Rethinking Malevich: Proceedings of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich's Birth 1904597483, 9781904597483

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Rethinking Malevich Proceedings of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich's Birth

Rethinking Malevich Proceedings of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich's Birth

Edited by Charlotte Douglas & Christina Lodder

The Pindar Press London 2007

Published by The Pindar Press 40 Narcissus Road London NW6 1TH · UK

Copyright © 2007 by the Contributors All rights reserved British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-904597-48-3 (hb)

Published with the assistance of a grant from The Malevich Society

Printed by Raithby Lawrence Ltd 18, Slater Street, Leicester LE3 5AY This book is printed on acid-free paper

Contents Preface Charlotte Douglas

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Malevich Scholarship: A Brief Introduction  Christina Lodder

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I 1. Kazimir Malevich and Fedor Rerberg  John E. Bowlt 2. The Early Work of Malevich and Kandinsky: A Comparative Analysis Elena Basner 3. Malevich and Kandinsky: The Abstract Path  Natalia Avtonomova

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27 40

II 4. Suprematism and Constructivism: An Intersection of Parallels  Tatiana Goriacheva

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5. Malevich and his Ukrainian Contemporaries  Myroslava M. Mudrak

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6. Malevich as Soviet Bureaucrat: Ginkhuk and the Survival of the Avant-Garde, 1924–1926 Pamela Kachurin 7. Malevich and Lenin: Image, Ritual, and the Cube  Konstantin Akinsha

121 139

III 8. Kazimir Malevich and José Ortega-y-Gasset on the “New Art”  Irina Vakar

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9. Living in Space: Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Architecture and the Philosophy of Nikolai Fedorov Christina Lodder

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10. From Vozbuzhdenie to Oshchushchenie: Theoretical Shifts, Nova Generatsiia, and the Late Paintings Adrian Barr

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IV 11. Malevich, Lissitzky, Van Doesburg: Suprematism and De Stijl Linda S. Boersma

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12. Malevich and Western Modernism  Éva Forgács

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13. Malevich and De Chirico Charlotte Douglas

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14. Back to Square One James Lawrence

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15. Aspects of Kazimir Malevich’s Literary Legacy: a Summary Alexandra Shatskikh

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16. Extending Malevich in Russian Contemporary Art Irina Karasik

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VI Notes on Contributors

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Index

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Preface

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ETHINKING Malevich appears at an opportune moment in the evolution of Malevich studies — for the first time this field of art history, long bifurcated between collections in the East and West, has been substantially reintegrated and expanded. After long years of difficulties of access, brought on by the course of history, and Russian and Western cultural politics, the greater portion of Kazimir Malevich’s work — both his art and his writing — is now available for research and study. This collection of essays both exemplifies and summarizes this present state of affairs. Rethinking Malevich is the immediate consequence of the conference of the same name that was held in New York in February 2004 to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Malevich’s birth. The conference, under the aegis of the Malevich Society of New York, brought together specialists working in the United States, Europe, and Russia to consider anew aspects of the artist’s work and biography, many of which were made possible by recent revelations and publications concerning the artist. The story of the dispersal and inaccessibility of Malevich’s artistic legacy is well known. Malevich, born in Ukraine, did his principal and best-known work in Russia. He created his objectless Suprematist style in the geographic and political isolation of the First World War. By the time the war was over, the great masterworks of Suprematism were also at their end. Malevich made his one and only trip abroad in 1927, spending three weeks in Warsaw and nine and a half weeks in Berlin. For anticipated exhibitions and publications in these cities and others, he brought with him close to one hundred paintings, drawings, architectural models, and theoretical charts, and a quantity of theoretical and philosophical writings. The paintings were exhibited in Warsaw in the banquet room of the Hotel Polonia, and again in Berlin in a separate section of the Great Berlin Art Exhibition [Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung]. Heavily redacted versions of two important essays, “Introduction to the Additional Element” and “Suprematism,” were published together in German under the title of The

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Objectless World [Die gegenstandslose Welt] after his departure for home. In anticipation of further exhibitions and publications abroad, Malevich deliberately left the artworks and manuscripts behind when he returned to Russia. Their disposition was subsequently complicated by political events in Western Europe, but eventually most of the works and texts made their way to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where, beginning in the late 1950s, they were made available to scholars and the public.1 The entire archive of writings was published on microfiche by the museum in 1980.2 Four volumes of Malevich’s essays, poems, and letters, edited by Troels Andersen, appeared in English between 1968 and 1978, which gave the Anglophone world access to some of Malevich’s history and aesthetic ideas.3 There were similar translations into French.4 A catalogue raisonné of the 1927 Berlin exhibition, which included a bibliography and other scholarly information, was published in 1970.5 There is no doubt that Malevich would have been profoundly gratified by the enlightened endeavors of Professor Andersen and the Stedelijk Museum. These materials, stemming principally from Malevich’s 1927 journey to the West, formed the basis for most of Western scholarship during the Cold War. In Russia, Malevich died in 1935, just as Stalin’s repression and persecution were escalating. Throughout the Soviet Union, the artist’s work disappeared from public view. For the next fifty years, he was a non-person. Soviet museums denied knowing anything about him. No mention was made of him in print; his name was eliminated from art and reference books. Even Malevich’s later figurative paintings, done after he returned to from his trip abroad — and often given earlier dates by the artist — had to be sequestered by Soviet museums, including the Russian Museum in

About twenty of Malevich’s works made their way to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and were on view there beginning in 1936, the time of the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition. One of these entered the Peggy Guggenheim collection in 1942. Several are now unaccounted for. 2 Kasimir Malevich Archive, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (Zug Switzerland: Inter Documentation Co., 1980). 3 Kazimir Malevich, Essays on Art, ed. Troels Andersen, 4 vols. (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968-1978). 4 K. S. Malevitch, Ecrits, ed. Jean-Claude Marcadé, 4 vols. (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1974-1981). 5 Troels Andersen, Malevich (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1970). 1

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St. Petersburg, where the bulk of this work was kept. Private collections were similarly closely held. Malevich’s art in the ex-Soviet Union remained generally inaccessible to both Russian and Western scholars until the glasnost era, inaugurated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s, finally made it safe to reveal the art, and publish the writings in full. A major addition to the information available about Malevich resulted when in 1993, amidst general scandal and publicity, the scholar and collector Nikolai Khardzhiev emigrated from Moscow to Amsterdam, taking with him his large collection of Russian avant-garde art and manuscripts. In 1994, Russian airport officials confiscated a second portion of the collector’s archives. Khardzhiev died in Amsterdam in 1996 at the age of ninety-three. His extensive collection of manuscripts and drawings, now owned by the Khardzhiev-Chaga Foundation, is housed at the Stedelijk Museum, where they are available to scholars. Some of the paintings, drawings, letters, and manuscripts from this collection have been published, most particularly in 2002 in a large volume in English devoted to Khardzhiev’s collection of avant-garde material, including documents, drawings, and paintings by Malevich.6 Even before the Soviet Union came to an end, the Russian Museum in Leningrad and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam succeeded in reuniting major portions of the East and West works of art in an historic exhibition which opened in Leningrad in 1988, and which then traveled to Moscow and Amsterdam.7 This feat of legal amity was repeated, with local variations, at the National Gallery in Washington in 1990, with venues in New York and Los Angeles. Malevich’s drawings from the Khardzhiev collection were shown in an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in 1997. Several of the paintings were included in the Suprematism exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in

A Legacy Regained: Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-Garde, ed. John E. Bowlt and Mark Konecny (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2002). 7 Kazimir Malevich 1878–1935 (Leningrad: State Russian Museum, 1988). Previously, even when works from these collections had been shown in the West, politics and legal considerations kept them from being shown together. For example, the Malevich exhibition at the S. R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1973 showed only works from the Stedelijk Museum, while the Malevich exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1980 showed only works from the Russian Museum. Kasimir Malewitsch (Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1980). 6

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Berlin in 2003, and subsequently at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.8 These exhibitions and their catalogues have been augmented by the recent appearance of several fundamental publications, which go far to make possible a much belated genuine “rethinking” of the history of Malevich and his art: Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works], a five volume illustrated scholarly edition in Russian of selected writings by Malevich, edited, introduced, and annotated by Alexandra Shatskikh, and published by the Moscow publishing house Gileia between 1995 and 2004. Volume 1 (1995): Articles, manifestoes, theoretical tracts, and other works. 1913–1929. This volume contains a section of articles published by Malevich in the newspaper Anarchy in 1918, separately edited by Andrei Sarabianov. Volume 2 (1998): Articles and theoretical works published in Germany, Poland, and Ukraine 1924–1930. Translation and commentary by Galina Demosfenova. Volume 3 (2000): Suprematism: The World as Objectlessness, or Eternal Rest. With an addendum of correspondence from K. S. Malevich to M. O. Gershenzon (1918–1924). Volume 4 (2003): Tracts and lectures of the first half of the 1920s, with an addendum of correspondence between Malevich and El Lissitzky (1922–1925). (Published with financial support from The Malevich Society, New York.) Volume 5 (2004): Works from various years: articles, tracts, manifestoes, and declarations. Projects. Lectures. Notes and observations. Poetry. (Published with financial support from The Malevich Society, New York.) Malevich o sebe. Sovremenniki o Malevich. [Malevich about Himself: Contemporaries about Malevich] (Moscow: RA, 2004). A twovolume illustrated edition of Malevich’s letters and documents, and

Drawings from the collection of the Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1997). Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2003). 8

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contemporaries’ memoirs and criticism. Collected and extensively annotated by Irina Vakar and Tatiana Mikhienko, with contributions from other scholars. (Published with financial support from The Malevich Society, New York.) Volume 1: Malevich’s autobiographical texts. Two hundred ninteen letters from Malevich to various people. Forty-four letters from Malevich to his wife, Natalia Manchenko. Two hundred fiftyfour official documents related to Malevich’s life and work. One hundred seventy documentary illustrations. Volume 2: One hundred and fifty-eight texts drawn from memoirs, letters, and other descriptions of Malevich and his activities. Forty-five published exhibition and book reviews, and other critical texts. A catalogue of fifty-six exhibitions in which Malevich participated, and the works shown. An essay by Irina Vakar on the most significant people in Malevich’s life. Two hundred thirty-one documentary illustrations. Andrzej Turowski, Malewicz w Warszawie: Rekonstrukcje i Symulacje [Malevich in Warsaw: Reconstruction and Simulation] (Cracow: Universitas, 2002). An extended meditation on Malevich’s 1927 journey and exhibitions. In addition, this beautifully produced book includes details of Malevich’s geneology, a discussion of his philosophy, documents and reviews published in Poland, correspondence, and a summary of the recent fate of the artist’s works. (Published with financial support from The Malevich Society, New York.) Kazimir Malevich in the State Russian Museum, ed. Yevgenia Petrova, with essays by Elena Basner, Svetlana Rimskaia-Korsakova, and other scholars. (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000). This is a detailed examination of all of Malevich’s work held by the museum, including extensive revised dating of these works. Published in both Russian and English editions. Striking by its absence among these publications, is any definitive book on the origins and early history of Suprematism, Malevich’s central achievement. As Rethinking Malevich goes to press, this situation is being rectified by the publication (by Tri Kvadrata Press in Moscow) of Malevich and the Supremus Society [Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus] by Aleksandra

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Shatskikh. (Published with financial support from The Malevich Society, New York.) In spite of the wealth of bibliographical resources mentioned above, there still remain lingering problems of access, including East-West bifurcations. Most serious is the portion of unpublished manuscripts and other materials that were confiscated in 1994, and which remain sequestered by the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow. More details on the history of Malevich’s written legacy may be found in Aleksandra Shatskikh’s contribution to this volume. Many more studies are needed to fill in the historical gaps that remain in the history of Malevich and his art. Among them are: a more detailed analysis of the early family and professional history of the artist; an unbiased scholarly biography; an intellectual biography that focuses on sources and comparative studies; reception studies for the various areas of Russia and the ex-Soviet Union, as well as for the West; and a day-by-day chronology of Malevich’s activities. The essays in this book make a beginning on several of these subjects. The establishment of a relatively firm chronology of Malevich’s paintings now allows confident comparisons of his work with that of his contemporaries, such as the comparative studies of two distinct periods in Malevich’s and Kandinsky’s art by Elena Basner and Natalia Avtonomova. John Bowlt addresses the history of the artist Fedor Rerberg’s importance to Malevich early in his career. Here, one may note, the author brings to light several lingering chronological questions. The conceptual roots of Russian avant-garde art are illuminated by Tatiana Goriacheva’s study of the early understanding of the term ‘construction’ by Malevich and other artists, and the complex interweavings of Suprematism and Constructivism that resulted. The reception of Malevich in the West is a subject undertaken in several essays. Éva Forgács’s contribution looks at Lissitzky’s efforts to introduce Malevich to Western audiences, and describes the difficulties inherent in bridging differing cultural and artistic concepts. Linda Boersma explores the exchanges of information between Dutch modernists and their Russian counterparts, and explains the relationship between Suprematism and Neoplasticism, two visually similar styles inaugurated by Malevich and Theo van Doesburg, respectively. James Lawrence analyzes the reception of Malevich’s art in the U.S., from the time of Alfred Barr’s Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936, to the 1960s

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interpretation by American Minimalist artists, particularly Barnett Newman and Donald Judd. The history of Russian and Soviet art in the 1920s and 1930s is necessarily intricately interwoven with the revolutionary social changes taking place throughout the country. Pamela Kachurin’s essay, solidly based on archival sources, follows Malevich’s confrontation of these realities, and the political adjustments he was able to make to protect his own work, and that of his artistic circle. Konstantin Akinsha describes Malevich’s reaction to Lenin’s death in 1924, his historic funeral, and the growth of the “Lenin myth.” Myroslava Mudrak examines the artist’s special relationship with Ukraine, and his interactions with Ukrainian contemporaries in the late 1920s, when he attempted to work in Kiev to escape artistic restrictions then prevalent in Leningrad. In their comparisons of Malevich’s concepts and esthetics with those of the philosophers Ortega y Gasset and Nikolai Fedorov, Irina Vakar and Christina Lodder highlight the artist’s place among contemporary thinkers, and make substantial contributions to his intellectual biography. It is no coincidence that several of the essays presented here pertain to the late works of Malevich, those done after the “white on white” paintings, shortly before and after his trip to Western Europe in the spring of 1927. In contrast to the Suprematist paintings, these have been studied very little; their relatively new accessibility make them a desirable subject of inquiry. The essays by Lodder on Malevich’s architectural models, by Adrian Barr on the artist’s late writings published in Ukraine, and their significance for decoding the figurative work, and by Charlotte Douglas on Giorgio de Chirico’s meaning for Malevich as he grappled with the judgment of history, all examine little researched aspects of the Post-Suprematist period. Finally, at the end of this volume devoted mainly to history, Irina Karasik describes the various ways in which Malevich is being “rethought” in today’s art, where in the work of contemporary Russian artists he can be seen in many forms and semblances, an enduring presence whose long shadow was cast far into the future. Charlotte Douglas 23 April 2007 New York

Malevich Scholarship: A Brief Introduction Christina Lodder

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AZIMIR MALEVICH has long been established as one of the great artists of twentieth-century art — a pioneer of abstraction, the creator of the Black Square, and an artist whose works have occupied an honored position in that pantheon of Western modernism, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, since 1936. After so long, it might be assumed that his career and his works have been thoroughly studied and there is little left to investigate. Yet, the fact is that there are still significant gaps in our knowledge of Malevich. In part, this is the result of historical circumstances. Even before his death in 1935, Malevich had fallen out of favor with the Soviet authorities. His exhibition at the Tretiakov Gallery, which opened in November 1929, was not censored, but neither was it reviewed in the Moscow press. Such passive tolerance soon changed into active hostility. By the time the show had been transferred to the Kiev Art Gallery in early 1930, it had become the focus of official disapproval.1 The exhibition had barely opened in the Ukraine, when it was closed, and the director of the gallery, Fedor Kumpan, imprisoned for the crime of exhibiting the work of a “bourgeois” artist.2 That same year, Malevich himself was arrested and questioned about his activities. Released after three months, he became officially unemployed,

I should like to express my gratitude to Charlotte Douglas and Kostantin Akinsha whose suggestions have been invaluable in the process of compiling this introduction. 1 On this exhibition, see Irina Vakar, “The Kazimir Malevich Exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery in 1929,” in The Russian Avant-Garde: Representation and Interpretation (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2001), 121–137. 2 See Dmitry Gorbachev, “‘We Reminisced about the Ukraine. We were Both Ukrainians’,” in Ukrajinska Avangarda 1910–1930 (Zagreb: Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, 1990), 196–199.

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eventually being allowed to work in a basement room at the State Russian Museum. In April 1932, the government’s decree “On the Reformation of Literary and Artistic Organizations” liquidated all independent artistic and literary groups, and officially began the process that would see the Communist Party exercise strict control over the country’s artistic life, and impose the doctrine of Socialist Realism on all fields of creative activity.3 Malevich was left in no doubt as to how he stood. In the exhibition Art from the Imperialist Epoch, his painting of Sportsmen [Athletes] (Fig. 10–2) was presented as an example of pre-revolutionary, “bourgeois” art. Despite this, he figured quite prominently in the show Artists of the RSFSR during 15 Years, which opened at the State Russian Museum in Leningrad in 1932, before the number of his works was drastically reduced when the exhibition moved to the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow. Malevich only contributed to three more group exhibitions before his death: an Exhibition of Works by Touring Artists (1933), The Woman in Socialist Construction (1934), and The First Exhibition of Leningrad Artists (1935). Meanwhile, his Suprematist works remained on display in the Tretiakov Gallery under the disparaging caption “bourgeois art at an impasse.”4 In 1936, the head of the Committee on Art Affairs [Komitet po delam iskusstv] Platon Kerzhentsev, as part of a concerted campaign against formalism, vehemently condemned the Russian Avant-Garde in Pravda.5 As a result, all innovative works were removed from public display at the Tretiakov Gallery and elsewhere.6 Malevich’s canvases became inaccessible and remained so throughout the Stalin period and even beyond; they were not shown again in his homeland until 1962. The artist’s name was barely mentioned in Soviet art history books. Documents and information suffered a similar fate; access was restricted and discouraged.

3 For the text in English, see C. Vaughan James, Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory (London: Macmillan, 1973), 120. 4 See, for instance, the photograph of the Experimental Complex Exhibition of the Art of the Epoch of Captialism, at the Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, 1931–2, reproduced in I. Lebedeva, “Avant-Garde Art in the Permanent Exhibition of the Tretyakov Gallery in the 1920s and 1930s,” in The Russian Avant-garde, 143. 5 P. Kerzhentsev, “O Tret’iakovskoi galeree,”Pravda, 7 June 1936, 3. Cited by Lebedeva, “Avant-Garde Art,” 146. For more details on Kerzhentsev’s role in Soviet artistic life of the 1930s, see Leonid Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki. Stalinskaia kul’turnaia revoliutsiia 1936–1938 (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia kniga, 1997). 6 Lebedeva, “Avant-Garde Art,” 146.

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Western scholars eager for information about Malevich had to rely on the few articles, books, and catalogues published in Russia during the artist’s life time, as well as the small handful of publications that had appeared in the West, such as the celebrated Bauhaus book of 1927, and Alfred H. Barr’s Cubism and Abstract Art catalogue of 1936.7 There was also the invaluable cache of documents and paintings that Malevich had left in Germany in 1927, on the occasion of the artist’s first and only visit to the West.8 This artistic heritage was successfully rescued from the Nazis’ destruction of degenerate art by the architect Hugo Häring and the curator Alexander Dorner, who together looked after the paintings, while the manuscripts remained in the care of Gustav von Riesen, to whom Malevich had entrusted them before his departure from Berlin. During the 1930s, some of the visual material made its way to America, either with Dorner (who later became curator of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art), or under Barr’s protection for display at the Cubism and Abstract Art show of 1936. The latter paintings subsequently remained at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and were more or less consistently on display, acting as a constant testimony to Malevich’s pictorial inventiveness, and a continued source of inspiration for American artists. Although a number of paintings and architectural models in Germany and Poland were destroyed during the Second World War, most of the works that remained in the West stayed in Häring’s possession until they were acquired by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in the 1950s.9 It was on the basis of this material in the West, as well as on certain materials available in Russia, that Troels Andersen produced the first major scholarly study of Malevich in 1970. This presented the first coherent account of the artist and his work, dispelling some of the myths that had grown up around the artist, and containing the first extensive listing of the paintings, drawings, prints, and architectural models, as well as a valuable bibliography.10 Andersen’s study represented a vital step forward in the

7 Kasimir Malewitsch, Die gegenstandlose Welt (Munich: Albert Langen, 1927) and Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936). 8 See Joop M. Joosten, “Berlin 1927,” in Kazimir Malevich 1878–1935 (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1990), 22–29. 9 Joop M. Joosten, “Malevich in the Stedelijk,” in Kazimir Malevich 1978–1935 (Leningrad: State Russian Museum, 1988; Moscow: State Tretiakov Gallery, 1988–9), 44–54. In 2004, Joosten admitted that this account was inaccurate. See Sylvia Hochfield, “Smoke Screen at the Stedelijk,” Art News (December 2004).

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process of defining the nature and extent of the artist’s oeuvre as well as disentangling fact from fiction. Its impact was reinforced by the publication, also under Andersen’s direction, of English translations of Malevich’s writings in two volumes. By the end of the 1970s, these were supplemented by another two volumes of writings, and eventually by the publication of a series of microfiches, reproducing Malevich’s manuscripts in the Stedelijk’s collection.11 Together, these five volumes and the microfiches represented a solid, although still incomplete, basis of material for understanding Malevich’s theory and practice, and, to this day, they remain an essential reference for all scholars researching the artist’s ideas and work. After the appearance of Camilla Gray’s book The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922 in 1962,12 interest in Russian art increased, and several important projects were undertaken by Western art historians. While John E. Bowlt and Valentine Marcadé provided the first comprehensive accounts of a range of important trends in Russian art of the first three decades of the twentieth century, Linda Dalrymple Henderson connected Malevich’s Suprematism to notions of the fourth dimension, and Charlotte Douglas’ Swans of Other Worlds provided the first detailed account of the emergence of Suprematism, relating it to the philosophical, literary, and cultural developments of the period.13 Since these pioneering contributions, other scholars, such as Susan Compton, Donald Karshan, Jean-Claude Marcadé, Andrei Nakov, William Sherwin Simmons, and others, have taken up the challenge and scrutinized the available archival, pictorial, and documentary material in depth to throw additional light on the artist’s work and ideas. Such intensive scholarship in the West was complemented by research

Troels Andersen, Malevich: Catalogue raisonné of the Berlin exhibition 1927, including the collection in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; with a general introduction to his work (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1970). 11 Kazimir S. Malevich, Essays On Art 1915–1933, 2 vols., ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968); Kazimir S. Malevich, The World as Non-Objectivity: Unpublished Writings 1922–25, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Hoffman and Edmund T. Little (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976); Kazimir S. Malevich, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism: Unpublished Writings 1913–33, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Hoffman (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1978). 12 Camilla Gray, The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1962; London: Thames and Hudson, 1962). 13 Charlotte Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the Origins of Abstraction in Russia (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980). 10

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in the East. In the 1970s, certain Soviet scholars were able to reinstate Malevich within the history of their country’s art, while still working within the constraints imposed by the ideology of Communism and Marxist materialism. Ironically, although they would have liked to produce just the kind of formal Greenbergian analysis that was beginning to lose favor in the West, to talk about form, color and space, they found themselves constricted by the aesthetics of Socialist Realism and forced to emphasize the sociological and historical aspects of artistic creativity in their publications. That they managed to produce valuable material is a testament to their commitment, energy, enterprise, and initiative. In the annual publication of the Pushkin House archives in Leningrad for 1974 (appearing in print in 1976), the art historian Evgeny Kovtun published ten letters from Malevich to the composer Mikhail Matiushin, with extensive introduction and copious notes.14 Kovtun went on to do a considerable amount of solid historical research, which was based on important primary material, which he discovered, as well as vital archival sources, which he helped to locate and preserve. His substantial efforts laid the groundwork for subsequent research and helped to elucidate the artist’s chronology and development. Sadly, Kovtun’s death in 1998 interrupted his own work of elaborating his ideas and insights into a full-length and detailed study of Malevich, just at the point when it was becoming possible to publish such a book in Russia. In a very different spirit, Larissa Zhadova’s monograph (published in East Germany in 1978 several years after its completion, and later translated into English), sought to rehabilitate Malevich by emphasizing Suprematism’s relationship to design, by stressing the artist’s revolutionary and ideological credentials, and by distancing him from any spiritual interpretations. She asserted, for instance, that “Mysticism was quite alien to Malevich’s artistic temperament.”15 Such statements and strategies were absolutely essential at the time she was writing, for, as she herself so candidly admitted, she was only able to publish her work at all because she was the wife of Konstantin Simonov, the celebrated Soviet writer and winner of the Lenin Prize.16 Despite his powerful support, her book never appeared in Russian. Zhadova, Kovtun 14 “K. S. Malevich, ‘Pis’ma k M. V. Matiushinu,’” publikatsiia E. F. Kovtuna in Ezhegodnik rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma na 1974 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976), 177–195. 15 Larissa A. Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910–1930, trans. Alexander Lieven (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982). 16 Simonov himself published an article on Malevich, possibly written by Zhadova, which reproduced four images: Malevich’s drawing of a future planit for Leningrad; his Portrait of the

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and the literary scholar Nikolai Khardzhiev (who amassed a vast collection of Malevich’s works and manuscripts) all found it easier to publish work on Malevich in the West than to find a publisher in the Soviet Union.17 This is also true of many scholars in Central and Eastern Europe who remained behind the Iron Curtain, although the Czech art historian Miroslav Lamač did succeed in publishing a substantial article about Malevich in Prague in the 1960s.18 Zhadova, of course, was not alone in stressing the design potential of Malevich’s output in order to publish the artist’s work in his homeland. This strategy had actually been used as early as the 1920s: in 1927–8, by Alexei Gan as editor of Contemporary Architecture and later by Fedorov-Davydov in his preface to the booklet published in conjunction with Malevich’s 1929 exhibition.19 The continued effectiveness of this tactic was demonstrated in the 1970s, when the journal Technical Aesthetics, and scholars at the Higher Scientific and Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics, promoted and published research into the entire field of the Russian Avant-Garde under this rubric. Valuable and informative articles appeared on a range of subjects and creative figures, including Malevich, by scholars who are now acknowledged to be leading experts on the 1920s: Natalia Adaskina, Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, Kovtun, Alla Povelikhina, Vasily Rakitin, Elena Sidorina, Anatoly Strigalev, and Zhadova herself.20 The journal Decorative Artist’s Daughter ; a photograph of Malevich on his deathbed, and one of the funeral courtege on Nevskii Prospect near the Moscow station. See Konstantin Simonov, “ ‘Vvidu zaslug pered sovetskim izobrazitel’nym iskusstvom …’ (Neskol’ko redkikh fotografii i neskol’ko slov v sviazi s nimi),” Nauka i zhizn’, 12 (1975): 126–7. 17 See N. Khardzhiev, K. Malevich and M. Matiushin, K istorii russkogo avangarda, ed. N. Khardzhiev (Stockholm: Hylaea, 1976). 18 Miroslav Lamač, “Malevič a jeho okruh [Malevich and his circle],” Výtvarné Uměni, 8/9 (1967): 373–383. This generously illustrated issue, published by the Czechoslovak Association of Artists, was devoted to the Russian Avant-Garde, and contained works and texts by Malevich, his students, and other artists. See also, Miroslav Lamač, “Malevich – le méconnu,” Cimaise, 15, no 85–86 (February–May, 1968): 38–45; Juři Padrta and Miroslav Lamač, “Malevitch et le suprématisme.” Suprématisme (Paris: Galerie Jean Chauvelin, 1977), 7–21; and Juři Padrta, “Malevitch et Khlebnikov,” Malévitch: Colloque international Kazimir Malévitch, ed. J-Cl. Marcadé (Lausanne: L’age d’Homme 1979), 31–45. 19 Aleksei Gan, “Spravka o Kazimire Malevich,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, 3 (1927):106; Kazimir Malevich, “ Pis’mo v rekatsiiu,”, Sovremennaia arkhitektura, 5 (1928): 157; Kazimir Malevich, “Forma, tsvet i oshchushchenie,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, 5 (1928): 157–159; and A. A. Fedorov-Davydov, “Iskusstvo K. S. Malevicha,” Vystavka proizvendenii K. S. Malevicha (Moscow: Izdanie gosudarstvennoi Tretiakovskoi gallerei, 1929), 5–10.

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Art, dedicated to contemporary craft and design, pursued a similarly liberal policy concerning avant-garde developments. Although no single article appeared on Malevich, he was often mentioned. Clearly, one of the ways in which work about the Avant-Garde was able to appear in Soviet Russia was precisely by emphasizing the aspect of design.21 Despite such efforts, it was only in 1988, just a few years before the final overthrow of Communism and over fifty years after Malevich’s death, that the first major exhibition of his work was shown in his homeland.22 That display stimulated a re-appraisal of the artist and encouraged further research into his oeuvre and writings. Thus a new phase in Malevich studies really began with perestroika in the 1980s and was encouraged further by the collapse of the communist regime in 1991, when the archives and store rooms of the museums and galleries were at last fully opened to scholars, the intellectual restrictions imposed by communist ideology were lifted, and publishing became free of all state control. Russian art historians were now at liberty to pursue all kinds

Publications in Technical Aesthetics’ flagship journal included items that discussed Malevich in the context of other subjects, as for example, L. A. Zhadova, “Iz istorii sovetskoi polikhromii,”, Technicheskaia estetika, 7 (1975): 53–60; and E. F. Kovtun and A. V. Povelikhina, “‘Utez iz budushchego’. (Arkhitekturnye idei Velimira Khlebnikova),” Tekhnicheskaia estetika, 5–6 (1976). The research institute, Vsesoyuznyi nauchno-issledovatel’skii institut tekhnicheskoi estetiki or VNIITE, regularly produced a series of booklets as well as special conference proceedings. The range of topics frequently included Malevich. See, for instance, G. L. Demosfenova, “K istorii pedagogicheskoi deiatel’nosti K. S. Malevicha,” Trudy Viinte, Tekhnicheskaia estetika, no. 59, Stranitsy istorii otechestvennogo dizaina (Moscow, 1989),143–170. This included Malevich’s text “V sovet 2-kkh gosudarstvennykh svobodnykh khudozhestvennykh masterskikh”, his advertisment for textile workers from 1919, and several texts from the Vitebsk school, Unovis, and extracts from Lev Iudin’s diary. See also, L. A. Zhadova, “K. S. Malevich — zhivopis’, tsvetopis’, ob’emostroenie (K stoletiiu s dnaia rozhdeniia khudozhnika),” in Khudozhestvennye problemy predmentno-prostranstvennoi sredi (Moscow: VNIITE, 1978), 33–38; A. A. Strigalev, “Stilisticheskaia evolutsiia ob’emnogo suprematizma,” ibid. 44–48; and V. I. Rakitin, “Utilitarnoe i bespredmetnoe”, ibid. 71–74. 21 The VNIITE was not alone in pursuing this policy. With many of the same scholars, the Central Scientific Research and Planning Institute for City Construction (Tsentral’nyi nauchno-issledovatel’skii i proektnyi institut po gradostroitel’stvu) also produced a publication called the Problems of the History of Soviet Architecture, which had an equally tolerant outlook, and published work on avant-garde figures such as Malevich. See, for instance, L. A. Zhadova, “Gosudarstvennyi institut khudozhestvennoi kul’tury (GINKhUK), v Leningrade,” Problemy istorii sovetskoi arkhitektury, 4 (1978): 25–41. 22 Kazimir Malevich 1878–1935. [See note 9] 20

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of independent investigations into the artist’s life and work, and to publish their thoughts and findings. Exhibitions were organized, and catalogues produced that illustrated obscure works and hitherto unknown materials, and contained illuminating essays by Russian scholars such as Elena Basner, Tatiana Goriacheva, Irina Karasik, Irinia Mikhienko, Evgenia Petrova, and Dmitry Sarabianov. This development has resulted in some remarkable and substantial new work, including two ground-breaking publications: Alexandra Shatskikh’s monumental, five-volume edition of the artist’s writings, and the two-volume compilation of letters, documents and memoirs by Irina Vakar and Tatiana Mikhienko.23 In Eastern Europe, the Polish art historian Andrzej Turowski also benefited from the relaxation of ideological controls, and conducted a rigorous investigation into Malevich’s Polish antecedents, and the artist’s relationship to his own Polish heritage.24 Turowski’s access to Ukrainian archives brought to light the fact that the artist was born, not in 1878, as was always thought, but in 1879.25 In Belarus, scholars have scrutinized the activities of Malevich and his students at Unovis [Champions of the New Art], the Suprematist group that was organized in Vitebsk during the Civil War.26 Likewise, in Ukraine, art historians have been at pains to explore the artist’s connections with the land where he grew up, and where he worked in the late 1920s.27 While Soviet repression greatly complicated Malevich studies, the artist himself also did much to muddy the historical waters. As his friend and admirer the literary scholar Nikolai Khardzhiev stressed, Malevich enjoyed mystifying people — his pupils, friends, and critics.28 The artist made misleading inscriptions on photographs, and he sometimes deliberately

23 Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. Alexandra Shatskikh (Moscow: Gileia, 1995–2004). Malevich o sebe. Sovremenniki o Malevich. Pis’ma. Dokumenty. Vospominaniya. Kritika, 2 vols., eds. Irina Vakar and Tatiana Mikhienko (Moscow: RA, 2004). 24 Andrzej Turowski, Malewicz w Warszawie: Rekonstrukcje i Symulacje (Cracow: Universitas, 2002). 25 Ibid., 46–50. 26 See the series of small books Malevich. Klassicheskii avangard. Vitebsk, 1–9 (Vitebsk: Izdatel’stvo N. A. Pan’kov, 1997–2007). 27 See particularly the work of Dmitry Gorbachev, “ ‘We Reminisced about the Ukraine’.” 28 Nikolai Khardzhiev, “Vmesto predislovie” in Khardzhiev, K istorii russkogo avangarda, 91.

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misinformed his colleagues. His dating of his artworks was particularly erratic, reflecting the fierce competition between avant-garde artists at the time, and his desire to establish his own creative priority. When he invented Suprematism in the spring of 1915, he immediately dated it back to 1913, on the grounds that it was at this point that the germ of the idea had first emerged.29 Presumably, it was on this basis, too, that he dated some Suprematist architectural designs 1913, although the majority were not conceived until the 1920s.30 His boldest and most successful “mystification” was to present the Black Square as the first Suprematist canvas.31 This was a myth that generations of artists and scholars believed. Once Malevich had painted this work, he clearly realized its potential as an iconic symbol for objectless art; he sacrificed truth for the sake of artistic simplicity and impact. The process of disentangling fact from fiction, dating individual works, and establishing a coherent chronology of his overall development overall is still not complete. Soviet neglect and Malevich’s own mythologizing tendencies have made the task of tracing Malevich’s early artistic development particularly difficult. Many of the paintings that the artist dated to the 1900s were actually painted in the late 1920s or early 1930s.32 By this time, Malevich was acutely conscious of the need to establish his own position within the history of Russian art, and to set down the story of his own artistic development — a dual process that involved re-inventing his career, re-evaluating his work, re-creating old paintings, and even producing entirely new ones. Both the See, for instance, Malevich’s statement, “Suprematism can be divided into three stages . . . all three periods developed between 1913 and 1918.” (K. Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka (Vitebsk, 1920), [1]. 30 Malevich inscribed the date 1913 on one of the drawings illustrating the development of Suprematist architecture. See Malevich, Tablitsa No. 1. Formula Suprematizma, 1920s, watercolour, gouache and pencilon paper, 36 x 54 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; Fig. 9–3. 31 Malevich suggested that the Black Square was the first Suprematist painting by placing it above all his other Suprematist paintings, when he launched his new style at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero – Ten). See Fig. 9–2. His writings reinforced the painting’s position. See K. Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm (Moscow, 1916), and Suprematizm. 34 risunka (Vitebsk, 1920). 32 See Charlotte Douglas, «Malevich’s Painting: Some Problems in Chronology,» Soviet Union, 5/2 (1978): 301–326; and Elena Basner, “Malevich’s Paintings in the Collection of the Russian Museum (The Matter of the Artist’s Creative Evolution),” in Kazimir Malevich in the Russian Museum (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000), 15–27. 29

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artist’s memoirs and many of these “early” paintings were produced at a time when the Soviet authorities were promoting Socialist Realism, an art that was realist in form and socialist in content. Malevich’s desire to present himself and his art in a favorable light undoubtedly affected the forms of both the recollections and the works. The task of the clarification of Malevich’s oeuvre has been compounded in recent years by persistent questions concerning the authenticity of some paintings and drawings. The years of repression and concealment of Malevich’s work have made it extremely difficult to build up the kind of detailed technical and visual knowledge of Malevich’s output that is essential for a scholarly catalogue raisonné. The proliferation of questionable works, and various misattributions of student art, has meant that there is now circulating a great number of works, particularly drawings, that are attributed to Malevich, but which might not be by him at all. Given these problems, Andrei Nakov’s catalogue raisonné seems somewhat premature.33 The interpretation of Malevich’s Suprematism has undergone several different stages of development in the decades since its invention. Ignored in his homeland, Malevich’s abstraction was seen by Western art historians, particularly in the 1960s, as the precursor of an art that focused primarily on the way that the painting was produced, and elevated the means of art to its content. Form, color, rhythm, and pictorial space in the painting became all-important. Such interpretations, usually labeled “formalist,” were in line with Clement Greenberg’s criticism, which justified and explained American Abstract Expressionism.34 This approach to Malevich’s oeuvre was challenged by art historians concerned to elucidate the philosophy that lay at the root of Malevich’s art. As his published and unpublished writings became more readily available, greater emphasis came to be placed on the more mystical aspirations that accompanied the artist’s move into Suprematism, such as its connection with notions of the fourth dimension.35 Likewise, Malevich’s work began to be related to contemporary Russian literary theories, espe-

Andrei Nakov, Kazimir Malewicz: Catalogue raisonné (Paris: Adam Biro, 2002). See, for example, George Rickey, Constructivism: Origins and Evolution (New York: Rizzoli, 1968). While formalist analysis never focused exclusively on the formal qualities of the work of art, such qualities were emphasised. 35 Among other works, there are Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “The Merging of Time and Space: ‘The Fourth Dimension’ in Russia from Ouspensky to Malevich,” The Structurist, 15/16 (1975–6): 97–108; Charlotte Douglas, “Beyond Reason: Malevich, Matiushin and 33 34

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cially zaum (beyonsense or the transrational), which divorced words from their conventional meanings and encouraged poets to combine sounds and syllables in an irrational way, and to create nonsense words.36 Other factors have since come to be emphasized, including Malevich’s relationship to semiotics, politics, mathematics, technology, and various philosophical ideas such as those of Schopenhauer, Kant and Bergson. Art historians such as Patricia Railing, Margarita Tupitsyn, and John Milner (to name but a few) have presented Malevich in a new light, through the prism of technical drawing, film, and mathematics, while philosophers like Paul Crowther have explored the philosophical connections.37 As post-modernism replaced modernism as a dominant approach in Western art history, the emphasis in Malevich studies also changed, especially in relation to the artist’s paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s. These late works, in which Malevich returned to a figurative content, used to be regarded as an ideological and aesthetic retreat from the high point of Suprematism. They were seen in an entirely negative light as being symptomatic of Malevich’s compromise with (and ultimately defeat by) the Soviet regime, as well as epitomizing his betrayal of modernism. They were, as the art historian T. J. Clark put it so succinctly, “the scandal of modernist orthodoxy.”38 They were virtually ignored by Western scholars until Charlotte Douglas produced her innovative and perceptive analysis, initiating the process of integrating these figurative works into the artist’s overall oeuvre.39 Even so, when they were shown in large numbers for the first time at Düsseldorf

Their Circles,” in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and New York: Abbeville Press, 1987), 185–199; and Susan P. Compton, “Malevich’s Suprematism — The Higher Intuition,” The Burlington Magazine, 118, no. 881 (August 1976): 576–583, 585. 36 Charlotte Douglas, “Views from the New World: A. Kruchenykh and K. Malevich”, Russian Literature Tri-Quarterly (Spring 1975), 352–370; and Rainer Crone and David Moos, Kazimir Malevich: The Climax of Disclosure (London: Reaktion Books, 1991). 37 See for instance, Patricia Railing, “Some Principles of Suprematist Thought,” in Malevich on Suprematism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1999); Margarita Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002); John Milner, Kazimir Malevich and the Art of Geometry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996); and Paul Crowther, “Philosophy and Non Objectivity,” Art and Design, 5, no.5/6 (1989): 51–54. 38 T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). 39 Douglas, “Malevich’s Painting”.

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in 1980, critics tended to respond negatively, and to suspect that the Soviet regime was trying to discredit the heroic pioneer of abstraction. Since the extensive display at the major retrospective of 1988–9, however, these painting have become more of a focus of interest in their own right. Instead of being dismissed as merely repetitive and defeatist, they have been reassessed and reinterpreted. Now, instead of representing the eclipse of Suprematism, they are considered to be innovative and a continuation of the Suprematist enterprise, and even to represent a new phase of Suprematism. In this constant and endless work of researching and evaluating Malevich’s art and ideas, art historians have, of course, benefited enormously from the work of scholars studying other members of the Russian AvantGarde. The climate of openness in Russia since 1991 has made all sorts of material more readily accessible, and new information about one artist has often had important ramifications for our understanding of the others. For instance, a letter by the artist Olga Rozanova includes a sketch and inscription of Malevich’s painting Automobile and Lady: Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, which was first exhibited at the launching of Suprematism at the Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10 (Zero Ten),40 confirming the identification of the painting from the existing photograph of the display (Fig. 9–2). Yet, often new material complicates the issues and raises new problems. Rozanova’s abstract paper collages, for instance, challenge Malevich’s status as the inventor of geometric objectless art in Russia. Produced independently, Rozanova’s collages “must be counted as one of the “earliest appearances of abstraction in Russia.” 41 Rozanova felt that Malevich had stolen her ideas. She wrote to Alexei Kruchenykh, “The whole of Suprematism is completely my paste-ups . . . Did you show my pasteups to Malevich?”42 The issue of the precise nature of the relationship between the two artists remains unresolved. Today there is an army of talented scholars in both East and West, determined to tackle such questions, probe Malevich’s works and ideas, 40 Amazons of the Avant-Garde: Exter, Goncharova, Popova, Rozanova, Stepanova, Udaltsova, eds. John E. Bowlt and Matthew Drutt (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1999), 324, 327. 41 Charlotte Douglas “The Art of Pure Design: The Move to Abstraction in Russian and English Art and Textiles: A Meditation,” in Russian Art and The West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts, ed. Rosalind P. Blakesley and Susan E. Reid, (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 99–101. Quotation, ibid, 100. 42 Ol’ga Rozanova, letter to Aleksei Kruchenykh, 2–4 January 1916; cited in Douglas, “The Art of Pure Design,” 100.

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investigate existing material, uncover new information, and develop new insights. This volume is conceived as a summation of what has been established, and an attempt to generate further research and open up new perspectives. It is dedicated to what Malevich scholars have achieved, while hoping to inspire and stimulate future endeavors. * * * * * Names Since Malevich spent most of his time in Russia itself, we have used the English transliteration of his name as it appeared in Russian, i.e. Kazimir Malevich. The Polish spelling of his name is Kazimierz Malewicz, while in Ukrainian his name is given as Kazymyr Malevych. Reflecting the troubled history of Russia, the city founded by Peter the Great as Sankt-Peterburg at the beginning of the eighteenth century, has changed its name several times. Following the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, it was given the more patriotic, i.e. the less Germanic sounding, name of Petrograd. Ten years later, after Lenin’s death in January 1924, the city became Leningrad in his honor, and that is how it was known for over seventy years. Only with the fall of Communism in 1991 did it revert to its pre-1914 name of Sankt-Peterburg — in English, St Petersburg. Throughout this book, the city is referred to by the name appropriate to the time of reference. The Calendar On 31 January 1918, Russia caught up with the rest of Europe and adopted the Gregorian calendar. Before this, dates in Russia went according to the Julian calendar — 12 days behind the Gregorian dates in the nineteenth century, and 13 days behind in the twentieth century. Hence the Bolshevik uprising took on place on 25 October 1917 according to the Russian calendar, but on 7 November according to Western usage. (This is why the anniversaries of the October Revolution were celebrated on 7 November.) In this text, the new style of dating is used throughout, even for events that occurred prior to the calendar change. Kazimir Severinovich Malevich’s date of birth is, therefore, given as 22 February 1878, rather than 10 February, which was the “old style.”

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The System of Transliteration The system of transliteration employed in this text is the “Modified Library of Congress System,” with the alteration that the Russian hard and soft signs have been omitted from the main body of the text. Russian surnames have usually been rendered according to this system, except where particular variants have become well established in Western usage, e.g. Marc Chagall not Mark Shagal; El Lissitzky, not Lazar Lisitskii; and Leon Trotsky, not Lev Trotskii. For the sake of consistency, names have been altered in quotations in accordance with this practice.

I

1 Kazimir Malevich and Fedor Rerberg John E. Bowlt

I

N spite of major publications, exhibitions, and conferences, the life and work of Kazimir Malevich still confront the researcher with moments of mystery and enigma. Certainly, Malevich is not as recondite as Pavel Filonov or Solomon Nikritin, but issues persist that either still defy adequate explanation or have yet to be examined in detail. What was Malevich’s philosophical response to Symbolism and whence came the fabulous gold and ocher of his pictures of 1907? When he spoke of the “iconic” phase of his artistic development, exactly which icons did he have in mind? Whence derived the numeration “0.10”? Why, at the twilight of his career, did Malevich turn to the Florentine Renaissance? These are only some of the many questions that have still to be answered in any comprehensive manner. Yet another unexpected lacuna is that of Malevich’s early training in Moscow from 1904 onwards, especially his enrolment at Fedor Rerberg’s Art Institute between 1906 and 1910.1 This is the focus of my essay.

1 Opinions vary as to the exact date of Malevich’s enrolment at Fedor Rerberg’s Art Institute. Many sources indicate 1905, for example, Larissa A. Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910–1930, trans. Alexander Lieven (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 11. According to other sources, however, including his own memoirs, Rerberg opened his institute only in 1906. See Fedor Rerberg, “Memuary. Plan” in Russian State Archives of Literature and Art, Moscow (RGALI) fond 2443, op. 1, ed. khr.113, l. 61. See also I. G. Miamlin, “Introduction,” in F. Rerberg, Sbornik vospominanii, ed. A. A. Miroliubova and I. G. Miamlin (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1986), 17; I. V. Kliun, Moi put’ v iskusstve. Vospominaniia, stat’i, dnevniki, ed. Andrei Sarab’ianov (Moscow: RA, 1999), 8. However, both before and after establishing his institute, Rerberg also gave lessons privately, and at other centers of higher learning, such as the Bess Gymnasium in Moscow. See

2

Who was Fedor Ivanovich Rerberg (1865–1938) and what was his Art Institute (Figs. 1–1, 2, 3)? Brother of the celebrated architect Ivan Ivanovich Rerberg (1869–1932, the designer of the Kiev Railroad Station and the Central Telegraph and Post-Office in Moscow), and father of the graphic artist Ivan Fedorovich Rerberg (1892–1957), Fedor Ivanovich was a graduate of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, the author of fairy-stories, and of eight books on art history, paint, and perspective (Fig. 1–4).2 He was a member of the Association of Wandering Exhibitions (also called The Wanderers) (1891–1903), chairman of the Moscow Association of Artists, an avid traveler in Western Europe (Austria, France, Germany, Italy), and a private tutor in Moscow homes and schools. He was, as his student Ivan Kliun recalled, “a good artist and a wonderful person.”3 Rerberg was also, incidentally, a major contributor to the ill-fated Russian section at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, so some of his paintings may still be languishing in American collections. In the history of Russian art, Rerberg is a lesser star, who nevertheless cast a strong penumbra upon artists of higher caliber. He was a conduit of information on artistic style, a leading authority on the technical and chemical qualities of paint, and an erudite scholar of the history of art. Pedantic in his lessons and pedestrian in his social behavior, Rerberg, the sober family man, could also inspire confidence and enthusiasm, and many of his pupils, leftist and rightist, had fond memories of his classes. Leonid Fainberg,4 Kliun,5 Valentina Khodasevich,6 Boris Korolev, Vasily Masiutin, Vladimir Roskin, Alexei Rybnikov (a member of The Donkey’s Tail group, who in Soviet times

B. D. Korolev, Iz literaturnogo naslediia, ed. N. Fomin and O. Iakhont (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1989), 13. 2 See the following books by Rerberg: Kraski i drugie khudozhestvennye materialy (Moscow: Moskovskoe tovarishchestvo khudozhnikov, 1905); Kratkii kurs istorii iskusstv (Moscow, 1908); Palitra sovremennogo khudozhnika (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1921); Khudozhnik o kraskakh (Moscow, 1932); Vvedenie v perspektivu (Moscow–Leningrad: Ogiz-Izogiz, 1933; second edition, 1937); Kak nauchit’sia pisat’ akvarel’iu (Moscow, 1936); Kak nauchit’sia pisat’ maslom (Moscow, 1936); with V. Gusev and V. Tiutinnik, Zhivopisnye kraski i ikh proizvodstvo (Moscow: Vsekokhudozhnik,1936). 3 Kliun, Moi put’, 64. 4 Fainberg’s and Vermel’s memoirs are included in F. Rerberg. Sbornik vospominanii. 5 Kliun’s memoirs of the Rerberg Institute are especially interesting. See Kliun, Moi put’, 64–70. 6 Valentina Khodasevich, Portret slovami (Moscow, 1996), 38.

malevich and fedor rerberg

1–1. Anon. photographer, photograph of Fedor Rerberg, c. 1900.

3

4

1–2. Fedor Rerberg, Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, 1918. 1–3. Advertisement for Fedor Rerberg’s Art Institute in the Moscow Telephone Directory, 1912.

malevich and fedor rerberg

1–4. Ivan Rerberg (designer), cover of Fedor Rerberg, The Palette of the Contemporary Artist (Moscow, 1921).

5

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became a celebrated restorer), Antonina Sofronova,7 Sergei Storozhenko, Vitaly Vermel, Konstantin Iasinsky, and Ekaterina Zernova,8 in particular, acknowledged a strong debt to Rerberg’s school, although, conversely, the young Anna Golubkina left his institute after only a few months, finding it conventional and tedious.9 In any case, Rerberg was neither an artist of genius, nor a social revolutionary, and perhaps for this reason, he is not the subject of an extensive literature. The most important source (which, however, ignores his links with the Avant-Garde) is the collection of memoirs by some of his pupils,10 and the catalogue of his 1963–64 Moscow retrospective. Part of his archive is in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art,11 which consists of letters, essays, lists, short stories and memoirs, and which, judging from the user registry, the art historian Nikolai Khardzhiev perused as early as 1976. A few of Rerberg’s paintings are in Russian museums (for example, Boats, 1904, in the State Tretiakov Gallery), others have entered private collections (for example, Geese, 1903, and Untitled [Strolling in the Park], 1903) (Figs. 1–5, 6). Rerberg was not an especially original painter. A loyal son of the Academy of Arts, he upheld the nineteenth-century canon, insisting on the need for technical prowess in anatomy and perspective, and on the precedence of the classical aesthetic. But if Rerberg, like the other professors at his institute, was traditional rather than radical, he did acknowledge artistic invention and evolution. As Kliun recalls, for example, Rerberg would take his students to see the famous collection of Sergei Shchukin, and discuss the innovations of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists,12 and in the early 1900s both Impressionism and the style moderne became active ingredients in his own pictorial style and theoretical vocabulary. Part of his 1905 book Paints and Other Contemporary Artistic Materials is devoted to Impressionism. Rerberg even became, to quote Kliun, a “sincere Impressionist,”13 and when Pavel 7 See Antonina Sofronova, Zapiski nezavisimoi, ed. Vasilii Rakitin, et al. (Moscow: RA, 2001), 39–43. 8 E. S. Zernova, Vospominaniia monumentalista, ed. G. Derviz et al. (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1985), 17–30. 9 A. S. Golubkina, Pis’ma, comp. E. Murina (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1983), 149. 10 Rerberg, Sbornik vospominanii, 17. 11 RGALI, fond 2443. 12 Kliun, Moi put’, 67. 13 Ibid., 64.

malevich and fedor rerberg

1–5. Fedor Rerberg, Geese, 1903, oil on canvas, 34 x 40 cm., private collection, San Francisco.

1–6. Fedor Rerberg, Untitled [Strolling in the Park], 1903, oil on canvas, 27 x 34 cm., formerly collection of Alexander Rabinovich, New York.

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I–7. Fedor Rerberg, The Funfair, 1903, oil on canvas.

