employed the terms in their inner debates: We hold that the fundamental feature of the present age is the triumph of the constructive method. We find it as much in the new economics and the development of industry as in the psychology of our contemporaries in the world of art. Object will take the part of constructive art, whose task is not to adorn life but to organize it. ( . . . ) We consider that functional objects turned out in factories—airplanes and motorcars—are also the product of genuine art. Yet we have no wish to confine artistic creation to these functional objects. Every organized work—whether it be a house, a poem, or a picture—is an “object” directed towards a particular end, which is calculated not to turn people away from life, but to summon them to make their contribution towards life’s organization. So, we have nothing in common with those ( . . . ) painters who use painting as a means of propaganda for the abandonment of painting. Primitive utilitarianism is far from being our doctrine.37

Listing airplanes and factory products as artworks goes back not only to the constructivists’ ethos but, as previously mentioned, also to Kállai’s 1921 article, and as far back as Larionov and Goncharova’s 1913 Rayonist Manifesto, which used the exact same examples. The Western reader, however, was not shown this historic aspect of Lissitzky’s text, which, on the other hand, underlines the unnamed

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other direction: the nonfunctional, albeit “organized” object as a fully recognized artwork—thus, in point of fact, bringing Malevich’s paintings and architectons into the pool of artistic achievements, although these were rejected by the Moscow constructivists. The position that Lissitzky took in this article, mediating between unnamed directions of the new Russian art, was, like his further communications, instrumental in the later confusion about the Russian art -isms, rather than serving as a clear identification of its new directions and intense debates.

Ivan Puni’s Fierce Critique of Malevich The lecture that Puni gave in Russian at the Café Leon in Berlin on November 4, 1922, was also published in Berlin as a book in Russian, titled Sovremennaia Zhivopis (Contemporary Painting),38 the following year. Puni had harbored strong antipathy toward Malevich since the 1915 futurist “Streetcar V” and “0.10” exhibitions, both of which he and his wife financed—and which, as he also pointed out, he himself had organized as well.39 Puni’s animosity grew when Malevich joined the Vitebsk school and took it over, causing Chagall to withdraw and ultimately Puni himself as well as his wife to leave the school, too. By the same token, Puni also disliked Lissitzky, who had brought Malevich to Vitebsk and idolized him. The Russian papers and journals in Berlin, Dni, Rul, and Nakanune,40 reported about not only Puni’s lecture but also the heated debate that followed it, in the course of which “Archipenko, Altman, Shklovsky, Mayakovsky, Shterenberg, Gabo, Lissitzky, and Ehrenburg burst into an intense dispute.”41 Puni’s audience may have been surprised to hear that Puni saw Kandinsky and Malevich as polar opposites in abstract painting, and that he sided with Kandinsky, harshly criticizing Malevich (and “his pupil” El Lissitzky) for expressionism, categorizing Malevich just as Umansky did—especially since, of the two artists’ work, Puni’s own paintings were closer to those of Malevich than to Kandinsky. In his book Contemporary Art, dedicated to the memory of Chlebnikov, the first third of which included the text of the lecture, Puni pointed out that nonobjective painting originated not from Russia but from Germany (acknowledging French orphism as well), namely from Vasily Kandinsky, who, deeply embedded in the German art world, “understands the picture as a kind of washout of his individuality and holds geometric forms as the generalizations of an abstract spirituality.”42 Puni explained that Kandinsky’s abstract works are not flat, as there is space and depth in them, a clear distance between the foreground and the background, and declared that “Kandinsky is undoubtedly a great artist,” one

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whom Puni respected as an authority.43 As opposed to this—again hesitating to even recognize the term and using it with a hint of irony—“the painting that is called suprematism ( . . . ) was a kind of artistic proclamation [claiming that] painting must be logically purified ( . . . ) and has to end up in two dimensions instead of three.”44 Like Umansky, Puni also called suprematism “a kind of nihilism; the desire to start the entire art of painting from its embryonic forms all over again and then develop it in its own, so to speak, normal environment: the plane.”45 In a hostile, ironic tone Puni remarked that as far as he could remember, Malevich had refrained from all kinds of tricks such as one-point perspective in an effort to paint “naturally,” and not in an illusionistic way; still “what do we see afterwards? ( . . . ) a white background that does not communicate planarity to the viewer [and] flat, non-objective figures float in it. ( . . . ) Moreover, in the Malevich student Lissitzky’s works we find a blatant use of academic perspective that encourages us to think that he understands form also in the sense of academic art.”46

In what amounts to a rant against Malevich and suprematism, Puni made efforts to argue that suprematism equaled the “mechanization of creation”47 and systematically misused the set rules of abstract art. He granted that the first suprematist images, the Black Square and a few others, had “had great strength,” but insisted that everything that followed was nothing more than mechanical shifting and positioning of various elements of the compositions. Puni bitterly stated: “At that time, [non-objective art] was America, today it is a province of Saratov ( . . . ) degenerated into aestheticism.”48 Puni painstakingly dissected some of Malevich’s compositions in order to demonstrate that in spite of Malevich having intended his paintings to feature movement, they were chaotic and movement appeared only in isolated details rather than pervading and holding together the entire composition. His verdict was that all Malevich accomplished was “compositional individualism, the failure of a fundamental, organizational idea.”49 Puni’s talk was part of an internal, ongoing Russian discourse; however, delivered in Berlin, his views could not remain hermetically sealed from the German and the international art world.

“New Russian Art”: A Talk by Lissitzky, Berlin, December 1922 While Puni talked and wrote to a circle of Russian intellectuals in Russian, Lissitzky gave a talk on the new Russian art to an international audience in

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German,50 apologizing for his limited fluency in the language. Giving a detailed account of the new developments in Russian art, in particular suprematism, once again, with obvious intent, Lissitzky blurred the difference between Malevich and the constructivists, even if he had provided a few specifics of their concepts: Two groups claimed constructivism, OBMOKhU and UNOVIS. ( . . . ) The former group worked in material and space, the latter in material and plane. Both strove to attain the same result, namely the creation of the real object and of architecture. They are opposed to each other in their concepts of the practicality and utility of created things. Some members of the OBMOKhU group [ . . . ] went as far as a complete disavowal of art, and in their urge to be inventors, devoted their energies to pure technology. UNOVIS distinguished between the concept of functionality, meaning the necessity for the creation of new forms, and the question of direct serviceableness. They51 represented the view that the new form is the lever, which sets life in motion, if it is based on the suitability of the material and on economy. The new forms give birth to other forms which are totally functional.52

Such an explanation was not only confusing in a similar vein as Lissitzky’s article in Veshch was but also flew in the face of everything Lissitzky knew very well about these two groups, representing suprematism and constructivism, respectively. Was it the difference between “space” and “plane” that separated suprematism and OBMOKhU’s constructivism? Did “functionality” ever mean “the necessity for the creation of new forms”? Moreover, as will be demonstrated, Lissitzky displayed ambiguity in presenting his own suprematism-inspired proun works, relating them to both suprematism and constructivism—consistently with his previous denial of their differences. Listing UNOVIS as one of the groups that claimed to practice a version of constructivism was a stretch by all means. On the other hand, such a “consolidation” was instrumental in clearly reducing the number of the protagonists—for better or for worse—to two: Tatlin and Malevich. This was a strategic move to make sure that the audience, which was probably familiar with Tatlin’s Tower, a work of legendary status early on in Germany, would understand that Malevich and UNOVIS, along with the constructivists—whom, at this point, Lissitzky did not distinguish from productivists like Tatlin—were the two engines of contemporary art in Russia, allied with one another. As the quote demonstrates, Lissitzky attempted to point out some fine difference—but no conflict—between them.

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How he streamlined his narrative and adjusted it to the German audience’s preconceived ideas is also shown by his praise of Tatlin’s Tower in his Berlin talk as well as by reproducing the model’s image accompanied with Punin’s praise in the first issue of Veshch,53 although he had previously thought very differently of it. At a discussion about this model held at the Paul Cézanne Club in Moscow, on December 14, 1920, he voiced his dislike of Tatlin’s work. He wrote Malevich about his opinion that he expressed in the debate: [the construction demonstrated] that the synthesis of painting, sculpture, and architecture is self-deception, that its synthesis with utilitarianism is a childish lack of consideration and fiction, that the relationship with the material is pernicious, that the construction is aesthetic and artistic, and not creative, ( . . . ) and that for a whole series of reasons it is the sum total of all the mistakes of the past and the desire to correspond not to Venus but to modernity.54

Such dual take on Tatlin’s work was not shared with the German audience. It was an internal affair, an ongoing personal discourse between Malevich and El Lissitzky.

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7

The First Russian Exhibition in Berlin, 1922, and Its Reception

The First Russian Exhibition that opened in Berlin at the Van Diemen Gallery in October 1922 was long-awaited and was expected to triumphantly introduce the new art of the communist country. Curiosity was immense since Ivan Puni participated at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung (Great Berlin Art Exhibition) in the spring of 1922. He received some press coverage, if not always on a positive note. Both the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung1 and the Hamburger Illustrierte Zeitung2 published negative reviews about his exhibition. Aside from Kállai’s article on Lissitzky in the July 1922 issue of Das Kunstblatt, which introduced Lissitzky to the German public as creator of abstract compositions of geometric solids, derived from the free-floating suprematist shapes, and a brief mention of his journal Gegenstand as representative of the “Russian left wing,”3 there was hardly any discussion of the new Russian art in the West prior to October 1922. Few new Russian artworks were seen apart from those that a few artists exhibited in the Der Sturm gallery and the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung.

The History of the Exhibition The exhibition’s origins go back to 1918 when the Art Collegiums of Petrograd and Moscow sent an Appeal to various societies of progressive artists in Germany. The Russian artists first turn to their closest neighbors, their German colleagues, for counseling and exchange of information regarding artistic creation. As a practical measure to realize such an exchange we propose a congress of representatives of German and Russian artists that would be the first step towards a later World Conference.4

Peter Nisbet thinks5 that it was probably Kandinsky, in his capacity as head of the Moscow branch of IZO, who initiated this contact and may well have written the

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text, which is all the more likely by Kandinsky’s command of German as well as a sentence in the first paragraph of the Appeal which emphasizes the importance of “the new creative work that originated from shortly before the world-shattering,” a period that had been clearly Kandinsky’s and his Der blaue Reiter’s pre–First World War prime time, a triumphant era of his own achievements that he liked to bring to mind as well as to continue. Due to the efforts of his friend, artist and diplomat Ludwig Bähr, who was stationed in Moscow establishing contacts between German and Russian artists, steps were made to prepare a RussianGerman conference. Adolf Behne and Walter Gropius, however, who were also friendly with Bähr, suggested an exchange of exhibitions instead, on behalf of the Arbeitsrat.6 The preparations for this were suspended as Bähr was arrested in Lithuania in 1919 while escorting thirteen crates of artworks that were all confiscated. Relations between Germany and Russia cooled down throughout 1920, but after the bolshevik Party prevailed in the Civil War and then grappled with serious economic problems and a devastating famine, it approached Germany and the two countries signed a trade agreement in May 1921. The famine, and the goal to help it with the sale of artworks, was such an important reason behind the exhibition that one of its organizers was the Auslandskomittee zur Organisierung der Arbeiterhilfe für die Hungernden in Russland (International Workers’ Aid for Helping the Starving in Russia).7 The desire to establish good mutual relations was so obvious that already two months before the agreement, in March 1921, Kandinsky proposed a Russian art exhibition of new works. The proposal was so enthusiastically received by the Germans that the director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin Ludwig Justi offered the Kronprinzenpalast, the gallery’s fashionable venue for modern art, for housing the show.8 This suggestion was coordinated with the Soviet Foreign Ministry that authorized the official Russian support for the exhibition. This intention was communicated to the German government by Victor Kopp, Soviet plenipotentiary for prisoner of war affairs in Berlin, on March 31, 1921,9 within a month of Kandinsky’s initiative. This move was followed by a personal negotiation between Johannes Sievers of the German Foreign Office and Umansky, now an empowered Russian emissary. However, because of a general strike and armed riots that broke out in Germany that spring, a Soviet exhibition that would have been inevitably politically charged, was not altogether desirable, and the plan for the exhibition was put off once again until November of the same year, when Lunacharsky, on a visit to Berlin, personally raised the issue.10 This time it was accepted on the condition that “the show contain no propaganda, should not be officially organized by the bolshevik government, and should be subject to a German

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jury.”11 The exhibition was also expected to tour several cities in Germany and several European capitals, as well as New York.12 Although these rules were clear, the preparation of the exhibition was marred, as Nisbet says, “with the interplay between propaganda, commerce, diplomacy and art often difficult to disentangle from the available documents.”13 While preparations turned chaotic, a parallel initiative came from Willi Münzenberg, head of the International Workers’ Aid. Münzenberg proposed to set up a propaganda exhibition in Berlin to counter the cacophonic messages of the Russian émigré community in Berlin, whom he thought compromised the reputation of the new communist state. Münzenberg turned directly to Lenin, who secured 70 million rubles for this project, and Lunacharsky calculated about 5 million marks from sales at the show.14 Münzenberg, now in charge, acted rapidly and arranged several wagons to be loaded with artworks, only to be revealed, when unloading them in February 1922 in Berlin, that they were propaganda materials, not works of art. Since this violated the previous agreement, the show was cancelled altogether as of March 1922. As Nisbet points out, the organization of the exhibition was ultimately the direct result of the German-Russian Treaty of Rapallo, “the resulting special relationship, the spirit of Rapallo”15 that called for the realization of the original project, and NARKOMPROS hastily gathered artworks in Moscow and Petrograd. This did not happen to the satisfaction of the artists, however. Early in 1922, a representative of the Petrograd Society of Left-wing Artists, Nikolai Punin, IZO head David Shterenberg, and others wrote Lunacharsky to voice their concerns over the proposed art exhibit of contemporary Russian artists in Berlin. The works had been chosen by the Commissar of Enlightenment without the artists’ permission. Several artists had been dissatisfied with the choices. The society also wanted to express strong support for having the artists travel to Berlin with the exhibit. Their argument was that without the artists there to discuss their art, the art would be meaningless.16

Artists felt the need to provide their own interpretation of their artworks to the Berlin audience that was unfamiliar with the development of the various visual languages and their coded references to different concepts as well as the everchanging group dynamics of the new Russian art. On the only surviving photo we are presently familiar with, taken of the organizers of the exhibition, we see Shterenberg and Altman, representatives of IZO NARKOMPROS; Naum Gabo, who was in Berlin at the time and was one of the participants of the exhibition; and the previously mentioned David Maryanov from the Russian security agency CHEKA, in the company of Friedrich Adolf

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Lutz, who was present on behalf of the Van Diemen Gallery. Gabo’s role is not entirely clear, apart from his participation in the exhibition,17 while El Lissitzky, who is not on the photo, was nonetheless involved not only as a participant but also as designer of the catalog cover. According to the future architect Berthold Lubetkin, whose task was to unpack the exhibits, both Gabo and Lissitzky were present most of the time, although the principal decisions about hanging the works were made by Altman.18 Russian artists did not travel to Berlin, after all, to accompany the exhibition and interpret their artworks. The exhibition was not officially organized by the government of the RSFSR per the agreement with the Germans—but, in spite of rhetoric to the opposite, it was a political event on behalf of both countries, with catalog texts by David Shterenberg as head of the IZO NARKOMPROS, and Dr. Edwin Redslob, Reichskunstwart (Imperial Authority of Art Matters, equivalent to Minister of Art and Culture) in Germany. The exhibition itself, however, was neither bolshevik nor otherwise political propaganda, unless we take the RSFSR’s demonstrated claim to cultural continuity with prerevolutionary Russian art for a propaganda statement. A number of impressionist, postimpressionist, and realist works were on view, while the presence of the avant-garde was limited to just one room. Nisbet suggests that many factors must be considered regarding this preference: It was not only the demands of diplomacy, which influenced the selection of works. There were financial constraints as well. The exhibition was, after all, intended to raise money for famine relief (and the Soviets had inquired as early as September 1921 about the possibility of selling art in Germany). The works on view therefore, had to be available for sale, as well as be sellable. ( . . . ) The organizers in NARKOMPROS decided to draw heavily on works already owned by the state ( . . . ) One cannot argue that the overriding motive was to present the most representative exhibition with works of the highest possible quality. Amazingly, in his essay about the exhibition, published in Izvestiya on December 2, 1922, Lunacharsky himself admits the many shortcomings of the show [that were] wholly excused by [its] political and diplomatic success.19

Winfried Nerdinger points out that the Russian leadership had, in fact, reconsidered its preferences regarding the new art, as “a phase shift” was in place: the avant-garde, increasingly popular in the West as the art of the future, was officially already disapproved (although not yet banned) in Russia. Lunacharsky saw left-wing abstracts as being insufficient representatives of the new ideas for the wider public abroad. This change was particularly significant as some of

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the Russian artists like Gabo, Pevsner, or Medunetzky had already been living abroad, and several others returned to the Soviet Union only years later.20

The Selection of the Artworks The catalog of the First Russian Exhibition lists 594 items, 25 of them porcelain and other applied art pieces.21 Although Nisbet warns “against attempts to over-interpret the Van Diemen exhibition [as it] cannot be used to draw conclusions about such questions as the state’s view of its avant-garde artists or the relative strength of various tendencies,”22 the Berlin audience could not but take the exhibition at face value, as an actual report on the state of Russian art, especially the latest trends, the presentation of which had been anticipated with so much curiosity. Shterenberg’s “Foreword” in the catalog acknowledged these expectations: “Our goal with this exhibition is to offer to Western Europe every proper information concerning the creative achievements of Russian art during the years of the war and the revolution.”23 This statement explained the conservative character of the majority of the exhibits—a direct message from the Soviet officialdom to the German viewers at the time when the realist artists were already organizing their group against the avant-garde in both countries. In fact, Shterenberg confused the reader by pointing out that “only works by those various art tendencies are exhibited that stepped actively forward in the most recent times. The works of the left-wing groups demonstrate the laboratory work that has been going ahead in the course of the artistic renewal.”24 “Left-wing,” in this statement, referred to loyal communists as well as revolutionaries only—but how would the German visitor sort this out? In fact, as Shterenberg goes on to mention, the exhibition included works by members of the Sojuz russkikh khudozhnikov (Society of Russian Artists), an organization of older artists and the Mir iskusstva (World of Art), including symbolists, Art Nouveau painters, and impressionists, largely outnumbering the cubists, suprematists, and constructivists. The untitled catalog essay by Redslob and an entry by German left-wing journalist Arthur Holitscher, as well as an unsigned “Introduction,” are, if possible, even more confusing. Since the latter is not signed, its author was only guessed at until Naum Gabo identified him as Shterenberg, who probably did not want to sign two contributions in the same catalog.25 The “Introduction” lists the traditional art groups represented in the exhibition without sharing much substantial information about them. Suprematism is only vaguely explained, and the list of its representatives is

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bewildering as it includes Malevich, Kliun, Rozanova, Exter, Lissitzky, Drevin, Mansurov, and “in some works,” Rodchenko. Moreover, according to this text “Kandinsky considers himself to share the same outlook, albeit he expresses himself in a different way of non-objective painting”26—another stretch in the account deliberately allowing to confuse Kandinsky’s expressionist painting with Malevich’s suprematist geometry, on the shaky grounds that both artists had a fundamentally metaphysical outlook. According to Shterenberg, the dividing line between them was nonobjectivity versus figurative painting—a claim that casually blurs the more complex differences between the various nonfigurative directions that saw each other as polar opposites. Constructivism is mentioned naming Tatlin as its single representative whereas, in fact, he was not even part of that group. Shterenberg mentions Tatlin’s “Tower” as a “transition” piece to his own brand name of productivism, whereas it was exactly that particular work that did not fit that category. Shterenberg also characterizes Rodchenko as an artist who “gave up the canvas for production art”27 but, at the same time, “who is represented by strong suprematist and constructive works”28—a double mistake, as Rodchenko was neither productivist nor suprematist, not to mention that considering their sharp opposition, it was highly inappropriate to connect the term “suprematist” to “constructivist” with “and.” No wonder that even the informed Berlin art critics who read this text for more understanding were unable to appropriately sort out the new trends in Russian art and their representatives’ respective orientation and loyalties. Informed viewers could also experience that the exhibition, where the presence of contemporary art was reduced, did not square with either Lissitzky’s account of the new art in Russia as presented in Veshch nor with Umansky’s description of the subject. Umansky included many reproductions of medieval and nineteenth-century artists’ works as relevant tradition, while Lissitzky, focusing on the latest art only, omitted introducing such influential painters of the recent past as Arkhipov, Kustodiev, Krimov, or Korovin and others who prominently figured at the First Russian Exhibition. Berliners expected the exhibition to be a sampling of the art of the revolution, firsthand information about the latest currents in the art of the revolutionary state that would clarify the many legends and words-of-mouth that circulated in the West. Presenting the young revolutionary art as a brief coda to the bulk of traditional artworks with a wrong identification of directions was in no way helpful in informing the German public or the international visitors about the actual state of the new art of Soviet Russia, and the confusion it caused was reflected not only in the show’s many reviews but in the later writings on the Russian avant-garde as well.

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The First Russian Exhibition in Berlin showed all the traces of the disorganization, adjustments, and compromises that had paved the way to it. Progressive artists were limited to less than one-fifth of the entire show. Reduced in number, the works of the avant-garde were not representative enough to reveal the great variety of the new art, nor the alliances or the conflicts still brewing and developing in Moscow and Petrograd. The exhibition did not inform the audience about the specific features of such different trends as constructivism, productivism, suprematism, cubism, cubo-futurism, and other short-lived trends listed by Stepanova, such as Primitivism or Color-Dynamism.29 The Van Diemen Gallery’s exhibition space presented the objects without the rich context in which they were deeply embedded back in Russia: the whole of the past and present of Russian culture, religion, poetry, theater, politics, and the ongoing public discourse on related social and cultural issues. The writings in the catalog included mostly formal generalities, marking the significance of the event. This exhibition, as will be further demonstrated, greatly contributed to blurring the image of the various new directions of the new Russian art and led to the emergence of the general view in Berlin that all new Russian artworks were variations of one and the same kind of modernist geometric abstraction. Malevich’s suprematist paintings were shown outside Russia for the first time in the Van Diemen Gallery. The catalog lists five paintings of his: the cubist Knife Grinder (1912–1913), three paintings titled Suprematism: Black Square (1915), Black Circle (1915), and Black Cruciform Planes (1915), and White on White (1918). A book cover design was listed among the prints, too. Vasilii Rakitin suggested that Malevich chose pictures in an attempt to offer an introductory, emblematic UNOVIS image in the West. Rakitin points out the conspicuous exclusion of Red Square (1915), which “at the time was hanging in Mikhail Matyushin’s house in Petrograd. There would have been no problem in borrowing it for the show, but Red Square was not important to universal UNOVIS,”30 since, as we know, Malevich validated the Black Square as the emblem of the group. The catalog also includes two paintings titled Suprematism by Kliun and Rozanova, respectively, one with the same title by Alexander Drevin, and one, erroneously so titled, by Rodchenko. Lissitzky had four drawings and three paintings on display.

Reception and Major Press Reviews of the First Russian Exhibition “This exhibition is a disappointment,” Paul Westheim started his review in Das Kunstblatt, adding: “and at the same time it is one of the most interesting artistic

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surveys that we have had for years.”31 Westheim voiced the dissatisfaction of many who expected the show to be the triumphant display of the new Russia and its groundbreaking new art. In spite of the restrained presence of revolutionary art, Westheim still focused on it with scant mention of the rest and had a strong grasp of the issue at the core of the show: the sweeping radicalism of the new. Disregarding or ignoring the role of traditional Russian art and seeing in the exhibition what he had been intent to see, the avant-gardes, Westheim writes: “Revolutionary Russia rejects all tradition on principle: it is a virgin territory for art, ruled by the idea of building everything anew, from scratch. ( . . . ) This instills into creative work a freedom and audacity unknown in Europe for centuries past.”32 Comparing the new Russian works to the less radical Western progressive art, he expressed fascination with ( . . . ) this sudden fanaticism, this total incapacity for moderation, this tendency to take everything to extremes ( . . . ) Take Malevich, for example. He is a great believer in the need to “simplify.” So, Malevich simplifies. More and more is removed from the picture area. First, of course, all representation of objects. Then color. All that remains is a single contrast between black and white: an abstract form, a black quadrilateral or a black circle on white ground. And even this is not the ultimate simplification. Malevich then dispenses with black and paints his celebrated work, White on White. On a white ground there is nothing but white. Simplification has been taken to such an extreme that nothing remains within the white frame but an empty expanse of white. This takes intellectual experimentation as far as it can go.33

Westheim harshly contradicted Umansky’s judgment of White on White as being extreme nihilism and reconstructed Malevich’s road to reductive abstraction without having known his previous work, as there was no way for him to see it. Constructions were also indicative of a major shift in the concept and practice of art, and, as Westheim attempted to clarify the actual novelty of this exhibition, these constructions were subject to a similarly close, analytical scrutiny: Tatlin and others following him have started to build their constructions with real materials: iron, sheet metal. This, again, is a negation of painting, and in its way a tangible proof of the “hatred of painting” that I once identified as a recurrent phenomenon in the latest generation of artists. It is work that craves to be treated as “engineering,” and yet ultimately it is neither more nor less than the “romance of engineering.” In the course of all this conceptual experimentation and exploration, the two-dimensional pictorial space became suspect, on the grounds that it involved an illusion. The cry went up for pictorial space to be developed into real space.34

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Concerning the perception of this art in Berlin, Westheim was compelled to point out that the Russian artworks of the new artists had nothing to do with art in the way that art was understood in Europe. Seen from that perspective, he found the works utterly primitive, even barbarian, but then this brought him back, once again, with amazing sensitivity for someone unfamiliar with zaum and pictorial alogism, to underline the audacity of the artworks: “those ‘Barbarians’ of the east, for their part, have in mind the possibility, indeed the necessity, of giving art a new Archaic Period. They see it as their mission to set about their work afresh, empty-handed. ( . . . ) Artists are still wrestling with basic grammatical concepts; language itself is still a thing of the far distant future.”35 Perceptive to the radicalism of the new Russian art, Westheim did not get carried away, though. He said that it was too soon to see what this art would become. Consistently with the Russian artists who wanted to be present next to their artworks in order to interpret them, Westheim said that this exhibition showed mostly brainwork. With the danger, he added, of falling back into dogmatism or even scholasticism, the Russian artists have more to say than to show ( . . . ) their theories and options, manifestoes and programs, arguments and theses, have more to teach us than an exhibition like this one. ( . . . ) The composition White on White means nothing as an “image,” and yet, ( . . . ) there is much to be learned from an intellectual situation that leads logically to this.36

Reminding his readers of the necessity of fathoming the concepts behind the artworks, Westheim’s review was exceptionally fine-honed, sorting out the artistic and intellectual problems, and pointing out the historical significance of the moment in Russian art, as documented by the exhibition. He acknowledged the radicalism of suprematism but expressed dismay over its crossing the boundaries of what he could still conceive of as art. In spite of some confusion about who belonged to which tendency, Westheim clearly pointed to suprematism and constructivism as the two poles of the new art, the two diametrically opposed strategies to surpass “painting.” It was on this same note that the committed left-wing critic Adolf Behne wrote as well. He put most contemporary artists of the show under the umbrella term “constructivism,” but clearly understood the radicalism of the new Russians and asked if, in the light of these new works, “the image as such can continue to supply us with an accepted, fruitful area of work, [as] the image itself is in crisis—not because a couple of painters thought this up but because the modern individual has experienced changes in intellectual structure that alienate one

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from the image.”37 Behne did not engage in a discussion about individual artists but, with a touch of utopian thinking and lagging behind the actual developments, he pointed out the superiority of the Russians. Consistently with his leftism and expectations, he praised both the artists and the officialdom that “would so frankly embrace art, the times, and all that is of current vitality.”38 According to Behne, German art was at least ten years behind the Russians. He admired the Russian artists for their compelling sense of history and for being part of the ongoing communist experiment of Russia. Many artists and critics made the pilgrimage to Berlin to see this exhibition. The Serbo-Croat avant-garde poet Branko Ve Poljanski39 turned his review into a pro-Russian diatribe. A memento! What these Russian artists have created so far, untouched by European influences, is of the utmost importance for European art and culture. The strongest representative of this independent, non-European Russianism is none other than Malevich. His most basic colors are used to construct a form, which is sharp, clear, mobile, and eternal. This form has no object as its model. He has reached the highest level of pure creation in his elemental suprematist painting Red Square.40

As already mentioned, no such painting by Malevich was exhibited. Poljanski must have meant Rodchenko’s painting Rote Farbe (Red Color), catalogued under No. 166, one of his monochromes painted in 1921,41 which happened to be square-shaped. While Behne mistakenly included Malevich in a nonexistent group, “the constructivists, splendidly represented by Malevich, Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Tatlin, Altman, and Gabo,”42 Poljanski followed his own thoughts when identifying the painter of Red Color as Malevich. Also deliberately, and following his own imaginary ideal, he identified Malevich as “An artist, mathematician, a physicist, a painter, a sculptor, a revolutionary anti-bourgeois—a Russian without a soul—a Russian with spirit,” who, as opposed to the artists of old who had belonged to religion, creates art “for factories!”43 Such looseness in identifying trends and artists and prioritizing the author’s own concepts occurred in almost every account of the exhibition and created, over time, a haze around this exhibition and around the Russian avant-garde, which lasted for decades. Once Malevich—or another artist—made a strong impression on a reviewer, the latter was bent on creating a narrative around that figure, lining up a deliberate selection of others as his followers or adherents. Poljanski even took the liberty of offering the following description: “Besides suprematists and constructivists (who are the same but just a tiny bit different!),

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who are the strongest and the most Russian at this exhibition, there is also a whole pleiade of Cézanneists, Van Goghists, Hodlerists, cubists, Picassoists, Braqueists, expressionists, Impressionists, depressionists, dadaists, and others,”44 which is noteworthy not so much for characterizing Poljanski, but because such views were the only source of knowledge about the newest Russian art for many readers of the art press. Alfréd Kemény who, as mentioned, had firsthand knowledge of the conceptual differences between the constructivists of the Moscow INKhUK and the suprematists clearly sided with constructivism in his review, as “the correct path to take.”45 In his disciplined ideological interpretation published in Hungarian in the Vienna-based communist journal Egység (Unity), both suprematism and constructivism had great potential to lead “art and society alike from the isolation of individualism to the universality of the collective,” although suprematism had, according to him, already slipped away and was on its way to becoming irrelevant: Suprematism has tremendous historical significance, [but it] has become as obsolete as futurism, which it is a continuation of. During the second stage of its evolution, instead of further developing the architectonic potential of the square as a planar form (as Mondrian did in Holland, independently of, and at the same time as, Malevich, when he started out from the square as the simplest, most objective and least psychically loaded form), suprematism turned away from the laws of two-dimensionality and, starting out from the white ground of the picture as infinite space, endeavored to create the illusion of the dynamic conflict of cosmic energies. As such, the dematerialized, illusionistic metaphysics of suprematism differentiate it from the objectively constructive demands of contemporary life that will find their appropriate artistic expression in the collective urban architecture of the future.46

Anticipating some of the 1960s concepts of urban architecture and collectively owned urban space, what Kemény really wanted to see in “post-suprematist Russian art”47—a category that resonated in Berlin and later in Warsaw—was something new, transcending both suprematism and constructivism. This was consistent with Lissitzky and van Doesburg’s aspiration to transcend their respective masters Malevich and Mondrian, proving themselves, with due respect to their elders, to better understand the latest directions in culture, the new technologies, and the new spirit of pragmatism and design. Hungarian poet, artist, and editor Lajos Kassák traveled to Berlin from his Vienna exile specifically to see the Russian exhibition. He found that suprematism was “the first consciously new step taken by young Russian

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artists,”48 which “opened the gates toward progress.”49 This opinion, voiced in Hungarian, due to which it did not directly reach the German-speaking public, was soon to become the general consensus in Berlin: Malevich was seen as a great initiator, and constructivism became solidified as the true art of the future. It was, therefore, Malevich who came to be seen as the face of the new Russian art, and “suprematism,” “productivism,” and “constructivism” were terms used alternately, more or less as synonyms. Kállai expressed utter disappointment at the exhibition in the article he sent to Vienna to the left-wing Hungarian dadaist journal Akasztott ember (Hanged Man), edited by Kassák’s communist brother-in-law Sándor Barta: The most serious among the several shortcomings of the Russian exhibition in Berlin was the fact that it refused to take any stand whatsoever and settled for providing a neutral survey of the most diverse visual objects, much to the delight of bourgeois democrats and aesthetes. It gave no indication that it had originated in a country going through the painful struggle of attaining communism, from where it was dropped into the midst of the luxurious bourgeois environment of Unter den Linden. Those few little neat Soviet posters in the impressionist style and one or two Soviet emblems on silk or china had the effect of awkward beauty spots modestly hiding among the hundreds of drawings and paintings.50

Kállai, probably unaware of the expected use of the income the exhibition was hoped to generate for helping the starving in Russia, criticized the minimal presence of the left-wing avant-gardism at the exhibition: It would seem that Lunacharsky and the others did not want to scare away the bourgeois viewers of the exhibition. This would explain why they refrained from any kind of overt revolutionary content. But I still find it incomprehensible that this Russian exhibition has overlooked the problem of proletarian art ( . . . ) even the slightest allusion to the much-debated central issues of proletkult. ( . . . ) Even the concept of an as yet nonexistent proletarian art, as the unknown quantity “x,” would have been an important factor in this exhibition, if the introductory texts in the catalogue had paid some attention to the demands, prospects, and obstructions presented by this concept. ( . . . ) Here was the opportunity to give an account of the results at a public forum available to all of Europe. It is greatly to be regretted that this opportunity has not been seized.51

Proletkult—a narrative, programmatically realist art, easily understandable to all regardless of the level of education—and the politics and aesthetics of the art of social progress were of paramount importance to the strategies of left-wing artists, critics, art forums, and organizations, even if they were deeply split by a

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number of fault lines regarding their views and programs. At the time of the First Russian Exhibition, the Hungarians in Berlin and Vienna, scathed by the defeat of the 1919 Hungarian Commune, were to the left of even the left-wing Berlin artists and art critics, so they were more disappointed about the Russian show than the Germans and judged the exhibition more harshly. Kállai, however, recognized the importance of faktura (material texture) of the Russians stating that their work with material and surface texture was exceptional and surpassed those artworks that were “only optically organized.”52 Berlin-based international constructivism tended to prefer the future-bound combination of elegant geometry and the real-life, real-material approach of the constructivists as anticipation of a regulated, egalitarian, and democratic future social order. Nevertheless, Malevich was recognized as one of the most significant artists of the Russian avant-garde at the First Russian Exhibition, even if he was introduced there as a painter and, to a lesser extent, porcelain designer, his architectons and writings still unknown. His early writings on suprematism, such as From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism and Suprematism 34 Drawings, had not been translated by the time of the exhibition, nor were any of his writings published until 1924, 1925, and 1927, respectively.53 In spite of his critique, Westheim invited David Shterenberg to contribute to Das Kunstblatt an authentic Russian interpretation of the exhibition. Shterenberg’s article “The Artistic Situation in Russia”54 was published in the same issue of the journal as Westheim’s own, correcting the latter on several points. Shterenberg took great pains to explain the exhibition’s proportional coverage of old and new art. First of all, he referred to the palpable presence of “official art also in the West, as well as in Russia”55 beside the avant-gardes; then he called attention to the importance of many Russian artists who, even if radically modern, “did not give up the true tradition of Russian art [and] while the Western artists considered Cézanne as their master, they turned to the old icons of Novgorod ( . . . ) to find the foundations of the Russian art of the present.”56 He interpreted the square as a negative statement, referring to Malevich, Rozanova, and other artists’ interpretation of it in their written works as the rejection of everything that had happened in painting before: reducing the painting to a square, “in their negation of the past they drew all the logical consequences of this negation.”57 Destruction of the past in the name of anarchism had been the precondition of building a future for Marinetti and the Italian futurists as well as the Hungarian Kassák and, as we saw, the equally anarchist-leaning Russian cubo-futurists. Shterenberg, however, clearly on behalf of the Soviet officialdom, expressed confidence that the suprematists would soon understand that destruction of the

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old is not sufficient for the construction of the new. If they did not engage in the constructive work of the ongoing revolution, such artworks as Tatlin’s cornercounter-reliefs which, according to him, make only superficial use of metal and other materials, might become irrelevant as “pure ornamental art.”58 This was a strong statement, amounting to an insult: “ornamental” and “decorative” meaning bourgeois, past-bound, useless, and unnecessary. Such reservations served as an explanation for the limited number of radically modern artworks in the Van Diemen Gallery. Shterenberg mentions the constructivists as being hesitant between aesthetic and pragmatic creation but does not clearly take their side. He does not name a dominant direction in Russian art, stating that there are a number of directions that fight one another, but does not specify these. When he names representatives of suprematism, constructivism, cubism, impressionism, and abstraction, he gives a very difficult-to-follow road map of the Russian avant-garde, only fostering further confusion about it. The fundamental problem of Shterenberg’s article is the attempt to balance between easel painting and utilitarian object-making, as well as between Soviet officialdom, radically innovative Russian artists, and the supposed Western views. Forgetting that the Russian Exhibition was meant to be a nonpolitical event, Shterenberg ends up writing on a repeated diplomatic note, underlining that with the Russians’ first step in establishing contacts with the West, the next step in mutual relations is expected from the other party: the Western artists. In light of the fact that the First Russian Exhibition was the result of joint efforts between the two countries, rather than Russia’s only, this statement has an awkward ring to it. As far as van Doesburg was concerned, the First Russian Exhibition alienated him from Russian art as well as from the Soviet Union. Having seen the exhibition, van Doesburg dramatically changed his original, unconditionally positive expectations of Soviet Russia. He was eager to see the exhibition, as a letter to Antony Kok dated a few weeks after its opening indicates.59 Upon attending it, he saw the great number of realist, impressionist, and postimpressionist artworks as a demonstration of reverence for the past, whereas he, like many other viewers, expected the rejection of that past tradition in favor of a celebration of the spirit of radical innovation. Van Doesburg anticipated the revolutionary country to proudly identify with her new art and exhibit exclusively revolutionary works. He may have been informed about the NEP—Novaia Economicheskaia Politika, or New Economic Policy—introduced in Soviet Russia in 1921 out of necessity, compromising the idea of the egalitarian communist society for the sake of a somewhat controlled form of capitalist market economy. Referring to this state of affairs, van Doesburg closed his letter to Kok on a disillusioned note:

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“In Russia, via state capitalism, a private capitalism of the worst kind is being formed! A bolshevist Russia only existed as a fantasy. The truth of the matter is that everything is being rebuilt on the old foundations!”60 Thus Russia was no longer that desirable new world of the future for van Doesburg which it had been in 1919; and this, too, may have affected his decreasing enthusiasm for his Russian friends and colleagues, and the Russian avant-garde altogether. Probably not satisfied with the coverage of the new Russian art by Shterenberg, Westheim commissioned Ivan Puni to write an article in order to continue the discussion about the First Russian Exhibition in the German press. Published in the summer of 1923 in Das Kunstblatt,61 Puni criticizes the Western requirement—or so he understands—that artists have to consistently work in one and the same direction throughout their career while, as he states, they have an inner dynamic that compels them to change style and direction at will. He coins the term “constructive naturalism”62 and strikes a hostile chord with regard to van Doesburg, mentioning “the dilettant revue De Stijl.”63 Surveying the reception of the First Russian Exhibition, it stands out that in spite of the confusion and the limited amount of information it offered, Malevich and the concept of constructivism dominated the general image it gave. All the recognition, reservations and disappointments considered, the exhibition may have reduced enthusiasm for Soviet Russia but kept the curiosity in the new Russian art alive.

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Respectfully Challenging the Master Lissitzky and Malevich

Since Malevich had provided Lissitzky with a new, quasi-theoretically as well as politically supported geometric vocabulary that offered a solution to Lissitzky’s existential dilemma in 1919, Malevich had grown into a father figure for Lissitzky, who, his admiration notwithstanding, had to grapple with Malevich’s work in order to stand his own ground. Lissitzky increasingly saw Malevich as a precursor rather than a peer. This struggle remained an undercurrent in Lissitzky’s creative work in the early 1920s while he lived in Germany. Having adopted suprematism, he also modified it. Lissitzky challenged Malevich’s concepts and artistic practice while doing his best to introduce Malevich in the West between 1922 and 1924. Harold Bloom’s theory about the “anxiety of influence”1 explores many previously hidden channels through which one artist contributes to the formation of another, and reveals the duality of indebtedness and the will to self-assertion behind the lasting wrestle with the precursor.

A Suprematist Tale of Two Squares: Surpassing Malevich In his proun paintings Lissitzky architecturally organized Malevich’s white, bottomless void replacing his flat geometric shapes with virtually threedimensional geometric solids. This modification was, in Bloom’s terms, a “corrective movement”2 to suprematism: a polemic against Malevich’s freefloating flat shapes. Lissitzky’s architectural vision, often including a narrative, collage technique, photographic details, or life-size reality among other things, manifestly differed from Malevich’s suprematism. Lissitzky asserted himself as an artist with architectural and engineering expertise that informed his painted works.

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Malevich did not point out any symbolic difference between the black and red squares in 1915 when he first painted and exhibited both motifs. It was only during the ideologically and strategically charged UNOVIS era in Vitebsk in 1919–1920 that this color symbolism was first invested with meaning. The first UNOVIS flier included an address to the group members signed by the “Art Committee of UNOVIS,” which declared: “Red teaches people a new way, and we learn the creation of a new art. Youth of the west, east, and the south, go to the red pole of the new earth, because there is the flag of the new art.”3 The same flier includes the already quoted appeal: “Have the overthrow of the old world carved in the palm of your hands! Wear the black square as the sign of world economy!”4 “Draw the Red Square in your studios as the sign of world revolution in the arts!”5 A dualism and a hierarchy of the two colors appear here: the youth is suggested to have a physical connection with the black square and are called to display it as a sign of their community, even a cultic code, while the red square belonged in the studio as a symbol of the revolution. As Shatskikh points out, “only Lissitzky employed the red square as an emblem of UNOVIS (in his design for its seal). Malevich and the true UNOVIS suprematists always considered the black square ( . . . ) to be the symbol of UNOVIS.”6 This remark makes an important distinction between Lissitzky and the “true UNOVIS suprematists,” raising the question, where exactly did Lissitzky stand within UNOVIS and within the Russian avant-garde generally, and whose views was he representing in Germany? And, if Malevich proposed the Black Square as the sign that UNOVIS members were to wear on the palm of their hands and on the cuff of their jackets, was the Red Square likewise Lissitzky’s deliberate choice for an UNOVIS symbol, marking the group’s close ties to the revolution? Lissitzky’s suprematist Tale of Two Squares addresses this dilemma. The booklet was, in Lissitzky’s words, constructed in Vitebsk in 1920 but published only in Berlin and then in De Stijl in 1922. Tale of Two Squares was, after the invention of proun, his first articulate, coded dispute with Malevich’s work, narrated in images charged with symbolic meaning. In it, Lissitzky reached back to his former practice of creating children’s books, but this time he was also the author rather than merely the illustrator of the book. The concept of harnessing the suprematist imagery for a narrative by using compositional elements as characters and story-building is fundamentally opposed to Malevich’s abstraction in which there was no room for narrative, on the contrary: it had been, as previously mentioned, the art of “pure sensation.” Thus, Tale of Two

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Squares is, indeed, applied suprematism narrating the ultimate future victory of a new world that would feature elements of both suprematism and proun. Malevich interpreted the black square for UNOVIS as symbol of “world economy,”7 a site for global energies “racing towards a single center” and “towards a policy of unity,”8 calling UNOVIS members to wear the Black Square as a badge of a tribal insignia rather than just a symbol. The Black Square bore the color of anarchism, too, to which Malevich and his cubo-futurist poet friends had been committed to at the time of its creation. The color red, on the other hand, chosen by Lissitzky for UNOVIS’s emblem, was explicitly the color of Communism. The transparency of its meaning worked against the quintessential mystery of the Black Square, which was once regarded as “a royal infant” and “the first step of pure creation in art.”9 Now the emblem of a movement, long gone were the times when Malevich announced: “The face of my Square cannot become merged with a single master or age”10 (see Figure 8.1, a–g). Lissitzky’s Tale, a suprematist-communist cartoon, further simplified the implications of both squares and their respective colors: he cast the red square in

Figure 8.1  El Lissitzky: Tale of Two Squares, 1922. Photo Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (930030) © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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the role of the positive, world-changing communist of the future and the black square, its counterpart, in the role of the predecessor representing the past: the symbol of the old world that is being overthrown in this narrative. The active “hero” of the tale is “the red square of the world revolution,” which distinguishes itself from the black by actively transforming and recoloring the world. Suprematist Tale of Two Squares, as several authors have observed, was an initiative to create the international visual language of the future.11 It addressed children, the generation of the future. The Tale’s simple neutral geometric idiom and brief “story” embodied the prototype of a new, universal narrative. There is rhythm and movement in the sequence; indeed, a choreography; and cinematic vision in the alternation of close-ups, wide shot-type compositions, and various vantage points throughout the altogether six-scene book,12 the narrative of which is strikingly reminiscent of Victory over the Sun,13 re-performed in Vitebsk by UNOVIS in 1920, at the time of Lissitzky’s “construction” of this booklet. The plot is simple. The Red Square, a superior power, arrives from the cosmos in the company of the Black Square and triumphs over the old, disorderly, blackcolored system on earth by disrupting, reconstructing, and recoloring it red. The Black Square, having witnessed the transformation of the chaotic black world into a clearly organized and regulated new red one, recedes back into the distance while the Red Square proceeds forward and directs its motion toward the viewer, covering the now red world, as if “stamping” it. The fourth “scene,” where the Red Square visibly disrupts the old realm, appears to be a “square”-version of the off-stage scene in Act Two of the opera, in which the sun is defeated, and the old world is destroyed. Lissitzky’s fifth “scene” is the vision of the red, upright world of the future featuring the well-organized modern architecture, with the “old” black square serving as its ground in an optimistic contrast to the ambiguous last scene of Victory over the Sun. There is an UNOVIS emblem—a red square inscribed into a white circle—on the final page of the book as identification with “world revolution”. Lissitzky also used the red square separated from the black one to mark the “New Man” in his 1923 Victory over the Sun portfolio (see Figure 8.2), confirming red as the true color of the communist future. In the light of this symbolism, the Tale narrates a historical-political rivalry between two lookalike squares “who” turn out not to be equal: the black square represents the original suprematist element while the red square stands for the new, UNOVIS idea, apparently suggesting that even Malevich’s own UNOVIS has outgrown its founder’s original concepts. In this context, the old-world Black Square is overwritten by the newer, fast-paced developments of history. It is

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Figure 8.2  El Lissitzky: “New Man,” from Figurinen Cabinet Victory over the Sun, 1923. Photo Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (89-F15) © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

gently defeated—not destroyed, not even offended, just proven to belong to a former phase of development and left behind—by the new, energetic, young Red Square. That is: Malevich is gently and reverentially posited into the past, surpassed by Lissitzky, man of the future. Malevich’s own focus on the iconic black quadrilateral of suprematism at the First Russian Exhibition in Berlin thus seemed to confirm the interpretation by El Lissitzky, his friend, follower, and rival. By way of the radical, suggestive, and futuristic contents of Tale of Two Squares, Lissitzky positioned himself as a modernizer, a man of the new world versus Malevich whom, by contrast, he positioned—albeit with admiration and due respect—as archaic, a man of the past.

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Proun Room, 1923, as a Further Riposte Lissitzky’s Proun Room,14 a real-space installation at the 1923 Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung held in a large exhibition hall near Berlin’s Lehrter Bahnhof (today’s Central Railway Station), also demonstrated, among its many other pursuits, Lissitzky’s surpassing of Malevich. Malevich also had plans to work in a three-dimensional, actual space rather than on canvas. He sketched out the design of “a wall, a surface, of a whole room, or a whole apartment painted over in the suprematist system,” in Vitebsk in 1919.15 Furthermore, to transcend the flat surface of paintings and extend the physicality of his work into an actual, three-dimensional space, Malevich started to create three-dimensional “planits” and “architectons” in 1921–1922. Lissitzky’s Proun Room, an actual space in which the visitor could walk along the geometric compositions mounted on the walls, was dramatically more “real” than Malevich’s “new painterly realism,” where it was the painted surface that Malevich considered “a real, living form.”16 Proun Room occupied actual space in which one could move around, unlike Malevich’s model-size, sculptural “architectons.” Proun Room was four-dimensional, as time was also a factor in walking through the area it occupied; however, it was an exhibit rather than an actual functional space, which is why Lissitzky called it a “demonstration room.” That is, Lissitzky’s views of the “real” were close to the ideas of the constructivists during their “laboratory phase” when they realized their ideas by creating objects that were not actually functional or utilitarian. Proun Room was not only a critique of suprematism by superseding it in conquering actual space. It was also a step toward constructivism as well as toward similar contemporary Western developments of working in real space. Lissitzky may have seen inspiring examples in Berlin. Painter Erich Buchholz redesigned his apartment on the Herkules Ufer in 1922, turning it into a modernist artwork of a living room that doubled as his studio space which Lissitzky visited many times. Buchholz explained that he proceeded “from the walls through reliefs attached to them into plasticity and architecture”17 to create an interior he called “gegenwartsraum” [sic],18 the “room of the present.” Buchholz thought that it had informed Proun Room19 which may have been another reason why Lissitzky emphasized its experimental, “demonstration room” character. Buchholz claimed to have surpassed the so-called dimension of styles, thus creating a “nonaesthetic room” where the planes of the walls, the furniture, and the decks were interrelated in such

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a way as to produce “a room where one can live, not only rent.” Buchholz’s room as well as Proun Room were not unlike some geometricized De Stijl interiors that Vilmos Huszar designed around 1918–1921, creating artistically composed bedrooms and living rooms. Buchholz used blue and green colors for the walls and mounted abstract compositions on them, including a small wooden sphere with interconnecting rods, to which Lissitzky’s similar unit on Wall 2 of Proun Room may have been indebted. Not as ambitious or conceptually supported as the De Stijl interiors, Buchholz’s studio was nonetheless the first realization of an abstract real-life interior in Berlin which introduced the idea that one’s living room at home could be turned into an artwork as a spatial composition. By constructing Proun Room and showing it in a well-attended exhibition, which garnered a great deal of publicity in thriving Berlin, Lissitzky could prove himself to be in the first line of progress. He made viewers walk along dynamic suprematist-style motifs on the walls, so they were not entirely passive spectators anymore. Moving in the room, they could actively change their viewpoints and perception of the visual motifs as well as their sense of the space. Further Berlin examples for real-space artworks included Puni’s previously mentioned exhibition design in his 1921 exhibition at Der Surm, which included compositions of geometric shapes hanging from the ceiling, and Vasily Kandinsky’s designs for the Juryfreie Kunstschau (Jury-Free Art Exhibition) in Berlin in 1922.20 Puni’s taking the exhibition out into the neighboring streets on opening night, having friendly visitors walk in geometric costumes around the gallery, thus integrating urban space into his work, anticipates the 1960s urban movements’ concept of the city as a collective and potentially artistic space, to be inhabited and possessed, such as the “psychogeographical” ideas of the Situationist International. Kandinsky, who frequently designed spaces in the form of stage sets for theater, described a Russian peasant house he had seen, where “The table, the benches, the great stove, ( . . . ) the cupboards, and every other object was covered with brightly colored, elaborate ornaments. ( . . . ) In these magical houses I experienced something I have never encountered again since. They taught me to move within the picture, to live in the picture.”21 Lissitzky was not a follower of Kandinsky, whom he considered a “German Romanticist”22 rather than a Russian modernist, but he was certainly attentive to the works that his fellow Russian artists Puni and Kandinsky created and conceptualized in actual space. Work in real space was a cutting-edge concept in the early 1920s involving

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movement, pointing farther ahead than Malevich’s three-dimensional “planits” and “architectons,” which were static objects. Moving from the picture plane into space was the new sensation in the segment of the Berlin art world that most interested Lissitzky. Published in various periodicals including De Stijl, fiery declarations, new materials, and the new genre of kinetic sculpture set the tone for, and laid out the principles of, the new art. De Stijl became a particularly integral part of the German art scene while van Doesburg was staying in Weimar in 1921–1922 converting a group of Bauhaus students to his concepts of a rigorous geometric formal vocabulary. Shortly before Lissitzky’s arrival in Berlin, Raoul Hausmann, Puni, Arp, and Moholy-Nagy published Aufruf zur elementaren Kunst (Appeal for Elementary Art) in De Stijl, which was addressed to the “artists of the world!”23 Elementare Kunst, by choice of the term, was an announcement of solidarity with van Doesburg’s elementarism. It was defined as anti-philosophical and anti-individualist: genuine, pure, new design work, free from both aestheticism and usefulness, later termed “concrete art.” The abstracted formal language of Proun Room with its bold diagonals and invitation of visitors into the interior space of a visual work reflected a sense of utopian unreality endemic to the Berlin scene of the postwar years. It projected a possible future art that was, at best, in an experimental phase. However, Proun Room superseded Malevich’s real-space designs that had remained on paper. In God Is Not Cast Down, dated in Vitebsk, 1922, Malevich wrote: “What we call reality is infinity without weight, measure, time or space, absolute or relative, never traced in a form. It can be neither conceived nor comprehended.”24 With Proun Room, however, Lissitzky once again meant to give a different direction to Malevich’s metaphysical concept by working in conceivable and palpable reality, which did have “weight, measure, time [and] space.” Proun Room was closer to being “actual” in Tatlin’s sense: that is, consisting of real materials in real space— even with its visionary proun-suprematist imagery complete with the black square, which was one of its motifs. It was a flashback on suprematism from the vantage point of an innovative new development: working in actual space, Proun Room surpassed UNOVIS’s activist program as well as the constructivists’ material concept of reality to the extent that Bloom calls “a movement towards discontinuity with the precursor.”25 Realizing this project in the actual space of the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung, Lissitzky also proved himself a progressive artist of international standing at a time when Malevich was aspiring at the same status for UNOVIS as well as himself.

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Victory over the Sun on Paper, 1923 Lissitzky’s recast and, in a sense, appropriation of Victory over the Sun as an “electro-mechanical show” for figurines in his 1923 portfolio of lithographs was another corrective response to Malevich. His designs show a modernized and technologically developed version of the opera, if on paper only, including a “Designer of the Spectacle,” or “Stage-Master,” who controls the light, sound, and movement of the marionettes operating an electric keyboard. Deviating from the original opera as well as its 1920 Vitebsk remake, it addressed the constructivists’ anticipation of a fully mechanized and automated future. The “Designer of the Spectacle” runs the show, thus presenting a model of the mechanized universe of a coming world. This element gives a spin to the more rustic 1913 and 1920 concepts and performances, turning the production, at least on paper, into a smooth-running, centrally directed mechanical show. Lissitzky may have seen the Bauhaus students Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack and Rudolf Schwerdtfeger’s electrically operated color-light shows in the Bauhaus in 1922 or 1923, which, limited to the movement of abstract color shapes, introduced the idea and practice of electrically run visual performances. Modernity in the sense of technical superiority is strongly emphasized in Lissitzky’s portfolio. He may also have been inspired by another Bauhaus production, Kurt Schmidt and Georg Teltscher’s 1923 Mechanical Ballet, featuring mechanical action and mechanical figures on stage, as well as Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet with geometricized human figures, which premiered in 1922 and was performed at the Bauhaus in the summer of 1923. The onstage presence of the Kunstfigur, the artificial figurine, was the focus of the debates on avant-garde performing arts in Germany. Aware of the similar initiatives at the Bauhaus, Lissitzky did, indeed, send a copy of his Victory over the Sun portfolio personally to Walter Gropius.26 The lithographic portfolio, while only a sketchy reference to Victory over the Sun’s actual stage productions, alters the opera to the extent that, in Bloom’s terms, it “generalizes away the uniqueness of the earlier work”27 of the predecessor, in this case Malevich. The original 1913 futurist opera, which certainly strongly resonated in the 1920 UNOVIS performance, becomes generic modernist raw material here, an archaic source, translated into the formal vocabulary and technological vision of international constructivism, blended with figurative reminiscences, and turned into stills of an automated spectacle of marionettes. Moreover, it is also a visit to Malevich’s original source of suprematism and a fresh, modernized update of it. Lissitzky recreated only a few of the characters of the original opera and ended his introduction to the portfolio by announcing that “The further adaptation and

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application of the ideas and forms set down here I leave to others while I proceed to my next work,”28 as if echoing Malevich’s earlier words commenting on Lissitzky’s “architectural suprematism”: “I am entrusting the further development of what is already architectural suprematism to young architects.”29 It is the voice of the founder and the father that Lissitzky appropriated and echoed in 1923, with emphasis on his moving on to yet newer tasks. Incomplete as his portfolio remained in comparison with the futurist opera, it appears that his ambition was to overwrite it with modern technology’s means in order to demonstrate a more tangibly real vision of the future, a manifest statement characterizing the original as archaic.

The Lenin Tribune, 1924 The 1924 Lenin Tribune is perhaps Lissitzky’s sharpest and most direct corrective response to Malevich. Late in 1923 and early 1924, Lissitzky tried to organize an exhibition of Malevich’s works at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover with the help of Sophie Küppers. He set to translating some of Malevich’s writings for a publication that could accompany the show. Besides, Lissitzky organized financial as well as material help for Malevich, notifying artist friends who were in contact with international help organizations about Malevich’s needs and difficulties.30   Lissitzky was working on translating writings of Malevich that the latter sent him from Russia in installments throughout the first half of 1924 all while Lissitzky was confined to a sanatorium room hoping to recover from tuberculosis in Orselina, a suburb of Locarno in Switzerland, eventually moving on to other hospitals. Despite having to grapple with Malevich’s convoluted and grammatically problematic Russian, Lissitzky truly admired his thoughts, and together with Sophie Küppers, who in turn corrected Lissitzky’s German, worked hard to make the Malevich book reality.31 Among the texts that Malevich kept sending to him, Lissitzky came across Malevich’s essay on Lenin dating from January 25, 1924, only days after Lenin’s death,32 which he translated and thoroughly edited. This essay, a version of which was published in Das Kunstblatt in the fall of 1924,33 may have prompted Lissitzky to mark the historical event of Lenin’s death with a work of his own as his share of the commemoration. He apparently pulled out of his files his former student Ilya Chashnik’s 1920 Speaker’s Tribune,34 drafted in Vitebsk. Lissitzky pasted Lenin’s photo onto it and changed the words that Chashnik, in one version, had scribbled on the screen above the speaker’s head from Vsja Vlast’ Sovietam (All power to the Soviets)35 for Proletarii, in reference to the more internationalist slogan Proletarii

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Figure 8.3  El Lissitzky, Ilya Chashnik: Lenin Tribune, pencil, photo on paper, 1924. Photo Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (930030) © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

vsekh stran soedinyaites! (Proletarians of all countries unite!), thus redesigning and renaming it the Lenin Tribune. On March 21, 1924, he wrote to Sophie about his ideas for a planned exhibition of his own in Paris and, possibly inspired by Malevich’s Lenin essay, he outlined his further plans: “The next thing is my movie (it will be dedicated to Lenin, and will be called a ‘Lenin Construction’).”36 The idea of a movie was part of the Soviet discourse about adequately evoking Lenin in artworks and memorials;37 Lenin having famously declared that film was the most important art for Soviet Russia. Making a film may have been a faraway project, while working on Chashnik’s design was feasible even in the confines of a sanatorium room. Lissitzky included the Lenin Tribune in the proun section of the book Kunstismen,38 which he edited together with Hans Arp at the time, to be published in 1925, with the caption: “Atelier Lissitzky, 1920.”39 The Lenin Tribune is not only different from but also pointedly opposed to Malevich’s anxious vision of Leninism as a new ersatz religion. Transparent, light, optimistically and dynamically diagonal and clearly constructed, bringing to mind Tatlin’s Monument of the Third International,40 the Lenin Tribune posits modern futuristic technology against Malevich’s heavy analysis of an emerging materialist mythology or religion, which replaces Christ with Lenin and the

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church with the factory.41 Thus, Lissitzky’s version of the Tribune, a streamlined, futuristic design, cast Malevich once again in the role of an honored, though transcended, archaic forefather who has grave misgivings regarding the future’s belief system, while the future, as the Lenin Tribune asserts, is bright, well constructed, and will open as a positive new chapter in history. The difference between Malevich’s text and Lissitzky’s design on paper revealed the thus clearly articulated differences between the two artists, as well as Lissitzky’s distance from the ongoing debates in Moscow about Lenin’s legacy and nascent cult. Malevich’s somber writing reckoned with the inevitability of Lenin becoming a cultic figure, eventually an ersatz Christ, in the process of “the replacement of the old prophet, the replacement of the holy by the technical.”42 Malevich observed that in the emerging cult of Leninism the former leader, who had ceased to materially exist, was being elevated to the rank of an idea and image, along with the institution of the factory that gained a new symbolism elevated to the rank of the church. Malevich saw this development as a course of necessity marking new conditions for the “priests and artists” and “art and religion.”43 Unfailingly attaching art to myth and cult, Malevich saw the new era differing from the old culture, which was dominated by religion, in the new object of worship: material reality. However, instead of the square, Malevich now proposed the cube to be accepted as the basic symbol of the “rectangular culture” of the new age of Lenin,44 offering the cube, as he had the Square, to stand for the “embryo of all possibilities” versus the “static”45 cult of materialism. That position would thus ensure the transcendental survival of the square in the form of the cube that he now offered as symbol of the new myth of Lenin. There is no evidence, however, of the extent of Malevich’s familiarity with the efforts and ideas of Lenin’s funeral committee46 or the ongoing debates about the public discourse regarding Lenin’s legacy. Lissitzky, for many years absent from Russia and somewhat isolated in the sanatoriums, was most probably unaware of these concepts and actions as well. As his Lenin Tribune indicates, Lissitzky saw the idea of the revolution living on in unbroken continuity. He demonstrated this by accepting and validating a 1920 constructivist design as a relevant symbol of Leninism in 1924.

Malevich’s Lasting Influence In Lissitzky’s whole typographical and book-designing career, throughout most of which he used suprematist emblems such as the black square, the

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red square, and the circle, the Lenin Tribune was a constructivist-leaning reinterpretation of suprematist geometry. Lissitzky’s use of the ritual locus of the palm of the hand, another obvious reference to Malevich’s charismatic UNOVIS leadership, referring to his slogan “May the overthrow of the old world of art be imprinted on the palms of your hands!”—in such a crucial and personal work as his 1924 photo-montage self-portrait The Constructor, as well as in his 1922 illustration for Ehrenburg’s story Shifs-Karta,47 and its use once again in the 1927 VKhUTEMAS book cover Architecture—reveals his lasting involvement with the ideas that captivated him in Vitebsk in 1919. The endless space and the irrational geometry of virtual space which Lissitzky evoked in his proun paintings and wrote about in “A. and Pan-Geometry”48 remained fundamental elements in his works. However, he found new possibilities in the designing of a book, a tangible object, which he saw as the Gesamtkunstwerk of the people’s culture. The book, he wrote as early as 1919, “has become in our time what the cathedral with its frescoes and colored stained glass windows used to be, what the palaces and museums, where people went to look and learn, used to be.”49 Lissitzky’s book design and graphic design also affected his interpretation of Malevich. His graphic designs were leaning to constructivism as well as to the consolidating social and economic scene with the ensuing rationalism and newfound “objectivism” of the vanguard art in Germany. Working on paper rather than on canvas also suited Lissitzky’s new situation as his illness propelled him toward activities that he could pursue in the limited space of a hospital room. At the same time, his graphic design was also fueled by a vision of the future, which had drifted considerably far away from the vision that he and Malevich had shared for a brief moment in Vitebsk in 1919. While Malevich bitterly contemplated the rising communist ideology as a new quasi-religious system comprising a redefinition of the spiritual and was profoundly convinced that the world was, and would always be, ruled by ideas, Lissitzky saw the new state, at least during his stay abroad, as a rational machinery, the improvement of which was a matter of increased pragmatic efforts. He posited his own work and his concept of the “artist-engineer” as a correction and contrast to the concept of the “artist-priest,” a tradition that Malevich meant to continue. “The idea that art is religion and the artist the priest of this religion we rejected forthwith,” Lissitzky wrote in the manuscript of his Berlin lecture “New Russian Art” in 1922.50 Malevich’s 1923–1924 “planits,” as well as his drawings of architectural units seen in cosmic suprematist perspective, may, to some extent, be seen as the continuation of the dialogue between himself and Lissitzky. Adopting the architectural volumes of the Proun compositions, they preceded Malevich’s three-dimensional “architectons”

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or “blind architecture,” constructed between 1923 and 1927. Mostly variations of the “basilica” format51 originating from the square, they assert pieces of solemn, cultic architecture—markedly opposed to Lissitzky’s pragmatic architectural and book designs like Cloud Iron, 1925, or For the Voice, 1922, respectively. Although Lissitzky remained indebted to Malevich, his original fascination with the utopian implications of pure geometry was eventually replaced by a rational and more humbly utilitarian work program, one that was more compatible with constructivism than with suprematism. His proun paintings were not only at the “intersection of architecture and painting,”52 as he defined them but also at the intersection of suprematism and constructivism. They featured three-dimensional architectural solids as well as the infinite void of the universe. In his efforts to introduce Malevich’s art and ideas to the West, Lissitzky appears to have been motivated by conflicting aspirations. On the one hand, he was enthralled with suprematism’s universal vision and wanted to introduce Malevich, accordingly, as the progenitor of this significant new idea on the international scene. On the other hand, however, Lissitzky wanted to build a consistent image of the new Russian art in the West without compromising his own idea of progress and technological modernity, in order to bring Russian progressive art closer to Western modernity. Moreover, he wanted to outline his own artistic lineage, proudly tracing it back to Malevich. Struggling with the work of translating Malevich’s texts reminded him again and again that it was not possible to completely translate and transfer an entire culture to another.53 He tried to reconfigure, rephrase, and reframe Russian concepts and Russian art so that they would be understandable and palatable for Westerners—that is, he felt it necessary to simplify and streamline a great deal, and he struggled with the near-impossibility of transferring the new Russian visual culture, with all its contexts, implications, layers, and richness to the West. As we could see in Kemény’s review of the First Russian Exhibition, Lissitzky was not the only one in Berlin who saw suprematism as somewhat obsolete, already history, along with futurism. Kemény bluntly expressed the need to see something new that would transcend both suprematism and constructivism.54 Lajos Kassák, on the other hand, saw suprematism as “the first consciously new step taken by young Russian artists,”55 which “opened the gates toward progress.”56 This duality, as will be demonstrated, characterized Malevich’s reception in Warsaw and in the Bauhaus, as many artists and critics were hesitant to uphold the original avant-garde ideas after the early 1920s. Malevich was seen as a great initiator, but many in the art world awaited even newer, younger directions to appear—and Lissitzky identified himself as that new type of artist.

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The Book That Was Not. Van Doesburg’s Thumbs-Down on the Malevich Volume

Had some of Malevich’s writings been published in German in 1924 when El Lissitzky translated them, that volume would have disseminated Malevich’s principles which were, at the time, largely unknown in the German-speaking West. Some of the myth generated around his person and the legends that were spreading by word of mouth might have dissipated, and his views as well as his distance from constructivism would have come across more clearly.

Translating Malevich’s Writings Lissitzky and Sophie Küppers, as previously mentioned, were tackling the difficult task of making a few of Malevich’s texts accessible in German. “Things are rather complicated with the Malevich—his Russian is not quite correct, the grammar is completely wrong, and there are incredible word formations,”1 Lissitzky wrote in a letter to Sophie. Anna Muza observed, “Kazimir Malevich’s critical prose is almost as remote from conventional norms of Russian writing as his painting is from the Russian realist tradition.”2 Throughout the first half of 1924 Lissitzky wrote to Sophie in details about his ongoing efforts at tackling Malevich’s language. “As you see, I have translated quite a lot for the Malevich book,” he reports in March 1924. “I am translating it more or less like poetry, otherwise I would have to make too many comments. But even where I do try to disagree, I am faced with such pounding force that I stop resisting. ( . . . ) Now I have the hardest part left: the chapter on suprematism. Malevich didn’t write anything definite about it. The best was the first brochure in 1915, which I unfortunately do not have. ( . . . )

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Last time I sent you ‘Pure Coincidence’; I am enclosing now: 1. ‘On New Systems in Art’, 2. ‘The Innovator in Art, State, Society, and Criticism’, 3. ‘God is Not Cast Down. Art, Church and Factory’. That makes four parts. There will also be ‘Suprematism’, ‘On Poetry’, and ‘Art and Artists’ (about Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and aphorisms)3. Then I will add sketches of illustrations needed for each chapter. For the most part they are facsimiles from Malevich’s notebook.”4

Lissitzky was determined to select parts that he thought would fare well with foreign readers and that he, too, found transparent, to ensure that Malevich could be presented in the best possible light and the volume might be a success. He admitted: “Some of what I have here I don’t want to translate so as not to present it all in an untrue light; that’s how inflexible and mystical these remarks are.”5 Convinced, however, of the great value in many parts of Malevich’s written work, Lissitzky edited the texts to the best of his ability, excluding some parts he thought would confuse rather than clarify Malevich’s ideas to the public. Malevich’s previously mentioned article on Lenin,6 written in the wake of the Soviet leader’s death, presented Lissitzky with problems of exceptional difficulty. He thoroughly edited the article, omitting long parts which he did not judge as being palatable or even comprehensible for Western readers. The English translation of the text runs through fifty-three (small-sized) pages, whereas the version published in Lissitzky’s translation in Das Kunstblatt7 takes up three and a half (larger) pages only. As Yve-Alain Bois confirms, Lissitzky had, indeed, “censored” Malevich in two important ways: omitting most of the criticism of the nascent cult of Lenin and streamlining Malevich’s writing to focus on one main line of thought, deleting most detours of metaphysical ruminations.8 However, a considerable part of the text was tied to concrete contexts and even persons Malevich was in dialogue with, and many of its elements functioned as coded communication referring to historical or concrete contemporaneous views, artworks, or public utterances, all of which belonged to the ongoing Russian discourse. Aside from his many disagreements with Malevich’s text, Lissitzky, away from Russia for three years already, did not know that not only did Stalin intentionally use religious references to anoint himself as Lenin’s legitimate successor, but that a whole operation was happening in Russia to deliberately link religion and Bolshevism in somewhat covert ways, a practice which Malevich strongly opposed in his article on Lenin. As Nina Tumarkin relates, “These links were provided by three bolsheviks who valued the spiritual, who were actively engaged with religion at the beginning of [the twentieth] century, and who, upon Lenin’s death, became imaginative contributors to the most mystical aspects of the

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Lenin cult.”9 At the moment Malevich was writing his essay he could not yet have known that the three members of the committee charged with arranging Lenin’s funeral, Vladimir Dmitriyevich Bonch-Bruevich, Lunacharsky—in his capacity of Commissar of Enlightenment—and Leonid Krasin, were deeply engaged in restoring religious enthusiasm for Lenin and the Soviet system, and considered socialism as a secular religion. Malevich was, most likely, unaware of the three men’s shared faith in the eventual bodily resurrection of the dead when they were in charge of organizing Lenin’s funeral, or their making decisions regarding the construction of the mausoleum and the preservation of Lenin’s body. While Malevich could not have yet known these facts, he nonetheless clearly saw the nature of the preparations and was informed of the intense debate between those who supported and those who opposed the mythic cult of Lenin. As discussed in the previous chapter regarding the differences between Malevich and Lissitzky’s respective concepts regarding Lenin’s legacy, Malevich was concerned by the prospects of Lenin indeed being regarded as the new Christ. Malevich was adamant in rejecting the concept of such a religiously permeated and designed transfiguration of the deceased leader, and, as he wrote, in rejecting the institutional replacement of the church by the factory in the Soviet Union. Lissitzky must have found this anxiety absurd and thought that German readers would do so, as well. In his essay on Lenin, although somewhat critical of the developing cult of the deceased leader, Malevich still put Lenin, symbolically, where he had put the Black Square in 1915: into the shrine. With all his critique of the exaltation of Lenin to a savior of sorts, Malevich ultimately blended his own suprematist art and the cult of Lenin so that in the end of his text he proposed a black cube to be erected as Lenin’s tombstone, as an ultimate symbol of his. Taking the discussion about the idolized communist leader to the level of a substitute religious faith and comparing Lenin’s adherents to a quasireligious cult may have been the adequate description of the situation in Russia, but it was far from the objectivity and clarity that Lissitzky had painstakingly construed and wanted to attach to the Russian avant-garde in Europe. Lissitzky kept on presenting the image of a rationally collective and constructive new Russian culture to the Western discourse. Poetic imagination and poetic language, literary or visual, and rationalism were not mutually exclusive in Germany, but a programmatic text had to have clarity and conceptual transparency. Moreover, Westerners were unaware of the emerging conflict between those who were busy creating a new Leniniconography in Russia and those who opposed it, not to mention the construction of monuments to Lenin.10 At the time when Malevich wrote his article, just days

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after Lenin’s death, the Lenin cult, as well as the opposition to it, was still in an initial phase, but by the time of the article’s publication in Das Kunstblatt in October, the conflict between the two sides was already rampant. Contributing to Lenin’s emerging cult in spite of his critique of it, Malevich invested the cube—the expanded, six-sided spatial version of the square—with an overarching symbolism: the result of [one’s] path will be the cube, as the cubic is the fullness of your comprehension and is perfection. ( . . . ) The cube will be a symbol which man wants to turn into the fullness of knowledge. ( . . . ) In the cube lies all man’s culture and development; by the cube the first epoch or the first cycle of the objective cognition of ideas will be symbolized; the new epoch will move towards a new creation of form, which he thinks to achieve because he will move the cube of his knowledge into space farther; or the cube as mobile space will create a new body, a new space.11

This text gave a new meaning to the cube in the context of Lenin as an eternal leader and positioned the cube as the iconographic emblem of a possible communist cult. Malevich extended the symbolism of the cube—six squares— to an exalted Lenin figure. This description suffused the square and the cube with very different meanings compared with what the international consensus approved in the West European avant-garde. For Malevich, however, proposing the suprematist form as an eternal symbol of the eternal leader was still part of the struggle to validate suprematism as the sole face of the new Soviet country. While the square’s metaphysical aspects and its universal implications were accepted as a halo around this form, it was impossible for a Western audience to agree with this kind of carried-away idolization of Lenin or any other public political figure, for that matter. The use of the motif of the square was not conceivable as this kind of symbolism. It may have symbolized universalism for Mondrian and van Doesburg, and the spirit of a well-engineered world in the Bauhaus, but it was by no means invested with any sort of cultic meaning let alone that of surrounding a human being. Western constructivists wanted to turn the square to a pragmatically acceptable emblem of a new egalitarianism, clarity, and simplicity.

Van Doesburg Kills the Malevich Volume Dissatisfied with the published version of Malevich’s Lenin article, Lissitzky sought a publisher for the book who could issue the collection of Malevich’s essays in a way that would do the author justice. It was not an easy task, as

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Malevich was very little known in Germany, even after the flurry of articles following the First Russian Exhibition. Lissitzky took the manuscript to the Vensky Verlag publishing company in Oldenburg and started negotiations, but to no avail.12 Meanwhile, Sophie Küppers had plans to translate Malevich’s writings into French, an idea which Lissitzky found excellent.13 In May 1924, Lissitzky wrote to Sophie saying he could not get a contract from the Vensky.14 A few weeks after he designed the publisher’s logo,15 Lissitzky wrote Sophie: “I do not like the whole history with the Vensky Verlag. ( . . . ) Damn all the publishing houses, one has to be one’s own publisher.”16 A few days before Sophie’s visit in the sanatorium in Orselina where Lissitzky was convalescing, Lissitzky wrote: “Concerning the Vensky, we shall discuss it here. It appears that the earth is strongly shaking over there and the pockets are tightly buttoned up.”17 He also wrote to Moholy-Nagy, editor of the Bauhaus Bücher series, who had apparently asked Lissitzky for a publishable manuscript, that he was ready to work on a book of his own for the Bauhaus, also mentioning that he “has put together a Malevich book, but has committed it to a publisher already.”18 Giving up on the Vensky Verlag, a couple of months later, however, Lissitzky turned to Paul Westheim, editor of Das Kunstblatt, who had a steady interest in covering Russian art and worked closely with the journal’s publisher, the Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag. Upon Westheim’s request, Lissitzky agreed to contribute to Westheim and Carl Einstein’s planned volume Europa Almanach, offering an article titled “A[rt] and Pangeometry.” In the same letter of agreement to contribute, Lissitzky mentions a plan to write a book of his own which he would title Amechanik der Kunst (A-mechanics, or lack of mechanics, of art)19 and adds: Meanwhile I have selected, put together, and finalized the German translation of Malevich’s writings. It is a completed manuscript of 40 typed pages. Seven sketches of his paintings would accompany them from his notebook.20 It has the following 7 chapters: From “The New Systems in Art” Suprematism The Novelty in Art (State, Society, Criticism) On Poetry From “God is Not Cast Down” (Art, Church, Factory) Lenin (From: On Non-Objectivity) The Pure Process It is high time for this to be published. I am in contact with a publishing house regarding this, but the current crisis in Germany causes delay. Perhaps you could make it happen in your publishing house, this is just a small booklet. You could include one chapter from it in Europa.21

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This is the most detailed account we have about the contents of the projected book that failed to get published. Westheim may have encouraged Lissitzky to submit the manuscript to Kiepenheuer, who probably assigned it to Hans Müller, previously linked, if in a complicated way, to the Kiepenheuer publishing house in Potsdam. Gustav Kiepenheuer, who had run the publishing house with his wife Irmgard since 1909, employed Hans Müller as managing secretary until the latter founded his own print and illustrated book publisher: Müller & Co. Verlag in Potsdam in 1919, with Gustav’s wife Irmgard after the Kiepenheuers separated in 1917. Müller & Co. changed its name to Müller & Kiepenheuer in 1925, after winning a lawsuit filed by Gustav Kiepenheuer, who continued to live in Potsdam and hosted a cultural salon there, being in friendly contact with contemporary artists, including many from the Bauhaus in Weimar. Müller apparently commissioned van Doesburg as a main authority on contemporary avant-garde art and writing, and judging from the contents of De Stijl, a trusted expert in contemporary Russian art, to write a reader’s report on the manuscript of the Malevich volume. Having published both Lissitzky and Malevich’s works in De Stijl, van Doesburg was a logical candidate to evaluate the manuscript and could be expected to support the planned book. Having read it, however, he adamantly rejected the project. Dated Hanover, February 20, 1925, van Doesburg wrote to the publisher: Dear Mr. Müller! Today I sent you back the Malevich manuscript from Berlin. I would like to sum up my judgment on it as follows: Maybe a short article of 3, or at most 4 pages could be put together out of the whole in an aphoristic format. The contents are mostly vague and dim, without any consequence on the development of thinking. The ideas are, inasmuch as they are enveloped in a romantic-symbolist phraseology, neither new, nor important, and they are full of contradictions. The deification of Lenin (Christ-Lenin) is outright ridiculous. Lenin himself would certainly not have liked to function as a born-again Christ. In summary: The author lacks the power and the skills to develop his ideas clearly and logically so that they could become valuable for a transnational culture. 2. Although Malevich does not lack the instinct for the issues that matter in our time, he unfortunately does not have enough mastery over the literary material to bring all that to a generally understandable form.22

This report singlehandedly killed the publication project of Malevich’s writings. The document does not offer the full name of the editor, nor does it include the name or the address of the publisher. The Doesburgs did, indeed, stay in Germany

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between January 17 and March 14, 1925. They were staying in Hanover late in February.23 Moreover, Müller corresponded with Lissitzky about the fate of the planned book but, probably after he received van Doesburg’s report, stopped discussing it with him. Lissitzky mentioned Müller in relation to Malevich in a letter to Sophie from Russia in June 1925: “I have not settled anything with Müller. Malevich came to see me a few times during the last month, and we agreed to go to town together ( . . . ) but he has not shown up.”24 Not having settled on anything concerning the book with a publisher, along with Malevich’s silence about the project, seems to have sealed the fate of the book project. Lissitzky returned to Russia, as his visa was not extended in Switzerland; and although he returned to Germany a few times in the late 1920s, he was not able to arrange for the publication of the Malevich volume. He received further medical treatment in Russia and died in 1941.

Van Doesburg’s Reasons What evidently displeased van Doesburg on reading the Malevich manuscript, aside from the contents, was that the text was, most likely, not convincingly organized as a series of clear, cohesive statements. It lacked numbered chapters25 and subchapters, as well as typographically enhanced statements with bullet points to give the reader the visual impression of strong logical structure, as many modern publications had it. As a matter of fact, Malevich was criticized by Anatoly Lunacharsky as well, for lack of clarity in his writings: The trouble begins when Malevich ceases to paint paintings and begins to write brochures. I heard that the Germans, too, were reduced to a state of confusion by the artist’s writing. I tried to read the bombastic and vague theoretical works of the leader of the “suprematists.” Malevich tried to somehow connect his goals and his paths, getting in a tangle, both with the Revolution and with God.26

The similarity of the two judgments originate, aside from Malevich’s poetically infused texts, from both readers’ respective political positions and strategies, even if van Doesburg and Lunacharsky belonged to very different worlds. While Lunacharsky did not find Malevich’s way of thinking acceptable from the perspective of communist ideology, van Doesburg did not support him because it was Malevich’s vagueness and inclination to mysticism which were not acceptable to him; nor would have any of this helped his strategic moves in the international avant-garde, where van Doesburg stepped up as a fighter for

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authoritative clarity and transparent, generally understandable and convincingly phrased ideas. In his earlier article “Elemental Formation,” van Doesburg wrote in the journal G: “The requisite of our time [is] PRECISION [sic].”27 Aside from all that, van Doesburg’s judgments on Malevich’s works were often directly dependent on the ups and downs of his relationship with El Lissitzky, who, in this case as translator and former contributing editor of Veshch, was also known to van Doesburg as the most ardent supporter of Malevich in Western Europe. Van Doesburg had promoted Malevich and Lissitzky, both of whom appeared to share concepts and formal language with him, and could have helped to advance his own agenda, strengthening his own positions in the spirit of widespread internationalism. Van Doesburg had offered his own De Stijl as a platform for their writings and images. Lissitzky, however, often proved unpredictable, as his ideas did not always square with Doesburg’s. Prior to writing his reader’s report which prevented the publication of the Malevich volume, van Doesburg had strongly disagreed with both Malevich and Lissitzky on several occasions. The first contretemps we are aware of occurred when Lissitzky led a walkthrough in his 1923 Proun Room for the Novemberlinge (November Group members), including Mies van der Rohe and Hans Richter, where van Doesburg also happened to be present. Members of the De Stijl group also exhibited works at the same event. As Kai-Uwe Hemken notes, Lissitzky did not comply with the unwritten but agreed rule to reject the commercialization of art and had put price tags on three elements of the Proun Room.28 Hemken believes that this was the cause of the “intense quarrel” (heftiger Streit) between the two of them, van Doesburg having detested the idea of putting revolutionary art up for sale. According to Richter the event—where Lissitzky was “half dancing” through the space he had created “to demonstrate the sequence of the wall decoration”—was controversial, and his performance, along with the price tags, may have alienated and upset van Doesburg.29 The next conflict was caused by Malevich’s aforementioned article on Lenin, published in the October 1924 issue of Das Kunstblatt, which must have been a fresh memory to van Doesburg at the time of writing his reader’s report the following February. Although van Doesburg was not aware that Lissitzky had significantly streamlined the article already, he had strong misgivings about it even in its abridged form—though at the time he read it in the planned volume, the text must have been closer to its original length. A book that van Doesburg judged to be disorganized, irrelevant, and confusing would not, if published, shine a positive light on his documented relationship with the author and the

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translator. Having published both Malevich and Lissitzky in De Stijl, it was in van Doesburg’s vested interest to avoid any retroactive embarrassment on their account. As his history with the Bauhaus had indicated, any disappointment entailed the risk of provoking personal attacks, a pattern in van Doesburg’s dealing with his fellow avant-garde artists.

Public Intellectual versus Prophet The difference between the reception of visual and written works has been an under-examined aspect of the Western reception of the Russian avant-garde. Images were put on public view sooner than texts related to them were made available to wider audiences. Writings either failed to get translated and published or, once they were accessible in German, found an even more limited audience than the artworks. It would be fair to surmise that texts were far less known than even the rarely shown Russian avant-garde paintings, photos, and sculptures. While texts required translation and editorial work as well as a publication forum, visual works, once transported to a gallery space or reproduced, spoke for themselves, however they may have been understood. As we saw in Lunacharsky’s comments, artists’ written works did not necessarily fare well with their compatriots either, albeit that depended on a number of political and personal conditions. The square as insignia anticipated the “international of the square” in the West. It represented formal and conceptual discipline, which may have appeared suitable to symbolize the regulated language of the avant-garde. In 1923 and the ensuing period, van Doesburg was fired up by, among other things, his recent anti-Bauhaus course30 in Weimar, held almost across the street from the school itself, which was attended by a number of young Bauhaus students, many of whom became faithful friends and came to form a cohort of his. Since van Doesburg venomously attacked the Bauhaus’ expressionism and the lack of an architecture course at the school,31 he felt confident that by way of an alliance with Lissitzky and other kindred spirits he would be able to overcome the obsolete trends of individualism that the Bauhaus, according to him, was still validating. The more international and larger the group van Doesburg was to command, the greater hopes he could attach to a new collective era in the arts. He proudly printed a Lissitzky proun image on the cover of De Stijl’s June 1922 issue, with a manifesto-like excerpt from Lissitzky’s text “No World Visions, BUT World Reality.” Malevich’s Black Square on White Ground was on the cover of the September 1922 issue of De Stijl, followed by van Doesburg’s own

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(unsigned) account of the new Russian art in “Plastic Russia.–Suprematism–New Painting–Proun–Counterreliefs.” These were the new Russian developments in art that van Doesburg was ready to welcome in his avant-garde international. What van Doesburg was still missing was a conceptual framework for the new art over which he intended to preside. However, it was precisely the written texts that blew this homogeneity of the visual language apart. All those artists whose works could be seen as speaking one and the same artistic language proved to be—as van Doesburg’s reading of Malevich indicates—strangely at odds when the artists themselves articulated their concepts in writing. Moreover, published writings were more controlled and strategic than personal letters, the private communications often revealing thoughts that opened up different paths of thinking, in stark opposition to the perceived meaning of some artworks, the new visual language, and its central element, the square. Even if the meaning and interpretation varied to some extent, there was a strong consensus regarding the visual symbolism of the square. Hesitations, however, are reflected, for example, in a letter that El Lissitzky wrote to Dutch architect J. J. P. Oud32 in March 1924, telling him both about his work on the Malevich book and his second thoughts about the square: The book of my friend Malevich I have been working on is almost ready. [ . . . However,] I am not so sure that our time really has “the square” as staple (according to Plato, concept of harmony and completion), but new methods will be found without the square, I am sure about this, and will want to demonstrate that in systematic work. You know, I am a rationalist, but I have moments when I am scared of “Ratio.”33

Throughout their correspondence, Lissitzky confessed to Oud further doubts about van Doesburg’s ideas in June 1924, unaware of the reader’s report that van Doesburg would soon submit: “It is symptomatic that we go on struggling ( . . . ) so we would not ossify in a Mandarinism of the square. ( . . . ) Doesburg talked to me about the opposition of nature and art. I do not agree with that idea that the Universal=straight line+right angle ( . . . ) the Universe does not know straight lines.”34 To enhance this latter point, Lissitzky guest-edited the August 1924 issue of the Hanover dadaist Kurt Schwitters’s journal Merz, emphatically titling the issue Nasci, Latin for “to be born.” The Lissitzky-edited issue of Merz is a programmatic homage to nature as opposed to artificiality, including the concept he had once shared with van Doesburg: that art is superior to nature. To underline his stance, Lissitzky topped the last page with the heading “Enough of

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the MACHINE MACHINE MACHINE with which man has achieved modern artistic production,” to clearly take the side of nature in his old debate with van Doesburg.35 While committed to a vision of modernity which he saw embodied in Malevich’s paintings, and projecting his own concepts into Malevich’s squares and abstract compositions, van Doesburg found that Malevich’s texts were not comprehensible and thus not publicly presentable. As an authority in matters of art and the discourse about art, van Doesburg commanded a language of succinct, pithy, brief statements in his articles and in his book Principles of NeoPlastic Art.36 Or so he thought: his book Principles of Neoplastic Art, published in 1925 as Volume 6 of the Bauhaus Books series with typography by MoholyNagy, actually also operates with a number of lofty, commonplace statements that are not much more transparent or logical than those of Malevich. Many of these declarations are flat, like “Everything that surrounds us is an expression of life”;37 or difficult-to-discern pronouncements, such as “The aesthetic value of a work of art depends upon the degree of distinctness of the aesthetic accents.” Van Doesburg uses undefined terms like “aesthetic accents” and “mixed aesthetic experience,” among many others, that are spectacularly arranged in the elegant typography complete with bullet points and added emphasis, which lends the appearance of enhanced conceptual structure to the text. Van Doesburg’s ultimate conclusion is also lackluster (“Aesthetic understanding of an exact work of art is possible only when the observer has an exclusively aesthetic relationship with works of art”), and the book does not deliver on the promise of its title: it does not present us with an understanding of the principles of neoplastic art. Van Doesburg’s use of strict language (“exact work of art,” “exclusively”) functioned rather as a code system of precision and claim to clarity than an actual consistency, logic, or clarity. With his choice of words and the visually strong, highly organized typographic framework, van Doesburg’s text exuded a sense of power; but, unlike Malevich who stepped up as a prophet, he assumed the power of a public intellectual: a secular expert who is an authority in the current cultural discourse. His tone is aggressive and imperative. Oskar Schlemmer, who met van Doesburg at the Bauhaus, noted about him in a letter: “Perhaps because of his fanatical, agitational sermons, something’s gone wrong with his good deed.”38 The fact that van Doesburg chose to focus his personal venom on Malevich’s language makes his critique also addressed to the translator, El Lissitzky. Van Doesburg was certainly appalled by some of Malevich’s statements, such as “Cubism is the culminating point of the culture of painting, as communism is

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the culminating point of socialist culture. ( . . . ) Not without reason was the symbol of the cube used for Lenin—as for eternity, Lenin is the culminating point.”39 Citing “eternity” and “culminating points” resonated as lofty talk for van Doesburg, who was in no way inclined to see the culmination of history in the person of Lenin. A comparison between cubism—which was a closed chapter of modern art to him—and communism—a perhaps still possible future—was, in his estimation, a nonsensical or at best deliberately Soviet-centered view. Had Malevich been a painter only, without any published writings, as Lunacharsky suggested, he would have been much more unproblematic and welcome, even raised to stardom by van Doesburg. But Malevich’s ambition to be a prophet of the future and an artist-priest of the present, claiming supreme power in the international battlefield of the avant-garde, would hardly have been acceptable to van Doesburg, even if it had come in the form of convincing verbal articulation. The controversy notwithstanding, van Doesburg’s suggestion in his reader’s report for Mr. Müller to assemble aphoristic excerpts from Malevich’s texts apparently squared with an idea already formed prior to van Doesburg’s letter. While the book was not yet rejected, the initiative to edit a selection of Malevich’s statements, perhaps as an introductory publication, thus bringing the planned book and its author to the attention of the public, may have occurred to its editors. Carl Einstein and Paul Westheim’s Europa Almanach, a Gustav Kiepenheuer publication of the same year, 1925, included “K. Malevich /Suprematism (From writings 1915-20),” a compilation of slightly more than two densely printed pages, including several excerpts from Malevich’s 1916 “From Cubism to Suprematism” essay, the 1919 “On New Systems in Art,” and the 1920 text “Suprematism 34 Drawings.”40 This fact allows us to deduce that a positive reader’s report was anticipated, and that in spite of the ongoing legal conflict between them, there was still cooperation between Hans Müller and Gustav Kiepenheuer.41 What makes it likely that the Europa Almanach was edited independently from van Doesburg’s suggestion or that the editing had been concluded prior to obtaining van Doesburg’s reader’s report is that Malevich received a copy of the book in the mail from Lissitzky on February 4, 1925,42 and thanked him for it, more than two weeks before the date of van Doesburg’s report. Van Doesburg may have had a conversation about this with someone from the Kiepenheuer publishing house prior to submitting his written report, as the Europa Almanach’s compilation of Malevich quotes appears to follow his suggestions—but also, it may just as well have been pure coincidence. The compilation of excerpts from Malevich’s writings in the Europa Almanach is illustrated by a suprematist painting of his as well as a proun composition

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by Lissitzky, in reference to their artistic kinship and also to Lissitzky’s part in making the Malevich texts available in German.43 While it seems beyond a doubt that Lissitzky translated the Malevich texts excerpted in the almanac, the identity of the editor who made the selection remains veiled, and no credit to anyone else is included in the volume, neither for the editing nor for the translation.44 The volume’s editors may have directly taken the texts out of the manuscript which Lissitzky had submitted to Mr. Müller. One likely reference to the Europa Almanach is a letter of Malevich’s to Lissitzky, dated February 11, 1925,45 in which Malevich mentions “letters of architecture” that he will send “to Gustav Kiepenheuer”46 and another “little article I sent to Gustav, the extracts from The World as Objectlessness.”47 It is not clear, however, whether Malevich did in fact mail these pieces of writing, and if so, whether in Russian or as translations; nor is it clear that, if received, why they were not published. Since there is no evidence of a second reader—the Kiepenheuer Verlag’s 1924–1925 documents are unfortunately missing from the holdings of the Stadtarchiv Leipzig, where the publisher’s papers are deposited48—and as the volume of Malevich’s writings was never published in German, it appears that van Doesburg did, indeed, terminate the project with his report. In the Europa Almanach the following motto is printed before the Malevich texts, presumably written by him: “Space is a receptacle without dimensions, where reason places its creations. I would like to place my creative form also there.” This is one of many examples demonstrating that taken out of their original context, Malevich’s textual excerpts read as pontifications. Such statements as “We can sense space only when we get detached from the earth and our secure contact with it disappears”; or, “Without color the world is impossible, without color there are no distances” made Malevich appear simply declarative without as much as making an effort to persuade his readers of the validity of his theses, thus vindicating van Doesburg’s verdict. This publication misrepresented Malevich first of all because in many—if not all—of his essays, he covered a lot of ground before coming down so decidedly on certain points, unlike the way in which the short collection of his ultimate conclusions presented him in the Europa Almanach.