Ettinger showed him an issue of the English journal Studio, Rerberg, “struck and excited,” took out a subscription immediately.14 Rerberg painted outdoor scenes, interiors, and portraits (Figs. 1–7, 8), experimented with the composition and durability of paint under various conditions, and, although encouraging independence, still expected his students to acknowledge the legacy of the Academy. Rerberg favored plein air over the portrait or the still life, and he used his landscapes, fresh, fluid, and unpretentious, as experiments in the rendering of cloud and mineral formations, foliage, light, and shade. He liked a small and intimate format, watercolor rather than oil, and combinations of yellow and blue, red and green. But despite the malleability of his style, reflected in his numerous drawings, sketches, and studies, Rerberg was rigorous, or 14 P. D. Ettinger, Stat’i, comp. A. Demskaia and N. Semenova (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1989), 65.

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1–8. Fedor Rerberg, Next to the Cart, c. 1900, watercolor on paper.

rather, repetitive, in his compositions; he marked his linear perspectives with strong promenades of figures or trees, distinguished carefully between foreground and background — almost à la Seurat — and had no interest in the social, political, or philosophical function of the work of art. Like other Moscow artists of his generation, such as Lev Turzhansky and Stanislav Zhukovsky, Rerberg regarded painting as the colored registration of process and the changing states of reality, and not as an authorial and imperious commentary. Why did Malevich come to Rerberg’s Institute in 1906? Many of the young men and women who enrolled there (including, apparently, David Burliuk) did so in preparation for the entrance examinations at the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (a stone’s throw from Rerberg’s Institute), or the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. On this level, Rerberg’s Institute was considered to be one of the most successful preparatory

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schools, and perhaps for this reason, it was more expensive than several rival schools and studios, such as those of Anatoly Bolshakov, Vladimir Fisher, Ilia Mashkov (in the same building as Rerberg’s), Vasily Meshkov, Nikolai Ulianov, and Konstantin Iuon. True, in Malevich’s case, the scenario was rather different, because in 1906, when he entered Rerberg’s Institute, he may already have been a student, albeit a desultory one, at the Moscow Institute.15 According to Kliun, Malevich had been disappointed by the inflexible methodology there, when one professor criticized him for painting a green nude.16 Still, how the impoverished Malevich could have afforded Rerberg’s steep tuition fees is a mystery, for as Zernova recalled, “you had to pay quite a bit for instruction, so it was the children of solvent parents or those who were already earning well” who joined Rerberg’s Institute.17 Then living at the Lefortovo Hostel, Malevich recalled that “my financial base had fallen apart. I had fallen like a chicken into the soup, absolutely unsuited to big city life.”18 What kind of pedagogical program confronted Malevich, the “most vivid figure in the Rerberg Institute”?19 Those alumni who wrote memoirs, such as Kliun, Sofronova, and Zernova, concurred that Rerberg had no special, polished system of teaching. On the other hand, the lessons were comprehensive and methodical, while Rerberg himself was forbearing, and tolerant of dissent. Physically, the Rerberg Institute occupied two large rooms and an office within the Rerberg family apartment located at 24 Miasnitskaia Street (at that time part of the same complex as the Stroganov Institute), very close to the Central Telegraph and Post-Office, opposite the Moscow Institute, and just round the corner from Pokrovsky Boulevard. The rooms contained “cushions, easels, stools, and a large quantity of plaster copies,”20 and according to the institute’s prospectus, the courses were open

15 There is currently some question about whether Malevich ever attended the Moscow Institute at all. He seems to have applied three times and been rejected each time. See Irina Vakar, “Malevich’s Student Years in Moscow: Facts and Fiction,” in Malevich: Artist and Theoretician (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), 29. 16 Kliun, Moi put’, 130. 17 Zernova, Vospominaniia, 130. 18 Kazimir Malevich, “Autobiography” in A Legacy Regained. Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-Garde, ed. John E. Bowlt and Mark Konecny (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2001), 163. 19 Kliun, Moi put’, 66. 20 Zernova, Vospominaniia, 18.

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to pupils “no younger than thirteen,” and covered “drawing (elementary, perspectival, drawing from plaster copies, the still life, and the model) and painting (oil, watercolor, pastel, tempera, from the still life, the live model, both clothed and nude).”21 According to Zernova, Rerberg did not recognize “intermediate gradations or classes, but grouped his pupils according to their success rates; once you had assimilated drawing from copies, you passed on to the living head, or to the figure, clothed or naked.”22 Classes ran from September through June, morning, afternoon, and evening. Rerberg supervised a large and diverse faculty at his institute, which, at various times, included Vladimir Beklemishev, Otton Engels, Ivan Gugunov, Vasily Komarov, Boris Takke (in 1910 a member of The Jack of Diamonds), Ulianov, and Ivan and Fedor Zakharov (all teaching painting, drawing and art history). Sergei Goloushev, a sculptor, but better known as the critic Sergei Glagol, taught anatomy, Georgy Motovilov taught sculpture, and Nikolai Zavialov, perspective. Rerberg maintained that artistic talent was within; it could be nurtured and enhanced, but not produced artificially, and he oriented his lessons accordingly. For example, he insisted that the student learn the rules of perspective, anatomy, color harmony and combination, the rendering of three dimensions in two; drawing from antique copies, from the life model, from nature, and then from memory; all played a major role in his syllabus, as did the understanding of anatomical precision, proportion, and kinesis. The Rerberg Institute provided a full curriculum, with exercises in painting in the morning, sketching in the evening, and lectures on anatomy, perspective, paint, and art history after that. Particular attention was paid to sketching both classical plaster casts and the nude model. The institute organized field trips to museums and surrounding areas, as well as seminars on the technical aspects of pigment, coloring, durability, and complementation. The institute also organized pupils’ exhibitions. Guest books record that visitors included Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Vladimir Maiakovsky, Malevich, and Leonid Pasternak.23 Kliun, who was enrolled at the institute from 1906 until 1908, and who had taken private

Rerberg, Sbornik vospominanii, 17. Zernova, Vospominaniia, 19. 23 “Kniga zapisei posetitelei vystavki rabot uchashchikhsia Khudozhestvennogo uchilishcha F. I. Rerberga,” RGALI, fond 2443, op. 1, ed. khr. 209. 21 22

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lessons from Rerberg before that, had his first solo show there, showing works in the moderne spirit that have much in common with Rerberg’s own experiments in Symbolism, such as his Moscow: By the Hermitage Garden Theater (1909, Fig. 1–9).

1–9. Fedor Rerberg, Moscow. By the Hermitage Garden Theater, 1909, watercolor on paper.

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1–10. Kazimir Malevich, Spring, 1928–29, oil on canvas, 53 x 66 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Despite his five years of proximity to Rerberg, Malevich never wrote about the man, the activities of the school, or his contacts there (Kliun, Korolev, Alexei Morgunov, and others). For his part, Rerberg seems not to have been especially impressed by Malevich, referring only once to “Malevich and that friend of his, Kliun” in the hundreds of pages of his memoirs.24 However, comparative analysis indicates that Malevich was drawn to Rerberg’s explanations of form, perspective, and the spectrum, as well as to the professor’s own unpretentious paintings of streets and farmyards, often luminous and “Impressionistic.” Malevich’s Spring (1905–06/1928–29, Fig. 1–10) for example, conveys a spirit of tranquility and immediacy similar to 24

l. 102.

Fedor Rerberg, “‘Tetrad’ No. 10” (1906) in RGALI, fond 2443, op. 1, ed. khr. 115,

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Rerberg’s Country Backyards (also 1905–06, Fig. 1–11). Both works display a simple contrast of architectural and human elements. The figure in red on the far right reminds us of another figure in the history of Russian landscape painting — the tiny, but looming and morose, peasant in Alexei Venetsianov’s Summer. Harvesting (1820s), who a century later, assertive and foreboding, will advance from the field to confront us in Malevich’s post-Suprematist peasant pictures. Still, there are more direct and intriguing parallels between Malevich and Rerberg — for example, the linear march of trees in Rerberg’s Strolling in the Park (1903, Fig. 1–12), which returns in Malevich’s cycle of pictures of boulevards and parks, such as The Boulevard (1903/c. 1930, Fig. 1–13). Perhaps there were also shades of Rerberg’s Strolling in the Park in the picture Strolling that Malevich contributed to the 17th Exhibition of the Moscow Association of Artists in 1909–10.

1–11. Fedor Rerberg, Country Backyards, 1905–06, watercolor on paper.

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1–12. Fedor Rerberg, Strolling in the Park, 1903, watercolor on paper. 1–13. Kazimir Malevich, The Boulevard, c. 1930, oil on canvas 56 x 66 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

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That the apprentice would copy the master is not especially surprising, but the interconnection does seem to provide a richer explanation for Malevich’s creative interest in Impressionism, that is, the episode gives us reason to assume that Malevich may well have come to Impressionism by observing and paraphrasing Rerberg’s pictures, rather than, or as well as, by studying French originals in the Shchukin and Morozov collections or in local exhibitions. The major problem that faces us in any attempt to collocate Malevich and Rerberg is the absence of original “Impressionist” works by Malevich, or rather, the insecurity of their chronology, inasmuch as many of those, previously dated to 1903 or 1904, have now been redated to about 1930. Elena Basner, Charlotte Douglas, Andrei Nakov, and other scholars have discussed these discrepancies and there is no need to repeat the arguments here. Suffice it to say that from 1928 onwards, partly in anticipation of, and as a response to, his 1929 solo exhibition at the Tretiakov Gallery, Malevich supposedly painted a cycle of Impressionist reprises — which, if true, would suggest that more than twenty years after his studies with Rerberg, Malevich suddenly experienced an extraordinary nostalgia both for Rerberg’s own style of painting, and for the Pokrovsky Boulevard, just to the right of 24 Miasnitskaia Street. It is the Pokrovsky Boulevard where a nanny guides the baby carriage in The Boulevard (1903/1930, Fig. 1–13), where the flower sellers sell their flowers (The Flower Seller, 1903/1930, Fig 1–14), and where decent ladies stroll with their parasols in On the Boulevard (1903/1930) and Sisters (1903/1930). The double walkways of the boulevard are still there, some of the moderne cast iron railings, too, and the view down towards Chistye prudy still frames some of the same tenements. But is it likely that Malevich from 1928 onwards, then living in Leningrad and Kiev, was recalling youthful visions so faithfully as he tried to reconstruct his pictorial autobiography? Could he have remembered and paraphrased Rerberg’s distant evocations of the boulevard, such as Strolling in the Park (1903, Fig. 1–12) and the untitled version (Fig. 1–6) with such accuracy?25 Or was he still heeding — after so many years and so many styles — Rerberg’s initial lessons in the theory and practice of perspective (Fig. 1–15), generated by the simple, rapid, and strategic distribution of figures, horizontal and vertical, especially on the left side of the painting?

25 Charlotte Douglas has noted the parallels in Kazimir Malevich (New York: Abrams, 1994), 38–9.

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1–14. Kazimir Malevich, The Flower Seller, 1930, oil on canvas, 80 x100 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. 1–15. Diagram illustrating the distribution of figures in space from Fedor Rerberg, Introduction to Perspective (second edition Moscow, 1937), fig. 37.

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One explanation for Malevich’s manifest return to Pokrovsky Boulevard in the late 1920s may lie in the very duality of Malevich’s later paintings; backgrounds with processions of figures, iron fences, and buildings seem to be — with their verisimilar details — genuinely of the early 1900s, whereas the frontal actors, such as the flower sellers, are, clearly, Post-Suprematist superimpositions. If this is so, then many of Malevich’s Impressionist paintings, once cheerfully accepted as being from 1903, and then just as cheerfully accepted as being of 1928-30, should perhaps be reclassified as simultaneously early and late. The Suprematist sheen of the flower seller’s dress confirms the later date, but the ambience in which she stands, and from which she seems detached, seems to predate Suprematism. This is the ambience that Rerberg and his students saw and painted on the boulevard every day, and some of the results decorated the institute and family apartment (both in the same building). Surely, Malevich executed similar assignments, observing and painting the ladies of leisure, and the servants of menial labor as they came and went along the boulevard. In other words, if, by 1930, Malevich was far removed in time and space from Pokrovsky Boulevard, in 1906 he had every occasion to paint such scenes. So Malevich was borrowing motifs and devices from his master’s repertoire, but what seems to have been just as significant to Malevich-the-student, was Rerberg’s discussions of the properties of paint — pigment, composition, durability, variability. Rerberg’s painting manuals concentrate both on the effect of the environment on paint and on the laws of the conformity and variability of color combinations. Rerberg gave his evaluations and descriptions, detailed and scientific, in lectures at his institute, and in publications such as Paints and Other Modern Art Materials (Fig. 1–16), and to a student who would be fascinated by the “liberation of color,” and “color as an end in itself,” Rerberg’s intrinsic analyses must have had particular appeal. There are many relevant illustrations in his books, such as those based on his experiments in color resistance, conformity, and changeability (Figs. 1–17, 18). In some cases, however, the prodigal Malevich seems to have disobeyed Rerberg’s instructions deliberately, choosing a direction or formula completely at odds with his mentor’s advice. For example, in his Palette of the Contemporary Artist (1921) (Fig. 1–4), and elsewhere, Rerberg asserts that it is very easy to make black by mixing red, yellow, and blue, but that “some paints are dangerous which, like bone black or Beinschwarz, possess a warm, brown hue. This indicates the presence of color substances — perhaps of untreated organic remnants — in addition to carbon. Of course,

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1–16. Diagram illustrating the pigment quality and changeability of the color yellow, from Fedor Rerberg, Paints and Other Art Materials (Moscow, 1905), table 1.

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1–17. Diagram illustrating qualities of the colors red and violet, from Fedor Rerberg (with V. Gusev and V. Tiutinnik), Paints and Their Production (Moscow, 1936), table 1.

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1–18. Diagram illustrating the action of the color spot within an environment of different colors, from Fedor Rerberg, How to Learn to Paint in Watercolor (Moscow, 1936), fig. 9.

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1–19. Diagram illustrating the pigment quality and changeability of the color red, from Fedor Rerberg, Paints and Other Art Materials (Moscow, 1905), table 2.

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1–20. Kazimir Malevich, Dissolution of a Plane, 1917, oil on canvas, 133 x 78 cm., private collection, courtesy Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich, Switzerland.

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over time these remnants can self-destruct.”26 Rerberg also insisted that the thicker the paint layer, the shorter the life of the picture — the more strata superimposed, the more fragile the surface.27 Malevich seems to have painted his Black Square (Fig. 3–4) in total defiance of these wise words — or, perversely, to illustrate their wisdom — for the impure black now reveals more brown and red than black, and cracking and flaking from the overpainting atop another picture, has resulted in a restorer’s nightmare. However Malevich interpreted Rerberg’s analyses and charts of complementary and supplementary colors, color as an independent element, and color intensity, the facts and terminology were available; perhaps more than any other source, Rerberg’s lectures and publications prepared the aspiring student for his own color explorations and reductions at Ginkhuk in the 1920s. Rerberg’s demonstration of fading yellows (Fig. 1–16), for example, bears an uncanny resemblance to the fading yellow plane in Malevich’s Dissolution of Sensation (1917), while his study of reds (Fig. 1–19) displays an equal affinity with Dissolution of a Plane (1917, Fig. 1–20) . One of Rerberg’s more frequent academic requirements was to “sketch the head of Michelangelo’s David life-sized”28 from a plaster copy in the institute — and, once again, what Malevich said of the David may echo his weariness of those rote diurnal lessons: “Angelo’s David is a deformation. His head and torso are modeled, as it were, from two incongruent forms. A fantastic head and a real torso.”29 Moreover, in arguing that a “hewn pentagon or hexagon would have been a greater work of sculpture than the Venus de Milo or David,”30 Malevich may have been thinking of Rerberg’s own didactic drawings of geometric solids in space (Fig. 1–21). Perhaps Kliun also had the same memory of Rerberg’s plaster cast of David when he wrote, “Michelangelo carved a beautiful David out of marble — but in a purely sculptural sense this work is insignificant.”31 There is a perverse postscript to these radical remarks, for in 1924, a group of young Communist enthusiasts, intent on proletarianizing the Rerberg, Palitra sovremennogo khudozhnika, 52–53. Zernova, Vospominaniia, 21. 28 Ibid. 19. 29 Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: : The New Painterly Realism,» (1916) in The Russian Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934, ed. and trans. John. E. Bowlt (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 121. 30 Ibid., 123. 31 Ivan Kliun, untitled statement (1915), in Bowlt, The Russian Avant-Garde, 114. 26 27

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1–21. Diagram illustrating the concepts of proportion and distance, from Fedor Rerberg, Introduction to Perspective (second edition Moscow, 1937), fig. 61.

Rerberg Institute, removed all the antique copies into the courtyard and smashed them. This gesture harbingered the end of Rerberg’s private school. Five years later it was transmuted into the State Courses of Painting and Drawing for the Bauman District Department of Popular Education, where Rerberg continued to teach until his sudden death in 1938. Many times, however, Malevich would seem to have been following Rerberg’s advice religiously. Rerberg spoke often of the “white canvas,” of the independence of each color (“each colored section”), and of his indifference to the effects of texture (faktura). (Unlike Popova and Tatlin, Malevich also seems not to have taken part in the fashionable and intense debates surrounding the issue of texture.) Malevich’s repeated insistence that traditional painting was a robber or a slave to nature, reiterates Rerberg’s analogous claim that the artist must never be the slave of nature (rab natury),32 while Malevich’s dismissal of pictorial composition — “composition is the death sentence for a figure condemned by the artist to an eternal pose”33 — echoes Rerberg’s intransigent refusal to teach composition, which for him was a static and stultifying device. Who knows? Perhaps on a more constructive note, Rerberg’s fascination with the Quattrocento, his lectures on fifteenth-century Florentine painting,34 his splendid collection of two thousand lantern slides of works by Botticelli, Donatello, and Titian, and his curious claim that “we are now experiencing a new epoch of the Renaissance,” 35 also reinforced Malevich’s interpretations of the Florentine 32 Fedor Rerberg, “O novom iskusstve,” RGALI, fond 2443, op. 1, ed. khr. 39, l. 43. Quoted in Rerberg, Sbornik vospominanii, 18. 33 Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism,” 135. 34 Fedor Rerberg, RGALI, fond 2443, op. 1, ed. khr. 73 and 76. 35 Fedor Rerberg, “Memuary,” quoted in Ettinger, Stat’i, 65.

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Medici in his own haunting portraits of the early 1930s. Above all, for all his artistic propriety and respect for the classics, Rerberg was a free spirit whose teaching method functioned more by flexibility, accommodation, and sympathy, than by myopic attention to established convention. Malevich must have found such openness gratifying after his negative experiences of the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (if, indeed, he ever did attend that school). Last, but not least, Malevich derived particular benefit from Rerberg’s administrative function in the Moscow Association of Artists. Founded in 1893 by Vasily Komarov (one of the professors at Rerberg’s Institute) and others, and chaired by Rerberg, the Association did much to promote the new styles, especially Symbolism. The key role of this organization in the stylistic evolution of painters such as Viktor Borisov-Musatov, Vasily Denisov, and Pavel Kuznetsov has yet to be evaluated in full. We can presume that it was through the good offices of Rerberg that Malevich was invited to make his public debut at the 14th Exhibition of the Moscow Association of Artists in 1907, which, showing works by Vladimir Burliuk, Goncharova, Vasily Kandinsky, Larionov, Morgunov, Alexander Shevchenko, and Georgy Iakulov, may well be regarded as the first consolidated exhibition of the nascent Russian AvantGarde. Malevich was also represented at the next three exhibitions until 1910. He contributed Symbolist and Impressionist works — for example, Triumph of Heaven at the 1908 session (presumably, a paraphrase of Petr Utkin’s painting of the same name, which Malevich had seen at the Blue Rose exhibition the year before), and Picking Flowers at the 1909–10 session. In his memoirs, Malevich almost disregards his time at the Rerberg Institute. True, his attendance was sporadic, he was older than most of the other pupils, and, hailing from a sugar beet plantation in the Ukrainian hinterland, he must have felt ill at ease in the midst of this bourgeois finishing school. On the other hand, Malevich met Kliun there, learned the fundamentals of paint and perspective, studied Impressionism, and made his exhibition debut in Moscow. Perhaps this essay leaves us with more questions than answers, but in broaching the subject of Malevich and Rerberg, pupil and teacher, we not only force ourselves to return to the artistic melting-pot whence came the early Malevich, and to his assimilation and interpretation of Impressionism and the landscape tradition, but also to examine the entire — and complex — issue of the role of the private art school in Russian artistic Modernism.

2 The Early Work of Malevich and Kandinsky: A Comparative Analysis Elena Basner

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HE Russian avant-garde movement can be viewed as an intensive electro-magnetic field, saturated with violent currents and swirls of energy formed around its most brilliant and outstanding representatives. It is not an exaggeration to say that the most powerful energetic vortex arose around the person of Kazimir Malevich, the recognized and charismatic leader of the movement. Even artists like Alexander Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, and, of course, Vladimir Tatlin — who stood in direct opposition to Malevich — were greatly influenced by him. To a large extent, their persistent efforts to overcome Malevich’s power and magnetism are a testimony to his influence and charisma. Among the contingent of notable avant-garde figures active in Russia in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the only artist comparable to Malevich, who was similarly significant for the evolution of modern abstract art, was Vasily Kandinsky. But he was not only independent of Malevich; he was opposed to him on principle. In his book On the Spiritual in Art,Kandinsky pointed out that an art that is entirely specific to its time and place does not hold possibilities for the future: 1 This art is only a child of its time, and will never become its mother, so this is a diluted art. It is short-lived; it dies at the moment when the atmosphere that created it changes. Another art, capable of 1 Vasilii Kandinskii, O dukhovnom v iskusstve (New York: Mezhdunarodnoe literaturnoe sodruzhestvo, 1967), 21–2.

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further evolution, also has its roots in its spiritual epoch, but it is not a simple echo and mirror of it. It possesses awakening prophetic power, which is able to act profoundly and for a long time. This statement could easily describe both artists, although it is unlikely that Kandinsky was thinking of Malevich when he wrote it. Time has proved that both artists produced work that was full of potential for the future, and possessed the “awakening prophetic power” that Kandinsky described. Not the least cause of an electric tension in the field of Russian objectless art was the fact that Malevich and Kandinsky occupied two contradictory extremes within it. They personified two fundamentally contrary tendencies within avant-garde ideology, which resulted from different concepts of the task of art, and even of the very nature of non-figurative art: the rational and constructive on the one hand, and the intuitive, spiritual, and mystical on the other. In his discussion of the genesis of non-figurative art in Russia, the art historian Evgeny Kovtun discerned two dominant trends — the abstract and the objectless — which he identified respectively with Kandinsky and Malevich: The abstract artist proceeds from the particular to the general, turning away from the tangibility of objects. In Kandinsky, one may often observe a “semi-figurative” sketch gradually being translated into a pure abstraction. This is one path “from the bottom up.” Objectlessness comes about by the opposite process. The artist starts from general structural regularities that are universal in character, and makes them tangible in objectless forms. This is a path “from the top down,” from the general to the particular. Hence, there is no natural or earthly reality, not even any that has been “cleansed” of figuration, concealed behind Malevich’s objectless forms.2 This appears quite true when we look at the mature forms of non-figurative art — Kandinsky's expressive abstraction and Malevich's geometrical Suprematism. Malevich created a “cold, solid, and unsmiling system.”3 As Evgeny Kovtun, “The Third Path to Non-Objectivity,” The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932 (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1992), 321. (Translation altered slightly.) 3 K. Malevich, “Suprematizm,” in Desiataia vystavka. Bespredmetnoe tvorchestvo i suprematizm (Moscow, 1919); reprinted in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. A. S. Shatskikh, 1 (Moscow: Gileia, 1995), 151. 2

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he wrote in his brochure From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, “Art is the ability to create a construction that derives not from the interrelation of form and color, and not on the basis of aesthetic taste in a construction’s compositional beauty, but on the basis of weight, speed, and direction of movement.”4 This view of art as a created construction was totally unacceptable to Kandinsky, who confessed that he was “unable to invent forms,“ and that it was painful for him “to see pure rational forms.”5 According to his “law of inner necessity,” forms are “not fabricated and not constructed.” He stated: All the forms I have ever used came to me “by themselves”; they either would appear before my eyes as they were, so that I had only to copy them, or they would come into being during the happy hours of working. Sometimes it took me a long time to “catch” them, and sometimes I had to wait, with fear in my soul, till they matured inside me. These inner maturings defy observation; they are mysterious and depend upon hidden causes.6 When we examine the origins of these two different phenomena, however, and the paths that the artists followed toward abstraction, we must come to the conclusion that their routes were not always so different. Not only did they share the same evolutionary track for a while, but certain stages in their artistic development were comparable, and even similar. In other words, to arrive at the general idea — the “top” — Malevich had taken, step by step, the same path “from the bottom up.” Kandinsky's artistic evolution is well known. Each step of his artistic career has been studied thoroughly and methodically, and this gives us a general knowledge of his organic development, from a variant of Neo-Impressionism which emphasized painterly texture, for example, Nymphenburg (1902–05)

Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde. Theory and Criticism. 1902–1934, ed. and trans. John E. Bowlt (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 123. 5 V. Kandinskii, Stupeni. Tekst khudozhnika (Moscow: Otdel izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv Narodnago kommissariata po prosveshcheniiu, 1918), 30. 6 Ibid. 4

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and Old Town II (1902); Pointillism: Summer Day (1901–04, Fig. 2–1); Jugendstil: Motley Life (1907, Fig. 2–2); through an increasing emphasis on expressivity: Lake of Starnberg (1908) and Mountain (1909, Fig. 2–3), gradually moving towards pure abstraction.7 Contemporary scholars rightly note that, in a sense, Kandinsky’s artistic path provides a general algorithm of the evolution of modern abstract art, with Jugendstil playing a fundamental role. We know that Malevich insisted on his own version of his artistic evolution, tracing his development from Impressionism through Cézannism to Cubism and Futurism, and then toward Suprematism, which he regarded as the highest and last stage of the evolution of painting. “And we, who only yesterday were Futurists, have reached new forms through speed, new relations with nature and objects. We have reached Suprematism, abandoning Futurism as a loophole through which those lagging behind will pass.”8 Malevich adapted the story of his development to the general course of European painting, quite intentionally smoothing things over, and omitting everything that did not suit the general concept. In his late years, he seemed to be very concerned with his posthumous reputation, with establishing his own chapter in the history of world art. This is the most probable explanation for Malevich’s great mystification, his comprehensive and quite successful attempts in the late 1920s to reinterpret his entire artistic biography to fit his current philosophical and theoretical views. Malevich’s late version of his creative evolution was logically irreproachable, and it was quite attractive to several generations of art historians, beginning with the leading art historian of the day, Alexei Fedorov-Davydov, who “legitimized” this autobiographical chronology in his booklet published for Malevich’s 1929 exhibition at the Tretiakov Gallery.9 Charlotte Douglas

7 Kandinsky, Nymphenburg (1902–05, Galerie Gunzenhauser, Munich); Old Town II (1902, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Nina Kandinsky Bequest); Summer Day (1901–04, Private collection, St. Petersburg, Fig. 2–1); Motley Life (1907, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Fig. 2–2); Lake of Starnberg (1908, Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York); Mountain (1909, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Fig. 2–3). Illustrations of these paintings may be found in Jelena Hahl-Koch, Kandinsky (New York: Rizzoli, 1993). 8 K. Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm (Moscow, 1916), 124. 9 A. A. Fedorov-Davydov, “Iskusstvo K. S. Malevicha,” Vystavka proizvendenii K. S. Malevicha (Moscow: Izdanie gosudarstvennoi Tretiakovskoi gallerei, 1929).

the early Work of malevich and kandinsky

2–1. Vasily Kandinsky, Summer Day, 1901–04, gouache on cardboard, private collection, St Petersburg © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2007. 2–2. Vasily Kandinsky, Motley Life, 1907, tempera on canvas, 130 x 162.5 cm., Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2007.

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2–3. Vasily Kandinsky, Mountain, 1909, oil on canvas, 109 x 109 cm., Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2007. 2–4. Kazimir Malevich, Landscape, c. 1906, oil on board, 19.2 x 31 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

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was the first art historian to question it, and propose an authentic biographical outline based on verifiable historical facts, as well as on the progressive stylistic evolution of Malevich’s painting.10 In this revised, or perhaps better, “restored,” version of Malevich’s biography, which is accepted nowadays by the overwhelming majority of scholars, the Pre-Suprematist period appears quite different from the classical scheme that Malevich himself proposed. His so-called Impressionism was not early, but actually produced at the end of 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. It was probably more “Impressionist” than the French classics. Malevich’s earlier small Impressionist studies show that he was quite close to Art Nouveau, sometimes even merging with it. The overt decorative qualities of Malevich’s early Impressionism, such as Landscape and Landscape with Yellow House (both c.1906, Fig. 2–4),11 which transformed visual motifs into subtle, integrated, painterly surfaces, had profound affinities with Kandinsky’s own version of Impressionism. We might call this common stylistic phenomenon “Post-,” “Neo-,” or “QuasiImpressionism” — the latter term may be the most suitable. The important point is that both variations of Impressionism are quite similar. Both artists were captivated by the possibilities of paint, first of all by its texture, but also by its plasticity, flexibility, viscosity, and thickness. Both Kandinsky and Malevich then passed through a Pointillist stage, for the first time searching not for a painterly manner, but for a painterly method or system. For Kandinsky, the Pointillist method was a further step in a continuing quest for those “inner maturings” he was to write about later. For Malevich, Pointillist principles seemed to be the result of a penchant for order and regularity, an inclination to system, of which he was perhaps not yet consciously aware. It is here that we first come face to face with Malevich as a budding analyst, intuitively trying to find an austere and logical painterly method. This tendency was at the core of his artistic individuality; it was expressed clearly in his later years, but can also be seen at the very beginning of his creative activity. It is worth noting that when Malevich rewrote, or reconstructed, his artistic biography, he excluded his whole Symbolist period from it — a late Symbolism embodied in the forms of Art Nouveau. Although later he always

Charlotte Douglas, “Malevich’s Painting — Some Problems of Chronology,” Soviet Union/Union Sovietique, 5/2 (1978). 11 Both paintings are in the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. 10

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spoke about Symbolism with a shade of contempt, as if trying to distance himself from a style that perhaps he thought of as too emotional or mystical, it is obvious that this period was of great importance for his development as an artist. Malevich remains one of the most significant Russian Symbolists of the first half of the twentieth century. His pronounced Symbolist inclinations originated in 1906–1910, when he became fascinated by the Blue Rose group. He wrote about the Blue Rose exhibition as a turning point in the history of modern Russian painting, and even implied his own participation in it.12 Nevertheless, the variant of Symbolism that Malevich first embraced was quite banal. He adopted its superficial features, including mystical, religious motifs — in his “Series of Yellows,” for example, or in his Shroud of Christ (Fig. 2–5) — and a decorative ornamentalism. Although he finally went down in the history of Russian art as one of the most significant of Russian Symbolists, compared to Kandinsky’s European Symbolism in the 1900s, Malevich’s Blue Rose version appears rather provincial, less individual, perhaps even naïve. On the other hand, Kandinsky’s Symbolist works sometimes looked even more sentimental and romantic than Malevich’s. In the Art Nouveau stage, an elaborate decorativeness characterizes the principal resemblance between Malevich and Kandinsky; not only does it dominate their compositions, it also constitutes the aesthetic essence of the works. Color separates into microelements that resemble mosaics or pearl embroideries, an obvious acknowledgement of the Neo-Impressionists, especially Signac. Malevich’s Art Nouveau paintings, such as Repose. Society in Top Hats (1908) or Bathing (1908), are frivolous, humorous, and ironic, and sometimes have an unequivocal erotic content.13 Typically, a two-dimensional cardboard plane is filled with tiny white spots, while human figures resemble ornamental vignettes. All the nuances of the author’s attitude towards the objects depicted dissolve in a general impression of playful triviality. This decorative, pattern-like painting, the striving for the convoluted, conveyed in a sophisticated pictorial manner, was a principle Malevich shared with Kandinsky. However diverse their tendencies sometimes appear, the substance

This is reflected in the author’s inscription on the reverse of Blue Portrait (1929, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg): “Sketch for a portrait Blue Portrait 1907 rejected by the Blue Rose.” 13 Kazimir Malevich, Repose. Society in Top Hats (1908, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg); Bathing (1908, Private collection). Malevich indicated that both pictures were from a “Series of Whites.” 12

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2–5. Kazimir Malevich, Shroud of Christ, 1908, gouache on board, 23.4 x 37.3 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

of their work, and to some extent the style, in this period belonged to the same evolutionary phase of modern painting. It seems impossible to overestimate the significance of the succeeding period of open expressiveness and emancipation of color. For both Malevich and Kandinsky, the culmination of their Expressionist period came in 1910– 1911, the moment of the overpowering domination of the same tendencies throughout Europe and Russia. Both artists entered this stage of evolution more or less simultaneously in about 1909. At this time Kandinsky reached the acme of his painterly self-determination, and acquired his own easily recognized manner. As one scholar has observed recently, “At last, Kandinsky becomes Kandinsky!” The paintings of the Murnau period “are bolder, brighter, still more temperamental. They are filled with greater tension and tend further toward abstraction and simplified forms and colors.”14

14

Hahl-Koch, Kandinsky, 120.

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About the same time Malevich entered a phase of more expressive, even brutal, painterly technique. The assertiveness of his brushwork, the energy which filled his canvases, the concentrated power of his color, marked by tense contrasts between red, black, green, and white, proved that the lessons of Fauvism had been successfully learned. Expressionism brought Malevich out of a long period of apprenticeship, of borrowing and assimilating the experiences of others, and set him off in a new, original, and temperamental painterly direction. Expressionism seemed to approach its limit in both artists’ work; here art was standing at the furthest edge of figuration. Beyond this point lay the unknown ground where new possibilities of painting would arise. Kandinsky's historic breakthrough to non-figurative art was grounded in the preceding stages of his evolution. The increasing expressiveness and dynamism of his brushwork, and the emancipation of forms and colors, had brought the artist to the moment when he was ready to separate painting from the object. In so doing, he established his reputation in the history of art. We have Kandinsky’s own words to describe the moment of liberation: I returned home with my paint box after having finished a study, still dreamy and absorbed in the work I had completed, and suddenly saw an indescribably beautiful picture, pervaded by an inner glow. At first, I stopped short and then quickly approached this mysterious picture, on which I could discern only forms and colors, and whose content was incomprehensible. At once, I discovered the key to the puzzle: it was a picture I had painted, standing on its side against the wall.15 A series of Malevich's gouaches from the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam demonstrates approximately the same degree of dynamism and expressiveness. The object seems to dissolve, to vanish in a purely painterly element. Ever-increasing artistic energy, as in the laws of physics, seems to require a transition to a new state. I am not going to draw direct parallels between Malevich's and Kandinsky's work (all the more so as their individual paintings differ greatly from each other), but it seems quite evident that Malevich was also ready at that moment to go beyond

15

Kandinskii, Stupeni, 28–9.

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2–6. Kazimir Malevich, Province, 1911–12, gouache on paper, 70.5 x 70.5 cm., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

the limits of figuration. Such paintings as Bather (1911), for example, or Province (1911–12, Fig. 2–6) support this idea quite convincingly, since the figures seem to melt away into the painting itself. “Allusions to shapes and landscapes are still to be found, but the leading role is played by the inimitable splotches of color,” Jelena Hahl-Koch writes about Kandinsky, but her words are equally applicable to Malevich.16 16

Hahl-Koch, Kandinsky, 118.

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One might ask why Malevich didn't accomplish the same breakthrough to objectless painting in the early pre-War period, especially since he was so close to it. Of course, it's easy to joke that he simply had no occasion to look at one of his paintings when it was on its side. But this, of course, is no explanation at all. We would do better to examine Malevich's own texts, particularly his conversations with his students and disciples at the very end of the 1920s. Here Malevich mentions the name of Kandinsky many times, always when speaking about the moment of transition from figurative painting to pure objectlessness, when the object began to dissolve. It is obvious that he regarded Kandinsky as an antagonist, but nevertheless his remarks were always full of respect. On 16 September 1929, speaking to Eduard Krimmer, a student who was complaining that he was not satisfied with his own work, and that “the only thing that had been conveyed was the sensation of the scorched, decolorizing sun,” Malevich said: Correct. I said back in the spring that it is necessary to approach one method — either Kandinsky or Picasso. The dissolution of color . . . is necessary to redefine the objective: what is it that makes life dissolve. . . . In Kandinsky's works, it is obvious what makes the nature dissolve . . . You should approach Kandinsky, for you have a subconscious attraction. And you must dissolve life just as Kandinsky did.17 About the same time Malevich expressed a thought that seems crucial for understanding his logic, and the reasoning that two decades earlier had led him first from Expressionism to Neo-Primitivism, and then to Cubism: There are two methods for approaching life – the deformation of life and its transformation into new realistic forms. One is the Cubist way and the other is the Kandinsky way. These two tendencies lead to objectless painting via the dissolution of nature. Your object has dissolved according to Kandinsky's system, and you have moved

Malevich quotation from Eduard Krimmer’s notes of 5 October 1929, cited in Victor Tsaritsyn, “A Sharp Feeling of Life and a Lively Feeling of Form: The Creative Biography of Eduard Krimmer,” in The Russian Avant-Garde: Personality and School (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2003), 104. 17

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from nature into objectlessness. Kandinsky's system is known. The second method, Cubism, also dissolves life, only [by means of ] a more object-oriented method. The first method is more individual. There are no outlines or borders with Kandinsky. Many plastic, individual aspects survive. With Cubism, more is [condensed], constructed, and established. Everything is clear to you and me in Cubism, but here it is clear to you [Krimmer] and not to me.18 Malevich confessed that Kandinsky's method seemed too individualistic, too subjective for him. In his opinion, it lacked the necessary constructiveness and rationality — something that Malevich had been searching for from the very early years of his career. Malevich was one of the first who realized that Kandinsky’s method did not encourage adherents, but only imitators. It’s worth noting that in 1911 Malevich was still very closely connected with Mikhail Larionov’s group The Donkey’s Tail. The group’s collectivist spirit somehow restricted his individuality, turning it (along with the majority of the artists of his generation) in the direction of Neo-Primitivism. Only after Larionov’s departure from the group (as well as from Russia) in 1915, did Malevich assume the leadership he so desired. In the period of CuboFuturism, he played the role of a pioneer who opened a path for numerous followers. Cubism, according to Malevich, “also dissolves life, but through a more object-oriented method.” At the divide between the subjective and the object, the ways of Malevich and Kandinsky had to diverge. Malevich was always attracted by the idea of universal categories, not only in art, but in life as well, as his Suprematist utopia showed clearly. This makes it all the more striking and interesting that he undertook his historical breakthrough into objectlessness and Suprematism — alone.

18

Ibid.

3 Malevich and Kandinsky: The Abstract Path Natalia Avtonomova “I am Razin, bearing Lobachevsky’s flag.” Velimir Khlebnikov1

I

HAVE chosen the topic, “Malevich and Kandinsky: The Abstract Path,” despite the fact that the creative evolution of each artist has been much researched in numerous studies by various scholars worldwide, studies that are quite thorough in their scope and depth. In this essay I use these wellknown facts and materials to compare the evolution of the two artists after the discovery of objectlessness, considering the late work of both artists in detail, drawing on archival sources and other concrete information. First, I would like to mention that the difference in the length of the lives of these artists, from my point of view, is not of great consequence. The fact that Kandinsky was born twelve years earlier than Malevich, and died nine years later, is offset by the qualities of their characters and the originality of their temperaments (Figs. 3–1, 2). The calm and composure of one contrasts with the impulsive, uncompromising nature, and irrepressible energy of the other. Their personal contact with each other was rare and accidental; different levels of education and culture determined different social circles. They were neither friends, like-minded fellows, nor comrades-in-arms. Their

1 Velimir Khlebnikov, “Razin” (1920). Cited in Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Velimir Khlebnikov,” in Aleksei Kruchenykh, Nash Vykhod, ed. R. V. Duganov (Moscow: RA, 1996), 26. For an English version of this book, see Alexei Kruchenykh, Our Arrival, ed. R. V. Duganov, trans. Alan Myers (Moscow: RA, 1995).

Malevich and kandinsky: the Abstract Path

3–1. Kazimir Malevich, Self-Portrait, 1908, paper, gouache 27 x 26.8 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

3–2. Gabriele Münter, Portrait of Kandinsky, 1906, color woodcut, 25.9 x 19 cm., Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

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relationship can sooner be described as coldly hostile. But time has united them, placing them in a single lineage as discoverers of objectlessness in twentieth-century art. They defined the path of development of the Russian Avant-Garde; they were its leaders. In completely individual and unique ways, each of them passed through his own complex evolution, traversing stylistic phases in quick succession — Impressionism, Art Nouveau, NeoPrimitivism, Cubo-Futurism — before breaking through into a free space of boundless possibilities for experiment and exploration. The plane of the pure canvas, like a screen, was the border between the two worlds: real and imagined. In the mid-1910s, the artists both independently approached this point. Kandinsky’s Compositions of 1913, and Malevich’s Black Square of 1915, marked the boundary; they were the original prototypes of the new world, the “new reality” that opened before them (Figs. 3–3, 4). “We began to see a Here and There,” noted a leader of the Russian Cubo-Futurists, the poet

3–3. Vasily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2007.

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3–4. Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, oil on canvas, 80 x 80 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

Alexei Kruchenykh.2 “We divide time by a sharp boundary line, and on the first page we place a plane in the form of a square, black as a secret,” Malevich wrote. “The plane gazes darkly upon us, as if within it were hidden the new pages of the future. It will be the stamp of our time; it will never Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Novye puti slova (iazyk budushchego smert’ simbolizmu),” in Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov, mit einem Vorwort herausgegeben von Vladimir Markov (Munich, 1967), 70. Cited in D. V. Sarab’ianov, “Kazimir Malevich i kubofuturizm,” in Russkaia zhivopis’. Probuzhdenie pamiati (Moscow: Iskusstvoznanie, 1998), 371. 2

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lose its identity, no matter where it hangs.” 3 A general cognizance of a move forward occurred at the same time. It is no accident that Alexandre Benois, the “patriarch” of Russian art and its recognized arbiter, declared a real fear when he saw the black square on a white ground in the icon corner at The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10 (Zero Ten) in 1915. “This is not simply a joke, not simply a challenge, not a small casual episode that is occurring in the building on Mars Field,” he wrote, “no, this is one of those acts of self-assertion, a beginning that … reduces all to ruin.”4 Kandinsky’s move out onto the border was less abrupt than Malevich’s. His passage into objectlessness proceeded more fluidly and smoothly via a gradual transformation of the landscape motif, a dissolving of the object on a plane, due to a strengthening of the color symbolism, and linear rhythm. Kandinsky moved thoughtfully and experimentally toward the creation of the “new worlds” in abstract compositions, balancing on the boundary between the real and the imagined. Each of his painterly works was an original milestone in his art; each was a concentrated search for new forms and structures. The creative impulse was manifested in the finetuning of the composition, a complex calculation in the construction of its forms, and the precise definition of small areas of color. It was as if the artist constructed the compositions out of the possibilities of painting itself, and in them, in his words, “the forgotten arsenal of the medium, which possesses an enormous titanic force, was freed from slavery.”5 There was rarely an element of chance. An emerging idea was first worked out in sketches and studies; each of them solved problems of composition, color, or rhythm. The problem of structuring space was one of the most important. Space acquired an independent significance, achieved a “ponderability” and materiality. Within it occurred the distribution of large masses, their “sketching out” on the canvas, as the artist said, and their balancing. “Although my constructive forms outwardly seem inexact, they are in reality established with the greatest exactitude, as if they were carved out of

3 Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. A. S. Shatskikh, 1 (Moscow: Gileia, 1995), 118. 4 A. N. Benua, “Posledniaia futuristicheskaia vystavka,” Rech’ (9 January 1916). Cited in E. F. Kovtun, “Put’ Malevicha,” in Kazimir Malevich 1878–1935 (Leningrad: State Russian Museum; Moscow: State Tretiakov Gallery; Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1988), 138. 5 V. V. Kandinskii, Izbrannye trudy po teorii iskusstva, 1 (Moscow: Gileia, 2001), 91.

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3–5. Vasily Kandinsky, Small Pleasures, 1913, oil on canvas, 109.8 x 119.7 cm., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2007.

stone,” Kandinsky wrote.6 In the Compositions there were usually two or three centers; if there were two, as in Composition VI (1913), according to Kandinsky, the painting might be safely cut in half without either part losing its independent meaning. The centers could be “overt,” as in the picture Small Pleasures (1913, Fig. 3–5), or “secret,” hidden, as in Composition VI. The right and left parts, as well as the weightiness of the corners, acquired 6 V. V. Kandinskii, letter to A. Dzh. Eddi. Cited in N. B. Avtonomova, “Stsenicheskie kompozitsii V. V. Kandinskogo,” in Russkii avangard 1910-x–1920-x godov i teatr (Moscow: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2000), 107.

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3–6. Vasily Kandinsky, Composition IV, 1910, oil on canvas, 159.5 x 250.5 cm., Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2007.

an important significance in the structure of the pictures. The separate parts were organized into a systematic and precise combination, harmonious, and with a range of contrasts. Contrasts were created between masses and lines; diffuse and clearly outlined forms; sharp, abrupt movements of line; and light, cool, delicate colors, as in Composition IV (1911, Fig. 3–6). In his theoretical writing, Kandinsky spoke about the various means of structuring a composition in graphic terms: “thinning out,” “braking,” “inner boiling,” “overlapping radiation,” and “galloping,” indicated the numerous variants of comparisons and contrasts in the structure of the movement of forms, lines, and color rhythms. For example, about Picture with Horses (1912) he wrote, “I involuntarily tried to compare a tragic color element with a refinement of the drawn forms.”7 He paid special attention to the texture of the painting, to the treatment of the surface of the canvas. He called the use of smooth and rough sections in the composition, “technically created unrest.”8 Kandinsky sought and worked out a new system of the 7 8

Kandinskii, Izbrannye trudy, 1:322. Ibid., 311.

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forms of expression. He thought that simple arithmetic increases in the expressive means — for example, simple repetitions meant to intensify a force, or strong emotional agitation emphasized by a fortissimo in music — sometimes led to the reverse effect. Thus, he asserted that in painting, “a colorful spot often loses its intensity, and loses the force of its influence, due to a purely external increase and an external intensification of the tone.” And conversely, “The greatest tragedy cloaks itself in the greatest calm, because quiet speaks louder than noise, and in silence there is a refined eloquence.”9 The Compositions represented the highest level in the hierarchy of genres created by the artist, after the Impressions and Improvisations. According to Kandinsky, the Compositions took shape exceptionally slowly, and in them “reason, consciousness, intention, and suitability” played a dominant role.10 The word “composition” had a special meaning and significance for Kandinsky. In his words, it sounded like a prayer, and provoked an inner vibration.11 The word “composition” is present in the authorial definition of his theatrical plays, beginning with the earliest, Yellow Sound and Violet. Kandinsky first turned to theater in 1908–09, but unfortunately, his directorial projects were not realized on the stage during his lifetime. They existed only in the imagination of the artist, as a sort of theoretical model. From the texts and sketches of the plays, it is apparent that Kandinsky experimented with the spatial depth of the stage, framing the action, and adjusting it to be closer or further away, in order to work out different variants in the distribution of masses on the stage, and the possibilities of perceiving them from different points in the hall. The moving colored light that united the space of the stage and the hall was important in composing his design. Beams of light pierced the space of the stage or slid along its surface, intersecting and separating. They were comparable to the role of lines on the surface of a painting. Work in temporal art helped Kandinsky find the point of highest concentration of forces in the Compositions, an extra-temporal culmination that encompassed past, present, and future moments.

Cited in N. V. Masalin, “Kartina Kandinskogo ‘Na tochkakh’ i nekotoryi aspekty romanticheskoi traditsii v russkoi zhivopisi na rubezhe vekov,” in Mnogogrannyi mir Kandinskogo (Moscow: Nauka, 1998), 73–74. 10 Kandinskii, Izbrannye trudy, 1:195. 11 Ibid., 277. 9

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It is well known that a theatrical experience also played a key role, the role of “midwife,” in the birth of Malevich’s Black Square. His work with Kruchenykh and Mikhail Matiushin on the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun in 1913 was a definite stage in the rejection of figuration (Fig. 3–7). The artist represented the cosmic theme of the opera — the victory over the sun, a battle of light and dark — with a diagonally divided square. The geometricizing of conventional forms — the characters of the opera had masked heads in the shape of rhombuses and squares, and the whole thing concluded with an actual black square on the stage’s backdrop – converted this performance into an animated prototype of the future style of Suprematism. The destruction of “three-dimensional space,” and the discovery of a “tenth land” occurred, not only as a result of experiments in form, but were also the products of intellectual effort, and the liberation of thought from the burden of reality. The new system, Suprematism, allowed the construction of space in front of the surface, as well as deep into it, creating the illusion of an “irrational” space, with a sense of receding into infinity and of pushing forward. The aesthetic of Suprematism was based on the beauty of geometric figures and proportions. The Black Square became the foundation of a new spatial construction of reality, which permitted all colors between black and white. “Color is the thing by which the painter lives, which means that it is the main thing,” Malevich noted.12 Suprematism called for the freeing of color and the affirmation of its inherent value, for establishing an equilibrium of pure color. In these discussions, Malevich calls to mind Kandinsky’s interpretations of color symbolism (Figs. 3–8, 9). The discovery of objectlessness in painting — Malevich in particular insisted on this description — brought with it many obligations, and required that its inventors observe a number of conditions to ensure the continued viability of their innovations. Above all, objectlessness had to be grounded theoretically and tried on a broad scale; it also needed to progress in conception, depth, and precision. As Dmitry Sarabianov defined it, the idea had to be exhausted.13 Both artists traversed this path. It is well known that academically inclined critics, as well as the majority of their artistic colleagues, received the new works negatively. Kandinsky had

Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:50. D. V. Sarab’ianov, “K ogranicheniu poniatiia avangarda” in Sarab’ianov, Russkaia zhivopis’, 268. 12 13

Malevich and kandinsky: the Abstract Path

3–7. Kazimir Malevich, Set design for act 2, scene 5, Victory over the Sun, 1913, pencil on paper, 21 x 27 cm., State Theatrical Museum, St Petersburg.

3–8. Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism (Supremus No. 58), 1916, oil on canvas, 79.5 x 70.5 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

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3–9. Vasily Kandinsky, Composition X, 1939, oil on canvas, 130 x 195 cm., Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2007.

to leave the New Artists’ Association of Munich because the jury rejected Composition V,14 and Malevich was not able to show Suprematist pictures at The Store exhibition because Tatlin refused to exhibit them.15 Each innovator rallied like-minded people around himself. In 1912 Kandinsky organized the Blue Rider group, and in 1916 Malevich organized the Supremus society. The result of these activities was the founding of journals with the same names, based on the new discoveries in painting.16 Each artist would devote the rest of his life to the theoretical grounding of objectlessness in painting. This is reflected in numerous publications, articles, and books. The legacy of these artist-theorists is enormous; Malevich’s is contained in a five-volume publication, and Kandinsky’s is, for now, published in just two volumes of his primary texts. Pure theory Peg Weiss, “Kandinsky in Munich: Encounters and Transformations,” in Kandinsky in Munich 1896–1914 (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1982), 66–67. 15 Joop M. Joosten, “Biographical Outline,” in Kazimir Malevich 1878–1935, 79. 16 Supremus was prepared, but never published. 14

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so enthralled Malevich that in 1920 he declared that there was no more need to paint pictures, but only to proselytize, and to throw out the tattered brush for the sake of the sharp quill.17 He turned to other forms of art, in particular, to architecture, creating “ideal models,” arkhitektony. His easel paintings at this time acquired the status of illustrations of his theories of Suprematism. In order to demonstrate the actuality of his breakthrough into Suprematist objectlessness, he created theoretical charts, and wrote a major scholarly tract: “Introduction to the Theory of the Additional Element in Painting.” In his book On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky devised a theory of counterpoint and polyphonic harmony, a theory of unity and dissonance. In 1920 at the Institute of Artistic Culture and the Academy of Artistic Sciences, he continued to work on theoretical questions in painting, studying its basic elements and the problem of their perception. In the book Point and Line to Plane, he developed a “grammar” of painting, created a new dictionary of art terms, elaborated a scientific program for studying theoretical and practical problems in a synthesis of the arts, and worked on deducing general laws based on investigations in psychophysical perception.18 Malevich and Kandinsky energetically took up pedagogical activities, each striving to work out his own system and method of teaching, and to train followers of his theories. This became possible for them in Russia only after the October Revolution. Kandinsky led a studio at the State Free Art Studios in Moscow, and then continued his pedagogical work at the Bauhaus. Malevich founded Champions of the New Art (Unovis) in Vitebsk, where he demanded a reorganization of the world and of the individual in the name of Suprematism. Later, he organized the State Institute of Artistic Culture (Ginkhuk) in Petrograd (Fig. 3–10). Each artist participated in organizing the new government’s museum structure, and undertook cultural and proselytizing work. After the Revolution, Malevich’s and Kandinsky’s pictures were widely displayed in exhibitions of contemporary art in Moscow and Petrograd. They were represented in expositions at the Museum of Painterly Culture, and in provincial collections. In the celebrated 1922 exhibition in Berlin, Malevich’s Suprematist works hung next to Kandinsky’s abstract works, against a wide panorama of contemporary Russian art. Both artists became famous in the 1920s, rightfully receiving recognition for their merits, and the glory accorded to pioneers. But artistic processes 17 18

Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:188–189. Kandinskii, Izbrannye trudy, 2:99–100, 331–333.