The End of a Friendship While van Doesburg had never met Malevich in person, and as of 1925 his ideas were mediated to him only by Lissitzky’s translations, van Doesburg and Lissitzky had a stormy relationship, a mix of camaraderie, rivalry, and hostility

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that ended bitterly in 1926. By rejecting the Malevich book early in 1925, van Doesburg also negated Lissitzky’s work as a translator as well as his art historical lineage. It was particularly van Doesburg’s statement that “Malevich ( . . . ) unfortunately does not have enough mastery over the literary material to bring it to a generally understandable form” that was a devastating critique addressed to Lissitzky, implying that the translator either chose the wrong text to work on or was incompetent himself in bringing the Russian original to an acceptable, clear German version. Both van Doesburg and Lissitzky had, at different points of time, cooperated with Kurt Schwitters and his journal Merz. Following their 1923 fallout at the walk-through of Lissitzky’s Proun Room, the two did not have any sort of exchange until the summer of 1924, when the Nasci issue of Merz was published,49 in which Lissitzky signed one of his articles not only with his name but also with the location of writing it, namely “Locarno, Hospital.” Having seen that, van Doesburg must have sent a postcard to Lissitzky inquiring about his health, whereupon, relieved to see their friendship on the way to being restored, Lissitzky responded in a long letter in July 1924. Among other things he wrote the following, most likely in reference to the Proun Room event where others “happened to be present” as well, and the conflict between him and van Doesburg broke out: The attention and appreciation that modern people give each other in Russia does not originate from their differences in views on art but from the very force of their respective, opposing artistic expressions. That is why you disappointed me so much when you allowed that our unexplained differences of opinion affect our friendship. To the satisfaction of some who happened to be present, odd differences [between us] were revealed. That is why your postcard now gave me such pleasure.50

Lissitzky informed van Doesburg that he was in a sanatorium, had had surgery that left him with only half a lung, but that he hoped to recover. Then he quickly switched to discussing work and future plans. Van Doesburg must have soon responded, as Lissitzky replied to him in a letter in August saying, “You have written so much in your letter that I cannot take in all of it at once. ( . . . ) Thank you for the photos, too.”51 The friendship, however, had not survived the year 1924. Nasci may have played a role in this, because it could be understood as Lissitzky’s betrayal of the ideas he had shared with van Doesburg back in Düsseldorf about the supra-

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natural status of geometry. Relating to developments that are not known to posterity, in a letter to Sophie in December 1924, Lissitzky wrote that he planned to dump a lot of his mail, “first of all Doesburg. DAMNIT. Don’t let me be taken for a perfect fool.”52 The tension between the two was exacerbated even further after van Doesburg read Lissitzky’s “A. and Pangeometry” article in the Europa Almanach, which included a comment on Mondrian in a footnote that van Doesburg would not tolerate: Mondrian accomplished the ultimate solution in the development of Western painting. He reduces surface to its primeval state, namely surface only, in the sense that there is no longer anything spatial inside or out of a given surface. ( . . . ) Whenever De Stijl artists transpose Mondrian’s principles onto the three surfaces of a room, they turn into decorators.53

“Decorator” was the ultimate defamatory insult and term of belittlement in the avant-garde discourse, and van Doesburg took it for an offense. He had already emphatically announced that “The age of decorative taste is past; the contemporary artist has entirely closed down the past.”54 Now, van Doesburg retorted in a vitriolic way. He remembered suprematist motifs that Malevich and other suprematists applied on teapots and other chinaware made at the Petrograd Porcelain Factory which had been on display at the First Russian Exhibition in 1922 as a project for changing the character and style of household objects from classical into futuristsuprematist. All of that was in fact decorative. In response to Lissitzky, van Doesburg published photos of suprematist-decorated mugs, jars, teapots, and a plate in De Stijl, with the comment “BAZAR, BAZAR, BAZAR, BAZAR” (junk, junk, junk, junk)—exactly echoing Lissitzky’s repetition of “ENOUGH of MACHINE, MACHINE, MACHINE” in upper-case typeface in the Nasci issue of Merz.   The four-time repetition of an all-upper-case-printed word55 may be a clear enough response to Lissitzky, but nonetheless van Doesburg addressed the “A. and Pangeometry” essay more directly, writing in a shockingly new tone: In Westheim and Carl Einstein’s Jewish Almanac “Europa” Elia Lissitzky stoops to the depths when he states that as soon as the “artists” of “De Stijl” transpose their principle into 3 dimensions, they become mere “decorators.” ( . . . ) Of just what kind of artsy-crafty tinkering Malevichian suprematism (confined to Moscow and Warsaw) is capable, we can see by the little mugs and jugs above, for which the Polish artist Malevich designed the decorations! In a similar way, Kandinsky decorates artistic dinner sets, which makes it evident that expressionism and suprematism are expressive forms of one and the same mentality.56

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Figure 9.1  El Lissitzky: MACHINE, MACHINE, MACHINE, Merz (Band 2, Nr.8/9), April–July 1924, interior page 1924. Photo Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (930030) © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 9.2  Theo van Doesburg: Kazimir Malevich: BAZAR, BAZAR, BAZAR, De Stijl, 1926–1927, pages 57–8. Photo Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S1754 vol.7 no.75/76) © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Previously unprecedented racist-nationalist language, anger and contempt are pouring out here from van Doesburg: the Almanach is “Jewish”; Lissitzky’s name is now contemptuously given in Yiddish as “Elia” rather than considering him a Russian artist; Malevich is now a “Polish artist,” “confined” to faraway, and thus obscure and irrelevant “Warsaw and Moscow,” excluded from van Doesburg’s earlier internationalist project; and, if that were not enough, “Malevichian

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suprematism” is compared, as it was by Umansky and Puni, to Kandinsky’s expressionism, the style that van Doesburg, as revealed in his 1922 anti-Bauhaus attack, had the greatest disdain for. This article marks the end of van Doesburg’s intentions to cooperate with Russian artists altogether, distancing them from the Western art world as orientals, with whom collaboration and harmonious work was out of the question in van Doesburg’s part of the world. The fact that this contempt for the porcelain work was generated by the Lissitzky article and these lines were a message personally addressed to Lissitzky is all the more obvious, as van Doesburg did not comment on such pots and plates when he saw them in the Van Diemen Gallery back in 1922 where they were exhibited.57 At that time, they were seen as demonstration of transforming tradition into modern forms even in household objects in order to reeducate the population; they did not arouse van Doesburg’s passionate repulsion, which he expressed in 1926, as he either skipped them or was not interested in critiquing them in 1922, when he did not interpret these objects against Russian artists as an ultimate abomination.

Personal or Cultural Issues? Was van Doesburg’s rejection of Lissitzky and Malevich purely personal, or was there a deeper than previously identified cultural difference between the Western cultural discourse and the new Russian art and art concepts? Not unlike Lissitzky’s observations on nascent German nationalism in 1924,58 Malevich was also intensely aware of cultural differences and rather bitter about them. He outlined his views in a letter he wrote to Lissitzky on February 11, 1925, coincidentally only a few days after the date of van Doesburg’s reader’s report. Discussing his painting Head of a Peasant,59 interpreted as the image of “The New Savior,” Malevich wrote, in part bringing Lissitzky’s aforementioned letter on Tatlin’s Tower to mind: I painted an ordinary head of a peasant, it turned out that it wasn’t ordinary, and indeed, if you look at it from the perspective of the East, then it is everything that is ordinary for Westerners, but for people of the East it becomes something not ordinary, everything that is ordinary turns into an Icon, for the East is in fact iconic, and the West is a machine, an object, a latrine, utilitarianism, technology, and here [the East] people will be set free through a new image, ( . . . ) a new Savior. ( . . . ) I painted that Savior between 1909 and 191060, he became a Savior through the Revolution. ( . . . ) Tatlin’s tower is a fiction of Western technology,

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he is sending it now to the Paris exhibition,61 and of course, he could also build an iron and concrete pissoir. . . . It is all so clear to me.62

Malevich, whose acerbity could have increased as the Russian constructivists were to represent the Soviet Union at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris later that year, while the suprematists were excluded, used a language similar to van Doesburg’s. He recognized that clarity was the issue in which East and West differed: they construed and read their respective ideas differently, which led to misunderstandings and misinterpretations of both Russian artworks and texts in the West. In Russia, Malevich could hardly have found a more derogatory phrasing for his longtime adversary Tatlin’s work than a “fiction of Western technology,” the word “fiction” citing verbatim Lissitzky’s earlier judgment of the object.

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Enter Malevich Exhibitions in Post-Utopian Warsaw and Berlin, and the Bauhaus Book, 1927

Both the attitudes and the historic context of the interwar avant-gardes changed in and around 1923. Utopian expectations drifted away as hard-core pragmatism and new concepts of the social usefulness of art gained currency. The rebuilding of post–First World War Europe entered a new era of down-to-earth rather than idealized goals: material and budgetary considerations were prioritized over big ideas. Malevich’s visit to Warsaw, Berlin, and the Dessau Bauhaus, as well as his only solo exhibition in Berlin in 1927, all took place in the midst of these new conditions. As an avant-garde artist, Malevich faced hostility from the officialdom in the Soviet Union and hoped to find a more receptive climate abroad. Although he gave up painting around 1921–1922—as painting was declared obsolete by most progressive artists in Moscow—and created three-dimensional “architectons,” the majority of the works he exhibited in Berlin were paintings, oil on canvas. With several of the pictures of the Berlin show lost or missing today,1 it was that exhibition and the preservation of most of its material that nonetheless kept Malevich’s work accessible for posterity. The manuscripts he left in Berlin were also retrieved in 1954 and, translated into German and published in 1962, served as the other pillar to the recovery of his oeuvre.

1923: A Watershed Year The second half of the year 1923 can be, with more or less precision, pinpointed as the end of the heightened revolutionary and utopian expectations of the avantgardes that emerged in the wake of the First World War. Events and documents

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of 1923 indicate a sea change in the outlook and conditions of the international avant-garde in or around that year. Planning the future gave way to work in the real world of the present. The events of 1922—the First Düsseldorf Congress of Progressive Artists in May, where the International Faction of Constructivists was formed, the momentum of which energized the Conference of Dadaists and Constructivists convoked by Theo van Doesburg in September, followed by the First Russian Exhibition in October—did not lead to the further advancement of the vaguely outlined idealist avant-garde project. Despite the activities of the “anti-authoritarian authorities” mentioned earlier, no international leadership materialized. Several “little journals” had a longer lifetime and circulation, but after 1923 the paths of the progressives who had met and planned activities in the wake of the Great War—including van Doesburg, El Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, Hans Richter, and others—diverged. It was in 1923 that both Malevich and van Doesburg reached a point of culmination in the radicalism of their visionary ideas. Van Doesburg, under the pen name I. K. Bonset, published the article “Toward Constructive Poetry”2 in his journal Mécano, stepping up as a dadaist against the emerging utilitarian concepts: “To accept the purely utilitarian as the whole foundation for a new art form = madness.” He lampooned the “blue jackets” for claiming a kind of pragmatism that they could not deliver on. Since “blue jacket” was, as Bann notes, a slang term for sailor, this brings to mind the productivist, utilitarian Tatlin’s 1911–1912 Self Portrait as Sailor as one of van Doesburg’s targets. Harshly critiquing the concept of functionality, van Doesburg asserted that the poet creates, in spite of “‘disinterested abstraction,’ a world and a new man”3 purely from the language, nothing else, regardless of any social or practical usefulness. At the same time, in the spring of 1923 Malevich, as Masha Chlenova relates, “exhibited two blank primed canvases close to the ceiling of a gallery space as the culmination of the UNOVIS display at the exhibition Petrograd Artists of All Trends,”4 titling this work Suprematist Mirror. In the accompanying text of the same title, Malevich announced that both “comprehension of God” and “comprehension of nature” equal “nothing”: there is no comprehension of anything whatsoever, all efforts to understand the world amount to nothing; and the world is the world of non-objectivity.5 At the same time, in the spring of 1923, Kállai, already an important voice in the German art scene, was carried away by a grand vision of constructivism. Kállai wrote an article titled “Constructivism,”6 which marked the apex of his thrill with the geometric abstract works of both constructivism and suprematism. Written in Berlin, it was published in the Vienna-based Ma. Consistently with

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the dominant perception of both trends in Germany as the art of the future, Kállai envisions and celebrates them as the victory over alienation in society. “Constructivist consciousness experiences itself in space-time in terms of the absolute here and now. . . . The constructive consciousness is ahistorical. ( . . . ) A suprematist single square is the realization of the will to achieve ultimate unity and identity with oneself.”7 These exalted lines were the last celebratory ones Kállai wrote about constructivism and suprematism as harbingers of an ideal future society. Already in the same May 1923 issue of Ma, editor Lajos Kassák published an article titled “The Tragedy of a Generation,” admitting the defeat of the utopian illusions. He described the progressive Hungarian artists— an account easily applicable to the entire international avant-garde—as having started their careers during the war and the revolutions “determined to climb the mountain peak, and now humbly descending halfway from the slopes.”8 Once again in tune with the vibes of the changing international scene, in the summer of the same year Kállai published the antithesis of his “Constructivism” essay, titled “Correction (To the Attention of De Stijl).”9 Addressed to the De Stijl, critiquing what Kállai had called their “exclusive constructivism”10 and “aesthetic games,”11 he redirected the concept of art from an imaginary future to actual present-day reality, which “would mean sacrificing constructivism, the isolated cult of future life, to the cult of today’s life.”12 Changing his mind almost overnight, he was done with all the purity and transcendentalism of geometric abstraction, and pronounced, “Art in its totality. . . is tied to the psychological and biological laws governing the organism that creates it.”13 In Berlin, the infinite dimensions of Lissitzky’s vision of the future dating from Vitebsk, 1919, gave way to the new concept and practice of day-to-day work in the form of advertisement design for the Pelikan firm that produced stationery, fountain pens, and ink in Berlin. This was happening at about the same time as when the 1919 Bauhaus utopia symbolized by the “Socialist cathedral” gave way to more pragmatism in the Bauhaus with a similar shift in the views and activities of Walter Gropius who, in his capacity as director, replaced the quasi-religious mysticism of Johannes Itten with the constructivist lucidity of László MoholyNagy in 1923; and substituted the religious ecstasy of Lothar Schreyer’s stage work with Oskar Schlemmer’s clearly planned geometric choreography. Not that Moholy-Nagy or Schlemmer had been limited to exclusively rational modes of thinking or working, but they both mustered a matter-of-fact professionalism that was the order of the day. Palpable change in history also registered with the Russians. In 1923 the VKhUTEMAS had a newly appointed rector, Vladimir A. Favorsky, who worked

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on realizing the government’s 1923 Educational Reform, which placed emphasis on the school’s collaboration with industrial production.14 Soviet-Russian writer Mikhail Slonimsky’s 1923 short story “The Emery Machine” accounts for the dramatic reversal of the great postrevolutionary illusions: I won’t fuss at all. I’ll shoot myself in the head. We have shot in the head, crushed and annihilated everything that even slightly resembled the past. We have skipped forward a thousand years, a millennium separated us from those we exterminated. . . . In brief, I struggled against time and space, I wanted to make the future present. This had seemed possible in those panic-stricken, confused years when time seemed to vanish, but now that the panic has ceased, life again proceeds in time and space. And even if space can be conquered, time cannot. Life is again motivated by the same old things: love, money, and fame.15

This short story precisely marked the nascent political and artistic changes. The French writer Jean Cocteau’s 1918 “Call to Order”16 had, at least at face value, its equivalent in Russia after the turmoil of the revolutionary and Civil War years: the establishment-organization AKhRR17 formed in 1922 advocated heroic realism and enhanced loyalty to the Soviet state. Its members attacked the artists of both INKhUK and NARKOMPROS as bourgeois and claimed exclusive right to be considered left wing. They organized their first exhibition in Moscow in May 1922, all proceeds of which were used, similarly to the First Russian Exhibition in Berlin, for relief of the Russian famine of 1921. The Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity, the new group of realist painters headed by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, emerged in Germany in 1920, but they organized their first exhibition only in 1925. Anti-expressionist as well as anti-abstraction, they engaged in a realist style of social critique that was opposed to—and even mocking all sorts of—idealism. Hartlaub published an article in Das Kunstblatt in 1927 titled “Looking Back on Constructivism,”18 clearly putting it in the past tense and anticipating an idea that would, three decades later, be one of the central program points of the Situationist International: “Our theoretical relation to abstraction and indirectness corresponds to the abstraction and indirectness of our relation to the world”19—meaning to urge actual activity and direct action instead of alienated “indirectness.” Critique of utopian idealism also came from inside utopian-progressive movements. After Raoul Hausmann, Hans Arp, Ivan Puni, and László MoholyNagy published the previously mentioned “A Call for Elementarist Art” in the fall of 1921, Kemény and Moholy-Nagy published Dynamisch-konstruktives Kraftsystem20 (Dynamic-Constructive System of Forces) at the end of 1922, a

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declaration in which they called for a reassessment of the criteria of “constructive art.” They claimed that “constructive art” has become static—or, in the language of the avant-garde, dead—and, as Kemény put it at INKhUK in 1921—a kind of “technical naturalism.” Instead, they proposed new “dynamic constructions,” where material is not considered more than “the vehicle of energy,” and emphasis is shifted from tangible material to intangible energy-systems—a modern concept of electric current and various rays. Such novel works, they suggested, would activate spectators and stimulate them. They also suggested the examination of free-hanging sculptures and the use of films for the purpose of studying the interrelationship of space, material, and energy.21 Kemény and Moholy-Nagy’s manifesto voiced a faith in the capacity of new materials and new systems in art. They proposed to draw art closer to the sciences—a view shared by many progressive artists at the time. Gabo’s plastic string sculptures, with their virtual volume created by movement; Moholy-Nagy’s interest in transparency and kinetic objects; Péri’s interest in space, manifest in his three-dimensional objects made of concrete; and van Doesburg’s concept of color planes in both spatial works and paintings, all pointed toward a reassessment of the interrelationship of space and object. Lissitzky’s already discussed 1923 Proun Room must also be considered in this context. Kemény published another article, “Das dynamische Prinzip” (“The Dynamic Principle”), in Der Sturm,22 advocating “cosmic constructions,” each of which would be dynamic. Critique of constructivism as “static” soon reached the point of the above artists’ and critics’ siding with a potentially popular figurative art. Kemény and Moholy-Nagy, along with Péri and Kállai, criticized abstraction embodied in constructivism in a “Nyilatkozat,” or Declaration they signed and published in the Hungarian communist periodical Egység (Unity), in February 1923.23 Similarly to AKhRR, although likely unbeknownst of its existence, they now proposed the organization of politically committed communist proletarian cultural units that would guarantee the cooperation of different artists’ groups and the termination of “bourgeois aestheticism,” which they claimed corrupted the true spirit of constructivism. They saw direct ties between communism and “true” constructivism, stating that the true art form of the collective society of the future would be what they called “collective architecture.” The Declaration voiced Kemény’s critique of the young OBMOKhU constructivists’ mechanical outlook24 in Moscow, too—a derogatory assessment that the authors now extended to the De Stijl group, as well. They urged the organization of proletkult movements in Europe—that is, initiatives for artists to create an easy-tounderstand, transparent, ideology-driven realist art for the working classes.

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The Bauhaus organized the “Bauhaus Week” in Weimar, a week of presentations and exhibitions in the summer of 1923, which was successful both nationwide and internationally but generated increased hostility in Weimar, and was followed by the school’s ousting of the town as a result of the 1924 parliamentary elections in its home region of Thüringen. Conditions for future-bound utopian art were changing. Lissitzky commented bitterly on the demise of the internationalist and collectivist-spirited avant-gardes in a letter to Sophie at the end of 1924: Forget about making international exhibitions in Germany. Now comes GERMAN national painting. I would very much like to be wrong, but we may witness how Burchartz, Schlemmer, and Röhl will step up as representatives of National Constructivism and National Bauhaus. I am not sure even about Kurtchen. And in this Germany, you want to propagate Malevich and Mondrian. Forget about it.25

Lissitzky had a very dark outlook but, in point of fact, turned out to be mostly wrong: neither Kurt Schwitters (“Kurtchen”) nor Schlemmer became nationalists, nor did “national” get attached to art directions as yet; on the other hand, however, he turned out to be right about Burchartz and Peter Röhl, both of whom joined the nazi Party in 1933. His pessimism notwithstanding, Lissitzky, as early as 1924, captured the new direction of the future that was, in the long run, antithetical to the internationalism and utopianism of the immediate postwar years. Noting the Zeitgeist of the times, Ernst Kállai gave the telling title “The Twilight of Ideologies” to an essay he published in 1925,26 stating that “today we are witnessing a time of professional consolidation and absorption in objective, expert work.”27 Malevich’s travel and exhibitions in Europe in 1927, as he brought his revolutionary avant-garde paintings and ideas to the West, must be examined in this framework as well.

Malevich in Warsaw Malevich’s visit and reception in Warsaw on his way to Berlin in the spring of 1927 was, in a sense, a prequel to his reception in Berlin. He had a commanding reputation in both cities, but many of his colleagues found that he represented concepts that have become, by the time he arrived in Warsaw and then Berlin, obsolete.

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Because of his family background and personal contacts,28 Malevich had close ties to Poland, and Polish artists regarded him as a fellow countryman who just happened to be living in Russia. The leading Polish constructivists Władisław Strzemiński (1893–1952) and his wife Katarżyna Kobro (Ekaterina Kobro, 1898–1951)29 had both studied at SVOMAS (Svobodnie Masterskii, The State Free Art Studios) in Moscow in 1918, with Malevich among others, and were connected to the Smolensk branch of UNOVIS. Until about 1921 they were the only artists outside Russia who had firsthand knowledge of Malevich’s work and ideas. After the couple moved to Poland in 1922, Strzemiński published “Notes on Russian Art” in the Polish journal Zwrotnica (Switch-Points). The editors of the journal appended a note, stating: The author of the following article recently came back from Russia, where he took an active part in artistic movements. In the letter addressed to our editorial board, he asks for help to bring Mr. Malevich, our countryman and one of the leading artists in the Russian art world, to Poland. We draw the matter to the attention of the Department of Culture and Art.30

Indeed, back in 1922, Strzemiński declared that Malevich was “a giant,” whose development had been “blocked by Commissar Lunacharsky,” who had failed to recognize true artistic value. Instead, the Commissar of Enlightenment had supported the productivists, whom Strzemiński criticized for having “no idea about the efforts that have led to cubist and suprematist developments.”31 Strzemiński, however, switched positions on both suprematism and productivism by the end of the decade, which is a clear indication of changes both within and without the avant-gardes. Views on progressive art in interwar Poland may have been matters of principle; however, the group dynamics of the progressive Polish art scene that reflected various trends did not entail the political hostilities of the Second Polish Republic.32 Progressive artists did not adapt a stance of militant opposition to mainstream Polish art—regained Polish independence made everyone enthusiastically patriotic—but they were marginalized by both the public and the officialdom. Mainstream art in Poland consisted of neoclassicism and neorealism, both of which, as Irena Kossowska observes, “resulted from a rejection of the self-referential experimentation with non-representational and abstract form manifest in modernism, and a denunciation of the intellectual speculation typical of the avant-garde.”33 This was a general trend, which accompanied and was parallel to the thriving international avant-garde during the first years of the 1920s, which nevertheless also developed in Poland.

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Strzemiński’s “Notes on Russian Art”34 was a controversial article. The rampant anti-Russian and anti-Soviet sentiments in Poland made all utterances about Russian culture provocative. The author, therefore, stressed Malevich’s Polish ethnicity, pointing out that he “is not the first pre-eminent Pole in Russian art.”35 Strzemiński‘s unequivocal admiration of Malevich had changed by 1924, however, when he founded the Blok (Block) Circle and journal of the same title, including fellow abstract artists Kobro, Henryk Stażewski (1894– 1988), Mieczyslaw Szczuka (1898–1927), and Teresa Zarnower (1895–1950). Typically, these self-confessed cubists, suprematists, and constructivists blurred the boundaries between these respective artistic trends, while the group became increasingly committed to constructivism, in particular to the utilitarianism that constructivism entailed. As early as March 1924 Stażewski identified what he referred to as “post-suprematism” in the first issue of Blok and announced the “bankruptcy of suprematism,” maintaining that with its invention, “A new notion of beauty is born—the beauty of utilitarianism.”36 Blok started to criticize Malevich in harsh terms, deliberately skewing the arguments in its editors’ favor. “Suprematism did not define the concept of shape in painting,”37 Strzemiński stated, and he reproached Malevich for misunderstanding the relations “between art and technology, art and astronomy, and art and [geometry].”38 By this time, Strzemiński was developing his own rigorous concept of “absolute painting,” which, he asserted, had to be absolutely planar, reduced to one flat picture plane, and avoid any interaction between forms—a system whose details he fully elaborated on in his manifesto, Unism in Painting, published in 1928.39 Having sent four drawings to the Second Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture in Warsaw in 1926,40 Malevich arrived in Warsaw for the first time in March 1927, with works for a retrospective exhibition, the material of which was, by and large, that of his upcoming Berlin show. He spent about three weeks in the Polish capital. His invitation and exhibition were the initiative of Strzemiński and Szczuka, apparently Strzemiński helping Malevich obtain the necessary travel documents.41 In Warsaw, Malevich received a mixed reception. On the one hand, he was enthusiastically welcomed and celebrated by the Polish artists who organized the exhibition and arranged a festive banquet in his honor (see Figure 10.1). Poet and art critic Tadeusz Peiper (1891–1969), for example, greeted him warmly and expressed the wish that he could become a permanent member of the Polish art world, as “Polish artists are overcome with melancholy at the thought that the Pole Malevich is not here working at their side [because] our artistic life is not

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Figure 10.1  Welcome reception for Malevich in the Polonia Hotel, Warsaw, March 1927. © Sotheby’s. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

exactly rich with artists of his calibre. We miss Malevich. ( . . . ) Malevich should not just visit us!”42 Malevich met members of the Praesens group, including Stażewski, Helena, and Szymon Syrkus, as well as Strzemiński and Kobro. As Andrzej Turowski relates, “Malevich’s exhibition in Warsaw was held at the Polish Arts Club in the Polonia Hotel, where the club occupied the entire first floor. ( . . . ) The Polonia occupied an important place on the social, cultural, and political map of the capital. Its position in the traditional city center in direct proximity to the international railway station, bestowed a certain prestige.”43 In the large clubroom of the hotel an improvised exhibition of Malevich’s paintings was arranged and shown for a week, as the art community celebrated the painter. A great number of reviews and articles on Malevich were published in the Polish press.44 Not all of these articles were celebratory, however. For example, Szczuka attacked Malevich in an article titled “The Funeral of Suprematism,”45 pointing out the many strong modernists in Poland who had come a long way since they had admired Malevich about a decade earlier. Szczuka stressed that “Malevich’s exhibition is a little too late for our country”46 and, coining a new term, explained: “Kazimir Malevich is the founder of ‘Eastern-European suprematism.’” This, he claimed, has failed to achieve “complete flatness” as dictated by Strzemiński’s Unism, which was much discussed ahead of its publication among Polish artists. Szczuka admitted that complete flatness is “an unattainable objective” but, short

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of this achievement, he maintained that suprematism has ended up being merely a form of “abstract museum painting.”47 “Eastern-European suprematism,” he wrote, lacks dynamism while, he claimed, it also features “a certain literary character, resulting from the juxtaposition of abstract shapes, thrown onto an unrelated background.”48 In other words, Szczuka argued that Malevich failed to keep the picture autonomous and non-referential. Therefore, his work is, in Strzemiński’s ultimate derogatory term, “baroque,” implying “decorative” and antiquated. More profoundly detaching himself and all “true” Polish modernists from Malevich, Szczuka asserted: “the characteristic feature of Malevich’s psychology is an abhorrence of the word ‘construction’, applied to works of art. He is a romantic who loves painterly means for their own sake.”49 This last statement, which happens to square with Puni’s and Umansky’s earlier judgments as well as the constructivists’ earlier critique, marks a turning point in the Polish interpretation of Malevich’s work. Consistently with the international shift from idealism to pragmatism after 1923, this critique of constructivism reflected a fundamental change within the Polish avant-garde as well, one that was now firmly committed to the rigor of utilitarianism—in a way that was similar to that of the Moscow constructivists but on the grounds of different aesthetics. The earlier fascination with Malevich’s cosmic abstraction was turning into a contempt for “Art for art’s sake, served by the artist priest. [ . . . ] Mystical and theological speculations in which Malevich attempted to contain his conception of art.”50 Szczuka’s rant, which on some points agrees with van Doesburg’s critique, still has more to do with the change in the Polish avantgarde than with Malevich’s art and ideas, and precisely because of this it vividly conveys the sharp tone that characterized the Polish avant-garde discourse of the late 1920s. The multitude of views expressed in a large number of articles suggests a serious and informed discussion about the future possibilities of the visual arts in Warsaw. Unism, however, was not the only authoritative voice in the debate. Malevich’s views and suprematism both had a catalytic impact on different artistic concepts which, in turn, dismissed him as imperfect or obsolete. And yet, whatever stance the Polish artists adopted, Malevich’s work and ideas consistently remained points of reference for them.

The Berlin Exhibition’s Context Malevich was offered a Sonderausstellung, a distinguished solo exhibition at the 1927 Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung, an annual event at which Lissitzky had

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participated earlier, in 1923. Malevich was presented this opportunity by way of help from his friend, architect and November Group member Hugo Häring (1882–1958) who, with his Russian-speaking wife of Latvian origin, had helped establish contacts between Russian and German artists.51 Malevich’s friends, engineer Gustav von Riesen and his family who had lived in Moscow and spoke fluent Russian, were his hosts and interpreters during his stay in Berlin from March 29 to June 4, 1927. According to Troels Andersen, Malevich took seventy paintings to Berlin, about one-third of which were suprematist, besides earlier mostly cubo-futurist works, as well as a number of drawings, architectural models, and “theoretical charts.”52 While Andersen suggests that with his “theoretical charts” Malevich wanted to demonstrate the ongoing theoretical work at Leningrad’s GINKhUK (Gosudarstvennii Institute Khudozhestvennoi Kulturi, State Institute for Artistic Culture), where he was working at the time as leader of one of the experimental departments, the demonstration boards were meant to be used in future lectures that Malevich hoped to give in Germany—at the Bauhaus, for instance—as well as in Paris and Vienna, where he had hoped to travel and exhibit his works while also teaching art courses. Malevich’s invitation to a solo exhibition in Germany demonstrated the further development of official German-Soviet relations in the second half of the 1920s. This opportunity, however, came rather late for Malevich, as the cosmic, utopian imagination he represented was being increasingly replaced by pragmatic professionalism at the time of his visit to Berlin. This tendency is demonstrated by a number of articles in the art press, including an essay by architecture critic Siegfried Giedion, who proposed that it was time to switch from the lofty term “architecture” to the more pragmatic and humble term “building,” and discuss the realization of functional rather than representational projects.53 Throughout the same period, the political shift to the right was unmistakable. One early symptom and consequence of this shift was the public humiliation of Walter Gropius by the Dessau press that, among other reasons, led to his resignation as director of the Bauhaus in 1927, effective 1928. Thus, Malevich’s exhibition in the same year came too late for becoming a celebrated or memorable event. So much so that many art journals skipped reviewing it altogether. As in Poland, so in Berlin Malevich was representative of the recent past that all too soon became history. His suprematist imagery brought back the recent memory of a free, unlimited imagination unrestricted by pragmatism. Moreover, Malevich exhibited mostly paintings in Berlin, in spite of having ceased to paint altogether54 five or six years earlier, as he instead turned to designing and

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making three-dimensional “architectons.” Malevich either trusted the radicalism of his paintings to be accepted as being revelatory in Berlin, or he was informed to the effect that paintings were still more coveted in Germany than more radical designs of a futuristic, imaginary architecture. In any case, the fact remains that he presented works from an earlier, already closed period of his art. After the 1922 Van Diemen Gallery exhibition, articles discussing the new Russian art in general, and constructivism in particular, became more frequent in the German press than previously. To refer to just a couple of surveys aside from the positive reviews of the Soviet participation in the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, Alfréd Kemény and Ernst Kállai’s articles stand out. Kemény’s “Abstraction from Suprematism to the Present”55 was published in Das Kunstblatt, the editor of which inserted a note between the title and the text announcing that the article does not reflect the journal’s value judgments. Thus, even the progressive Das Kunstblatt was cautiously tactful regarding the art talk of the previous years. Kemény, a staunch communist, discusses “new designers” rather than “new artists” and asserts an “East-West polarity: the antithesis between the social dynamism of Russia and the comparative social immobility of the West,”56 representing the left-wing concept that did not admit to a slowdown in Soviet dynamism regarding the arts and was equally blind to the ongoing shift to the political right in Germany. Kemény underlines that Malevich’s Square is “the symbol for the principle of economy in art,”57 a minimal form; and while the Russian artist stepped out into infinite, dynamic space, Mondrian, often seen as his Western counterpart, achieved ultimate equilibrium, supreme harmony, using the same form of the square as part of his grid paintings. Kemény, in his article, ranks dynamism higher than equilibrium. He emphasizes the significance of the cinematographic experiments of Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, mentioning Lissitzky as an example of transcending suprematism with proun—the real space of which could expand into the fourth dimension, time. Using constructivism’s self-definition, Kemény clearly posits “the art of material culture in the age of technology” as a counterreaction to the “metaphysical emphasis of suprematism.”58 He corrects the erroneous concept of Tatlin’s art as “machine art,” explaining it as experiments in space and mentions his fellow Hungarian artist László Péri as a similar new designer of spatial modules. Kemény’s survey, if representing the political left’s views, is one of the most adequate reports of the state of affairs in the international avant-garde as of 1924, but even so, it did not seem to have much of an impact on the overall art discourse. In the same year, Kállai also published an overview on the art scene of the time.59 Less emotional than he was in 1923, Kállai now described constructivism

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as the art of utmost formal discipline, a clear contrast to expressionism, which he downplays as the art of “baroque ecstasy.” His former critique of the “bourgeois” character of De Stijl’s constructivism now revised, in 1924 Kállai confirms that only the Dutch and the Russians produced actual constructivist works in the true, material, and functional spirit of the term. Examining most artists of the progressive scene from the point of view of constructivism in the revised, more functional sense of the term, Kállai surprisingly also lists Malevich among the constructivists. However, he also attempts to point out the subtle differences between Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Tatlin, Gabo, Moholy-Nagy, and other representatives of the avant-garde, but he ultimately puts UNOVIS and OBMOKhU in the same camp, as did other authors. He gives special mention to film, photography, and theater as being the most important media in constructivism, as well as in the new art in general.60 In this 1924 article, however, Kállai discusses constructivism in the past tense. Another factor that played a role in making Malevich’s exhibition in Berlin happen was the Bauhaus, which contributed to strengthening the GermanRussian relations in the field of culture. As part of mutual visits, several official Soviet delegations visited the Bauhaus in the fall of 1927,61 including such prominent personalities as Lunacharsky and Ehrenburg.62 The catalog of the 1927 Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung had the following one-page information about Malevich’s exhibition: The Russian painter Kazimir Malevich’s development is characteristic for the development of the art of the present. The artist, born in Kiev in 1878, started his career as a naturalistic painter who proceeded first to impressionism, then to the Cézanneists to arrive to futurism and cubism. In 1915 he founded the group of suprematists, a direction that he initiated. Suprematism is objectless and idealess art that creates forms and color in order to render sensations. It is characteristic for the recent artistic developments that the Paris-based Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, who works by similar principles has, as opposed to Malevich’s dynamism, arrived at a completely static concept of art. In some of his architectonic designs Malevich uses suprematism in threedimensional space. Malevich is leader of the experimental laboratories of the State Institute for Art History in Leningrad. This special exhibition is the first in Western Europe that presents, in their historical development, the works of an artist who has been known here through his students only.63

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This introduction would have been different, for better or worse, had Malevich’s writings been published and had he not been known “through his students only” in Germany.

Visit to the Dessau Bauhaus Malevich visited the Bauhaus in the spring of 1927 unannounced—a strong indication of his detachment from Western ways. He arrived in Dessau on April 7, accompanied by his friend Tadeusz Peiper as his translator. Malevich had hopes to find some work, if only temporary, at the school. He attached hopes to the Bauhaus as an important venue for spreading suprematism internationally. Unbeknownst to Malevich, who failed to check the date or coordinate his schedule with the Bauhaus faculty, it was the second day of the Easter holiday, so the school was closed and many of the professors and students had already left town. Malevich and Peiper called Kandinsky from a payphone in a café, but to no avail. Another call—still no answer. They then called Gropius, who answered and set out to pick them up. “He is very pleased,” Peiper wrote, “offers us to spend the night in his home, drives up to the café in the director’s car.”64 Peiper’s description of Gropius’s house gives us an idea of what Malevich, too, found strange and unusual in this “machine for living,” as modern housing was referred to at the Bauhaus. Entry hall. A wall that consists of a thin, sandy cloth curtain behind which stands—as we will see the following day—the dining room, which is directly connected to the kitchen, with a sliding door between the two. The walls are painted to match the architectonic divisions of the room precisely. Just as the room is divided into two sections, the ceiling is divided into two rectangular fields of color. One of them is black. Flooded by the milky light from the horizontal ceiling lamps, this black color fills the hall with a cool repose. At the edges of an architectonic section the surfaces are equal. Everywhere the taste for the flattest wall possible. No cabinets; everything is in the walls. Even the bookshelf in front of me arouses the ire of the man of the house, who is already thinking of ways to hide this piece of furniture.

Peiper’s observations express both admiration for the new and an almost comical critique of the bleak modernity of the privileged Bauhaus director’s state-of-theart, high-tech style, as characteristic of modernity in the Germany of 1927. Later, however, not without malice, Peiper describes the less impressive part of the house: “The guestroom is on the second floor. Hidden away: two old beds.”

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But first, his initial surprise increases when they are seated on Marcel Breuer’s “Vasily chairs”: We sit comfortably in armchairs that really ought to be called machines for sitting. Their form differs vastly from that of traditional furniture of this sort. They recall medical instruments. That fact suggests that the physiology of the human body was the source of their inspiration. On a skeleton of nickel steel tubes, supports and rests have been arranged according to the needs of the seated human body, dispensing with any high-flying invention. We sit comfortably, very comfortably.

Gropius called whoever was available for the evening, so Moholy-Nagy and Hannes Meyer showed up because “everyone was very interested in Malevich,” whose reputation was due to his exhibits at the 1922 Russian exhibition and had been spread by Lissitzky, who had disseminated Malevich’s ideas so that “At the mention of Malevich at the Bauhaus, hats are removed in profound respect.” Kandinsky also arrived eventually, but there was no hearty meeting between the two Russians. “Kandinsky greeted Malevich with a vague gesture and soon disappeared without a trace.” Malevich did not speak either German or French, which contributed to the distance between him and the Bauhaus professors—distance manifested itself as a profound conceptual difference as soon as concrete topics were touched upon. Peiper writes, “Malevich distinguishes between architecture and ‘architectonics’; the first has use value, the second only artistic value. ‘Architectonics’ produces forms that are concerned solely with the artistic combination of spatial forms: the resulting works are not supposed to be inhabited”—so they do not need architectural details. This distinction did not make sense to the functionalist architects who were present, especially Gropius, who had to fight accusations of not being functionalist enough. On top of these theories, Malevich told an anecdote at lunch the next day to demonstrate how pure formal concerns may lead to unexpected uses of an object: Once for fun he broke a cup into two pieces along its vertical axis. It was a time when his money stretched neither forward nor backward; his wife made a scene. But he liked one half of the cup so much that he kept it. One day he discovered [that] his wife was using it to transfer flour or sugar between containers. This anecdote was intended to demonstrate that something that was not made with a utilitarian purpose in mind, could still become a useful utilitarian object.

This story may have hit a nerve with Malevich’s audience in the wrong way: “Gropius heard the anecdote and said nothing.”65 This brought to Peiper’s mind

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an encounter and discussion with Mies van der Rohe a few days earlier in Berlin that was even more clearly confrontational: Malevich was making the point that architecture, like the applied arts and art in general, developed exclusively under the influence of aesthetic ideas, independent of historical (social, economic, and other) factors. He described how he had built architectonic models constructed from new architectural elements, but according to the Gothic system. Mies remarked that these Gothic buildings weren’t suited for anything today. “Who knows!” Malevich replied, and his reply was considered “extraordinarily interesting” by those present. Then he said that the form of furniture would never have changed if not for a transformation in aesthetic perspectives. Mies replied with the assertion that, for example, today’s armchair had changed because today’s athletic people sit differently than their predecessors. [ . . . ] The conversation, which was meant to serve to get to know one another, bubbled over. There was an excess of controversial questions, and one by one they slipped into silence.

The silences and polite nods to Malevich’s thoughts which were not acceptable to Gropius or Mies distanced the parties. Professional pragmatism on behalf of Mies and Gropius collided with Malevich’s ideas, which in turn were fed mostly by imagination. Malevich was clearly unaware of what was going on in Germany, and specifically in the Bauhaus, where Gropius was at the point of silently preparing to withdraw. Besides political polarization, streamlined functionalism, pragmatism in an industrial framework, and service to the consumer and the public were, as a matter of ethical standards, put before aesthetic considerations at the Bauhaus, especially by the recently hired professor of architecture and director-to-be, Hannes Meyer. Tension between the artists of the faculty and their architect and designer colleagues was growing; and now that the battle fought against Itten and his expressionism a few years earlier seemed to have been settled, Malevich’s views, drawn purely from aesthetic and spiritual considerations, could not but resonate with them as foreign and outdated, reminding them of a conflict that, as far as Gropius was concerned, was already a closed chapter. Conversely to Malevich, who first and foremost was a painter, Gropius and Mies designed, aside from buildings, armchairs, and other pieces of furniture, and so had firsthand acquaintance with every pragmatic aspect of that job, from the elements of structure and form through material and production to marketing. Talking to these practicing architects and designers about “Gothic” and pure aesthetics likely made Gropius and Mies think that Malevich’s ideas were remote and irrelevant.

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“Malevich’s standpoint of timelessness leads to errors,” comments Peiper. In Peiper’s account, Malevich gives a description of the Bauhaus buildings by comparing the level of German industrial development using iron, reinforced concrete, and glass to that of the “more modest level” of architecture in Poland and Russia, and asks, in conversation with Peiper, the piercing question concerning the priority of art or technology at the Bauhaus. From the technological point of view, Peiper saw that aesthetics were contingent on the given level of technical and social development, and so “Malevich's standpoint of timelessness” in this sense appeared inadequate. Modernity in the Germany of 1927 was not a matter of courageous vision, but rather of a matter-of-fact daily work and industrial production. Malevich’s imagination could be unlimited as it had not crashed with brickand-mortar reality other than that of the Soviet bureaucracy, but his timeless visionary aesthetics could not engage the Bauhaus’ architects and designers, who carried on work in real time and space, with a very real price tag on the finished products. The theoretical charts that Malevich carried to Germany in order to demonstrate his views on art were constructed to prove that artistic styles throughout history have always been determined by the dominant social and cultural change that an era featured compared with the previous one—while he saw, as he wrote in a letter to Lev Yudin, that “Germans do everything differently, they define everything more precisely.”66

Reception of the Berlin Exhibition While the widely read art journal Der Cicerone (The Chaperone) failed to mention Malevich’s exhibition in its account of the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung of the year, Kállai reviewed it in Das Kunstblatt, stating the obvious: “Like much else that reached us from Russia in the early post-war years, this legend about Malevich seemed extremely dubious. It was impossible to establish what was true and what was invention.” Seeing the exhibition, however, was an eyeopening experience for him: “Malevich’s work has strong individual singularity that organically connects Western European repercussions with deeply Russian traits.”67 Kállai surveys Malevich’s career from postimpressionism through cubism and through cubo-futurism to suprematism, considering the latter to be “intensely personal and unique ( . . . ) fusing West-European elements with original and ancient Russian ones.”68 Kállai, whose wife was Russian, was more sensitive to the Russian context and tradition than many other art critics in

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Berlin and could identify continuity between the religiosity of Malevich’s early primitivist works and the visionary, cosmic “enthusiasm” of his suprematist imagery, which he found a revelation. He attributed the change in Malevich’s work to the new perspectives that emerged in the aftermath of the First World War and the October Revolution of 1917. Kállai described Malevich’s trajectory from contemplating the mystery of nature to the “trans-natural world of dynamism and unimpeded freedom.”69 While working in the German and international art world, Kállai’s understanding and interpretation of Malevich was also influenced by his familiarity with the Hungarian and Eastern European art of the late 1920s. Unlike Szczuka in Warsaw, Kállai did not condemn Malevich for his abstract idiom but was much less enthusiastic about it than about another painterly achievement of Malevich’s: the creation of a new, non-perspectival space on the canvas. Although sensitive to the religious, confessional, and utopian dimensions of Malevich’s art, Kállai came to appreciate suprematism primarily for opening up a new pictorial space on the canvas that offered the sensation of flying into the bottomless, endless void by purely painterly means: contrasting flat shapes and non-perspectival white space. Kállai’s emphasis on Malevich’s professional painterly achievements rather than on his visionary power also reflects the post-utopian moment of the late 1920s when, as opposed to the beginning of the decade, ingenuity and the inventive use of painterly methods carried more weight than the universal anticipation of an emerging new world. Appreciation of professional work gained priority over fascination with visions in art criticism as well. Long gone was the time when Paul Westheim wrote, regarding Malevich’s White on White painting, that “there is much to be learned from an intellectual situation [in Russia].”70 The 1927 exhibition was the first shift in the critical interpretation of Malevich’s work which was to be a sign of the changing times. Malevich’s original major asset that distinguished him as a radical innovator, whether as an object of cultic worship or of animosity, was his visionary capability that propelled the viewer into the imagery of a never-before-experienced cosmic void free of gravity. His power to anticipate a future cosmic reality that eliminated boundaries was now, in 1927, more objectively analyzed than enthusiastically or uncritically welcomed. Kállai describes the phenomenon in coolly objective terms: This fervor, which sublimates technicism to a vision of some new sensation of the world, comes from the abnegation of the soul, which even so must be called religious. Neither in his post-impressionist nor his suprematist paintings

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is Malevich just an artist. His painting is for him a vehicle for a confession of faith. These confessions in former times, before the war, held an almost monkish attitude towards existence. War and revolution shifted this mentality on to another course entirely. From a mysterious stasis of a soul bound to nature, it moved to a certain unfettered dynamic immensity on the other side of any sort of nature. ( . . . ) In Malevich’s suprematist painting, a few lingering points, intersecting or diverging lines, are enough to open the entire breadth of the world’s space.71

In the changed historical context of the late 1920s the reception of Malevich’s art was far from the ecstatic enthusiasm with which Lissitzky, the UNOVIS collective, and van Doesburg had received suprematism upon first encountering it. The magic power of the square was gone. The utopias attached to it had faded.72 Malevich received a warmer but still critical reception from none other than Lunacharsky, who reviewed his exhibition in Ogonek, before his already cited derogatory lines about Malevich’s writings: Here, perhaps, Malevich showed himself in full ( . . . ) Severe and zealous, like his models—the icon and the lubok—“classicist” deep down ( . . . ) It is a visual music of pure tones, very strict, even severe. Doric, so to speak. And yet saturated with the joy of love for color. ( . . . ) [such canvases] as a decorative device can have a rich future.73

Downgrading suprematist work as decorative and seeing its future along this direction were no less scathing coming from Lunacharsky than had been from anyone else before.

Volume 11 of the Bauhaus Books Series: Malevich’s The Non-Objective World and Suprematism It was Malevich’s perceived position as a living classic, rather than a frequently visible personality in the living art scene, that made the publication of the truncated German translation74 of his Objectless World and Suprematism under the title Die gegenstandslose Welt (The World of Non-Objectivity) by the Bauhaus possible in 1927, albeit with reservations. His Berlin host Gustav von Riesen’s son, Hans von Riesen, translated the two texts into German. He confided the editor, Moholy-Nagy in a letter in June 1927, that he “will try to convince Mr. Malevich that many things that are important and relevant in Russia are superfluous or, at least, lack interest in Germany.”75 Malevich had no control over

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the German edition, which was considerably streamlined to be more palatable for the German readership, and did not agree with a number of modifications that the translator asked him to accept. Thus, von Riesen ended up reporting to Moholy-Nagy: we have to take the work as is, in its entirety. A great part of what Malevich has to say could be expressed in a more efficient and cleaner form, and a few changes adapting it to the conditions here would do a world of good to it. Still, my opinion is—in spite of disagreeing with Malevich on many points—that the work is, in the condition it is in, significant and, as a whole, interesting.76

However, the translation ultimately shortened the original text. Still, when finally published, the editors of the Bauhaus Books series inserted a note before the text of the book: We are pleased to have the chance to publish this book by Malevich, the significant Russian painter, albeit it represents, in fundamental points, views that are different from ours. At the same time, however, we can encounter the concepts of art and the lives of its representatives of modern Russian painting in a light that has been, until now, unknown. Dessau, November 1927. The Editors.77

The translator’s and the editors’ reservations echo van Doesburg’s reader’s report on the planned volume from two years earlier and, similarly to Malevich’s conversations with Bauhaus architects, shine a light on the disconnect between some of his ideas and those of the West European avant-garde discourse in 1927. In the wake of the avant-garde’s unlimited social and aesthetic projects that morphed into the charting out of what they considered to be realistically achievable by the late 1920s, Malevich appeared as a representative of the previous years. This was, in effect, a time lag, a historical disconnect between the Soviet Union and the West. In Soviet Russia, the increasing censorship invested the avant-garde with a sense of persistence and heroism, as the state deprived artists and architects of independently realizing their projects; while in Western Europe, the idealism of the early 1920s was downgraded, and a surrealist or realist critique of society and culture, coupled with an adjustment to social needs and business, constituted the new reality in the visual arts. The aesthetic standards of the avant-garde were not forgotten or discarded, but social satire or the already mentioned new realism—termed ironically, with regard to Malevich’s nonobjectivity, “New Objectivity”—and pragmatism prevailed: housing projects, utilitarian objects, and a new aesthetic in painting, photography, and even film.