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3–10. Kazimir Malevich and his assistants in the Formal and Theoretical Department of Ginkhuk, 1925.

inevitably and implacably rushed onward, one stylistic movement yielding precedence to another. The Surrealists appeared in Western artistic life, and in Russia there was the group of Constructivists led by Alexander Rodchenko. The political climate also changed. In Russia a system of state control and censorship took shape in the cultural realm. In 1926, the Museum Department of Ginkhuk was closed; a book documenting the institute’s research, including an article by Malevich, was scattered to the winds, and that fall Malevich was removed from the post of director (Fig. 3–11). In 1933 in Germany, where Kandinsky had lived since late 1921, the Nazis closed the Bauhaus. In Munich in 1937, three paintings and two watercolors by Kandinsky, along with works by many of his friends, were included in an exhibition of “degenerate” art.19 Many 19 Entartete Kunst: Bildersturm vor 25 Jahren was held at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, in the summer of 1937. Christian Derouet, “Kandinsky in Paris: 1934–1944,” in Kandinsky in Paris: 1934–1944 (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1985), 20.

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3–11. Installation photograph of the exhibition at the State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, 1931, showing caption stating “Bourgeois art at the impasse of formalism and negation of itself ”.

German museums tried to divest themselves of Kandinsky’s work. In 1939, the artist again became an emigrant when the German consulate in Paris refused to extend his citizenship.20 Kandinsky kept track of life in Russia from the most varied sources, collecting information about friends and close relatives item by item. He petitioned for the return of paintings left in the care of the Moscow Museum of New Western Art, still not cognizant of the decree that had nationalized and distributed them to various museums in the country.21 In Paris, Kandinsky’s work was not appreciated by the Russian emigration. Russian newspapers passed over his participation in numerous art exhibitions in silence.22 In Paris, too, he became personally acquainted with Alexandre Ibid., 21. State Museum of New Western Painting, Book of Acquisitions, 1:16. Manuscript Department, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. 22 Olga Hartmann, letter to Kandinsky. Cited in Derouet, “Kandinsky in Paris,” 18. 20 21

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Benois. Since in 1902 Kandinsky had published surveys of the German art world in the World of Art journal under Benois’ editorship, he had turned to Benois for a letter of recommendation in 1921, in connection with the preparation of a Russian edition of On the Spiritual in Art.23 At Kandinsky’s request, Benois attended Kandinsky’s Paris exhibition in December 1936, and wrote a review.24 In a letter to Kandinsky, Benois conveyed his impression that “perhaps it can be considered a widely recognized sensation,” but after careful inspection he had come to the personal conclusion that he “didn’t understand anything in any of it.” Benois noted further: In theory, I admit that such an art may exist in general. Perhaps it is even possible that it is real art, corresponding to, let us say, “pure music,” but to me, such an art is not comprehensible or pleasurable. Without that moment of “enjoyment,” I simply do not fathom and do not accept an art. I am a hopeless “materialist.” In order to feel a specific shiver — that very shiver “for which life is worth living” — I need consistent material forms, if not for the faculty of reason, then for the conscious mind, and also for the subconscious. And in your work I do not find them . . . I do admit that that your creations have a great future. It would not surprise me at all that if I could peer into the future, I would see only art originating with you or descending from you . . . It would not surprise me, but in such a situation I would be devastated . . . I love the world as I see it.25 This excerpt from Benois’ letter gives a clear idea of his attitude to abstract painting. It had not changed since 1915, when he had first seen Malevich’s Black Square. In an answering letter, Kandinsky thanked Benois for his directness and openness, and tried to explain that, in his opinion, they were in different “camps,” and that in art, as in life, it was impossible to exist without “contrasts” and “oppositions.” “In an orchestra there are

23 Kandinsky, letter to Alexandre Benois, 26 May 1921, Manuscript Department, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, fond 137, ed. khr. 1030, l. 1. 24 Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow (RGALI), fond 938, op. 2, d. 262, ll. 2–4. “Vystavka V. V. Kandinskogo,” Poslednie novosti (13 December 1936). Cited in B. I . Asvarishch, “V. V. Kandinskii i A. N. Benua v Parizhe,” Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia, VIII (1996): 611–13. 25 Ibid.

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the ‘slender’ violins and flutes,” wrote Kandinsky, “but also the bellowing trumpet, the growling double-bass, and the menacing banging drum. Similarly, we have smoky cobalt, sharp cadmium, bottomless alizarin, and ivory, simultaneously flat and limitless. Only each of these ‘forces’ must be in its place, and help, not impede, the others.26 In Paris, Kandinsky took part in discussions about the interrelations and mutual influences among different movements of contemporary art, in defining their precise succession, and also in polemics about who was the first creator of twentieth-century abstract art. He had to produce well-reasoned proofs of his innovative experiments, down to citing specific witnesses for the dates of his first abstract pictures.27 He thoroughly discussed his works in correspondence with his nephew Alexander Kozhevnikov, later a wellknown philosopher. Kozhevnikov wrote to him: I am struck every time by your ability to find more and more new forms for your paintings. In this, only Picasso can be compared to you. But in contrast to him you never allow yourself to shock, and so on. Indeed, in your paintings there is rather more taste, tact, wisdom, and skill. However, this great virtue is also sometimes a disadvantage, you see; often, and sometimes fairly, you are charged with intellectualizing. I myself think that some of your paintings are sooner examples of your theory of painting, than spontaneous painting. In this, you are reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci.28 In the mid-1930s, the leading role in art belonged to the Surrealists. They “ruled” the European artistic arena. Many researchers — in particular, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Alfred Barr, in his exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art — noted the influence of Malevich and of the Surrealists Joan Miró and Jean Arp on Kandinsky’s

26

Kandinsky Archive, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou,

Paris. Derouet, “Kandinsky in Paris,” 46–47. C. Derouet, “Vassily Kandinsky correspondance avec Zevros et Koje’ve,” Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne (Paris, 1995), 143–144. Kozhevnikov is noted for a book on the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev. See Vivian E. Barnett, “Kandinsky and Science: the Introduction of Biological Images in the Paris Period,” Kandinsky in Paris, 83–84. 27 28

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3–12. Vasily Kandinsky, Composition IX, 1936, oil on canvas, 113.5 x 195 cm., Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2007.

Paris work (Fig. 3–12). This comparison with the Surrealists provoked only indignation in the artist. An angry Kandinsky wrote in May 1936: The last straw is the suggestion that my Paris painting could be influenced by Arp or Miró. Barr with equal accuracy could have named Corot instead of Arp, or Velásquez instead of Miró. One needs to learn from everyone, even the weak (why not?). Once Miró said that he was extremely grateful to me for “liberation.”29 Abstraction had become the language of Surrealism. Kandinsky’s Paris period was devoted exclusively to art. In the numerous works from this time — termed in the literature his “synthetic” period30 — Kandinsky seemed to unite everything he had found earlier, creating new forms of painterly composition. His paintings lose the strict constructedness

29 30

Barnett, “Kandinsky and Science,” 83–84. Derouet , “Kandinsky in Paris,” 14.

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of the Bauhaus period; there is a combination of freely floating curved forms reminiscent of living biological cells, which he associated with the “origin of life.” The theme of the microscopic world became a leitmotif.31 Kandinsky’s late works are distinguished by elegant line and beautiful form, refined color combinations, an endless variety of compositional variations, and the most delicate filigree of detail. He used a sand technique in major compositions. “I usually do not make a distinction between traditional oil painting, gouache, tempera, and watercolor, and even simultaneously use various materials,” he explained.32 During the eleven years he spent in Paris, Kandinsky created 144 paintings, about 250 watercolors and gouaches, and a large number of drawings. They are imbued with calm and conciliation, testifying to a new era, a new stage in the life of the artist, who had discovered the secret of a microscopic world, and who possessed a sense of the infinitude of life and the harmony of being. Kandinsky’s abstract Improvisations and Compositions are the result of intensive experience, and a deep sense of the intellectual and emotional life of contemporary society. The goal of painting is like a force, he insisted, it must be directed toward the purification of the spirit. Kandinsky painted abstract pictures until the end of his life, remaining within the space of the “new reality” he had discovered. The situation with Malevich in Russia was similar in atmosphere and events. The principal difference between the views of the two avant-garde artists in regard to polemics and the development of art, had been evident already at the Tenth State Exhibition: Objectless Creation and Suprematism in 1919 in Moscow, which had led to the isolation of Malevich. At this time, the creator of the Suprematist system began to abandon the original definition of Suprematism as the “supremacy of color over the object,” issued the “White Manifesto,” and made a series of “white on white” paintings. Painting, he said, was over long ago, and the artist himself was a prejudice of the past. Ivan Kliun, one of Malevich’s closest friends and followers, broke with Suprematism at this time. In the article “The Art of Color,” he maintained that Suprematism was just “dead forms painstakingly painted with various colors.” “The art of painting died, was sealed by Suprematism’s Black Square,

31 Ibid., 30. See Kandinsky, Blue World (1934, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York); Relations (1934, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David Lloyd Kreeger); Succession (1935, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D. C.) in Barnett, “Kandinsky and Science.” 32 Ibid., 30.

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3–13. Kazimir Malevich, Perfected Portrait of Ivan Kliun, 1913, oil on canvas, 112 x 70 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

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3–14. Ivan Kliun, Portrait of Malevich, 1933, pencil on paper, private collection.

and its sarcophagus put on view to the public in the new graveyard of the arts, the Museum of Painterly Culture.”33 Many years of friendship, beginning in their student days at Fedor Rerberg’s Art Institute, united Malevich and Kliun. This friendship strongly influenced the fate of both artists. As Kliun’s daughter remembers it, they were very attached to one another, often discussing and arguing about art, and regularly writing to each other once a week.34 Numerous portraits remain as artistic evidence of this relationship. Malevich painted three portraits of Kliun, including the famous Perfected Portrait of I. V. Kliun (1913), and Kliun made several portrait drawings of Malevich, two of them in 1935, during the final minutes of the artist’s life (Figs. 3–13, 14).35 It was due to Malevich that Kliun started along the path of Cubo-Futurism and Suprematism. 33 I. V. Kliun, “Iskusstvo tsveta,” Desiataia vystavka. Bespredmetnoe tvorchestvo i suprematizm (Moscow, 1919), 8. 34 N. Avtonomova, “I. V. Kliun. Ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva,” in I. V. Kliun v Tret’iakovskoi galerei (Moscow: RA, 1999), 32. 35 I. V. Kliun, Moi put’ v iskusstve. Vospominaniia, stat’i, dnevniki, ed. Andrei Sarab’ianov (Moscow: RA, 1999), 246–247, ill. no. 102, 103.

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3–15. Photograph of Kazimir Malevich in Leningrad, 1925.

By the second half of the 1920s, their mutual friend Alexei Kruchenykh had concluded his “beyonsense” (zaum) period, and Kliun had returned to creating figurative work. He was fascinated by the painting of the French Purists, Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). In the fall of 1928, Malevich wrote some satirical poems directed against his friends. He called them “uncommon bullies,” infected anew with the “figurative parasite,” while he remained, as before, an objectless artist, who was preparing to present a “twentieth square” to the world.36 Kliun responded that Malevich was like a King Lear, who had abandoned the world and was now wandering in an “objectless desert,” bearing his “twentieth square.” “Why not a fortieth? A hundredth?” Kliun asked. “Art, Kazimir Severinovich, does not bear repetition. . .” And he continued: You yourself used to say that you looked at the world through the eyes of art, and you have rejected the art of painting? You stopped with N. I. Khardzhiev, Stat’i ob avangarde, ed. Rudol’f Duganov, Iurii Arpishkin and Andrei Sarab’ianov, 1 (Moscow: RA, 1997), 214. 36

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3–16. Photograph of Vasily Kandinsky in Dresden in 1933.

Suprematism in painting, with objectlessness, and in philosophy you have never, and will never, go any further. You will always wander in the desert of objectlessness, where even your children (your Leningrad group) will soon abandon you. The letter concludes with Kliun’s appeal to Malevich: You must take up the brush, the time has come; it is time to come out of the desert. I am not deciding the question of what and how you must paint, but I know that you must paint a picture, and you yourself will see how your voice will ring out firmly, as it once did. Now it is necessary . . . Only the hammer and sickle will help you get out of the desert of objectlessness.37 A year earlier, in 1927, Malevich had made his first and only trip abroad, visiting Warsaw and Berlin. He went to the Bauhaus for one day, where in passing he met Kandinsky (Figs. 3–15, 16). For Malevich, this trip was an attempt to establish the principles of Suprematism in the West. He wanted to 37 Ivan Kliun, letter to Kazimir Malevich, 1928. Kliun family archive. Cited in I. V. Kliun v Tret’iakovskoi galerei, 25.

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3–17. Kazimir Malevich, Three Female Figures, early 1930s, oil on canvas, 47 x 63.5 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

be a part of the global art world. In Germany, however, he did not find much in the way of mutual understanding with regard to his theories. By that time, abstract art had already lost its topicality in Europe. The artist’s arrest in Russia in the fall of 1930, a toughening of the ideological situation in the country, and the demands for Socialist Realism in art aggravated his depression. Malevich returned to figurative painting. In the works of his “second peasant cycle,” he again transformed figurative painting in a new way — while remaining true to his Suprematist principles — this time by imparting a neoclassical look to figuration (Fig. 3–17). This was not simply the artist returning to the old Renaissance system, to the coordinates of threedimensional space. It was an exit to this side of the canvas’s surface, but now enriched with innovations that had been essential to the revolutionary Suprematist works. To paraphrase El Lissitzky, it was the path from the factory to the laboratory all over again.38 In the late works, Malevich created 38

El Lisitskii, “Vystavki v Berline,” Private archive, 14.

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monumental compositions, panoramic in the scale of their spatial scope and color intensity. He operated, in the words of his pupil Lev Iudin, not with volumetric, but with planar spatial categories. Spatial liberation, a predominance of centrifugal forces, estrangement from the earth (plastic weightlessness, depersonalization, and a tragic quality in the tenor of the images) characterize the artist’s Post-Suprematist work. Malevich’s attraction to metaphysical painting helped him to achieve a formal and plastic depth, to realize a symbolic quality within the limits of figuration, and to create a new image of the cosmic man who encompasses infinity. Malevich’s SelfPortrait (1933, Fig. 3–18) is a manifestation of his artistic credo, the creative

3–18. Kazimir Malevich, Self-Portrait (“Artist”), 1933, oil on canvas, 73 x 66 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

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position of the artist-philosopher, a triumphant hymn in a final accord that simultaneously sounds the notes of the “beginning” and “end” of his art. So then, is the idea exhausted? From the point of view of a definite stage in the artistic process, yes. The “utopian” Avant-Garde has completed its path. Naturally, its traditions are alive and its impulses continue to arise in contemporary art. There is also a continuation of Suprematist tendencies in the work of Malevich’s students and followers, and in the development of a new cycle of abstraction in American postwar art. From the point of view of the discovery of a “new reality,” a “new space,” the endeavor to reveal new connections among abstract, geometric, objective forms, to study the laws and boundless possibilities in their realization on an imaginary, illusory surface that opens before the artist — then no. That is why Kandinsky called the abstract, “concrete,” while Malevich called it the “new painterly realism.” Their discovery created enormous possibilities for later generations, for our contemporaries, who truly learned to create this imaginary world, to wander its back streets, to be connected instantly with any point on the earth, and to dwell in a world parallel to real space, the world first discovered by two brilliant artists of the Russian Avant-Garde.

II

4 Suprematism and Constructivism: An Intersection of Parallels Tatiana Goriacheva

B

Y the beginning of the 1920s, the concepts of “construction” and “constructivity” were fully embedded in avant-garde discourse, and had acquired the specific function of designating key parameters of Constructivist aesthetics. However, the terms had actually appeared much earlier with very different meanings. As early as 1913, Vasily Kandinsky had written, “A strong (and getting stronger all the time), conscious, and sometimes even subconscious, aspiration to substitute the constructive for the figurative that is becoming apparent today, is the first stage of a nascent, pure art.”1 In his understanding, “construction” denoted a necessary and organic relationship between the various elements of a picture. Two years later in 1915, Kazimir Malevich contrasted construction and composition, characterizing the Cubist approach as the “construction of pictures” or “constructing,” and dismissing previous art, saying, “composition is a death sentence for the figure, which is doomed by the artist to its eternal pose.”2 Similarly, Olga Rozanova and Mikhail Le Dantiu wrote of “construction” as the most perfect way of organizing plastic elements. In the 1910s, the terms “construction” and “constructivity,” therefore, had been used in opposition to the figurative;

1 V. V. Kandinskii, “Zhivopis’ kak chistoe iskusstvo,” reprinted in Izbrannye trudy po teorii iskusstva, 1 (Moscow: Gileia, 2001), 266. 2 Kazimir Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm (Moscow, 1916); reprinted in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. A. S. Shatskikh, 1 (Moscow: Gileia, 1995), 55.

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“construction” was conceived of as operating with the pure elements of an artwork, devoid of any artistic mimetic function. In 1928, when Malevich analyzed the emergence of Constructivism, he emphasized the moment of change, pointing out that the term “to construct” was substituted for “to compose” at the very time that spatial plastic solutions emerged in Cubist painting. The introduction of real materials into Cubist works generated the need for a new terminology that would reflect the new artistic mentality.3 In the 1910s, Russian avant-garde artists advanced another important aspect of “construction,” the correlation between “constructivity” and the classical norms of architectonics, as well as the identification of constructive thinking as a style marker. To take just one example, we find this attitude in Le Dantiu, who eulogized Cézanne’s classical form, which he considered the result of faultless construction, and praised the exceptional constructivity of Novgorod icons that, in his opinion, was inherited from the Greeks.4 Thus, “construction” — on the one hand defined as an important method of non-figurative art, and on the other, as a sui generis indicator of the grand style, or a kind of a generalizing instance — became a conceptual difficulty that the Constructivists raised for themselves. In the early 1920s, the AvantGarde felt the lack of a universal method that would allow it to present its approach as something more than just a range of different versions of nonfigurative art, that is, to present its work as a fundamentally new system of artistic mentality, as a totally new style. The concept of “construction” thus crystallized in the process of the Avant-Garde’s self-identification, and eventually became the framework for defining its central problem. Moreover, the concept played an ambiguous role, for it also became the focus of the program of Constructivism, both as a local movement and as a major trend in artistic thinking. The semantic breadth of the word “constructiveness” ensured a collision of “intersecting parallels” in the interrelationship between Suprematism and Constructivism, since they might be considered both as two cognate phenomena and as two belligerent parties. Before the emergence of Constructivism as a movement, Malevich was in a favorable position. With

Kazimir Malevich, “Zhivopis’ v probleme arkhitektury,” Nova generatsiia, 2, (1928); reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2 (Moscow: Gileia, 1998), 132. 4 Mikhail Le Dantiu, “Zhivopis’ vekov,” in Neizvestnyi russkii avangard v muzeiakh i chastnykh sobraniiakh, ed. A. D. Sarab’ianov (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1992), 330– 331. 3

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the exception of Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko, Malevich’s articulated aesthetic had no viable alternative or clear-cut circle of opponents, and there had been no insuperable dissent. The artist’s struggle against his competitors came down chiefly to his wish “to eliminate confusion in criticism, according to which what is non-figurative is at the same time Suprematist.”5 The year 1921 was a turning point in the confrontation between Malevich and other innovators. Many non-figurative artists, who formerly might have been seduced by Suprematist ideas, united on the Constructivist platform. Constructivism presented itself as a method, rather than as a stylistic or form-building concept. For this reason, the Constructivists did not formulate an explicit aesthetic program, although it existed de facto; the style of their painting and three-dimensional constructions can be easily identified. Despite disagreements among the Constructivists, they were all united by the notion of technical construction as an aesthetic standard and method. These non-figurative artists made the idea of “construction,” already one of the most important ideas for avant-garde art in general, their own basic principle, and thus they found themselves on the firing line. Malevich responded by legitimizing the terms “construction” and “constructivity” in the Suprematist lexicon, and giving them quite different meanings. At the Vitebsk School of Art, second-year students studied such subjects as “construction” and “theory of constructive systems.”6 The Unovis motto asserted, “We affirm Suprematism as the new constructivity of world forms.” When the members of Unovis exhibited in Moscow in the summer of 1921, they supplied their works with the following commentary: “Our way is based on the method of “geometricism” or the constructive method of K. S. Malevich. . . . The distinctive feature of this method is the organic development from color composition to the elements of pictorial form as elements of abstraction, and furthermore, to complete abstraction, [that is] to the composition of new forms or new constructions.”7 For Malevich, constructivity was a method too, but this method was also an integral part of

Kazimir Malevich, “Vystavka Professional’nogo soiuza khudozhnikov-zhivopistsev,” Anarkhiia, 89 (1918); reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:121. 6 Il’ia Chashnik, “Zachetnaia knizhka,” “Svidetel’stvo ob okonchanii I. Chashnikom Vitebskogo khudozhestvenno-prakticheskogo instituta.” Private collection. 7 Malevich, “K vystavke ‘Unovisa’ 1921 goda,” ms, Cultural Foundation “KhardzhievChaga Center,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 5

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his Suprematist philosophy. As in the 1910s, he conceived of “construction” as perfected, pure form. Malevich insisted on the priority of the notion of “system.” In his diary, Lev Iudin wrote down Malevich’s words: “The system pre-ordains the construction,”8 and Malevich defined three systems on which the construction was based. Two of them were the subsidiary systems that played an intermediate role in the comprehension of spatial and dynamic relations between forms; these systems were Cubism and Futurism. The main system was Suprematism, which absorbed their accomplishments and laid the foundation for new form-building.9 The development of Constructivist principles led to the emergence of two basic concepts: “appropriateness” [tselesoobraznost’] and “utility.” These in turn sparked off an antagonism between the Constructivists and Suprematists, as well as generating differences among the Constructivists themselves, many of whom were not ready to completely discard their experiments with pure art. In general, no one challenged the importance of these concepts for modern art, but the semantics and axiological content of these concepts were different for the different “factions.” El Lissitzky, for example, kept to the position of pure form-building as the basis for a new aesthetic. Ilia Ehrenburg, who had become a spokesperson for Lissitzky’s ideas,10 wrote, “[New forms] are appropriate, because a newly born form, faultless and bearing meaning, is the product of an act of creativity, a lever of life. Utilitarian use will come later. Utility comes after appropriateness.”11 The Stenberg brothers (Georgy and Vladimir) and Konstantin Medunetsky interpreted appropriateness as the “use of modern industrial material,” and defined utility as the “logic of being.”12 Alexei Gan not only adopted the slogan “[bring] art into production,” but also placed ideological requirements in the forefront. He said, “Appropriateness

“Iz dnevnikov Iudina,” in Kazimir Malevich v Russkom muzee (St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000), 417. 9 “Programma edinoi auditorii zhivopisi,” Almanakh Unovis. Faksimil’noe izdanie. Podgotovka teksta, publikatsiia, kommentarii, vstupitel’naia stat’ia, T. Goriachevoi (Moscow: SkanRus, 2003), 93. 10 During the 1920s, Ehrenburg took a great interest in Constructivist ideas; his friendly relations with Lissitzky determined the closeness of his views to Lissitzky’s. 11 Il’ia Erenburg, A vse-taki ona vertitsia (Berlin, 1922), 92. 12 Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, INKhUK i rannii konstruktivizm (Moscow, 1994), 213– 214. 8

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must be understood in terms of organic properties and the requirements of Communism on the one hand, and as a conscious approach to industrial material on the other. . . . The ideological part must go hand in hand with the formal part. . . . Therefore, our Constructivism, that is, Constructivism grown on the territory of RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic), is strikingly different from the Constructivism they are talking about in the West, and with whose artists our left artists are in contact.”13 A dispute between the Constructivists and Suprematists took place in December 1921, when Malevich read a paper entitled “The First Task” at the Unovis exhibition at the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture (Inkhuk). The text and the contents of this paper have not come down to us, but it is plausible to assume that it was devoted to the key concepts of that period: construction, constructivity, utility, and appropriateness.14 In the early 1920s, Malevich developed a theory that rationalized the elimination of causality from creativity, which led to an incongruity between the ideologies of Suprematism and Constructivism. He also introduced a different concept of utility, which he defined as the functionality of pure form-building, independent of any considerations of practical use. This theory was based on his Suprematist manifestos from the mid-1910s, where he formulated the idea of creativity for creativity’s sake. In Malevich’s system of reasoning, the term “utility” was not deprived of its accepted meaning of “practical purpose,” but effectively gained another connotation. If the aim of creativity is creativity itself, then utilitarian creativity is pure creativity, the creation of new forms. “Suprematist forms, as abstract forms, have achieved utilitarian perfection,” Malevich wrote.15 Here “utilitarian perfection” invokes the model of an ideal cosmos, Malevich’s “objectless world.”16 Malevich severely criticized the Constructivists’ interpretation of utility and appropriateness. He considered appropriateness in terms of “natural

Aleksei Gan, Konstruktivizm (Tver’, 1922). Documents in the Cultural Foundation “Khardzhiev-Chaga Center,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam contain a brief account of the Unovis presentation at the exhibition. 15 K. Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka (Vitebsk, 1920); reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:186. 16 One might note also a certain similarity between this statement and an idea advanced by Schopenhauer (with whose The World as Will and Representation Malevich was well acquainted) — the idea that inutility is one of the characteristic features of a work of genius. 13 14

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construction”; utility denoted the organic plastic unity of the construction. “We Suprematists repudiate [and want to exempt] Suprematism from the utility which surrounds us. The surrounding utility demands that a house stand on the ground, but we are willing to find out what kind of utility is hidden in the objectless universal forms of Suprematism, and this is why we develop non-figuratively, but at the same time say that we will become figurative. It is difficult to say now what kind of figuration there will be, for any proposition or suggestion can be made through the influence of the surrounding world.”17 These statements led Malevich to a final break with the Constructivists, whom he had started to perceive as a hostile camp. This represented something more than his personal antagonism to Tatlin or Rodchenko; it was a struggle between two ideologies. To Malevich, the main shortcoming of the Constructivists’ interpretation of utility as an orientation toward practical use, was the lack of any spirituality in their desire to satisfy short-lived social and aesthetic requirements. He contrasted this position with Suprematism as a universal teaching. “So, many young people entered polytechnic schools to create their animal, figurative kingdom . . . Well, let them do it, but someone else must keep the other way, and create an idea of man.”18 Malevich treated the Constructivists’ idea of appropriateness as a new version of academicism, because Constructivism, in his opinion, reproduced the plastic image of modern machinery and, therefore, developed a figurative mentality. “Art has met the new figurative world of motors and machines again, the world of machinery which it should destroy, along with the figurative world of academic arts, and only then will the actual form of a new world come into being. Some of the revolutionary artists who are keen on constructivity have already got into the swamp of the old [art], for they could not realize that, as a whole, the academicism of art and the academicism of machinery are one and the same thing.”19 Kazimir Malevich, letter to the Dutch artists, 7 September 1921, not sent; the Cultural Foundation “Khardzhiev-Chaga Center,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; reprinted in Malevich o sebe. Sovremenniki o Maleviche. Pis’ma. Dokumenty. Vospominaniia. Kriitika, ed. I. A. Vakar and T. I. Mikhienko, 1 (Moscow: RA, 2004), 143–147. 18 Kazimir Malevich, letter to the Dutch Artists, 12 February 1922; reprinted, alongside the 1920 draft, in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:143–147; English translation in Essays on Art 1915–1933, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin 1 (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968), 184. 19 Ibid. 17

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Malevich argued vehemently with the Constructivists, who had captured key positions in the arena of modern art. His only followers were his devotees in Unovis. Meanwhile, the Constructivists’ ideas spread like wildfire. In such a situation the Suprematists desperately needed allies, and they tried to find them abroad. In the fall of 1920, Unovis sent some materials to Germany,20 but it was impossible to contact the German artists. The Western blockade of Bolshevik Russia included mail originating from there. Lissitzky, who left for Berlin in the fall of 1921, did not fulfill his promise to Malevich to disseminate the ideas of Unovis. The Germans were left to judge Suprematism by the works of Ivan Puni. 21 Their first opportunity to appreciate Malevich’s oeuvre was at the First Russian Art Exhibition in Berlin in 1922. Meanwhile, the Dutch artists associated with De Stijl tried to contact the Russian artists. The Dutch scholar Ger Harmsen refers to the Dutch artists’ numerous attempts to get in touch with their Russian colleagues during 1919.22 In May 1919, Robert van ’t Hoff wrote to Chris Beekman, “I am a member of the Communist Party and asked Wijnkoop to help me deliver our first manifesto to Russia.23 He’ll try. . . . Everyone who reads the manifesto in the latest issue of De Stijl will have no doubt of our movement’s attitude to Communism.”24 Materials from De Stijl were sent to Russia in the fall. In September, Theo van Doesburg wrote to Beekman, “I am very glad that our first manifesto has reached Russia. I would be very interested to know how it was received. Of course, I wait with impatience for contact with our Russian colleagues. Will their work remain under the yoke of Expressionism, or will they advance further? Russia is the only contact we missed.”25 But Doesburg had spoken too soon; the manifestoes did not reach their addressees. The Dutch government also participated in the blockade, and the parcel was returned. In the summer of 1920, David Wijnkoop was a delegate to the Second Congress of the Comintern in Moscow, but even 20 “The Executive Bureau of Communications for Art Affairs, organized in the Central Creative Committee, shipped Unovis materials to Germany.” Unovis. Listok Vitebskogo tvorkoma, 1 (20 November 1920). 21 Ivan Puni (1892–1956); his Suprematist works were exhibited in Berlin in 1921. 22 Ger Harmsen, “De Stijl and the Russian Revolution,” in De Stijl: 1917–1931: Visions of Utopia (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1982), 45–51. 23 David Wijnkoop (1876–1941) was the chairman of the Dutch Communist Party and the editor-in-chief of Tribune magazine. 24 De Stijl 1917–1931, 45. 25 Ibid., 46.

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then the De Stijl materials apparently were not given to Malevich. In a letter of April 1921 from Moscow to Vitebsk, Malevich wrote that he had met some foreigners — Hungarians, Germans, and Dutchmen — but he did not mention anything about modern Dutch art.26 There was no communication with the Russian artists until the summer of 1921, when the Dutch communist painter Pieter Alma attended the Third Congress of the Comintern in Moscow as a correspondent. Malevich wrote to the members of Unovis, “Yesterday a delegate from the West came here; he brought many books, journals, and letters addressed to me in person from Dutch painters, with their works attached. They ask me to discuss their works and send them my criticism. . . . Their works suffer from planarity, and one can say that although the Dutch have gotten ahead of all the others, they can learn something from us.”27 Looking ahead, it should be noted that a solid alliance between the Russian and Dutch painters was never realized, even though the relationship was of mutual interest. In 1922 an issue of De Stijl featured the Black Square on the cover.28 It is quite possible (although this hypothesis requires additional research) that works by Dutch artists gave an impetus to Malevich’s later architectural work; his architectons of the mid-1920s resemble some of Georges Vantongerloo’s and van ’t Hoff ’s three-dimensional constructions of 1918.29 In his reply to the Dutch artists, Malevich concentrated on explaining the Suprematist system, and only noted in passing, “I received your letter and read your article . . . and what you said in [it] is undoubtedly a link in the chain that connects me (and my comrades) and you. . . . The photographs you sent certainly contradict our system and construction.”30 Malevich had apparently detected two important differences between his and De Stijl’s work: the priority that was given to the plane in the Dutch architecture (an aspect that he had pointed out in the letter to his Vitebsk colleagues), and the predominance of functionality over a new spatial aesthetic. These differences made him consider the practice of De Stijl to be closer to Russian Constructivism than to Suprematism, and this may explain the extensive Cultural Foundation “Khardzhiev-Chaga Center,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Ibid. 28 De Stijl, 5, no. 9 (1922). 29 See photos in Paul Overy, De Stijl (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 72, 74. 30 Cultural Foundation “Khardzhiev-Chaga Center,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 26 27

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diatribes against Russian Constructivism in his letter. Malevich indicated to the Dutch artists the two artistic groups that in the fall of 1921 represented Constructivism in Russia: The Society of Young Artists (Obmokhu), and The Working Group of Constructivists (The Constructivists). To him, both groups were characterized by a limited artistic consciousness, “Both groups failed to recognize the polytechnic school as their new enemy. . . . all their constructions [reproduce] the old machinery.”31 Malevich had another important reason to emphasize the polarity of his views and those of the Constructivists — both Suprematist and Constructivist works are superficially similar in their succinct geometries. But Malevich intended to present Suprematism as a central movement in Western, as well as Russian, modern art, and therefore he had to distinguish properly between the two Russian trends, and demonstrate that the superficial similarity produced a false impression about two radically different approaches. His assessment of the possibility of confusion between Suprematism and Constructivism was not groundless; they are easy to confuse if one does not take into consideration anything other than their outward appearance. Indeed, many people thought that Suprematism and Constructivism were almost identical, or at least very close to each other. This idea goes back to the 1910s, when critics identified non-figurative artists with Suprematism, and were not inclined to consider particular discords and differences. In the 1920s, when the Constructivists proposed the slogan “[bring] art into production,” this misunderstanding strengthened; Suprematist design was interpreted as an implementation of the Constructivist program. Constructivism was considered the more general phenomenon, while Suprematism was often referred to as its branch, and thought of within a Constructivist frame of reference. Or vice versa: Constructivist works were typified as Suprematist by virtue of their non-figurative character and superficial geometric similarities. In 1922, a critic, writing of the new tendencies in art and theater on the pages of the journal Hermitage, defined the Constructivist sets of The Magnanimous Cuckold as an example of Suprematism, or an art of “pure form.”32 In 1934, the artist and critic Boris Ternovets quoted Fernand

31 32

Malevich, letter to the Dutch artists, Malevich o sebe, 1:144. V. Tikhonovich, “Stupeni teatra,” Ermitazh, 6 (1922): 4.

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Léger’s statement that a circle and a square on a white background were not sufficient for a modern easel painting, and commented that Léger was criticizing “our Suprematists — Malevich, Rodchenko, and the others.”33 Lissitzky, who tried to reconcile Suprematism with Constructivism, called van Doesburg a Suprematist;34 Hannes Meyer called his apparently Suprematist works Constructions.35 The critic Alexei Sidorov, dissenting from the thesis concerning the transition from art into production – very popular at the time — argued that “from objectlessness — to the creation of objects” . . . is a fully appropriate direction, but only for those Supremato-Futurists who have long since lost their hold on the genuine element of art.”36 The same aberration is found in another article by Sidorov: “We consider Malevich’s Suprematism distant from the mainstream of the “art of painting”; his main point was Malevich’s connection with industrial art.37 At the same time, the ideologists of Constructivism, paying tribute to Malevich, made a sort of terminological inversion. They avoided calling Suprematism one of the strongest artistic influences on Constructivism, yet placed Malevich among the older generation of Constructivists, thus simultaneously downgrading Suprematism, and defining it in terms of Constructivist criteria. This, of course, contradicted many of Malevich’s ideas. Osip Brik called Malevich, as well as Tatlin and Rodchenko, early Constructivists.38 The same combination of names is found in the writings of Ilia Ehrenburg.39 In his analysis of Russian Constructivism, Alfréd Kemény in one case stated that Malevich had nothing in common with Constructivism, in another, following Brik, identified Malevich, Tatlin, and Rodchenko as the “initiators of Constructivism.”40 At the same time, he criticized the works of

33 Boris Ternovets, footnotes to F. Léger, “Moia berlinskaia vystavka,” in Mastera iskusstva ob iskusstve, ed. David Arkin and Boris Ternovets, 3 (Moscow, 1934), 800. 34 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Nikolai Punin, in Pis’ma Kazimira Malevicha El’ Lisitskomu i Nikolaiu Puninu, ed. A. Shatskikh and A. Kamenskaia (Moscow, 2000), 4. 35 See Hannes Meyer’s Construction (Khannes Maier, Konstruktsiia) of c.1924; MoskvaBerlin/Berlin-Moskau 1900–1950 (Moscow; Berlin, 1996), 255. 36 Aleksei Sidorov, “Retsenziia na Iskusstvo v proizvodstvo. Sbornik khudozhestvennoproizvodstennogo soveta otdela Izo Narkomprosa,” Tvorchestvo, 4–6 (1921): 70. 37 Aleksei Sidorov, “Muzei zhivopisnoi kul’tury. K voprosu o granitsakh professionalizma v iskusstve,” Tvorchestvo, 4–6 (1921): 49. 38 Khan-Magomedov, INKhUK i rannii konstruktivizm, 205. 39 Erenburg, A vse-taki ona vertitsia, 24. 40 Khan-Magomedov, INKhUK i rannii konstruktivizm, 199, 204.

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Tatlin and Rodchenko for their “technical naturalism,”41 an opinion shared by Malevich. Boris Arvatov considered Suprematism, together with Cubism, Futurism, “engineerism,” and the “music of noise” in the category of “analytic art,” which according to him, began the movement toward Constructivism. Indeed, Suprematism and Constructivism were not such antagonistic opponents as has been thought. Nevertheless, for their adherents, the differences were obvious and a matter of principle. Malevich’s fundamental idealism could transform points of contact into repelling magnetic poles. The applied art of Unovis, which, prima facie, had so much in common with the Constructivist program of artistic production, pursued the utopian goal of building an “objectless world.” The priority given to geometric plastic principles had opposite modalities in Suprematism and Constructivism. The Suprematists read philosophical implications into geometry, and assumed that the absolute nature of geometrical form is an expression of a supreme economy. Malevich wrote: “We want Suprematist construction to go . . . along the economic path, so that every form, volume, or plane is geometrically simple in its economic necessity.”42 Thus, geometricism was considered a goal, while construction was the means to achieve that goal. For the Constructivists, it was quite the reverse; Constructivism uses geometry as the most practical method, the means of building a construction. As a result of these ideological differences, Suprematism and Constructivism could not agree on the question of their relationship to material. Malevich de facto equated the philosophical notion of “matter” with “material,” as the physical property of the work of art. He treated the focus on material as materialism, a new embodiment of the figurative mentality, whose limitations are opposite to the infinitude of Suprematism. This opened Suprematism to criticism. Nikolai Punin, for example, considered indifference to material to be one of the main inconsistencies of Suprematism. “What then, if not material? There is nothing without material, the existence of which has not been refuted, only nothingness, emptiness, repose. . . . The Suprematists take so much exception to material, because they are deliberately insensitive to it.”43 Karl Ioganson blamed Malevich and Tatlin

Ibid., 204. Malevich, letter to the Dutch artists, Cultural Foundation “Khardzhiev-Chaga Center,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 43 Nikolai Punin, “Konspekt k dokladu ‘Tupik suprematizma’ chitannomu v ‘Ob”edinenii’ 29 aprelia 1923 goda,” Experiment, 5 (1999): 159. 41 42

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for “voluntary operations with material,” leading to the creation of a “false construction.”44 The idealism of the Suprematist system, which works with concepts such as infinity and the absolute, and is indifferent to the materiality of a construction, was formulated by Lissitzky. When he analyzed the difference between spatial conceptions in Suprematism and Constructivism, Lissitzky defined Constructivism as a continuation of Cubism; it builds “its construction forward — from the plane of the canvas toward our eye.” Lissitzky called Tatlin’s counter-reliefs the climax of this movement in art; they are “construct[ed] from the plane of the board — forward,” as a “pictorial whole that can be touched by the eyes as well as by the hands.”45 Suprematism, for Lissitzky, builds an infinite space deep into the canvas. “Suprematism gave priority to a reality that can be touched by the eyes. This is how it ended up with illusion transformed into an absolute.”46 The idealistic priority of a speculative idea of perfection over the idea of practical use became too constricting for artists who wanted to construct real volumes in material. Constructivism invaded Unovis; Sergei Senkin, Gustav Klutsis, and Lissitzky “betrayed” Malevich.47 In a Unovis questionnaire of 1921, Klutsis emphasized his solidarity with Unovis, but claimed, “There is no work of art that I regard as a model.”48 (When Ilia Chashnik answered the same questionnaire, he referred to the works of Malevich as his models.)49 The members of Unovis studied Constructivism with great attention, and increasingly as it gathered steam in Russia. In the spring of 1922, Messenger of the Arts published an article signed I. M., who wrote, “In the winter, various sections and the scholarly council presided over by K. Malevich examined the program of the Working Group of Constructivists. The Unovis members intend to send their appraisal of the program to Khan-Magomedov, INKhUK i rannii konstruktivizm, 229. L. Lisitskii, “Preodolenie iskusstva (1921),” Experiment, 5 (1999): 143. 46 Ibid. 47 Sergei Sen’kin (1894–1963) and Gustav Klutsis (1895–1938) were artists and designers. In 1920 they were Malevich’s disciples and in 1921–1922, they were members of the Moscow section of the Unovis group. Both Sen’kin and Klutsis were influenced by Suprematism for a short time, but later moved to Constructivism. 48 Gustav Klutsis, “Otvety na voprosy ankety,” ms, Cultural Foundation “KhardzhievChaga Center,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 49 Vasilii Rakitin, Il’ia Chashnik (Moscow: RA, 2000), 110–12. 50 “Khudozhniki i proizvodstvo,” Vestnik iskusstv (Moscow), 5 (1922): 26. The author is supposedly I. Meerson. 44 45

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the Constructivists.”50 The author summarized the distinctive features of Suprematism and Constructivism: “The main difference between Unovis and the Constructivists is that the former declaim against figurativeness even in buildings, whereas the Constructivists insist on the “Communist expression of material structures.”51 The Constructivists used such rhetoric to express clearly their attitude to social reality. In theorizing, Malevich repeatedly predicted the advent of a realm of Suprematism, which would be the successor to Communism. He thus equated the historical and philosophical significance of Suprematism and Communism, emphasizing at the same time that Suprematism’s artistic principles were independent of empirical reality. In contrast, the Constructivists considered Russia’s urgent social needs the all-important focal point of their work. This difference incited the conflict between figuration and objectlessness in the Suprematist—Constructivist dispute. To the Constructivists, “the Communist expression of material structures” meant functionality, that is, the dependence of material and form on the utilitarian purpose of the construction. The utilitarian purpose, in turn, had a social orientation very specifically. To Malevich, such forms of dependence imposed restrictions on the artistic mentality and made it figurative. He perceived real objectlessness in a rather dogmatic way. His attitude to Lissitzky’s Prouns is quite revealing; he regarded them as based on the Suprematist system, but supplemented by a rational constructivity, alien to Suprematism. In 1924 Malevich wrote to Lissitzky: “You, constructor, got a fright from Suprematism . . . and now — what are you now? A constructivist-installer. [And] where are you now? You wanted to emancipate your personality, your Self from what I had done . . . and went to Gan and Rodchenko; you became a constructor, not even a proun-ist.”52 The scornful not even reveals both Malevich’s jealousy of the Prouns and his resentment of Lissitzky, his needless independence, and his apostasy of orthodox Suprematism. Lissitzky ignored the philosophical content of Suprematism and separated out its constructive element. He truly believed that Suprematism and Constructivism converged, rather than diverged. In his essay “Modern

51 This expression is from the “Program of the Working Group of Constructivists at Inkhuk,” adopted on 1 April 1921 at a meeting of the Working Group of Constructivists. The program begins, “The Group of Constructivists aims at the communist expression of material structures.” 52 Malevich, letter to Punin, in Pis’ma Kazimira Malevicha, 6.

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Russian Art,” Lissitzky wrote, “Constructivism was created by two groups: Obmokhu . . . and Unovis. The first group worked in material and [threedimensional] space; the second group worked in material and the plane. Both groups strove after one and the same result — the creation of real things and architecture.”53 It is interesting to note that in 1929, when Malevich tried to interpret the historical significance of Suprematism and Constructivism, and define a hierarchy, he managed to find some points of contact, though in a very subjective way and, of course, in favor of Suprematism. He maintained that aesthetic solutions to functional constructions are eventually based on the “Suprematist formula of pure art,”54 and cited such examples as Rodchenko’s constructions, and the architectural projects of Theo van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld, Farkas Molnár, and Arthur Corn. In fact, Lissitzky and Malevich were saying one and the same thing: that Suprematism laid the foundations of the planar geometrical aesthetic. When Lissitzky analyzed the impact that Suprematism had had on the development of modern art, he highlighted two principal achievements: the creation of a sign system of geometrical planes, a basis for “further constructing in space,” and a new aesthetic criterion of economy.55 But this is exactly the same as Malevich’s “Suprematist formula of pure art,” as it was used by the Constructivists. For Lissitzky, however, the vital question concerned “overcoming art,” and the “transition from subjective creativity to universal creativity.”56 And Lissitzky, while not making it explicit, implied that Suprematism gave a renewed impetus to the development of a modern artistic mentality — even though it was already a part of history and not important except for those aspects that could have been integrated into Constructivism. Malevich’s evaluation of the relations between Suprematism and Constructivism is the mirror image of Lissitzky’s. He did not recognize the merits of Constructivist works, except those that bordered on Suprematism. However, Malevich considered that the shortcomings of modern architecture

53 El Lisitskii, “Novoe russkoe slovo;” reprinted in Sbornik teoreticheskoi prozy L. Lisitskogo, ed. Tat’iana Goriacheva (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia Tretiakovskaia galereia, 1991), 123. 54 Kazimir Malevich, “Russkie konstruktivisty i konstruktivizm,” Nova generatsiia, 9 (1929); reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 2:207–212. 55 Lisitskii, “Novoe russkoe slovo,” 120–121. 56 Ibid., 123.

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(both Western and Soviet) lay in its mechanical combination of the aesthetic of the geometrical plane with functionality, and the reluctance to consider pure form as the basis of the new order and style. Incidentally, this claim was partly verified by the opposition. As early as 1922, Brik stated that Western Constructivism had passed immediately to practical activities, having skipped the analytical stage, that is, without posing the problem of form.57 A few years later in 1927, Gan concurred. “But if the three-dimensional compositions of Suprematism do not reveal the everyday useful qualities of an object, i.e., its [Suprematism’s] works have no concrete-social value, without which modern architecture is not architecture at all, these works are of great importance from the viewpoint of the abstract quest for a new form as such.”58 Analyzing modern architecture, Gan blamed it for its inability to “make a move and abandon the old forms of architecture,” and its reluctance to “imagine new architectural solutions and modern resolutions.” He concluded, “The appearance of Suprematist works can play a considerable role in this shift.”59 Returning to Malevich’s and Lissitzky’s evaluations of the relationship between Suprematism and Constructivism, one should note that each artist was eventually right in his own way. Looking at Russian art from the distant vantage point of Europe, Lissitzky in 1922 was able to perceive the parallelism underlying the debates between the Suprematists and the Constructivists. And Malevich had good reason to insist that Suprematism had exerted a strong influence on the development of Constructivist thought.

57 58

Khan-Magomedov, INKhUK i rannii konstruktivizm, 208. Aleksei Gan, “Spravka o Kazimire Maleviche,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, 3 (1927):

105. 59

Ibid., 106.

5 Malevich and His Ukrainian Contemporaries Myroslava M. Mudrak

I

N SPITE of the seminal position occupied by Kazimir Malevich in developing an abstract idiom in modern painting, Malevich’s background has barely been scrutinized in regard to the role it may have played in his artistic formation. Although Malevich is known mostly as a Russian artist, his genealogy links him to both Polish and Ukrainian roots (Fig. 5–1). Recently, Polish art historian and scholar Andrzej Turowski, in an effort to reclaim Malevich for Polish modernist culture, published an impressive volume on Malevich’s links to Poland, featuring the artist’s historic visit to the West in 1927, Malevich’s only trip outside the Soviet Union.1 On his way to Berlin, Malevich spent several days in Warsaw among friends and family, and in modern artists’ circles. Turowski’s book highlights Malevich’s activities during his stay in Warsaw; in contextualizing Malevich’s connections to Poland, the book also reveals a great deal about the artist’s Ukrainian heritage as well, especially his Ukrainian genealogy, and the time he spent in Ukraine during his youth. Although Malevich would later make reference to his affinities for Ukraine in his own writings and reminiscences, a volume comparable to Turowski’s, but dedicated to a closer documentation of Malevich’s activities in Ukraine, has yet to be written. This chapter, then, offers an initial overview of key points of intersection of Ukraine and Malevich’s development and artistic evolution. Andrzej Turowski, Malewicz w Warszawe: Rekonstrukcje i Symulacje (Cracow: Universitas, 2002). Turowski studied the relevance of Malevich’s biography and family genealogy to his artistic development, linking him to his Polish forebears who lived in the westernmost outlying lands of Poland, regions that, although under Polish dominion in the artist’s time, nonetheless comprised Ukrainian ethnographic territories. 1

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5–1. Drawing of the house where Malevich was born on Bulionsky, formerly 13 Bozhenko Street, Kiev, private archive. Reproduced in Andrzej Turowski, Malewicz w Warszawie (Cracow, 2002), 51.

Malevich’s autobiographical notes make it clear that his childhood in the Ukrainian countryside instilled an attraction to the indigenous decorative arts, particularly the brightly colored, but restrained, ornamentation on the façades of white-washed village houses, and the walls of interior hearths. Equally important in the formation of the artist’s aesthetic sensibilities were the geometric patterns of the traditional Easter eggs [pysanka] and homespun tapestries, the simple angled motifs of cross-stitch embroideries on white linen, as well as the “boxy” silhouette of both the male and female brightly contrasting native costumes.2 On numerous occasions, Jean-Claude Marcadé has made a compelling case for such Ukrainian folk art as a source Ukrainian peasant art and its traditions offered a wealth of creative impulses. The Futurist Sergei Podhaevsky created a booklet of poems entitled Pysanka, with potato-cut imprints of Ukrainian Easter egg designs. Reproduced in The Russian Avant-garde Book 1910– 1934, ed. Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 79. 2

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of inspiration for Malevich’s art.3 Peasant motifs, and, prior to the First World War, Malevich’s penchant for reductive geometric forms, have been attributed repeatedly to his intimate familiarity with the aesthetics of Ukrainian folk culture.4 Malevich’s predilection for basic geometries, primary colors, and the pristine clarity of flat white backgrounds should not be discounted as merely impressionistic or anecdotal. Malevich’s primitivist inclinations, to which he returned over and over again in his art, can be linked directly to the textures and colors that he first became aware of during his childhood in the villages of Ukraine. The artist’s sustained interest in peasant culture infused his basic forms and solid colors with essential, universal properties. This influence came to synthetist fruition in Malevich’s Cubo-Futurist and Suprematist work. Marcadé, along with the Kiev scholar Dmytro Horbachov, provide us with numerous examples of Ukrainian peasant material culture that offer compelling evidence of correlations between abstraction and Ukrainian folk art, which may have guided Malevich’s path toward objectless art.5 Yet such kinship, while useful to examine on a formal level, provides little understanding of the stylistic and theoretical influences on Malevich’s art, which derived from his association with Ukrainian artists. Indeed, the degree to which he maintained contacts and relationships with those artists in Kiev who helped to shape Ukrainian modernism is hardly known. The object of this essay is to call attention to some of the aesthetic issues resulting from Malevich’s time spent in Ukraine. A consideration of Malevich’s contacts with specific artists makes possible a more systematic study of Ukrainian cultural influences on Malevich’s development. Beginning with the effects of local art training on the young artist, and ending with his role as teacher at the Kiev Art Institute several years before his death, the land of Malevich’s birth provides insights that heretofore have been largely overlooked.

3 See, for example, Jean-Claude Marcadé, Malévitch (Paris: Casterman, Nouvelles Éditions Françaises, 1990), 8–11. 4 Due to Malevich’s father’s occupation in the sugar beet industry, the artist’s early life was spent in mostly agrarian settings, where he came into contact with the fine arts only sporadically. One of those occasions was his contact with the future avant-garde composer Nikolai A. Roslavets, during a brief stay in Konotop in 1894. D. Sarab’ianov and A. Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich. Zhivopis’. Teoriia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1993), 383. 5 Because of its familiarity to readers of English, the spelling “Kiev” has been maintained throughout this essay. However, it may be noted that in the United States, the Board of Geographic Names, a federal body, has changed the official spelling to Kyiv.