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Malevich observed a pattern in The World of Non-Objectivity: existing systems are disrupted by “additional elements” that are organized and developed into a new system of visual communication, establishing a new rule and thus creating a new tradition. Over time, however, a new “additional element” emerges in the new system and disrupts it to establish its own, even newer system. Malevich, in other words, was the first to talk about obsolescence cycles as an inherent law of the visual arts, providing a blueprint of the process. This observation was interspersed with lofty theorizing and summary statements about art history and art criticism in general that did not stand up to generally recognized facts. In the midst of the rich and multifaceted German art discourse, for example, it was not correct to announce that “until now, critics viewed the painterly art from the emotional side, independent of the circumstances in which it was found,”78 as art criticism in Germany—and, for that matter, also in Russia—had the tradition of considering the historic context of artworks and had standards of formal analysis in place. Many of Malevich’s statements concerning the state and the relation of the individual to a system met with disapproval by the editors as relevant in the Russian context only, while, as von Wiese was recorded to have said, Malevich’s description of the dynamics of system-forming and system-disruption as a pattern of emerging new systems was nonetheless met with significant interest. Reservations with regard to Malevich manifested also in the “Painting and Photography” debate, published in the Amsterdam-based international revue i 10, also in 1927. The debate was generated by Kállai’s article of the same title and was moderated by Moholy-Nagy, who invited Malevich to participate along with Kandinsky, Mondrian, Behne, Will Grohmann, and other luminaries. Malevich’s contribution was, however, not published, most likely because it was perceived as counterproductive or confusing.79 At a time of fascination with the new medium of photography in art, an analysis of its aesthetics, and a discussion of its pros and cons with regard to painting, Malevich wrote: “I have never supported or approved the dead mechanical glazed photographic objective.”80 Here, “objective” does not only mean the camera lens but also figurative representation. “Non-objective” in Malevich’s vocabulary still means “free of object,” “free of figuration,” rather than using “objective” as the synonym of the camera lens or the antonym of “subjective,” which, however, is the word’s primary meaning and use in the German context. Malevich’s further statement, “the contents of art embrace various non-objective sensations and through them I keep in complete contact with the world,”81 is certainly less than clear. Ultimately, Malevich rejected photography as a possible new art, categorizing it as “a technical new media ( . . . ) like graphite and paint”82 that cannot replace,

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or even compete with, painting. The moderator of the debate, in turn, was interested in having more progressive voices in favor of affirming photography as being a token of the future, one with possibilities that may surpass manual painting or open up new alternatives to it. By the time Malevich had his solo exhibition in Berlin and his Bauhaus book was published in 1927, both his art and ideas belonged to the already left-behind avant-garde of the first years of the decade, which they had, in fact, pioneered from 1915 onwards. However, it was the body of work shown in Berlin that became the basis of his postmortem recognition when most of it was retrieved after the Second World War.

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The Postwar Scene and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam’s Malevich Exhibition, 1957

The post–Second World War recovery of the interwar avant-gardes was fueled by elementary antifascism in museums, galleries, and writing. Curators, artists, and critics as well as art historians set to reestablishing cultural continuity with the prewar era. After the years of brutal cultural regression, concerted efforts were made to restore the tradition of the Enlightenment and modernism. The daunting moral and professional task that curators and art historians now faced and were determined to accomplish was no less than that of recovering what had been lost to nazism, Italian fascism, Stalinism, and the war itself. The challenge of restoring the modernist narrative in the wake of the war was part of the effort to revive a traumatized European culture. This effort was enhanced in the United States, as well. Many European refugees had brought over a number of modernist artworks, and they were also active in shaping the art world of their new country. A number of American art historians took interest in the modernist project, too, historically as well as aesthetically, and morally. The conservative ideology-driven, figurative, nationalist, and religious neoclassicism of the interwar period was a much larger and longer-lasting trend than that of the avant-gardes. However, this conservative trend by and large went ignored in the art history of the postwar decades, as the artistic legacy of a past that offered meagre intellectual and aesthetic animation. Instead, efforts were focused on retrieving the progressive art of the interwar years that went almost into oblivion across the board—at which point in time, in the early Cold War period, the Russian avant-garde and Eastern European modernism were virtually unknown. A number of trends and styles and many modernist artists had disappeared from the public eye: many artists either relocated somewhere over the five continents or perished in the war. Among others, the modernist architecture of Shanghai; the modernist graphic design in Hong Kong and Japan; the importation of modern architecture and design into Australia; the

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many modernist directions grafted into the art of Mexico and South America as well as South Africa, many of which activities shared the legacy of the Bauhaus, deserve detailed studies in their own right.

Three Decades after the Berlin Exhibition Malevich’s rediscovery happened as a part of the effort to retrieve the progressive artistic culture of interwar Europe. As Peter Weibel points out, “In 1945, after World War  II ended, not only the cities of Europe were in ruins, but after 60 million dead, seven years of war, the Holocaust, the Gulag, and nuclear annihilation, also the belief in humanity, humanism, and culture was destroyed. Europe was at ground zero of meaning and existence.”1 Postwar imagination, however, vigorously anticipated progress and was enthralled with the vision of a new Europe and a new world. Progressives wanted to graft the marginal avantgardes of the interwar era into the mainstream art of the present, bringing the unfulfilled project of interwar modernism and the avant-gardes to fruition, and eagerly seeking out their new, postwar chapters in the making. Malevich had vanished from the European art scene after his return to Russia in June 1927. He had his last exhibitions in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in 1929 and the Kiev Art Gallery in 1930. He died of cancer in Leningrad in 1935, and the subsequent dark chapter of Russian and European history was not favorable for keeping his and other modernists’ artistic legacy alive. His works were, according to various accounts, in the vaults of the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, and the Kiev Art Gallery; and some were evacuated during the war to various museums in the Eastern provinces of Russia, not revisited until the 1970s and not widely exhibited until the 1990s. The Cold War division of Europe into East and West, enforced since 1948, had put the Russian avantgarde entirely out of sight for at least a decade in postwar Western Europe as well as the United States. Malevich’s exceptional return to the art scene was made possible in no small part by the body of work he had left in Berlin and, to a great extent, by the team of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. At the closing of the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung in Berlin on September 30, 1927, Malevich’s paintings, along with the drawings and the “theoretical charts,” were crated and put into storage by the transportation firm Gustav Knauer at the expense of architect Hugo Häring, while Malevich’s manuscripts remained with his Berlin hosts, the von Riesen family.2 An idiosyncratic modernist and November Group member, known for his writings on organic architecture,

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Häring had belonged to architectural modernism and the international style along with Gropius, Bruno Taut, Mies van der Rohe, and Ludwig Hilberseimer. He had contributed to Hans Richter’s avant-garde journal G,3 originally coedited with Lissitzky, which publicized, among other things, the launching of a Society of the Friends of the New Russia in 1923.4 Having had such left-leaning connections and career, Häring was often harassed by the nazis. By about 1930, Häring had to save on the storage fee and had the crate of Malevich’s works transferred to the Provinzialmuseum Hanover, where the director, Alexander Dorner, former manager of the Hanover-based Kestner Gesellschaft, had ties to the new Russian art through his friends, including Sophie Küppers, widow of the Gesellschaft’s former director Paul Küppers and future wife of El Lissitzky. Lissitzky’s graphic portfolio was published by the Kestner Gesellschaft, and his 1926 Cabinet of Abstract Art, commissioned by Dorner, has been restored and is still on view in the museum now renamed Landesmuseum. After the nazi takeover in January 1933, it became dangerous for Dorner to keep abstract works by a Russian artist, so he hid them in the vaults of the museum. Alfred J. Barr, Jr., founding director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, visited the Provinzialmuseum in 1935 during his European tour to collect artworks for his upcoming exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art in the following year. He recalled that he purchased two suprematist paintings and two architectural drawings by Malevich from the Landesmuseum, and borrowed six further paintings, a gouache, and five out of the twenty-two theoretical charts. In order to avoid nazi questioning, Barr, now famously, smuggled out some of his new acquisitions rolled around his umbrella and mailed the borrowed pieces to America as “technical study material.”5 Dorner sent the remaining works back to Berlin to Häring, who hid them in his home. As the private school of architecture and design where Häring worked6 burned down in a bomb attack in 1943, he returned to his native town Biberach an der Riss in Baden-Württemberg, taking the crate of Malevich works with him. According to Joop M. Joosten, some of the Malevich works may have been given as gifts or compensation for safekeeping to others, so that finally “fifteen pictures have indeed vanished.”7 The rest remained with Häring in Biberach. As of 1957, the Malevich works to be found in the United States included the paintings, drawings, and instructional panels on “extended loan” at MoMA in New York; the 1915 cubist painting Knifegrinder, which Katherine Dreier purchased for the Société Anonyme in 1922 at the First Russian Exhibition, and which is today at the Yale University Art Gallery; and the Solomon R.

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Guggenheim Museum’s 1912 painting Morning in the Village after Snowstorm, which a German collector purchased at Malevich’s 1927 Berlin exhibition. YveAlain Bois states8 that aside from the 1936 Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition in MoMA, which was a landmark survey show charting out the tendencies of modernism and drafting its canon, these were the only works of Malevich to be seen in public until the Stedelijk Museum’s December 1957 Malevich exhibition. Although exhibited in the United States, these works did not inspire lively critical or art historical discourse, nor did they generate extended research of Malevich at the time. Inclusion of Malevich in the 1936 MoMA show was a pioneering act, but the show did not single him out. It is telling how low of a price Barr had paid for the Malevich works (orthography unchanged): the museum, acting in complete good faith, bought two paintings and two drawings through dr. dorner from a large collection of malevich material concealed in the basement of the hannover museum in 1935. it also made arrangements to borrow a number of other paintings and drawings for inclusion in the exhibition cubism and abstract art which opened during the following season. the price paid for the four works, about $200, was not large, but at the same time it must be recognized that malevich’s reputation at that time was very low.9

Naum Gabo mediated between Barr, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s director Willem Sandberg, and Dorner, who had moved to America at the end of the 1930s. In a letter to Sandberg, Gabo highlighted the sensitive legal status of the Malevich works that Barr had borrowed from Dorner: My impression and conviction is that Barr is acting in good faith when he tells me that two paintings and two drawings were purchased by him from Dorner in Hanover; although Dorner vigorously denied this, insisting that he did not have the right to sell them and that there must be some mistake or misunderstanding on Barr’s part. I have the impression that the misunderstanding is on Dorner’s side. ( . . . ) Barr is willing to lend you these works [and those on extended loan] provided you will guarantee the return of the works to the Museum of Modern Art after the exhibition.10

However, in Barr’s letter attached to Gabo’s we read (orthography unchanged): “I have been asked recently to lend Malevich works to two exhibitions in Europe and do not feel that I should do so until the above [legal] questions are answered”11—in reference to the rule that as soon as artworks leave the country in which they are being held, international law or the host country’s laws come into force with regard to their legal ownership.

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Bringing Malevich’s artworks and manuscripts back to sight and to public awareness were operations on two separate, parallel tracks. Exhibiting the artworks was initiated by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Director Willem Sandberg and his deputy Hans L. C. Jaffe’s visit to Häring as early as spring of 1951 was the beginning of a long journey that, after the 1957 exhibition and the subsequent Malevich shows, was followed by the publication of the manuscripts and led to the rediscovery of Malevich west of Russia.

The Stedelijk Museum’s Tour de Force Willem Sandberg (1897–1984), director of the Stedelijk (Municipal) Museum of Amsterdam between 1945 and 1962, played a decisive role in bringing Malevich back to the art world. Sandberg got acquainted with modern art during his travels across Europe in the 1920s. He had met expressionist painter, Mazdaznan priest, and later Bauhaus master Johannes Itten in Switzerland; had seen new, kinetic art experiments in Vienna; and had visited the Bauhaus.12 He studied graphic design in Amsterdam and got in contact with the Stedelijk Museum in 1928, first as a designer; then, starting in 1937, as a curator of modern art (see Figure 11.1).

Figure 11.1  Willem Sandberg, director of the Stedelijk Museum, 1945–1962. Photo courtesy of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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During the Second World War and the nazi occupation of Holland, Sandberg was an activist of the Dutch Resistance movement. He was one of those antifascist resistance members who forged documents for Jews and other persecuted people and participated in setting fire to the Amsterdam Registry Office so that the holders of the forged documents could not be identified. Narrowly escaping the fate of the group’s other members who were executed by a German firing squad, Sandberg was guarding the bunker he had started to build for rescuing the artworks of the Stedelijk and, eventually, other Dutch museums. After the war, he became director of the museum in 1945 and remained in that position until he retired in 1962. Throughout his tenure, he curated exhibitions of modern art, for which he designed the accompanying posters and other printed matter himself. As early as 1946, Sandberg curated an exhibition of Piet Mondrian in celebration of modern art’s triumph over nazism. Sandberg not only showed Mondrian’s unfinished 1944 Victory Boogie Woogie, painted in New York, anticipating the victorious end of the war, but had a copy made of it and hanged it in his office as a symbol of freedom and victory—also the victory of modern art.13 Chief curator Hans. L. C. Jaffe (1915–1984) also played a key role in making the Malevich exhibition reality. Jaffe, born in Frankfurt to a Jewish family, immigrated to the Netherlands in 1933, studied art history at the University of Amsterdam, and started to work at the Stedelijk in 1935. Having worked on restitution of looted goods in Holland after the war, he returned to the Stedelijk in 1947 and served as deputy director from 1953 to 1961. He researched the history of the De Stijl movement and widely published on the group. In September 1952 Jaffe wrote a letter to Häring reminding him of the visit that he and Sandberg had paid to him the previous year to take a look at the Malevich paintings, gouaches, and instruction boards. Jaffe also reminded Häring that the reason why he and Sandberg had been interested in the works was to explore the “Russian abstracts”14 as the wider context of the De Stijl group in the wake of the successful exhibition of their works in the Stedelijk in 1951, which was curated by Jaffe and traveled to the MoMA, New York, the following year.15 Jaffe, who was working on his De Stijl monograph16 and may have been interested in De Stijl’s Russian counterparts and connections also on that account, made it clear that the Stedelijk intended to organize a Malevich exhibition in this framework. He wrote to Häring in 1952: “Now, after our De Stijl Group exhibition, the catalog of which I am enclosing to you, we have an opportunity to give more attention to the Russian abstracts, who naturally interest us as their contemporaries.”17

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In the reconstruction of the pre–Second World War progressive movements, Jaffe and Sandberg considered the Malevich works of very high importance. They saw the paintings as being of exceptionally high quality. While Barr was cut off from further Russian acquisitions during the Cold War years, the leaders of the Stedelijk found a unique treasure trove in Häring’s house and were intent to tap it. In September 1952 Jaffe explicitly and somewhat urgently asked Häring if he was willing to lend the works for the purposes of an exhibition at the Stedelijk, and assured him that the museum would pay for the loan, take care of all transportation costs, and would guarantee the safe return of all the pieces.18 Before a long-awaited reply from Häring arrived, in March 1954 an American living in Munich who was apparently part of the group visiting Häring in 1951 turned to Sandberg on behalf of a friend he did not want to name, who would be interested in buying “any paintings by Malewitsch [sic!] that might be available.”19 Responding on behalf of Sandberg, Jaffe deferentially answered that the museum had not heard back from Häring ever since their repeated earlier communications with him and confirmed that the Stedelijk Museum would like to be the first to have access to the Malevich works. He added that “Mr. Alfred Barr was very much interested in the plan to organize the show together with the Stedelijk”20—maybe signaling his intuition that the unnamed friend mentioned in the letter might have acted on behalf of Barr, who was thought to be interested in purchasing works by Malevich and other Russian avant-garde artists in order to develop MoMA’s permanent collection. In 1955 Sandberg started a correspondence with Naum Gabo whom he had known since the 1920s.21 A retrospective of Gabo at the Stedelijk was considered and discussed. The Russian-born artist, now living in Connecticut, knew some of Häring’s old friends who, both himself and Sandberg thought, could weigh in to persuade Häring to go along with the exhibition project. On April 3, 1955, Gabo informed Sandberg that he had got in touch with Mies van der Rohe, former colleague of Häring and his fellow November Group member, as well as MoMA curator James Johnson Sweeney “to talk to them about our project re. the Malevich exhibition. ( . . . ) I definitely got the promise from Mies van der Rohe to write to Häring in his own name and in the names of Sweeney, Herbert Read, yourself and myself about the proposition to lend the Malevich works for a traveling exhibition.”22 An undated carbon copy of a letter indicates that the communication Sandberg refers to in his November 7, 1955, letter had been addressed and sent to Häring, apparently drafted by Sandberg, who signed it at the bottom.

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It persuaded and assured the recipient that Mies, former Bauhaus professor of urban design and Häring’s friend Ludwig Hilberseimer, as well as Gabo, fully agree with the Stedelijk’s planned arrangements for the Malevich exhibition and its future travels to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London.23 The draft includes the first arguments of the nascent narrative of the Malevich revival: Many of our mutual friends and I have suffered for many years to see that Malevich’s work is entirely and fully unknown here in spite of the great interest that the youth and many leading personalities in our field take in it. Now I am writing you not only in my own name but also in the name of all the undersigned to make it clear to you how very desirable it would be to organize a Malevich exhibition here as well as elsewhere. We are all profoundly convinced of your uniquely great service in preserving this collection for posterity and it is very far from us to decrease or diminish your authority concerning the collection.24

In his letter to Gabo, Sandberg gives an account of his and his staff ’s25 recent visit with Häring, whom they found in very weak health, indeed near to death, as Häring himself had expressed it to his visitors, so that Sandberg felt it urgent to come to an agreement with him regarding the Malevich exhibition before it would be too late. As Sandberg informs Gabo, “[Häring] immediately mentioned our letter and confided that he has already responded to Hilberseimer.”26 With one painting being on loan to a friend which, after the exhibition, would be returned directly to Häring, Sandberg says that altogether “there are 66 items including the theoretical charts etc. The whole could be put into one or two crates because the paintings are not framed.”27 Häring had also informed Sandberg that he had been in correspondence with persons in America and England28 who were interested in the Malevich works but was unable to convey more exact information due to his physical weakness. Some of these letters are indicative of the gradual building up of international interest in Malevich. French art critic Jean-Pierre Wilhelm wrote in September 1954: “In France there is enormous interest in Malevich that continues to increase, especially after last winter’s Yavlensky exhibition in Paris and the exhibitions featuring works by Larionov and Goncharova. ( . . . ) Such few pictures are known by Malevich that an exhibition of his works would be of the greatest importance here.”29 The New York–based Rose Fried Gallery’s inquiry, also in 1954, is an early sign of American interest: Recently I have learned that there are quite a number of Malevich and Lissitzky works in Germany, and more, especially the Malevich works which,

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I understand, are in your possession. I am most eager to get together enough of these works to put on an exhibition at this gallery which would give scope to the entire movement in the “avant-garde” of that period—an exhibition which would do much to clarify the present scene here and elsewhere among young painters, and at the same time give opportunity to the collectors and museums here in the United States to acquire such works, as much for aesthetics as for documentation of an era.30

Sandberg, aware of the flurry of requests and offers addressed to Häring, eagerly asked Gabo “if Häring had contacted MoMA? I would be very glad if you could get information—maybe Hilberseimer knows something about it?”31 Sandberg was clearly competing with Barr for having the first major Malevich exhibition. “It was two years ago that I talked to Barr about this Malevich collection—he very much wanted to exhibit it in his museum. [But] Häring told me that it was impossible for him to travel as we had suggested to him.”32 Furthermore, Sandberg suggested at this point that three or four museums could cooperate on this project and put on the exhibition alternately before other museums, and then, after these initial shows, allow it to travel. This plan, however, was not accomplished. A few months later Sandberg had the good luck of finding Häring in a wellenough condition to communicate and received a good deal of information from him. He visited Häring at the hospital in the company of Häring’s secretary Margot Aschenbrenner and gave an account of his visit to Gabo in a letter dated March 7, 1956.33 Häring’s indecision and his severe illness kept things in suspense. He told Sandberg about the increasing interest in the Malevich works and later in March 1956 Gabo reported to Sandberg: I have been told from many sources that a whole pack of wolves of art dealers and speculators are attempting to get this collection out of Häring’s hands and by any means to get possession of Malevich’s work. ( . . . ) We need to make clear that this collection is not up for sale and that we are prepared to put up a fight against them in case they should take advantage of a weak man and come into possession of a property which does not belong either to Häring nor to anybody else but the lawful heirs of Malevich.34

Indeed, Häring was flooded with letters from artists, art dealers, and collectors who had heard about the body of Malevich’s work which Häring was safekeeping in his home, as many of them wanted to purchase select pieces from it. From early 1952 till his death in 1958, Häring rebutted several dozen such requests. The response he gave to New York art dealer Hans Curjel sums up his replies:

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Every art dealer would like to cherry pick from the Malevich collection and leave me the unsellable rest of it. Therefore, I am not interested in either lending or selling pieces of the collection. I am interested in keeping it all together, along with the study charts that belong to the paintings, so that they constitute a basis for teaching Malevich.35

At the end of March 1956 Häring wrote to his friend Hilberseimer, now in Chicago, explaining to him that Sandberg wanted the Malevich paintings, but because of difficult issues regarding ownership (“schwierige eigentumsfrage” (sic!)) that have finally cleared up, he considered to offer the paintings as a loan to the Stedelijk.36 Häring disclosed that he had accepted Sandberg’s offer and that the Malevich exhibition would travel to the United States for several exhibitions after its Amsterdam debut. However, he requested a statement from those whom Hilberseimer mentioned in his last letter to him, including Gabo (and, most likely, Sweeney, Herbert Read, and Mies), declaring that they were in agreement with this arrangement. Häring estimated that the loan will cost the Stedelijk Museum only a small fragment of the probable income the exhibition was expected to generate and went on to discuss the estimates of the total possible income—as though he owed it to Hilberseimer to come clean with the numbers. In June 1956 Häring notified director Sandberg that according to German law he had, as of 1955, acquired legal ownership of the Malevich works and was now entitled to lend or even sell them.37 Häring’s awareness of the imminence of his passing is expressed in most of his letters until his death on May 17, 1958. A draft of a loan contract between Häring and the Stedelijk Museum dated May 8, 1956, lists: “1 Karton; 7 Gouaches; 28 paintings on canvas; 7 color studies; 21 study boards, and 16 drawings (‘Zeichenstudien’).”38 In an undated letter probably written late in 1957,39 Sandberg discloses: Häring allows us to rent the entire collection for +,-, $3,000. a year with the clause that we have the option to buy it if we decide so before December 31, 1958, for $ 30,000. Häring is not entitled to withdraw if we execute the contract. Häring has notarized that according to German law he is the owner of the works since 1955. ( . . . ) It is not our intention to do anything against MoMA. It would not be convenient, and I do not think that there is any possibility to doubt Barr’s good faith. What is important is not the ownership question but to honor Malevich’s genius and to integrate him in the development of the art of our time.40

While the ownership question was of undeniably high importance, the deeper motivation and wider art historic significance of making the Malevich exhibition

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reality was, indeed, “to integrate him in the development of the art of our time.” This was consistent with the Stedelijk leadership’s project to retrieve interwar modernism, and that project had, after initial steps, yet to be realized. During the run-up to the exhibition, the Stedelijk started an intense correspondence with other museums that were eager to take over the exhibition, as well as with individuals—primarily Russian expat artists dispersed in different countries—who were thought to have personally known Malevich and to be able to provide information on the un-annotated artworks. Sandberg was also seeking early twentieth-century Russian catalogs that could provide original photos and information on the artworks included in the Häring material, with respect to their earlier exhibition history. He was also interested in further works that could be added to the list.

The First Building Blocks of a New Narrative In February 1957, the director of the Kunstverein Braunschweig, Dr. Peter Lufft, wrote a letter to Sandberg asking for an update about the Malevich material. He learned from the Braunschweig lawyer Ernst Böhme that the legal process of the Malevich estate had been closed and expressed that he too was interested in taking over the exhibition in cooperation with the museums of Bremen and Cologne, which were also keen to put it on. Contributing to the nascent narrative, Dr. Lufft wrote that “To Malevich, I think, the injustice that had been done by forgetting has to be made good by broadening awareness of his significance (which can happen only through an exhibition).”41 The museum and gallery directors who were eager to house the Malevich exhibition were, indeed, pioneers, as information and knowledge about Malevich was still scarce at the time. A letter written by Gary Schmidt, director of the Kunstmuseum Basel, sent to Sandberg in May 1957 in answer to his question concerning adequate documentation of the Malevich works is indicative of this lack of available information about Malevich at the time. Schmidt wrote that he was not familiar with any literature on Malevich aside from a few mentions in some publications as of 1957, of which he gave precise reference.42 In July 1957, half a year before the opening of the Malevich exhibition in Amsterdam, Jaffe asked Barr if he could provide any data of the Malevich works to be shown, “with a view to the possibilities of taking over ( . . . ) the exhibition to America,”43 but no cooperation from Barr is documented. On November 4, 1957, Sandberg addressed the director of the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, asking for information

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to help with dating and identifying some Malevich works by photocopies of old exhibition catalogs that included Malevich’s early works, primarily pre-1911 and post-1915. In an undated letter, lacking polite addressing—putting in “Dear Colleague” only—which was received on January 3, 1958, P(avel) Lebedev, director of the Tretyakov Gallery, answered that he and his staff were, regrettably, too busy to fulfill this request, “as the Malevich works are stored in the cellars of the Tretyakov,”44 that is, they were inaccessible or hard to access. The Malevich exhibition opened in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam on December 20, 1957. The Press Release gave a detailed biography and career history of Malevich, clearly presenting him as an unknown master and calling attention to similarities between him and Mondrian, who was a point of reference for the Dutch as well as international audiences.45 Upon receiving of the announcement of the exhibition, a letter on behalf of Dr. Werner Schmalenbach, director of the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, was sent to Sandberg, dated December 28, 1957, expressing bitter disappointment for not being considered the first venue to take over the Malevich exhibition from the Stedelijk, in spite of an earlier promise.46 The Kestner Gesellschaft, on account of its role in safekeeping the Malevich works as well as publishing, commissioning, and exhibiting Malevich’s disciple Lissitzky, had expected to be ranked first in the process of Malevich’s rediscovery but had to be disappointed. The apparently first written response to the Stedelijk’s Malevich exhibition after its opening was dated January 14, 1958. It came from Karl Gunnar Vougt Pontus Hulten, then director of the Nationalmuseum Stockholm. Besides trying to secure the Malevich exhibition for the first show of the soon-to-open Moderna Museet in Stockholm, he assessed Malevich’s significance, declaring him “one of the most advanced artists of our time. When Mondrian speaks about constants, Malevitch [sic!] speaks already about dynamism and relativity.”47 However, the general obscurity of Malevich at the time is still reflected in Hulten’s question: “Did Malevitch [sic!] . . . show some interest in Gabo, Pevsner, and Tatlin’s works and theories?”48 The map of the Russian avant-garde was still very far from being drawn up by scholarship. Throughout the fall of 1957 and the winter of 1958, the leaders of the Stedelijk set out to gather more information on Malevich for the catalog that was still in the making. They engaged in correspondence with Xenia Boguslavskaia Pougny (Puni); Rob Lipchitz, brother of sculptor Jacques Lipchitz; Henryk Stażewski; and English ballet dancer and author of the first comprehensive Western book on the Russian avant-garde, Camilla Gray. Each of them provided bits of information that Sandberg acknowledged. However, in December

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1957 Sandberg was still in need of more clarification and data, so he wrote to Barr who, in turn, had “through our mutual friend Gabo”49 also heard about the need for more information concerning the items of the Malevich exhibition. Sandberg explained in this letter that although he thought “it will be good just to show the collection as it is now in our Museum from December 20th—February 2nd” and publish a “first catalog,” he planned to improve both efforts and hoped to get Barr’s “critique and advice” so that “a revised and corrected edition can be printed later on along with a more complete show in Amsterdam,” for which he would be happy to collaborate with Barr and include the Malevich works from MoMA, too—also hinting at the possibility of traveling the entire exhibition to New York, as well.50 That is, having secured the Stedelijk’s priority in exhibiting Malevich, Sandberg offered a later cooperation to MoMA in return for muchneeded help with correctly identifying the Malevich works and the inclusion of additional ones. This cooperation, however, did not materialize. Further celebratory responses arrived from Dr. Lufft, Braunschweig, who had read the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s account of the Malevich exhibition in Amsterdam and reproachfully reminded Sandberg that he had been among the first to want to take it over. In January 1958 Sandberg received a letter from the State Russian Museum, Leningrad, signed by a secretary, providing photos and the list of eighteen Malevich paintings in the collection of the State Russian Museum—an important reference for Sandberg regarding the Malevich oeuvre.51 Schmalenbach wrote again from Hanover in the same month, explaining that he was in disbelief when he had heard about the exhibition’s traveling to nearby Braunschweig—a move that was contrary to a verbal agreement between him and Sandberg and which hurt the framework of his larger project of consecutive exhibitions of Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitzky,52 and Malevich, among other modernists of that generation. However, in a letter to Häring written at the time of the Stedelijk’s exhibition’s closing, Sandberg confirmed that the exhibition would travel to Braunschweig, while Hanover was included only in the waiting list of museums that were interested—along with Baden-Baden, Bern, Stockholm, Brussels, and London.53 In February 1958 Palma Bucarelli, legendary director of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, joined those who were eager to have the Malevich exhibition over in their respective institutions. On February 19, 1958, Dr. Lufft could already give an account of the successful opening of the Malevich exhibition in Braunschweig, with a catalog published by the local Kunstverein (Art union). The catalog essay, authored by Lufft, surveyed Malevich’s career, also providing a brief history of the Russian avant-garde of the early 1910s, thus shaping the somewhat erroneous narrative the Western public

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was just becoming familiar with. For example, Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner are described as being followers of “Tatlin’s constructivism”; Rodchenko as “Malevich’s pupil”; and Malevich’s only visit in Germany in 1927 is mentioned as his “last visit in 1926.”54 Lufft informed Sandberg about the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart’s intention to take over the show, adding that if its next location was within Germany, savings could be made on costs of transportation and insurance. However, a month later, on March 19, 1958, a letter came to Amsterdam from the Düsseldorf Kunstverein declaring that it was ready to step in instead of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, which had cancelled. The organizing process accelerated: only a week later, on March 26, Dr. Curt Schweicher, director of the Städtischen Museum Leverkusen Schloss Morsbroich, wrote to Sandberg informing him that a casual encounter between him and Dr. Lufft led to the latter expressing willingness to send the Malevich exhibition over to Leverkusen rather than to Düsseldorf—and so, Dr. Schweicher expected only a brief yes or no answer. In point of fact, the exhibition traveled to the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, was shown there in May and June 1958, and then to the Kunsthalle Bern in February and March 1959. On January 27, 1958, Düsseldorf art dealer Alex Vömel wrote to Sandberg saying that the Malevich exhibition had greatly impressed him and he wondered if some of the paintings were for sale, and if so, for what price.55 On February 28, 1959, Franz Meyer, director of the Kunsthalle Bern, wrote to Sandberg that “The Malewitsch [sic!] exhibition has been so extraordinary that I cannot but thank you once again for having the possibility to put the pictures on show. This is an artistic force and uniqueness that I have rarely seen in these rooms.”56 He also informed Sandberg that the artworks will be on their way to Rome to safely arrive there by April. The exhibition at the Galleria Nazionale dell’Arte Moderna was open until July 1959. Bucarelli wrote the catalog essay herself, discussing Malevich in the context of the Russian avant-garde.57 Sandberg also actively worked on developing awareness of Malevich. Prior to the opening of the Malevich exhibition at the Stedelijk, he wrote a letter to the general secretary of the Venice Biennale informing him about the upcoming “important exhibition of the founder of the suprematist movement in Russia: the painter Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935),” pointing out, once again, that “[Malevich] had a significance that was analogous to that of ( . . . ) Mondrian.”58 The exhibition’s following station was the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in the fall of 1959 and then the Louisiana Foundation in Humlebaek, Denmark, in the spring of 1960. In an unprecedented posthumous career, Malevich was now center stage as hero of the pre–Second World War avant-garde.59

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The Manuscripts Left in Berlin On May 30, 1927, a few days before his sudden departure from Berlin as his Soviet exit visa could not be extended, Malevich gave his host Gustav von Riesen a bulky, well tied-up package wrapped in brown paper. In an otherwise unusual ceremoniousness, he beseeched my father to safekeep that package until his return. He said he hoped to come back in the summer of 1928. Should he not be able to make it and send no news about himself for the next twenty-five years, the package may be opened and dealt with at the family’s discretion.60

According to Gustav’s son Hans von Riesen’s account in 1934, the package was taken to the cellar of the house and carefully hidden. In the last days of the war in 1945, the house was hit by a grenade attack, which blocked the cellar. The cleanup efforts started only eight years later, in 1953, at which point it became clear that the cellar’s roof held up, and so the objects underneath it did not suffer any significant damage. The long-forgotten package could be taken out from under the debris in 1954, and since the twenty-five-year period that Malevich had requested was thus over, the von Riesen family felt entitled to open it. It contained two folders filled with manuscripts; four notebooks with dense writing typical of Malevich, from the years 1923 to 1927; a big folder filled with press coverage cutouts from the years 1910 to 1927; as well as a number of smaller essays, writings, letters, loose sheets of paper, drawings, and photos. On the top lay a sheet of paper, only half of which was covered with writing. On the lower part of that sheet the following last will arrangement was hand-written by Malevich (in Russian): In case of my death or hopelessly long loss of freedom, and in case the holder of these manuscripts has the will to make them public, he has to carefully study them and then transfer them to another language, because, being under revolutionary influence at the time of their writing, there may be considerable contradictions in the form of defending the art that I now, in the year 1927, represent. Only the above are valid for consideration. May 30, 1927. Kaz. Malevich, Berlin61

Hans von Riesen set to studying Malevich’s hard-to-decipher handwriting, idiosyncratic Russian, and worked his way through the notebooks and manuscripts. He received considerable help from the DuMont Schauberg Verlag in Cologne, which published his translation of a selection of Malevich

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texts in the volume Suprematismus—Die gegenstandslose Welt (Suprematism— The Non-Objective World), edited by Werner Haftmann, in 1962. Von Riesen acknowledged further help from Dr. Franz Meyer, Bern, who put him in contact with Malevich’s former colleague, painter Pavel A. Mansurov in Paris, Ida Meyer-Chagall, Camilla Gray, and Peter Lufft, all of whom delivered valuable documents to him, as well as art historian Troels Andersen from Copenhagen. Andersen did research in Moscow and worked closely together with the Stedelijk Museum as author and editor of Malevich: Catalogue Raisonné of the 1927 Berlin Exhibition, which was published by the Stedelijk Museum in 1970 as the long-delayed catalog of the 1957 Malevich exhibition. As he came close to finishing this work, Andersen contacted MoMA in the hope of furthering his knowledge of Malevich and suggested a joint publication, upon which Wilder Green of MoMA and then director de Wilde of the Stedelijk exchanged letters, illuminating the state of Malevich scholarship as of 1967–1968. In the letter, Green wrote: We have for some time been considering doing a definitive book on Malevich, which might include a substantial text, chronology, bibliography, with perhaps a catalogue raisonné, and a partial, if not complete appendix of his writings. For financial reasons, this may prove to be too ambitious, but I think our interest would be, at the least, to publish a volume, which would include a catalogue of our two collections plus the very few other Malevich works in the West.62

Once again, the Stedelijk pinned down its own pioneering role in the Malevich saga. As to Andersen’s work-in-progress, de Wilde declared: “We intend using it as a catalog when our selection will be exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum and abroad,”63 and he added: Regarding the paintings from Russian collections, part of them will be used as illustration in our publication. However, as long as the Russian collections are not fully accessible, it will be impossible, for the time being, to issue a scientifically justified publication on this part of Malevich’s oeuvre. Photographs are partly available, but a good deal of the paintings (notably the important collection in Leningrad) cannot be viewed and sufficient documentation cannot be obtained either—not even by Troels Andersen who has excellent introductions and besides speaks the Russian language fluently. For the time being it is also impossible to borrow works from Russian collections.64

Andersen translated Malevich’s texts, which had already been known from early Russian publications, into Danish; then edited their English translation by Xenia

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Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillen. These groundbreaking publications came out in two volumes in 1968. The manuscripts of the von Riesen archive were purchased by the Stedelijk Museum in 1971.65 They were translated and published by Andersen in two more volumes in 1976 and 1978, respectively. These publications, in a total of four volumes, constituted the starting point of all later Malevich scholarship in the English-speaking world.66

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The New Left’s Role in Retrieving the Interwar Avant-Gardes and Reclaiming the Russian Avant-Garde in the 1960s

The rediscovery of the Russian, and, eventually, the entire avant-garde art of the early 1920s played an outstanding role in the revisionist and rebellious culture of the political and theoretical movements referred to with the umbrella term as the “New Left,” and vice versa: it was the alternative leftist revival of the West, starting in the late 1950s, that invested the art and culture of the Russian and the international avant-garde with a new significance in Western Europe. Seeking predecessors and historical antecedents, various New Left directions found a tradition of left-wing modernism in postrevolutionary Russia as well as in post– First World War Europe. Throughout the Cold War period of 1948–1975, the Soviet Union, along with its artistic culture, was cut off from the Western world. It was an enemy that was fascinating and formidable at the same time, particularly in the eyes of the Western left wing that was haunted by the specter of various utopias and incarnations of communism. Adherents of the New Left, a politicalintellectual current that arose in the wake of the Soviet military’s crushing of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, sought a new, valid leftist political and cultural paradigm outside the Soviet model. Awareness of the terror in the Soviet Union could not be erased, thus one of the possible models was postrevolutionary, preStalin Russia, 1917–c. 1928, but interest was expanded to the prerevolutionary Russian avant-gardes as well, the survival of which after the October Revolution seemed to demonstrate the intriguing intellectual modernity of revolutionary Soviet Russia. Various branches of the New Left worked out their respective political programs in a way that had great emphasis on art and culture. They sought a visual face of their respective agendas and visual epitomes of their concepts. Throughout the 1960s the New Left movements positioned the early Soviet-Russian art more in the context of the present than the historical past. In

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this way, this art came much more alive and relevant than in any other historic era since its actual existence.

Reconquering Everyday Life Left-wing cultural and political movements, critical of both the existing Soviet and post-1948 East European communism as well as Western capitalism, abounded since the end of the war. Growing out of the Trotskyist Fourth International, the Paris-based Socialisme ou barbarie group, led by Cornelius Castoriadis, was formed in 1948, opposing, first and foremost, the bureaucratization of the state, capitalist or communist. The international Abstraction-Création artistic group in Paris, originally founded by, among others, van Doesburg in 1931 as successor of the 1930 Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) group, was revived in 1946 as the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles (Salon of New Realities), a telling name for reckoning with the new, post–Second World War reality. These groups that organized exhibitions of abstract art in Paris, bringing them together from international sources, may have revived the progressive spirit of the interwar avant-garde; however, hardly any Russian artist’s work was on their radar. The Soviet Union was off limits. In 1948 the radical artists’ group CoBrA (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) was launched in Paris, organized by, among others, Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, Constant (Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys), and Christian Dotremont, with a program of unbridled spontaneous expression, childlike directness, and unrestricted use of colors.1 In 1948 Constant wrote, envisioning a new beginning and the desire to change the culture and the society recalling the anti-individual utopias of the 1920s avant-gardes: “In the unprecedented cultural emptiness that has followed the war (...) We find established a culture of individualism, which is condemned by the very culture that has produced it.(…) There cannot be a popular art, even if concessions such as active participation are made to the public, while art forms are historically imposed. (…) A new freedom is about to be born.”2 Willem Sandberg strongly—even financially—supported the group as one that was representative of that new freedom of artistic expression and organized a CoBrA exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in 1949. Political protest against the consolidating consumer culture of post–Second World War Western Europe received increasingly more emphasis in artistic movements as well. Splitting from CoBrA, Asger Jorn launched the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (IMIB) with Enrico Baj in1955, in protest

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of the Bauhaus’ successor institution, the Hochschule für Gestaltung (College of Design), in Ulm. From an exchange of letters with rector Max Bill, Jorn learned that the Hochshcule prioritized pragmatic technical training over a strong and imaginative artistic and aesthetic program.3 Unlike the sense of modernity that dominated the late 1920s in the West, now it was the power of imagination and spirituality that was the token of freedom for Jorn, in order to curb the power of modern technologies tied to big business. While before the Second World War the avant-garde artists attached great hopes to the liberating effect of new technologies, after the war they experienced those same technologies put into the service of mass production and mass manipulation, suppressing individual human creativity and the freedom of artistic expression. Aesthetic anarchism, with a stance of political dissent, was also on the rise. Such a stance characterized the Internationale Letteriste (sic!) group, organized by Guy Debord (1931–1994) in Paris in 1952, splitting from Isidore Isou’s (1925– 2007) Letteriste movement, which in turn was based on a radical renewal of the language and literature—similarly to the Russian cubo-futurists of the 1910s—that Isou launched as early as 1946. Preceded by the 1953 essay of Ivan Chtcheglov (1933-1998), “Formula for a New City” (published only in 1958), that dreamed up new cities that would help people break away from consumerism,4 Debord introduced the concept of Unitary Urbanism, experimenting with sustainable new ways of life in city.5 In 1955 Debord invented the term “psychogeography”—that is, the study of the personal and subjective ways in which the city environment affects the individual “drifting around” in the city. Wandering around in Paris playfully and casually, “drifting,” that is, not doing anything but experiencing the city, was an attitude reminiscent of Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century flâneur, or drifter, re-invoked by Walter Benjamin6 as early as 1935. Forecasting Debord’s later critique, Benjamin also connected the act of “drifting” or “flâner” in a city to consumerism, referring to the institution of the department store as the flâneur’s ultimate pleasure “that puts even flânerie to use for commodity circulation.”7 Consumerism was identified and recognized as both a symptom and a rationale of the capitalist production system and was declared toxic for both society and the individual. Philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901– 1991) voiced a critique of consumerism as early as 1947.8 In his 1968 book Right to the City, he argued, not unlike the urbanists of the early 1920s, but with the experiences of the postwar decades, that the urban space is, and must be, a collective one. Lefebvre strongly influenced Debord, who launched the Situationist International (SI) in 1957, merging with Jorn’s IMIB, the Letterist

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(sic!) International, and the London Psychogeographical Association. The name Internationale Situationniste (Situationist International) originated from the program that set out to actively create real-life situations in order to conquer the physical space of the city instead of passively contemplating and consuming the spectacle offered by the apparatus of industrial and commercial establishments via advertisements and commercials as a simulation of actual life. Debord intensely examined the interwar avant-gardes, primarily as early attempts to terminate the culture of the bourgeoisie, which he held in contempt. In his analysis, the interwar avant-gardes did not even really exist; it was his own historic time that projected desirable content back to the interwar era. “The very notion of a collective avant-garde, with the militant aspect that it entails, is a recent product of historical conditions [because of their] need for a consistent revolutionary program.”9 However, he draws attention to some of the early avant-garde movements, judging the futurists, for instance, as being “childish [for their] technological optimism”;10 acknowledging dada for the “refusal of all the values of bourgeois society,”11 but deriding it for being too negative; and praising the surrealists in France, who “defined the grounds for a constructive action starting from dada’s emphasis on moral revolt.”12 Reflecting on these past movements from the vantage point of his own time and the point of view of his own SI, Debord recognized the era of the present as a cultural void. The worst choice for filling that cultural void would be, he argues, that of Soviet culture, which he identified with petit bourgeois values. Modern Catholicism fares just a little better inasmuch as, according to Debord, it attempted to accept such a modernist form of painting as informel, however: “everything since 1956 indicates that we are entering into a new phase of the struggle. [ . . . ] The avant-garde minority can recover its positive import. The ebbing of the worldwide revolutionary movement, which became obvious a few years after 1920 [ . . . ] had tried to advance a liberatory new attitude in culture and everyday life.”13 With all his skepticism about the culture of his day, Debord still expressed hope that “It is only within this avant-garde that a new revolutionary conception of culture is imperceptibly being formed.”14 He remained, however, profoundly critical. Debord’s radical extended essay The Society of the Spectacle, first published in 1967, was a reckoning with the central feature of the post–Second World War capitalist societies’ commodity fetishism which he identified as the “spectacle.” A philosopher by training, Debord put a Feuerbach quote dating from 1845 at the head of Part I of his book: “But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality,

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the appearance to the essence . . . illusion is only sacred, truth profane.”15 This was strikingly valid in the era of the new, lulling and entertaining visual culture of television, commercials, and ubiquitous ads that all had strong political potential and power to demobilize and deactivate masses of people, turning them from being masters of their life into spectators of a second-hand, mediated reality which thus represented the interests of big industries. Alienation through the “spectacle,” as Debord put it, separated individuals from each other while the “triumph of an economic system founded on separation leads to the proletarianization of the world.”16 Debord described the modern spectacle as the replacement of religion, echoing Malevich’s 1924 dismay, described in his Lenin essay, at an emerging new cult that will replace religion with a version of socialism and the church with the factory. Drifting in the city is also described by Debord as “a total dissolution of boundaries between art and life.”17 Very much like the avant-gardes of the 1920s, such as the Russian constructivists and the Bauhaus that worked on ending the duality of “art” and “life,” all the previously mentioned movements’ fundamental programs were directed primarily against alienation. “Merging of art and life”18 had been a central aspiration of the Russian constructivists as a way of turning the society into an actual community. As Lodder remarks, This utopianism infected such a stalwart of traditional culture as Lunacharsky. At the opening of the State Free Art Studios in October 1918 he expressed the dreams that inspired artists of the time: “A brotherhood of artists and architects will be born and will create not only temples and monuments to human ideals but also complete artistic towns. To link art with life (emphasis added) this is the task of the new art.”19

Less skeptical than Debord, the theoreticians and activists of the New Left groups were particularly concerned about the uncanny process of the morphing of socialist ideals into bureaucratic power practices in the Soviet Union and within its satellite countries’ totalitarian state powers. They were eager and hopeful to find possibilities of preempting such deterioration in a future state. In a better world, the state would redeem the French Revolution’s ideals of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” the enlightened reality of which was, once again, envisioned. In the 1950s and 1960s the mirage of a radical improvement of the world appeared, similarly to the early 1920s, on the horizon of the leftist movements. Several events of the year 1956 prompted the activists of these movements to think that a new world revolution was in the making, which they had already anticipated. A battle for the new imagination was, once again, underway,

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similarly to the one fueled by the utopian expectations of the early 1920s. One of the documents of these views is the account published on November 2, 1956, in the Letterist International’s information bulletin about a congress which was co-organized two months earlier by the Letterist International and the IMIB in Alba, Italy. The last paragraph sums up the congress as one of the stages in the struggle for a new sensibility and a new culture, a struggle which is itself part of the general revolutionary resurgence characterizing the year 1956, visible in the upsurge of the masses in the USSR, Poland, and Hungary ( . . . ), in the successes of the Algerian insurrection and in the major strikes in Spain. These developments allow us the greatest hopes for the near future.20

As in the case of the avant-garde of the 1920s, historical reality and idealist expectations diverged. Two days after these lines were printed, the Hungarian uprising was crushed by the military force of the Soviet Union. The dramatic disappointment on the part of Western communists as well as leftists in the Soviet Union and proponents of Soviet-type communism—for which the new term “state-capitalism” was coined—drove thousands of members out of Western communist Parties and engendered the new varieties of leftist and communist movements which came to be referred to as the New Left.21 Although every uprising mentioned in the Alba document was defeated, the energy that its authors witnessed in “the general revolutionary resurgences” also beyond the above mentioned countries, would incessantly fuel the New Left for almost two decades to come. The disillusionment caused by the moral and economic bankruptcy of Bolshevism—not entirely novel since the spread of news about the Soviet and East European show trials of the late 1930s to the early 1950s22—reached a tipping point after the brutal intervention in Hungary and opened up new perspectives for left-wing currents in the West, inspiring ideas of new, revised varieties of the communist model. Disappointment in Bolshevism engendered alternative socialist and communist ideas in the West, reformed by new philosophies as newly relevant social models. The critical, anticapitalist intelligentsia, from the New Left Review in London, founded in 1960, through the SI and Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s March 22 Movement in Paris, to the German radical Rudi Dutschke, as well as a number of other groups, saw a great future in various reformed and revised concepts of socialism or communism. They envisioned a non-bureaucratized, non-oppressive society, modeled on either an imaginary pre-Stalinist Russia, or Trotsky’s unrealized concept of a permanent revolution, or self-management without state power, that is: direct democracy. Some groups, however, had quite a contrary, extreme

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concept, idealizing Mao’s China. In other words, in the West something new and future-bound—culminating in 1968—grew out of the crushed Hungarian uprising, while for Hungary—and, to a different degree, for the other Eastern European countries—1956 marked not a beginning but an end. A further similarity between the outcomes of the 1920s and the 1960s, respectively, was, as Debord’s monographer Anselm Jappe points out, that in 1968 “For several weeks ( . . . ) a feeling that ‘everything is possible’ prevailed [but after that] the upside-down world was set back on its feet.”23 Utopian ideas about the future world and the future city abounded in postrevolutionary Russia from poems and novels to VKhUTEMAS architecture student Georgii Krutikov’s (1899–1958) radical “Flying city” project.24 The reforming of the immediate human environment, that of the home and the city as well as of the globe itself, was a program that the proponents of the New Left shared with the interior designers of the De Stijl and the Bauhaus and the imaginative architects of the interwar years. According to Jappe, the main reason for the SI’s failure was that in spite of the many working-class actions and strikes in 1968, the SI’s “theory never spread significantly beyond the much disparaged milieu of the students and intellectuals [as] no proletariat existed which as a class stood opposed to the totality of the society of the spectacle.”25 This was certainly the case in the 1920s, too, when the Russian constructivists had believed that they were part of the actual working class, if acting provisionally on their behalf only in a symbolically induced “laboratory phase” but with the perspective to efficiently shape the incipient new reality, which, in the end, they did not. In Western Europe the social role and the relationship of high art and industrial design were the subject matters of a discourse that, as the history of the Bauhaus attests to it, remained unresolved. Creatively reconquering everyday life, taking its venues and means from those who had political and economic control over it, was the incentive of artists and thinkers both in the 1920s and the 1960s.