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Three phases in Malevich’s artistic development have links with Kiev: his earliest formal training in the city, the context and texture of Kievan CuboFuturist practice, and Malevich’s pedagogical work at the Kiev Art Institute in the late 1920s. These periods correspond to discrete stylistic phases that mark Malevich’s art. An analysis of his work, contextualized against the background of the art of Malevich’s Ukrainian contemporaries, suggests that his later work is more cohesive with the rest of his oeuvre than has often been thought. In studying the subject and form of the peasant, and examining Malevich’s chronological working through his peasant themes in relation to the artistic climate of Kiev, it becomes apparent that ultimately Malevich’s artistic development was not linear. Instead, by returning to the subjects and compositions of his primary teacher, Mykola Pymonenko, Malevich’s last — and representational — phase, which was spent in the company of Ukrainian contemporaries, brought his artistic experience in Ukraine to a full and complete circle.6 Pymonenko Mykola Pymonenko [Nikolai Kornilovich Pimonenko] (1862–1912) was associated primarily with the artistic life of Kiev in the early years of the twentieth century. The son of an icon painter, his initial education was at the icon-painting school of the Kiev-Pechersk Monastery (Monastery of the Caves), followed by a formal program at the Kiev Drawing School from 1878 to 1882. Between 1879 and 1884 he tutored at the Drawing School, while completing his studies at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Petersburg (1882–84). Pymonenko officially taught at the Kiev Drawing School from 1884 to 1900.7 When Malevich met him on his first visit to Kiev, Pymonenko

6 Malevich’s reworking of earlier paintings suggests a resurgence of interest in the early period of his life. Compare his Flower Seller of 1930 (Fig. 1–14) with Pymonenko’s FlowerSeller of 1897 (oil on canvas, 64 x 77 cm., Collection Z. Strazhesko, Kiev). 7 In 1900 Pymonenko left the Kiev Drawing School and, together with other artists, founded the Kiev Art (Specialized) School, where he served as the principal teacher. The literature on Pymonenko is limited, and most of it suffers from Soviet-style methodology, which is sparse on analysis, but long on description and biography. See, for example, P. Hovdia, Pymonenko (Kiev, 1957), Iu. Turchenko, Kyivs’ka rysuval’na shkola (Kiev, 1956), Ia. P. Zatenats’kyi, Nikolai Kornilevich Pimonenko (Kiev, 1955), and more recently, Mykola Pymonenko (Kiev: Mystetstvo, 1983).

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was the city’s most authoritative and influential teacher. “I was moved by everything I saw in [Pimonenko’s] studio,” Malevich wrote. . . . “I ended up at the Kiev Art School.”8 Biographies suggest that Malevich studied at the Drawing School from 1895 to 1896, directly under Pymonenko’s influence. Indeed, the “earthy” sensibilities of Pymonenko’s style, and his predisposition

Quoted in N. Khardzhiev, K. Malevich, and M. Matiushin, K istorii russkogo avangarda, ed. N. Khardzhiev (Stockholm: Hylaea, 1976), 113. Several publications about Pimonenko date from before the First World War, so Malevich could have continued to find inspiration from his master-teacher even while working in Russia, especially during the years of his Neoprimitivist leanings. In 1910, a jubilee publication in the form of a “photo-album,” featuring Pymonenko’s major works to honor his status as Academician and twenty-five years of teaching, was issued in Moscow (see Akademik Nikolai Kornilevich Pimonenko 1885–[9/III] 1910). The album included 37 pictures on 21 folios; it is currently in the Research Library of the National Museum of Art of Ukraine. In addition, a memorial exhibition was held in St. Petersburg in 1913: Posmertnaia vystavka kartin, akademika zhivopistsa N. K. Pimonenko (St. Petersburg: Akademiia khudozhestv, 1913), and again, in 1916 in Moscow: Posmertnaia vystav. N. Pimonenko i Prof. D. Orlovskogo s 27 noia. po 18 dek. (Moscow: Galereia Lamerse, 1916). The multiple transformations of the art schools in Kiev during the revolutionary period can be difficult to follow. Here, as an aid to the reader, is a summary. The first Ukrainian Academy of Art was formed at the end of 1917, immediately after the dissolution of imperial rule over Ukraine. Until then, aspiring artists like Malevich would prepare for a career in the arts by attending the private Kiev Drawing/Painting School (1875–1901) named after Mykola Murashko. In 1901, with the collaboration of Mykola Pymonenko [Nikolai Pimonenko], another school, the Kiev Art (Specialized) School, was established under the purview of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. It lasted until 1921, and in its later years functioned separately from the Ukrainian Academy of Art. Many artists who came to define modernism in Ukraine, for example, Alexander Archipenko, Alexandra Exter, Ivan Padalka, Oksana Pavlenko, and Anatol Petrytskyi [Anatoly Petritsky], were products of the Kiev Art (Specialized) School; some, such as Oleksander Bohomazov [Alexander Bogomazov] and Abram Manevych [Manevich], who also attended the school, went on to become professors at the Ukrainian Academy of Art. Other artists who had trained and worked abroad — specifically Heorhii [Georgy] Narbut and Mykhailo [Mikhail] Boichuk — were also appointed to the faculty of the Ukrainian Academy of Art. In 1919, the Ukrainian Academy of Art, endorsed as a state institution by the first President of an independent Ukraine, historian and professor Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, was renamed the Kiev Institute of Plastic Arts. Vadym [Vadim] Meller taught there from 1921, and simultaneously at the Kiev Institute of Architecture (established in 1918) which, in 1924, merged with the Ukrainian Academy of Art to form the Kiev Art Institute at 20 Smyrnov-Lastochkin Street. Under the leadership of Ivan Vrona, the Institute implemented a radical form of education, involving an extensive theoretical curriculum and practical work conducted by a diverse faculty. Vladimir Tatlin taught there from 1925 to1927; Kazimir Malevich joined the teaching staff in 1928. 8

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to vernacular themes in which human kinship is represented in the midst of workaday labor, point to an identifiable thematic connection between the two artists. Pymonenko’s subjects — the mundane events of casual country life, heightened by understated human drama — belie a psychological emphasis that may have set Malevich on the path of a contemplative and philosophical approach to art. At the same time, it is clear that the two artists represent different art historical generations; Pymonenko’s art is linked to the sentimental Romanticism of nineteenth-century painting, whereas Malevich’s art, while treating similar themes, tends to sublate subjective narrative to a metaphysical level. Pymonenko’s influence on a younger generation of artists who would turn away entirely from academism was otherwise negligible; yet he wasn’t completely marginalized. The irascible Futurists of the 1910s acknowledged his ability to work abstractly (in the way that the English painter Turner painted mists), but they most certainly considered Pymonenko “old guard,” particularly because he was widely known, and still appreciated, by the educated class.9 Pymonenko came from a regional Ukrainian tradition of realist painting that favored light as a compositional device to emphasize primary figures. His depiction of warm sunlight called attention to the pigments’ own intensity, (a device that Malevich, would explore more fully as his work evolved toward painterly abstraction), but for Pymonenko, depicted light also revealed subtle psychological energies inherent in the subjects of his paintings. A plein-airiste, Pymonenko painted outdoors, and emphasized to his students that essential form resulted from the direct observation of nature.10 Peasants standing iconically in the landscape, highlighted by the

According to Benedikt Livshits’s 1933 memoiristic account of the life of the Futurists, Pymonenko was denigrated in a lecture by the Futurist poet and artist David Burliuk, but Pymonenko’s only crime was his continuing favorable status among middle-class art lovers. Benedikt Livshits, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, ed. and trans. John E. Bowlt (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1977), 81. 10 Although belonging to the generation of Realist painters, Pymonenko deviated from the prevailing critical approach of the Wanderers, by shifting his emphasis from the social conflict that predominated in their work to the study of subtle psychological tensions brought about by human peccadilloes. Scenes of one-upmanship, courtship rivalries, and a veritable gallery of outward emotions and introspective responses to weddings and other rituals abound in Pymonenko’s paintings, all of which reflect Ukrainian village life, which was so familiar to Malevich. 9

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bright rays of the sun, are a typical visual trope in Pymonenko’s paintings, a device that Malevich would keep returning to throughout his life. The foregrounded and monumentalized stances of Pymonenko’s female peasants, especially, are reiterated in a pronounced way in Malevich’s late paintings. Building upon these ideas, and swayed by the Futurists’ belief that the light of the sun distorts our perception of reality, Malevich also explored the metaphoric and philosophical aspects of sunlight. His preoccupation with the power of a sun that can blind us — literally and figuratively — and can misrepresent true reality, led him and his contemporaries to dramatize its capture in the 1913 Cubo-Futurist opera, Victory over the Sun. In the opera, Malevich went beyond the artistic expressiveness of light, and combined its elusive theatrical effect with color. Malevich would come to understand color to be pure and unmediated by light rays, unimpeded in its truthful presentation of nature. Even during his Cubo-Futurist period, when he was beginning to turn his attention to greater formal experimentation, Malevich did not extricate himself fully from Pymonenko’s sympathies for the subjects of rural life, but explored the character of that existence in a new pictorial idiom that extended into the sphere of uncanny and illogical transpositions. The staidness of rural life is vibrantly contrasted with the transient efflorescence of the city in Malevich’s An Englishman in Moscow (1914, Fig. 5–2), for example. Here Malevich’s imaging of the trans-sensical poetic language of zaum leads to a bisecting of images, to create radical shifts of time and space, word and image. A series of visual cleavages relating to city and country, East and West refer directly to the cultural tension implied by the title of the work. Echoes of historical schisms are introduced through a panoply of collagelike slicings — a process of cutting, ripping, sawing, and piercing suggested by scissors, sword, saw, bayonets, and even sharp fish fins. The high-brow realm of an English riding society is countered by the low-brow life of Russian (or Ukrainian) peasant life, emblematized by the red silhouette of a crudely carved peasant wooden spoon that was once attached to the surface of the canvas. Armed defense is suggested by the suspended sword and the downward rush of the red arrow, as if invoking the animated chiasmic gesture of ubiquitous and highly popular icons of St. George slaying the dragon, or the beginning of the Great War. Malevich’s painting parallels the kinds of linguistic juxtapositions of zaum that dislodge the normal sequencing of thought patterns in verbal and literary form, while forcing the viewer to reconsider the meanings attached to common objects, activities, or concepts.

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5–2. Kazimir Malevich, An Englishman in Moscow, 1914, oil on canvas, 88 x 57 cm., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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5–3. Mykola Pymonenko, The Rivals, 1910, oil on canvas, 148 x 198 cm., National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kiev.

The repeated references to partial eclipses — on the one hand, a direct and physical obscuring of light sources upon which illusionist painting relies, on the other, a symbolic reference to the eclipsing of Western cultural hegemony in Russian art — also encourages a metaphoric interpretation of the painting. These counter-contexts create a “strangeness” and “defamiliarization,” where objects are seen out of their normal context. The concept of “making it strange,” [ostranenie]11 brought about by the juxtaposition of two opposing contexts, can be traced in Pymonenko’s art. On the surface of things, Pymonenko’s paintings seem quite prosaic, and his

11 The formalist device of ostranenie was introduced by the linguist Viktor Shklovsky in 1917 in his essay “Iskusstvo, kak priem.” For an English translation, see “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 3–24.

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depictions of nature and Ukrainian villages with colorful figures in national dress, convey a degree of sentimentality that typifies the art of the nineteenth century (Fig. 5–3, 4). While Pymonenko’s paintings embrace the naturalism of nineteenth-century painting as a whole, they also manipulate mimetic realism, introducing the modernist theme of alienation. Pymonenko translated the French idea of separation and isolation brought about by the growth of the city into the context of daily life in the Ukrainian village. Here it is not industrialization that causes a break with nature, but the singling out of the individual, who seems cut out of the landscape and suspended in time. Pymonenko’s rural landscapes become a foil for larger, universal themes; inchoate references to the unchanging setting, and the rupture caused by the isolated drama of individual figures, create a delicate dissonance within the works. The resulting disharmony within seemingly harmonious contexts is the kind of semantic structure that anticipates the formalist device of ostranenie, and creates a modern perception inextricable from the anecdotal and folkloric.

5–4. Mykola Pymonenko, The Wedding in the Kyiv [Kiev] Region, 1891, oil on canvas, 71 x 108 cm., National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kiev.

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The contextual dislocation in Malevich’s Cubo-Futurist painting Cow and Violin (1913, Fig. 5–5), implied by the violin and cow placed directly in the middle of the canvas, describes two distinct spheres of human activity. The violin conjures up images of urbanity and sophisticated musical taste, and contrasts sharply with the humble, naturalistically painted cow. The violin evokes musical instruments in contemporary French art, especially because of the trompe l’oeil treatment of the wood grain that engages the Cubist play with illusionism. The subject of the cow, on the other hand, rather than the modernist ambiance of Paris, conjures up nineteenth-century landscape painting, rendered in the academic manner. It may recall the painters of the Barbizon, but in this case it was more probably appropriated from the golden-toned, full-bellied depictions of cattle in Pymonenko’s paintings, or those of the Ukrainian painter Serhij Svitoslavskyi (1857–1931), whom Malevich admired.12 The schismatic relationship between high and low art, and the counterpositioning of foreign and native images, are continued throughout Malevich’s Cubo-Futurist work, creating an embattled field of artistic self-identification. The disruption of both contextual and syntactic logic, demonstrated specifically by the superimposition of the violin and the cow on flattened Cubist planes, introduces a palimpsest of simultaneous influences operating on Malevich’s art, which moves from the naturalism of Pymonenko to the broken logic of Cubo-Futurism. The impressionistic handling of the blonde cow and the play of light over its supple rounded form suggest that Malevich may be paying homage to his Ukrainian roots. Bohomazov A comparison of Malevich and the Ukrainian painter Oleksander Bohomazov [Alexander Bogomazov] (1880–1930), a Cubo-Futurist who worked primarily in Kiev, offers yet another avenue for examining Malevich’s links with Ukraine. Although both worked in the new idiom, and came to it by a remarkably similar biographical trajectory, they belonged to different artistic circles. The seeds of their aesthetic kinship were planted at the Drawing School in Kiev,13 and continued at the Rerberg Art Institute in Moscow at the 12 For a wide selection of the artist’s works, see Serhij Svitoslavs’kyi (1857–1931), (Kiev: Artaniia Nova, 2004). 13 Bohomazov entered the Kiev Art School in 1902, but after being expelled for participating in student protests, he took a two-year hiatus from the school, returning to take private lessons with Serhij Svitoslavskyi.

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5–5. Kazimir Malevich, Cow and Violin, 1913, oil on wood, 48.8 x 25.8 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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peak of the Symbolist movement. Bohomazov studied at the Institute during 1907–08; Malevich frequented classes there from about 1906 until 1910.14 For a short period of time each artist, independently, explored female subjects in their paintings, particularly scenes of dreamlike reverie, typical of turnof-the-century art. In muted tones of blues and listless greens and yellows their works resonate with the influence of Viktor Borisov-Musatov, and the Blue Rose artists. The exploration of diaphanous and transparent effects allowed both artists to move away from the academic precepts of naturalism, and explore new means of representation. As they condensed space and pushed the image to the surface, shallow, frieze-like pictorial arrangements emerged in their work, marking a sharp departure from the tactile properties once elicited by Pymonenko’s scumbled paintings. The harsh contrasts of this master’s paintings gave way to saturated hues of flat color in the art of his protégés. Such matte, two-dimensional surfaces prepared Malevich for introducing collage into his paintings, a technique that by late 1912 had become a mainstay of Cubist art. Furthermore, the dissection of space into planar units, as practiced by so many of the Puteaux Cubists, led him to the new language of Cubo-Futurism. After returning to Kiev from Moscow in 1908, Bohomazov was influenced more directly by Italian Futurism. There is an unmistakable resonance of Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini in Bohomazov’s works; most likely it was because of Alexandra Exter’s intimate familiarity with Italian Futurist art.15 Exter played a singular role in bringing the artists of Russia and Ukraine into direct contact with Western modernist discourse.16 Her inimitable

See the article by John E. Bowlt in this volume. During the years 1915 and 1917, Exter divided her time between Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. In her memoirs, Alice Koonen described the charm of Exter‘s Moscow home, which was filled with “unusual combinations of European culture and Ukrainian everyday life. Among the paintings of Picasso, Léger, and Braque, the walls were filled with Ukrainian embroideries, the floor was covered with a Ukrainian weaving, little jars with mushrooms were brought to the table; eggplant spread, and stuffed tomatoes were served on bright majolica dishes. All those appetizers, and incomparable ‘varenyky’ . . . were offered to the entire cubofuturist crowd.” A. Koonen, Stranitsy zhizni (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975), 225–226. Quoted from G. F. Kovalenko, Aleksandra Ekster: Put’ khudozhnika. Khudozhnik i vremia (Moscow: Galart, 1993), 193. 16 Exter wrote of the Cubists, “those painters (Le Fauconnier, Metzinger, Gleizes, and others, mainly the Puteaux Cubists) aim to express their objectives by means of a single kind of painting exclusively, and they don’t permit any kind of intermediary, except for line, form 14 15

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energy and friendships with the principal artists, whose work forged the aesthetic principles of Cubism and Futurism, had historic consequences for the development of modern art, not only in Russia, but also in Ukraine.17 Exter brought information on the latest forms of art in Western Europe and sowed it in such out-of-the-way places as Kiev and Odessa, allowing the new styles to hybridize naturally with local tastes.18 Exter was Bohomazov’s most important ally in Kiev modernism. They were partners in organizing The Link [Lanka (Ukr), Zveno (Rus)] in 1908, Kiev’s first exhibition of modern art, which emphatically pointed to a radical shift within local art practice.19 As sensational as this step was for introducing modern art to Kiev audiences, The Link was not received with great enthusiasm by those who had staked their careers on preparing young painters for entry into the academy. The painter Mykola Murashko, Director of the Kiev Drawing School, disparaged the exhibit, attacking the organizers for their inability to capture the local ethos, and the native timbre and resonance of Kievan art: The Link gave us an unsuccessful imitation of foreign models. There was none of our own, albeit wild — but our own music. This absence of independence was evident in the manifesto of The Link. Those who so easily curse their ancestors, those who in the history of their painting cannot find one beautiful, clear note, will be unable to create their own music.20

and colors. . . between their work and the reception of the viewer.” Aleksandra Ekster, “Novoe vo frantsuzskoi zhivopisi,” Iskusstvo (Kiev), 1–2 (1912): 40. 17 When Exter first went to Paris in 1907, the Kiev painter Serge Férat [Sergei Iastrebtsov] introduced her to Guillaume Apollinaire, Picasso, Braque, Max Jacob, and Fernand Léger. Kovalenko, Ekster, 180. 18 Upon her return to Kiev, Exter showed her works in an exhibition organized by the Kiev journal V mire iskusstve. 19 David Burliuk’s account of his first meeting with Exter at the Stephanos exhibition suggests that this was the inspiration for the Kiev exhibition. See David Burliuk, “Fragmenty iz vospominanii futurista,” Manuscript Department, Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library, St Petersburg, fond. 552, item 1; quoted from Kovalenko, Ekster, 181. David Burliuk and Nikolai Kulbin were also organizers of The Link, and helped to disseminate Burliuk’s flyer “Voice of an Impressionist in Defense of Painting” [Golos impressionista v zashchytu zhivopisi], his first theoretical articulation of the nature of a new modernist art. 20 “Khudozhestvennaia khronika,” Iskusstvo i pechatnoe delo, 1–2 (1909): 18; quoted from Kovalenko, Ekster, 181.

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It is clear from Murashko’s comment that he opposed the ideas of the new breed of artists who were making a decisive break, not only with Naturalism and Realism, but with the current vogue for Impressionism as well. But modernism had already taken hold in the work of vanguard artists, and its further evolution would not be curtailed until two decades had passed. As Exter forged a union among the new artists of Kiev, she also fostered a close working relationship with the regional cottage industry of embroidery workshops. In the production of embroidered objects, her longstanding preoccupation with folk art was finally wedded to the abstract forms of contemporary easel painting. She systematically supplied the women at Verbivka [Verbovka], outside of Kiev, with motifs from the work of avantgarde artists; the women turned them into embroidered designs. This creative association was reciprocal. Malevich’s Suprematist squares and rectangles, as well as Exter’s architectonic compositions, were channeled into modernist handicrafts, while the artists found peasant handicrafts inspirational sources for their own art.21 The characteristic “flatness and planar distribution of form in vegetal, organic, and architectural ornamentation” was an important lesson that modern painters could glean from the native peasant culture.22 Exter’s formal studies of local folk arts revealed the inherent dynamic energy in the simplest of shapes. This work was fundamental for Bohomazov’s ideas, and strongly shaped his development.23 It is not surprising, therefore, to find Dmytro Horbachov, “Kazimir Malevich and Ukraine,” in Ukrainian Modernism 1910–1930 (Kiev: National Art Museum of Ukraine, 2006), 120. 22 A. Ekster, “Vystavka dekorativnikh risunkov: E. I. Prybyl’skoi i Ganny Sobachko,” Teatral’naia zhizn’ (Kiev), 9 (1918): 18; quoted from Kovalenko, Ekster, 209. See also Alexandre Bogomazov. Jampol 1880–Kiev 1930. ([Toulouse]: Editions ARPAP, 1991). 23 Bohomazov’s “Painting and Elements” was written in the summer of 1914. It consists of ten, fully-developed chapters, and reflects the depth to which the artist contemplated abstract painting and its inherent formal dynamics. During the 1920s, there were several attempts to publish the essay. On 2 March 1927, the treatise was approved by the Kiev Art Institute with the intent of using it as the school’s instruction manual for easel painting at the institution. It was to be entitled Study of the Elements of Visual Art [Issledovanie elementov izo-iskusstva], although it was commonly referred to as The Art of Painting [Iskusstvo zhivopisi]. The title page prepared by Bohomazov gives clear evidence of the artist’s choice of title: Painting and Elements [Zhivopis’ i elementy]. Bohomazov’s original manuscript is housed in the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art of Ukraine (TsDAMLMU) in Kiev. It was bequeathed to the collection in the 1970s. Recently, several translations have appeared: Alexander Bogomazov, Painting and Elements, (Kiev, 1996), in English and Ukrainian; La peinture et ses elements (1991); and an excerpt, “Rhythm,” in Ukrajinska Avangarda 1910– 1930 (Zagreb: Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, 1990) in Croatian and English. 21

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diagrams inspired by ornamental stitches as a paradigm in the discussions of color and form in Bohomazov’s writings. Both Malevich and Bohomazov understood Exter’s strong interest in folk art, and its function as the foundation for formal analysis. Such ideas can be linked to Malevich’s historic break with representational art, at about the same time that Bohomazov, too, laid out, at least in theoretical terms, the significance of the square as the primary reductive form of the new painting. Not only was this shape considered symbolic of the purest simplicity, but Bohomazov’s analysis also touched upon the final stages of Impressionist simultaneous contrasts, the ranges of dark-light values, and the primacy of saturated color for optical effects. In the chapter on form in Painting and Elements, Bohomazov described how the minimal square can be used to express a rich dynamic content without the agency of any other element except, perhaps, for line. He used as a visual example a perfectly square picture surface onto which a pictorial square with sides (lines) A,B,C. and D is to be fitted (Fig. 5–6 ). The picture surface and the square K are on the same plane. In order to preserve the expressiveness of each line of the square—as well as the relationship between them, i.e., their rhythmic combination—we should place them [the lines] in a corresponding manner on the picture surface. The square picture surface is to be filled with the given square K. The first line of the square, indicated by the letter A, is placed on the picture surface. In order to preserve the expressivity of its upward and downward directional movement, it is marked in the given diagram as A1. Taking the second line of the object, B, and

5–6. Oleksander Bohomazov [Alexander Bogomazov], Diagram of Square, from “Painting and Elements”; reproduced from A. Bogomozov, Painting and Elements (Kiev, 1996), 125.

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again, preserving exactly the expressiveness of its horizontal, left-right movement, as well as its mutual relationship with the first line (that has now resulted in a right angle), we will transfer it to the picture surface and designate it as B1. The directions of lines A1 and B1 are not the same as the directions of object lines A and B (and the corner need not be a precise right angle); nonetheless, the characteristic features of those two lines and the angle they create are preserved. If we now take the third line of the object, the line C, then we can see that in order to translate it properly onto the picture surface, it is necessary to take into account, not only the picture surface, but also the influence of the two lines that have already been added. This line also aims to go upward and downward, just as line A does, but if we transfer the line in the same way as we did with the first line, then merely repeating it as line C will weaken the expressiveness of line A1, and will not achieve the expressiveness of line C. Consequently, it is necessary to transfer the painterly values of line C in such a way that it retains its individual rhythmic qualities (as well as its tendency to move up and down as in line A), and not negate the translation of the first line, nor interfere with it. This is achieved by a slight shift in its tilt with respect to the first line; by avoiding parallelism, it simultaneously preserves the character of the corner with the second line. The line D, the fourth line of the square, will be translated in exactly the same way, except with respect to line B1. In this way, we can achieve the pictorial representation of the square K on the picture surface. From this, it now becomes apparent that the repetition of one and the same qualities of line cannot be useful for a work of art.24 Bohomazov’s paradigm serves as a semiological demonstration of how the simplest form can be charged with energy, vitality, and complete harmony. When he introduced the square as the “totality of signs” in Painting and Elements, almost a year prior to Malevich’s launch of Suprematism at The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10 (Zero Ten), he was already able to envision the route toward objectless art.25 The enigmatic relationship Oleksander Bohomazov, “Painting and Elements,” author’s manuscript, TsDAMLMU. 25 Andrei Nakov, Tatlin’s Dream: Russian Suprematist and Constructivist Art 1910–1923 (London: Fischer Fine Art Limited, 1973), 59. 24

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5–7. Professors at the Kiev Art Institute, Division of Fortekh (Formal-Technical Workshop), 1929. Left to right, M. Kozyk, O. Bohomazov, L. Kramarenko, I. Vrona (Rector), M. Boichuk. Reproduced from Lev Iurevich Kramarenko 1888–1942 (Moscow: Tviga, 1995).

between Bohomazov’s diagrams of dynamic squares which illustrate his text, and the similarly “tilted” square in Malevich’s painting White on White of 1918, bespeaks a true oneness of mind, even though their paths would not intersect until the latter part of the 1920s in Kiev, when they both dedicated themselves to teaching art. Bohomazov devoted most of his life to teaching, initially in various vocational and trade schools,26 but then without interruption from 1922 to 1930, at the Kiev Art Institute, overlapping with Malevich in the last two years. After Malevich was ousted from the State Institute of Artistic Culture (Ginkhuk) and the State Institute of Art History in Leningrad,27 Ukraine’s Minister of Education, Mykola Skrypnyk, joined Ivan Vrona, the Director of the Kiev Art Institute, in offering Malevich a teaching position there. Two of the institute’s faculty, Lev Kramarenko and Andrij Taran, had been

Bohomazov spent much of his life teaching in trade schools. In 1917–18, he taught at a vocational school in Zolotonosha, followed by a period at a trade school-studio, and then at the Higher Preliminary Art School in Budayev, culminating in a two year (1919–1922) appointment at the Boyar Railroad Factory School. Bohomazov initially led the formaltechnical disciplines [fortekh] at the Kiev Art Institute, and from 1926 he concentrated on the museum excursion section of the institute’s pedagogical section [pedfak]. 27 See the article by Pamela Kachurin in this volume. 26

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instrumental in securing the teaching position. The period between 1928 and 1930 became a time of enormous creative resurgence for Malevich, for it brought him into close contact with artists who were still relatively free to explore new forms in art, and to train students in an open environment of creative experimentation (Fig. 5–7).28 Just as Malevich had established a modern system of artistic training, which involved analysis and experiment, at Ginkhuk, so too Bohomazov’s pedagogy at the Kiev Art Institute was oriented toward the latest scientific ideas about color theory. A consummate Cubo-Futurist, Bohomazov produced an unusual work at the Kiev Art Institute, which points to the seriousness with which analytical study was undertaken in the curriculum. Bohomazov’s most famous painting, Repairing the Saws (1927, Fig. 5–8), no longer possesses the vertiginous forms of his earlier, effusive style, but displays a sober deliberateness in the treatment of color and form. The work is significant, because it reflects the objective and scientific way color theory was studied at the Kiev Art Institute, and parallels, to a large degree, work that Malevich had been conducting at Ginkhuk. Malevich’s research isolated structural color elements, establishing a kind of “chromatography” that he demonstrated in a series of analytical charts. Bohomazov accomplished something similar in a single paradigm, not in any diagrammatic fashion, but by the example of a painted work of art. Bohomazov’s Repairing the Saws is an explication of color harmonies based on Wilhelm Ostwald’s color theory, which was of widespread interest to painters. Ostwald’s ideas were based on the importance of the “ordering” of the “full” colors of the color wheel, which stem from what he called the four “proto-colors”: yellow, red, blue, and sea-green. These four areas are clearly seen in Bohomazov’s painting: the blue is concentrated on the sky, while each of the workmen represents the three remaining colors. The “fanning” arrangement of the saws and the logs, and their segmentation according to discrete colors, allows one to see separate areas of harmonious color combinations as contained in the color circle. In effect, Bohomazov’s painting is not about the subject, just

28 From all accounts, Malevich felt welcomed by his friends at the institute, although outside of it, his work met with opposition. Malevich encountered difficulties with the director of the Kiev Art Gallery, Fedor Kumpan, as well as the art historian Serhij Efimovych, who wrote a scathing article on Malevich’s painting in 1930. See S. Efimovych, “Vystavka tvoriv khudozhnyka K. S. Malevycha v Kyivs’kii Kartynnii Galereii,” Radians’ke mystetstvo, 14, no. 44 (15 June 1930): 3–7.

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5–8. Oleksander Bohomazov [Alexander Bogomazov], Repairing Saws, 1927, oil on canvas, 138 x 155 cm., National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kiev.

as Malevich’s depictions of peasants were not about the charm or vagaries of agricultural life. For both artists, these themes became the pretext for purely artistic pursuits. When Malevich worked alongside Bohomazov in the pedagogical section, he investigated linguistic and semantic analogies with iconography or ikonopys. His concept of “colorgraphy” or koloropys, which means literally “drafting an image by means of color,” formed the basis of his teaching, and brought him closer to the contingent of avant-garde colorists already there, including Viktor Palmov and Pavlo Holubiatnykiv.29 Malevich’s writings during these years include extensive notes for introducing a course on color as a formal-technical discipline at the Kiev Institute. Fragments of his remarks at the 29

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In the wake of the collapse of the tsarist empire, Ukraine’s longanticipated independence and sovereignty finally arrived in 1918, and a program of cultural renaissance called Ukrainization was instituted by Mykola Skrypnyk, Ukraine’s Minister of Culture.30 Throughout the 1920s, Ukrainization sparked a lively debate on the literary front, and filtered into the cognate practices of the visual and performing arts. Icons became a key element in this program. One of the goals of Ukrainization was to identify core values of Ukrainian cultural life that would unite the population on the level of shared cultural experience. An obvious source for codifying such an identity was the lore of village life, the cultural backbone for this generally agricultural population. Traditional forms of expression, including folk humor, were updated to meet the exigencies of the new era of self-governance and national self-determination. Yet to some of the new generation of writers and artists, the folk vernacular was a misguided source from which to construct a national culture, particularly when it was viewed in contrast to European modernism. Mykhail Semenko, a poet and selfproclaimed artist, was the most belligerent and vociferous in deriding such “provincialisms,” although even he used them — albeit ironically — in his poetic invention called “poetry-paintings”[poezomaliarstvo]. In their formal construction, poetry-paintings not only wedded two highly subjective expressive media — painting and poetry — but also blurred the contextual distinctions between high art and the syntax of vernacular communication. The trope of rural life served as a context for the poetry-painting “Village Landscape,” which invoked the raw and unmannered, yet typically offhanded, peasant communication, interrupted (ever so slightly) by the

meetings of the institute’s Committee on Methodologies were recorded by M. Kropyvnytskyi. A partial transcript from one of Malevich’s speeches, as well as a debate between Malevich and the artist Viktor Palmov regarding Spectralism, a colorist approach to the transcendent characteristics of painting, also survive in the archives of the National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kiev. 30 “Ukrainization” (or “Ukrainianization”) refers to the policy of “indigenization” [korenizatsiia] that was introduced by the Soviet government in 1923 to allow the separate nationalities that had become part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to build on their national roots, in the process of Sovietizing the multi-ethnic republics. Ukrainization promoted publication in the Ukrainian language, and operated at every other level of Ukrainian cultural life, fostering a national cultural identity.

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gentle moan of a cow’s mooing: “Paul, Take the Co-o-w to Pasture”[Pavlo, popasy koroovu].31 Semenko belonged to the most radical flank of post-revolutionary Ukrainian literature. His circle of Panfuturists, who advanced a new, modernist, poetic syntax, created by manipulating high art with uninhibited and witty vernacular expressions, suited Malevich exactly. The artist was quickly taken up by the literary Avant-Garde, and published his essays in their journals, the New Generation [Nova generatsiia] based in Kharkiv [Kharkov], and the Kiev publication, Avant-Garde Almanac [Avangard almanakh].32 These were the most progressive journals in Ukraine in the late 1920s, enterprises initiated by Semenko and fellow Panfuturist, Geo Shkurupij, as general editor. Thirteen of Malevich’s essays were published in New Generation between 1928 and 1930, among them a two-part analysis of color and form.33 There were differing views at the Kiev Art Institute about what constituted the so-called New Art. The left flank of Ukrainian art and literature, which promoted the Constructivist ethos of Panfuturism in New Generation, embraced and modeled itself on the progressive ideas espoused in contemporary international magazines, such as The Style [De Stijl] and The New Spirit [L’Esprit Nouveau].34 The Panfuturists polemicized with the

Semenko’s primary target was the sentimental poetry of Ukraine’s bard Taras Shevchenko, whose lyrical poems and patriotic sentiments, elicited by nostalgic images of white-washed peasant houses and peaceful village life (“Selo, i sertse odpochyne…”), constitute the bulk of poems collected in his Kobzar. This collection was regarded as sacrosanct, not only as a canon of Ukrainian literature, but also as an important historical document. In a gesture of obstinacy and disregard for the reverence Ukrainians held for the Kobzar, Semenko created his own book of poems (Mij Kobzar) in 1924, and filled it with avant-garde poetry, such as “Village Landscape.” 32 The general position of the leftist journal Avangard almanakh — the Kiev publication of the Panfuturists in which Malevich published his essay “Architecture, Easel Painting, and Sculpture — was ideologically opposed to the Boichukists. See Avangard almanakh, 6 (1930): 91–93. 33 Malevich had intended to put these essays together in a book entitled Artology, but just like Bohomazov’s 1914 “Painting and Elements” (which had resurfaced as an institute publishing project in 1927, only to falter once again due to a lack of funds), Malevich’s Kiev essays were never published in a separate volume. Nonetheless, Malevich’s friendly association with the leftist poets and artists gave his ideas a voice and an audience. For an analysis of these publications, see Adrian Barr’s essay in this volume. 34 De Stijl was published from 1917 to 1928; L’Esprit Nouveau from 1920 to 1925. 31

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dominant group at the Kiev Art Institute whose ideas about modernism included the revival of the formal principles of Quattrocento art that had been lost to Academism, and a revitalization of the canons of ancient fresco art and Byzantine icons for the modern era. In reviving the tenets of proto-Renaissance painting, and all art unaffected by the invention of scientific perspective, this group of modernists saw themselves as engaging in a historical discourse made relevant by the post-revolutionary climate. They challenged the status quo of nineteenth-century Realism by reinstating the techniques of fresco and icon painting, both of which assert the flat picture plane. The insistence on flatness was deemed as powerful a reaction to academic spatial artifice as the ultra-reductivism and surface planarity of Malevich’s Suprematist forms. Boichuk Mykhailo Boichuk (1882–1937?) began developing his “primitive” style in Paris during the summer and autumn of 1907, at a time when the Fauves were looking to folk art and tribal arts as a way of enlivening their painting.35 This trend may have led Boichuk to examine his own native arts as a viable resource for modern Ukrainian art. A small group of Boichuk’s followers (mainly artists from Poland and Ukraine) exhibited in the 1908 Salon d’Automne, and later, at the 1910 Salon des Indépendants, where a special room, designated by Guillaume Apollinaire as the “School of Byzantine Revival,” was devoted to their work. What Apollinaire in the 1910s called

The exact date of Boichuk’s death during Stalin’s extermination of Ukrainian intellectuals cannot be documented, despite the 13 July 1937 date given in Myttsi Ukrainy, ed. A. V. Kudryts’kyi (Kiev: Ukrains’ka entsyklopedia imeni M. P. Bazhana, 1992), 78. Boichuk studied drawing at a private art school in Vienna from 1898 to 1899, and continued his training at the Cracow Academy of Art from 1899 to 1904. In 1905 he moved to Munich, where he began to exhibit his work. During 1906–1907, he worked in Paris and attended the Académie Ranson, named after Paul Ranson, who had supported the idea of neo-Catholicism and a revival of sacred art among the French Nabis painters. In 1910, after a trip to Italy to see the great frescoes of Rome and Florence, he returned to Lviv. Even though Boichuk was derided for patterning modernist art after Byzantine and Renaissance models, his commitment to these ideals engendered a national school of monumental painting after he was appointed professor at the Ukrainian Academy of Art in Kiev in the fall of 1917. 35

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Néobyzantinisme, came to be known later in Ukraine as “Monumentalism” or “Boichukism.”36 Boichukism rejected narrative art and reinforced the lack of realism by drawing on the principles of icon painting, which maintained that “what is purely spiritual cannot be drawn,” and that “to try to visualize or portray it by means of the tangible, would be only to destroy it and contradict it.”37 The conventions of past art, including the naïve icons produced by village artists known as “god-daubers” [bohomazy], lent the Boichukists’ workaday themes an elevated, spiritual, and transcendent ambience, as they integrated the indigenous visual tradition into a new modernist context. The Boichukists also attempted to create a universal artistic vocabulary that was based on recognizable models of Egyptian, Renaissance, and Byzantine art. Boichuk’s particular enthusiasm for the proto-Renaissance was prompted by his understanding that this period marked a major turning point in Western art, when the purely religious art of medieval times gave way to increased secularization. The artists of the early Renaissance did much to structure the modern vision of the world, which is why this art had such significance for Boichuk. His close analysis of the art of Cimabue, Giotto, and Duccio during a sojourn in Italy drew him toward these artists, who bridged the aesthetic gap between East and West, the medieval and the modern, the religious and the secular. These Italian painters interested Boichuk because their art, even though coming from the tradition of Eastern icon painting, represented a departure from the art of Byzantium, and initiated what was seen as its “desacralization.” In visual terms, this led to a style that was “iconic” in spirit. Figures were not placed firmly on the ground, but stood transfixed, staring out beyond the viewer’s space, as if frozen in time. Like the followers of Giotto, the Boichukists also dwelled on rounded forms — the bent backs of laboring figures, the bulging curves of their bulky clothing, head scarves and caps — to create a cadence of flowing volumes. Meaning in these works was encoded in exaggerated hand gestures and exacting poses.

36 Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902–1918, ed. Leroy C. Breunig (New York: The Viking Press, 1960), 154. 37 Michel Quenot, The Icon: Window on the Kingdom (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991), 87

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5–9. Mykhailo Boichuk, Milkmaid, early 1920s, tempera on canvas, 95 x 45 cm., National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kiev.

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The way that Boichuk treated a single figure in the landscape, in such works as the Milkmaid (early 1920s, Fig. 5–9), is similar to the way, after having spent time in Kiev, Malevich painted his late peasants in the fields. A striking example is Woman with a Rake (Fig. 5–10), a figure presented against a reverberating blue background. Many other works invite comparison with

5–10. Kazimir Malevich, Woman with Rake, 1928–32, oil on canvas, 100 x 75 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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5–11. Kazimir Malevich, Girl in the Countryside, 1928–29, oil on plywood, 70.5 x 44 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Boichuk’s Milkmaid, among them Girl in the Countryside (1928–29, Fig. 5–11), and a number of paintings that Malevich exhibited in Kiev in 1930, for example, Haymaking (Fig. 5–12).38 The frontal and flat treatment of a figure with long arms hanging to the sides, the tectonic mounds of ground, The exhibition of Malevich’s works took place in Kiev, March–June 1930. See Efimovych, “Vystavka tvoriv khudozhnyka”; and Globus, 14 (1930) for reproductions of Malevich’s works. 38

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shifting ever-so-slightly left to right and angling back, and the deep middle space of vertical forms — tree trunks in Boichuk’s case, and haystacks or peasant farmers in Malevich’s — impart an overall feeling of stillness and unspoken omniscience to the agrarian figures. The futuristic construction of an ideal state that underlays Boichukism was inspired by the Renaissance philosopher and Dominican monk, Tommaso Campanella, whose essay The City of the Sun (1602) became widely popular in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. Campanella’s ideas about an “inner sense” that reveals the very core of one’s existence, accounts, in part,

5–12. Kazimir Malevich, Haymaking, 1928–29, oil on canvas, 85.8 x 65.6 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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for the metaphysical nature of Boichukism and the late work of Malevich. By glorifying the labor of peasants and rural life in Ukraine, Boichuk expressed the realities of the day, and the utopian expectations of the Revolution. Malevich, by contrast, exposed the underside of that reality. Whereas Boichukism tends to offer a positive message — workers and peasants united in their physical labors, toiling to complete common goals for the betterment of society — Malevich’s depictions of mostly barren fields, and the wanness of his often faceless peasants, elicits a hopelessness and futility. As different as their intentions may have been, their art mirrors the socio-political valences of the day, for which neither was spared recrimination. Boichuk’s reexamination of historical modes of representation was seen as retardataire and anti-modern by the Panfuturists, and the artist’s followers were branded as regressive and unresponsive to the exigencies of the day. More serious attacks against Boichuk began in 1921, when he was rector of the Ukrainian Academy of Art, and had created a Studio of Religious Painting, Frescoes, and Icons.39 The studio was established for the purpose of examining the compositional structures of sacred art, as a way of bringing modernity closer to a people whose high art was already vested in Byzantine norms, and who had a deep familiarity with its aesthetics. The work of the studio involved the restoration, by brigades of students, of ancient frescoes in Kiev’s medieval buildings. To deflect any misconstrued affiliations to religion or its promotion, Boichuk’s section of the academy, which in 1922 was reorganized into the Institute of Plastic Arts, was eventually given a new and innocuous name — the Studio of Monumental Art. By the time the academy had evolved into the Kiev Art Institute in 1924, and had implemented a more systematic training of artists in the culture of materials — as the Bauhaus had revived guilds and workshops — Boichuk’s teaching of monumental art at the institute had already strongly affected a generation of young painters. Their experience of the Revolution elicited a unique response to the ideology of proletarian rule, and the creation of an ideal socialist society. But despite the strength of their numbers, and the growing influence of their style, they became suspect in the eyes of the authorities. A campaign was mounted to undermine their work, on the grounds that national consciousness-raising, conducted as part of Ukrainization, was counter-revolutionary. 39 Boichuk had been studying and restoring icons since before the First World War; between 1911 and 1914, he was responsible for restoring icons for the National Museum in Lviv.

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Boichuk’s ideas met with great internal opposition at the institute, which soon developed into damaging political intrigue outside its walls as well. His modification of canonical icons to address the issues of the day was deemed incompatible with the political program of socialist construction. Because Boichuk chose to revive a traditional ecclesiastical style as a contemporary standard, it was easy for the atheistic government to distort his intentions and indict him on trumped up charges of religious propaganda. Furthermore, because (in the hope of engendering a sense of ethnic identity) his art highlighted the life of the local population, he was branded a “bourgeois nationalist,” a charge that made him a victim of the Stalinist purges. Boichuk’s Western-oriented outlook was further cause for reprisals. Because his initial travels to Europe had been supported by Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytskyi, a progressive leader of the Uniate church of Ukraine, which maintained allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church, he was suspected of espionage on behalf of the Pope and the Vatican.40 Even though Boichuk was baptized and raised in the Eastern Rite, it was not so much his Catholic faith, as it was his interest in sacred art in a society bent on destroying religion, that made him a clear and obvious target for political repression. It is interesting to note that Malevich, too, was baptized a Catholic, but not in the Eastern Rite.41 He shared with Boichuk the experience of living in a predominantly Orthodox society, while under the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome. Like Boichuk, Malevich was accused of propagating “mysticism, monasticism, and spirituality” when he was teaching the principles of Suprematism at the State Institute of Artistic Culture in Leningrad. When life in Russia became untenable for Malevich, he found refuge in Ukraine where it was still possible to pursue his art. When Malevich first went to teach at the Kiev Art Institute in 1928, it was at the urging of Lev Kramarenko, Head of the Painting Section.42 Understandably, as an

See Morality and Reality: The Life and Times of Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, ed. Paul Robert Magocsi (Edmonton: University of Alberta and The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1989), especially Chapter 14: “Sheptyts’kyi as Patron of the Arts,” 289–311. 41 Malevich’s baptism was entered in the register of St. Alexander’s Roman Catholic Church in Kiev on 1 March 1879. Turowski, Malewicz w Warszawe, 47–50. 42 Like Boichuk, Lev Kramarenko had extensive exposure to Renaissance art. During 1911 he studied fresco painting in Rome, and visited Florence, Padua, and Venice. In 1912, he studied the mosaics of Constantinople and the frescoes in the churches on Mount Athos. He worked in the ancient cities of Suzdal and Vladimir in 1916, and studied the frescoes of 40

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invited guest professor, Malevich allied himself with the avant-garde camp represented by Kramarenko and his colleagues, who by then had entered into a polemic against Boichuk and represented a different orientation for contemporary Ukrainian art.43 Kramarenko had been one of the organizers of the Association of Contemporary Artists of Ukraine (OSMU), which was at odds with Boichuk’s organization, the Association of Revolutionary Artists of Ukraine (ARMU).44 ARMU was also vehemently attacked by the Panfuturists. Malevich’s theoretical writings, published from 1928 to 1930 in the Ukrainian journal New Generation, and coinciding with the period of his teaching at the Kiev Art Institute, proved him to be a consummate theorist, pedagogue, and practitioner of abstract art. It was fitting, therefore, that he was aligned firmly with the “leftist” camp at the institute. Yet Boichukism could not be ignored; it permeated the atmosphere at the Kiev Art Institute, and was bound to have an impact on Malevich.45 In 1929, Malevich found himself involved in designing a fresco for the Hall of

Novgorod for a commission to decorate a children’s school in that city. In 1926, after a highly visible career, he became Head of the Painting Section at the Kiev Art Institute, a post he held until 1929. Kramarenko was Boichuk’s arch-rival at the institute. 43 Correspondence between Malevich and Lev Kramarenko for the years 1930–1932, in which Malevich disparages Boichukism, have been preserved in the National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kiev (fond Kramarenko). Russian translations of Malevich’s letters were published in Lev Iur’evich Kramarenko 1888–1942: Zhivopis’. Grafika (Moscow: Tviga, 1995); excerpts of Malevich’s letters written in his original “Russo-Ukrainian” language can be found in Khronika 2000: Nash krai, nos. 3–4 (5–6): 238–239. See also Malevich o sebe. Sovremenniki o Maleviche. Pis’ma. Dokumenty. Vospominaniia. Kritika, ed. I. A. Vakar and T. N. Mikhienko, 1 (Moscow: RA, 2004), 211 – 230. 44 Boichuk had been a prominent member of the Association of Revolutionary Artists of Ukraine [Asotsiatsiia Revoliutsiinykh Mysttsiv Ukrainy – ARMU] since 1925. Bohomazov also exhibited with ARMU while teaching at the institute. 45 In a letter to Kramarenko, Malevich wrote that he was not opposed to the manner in which fresco was being utilized in the West, “for it was occurring in countries where there are plenty of monasteries. But here, [in the Soviet Union],” wrote Malevich, “we have no monasteries, and yet fresco is evolving according to ancient monastic principles and canons.” Perhaps Malevich’s statement was a way of protecting himself from the kinds of attacks that befell the Boichukists, although it is ironic that, after returning to Leningrad, Malevich undertook two fresco projects himself: a fresco mural for the Leningrad Red Army Theatre (1931), as well as a project for the House of the Soviets in Moscow. Earlier, during his Symbolist period, Malevich had painted numerous studies for frescoes, which were part of his Yellow Series, shown at the First Moscow Salon exhibition in 1911. See Kazimir Malevich in the Russian Museum (St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000), cat. nos. 3–6.

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5–13. Kazimir Malevich, Sketch for the Conference Hall of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kiev, 1930, pastel, gouache, and graphite pencil on paper, 44 x 31 cm., National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kiev.

the Presidium of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev, a project celebrating the jubilee year of its founding that was headed by Kramarenko (Fig. 5–13, 14). As a confirmed colorist and easel painter, Malevich would probably not have been inclined to cultivate the pale matte surfaces of fresco painting, yet when assisting Kramarenko on this commission, his forays into the medium resonate with Boichuk’s influence.46 The rigid and quiet figures in Boichuk’s large mural cycles of the 1920s and 1930s were formally harmonious; the stately frontality of their style is echoed in the sole figure that was depicted by Malevich in the tympanum of the hall. Next to a peasant woman, there is a large cross that reminds us of the format of several of Malevich’s Suprematist works. As both the figure and the cross stand side-byside, the artist may be making a subtle pronouncement about his transition from the objectless to the representational mode. By allowing the abstract

When Malevich came to teach at the institute, the Boichukists were already working on the sanatorium of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee (VUTsVK) in Odessa (1928), and as late as 1933–1935, they were working on a mural project in the Red Army Theatre in Kharkiv. 46

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5–14. Kazimir Malevich, Sketch for the Conference Hall of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kiev, verso, 1930, pastel, gouache, and graphite pencil on paper, 44 x 31 cm., National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kiev.

and the figurative to coexist in one space, he valorized the equanimity and validity of both styles at this critical juncture in his artistic life.47 Malevich’s project for the Hall of the Presidium coincided with the beginning of Stalin’s vicious attack on “bourgeois intellectuals” in Ukraine. The growing repression of the faculty of the Kiev Art Institute dispersed most of its professors, and any plans that Malevich may have had to remain to Kiev were no longer viable.48 When the exhibition of Malevich’s works

47 The contradiction between Malevich’s private statements (gleaned from his correspondence with his colleagues in Kiev) and his willingness to accept the commission, suggests that he had been influenced by his brush with Boichukist monumentalism in Ukraine. Whether Malevich was speaking from both sides of his mouth, or whether he was just trying to protect himself during a particularly volatile period of ideological conflict, remains an open question. It may be that Kramarenko offered Malevich the commission to help supplement his meagre stipend at the institute. On the reverse of Malevich’s sketch for the mural are three Suprematist sketches that define the palette for the project. 48 Boichuk was arrested in 1936. Ivan Vrona, the tolerant rector of the Kiev Art Institute, was removed from his post and replaced by S. Tomakh, whose provincial ways prevented the Kiev Art Institute from ever regaining its former status.

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opened at the Kiev Art Gallery, there was a groundswell of local opposition, and it was soon closed.49 After he left in 1930, Malevich never again returned to Ukraine. Publicly, he tried to extricate himself from any affiliation with Boichuk. While preparing his book, Artology [Izolohiia, Izologiia] in 1931, Malevich wrote to Kramarenko, “The world of art is an objectless world, but Soviet art is symbolic, neither naturalistic, nor realistic. The fresco is the wrong way to go in a proletarian society. Frescoes are part of monastic silence, while today, we need a change of forms, themes, and ideas. To make permanent on walls that which will soon become antiquated is misguided.”50 Nevertheless, Malevich began his so-called “second peasant series” of the late 1920s under the sway of Boichukism. It was a decisive turn toward a representational art, in which the metaphysical features can be read as an extension of the spiritual values of Suprematism. Malevich’s subjects revert back to the peasants that had initially been expressive of his worldview. Like Boichuk, who avoided all prosaic content, Malevich sought the psychic transformation that a monolithic form engenders in the viewer. Malevich’s exposure to the straightforward presentation of Boichukism in Kiev, and the elegance of its forms adopted from the humanist principles of the Renaissance, lingered in his work, even after he returned to Leningrad. The context of Boichukism in Kiev helps to explain Malevich’s dramatic turn from abstraction to peasant figures in his late paintings. Even in his series of “Renaissance” portraits, undertaken after the years spent in Ukraine, traces of Boichukism abound.51 A simple comparison of the Portrait of Oksana

49 The exhibition was to be sponsored by OSMU. Eventually, Malevich became a member of OSMU, and supported its most famous exponent, Viktor Palmov, who espoused a direction of diaphanous color painting, which he called, “Spectralism.” Fedor I. Kumpan (1896–1970), nicknamed “Kupon” by Malevich, was the director of the Kiev Picture Gallery at the time of Malevich’s exhibition. From Malevich’s correspondence with Kramarenko, it seems that Kumpan was ineffective in securing the proper transportation for Malevich’s artworks between Kiev and Leningrad. 50 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Lev Kramarenko, 2 October 1931, State Museum of Ukrainian Fine Arts, Kiev, fond Kramarenko; reprinted in Malevich o sebe, 1:229. 51 Note that these paintings are also very reminiscent of Pymonenko’s depiction of the young bride in Wedding in the Kiev Region (1891, National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kiev), suggesting that the spirit of his first teacher may also have begun to resurface when Malevich returned to Kiev.

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5–15. Vasyl Sedliar, Portrait of Oksana Pavlenko, 1926–27, tempera on canvas, 123 x 75 cm., National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kiev.

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Pavlenko — herself, a prominent Boichukist — painted by the Boichukistmonumentalist Vasyl Sedliar in 1926–1927 (Fig. 5–15), just before Malevich arrived in Kiev, and the Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter Una, which Malevich painted in 1934 (Fig. 5–16), reveals haunting similarities — the threequarter view, the bulky coat cinched at the waist, the bodice marking a thin line where the edge flaps are secured, and the red scarf and trim at the sleeves contrasting with the off-white color of the thick clothing. Both figures hold an object in their raised right hand, while the left arm is extended downward.

5–16. Kazimir Malevich, Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter Una, 1934, oil on canvas, 85 x 61.8 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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That Malevich chose to paint his daughter in a manner reminiscent of the Boichukists suggests that he was willing to admit a certain indebtedness to his Ukrainian contemporaries. Because the style of Boichukism embodied the ethos of an enduring existence, it also suggests that Malevich wished to leave behind a legacy of communion with his forebears. Malevich’s impressionist technique, and his sharpening of the contrasts between light and dark, also honored Pymonenko, his first teacher. Conclusion Placing Malevich in the context of Boichukism and the discourse surrounding it, which took place far from the centers of artistic modernism — St. Petersburg (Leningrad), Vitebsk, and Moscow — expands our recognition of the diverse influences in Malevich’s art, and offers a way to address the enigma of his return to figurative art at the end of his life. In coming to Kiev, Malevich no doubt hoped to distance himself from the tense atmosphere of politicized aesthetics in Leningrad and Moscow. Boichukism gave him a way out. Although, as some of the scholarship on Malevich’s late period maintains, Malevich’s turning to figuration was an expression of a loss of faith in the Avant-Garde,52 there may have been another catalyst that prompted him to return to the imagery of his second peasant series. Boichuk’s bold presentation of the peasant may have served as that stimulus. Between 1928 and 1932 Malevich’s earlier colorful and rhythmic peasant figures became gaunt, faceless peasants, seen against backgrounds of barren fields. The redundant and tedious emptiness of clod-lined furrows suggests that dark forces external to painting were affecting the artist. Malevich’s late period spent in Kiev was a kind of homecoming. He bonded once again with the familiar Ukrainian peasantry, but without the naiveté and simple aesthetic pleasure of his initial youthful encounter. Not only did he return to the subjects of his youth, but he also copied, in a realist style of painting, the compositions and subjects of his old teacher Pymonenko, such as Women Reapers (c. 1928, Fig. 5–17), and Girl without Employment (c. 1930, Fig. 5–18). In the stultifying climate of Stalinist times, he seems to have been reviving long-lost energies. The recycling of the subjects of his paintings, and the attempt to copy them in the loose and 52 Dmitry Sarabianov, “Malevich at the Time of the ‘Great Break’,” in Malevich: Artist and Theoretician (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), 146.

malevich and his ukrainian contemporaries

5–17. Kazimir Malevich, Women Reapers, 1928–29, oil on canvas, 71 x 103.2 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

5–18. Kazimir Malevich, Girl without Employment, c. 1930, oil on canvas, 80 x 66 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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colorful manner that he learned first, offers a kind of personal testimonial to the trajectory that his life had taken, and perhaps can be read as an attempt to recoup what he may have felt had been lost forever. The dominant forces of monumentalism that pervaded the Kiev Art Institute, and its recollection of Renaissance models, perhaps played a decisive role in Malevich’s mystifying return to figurative art.

6 Malevich as Soviet Bureaucrat: Ginkhuk and the Survival of the Avant-Garde, 1924–1926 1 Pamela Kachurin

I

N A letter to Mikhail Larionov dated 17 July 1926, Vera Ermolaeva expressed her admiration for Kazimir Malevich who, despite the increased restrictions on all artistic activity in the Soviet Union, had succeeded in maintaining an institute dedicated to artistic experimentation: Leningrad is the last citadel of new art in Russia. Everywhere, on all fronts, there is Akhrr [Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia]. Akhrr occupies all the positions. Akhrr is the official art. Akhrr is in the Leningrad Academies and technical schools. . . . They have exhibitions all year round. In all this . . . Malevich with his iron-like energy [zheleznaia energiia] has managed to create this Institute of Artistic Culture in Leningrad, to maintain a building with exhibition space and 16,000 rubles per year, to give a small group the possibility of working.2 This essay is about how Malevich did it. Specifically, I will consider how, as director of the State Institute of Artistic Culture (Ginkhuk), he I would like to thank Charlotte Douglas, Christina Lodder, and Ernest Zitser for their recommendations for improvements to this paper. 2 Vera Ermolaeva, letter to Mikhail Larionov, 17 July 1926, in V kruge Malevicha. Soratniki, ucheniki, posledovateli v Rossii 1920–1950 gg., ed. I. Karasik (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000), 130–131. 1

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managed to foster experimental artistic and theoretical work during a period of targeted marginalization and restrictions on so-called “left” or “avantgarde” art by governmental agencies and the Communist Party. Indeed, the fact that Ginkhuk survived as an independent art institution for two and half years is a testament to Malevich’s political and bureaucratic savvy. This essay will show that Malevich kept Ginkhuk open by constantly adapting its program to coincide with the ever-shifting cultural policies, as articulated by the various Soviet organizations. But Malevich didn’t do it alone. The Ginkhuk group constituted a familiar Soviet institution — the family circle — a small coterie of colleagues who depended on each other, and did their best to protect one another from the hardships and vagaries of life in the first Communist country.3 Contrary to most treatments of this topic, this essay sees Malevich and the Ginkhuk circle not as the victims of Soviet oppression, but as active subjects participating in the evolving discourse of Soviet life. For even if Malevich were simply complying with the authorities in order to safeguard his position and his ability to work creatively, by taking part in the discursive practice of “speaking Bolshevik,” he made himself vulnerable to the charge of giving moral support to the restrictions placed on all creative enterprises, including his own.4 Lest we be quick in denouncing Malevich’s pragmatism as mere opportunism, we must recall that Malevich was not alone in playing what Steven Kotkin and others have described as a “state-sponsored game

Merle Fainsod, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule (Boston, 1989), 48. Although Soviet officials often used this term to attack various “abuses” and “corruption,” recent research suggests that such unofficial forms of local self-organization were as much a collective survival strategy as a means of collective self-aggrandizement. 4 Steven Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995). Kotkin argues that for Soviet citizens “it was not necessary to believe. It was necessary, however, to participate as if one believed — a stricture that appears to have been well understood,” since open disloyalty was rare. Malevich, and indeed the vast majority of artists who remained in the Soviet Union after the Revolution, played this state sponsored game of social identity “as the one permissible and necessary mode of participation.” Kotkin thus blurs the distinction between those playing the game and the “true believers,” and characterizes the relationship between individuals and the state as ultimately pragmatic. For a cogent analysis of Kotkin’s argument, see Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck, “Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain and the State of Soviet Historical Studies,” Jahrbucher für Geschichtes Osteuropas, 44 (1996): 456–463. 3

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of social identities.”5 Almost from the outset of the Bolshevik takeover, artists in administrative positions adopted the language of Bolshevism to describe their own projects, and the projects of the new art museums and art schools. Artists learned quickly that in order to ensure support — both financial and ideological — from the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros), they had to speak its language. In his 1920 description of Moscow’s Museum of Painterly Culture, Vasily Kandinsky employed the vocabulary of early Soviet slogans and declarations: “This museum was created out of the demand for the democratization of all areas of life. . . . [The museum] gives the masses the right to consider art to be a result of labor. . . .”6 Moreover, the founding principles of the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture (Inkhuk), written in 1921, were closely aligned with Communist Party declarations about the urgent need for objective and scientific methods of work in all art institutions. Inkhuk claimed, for example, that “the aim of the work of the Institute of Artistic Culture is Science.” 7 Malevich’s own administrative savvy was already on display earlier in Vitebsk, when in 1921 and 1922 the Art-Practical Institute faced layoffs and even closure.8 During the summer and fall of 1921, the initial phase of the New Economic Policy, schools of higher education were required to serve the interests of the state by demonstrating their commitment to practical and professional education. Those that did not were closed. Between January and May 1922, one-half of all cultural institutions and schools in the Vitebsk district were closed;9 only two schools of higher education

5 Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” Russian Review, 60 (July 2001): 340–359. See also “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931–1939),” Jahrbucher für Geschichtes Osteuropas, 44 (1996): 344–373. 6 Vasilii Kandinskii, “Muzei zhivopisnoi kul’tury,” Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’, 2 (January 1920): 18–20. 7 Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 79. 8 When the Main Administration of Professional Education took over the school in spring 1921, the Vitebsk School of Art changed its name to the Vitebsk Art-Practical Institute. 9 Vitebsk Regional Archive, fond 1319 (Main Administration of Professional Education), op. 1, d. 1, l. 148.

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remained: the Conservatory and the Vitebsk Art-Practical Institute. That the art school survived this round of closures can be attributed to Malevich and Ermolaeva’s revised curriculum that stressed the practical application of art training, especially the creation of posters and propaganda. The revised curriculum also included some new courses not offered in previous years, including social sciences, economics, politics, and carpentry.10 The 1922 curriculum mentioned neither Suprematism, nor the Champions of the New Art (Unovis), an association of Malevich’s students, although Unovis continued its activities, including giving presentations and mounting two exhibitions in 1922: in March in Moscow and in May in Vitebsk.11 Indeed, it was in Vitebsk that Malevich began to “speak Bolshevik,” as he began to adapt — discursively and practically — to the new Soviet realities. Of greater relevance to this matter is the fact that the artists associated with “left art” — Malevich, Ermolaeva, and even Robert Falk — sequestered themselves in a newly-created research division, so as not to appear to be training young art students in abstract art, while Yehuda Pen, the academic painter, and David Iakerson, a modernist, were in charge of teaching basic artistic techniques.12 This reorientation of the former Vitebsk Free Art Studios — the home of Unovis — helped the school to find a new identity as a technical school for training art teachers, and allowed it to remain open until late 1923, a year after Malevich and his group had left for Petrograd. Malevich’s experience in Vitebsk prepared him well for what he would encounter in Petrograd. His arrival at the Museum of Artistic Culture in August 1922 coincided with the arrest of about two hundred members of the intelligentsia in Petrograd, Moscow, and the Ukraine. Writers, professors, and scientists were imprisoned for purportedly “anti-Soviet” activities, and many were subsequently ordered to leave the country.13 As Stuart Finkel argues, this was part of an effort to send a strong message about the proper place of public intellectuals in a socialist society. They were to work for 10 State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), fond A–1565 (Main Administration of Professional Education), op. 9, d. 490, l. 1–3. 11 Alexandra Shatskikh, “UNOVIS: Epicenter of a New World,” The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant Garde 1915–1932 (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1992), 62. 12 GARF, fond A–1565 (Main Administration of Professional Education), op. 9, d. 490, ll. 1–3. 13 Stuart Finkel, “Purging the Public Intellectual: The 1922 Expulsions from Soviet Russia,” The Russian Review, 62 (October 2003): 604.

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the people, and only as directed by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Any attempt to define their tasks independently of the collective command would be interpreted as anti-Soviet. While the expulsions were the most stunning events of the anti-intelligentsia campaigns of 1922–23, most nonparty institutions, including museums, experienced a dramatic increase in the monitoring of their activities, among other restrictive measures.14 Malevich and his colleagues were keenly aware that any intellectual activity in the Petrograd Museum of Artistic Culture would have to accord with the directives of the Main Academic Administration (Glavnauka). They enacted fundamental changes in response to the increased state intervention. By December 1922, they had established a research laboratory on the premises of the Museum.15 Although the idea for such a research unit within the museum had arisen as early as 1921, and was supported by Pavel Filonov, Nikolai Lapshin, and Nikolai Punin,16 it is significant that it did not take shape until Malevich appeared on the scene. It was this research unit that formed the basis of a family circle, with Malevich as patriarch. During the ongoing anti-intellectual campaigns, this research unit was indeed the safest place to be. People in research departments were subject to far less scrutiny than were public intellectuals, since they supposedly were not in positions of influence. By early 1923, museum reports begin to include descriptions of the research activities being conducted by Malevich, Punin, Mikhail Matiushin, and Vladimir Tatlin, all future departmental heads at Ginkhuk.

Ibid., 593. Central State Archive of St. Petersburg (TsGA SPb), fond 2555 (Leningrad Department of Glavnauka), op. 1, d. 371, l. 4. Andrei [Andrij] Taran had been director of the Museum of Artistic Culture since the fall of 1921, having taken over that post from Natan Altman, and he continued as the director until June 1923. Under Taran’s leadership, the museum had evolved into a multi-faceted institution dedicated to exhibitions, public programs, and research. It organized lectures and printed a catalogue, paid for by Glavnauka, with the proviso that the text about the new art be “of a popular character.” The museum also started charging an entrance fee, thereby implementing the New Economic Policy directives that all state institutions should try to be somewhat self-supporting. TsGA SPb, fond 2555 (Leningrad Department of Glavnauka), op. 1, d. 474, list 12. 16 For details, see Elena Basner, “Petrogradskii muzei khudozhestvennoi kul’tury,” in Muzei v muzee. Russkii avangard iz kollektsii muzeia khudozhestvennoi kul’tury v sobranii gosudarstvennogo russkogo muzeia, ed. Irina Karasik (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 1998). 14 15

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When Malevich became the director of the Museum of Artistic Culture in August 1923, his first act was the formal organization of four research laboratories within the museum: the Departments of General Ideology (headed by Punin), Material Culture (Tatlin), Organic Culture (Matiushin), and the Formal-Theoretical Department (Malevich).17 He then tried to find an appropriate name for this new research structure; repeated renaming reveals his halting attempts to master the language of Bolshevism. In September 1923, Malevich requisitioned thirty easels from the Academy of Arts for the “Institute of Artistic Knowledge”;18 one month later, he called the organization the “Institute of Higher Artistic Knowledge,”19 and two months after that, in a newly revised charter, he called it the “Research Institute of Artistic Labor,” a lofty, yet proletarian sounding, name.20 The new charter, submitted to Glavnauka in December 1923, marked an important moment of transition; it stressed the museum’s new identity as a research institution, while relegating the educational and museological functions to the sidelines. As Loren Graham has argued, by 1923, education was a carefully observed and controlled realm infused with socialist doctrine, whereas research institutes were maintained separately, to avoid the potential for the ideologically suspect intelligentsia’s “bad influence upon Soviet youth.”21 The shift in the museum’s identity is illustrated by the fact that the description of the museum’s activities was left until last in the charter. The museum and its collection were presented as an appendage, a small department within a well organized, scholarly research institution devoted to formulating a “scientifically based method of research about art, its role and meaning in life.”22

TsGASPb, fond 2555 (Leningrad Department of Glavnauka), op. 1, d. 647, l. 182. Central State Archives of Literature and Art of Sankt–St. Petersburg (TsGALI SPb), fond 244 (Museum of Artistic Culture and Ginkhuk), op. 1, d. 15, l. 95. Malevich did actually receive ten easels from the Academy. 19 TsGALI SPb, fond 244 (Museum of Artistic Culture and Ginkhuk), op.1, d.15, ll. 100–102. 20 Ibid., op. 1, d. 21, ll. 2–6. 21 Loren Graham, “The Formation of Soviet Research Institutes,” in Russian and Slavic History, ed. Don Rowney and G. Orchard (Columbus, OH., 1977), 66. 22 TsGALI SPb, fond 244 (Museum of Artistic Culture and Ginkhuk), op. 1, d. 21, ll. 2–6. 17

18

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In this, as in many other respects, the 1923 charter is strikingly similar to the description of the Academy of Artistic Sciences (Gakhn). Founded in 1921 in Moscow as an institute for research and study of art within a Marxist-Leninist framework, Gakhn was the ideal revolutionary institution. Its members were as diverse as the avant-garde Vasily Kandinsky and the Impressionist Konstantin Iuon, and by 1922 it had already impressed Anatoly Lunacharsky as “one of the most important scientific-artistic institutions of the republic.”23 Since Malevich was a member of Gakhn at the time, he may have had access to their charters and plans, which described “the creation of a science about painting, not only for its own sake but for practical use.”24 In an attempt to validate his institute’s work, and to justify commensurate funding and ideological support, Malevich directly compared it with Gakhn in a December 1923 letter to Glavnauka.25 This may seem surprising, given that, as Nicoletta Misler states, the Academy of Artistic Sciences was a “venerable, dignified institution that had little to do with the Avant-Garde,” and at best had an ambivalent attitude towards it.26 Yet it was exactly this status that Malevich sought for Ginkhuk, albeit on a much smaller scale. By reducing the role of the museum collection within the new research institute, and by mimicking the more successful Academy of Artistic Sciences, Malevich successfully avoided the fate of Moscow’s Museum of Painterly Culture. In May 1923, the Moscow museum was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Main Museum Administration (Glavmuzei) as part of an effort to “connect every museum with the general economy.”27 Lazar Vainer, a former Glavnauka inspector and an undistinguished realist sculptor, was named director, and the progressive artist Piotr Viliams, who had been

GARF, fond A–2307 (Glavnauka), op. 4, d. 8, l. 47. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow (RGALI), fond 941 (State Academy of Artistic Sciences), op. 3, d. 10, ll. 1–4. Malevich was closely associated with Gakhn between 1923 and 1925; he was a member, gave speeches, and participated in meetings. Malevich o sebe, Sovremenniki o Maleviche. Pis’ma. Dokumenty. Vospominaniia. Kritika, ed. I. A. Vakar and T. N. Mikhienko, 1 (Moscow: RA, 2004), 473. 25 TsGALI SPb, fond 244 (Museum of Artistic Culture and Ginkhuk), op. 1, d. 18, ll. 21–23, ob. 26 Nicoletta Misler, “A Citadel of Idealism: RAKhN as Soviet Anomaly,” Experiment, 3 (1997): 14–30. 27 N. Trotskaia, “Osnovie zadachi muzienogo stroitel’stvo,” in Sovietskaia kul’tura (Moscow, 1924), 238–239. 23 24

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director since July 1922, was demoted to deputy director. Upon the change of jurisdiction, the character of the museum was altered fundamentally. In November 1923, Glavmuzei told Vainer to transfer some works from his own institution to a provincial museum; another group of works had to be transferred to the Tretiakov Gallery28 — the first steps in the process of liquidating the Museum of Painterly Culture entirely. After the transfer of the paintings, the museum was closed for much of the time. It was annexed by the Tretiakov in 1924, and had lost its own budget and its entire art collection by 1925. Malevich, apparently wanting to forestall a similar fate, completed the transformation of the Petrograd institution into a research institute in the course of the following year. Winter 1924 saw a dramatic increase in Communist Party interventions in the artistic arena, with concrete consequences for Malevich and the institute. Within two months of Lenin’s death in early 1924, the Communist Party began replacing non-party specialists in the cultural sphere with party members, in order to solidify its control. Within the party, there was a push for a unified arts policy; the party openly supported proletarian writers’ groups in their bid for literary hegemony. Akhrr became the standard for painting.29 A leading art journal condemned “all experiments: Futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism,” as trash, and lamented the fact that new artistic principles had not yet been created.30 There was a marked shift within the Art Department of Glavnauka — a state, not a party, organization — as non-Communists were replaced by party members. As part of these changes, the art department demanded that research institutions should study not only the theory and history of art, but that their scientific activity should satisfy the demands of the working masses. Furthermore, the institutions were to develop collaborative methods of research, and organize exhibitions.31 Ginkhuk’s activities during winter and spring of 1924 closely reflected the imperatives laid out by Glavnauka’s Art Department, and the institute’s descriptions were couched in current Bolshevik rhetoric. Malevich’s FormalTheoretical Department planned to “establish an analytical approach to

GARF, fond A–2307 (Glavnauka), op. 3, d. 210, l. 2. The Central Committee’s pronouncement on literature was published in all Soviet newspapers on 1 July 1925. 30 R. Pel’she, “O edinoi khudozhestvennoi politike,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 1 (April 1925): 10–11. 31 RGALI, fond 645 (Glaviskusstvo), op. 1, d. 28, ll. 151–153. 28 29

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painting,” out of which would develop a new objective approach to teaching art.32 Malevich and his staff also planned a number of publications and lectures for the public, thus realizing Glavnauka’s goal of closer connections between research activities and the working masses. Tatlin’s May 1924 lecture, “Material culture and its role in production and every day life in the USSR,” was clearly an attempt to meet these imperatives. In order to drum up an appropriately proletarian audience, Tatlin wrote a letter to the deputy director of the Petrograd Art Department, inviting “Communists, union leaders, members of factory administrations,” explaining that the lecture would focus on how artist-constructors would be connected with factories, and the general organization of the new life. He signed the letter “With comradely greetings (s tovarishchskim privetom).”33 In late September 1924, Glavnauka formally recognized the subordination of the museum to the research institute; the name change from Museum of Artistic Culture to the Institute of Artistic Culture took effect in October 1924.34 For the next two years Ginkhuk survived by distancing itself from its roots in “left art,” and interpolating itself into the growing network of scientific-research institutes in the Soviet Union. Almost immediately, the language used by Malevich and his research associates shifted to an even more scientistic conceit. Punin described the work of his department as the “creation of scientific criticism, based on the solid base of a scientific approach to art.” Malevich also vowed to establish a “scientifically precise” explanation of every painterly system — his Additional Element project.35

32

TsGALI SPb, fond 244 (Museum of Artistic Culture and Ginkhuk), op. 1, d. 21,

l. 21. 33

TsGA SPb, fond 2555 (Leningrad Department of Glavnauka), op. 1, d. 647, l. 159–

160. Ibid., ll. 298–299. TsGALI SPb, fond 244 (Museum of Artistic Culture and Ginkhuk), op. 1, d. 32, ll. 7–8 ob. As is well known, Malevich employed medical metaphors to describe the activities of the research departments. For example, he called himself “doctor,” and his students, “patients,” whose paintings underwent a “diagnosis.” Charlotte Douglas, “Biographical Outline,” in Malevich: Artist and Theoretician (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), 16. According to Linda Boersma, Malevich started his research on the theory of the complementary element in Vitebsk, where he was teaching and had the opportunity of analyzing his student’s work. 34 35

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The context of the scientific research institute provides a perfect opportunity to see Malevich’s family circle in action. With its roots stretching back to the Unovis circle in Vitebsk, the institute itself was a fiefdom, in that its status and power were inseparable from the man in charge. At Ginkhuk, Malevich acted as the patron for a circle of loyal clients, and members of this circle hoped to keep challenges or criticism at bay by presenting a united front to government officials. However, if even one person did not conform to the practices of the family circle, he or she could make the circle vulnerable to being disbanded by outside officials. Such a person was Tatlin. Tatlin and Malevich’s power struggles, which began before the October Revolution, finally came to a head at Ginkhuk.36 During its October 1924 inspection of the institute, Glavnauka censured Tatlin for “isolating himself.”37 The following month, when all department heads were scheduled to present their work to the Glavnauka inspectors, Tatlin refused to appear, at which point Malevich asked Mikhail Lekht, head of Petrograd Glavnauka, to fire Tatlin.38 Rather than risk the institution’s censure or demise, Malevich distanced himself from Tatlin so that he, and only he, would take the fall. In a spring 1925 letter to Punin, Malevich expressed concern that Tatlin and Pavel Mansurov would sabotage the next inspection by not adhering to the “unified” line of Ginkhuk’s policies.39 In other words, if they did not go along, they would jeopardize the whole group. Malevich had legitimate reasons for concern: the Glavnauka inspectors had already branded Tatlin as “a paranoiac,” “poorly educated,” “psychologically abnormal,” and disruptive of “the normal life of the institute.”40 Mansurov, the head of the

Tatlin had an important executive role at the Museum of Artistic Culture before Malevich arrived and took over the directorship. Basner, “Petrogradskii muzei khudozhestvennoi kul’tury.” In June 1924, in a letter to El Lissitzky, Malevich described Tatlin as an “idiot.” Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:158. 37 GARF, fond A–2307 (Glavnauka), op. 7, d. 11, l. 111. 38 In an effort to improve Ginkhuk’s commitment to Communist Party values (partiinost’), and perhaps to break up the family circle, Glavnauka sent Tikhon Chernyshev, a member of Akhrr, to replace Tatlin as the Head of the Department of Material Culture. However, Tatlin remained at Ginkhuk until spring 1925, at which point he departed for Kiev. 39 Malevich, letter to Nikolai Punin, 23 April 1925, in Pis’ma Kazimira Malevicha El’ Lissitzkomu i Nikolaiu Puninu, ed. A. Shatskikh and A. Kamenskaia (Moscow: Pinakoteka, 2000). 40 GARF, fond A–2307(Glavnauka), op. 7, d. 11, ll. 34–34 ob. 36

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Experimental Department at Ginkhuk, had been completely uncooperative during a December 1924 inspection, refusing to allow the inspectors to see the current work of the department, which prompted them to conclude that the department was “unsuccessful.”41 Later, Malevich distanced himself from Mansurov’s manifestos by deeming them “provocations,” intended, as they indeed were, to be deliberate criticisms of the state’s intervention in the arts.42 Malevich, of course, as both director of the institute and paterfamilias, could not appear to support Mansurov’s declarations. Ginkhuk’s spring 1925 charter clearly corresponds to the mission statement of research institutions published in January 1925 by the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros), the ministry which oversaw all the educational and research institutions in the developing USSR. Narkompros declared that research institutes should study problems from a scientific point of view, and should popularize the resulting scientific knowledge.43 To underline the scientific, or at least systematic, nature of their work, Malevich, Punin, and Matiushin included charts, along with the narrative descriptions of their research, in the charter document. Malevich’s Formal-Theoretical Department analyzed art and the sociological circumstances under which it arose, along with the historical development of artistic systems. Matiushin’s Department of Organic Culture focused on audience perception. The aim of Punin’s General Ideology Department was to establish an exact and objective art criticism.44 In addition, the Ginkhuk department heads planned to carry out cultural and educational activities, such as conducting excursions through Ginkhuk’s art museum. To further embrace Bolshevik imperatives, the researchers had formed research cooperatives, rather than individual research projects.45 In the end, Malevich gained approval for Ginkhuk’s activities, and although the institute received only about half of the amount of money he had requested for the 1925–1926 academic year, his petition to remain in their current accommodations was successful.46 Ibid., ll. 94–95. Malevich o sebe, 1:175. 43 Osnovye uzakoneniia i rasporiazheniia po narodnomu prosveshcheniiu (Moscow, 1929). 44 TsGALI SPb, fond 244 (Museum of Artistic Culture and Ginkhuk), op. 1, d. 30, ll. 32–34. 45 Ibid., l. 2. 46 Ibid., op. 1, d. 56, ll. 66–67. 41

42

132 FORMAL-THEORETICAL DEPARTMENT (ARTISTIC CULTURE) Research of Systems in

Theoretical Office

Research of the Means of

Art: Impressionism,

Artistic Development

Cézannism. Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism Laboratory A

Laboratory B

Basic Principles of

Movement

Changes in

Color

Form

Painterly Systems

Of Color in

Form

Light

Line

Methods of

Centers

In Centers

Color

Volume

Studied Systems

Of Culture

of Culture

Painting Tone

Composition

Organization of System Founders and Followers Connection with Production

Contemporary Art

Contemporary Relations

Glavnauka’s Art Department illustrated its current priorities and goals for fall 1925 at the Glavnauka exhibition, which was timed to coincide with the eighth anniversary of the October Revolution. The Moscow exhibition showcased the work of its ninety institutions, including Ginkhuk. The Art Department’s priorities were production and pedagogy: to regulate contemporary art, establish connections with production in order to meet the demands of the worker-peasant state, encourage sociological research methods, increase the concentration on production in art institutions, and to promote the study of peasant art.47 Judging from the 1925–1926 P. Novitskii, “Khudozhestvennyi otdel Glavnauki,” in Pervaia otchetnaia vystavka Glavnauki Narkomprosa (Moscow, 1925), 39–66. 47

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description of its activities, Ginkhuk closely followed the Glavnauka Art Department’s policies. Not coincidentally, the work of Malevich’s own department was divided into two categories: production and pedagogy. In order to orient his activity towards production, Malevich planned to work on textiles and constructions, and described a pedagogical method based on his theory of the additional element. To meet Glavnauka’s demands, the Department of Organic Culture planned to design posters and kiosks, as well as to popularize artistic knowledge.48 And in order to raise the institute’s pedagogical profile, Malevich asked that it be registered with the organization in charge of political education (Glavpolitprosvet) as open, and willing to take bookings for excursions. In his request, Malevich wrote that Ginkhuk had installed an exhibition on “the nature of artistic culture, and its connections with sociological, physiological, and psychological manifestations.”49 It is unclear exactly what was on view, but it may have been the charts explaining his theory of the additional element. During January 1926, Ginkhuk researchers also gave lectures at a conference on the study of peasant art.50 In a move that confirms Malevich’s administrative abilities, Glavnauka appointed him director of the floundering Decorative Institute in Leningrad, and charged him with planning the Decorative Institute’s activities for 1925–1926, and with coordinating the “work of the [Decorative Institute] with the scientific-research activities” of Ginkhuk.51 The Ginkhuk researchers seem to have worked relatively undisturbed through the winter and early spring of 1926, although the institute’s art collection was transferred to the Russian Museum in Leningrad and the State Museum Collection in Moscow during the spring and summer.52 According to documents, Ginkhuk seemed to be functioning smoothly when Grigory Seryi’s now infamous article, “A State Sponsored Monastery,”

TsGALI SPb, fond 244 (Museum of Artistic Culture and Ginkhuk), op. 1, d. 70, ll. 9–11. 49 Ibid., l. 41. 50 Ibid., l. 58. 51 “O dekorativnom institute,” in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:518; related documents, ibid., 518–523. 52 TsGALI SPb, fond 244 (Museum of Artistic Culture and Ginkhuk), op. 1, d. 50, l. 17. The circumstances surrounding the transfer of the works of art are unclear at best. Ginkhuk wanted to keep the art collection so that it could fulfill its educational function, but the art was transferred anyway. For more details, see Basner, “Petrogradskii muzei khudozhestvennoi kul’tury,” 24–25. 48

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was published in Leningradskaia Pravda on 10 June 1926.53 Seryi used his review of Ginkhuk’s exhibition at the end of the academic year as a platform to attack Malevich and his colleagues. Seryi deliberately employed a religious metaphor to denounce them, labeling the staff “holy crackpots,” and describing them as monks carrying on in a monastery. Seryi pointedly condemned the whole institute for artistic debauchery, and wasting the government’s money, “when hundreds of really talented artists are going hungry,” and then accused them of counterrevolutionary activities.54 Seryi clearly intended his inflammatory rhetoric to enrage Glavnauka and party members. It worked. According to Charlotte Douglas, right after the appearance of the article, an inquiry was indeed initiated.55 In response to Seryi’s blistering attacks, the members of Malevich’s circle sprang into action. Punin, as Director of the Department of General Methodology — the new name for the Department of General Ideology — immediately sent a letter to Glavnauka defending the institute’s work, mentioning that it had received consistent support from Glavnauka, and that Malevich’s art had been purchased recently by the state.56 In yet another instance of trying to maintain the circle by distancing Ginkhuk from a less reliable member, Punin stated that Mansurov — who had drawn particular ire in Seryi’s article — had been given space in the exhibition, “although his ideas do not reveal sufficient scientific objectivity.”57 While Charlotte Douglas implies that Seryi’s article prompted the inquiry that shut down Ginkhuk, there ensued a period of six months in which Ginkhuk continued to operate, submit new plans, and even hire new staff members. In all, four previously unpaid researchers at Ginkhuk were put on the payroll, and Boris Ender, formerly a student of Matiushin, was promoted to head a new Department of Physiology. These facts suggest

53

Grigory Seryi was the pseudonym of the art critic Grigory Sergeevich Ginger (1897–

1994). 54 Douglas, Malevich, 18. This politically-motivated attack on Malevich’s “monastery” can be said to have acknowledged, in the language of Soviet anti-clericalism, the existence of a functioning family circle. 55 Ibid. 56 Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 2:306. Interview with Konstantin Ivanovich Rozhdestvensky, one of Malevich’s students at Ginkhuk. 57 TsGALI SPb, fond 244 (Museum of Artistic Culture and Ginkhuk) op. 1, d. 50, ll. 21–22.

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that the closure of Ginkhuk was not the direct or inevitable result of the inquiry. That the closure was not imminent is further evidenced by the fact that Malevich went to Moscow later that month to negotiate the institute’s budget for the 1926–27 year, and to discuss the transfer of the Decorative Institute to the management of Ginkhuk.58 He argued that the Decorative Institute was “directly connected with production,” and that it would allow Ginkhuk to become financially independent from Narkompros.59 The association with art production studios, and the resulting financial independence, would have placed Ginkhuk on more stable ideological ground, and guaranteed its fiscal survival, at least for a few more years. Ermolaeva’s letter mentioned at the beginning of this essay was dated 17 July 1926, over a month after the publication of the fateful review, yet it does not reveal any concern about imminent closure. In fact, she makes a point of praising Malevich precisely for keeping the institute open, and herself and her colleagues employed, while weathering fierce ideological storms. Malevich also met with Mikhail Kristi, head of the Leningrad Section of Glavnauka, who reiterated his support for Malevich and Ginkhuk by telling Malevich to ignore Seryi’s review. However, it is clear that Malevich was very concerned about the future of Ginkhuk. In July he went as far as to suggest to Punin that he [Malevich] should resign from his post as director, and be replaced by someone able to carry on the work of the institute.60 While I was unable to locate the plan for the entire institute for the 1926–27 fiscal year, I found another striking example of “speaking Bolshevik”: Punin’s “Five Year Plan” for his Department of Methodology.61 Drawn up in September or October 1926, the Five Year Plan has two points of interest: first, Punin’s cooption of the title of the Communist Party’s massive industrialization campaign; and second, his belief, or at least hope, that

Ibid., l. 20. Ibid., l. 18. 60 Malevich, letter to Nikolai Punin, 28 July 1926, in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:177–178. 61 TsGALI SPb, fond 244 (Museum of Artistic Culture and Ginkhuk), op. 1, d. 48, l. 51. A brief summary of Malevich’s plans for 1926–1927 for his recently renamed Department of Painterly Culture may be found in V kruge Malevicha, 121. Malevich reverts to the medical terminology he had used earlier, describing different styles of painting as “illnesses.” 58 59

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Ginkhuk would operate for another five years.62 While most of Ginkhuk’s activities during the fall of 1926 are unknown, it does appear that matters were on hold until the merger with the Decorative Institute was finalized.63 But in a move that seems designed to break up the family circle, Glavnauka informed Malevich that as of 15 November 1926, he was “freed from his duties as director of Ginkhuk,” and that the temporary director would be Sergei Isakov, an academic realist sculptor who had taught at the Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops (Vkhutemas). Punin was named deputy director, and Malevich was permitted to remain on the administrative board. The administration was charged with “carrying out reforms of the institute” and arranging for the workers to fulfill “practical tasks of contemporary artistic industry.” The reorganized institute was to be divided into two departments: Research–Theoretical and Experimental Production. Petrov, the director of Glavnauka, specified that an expert in physics should be hired as soon as possible, and that Ginkhuk should organize an exhibition for spring 1927 devoted to objects of every day use.64 The planned institution was never realized. Less than two weeks later, on 4 December 1926, both Ginkhuk and the Decorative Institute were merged with the State Institute of Art History (Giii), and became known as the Committee for the Experimental Study of Artistic Culture.65 The basic structure of Ginkhuk was nevertheless preserved within Giii. Malevich headed an Experimental Laboratory of Art, and Ermolaeva and Lev Iudin worked there with him. Matiushin and his students Maria and Boris Ender remained in their Laboratory of Organic Culture, and Nikolai Suetin headed a Laboratory of Artistic Industry.66 The merger was therefore a mixed blessing for Ginkhuk. Although the institute lost its autonomy, Malevich

62 Although the First Five Year Plan was adopted only in 1928, according to Alec Nove early drafts of such a plan were widely discussed during the mid 1920s. Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR 1917–1991 (New York, 1992), 142. 63 Some documents relating to Ginkhuk’s activities during this period may be found in the first volume of Malevich o sebe. 64 TsGALI SPb, fond 244 (Museum of Artistic Culture and Ginkhuk), op. 1, d. 70 l. 2. 65 Malevich began his work under the aegis of The State Institute of Art History in January 1927, although, according to reminiscences, Malevich did not actually move into the building of Giii until 1928 or later. Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:524. 66 TsGALI SPb, fond 244 (Museum of Artistic Culture and Ginkhuk), op. 1, d. 70, ll. 3–4.

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and his colleagues not only retained research posts at Giii for almost three more years, but also continued working on their usual art projects. The family remained together. In May 1929, upon learning that his post at Giii was in jeopardy, Malevich wrote an appeal to the director of the Main Arts Administration (Glaviskusstvo), an agency that had been created in 1927 to administer all art institutions. In the letter, he fashioned his personal history and career in the image of the perfect Soviet intellectual. Describing the work at Ginkhuk, he wrote, “At Ginkhuk we had one task and goal — finding new forms for architecture, textiles, shoes, furniture, and graphics.” He added that the work at Ginkhuk was not opposed to the work of Akhrr, and should not be considered hostile to it, and he went on to describe his work at Giii as having a “profound connection with contemporary demands for the organization of a new life.” At the end of the letter, Malevich appended a list of his colleagues—Suetin, Ermolaeva, and the Enders — who were also in danger of losing their positions and who had formed the core of the Ginkhuk family circle.67 Apparently the appeal worked, albeit temporarily. Malevich and his colleagues remained in their positions for another eight months, until finally in early 1930 they were expelled as part of a round of closures of state-operated art institutions. Even Gakhn, that paragon of state sponsored intellectual activity, was censured in the late 1920s for disregarding Marxist approaches, and closed in 1930.68 The closure of Ginkhuk, however, should not obscure the fact that Kazimir Malevich had managed to carve out a place for himself and his colleagues to carry on experimental artistic and conceptual work during one of the most turbulent decades in Russian intellectual and cultural history. He did it by skillfully negotiating the constantly shifting landscape of political imperatives and cultural policies, not only speaking the language of Bolshevism, but also shrewdly shaping his public identity according to the rules of Bolshevik society, as they evolved over the first twelve years of Soviet rule. Malevich participated in the widespread practice of continual selffashioning, a key strategy for success in the Soviet political context. In our attempt to “rethink Malevich,” we must acknowledge not only this political RGALI, fond 645 (Glaviskusstvo), op. 2, d. 411, ll. 65–67. Sergei Strekopytov, “RAKhN as a State Research Institution,” Experiment, 3 (1997): 50–60. 67

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context, but also the self-conscious, discursive and practical activities that allowed Malevich, the Soviet bureaucrat, to succeed for as long as he did. In doing so, we remove any possible moral opprobrium associated with charges of political opportunism, reconcile the dichotomy between inward belief and external compliance, and open up new vistas in the study of the modern artist working within a system of state patronage.

7 Malevich and Lenin: Image, Ritual, and the Cube Konstantin Akinsha The Creation of the Image

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HE death of Lenin on 21 January 1924 became an important turning point, not only in the history of the revolutionary state, but also in the history of Soviet avant-garde art. In the political life of the country, it led to the glorification of the deceased chief and the creation of the cult of Lenin, which was constructed by the Communist Party, and skillfully manipulated by Joseph Stalin to consolidate his own power. In artistic life, it ultimately resulted in the victory of the realistic image over non-figurative art. Kazimir Malevich understood the importance of the event from the very beginning. On 25 January, two days before Lenin’s funeral on Red Square, the artist completed his tract “The Book about Objectlessness.”1 Sometime during that spring he wrote an essay, a version of which was later published by El Lissitzky2 under the title “Lenin” in the German magazine Das Kunstblatt.3 The article, which essentially comprised the main theses 1 Kazimir Malevich, “Iz kniga o bespredmetnosti,” 1924. For the complete text, see Kazimir Malevich, “Iz knigi o bespredmetnosti,” ed. Mojmir Grygar, Russian Literature, 25, no. 3 (April 1989). 2 Galina Demosfenova, “Kommentarii i primechania,” in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. G. L. Demosfenova and A. S. Shatskikh, 2 (Moscow: Gileia, 1998), 303–304. 3 Kasimir Malewitsch, “Lenin (Aus dem Buch ‘Über das Ungegenständliche’),” Das Kunstblatt, 10 (1924): 289–293; Russian translation in Sobranie sochinenii, 2: 25–29; further references in this article are to the Russian translation.

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of the original Russian tract, was permeated with the author’s emphatic rejection of the “new religion of Leninism.”4 Malevich clearly regarded the sanctification of Lenin as a betrayal of the materialist teaching of Marxism. For him, it represented a return to idealism, as well as the establishment of a new quasi-religion — a new type of Christianity, in which the deceased leader replaced Christ. In the artist’s view, Lenin had become a kind of materialist Moses, who had warned his pupils about the danger of the “shining nimbi of images.”5 Malevich believed that Lenin’s teaching had promoted a distrust of both religion and art, and had encouraged a reliance upon science and the cinema, “two systems that record reality without artistic falsehood.”6 At the beginning of his text, Malevich explained the weakness of materialism when confronted with phenomena such as death: “Materialist thought or consciousness is still so weak in a man that at the moment of death he, one way or another, directs his materialist attitude towards the path of religion or the way of art.”7 The desire to save the body from death prompts the creation of an image of the deceased, so that the deceased is “transformed into an image, i.e. into that phantom state, which physically and materially is indissoluble, un-decomposable, free…”8 Yet while art was capable of creating an icon of Lenin, Malevich argued, it was not able to produce a precise image of him: “His material appearance defies art.”9 The

Malevich, “Lenin,” 27. Ibid., 26. 6 Ibid. In praising Lenin as an iconoclast, Malevich even found an excuse for the famous Plan of Monumental Propaganda, which, according to him, was not so much an effort to create an iconography of the revolutionary martyrs and heroes, as an attempt at “de-representation.” He wrote, “When it was necessary to erect monuments to prominent people, the new art, instead of representing the face, de-represented the image, made it objectless. This is the direct function of art.” Malevich, “Lenin,” 28. 7 Malevich, “Lenin,” 25. 8 Ibid. Malevich’s idea coincides with the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov’s conception of the origin of art. Fedorov believed in the future resurrection of the dead, and his teaching inspired Leonid Krasin, who was a member of the Executive Commission responsible for the organization of Lenin’s funeral. Later, Krasin was a member of the Commission for Immortalizing Lenin’s Memory, set up by Central Executive Committee of the USSR, which demanded that the mummified remains of the leader be preserved, not just for propaganda purposes, but for his potential future “scientific” resurrection. 9 Malevich, “Lenin,” 26. The idea that it was impossible to represent Lenin became a truism of the period. It was expressed not only by Malevich, but also by figurative artists such 4 5

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artist conceded, however, that films had managed to capture something of the leader’s presence: “There is more reality in his [Lenin’s] portraits in the cinematograph.”10 Malevich’s text on Lenin was written at a time when discussion about the creation of an iconography of Lenin was at its height. Immediately after the leader’s death, people started collecting money to erect monuments to him, often initiating the collections at commemorative meetings held in the work place.11 The process of Lenin’s canonization received powerful support from the party, but it also encountered some influential opposition. Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin’s widow, publicly condemned the idea of erecting monuments to her husband.12 Her position was also embraced by the Komsomol (The Communist Youth), which immediately started to campaign against the collection of money for future monuments.13 The supporters of sanctification won, but the creation of appropriate monuments was not easy. No Lenin iconography had developed during the leader’s lifetime; there were only a few sketches by different artists, a small number of photographs and some documentary film footage, but there was no single, important portrait created while the great man was alive.14

as Käthe Kollwitz, who wrote to the magazine Krasnaia niva, “I personally would prefer for Lenin simply to remain in the people’s memory, rather than erect an unworthy monument to him.” Unlike Malevich, Kollwitz didn’t protest against the visual canonization of the late leader. She stated, “I can’t imagine who of the sculptors known to me would be able to realize this difficult task . . . It demands a new brilliant Dostoevsky in the field of sculpture. And where is he?” Erik Gollerbakh, “Lenin v monumental’nom iskusstve,” in O pamiatnike Leninu. Sbornik statei (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1924), 54. 10 Malevich, “Lenin,” 26. Many of Malevich’s contemporaries shared his opinion. Anatoly Lunacharsky, for example, stated that Lenin “resembles himself” only in documentary footage. Gollerbakh, “Lenin v monumental’nom iskusstve,”17. 11 Krasnaia gazeta wrote, “After reports that workers are spontaneously collecting money for funeral wreathes and the erection of a monument, the plenary session of the Petrosovet (Petrograd City Council) decided to erect a monument to Vladimir Ilich. The presidium was ordered to select a place and to work out the conditions for the competition.” See “Pamiatnik vozhdiu,” Krasnaia gazeta, 24 January 1924. 12 In the draft of his manuscript, Malevich mentioned Krupskaia’s letter. Demosfenova, “Kommentarii,” 306. 13 Olga Velikanova, The Public Perception of the Cult of Lenin Based on Archival Materials. Slavic Studies, 6 (Lewiston, N. Y.: Edwin Mellon Press, 2001), 81–82. 14 The only convincing sculptural image of the deceased was the death mask made by Sergei Merkulov (State Historical Museum, Moscow).

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The frenetic grass-roots initiatives to erect monuments to Lenin after his death were inspired by good intentions, but the enthusiasm of amateur sculptors around the country led to the production of many inept and unsuitable portraits. Even the results of the competition organized by the City Council of Petrograd proved to be unsatisfactory.15 The submitted projects were publicly exhibited, but Leonid Krasin, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade, and Lenin’s close friend and comrade in arms, was critical.16 “Some of the busts are truly disgusting and worse than caricatures,” he lamented, “It is terrible to imagine that tens and hundreds of thousands of such busts could spread across the Soviet land.”17 Nevertheless, within a few months, some artistic products approved by the Commission went on sale around the country, and newspapers advertised Sergei Merkulov’s busts of Lenin, available in a range of sizes and materials.18 This introduction of official icons of Lenin provoked the anger of the journal Lef (Left Front of the Arts). The editorial in the first issue for 1924 criticized the current use, and abuse, of images of the deceased leader. It commanded, “Don’t produce Lenin mechanically! Don’t print his portraits on posters, on oil-cloth, on plates, on mugs, on cigarette cases! Don’t turn Lenin into bronze!”19 Correctly identifying the true nature of the emerging cult of personality, the editors of Lef advised, “Study Lenin, but don’t

Petrograd was renamed Leningrad on 26 January 1924. The low artistic quality of numerous portraits produced by amateurs and professionals was used as a reason for establishing a strict censorship of Lenin’s image, which, at Krasin’s suggestion, was entrusted to the Commission for Immortalizing the Memory of Lenin. Leonid Krasin, “O pamiatnikakh Vladimiru Il’ichu,” in O pamiatnike Leninu, 20. 17 Krasin, “O pamiatnikakh,” 13. Krasin didn’t spare his sarcasm in describing the projects: “It is not so bad when there is no resemblance at all. In such cases, you can tell yourself: this has nothing to do with Vladimir Ilich, and calmly disregard it. But when a sculptor manages to reproduce some features that recall Vladimir Ilich, but in other respects the image does not resemble him, the result is sometimes inexpressibly banal and ugly. Instead of the magnificent and incomparable skull of Vladimir Ilich (more interesting in its shape than the sculptures of Socrates that have survived until our day), we find in front of us the head of some shop assistant suffering from rickets, or a provincial solicitor.” Ibid., 15–20. 18 “Ne torguite Leninym!” Lef, 1 (1924): 3. The same advertisement stressed the commision’s monopoly on the copyright of Lenin’s image, and warned that unauthorized copying would be prosecuted. 19 Ibid. 15

16

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7–1. Alexander Rodchenko, Lenin, 1924, photomontage reproduced in Molodaia gvardia. (Moscow: OGIZ, 1924) © DACS 2007.

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7–2. Sergei Senkin, Lenin, 1924, photomontage reproduced in Molodaia gvardia (Moscow: OGIZ, 1924).

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7–3. Gustav Klutsis, Lenin, 1924, photomontage reproduced in Molodaia gvardia (Moscow: OGIZ, 1924) © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2007.

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7–4. Gustav Klutsis, Lenin, 1924, photomontage reproduced in Molodaia gvardia (Moscow: OGIZ, 1924) © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2007.

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canonize him! Don’t create a cult of the man who all his life fought against various cults! Don’t sell objects of this cult. Don’t sell Lenin!” 20 If Lef didn’t want Lenin to be “turned into bronze,” it had nothing against Lenin being turned into a photograph. Even for his imaginary conversation with the dead leader, Maiakovsky needed the support of a photographic image, which he could address as if it were a living person. He wrote, “There are two in the room, I and Lenin — a photograph on a white wall.”21 Immediately after Lenin’s death, other Lef activists, like Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, as well as other innovative artists, like Sergei Senkin and Gustav Klutsis, became involved in designing memorial publications, photomontages, and posters, which turned out to be an important part of Lenin’s emerging iconography. These political photomontages sometimes possessed a trace of that “Dadaist” absurdity that can be found in Rodchenko’s illustrations for Vladimir Maiakovsky’s poem About This, published in 1923, the year before Lenin died. Like these, the political posters employed “medievalist” devices, such as exploiting an archaic hierarchy in the sizing of figures (Figs. 7–1, 3); using de-contextualised, enlarged photographs of faces that looked a little like icon images (Figs. 7–2, 3); and repeating images of the same individual several times (Fig. 7–1). The whole composition was enriched by the addition of symbolic geometrical elements in red and black — the colors of the Revolution, and equally those that had dominated Lenin’s funeral (Figs. 7–4, 5). All these archaic strategies were very effective in the “funeral” montages, precisely because in 1924 the artists were not really producing illustrations, but creating icons. The medium of photomontage proved to be far more flexible and successful in responding quickly and effectively to the new task than traditional media in the visual arts, and it developed the basic types of Lenin iconography that were later embraced by painting and sculpture. Long before Isaak Brodsky and Alexander Gerasimov had had time to stretch their canvases, Rodchenko and Klutsis had developed the essential Lenin themes: Vladimir Ilich as the friend of children; the tribune of the people

20 Ibid. As a positive example, Lef cited the workers on the Kazan railroad, who asked an artist to design a memorial hall to Lenin for their club. They wanted no portraits or statutes in it, because they didn’t want “icons.” By the time Lef ’s editorial appeared, only a small minority shared the iconoclastic views of the railway men. 21 Vladimir Maiakovskii, “Razgovor s tovarischem Leninym,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 20 January 1929.

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(Figs. 7–1, 4); the leader of foreign workers (Fig. 7–5); and the hope of the colonized East (Fig. 7–5). Progressive and innovative artists seem to have had the ability to visualize every metaphor used in the speeches delivered at the mourning session of the Second Congress of the Soviets.22 As Rodchenko observed four years later, the deceased leader’s visual canonization had proved the victory of photography over the “opium of art.” He stressed, “Art lost the struggle against photography,” and “The only thing that remained for it was to blow up photographs, making them worse.”23 Rodchenko had a point. As early as 1924, traditional artists were exploiting the quite sparse photographic record of Lenin’s life as raw material for their compositions. They also used the small amount of documentary film footage of Lenin that had been so highly praised by Malevich. The sculptor Leonid Mendelevich, for instance, who started to work on a statue of Lenin on the second day after the leader’s death, openly acknowledged this. He admitted that for the artist trying to create an image of the deceased, the task was to “turn documents into symbols.”24 He explained, “The basis for my sculptural portrait was mainly film footage and some photographs, which are helping me enormously in my work.”25 Conventional artists used film and photography to create “symbols,” and both these mechanical media, which in theory were able to record “reality without artistic falsehood,”26 proved to be highly effective in the creation of icons. This efficiency was not limited to the medium of photomontage, which since its beginning had played the role of surrogate painting; straight photographs and documentary shots were equally important in creating icons of Lenin. Henri Beraud, who visited Moscow eighteen months after Lenin’s death, left a striking description of the realization of Malevich’s worst expectations. The observant Parisian noticed the equal presence of traditional and mechanical media in the Lenin icon industry. He wrote: Lenin is everywhere, in every shop window, whatever the goods on sale. Reproductions of Lenin, etchings of Lenin, prints of Lenin, Lenin in mosaic, on linoleum, on ink-pots, and blotting 22 The session took place on 26 January 1924, on the eve of the funeral. Texts of all the speeches were published in Pravda on 27 January 1924. 23 Ibid. 24 Gollerbakh, “Lenin v monumental’nom iskusstve,” 42. 25 Ibid., 17. 26 Malevich, “Lenin,” 26.

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7–5. Gustav Klutsis, Lenin, 1924, photomontage reproduced in Molodaia gvardia (Moscow: OGIZ, 1924) © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2007.