The Russian Avant-Garde in Galleries and Museums Interest in revolutionary Russian avant-garde art throughout the 1960s in the West was a collateral development of social movements, with increasingly political overtones and, socialist ideas aside, in no small part a contribution of market prosperity. This art was gradually posited center stage as the visible example of a possible, radically new culture. Its energy and radicalism resonated, once again, as the relevant voice of dissent in the present.

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Gallery shows of the interwar avant-gardes, including works by Russian artists, started to mushroom in Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The first Russian exhibitions were indiscriminately inclusive of artists of different styles, pursuits, and careers, émigré or otherwise: works by Kandinsky, Yavlensky, Chagall, Puni, Gabo, Pevsner, Serge Poliakoff, Georges Annenkov, Nicolas de Staël, El Lissitzky, Pavel Mansuroff, Chaim Soutine, and others were thrown together simply because they were related, one way or another, and at one time or another, with Russia or the Soviet Union. The availability of Russian works in the West set a limit on these shows, and the fact that “Official Russia would not show this art”26 also weighed in. The first systematic survey exhibition of Russian avant-garde works was organized in 1962 at London’s Grosvenor Gallery, titled Two Decades of Experiment in Russian Art 1902–1922, accompanied by Camilla Gray’s groundbreaking book The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922. Gray first visited the Soviet Union as a ballet student and, fascinated by modern Russian art, returned there to study Russian modernism. As her book’s back cover proudly states, “This is the first book to examine the vitally significant Russian contribution to the modern movement in art and architecture.” The book was, indeed, a landmark; the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition, however, was still eclectic. It included works by émigré artists such as the cubist Archipenko, the expressive Chagall, the expat rayonists Goncharova and Larionov, and the expressionist Kandinsky who had been detached from Soviet Russia, as well as artists who were, at some point of their respective lives, part of the Soviet scene, such as El Lissitzky, Tatlin, and Malevich. The catalog essay underlined that “for [these artists] art was an active force in society, and not an amusement of the richer classes”; and that as a result of the revolution, “from 1917-1921 [they] controlled artistic life and thought in Russia.”27 The concept that the artists of the avant-garde had any actual power in early Soviet culture—one that eventually proved erroneous—appeared to be an exciting component of their inceptive myth in the West in the early 1960s nonetheless, where many movements and charismatic leaders competed for controlling a segment of the cultural scene. It appears that what Thomas Crow called the “ambivalent fascination felt by audiences for the work of dissident artists” in the West in the 1960s, missing neither the “aggression of the work” nor “its setting”28—that is, the excitement by both the dissenting voice of the work and the market hype—was also true for the revival of the Soviet-Russian art of the 1910s and 1920s, which occupied a unique position between mainstream and dissident.29

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The innovative geometric idiom of the Russian avant-garde exuded authority as well as idiosyncratic dynamism. During the 1960s, emphasis markedly shifted from the esthetic to the political-ideological factors in exhibiting the Soviet-Russian avant-garde. In 1964 the Galleria Levante in Milan organized an eclectic show including thirty-four diverse Russian artists, from symbolists to constructivists, but the main message of its catalog essay was addressed to the present, warning that “the new Russian culture before and immediately after the revolution could teach the communists that progressive politics and cultural conservatism are irreconcilable.”30 This remark set the tone for the more sharply political reception of this art at the end of the decade. The student movements and anti-Vietnam-war demonstrations gave weight and currency to thoughts urging social and cultural change in both Western Europe and the United States; and dissent was manifest in art exhibitions, too. In 1967 the Frankfurter Kunstverein organized Konstruktive Malerei (Constructive Painting) 1915-1930, a survey of the avant-garde’s geometric art with revolutionary connotations. A survey show, Avantgarde Osteuropa 1910-1930, organized by the West Berlin Kunstverein in the Fall of 1967, commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution and reminded of the fact that this was the first such exhibition since 1922—although this time not only Russians were included but Czech, Hungarian, and Polish artists’ works, as well. The works were loaned, as it was emphasized, exclusively from Western collections. In the catalog, former dada-abstract filmmaker and editor Hans Richter recalled his original fascination with Soviet-Russian art as he had seen it and had been informed of it in 1922. His description of this memory resonated, at the same time, as a desire in the present: All of a sudden, we, who had been familiar with Western art, and looked at Paris, encountered a whole generation of new artists from the East who had the same ideas as we had. ( . . . ) The most extreme, abstract forms of modern art could contribute to the public life of a people. ( . . . ) [Lissitzky’s] decorations on the Red Square ( . . . ) were more than decoration. They expressed an optimism, which pervaded the entirety of public life and promised to the artists, through free, abstract language, a new function in society. It is a rare moment in the history of a people when government and people, patron and artist want one and the same thing.31

Styling memory, and mixing it with imagination and hearsay, and adjusting all that to the present moment, Richter spoke for a large group of the intelligentsia who hoped to find a way out of capitalism’s discontents by espousing early,

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“uncorrupted” socialism as a golden age of sorts. Imagining a moment when alienation was suspended was the most energizing and inspiring idea on the eve of 1968. Faith in the social and transformative power of art was also palpable in the 1960s, as it had been in the early 1920s. Architect and urban designer Anatole Kopp (1915–1990) published Ville et Révolution (City and Revolution),32 his first survey of early Soviet-Russian architecture and urban design, a book widely read amidst the events of May 1968 in Paris. According to one of his reviewers, Kopp’s motivation seems to rhyme with Lisstzky’s postrevolutionary hopes, as Kopp apparently projected them back from 1968 to 1917: “For the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who was raised between cultural boundaries, ( . . . ) and faced the chauvinistic and xenophobic France of his youth, the October Revolution signified [to Kopp] a new universality, a society free of social as well as national differences, suggesting affinities between Jewish messianic aspiration and a social utopia interpreted as an ethical enterprise.”33 The year 1967, which was marked by the first signs of the “Prague Spring,” the Czechoslovakian attempt to humanize the Soviet-type communist system, exuded a sense of freedom in Eastern Europe as well as in the West—a freedom which may not have been really there, but at least was no longer impossible to imagine. Publications and Western exhibitions of the Soviet-Russian avantgarde symbolically charted out the direction of political and intellectual aspirations. Books that could not have been published before in Eastern Europe, like Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers’s substantial volume on Lissitzky, complete with original documents; a smaller book of Lissitzky’s writings; and Larisa Zhadova’s book on Malevich with the VEB Verlag in Dresden; or the Soviet author German Karginov’s monograph on Rodchenko with the Corvina Publishing House in Budapest, now came out; and a new, somewhat liberated, post-Stalinist tone of discourse was introduced. The events of the following year 1968 affected, among many other things, the assessment of the historic, particularly Russian, avant-garde. While Daniel Cohn-Bendit, along with several anarchist-leaning movements, discarded the idea of a political party and that of organized leadership altogether, Trotskyist groups in Paris, particularly La Ligue communiste Révolutionnaire, who identified themselves as the French section of the Fourth International, led by Alain Krivine, put “original” and “uncorrupted” communism into focus. These groups were rereading and revising the history of the October Revolution and the early years of Soviet power and were inspired by Trotsky’s idea of a permanent revolution. They believed that incessant revolutionary dynamism is

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the key element that would preempt bureaucratization—the factor that, most leftist movements believed, skewed the original ideas of the October Revolution. The original purity of the revolution, they thought, was demonstrated and popularized by the freshness and the freedom of pre-Stalinist Soviet-Russian art, architecture, literature, theater, and film, all of which was experimental, abstract, and anti-bourgeois. What was perceived as “the Russian avant-garde” at this point was a broad and all-inclusive idea, still similar to what was understood by the term during most of the interwar era. The spring 1968 issue of the Paris-based art journal Cimaise, the entirety of which was dedicated to the Soviet-Russian avant-garde, had the photo negative of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International on its cover as an iconic image of the revolution, calling for a parallel between 1917 and 1968, as if announcing that the revolution—or, as per the photo negative, the shadow of it—was, once again, “in” (see Figure 12.1). In Cologne, the Gmurzynska Gallery opened a Russian art show.34 Kenneth Frampton published his essay “Notes on a Lost Avant-Garde,”35 a survey of Soviet-Russian art with Tatlin’s Tower as its starting point. In Copenhagen, Troels Andersen organized a Tatlin exhibition and published the first two volumes of the English translation of Malevich’s writings. One of the features of the Soviet avant-garde that fascinated the Trotskyist groups in Paris was that it was apparently state-sponsored art. Although everything was nationalized and state-controlled in postrevolutionary Russia, and art was no exception, this belief proved to these particular groups of the New Left that the concepts of a communist state and artistic freedom were compatible, which in turn justified their concept of the necessity and benevolent potential of a leading leftist political party. Looking back from 1968 when abstract art was, with the exception of Poland, banned east of the iron curtain, the oncedominant public presence of abstract art in a communist state appeared to be the clear proof of the once existing unlimited freedom of expression in that state. Scholarship had not yet revealed at that point the boundaries and conditions that the bolshevik Party imposed on that art from as early as 1918 and 1919 (as already mentioned in previous chapters), when several avant-garde journals were already banned. The newfound evidence of such imagined freedom, however, flew in the face of everything that this generation had learned about communism in school. A treasure trove was discovered that had been hidden by the joint efforts of mainstream politics, both in the East and in the West. Since the Trotskyist groups had many activists and members who immigrated to France from Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union—some directly from the Warsaw or

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Figure 12.1  Cover page of Cimaise, spring issue 1968.

Prague student movements—or were descendants of former émigrés, it is no surprise that they had particular interest in the art of the “original” revolution. These activists’ interest in early Soviet culture also coincided with the commercial success of the Soviet avant-garde in the art market and with widespread intellectual and political curiosity in alternatives to the present conditions in the West. It is hard to fathom which of these components had more influence on putting the Russian avant-garde center stage. Cold War

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fascination with the other side of the iron curtain, coupled with the widely known fact that this art was still hidden and discarded in its place of origin, must have played a role. As previously mentioned, abstract art as well as the various iterations of American minimalism—which ultimately traced their origins back to Russian constructivism—also resonated as dissident art in the West in the 1960s, since at that time they were not yet supported by the market.36 The rediscovery of the Soviet-Russian avant-garde was a complex experience in the West, which included a sense of repaying a debt and restoring the moral order and continuity of an important tradition of the culture. In his Preface to Anatole Kopp’s book, Romanian-born French architect Ionel Schein underscored that Kopp’s book “did not merely rehabilitate Soviet architects, but, beyond all politics, it had restored historic truth, which is the condition of further development.”37

“It’s Only a Beginning!” After De Gaulle reinstated his power in France in June 1968 and the Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia to terminate the “Prague Spring” in August 1968, the appreciation of early Soviet art was invested with yet another meaning. Now, for several New Left groups, it symbolized sustained hope in a future revolution. They hammered out a new strategy after the defeat. Activists—in the spirit of the summer ’68 slogan “Ce n’est qu’un début, continuons le combat!” (It’s only the beginning, let’s continue the fight!)—set out to East European countries to escalate the movement, clandestinely recruiting future allies from among those who were likely to respond and willing to actively engage in anti-Soviet leftism. The counterculture of 1960s Europe, from its ecstatic quest of a fundamental improvement of the world to the loss of such illusions was, in many ways, the reincarnation of the equally leftist counterculture avant la lettre of the 1920s, which wasn’t lost on the supporters of this art. “It doesn’t need to be proved that understanding the art of the 1920s is indispensable for the understanding of our present world,” art critic Tomas Straus wrote in the Introduction to the catalog of Lajos Kassák’s exhibition in 1973.38 “[The avant-garde movements of the 1920s] cooperated beyond national borders. ( . . . ) It is extremely important for us today to understand the trends of our own time through their activity, and, learning from them, to try to overcome our national isolations,” Peter Spielmann wrote in another Kassák catalog at the same time.39

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A new initiative, mail art, was growing into a widespread global movement in the 1970s.40 It resembled the beginnings of the internationalism of the avantgardes of the early 1920s, when supranational networking was achieved by the circulation over the national borders of the “little journals,” the avant-garde publications, in the wake of the First World War. Mail art used the existing international mail service for the purposes of creating a global network of those who opposed the establishments that operated, among other things, the mail services. The 1970s was the decade during which the canon and interpretation of the Russian avant-garde was being shaped in the West. In the spring of 1971, the Arts Council of Great Britain organized “Art in Revolution: Soviet Art and Design since 1917” in the Hayward Gallery in London, originally proposed by Camilla Gray and curated, due to her efforts and connections, with the participation of the Soviet Ministry of Culture. Gray was married to the son of Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev; thus it was, at that point, a one-time contribution on behalf of the Soviet officialdom to a Soviet (rather than Russian) avant-garde show in the West. This exhibition was different from previous, all-inclusive shows. As Gray explained in her preface to the catalog, the exhibition was meant to clearly define constructivism, particularly because Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, who at that point lived in the West, had claimed to have been the founders of the trend, when in fact they left Russia before the movement was actually launched. Gabo and Pevsner, however, authored The Realist Manifesto in 1920 that had similarities to later constructivist concepts.41 The Hayward Gallery show was starkly distanced from previous ones, which had featured painters only. Here no émigré artists were included, and constructivism ruled as Rodchenko, Stepanova, the Stenberg brothers—that is, as INKhUK and OBMOKhU defined it in Moscow in 1921—but also as official Soviet lenders agreed to show it as of 1971. This was probably the first Russian show which did not include any works by Malevich. Tatlin, Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Dziga Vertov, Eisenstein, and the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold were its protagonists. Exhibits included architecture, design, film, theater, and graphic design, dating mostly from the late 1920s. In spite of the many excellent artists included in it, this exhibition was so controversial—partly because it was officially Soviet and partly because it ran against the image of the Russian avant-garde that the galleries had already built up for about a decade by that time—that when the show traveled to Germany, the authors of the German catalog essay felt obliged to explain that “artists like Chagall and Kandinsky are absent from this exhibition, because, although at first

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they had been employed by the revolution, they considered their artistic activity apolitical, and eventually left Russia.”42 In a further response to this exhibition, the gallery Fischer Fine Arts in London organized a show titled “Tatlin’s Dream” in 1973. “In the confines of a private gallery,” the dealer Wolfgang Fischer wrote in his introductory Notes to the catalog, “[we hope] to present a postscript to the official Arts Council exhibition of 1971, ‘Art in Revolution’, without the ideological and practical restrictions of a state cultural exchange-program.”43 A review in The Observer went as far as praising Fischer’s selection that opposed “Art in Revolution’s [ . . . ] self-mutilating Soviet censorship.”44 The author of the “Tatlin’s Dream” catalog essay, André Nakov, once again pointed out the connection between the Russian avant-garde and the American abstraction of the 1960s. “The work of Dan Flavin and Carl André reveals its sources,” he wrote, “the writings of Robert Morris discuss them; together they bring to light a conceptual notion of two artistic evolutions which have so much in common.”45 The horizon widened and opened up beyond what Hans L. C. Jaffe found when discovering Malevich as part of the De Stijl’s international context. Now, the newly discovered Soviet avant-garde directed the commercial galleries’ attention to the whole progressive art of the 1910s and 1920s. The fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Bauhaus was celebrated by a large traveling exhibition. The 1970 winter issue of Cimaise was dedicated to De Stijl, which was now seen in more revolutionary light as well, as part of the broad avant-garde movements of the interwar period. Kurt Schwitters’s works were exhibited in several venues in Germany throughout the 1970s. The Gmurzynska Gallery in Cologne, which pioneered in showing early Soviet art, now interspersed it with a great many Polish, German, Czech, Hungarian, Dutch, and French avant-garde artworks. The Paris-based Galleries Jean Chauvelin, Denise René, as well as German, Swiss, and French dealers expanded their efforts to familiarize the Western audience with Soviet, East European, as well as West European avant-gardes of the 1920s. The merit of these exhibitions was, among other things, that they contextualized those works which had already been on show in various private and public collections worldwide. The Gmurzynska Gallery in Cologne had a particularly consistent program over the years, organizing Konstruktivismus (Constructivism) in 1972, Progressive Russische Kunst (Progressive Russian Art) in 1973, and From Surface to Space, Russia 1916-1924 in 1974; Die Zwanzige Jahre in Osteuropa (The 1920s in Eastern Europe) in 1975, El Lissitzky in 1976, Die Kunstismen in Russland (The Art isms) 1907-1930 in 1977, and “Malewitsch” in 1978. It also pioneered in showing works by the artist and composer Mikhail Matyushin and Pavel Miturich, although many aspects of Malevich’s

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prerevolutionary work and the spiritual approach of Matyushin, Guro, and the Ender siblings were brought to the fore only in the 1980s. The revolutionary anticapitalism of the New Left, paradoxically, added a sense of approval to the marketing of Soviet and East European art. This art, which had denied commerce and capitalism forthwith, needed the intellectualpolitical engagement of the New Left to give legitimacy for its trade, which—in turn—greatly helped the art market to gain momentum in showing and selling revolutionary art. Dealers got hold of an amazing number of artworks and they mobilized scholars to research the history of this art and its original documents. Galleries cooperated with one another and with collectors to stage large survey shows. To retrieve this art and keep it under the public eye against the efforts of the Soviet and East European communist parties’ policies of culture that tried to conceal it, as well as against the efforts of mainstream Western cultural agents who scorned its leftism, was invested with an aura of moral commitment. Many art dealers supported systematic art historical research of the Russian and East European avant-gardes, thus espousing a cause rather than mere business. Moreover, after 1974–1975, when even the aftermath of the social and political movements of the 1960s had faded, the myth of the Russian avant-garde, its narrative having been established, still increasingly resonated—and keeps on resonating—among collectors, intellectuals, and art institutions. Its reception and marketing had to tackle a few particular circumstances. This art originated from a country which, by definition, lacked an infrastructure of art trade. The works belonged to an art historical context that was, for many decades, hardly, or not at all, known in the West. Since many of the works made their way to the West illegally, provenance was blurred. Geometric abstraction was eminently easy to fake. In the midst of high demand for Soviet-Russian avant-garde works, even paintings attributed to invented artists were offered for sale. For example, John Bowlt mentions that works by a certain Ulia Aranova were sold at Sotheby’s July 4, 1974, Russian and East European auction, whereas “Not only did such an artist never exist, but a work dated 1911 was in fact painted in 1971.”46 The presence of a number of fake works on the market did not make the historical surveying of the Russian avant-garde easy. The 1975 Helsinki Accords, which aimed to improve East–West relations, and introduced the politics of détente, or thaw, decreasing Cold War tensions, enabled in the field of culture great survey exhibitions of the classic avant-garde. These shows, accompanied by extensive catalogs, were dedicated to the Soviet and East European avant-garde—and, increasingly, to the contemporary art of the region47—and were organized by leading French and German institutions. They

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also indicated a sort of territorial debate over which of the two countries had had a greater part in fostering Russian and East European art in the 1920s and in the present. The Paris-Berlin show in the Pompidou Center in 1978, sandwiched between the 1977 Paris-New York and the 1979 Paris-Moscow exhibitions, was probably meant, as if in response to a number of recent German exhibitions, to restore Paris’ historic status as the art capital of the world, something that had been challenged by Berlin during the interwar period and by New York from the 1940s onward.48 The Paris-Moscow exhibition, which showed Soviet-Russian avant-garde works from Soviet state collections (some of them in deplorable state), was also the result of high-level diplomatic cooperation. It would not have happened without the commercial activities of the galleries that had created awareness of this art in the West or without the New Left’s strong political emphasis on this art; nor would it have happened without the Helsinki Accords that made it uncomfortable for the Soviet Union to continue hiding this art now that it had become internationally better known than in the USSR. News of the very fact that this art had been in the vaults for half a century was in and of itself an accusation of Soviet politics of culture; and, also for this reason, this event reverberated in post-Helsinki Europe as an example of the Soviet Union’s “coming out” with the country’s historic avant-garde. New publications such as the Paris-based journal Macula, launched in 1976 by Yves-Alain Bois and others, contributed to a more detailed and more well-rounded picture of art in the early Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The first issue included the French translation of Władisław Strzemiński’s Unism in Painting; Bois’s essay on Malevich, articles on De Stijl; and John Bowlt’s previously cited account of the Soviet art business; as well as essays on the 1920s Dutch and German avant-gardes. Also in 1976, the journal October was launched in America by Rosalind Krauss and Anette Michaelson, its title chosen “in celebration of that moment in our century when revolutionary practice, theoretical inquiry and artistic innovation were joined in a manner exemplary and unique.”49 Its first issues discussed, among other things, the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein’s unrealized project of making a film of Marx’s Capital; his exchange with Malevich on the nature of cinematic expression; other writings included references to works of Vladimir Markov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Viktor Shklovsky, thus bringing the Soviet avant-garde’s artists, historians, writers, and theorists center stage in the international critical-theoretical discourse.50 The rediscovery and art historical restoration of the Soviet-Russian avantgarde resulted in the creation and acknowledgment of a narrative parallel

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to that of Western modernism. Cubo-futurism, rayonism, suprematism, constructivism, proun, productivism, and their prominent representatives now arose as full-fledged chapters and agents of the Russian avant-garde, with their impact on their Western counterparts fully recognized. The initiative of the 1960s that originated in, and was akin to, motivations that had inspired the progressive artists of the early 1920s, gave way to the extensive scholarly work on the Russian avant-garde, starting in the 1980s and intensifying when the Soviet archives opened up after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Notes Introduction 1 See Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Gardes and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA; London: The MIT Press, 1986. 2 Besides Camilla Gray’s groundbreaking The Great Experiment: Russian Art 18631922, London: Thames and Hudson, 1962, see, among others, Louise Hardiman, Nicola Kozicharow, eds., Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017; Anatolii Strigaljov: “Die Bedeutung der altrussischen und der volkstümlichen Kunst in Tatlins Werk”, in Jürgen Harten, ed., Tatlin, Cologne: DuMont, 1993; Mark Steinberg, Heather J. Coleman, eds., Sacred Stories. Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007; Alexei Kurbanovsky: “Malevich’s Mystic Signs: From Iconoclasm to New Theology,” in Steinberg, Coleman, op​.cit​.; Maria Taroutina, The Icon and the Square. Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival, Penn State University Press, 2018, Ulrich Linse, Barfüssige Propheten, Berlin: Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag, 1983. 3 Inverting the word Hausbau, or house building, Gropius let the word Bauhütte, or building huts serving for the medieval cathedrals’ builders and building communities, hear through the neologism Bauhaus. 4 For detailed analysis, see Nina Tumarkin, “Religion, Bolshevism, and the Origins of the Lenin Cult,” Slavic Review, vol. 40, January 1980, 35–46. 5 Quoted by Tumarkin, ibid., 43. Originally in Lunacharsky: Velikii Perevorot, Petrograd, 1919, 31. Lunacharsky’s brother-in-law Alexander Bogdanov had shared Krasin’s and Fodorov’s ideas on perpetuated eternal living and caused his own death by conducting blood transfusions on himself (Tumarkin, ibid., 43). See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment. Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Chapter 1, “Lunacharsky.” 6 Oleg Tarasov: “Spirituality and the Semiotics of Russian Culture: From the Icon to Avant-Garde Art,” in Louise Hardiman, Nicola Kozicharow, eds., Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017, 115–28. 7 Nina Gourianova: “Re-imagining the Old Faith: Larionov, Goncharova, and the Spiritual Traditions of Old Believers,” in Hardiman, Kozicharov, op. cit., 129–48.

238 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

17

18

19

20

21 22

23 24

25

Notes Louise Hardiman, Nicola Kozicharov, “Introduction,” op​.cit​., 26. Tarasov, op​.cit​., 121. Strigaljov, op​.cit​., 128. M. N. Yablonskaya, Women Artists of Russia, London: Thames & Hudson, 1990, 63. Larionov: Rayonnist Manifesto, quoted and translated by Camilla Gray, in Gray op. cit., 137–8. Krauss, op​.ci​t. Florensky, 1920, reprinted in Nicoletta Misler, ed. Pavel Florensky, Essays on the Perception of Art, London: Reaktion Books, 2002, 201–72. This book was based on Florensky’s lectures at the Theological Academy in Moscow, 1918, so his views were likely to be known earlier than the publication of his book. (Clemena Antonova, Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon. Seeing the World with the Eyes of God, Burlington: Ashgate, 2010, 15.) Boris Vipper, “Problema vremeni v izobrazitel’nom iskusstve”, in 50 let gosudarstvennomu muzeiu izobrazitel’nylh iskusstv imeni A.S. Puskina, Moscow 1962, 134–50, quoted by Antonova, op. cit., 15. For a detailed discussion, see Verena Krieger, Kunst als Neuschöpfung der Wirklichkeit. Die Anti-Ästhetik der russischen Moderne, Cologne, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2006, 9–14. Erich Buchholz in reference to El Lissitzky, Berlin, Archives of the Berlinische Galerie, and El Lissitzky, Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer, Eindhoven: Municipal Van Abbe Museum, 1990, 64. Pervy vserossuski s’yezd professionalnykh soyuzov, 7–14 yanvarya 1918, Moscow: 1918, 212. www​.s​​punk.​​org​/t​​exts/​​place​​s​/rus​​sia​/s​​p0018​​61​/19​​18​.ht​​ml accessed June 12, 2013. For detailed discussion, see Krieger, op. cit., 18; Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Henderson, op. cit., 241–5. For example, see Count Saint-Simon in correspondence with Olinde Rodrigues, quoted and translated by Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, Durham: Duke University Press, 1987, 102–4; see also Irina Gutkin, The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic 1890-1934, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999, 10–11. For a more detailed discussion, see Éva Forgács, “Concepts of Art and State,” Arcadia, Bd. 41, Heft 2, 2006, 260–74. Olinde Rodrigues: “L’Artiste, le Savant et l’Industriel. Dialogue,” originally published in Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles, Paris: Galérie de Bossange Père, 1825, translated and quoted by Calinescu, op​.cit​., 103. Emil Ludwig: Talks with Mussolini, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul, London, Allen & Unwin 1932, 128, quoted by Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, translated by Janet Lloyd, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 3.

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26 Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism. Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. 27 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, New York: Dover Publications, 159–62. 28 On the significance of the motif of flying in Russian and Soviet art, see Maria Tsantsanoglou: “The Soviet Icarus: From the Dream of Free Flight to the Nightmare of Free Fall,” in Christina Lodder, Maria Kokkori, Maria Mileeva, eds., Utopian Reality. Reconstructing Culture in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2013, 43–56. 29 Klaus von Beyme, Das Zeitalter der Avantgarden. Kunst und Gesellschaft 1905-1955, Munich: C.H. Beck, 2005, 223–4. 30 Theo van Doesburg, Grundbegriffe der neuen gestaltenden Kunst (Principles of NeoPlastic Art), Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1925, Translated by Janet Seligman, reprint London: Lund Humphries, 1969, 6. 31 Ibid., 9. 32 von Beyme, 225.

Chapter 1 1 Malevich’s birth date has been corrected from 1878 to 1879. See Andrei Nakov, Black and White. A Suprematist Composition of 1915 by Kazimir Malevich, Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 2009, 97, n. 4. 2 He was born to a family of noble lineage, with the double surname DorotichMalevich. VM, Vol. I., 392. 3 On Malevich’s formative years in Kiev including the influence of the abstract folk-art motifs on his later work, see Miroslava M. Mudrak, “Malevich and His Ukrainian Contemporaries,” in Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder, eds. Rethinking Malevich, London: The Pindar Press, 2007, 82–120. 4 See Jane Ashton Sharp, Russian Modernism between East and West: Natal’ja Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 121, and 309, n. 104: “Several paintings of religious subject matter were confiscated in addition to Goncharova’s.‘Moskovskaia Khronika’” Rech, January 11, 1911, 3. 5 See Savva Mamontov’s review in Russkoie Slovo, December 15, 1910, 6, quoted by Sharp, op. cit., 310, n. 110. 6 The origin of the group’s name goes back to a prank of the French artist Roland Dorgelès, who “tied a paintbrush to a donkey’s tail, enticed the animal to swish a few paint-loaded strokes across a piece of canvas and exhibited the result at that year’s Salon des Indépendants, under the title Et le soleil se coucha sur l’Adriatique,

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and over the pseudonym Joachim-Raphael Boronali. Few critics seem to have thought the work interesting enough to mention [until] two weeks into the exhibition Dorgelès published a full account of his spoof in the Parisian humorist periodical Fantasio. The press reaction was extensive ( . . . ) guaranteeing the affair instant notoriety that spread as far as Russia.” David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris, 1905-1914, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, 9. 7 For Russian futurism and cubo-futurism, see Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History, Washington DC: New Academia Publishing, 2006; Anna Lawton, ed., Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes 1912-1928, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988; Gerald Janecek, Zaum. The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism, San Diego: San Diego University Press, 1996. 8 Kruchenikh: “The Word as Such” (Slovo kak takovoe), in Collected Works, Leningrad 1933. See Lawton, 57. 9 Khlebnikov, Kruchenikh: “The Letter as Such,” Lawton, 55. 10 D. Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenikh, V. Mayakovsky, Victor (sic!) Khlebnikov, (A slap in the face of public taste) Moscow, 1912; English translation Anna Lawton, Herbert Eagle; Lawton, 51–52. 11 Lawton, 51. 12 Ibid., 52. 13 Ibid., 60. 14 Ibid., 63. 15 This translation by Paul Schmidt in Charlotte Douglas, ed. The King of Time. Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985. “Futurian” is creative translation of budetljanie, “the one who will be”: the Russified term for “futurist.” 16 David Burliuk, Elena Guro, Nikolai Burliuk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Katherine Nizen, Victor (sic!) Khlebnikov, Benedikt Lifshitz A. Kruchenikh, A Trap for Judges, 1913, Lawton, 54. 17 “Color masses,” painterly masses,” or, in other translation, “pictorial masses” are part of the description of Malevich’s suprematist paintings in the catalog of the 0.10 The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, Petrograd, December 1915–January 1916. 18 Quoted by Charlotte Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press1976, 36. 19 Ibid. 20 Alexandra Shatskikh, Black Square. Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012, 1–33. 21 Malevich: “From Secret Vices of Academicians,” in Kruchenikh: Secret Vices of the Academicians, Moscow, 1916, that included this pamphlet and other short texts by Malevich along with some by Ivan Kliun, who was also the illustrator

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of the booklet. In Troels Andersen, ed., K.S. Malevich Essays on Art 1915-1928, Vol. 1, Transl. Xenia Glowacki-Prus, Arnold McMillan, Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968, 17. 22 Shatskikh, Black Square, 5. 23 Elena Basner, “Malevich’s Paintings in the Collection of the Russian Museum,” in Yevgenia Petrova, ed., Kazimir Malevich in State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000, 18. Basner relates that Malevich’s student Konstantin Rozhdestvensky confirmed that Malevich called the painting Cow on a Violin and predated it 1911. According to Shatskikh he predated it to 1913. 24 Malevich: “The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism,” 1926; trans. Howard Dearstyne, Chicago: Theobald Books, 19, 67. 25 Malevich 1916, in Andersen 1968, 38. 26 Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment,” 1784, translated by Mary C. Smith, http:​ /​/www​​.colu​​mbia.​​edu​/a​​cis​/e​​ts​/CC​​READ/​​etscc​​/​kant​​.html​, accessed December 12, 2012. 27 Sharp, op​.cit​., 121. 28 (Untitled) A Trap for Judges, 1910. Lawton, 53. 29 Piotr Damianovich Uspensky, Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought, a Key to the Enigmas of the World. Translated from the Russian by Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon. Rochester and New York: Manas Press, 1920; New York: Knopf, 1922; London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1923, 1934; 3rd American edition, New York: Knopf, 1945. 30 See Henderson, op​.ci​t. 31 For detailed discussion of the Russian futurist books, see Nancy Perloff, Explodity, Los Angeles: Getty Publishers, 2017, especially 113–44. 32 Douglas, op​.cit​., 28. 33 S. Patraskin, “Bayachi budetliane” (“The Futurist Bards”), Den, December 8, 1913, quoted and translated by Nina Gurianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012, 125. 34 See R. W. Flint, ed., Let’s Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings of F.T. Marinetti, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli, Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1991. Khardzhiev, in Petrova, op. cit., 132, also references Marinetti’s Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna, translating it as “We shall kill the moonlight.” 35 Nikolai Khardzhiev, “Alexei Kruchenikh,” in Petrova, 132. 36 Victory over the Sun, libretto Alexei Kruchenikh, music Mikhail Matyushin, prologue Velimir Khlebnikov, sets K. Malevich. Translation by Ewa Bartos and Victoria Nes Kirby, The Drama Review XV (Autumn 1971), 107–24. 37 K. Malevich, “On the Museum,” Iskusstvo Kommuny No. 12, February 23, 1919. In Andersen, 1968., 72. On Russian Cosmism, see Boris Groys, ed., Russian Cosmism, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018.

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38 For a more detailed discussion, see Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism, New Haven: Yale University Press,1983, 208 and 298, notes 17–26. 39 For discussion of this motif, see Maria Tsantsanoglou: “The Soviet Icarus: From the Dream of Free Flight to the Nightmare of Free Fall,” in Christina Lodder, Maria Kokkori, Maria Mileeva, eds., Utopian Reality. Reconstructing Culture in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013, 43–56; and Hubertus Gassner, “Alexander Rodtschenko. Auf der Suche nach Leichtigkeit” in Alla Chilova, Ortrud Westheider, eds., Rodtschenko. Eine neue Zeit, Munich: Hirmer, 2013, 44–53. 40 Malevich, “Non-Objective Creation and Suprematism” printed in the Catalog of the Tenth State Exhibition, Moscow, 1919, transl. in Andersen, 1968, 122. 41 Arnie Glimcher and Bernice Rose, on the exhibition Picasso, Braque, and Early Film in Cubism, New York: Pace Wildenstein, April 20–June 23, 2007. 42 Benedikt Lifshitz, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, translated by John Bowlt, Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1977, 163–64. 43 “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism. The New Realism in Painting,” 1916. In Andersen 1968, 19. 44 Shatskikh, op​.cit​., 48. 45 “fiery lightning bolts were constantly crossing the canvas in front of him,” Kljun remembers to have heard from Malevich; while Malevich’s pupil Anna Leporskaia recalls that Malevich “considered Black Square an event of such tremendous significance in his art that he could not eat, drink, or sleep for a full week,” quoted by Shatskikh, op​.cit​., 45. 46 Painter Ivan Puni, 1892–1956. 47 Postcard of Malevich to Matyushin dated September 25, 1915, quoted in Shatskikh, op. cit., 55; VM. Vol. I., 68. 48 Shatskikh, op​.cit​., 23. 49 ibid., 85 and passim. 50 Patricia Railing, ed. and intr. Malevich on Suprematism. Six Essays 1915-1926, Iowa City: Iowa, The Museum of Art of the University of Iowa, 1999, 99, 37. 51 Alexander Benois: “The Last Futurist Exhibition,” Rech, St. Petersburg, January 9, 1916, VM, Vol. II, 514–17; this and subsequent quotes 517. 52 Nakov, op​.cit​., 103, n. 54. 53 Shatskikh, op​.cit​., 85. 54 Alexander Rostislavov: “On the Futurists’ Exhibition,” Rech, St. Petersburg, December 25, 1915. VM, Vol. II, 513. 55 Christina Lodder: “Malevich as Exhibition Maker,” in Malevich, exh. cat., London: Tate Modern, 2014, 94–9, this quote 95. 56 Maria Taroutina, The Icon and the Square. Russian Modernism and the RussoByzantine Revival, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2018, 18, 180.

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57 Irina Vakar: “New Information Concerning the Black Square,” in Christina Lodder, ed., Celebrating Suprematism. New Approaches to the Art of Kazimir Malevich, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019, 11–28. 58 Shatskikh, op​.cit​., 260. 59 Gray notes “Malevich was a brilliant speaker and a man of great charm and humour.” Gray, 143. 60 Alexandra Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich and Supremus, Tri Kvadrata, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009, 118. 61 Kliun in Malevich 2004, 71, quoted by Tatiana Mikhienko, “Kasimir Malewitsch in den Augen seiner Schüler und Nachfolger,” in Malsch, Friedemann, ed., Malewitsch und sein Einfluss, Vaduz: Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, 2008, 19–29, 21. 62 Alexandra Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich and Supremus, op​.cit​., New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009, 118–19. 63 See Dmitrii Sarabianov and Alexandra Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich: zhivopis, teoria Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1993; Taroutina 2018. 64 Gray, op​.cit​., 206. 65 Shatskikh, The Black Square, 127. 66 ibid., 128–9. 67 Matyushin, “On the Exhibition of the Last Futurists,” 1916, in VM, Vol. 2, 122, quoted by Mikhienko in Malsch, 20–1. 68 Mikhienko, op​.cit​., 21. 69 Ibid., 20–8. 70 Troels Andersen, “Malevich on New Art,” in Andersen, 1968, 9. 71 Kazimir Malevich: The World of Objectlessness. With essays and new translation of the Bauhaus Book 1927. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis, Anna Brailkovsky, Meredith Dale, Bronwen Saunders. Basel: Kunstmuseum and Ostfildern: Hetje Cantz Verlag, 2014, 187; Malevich: “The Non-Objective World,” ibid., 67 as “pure feeling.” 72 Railing, op. cit., 19. 73 Malevich, letter to Matyushin, May 1915, quoted in Douglas 64; VM, Vol. I., 66. 74 Isabel Wünsche, Kunst un Leben. Mikhail Matyushin und die Russische Avantgarde in St. Petersburg, Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2012, 54. 75 quoted by Mikhienko, op​.cit​., 19. 76 Ibid., 19–20. 77 A. Lunacharsky in Ogoniok, 1927, quoted by von Beyme, op​.cit​., 5, 335. As briefly mentioned in the Introduction as well as Chapter 10, Lunacharsky was also working on the compatibility of the revolution and religion. His concept of “Godbuilding” (bogostroitelstvo), however, was based on faith in the enthusiasm he thought was moving people in constructing a socialist state. 78 A. Gan, “Kazimir Malewitsch,” Moskauer Rundschau, 24, 11, 1929, Nr. 29, in Hubertus Gassner, Echart Gillen, eds., Zwischen Revolutionskunst und

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Sozialistischen Realismus. Dokumente und Kommentare Kunstdebatten in der Sowietunion von 1917 bis 1934. Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 19, 205–6. 79 Gurianova, op​.cit​., 196. 80 Ibid., 197. 81 Malevich, “From Cubism to Suprematism. The New Realism of Painting,” November 1916, in Railing, op. cit., 26. 82 Kazimir Malevich: From Cubism to Suprematism, Petrograd, 1915, English translation in T. Andersen, 1968, 19–41, this quote 19. 83 Soloviev, Sochinenia v dvukh tomakh (Works in two volumes), Moscow, Mysl, 1988, 2, 294 and 1: 742–3, quoted and translated by Irina Gutkin, The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic 1890-1934, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 19, 1999, 11. 84 Douglas, op​.cit​., 68. 85 This text was dated “Moscow 1915” but published in November 1916. See Railing, 27. 86 Andersen 1968, 19. 87 Malevich 1915 in Railing, 29. 88 Ibid., 31. 89 Ibid., 37. 90 Ibid., 46. 91 Felix Philipp Ingold, “Welt und Bild. Zur Begründung der suprematistischen Ästhetik bei Kazimir Malevič,” in Gottfried Boehm, ed., Was ist ein Bild? Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006, 367–407. 92 Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1819. 93 Douglas, op​.ci​t. 94 Quoted by Krieger, 191. 95 Shatskikh, The Black Square, 130, 131. 96 Igor Terentiev, “Materials from the Investigation File,” excerpt in VM, Vol. 2, 333– 9, this quote 334. The reader is also referred to a piece of memoir of Fedor Petrov who asked Malevich about the meaning of his paintings in 1926, whereupon the painter answered: “the task of art lies in visual irritation, while defining the essence is the tour guide’s job.” According to Petrov, “It was clear that the artist himself had no concept of who such ‘canvases’ were for and why they were needed. But Malevich was a talented man.” VM, Vol. 2, 344. 97 Konstantin Rozhdestvensky, “GINKhUK,” written in the 1970s–1980s years, VM, Vol. 2, 288. 98 Malevich used typewriters mostly, if not exclusively, in his official correspondence. Many typewritten pages are, for example, in the Khardzhiev-Chaga foundation in the archives of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 99 Kazimir Malevich, From Cubism to Suprematism. New Painterly Realism, Petrograd: Zhuravl, June 1915. Transl. Charlotte Douglas, in Railing, 18–24;

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Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism. The New Realism in Painting, November 1916, Petrograd, Zhuravl, 1916. Transl. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin, in Andersen 1968, 19; reprinted in Railing, 28–42. 100 Minutes of the Meeting of the Moscow Military-Revolutionary Committee, November 13, 1917, 17:00 p.m. VM, Vol. I, 407. “The fact that Malevich was chairman of the Soviet’s Department of Arts and Education beginning in September 1917 was evidently instrumental in his appointment,” the editors’ footnote adds on the same page. 101 For a detailed discussion, see Pamela Kachurin, “Malevich as Soviet Bureaucrat: Ginkhuk and the Survival of the Avant-Garde, 1924-1926,” in Douglas, Lodder, op​.cit​., 124. 102 Alexandra Shatskikh, “UNOVIS: Epicenter of a New World,” The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde 1915-1932, New York: The Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1992, 107–24. 103 Gurianova, 223. 104 Bengt Jangfeldt, Majakovskij and Futurism 1917-1921, Stockholm, Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksell, 1976, 6, 17. 105 Boris Kushner, “Rukopozhatie”, in Nash Put, May 2, 1918, 186, quoted by Jangfeldt, 28. 106 Quoted by Gurianova, 224. 107 Alexander Rodchenko, “To ‘Original’ Politics and the Newspaper Ponedelnik,” Anarkhiia, No. 81, June 15, 1918. translated Jamey Gambrell, in Alexander Rodchenko. Experiments for the Future. Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2005, 83. 108 Alexander Rodchenko, “Note Dec. 25, 1918,” ibid., 88. 109 Jangfeldt, 20. 110 Ibid., 11. 111 Ibid., 30. 112 Ibid., 36. 113 On July 10, 1918, the Russian Constitution renamed the country the RSFSR (Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic). This changed on December 30, 1922, when the country was renamed the Soviet Union (SSSR: Soviet Alliance of Socialist Republics). 114 Malevich, “On the Museum,” orig. “O muzeye,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 12, February 23, 1919, in Andersen, 1968, 69, 72. 115 Yehuda (Yurii) Pen, 1854–1937, teacher and painter active in Vitebsk. He worked in the realist style and played a role in the Jewish Renaissance of the early twentieth century in the Belarus. For detailed discussion of Yehuda Pen, who Russified his name to Yuri Moiseevich, see Alexandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk. The Life of Art, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, 9–11.

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116 Peter Nisbet, El Lissitzky in the Proun Years: A Study of His Work and Thought 1919-1927 diss., Yale, 1978, 13, 44. 117 Shatskikh, Vitebsk, 22. 118 Ibid., 28. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered on January 15, 1919. 119 Ibid. 120 Boguslavskaja 1921, quoted by Shatskikh, Vitebsk, 2, 37. 121 Ibid., 38–40. 122 ibid., 66. 123 The letter dated October 29, 1919, said: “In spite of my desire to continue working here I have been compelled, in the absence of an apartment (I’m living in a cold dacha), firewood, or electricity, to accept the offer made by the Vitebsk studios, which will provide me with the necessary working and living conditions, and to leave Moscow.” Willem Jan Renders, “Malevich in Vitebsk”; To Mihail Gershenzon, November 7, 1919, Malevich wrote: “I had to pack my things very quickly and leave for Vitebsk; ( . . . ) out of the blue people from Vitebsk arrived and dragged me out from under the wings of impending cold and darkness.” In VM, Vol. 1, 111. 124 Shatskikh, Vitebsk, 66–7. 125 Ibid., 68. 126 Nikolai Punin, “Kvartira 5”, 1930-1932, in Tatiana N. Mikhienko, Irina A. Vakar, eds. Malevich o Sebe. Sovremenniki o Maleviche. Pisma, Dokumenty, Vospominania, Kritika, Moscow: 2004, 149, quoted by Mikhienko in Malsch, op​.cit​., 21. 127 Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism,” translated by Xenia Hoffmann, in Railing, 100. 128 Malevich: “Suprematism,” 1924–6, in Railing, 97. 129 UNOVIS group, UNOVIS—the Champions of New Art, Vitebsk, probably 1920. Signed by “The Creative Committee of UNOVIS,” probably worded by Malevich. Larisa Zhadova, Suche und Experiment. Russische und Sowietische Kunst 19101930, Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1978, 297. 130 Shatskikh, The Black Square, 110. 131 Shatskikh Vitebsk, 73. 132 Malevich, in Andersen 1976, Vol. III, 83. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid., 104. 135 “How UNOVIS Emerged,” originally published in the Russian journal Ermitazh No. 10, 1922; 3–4. Republished and transl. by Nisbet, op​.cit​., 43. 136 Shatskikh, Vitebsk, 11, 53. 137 Malevich 1915, in Railing, ed., Malevich and Suprematism, 20. 138 Ibid.

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139 Ibid. 140 Ibid., 22. 141 See Anna C. Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine, vol. 64, no. 5, January 1990, 44–63. 142 Shatskikh The Black Square, 127. 143 Malevich 1915, in Railing, 20.

Chapter 2 1 His name is often cited as Lazar Markovich Lissitzky. This original name is given in Peter Nisbet, El Lissitzky 1890-1941, Retrospektive, Hanover: Sprengel Museum, 1988, 36, n. 4, as Lissitzky’s name appeared in the Diploma given by the Riga Polytechnic Institute in 1918. Nisbet notes that several versions of Lissitzky’s name are used in the literature. 2 Alan C. Birnholz, “El Lissitzky and the Jewish Tradition,” Studio International, October 1973, 130–6, 4, and 51, n. 3, suggests either or both reasons possible. 3 Peter Nisbet, El Lissitzky 1890-1941, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums, Busch-Reisinger Museum, 1987, 47, n. 10. 4 E. Basner, “Malevich’s Paintings in the Collection of the Russian Museum,” in Yevgenia Petrova, ed., Kazimir Malevich in the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg: State Russian Museum, 2000, 18. 5 Friedmann Malsch, ed., Malewitsch und sein Einfluss, Vaduz: Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, 2008, 127. 6 Rodchenko wrote on Profsojuz in Opyty dlia budushchego Moscow: Grant, 1966; quoted by Dabrowski, in Magdalena Dabrowski, Leah Dickerman, Peter Galassi, Aleksandr Rodchenko, New York: MoMA, 1998, 24. 7 Nisbet, 1987, 47, n. 12. 8 Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History, Washington DC: New Academia Publishing, 2006, 110. 9 Issackar Ber Ryback, 1897–1935, was a Ukrainian-born Jewish artist who emigrated to France in 1926. 10 El Lissitzky, “The Mohilev Synagogue Reminiscences,” Milgroim, 1923, translated by Louis Lozowick, in Nisbet 1987, 55. 11 Peter Nisbet, El Lissitzky 1890-1941, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums, Busch-Reisinger Museum, 1987, 17, relates that Lissitzky signed a contract on April 22, 1919, “to provide illustrations for 11 children’s books in a series called ‘Kindergarten,’” which were to be written by Ben-Zion Raskin, but only three of these were published. 12 The General Jewish Labor Bund was founded in 1897.

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13 Avram Kampf, Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century, South Headley, Mass.: Begin and Harvey, 1984, 16, 29. 14 Ibid., 17. 15 Ibid., 35. 16 J. V. Stalin: “Marxism and the National Question,” orig. Prosveshcheniye, Nos. 3–5, March–May 1913, in particular Chapter V. The Bund, Its Nationalism, Its Separatism, https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​refer​​ence/​​archi​​ve​/st​​alin/​​works​​/1913​​/​03a.​​htm​ #s​​5, last accessed June 11, 2019. 17 Kampf, ibid., 35. 18 El Lissitzky, “Autobiography,” in El Lissitzky, Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer, Eindhoven: Municipal van Abbemuseum, 1990, 8. 19 “The February Revolution of 1917 transformed Russian Jewish life. Just days after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the formation of the Provisional Government, all legal restrictions on Russian Jewry were lifted.” However, whether Lissitzky experienced it or not, “Running alongside these revolutionary transformations was the re-emergence of anti-Jewish violence and the returning specter of pogroms.” Brendan McGeever, “Revolution and Antisemitism: The Bolsheviks in 1917,” in Patterns of Prejudice, 2017, Vol. 51, Nos. 3–4, 235–52, These quotes, p. 235. https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​080​/0​​03132​​2X​.20​​17​​.13​​51798​. Last accessed March 2, 2019. 20 Cf. Issachar Ber Ryback’s recalling “I saw so much horror after the revolution of 1917—the frightful pogroms in the Ukraine, my father murdered, my birthplace destroyed,” quoted by Serge Aliosha Stommels and Albert Lemmens, “The Graphic Work of Issachar Ber Ryback,” in Jörg Schulte, Olga Tabachnikova, Peter Wagstaff, eds., The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture 1917-1937, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 12, 284. 21 Zvi Y. Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics. The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917-1930, Princetion NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972, 72, 267. 22 El Lissitzky: “The Film of El’s Life,” 1926, in Sophie Lissitky-Küppers, Jen Lissitzky, eds., Proun und Wolkenbügel. Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente. translated from Russian by Lena Schöche und Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977, 329. 23 Bengt Jangfeldt, Majakovskij and Futurism 1917-1921, Stockholm and Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksell, 1976, 51–71. 24 Malevich, Essays on Art 1915-1928, ed. Troels Andersen, 1968, 21, 25. 25 Alexander Rodchenko, “To Artist-Proletarians,” Anarkhiia, April 11, 1918, quoted and translated by Nina Gourianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012, 224.

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26 Brendan McGeever, “Red Antisemitism: Anti-Jewish Violence and Revolutionary Politics in Ukraine, 1919,” http://www​.quest–cdecjournal​.it​/focus​.php​?id​​=413. Last accessed March 3, 2019. 27 Ibid. 28 Alexander Rodchenko, “Be Creators!,” Anarkhiia, no, 61, May 17, 1918, translated Jamey Gambrell, in Alexander Rodchenko. Experiments for the Future. Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2005, 82. 29 Nancy Perloff, “Introduction,” Arnold J. Band, ed., Had Gadya (The Only Kid), Facsimile of El Lissitzky’s Edition of 1919, Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2004, III. 30 Haia Friedberg: “Lissitzky’s Had Gadia,” in Aliza Cohen-Mushlin, ed.: Jewish Art, Jerusalem: Center for Jewish Art of the Hebrew University, 1987, 294. See also Alan C. Birnholz. “On the Meaning of Kazimir Malevich’s ’White on White’” Art International, 21, January 1977, 28–9. 31 The same letters appear on the palm of a hand in Lissitzky’s illustration to Ilya Ehrenburg’s short story “Schiffskarta”, in his volume Six Stories with Light Ending, Berlin: Skifi Verlag, 1922, where the letters appear to refer to the end of the “old world.” 32 Friedberg, ibid., 302. Both Birnholz and Friedberg underline that in the 1917 sketch made during the uncertain times of the victory over the Tsarist regime, the Angel of Death is only dying, whereas in the 1919 version it is definitely defeated and dead (Birnholz, 28–9, Friedberg, 301). 33 Friedberg, http:​/​/jho​​m​.com​​/topi​​cs​/go​​ats​/l​​issit​​​zky​.h​​tm. Last accessed September 21, 2018. 34 The year of the making of this poster is 1919 in Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers’s book (as in Note 18); in Birnholz, ibid.; 1919/1920 in El Lissitzky, Eindhoven: Municipal van Abbemuseum, catalog, 1990; and 1920 in the 1988 Hanover; Sprengel Museum, exhibition catalog. The latter date is taken over by many other authors. 35 Boris Aronson’s letter to Avram Kampf, in Kampf, op​.cit​., 46, n. 16. 36 Vasilii Rakitin, “The Optimism of a Nonobjectivist,” in Matthew Drutt, ed., Kazimir Malevich. Suprematism, New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2003, 62. 37 Gitelman, ibid., 269. 38 Vladimir I. Lenin, “Two Cultures in Every National Culture,” originally in the exile journal Prosveshchenie, quoted in Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia. Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997, 26. 39 For excerpts of the resolutions of the Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, held March 18–23, 1919, see Robert V. Daniels, ed., A Documentary History of Communism in Russia. From Lenin to Gorbachev, Hanover and London: University of Vermont, University Press of New England, 1993, 87.

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40 https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​archi​​ve​/le​​nin​/w​​orks/​​1919/​​m​ar​/x​​02​.ht​​m. Accessed April 4, 2019. 41 Kampf, op. cit., 36. 42 Gitelman, op​.cit​., 272. 43 Ruth Apter-Gabriel, The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art 1912-1928, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1987; and Margolin, op. cit., 26. 44 Kummunistische fon, July 10, 1919, quoted in Gitelman, op​.cit​., 272. 45 See also Alexandra Shatskikh, “Unovis: Epicenter of a New World,” in The Great Utopia. The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1992, 55: “Almost in a matter of days, Lissitzky, an architect by training and until recently under the influence of Chagall, brushed aside figuration and the intricate decorativeness of his earlier work ( . . . ) and plunged ( . . . ) into non-objective art.” 46 Alan C. Birnholz, “El Lissitzky and the Jewish Tradition,” Studio International, October 1973, 130–6; and Alan C. Birnholz: “El Lissitzky 1890-1941,” PhD dissertation, New Haven: Yale University, 1974 (written in 1973, published in 1974) esp.16, 36 and passim, argues that as a Jew Lissitzky was particularly attracted to abstraction because of the Second Commandment (“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”), the abstract graphic quality of Hebrew lettering, similarity of Jewish cabbalistic-mystical beliefs, and also the messianic and elitist concept of the avant-garde, similar to the concept of the “chosen people.” However, Lissitzky’s Jewish book illustrations were figurative, so he did not act according to this commandment. 47 Shatskikh, “Malevich i Lisitskii—lidery UNOVISa,” in “V kruge Malevicha. Soratniki, ucheniki, posledovateli v Rossii 1920-1950-kh godov”, Moscow: Tretyakov Gallery, 2007, 45–51; Christina Lodder, “Ideology and Identity: El Lissitzky in Berlin,” in Schulte, Tabachnikova, Wagstaff, op​.cit​., 339–64, 351. Judith Glatzer Wechsler, “El Lissitzky’s Interchange Stations: The Letter and the Spirit,” in Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, eds., The Jew in the Text, London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, 321. n.m14. 48 Lissitzky, “suprematism of world reconstruction” [sic!], UNOVIS, 1, 1920; LissitzkyKüppers, op​.cit​., 334. Lissitzky wrote this to Pavel Ettinger in a letter of April 4, 1920, in VM, Vol. 2, 212; and Malevich also wrote in the UNOVIS Alamanc, No. 1, 15: “The Suprematist gospel is coming to replace Communism” also in VM, Vol. 2, 159, Malevich is remembered by Evgeny Katsman to have said “So, now we have Socialist order, then there will be Communist order, and after that there will be [Suprematist] abstract order.” Katsman added: “I looked at him—his fanatic eyes— what was the point of arguing with him? He knew nothing about Marxism, never read anything.” VM, Vol. 2, 159. What is certain is that stakes for him were different than for Lissitzky, whose deep conviction was based on hope.

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49 Shatskikh, Unovis, 55: “A vestige of his stormy ‘romance’ with Suprematism and its creator would remain with Lissitzky for the rest of his life: the ‘transrational’ phrase from the opening of On New Systems in Art—‘U-el-el’-ul-el-te-ka,’ which became a sort of anthem for UNOVIS—was the inspiration for Lissitzky’s adopted name, first El and later El’.”. See also ibid., 63, n. 4: “The first instance of Lazar” Lissitzky’s use of the ‘article’ El, and then El’, is to be found in the UNOVIS Almanac No. 1. With the switch to German and the Latin alphabet, he signed his name “El Lissitzky.” There are no grounds for the belief that Lissitzky chose El’ because that is the pronunciation in the Russian alphabet for the letter l, his first initial; at the time, the word liudi (people) was the guide to pronunciation. There is no question that Lissitzky’s unusual name, hardly a pseudonym, was inspired by Malevich’s highly musical “transrational” line, which had deep meaning for the members of UNOVIS; Malevich cited it repeatedly, and Chashnik’s 1924 inscription in his fiancée’s album called on her to “remember this madman . . . whose way of life is U-El-El.” See Ilya Grigroevch Chashnik, Lyucite/1902-Leningrad/1929; Watercolors, Drawings, Reliefs, catalog for the exhibition at Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York: Leonard Hutton Galleries, 1979, 11. 50 Birnholz in Studio International, op​.cit​., 136, n. 47a, notes that “whereas Eliezer meant ‘the Lord hath helped’, ‘El’ was one of the names, according to the Jewish Kabbalists, of God himself (Gershom Scholem, ‘Der Name Gottes und die Sprachtheorie der Kabbala, Neue Rundschau, Vol. 83, No. 3, 1972, p. 490). If nothing else, ‘El’ reflected the hubris of the avant-garde and the continuation of the centuries-old concept of the artist as divine.” This appears far-fetched, and rather the proof of Lissitzky having not been quite familiar with Kabbalist studies. I would argue that had he known the Kabbalist meaning of his chosen name, he would not have called himself “EL,” as throughout his career he gave no sign of thinking himself as god. 51 The fact that Lissitzky made a few more Jewish book illustrations after this decisive encounter does not affect the radicalism of his 1919 decision and turn. Peter Nisbet presents Lissitzky’s previously unknown article “The New Culture,” written prior to Malevich’s arrival to Vitebsk, in which he—through concepts remarkably close to some of Walter Gropius’s ideas expressed in the Bauhaus Manifesto earlier in the same year —shifts focus from Jewish culture to architecture and book design, and to a racially and religiously not identified—indeed, neutralized—“new man.” This article shows that Lissitzky was ready to transcend Jewish culture before he (as Nisbet rightly points out) had any plans to embrace suprematism. 52 Lissitzky, “Der Suprematismus des Weltaufbaus” transl. from Russian to German Helmut Barth, Lisstzky-Küppers, 331. 53 Fabian Ziegler, El LIssitzky—PROUN. Zur Logik der Form, Diss. (Diplomarbeit), Universität Wien, 2010.

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54 Alexandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk. The Life of Art, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, 60–1; Christina Lodder, “Ideology and Identity: El Lissitzky in Berlin,” op​.cit​., 351; Fabian Ziegler, 2012. 55 El Lissitzky, Abstract Composition 1919, oil on canvas, 71 × 58 centimeters, Museum of Ukrainian Art, Kiev. Cf. Alexander Kanzendikas, “Ein unbekanntes Bild von Lissitzky,” in Die grosse Utopie. Die Russische Avantgarde 1915-1932, Frankfurt a. M.: Schirn Kunsthalle 1992, 71. There is no consensus among scholars regarding the painting’s being painted by Lissitzky’s hand. 56 Birnholz in Studio International, 133, 134. 57 Henryk Berlewi, El Lissitzky in Warschau, in Jan Leering, ed., El Lissitzky. Eindhoven; Exhibition Catalog, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, 1965, 61–3. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid, 62. 60 Ibid, 63. 61 Ibid. 62 It has to be made clear that the concept of the “collective” by the feverish dreamers of the 1920s had not much to do with the actual social democracies of the post– Second World War period that, as Tony Judt writes, operated in free countries, and, “in contrast to the revolutionary socialists of the early 20th century and their communist successors accepted the rules of the democratic game ( . . . ) [that was] a distributive concept. It was a moral concept, too, prioritizing ‘public education, the public provision of health services and medical insurance, public parks and playgrounds, collective provision for the aged, infirm and unemployed.’ ( . . . ) Universalists, influential in Britain, favoured high across-the-board taxation to pay for services and resources to which all would have equal access [by leaving] the economy to the private sector.” Judt, Ill Fares the Land, London: Penguin Books, 2010, 72–5. 63 For Malevich’s exercises in poetry and with sounds, see Masha Chlenova, “Abstraction,” October 143, 20. 64 Malevich, 1915-1928, Andersen, Vol. III, 117. 65 Ernst Kállai, “Lissitzky,” Das Kunstblatt, Vol. 6, No. 7, 1922, 296–8. 66 The term is introduced by Stephen Bann, in Bann, The Tradition of Constructivism, London: Thames and Hudson 1974, XXVII. 67 Ernő Kállai, Új magyar piktúra, Budapest: Amicus, 1926,184. 68 Rakitin, op​.cit​., 63. 69 State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, reproduced in El Lissitzky. Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer, op​.cit​., 146, 147. 70 Some of his early Proun compositions like Proun I A, Bridge I, or Proun 23, Nr. 6, are dated 1919. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers: Lissitzky-Küppers 1967, plates 22, 23; the latter also by the 1965 Eindhoven exhibition catalog.

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71 S. Eisenstein, Notes on V.V. Mayakovsky, quoted by Selim Khan-Magomedov, “Three-Dimensional Suprematism and Prouns,” El Lissitzky, Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer, op​.cit​., 41.

Chapter 3 1 Evert van Straaten, Theo van Doesburg: Constructor of the New Life, Otterlo: KröllerMüller Museum, 1994, 7. 2 Carel Blotkamp, ed., De Stijl. The Formative Years, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1982, 4. 3 Ibid. 4 Malevich: The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism, 1926; trans. Howard Dearstyne Chicago: Theobald Books, 1959, 67. 5 Blotkamp, op​.cit​., 8. 6 Van Straaten, op​.cit​., 11. 7 Hans L. C. Jaffe, De Stijl, London: Thames and Hudson, 1970, 17. 8 For detailed descriptions, see Boris Groys, ed. Russian Cosmism, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2018. 9 Manuscript, The Hague, RKD, quoted by Van Straaten, 11. 10 Blotkamp, 8. 11 Saint Bavo is a medieval cathedral in Haarlem. 12 Quoted in Van Straaten, 11. 13 Theo van Doesburg: De Priester-Kunstenaar, dated Utrecht, 7-1-16, Eenheid, January 22, 1916​.n​p. RKD, No. 621. 14 Mondrian: “Neoplasticism in Painting,” De Stijl, Vol. 1, No. 5, 49–54, English translation in Hans L. C. Jaffe, De Stijl, London, Thames and Hudson, 1970, 64. 15 Balázs wrote: “The great Hungarian culture that we have to create [ . . . ] would be a unified Sturm und Drang movement, a spiritual rebirth which would cleanse the present of its journalistic art and clownish science and would build in its place a fresh new art, a new science, a great new culture. I spoke to [Kodály] of the rehabilitation of art, of the religion of art, which would form the basis of the future culture. Its temple would be the concert hall, the art gallery, and the theater. I spoke to him of the redeeming power of art that people will improve, and society will once again become healthy” (Béla Balázs: entry in his diary on August 22, 1905, in his Napló [Diary] 1903-1924, Budapest: Magvető Kiadó, 1982, p. 220). 16 Theo van Doesburg, “Van ‘natur’ tot ‘kompositie’” De Hollandsche Revue, 24 (1919), 470–6. Referred to by van Straaten, 17. 17 Ibid.

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18 Malevich: “From Cubism to Futurism to Suprematism. The New Realism in Painting”, in Troels Andersen 1968, 23, 27. 19 On van Doesburg’s artistic development, see, among others, Blotkamp, 3–37. 20 Blotkamp, 25. 21 Ibid. 22 Hannah L. Hedrick, Theo van Doesburg. Porpagandist and Practitioner of the Avant-Garde, 1909-1923, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1980, 59. 23 Ibid., 60. An example (out of many) is a 1914 poem Set Table: “Half a chair / there in the haze / with more to the left / and more in back.” 24 Van Straaten, 7. 25 Van Doesburg: “Elementarism,” De Stijl, ol. 7. No., April 7–8, 1925, 82–7. Translated from Dutch by Hans L. C. Jaffe, in Jaffe, De Stijl, New York: Abrams, 1971. 26 Ibid. 27 As in Note 15. 28 Ibid. 29 Van Straaten, 23. 30 Theo van Doesburg, “Der Kampf um den neuen Stil”, in Neue Schweizer Rundschau, 22, 1929, 628; quoted by van Straaten, 23. 31 Rosalind E. Krauss: “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” in idem, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986, 157. 32 László Moholy-Nagy to Erich Buchholz, April 3, 1928, published in Mo BuchholzEberhard Roters, eds., Erich Buchholz, Berlin: Ars Nicolai, 1993,110–2. 33 Letter of El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, Locarno, January 4, 1925. GRI, access no. 950076 (box 1, folder 3). Similar letters were written on May 16, 1924, October 16, 1924, and September 15, 1925. 34 See Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker and Christian Weikop, eds., The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. III, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 35 See correspondence of van Doesburg with Moholy-Nagy, Kállai, Péri, Kassák, and others in the RKD; for more details, see Éva Forgács, “Internationalism and Its Technicalities,” in Karel Srp, ed., Years of Disarray 1908-1928. Avant-Gardes in Central Europe, exhibition catalogue, Olomouc: Arbor Vitae Societas, Museum Umeni, 2018, 476–83. 36 For a full list, see Peter Brooker, Sacha Bru, Andrew Thacker, Christian Weikop, eds., The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. 1–III, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 37 Kassák, Moholy-Nagy 1922; Arp, Lissitzky, 1925. 38 See Chapter 8.

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39 Theo van Doesburg: Letter to J. J. P. Oud, September 12, 1921, quoted in Nancy Troy, The De Stijl Environment (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983), 70. 40 On the generational issue in the Bauhaus, see Éva Forgács, “Between the Town and the Gown. Hannes Meyer’s Dismissal from the Bauhaus” Journal of Design History, August 2010, 265–74. 41 See Chapter 10, “Visit to the Dessau Bauhaus.” 42 Chris Beekman, Robert van t’Hoff, Peter Alma, and other Dutch artists turned to the Dutch Second Chamber of Parliament in 1919 “asking for assistance to establish contact with foreign, especially Soviet artists.” Malevich allegedly heard about this effort and sent a letter in response to his Dutch colleagues dated February 12, 1922. See T. Andersen 1968, 254; Van Doesburg, letter to Anthony Kok, June 6, 1922, RKD, The Hague, referred to by Linda S. Boersma: “Malevich, Lissitzky, Van Doesburg: Suprematism and De Stijl,” in Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder, eds. Rethinking Malevich. London: The Pindar Press, 2007, 226. 43 Malevich: “A letter to the Dutch Artists,” 12.2.1922, in T. Andersen 1968, 183–7; also as “To the Dutch artists” in VM, Vol. 1,152; a draft to the letter dated September 7, 1922, Vitebsk, is translated with comments by Vasily Rakitin, op. cit.,151–6. 44 Malevich, op​.cit​., Andersen 1968, 185. 45 Ibid., 186. 46 See Chapter 4 in this book. 47 Malevich, op​.cit​., Andersen 1968, 187. 48 Lissitzky attended a lecture of van Doesburg in Berlin, in the Theleman bookshop, April 9, 1922; Correspondance of van Doesburg and Antony Kok‚ De Stijl ovaral absolute leiding’, De briefwisseling tussen Theo van Doesburg en Antony Kok, The Hague: RKD-Bronnenreeks, 2008, 353, n. 7. 49 Van Doesburg, letter to Antony Kok, Ober Weimar, June 6, 1922, Correspondence of van Doesburg, 390. 50 El Lissitzky, also on behalf of Ilya Ehrenburg, “Statement of the Editors of Veshch, Gegenstand, Objet, De Stijl, Vol. 5, No. 4, April 1922, 56–7. 51 Das junge Rheinland was a moderately progressive literary and artistic platform founded on February 24, 1919, in Düsseldorf. 52 For van Doesburg’s Bauhaus episode, see Éva Forgács, The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics, Budapest, London, Oxford: Central European University Press, 1995, 65–70, and 209–10. 53 Van Doesburg, El Lissitzky, Hans Richter, “Erklärung,” De Stijl, Vol. 5, No. 4, “Kongres-Nummer,” 1922, 61–4. Translation by Nicholas Bullock, BW 393–4. 54 Ibid. 55 De Stijl, 1922, Vol. 5, No. 10/11. 56 Ibid.

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57 Van Straaten, 11. 58 Theo van Doesburg, “Der Wille zum Stil,” De Stijl, Vol. 5, No. 2, February 1922, 23. 59 Theo van Doesburg, letter to Evert Rinsema, August 20, 1922, quoted by van Straaten, 23–4. 60 Theo van Doesburg, letter to Van Eesteren, undated [likely July 1922], quoted by van Straaten, 24. 61 Van Doesburg: “Balans van het nieuwe. Beeldend Russland.” De Stijl, Vol. 5, No. 5, September 1922, 130–5. 62 Ibid., 235.

Chapter 4 1 Peter Noever, ed., Alexander M. Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, The Future Is Our Only Goal, Munich: Prestel, 1991, 122. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 124. 5 Ibid., 137: “The museum should comprise the following departments”: The icon The signboard The popular print “The World of Art” (Saryan, Sapunov, Kuznetsov, Yakulov, Lentulov), etc. “The Donkey’s Tail” and “Target” (Larionov, Goncharova, Zdanevich, Le-Dantyu, Bart) Primitivism (Shevchenko) Color Dynamism (Grishchenko) Expressionism (Kandinsky) “The Jack of Diamonds” (Mashkov, Konchalovsky, Rozhdestvensky, Kuprin, Falk) Suprematism (Popova, Malevich, Kljun, Minkov, Udaltsova, Drevin) Nonobjective art (Rozanova, Rodchenko, Tatlin). 6 Ibid., 138. 7 Khan-Magomedov: Rodchenko 1891-1956. The Complete Work, London: Thames and Hudson 1986, 61. 8 A series of debates took place late in 1920 and in spring 1921. Khan-Magomedov, 83–133; Lodder; Russian Constructivism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983, 83. Dates of the transcripts of the debates are not given, but Khan-Magomedov follows a chronology grouping the debates prior to the formation of the First Working Group of Constructivists (March 18, 1921) and after that date.

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9 Khan-Magomedov, op. cit., 59. 10 Ernő Kállai, “Új Művészet” I., II., Ma, Vol. VI, No. 7, June 1, 1921, 99; and Ma, Vol. VI, No. 8, August 1, 1921, 114–15, respectively. 11 Nikolai Alexandrovich Ladovsky, 1881–1941, architect, rector of VKhUTEMAS 1920–30. 12 Khan-Magomedov, op. cit., 83. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 84. 15 Nikolai Tarabukin, “Polozhenie o gruppe ob’ektivnaia analiza,” Manuscript in private archive, Moscow, quoted by Lodder, op. cit., 82. 16 See, for example, Lodder 1983, Khan-Magomedov 1986, Maria Gough, The Artists as Producer. Russian Constructivism in Revolution, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. 17 Lodder, 88–9, Rodchenko quote from the INKhUK Archives, Lodder’s translation. 18 Lodder, 89. n. 84: the volume’s title was Ot izobrazitel'nosti k konstruktsii, but it was not completed and remained unpublished for lack of money. 19 Khan-Magomedov, 85. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 87. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Quoted by Lodder, 160. The meetings of the General Working Group of Objective Analysis were held: January 1, 21, 28, February 11 and 18, and March 25, 1921. 27 Varvara Stepanova: Lecture at INKhUK, December 22, 1921, in John Bowlt, ed., and Alexander Lavrentiev, Stepanova. The Complete Work. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988, 175. 28 This was said at a meeting on December 26, 1921, quoted by V. Rakitin: “Malevich and Inkhuk,” in: Malewitsch zum 100. Geburtstag, Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1978, 298. The OBMOKhU included, among others, the Stenberg brothers Georgii and Vladimir, Karl Ioganson and Konstantin Medunetzkii. For the full list of the members, see Lodder, 67. 29 For more on the “Composition-Construction debate,” see Lodder, 83–94, and Rakitin: “Malevich and Inkhuk,” 294–6. 30 Quoted by Lodder, 88. 31 Quoted by John Milner, in his Introduction to the reprint of the catalog 5x5=25, Budapest: Helikon, 1992, 18. 32 Lodder, 85.

258

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33 John Milner, Kazimir Malevich and the Tradition of Geometry, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996, 94. 34 “Protokol zasedaniya INKhUKA,” 4 March 1921, MS, Private archive, Moscow, quoted by Lodder, 88. 35 Noever, 171. 36 Rodtschenko: Aufsätze, Autobiographische Notizen, Briefe, Erinnerungen Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1993, 119. 37 Boris Arvatov, “Malevich: ‘Bog ne skinut (Iskusstvo, Tserkov, Fabrika)’” (Malevich: God is not cast down. Art, Church, Factory), Pechat I revoliucia No.7, 1922, 343–4. Quoted by Yevgenia Petrova, “Malevich’s Suprematism and Religion,” in Matthew Drutt, ed., Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism, New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2003, 92. 38 It is, as John Bowlt also confirms, agreed that Lissitzky’s INKhUK lecture was corresponding to his text “Proun,” written in 1920–1, translated by John Bowlt, in: El Lissitzky, exh. Cat. Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska 1976, 60–72. See references to mathematics, 60–5. 39 Lodder 1983, 93. 40 Concerning the origins of the Black Square and the first sketches for it related to the sets of Victory over the Sun in 1913, and thus the lingering incertitude and possible early ideas of it, see Alexandra Shatskikh, Black Square. Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism, New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2012, 34. 41 El Lissitzky: Proun, 64. 42 Ibid. 43 Malevich: “Suprematism,” originally published in the catalog of the Tenth State Exhibition: Non-Objective Creation and Suprematism, Moscow, 1919; this translation in Patricia Railing, ed., Malevich on Suprematism, op. cit., 46, slightly different from T. Andersen 1968, op​.cit​., Vol. 1, 121, where it reads; “The blue color of the sky has been defeated.” 44 El Lissitzky: Proun, 66. 45 Ibid. 46 See detailed analysis in Yve-Alain Bois, “El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility,” Art in America, April 1988, 160–81; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: “From Faktura to Factography,” October No. 30, Fall 1984, 83–119. 47 Buchloh 1984, Proun, 66. 48 Buchloh 1984. 49 Lodder, 83. 50 El Lissitzky: Proun, 69. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 67. 53 Ibid., 69. 54 Lodder 1983, 90.

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Chapter 5 1 For the rich literature on “Center and Periphery” see, for example, Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York: Academic Press, 1974; Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of Enlightenment, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994; Anna Klobucka, “Theorizing the European Periphery,” Symploke 5.1, 1997. 2 Hirschfeld-Mack 1963, 2–3, quoted by Ann Stephen, Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2019, 167. To this state of affairs attests the 1932 novel of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit. 3 Vasily Kandinsky 1920; in Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, eds., Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, New York: DaCapo Press, 1994, 448. 4 Ibid., 448. 5 Ibid., 449. 6 Ibid., 454. 7 Roland Nachtigäller and Hubertus Gassner observe that “thanks to galloping inflation, even modest savings brought into Berlin made it possible to start a small business,” and by 1922 forty Russian publishers operated in the city. See Hubertus Gassner, Roland Nachtigäller, Preface to “3x1=1. Vešč' Objet Gegenstand,” Reprint edition of Vešč' Objet Gegenstand, Baden: Verlag Lars Müller, 1994, 29. 8 Peter Gay, Weimar Culture. The Outsider as Insider, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1968, 129. 9 Quoted by Peter Fritzsche, “Cities Forget, Nations Remember,” in Paul Betts, Greg Eghigian, eds., Pain and Prosperity. Reconsidering Twentieth Century German History, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 35. 10 Harry Kessler, Berlin Lights. The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler 1918-1937, Transl. Charles Kessler, New York: Grove Press, 1999, diary note of Tuesday, November 12, 1918, Berlin, 10–11. 11 István Deák, Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals. A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968, 1. 12 For Lenin’s “weakest link” theory, see Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964, Vol. 24, 519–20. 13 Stéphane Courtois, ed., The Black Book of Communism, transl. from French by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kromes, Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, 282.

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14 P. Broue, The German Revolution: 1917-1923, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006, 516. 15 About the complexities of this “idealism” though, and the role of the centrally important Der Sturm Gallery’s Herwarth Walden, see Hubert van den Berg, “The Autonomous Arts as Black Propaganda. On a Secretive Chapter of German ‘Foreign Cultural Politics’ in the Netherlands and Other Neighbouring Neutral Countries during the First World War,” in: Dorleijn, G. J., Grüttemeyer, R., Korthals-Altes, L., eds, The Autonomy and Engagement in Literature at the Two Fins de Siècles, 1900 and 2000, Leuven: 2008, 71–120. 16 György Lukács, “A Tanácsköztársaság kultúrpolitikájáról” in Lukács, Magyar irodalom, magyar kultúra, Budapest: Magvető, 1970, 626. 17 “Das Kunstprogramm des Kommissariat für Volksaufklärung in Russland,” Das Kunstblatt, Vol. 3, No. 3, March 1919, 91–3. 18 Ibid., 91. 19 English translation: http:​/​/lib​​com​.o​​rg​/li​​brary​​/thir​​d​-int​​ernat​​ional​​-cong​​ress-​​r​epor​​t​ -ruh​​le, last accessed May 11, 2011. 20 Ibid. 21 Kessler, op. cit., 179 (May 12, 1922). It needs to be added that on May 17, 1922, Kessler slightly modified his assessment: “The Conference ends in failure. It was a small step forward instead of the stride [British Prime Minister] Lloyd George anticipated. But it was progress all the same,” 181. 22 Van Doesburg, Lissitzky, Richter 1922, “Statement by the International Faction of Constructivists,” De Stijl Vol. 4, No. 4, April 1922 (Kongreß-Nummer), 59. 23 Karl-Heinz Hüter, Das Bauhaus in Weimar, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1976, 20; Barbara Miller-Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918-1945, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968, 69–86. 24 Hüter, 21. 25 Robert C. Williams, Russian Emigrés in Germany 1881-1941, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1972, 304. 26 Franz Jung, Der Torpedokäfer, Berlin: Luchterhand, 1972, 190. 27 Ibid., 110. 28 Ibid., 111. 29 The term was coined by Stephen Bann, in “Introduction,” in Bann, ed., The Tradition of Constructivism, New York, Da Capo, 1974, XXVII. 30 Or Herzfeld; original name: Held. 31 Kessler, 109. 32 Ibid., 108. 33 George Grosz, An Autobiography, Transl. Nora Hodges, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998, 150.

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34 See, among many others, Erich Eyck, A History of the Weimar Republic, Vol. 1 and 2, New York: Atheneum 1970; Betts, Eghigian, op​.cit​.; Fritzsche op. cit., 35–60; Sebastian Haffner, Die deutsche Revolution 1918/19, Berlin: Kindler Verlag GmbH, 1979; Ulrich Linse, Barfüssige Propheten, Berlin: Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag, 1983. 35 Haffner, Die deutsche Revolution 1918/19, Berlin, Kindler Verlag GmbH, 1979. 36 Nina Gourianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde, Berkeley, Los Angeles, University of California Press: 2012. 171. 37 Fritzsche, 56. 38 Ibid. 39 Victor Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey, Memoirs 1917-1922, translated by Richard Sheldon, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984, 137. 40 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of the German Film, Princeton NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1974; Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Classes: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, transl. Quintin Hoare, Inka Mülder-Bach, London: Verso, 1998. Originally Die Angestellte, published in 1930. 41 Kracauer 1974, 19. 42 Ibid., 53. 43 Ibid., 65. 44 For detailed discussion of these movements, see Sandra Neugärtner, “Utopias of a New Society: Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, and the Loheland and Schwarzerden Women’s Coomunies,” in Elizabeth Otto, Patrick Rössler, eds. Bauhaus Bodies. Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School, New York, London, Oxford, Sydney: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018, 9, esp. 76–7. 45 For a detailed discussion, see Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007, 6. 46 See, for example, Hannes Meyer, “bauhaus und gesellschaft” [sic], 1929, using the terms “Volksseele,” “Volksinteresse,” and other “Volks”—words, preferred items of the Nazi vocabulary; in art historical literature, see Anna C. Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine, Vol. 64, No. 5, January 1990, 44–63; Winfried Nerdinger, Bauhausmoderne im Nationalsozialismus, Munich: Prestel, 1993, 3; Brandon Taylor, Wilfried van der Will, eds., The Nazification of Art, Winchester: The Winchester Press, 1990. 47 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment. Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, XVI.

262

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48 Bengt Jangfeldt, Majakovskij and Futurism 1917-1921, Stockholm, Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksell, 1976, 35. 49 For detailed description, see Jangfeldt, 42–3. 50 Lodder, 184. 51 Robert Service, A History of Twentieth Century Russia, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997, 94. 52 The November 9, 1917, Decree on the Press, signed by Lenin, forbade every publication that was “bourgeois,” that is, could be seen as adversarial to the Bolshevik rule. 53 Service, 94. 54 Sidney Monas, Jennifer Green Krupala, eds., The Diaries of Nikolay Punin 1904-1953, translated by Jennifer Greene Krupala, Austin: University of Texas Press 1999, 57. 55 Ibid., 62. Diary entry of January 11, 1920. 56 Williams, 111. 57 Wipert von Blücher, Deutschlands Weg nach Rapallo: Erinnerungen eines Mannes aus dem zweiten Gliede, Wiesbaden, 1951, quoted by Williams, 112. 58 Ibid., 116. 59 Ibid., 113. 60 See Fritz Mierau, ed., Russen in Berlin. Literatur Malerei Theater Film 1918-1933, Leipzig: Reclam, 1987, 7. 61 Williams, 132. 62 Vasilyevich Ivanov-Razumnik, 1878–1946, Russian writer and critic. 63 Williams, 253. 64 See Chapters 8 and 9. 65 Izvestia 1922, Nr. 273, quoted after the Italian translation in Rassegna Sovietica, No. 1, 1965, “L'esposizione russa a Berlino,” 110–16, quoted by Winfried Nerdinger, Rudolf Belling und die Kunstströmungen in Berlin 1918–1923, Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft 1980, 146. 66 Leo Popper, letter to György Lukács, Berlin, February 28, 1910, in Lukács György levelezése, Budapest: Magvető Kiadó, 1981,178. 67 Mátyás Péter (pen name of Kállai), “Új művészet” Part I, Ma, Vol. VI, No.7, June 1, 1921, 99. 68 Vladimir Tatlin, T. Shapiro, I. Meyerzon, “Pavel Vinogradov: The Work Ahead of Us,” in Vladimir Tatlin, Stockholm: Catalog of the Moderna Museet Stockholm 1968, quoted by Bann, 110. 69 Kállai, op. cit., 115. 70 Cf. “We declare: the genius of our days to be: trousers, jackets, shoes, tramways, buses, airplanes, railways, magnificent ships—what a great epoch unrivalled in world history.” Quoted and translated by Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922 London: Thames and Hudson, 1962, 136.

Notes

263

71 Mátyás Péter (pen name of Kállai), “Új művészet” Part II, Ma, Vol. VI, No. 8, August 1, 1921, 114. 72 Ibid., 116. 73 Mátyás Péter (pen name of Kállai), “Moholy-Nagy,” Ma, Vol. VI, No. 9, September 15, 1921, transl. Eva Grosz, Judy Szőllőssy, László Baránszky, BW 425. The Fall 1921 publication date of this article interpreting Moholy-Nagy’s abstract paintings contradicts Naum Gabo’s remembering Moholy-Nagy as a painter who switched from traditional works to the abstract style under his eyes, at the time of the First Soviet Exhibition in fall of 1922 as in Martin Hammer, Christina Lodder, Constructing Modernity. The Art & Career of Naum Gabo, New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2000,105. 74 Mátyás Péter (pen name of Kállai), “Moholy-Nagy,” ibid., 119. 75 Ibid. 76 Mátyás Péter (pen name of Kállai), “Kassák Lajos,” Ma, Vol. VII, No. 1, November 21, 1921, 139. Translation John Bátki, BW 426.

Chapter 6 1 Alexander Bogdanov, Die Kunst und das Proletariat, Leipzig: “Der Kentaur,” September 1919; Anatoly Lunacharsky, Die Kulturaufgaben der Arbeiter Klasse, Berlin: Die Aktion, 1919; See also Dennis Crockett, German Post-Expressionism: The Art of the Great Disorder 1918-1924, Universal Park: Penn State University Press, 1999, 16. 2 Konstantin Umansky (1902–45), who joined the Communist Party in 1919, later became a diplomat. 3 Béla Uitz, “Jegyzetek a Ma orosz estélyéhez”, Ma, Vol. VI, No. 4, February 15, 1921, 52. 4 See Umansky, Neue Kunst in Russland 1914-1919, Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1920; Wulf Herzogenrath, “Die holländische und russische Avantgarde in Deutschland,” in Malewitsch, Mondrian und ihre Kreise. Aus der Sammlung Wilhelm Hack, Cologne: Kölnischer Kunstverein 1976, 42. 5 Umansky, 19. 6 Ibid., 20. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 22, Note 1. 9 Éva Bajkay, Uitz Béla, Budapest: Corvina, 1974, 108–9. See also Oliver Botar: “Constructivism, International Constructivism, and the Hungarian Emigration,” The Hungarian Avant-Garde 1914-1933, Storrs: University of Connecticut/The William Benton Museum of Art, 1987, 95.

264

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10 Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism, New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1983, 282, n. 116. Lodder also notes that the manifesto “Dynamischeskonstruktives Kraftsystem” that Kemény published with Moholy-Nagy upon his return in the March issue of Der Sturm “relied very heavily on Russian ideas.” 11 Alfréd Kemény, “Vorträge und Diskussionen am INKhUK, Moskau, 1921,” Nach dem Protokollen zusammengefasst von Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, in Hubertus Gassner, ed., Wechsel Wirkungen. Ungarische Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik, Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1986, Dok. 49, 226–30. Subsequent quotes are from this same source. 12 See, for example, Henk Puts, “El Lissitzky (1890-1941) His Life and Work,” El Lissitzky, Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer, Eindhoven: Municipal Van Abbemuseum, 1990, 14. 13 Quoted in Martin Hammer, Christina Lodder, Constructing Modernity. The Art & Career of Naum Gabo, New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2000, 123; Christina Lodder, “Ideology and Identity: El Lissitzky in Berlin,” in Jörg Schulte, Olga Tabachnikova, Peter Wagstaff, eds., The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture, 1917-1937, London: Institute of Jewish Studies, 2012, 346; Christina Lodder, “El Lissitzky and the Export of Constructivism,” in Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed, eds., Situating El Lissitzky: The Current Debate, Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2003, 33. Also to be noted is that Lissitzky had to return to the Soviet Union in 1925 because his Swiss visa, in spite of his repeated applications for extension, was not extended. According to his frantic correspondence (GRI, Lissitzky papers) he made efforts to stay as he needed treatment in Swiss sanatoriums and did not want to be far from Sophie Küppers, but to no avail. 14 Hammer, Lodder, op​.cit​., 53 and passim. See also Benjamin D. Buchloh, “Cold-War Constructivism,” in Serge Gilbaut, ed., Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945-1964, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990, 85. 15 Hammer and Lodder note (op​.ci​t. 482, n. 179) that Lissitzky did a lot of state propaganda after his return to the Soviet Union in 1925. It needs to be considered, though, that besides the denial of extension of his Swiss visa, after 1925 the avantgarde artists did not have much of a choice politically. Gustav Klucis, later executed, and Rodchenko worked for the same propaganda journal USSR in Construction as Lissitzky, and their activity has not raised such suspicion against them. 16 Reproductions of both designs in Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, ed., El Lissitzky, Maler Architekt Typograf Fotograf Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1967, figs. 64, 65. 17 Lissitzky’s notebook, Getty Research Institute, Special Collections. 18 El Lissitzky, Ilya Ehrenburg, “The Blockade of Russia Is Coming to an End,” Veshch, Gegenstand, Objet, No. 1–2, Berlin, 1922, translated by Stephen Bann, in Stephen Bann, ed., The Tradition of Constructivism, London: Thames and Hudson 1974, 53–7, this quote, 57. 19 Lodder 1983, op​.cit​., 227.

Notes 20 21 22 23 24

25

26

27

28 29 30 31

32

265

“The Blockade of Russia . . .,” Bann, op​.cit​., 56. Ibid. Ibid., 54–5. “The Statement by the Editors of Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet,” English translation Nichols Bullock, in Bann, op​.cit​., 63. Varvara Stepanova wrote in her diary on March 27, 1919: “Asiatic, spiritual painting has always been regarded religiously with no overtones of enjoyment. They considered the artist’s work to be something great and spiritual. The west relates superficially and materially to works of art: the east idolizes art and puts it above everything else and keeps it from becoming utilitarian.” Notably, this statement comes from a future constructivist advocating utilitarianism. In Noever, The Future Is Our Only Goal, Munich: Prestel, 1991, 137. Theo van Doesburg, Grundbegriffe der neuen gestaltenden Kunst, Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1925. English transl. Janet Seligman, London: Lund Humphries, 1969, 2. This curiosity-cum-impatience, the desire to have information and have it fast and transparent, was similar to the sudden interest in East European art after the collapse of communism in 1989–90, when curators of Western exhibition venues asked for “before and after” exhibitions that would demonstrate clear contrast between art in communism and after its collapse, following their own ideas rather than the more complicated reality and less sudden changes in those countries. El Lissitzky, letter to A. Rodchenko, March 3, 1922. A. M. Rodchenko, Aufsätze, autobiographische Notizen, Briefe, Erinnerungen, Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1993, 169. According to Lodder (Lodder 2003, 45, n. 16) this project was the IZO International Buro’s planned magazine International Iskusstv (The International of the Arts), announced in September 1919. Although the first number including contributions by Malevich, Tatlin, Lunacharsky, Khlebnikov, and others was put together, the journal was not published. Ulen (most likely Lisstzky’s pen name), “Die Ausstellungen in Russland”, Veshch, Objet, Gegenstand, No. 1–2, 18–19. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 18. “I am very glad that you suggested a meeting at your place with Moholy-Nagy and Lissitzky at the earliest possible occasion,” Gropius to Behne, dated Weimar, January 3, 1923, in Hubertus Gassner, ed., WechselWirkungen, op​.cit​., 269. Kállai wrote several reviews on Lissitzky’s work: “El Lissitzky,” Das Kunstblatt, 1922/1, 296–8; “El Lissitzky,” Der Cicerone 1924/1, 1058–63; “El Lissitzky,” in Georg Biermann, ed., Jahrbuch der jungen Kunst, Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1924, 374–86. He also published a review of various graphic portfolios published in the Kestner Mappe series: “Grafikus kiadványok. El Liszickij, Péri László, Moholy-Nagy munkái (Kestner mappák),” Ars Una [Budapest] 1923, 242.

266

Notes

33 Ma, Vol. VIII, No. 8, August 30, 1922. 34 Bann, op​.cit​., 55. 35 Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach’s idea of the priority of pure empirical experience was shared by Bogdanov and Lunacharsky, but strongly opposed by Lenin. 36 Tatyana Gorjacheva, “K ponjatiju ekonomii tvorchestva” Moskva: Nauka, 2000, 263–74, this quote 265. 37 Bann, op​.cit​., 55–6. 38 Ivan Puni, Sovremennaia Zhivopis, Berlin: Frenkel Verlag, 1923. 39 Ibid., 109. 40 The newspaper Nakanune, Berlin, 1922-1924, was edited by IU. V. Kliuchnikov and G. L. Kirdetsov. Referred to by Hubertus Gassner, “Der Text im Kontext,” in Iwan Puni. Synthetiker Musiker, Berlin: Berlinische Galerie 1999, 70. 41 Ilya Ehrenburg, Menschen, Jahre, Leben, Vol. II. Berlin (East): 1962, 19. Also in Hubertus Gassner, op​.cit​., 71. 42 Puni 107. 43 Ibid., 109. 44 Ibid., 1923, 109–10. 45 Ibid., 1923, 112. 46 Ibid., 1923, 112–13. 47 Ibid., 1923, 114. 48 Ibid., 1923, 116. 49 Ibid.,120. 50 The talk was originally planned to be given in Hanover, at Lissitzky’s exhibition with the Kestner Gesellschaft (Lissitzky-Küppers, op​.cit​., 24). 51 It is remarkable that Lissitzky uses “They” instead of “We” whereas he was a member of UNOVIS. 52 Lissitzky 1922, in Lissitzky-Küppers 1967, 340. 53 N. Punin, “Tatlinova bashnya”, Veshch, No. 1–2, 1922, 2. 54 El Lissitzky to K. Malevich, Vitebsk, December 21, 1920; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Khardzhiev papers, file 729, 2–4, translated by Kenneth MacInnes in Irina Karasik, ed., In Malevich’s Circle: Confederates, Students, Followers in Russia 1920s-1930s, St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2003, 53; quoted by Maria Gough, “Model Exhibition,” October, No. 150, Fall 2014, 16.