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pads. Whole shops are devoted to the sale of his busts; they are of all shapes, materials, prices, in bronze, marble, stone, porcelain, alabaster, and plaster, without counting the Lenins portrayed in every “guise,” from the posed photograph to snapshots and film. A million portraits — and perhaps more.27 Beraud highlighted a further kind of Lenin image — one that had not been mentioned by Lef: “As if this were not enough, there are his doubles, the highbrow or shrewd citizens who try to look like Lenin. They are innumerable, and most of them are wonderfully successful. I suppose that there are more than ten thousand counterfeit Lenins in Moscow, adorned with imperials, carefully trimmed after the best portraits of their model.”28 In 1927, one of these impersonators of the dead leader was at the center of a scandal caused by Sergei Eisenstein’s film October, which was released on the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. Eisenstein didn’t employ professional actors and had wanted to use documentary footage to show Lenin, but found both the quality and the quantity unsatisfactory. He decided, therefore, to use the father of a friend, the worker Vasily Nikandrov, who looked like Lenin and enjoyed impersonating him.29 Such a crime against Lef ’s principles of factography could not readily be forgiven. Even before the film was shown publicly, Maiakovsky protested about Lenin’s impersonator. “Give us documentary shots!” he wrote, “It is disgusting to see a person posing as Lenin and making gestures reminiscent of him. Behind this appearance we feel utter emptiness and a complete absence of thought. One comrade noticed, absolutely correctly, that Nikandrov doesn’t look like Lenin, but like his statues.”30 The attack on Nikandrov culminated in Osip Brik’s dismissal of him as a “disgusting fake.”31

27 Henri Beraud, The Truth about Moscow as Seen by a French Visitor, trans. John Peile (London: Faber and Faber, 1927), 56–57. 28 Ibid., 57. 29 Rostislav Iurenev, Sergei Eizenstein. Zamysly. Fil’my. Metod. Chast’ pervaia 1898– 1929 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1985). 30 Ibid, 208. 31 Osip Brik, “’Oktiabr’ Eisensteina,” Novyi lef, 4 (1928): 30. Brik wrote, “For this he used the most ugly device, which is beneath all criticism – he forced a man who looked like Lenin to play Lenin. The disgusting fake could only be believed by people completely insensitive to the historical truth.” This opinion was shared by Esfir Shub, a film director

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The most important criticism, however, came from Krupskaia. She praised October on the pages of the party newspaper Pravda, but she was profoundly annoyed by Nikandrov’s impersonation of Lenin. She complained, “The image of Ilich is poor. He is somehow too fussy. Ilich was never like this.”32 She concluded, “If it is not possible to depict Ilich in a different way, it might be better to omit him completely.”33 Nikandrov’s “fussiness” was a direct result of the fact that he had based his performance as Lenin on surviving documentary footage, which had actually been shot with the cameras going too fast, as was common in the first years after the Revolution. Krupskaia eventually understood this. In 1937, she was still protesting against Nikandrov mimicking the high-speed documentary shots, but she was no longer demanding that Lenin be omitted entirely.34 Both photography (glorified by Lef ) and film (praised by Malevich) played a vital role in establishing Lenin’s iconography. Photographs became the source of numerous paintings by figurative artists, while documentary footage became the main resource for films like Mikhail Romm’s Lenin in October, created on Stalin’s orders.35 Malevich’s words proved to be prophetic; Lenin was transformed into an image. The mechanical media embraced by avant-garde artists played the role of the Trojan horse in the war that was ultimately lost by non-figurative art — the war that put an end

devoted to the factography of documentary footage: “One cannot dramatize a historical fact, because dramatization is distorting the fact. It is impossible to present Vladimir Ilich by an actor’s performance or by a face resembling Vladimir Ilich’s face, by a monkey likeness.” Iurenev, Sergei Eizenstein, 228. 32 Ibid., 228. 33 Ibid. 34 In 1937 Krupskaia wrote, “I think that actors must only study photographs, and even then they must know to which period they belong.” She complained, “Actors who never saw Lenin could be misled by a documentary film shown earlier in the Lenin museum. The point is that, in the beginning, because of the defects of old films, Ilich was shown walking too fast, or rather not walking, but running, waving his hands too much, etc.” Nadezhda Krupskaia, “O p’esakh, posveschennykh Oktiabr’u,” Pravda, 13 December 1937. Fortunately, by 1937 the problem was resolved, and the footage was re-filmed in slower motion. Krupskaia now stressed that actors should study Lenin’s movements in this improved documentary film, although ten years earlier she had believed that Lenin should be omitted from feature films. 35 B. G., “K probleme tvorcheskogo vossozdaniia obraza V. I. Lenina. Rol’ dokumental’nykh foto-s’emok,” Sovetskoe foto, 2 (1938): 8–9.

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to Malevich’s freedom from “the slavery of the object,”36 and ended with the triumph of the image. The Creation of Ritual If Malevich dedicated the first part of his text to the “materialist” struggle against the image, he devoted the second part to the rejection of ritual. “Lenin didn’t utter a word about ritual,” the artist wrote.37 He was right. Leon Trotsky, however, in 1923 had published a book that dealt in part with this issue.38 He argued that the main task of Bolshevist rituals was to replace the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church, and answer the need for “everyday theatricality.”39 He explained, “Theoretical arguments can only influence reason. Theatrical rituals influence feeling and the imagination. Hence their influence is much broader.”40 New rituals had to embrace every aspect of existence, including death: “The situation with funerals is … complicated. To bury a person in the earth without a burial service is as unusual, strange, and shameful as to bring up a child who has not been baptized. In those instances when the funeral acquires political significance because of the personality of the deceased, the new theatrical ritual impregnated with revolutionary symbolism appears – the red banners, the revolutionary funeral march, and the farewell gun salvo.”41 Trotsky also advocated cremation. In support of this, he cited the statements of some Moscow workers who stressed “the need for the most rapid cremation of corpses,” and proposed beginning “with significant revolutionary figures, regarding it as a powerful weapon of anticlerical propaganda.”42 Nevertheless, Trotsky didn’t believe that cremation would remove the need for a burial ritual: “Of course, the cremation of corpses, to which we had to switch a long time ago, wouldn’t

36 Viktor Shklovskii, “Prostranstvo v iskusstve i suprematisty,” Zhizn’ iskusstva, 196–197 (23–24 July 1919); reprinted in Viktor Shklovsky, Gamburgskii schet. Stat’ i, vospominaniia, esse (1914–1933) (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 98. 37 Malevich, “Lenin,” 25. 38 Lev’ Trotskii, Voprosy byta. Epokha “ kul’turnichestva” i ee zadachi (Moscow: Krasnaia Nov’, Glavpolitprosvet, 1923). 39 Trotsky’s idea of “everyday theatricality” possibly influenced Mikhail Bakhtin in the development of his conception of “the carnivalization of life.” 40 Trotskii, Voprosy byta, 49. 41 Ibid., 50. 42 Ibid.

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mean the absence of processions, speeches, marches, and gun salutes”.43 He considered that the new rituals would develop in the future, along with “the spread of literacy and material well-being.”44 When writing his book, he could hardly have imagined that within a year of its publication the most important funeral in the history of the Soviet state would occur, definitively shaping Soviet funeral ritual. On 21 January 1924, Lenin died. Two days later his body was transported from the country estate of Gorky, where he had spent the last months of his life, to the Paveletskaia railway station in Moscow, from whence it was solemnly carried to the Hall of Columns in the House of the Soviets, where he lay in state.45 The decoration of the hall is well known, thanks to numerous paintings, drawings, and the extensive documentary footage used later by Dziga Vertov for his film Three Songs about Lenin.46 The ceremony and the decorations of the Hall of Columns were similar to those encountered in Russian imperial funerals; just like the tsars, the embalmed body of Lenin was exhibited in an open coffin in the hall, surrounded by crepe, banners, and palm trees. The gigantic chandeliers looked especially spectacular wrapped in transparent black crepe.47 Members of the Politburo and the government replaced the Imperial guards, and created a constantly changing retinue around the coffin. The choice of music was conservative — Mozart’s Requiem and selected pieces

Ibid. Ibid., 51. 45 Some memoirs suggest that members of the Politburo held preliminary discussions about Lenin’s funeral before he died, but there is no evidence that such conversations took place. See Nikolai Valentinov (Vol’skii), Novaia ekonomicheskaia politika i krizis partii posle smerti Lenina. Gody raboty v VSNKh vo vremia NEP. Vospominaniia (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1991), 147–148. The organization of the funeral betrayed a degree of improvisation, which suggests that the death of the mortally sick Lenin took everybody by surprise. 46 Seventeen Soviet cameramen shot 6427 meters of film during the lying in state and the funeral, an unheard of amount for those times. Zinovii Iasman, “Ego oruzhiem byla kinokamera,” Nauka i zhizn’, 11 (1967). It is interesting to note that despite the confusion, the government didn’t forget to protect their copyright of Lenin’s image. A cameraman for the French film company Pathé, who hurried to Moscow from Riga for the funeral, was forbidden to shoot any film and was immediately deported. 47 The palm tree was used because it is the Christian symbol for triumph over death: “After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands.” St John the Divine, Revelations, 7: 9. 43

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of Richard Wagner (Lenin’s favorite composer).48 Contemporary observers noticed the “imperial overtones.” Nadezhda Mandelshtam remembered Osip Mandelshtam, on his way home from the House of the Soviets, being overtaken by the feeling that Moscow looked as if “a tsar was being buried.”49 Describing the ceremony in his novel Grabber, Ilia Ehrenburg observed, “After a long period of waiting, people entered the hall, where the tasteless splendor of Soviet ‘Byzantium’ was smothering Lenin.”50 On Sunday 27 January, Lenin was placed in a temporary mausoleum on Red Square. The decision to preserve his body for posterity had not yet been taken. Exhibiting his embalmed corps was regarded as a temporary measure that would enable the people to pay their last respects to their leader. Although there were still demands that Lenin’s body be cremated, Malevich believed that this would not stop the growing cult of personality surrounding Lenin and his image. “There can be no return to materialism,” he wrote.51 Indeed, he was convinced that cremation would only intensify the analogy between Lenin and Christ.52 Trotsky was right — the ritual was more important than the method of burial.53 The “Byzantine” elements of Lenin’s funeral could hardly inspire Malevich, but the artist was excited by the one element of modernity that intruded. At exactly 4 pm, as the coffin was carried into the mausoleum, the sirens of factories, steam engines, and ships sounded continuously for five minutes throughout the country. Even before Lenin’s funeral, avant-garde composers had been interested in exploring the use of these kinds of sounds. In 1922, Arseny Avramov, a composer and one of the founders of Proletkult, had organized a concert in Baku, which had been performed by the sirens of the oil fields, the ships and boats in the harbor, and two cannons. Avramov called this “the sixty-kilometers-long orchestra.”54 Malevich does not appear

48 Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). 49 Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Vtoraia kniga (Moscow: Soglasie, 1999), 214. 50 Il’ia Erenburg, Rvach (Berlin: Skif, 1925), 359. 51 Malevich, “Lenin,” 28. 52 Ibid. 53 Trotskii, Voprosy byta, 50–51. 54 Lidia Ivanova, Vospominaniia. Kniga ob otse (Moscow: RIK Kul’tura, 1992), 113–114. See also Hanno Mobius, Montage und Collage. Literatur, bildende Kunste, Film, Fotografie, Musik, Theater bis 1933 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2000), 275.

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to have been aware of such experiments; he was profoundly impressed by Lenin’s funeral “symphony.”55 Malevich emphatically rejected the new anti-materialist ritual, but was also tempted by it. He proposed a future burial ritual based on Lenin’s funeral: A factory must perform all the rituals. Sirens have to accompany Leninists to the grave, as it accompanied them during their life. The body of the deceased or fallen has to be carried to a factory, where a place for performing rituals, for the funeral service and a sermon of HIS [Lenin’s] commandments, has to be established. The next question is the question of the connection to HIM. This connection could be realized through entering the cube as eternity.56 The Cube Malevich explained the symbolism of the cube, which he considered one of the main components of the new mystical teaching of Leninism, “HE is the new spiritual banner, which is constantly showing the way in front of HIM. Because of this the mausoleum is a cube, as a symbol of eternity, because HE is in it like eternity.”57 For Malevich, the cube symbolized the new “kingdom of heaven.” He wrote, “Those buried in graves, fallen for the teaching of materialism, who are temporary not in eternity, will be with “HIM” in the cube of the kingdom of eternity, and will sit with HIM in the kingdom of HIS new teaching.”58 Malevich fundamentally revised the New Testament of Leninism as drafted by the Politburo and the members of the Extraordinary Commission for Lenin’s Funeral.

55 Malevich wrote, “The essence of the New Testament sounded. The church bells of the Old Testament became silent. Indeed, they are needed no more; the new ritual has been created, the new mourning organ of factories and industrial plants has become the religious rite.” Malevich, “Lenin,” 27. 56 Malevich, “Lenin,” 27. Malevich’s scenario was not realized in its entirety. Sirens were never again used as a “funeral organ,” but “mourning meetings,” an official “lying in state” with a “guard of honor,” and ideological “sermons” became common until the fall of the USSR. 57 Malevich, “Lenin,” 26. 58 Ibid., 27.

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It has been suggested that Malevich’s symbol of the cube is based on the shape of the temporary mausoleum, constructed on Red Square by 27 January 1924.59 The mausoleum, however, was not a regular cube. This would suggest that “the cube of eternity” is Malevich’s contribution to the New Testament of Leninism, rather than a reference to the temporary mausoleum. On 5 April 1924, ARTNews magazine, based in New York, published a short article entitled “Bolshevism Balks at Bolshevist Art.”60 It reported that city officials in Petrograd had rejected Malevich’s monument to Lenin: Malevich, who, like all other Bolshevist artists, has been working to express the greatness of Lenin in a model for his monument, proudly exhibited a huge pedestal composed of a mass of agricultural and industrial tools and machinery. On top of the pile was the “figure” of Lenin — a simple cube without insignia. “But where’s Lenin?” the artist was asked. With an injured air, he pointed to the cube. “Anybody could see that if they had a soul,” he added. But the judges without hesitation turned down the work of art. There must be a real figure of Lenin, they reasoned if the single-minded peasant is to be inspired.61 There is no other evidence documenting Malevich’s attempt to design a Lenin monument. The description of a pedestal “composed of a mass of agricultural and industrial tools and machinery” hardly accords with any of Malevich’s works of the period. Yet it is difficult to imagine that the fact-oriented American magazine would not have used reliable sources for its report. Indeed, other projects described in the article, like Matvei Kharlamov’s sculpture, do survive.62 The article was published eleven days before the City Council publicly launched a competition for a Lenin sculpture to be erected in front of the Finland Railway Station.63 This might appear to shed doubt on the veracity of the account, but apparently, sculptors and architects had started working on their projects long before the official announcement. The article in ARTNews predated the publication of Demosfenova, “Kommentarii,” 305. “Bolshevism Balks at Bolshevist Art,” ARTNews (5 April 1924). 61 Ibid. 62 I. V. Efremov, Matvei Iakovlevich Kharlamov (Leningrad, 1986). 63 G. Pavlov and A. Rozina, Pamiatniki Il’ ichu v Leningrade (Leningrad, 1970), 17. 59

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7–6. Ivan Kliun, The Dying Malevich, 1935, lithograph, photograph, colored paper on paper, 21 x 28.5 cm., private collection, Germany. In this collage, Kliun has combined a lithograph of one of his portraits of the dying artist with a photograph of Malevich full of life and energy. The geometric elements — the red circle and the black square — symbolize life when they are in “dynamic interaction,” but death when they are “static” and distant from each other. The “static” circle and square were used by Suetin to decorate the top of Malevich’s coffin.

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Malevich’s text on “Lenin,” so that a misunderstanding of the artist’s theses could not have been the source of the American report. Moreover, there is a striking similarity between the “cube of eternity” described by Malevich in his text, and the project of the Lenin monument described by the anonymous journalist. All of this suggests that the ARTNews correspondent was writing an accurate report about a project that had been designed by the artist, but subsequently was lost or destroyed. In 1929, the death of Ilia Chashnik, Malevich’s disciple, seems to have prompted the first attempt to develop a Suprematist funeral ritual. Chashnik’s gravestone was in the shape of a cube.64 Konstantin Rozhdestvensky, who later described the funeral and his conversations with Malevich, wrote, “Ritual always existed and always will exist. It is enough to point to Lenin’s funeral. And it is good, because it is needed by man.”65 It seems that by 1929, Malevich, who had rejected the “new ritual” of Lenin’s funeral, was absorbed in the creation of his own Suprematist rite. This is confirmed by his attempts to write a script for his own funeral.66 After Malevich’s death, his pupils organized his Suprematist funeral, but did not follow all his wishes (Fig. 7–6). Instead of an architecton in the shape of a column,67 they put on his grave a cube with the image of the Black Square.68 History corrected their design; during the Second World War, the cube was destroyed.69 Today, even the location of Malevich’s grave is unknown. In his theses, the artist had contrasted Lenin’s mausoleum with the mass graves of the unidentified heroes of the Revolution — “they are purely objectless, resisting the image and the brush of the painter.”70 Despite his surrender to both image and ritual, Malevich posthumously joined their ranks.

64 I. A. Vakar, “Posleslovie. K. S. Malevich i ego sovremenniki: biografia v litsakh,” in Malevich o sebe. Sovremenniki o Maleviche. Pis’ma. Dokumenty. Vospominaniia. Kritika, ed. I. A. Vakar, and T. I. Mikhienko, 2 (Moscow: RA, 2004), 617. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 617–618. 67 Ibid., 617. In a letter to Ivan Kliun in June 1931, Malevich asked that his grave be marked by a tower (an architecton) with a telescope in the top. Malevich o sebe, 1: 226. 68 Ivan Kliun, “Pokhorony suprematista. Bolezn’ i smert’ K. S. Malevicha,” in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 2: 96. 69 Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov, “Malevich. The Tangled Legacy,” ARTNews (December 1992). 70 Malevich, “Lenin,” 28.

III

8 Kazimir Malevich and José Ortega-y-Gasset on the “New Art” Irina Vakar

I

N 1925, the Spanish newspaper El Sol published José Ortega-y-Gasset’s article “The Dehumanization of Art.” In 1928, Malevich started publishing a series of articles on modern painting in New Generation (Nova generatsiia) and Soviet Architecture (Sovetskaia arkhitektura). Malevich and Ortega did not know one another, and most likely did not know anything about one another. Excerpts from “The Dehumanization of Art” were translated into Russian for the first time in 1957; as far as can be determined, the name of the Spanish philosopher is not found in the documents and memoirs where Malevich is mentioned. In Ortega, there is no mention of the leading Russian Suprematist either; although Ortega was not unaware of geometrical abstraction, he rejected it, as well as non-figurative art in general. The texts of Malevich and Ortega, although independent of each other, are similar in many respects. In the articles mentioned above, both authors summarized what they had said about the “new art” (both used this term). In the early 1920s, Ortega wrote about modern music, painting, literature, and theater, including the work of Debussy, Marcel Proust, and the Impressionists. Malevich’s articles were based on the lectures he had given at The State Institute of Artistic Culture (Ginkhuk) and the State Institute of Art History in previous years. The time in which they were written — the early and mid-1920s — determined their summary character. The goals pursued by Ortega and Malevich are different. Ortega wanted to examine the phenomenon of new art in general: “I am not really interested in particular movements within the new art, and even less interested in each

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individual work, very few excepted.”1 Malevich, on the contrary, thoroughly analyzed particular movements and individual works of the new art, and set out a coherent evolution in his theoretical works from 1915 on. In later articles, however, he tried to combine such an analysis with the same task as Ortega — defining the essence and distinctive features of the new art. At this moment, the Spanish philosopher and the Russian artist came to similar conclusions. First and foremost, they decidedly opposed the new art to earlier artistic forms. Malevich even emphasized this fact in the titles of his articles: “New and Figurative Art,” “An Analysis of the New and the Figurative Art.” Both authors were faced with methodological difficulties when they attempted to define new and old art. Ortega admitted that he was unable to find a unique stylistic or semantic criterion which developed from its inner properties, and which characterized the diverse manifestations of the new art. The indirect sign of social functioning turned out to be its most precise property. The new art was something incomprehensible to most people: “The unpopularity of new music is similar to the unpopularity of the other Muses. All young art is unpopular — and this is not by chance, but is its essential destiny.”2 Ortega pointed out that he was not referring to the strangeness of a newly born artistic movement, as had been the case, for example, with Romanticism, which eventually won popularity with the public: “The new art meets hostile masses, and will always contend with them. New art is not popular in its essence; moreover, it is anti-popular.”3 “New art is identified by its tendency to divide the public into two classes: those who understand it, and those who are unable to understand it. . . . Hence the irritation of the masses.”4 New art is not incomprehensible because of its sophisticated technique, but because of the specificity of its aims, which are not generally meaningful. Ortega noted, “The means of [new music] are more than simple, but the spiritual constitution of its composers are diametrically opposite to that of the crowd.”5

José Ortega-y-Gasset, Estetika. Filosofiia kul’tury, ed. V. E. Bagno, intro. G. M. Fridlender (Moscow, 1991), 232. 2 Ibid., 219. 3 Ibid., 220. 4 Ibid., 221–222. 5 Ibid., 166. 1

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Ortega spoke of the organic character of the new art’s incomprehensibility as a “change in optics”: In order to see a thing we have to adjust our optical apparatus in a certain way. . . . Let the reader imagine looking at a garden through a windowpane. . . . To see the garden and to see the windowpane are two incompatible operations; they require different optical accommodations and exclude each other. Accordingly, those who look for emotional sympathy with the fate of Juan and Maria, or Tristan and Isolde, in a work of art, and adjust their perception to this, will not see the work of art as such. . . . A person depicted in a portrait and the portrait itself are two entirely different things; we are interested in either one or the other.6 Malevich came to the same conclusion as early as 1919. In the pamphlet On New Systems in Art, he analyzed Cézanne’s Self-Portrait: “It was not so much the face of the person in the portrait that he [Cézanne] saw, as the fact that he introduced something artistic into its forms; he did not so much see as feel. He who feels a painting, sees an object less, he who sees the object, feels the artistic element less.”7 Thinking about the “change of optics,” Ortega continued: If most people have a garden in front of their eyes, they are unable to accommodate their vision so that they can see the windowpane — that is, the transparency that is the work of art. Instead, people pass by — or through — without delay, preferring to passionately grab for the human reality that flickers in the work of art. If they are asked to leave their prey, and pay attention to the work of art itself, they say that they do not see anything there, since in fact they do not see the human material they are so used to.8 According to Ortega, the human point of view is the one from which we experience “situations, people, or things,”9 in the way we do in real life. Ibid., 224–225. Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomov, ed. A. S. Shatskikh, 1 (Moscow: Gileia, 1995), 167. 8 Ortega, Estetika, 225. 9 Ibid., 231. 6 7

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It is the new art’s rejection of this point of view that Ortega called “the dehumanization of art.” In 1928 Malevich also proceeded from the perceptual psychology of the new art and described the recipient’s response in a similar way: New works of art have no task, no aim, which would lead to figurativeness. (Objectlessness). When such works arose, the critics and society examined them, trying to find either the depiction of objects or content, and not finding either, said that there was nothing in these works of art. And actually, looking at these works, we lose the object whereby we could define the content of a painting.10 Just like Ortega, Malevich stated that society was divided into those who understood and those who didn’t: “In Cézanne, it is already terrifying to see with the naked eye the break in the link . . . between the object and Art. Thus, with Cézanne, society had to split into two parts as well . . . This was an irritating fact for society, and it landed on Cézanne and the Cézannists.”11 Malevich also posed the question of whether this incomprehension was temporary. Although he did not come to such definite conclusions as Ortega, he nevertheless admitted that “we . . . do not expect that, with time, the paintings of Cézanne and similar artists will make an impression on the spectator, that he will perceive them as artistic.”12 Thus, the new art is first of all a relationship, a new attitude toward the object of art — an attitude of both the artist and the recipient. Here Malevich and Ortega agree. In principle, it is not important what kind of painting the artist paints — figurative or non-figurative; when painting an object, he or she may strive for the realization of the “artistic sensation,” and thereby create an example of the “new art.” Otherwise, the artist may concentrate on the figurative task, and characterize the object as such; in this case, painting is a means rather than an end; the aim can be referred to as the

Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2 (Moscow, 1998), 141. Quoted in: D. S. Sarab’ianov and A. Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich: Zhivopis’. Teoriia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1993), 328. 12 Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:246. 10 11

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“object-content” (Malevich), or real-life “experience” (Ortega) — the garden behind the window, rather than the windowpane. It is not a coincidence that both theoreticians chose nineteenth-century works for their comparative analyses. Malevich used Ivan Shishkin’s paintings as an example, while Ortega suggested any painting created in 1860. They both saw the genesis of the new art as the result of an internal artistic evolution, a reaction to nineteenth-century art. New art and nineteenthcentury art represent two extremes in the artist’s attitude to reality. During the nineteenth century, artists worked too impurely. They reduced the aesthetic elements to a minimum, and tried to base their works almost entirely on the representation of human realities. . . . Such creations are only partly works of art or artistic objects. To enjoy them, one does not necessarily have to be sensitive to the indistinct and the transparent, as is presupposed by artistic sensitivity. The usual human sensitivity, feeling your neighbor’s troubles and pleasures, was sufficient. From this it is understandable why nineteenth-century art was so popular. It gave the masses an art so diluted that it became not art, but an extension of life.13 Malevich pointed out that “artistic sensation” also manifested itself in the old art, for example, in the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki), but it was overpowered by the figurative vision. In memoirs written in the early 1930s, he described how he came to this understanding as a young man, working in the Impressionist system: [I] realized that the art of painting in general consists of two parts. The first part is pure . . . pure artistic form; the other part consists of a figurative theme referred to as content. Together they constituted an eclectic art, a mélange of painting and non-painting. When I analyzed my own behavior, I noticed that, properly speaking, the work was on the releasing of the artistic element from the contours of natural phenomena, and the liberation of my artistic psyche from

13

Ortega, Estetika, 225–226.

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the object. . . . In no way did I want to make painting a means, but only self-sufficient content (samosoderzhanie).”14 Ortega also saw the meaning of the ongoing artistic process as a “purifying” of art from the human element. “Even if pure art is impossible, there is no doubt that a natural tendency to purification is possible . . . In the course of this process, there is a moment when the human content becomes so slender that it is almost imperceptible. Then before us will be an object, which may be perceived only by those who have the special gift of artistic sensitivity. This will be an art for artists, not for the masses.”15 Ortega did not explain what kind of content this would be. Malevich did. He referred to the specific content of the new art as various “sensations.”16 Both Malevich and Ortega energetically spoke against the false notion of the accidental, random, or arbitrary origin of the new art. Here their thoughts are very similar. Ortega claimed that those who considered modern art “only a whim, can be sure that they do not understand anything about art, new or old. The present condition of painting, and art in general, is the fruit of an inexorable and inevitable evolution.”17 “In art, as in morals, what is necessary does not depend on our whim. We have nothing to do but to yield to the imperative dictated by the epoch.”18 Ortega’s words are in accord with those of Malevich in 1916: “In art, there is an obligation to execute its necessary forms, regardless of whether I like them or not. Whether you like them or not — art never asks you this.”19 To Ortega, the new artistic feeling is characterized by a “perfect purity, rigor, and rationality.” It rejects the principle of psychic contagion. Ortega quoted Mallarmé: “Toute maîtrise jette le froid.”

K. S. Malevich, “Glavy iz avtobiografii khudozhnika,” in N. I. Khardzhiev, Stat’i ob avangarde, ed. Rudol’f Duganov, Iurii Arpishkin, and Andrei Sarab’ianov, 1 (Moscow: RA, 1997), 124–125. 15 Ortega, Estetika, 226. 16 See, for example, Malevich, “Forma, tsvet i oshchushchenie,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, 5 (l928): 157–159; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:311–321. 17 Ibid., 200. 18 Ibid., 227. 19 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Alexandre Benois, Manuscript Department, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, fond 137, no. 1186. 14

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The theme of “coldness” became important in a dispute between Malevich and Alexandre Benois about the new art. For Benois, the absence of “warmth” in art (“There is not enough warmth, why is it so cold at this art fair?”) is equal to its death, the loss of its “nature.” The “habit of consciousness of seeing depictions in painting [is] the most ardent and sublime, secret and joyful thing in the world. It is the cult of earthly and heavenly love . . . it is life itself.”20 In reply, Malevich exclaimed rhetorically: “But how does warmth concern creativity? Really, isn’t it possible to create the cold in the cold?” Ortega answered this question as follows: “‘It is unfair,’ the contemporary artist would say. It takes advantage of a noble human weakness. . . . Art cannot be based on psychic contagion; this is an instinctive subconscious phenomenon, while art should be absolutely clear. . . . Laughter and tears are aesthetic deceptions, frauds.” Malevich’s sarcastic remark about the “physiological” influence of Benois’s favorite old art — “I do not like the warmth of [Venus]. She stinks of Caesar’s sweat!”21 — echoes Ortega’s statements: “To evaluate the work by the criteria of how exciting it is, how much a person is apt to submit to it, is a mistake. Were it so, tickling and alcohol would be the most sublime of artistic genres.”22 The changes taking place around 1900 appear rapid only at first glance. Malevich emphasized the gradual and imperceptible character of artistic evolution. Ortega described the shift as the amplitude of a pendulum: the motion from a maximum of realism and popularity, to the opposite extreme. Reverting to his comparison of art to two forms of visual accommodation, he claimed: “Art that could offer such a double vision, would make us cross-eyed. The nineteenth century was excessively cross-eyed; that is why its creative work, far from being a normal type of art, is, perhaps, a great anomaly in the history of taste.”23 Both theoreticians were aware that the internal evolution of art is associated with a certain spirit of the times. Ortega considered the new art as an outburst of “iconoclasm,” a sign of contemporary artists’ rejection of art, science, and the state — that is, the preceding culture in its entirety. This

20

A. N. Benua, “Posledniaia futuristicheskaia vystavka,” Rech’ (Petrograd) 9 January

1916. Malevich, letter to Benois. Ortega, Estetika, 175. 23 Ibid., 237, 252. 21 22

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explanation may be applied to the mentality of the Russian Avant-Garde in general, and Malevich in particular. In his youth, Malevich was drawn to the political revolution, and for a long time identified his fate with it. In later years, he insisted that the new art was the spiritual precursor of the immense historical upheaval. We should also discuss Malevich’s thought as distinct from Ortega’s. The differences became apparent when they considered specific works of art. The Spanish philosopher himself said that he was not an enthusiast of modern art. His comprehension went only as far as Cézanne’s painting; he mentioned in passing the “delusions and even the swindles of Cubism,” the unsuccessful experiments of Picasso and the Dadaists, and so on. He wrote of the experiments of the Dadaists: “It is easy to pronounce or paint something completely without meaning, unintelligible, useless; it is enough to mutter unconnected words, or to draw several random lines.”24 When Ortega tried to solidify his characterization of the new aesthetic, he did it on the basis of Western European (chiefly French) art of the first quarter of the twentieth century, but without including International Constructivism or the Russian Avant-Garde. Besides dehumanization, Ortega enumerated such distinctive features of the new art as a strict distinction between the artistic sphere and everyday life, the tendency to irony and games, a loss of enthusiasm, the “absence of the transcendental,” and the cult of youth — beauty of the body, sports, and so on. This sort of definition seems to be narrower than the general problematics of “the dehumanization of art.” But when he described the artist of the past, it reminds us of Malevich: One could see “the solemn pose of the great poet or the ingenious musician before the masses – the pose of a prophet, the founder of a new religion, or the lofty mien of a statesman responsible for the fate of the world! . . . To a contemporary artist, on the contrary, the realm begins when he notices that there is no longer anything serious in the air.”25 However, the main divergence between Malevich and Ortega is associated with the sociological conclusion that was the thrust of “The Dehumanization of Art,” and which anticipated the idea of Ortega’s most famous book, The Revolt of the Masses (1929). In the philosopher’s opinion, the new art was fundamentally antidemocratic: “It is the art of the privileged,

24 25

Ibid., 235. Ibid., 256.

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the art of the refined nervous organization, an art of aristocratic instinct;”26 whereas, “the good bourgeois, a creature unable to perceive the secrets of art, is blind and deaf to any disinterested beauty.” The clash between these forces “cannot pass without consequence after a hundred years of general pandering to the masses, and exalting the ‘people’.” Thus the new art was a symptom of a general crisis brought on by the idea of democracy: “The surface of contemporary life conceals a profound and revolting lie – the false assumption of the actual equality of men.” Ortega believed that the aristocracy of the spirit would reconcile this conflict: “The time is drawing near, when society, from politics down to art, will begin anew to constitute itself as it should, into two orders or ranks: an order of the illustrious people, and an order of ordinary men.”27 Neither Malevich, nor any other Russian avant-garde artist, could ever have shared such views. Ortega’s criticism of the dumb bourgeois to a certain extent may be closer to the attitude of the opponents of the Avant-Garde, the representatives of The World of Art (Mir iskusstva). In particular, it echoes Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s 1906 article “The Coming Barbarian.” However, even members of The World of Art, who perceived themselves as a spiritual aristocracy, never drew such an extreme conclusion. As a rule, for the generations of the Russian intelligentsia who were brought up with the social and moral utopian doctrines of the second half of the nineteenth century, a break with the tradition of exalting the people, and the practice of educating them, was impossible in principle. One need only mention that while Ortega placed the word “people” in inverted commas as something mythical, and identified the masses with the crowd, Malevich was quite positive on this point: “The people don’t have to be taught Art, they are already three quarters of the way into Art as such.”28 “I do not want to say that Art should belong to only a few . . . for Art, in its pure form, may be the property of each person of the masses.”29 Here is a source of drama in the interrelationship between the AvantGarde and society. It is not the subject of this paper to characterize or simply cite Malevich’s numerous passages devoted to this problem; they are scattered about his texts from different periods. I shall only give a brief outline of Ibid., 221. Ibid., 222. 28 Sarab’ianov and Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich, 300. 29 Ibid., 329. 26 27

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the evolution of his views. Malevich saw several reasons for the antagonism between art and society: the conservatism of cultural authorities, the sluggishness of the average citizen, and the ignorance of a deceived people.30 But if in the 1910s, Malevich angrily blamed the opponents of modern art, at the end of his life he clearly saw that such misunderstanding was natural. When he was young, he would probably have agreed with Ortega: “New art helps ‘the best people’ to get to know themselves, to recognize each other in the grey mass, and to understand their own destiny — to be the minority and fight against the majority.”31 Artists had to stand fast: “The minority always has to reserve its own opinion,” Malevich wrote in 1918.32 In the fall of that year, Tatlin organized a meeting at the State Free Art Studios under the heading, “The Minority in Art.” The term “Avant-Garde,” as used by Malevich at the time, had much the same connotation. However, rather than individual battles, the Avant-Garde took on the leadership of an entire army. This is why Malevich persistently explained and popularized the new art for many years. He did not want, as it were, to recognize the fatality of its break with society.33 His efforts may be explained In 1918 Malevich wrote, “The crowd will not contemplate the present day; it screams at innovators, rails at them, and cannot do otherwise. For whole centuries, the heads of the crowd have all been fastened facing in the same direction.” (Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:98.) The workers “have not known [the new art] at all, because they were forced into stinking factories early in the morning, and night drove them back to their flops in the slums.” (Ibid., 99.) But even after the revolution, the situation did not change much: “neither the intelligentsia nor the workers have a clear understanding of the real aims of art.” (Ibid., 107.) Malevich believed “the socialists, too, promote the repression of . . . the new conclusions in art . . . for the single reason that in them still lives that art which public opinion lived for before the socialist era. On the other hand, great influence is exerted by the mind, which has become comfortable, and which is afraid of being disturbed by innovation.” (Ibid.) Here Malevich approached Ortega’s criticism of the bourgeois, when he wrote about the average citizen “whose soul is full of sawdust, and whose feelings are like worn out bast mats.” (Ibid., 119.) Malevich set his hopes on the uneducated, rather than the intelligentsia. However, in time, he became more and more aware of the naturalness of a break between art and the people: “For the worker, the object-thing itself is nothing more than an expression of its function. This is why the artistic, plastic aspect is not comprehensible. This is the reason we are faced with a lack of understanding between the artist and the worker.” (Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:173.) 31 Ortega, Estetika, 221–222. 32 Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:171. 33 Malevich explained the new art again and again. In 1927 he complained that “society continues to evaluate the work [of art] from an external point of view, in terms of its plot and the depicted object,” and he affirmed the necessity of studying Cubism. 30

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by his utopian belief in the transformation of life through an art, the essence of which is non-figurativeness or objectlessness, that is, according to the late Malevich, a disinterested and free creativity. 34 As we can see, the social projects of Ortega and Malevich are different in their content, but they have one common feature: both thinkers deduced their social theories from the new artistic experience. For both of them, the artistic Avant-Garde was the basis for the transformation of society. Finally, there is the question of how we can explain the similarity between the views of the Spanish philosopher and the Russian artist, who were so distant from one another, and whose professional interests, life experiences, tastes, education, and political views were profoundly different. As already mentioned, their main works were published almost simultaneously. There is also a kind of geographical symmetry: Spain and Russia are both on the borderlands of Europe; in the early twentieth century both countries gave the art world the most prominent exponents of avant-garde thinking — Picasso and Dali, and the Russian modern artists. Ortega-y-Gasset became one of the great Spaniards who amazed contemporaries with the novelty and radicalism of his ideas. Malevich rightly occupies a place in the ranks of the great artistic innovators of the twentieth century. The shared features of his views and those of Ortega, one of Europe’s best minds, make us appreciate anew Malevich as a theoretician. Translated by Igor Pilshchikov and Charlotte Douglas

“Our time should make clear to itself that it is not life that will be the content of art; the content of life must be art, for only under this circumstance can life be beautiful.” Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:140. 34

9 Living in Space: Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Architecture and the Philosophy of Nikolai Fedorov Christina Lodder

T

HE names of the artist Kazimir Malevich and the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov have already been linked in art-historical scholarship, which has drawn attention to the general affinities between their ideas, particularly in connection with Malevich’s architectural projects of the early and mid 1920s (Fig. 9–1).1 As early as 1976 Evgeny Kovtun and Alla Povelikhina had suggested that there might be a link between Malevich’s “Suprematist sputniks” and Fedorov’s ideas.2 Three years later, George Young observed, “Malevich’s designs for planity, architectural structures to house life beyond the planet earth . . . can be seen as conscious or unconscious efforts to realize projects formulated by Fedorov.”3 In this paper, I should like to probe this relationship more deeply, highlighting certain fundamental parallels

In Russia, the renowned Malevich specialist Evgeny Kovtun and the avant-garde expert Alina Povelikhina seem to have been the first scholars to indicate an affinity between Malevich’s architectons and Fedorov’s ideas; in the West it appears to have been George Young. See E. F. Kovtun and A. V. Povelikhina, “‘Utez iz budushchego’. (Arkhitekturnye idei Velimira Khlebnikova),” Tekhnicheskaia estetika, 5–6 (1976): 42; and George M. Young, Nikolai F. Fedorov: An Introduction (Belmont, Mass.: Nordland Publishing Company, 1979), 191. Their ideas have been developed further by Charlotte Douglas, Kazimir Malevich (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 27. In addition, I should like to acknowledge a debt to the stimulating discussions that I had with Angeliki Charistou while I was supervising her dissertation, “Strands of Cosmic Thinking and Science Fiction and the Art of the Russian Avant-Garde” (M. Litt Dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2004). 2 Kovtun and Povelikhina, “ ‘Utez iz budushchego’,” 42. 3 Young, Fedorov, 191. 1

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9–1. Photograph showing a range of architectons on display at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1989. From left to right: Gota 2, Alpha, Gota, Zeta, Beta.

between the approaches of the two figures, while focusing on Malevich’s designs for buildings.4 Although examining Malevich’s architectural experiments in the light of Fedorov’s ideas is not the only way of approaching Suprematist architecture, it is, as I hope the following text will demonstrate, an illuminating avenue to pursue. At first sight, the two figures do not seem to have much in common. Fedorov was a mystical thinker and a reclusive philosopher who spent his life in obscurity, working as a librarian and archivist, developing his distinctive and rather eccentric ideas in his spare time, and never publishing anything while he was alive. In contrast, Malevich worked very much in the public arena. An avant-garde artist, he was eager to pursue and promote creative innovations in his work. In December 1915, when he launched the objectless language of Suprematism at The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10 (Zero Ten) with the Quadrilateral, better known today as the Black Square, In the interest of brevity, I shall not be dealing with Malevich’s sketches for new towns and urban complexes, but will be focusing on the planits and the architectons. 4

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9–2. Photograph showing a section of Malevich’s display of Suprematist paintings at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero – Ten), Petrograd, December 1915/January 1916.

he deliberately courted publicity, and was at pains to select his co-exhibitors so that his new style would make the maximum impact on the art world of the time (Fig. 9–2).5 Despite these differences in temperament, both men were important visionaries and innovators in their respective fields. While Malevich pioneered objectless painting, Fedorov developed a brand of Christian thinking that was unique. Instead of placing heaven in the afterlife, Fedorov believed that man should create a perfect life on Earth, pursuing peace and harmony, and creating a universal brotherhood of all mankind. Rejecting both capitalism and contemporary socialist alternatives, he aspired to build a future world on the basis of the Christian faith, with men living in small communes, working in the fields in summer and factories in winter. He believed that by harnessing technology, human beings would be able to, and indeed 5 December 1915 is old style; the exhibition opened in January 1916 according to the Western calendar.

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should, complete God’s project by conquering death and making themselves immortal. They should then use their scientific knowledge to resurrect earlier generations. Since this would produce drastic overcrowding on Earth, Fedorov argued that humanity would have to take to space and colonize distant stars. Eccentric as these ideas might seem, the writers Fedor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, as well as the rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and many others were among Fedorov’s most fervent admirers.6 Fedorov died in 1903, but his writings were published posthumously in two volumes, issued in 1906 and 1913 under the title The Common Task.7 In 1915, the prominent religious philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev published a long and important article celebrating Fedorov’s ideas in the popular Moscow journal Russian Thought.8 In a way, therefore, the new ideas of both Malevich and Fedorov came to the attention of the cultivated Russian public in 1915. It would be difficult to suggest that there was any causal link between these the two events of 1915, and it is equally impossible to establish any substantial connection between the two figures. Their dates overlap — Fedorov (1828–1903) and Malevich (1879–1935) — so in theory they could have met, but it is extremely unlikely. Fedorov was primarily based in Moscow, which Malevich visited for the first time around 1905, two years after Fedorov had died. There is no documentary evidence that Malevich read Fedorov’s writings or even knew about him.9 Perhaps for this reason, 6 Young, Fedorov, 37–52, 60–71, 31–34. Fedorov’s idea of resurrecting all the past generations still seems very bizarre. Today, however, given the enormous advances in medical science and technology, the idea of resuscitating the recently dead perhaps no longer seems to be such a wild pipe dream, and the excessive evaluation of scientific progress that gave rise to such hopes does not seem so misplaced. Indeed, now people can have their bodies frozen at the point of death, so that they can be resuscitated when a cure has been found for the disease from which they were dying. Similarly, today space travel is becoming a reality, although Fedorov’s other ideas, such as colonizing distant stars and the notion of the heavenly bodies themselves becoming free of their present orbits through man’s efforts, remain problematic. 7 Filosofiia obshchago dela. Stati, mysli, i pis’ma Nikolaiia Fedorovicha Fedorova, ed. V. A. Kozhevnikov and N. Peterson, 2 vols. (Verny, 1906; Moscow, 1913; reprint Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers, 1970). 8 Nikolai Berdiaev, “Religiia voskresheniia,” Russkaia mysl’ (Moscow), 367 (1915): 75–120. 9 There is, for instance, no reference at all to Fedorov in Malevich o sebe. Sovremenniki o Maleviche. Pis’ma. Dokumenty. Vospominaniia. Kritika, ed. I. A. Vakar and T. N. Mikhienko, 2 vols. (Moscow: RA, 2004).

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the scholar Nikolai Khardzhiev, who amassed a vast archive of materials relating to the artist, categorically refuted the idea of any relationship between Malevich and Fedorov, stating that “Malevich was never interested in him.”10 Nevertheless, it is possible that Malevich was aware of the thinker through his own close friendship with the artist Mikhail Matiushin.11 Matiushin was interested in the ideas of the occult writer and philosopher Petr Uspensky, and had linked Uspensky’s notions about the fourth dimension to Cubism.12 Given his interest in philosophy and spiritual ideas, Matiushin may well have read the two volumes of Fedorov’s writings and Berdiaev’s article of 1915. If so, it is very likely that he discussed them with Malevich. Another connection between Malevich and Fedorov is the poet Velimir Khlebnikov. He is known to have been an admirer of Fedorov, and in some of Khlebnikov’s works, such as the play Death’s Mistake and the poem Ladomir, he suggests that universal solidarity and the common effort of all mankind can abolish death; in his poem We and the Houses, he even alludes to space travel.13 Khlebnikov went so far as to produce drawings of buildings that would accommodate transport cabins in which a human being could both live and travel through space.14 Such ideas are loosely evocative of Fedorov’s own concept of man’s move into space. Malevich had worked with both Khlebnikov and Matiushin on the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun, performed in December 1913 in St Petersburg, and Fedorov’s ideas might easily have been a subject for discussion between the men at that time, especially as themes of flight, as well as travel through space and time, were central to the plot of the opera.15 N. Khardzhiev, K. Malevich, M. Matiushin, K istorii russkogo avangarda, ed. N. Khardzhiev, (Stockholm: Hylaea, 1976), 89. 11 For Malevich’s friendship with Matiushin, see Charlotte Douglas, “Mikhail Matiushin and Kazimir Malevich,” Experiment, 6 (2000): 12–15. 12 See Mikhail Matiushin, “O knige Gleza i Metsanzhe ‘Du Cubisme’,” Soiuz molodezhi, 3 (March 1913): 25–34. 13 Young, Fedorov, 180. See also Irene Masing-Delic, Abolishing Death: A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 104, 243–244. 14 See Velimir Khlebnikov, sheet of drawings for architectural structures, c. 1920, Pushkinskii Dom, St. Petersburg. Reproduced in Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 207. 15 Zhadova points to strong affinities of terminology and general concept between Khlebnikov’s flying houses and Malevich’s planits. See Larissa A. Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910–1930, trans. Alexander Lieven (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 99. 10

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Although there is no direct connection between Fedorov and Malevich, there are some interesting parallels between the two men. For instance, neither figure followed a conventional career trajectory, nor received any extensive professional training in their chosen vocations. Fedorov did not complete his university studies, which in any event had been about the law, rather than philosophy. Likewise, Malevich studied only briefly at art school in Kiev, and never managed to enter the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, despite several attempts to do so.16 Instead he received his art education in a more informal atmosphere, studying at the private studio of the painter Fedor Rerberg, who prepared him (unsuccessfully) for the official entrance exams of the Moscow School.17 There is also a strong similarity in the terminology that both figures invented to describe their work. Fedorov coined the term Supramoralism to describe his new philosophy, and to denote the universal synthesis, which consisted of the fusion of God, man, and nature, and the synthesis of science and art within religion.18 Strangely enough, a few decades later, Malevich created the word Suprematism to describe his new, objectless style of painting. This similarity in terminology may be simply another coincidence, but the fact that Malevich coined the term in 1915, in the wake of Berdiaev’s article, suggests that he may have been aware of it and of Fedorov’s ideas. It also indicates that there might have been a deeper link between the two men than has hitherto been suspected. Above all, what the two men share is the fact that they were both utopian visionaries, regarding themselves as prophets, and believing that their task was one that encompassed the whole of mankind. Even in Malevich’s CuboFuturist work, parallels between the two men can be perceived; they shared a spiritual emphasis, and a belief in man’s progress towards a higher reality. Malevich’s designs for Victory over the Sun (Fig. 3–8), and paintings such as The Perfected Portrait of I. V. Kliun (Fig. 3–15) are characteristic of the artist’s approach at this time, and they can be seen to be representing “the art of the transcendent, expressing the highly developed consciousness of a future species of humanity that would possess radically new organs of sight, as well as a new and universal language.”19 Such works embody “a higher 16 See Khardzhiev, Malevich, and Matiushin, K isotrii russogo avangarda, 113; also see Douglas, Kazimir Malevich, 8, 9. 17 For Malevich’s studies at Rerberg’s school, see John Bowlt’s article in this volume. 18 Young, Fedorov, 90. 19 Douglas, “Mikhail Matiushin and Kazimir Malevich,” 12.

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order of reality” and convey a belief that “a synthesis of psychic and organic evolution would lead to a heightened consciousness.”20 In Malevich’s Suprematist painting, such parallels are intensified. It could be argued, for instance, that Fedorov’s emphasis on overcoming subservience to the laws of nature, as well as his stress on spiritual values and space, find a strong resonance in Suprematist paintings, which themselves are anti-naturalistic, and possess strong mystical and cosmic overtones. When Malevich launched Suprematism in 1915, he declared that his Black Square marked the beginning of a new epoch in artistic creation, and he called it “the face of the new art,” and “the first step of pure creation in art,” in which the language of painting (color, line and the plane) took on an autonomous existence.21 For Malevich, the Black Square represented the destruction of the mimetic tradition and the birth of a new kind of art, “the pure art of painting,”22 which had nothing to do with the appearances of the material world. Malevich declared, “I have transformed myself into the zero of form,”23 and explained, “The artist can be a creator only when the forms in his picture have nothing in common with nature.”24 He stated, “to gain the new artistic culture, art approaches creation as an end in itself and domination over the forms of nature.”25 One might argue that just as Fedorov’s transfigured humanity was to free itself from the fetters of nature that bound it to the earth, so Malevich’s Suprematism was to free the artist from replicating natural appearances. Liberated from the constraints imposed by nature, Fedorov’s humanity becomes as it should be, and Malevich’s art becomes true creation. While Malevich emphasized that he was rejecting the role of natural appearances in art, he also emphasized the spiritual dimension of his new style. He called the Black Square “the creation of intuitive reason,”26

Ibid. K. Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm (Moscow, 1916); reprinted in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. A. S. Shatskikh, 1 (Moscow: Gileia, 1995), 35–55; quotation, 53; English translation in K. S. Malevich, Essays On Art 1915–1933, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin, 1 (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968), 19–41; quotation, 38. 22 Malevich, Ot kubizma, in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:50; Essays on Art, 1:34. 23 Ibid., in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:35; Essays on Art, 1:19. 24 Ibid., in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:40; Essays on Art, 1:24. 25 Ibid., in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:36; Essays on Art, 1:19. 26 Ibid., in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:53; Essays on Art, 1:38. 20 21

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suggesting that he was inspired by subjective, rather than objective, criteria. At the same time, Malevich deliberately presented the work as an icon, placing it high across the corner of the room, in the position that an icon normally would have occupied in a Russian Orthodox home (Fig. 9–2). He even referred to the Black Square as “the bare and frameless icon of my times,” and emphasized the fact that for him it embodied a new metaphysical truth.27 He wrote, “The artist uncovers the world and shows it to man.”28 But, as his titles suggest, this was not the world known through logic, but through intuitive reason or a higher state of consciousness. Titles like Painterly Realism: Boy with a Knapsack: Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension (1915, Fig. 14–2)29 served to evoke a whole range of ideas denoted by the umbrella term of the fourth dimension: Bergson’s notion of time, the concept of n-dimensional geometries, other spatial dimensions, and Uspensky’s idea of a heightened state of spiritual awareness. When it was launched in 1915, therefore, Suprematism was linked with spiritual truth and alternative perceptions of reality. At the same time, space was as fundamental to Suprematist painting as it was to Fedorov’s project. The white grounds were chosen to “give a true impression of the infinite,” and a “real conception of infinity.”30 Moreover, Suprematist compositions had no horizon. In Suprematist paintings, the implied motion of the geometrical forms through and across the picture Kazimir Malevich, letter to Alexandre Benois, May 1916, Manuscript Department, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg; reprinted in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:85; English translation in Essays on Art, 1:45. 28 Kazimir Malevich, “Khudozhnik,” early 1920s, ms, Malevich Archive, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 5 (Moscow: Gileia, 2004), 455; English translation in Malevich, Essays on Art, 4, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism: Unpublished Writings 1913–33, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Hoffmann (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1978), 9. 29 See Poslednaia futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin 0,10 (nol’-desiat’). Katalog (Petrograd, 1915): no. 41. For a discussion of Malevich and the fourth dimension, see Charlotte Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the Origins of Abstraction in Russia (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980); and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 274–94. 30 K. Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka (Vitebsk, 1920); reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:188; English translation in Essays on Art, 1:125. See also K. Malevich, “Suprematizm,” in Katalog desiatoi gosudarstvennoi vystavki. Bespredmetnoe tvorchestvo i suprematizm (Moscow, 1919); reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:150; English translation in Essays on Art, 1:121. 27

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plane conveys strong sensations of infinite space.31 Such sensations reach their culmination in the “white on white” paintings of 1918, which imply space within space, infinity within infinity, an infinite cosmic space, carrying connotations of what Charlotte Douglas has called the “philosophical sublime.”32 Yet it was after the Revolution of October 1917, and Malevich’s development of architectural Suprematism, that the parallels with Fedorov’s thinking become most marked. The Revolution seemed to open up endless possibilities; a perfect society no longer seemed a distant dream, but a potential reality. Indeed, for some, the Revolution was “the first great utopia in modern history.”33 Liberation from the Earth’s gravity acted as a powerful metaphor for political liberation. Fedorov’s ideas became a significant aspect of this Promethean way of thinking in Russia: “the belief that man — when fully aware of his true powers — is capable of totally transforming the world in which he lives.”34 In particular, his vision produced a school of disciples who were generally called biocosmists, and embraced the twin ideas of immortality and space travel.35 Social utopias, previously located in the indeterminate world of the dream, began to find their home in outer space. In Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What is to Be Done of 1863, the heroine Vera has a dream of a perfect future life in a city of glass and iron, redolent of London’s Crystal Palace of 1851, which Chernyshevsky had actually seen and admired. The Marxist Alexander Bogdanov, however, in his Red Star of 1908 (republished 1918), and its sequel Engineer Menni of 1919, placed his modernist, socialist utopia on the planet Mars, and described the journey from Earth to Mars in a spaceship. In 1920, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (the scientist who is known as the father of Russian space travel and a disciple of Fedorov) published his science fiction novel Beyond the Planet Earth in which he used convincing and pragmatic scientific terms to describe the construction of a rocket and the subsequent journey undertaken by a group of six scientists, which was Zhadova, Malevich, 53. Douglas, Kazimir Malevich, 24. 33 Vladimir Sviatlovskii (1922), cited by Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 168. 34 James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretative History of Russian Culture (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966), 478. 35 Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 170. 31

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seen as a prelude to setting up “future trans-atmospheric colonies.”36 Even political activists seem to have succumbed to Fedorov’s ideas. In 1906, an anonymous Marxist pamphlet, which was subsequently republished in 1918, declared that man was destined to “take possession of the universe and extend his species into distant cosmic regions, taking over the whole solar system. Human beings will be immortal.”37 In the post-revolutionary period such thinking encouraged other creative figures to devise innovative projects for building in space, including Anton Lavinsky’s city on springs of 1923, and Georgy Krutikov’s flying city of 1928.38 Malevich was clearly not immune to this general atmosphere of euphoria and Promethean thinking. Although he was not a Marxist or a Communist, there is no doubt that he, too, envisaged the emergence of a better society in which men would be equal and prosperous. Yet, this was not merely a material utopia. In a phrase that seems to echo Fedorov’s own vision, the artist wrote, “I strive towards brotherhood and unity in order that through brotherhood and unity, I may live in peace and in plenty.”39 He evidently shared Fedorov’s optimism; and clearly considered that substantial progress was being made in this direction. He stated, “When humanity achieves unity — it is on the path now — it must unite with the new world that has flown out of its skull.”40 Like Fedorov, Malevich emphasized universal brotherhood and a total transformation of reality, which entailed development towards perfection, in both man and the world in which he lived. In 1918, Malevich stopped painting, and announced that he wanted to devote his energies to writing and

36 Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, Beyond the Planet Earth, trans. K. Syers (Oxford, London, and New York, 1960), 16. Tsiolkovsky had studied in the Rumiantsev Museum in Moscow while Fedorov was working there as a librarian, and had became the older man’s protégée, although, according to Tsiolkovsky’s memoirs, they never discussed space. Young, Fedorov, 31–34. 37 O proletarskoi etike (1906; Moscow, 1918), 328; cited in Billington, The Icon and the Axe, 488. 38 Anton Lavinsky’s project is described by Boris Arvatov, “Oveshchestvlennaia utopiia,” Lef, 1 (1923): 61–64. For Krutikov’s project, see Modernism: Designing a New World 1914–1939, ed. Christopher Wilk (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2006), 36, 47. 39 K. Malevich, O novykh sistemakh v iskusstve (Vitebsk, 1919); reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:171; English translation adapted from Essays on Art, 1:103. 40 Ibid., in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:174; Essays on Art, 1:107.

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become a prophet.41 In the autumn of the following year, he moved to Vitebsk (in Belarus). There he organized Champions of the New Art (Unovis), and entrusted this group with the task of transforming the world into a Suprematist utopia.42 He stated, “We wish to build the world up according to a objectless system, departing further and further from the object, like the cosmos’s creation of nature.”43 The role of the artist was no longer simply to describe the world, but to create it. Hence, Unovis was committed to “the creation of a new culture for all, in accordance with the new commune.”44 Extending Suprematism into all realms of human life naturally involved developing a three-dimensional Suprematist vocabulary, and generating architectural projects, including three-dimensional models of buildings.45 The formal beginnings of this can be traced back to the 0.10 exhibition, when Malevich not only displayed his Black Square across the corners of the room (interacting 41 Varvara Stepanova, diary entry for 8 January 1919, in Varvara Stepanova, Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Sfera, 1994), 62. 42 On Unovis, see Alexandra Shatskikh, “Unovis: Epicenter of a New World,” in The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde 1915–1932 (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1992), 53–64. 43 Kazimir Malevich, letter to the Dutch Artists, 12 February 1922, archive of G. Harmsen, Amsterdam; reprinted in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:145 (where it is printed alongside the earlier draft of 7 September 1920 from the Cultural Foundation “Khardzhiev-Chaga Center,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam); English translation in Essays on Art, 1:186. 44 Il’ia Chashnik, “Arkhitekturno-tekhnicheskii fakul’tet,” Unovis, 2 (January 1921): 15; cited and reproduced in Zhadova, Malevich, 96, 312–313. 45 For a catalogue of Malevich’s architectons, see Troels Andersen, Malevich (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1970), 139–144. For discussions of Malevich’s architectural experiments, see Milka Bliznakov, “Suprematism in Architecture,” Soviet Union, 5/2 (1978): 241–255; A. A. Strigalev, “Stilisticheskaia evolutsiia ob’emnogo suprematizma,” in Khudozhestvennye problemy predmentno-prostranstvennoi sredi (Moscow: VNIITE, 1978), 44–48; Jean-Hubert Martin, Malévitch: Oeuvres de Casimir Severinovitch Malévitch (1878–1935) (Paris: Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980); Irina Kokkinaki, “Suprematicheskaia arkhitektura Malevicha i ee sviazi s real’nym arkhitekturnym protsessom,” Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia, 2–3 (1992): 119–130; E. Ovsiannikova, “Superarchitecture or Supergraphics?” in The Russian AvantGarde: Representation and Interpretation (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2001), 187–192; Tatiana Mikhienko, “The Suprematist Column – A Monument to Non-Objective Art,” in Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism, ed. Matthew Drutt (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2003), 79–87; and Evgenia Petrova, “Kasimir Malévich. Materiales nuevos. Modelos arquitectónicos,” in Kasimir Malévich (Bilbao: Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2006), 214–220.

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dynamically with the surrounding space, almost like a three-dimensional construction), but also showed one painting with an elongated cuboid form (Fig. 9–2). Now the exploration of a three-dimensional vocabulary became more urgent and directed towards more practical ends. In 1920 Unovis declared, “We bring new cities. We bring the world new things . . . innovators . . . must unite without delay under the flag of the new art and build the world.”46 Such ambitions seemed to go hand in hand with a general rejection of painting in favor of more extensive projects. Malevich emphasized, “There can be no question of painting in Suprematism; painting has become obsolete and the painter himself is a prejudice of the past.” 47 He stressed, “Art must become the content of life, since only thus can life be beautiful.” 48 At the same time, he asserted that Suprematism’s ability to construct a new reality surpassed more conventional means. “Suprematist art plays an enormous role in the building of life . . . It has a capacity and technique that people cannot attain in their purely material search for the land of plenty.” 49 Indeed, he observed in 1920, “At the present time, Suprematism is growing as a new architectural construction in space and time. The white square . . . embodies the whole new, white world building.” 50 Malevich had actually started thinking about architecture and the architectural potential of Suprematism in 1918, even before moving to Vitebsk.51 In spring that year, he had published his first statement specifically dealing with the subject “Architecture as a Slap in the Face of Reinforced Concrete.”52 46

Ot Unovisa. My khotim (Vitebsk, 1920); English translation in Zhadova, Malevich,

297. Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka, in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:189; English translation adapted from Essays on Art, 1:127. 48 Kazimir Malevich, “Zhivopis’ v probleme arkhitekturi,” Nova generatsiia, 2 (1928): 116–124; reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 2:140; English translation in Essays on Art, 2:17–18. 49 Kazimir Malevich, “Suprematizm,” early 1927, ms, Malevich Archive, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; English translation in Malevich, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism, 149. 50 Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka, in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:188; Essays on Art, 1:126–127. 51 Kazimir Malevich, “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, 5 (1928): 156; reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:309. 52 Kazimir Malevich, “Arkhitektura kak poshchechina betono-zhelezu,” Anarkhiia, 37 (6 April 1918): 4; reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:69–72. The article was republished with additions in Iskusstvo kommuny, 1 (7 December 1918); this is the version translated in Essays on Art, 1:60–64. 47

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Disgusted with modern buildings being constructed in the styles of the past, he declared: The Avant-Garde of revolutionary destruction is marching over the whole wide world . . . and on the square of the fields of revolution there should be erected corresponding buildings. We are the highest point in the race of contemporary life, the kingdom of machines and motors, and their work on earth and in space. We tear ourselves from earthbound shackles, our motors daily enter the chasms of space; we represent striving, and everything on earth should be built in the form of strivings. Down with cupolas . . . let wedges cut into the bosom of space. Let tall steeples and flying houses prepare for flight . . . Our new architect will be he who . . . speaks in the new language of architecture. . . . We painters must rise to the defense of new buildings . . . impel people towards what is new, in order that the newly forged image of our day be pure.53 Like Fedorov, Malevich envisaged the transformation of reality as an essentially collective process, initially the work of a small band of acolytes united under the Unovis flag. He wrote, “I attribute the form of the new architecture to the collective way in which it is elaborated, and in which not only architects, but also even artists, mostly painters, take part.54 Malevich argued that Suprematist architecture had to be developed in accordance with a set formula starting with a cube, in either red or black. This was followed by the “disintegration of the cube,” often resulting in an “elongated cube” (Fig. 9–3).55 He explained that the disintegration of the red and black square into red and black solids would lead to a multiplication of shapes. The elongated cube would form a parallelepiped, and the intersection between it and one or more shorter parallelepipeds would 53 Malevich, “Arkhitektura kak poshchechina betona-zhelezu.” English translation in Essays on Art, 1:63–64. 54 Malevich, “Zhivopis’ v probleme arkhitekturi,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 2:140; Essays on Art, 2:17. 55 Kazimir Malevich, inscription on Tablitsa No. 1. Formula Suprematizma, 1920s, watercolor, gouache and pencil on paper, 36 x 54 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg (Fig. 9–3).

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9–3. Kazimir Malevich, Table No. 1, Formula of Suprematism, 1920s, watercolour, gouache and pencil on paper, 36 x 54 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

produce some semblance of an aerodynamically shaped spatial solid, which was the prototype of an architectural planit. He concluded, “This is how architecture must achieve a new look. A clean look, independent of practical purposes, since architecture begins where there are hardly any practical purposes; [this is] architecture as such.”56 Malevich had reduced painting to its essentials; he was now doing the same for architecture. Malevich’s architectural projects fall into two basic categories: the architectons and the planits. While he seems to have primarily used the term “architectons” to denote the plaster models, he appears to have coined the term “planits” to describe his drawings. According to his own account, he began making three-dimensional architectural models in 1923.57 He put these on display for the first time at the Leningrad State Institute of Ibid. Malevich, “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu,” 157–9; in Sobranie sochinenii, 2:309–310. This is confirmed by Konstantin Rozhdestvensky, who stated in his memoirs that work on the arkhitektons was already underway when he joined Malevich’s department at Ginkhuk in fall 1923. See Mikhienko, “The Suprematist Column,” 87, n. 8. 56 57

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9–4. Kazimir Malevich, Architecton Alpha, 1923, plaster 33 x 37 x 84.5 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Artistic Culture (Ginkhuk) in May 1924,58 and in August of that year, he reported to El Lissitzky that he had just completed 15 projects for his “blind Suprematist buildings.”59 The architectons themselves fall into two main groups: the horizontally articulated structures like Alpha (1923) and Beta (before 1926), and the vertical structures like Gota (1923) and Zeta (1923–27). Some of these are now lost and only known through photographs, but others, like Alpha and Gota now in the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, have been restored since 1988, using the original elements.60 Most of the early architectons like Alpha and Beta are elongated, essentially horizontal cuboid structures with one main axis, to which minor Mikhienko, “The Suprematist Column,” 81. Andersen states that architectural projects were also exhibited in Vitebsk in 1920 and March 1921. Andersen, Malevich, 31–32. 59 Kazimir Malevich, letter to El Lissitzky, 14 August 1924, Manuscript Department, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; reprinted in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 2:160–161. 60 See Kasimir Malévich (Bilbao), 214 and 220. 58

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9–5. Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Architecton, c. 1929, destroyed. Documentary photograph.

forms have been attached, usually asymmetrically, extending the essential lines of the composition, creating a subsidiary cross formation, providing an asymmetrical accent, or producing some vertical interest (Fig. 9–4). Extensions were often divided, and even subdivided again, while more and more forms were attached to the basic structure, creating a profound sense of rhythm. One of Malevich’s most impressive and elegant models contains all of these elements (Fig. 9–5). A low circular volume, which might be an auditorium, dominates one end of a long low building, and is overlooked by a low tower. Another tower is situated towards the center of the building, and a horizontal structure crosses it towards the other end. The combination of large circular and cuboid structures suggests a public building of some kind, and it is possible that this architecton was conceived in relation to a project like the Palace of Soviets Competition, or even as a house of culture.61 In 1927 Malevich stated, “I see in my Suprematist architecture the beginning of a new classical architecture, which, as in the past, creates In 1931, Malevich noted that there was work in the offing with the Palace of Soviets in Moscow; see Malevich, letter to Lev Kramarenko, 2 October 1931, National Art Museum, Kiev; reprinted in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:229; cited in Zhadova, Malevich, 102. In 1931, Malevich was also interested in the House of Culture project on Vasily Island, Leningrad. See Malevich, letter to the builders of the House of Culture on Vasily Island; reprinted in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:224–225. 61

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9–6. Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Skyscraper, 1925, photomontage, illustrated in Praesens 1, 1926 (Warsaw).

only ‘the beautiful’.”62 He admired classical temples for their “pure feeling for plastic relationships,” and emphasized architecture’s timeless aesthetic qualities.63 It is possible that his aspiration to find such elements in his own work stimulated him to develop vertical compositions in the latter half of the 1920s.64 Of course, he may equally have been inspired by the upward thrust of modern American skyscrapers; a photomontage of 1925 presents a vertical Suprematist structure surrounded by contemporary multi-storied buildings from the USA (Fig. 9–6).65 Malevich had clearly admired these for a long time as a paradigm of modernity. As early as 1913 he had written 62 K. Malewitsch, “Suprematische Architektur,” Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst, 10 (1927): 412–414; Russian translation in Sobranie sochinenii, 2:124–127. 63 Kazimir Malevich, “Mir kak bespredmetnost’,” 1927, Russian text of Die gegenstandslose Welt (Munich, 1927); reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 2:113; English translation in Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company, 1959), 78. 64 Mikhienko, “The Suprematist Column,” 81.

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9–7. Kazimir Malevich, Architecton Gota, 1923, plaster, 85.3 x 56 x 52.5 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

to Matiushin, “Everybody hastens towards skyscrapers . . . our heads must touch the stars.”66 An aspiration towards the sky had certainly been manifest in the work of the Architectural and Technical Faculty at Unovis, where Ilia Chashnik had conceived his design for a soaring speaker’s platform, a skeletal structure springing, at a dynamic diagonal, from a back cubic base.67 Inevitably, vertical architectons like Gota and Zeta (Fig. 9–7) have a completely different look from the horizontal models. The demands of 65 This was reproduced in Kazimierz Malewicz,“Świat jako bezprzedmiotowość,” Praesens, 1 (1926). 66 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Mikhail Matiushin and Iosif Shkol’nik, between 12 February and 7 March 1913, Manuscript Department, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow; reprinted in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:49; English translation in Malevich, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism, 201. 67 This was published in Unovis (20 November 1920); see Zhadova, Malevich, 80, 299, plates 150–4. The design was later reworked and published in the West as the Lenin Podium by El Lissitzky, who had run the Technical and Architectural Faculty at Unovis.

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gravity clearly placed some restrictions on the placing of the additional elements, their scale, and nature. Hence, the scope for extending the surfaces asymmetrically seems to have been more limited than in the horizontal structures, and the accretions of elements therefore tend to be more repetitive. This makes the designs more ponderous, and at the same time gives them a somewhat decorative feel, while the vertical massing at times produces a kind of fluted effect, which endows the entire structure with a classical resonance. These qualities are particularly evident in the Architecton Lukos, which was mounted on a cube when it was exhibited at the State Institute of Art History in 1928.68 They also informed the nature of Malevich’s display at the exhibition Artists of the RSFSR during 15 Years, by which time this classical spirit had become discernibly stronger (Fig. 9–8).69 In tandem with this, Malevich was beginning to think along more conventional lines, such as presenting these vertical structures as potential Soviet monuments. The largest item in the display is surmounted by a figure of Lenin, which seems highly reminiscent of the gigantic statue of Lenin that crowned the winning design for the Palace of Soviets Competition launched in 1931.70 The term architecton (in Russian, arkhitekton) is derived from the word arkhitektonika, denoting “the science of the application of mathematics and mechanics to architecture.”71 Malevich himself explained, “Architectonics is the science of building. But recently architectonics has meant operating with elements of volume. That is why I coined the new word arkhitektona.”72 The original feminine form of the word eventually gave way to the masculine variant arkhitekton, or architecton.73 Like the English word architectonics, arkhitektonika can also be understood as the proportionate arrangement of parts and their harmonious combination in the structure of a building or composition. Such a definition could almost be applied verbatim to Zhadova, Malevich, 100. Mikhienko, “The Suprematist Column,” 83. 70 The final design, developed at the sixth stage of the composition in 1933, was by Boris Iofan, Vladimir Shchuko, and Vladimir Gelfreik. See Naum Gabo and the Competition for the Palace of the Soviets 1931–1933 (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1993), 176. Iofan’s earlier submission of 1931 was perhaps closer to Malevich’s vertical architectons. It was simpler and included a ribbed tower, with a gigantic statue of Lenin on top; ibid., 172. 71 Vladimir I. Dal’, Tolkovyi slovar zhivogo Velikorusskogo iazyka (Moscow, 1880–1882, reprinted Moscow, 1981), 1:25. 72 Malevich, “Suprematicheskaia arkhitektura,” 1927, ms, variant of Wasmuths’ article; reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 2:292. 73 Ibid., 334. 68 69

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9–8. Kazimir Malevich’s installation of paintings and architectons at the exhibition Artists of the RSFSR during the Last 15 Years, Leningrad, 1932–3.

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Malevich’s models. By adopting the term architecton, Malevich was clearly signaling to his colleagues and the wider public that the plaster models were abstract explorations of different combinations of formal elements, which could eventually be applied to architecture. He stressed the importance of the “constant, beautiful, forming element” achieved by Suprematist art, which would be the content of the new architecture, for “life will not be the content of art, but rather, . . . art must become the content of life, since only thus can life be beautiful.”74 Malevich emphasized, “I understand architecture as an activity outside all utilitarianism, an objectless architecture, consequently possessing its own ideology . . . an activity free from all economical, practical, and religious ideologies.”75 This may explain why the precise function of the elements in each structural ensemble is not identified, and why Malevich did not associate the overall compositions themselves with any actual utilitarian purpose. There are none of the usual features you might expect in an architectural model; there are no indications of windows, doors, entrances, or exits. The models were not conceived in response to the needs of particular architectural briefs, or intended to answer the highly specialized, practical requirements of specific building types, such as hospitals, communal housing, or schools. They were also not related to any particular structural system of building. Indeed, how they were to be built and function was left pretty vague. Even their scale is not really indicated. None of them has an identifiable façade, but exist in the round, fully in space. If architecture is the way space is enclosed for a given purpose, then Malevich’s structures are not architectural. They exist in space, but do not define space, or contain space within them. The sole purpose of the architectons seems to have been to elucidate and elaborate potential compositional ideas and possible combinations of forms. In this sense, their role was pre-eminently experimental, rather than practical. As Malevich explained in his film scenario on painting and architecture, architecture could be approached “as a problem,” or as “in life.”76 Malevich, “Zhivopis’ v probleme arkhitektura,” in Sobrania sochinenii, 2:140; Essays on Art, 2:17–18. 75 Kazimir Malevich, “Zametka ob arkhitekture,” 1924, ms, Malevich archive, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 5:283–284; English translation in Malevich, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism, 102. 76 Kazimir Malevich, “Khudozhestvenno-nauchnyi fil’m ‘Zhivopisi i problemy arkhitekturnogo priblizheniia novoi klassicheskoi arkhitekturnoi sistemy’,” 1927, ms, Private archive, Baden-Baden; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:309. 74

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9–9. Kazimir Malevich, Modern Buildings, 1923–24, pencil on paper, 36 x 53.5 cm., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 9–10. Kazimir Malevich, Future Planits for Leningrad: The Pilot’s Planit, 1924, pencil on paper, 30.5 x 45 cm., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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9–11. Kazimir Malevich, Future Planits for Earthlings, 1923–24, pencil on paper, 39 x 29.5 cm., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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He was far more interested in “architecture as a problem,” which he saw as the exploration of a new architectural system, or the “Suprematist order” on which architecture in life would be able to draw for resources.77 Architectons, therefore, were about “the primacy of volumetric masses and their spatial solution in consideration of weight, speed, and direction of movement.”78 As his colleague, the artist Vera Ermolaeva elaborated, for Malevich, the architectons “have the aim of finding and confirming a definite style, which can be applied to all fields of artistic construction and artistic production. He conducts his work in this area on the basis of his system of Suprematism, developing in volume the same order of construction of forms and the same rhythm that he discovered for planar composition. Malevich has called his models architectons, underlining that purely objectless content.” 79 Malevich subsequently developed the notion of the planits or what he called “the houses of the future.”80 The planits formally and in general terms seem very close to the architectons. They tend to be simpler structures, and are far less complicated in terms of the number and nature of attached elements (Fig. 9–9). Almost all of them are arranged on the sheet horizontally, imparting a feeling of take-off or flight to the compositions. Like the architectons, they were not usually defined in terms of function, but a few were given quite specific identities, such as the pilot’s house in Leningrad (Fig. 9–10). Malevich also provided some details about the building materials. For instance, on the drawing Future Planits for Earthlings of 1923–24 (Fig. 9–11), he wrote: Suprematism in buildings. The Suprematist forms AF of the second group of planits 1913–1924. I am now thinking about the materials —

77 In 1928, Malevich asked that his architectons be reproduced under the general heading “The Suprematist Art of Volume Construction (The Suprematist Order) 1923.” See Malevich, “Pis’ma v redaktsiiu,” 156, in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:310. 78 Aleksei Gan, “Spravka o Kazimire Malevich,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, 3 (1927):106; reprinted in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 2:540; English translation, Alexei Gan, “Notes on Kazimir Malevich,” Art and Design, 5, no. 5/6 (1989): 36. 79 Vera Ermolaeva, “Vystavka prikladnogo iskusstvoznaniia,” Zhizn’ iskusstva, 9 (28 February 1928): 17; reprinted in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 2:263–264. 80 See, for instance, Kazimir Malevich, inscription on drawing Budushchie planity/ doma/dlia zemlianitov/liudei, 1923–4, pencil on paper, 44 x 30.8 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; reproduced in Kazimir Malevich 1878–1935 (Los Angeles: The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 1990), 152, 221.

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opaque white glass, concrete, tarred roofing felt, and electric heating without chimneys. The colors of the residences are predominantly black and white. Sometimes, in exceptional circumstances, it could be red, black, and white — but that depends on the tension of the state’s powers and its weakness in terms of dynamism. Earthlings must be able to reach a planit from every side; they can be inside it or outside. The planit is simple, like a tiny object, and all of it is within the reach of the Earthling who lives in it. In fine weather, he could sit or even live on its surface. Thanks to its construction and its system, the planit is self-supporting, and it will be possible to keep it hygienically clean — it can be washed every day without the least difficulty, and owing to its low shape, it is not dangerous.81 He inscribed another drawing with a similar, although slightly different, explanation: The planit must be accessible for the earth dweller in every way. He can be everywhere: on top and inside the house and live equally well inside or on the roof of the planit. The planit system enables it to be kept clean and it can be washed without any appliances. Each of its volumes is a low structure, but you can go up and down it like a flight of stairs. The walls are heated as well as the ceilings and floor.82 The planit seemed to allow the resident to experience space in a very complete and full way. It is as if the visual experience of space produced in the earlier paintings were now translated into an actual physical experience of space in a living, rather than a specifically artistic, context. Whereas the architectons appear to have been predominantly earth bound, this is not true of the planits. Their name planit (singular) and planity (plural) is evocative of the Russian word for planets (planeta singular or planety plural) and, as this suggests, Malevich’s planity could be satellites

81 Kazimir Malevich, inscription on drawing Budushchie planity dlia zemlianitov, 1923–4, pencil on paper, 39 x 29.5 cm., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. (Fig. 9–11). 82 Malevich, inscription on drawing Budushchie planity/doma/dlia zemlianitov/liudei, in Kazimir Malevich 1878–1935, 152, 221.

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or spaceships traveling freely in space. Malevich made this clear in his text Suprematism: 34 Drawings of 1920: The Suprematist apparatus, if one can call it that, will be one whole, without any fastenings. A bar is fused with all the elements, just like the Earth’s sphere, which contains life perfectly in itself, so every Suprematist body that is built will be included in a natural organization, and form a new satellite. One only has to find the interrelationship between two bodies speeding through space. The Earth and the Moon — perhaps a new Suprematist satellite can be built between them, equipped with all the elements, which will move in orbit, creating its own new path. . . . Suprematist forms, as an abstraction, have achieved utilitarian perfection. They are no longer in contact with the Earth and may be examined and studied like any planet or entire system.83 In this respect, both Malevich and Fedorov shared a Promethean vision, and, for both men, that vision was closely linked to a concept of humanity’s expansion into space. Fedorov did not refer to space travel in a romantic or metaphorical way, but regarded it as a crucial component of humanity’s “common task,” or “common mission,” and an inevitable result of the universal resurrection that he envisaged. He wrote: For the coming generations, the planets in space will be the future dwellings of their fathers . . . the exploration of outer space is a preparation for those dwellings . . . The project of resurrection demands such discoveries, because without the conquest of outer space, the simultaneous existence of all the generations is not possible, although, on the other hand, without resurrection it is impossible to achieve the complete conquest of outer space.84 For Fedorov, a transformed humanity would totally change the world, and would then extend its territory far beyond the Earth to the planets, 83

Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka, in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:186; Essays on Art,

1:124. 84

Fedorov, Filosofiia obshchago dela, 1:283.

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where people would settle and live a communal life in peace and harmony. Eventually, human beings would colonize the entire universe. Fedorov also envisaged the ultimate liberation of the Earth and all the planets from the law of gravity. No longer restricted to their present orbits, the earth and other planets would move freely through space, navigated by their inhabitants. Through these movements, they would transform the entire universe into a “celestial cathedral.”85 Both the notion of floating freely in space and the idea of the “celestial cathedral” seem to find a resonance in the Suprematist planits. One can easily imagine these structures floating into the infinite cosmos, creating a celestial dance with their orbits. For Malevich, his Suprematist architectural projects represented “the new architecture of space.”86 He explained in 1920, “Suprematism is defined in an earthly context . . . it alters the entire architecture of earthly things in the widest sense and links up with the space that holds the moving monolithic masses of the planetary system.”87 Both men, therefore, gave architecture a central role in their visions. For Fedorov, architecture was valued because it allowed solid mass to escape from the confines of gravity and soar upwards into space.88 The culmination of this, was, of course the celestial cathedral or “the cathedral of worlds,” created when the stars and planets, liberated from all constraints, would move freely in space, producing a truly cosmic architecture.89 For Malevich, as we have seen, architecture became the most important of the arts, central to his vision of a Suprematist future, providing the perfect environment for the new Suprematist man. Moreover, for both men, movement was an integral element in this architecture. Both the celestial cathedral and the planits were in continuous motion. Like Fedorov, and many people in the post-revolutionary period, Malevich fervently believed in the power of science and technology. He was convinced that contemporary technological achievements must be applied to the architecture of the future. As early as 1918 he had written, “We are the

Ibid., 2:249. Malevich, letter to the Dutch Artists, in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:144; Essays on Art, 1:186. 87 Malevich, Suprematism. 34 risunka, in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:188; Essays on Art, 1:126. 88 Fedorov, Filosofiia obshchago dela, 2:151–153. 89 Ibid., 350. 85

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highest point in the race of contemporary life, the kingdom of machines and motors and their work on earth and in space. . . . Let tall steeples and flying houses prepare for flight.”90 He stressed, “man’s path lies across space.”91 He seems to have had unbounded faith in the technological potential and power of Suprematism, observing, “I discovered that in Suprematism there lies the idea for a new machine, i.e. a new motor of the organism, without wheels, steam, or petrol.”92 Such statements suggest that Malevich shared Fedorov’s optimistic belief in the limitless possibilities of technology. Just as Fedorov was convinced that at some time in the future science would be able to resurrect the past generations of human kind, Malevich seems to have believed that the energy inherent within Suprematist forms would mean that there would be no problem in constructing and maintaining the planit. Malevich’s passionate belief in the power of art seems to have taken on a metaphysical dimension during his stay in Vitebsk. In 1920, in a letter to his friend the critic and scholar Mikhail Gershenzon, Malevich presented Suprematism and Suprematist architecture in a rather mystical light. He wrote: The Black Square developed into architecture with such forms that it was difficult to detect the appearance of architecture; it took on such an aspect that it was impossible to find. This form is a kind of new living organism. If one suddenly came upon such a town, it would be impossible to recognize what it is. The Square has become a living entity, producing a new world of perfection; I look at it completely differently from how I used to; it is not painting, it is something else … perhaps the Black Square is the image of God, as the essence of his perfection, on the new path of today’s fresh beginning.93 90 Malevich, “Arkhitektura kak poshchechina betono-zhelezu,” in Essays on Art, 1:63–4. 91 Malevich, “Suprematizm,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:151; Essays on Art, 1:121. 92 Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka, in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:188; Essays on Art, 1:126. 93 Malevich, letter to Mikhail Gershenzon, 18 March 1920, Cultural Foundation “Khardzhiev-Chaga Center,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; reprinted in Kazimir Malevich, Chernyi kvadrat, ed. A. Shatskikh (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2003), 438–9; see also Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:125, where the punctuation is slightly different.

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In God Is Not Cast Down, which seems to have been written in 1920, although it was not published until 1922, Malevich perhaps came closest to Fedorov’s ideas. Although Malevich did not mention the philosopher’s name in this somewhat mystical tract or replicate Fedorov’s ideas, he did attack materialism and argue for retaining the concept of God, while suggesting that art (of all humanity’s activities) came closest to God’s own perfection. He referred to the idea of social perfection, overcoming the constraints of the natural world, and immortality, declaring, “Humanity is moving towards absolute thought through its products . . . liberation from physical reality, . . . the achievement of acts in pure thought, will make thought the means for reincarnation (an inevitable result of society’s achieving perfection).”94 Movement itself took on a mystical dimension. Malevich stated that man “is preparing on the Earth to throw his body into infinity . . . from legs to aeroplanes, further and further into the limits of the atmosphere, and then further to his new orbits . . . of movement towards the absolute . . . man’s path goes towards humanity, and from there to God as perfection.”95 In this text, therefore, Malevich was explicitly linking the notion of the perfection of man and society with travel into deep space and the pursuit of spiritual goals. Indeed, underlying Malevich’s architecture there seems to have been a highly spiritual aim, which, like Fedorov’s common task, was related to attaining the “Kingdom of God.”96 In a statement of 1927, Malevich’s vision and terminology come very close to those of Fedorov. Malevich declared, “I conclude that, in principle, architecture is purely artistic form (arkhitektonika) and that in this pure form resides God’s Kingdom on Earth, which can be attained only through pure contemplation, but which we cannot ‘use’ for any specific aim, because anything that serves a useful purpose cannot come from the Kingdom of God on Earth or in the Heavens.” 97 In this sense, therefore, both Fedorov and Malevich saw themselves as doing God’s work. Malevich’s adoption of an explicitly religious dimension in his activity seems to have occurred in Vitebsk. In April 1920, he wrote to Gershenzon,

Kazimir Malevich, Bog ne skinut. Iskusstvo. Tserkov. Fabrika (Vitebsk, 1922); reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:244–245; Essays on Art, 1:198. 95 Ibid., in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:244; Essays on Art, 1:197. 96 Malevich, “Suprematische Architektur,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 2:127. 97 Ibid., 124–127; quotation, 127. 94

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“now, I have returned, or entered into the world of religion . . . I go to church, I look at the saints and at all the protagonists of the spiritual world, and I see in myself and perhaps in the whole world that the moment for religious change is beginning. I have seen that just as painting went towards its pure form of action, so the religious world is going towards the religion of pure action . . . I see in Suprematism, in the three squares and the cross, a beginning that is not just pictorial, but encompasses everything.”98 In certain statements that he made in Vitebsk, Malevich also mentions the notion of resurrection. This is usually placed within an artistic context. Yet, he may also have intended to imply the possibility of resurrection in Fedorov’s sense. Malevich does not seem to have adopted the idea of the resurrection of all the generations, but his notion of transformation certainly entailed some kind of immortality and encompassed the individual, the collective, and the world. He wrote, “In transforming the world, I await my own transformation; perhaps in the final day of my transfiguration I shall assume a new form, leaving my present image behind in the dying, green, animal world.99 Like Fedorov, Malevich accepted the power of technology, without fetishising it. Indeed, both men envisaged utopias that were not about technology, but about the spirit, in which technology provides essential support and plays a fundamental role, but is not celebrated for its own sake. Like Fedorov’s vision, Malevich’s too is not worked out in minute detail. His models are ideas, not fully formulated designs.100 They belong to the distant future — just as Fedorov’s vision did. Malevich has been called the “artistic prophet of the space age.”101 Certainly, space was central to his painting and architecture. It was also

98 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Mikhail Gershenzon, 11 April 1920, Cultural Foundation “Khardzhiev-Chaga Center,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; reprinted in Malevich, Chernyi kvadrat, 438–439; also in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:125. 99 Malevich, O novykh sistemakh v iskusstve; in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:159; Essays on Art, 1:88. 100 The stereometric quality of some of the planit drawings do mean that, in theory, buildings could be constructed from these drawings. There would, however, remain enormous room for interpretation in the construction process, encompassing a vast range of factors, including such essentials as scale, the placement of doors and windows, and the materials. 101 Billington, The Icon and the Axe, 485.

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important to his sense of identity. He even expressed the hope that after his death a tower would be erected on his grave in the form of a vertical architecton containing a turret equipped with a telescope to watch Jupiter.102 With his vision of space, Malevich could be said to have acted as the artistic counterpoint to Fedorov, whose philosophy had perhaps pointed the way.

Malevich, letter to Ivan Kliun, 2 June 1931, private archive; reprinted in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:226; cited by Mikhienko, “The Suprematist Column,” 86. Malevich’s coffin, which seems to have been designed and built by Nikolai Suetin, was loosely cruciform in cross-section and bore a marked resembled to one of Malevich’s planits. See Vasilii Rakitin, Nikolai Mikhailovich Suetin (Moscow: RA, 1998) 166, 169. 102

10 From Vozbuzhdenie to Oshchushchenie: Theoretical Shifts, Nova Generatsiia, and the Late Paintings Adrian Barr

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ITHIN the Modernist trajectory, abstraction is a hard-fought victory: to rescind such achievements a capitulation. Situated within these narratives, Malevich’s post-Suprematist, figurative paintings of 1927–33 have long carried the taint of regression. Art historians as diverse as Benjamin Buchloh, Dmitry Sarabianov, and more recently, Matthew Drutt, have discussed the works in terms of external events, describing the paintings primarily as reactions to the constricting political climate.1 Whether as ciphers of resistance or capitulation, these late works are generally linked to the political Zeitgeist. A return to figuration thus becomes a visual symptom of an Avant-Garde slowly suffocating in an increasingly restrictive cultural climate. This essay reassesses the post-1927 paintings by addressing the continuity, rather than the discrepancy or recapitulation, of these works with Malevich’s other primary mode of expression during the 1920s, his philosophical and theoretical writings. In particular, it focuses on the artist’s philosophical worldview, as set forth in God is not Cast Down. Art. The Church. The Factory, published in 1922, and the reconsiderations and

Benjamin Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting,” in Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts (London, 1992), 222–238. Dmitry Sarabianov, “Malevich at the Time of the ‘Great Break’,” in Malevich: Artist and Theoretician (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 142–147. Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism, ed. Matthew Drutt (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2003), 21. 1

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modifications to this worldview, as outlined in the cycle of articles Malevich published in Ukrainian in the avant-garde journal Nova generatsiia from 1928 to 1930.2 Examination of these later articles demonstrates that there is a sustained coherence between Malevich’s late, evolved, philosophical systems, and the allegedly regressive characteristics that distinguish the late paintings from his Suprematist period. The return to figuration will be discussed as a visual and artistic counterpoint to Malevich’s theoretical and philosophical systems. Before evaluating Malevich’s philosophical worldview as expounded in God is Not Cast Down, however, it is prudent to briefly outline Malevich’s initial conception of Suprematism as set forth in 1915–16. In the pamphlets From Cubism to Suprematism (1915) and its revised and extended companion, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism (1916), Malevich insists upon an absolute division between Suprematism and the art of the past.3 From Cubism to Suprematism begins with the declaration, “All previous and

K. Malevich, Bog ne skinut. Iskusstvo. Tserkov. Fabrika (Vitebsk, 1922); reprinted in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. A. S. Shatskikh, 1 (Moscow: Gileia, 1995), 236–65. K. Malevich, “Suprematicheskoe zerkalo,” Zhizn’ iskusstva, 20 (895), (22 May 1923): 15–16; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:273. Malevich’s articles originally published in Ukrainian have been translated into Russian and republished in his Collected Works: “Zhivopis’ v probleme arkhitektury,” Nova generatsiia, 2 (1928); republished in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2 (Moscow: Gileia, 1998), 129–140. “Analiz novogo i izobrazetel’nogo iskusstva,” Nova generatsiia, 2 (1928); republished in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:141–153. “Novoe iskusstvo i iskusstvo izobrazitel’noe,” Nova generatsiia, 9, 12 (1928); republished in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:154–176. “Prostranstvennyi kubizm,” Nova generatsiia, 4 (1929); republished in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:177–182. “Lezhe, Gris, Erben, Mettsenzhe,” Nova generatsiia, 5 (1929); republished in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:183–197. “Konstruktivnaia zhivopis’ russkikh khudozhnikov i konstruktivizm,” Nova generatsiia, 8 (1929); republished in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:198–206. “Russkie konstruktivisty i konstruktivizm,” Nova generatsiia, 9 (1929); republished in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:207–214. “Kubofuturizm,” Nova generatsiia, 10 (1929); republished in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:215– 225. “Futurizm dinamicheskii i kineticheskii,” Nova generatsiia, 11 (1929); republished in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:226–237. “Estetika,” Nova generatsiia, 12 (1929); republished in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:238–253. “Popytka opredeleniia zavisimosti mezhdu svetom i formoi v zhivopisi,” Nova generatsiia, 6–7, 8–9 (1930); republished in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:254–273. 3 K. Malevich, Ot kubizma k suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm (Petrograd, 1916); reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:27–34. Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu (Moscow, 1916); reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:35–55. 2

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contemporary painting before Suprematism — sculpture, the word, music — were enslaved by the form of nature.”4 Notably, the redundant arts of objectivity here include both Cubism and Futurism. The absolutism of the partition between Suprematism and past art is emphasized in Malevich’s frequent references in both texts to Suprematism as being “samotselnyi,” or “self-referential.” Suprematism alone is self-referential because it refers to no objective reality beyond itself. A Suprematist painting embodies “the domination of form as an end in itself over content and things,”5 and is therefore a “new realism”; a singular and primary creation. Malevich’s theorizing of objectlessness (bespredmentnost) begins with the assertion of an ontological divide between objectless Suprematism and the art of the past. Suprematist art is an evolutionary phenomenon, the ultra-modern conquest of the entire artistic tradition. From the vanguard perspective of Suprematism, the “object arts” are henceforth obsolete, identified with the base consciousness of a lower human order. To quote a memorable phrase in From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, “Suprematism is the beginning of a new culture; the savage is conquered like an ape.”6 It is salient that both early texts generally limit their objectless theorizing to questions of art. This focus is not sustained. God is not Cast Down, in contrast, concerns itself primarily with existential themes. Published in Vitebsk in 1922, three years after Malevich had largely abandoned painting for writing, the work is essentially a treatise on metaphysics, a broad and absolutist tract that is typical of Malevich’s thought during the early 1920s. As a philosophical document, God is not Cast Down is distinguished by a totalizing anti-realism that places the initial binary oppositions of From Cubism to Suprematism and From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism within a relatively sophisticated worldview. The treatise begins with a view to the objectless foundation of existence: The basis and reason for what in society we call life, I consider to be a stimulus, which reveals itself in all possible forms, pure, unconscious, inexplicable; its existence has never been proved, it

Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:27. Ibid., 50. 6 Ibid., 53. 4 5

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is without number, precision, time, space, and absolute or relative condition.7 This sentence succinctly illustrates Malevich’s philosophical methodology. He defines ‘stimulus’ (vozbuzhdenie) negatively, removing all concepts such as ‘number’, ‘time’, and ‘space’ that would bind it to the finite, labeled, world of objects. The objectless world is indefinable, omnipresent, and transcends all comprehension and description. Because the universal foundation is not form, but formlessness, Malevich refers to it as “nothing,” noting that all phenomena, all consciousness, arise from this objectless core. Hence in Chapter 1, the assertion “nothing influences me, and ‘nothing’ as an entity determines my consciousness, for everything is stimulus as a single state without attributes that have a name in everyday language.”8 Here, appearance, matter, finitude, and the world of objects are simply contingent differentiations of the universal essence. All concrete form or visual reality, from rocks to our bodies to technological creations, is illusionary, constituting a limited module of a limitless energy. Developing the point, Malevich argues in Chapter 10 that “investigating reality means investigating what does not exist and is incomprehensible.”9 Throughout God is not Cast Down, Malevich returns to and reiterates the thesis of dual realities: one apparent, one actual. We exist within a universe of illusionary objectness, constituted by, and suffused with, the infinite monism of “nothing.” And we sense or apprehend this nothing via stimulus or vozbuzhdenie. The encompassing opposition of appearance and essence here structures the philosophical worldview of the article. Malevich here presents us with a metaphysical absolute mapped in structural opposition to the empirical experiences of the world of objects. There are the temporal limitations and distinctions of the world of appearances, and the indivisible, a-temporal infinity of the objectless universe. For Malevich, it follows that all human endeavors to comprehend and know the world of objects will founder on its unreality, because: Reason cannot understand anything, and intelligence cannot judge anything, for there is nothing in nature that can be judged, Ibid., 236. Ibid., 236. Italics added. 9 Ibid., 241. 7 8

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understood, or examined; it has no unit that could be taken as a whole. All that seemed to us to be separate and single is untrue; everything is at once linked and undone, but there is nothing separate, and therefore there are, and can be no objects and things – and therefore any attempt to attain them is senseless. What can one embrace when there is not line, plane, or volume?10 Reality is, in the words of Malevich, “a book in which neither first nor last page exists,”11 and thus is ultimately uncountable, infinite, objectless. Consequently, any objective ideology, be it science, progress, or the material culture of Constructivism, is deluded, superfluous, and false. The conclusion of God is not Cast Down re-emphasizes these structural oppositions, stating emphatically, “Nothing can be proved, defined, studied or comprehended.”12 Any “proof” of objects is, for Malevich, “simply the appearance of the indemonstrable” — the objectless absolute.13 The work ends with a final assertion of its anti-realist core, affirming that “man calls every appearance an object, and thus no object exists in either the demonstrable or the indemonstrable.”14 Our world is supremely illusory. Before examining the recasting of this philosophical model within the Nova generatsiia writings, and its relevance to the late paintings, I wish first to discuss the theorizing of the human condition, as set forth in God is not Cast Down. For Malevich here, man is a divided and dualistic entity, constituted in the collision of the object and the objectless spheres. Both physical and limitless, a conflation of earth and universe, man might perhaps be described as “objectless in spirit.” As Malevich puts it, “Man’s skull represents the same infinity for the movement of concepts. It is equal to the universe, for in man’s skull is contained all that it sees in the universe.”15 Man is bound by objectness, restrained by weight, corporeality, and finitude. Yet thought, the core process of humankind, is an objectless product of vozbuzhdenie, pulling man away from the world of the senses. Thought connects with and manifests the universally objectless, meaning that human consciousness

Ibid., 239. Ibid., 242. 12 Ibid., 265. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 240–241. 10 11

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and bodily activity result not from objective or earthly need, but from the stimulus of the objectless universe: Thought is the process or state of stimulus manifested in the form of real or natural action. Thus thought is not something by which one can reflect upon some manifestation, i.e. understand, cognize, realize, know, prove, or base; no, thought is simply one of the processes of the action of an unrecognizable stimulus.16 It is this unconscious yet inevitable orientation towards the universally objectless that is manifest in many of humankind’s histories, be they religion, art, or even technological creation. In Chapter 13, Malevich describes this trajectory in a memorable metaphor: So it is that he, as a particle of absolute thought, having left the general orbit of the moving absolute, is now striving to rejoin that orbit. Perhaps it is for this reason that in the earth he collects his body in order to hurl it into infinity. First of all he freed his legs and then raised them — this was the first wrench from earth; and then gradually, with the speed of wheels and the wings of airplanes, he sailed further and further to the limit of the atmosphere, and then further still to his orbits, joining the rings of movement to the absolute.17 Humankind, both constituted and restrained by physical form, by objectness, seeks ultimate unity and ultimate rest in the infinity of the cosmos. This polarity between earth and universe, finite space and infinite expanse, will become a focus of Malevich’s late paintings, where the horizon line, so ubiquitous in these works, divides the poles of existence that the human figures, and hence the human condition, intersect. Malevich concludes God is Not Cast Down with the assertion that God, as one of the terms humankind has thrown at the objectlessness of the absolute, cannot be “cast down.” For simply, no matter transcends the objectless universe. We then view the world as objectlessness, for:

16 17

Ibid., 236. Ibid., 242–243.

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What we call reality is infinity without weight, measure, time, or space, absolute or relative, never traced in a form . . . There is nothing that could be comprehended, and at the same time there exists this eternal “nothing.”18 To summarize, the philosophical core of God is Not Cast Down affords no value to objects, and no importance to the world of appearances. As with the evolution of Suprematism in art, Malevich reads into human history an inexorable drive towards the reality, the “home” of the objectless universe. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that God is Not Cast Down affords no privilege to art. Art, like religion, is a human system for apprehending the absolute, but by no means the most direct or infallible. Suprematism is not mentioned in the text, and just one of its 33 chapters is dedicated to art. It is at the level of being, of existence and perception, that the “0,” or “nothing,” of objectlessness surrounds and suffuses the “1” of the object world. Caught precariously between these two poles is man. The metaphysical concerns that structure God is not Cast Down, are succinctly restated in the article “The Suprematist Mirror,” published in May 1923 in the newspaper The Life of Art (Fig. 10–1). Offering a concise account of the monistic “0” of the objectlessness at the heart of the world, the short text is devoted solely to describing the difference between the a-temporal essence of “0” or “nothing,” and the phenomenal distinctions of “1.” “The Suprematist Mirror” begins by asserting that “the essence of nature is unchanging in all changeable appearances,”19 immediately invoking the polemic between the apparent and the actual, the temporal and the timeless. Clause A.1 notes in quasi-mathematical fashion that all distinct phenomena, be they technological, natural, or metaphysical, are separated out from the fabric of the infinite solely by human perception. Therefore, if “religion has comprehended God, it has comprehended nothing,”20 and if “science has comprehended nature, it has comprehended nothing.” All paths, all human distinctions, then lead back to “0” (and its synonym “nothing”), which is described in the final clause as the “essence of distinctions.” And in Ibid., 242. Malevich, “Suprematicheskoe zerkalo,” in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:273. 20 Ibid. 18 19

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10–1. Kazimir Malevich, “The Suprematist Mirror,” Zhizn’ iskusstva [The Life of Art] (Petrograd), No. 20 (895) (22 May 1923): 15–16.

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that constitutive presence is “the world as objectlessness.” The Suprematist Mirror both affirms the illusion of the world of appearances, and provides a diagrammatic illustration of Malevich’s philosophical model of illusionary distinction and essential unity — a model that would be employed, with a different focus, in the articles in Nova generatsiia. These eleven publications represent a substantial re-evaluation of the unrelenting anti-realism of much of Malevich’s previous thought. Written and published after the artist’s return from Germany in June 1927, and contemporary with his late paintings, the articles were intended ultimately to be published together, constituting the chapters of a book. They are essentially homogenous in character, and present a resolved, rather than evolving, philosophical core. Importantly, the Nova generatsiia articles focus and reduce the universalizing opposition of appearance and essence onto the sphere of art, a move that largely invalidates the previously guarded theoretical boundaries between Suprematism and the arts of the past. Further to this, the cycle emphasizes an interrelationship between humankind, environment, and the objectless world that is far more subtle and reciprocal than previously theorized. The objective or physical environment is rehabilitated, in that its influence upon man and the creative process is recognized. The critical tool that enables these changes is Malevich’s new conception of objectless energy, expressed by the term “sensation,” or oshchushchenie. While Malevich had occasionally used the expression in his writings from the late 1910s, its frequent and coherent use from 1926–27 onward marks a conscious evolution away from the absolutism of the previous term “stimulus,” or vozbuzhdenie. In “Painting in the Problem of Architecture,” the first in the cycle of articles,21 Malevich indicates the breadth of his philosophical shift by extending the definition of “objectless” to include a variety of art, much of it figurative: “The objectless category [of art] consists of several trends or forms of expression: Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism and others, which may in turn be subdivided into a considerable number of groups.”22 This is a significant re-evaluation. Malevich has here moved from the theorizing of Suprematism as “the first step of pure creation in art,”23

Malevich, “Zhivopis’ v probleme arkhitektury,” in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:129–140. 22 Ibid., 131. 23 Malevich, “Ot kubizma i futurizma,” in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:53. 21

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the sole artistic domain of objectlessness, towards the idea of a collective objectless essence, common to different styles. The property that here collates Suprematism as an “objectless art” with, say, Cubism is not formal, but rather centers upon their shared possession of sensation, oshchushchenie. As Malevich puts it, “In the objectless stages [of art], one is not dealing with the representation of phenomena ‘as such,’ but with the communication of definite sensations that exist in the phenomenal world.”24 Oshchushchenie then, is theorized as both the essence and constitutive presence of all objectless art. The definition of objectlessness in art is broadened from the narrow formalism of the early tracts on Suprematism, to here include such diverse historical figures as Rembrandt, Cézanne, and Lysippus, who communicate sensations of light, painterly form, and power, respectively. Clearly at this late stage of Malevich’s theorizing of art, “objectless” does not mean “abstract” or “Suprematist.” Indeed, it refers to all art that alters or deforms the reality it depicts, thus revealing a higher organizational order than the purely visual. For Malevich at this juncture, an artist like Ivan Shishkin, who faithfully reproduces the seen world on canvas, does not produce creative and objectless art. An artist like Cézanne, who paints the world that his sensations describe to him, does. One can explain this new inclusiveness in Malevich’s thought on art by noting that the Nova generatsiia articles concentrate the totalizing philosophical model of God is not Cast Down and “The Suprematist Mirror” onto a dialectic of creative art and the functionalism of utilitarian inventions. Like the objectless absolute, art possessed of sensation constitutes an ultimate, a-temporal, infinite whole, whereas all utilitarian creations are finite, temporal, and limited. Throughout the Nova generatsiia cycle, Malevich repeatedly insists on the indivisible essence of a creative art that is beyond time and the limitations and distinctions of the objective world: The value of art is great, not because the functional side of life played a part in it, but because this form of pure art is now set aside from life and preserved in museums as an objectless, invariable treasury of art as such . . . None of the functions of life, with the exception of art, are constant.25

24 25

Malevich, “Zivopis’ v probleme,” in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:130. Ibid., 134–35

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Further on in “Painting in the Problem of Architecture” Malevich asserts, “All that is artistic exists for eternity, and neither time, nor new forms of social relations can change it.”26 In its a-temporality and ultimate unity, art here dons the garb of the “0” or “nothing,” of Malevich’s earlier thought. Much in the manner of the “world as human distinction” outlined in “The Suprematist Mirror”, different forms of creative art are theorized as simply different perceptions of the objectless essence of sensation, and therefore ultimately one. It is important to note that Malevich’s positing of oshchushchenie as the objectless essence of art necessarily precludes the ontological privileging of Suprematism. Suprematism is no longer “selfsufficient.” It ceases to exist as its own essence, its own reality, becoming but a contingent appearance, or manifestation, of the constitutive absolute, sensation. In Malevich’s words, “Cubism, Futurism, and Suprematism have established an immediate link with the world, revealing its sensations.”27 Here Suprematism, like other artistic styles, exists to reveal the sensation flowing through existence. Suprematism is further relativized within the Nova generatsiia writings by being theorized as possessing no sensations exclusively. Nowhere in the cycle of articles is a “Suprematist sensation” mentioned. Instead, Suprematism shares its constitutive sensations with other styles of art. In the final article of the series, “An Attempt to Determine the Relationship between Form and Color in Painting,” Malevich notes, “Dynamic sensation occupies the most important place in Suprematist art, followed by Suprematist contrast.”28 However, Futurism also communicates dynamic sensation, and all Cubism is constructed around sensations of contrast. If one wants to express a dynamic sensation (and Malevich asserts that all creative urges begin as sensations), does it matter absolutely if one adopts a Suprematist or Futurist idiom? Questions like these point towards the heart of Malevich’s new theoretical orientation regarding art. Furthermore, given that oshchushchenie in its manifestations is spread between many epochs and styles of art, it follows that the artist is freed to move through and between them seeking the means to represent sensation. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 137. 28 Malevich, “Popytka opredeleniia zavisimosti mezhdu svetom i formoi v zhivopisi,” in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:266. 26 27

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The formal autonomy of (ostensibly) different styles and schools of art is hence undermined. Within Malevich’s evolved theories of art, all creative styles become vehicles for the expression of the objectless in the world. Just as different art forms can express identical sensations, so can diverse objects contain an irreducible essence. Malevich writes in “An Attempt to Determine the Relationship between Form and Color in Painting”: The world perceived through sensation is a constant world. The world which consciousness perceives as a form is not constant. Forms disappear and alter, whereas sensation never disappears or alters. A ball, a motor, an arrow are different forms, but the sensation of dynamism is the same.29 In accordance with Malevich’s late philosophy, creative art can move between objects as between styles, revealing the essential unity at the heart of difference — the timeless within the temporal. Like the world as revealed in The Suprematist Mirror, art is structured through contingent distinctions and infinite essence. It is precisely this redirection of Malevich’s philosophical model, from the existential to the artistic, that I wish to emphasize. In the Nova generatsiia articles we approach the concept of merging diverse styles and epochs of creative art into an inter-stylistic, essential language of pure sensation. Formal divisions become blurred, as does the binary opposition between abstraction and figuration. This theoretical model is of central importance to the late paintings. It is therefore noteworthy that in the late works, Malevich oscillates between styles and epochs of art in a conscientious and deliberate manner. For example, the large canvas entitled Sportsmen (1930–31, Fig. 10–2) takes its structure from Russian icons in the flat, frontal arrangement of the four figures. This historical allusion is then juxtaposed with elements of Suprematism in the planes of bright colors that delineate and divide both the bodies of the athletes and earth upon which they stand. More than just formal quotation, Malevich has here selected two artistic idioms with strong metaphysical properties. Icons themselves both symbolize and invoke the presence of the divine, and Suprematism, as we have seen, denotes the cancellation and transcendence of the object-world.