Chapter 7 1 Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung 1922, Nr. 32, August 1922, with reproduction of Puni’s Synthetic Musician, 1922, and Tatlin’s Tower, 1920. Reproduced in Iwan Puni,

Notes

2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17

18

267

Synthetiker Musiker, Essays by Eberhard Roters and Hubertus Gassner, Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1992, 13. Hamburger Illustrierte Zeitung 1922, Nr. 22, May 1922, reproduced in Roters, Gassner, ibid.,14. “Zeitschriften”, Das Kunstblatt 1922/7, 316. For the full text of the Appeal, see Fritz Mierau, ed., Russen in Berlin. Literatur Malerei Theater Film 1918-1933, Leipzig: Reclam, 1987, 186. Peter Nisbet, “Some Facts on the Organizational History of the Van Diemen Exhibition,” First Russian Show. A Commemoration of the Van Diemen Exhibition Berlin 1922, London: Annely Juda Fine Arts, 1983, 3, 67. Ibid., 68, and Horst Richter, “1.Russische Kunstausstellung Berlin,” 1922, brochure accompanying the reprint of the original catalog, Cologne: Walther König, 1988, np. The subsequent description of the preparations of the 1922 exhibition heavily relies on both Nisbet and Richter’s works. Winfried Nerdinger, Rudolf Belling und die Kunstströmungen in Berlin 1918-1923, Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft 1980, 142. Nisbet, 1983, op​.cit​., 69. Ibid., 69, quoting relevant Foreign Office file, Politisches Archiv, Auswärtiges Amt, Bonn, Abt. IV/ Russland Austellungswesen Russland, Bd. 1, and Bd. 2. April 1921– January 1923. Ibid. Ibid. Nerdinger, Rudolf Belling, op​.cit.​,1​48. Nisbet, 1983, op​.cit​., 69. Ibid. It is hardly possible to compare the values of 70 million rubles and 5 million Reichsmarks (particularly if we do not know if Lenin offered old or new rubles) as inflation was rampant in both countries, although in Germany not yet at its summer 1923 peak. According to historical exchange rate for ruble​.d​oc and www.történelmi márkaárfolyamok​.do​c, the numbers do not add up. In the first quarter of 1922 1₤ equaled circa 1, 450 RM, while in rubles its value was 1, 650, 000. According to this, Lenin offered c. ₤45 for the exhibition while Lunacharsky expected ₤3, 000 revenue. Nisbet, op​.cit​., 70. Nikolai Punin, “Brief Summary of Letter Sent to Lunacharsky by Shterenberg, Concerning the Proposed Art Exhibit in Berlin, 1922,” in Sidney Monas, Jennifer Green Krupala, eds., The Diaries of Nikolay Punin 1904-1953, translated by Jennifer Greene Krupala, Austin: University of Texas Press 1999, 77. For a detailed discussion, see Martin Hammer, Christina Lodder, Constructing Modernity: The Art & Career of Naum Gabo, New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2000, 107–9. Ibid.

268 19 20 21 22 23

Notes

Nisbet, op​.cit​., 71. Nerdinger, op​.cit​., 146. Erste Russische Kunstausstellung, Berlin 1922, Catalog, list of applied art works, 31. Nisbet, op​.cit​., 71. D. Shterenberg, “Vorwort” (Foreword), catalog Erste Russische Kunstausstellung Berlin 1922, Berlin: Verlag internationale Arbeiterhilfe, 1922, 3. 24 Ibid., 4. 25 Hammer and Lodder, op​.cit​., 480, n. 63. 26 “Introduction,” catalog Erste Russische Kunstausstellung Berlin 1922, Berlin: Verlag internationale Arbeiterhilfe, 1922, 12. 27 Ibid., 13. 28 Ibid. 29 Varvara Stepanova, “Thoughts of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s on Art,” Peter Noever, op​.cit​., 136–7. 30 Vasilii Rakitin, “The Optimism of a Nonobjectivist,” in Matt Drutt, ed: Kazimir Malevich. Suprematism New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2003, 71. 31 Paul Westheim, “Die Ausstellung der Russen”, Das Kunstblatt, 1922/11 (November 1922) English translation David Britt, in BW, 405. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 406. 34 Ibid., 406–7. 35 Ibid., 407. 36 Ibid., 408. 37 Adolf Behne, “Der Staatsanwalt stützt das Bild”, Die Weltbühne, No. 47, November 23, 1922, Translated by Don Reneau, “On the Russian Exhibition,” BW, 408. 38 Ibid. 39 Pseudonym of Branislav Micić, 1898–1947. 40 Branko Ve Poljanski, “Kroz rusku izložbu u berlinu”, Zenit, Vol. 3, No. 22, March 1923, translated by. Maja Stařevič, BW, 414. 41 This painting is reproduced under its correct title Pure Red Color in Magdalena Dabrowski, Leah Dickerman, Peter Galassi, eds., Aleksandr Rodchenko, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998, 174. 42 Ve Poljanski, op​.cit​., 414. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Alfréd Kemény, “Jegyzetek az orosz művészek berlini kiállításához”, Egység, February 4, 1923, English translation John Bátki, BW. 413. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid.

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48 Lajos Kassák, The Russian Exhibit in Berlin, (originally published as “A berlini orosz kiállításhoz,” Ma, No. 8, December 15, 1922), BW, 409. 49 Ibid., BW, 410. 50 Ernst Kállai, “A berlini orosz kiállítás”, Akasztott ember (Hanged Man), Vol. 1, No. 2, February 15, 1923, English translation John Bátki, BW. 410–11. 51 Ibid., 411. 52 Ibid. 53 Malevich’s article “Lenin,” translated and abridged by Lissitzky, was published in Das Kunstblatt, Vol. 8, No. 10, October 1924, 289–93; A compilation of his writings, probably translated by El Lissitzky, was published in Westheim and Einstein, eds., Europa Almanach, Potsdam: Gust Kiepenhauer Verlag, 1925, 142–4, and his Die gegenstandslose Welt translated by Alexander von Riesen was a Bauhaus Book in 1927. For the first volume of Malevich’s writings, T. Andersen, 1968. As Andersen acknowledges in the Preface, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism” was translated by David Miller. 54 David Shterenberg: “Die künstlerische Situation in Russland,” Das Kunstblatt, Vol. 6, No. 11, November 1922, 485–92. 55 Ibid., 485. 56 Ibid. 486–7. 57 Ibid. 487. 58 Ibid. 59 “Er is een bizondere tentoonstelling van de russen in Berlijn.16 Zaalen vol werk. Ook revolutionaair werk. Kun je niet eens overwippen?” Van Doesburg, Letter to Antony Kok, November 20, 1922, in De Stijl overal absolute leiding . . . , 147. 60 Van Doesburg, Letter to Antony Kok, November 20, 1922. English translation of this paragraph in Evert van Straaten, Theo van Doesburg: Constructor of the New Life, Otterlo: Kröller–Müller Museum, 1994, 15. 61 Ivan Puni, “Zur Kunst von heute”, Das Kunstblatt, Vol, VII, No 7, July 1923, 193–201. 62 Ibid., 194. 63 Ibid., 195.

Chapter 8 1 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 2 Ibid., 14.

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3 UNOVIS Flyer No. 1, November 20, 1920. Reproduced and published in English translation in Larissa A. Zhadowa, op​.cit​., 297–9. The text offers a more complicated color symbolism, projecting the transcendence of even color red: “we shall create the new world to succeed the red world which gutted the image of the old world. Red points the new way for man, while we point to the new creative work in art” (ibid., 298). These words, however, are followed by the appeal to go to “the red pole.” 4 “Economy” is explained in “On New Systems in Art” as “the fifth dimension which evaluates and defines the Modernity of the Arts and Creative Works.” T. Andersen 1968, 83, and Goriacheva, op​.ci​t. 265. 5 UNOVIS flier, No. 1, November 20, 1920. Zhadova, op​.cit​., 299. 6 Alexandra Shatskikh, “Unovis—Epicenter of a New World” in The Great Utopia, op​.cit​., 63. 7 On the implication of empiriocriticism, see Gorjacheva’s insight, op​.cit​., Chapter 6, N. 33. 8 Malevich, “On New Systems in Art,” in Andersen, 1968, 116. 9 Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism,” in Andersen 1968, 38. 10 Malevich, letter to Benois, quoted in Jane Sharp, “The Critical Reception of the 0.10 Exhibition: Malevich and Benua,” The Great Utopia, op​.cit​., 44. 11 See, for example, Steven Mansbach, Visions of Totality: László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, and Theo van Doesburg, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,1980; Patricia Railing, More about Two Squares, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991. 12 Patricia Railing gives a detailed description of the spatial dynamics of Two Squares in Railing, 1991, 31. 13 Ibid, 26. Railing suggests a parallel between Tale of Two Squares and Edwin A. Abbot’s 1884 book Flatland, too. 14 It has been referred to as Proun Room in the literature, but the correct title is Prouns Room, as the original German title was in plural, Prounen Raum. 15 Zhadova 1978, 317; Unidentified Unovis artists made designs for an abstract room, see Rowell, Rudenstine, op​.cit​., 170–3. 16 Malevich: “From Cubism to Suprematism,” 33. 17 Erich Buchholz, an meinem fall scheitert die offizielle kunstgeschichte [sic], Frankfurt: Edition Hoffmann, 1969; manuscript ed. of 150 copies np, nd. Subsequent quotes regarding this room design are from this same manuscript. 18 It is not clear whether this term, used by Buchholz in his memoirs, inspired Moholy-Nagy’s unrealized design project Raum der Gegenwart (1927), for the Provinzialmuseum in Hanover, or vice versa. 19 Erich Buchholz, “El Lissitzky in Berlin,” El Lissitzky, Eindhoven: Catalog, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum Kunsthalle Basel, and Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, 1966, 64. 20 These designs are in the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

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21 Vasily Kandinsky, “Reminiscences/Rückblicke,” in Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, eds.: Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, New York: DaCapo Press, 1994, 368–9. 22 Erich Buchholz, “El Lissitzky in Berlin,” in El Lissitzky, exh. cat. Eindhoven: op​.cit.​ ,19​65, 64. 23 Raoul Hausmann, Hans Arp, Ivan Puni, and László Moholy-Nagy: “Aufruf zur elementaren Kunst,” De Stijl, Vol. 4, No. 10, 1921, 156. 24 Malevich. “God Is Not Cast Down,” Andersen, 1968, 195. 25 Bloom, op​.cit​., 14. 26 Lissitzky-Küppers op​.cit​., 39: “Habe einen sehr lieben Brief von Gropius bekommen. Er dankt für die Mappe . . . ” 27 Bloom, op​.ci​t, 15. 28 Lissitzky-Küppers, op​.cit​., 352. 29 Shatskikh 1992, 57. 30 See, for example, Malevich’s letter to Lissitzky dated September 6, 1924, in which he thanks him for the intention to send him dollars, and for his interest in wanting “to know how much it costs to live here.” VM, Vol I., 170, 172. Letters to Sophie in GRI 950076, Box 1, Folders 1–3: a parcel sent to Malevich with clothes and other things is mentioned repeatedly as it was never received by Malevich, first because of the overly high duty he would have had to pay for it, and when Lissitzky settled this through friendly relations, the parcel disappeared. In a letter of 12.6.1924 (GRI 950016, Box 1, Folder 2) Lissitzky expresses hope that Malevich will receive the package by Christmas. 31 See his correspondence with Sophie in the archives of the Getty Research Institute, Cat. #950076, Box 1. F.1., and discussion of them in Chapter 9. 32 Malevich: “Lenin” (Iz knigi “O bespredmetnoshti,”) A. Shatskikh, ed., Kazimir Malevich. Sobranie sochinenii v piatykh tomakh. Tom 2. Moscow: Gilea, 1998, 25–9. English translation Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Edmond T. Little, “Appendix from the Book of Non-Objectivity,” in Andersen 1976, 358. 33 Kazimir Malevich, “Lenin,” Das Kunstblatt, Vol.8, No.10, 1924, 289–93. For detailed analysis and Lissitzky’s omissions, see Yve-Alain Bois, “Lissitzky: Censeur de Malévich?” Macula 3–4, 1976, 191–201. 34 This design was published under Ilya Chashnik’s name in the November 20, 1920, issue of the Unovis leaflet, np. 35 Zhadova 1978, plate 153. 36 Lissitzky, letter to Sophie, March 21, 1924, quoted in Lissitzky-Küppers 1968, 39. 37 Konstantin Akinsha, “Malevich and Lenin: Image, Ritual, and the Cube,” in Douglas, Lodder 2007, op​.cit.​,​139–60, this quote 140; Malevich 1924, 289. 38 Hans Arp and El Lissitzky, Die Kunstismen: Les isms de l‘art: The Isms of Art 19141924, Erlenbach, Switzerland, Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1925. 39 Zhadova op​.cit​., plate 154, with caption: “Unovis. El Lissitzky’s studio. Based on a design by I. Chashnik. Plan for Lenin Tribune 1920-1924.”

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40 On the similarities, see Christina Lodder: “Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? Suprematism and Constructivism,” in Christina Lodder, ed., Celebrating Suprematism. New Approaches to the Art of Kazimir Malevich, Leiden, Boston; Brill, 2019, 259–88. 41 For the Moscow efforts for and against the cult of Lenin, see Tumarkin 1980 op​.cit​, and Akinsha 2007, op​.cit​., and brief discussion of it in Chapter 9. 42 Andersen 1976, 315. 43 Ibid., 320, 328. 44 Ibid., 326. 45 Malevich: “On New Systems in Art,” Andersen 1968, 84. 46 See Introduction and Chapter 9. 47 Ilya Ehrenburg, “Shifs-Karta”, in Ehrenburg’s Shest povestei o legkikh konstakh, Moscow and Berlin: Helikon, 1922. 48 El Lissitzky, “A. and Pan-Geometry,” originally published in Carl Einstein, Paul Westheim, eds., Europa Almanach, Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1925, 103–13; English, translation by Eric Dluhosch, in El Lissitzky: Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1984, 142–8. 49 El Lissitzky, “The New Culture,” published and translated by Peter Nisbet in his dissertation, op​.cit​., 13, 49. 50 Lissitzky-Küppers, op​.cit​., 334–5. 51 John Milner, Kazimir Malevich and the Tradition of Geometry, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996, 192–9. 52 Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, Jen Lissitzky, eds., Proun und Wolkenbügel. Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente. Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977, 69. 53 On 7.22.1925 he wrote in a letter to Jan Tschichold accompanying a reproduction if his poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge: “‘Mit dem Keil mit dem Roten schlage die Weisse’—can you see how one cannot translate it at all? Instead of four words we get nine, and nothing remains from the ring to it: ‘Klinom krasnim bej bjelih,’” GRI, Tschichold papers, 930039, Box 3, Folder 1. 54 BW, 413. 55 Ibid., 409. 56 Ibid., 410.

Chapter 9 1 Letter to Sophie Küppers, March 23, 1924, VM, Vol. 2, 213. 2 Anna Muza, “Weaving Texts: A Note on Malevich’s Uses of Language,” in Oksana Bulgakowa, ed., Kazimir Malevich: The White Rectangle. Writings on Film, Berlin, San Francisco: Potemkin Press, 2002, 86.

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3 Some of the titles may have been given by Lissitzky, or some essays may have been parts of longer texts known by different titles. 4 Letter on March 21, 1924, Orselina (Sanatorium). GRI 950076, Box 1, Folder 2; VM, vol. 2, 213. 5 Ibid. 6 Malevich: “Lenin. Iz knigi ‘o bezprednosti’”, G. L. Demosfenova, A. Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich. Sobranie sochinenii v pjatii tomakh, Moscow: Hylea, 1998, 25–9; “Lenin”: published in Das Kunstblatt, Potsdam, 1924, 289–93, translated and edited by El Lissitzky “aus dem Lenin-Buch”; English translation by Troels Andersen in “Appendix. From the Book of Non-Objectivity,” in Andersen 1976, 354–5. See also “Commentaries and Remarks” in Demosfenova et al., 304–6. 7 K. Malewitsch: “Lenin. Aus dem Buch ‘Über das Ungegenständliche’,” Das Kunstblatt, Vol. 8, No. 10, October op​.ci​t. In a letter to Sophie, October 20, 1924, Lissitzky wrote: “Just received Das Kunstblatt with ‘Lenin ’ in it. ( . . . ) Poor Malevich. ( . . . ) The editing is not right.” GRI 950076, Box 1, Folder 2. 8 Yve-Alain Bois, “Lissitzky, Censeur de Malévich?” Macula 3–4, 1976, 201. 9 Nina Tumarkin, “Religion, Bolshevism . . . ,” op​.cit​., 38. 10 For a detailed discussion of this conflict, see Konstantin Akinsha, “Malevich and Lenin: Image, Ritual, and the Cube,” in Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder, eds. Rethinking Malevich, op​.cit​., 139–60, 139–58. 11 Malevich; “From the Book of Non-Objectivity,” in Anderson 1976, 354–5. 12 Lissitzky: Letter to Sophie Küppers, May 26, 1924; English translation by Antonina W. Bouis, in VM, Vol. 2, 214; and letters to her dated 3.21.24, GRI, 950076, Box 1, Folder 2; March 23, 1924, ibid., 213–14; April 2, 1924, May 26, 1924, ibid., 214. The Vensky Verlag was, at the time, directed by Dr. jur. Martin Vensky (1891 Berlin–1933 Oldenburg), son-in-law of the publishing house’s founder Heinrich Stallings. Vensky took it over from his father-in-law in 1919. http:​/​/www​​.alt-​​olden​​ burg.​​de​/ge​​werbe​​/stal​​ling-​​druck​​-und-​​verla​​g​/die​​-stal​​ling-​​bilde​​rbuec​​​her​/i​​ndex.​​html, last accessed November 16, 2018. 13 Lissitzky: Letter to Sophie Küppers, March 30, 1924. GRI 950076, Box 1, Folder 2. 14 Lissitzky: Letter to Sophie Küppers, May 13, 1924. GRI 950076, Box 1, Folder 2. 15 VM, 213. N. 6. 16 Ibid. 17 Lissitzky: Letter to Sophie Küppers, May 31, 1924. GRI, 950076, Box 1, Folder 2. 18 El Lissitzky, Letter to László Moholy-Nagy, Orselina, April 11, 1924, Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin. 19 El Lissitzky’s letter to Paul Westheim, dated July 5, 1924, Paul Westheim Archiv, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Paul Westheim Archiv, 160. 20 Shatskikh mentions an “unnamed drawing reproduced in the guise of Supremus No. 58, [with the subscription] ‘Color shield in motion based on the black axis

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contra color plane’.” Shatskikh, Black Square, op​.cit​., 145, see Note 21 in reference to it: “It was sent to Germany, along with others, in about 1924, for placement as an illustration of Malevich’s essays on which El Lissitzky was working; prizing Malevich’s originals, Lissitzky copied his teacher’s drawings to give them to the printer.” Ibid., 297. 21 Lissitzky, Letter to Westheim. The titles in German are the following: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Aus “Die neuen Systemen in der Kunst” Suprematismus Die Neuerer in der Kunst (Staat, Gesellschaft, Kritik) Über die Dichtung Aus “Gott ist nicht gestürzt” (Kunst, Kirche, Fabrik) Lenin (Aus “Über das Ungegenständliche”) Das reine Geschehen

22 The document is in the Theo van Doesburg Archives of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD), The Hague, in a folder labeled “Miscellania.” It is likely a draft or a copy of an original which was probably typed on De Stijl’s letterhead as van Doesburg usually did his correspondence on his official stationery. 23 Bergzord door Akied Ottevanger, ed., De Briefwisseling tussen Theo van Doesburg en Antony Kok, The Hague: RKD, 488. 24 El Lissitzky: Letter to Sophie Küppers, June 26, 1925, GRI 950076, Box 1, Folder 3. 25 The original version of “Lenin,” as published in T. Andersen 1976, happens to include numbered parts, but the German version does not. 26 Anatoly Lunacharsky: “Ob iskusstve”, Ogonek, No. 30, 1927. VM, Vol. 2, 538. 27 Theo van Doesburg: “Elemental Formation,” G, Zeitschrift für Elementare Gestaltung, July 1, 1923. Translated for Bann 1974, by Richard Taylor; Stephen Bann, op​.cit​., 91. 28 For details, see Kai-Uwe Hemken: El Lissitzky. Revolution und Avantgarde, Cologne: DuMont 1990, 39. Lissitzky, according to Hemken, exhibited certain parts of his room installation as objects for sale. Proof of this, he argues, is the inclusion of three items in Lissitzky’s “Annotated Transcript of El Lissitzky’s Proun Inventory” that, as in Peter Nisbet: El Lissitzky 1890–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums, Busch-Reisinger Museum, 1987, 155), dates from February 1924 and was compiled “to list the artist’s ‘assets’ when he was preparing for an extended stay in a Swiss sanatorium.” That is, it was made later than the Proun Room’s exhibition, but it does not exclude there being price tags in the exhibition room. 29 Hemken, ibid., 39.

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30 For detailed discussion, see Éva Forgács, The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics, Budapest, London: Central European University Press 1995, 65–70. 31 Signed by Vilmos Huszar (but almost certainly penned by van Doesburg): “Dasstaatliche Bauhaus in Weimar”, De Stijl, Vol. 5, No. 9, September 1922, 135–7. 32 Johannes Jacobus Pieter Oud, Dutch architect, 1890–1963. 33 Lissitzky: Letter to J. J. P. Oud, Orselina near Locarno, Pension Plante, March 26, 1924. GRI 90076, Box.1. F.3. 34 Lissitzky: Letter to Johannes Jacobus Pieter Oud, Ambri/Sotto, June 30, 1924, GRI, 90076, Box.1. F.3. 35 Van Doesburg, “Van ‘natuur’ tot ‘kompositie’,” De Hollandsche Revue, No. 24, 1919, 470–6. Referred to by Evert van Straaten, Theo van Doesburg: Constructor of the New Life, Otterlo: Kröller-Müller Museum, 1994, 17. 36 Van Doesburg: Principles of Neoplastic Art, 1925, translated by Janet Seligman, as reprint of Volume 6 of the Bauhaus Bücher series, London: Lund Humphries, 1969, 10. Subsequent quotes are from the same edition. 37 Ibid. 38 Oskar Schlemmer: Letter to Otto Meyer-Amden, January 3, 1926, Oskar Schlemmer: Briefe und Tagebücher, Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1977, 86; VM, Vol. 2, 360. 39 Malevich: “From the Book of Non-Objectivity” (Lenin), op​.ci​t, 355. 40 The Europa Almanach’s Malevich article is published in Russian in Demosfenova, et al., op​.cit​., Vol. 2, 25–9, with comments on the original works, 308; and the note that a copy of Europa Almanach was preserved in GINKhUK with Malevich’s own remarks (also concerning his publication in Das Kunstblatt) saying that these were fragments of rather old writings, whereas he would have preferred “to publish newer works, from his books, including a work in progress, The Ideology of Art, (Analysis of Cubism, Cézannism, Futurism, Suprematism, etc.)” 41 http:​/​/www​​.moma​​.org/​​colle​​ction​​_ge​/b​​rowse​​_resu​​lts​.p​​hp​?cr​​iteri​​​a​=O​:AD​:E​ :32854|A:AR:E:3&role=3 accessed August 27, 2012. See also Tripmacker, Wolfgang, “Irmgard Kiepenheuer als Verlegerin.” Marginalien 143, No. 3 1996: 37–47; Weber, Klaus, ed. Punkt, Linie, Fläche: Druckgraphik am Bauhaus. Berlin: G+H, 1999. As the Staatsarchiv Leipzig, where the Kiepenheuer Verlag’s documents are deposited, informed me, papers from the years 1924–5 are missing, allegedly due to war damages. 42 Demosfenova, et al., op​.cit​., Vol. 1, letter No. 139, 180, Malevich to El Lissitzky, February 4, 1925, Leningrad. VM, Vol. 1, 180. 43 K. Malewitsch/Suprematismus (Aus den Schriften 1915–20), Paul Westheim, Karl Einstein, eds., Europa Almanach, Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1925, 142–4. Demosfenova, et al., op​.cit​., includes the Malevich illustration only.

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44 Rather strangely, the editors indicate only that “translations from the contributions written in the French language are by Roland Erb”; they give the translator’s name at the end of many poems and articles but there is no word about who translated and edited the Malevich article. 45 Malevich: Letter to El Lissitzky, February 11, 1925, in VM, Vol. 1, 181–2. 46 Ibid., 181. 47 Ibid., 182. 48 Email of Dr. Thekla Kluttig Referatsleiterin to the author, March 12, 2013. She confirmed that the names Malevich, Lissitzky, and van Doesburg do not occur in the index of the Kiepenheuer papers. Nor is any mention of them or the Malevich book project in Siegfried Lokatis, Ingrid Sonntag, eds., 100 Jahre KiepenheuerVerlage, Berlin: Ch.Links, 2011. 49 El Lissitzky, “Nasci,” Merz, Vol. 2, No. 8/9, April–July 1924. Lissitzky was also coeditor of the double issue with Kurt Schwitters. 50 El Lissitzky’s letter to van Doesburg, sent from Villa Croce, Ambri-Sotto, Tessin, July 7, 1924. RKD. 51 El Lissitzky, Letter to van Doesburg, Locarno, August 22, 1924, RKD. 52 El Lissitzky, Letter to Sophie Küppers, December 12, 1924, GRI, Lissitzky papers, 950076, box 1. 53 Europa Almanach, 106, Note 1. 54 Stephen Bann, ed., The Tradition of Constructivism, op​.cit​., 92. 55 The allusion seems to be direct, but it is also true that such repetitive upper-caseletter ads were frequent in the German print media at the time. 56 Van Doesburg, “Bazar, bazar, bazar, bazar,” De Stijl, Vol. 7, No. 75/76, 1926–27, 57–8. Translated and quoted by Linda S. Boersma: “Malevich, Lissitzky, Van Doesburg: Suprematism and De Stijl,” in Douglas and Lodder, Rethinking Malevich, op​.cit​., 232. 57 See Erste Russische Ausstellung catalog, items No 583–90, 31, with reproductions, n.p. 58 See Chapter 10, N. 25. 59 Two paintings by this title are dated 1928–32 by the State Russian Museum, see Yevgenia Petrova, ed., Kazimir Malevich in State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000, illustrations 46, 47; cat. Numbers 29 and 30, 331. Commentary to Cat. No. 29 says: “Reproduced in S. Yefimovich ‘Vistavka tvoriv K. S. Malevicha v Kiivskii Kartiniii Galerei’, 1930. no. 14 (44) (dated 1910).” See also Elena Basner’s “Chronological Order of Malevich’s Works of Painting in Accordance with the Artist’s Own Datings,” ibid., 388, where Head of a Peasant, Cat. No. 29, is dated to 1910. 60 Vasily Rakitin’s commentary: “here we encounter another example of the chronological mystification practiced by Malevich. The work entitled Head of a Peasant was first shown at the Donkey’s Tail exhibition [in 1912].” VM, vol. 1, 182.

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61 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, Paris, Grand Palais, April–October 1925. 62 VM, Vol. 1., 182. An interesting counterpart of this view is what architect Hugo Häring’s secretary Margaret Aschenbrenner wrote to the Stedelijk Museum’s director Willem Sandberg on June 28, 1957, responding to his queries regarding Malevich’s 1912 paintings The Woodcutter and Harvest (catalogued by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, under the title Taking the Rye): “It is the suprematist paintings that western experts were, and are most interested in and that they collect The Woodcutter and Harvest as ‘Russian’ in a particular sense. Beneath their colors lurks something like a resurrection theme, working through the elements of ‘nature’ that is born again; in this way comes the ‘picture’ to life, too: the new nature, dematerialized and purified, turned into pure color constellation.” Berlin: Archives of Akademie der Künste, Häring papers, No. 600/6.

Chapter 10 1 . See Troels Andersen, Malevich. Catalogue raisonné of the Berlin exhibition 1927, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1970. 2 I. K. Bonset, “Toward a Constructive Poetry,” Mécano, Vol. 1, No. 4–5, text dated Vienna, 1923. 3 Ibid., as in Stephen Bann, ed., The Tradition of Constructivism, op​.cit​., 112. 4 Chlenova, “Abstraction,” October 143, op​.cit​., 21. 5 Malevich, “The Suprematist Mirror,” Andersen 1968, 224–5. Originally in Zhizn’ Iskusstva, No. 20, May 22, 1923, 15–16. 6 Ernő Kállai, “Konstruktivizmus”, Ma, Vol. VIII, No. 7–8, May 1, 1923, n.p.; English translation John Bátki, in BW 435–6. 7 Ibid., 435. 8 Kassák, “Egy generáció tragédiája”, Ma, Vol. VIII, No. 7–9, May 1, 1923, np. 9 Ernő Kállai: “Korrektúrát! A De Stijl figyelmébe” in: Ma, Vol. 8, No. 9–10, July 1, 1923, English translation John Bátki, in BW, 436–43. 10 Ibid., 440. 11 Ibid., 439. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 437. 14 S. Senkin: “VKhUTEMAS 1923,” in Hubertus Gassner, Eckart Gillen, Zwischen Revolutionszeit und Sozialistischen Realismus, Cologne: DuMont, 1979, 134.

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15 Mikhail Leonidovich Slonimsky (1897–1972): The Emery Machine, 1923; translated by John Bátki from the Hungarian translation by Klára Szőllőssy, in János Elbert, ed., Kegyetlen szerelem, Budapest: Európa, 1969, Vol. 2, 209–42. 16 French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau urged his contemporaries to open a new page in history after the tragedy of the First World War. 17 The AKhRR (Assotsiatsia Khudozhnikov Revolutsionnoi Rossii, Association of Revolutionary Artists of Russia); see Chapter 5. 18 G. F. Hartlaub: “Rückblick auf den Konstruktivismus,” Das Kunstblatt, Vol. XI, No. 6, June 1927, 256–63. 19 Ibid., 255. 20 Alfréd Kemény and László Moholy-Nagy, “Dynamisch-konstruktives Kraftsystem,” Der Sturm, 13, No.12 (1922), 186; English translation Nicholas Bullock, in BW, 470. 21 Ibid. 22 Alfréd Kemény: “Das dynamische Prinzip in der Welt Konstruktion im Zusammenhang mit der funktionellen Bedeutung der konstruktiven Gestaltung”, Der Sturm, Vol. 14, No. 4 (1923), 63–4. English translation David Britt, in BW 477–9. 23 Ernő Kállai, Alfréd Kemény, László Moholy-Nagy, and László Péri: Nyilatkozat, Egység, 1923, No. 4, 51. Although this text was published in Hungarian in Austria, all of its authors lived in Berlin and disseminated these ideas among their friends and colleagues making their arguments generally known. 24 Ibid. 25 Lissitzky, Letter to Sophie Küppers, December 12, 1924. GRI, 950076, Box I, folder 2. 26 Ernő Kállai, “ Ideológiák alkonya,” orig. 365, April 19–20, 1925; translated by John Bátki, BW 615–16. 27 Ibid., 615. 28 Malevich had brothers Antoni, Bolesław, and Stanisław Malewicz in Warsaw, but, according to Andrzej Turowski, he was not close to them. For more details, see Andrzej Turowski: Malewicz v Warszawe, (Cracow, 2002), Chapter 4, 190–2. 29 Kobro, born in Moscow, was of Russian, Latvian, and German extraction. 30 Władisław Strzemiński, “O sztuce rosyskiej—novatki”, Zwrotnica, No. 3, (1922); translation adapted from Wanda Kemp-Welch in BW, 272–80; this quote 272. 31 Ibid., 279. 32 The Second Polish Republic was also referred to as Rzeczpospolita Polska, or Commonwealth of Poland. 33 Irena Kossowska: “Introduction: Reframing Tradition—Art in Central and Eastern Europe between the two World Wars,” in Kossowska, ed.: Reinterpreting the Past: Traditionalist Artistic Trends in Central and Eastern Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2010, 10.

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34 Strzemiński, “O sztuce rosyskiej—novatki,” 275. As further Polish artists living in Russia, he cited Vladimir Orlovsky and Mikhail Vrubel. 35 Ibid. 36 Stażewski, “O suprematisme w malarstwie”, Blok, No. 1 (March 8, 1924); translated by Wanda Kemp-Welch, BW, 492–3, these quotes 492. 37 Władisław Strzemiński, ‘B=2’, Blok, No. 8/9 (1924); translated by Wanda KempWelch, BW, 497–503; this quote 501. 38 Ibid. 39 Władisław Strzemiński: Unizm w malarstwie, Warsaw: Praesens, 1928. 40 Helena Syrkus: “Kazimir Malevich,” VM, Vol. 2, 355. 41 Ibid., 356. 42 Tadeusz Peiper, “Malewicz w Polsce”, Zwrotnica, No. 11 (1927); translated by Wanda Kemp-Welch, BW, 664. 43 Andrzej Turowski, Malewicz w Warszawie, op​.cit​., 199, 202. 44 See a list of the publications in Turowski, op​.cit​., 206. 45 Mieczysław Szczuka, “Pozgonne suprematyzmu”, Dzwignia, No. 2–3, 1927; translated by Wanda Kemp-Welch, BW, 664–6. 46 Ibid., 665. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 666. 50 Ibid. 51 Troels Andersen, Malevich. Catalog Raisonné of the 1927 Berlin Exhibition Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1970, 57. 52 ibid. 53 Siegfried Giedion, “Zum neuen Bauen,” Der Cicerone, 1928, Vol. XX., No. 6, 210–12. 54 This was his concept as of 1927; his 1929 exhibition in the Tretiakov Gallery opened a new chapter of painting for him. 55 A. Kemény, “Die Abstrakte Gestaltung vom Suprematismus bis heute,” Das Kunstblatt, Vol. 8, No. 8, August 1924, 245–9. English translation David Britt, BW 479–82. 56 Ibid., BW 480. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ernst Kállai, “ Konstruktivismus,” Jahrbuch der jungen Kunst, 1924, 374–86. 60 The review of the 1924 Jahrbuch der jungen Kunst in Der Cicerone gives special mention to Kállai’s articles in the volume, especially “Constructivism” as a very clear and unprejudiced account. Der Cicerone, Vol. XX, No. 12, 1924, 1014.

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61 Annemarie Jaeggi, www​.international​.icomos​.org/.../ Soviet_Heritage_34_V–4_ Jaeggi, last accessed October 17, 2017. 62 A group of Russian students arrived in Germany to study construction technologies, and the following year a delegation of Bauhaus students headed by the textile department’s leader Gunta Stölzl (1897–1983) visited the Russian students in Moscow. Former Bauhaus student Hinnerk Scheper (1897–1957) was working in Moscow for a two-year period in 1929–31; and letters in the collection of the Bauhaus-Archiv document state that “in 1931 a Soviet government delegation visited Gropius in Berlin and nourished expectations that he be called to Moscow, presumably as the head of the town planning department of GIPROGOR, the State Institute for City Planning. But at the end, no more than a three-day lecture trip to Leningrad in 1933 resulted from Gropius’s Russian plans.” A. Jaeggi, ibid. 63 Katalog Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung 1927, Veröffentlichungen des Kunstarchivs Nr. 41/42, ed. Gustav Eugen Diehl, 107. 64 Peiper 1927, BW, 628. VM, vol. 2, 365. Subsequent quotes about the Bauhaus visit are from this same article. 65 Ise Gropius wrote in a letter about Malevich’s visit: “Malevich came to lunch and wondered if he could possibly work at the Bauhaus. That is, unfortunately, not possible as the budget here has its limits, even if people at the Bauhaus are very interested in his works. ( . . . ) We were impressed by Malevich as extraordinarily strong and energetic. He blames the state of affairs in Russia for the impossibility of actual work. Everything that is not directly political has no value there. He was especially interested in the political attacks against the Bauhaus and the inflammatory article in the ‘Deutsche Zeitung’ that accuses the Bauhaus with Soviet propaganda. According to him the same things that here count for Bolshevik, are rejected there as ‘western bourgeois’ views. Malevich would like to stay in Germany and will try to establish a livelihood in Berlin” (Ise Gropius’s letter in Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin; quoted in Heiner Stachelhaus, Kasimir Malewitsch. Ein tragischer Konflikt, Düsseldorf: Claassen, 1989, 256–7). 66 Malevich, Letter to L. Yudin, Berlin, May 7, 1927, in Yevgenia Petrova, ed., Kazimir Malevich in State Russian Museum, op​.cit​., 395. 67 Ernst Kállai, “Kasimir Malewitsch,” Das Kunstblatt, vol. 11, no. 7, July 1927, 264–6, English translation in VM, vol. 2, 536–8. 68 Ibid. VM, vol. 2, 537. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., Westheim, “Die Ausstellung der Russen,” op​.cit​., 408. 71 Kállai, op​.cit​., 537. 72 Ever skeptical, Paul Westheim had already written satirically about the square already in 1923, after his visit to the Bauhaus exhibition: “Three days in Weimar, and one doesn’t want to see a square again for the rest of one’s life. ( . . . ) Talent is a square, genius is an absolute square. The De Stijl people ( . . . ) claim that they

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73 74 75

76 77

78 79

80 81 82

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possess the only true squares” (Paul Westheim, Comments on the “Squaring” of the Bauhaus, Das Kunstblatt, 1923, VM, vol. 2, 360). A. Lunacharsky, “Ob iskusstve”, Ogonek (The Spark), 30, 1927. VM, Vol. 2, 538. For a new full translation of Antonia W. Bouis, see Kazimir Malevich: The World as Objectlessness, op​.cit​., 147–200. Letter of Hans von Riesen to Moholy-Nagy, June 7, 1927, quoted by Stephan von Riesen, “Introduction,” Malewitsch: Die gegenstandslose Welt, Mainz: Florian Kupferberg Verlag, 1980. Reprint, XIII. The Hungarian edition of the book, Budapest: Corvina Kiadó, 1986, translated from German into Hungarian by Éva Forgács, includes a photocopy of the Russian original in the back matter. Lost letter dated June 2, 1927, quoted by Stephan von Wiese, ibid. Malewitsch: Die gegenstandslose Welt, 7. For a more recent translation, see Kazimir Malevich: The World of Objectlessness. With essays and new translation of the Bauhaus Book 1927. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis, Anna Brailkovsky, Meredith Dale, Bronwen Saunders. Basel: Kunstmuseum and Ostfildern: Hetje Cantz Verlag, 2014. Ibid., 148. See Malevich’s contribution to the debate in BW 698–9; for details of the debate, see Forgács, “‘This Is the Century of Light’ László Moholy-Nagy’s Painting and Photography Debate in i 10, 1927,” Leonardo, Vol. 50, No. 3, 2017, 274–8. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

Chapter 11 1 Peter Weibel in Booklet to the Exhibition Art in Europe 1945–1968. The Continent that the EU Does Not Know, Peter Weibel, ed., Art in Europe 1945–1968, Karlsruhe: ZKM 2017, 7. 2 I follow the description of the trajectory of Malevich’s works given by Joop M. Joosten, “Malevich in the Stedelijk,” in Malevich 1878–1935, Exh. Cat., Leningrad, Moscow, Amsterdam: 1988–9, and Hans von Riesen: “Vorwort”, in Kasimir Malewitsch, Suprematismus—Die gegenstandslose Welt, Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1962, 31–5. 3 For his views on film, see Hugo Häring, “Was wirkt im Lichtbild? Was wirkt im Lichtbild?,” G, Material zur elementaren Gestaltung, 1926/1–2, Film issue, 128–9. 4 “On June 1 the ‘Society of the Friends of the New Russia’ was founded in Berlin. All unprejudiced men and women who anticipate the making of a new world should

282

5 6

7 8 9

Notes find here opportunities to have access to impartial information about the economic and cultural directions in Russia from lectures and objective accounts.” G, vol. I. no. 2, September 1923, np. Joosten, “Malevich in the Stedelijk,” op​.cit​., 8. In 1934 Häring took over Albert Reimann’s private school of art and design because Reimann, as a Jew, was forced out of it. He started to work with Secretary Margot Aschenbrenner there. Joosten, op​.cit​., 9. Joosten, ibid., 10. Yve-Alain Bois, “The Availability of Malevich,” Allison McDonald, Ealan Wingate, eds., Malevich and the American Legacy, New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2011, 31. Alfred J. Barr, Jr., Letter to Naum Gabo, New York, October 7, 1957 (Stedelijk Museum, folder 5828). It has to be mentioned that Barr had already disclosed the history of his accessioning the Malevich works in a letter responding to Max Bill’s inquiry, dated New York, December 19, 1952. It is remarkable that he always gives an approximate amount as the “purchase price,” not naming the exact amount either in US dollars or Reichsmarks. Having listed the purchased Malevich works and those he considered on extended loan, he gave a detailed account to Max Bill (orthography unchanged): all the above works by malevich were shown to me and my wife in the cellar of the provincial museum in hannover in the summer of 1935 by dr. alexander dorner, at that time director of this museum. I was collecting material for the exhibition cubism and abstract art. in addition to the works listed we saw there many other canvases, a number of drawings and several more of the placard charts. I was of course overjoyed to find this malevich material since we had had great difficulty in borrowing anything from the u.s.s.r. at the time we were faced with an uncertain question as to whether the nazi government would permit the export of the malevich material which in some cases bore russian writing and might also have been suspect because of the character of the designs which bore resemblances to airplanes or other mechanical or architectural motives. because I wanted to insure the inclusion of some of the material in our exhibition and since I was also eager to acquire a few for our collection I offered to buy two canvases, nos. 248.35 and 249.35, and two drawings, 251.35 and 250.35. dr. dorner agreed to a price of about $200 for the four items. these four items I took with me across the german-dutch border, the drawings in my suitcase, the two paintings wrapped around my umbrella. (...) to answer your question # 3: I do not know of any earlier owners of any of the works by malevich in question, but my recollection is that when I discussed

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the question with dr. dorner in hannover I had the impression that the material had been left by malevich in dr. dorner’s care when malevich returned to the u.s.s.r. about 1927 (?) and that malevich had not wanted the material returned to him because of the increasing antipathy toward abstract art in the u.s.s.r. I understood that dr. dorner was not the owner of the works by malevich but felt entitled to act as agent. while I deeply regret the loss of the drawings I believe that our museum has done more than any individual or institution during the past 25 years to increase the knowledge and fame of this great pioneer of abstract art. (copy, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5828) 10 Gabo to Sandberg, Middlebury, Conn., October 24, 1957, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5828. 11 Alfred J. Barr, Jr. to Gabo, New York, October 7, 1957, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5828. 12 See Ad Petersen, Sandberg: Graphiste et Directeur de Stedelijk Museum, translated by Daniel Cunin, Paris: 2007, 87. 13 Ibid. 14 Hans L. C. Jaffe, letter to H. Häring. Amsterdam, September 1, 1952, carbon copy, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5829. 15 De Stijl MoMA Exh. #527, December 16, 1952–February 15, 1953. 16 Hans L. C. Jaffe, De Stijl. The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art, 1956. 17 Hans L. C. Jaffe, letter to Häring, September 1, 1954, Berlin, Akademie der Künste Archiv, Häring 454. 18 Jaffe, Letter to Häring, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5830. 19 John Anthony Thwaites, Letter to W. Sandberg, March 17, 1954, carbon copy, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, folder 5830. 20 Hans L. C. Jaffe, Letter to J. A. Thwaites, March 23, 1954, carbon copy, Archives of the Stedelijk Musuem, Amsterdam, folder 5830. 21 Martin Hammer, Christina Lodder, Constructing Modernity. The Art & Career of Naum Gabo, New Haven: London, Yale University Press, 2000, 355. 22 Naum Gabo, Letter to W. Sandberg, Middlebury, Conn., April 3, 1955. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, folder 5828. 23 Carbon copy, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5829. 24 Ibid. 25 He uses plural “we” (“nous”) but does not name who else was included. 26 Sandberg, Letter to Gabo, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, November 7, 1955. In French. folder 5828. 27 Ibid. 28 Many of these letters are in the Archives of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, among the Häring papers. They include Correspondence with Max Bill, No. 147; Julius Bissier,

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29 30 31 32 33

Notes No. 151; Hans Curjel, No. 172; Hilberseimer, No. 249; Dr. Udo Rukser, No. 356; Rudolf Springer, on behalf of Galerie Springer, No. 452; Jean-Pierre Wilhelm, No. 473; Charlotte Weidler on behalf of the Carnegie Institute, No. 485; correspondence with Sandberg, No. 600., Rose Fried on behalf of Rose Fried Gallery New York, No. 602. Jean-Pierre Wilhelm to Häring, September 19, 1954. Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Häring, 473. Rose Fried to Häring, January 30, 1954, Berlin, Archives of Die Akademie der Künste, Häring 602. Sandberg to Gabo, as in Note 22. Ibid. W. Sandberg, letter to N. Gabo, March 7, 1956, in French. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5828. He relates that M. Achenbrenner recalled he was extremely vivacious and remembered a lot of the details of the Malevich pictures’ Odyssey: [after the closing of the exhibition] Malevich had a big crate sent to Häring that included the paintings, gouaches, drawings, theoretical charts in color etc. Häring did not open the crate but deposited it with the transporter Knaur. After a few years when the storage fees became too heavy, he had the crate transferred to Dorner (Kestner Gesellschaft) in Hanover. Dorner had kept them for several years then he thought it was dangerous (entartete Kunst); he sent the crate back to Häring who kept it in his home in Berlin. When the Reimann school was bombed in 1943 he moved back to Biberach and took the crate there. After the war Häring opened the crate and compared the contents with the catalog of the 1927 Malevich exhibition finding that 12 pieces were missing ( . . . ). Häring explained to me that as he had not been the owner of the works he was not able to sell anything. ( . . . ) He also mentioned Max Bill who had made propositions to him but with whom he has had a conflict since then. An art dealer offered 120,000 DM for the whole material but he did not want to sell, particularly not to an American ( . . . ) he wanted to keep the works together and have them stay in Europe, preferably Amsterdam.

34 Gabo, Letter to Sandberg, Middlebury Conn., March 24, 1956. In English, I corrected some of the names’ spelling. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5828. About some of those showing interest in buying Malevich works, see the folder Häring 172, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. 35 Häring, Letter to Hans Curjel, July 10, 1954, Doc. Häring 172, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. 36 Häring to Herrn. Professor. l. hilberseimer (sic!), 29.3.56, carbon copy, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5829. 37 Häring to Sandberg, 29.3,1956, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5829. 38 Carbon copy, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5829.

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39 Sandberg to Gabo, in French, thanking for Gabo’s letter of 24.X.57, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5828. 40 Ibid. 41 Carbon copy, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5829. 42 He mentioned Michel Seuphor, L’Art Abstrait, Paris: Maeght, 1949, 303, illustrations on 220–5, a short text by Malevich on 179. 43 Jaffe to Alfred Barr, Amsterdam, July 15, 1957, carbon copy, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5829. 44 Lebedev, Letter to the director of the Stedelijk, carbon copy, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5829. 45 “Casimir Malevitch,” document, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 3738. 46 Letter to Sandberg in the name of W. Schmalenbach, written, because of his illness, by his secretary, Hanover, December 28, 1957, carbon copy, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 3824. The Kestner Gesellschaft had merits in showing and purchasing works by El Lissitzky, among other modernists; its first director having been Paul Küppers, whose widow Sophie married El Lisstizky and eventually moved to Moscow with him. 47 Pontus Hulten to Sandberg, Stockholm, January 14, 1958, carbon copy, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 3824. 48 Ibid. 49 Sandberg, Letter to Barr, Amsterdam, December 10, 1957, carbon copy, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5829. 50 Ibid. 51 Letter and list in Russian, dated January 30, 1958, carbon copy, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5829. 52 This list of projects indicates how the Stedelijk’s exhibition influenced the rediscovery of the interwar avant-gardes. 53 Sandberg to Schmalenbach, January 31, 1958, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 3824. 54 Peter lufft, kasimir malewitsch (sic!), kunstverein braunschweig, haus salve hospes, February 16–March 16, 58. 55 Alex Vömel to Sandberg, January 27, 1958, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 3738. 56 Franz Meyer, Basel, Letter to Sandberg, carbon copy, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 3824. 57 Givonani Carandente, ed., Casimir Malevic, Catalogo, Intr. di Palma Bucarelli, Roma: Editalia, 1958. 58 Sandberg to Dott. Del Aqua, November 22, 1957, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 3823. 59 Malevich’s rediscovery marked the beginning of reacquainting the West with the Russian and East European avant-gardes as integral parts of the interwar period’s

286

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61 62

63 64 65

66

Notes artistic progression. Since the 1922 First Russian Exhibition in Berlin until the Stedelijk’s 1957 Malevich show this art had little visibility in the West. There were a few occasions though: In 1923 three Russian constructivists had a small one-day show in the Paul Guillaume Gallery in Paris while they were staying there with Tairoff ’s theater. Picasso visited it the day before it opened and spread word of it, so it attracted considerable interest from Parisian artists. (See Christina Lodder: “Exhibitions of Russian Art after 1922,” The First Russian Show, a Commemoration, London: Annely Juda Fine Arts, 1983, 80.) The three artists were K. Medunetsky, Georgy, and Vladimir Stenberg; see also Andrei Nakov, 2 Stenberg, Paris, Galérie Jean Chauvelin, April–May 1975, 50. There was Soviet participation at the International Art Deco exhibition in Paris, 1925, where a model of Tatlin’s tower, the Monument to the 3rd International and Rodchenko’s Workers’ Club interior design attracted interest, Malevich had his solo show in Berlin in 1927 (see Chapter 10), and there were sporadic shows in the United States, too. A few gallery shows were organized in London in the late 1950s, and the Galérie Denise René in Paris organized survey shows for international “constructive” art in 1957, 1959, and 1961. Hans von Riesen, “Vorwort,” in Werner Haftmann, ed., Suprematismus—Die gegenstandslose Welt, translated by Hans von Riesen, Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1962. Ibid. Wilder Green, Coordinator of the Museum program, MoMA, to Edy de Wilde, director of the Stedelijk 1963–85, New York, March 31, 1967. Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5834. De Wilde to W. Green, Amsterdam, May 27, 1968. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5834. Ibid. See correspondence between de Wilde and the Rewolle Gallery, Bremen, commissioned by the widow of Hans von Riesen to sell the manuscripts. Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5833. About the fact of the purchase, letter of de Wilde to Dr. Franz Mayer, director of the Kunstmuseum, Basel, Amsterdam, November 29, 1974, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, folder 5834. Malevich, Essays on art 1915–1928, edited by Troels Andersen. Vol. I., Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968; Malevich, Essays on art 1928–1933, edited by Troels Andersen. Vol. II., Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968. Malevich, The World as Non-Objectivity. Unpublished Writings 1922–1933, edited by Troels Andersen. Vol. d III., Copenhagen: Borgen,1976; Malevich, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism. Unpublished Writings 1913–1928, edited by Troels Andersen. Vol. IV., Copenhagen: Borgen, 1978.

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Chapter 12 1 In the magazine Reflex, forum of CoBrA’s predecessor, the Reflex group, Constant wrote: “A painting is not a structure of colours and lines, but an animal, a night, a cry, a man, or all of these together” (Fanny Kelk, Constant, Amsterdam: G.I.N. Gallery, 1977, 1). 2 Constant, “Declaration of Freedom,” Reflex, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1948, quoted by Stewart Home, The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War, Sterling: A.K Press, 1991, 9. 3 The HfG was one of the most outspokenly antifascist institutions, founded and initially financed by the brother-and-sister Scholl Foundation, in memory of Hans and Sophie Scholl, killed by the Nazis for plotting against them. The HfG’s building was designed by Max Bill, first rector of the school, 1955–6, followed by Tomás Maldonado, 1956–68. 4 https​:/​/te​​l​.arc​​hives​​-ouve​​rtes.​​fr​/te​​l​-031​​67918​​​/docu​​ment,​ last accessed January 2, 2021. 5 For more detailed discussion, see Simon Ford, A User’s Guide to the Situationist International, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005, especially 15–23. 6 Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 1935, in Benjamin, Reflections, translated by Edmund Jephcott, New York: Shocken Books, 1986, 146–62; on Baudelaire and the flâneur: 156–58. 7 Ibid., 156. 8 Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne, Paris: L’Arche, 1947. 9 Guy Debord: “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency,” in Tom McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Texts and Documents, Cambridge, Mass., London: The MIT Press, 2002, 31. 10 Ibid., 32. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 36–8. 14 Ibid., 39. 15 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: Zone Books, 1995, 11. 16 Ibid., 21. 17 Guy-Ernest Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” Les Lèvres Nues, No. 6, 1955. http:​/​/lib​​rary.​​nothi​​ngnes​​s​.org​​/arti​​cles/​​SI​/en​​/d​isp​​lay​/2​, last accessed September 3, 2019. 18 Lodder: Russian Constructivism, op. cit., 59, quotes Ehrenburg, Vse-taki ona vetrtyitsa (“Eppur si muove,” Still [the earth] rotates) Berlin: 1922, 26.

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19 Quoted by Lodder, Russian Constructivism, op. cit., 59, form Severnaya kommuna, October 17, 1918. 20 “The Alba Platform,” in: Potlatch: Information Bulletin of the Letterist International #27, November 2, 1956. Reprinted in Ken Knabb, ed.: Situationist International, Anthology, Berkeley: Bureau of Public Services, 1981, 14–15. 21 Peter Wollen, “Bitter Victory: The Art and Politics of the Situationist International,” in Elisabeth Susmann, ed.: On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: Situationists 1957–1972, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990, 30. 22 Especially efficient was Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon that came out in English and German in 1940, and in French in 1945, telling the story of a veteran communist, detained, sentenced, and executed; and George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four, published in 1949. 23 Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1999, 101. 24 Georgii Krutikov: The Flying City and Beyond, ed. by Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, translated by Christina Lodder, Barcelona: Tenov Books, 2008, 68–89. 25 Ibid., 103. 26 Catalog to the exhibition Malevich of the Kunsthalle Bern, 1959, catalog essay by Franz Meyer, director of the Bern Art Museums (Meyer put Malevich’s art in the context of Matisse, Léger, and Marinetti). 27 Two Decades of Experiment in Russian Art, London: Grosvenor Gallery, 1962, catalog essay signed “Grosvenor Gallery,” np. 28 Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties, New York: Abrams, 1996, 13. 29 With the difference, among other things, that “setting” in 1920s Russia would not refer to the market but to official approval, or, at least, lack of disapproval. 30 Carlo Belloli, catalog essay to Contrubuto russo alle avanguardie plastiche, Milan: Galleria Levante, 1964, 16. 31 Hans Richter: “Begegnungen in Berlin,” Avantgarde Osteuropa, Berlin: Kunstverein Berlin-Akademie der Künste 1967, 14. 32 See Anatole Kopp, Ville et revolution Architecture et urbanisme Soviétiques des années vingt, Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1967. 33 Anat Falbel, University of Campinas, Brazil: https​:/​/th​​echar​​nelho​​use​.o​​rg​/20​​13​/08​​ /02​/a​​natol​​e​-kop​​p​-191​​5​-199​​0​-the​​-enga​​ged​-a​​rchit​​ect​-a​​nd​-th​​e​-con​​cep​t-​​of​-mo​​dern-​​ archi​​tectu​​re/, last accessed July 6, 2019. 34 Russische Künstler aus dem 20. Jahrhundert, October 11–November 22, 1968. 35 Art News Annual, No. 34, 1968. A rewritten version published in Art in Revolution, London: The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1971, 21–8. 36 For more details, see Crow, op. cit., Chapter IV. 37 Ionel Schein, “Préface,” in Anatol Kopp, op​.cit​., 4.

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38 Tomas Straus: Catalog essay (untitled), in Lajos Kassák 1887–1967, Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, January 15–March 5, 1973, np. 39 Peter Spielmann: “Introduction,” in Lajos Kassák 1887–1967, Bochum: Museum Bochum, 1973, np. 40 Mail art had its origin in Ray Johnson’s 1943 initiative, the New York Correspondence School, as well as the Fluxus movement of the early 1960s. 41 Camilla Gray-Prokofieva: Introduction, Art in Revolution, p. 9; on Gabo and Pevsner, see also Benjamin D. Buchloh: “Cold War Constructivism,” in Serge Gilbaut, ed., Reconstructing Modernism, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990, 85–110. 42 G. Bussmann, Helmut R. Leppien, Uwe M. Schneede: “Zu dieser Ausstellung,” Kunst der Revolution, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Kunsthalle Köln, 1972, np. 43 Wolfgang G. Fischer: “Tatlin’s Dream: A Note to the Exhibition,” Tatlin’s Dream, London: Fischer Fine Art Ltd., November 1973–January 1974, 3. 44 Nigel Gosling: “Tatlin’s Dream at Fischer Fine Art,” The Observer, November 11, 1973. 45 A. Nakov, “Introduction,” Catalog of exhibition Tatlin’s Dream. Russian Suprematist and Constructivist Art 1910–1923, London: Fischer Fine Art Ltd., 1973, 11. For a detailed discussion concerning Flavin, see Natasha Kurchanova, “The Art of Objecthood: Tatlin through the Eyes of Flavin”, in Silvia Burini, ed., Translations and Dialogues: the Reception of Russian Art Abroad, Salerno, Europa Orientalis Dipartimento DIPSUM – Università di Salerno, 2019, 231–239. 46 John Bowlt: “Art business á Moscou,” Macula, No. 1, 1976, 125. 47 See, for example, Klaus Groh: Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa, Cologne: DuMontSchauberg, 1972; and Présences Polonaies exhibition and catalog, Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1980. 48 It might have been due to these same efforts that many samizdat publications authored by Soviet and East European dissidents starting around the early 1980s were also funded and printed in France. 49 “About October” by the editors, October, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1976, 3. 50 Cf. Sergei Eisenstein: “Notes for a Film of Capital,” October, Vol. 1, No.2; Annette Michaelson: “Reading Eisenstein Reading Capital,” October, Vol. 1, Nos. 2, 3, and 4; Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and John Johnston: “Gravity’s Rainbow and the Spiral Jetty,” October, Vol. 1, No. 2 and 3.

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Index Agursky, Samuel  50, 51 Akinsha, Konstantin  271 n.37, 272 n.41, 273 n.10 Allais, Alphonse  20 Alma, Peter  255 n.42 Altman, Natan  31, 42, 43, 106, 126, 133, 134, 140 Andersen, Troels  23, 189, 216, 217, 229, 241 nn.21, 37, 242 nn.40, 43, 243 n.70, 244 nn.82, 86, 245 n.114, 248 n.24, 255 n.42, 258 n.43, 269 n.53, 270 n.4, 272 n.42, 273 n.6, 274 n.25, 277 n.1, 279 n.51, 286 n.66 André, Carl  233 Andreeva, Maria Fiodorovna  106 Annenkov, Georges  226 Antliff, Mark  261 n.45 Antonova, Clemena  238 nn.15, 16 Appel, Karel  220 Apter-Gabriel, Ruth  250 n.43 Aranova, Ulia  234 Archipenko, Alexander  110, 126, 226 Arkhipov, Avram Efimovich  136 Aronson, Boris  42, 249 n.35 Arp, Hans  68, 69, 100, 124, 154, 157, 182, 254 n.37, 271 n.23, 271 n.38 Arvatov, Boris  82, 85, 117, 258 n.37 Aschenbrenner, Margaret  277 n.62 Aschenbrenner, Margot  209, 282 n.6 Avenarius, Richard  266 n.35 Babichev, Alexei  81 Bähr, Ludwig  93, 132 Baj, Enrico  220 Bajkay, Éva  263 n.9 Bakhtin, Mikhail  23 Balázs, Béla  62, 253 n.15 Bann, Stephen  180, 252 n.66, 260 n.29, 264 n.18, 265 n.23, 266 nn.34, 37, 274 n.27, 276 n.54 Baránszky, László  263 n.73

Barr, Alfred J., Jr.  203, 204, 207, 209, 211, 213, 282 n.9, 283 n.11, 285 n.43 Barta, Sándor  142 Bartos, Ewa  241 n.36 Basner, Elena  41, 241 n.23, 247 n.4, 276 n.59 Bátki, John  269 n.50 Baudelaire, Charles  221 Beekman, Chris  255 n.42 Behne, Adolf  124, 132, 139–40, 199, 265 n.31, 268 n.37 Belloli, Carlo  288 n.30 Benjamin, Walter  2, 221, 287 n.6 Benois, Alexander (1870–1960)  19, 20, 242 n.51 Bergson, Henri  10, 28, 239 n.27 Berlewi, Henryk  54, 55, 252 n.57 Berly, Andrei  107, 108 Bessaraboff, Nicholas  241 n.29 Betts, Paul  259 n.9 Biely, Andrei  107 Biermann, Georg  265 n.32 Bill, Max  221, 282 n.9 Birnholz, Alan C.  54, 247 n.2, 249 n.32, 250 n.46, 251 n.50, 252 n.56 Blok, Alexander  107, 108 Bloom, Harold  147, 154, 155, 269 n.1, 271 nn.25, 27 Blotkamp, Karel  59, 60, 63, 253 nn.2, 5, 10, 254 n.20 Boersma, Linda S.  76, 255 n.42, 276 n.56 Bogdanov, Alexander  6, 62, 115, 237 n.5, 263 n.1, 266 n.35 Boguslavskaia, Xenia  21, 24, 32, 33, 41, 107, 212 Boguslavskaja, Ksenia K.  246 n.120 Böhme, Ernst  211 Bois, Yves-Alain  162, 204, 235, 258 n.46, 271 n.33, 273 n.8, 282 n.8 Bolshakov, Konstantin  42

308

Index

Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir Dmitriyevich  163 Bonset, I. K.  63, 67, 277 n.2 Bortnyik, Sándor  110 Botar, Oliver  263 n.9 Bouis, Antonina W.  243 n.71, 273 n.12, 281 n.77 Bowlt, John  234, 235, 242 n.42, 257 n.27, 258 n.38, 289 n.46 Bragdon, Claude  241 n.29 Brailkovsky, Anna  243 n.71, 281 n.77 Braque, Georges  17 Brecht, Bertolt  99 Breuer, Marcel  193 Brik, Lily  107 Brik, Osip  31, 82, 89, 107 Britt, David  268 n.31 Broderzon, Moshe  42 Brooker, Peter  254 n.34, 254 n.36 Broue, P.  260 n.14 Bru, Sascha  254 nn.34, 36 Bucarelli, Palma  213, 214 Buchholz, Erich  110, 112, 124, 152–3, 238 n.17, 254 n.32, 270 nn.17, 19, 271 n.22 Buchloh, Benjamin D.  258 nn.46–8, 264 n.14 Bulgakov, Mikhail  17 Bullock, Nicholas  255 n.53, 265 n.23 Burchartz, Max  112, 184 Burini, Silvia  289 n.45 Burliuk, David  12, 30, 32, 116, 240 nn.10, 16 Burliuk, Nikolai  12, 32, 240 n.16 Burliuk, Vladimir  12, 32 Bussmann, G.  289 n.42 Caden, Gert (Gerd Kaden)  110, 112, 124 Calinescu, Matei  238 nn.22, 24 Camini, Aldo  63, 67 Carandente, Givonani  285 n.57 Carrà, Carlo  109 Castoriadis, Cornelius  220 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand  259 n.2 Cendrars, Blaise  124 Cézanne, Paul  35 Chagall, Marc  32–4, 42, 44, 49, 116, 126, 226, 232, 250 n.45 Chashnik, Ilya  33, 157, 251 n.50, 271 n.34

Chave, Anna C.  36, 247 n.141, 261 n.46 Chervinko, Ivan  57 Chilova, Alla  242 n.39 Chlebnikov, Velimir  126 Chlenova, Masha  180, 252 n.63, 277 n.4 Chtcheglov, Ivan  221 Cocteau, Jean  182, 278 n.16 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel  228 Coleman, Heather J.  237 n.2 Coppotelli, Arthur A.  241 n.34 Cottington, David  240 n.6 Courtois, Stéphane  260 n.13 Crockett, Dennis  263 n.1 Crow, Thomas  226, 288 n.28 Cunin, Daniel  283 n.12 Curjel, Hans  209 Dabrowski, Magdalena  247 n.6, 268 n.41 Dale, Meredith  243 n.71, 281 n.77 Daniels, Robert V.  249 n.39 Davydova, Natalia Mikhailovna  24, 30 Deak, István  95, 259 n.11 Dearstyne, Howard  241 n.24 Debord, Guy  221–3, 225, 287 nn.9, 15, 17 De Gaulle, Charles  231 Demosfenova, G. L.  273 n.6 Denikin, Anton Ivanovich  44 de Staël, Nicolas  226 de Wilde, Edy  286 nn.62, 65 Diaghilev, Serge  41 Dickerman, Leah  247 n.6, 268 n.41 Dluhosch, Eric  272 n.48 Döblin, Alfred  94 Doesburg, Theodorus  59 Dorgelès, Roland  239–40 n.6 Dorleijn, G. J.  260 n.15 Dorner, Alexander  203, 204 Dotremont, Christian  220 Douglas, Charlotte  15, 25, 26, 239 n.3, 240 nn.15, 18, 241 n.32, 244 n.99, 244 nn.84, 93, 255 n.42 Doyle, Conan  103 Drevin, Alexander  30, 31, 81, 136, 137 Dreyer, Katherine  203 Drutt, Matthew  249 n.35, 258 n.37 Dutschke, Rudi  224 Ebert, Friedrich  102 Eggeling, Viking  112, 124, 190

Index Eghigian, Greg  259 n.9 Ehrenburg, Ilya  49, 54, 107, 108, 119, 126, 159, 191, 249 n.31, 255 n.50, 264 n.18, 266 n.41, 272 n.47 Einstein, Carl  10, 124, 165, 172, 175, 232, 272 n.48, 275 n.43 Eisenstein, Sergei  58, 232, 235, 253 n.71, 289 n.50 Ék, Sándor (Alex Kiel)  117 Elbert, János  278 n.15 Ermolaeva, Vera  33 Esenin, Sergei  107, 108 Exter, Alexandra  12, 54, 136 Eyck, Erich  261 n.34 Falbel, Anat  288 n.33 Falk, Robert  42 Favorsky, Vladimir A.  181 Fedorov, Nikolai  8 Finsterlin, Hermann  94 Fischer, Wolfgang  233, 289 n.43 Fitzpatrick, Sheila  105, 237 n.5, 261 n.47 Flavin, Dan  233 Flechtheim, Albert  99 Flint, R. W.  241 n.34 Florensky, Pavel  7, 238 nn.14, 15 Fodorov, Nikolai F. (1828–1903)  6, 237 n.5 Forgács, Éva  238 n.23, 254 n.35, 255 n.40, 255 n.52 Frampton, Kenneth  229 Frank, S. L.  99 Fried, Rose  284 n.30 Friedberg, Haia  47, 249 nn.30, 32, 33 Fritzsche, Peter  102, 259 n.9, 261 n.37 Gabo, Miriam  118, 213 Gabo, Naum  107, 117, 118, 126, 133–5, 140, 183, 191, 204, 207–10, 212, 214, 226, 232, 263 n.73, 283 n.10, 283 n.22, 284 nn.31, 33, 34, 285 n.39 Galassi, Peter  247 n.6, 268 n.41 Gambrell, Jamey  245 n.107, 249 n.28 Gan, Alexei  8, 23, 30, 78, 82, 243 n.78 Garb, Tamar  250 n.47 Gassner, Hubertus  242 n.39, 243 n.78, 259 n.7, 266 n.41, 267 nn.1, 2, 277 n.14 Gay, Peter  94, 259 n.8 George, Lloyd  260 n.21

309

Gershenzon, Mihail  246 n.123 Giedion, Siegfried  189, 279 n.53 Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy  289 n.50 Gillen, Echart  243 n.78, 277 n.14 Gitelman, Zvi Y.  248 n.21, 249 n.37, 250 nn.42, 44 Glimcher, Arnie  242 n.41 Glowacki-Prus, Xenia  216–17, 241 n.22, 245 n.99 Gmurzynska, Galerie  257 n.28 Goncharova, Natalia  7, 11, 12, 15, 19, 40, 42, 110, 125, 208, 226 Goriacheva, Tatiana  41, 125, 266 n.36 Gosling, Nigel  289 n.44 Gough, Maria  257 n.16, 266 n.54 Gourianova, Nina  6, 237 n.7, 248 n.25, 261 n.36 Gray, Camilla  212, 216, 226, 232, 237 n.2, 238 n.12, 243 nn.59, 64, 262 n.70 Gray-Prokofieva, Camilla  289 n.41 Green, Wilder  286 n.62 Grinkrug, Lev  30 Grohmann, Will  199 Gropius, Ise  280 n.65 Gropius, Walter  93, 94, 98, 124, 132, 155, 181, 189, 192–4, 203, 237 n.3, 251 n.51, 265 n.31, 280 n.62 Gross, Hans  98 Grosz, Eva  263 n.73 Grosz, George  101, 109, 261 n.33 Groys, Boris  9, 239 n.26, 241 n.37, 253 n.8 Grüttemeyer, R.  260 n.15 Gurianova, Nina  30, 102, 241 n.33, 244 n.79, 245 n.103 Guro, Elena  234, 240 n.16 Gutkin, Irina  238 n.22, 244 n.83 Haffner, Sebastian  101, 261 n.35 Haftmann, Werner  216 Hammer, Martin  263 n.73, 264 nn.13– 15, 268 n.25, 283 n.21 Harden, Maximilian  99 Hardiman, Louise  237 n.2, 237 nn.6, 7, 238 n.8 Häring, Hugo  189, 203, 205–11, 213, 277 n.62, 281 n.3, 284 nn.29, 30, 33–6 Harten, Jürgen  237 n.2

310

Index

Hartlaub, Gustav Friedrich  182, 278 n.18 Hausmann, Raoul  100, 124, 154, 182, 271 n.23 Heartfield, John (Helmuth Herzfeld)  100, 101 Hedrick, Hannah L.  63, 254 n.22 Heine, Heinrich  39 Hemken, Kai-Uwe  168, 274 nn.28, 29 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple  238 nn.20, 21, 241 n.30 Herzfelde, Wieland  101, 106 Herzogenrath, Wulf  263 n.4 Hilberseimer, Ludwig  203, 208–10 Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig  92, 155, 259 n.2 Hitler, Adolf  9 Höch, Hannah  100 Hodges, Nora  261 n.33 Hoffmann, Xenia  246 n.127 Holitscher, Arthur  135 Huelsenbeck, Richard  100 Hulten, Karl Gunnar Vougt Pontus  212, 285 n.47 Huszar, Vilmos  153, 275 n.31 Hüter, Karl-Heinz  260 nn.23, 24 Ingold, Felix Philipp  26, 244 n.91 Ioganson, Karl  82, 257 n.28 Isou, Isidore  221 Itten, Johannes  5, 121, 181, 194, 205 Ivanov, Alexander (1806–58)  7 Ivanov, Vyacheslav  235 Ivanov-Razumnik, Vasilyevich  108, 262 n.62 Jaeggi, Annemarie  280 n.61 Jaffe, Hans L. C.  61, 205–7, 211, 233, 253 nn.7, 14, 254 n.25, 283 nn.14, 16, 17, 20, 285 n.43 Jakobson, Roman  107 Janecek, Gerald  240 n.7 Jangfeldt, Bengt  30, 31, 105, 245 nn.104, 106, 109, 248 n.23, 262 nn.48, 49 Jappe, Anselm  225, 288 n.23 Jephcott, Edmund  287 n.6 Joganson, Karl  78 Johnston, John  289 n.50 Joosten, Joop M.  203, 282 nn.5, 7 Jorn, Asger  220, 221

Judt, Tony  252 n.62 Jung, Franz  100, 260 n.26 Justi, Ludwig  132 Kabakov, Ilya  17 Kachurin, Pamela  245 n.101 Kállai, Ernő (Ernst)  56, 78, 109–12, 116, 125, 131, 142, 143, 180–1, 183, 184, 190, 191, 195, 196, 199, 252 n.65, 252 n.67, 254 n.35, 257 n.10, 262 nn.67, 69, 265 n.32, 269 n.50, 277 nn.6, 9, 278 nn.23, 26, 279 n.59, 280 nn.67, 71 Kamensky, Vasily  14, 30 Kampf, Avram  43, 247 n.13, 248 n.17, 250 n.41 Kandinsky, Vasily  7, 8, 60, 78–80, 93, 99, 107, 116, 126, 131, 132, 136, 153, 154, 177, 192, 193, 199, 226, 232, 259 n.3, 271 n.21 Kant, Immanuel  28, 241 n.26 Kanzendikas, Alexander  252 n.55 Karasik, Irina  266 n.54 Karginov, German  228 Kassák, Lajos  67–9, 110–12, 124, 125, 141–3, 160, 181, 231, 254 nn.35, 37, 269 n.48, 277 n.8 Katsman, Evgeny  250 n.48 Kemény, Alfréd  111, 112, 116, 117, 124, 141, 160, 182, 183, 190, 264 nn.10, 11, 268 n.45, 278 n.20, 278 nn.22, 23, 279 n.55 Kemp-Welch, Wanda  279 nn.36, 37, 42 Kessler, Charles  259 n.10 Kessler, Harry  94, 97, 101, 259 n.10, 260 nn.21, 31 Khan-Magomedov, Selim  79, 253 n.71, 256 nn.7, 8, 257 nn.9, 12, 16, 19, 288 n.24 Khardzhiev, Nikolai  16, 241 nn.34, 35 Khlebnikov, Velimir (Victor)  12, 13, 16, 17, 240 n.9, 240 nn.10, 16, 241 n.36, 265 n.27 Kiepenheuer, Gustav  166, 172, 173, 263 n.4 Kiepenheuer, Irmgard  166 Kirby, Victoria Nes  241 n.36 Kirdetsov, G. L.  266 n.40 Klein, Cäsar  93

Index Kliuchnikov, IU. V.  266 n.40 Kliun, Ivan  20, 21, 24, 30, 81, 136, 137, 240 n.21 Klobucka, Anna  259 n.1 Klucis, Gustav  264 n.15 Kobro, Katarżyna (Ekaterina Kobro, 1898–1951)  110, 185, 186, 187 Koestler, Arthur  288 n.22 Kogan, Nina  33, 57 Kok, Antony  61, 72, 144, 255 n.42, 255 nn.48, 49 Kokkori, Maria  239 n.28, 242 n.39 Konchalovsky, Piotr  12 Kopp, Anatole  228, 231, 288 n.32 Kopp, Victor  132 Korovin, Konstantin  136 Korthals-Altes, L.  260 n.15 Kossowska, Irena  185, 278 n.33 Kozicharow, Nicola  237 n.2, 237 nn.6, 7 Kracauer, Siegfried  102, 103, 261 nn.40, 41 Krasin, Leonid  6, 163, 237 n.5 Krauss, Rosalind  66, 235, 237 n.1, 238 n.13, 254 n.31 Kreubel, Emil  98 Krieger, Verena  26, 238 n.17, 238 nn.20, 94 Krimov, Nikolai Petrovich  136 Krivine, Alain  228 Kromes, Mark  260 n.13 Kruchenikh, Alexei  12, 13, 15, 17, 24, 240 n.10, 240 nn.8, 21, 241 n.36 Kruchenikh, Benedikt Lifshitz A.  125, 240 n.16 Krupala, Jennifer Greene  262 n.54, 267 n.16 Krutikov, Georgii  225, 288 n.24 Kudriashev, Ivan  82 Küpper, Christian Emil Marie  59 Küppers, Paul  203 Küppers, Sophie  66, 156, 157, 161, 165, 167, 175, 184, 203, 228, 249 n.34, 250 n.48, 251 n.52, 252 n.70, 254 n.33, 264 n.13, 264 n.16, 271 nn.26, 28, 272 nn.50, 52, 273 n.17, 278 n.25, 285 n.46 Kurbanovsky, Alexei  237 n.2 Kurchanova, Natasha  289 n.45 Kushner, Boris  30, 82, 245 n.104 Kustodiev, Boris  136

311

Ladovsky, Nikolai  78–81, 257 n.11 Lapitsky, Zhenia  106 Larionov, Mikhail  7, 11, 12, 15, 19, 40–2, 110, 125, 208, 226, 238 n.12 Lavrentiev, Alexander  257 n.27 Lawton, Anna  240 nn.7, 10, 11, 16, 241 n.28 Lebedev, P(avel)  212, 285 n.44 Le Corbusier  124 Leering, Jan  252 n.57 Lefebvre, Henri (1901–91)  221, 287 n.6 Léger, Fernand  92, 124 Lehning, Arthur  8 Leib, Mani  54 Lemmens, Albert  248 n.20 Lenin, Vladimir  6, 27, 32, 49, 95, 108, 133, 156–8, 162–4, 168, 172, 249 n.38, 259 n.12, 262 n.52, 266 n.35, 272 n.41 Leporskaia, Anna  242 n.45 Leppien, Helmut R.  289 n.42 Leschenko, Dmitry  106 Liebknecht, Karl  32, 246 n.118 Lifshitz, Benedikt  17, 242 n.42 Lindsay, Kenneth C.  259 n.3, 271 n.21 Linse, Ulrich  237 n.2 Lipchitz, Jacques  212 Lipchitz, Rob  212 Lissitzky, Eliezer Mordukhovich (Lazar Markovich)  3–4, 9, 33, 39–59, 62, 66–76, 78, 80, 84–9, 93, 98, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 116–29, 131, 134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 147–62, 164–78, 180, 181, 183, 184, 188, 190, 191, 197, 203, 208, 212, 213, 226, 228, 232, 238 n.18, 247 nn.1, 10, 11, 248 nn.18, 22, 249 n.31, 250 nn.45, 46, 48, 251 nn.49– 52, 252 nn.55, 57, 254 nn.33, 37, 255 nn.48, 50, 53, 258 nn.38, 41, 260 n.22, 264 nn.13, 15, 17, 18, 265 n.27, 266 nn.51, 52, 269 n.53, 271 n.30, 272 nn.48, 49, 273 nn.12–14, 17–19, 274 nn.20, 21, 24, 275 nn.33, 34, 278 n.25, 285 n.46 Lissitzky, Jen  248 n.22 Liubavina, Nadezhda  33 Livshitz, Benedikt  12 Lloyd, Janet  238 n.25 Lobachevsky, Nikolai (1792–1856)  9

312

Index

Lodder, Christina  20, 28, 30, 32, 54, 119, 223, 239 nn.3, 28, 242 nn.38, 39, 55, 243 n.57, 250 n.47, 252 n.54, 255 n.42, 257 nn.16–18, 258 nn.34, 39, 49, 259 n.54, 262 n.50, 263 n.73, 264 nn.10, 13–15, 19, 265 n.27, 268 n.25, 272 n.40, 283 n.21, 287 n.18, 288 nn.19, 24 Lourie, Arthur  106 Lubetkin, Berthold  134 Ludendorff, Erich  101 Ludwig, Emil  238 n.25 Lufft, Peter  211, 213, 214, 216 Lukács, György  95, 109, 111, 260 n.16, 262 n.66 Lunacharsky, Anatoly (1875–1933)  6, 23, 52, 62, 105, 106, 115, 132, 133, 134, 142, 163, 167, 169, 172, 191, 197, 237 n.5, 243 n.77, 263 n.1, 265 n.27, 266 n.35, 274 n.26, 281 n.73 Lutz , Friedrich Adolf  133–4 Luxemburg, Rosa  32, 246 n.118 McGeever, Brendan  248 n.19, 249 n.26 Mach, Ernst  266 n.35 MacInnes, Kenneth  266 n.54 McMillen, Arnold  217, 241 n.22, 245 n.99 Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich  1–4, 8, 9, 11–37, 39, 41, 45, 46, 49–54, 56–63, 65, 70–8, 80–7, 89, 96, 104, 106, 108, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 120–9, 136–8, 140–3, 145, 147–52, 154–79, 184–217, 223, 226, 228, 229, 232, 233, 235, 239 nn.1–3, 240 nn.17, 21, 241 nn.23–5, 36, 37, 242 nn.40, 45, 47, 243 nn.71, 73, 244 nn.81, 82, 87, 98, 99, 245 nn.99–101, 114, 246 nn.127–9, 132, 137, 247 n.143, 248 n.24, 250 n.48, 251 nn.49, 51, 252 nn.63, 64, 253 n.4, 254 n.18, 255 nn.42, 43, 44, 47, 258 n.43, 265 n.27, 266 n.54, 269 n.53, 270 nn.8–10, 16, 271 nn.24, 30, 32, 33, 272 n.45, 273 nn.6, 11, 274 n.20, 275 n.39, 276 nn.44, 45, 48–52, 277 n.5, 278 n.28, 280 nn.65, 66, 282 n.9, 284 nn.33, 285–6 n.59, 286 n.66 Malewitsch, K.  273 n.7, 281 n.77

Malsch, Friedemann  243 n.61, 247 n.5 Mamontov, Savva  239 n.5 Mansurov, Pavel  26, 136, 216, 226 Mao, Zedong  225 Margolin, Victor  249 n.38 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso  12, 16, 112, 113, 143 Markov, Vladimir  235, 240 n.7, 247 n.8 Maryanov, David  118, 133 Mashkov, Ilia  12 Matyushin, Mikhail  12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21, 23, 24, 29, 32, 61, 137, 233, 234, 241 n.36, 242 n.47, 243 nn.67, 73 Mayakovsky, Vladimir  12, 13, 30, 31, 107, 126, 240 n.10, 240 n.16 Medunetzky, Konstantin  78, 81, 82, 135, 257 n.28, 286 n.59 Menkov, Mikhail  24 Meyer, Franz  214, 216, 285 n.56, 288 n.26 Meyer, Hannes  193, 194, 255 n.40, 261 n.46 Meyer-Chagall, Ida  216 Meyerhold, Vsevolod  232 Meyerzon, I.  262 n.68 Michaelson, Anette  235 Michaud, Eric  238 n.25 Micić, Lubomir  67, 68, 124 Mierau, Fritz  262 n.60, 267 n.4 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig  168, 194, 203, 207, 208, 210 Mikhienko, Tatiana  243 nn.61, 67, 68, 75, 246 n.126 Mileeva, Maria  239 n.28, 242 n.39 Miller, David  269 n.53 Milner, John  257 n.31, 258 n.33, 272 n.51 Misler, Nicoletta  238 n.14 Miturich, Pavel  17, 233 Moholy-Nagy, László  66–9, 110–12, 116, 125, 154, 165, 171, 180–3, 191, 193, 197–9, 254 nn.30, 35, 37, 263 n.73, 264 n.10, 270 n.18, 271 n.23, 273 n.18, 278 nn.20, 23 Möller, Ferdinand  99 Monas, Sidney  262 n.54, 267 n.16 Mondrian, Piet  1, 8, 60–3, 65, 70, 73–5, 141, 164, 175, 190, 191, 199, 206, 212, 214, 253 n.14

Index Morris, Robert  233 Mudrak, Miroslava M.  239 n.3 Müller, Hans  166, 167, 172, 173 Müller, Karl Alexander von  102 Münzenberg, Willi  133 Murphy, Jonathan  260 n.13 Mussolini, Benito  9, 104 Muza, Anna  161, 272 n.2 Nabokov, Vladimir  99, 107 Nachtigäller, Roland  259 n.7 Nakov, André  19, 233, 239 n.1, 242 n.52, 286 n.59, 289 n.45 Nerdinger, Winfried  134, 262 n.65, 267 n.7, 267 n.12, 268 n.20 Neugärtner, Sandra  261 n.44 Nicholas II  248 n.19 Nicholson-Smith, Donald  288 n.23 Nieuwenhuys, Constant Anton (Constant)  220 Nikon, Patriarch (1605–81)  6 Nisbet, Peter  131, 133–5, 246 n.116, 246 n.135, 247 nn.1, 3, 7, 11, 251 n.51, 267 nn.5, 8, 13, 15, 268 nn.19, 22 Nizen, Katherine  240 n.16 Nochlin, Linda  250 n.47 Noever, Peter  256 n.1, 258 n.35 Orwell, George  288 n.22 Otto, Elizabeth  261 n.44 Oud, Johannes Jacobus Pieter  60, 124, 170, 275 nn.32, 33 Ouspensky, Piotr (1878–1947)  8 Pasternak, Boris  107 Patraskin, S.  241 n.33 Paul, Cedar  238 n.25 Paul, Eden  238 n.25 Pechstein, Max  93 Peiper, Tadeusz  186, 192, 193, 195, 279 n.42, 280 n.64 Pen, Yurii (Yehuda)  32, 39, 245 n.115 Péri, László  116, 125, 183, 190, 254 n.35, 278 n.23 Perloff, Nancy  241 n.31, 249 n.29, 264 n.13 Pestel, Vera  24, 30 Péter, Mátyás  263 nn.71, 73, 74, 76 Petersen, Ad  283 n.12

313

Peter the Great (1682–1725)  5 Petrov, Fedor  244 n.96 Petrova, Yevgenia  241 n.23, 258 n.37, 276 n.59 Pevsner, Antoine  107, 135, 212, 214, 226, 232 Picasso, Pablo  17 Piscator, Erwin  99 Poliakoff, Serge  226 Poljanski, Branko Ve  140, 141 Popova, Liubov  24, 30, 31, 81, 111 Popper, Leo  109, 111, 262 n.66 Prokofiev, Sergei  232 Puni, Ivan (1892–1956)  21, 24, 32, 33, 41, 107, 116, 126–7, 131, 145, 153, 154, 177, 182, 188, 212, 226, 242 n.46, 266 nn.38, 42, 269 n.61, 271 n.23 Punin, Nikolai  31, 34, 106, 129, 133, 246 n.126, 266 n.53, 267 n.16 Railing, Patricia  242 n.50, 243 n.72, 244 n.99, 244 nn.85, 87, 245 n.99, 246 n.127, 258 n.43, 270 nn.11–13 Rakitin, Vassily  49, 57, 137, 249 n.35, 252 n.68, 257 n.28, 268 n.30, 276 n.60 Rapoport, Joseph  106 Raskin, Ben-Zion  247 n.11 Ray, Man  66 Read, Herbert  207, 210 Redslob, Edwin  134, 135 Reed, Brian  264 n.13 Reimann, Albert  282 n.6 Reinhardt, Max  99 Renders, Willem Jan  246 n.123 Reneau, Don  268 n.37 Richter, Hans  66–9, 72, 98, 112, 124, 168, 180, 190, 203, 227, 255 n.53, 260 n.22, 288 n.31 Richter, Horst  267 n.6 Rinsema, Evert  256 n.59 Rinsema, Evert  74 Rodchenko, Alexander  8, 30, 31, 41, 45, 46, 77–82, 84, 86, 117, 123, 124, 136, 137, 140, 191, 214, 228, 232, 245 nn.107, 108, 247 n.6, 248 n.25, 249 n.28, 256 n.1, 257 n.17, 258 n.36, 264 n.15, 265 n.27 Rodrigues, Olinde (1795–1851)  9, 238 nn.22, 24

314

Index

Röhl, Peter  184 Rose, Bernice  242 n.41 Roslavets, Nikolai  24 Rössler, Patrick  261 n.44 Rostislavov, Alexander (1860–1920)  19, 242 n.54 Roters, Eberhard  267 nn.1, 2 Rozanova, Olga  24, 30, 32, 116, 136, 137, 143 Rozhdestvensky, Konstantin  27, 241 n.23, 244 n.97 Ruhle, Otto  96 Ryback, Issackar Ber  42, 247 n.9, 248 n.20 Saint-Simon, Count  9, 238 n.22 Sandberg, Willem (1897–1984)  204–14, 277 n.62, 283 nn.10, 19, 22, 26, 284 nn.31, 33, 285 nn.39, 46, 49, 53, 58 Sarabianov, Dmitrii  243 n.63 Saunders, Bronwen  243 n.71, 281 n.77 Schad, Christian  66 Scharoun, Hans  94 Schein, Ionel  231, 288 n.37 Scheler, Max  99 Scheper, Hinnerk  280 n.62 Schlemmer, Oskar  155, 171, 181, 184, 275 n.38 Schmalenbach, Werner  212, 213 Schmidt, Gary  211 Schmidt, Kurt  155 Schmidt, Paul  240 n.15 Schneede, Uwe M.  289 n.42 Schöche, Lena  248 n.22 Schoenmakers, Mathieu Hubertus Josephus (1875–1944)  60, 61 Scholl, Hans  287 n.3 Scholl, Sophie  287 n.3 Schopenhauer, Arthur  26, 244 n.92 Schreyer, Lothar  5, 121, 181 Schulte, Jörg  248 n.20, 264 n.13 Schweicher, Curt  214 Schwerdtfeger, Rudolf  155 Schwitters, Kurt  67, 69, 124, 170, 174, 213, 233 Seligman, Janet  239 n.30, 265 n.25, 275 n.36 Senkin, S.  277 n.14 Service, Robert  106, 262 nn.51, 53

Seuphor, Michel  69, 285 n.42 Shakespeare, William  39 Shapiro, T.  262 n.68 Sharp, Jane Ashton  14, 239 nn.4, 5, 241 n.27 Shatskikh, Alexandra  15, 20, 21, 27, 35, 52, 148, 240 n.20, 241 nn.22, 23, 242 nn.44, 45, 47, 48, 53, 243 nn.58, 60, 62, 63, 65, 244 n.95, 245 n.102, 245 n.115, 246 nn.117, 120, 124, 130, 131, 136, 247 n.142, 250 nn.45, 47, 251 n.49, 252 n.54, 258 n.40, 270 n.6, 271 n.29, 273 nn.6, 20 Sheldon, Richard  261 n.39 Shklovskii, Viktor  102, 106, 107, 126, 235, 261 n.39 Shterenberg, David  31, 43, 106, 126, 133–6, 143–5, 268 n.23, 269 n.54 Sievers, Johannes  132 Slonimsky, Mikhail Leonidovich (1897–1972)  182, 278 n.15 Smith, Mary C.  241 n.26 Soloviev, Vladimir  25, 244 n.83 Sombart, Werner  99 Sorel, Georges  104 Soutine, Chaim  226 Spielmann, Peter  231, 289 n.39 Srp, Karel  254 n.35 Stalin, Joseph  6, 9, 44, 49, 50, 162, 247 n.16 Stażewski, Henrik  67, 186, 187, 212, 279 n.36 Steinberg, Mark  237 n.2 Stenberg, Georgii  81, 82, 232, 257 n.28, 286 n.59 Stenberg, Vladimir  81, 82, 232, 257 n.28, 286 n.59 Stepanova, Varvara  78, 82, 84, 137, 232, 256 n.1, 257 n.27, 265 n.24, 268 n.29 Stephen, Ann  259 n.2 Sternhell, Zeev  104 Stölzl, Gunta  280 n.62 Stommels, Serge Aliosha  248 n.20 Straus, Tomas  289 n.38 Strigaljov, Anatoly  6, 237 n.2, 238 n.10 Strzemiński, Władisław (1893– 1952)  185–7, 235, 278 n.30, 279 nn.34, 37, 39 Suetin, Nikolai  57

Index Sweeney, James Johnson  207, 210 Syrkus, Helena  187, 279 n.40 Syrkus, Szymon  187 Szczuka, Mieczyslaw  186–8, 196, 279 n.43 Szilágyi, Jolán  117 Szőllőssy, Judy  263 n.73 Szőllőssy, Klára  278 n.15 Tabachnikova, Olga  248 n.20, 264 n.13 Tarabukin, Nikolai  82, 257 n.15 Tarasov, Oleg  6, 237 n.6, 238 n.9 Tarbukin, Nikolai  79 Taroutina, Maria  20, 21, 237 n.2, 242 n.56 Tatlin, Vladimir  12, 21, 23, 31, 32, 40, 41, 96, 109, 112, 115, 117, 123, 128, 129, 136, 138, 140, 144, 154, 157, 177, 178, 180, 190, 191, 212, 214, 226, 229, 232, 262 n.68, 265 n.27, 286 n.59 Taut, Bruno  93, 94, 203 Taut, Max  94 Taylor, Brandon  261 n.46 Taylor, Richard  274 n.27 Teige, Karel  67, 68 Teltscher, Georg  155 Terentiev, Igor  27, 244 n.96 Thacker, Andrew  254 nn.34, 36 Thwaites, John Anthony  283 n.19 Todorova, Maria  259 n.1 Tolstoi, Alexei  26, 107 Trotsky, Lev Davidovich  224, 228 Troy, Nancy  255 n.39 Tsantsanoglou, Maria  239 n.28, 242 n.39 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin (1857–1935)  8, 17 Tumarkin, Nina  6, 162, 237 nn.4, 5, 272 n.41, 273 n.9 Turowski, Andrzej  187, 278 n.28, 279 n.43 Tzara, Tristan  100 Tzvetaeva, Marina  107 Udaltsova, Nadezhda  23, 24, 30, 31, 81 Uitz, Béla  116, 117, 263 n.3 Umansky, Konstantin  115–17, 120, 126, 127, 132, 136, 138, 177, 188, 263 n.2, 263 nn.4, 5 Uspensky, Piotr Damianovich  15, 241 n.29

315

Vakar, Irina A.  20, 243 n.57, 246 n.126 van den Berg, Hubert  260 n.15 van der Will, Wilfried  261 n.46 van Doesburg, Theo (I. K. Bonset)  3, 4, 10, 59–76, 98, 112, 122, 124, 141, 144, 145, 154, 164–78, 180, 183, 188, 197, 198, 220, 239 n.30, 253 nn.13, 16, 254 nn.19, 25, 30, 35, 255 nn.39, 42, 48, 49, 52, 53, 256 nn.58–61, 260 n.22, 265 n.25, 269 nn.59, 60, 274 nn.22, 27, 275 nn.35, 36, 276 n.56 van Eesteren, Cornelis  74, 256 n.60 van Straaten, Evert  59, 63, 65, 253 n.1, 253 n.6, 254 nn.24, 29, 30, 256 nn.57, 59, 269 n.60 van t’Hoff, Robert  255 n.42 Vasilievich, Mikhail  18 Ve Poljanski, Branko  268 nn.40, 42 Vergo, Peter  259 n.3, 271 n.21 Verlag, Malik  101 Vertov, Dziga  232 Vesnin, Alexander  30 Vipper, Boris  238 n.16 Vömel, Alex  214, 285 n.55 von Beyme, Klaus  10, 239 nn.29, 32, 243 n.77 von Blücher, Wipert  262 n.57 von Riesen, Alexander  269 n.53 von Riesen, Gustav  189, 197, 215, 286 n.60 von Riesen, Hans  197, 198, 215–17, 281 n.75 von Wiese, Stephan  199 Wagstaff, Peter  248 n.20, 264 n.13 Walden, Herwarth  99, 124, 260 n.15 Wallerstein, Immanuel  259 n.1 Wechsler, Judith Glatzer  250 n.47 Weibel, Peter  202, 281 n.1 Weikop, Christian  254 nn.34, 36 Weima, Ober  255 n.49 Westheider, Ortrud  242 n.39 Westheim, Paul  116, 137–9, 143, 165, 166, 172, 175, 196, 268 n.31, 272 n.48, 274 n.21, 275 n.43, 280 n.72 Wilde, Edy de  216 Wilhelm, Jean-Pierre  208, 284 n.29 Williams, Robert C.  99, 107, 260 n.25, 262 nn.56, 57, 61, 63

316 Winter, Janus de  60, 62 Wolff, Larry  259 n.1 Wollen, Peter  288 n.21 Wright brothers  17 Wünsche, Isabel  243 n.74 Yablonskaya, M. N.  238 n.11 Yavlensky, Alexei  208, 226

Index Yudin, Lev  195 Yurkevich, Mstislav  24 Zarnower, Teresa  186 Zhadowa, Larissa A.  228, 246 n.129, 270 n.3, 271 nn.35, 39 Zhuravlev, Vasilii  17 Ziegler, Fabian  251 n.53

317

318