29

Ibid.

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10–2. Kazimir Malevich, Sportsmen (Athletes), 1930–32, oil on canvas, 142 x 164 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Malevich here makes use of two distinct artistic languages, in order to conjoin the mystical properties of both into a single whole.30 Formally, the metamorphosis of the human figures into ciphers of Suprematism emphasizes a duality between corporeality and objectlessness that mirrors Malevich’s writings on the human condition in God is Not Cast Down. The colored division of the figures’ heads, with the white halves melding into the space beyond, heightens the body/mind opposition that Malevich emphasized in the 1922 text. This duality is restated in the reference to icon art, where the body is depicted as a container for the divinity within. It is this simultaneous solidity and transparency — of form which is My reading of Sportsmen is based in part on Charlotte Douglas’s fruitful discussion of the work in Kazimir Malevich (New York: Abrams, 1994). 30

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in essence formlessness — that relates Sportsmen to Malevich’s philosophical oeuvre. Sportsmen merges two discrete artistic idioms into a whole that is both modern and ancient — in this sense, an art beyond time — and simultaneously uses the transcendental thematic of artistic languages to subvert the validity of the depicted forms. Objectlessness here does not banish or erase the object (as Suprematism had done), but reduces objectivity to a state of translucence, eternally caught between the poles of object and non-object. The point I want to emphasize is not that the practice of borrowing was new to Malevich in 1927 — several of his pre-war works are also based on the icon format — but that Malevich’s return to painting in 1927 was motivated by a desire to give his philosophical and theoretical ideas visual form. Another work in which Malevich utilizes an inter-stylistic language to express sensation is Complicated Premonition (1928–32, Fig. 10–3). A sparse and haunting essay of alienation, Complicated Premonition is constructed around a series of oppositions. The painting’s primary divisions, of substance and void, bounded space (as signified especially by the prison-like house) and infinite extension, are reiterated within the figure of the peasant, whose head and torso are illuminated from opposite angles. The disjunction between the objectless space of the mind and the physical constitution of the body is here again emphasized as a microcosm of the universal duality Malevich returns to time and again in his writings. Form is illusion, woven from the objectless fabric of the universe, and this formless energy is known via its presence in the heart of form — as oshchushchenie. To articulate these themes in paint, Malevich again selects appropriate stylistic devices from the history of art. A strong Baroque chiaroscuro illuminates the peasant figure, heightening the edges of his yellow shirt in a blaze of white light. In Baroque painting chiaroscuro was frequently a symbol or sign of divine presence. We can thus read the light-effects of Complicated Premonition as anti-materialistic, both formally (such light threatens to dissolve objects), and thematically (as a cipher for the presence of a non-material being). It is interesting that in the article “Aesthetics” in Nova generatsiia, Malevich himself mentions chiaroscuro, when he describes Rembrandt as “striving to reveal the sensation of light” in his paintings.31 In

31

Malevich, “Estetika,” in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:249.

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10–3. Kazimir Malevich, Complicated Premonition (Torso in a Yellow Shirt), c. 1932, oil on canvas, 99 x 79 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Complicated Premonition, Malevich attempts to do something similar. By recasting selected parts of the Baroque idiom within the painting, Malevich looks beyond the dictates of singular or personal style. Here, as in other late paintings, it is the simple presence of various artistic signs for objectless energy that heighten the work’s sensation or oshchushchenie, and hence its transcendent value as art. We could discuss many more of Malevich’s late paintings, but there is not space here to do so here. The main point is that Malevich’s contemporary theoretical writings suggest a critical approach to these diverse and difficult works. It can be cogently argued that Malevich’s late concern with sensation is the vehicle for an evolved and revised philosophy of art, one divested of much of the rigid categorization associated with formal divisions and laws — divisions that were central to Malevich’s initial theorizing of Suprematism. That the late paintings embody the plurality and freedom suggested by this new artistic model, points toward an intimate, dialogic

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relationship between Malevich’s painterly art and his theoretical writings. It is a relationship that deserves more attention. The rehabilitation of the objective world that Malevich engineers in the Nova generatsiia articles also has more tangible links to the late paintings. In the extensive discussions regarding sensation — oshchushchenie — in Nova generatsiia, Malevich devotes considerable time to elucidating precisely how sensations arise within the mind. As opposed to stimulus — vozbuzhdenie — a “cosmic flame” leading away from all earth-bound objectivity, sensation arises from human interaction with the environment. As Malevich notes in “Aesthetics,” “Every landscape can put us in a different mood, act on our nervous systems, and create various feelings and various sensations.”32 Human creativity is no longer aligned exclusively with the cosmos, but with the objectless sensations arising from objects. When we contemplate nature, A process is evidently brought about within us that transforms nature into an artistic spectacle. Thus, the movement of elements in nature — for example, cows, people, children, clouds, and even the temperature — are perceived by us as pure color interrelations. The whole becomes an artistic picture, whose forms undergo no changes in time.33 For the human being, for the artist, studying nature is no longer studying “what does not exist and is incomprehensible,” as Malevich put it in God is not Cast Down. For if, as is noted in “Aesthetics,” different landscapes could be used in the treatment of different mental conditions, it then follows that the material world is to a significant degree formative of the human condition. The relevance such revisions had to Malevich’s late works, many of them landscapes, is obvious. The term “pure color interrelations” describes remarkably well the bands of color so typical of the late landscapes, such as Peasant Woman (early 1930s, Fig. 10–4). Throughout the late works Malevich seems literally to be illustrating the processes of nature transformed into sensation, and hence again the presence of the monadic and objectless ‘0’ within the world. Yet instead of the total dissolution of form, here we have its partial subversion; a translucence that captures

32 33

Ibid., 243. Ibid. Italics added.

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10–4. Kazimir Malevich, Peasant Woman, early 1930s, oil on canvas, 98.5 x 80 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

both the presence and illusion of the object-world with which we interact. Different landscapes will communicate differing sensations; both object and sensation must be apprehended in any attempt to describe the nature of existence. The late paintings aim to effect a conjoining of objectless and object worlds, of void and substance. Malevich’s articles for Nova generatsiia are salient to his post-Suprematist works precisely because they delineate the new theoretical and philosophical paradigm that both facilitates and legitimizes Malevich’s move beyond the abstraction of Suprematism. By viewing creative art itself as a manifestation of objectlessness, Malevich repudiates the strict formalist divide between abstraction and figuration. The concomitant polemic, between object and essence, earth and universe, finite and absolute, is likewise undermined in favor of the simultaneous apprehension of both poles of existence. In a statement that points to the raison d’etre of the late paintings, rather than to Suprematism, in “An Attempt to Determine the Relationship between Form

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and Color in Painting” Malevich observes, “The merging of man with the universe takes place not in form but in sensation.”34 This very brief sketch of the evolution of Malevich’s thought in the 1920s — an evolution that runs parallel to his artistic practice — although limited, indicates a general trend in Malevich’s thought. There is a sustained and significant internal coherence between the shifts and revisions evident in the Nova generatsiia articles, and Malevich’s seemingly regressive return to figuration in 1927–28. Considered concurrently with these writings, the late works can be seen as precisely the opposite of regression; they are a resolution of the seeming dead end of Suprematism, and a visual articulation of Malevich’s primary creative endeavor of the 1920s — his philosophical and theoretical oeuvre. It is well time for a substantial re-evaluation of both Malevich’s late paintings and his philosophical and theoretical oeuvre; the dialogue between the two is substantial and revealing.

34

2:267.

Malevich, “Popytka opredeleniia zavisimosti,” in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii,

IV

11 Malevich, Lissitzky, Van Doesburg: Suprematism and De Stijl Linda S. Boersma

K

AZIMIR Severinovich Malevich and Theo van Doesburg (1883– 1931) — founder and principal figure of the Dutch avant-garde association The Style [De Stijl] — never met, and until 1919, had never even seen reproductions of each other’s work. Van Doesburg was obviously still completely unaware of Malevich’s Suprematism when on 9 September 1919 he wrote in a letter to his fellow-countryman, the painter Chris Beekman: I’m pleased to hear that our first Manifesto has finally arrived in Russia. I’m curious about how it will be received. Naturally, I’m eager for collaboration with our Russian colleagues. Will they still be working under the sign of spaghetti-expressionism, or will their work have developed further? Russia is the only contact that has eluded us so far.1 That year, Malevich’s famous Black Square was four years old, and the De Stijl magazine had been appearing for two years. Eventually, both artists must have found to their surprise that they had come to similar visual conclusions independently. Both Malevich and van Doesburg regarded the idea of individual artistic creation as outmoded. Modern times demanded a new and universal plastic language, and both felt that abstract art — an inadequate, misleading term that both would consciously avoid — would 1 Ger Harmsen, “De Stijl and the Russian Revolution,” in De Stijl 1917–1931: Visions of Utopia (New York: Abbeville Press, 1982), 46.

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be the new “concrete” art of the future. They both considered the styles with which their names were associated — Suprematism and Neoplasticism, respectively — as the culmination of a long development in painting, and the starting point of a totally new aesthetic phase, in which a work of art would be created out of pure plastic elements. Both Malevich and van Doesburg believed that this new, “concrete” art would ultimately be integrated into everyday life, and they were both convinced that architecture would play a central role in the process. That Malevich saw a link between Suprematism and van Doesburg’s compositions is clearly demonstrated by a theoretical chart that was produced under Malevich’s supervision at the State Institute of Artistic Culture (Ginkhuk) in Leningrad. It is one of a series of twenty-two charts that, considered as a whole, forms a fascinating and logically constructed exposition, combining Malevich’s passionate appeal for an unconditioned art founded on purely creative considerations with an acute analysis of painting and its role in society. The series was designed especially to be used during the trip to Warsaw and Berlin that Malevich undertook in March 1927 (Fig. 11–1).2 On chart six is written in German, “The influence of the additional element on the perception of nature.” The idea was to demonstrate that every phase of painterly development reflects a specific perception of the world — a Weltanschauung. In other words, Malevich believed that every style in modern art is the product of a kind of prism through which the world assumes form, and which is manifested in the shapes, lines, and colors on the canvas, as well as in the very application of the paint. Beneath an example of each style on the chart, the characteristic linear trait that conditioned the structure of all paintings of a particular style is illustrated in a small circle, like a bacterium seen through the lens of a microscope. Malevich referred to it as a “graphic formula of the additional element.” As the chart shows, the additional element for Suprematist paintings is a small diagonal plane. The same is also held to be true for the composition shown to its left, van Doesburg’s Countercomposition VIII in Black, White, and Grey from 1924.3 In short,

For information about these charts, see Linda Boersma, “On Art, Art Analysis, and Art Education: The Theoretical Charts of Kazimir Malevich,” in Kazimir Malevich 1878– 1935 (Leningrad: State Russian Museum; Moscow: State Tretiakov Gallery; Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1988), 206–223. 3 The painting is now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. 2

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11–1. Kazimir Malevich, Theoretical Chart no. 6, 1926/1927, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Malevich’s Suprematist works and van Doesburg’s Countercompositions are presented as the result of one and the same artistic perception. Apart from the work of Malevich and van Doesburg, no other artist’s paintings are classified under this graphic element (although it is probably meant to include other Suprematists). The fact that this pure artistic perception was arrived at more or less simultaneously, and yet independently, by these two artists may have been understood as further proof of the universal nature of pure plastic language. In the Countercompositions, as in Suprematist works, dynamism is created by diagonally oriented elements, and for this reason Malevich and his followers may have felt closer to van Doesburg’s Countercompositions, on which he worked from 1924, than to the rectilinear compositions of Neoplasticism. In 1926 van Doesburg himself characterized Neoplasticism as two-dimensional, and “absolutely static,” while he described his new theory of Elementarism — which allowed diagonal elements in the

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Countercompositions — as “a four-dimensional embracing of time and space.”4 It was no coincidence that Russia was the only contact that had eluded De Stijl, as van Doesburg had noted in 1919. In one of the first accounts of modern art in Russia to circulate in Western Europe, the art critic Konstantin Umanskij characterized Russia in 1920 as an “unwilling Tibet.”5 Because of the First World War, the October Revolution, and the Civil War, Russian contact with foreign countries was almost impossible, and not only due to circumstances within Russia itself. In reaction to its unilateral withdrawal from the First World War, the young Bolshevik state had been isolated by other European countries; as part of the international blockade, no mail destined for, or arriving from, Russia was delivered. In June 1922, van Doesburg learned from Russian artists in Berlin that “photographs of works by van ‘t Hoff, Mondrian, etc. had entered Russia,” and had been greatly appreciated there. Van Doesburg considered it “most peculiar” that he had not been informed about the initiative to send information to Russia, and took offense.6 He had been in Weimar for two months already, giving private lectures, and so was unaware that Chris Beekman’s letter had apparently reached Malevich. Sometime in 1922, Beekman received an answer from Malevich — an open letter from Vitebsk, addressed, “Dear Comrade Innovators in Holland.” “I received your letter,” Malevich wrote, “and there is undoubtedly a link between us.”7 At the time, Malevich was the head of Van Doesburg, “Painting and Plastic Art,” [“Schilderkunst en plastiek. Over contracompositie en contra-plastiek. Elementarisme”] De Stijl, 7, no. 75/76 (1926–1927): 35–43. 5 Konstantin Umanskij, Preface to Neue Kunst in Russland 1914–1919 (Munich: Hans Goltz, 1920), 2. 6 Van Doesburg, letter to his friend the Dutch poet Anthony Kok, 6 June 1922. Theo van Doesburg Archive (Van Moorsel Donation), Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD), The Hague. 7 Chris Beekman noted in his memorandum book on 6 April 1922 that he had sent a letter and some photographs to Malevich. The letter Malevich wrote in return may have been part of the Beekman archives that nowadays only contains a copy. Malevich’s letter has been published in K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art 1915–1928, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin,1 (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968), 183–7. According to the same memorandum book, after receiving Malevich’s answer, Beekman sent a second letter on 26 October 1922. “donderdag / verzonden brief rechtstreeks / Mallevitch” (“thursday / sent letter directly / [to] Mallevitch” [sic]). Beekman’s memorandum book is part of the Chris Beekman Archive, the Kröller-Müller Museum Otterlo (The Netherlands), Donation Ger Harmsen in 1998. 4

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Unovis, a group of mostly young artists who were calling for a non-figurative art and design. In Vitebsk, Malevich’s most active and gifted ally was Lazar Markovich (El) Lissitzky, artist, architect, designer, and member of Unovis from its very beginning. El Lissitzky arrived in Berlin in December 1921, and within four months — in April 1922 — he had met Theo van Doesburg.8 Soon a stimulating, although short-lived, friendship developed between them. On 24 April, van Doesburg wrote enthusiastically to a friend in Holland that “all” the younger Russian artists are “working in our spirit, that is, in Neoplasticism.”9 And in a second letter, dated 6 June, he commented, “Lissitzky, who has recently arrived from Russia, is a terrific guy who is very consistent. The Germans on the other hand, are cowards.”10 Undoubtedly it was due to Lissitzky that modern Russian art was discussed for the first time, and at length, in the September 1922 issue of De Stijl, and that in this essay Malevich was accorded a central role. This first, and favorable, article on contemporary Russian art appeared under the title “Assessment of the New. Plastic Russia.”11 The first illustration in the text is a drawing of a black square within a white square. The caption reads, “K. Malevich. (Moscow) 1913.” This anomalously early 1913 date would surely have pleased Malevich. Van Doesburg, the author of the text, seems quite well informed; most likely, his information came Van Doesburg met Lissitzky before he [van Doesburg] and his wife went to Weimar (where they arrived on 29 April 1922.) Sjarel Ex, Theo van Doesburg en het Bauhaus. De invloed van De Stijl in Duitsland en Midden-Europa (Utrecht, 2000), 62. In a letter to the Dutch architect C. R. de Boer, dated 24 April 1922, van Doesburg wrote that he had had a lengthy conversation with both Lissitzky and Kandinsky after the lecture “The Will to Style” [“Wille zum Stil”] that he [van Doesburg] had given in Berlin earlier that month. Ibid., 62–3. 9 Ibid. 10 Van Doesburg, letter to Anthony Kok, Theo van Doesburg Archive (Van Moorsel Donation), Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague. 11 [Theo van Doesburg,] “Assessment of the New. Plastic Russia,” [“Balans van het nieuwe. Beeldend Rusland,”] De Stijl, 5, no. 9 (September 1922): 130–5. “Plastic Russia” was the first in a series of three articles that appeared in De Stijl between 1922 and 1924 under the general title “Assessment of the New.” Van Doesburg is not mentioned as the author of this article, but there is no doubt that the text is from his hand. This is confirmed by a letter from El Lissitzky, written in rigid German: “Received yesterday No. 9 Style. Read about Russian art from Does. . . . Seems to be good, but understand little Dutch.” [“Habe gestern den N.9 ‘Stijl’ bekommen. Gelesen über Russische Kunst von Does. . . . Scheint gut zu sein, aber verstehe wenig Holländisch.”] 8

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directly from El Lissitzky. One of the sources mentioned in the article is the trilingual periodical Object (Veshch/Gegenstand/Object) that appeared in Berlin in the spring of 1922, under the editorial direction of El Lissitzky and Ilia Ehrenburg. It is impossible to say how many contemporary Russian artworks van Doesburg had actually seen at the time. The 1922 First Russian Art Exhibition (Erste russische Kunstausstellung) in Berlin, which marked the end of Russia’s cultural isolation, opened on 15 October, too late for van Doesburg’s “Russian issue” of De Stijl. “In Russia, there are strong indications of a like-minded striving,” van Doesburg wrote in “Plastic Russia.” Like the members of The Style, artists such as Malevich, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, and Ivan Puni sought clarity and exactitude, and a strict equilibrium between the subjective and the universal. Van Doesburg explained that, formally speaking, Russia was developing in the direction of the quadrilateral. (It seems no coincidence that the various parts of the text are interspersed with small black squares.) “Plastic Russia is contending under the sign of the quadrilateral,” van Doesburg continued, “in the near future, so will all of plastic Europe.”12 Malevich would surely have agreed. In this article, van Doesburg also formulated the essential difference between Suprematism and Neoplasticism. Within Suprematism, he said, a white surface was seen as an illusionary space; it expressed emptiness. For the artists of De Stijl, on the other hand, the white surface functioned as “a means of expression without any symbolic or underlying meaning.” Whereas the spatial, immaterial, white in Suprematism neutralized all opposition, according to van Doesburg, in Neoplasticism this opposition was emphasized. That is why, in the reasoning of van Doesburg, only Neoplasticism possessed “an effective endurance, and a general ability to extend into art and life.” He concluded with satisfaction, “because of this, Neoplasticism stands above all experiments in expression.”13 Nevertheless, van Doesburg seems to have had high expectations for his new friend Lissitzky’s Prouns, which he described as a three-dimensional continuation of Suprematism.14

“Plastic Russia.” Ibid. 14 Lissitzky’s article “Proun” had already appeared in De Stijl, 5, no. 6 (June 1922): 81–5. 12 13

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The square had had symbolic value for van Doesburg before 1922, but after making the acquaintance of Lissitzky, he attributed an almost mystical power to it. He soon became convinced that the battle for a new art would take place under this sign. In letters from Germany to friends in the Netherlands, he repeatedly stressed the metaphorical meaning of the square. In a letter of 19 June 1922 to his friend Evert Rinsema, he related a rather strange story about a square, which had obviously impressed him deeply: Malevich, one of the most modern of Russians, gave a lecture in Moscow about Cubism (in 1918). After he finished, he produced a red quadrilateral, held it above his head and cried, “And this is the task for the future!” Immediately thereupon he was arrested, and when he asked why, they answered, well, because you just announced the revolution. And indeed, the next day the revolution broke out. Remarkable, isn’t it, that what for us here became the sign of the absolute new world expression, was also the same thing for the most modern Russians. I also discussed it at the time with Mondrian, about how the [drawing of a cross] for the first Christians, is for us the [drawing of a square]. Not as a symbol, but as the basic form of the external and internal culture, as a synthesis of the new faith, so to say.15 In a subsequent letter to Rinsema, he added that he had told the “Russian Lissitzky” at the May 1922 International Congress of Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf that this “ ‘international’ was in fact ‘a compromise’; to mention the child by its name, we should call for an international of the quadrilateral.” To which Lissitzky purportedly responded, “Exactly. That is the new faith.”16 (Fig. 11–2) All in all, the year 1922 was a high point in the exchange of information between the progressive Dutch artists and their Russian colleagues. In 1922 van Doesburg’s article on “Plastic Russia” was published, and Chris Beekman received Malevich’s letter. “Proun,” the text written by Lissitzky, appeared in the June issue of De Stijl. Lissitzky’s Suprematist story A Tale of Two Squares was published as a special issue

Evert van Straaten, Theo van Doesburg: Constructor of the New Life (Otterlo, The Netherlands: Kröller-Müller Museum, 1994). 16 Theo van Doesburg, letter to Evert Rinsema, 20 August 1922, in van Straaten, Theo van Doesburg. 15

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11–2. Weimar, 25 September 1922. Standing next to each other from left to right: El Lissitzky (with black-white cap), Nelly van Doesburg, and Theo van Doesburg (in black shirt, white tie and black hat) at the “Constructivist Congress.” Theo van Doesburg Archive (Van Moorsel Donation), Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague.

of De Stijl. 1922 is also the only year in which van Doesburg designated El Lissitzky as an associate of De Stijl. But the grand collaboration of van Doesburg and Lissitzky did not last long. Differing views on artistic matters — and most likely also feelings of rivalry — soon led to a split. By the end of 1922, Russian art was no longer a topic in De Stijl. It was July 1924 when Lissitzky, probably in response to a letter from van Doesburg, wrote to him explaining that respect and esteem in Russia do not depend upon a person’s artistic point of view, and that he was disappointed that such matters had interfered with their personal friendship.17 Lissitzky, El Lissitzky, letter to van Doesburg on printed letterhead: “Lissitzky, Villa Croce, Ambri-Sotto,” handwritten “Tessin,” and dated “A. 7.7.24.” Lissitzky wrote: 17

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in Switzerland recovering from a severe pulmonary infection, was willing to take up corresponding again. He was full of plans and ideas. He asked van Doesburg to send him photographs of his work so that he, Lissitzky, could forward them to an association of modern architects in Moscow. And again, in a second letter, written on 22 August 1924, Lissitzky asked for photographs, this time for an illustrated publication about the latest directions in art, for which Hans Arp had found a publisher in Zurich.18 Furthermore, Lissitzky was working on a book, for which he was making notes during the long hours that he had to spend lying down. He had outgrown the traditional “nature — art” opposition, he wrote to van Doesburg, but the antipodes of “space and time” have given him new insights, about which he really would like to learn van Doesburg’s opinion, especially since it would be different from his own. His new views “are to appear in a large almanac,” Lissitzky continued enthusiastically. And, in what was no doubt a reference to his friend’s temperament, he wrote in conclusion, “I think you will create quite a stir on my behalf, and that pleases me.”19 This last remark is prophetic. It is in the last letter from Lissitzky to van Doesburg in the van Doesburg archives. In December 1924 Lissitzky reverted to his old “system” of cleaning up, as he wrote to his future wife Sophie Küppers, by throwing “a whole lot of letters in the wastepaper basket, starting with Doesburg’s.”20 Lissitzky detailed his new insights in his famous 1925 essay “A[rt] and Pangeometry” (“K[unst] und Pangeometrie”) which appeared in the

“Die gegenseitige Achtung und Schätzung hängt bei uns in Russland nicht von den Künstlerischen verschiedenen Auschauungen der moderne Leute ab sondern nur von der Kraft, selbst des gegenseitiges, Ausdruckes. Darum war ich sehr enteuscht von dir, wenn ungeklärte Einstellungs-verscheidenheit unsere persönliche freundschaftliche Beziehungen beinträhtig haben.” Theo van Doesburg Archive (Van Moorsel Donation), Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague. 18 The publication in question is the trilingual book Die Kunstismen. Les ismes de l’art. The isms of art, ed. El Lissitzky and Hans Arp (Erlenbach-Zurich, Munich, and Leipzig: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1925). With photographs of exemplary works, key concepts, and short quotations, the book characterizes modern art movements from Expressionism and Cubism to contemporary art of the 1920s. 19 “Ich glaube du wirst mir viell Krach machen zu meiner Freude.” 20 El Lissitzky, letter to Sophie Küppers, 12 December 1924, written in Lugano, Switzerland. Quoted from El Lissitzky. Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, trans. Helen Aldwinckle and Mary Wittall (Greenwich, Ct.: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 56. In fact, the last letter from Lissitzky in the Van Doesburg Archives is a letter of condolence, dated “Moscow, 19/III/31.”

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German publication Europa Almanach. Not mincing his words, he wrote in a footnote: Mondrian’s solution is the ultimate achievement in the development of Western European painting. He brings the plane back to its original condition, to utter flatness. . . . It is the ultimate in confinement within the plane. When The Style a[rt]ists transpose the Mondrian principle to the three planes of space, they become decorators.21 In the margin of his copy of the Europa Almanach, an indignant van Doesburg wrote “No, you crook!”22 In late 1926 or early 1927, just when Malevich and his assistants were working on the series of theoretical charts in which they stressed the consonance between the work of Malevich and van Doesburg, De Stijl magazine was making short work of Suprematism. Next to photographs of Malevich’s teapot and cup, and another teapot, plate, and two mugs with Suprematist ornament, is written in bold: “Bazar Bazar Bazar Bazar,” that is, “Junk, Junk, Junk, Junk.” Beneath it all is the one word, “Malevich” (Fig. 11–3). The accompanying text reads, In Westheim and Carl Einstein’s Jewish Almanach ‘Europa,’ Elia Lissitzky stoops to the depths when he states that as soon as the “artists of The Style” transpose their principle into 3 dimensions, they become mere “decorators.” . . . Of just what kind of artsycrafty 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.23 The publication of “A and Pangeometry” brought van Doesburg and Lissitzky’s friendship to a definite end. “In a world that was divided into two Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, 354. Theo van Doesburg Archive (Van Moorsel Donation), Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague. 23 Theo van Doesburg, “Bazar Bazar Bazar Bazar,” De Stijl, 7, no. 75/76 (1926–1927): 57–8. 21

22

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11–3. “Bazar, bazar, bazar,” De Stijl, 7, no.75/76 (1926–1927): 57–58.

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11–4. Kazimir Malevich and Tadeusz Peiper in Dessau April 1927, (recto).

parts, our roads went in different directions,” Lissitzky wrote resignedly on 19 March 1931, in a letter of condolence to Theo’s wife Nelly. In Davos on 7 March 1931, van Doesburg had died at the age of 47. The question that remains is how much Malevich, far away in Russia, knew of all this. In all probability, nothing. There are two indications that point to this conclusion. In 1926 or early 1927 — at about the same time that the insulting “Bazar” text appeared in De Stijl — the theoretical charts that Malevich took with him on his trip to Poland and Germany were produced. One of the things the charts were to demonstrate to the art world was that Suprematism and van Doesburg’s Countercompositions were the result of one and the same, “pure,” artistic vision of the world. That van Doesburg’s reputation was still good within Malevich’s circle, is also confirmed by two snapshots made in April 1927, during Malevich’s visit to the Bauhaus at Dessau. In both photographs Malevich poses outdoors with Tadeusz Peiper, a Polish poet and art critic who had accompanied Malevich on his trip from Warsaw to Berlin. The text on the back of the first picture claims, in what seems to be Malevich’s handwriting, that he is here immortalized with Le

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11–5. Kazimir Malevich and Tadeusz Peiper in Dessau April 1927, (verso).

Corbusier. From the incorrectly spelled — and now damaged — text on the back of the other picture (Fig. 11–4), one was supposed to conclude that Malevich was in Dessau on 7 April 1927, with “The architect van Deusburg” [sic] explaining to him “[illegible] Suprematist roof and terrace” (Fig. 11–5). 24 In light of the political circumstances that made it extremely desirable that Malevich’s only trip abroad be considered a success, Malevich’s act is as understandable as it is sad. But it obviously does not record the true facts. Van Doesburg had left Germany years previously, and was then, in fact, in Strasbourg. It is clear that the way in which Malevich’s work was received in De Stijl depended directly on the relationship between van Doesburg and El Lissitzky. I don’t know if Malevich ever learned about “Plastic Russia,” the 24 The translation of this text is taken from K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art 1915–1933, 3, The World as Non-Objectivity. Unpublished Writings 1922–1925, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Edmund T. Little (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976), 144, and note 34, 376.

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favorable article on Suprematism in De Stijl in 1922. But in the spring of 1927, at the time he visited the Bauhaus and deliberately transformed his Polish friend Tadeusz Peiper into Theo van Doesburg (who had left Germany years previously), Malevich was clearly not aware of van Doesburg’s insulting and spiteful description of Suprematism in “Bazar, Bazar, Bazar, Bazar.” I hope he never found out.

12 Malevich and Western Modernism Éva Forgács

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ALEVICH’S reception in Western Europe raises a host of questions about the transfer of cultural concepts and their inevitable alterations in the process. New concepts in art have specific meanings and functions in their place and time of origin, which undergo slight or drastic modifications during transfer to each and every other context, local or international, contemporaneous or previous. Some of Malevich’s core ideas originated in the close-knit circle of his friends Alexei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Matiushin, and the poet Elena Guro, and they were conceived before or around the time of the writing and designing of Victory over the Sun, first performed in December 1913. These concepts include versions of a transrationalist language (“beyonsense” or zaum), the fourth dimension,1 and economy,2 all of which were related to Malevich’s notion of objectlessness in painting, realized in the Black Square of 1915, and elaborated in various writings thereafter. These concepts, as well as Malevich’s art, had undergone changes before the artist acquired a reputation in the West. Malevich’s ideas and artistic practice had their own dynamics, which were manifested in his shifts from “black” to “colored,” to “white” Suprematism,3 and then to

1 On this subject see Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s seminal work The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 2 On Malevich’s concept of economy in artistic expression, see T. V. Goriacheva, “K poniatiiu ekonomii tvorchestva,” in Russkii avangard 1910–1920-kh godov v evropeiskom kontekste (Moscow: Nauka, 2000), 263–274. 3 K. Malevich, Suprematism: 34 Drawings (Vitebsk, 1920) in K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art 1915–1928, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin, 1 (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968), 123.

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the abandonment of painting altogether, in favor of his three-dimensional architectons.4 Moreover, he made adjustments to the rapidly changing cultural, artistic, and political contexts of the Russia of his day; for example, Suprematism fueled the group Champions of the New Art (Unovis), which he founded in Vitebsk in 1919. On the other hand, his artistic work and ever-developing ideas were interpreted in various ways by agents of the changing Soviet art scene. For instance, the concept of economy in Malevich’s and Kruchenykh’s thinking, as Tatiana Goriacheva points out, was based on the philosophy of empiriocriticism, as well as on aesthetic concepts of the artistic sign, which was considered the most concentrated, intuitive, and ultimately completely unconscious expression.5 The meaning of “economy” as the utmost condensation of meaning, a royal road of directly visualizing universal contents, was understood in a slightly different sense by El Lissitzky in Vitebsk in 1920. Discussing technology in his article “Suprematism in World Reconstruction,” Lissitzky talked about “the economy of the dynamo,” and “achieving economy and spatial diagonals,” as well as “economy of form,” 6 all in the sense of saving effort, and achieving maximum results. This use of the term economy is not entirely opposed to Malevich’s original concept, but has a more physical side, and is closer to the more quotidian understanding of the word, in step with post-revolutionary Soviet Russia’s need to save and conserve resources. Malevich also used the term in a more traditional sense in some of his Vitebsk writings, where he mentioned “economic distribution” in the context of “political rights, and the freedoms of man.”7 Apart from the continual changes within the Russian context – the shift from theory to practice after the Revolution, and the increasingly politicized environment, reflected in Suprematism’s becoming the organizing principle of Unovis as an “art party” — it was, to an even greater extent, the context

For a discussion of Malevich’s architectons, see Christina Lodder’s article in this volume. 5 Goriacheva, “K poniatiiu,” 265. 6 El Lissitzky. Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, trans. Helen Aldwinckle and Mary Wittall (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 331, 332. 7 UNOVIS [Champions of the New Art], propaganda leaflet signed by the Creative Committee of Unovis, Vitebsk, probably November 1920; written or supervised by Malevich. Larissa A. Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910– 1930, trans. Alexander Lieven (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 297. 4

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of Germany after the First World War that shaped the interpretation of Malevich in the West. The trauma of the Great War led to a profound crisis of religion and philosophy in Germany, which was manifested in a return to medieval mystical thinkers such as Jakob Böhme, and the cult of the so-called “barefoot prophets,” who wandered from village to village, preaching in return for a piece of bread. Irrationalism dominated the early Bauhaus, where Lothar Schreyer’s theatrical works, culminating in religious ecstasy, attracted audiences, and Johannes Itten’s advocacy of the Mazdaznan cult gripped the student body. But by the end of 1921, when the blockade of Russia was over, and the news of the Soviet Avant-Garde reached Germany, the post-war confusion had settled, and a new pragmatism and rationalism emerged. Progressive artists and intellectuals were still expecting a world revolution, and regarded the new communist country as its harbinger, but in the early 1920s, the ideas and visualization of these utopias increasingly solidified as rationalist, pragmatic, and transparently clear. One individual who greatly influenced and actively shaped Malevich’s image in the West was El Lissitzky, his former colleague, follower, and chief interpreter in Germany, who arrived in Berlin at the end of 1921. Malevich had been first introduced to the European art world in 1912 at the Second Blaue Reiter Exhibition, to which he had contributed Head of a Peasant.8 The journalist Konstantin Umanskij, who left Russia in 1920, mentioned Malevich in his book Neue Kunst in Russland, serialized in the Munich journal Der Ararat, as well as in a slide-illustrated lecture he gave in Vienna to the members of the Hungarian Ma group in November 1920.9 In the spring of 1922, Theo van Doesburg wrote about Malevich in the

8 Malevich’s work is entitled Bauernkopf (Peasant’s Head) in the catalogue. See Charlotte Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the Origins of Abstraction in Russia (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980), 90, n.15, in ref. to Donald Gordon, Modern Art Exhibitions 1900–1916, 2 (Munich, 1974), 549. 9 Ma, VI, no 3 (1 January 1921): 36. Under the headline “A Ma köréből,” [“From the Circle of Ma”] a short editorial announcement on the back cover states: “On 13 November, Ma organized an evening with comrade K. Humansky’s [sic] presentation on the latest developments in Russian art, accompanied by slide projection. In the literary section of the evening, he also recited two Russian activist poems. In the musical section, we also played the latest modern Russian music. Béla Uitz has written an account of this evening, where admission was, regrettably, by invitation only, but his article comes, for lack of space now, in our next issue.”

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journal De Stijl, and El Lissitzky published (and probably wrote), a survey article titled “Die Ausstellungen in Russland” in the journal Object (Veshch/ Gegenstand/Objet), where Malevich is referred to as “a great artist and man, the founder of Suprematism, the leader of a whole generation of artists radiating the youthful flame of the revolutionaries.”10 The 1919 Moscow exhibition Objectless Creation and Suprematism11 is mentioned in Object as the last word in painting, after which construction, work with real materials, and three-dimensional object-making came to the fore. The entire article, which deserves detailed analysis, ends with the slogans “Art into Life,” and “Art is Production.”12 The author Ulen (probably a penname of El Lissitzky) discussed Unovis as one of the most progressive groups in Russia, along with the Society of Young Artists (Obmokhu), without naming any one artist in particular as a member or organizer. Perhaps Lissitzky was aware of having to simplify his account for a better reception from his less well-informed audience, but it is also possible that he wanted to present these new groups as anonymous and collective workshops, in line with the anti-individualism of Germany’s new art communities. Malevich’s Suprematist work was first shown in the West at the First Russian Art Exhibition, which opened in Berlin in October 1922 (Fig. 12–1). Several reviewers expressed disappointment at the relatively small number of avant-garde works on show, and the overwhelming amount of more conservative art.13 Art critics in Germany apparently found it difficult to distinguish between Constructivism and Suprematism. Ernst Kállai wrote about “Russian Constructivists (including Suprematists),” 14 Ulen, “Die Ausstellungen in Russland,” Veshch’/ Gegenstand/ Objet, 1 (1922): 18–19. Author’s translation. 11 The German translation in Object is: “Gegenstandslosen und Suprematisten.” 12 Ulen, “Die Ausstellungen,”19. 13 Paul Westheim, “Die Ausstellung der Russen,” Das Kunstblatt (November 1922); Ernst Kallai, “A berlini orosz kiállitás” [“The Russian Exhibition in Berlin”], Akasztott ember (15 February 1923); Kassák Lajos, “A berlini orosz kiállitáshoz” [“On the Russian Exhibit in Berlin”], Ma (December 1922); Alfréd Kemény, “Jegyzetek az orosz művészek berlini kiállitásához” [“Notes to the Russian Artists’ Exhibition in Berlin”], Egység (4 February 1923). The following quotations are from the English translation of these reviews in Between Worlds: A Source Book of Central European Avant-Gardes 1910–1930, ed. Timothy O. Benson and Éva Forgács (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2002). 14 See also Branko Ve Poljanski, “Through the Russian Exhibition in Berlin, Suprematists and Constructivists (who are the same but just a tiny bit different!),” in Benson and Forgács, Between Worlds, 415. 10

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12–1. Kazimir Malevich, Suprematismus, 1916, as reproduced in the catalogue Erste russische Kunstausstellung (Berlin: Galerie van Diemen, 1922).

and Adolf Behne, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the show, listed Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, Natan Altman, and Naum Gabo as Constructivists, implying that Suprematism was a kind of sub-category of Constructivism. Lissitzky greatly, and certainly intentionally, contributed to this confusion when he said in his lecture “New Russian Art,” given in December 1922, that in Russia “two groups claimed Constructivism: Obmokhu and Unovis.”15 But then again, he may have 15

El Lissitzky, “New Russian Art: A Lecture,” in Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, 339.

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been trying to simplify the Russian art scene for the Germans by reducing the number of main trends to two, both a variant of the Germans’ favorite Russian invention: Constructivism. As Christina Lodder stated in her book Russian Constructivism, the term “Constructivism,” which soon morphed into “International Constructivism” in the West, did, indeed, become an umbrella term for the Russian Avant-Garde there, an all-inclusive label, which blended different ideologies and programs in the concept of a new esthetic.16 Paul Westheim, who found the exhibition “disappointing,” had a more subtle approach than his colleagues, stating that the Russian artists “have more to say than to show; . . . their theories and options, manifestoes and programs, arguments and theses, have more to teach to 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.”17 The art critic Alfréd Kemény, a regular contributor to the communist Die Rote Fahne, who was familiar with the conceptual differences between the Constructivists of Moscow’s Institute of Artistic Culture (Inkhuk), and the Suprematists, since he had given a talk at Inkhuk in December 1921, clearly sided with Constructivism as “the correct path to take.” Nevertheless, what he really wanted to see in “Post-Suprematist Russian art” — a category that resonated in Berlin — was something new, transcending both Suprematism and Constructivism.18 The Hungarian poet, artist, and editor Lajos Kassák, who traveled to Berlin from Vienna specifically to see the Russian exhibition, thought that Suprematism was “the first consciously new step taken by young Russian artists,”19 which “opened the gates toward progress.”20 This opinion was soon to become the general consensus in Berlin; Malevich was seen as a great initiator, but, as Kemény wrote, soon “the metaphysical dynamism of Suprematism [became] as obsolete as Futurism.”21

16 Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 225–238. 17 Benson and Forgács, Between Worlds, 408. 18 Ibid., 413. 19 Ibid., 409. 20 Ibid., 410. 21 Ibid., 413.

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This view gained general currency. Berlin-based International Constructivism tended to prefer the future-bound combination of elegant geometry, pragmatism, and the real-life, real-material approach of the Constructivists. Malevich’s appeal to Unovis members to create real objects, and Malevich’s own architectons were not known in Germany at the time. The word “Constructivism” resonated magically; it was identified with action, engineering, progress, and revolution. The word, perhaps because of Raoul Haussmann’s 1920 collage poster Tatlin At Home, exhibited at the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920, was first of all attached to Tatlin. “Constructing” designated the most progressive creative activity, both intellectually and practically. The same idea was captured in the neologism “Bauhaus,” of which Gropius said that “building” was symbolic as well as concrete, because “one builds a character, too.”22 “Suprematism” sounded somewhat more esoteric; the word “supreme” implied elitism, and it complicated the emerging image of the new Russian art as a streamlined passport into an egalitarian future. At the First Russian Art Exhibition, Malevich was recognized as one of the most significant artists of the Russian Avant-Garde, although he was introduced as a painter only. His early writings, such as From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism, and Suprematism: 34 Drawings, had not been translated by the time of the exhibition, nor did this happen soon afterwards.23 The absence of Malevich’s own theoretical statements impeded an accurate interpretation of his work. In Berlin, as well as the Cubo-Futurist Knife Grinder, Malevich showed Black Square (1915), Black Circle (1915), Black Cross — under the title Black Cruciform Planes (1915) — and White on White (1918). Vasily Rakitin has suggested that Malevich’s choice was made with regard to establishing an emblematic Unovis image in the West; he points out the conspicuous exclusion of Red Square (1915), which “at the time was hanging at Mikhail Matiushin’s house in Petrograd. There would have been no problem getting it for the show, but Red Square was not important to universal Unovis.” 24 22 Walter Gropius, letter to Wulf Herzogenrath, 30 October 1968, in R. Isaacs, Walter Gropius, 1 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1983), 460. 23 Malevich, Essays on Art, 1. As Andersen acknowledges in the preface, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism” was translated by David Miller. 24 Vasily Rakitin, “The Optimism of a Nonobjectivist,” in Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism, ed. Matthew Drutt (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2003), 71.

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Though the enigmatic origin of Malevich’s objectless painting, and the entire vision of a gravity-free, cosmos-bound future was latent in the ambiguous and iconic Black Square, Malevich himself did not point out any symbolic difference between the black and the red squares in 1915, when he first painted and exhibited them both. 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 readers 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.” 25 The same flier contained further appeals: “Have the overthrow of the old world carved in the palm of your hands! Wear the black square as the sign of world economy”! 26 “Draw the red square in your studios as the sign of world revolution in the arts”! 27 A dualism and a hierarchy of the two colors appear here; there is an intimate physical connection to the black square, while the red square belonged in the studio as a reminder of the Revolution. As Alexandra Shatskikh has pointed 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 .” 28 This remark makes an important distinction between Lissitzky and the “true Unovis Suprematists,” and raises the question of exactly where Lissitzky stood within Unovis, and within the Russian Avant-Garde generally, and, therefore, precisely whose views he was representing in Germany. Malevich’s own focus on the iconic black Suprematist imagery in the Berlin exhibition seemed to confirm the interpretation of El Lissitzky, his

25 The text offers a more complicated color symbolism, projecting the transcendence ultimately of even the red square: “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.” These words, however, are followed by the appeal to go to “the red pole.” Zhadova, Malevich, 297–299. 26 In On the New Systems in Art, economy is explained as “the fifth dimension, which evaluates and defines the Modernity of the Arts and Creative Works.” Essays on Art, 1:83; also see Goriacheva, “K poniatiiu.” 27 Zhadova, Malevich, 299. 28 Alexandra Shatskikh, “Unovis — Epicenter of a New World,” in The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-garde 1915–1932 (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1992), 63.

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friend, follower, and rival. Lissitzky positioned himself as the modernizer, a man of the future, in contrast to Malevich, whom he presented, albeit with admiration and great respect, as archaic and a man of the past. As one of the few authentic Russian avant-garde artists to arrive in Berlin in the early 1920s, and perhaps even the official envoy of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros), Lissitzky played a particularly important role in shaping Malevich’s image in the West. His interpretation of Malevich was clearly affected by the complexities of their personal relationship. One of the most intriguing examples of artistic influences was Malevich’s profound impact on Lissitzky; within a very short time of their first encounter in 1919, Lissitzky entirely replaced his own visual vocabulary of architectural drawings and Chagall-like, Jewish book illustrations with the visual language of Suprematism.29 I would like to propose that the particular nature of this relationship had deep roots in Lissitzky’s apparently irresolvable conflict between his simultaneous commitments to the Jewish cultural renaissance in the Ukraine — a cause that he had espoused for many years — and to Communism. The two issues were closely connected, because Lissitzky had expected Communism to resolve the Jewish question by totally assimilating all nationalities into a new collective, Soviet identity. Whereas the October Revolution promised cultural emancipation and freedom for the Jews, its anti-nationalist policy led Joseph Stalin, in his capacity as Commissar of Nationalities, to issue a decree in the summer of 1919 designating all Jewish organizations as enemies of the Revolution.30 Lissitzky must have felt trapped by his divided loyalties. If he remained true to the cause of Jewish culture, he would be untrue to the Revolution, and vice versa. Suprematism, with its gigantic vision of the future and claim to be the “face” of communist Russia, resolved this conflict by transcending it. Lissitzky may have been familiar with Malevich’s work before 1919, as Shatskikh suggests he was, but he may not have yet been sensitized to the conflict between his allegiances as a Jew and a Communist, having to choose between a past and a future. But in the fall of 1919, the liberating

For a more detailed analysis, see Éva Forgács, “Malevich, Lissitzky, and the Culture of the Future,” The Structurist, 39–40 (1999/2000): 50–57. 30 For more details, see Avram Kampf, Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century (South Headley, Mass.: Bergin and Harvey, 1984). 29

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12–2. Kazimir Malevich, pages devoted to Suprematism in El Lissitzky and Hans Arp, Die Kunstismen (Erlenbach, Zurich, Munich and Leipzig, 1925).

effect of Suprematism was so great for him that he ranked it highest in a hierarchy that he composed: “AFTER THE OLD TESTAMENT THERE CAME THE NEW — AFTER THE NEW, THE COMMUNIST — AND AFTER THE COMMUNIST THERE FOLLOWS FINALLY THE TESTAMENT OF SUPREMATISM.” 31 As a symbol of his new commitment, he changed his first name from the Jewish Eliezer (Lazar) to El, a syllable not only in his original name, but also in a line of Unovis verse.32 In addition to being fundamental, the conflict to which Suprematism provided a solution was deeply emotional, and Lissitzky may have been obligated to Malevich beyond his understanding. Formally, he was Lissitzky, “Suprematism in World Reconstruction,” 330. In his article “On Poetry” (1919) Malevich quotes an unnamed poet (Khlebnikov?) for the mere “dialect, rhythm, and tempo” of his lines, “which to the beholder will represent the real, new, and living church”: Ule Elye Lel Li Onye Kon Si An/ Onon Kori Ri Kosambi Moyena Lezh/ etc.,” Essays on Art, 1:82. This poem might have been the original for Malevich’s epigram on the first page of On New Systems in Art: “I follow/ u-el-el-ul-el-te-ka/ my new path.” Essays on Art, 1:83. 31

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Malevich’s colleague and friend, but, in fact, he acted like a son who had been humbled by the dimensions of the father, and he struggled to assert and validate himself as his own man.33 Much of Lissitzky’s work and writing between 1920 and 1924/25 testifies to his efforts to tear himself away from his giant precursor without offending him, although at certain points he does articulate his utter disagreement with him. His different temperament also divided him from Malevich. Lissitzky was a pragmatist and rationalist, who was fascinated by modern technologies, and did not relate to Malevich’s metaphysical and mystical ideas. Only a few months after he adopted Suprematism, Lissitzky developed his own version of it; his Project for the Affirmation of the New (Proun) replaced Malevich’s planar forms with planar images of three-dimensional objects. After his arrival in Berlin in December 1921, Lissitzky made many attempts to introduce Malevich to the West. He appears to have been motivated by partially conflicting aspirations: to reveal Malevich in his full Harold Bloom: The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 33

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significance, and to build a consistent image of Russian art in the West, while accommodating Western preferences and not compromising his own idea of progress and technological modernity. Lissitzky, therefore, tried to reconfigure, rephrase, and reframe Russian art and its accompanying aesthetic concepts so that they would be accessible and palatable to Westerners. He had to simplify a great deal, and he struggled with the near impossibility of trying to translate one culture into another, even though there was so much apparent similarity between progressive art in the East and West. Lissitzky recognized Malevich’s greatness as an artist and thinker; he was proud of him, and expected his work to be a sensation in the West. He also hoped that the introduction of Malevich would provide an opportunity to promote the cause of the entire Russian Avant-Garde. Lissitzky tried to organize an exhibition of Malevich’s works at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover, and set about translating some of his writings.34 He even organized material help for Malevich in the form of a package of clothes (Fig. 12–2).35 But Lissitzky also had an urge to surpass Malevich as a more modern, more Western, and technically more informed creative figure, who had embarked on the path of modern engineering and constructive thinking, and blended the particular Russian experience with the utopian aspirations of Western modernists. This is clearly manifested in his booklet A Tale of Two Squares, dated Vitebsk 1920, but published in Berlin in 1922.36 It is reminiscent of Malevich’s 1913 opera Victory over the Sun, which was being staged in Vitebsk by Unovis at the same time that Lissitzky was constructing the book.37 The storyline of Two Squares is simple: the red square, a superior power, arrives from the cosmos in the company of the black square and triumphs over the old, black, chaotic system on the Earth, turning it all red, In a letter to Sophie Küppers dated 21 March 1924, Lissitzky listed Malevich’s texts that he wanted to include in a volume of translations as “On New Systems in Art,” “The Innovator in Art, State, Society, Criticism,” “God Is Not Deposed Yet,” “Art, Church, Factory,” “Suprematism,” “On Poetry.” and “Art and Artists.” Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, 46. 35 Lissitzky’s letters to Sophie Küppers, in Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, 55, 56. 36 El Lissitzky, Suprematicheskii skaz pro dva kvadrata v shesti perestroikakh (Berlin: Skify, 1922). 37 Aleksei Kruchenykh, Pobeda nad sol’ntsem (St. Petersburg, 1914). Originally performed at the Luna Park Theater, Petersburg, in December 1913, then in Vitebsk in February 1920 by the Unovis group, with sets and designs by Nina Kogan. An English translation may be found in Ewa Bartos and Victoria Nes Kirby, The Drama Review, 15, no. 4 (Fall 1971): 106–124. 34

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while the black square, having witnessed this transformation, recedes back into the distance. The fourth scene, in which the red square visibly disrupts the old realm, appears to be a “square” version of the off-stage defeat of the sun in the earlier opera. The fifth scene is a vision of the well-organized, red world of the future, an optimistic contrast to the more skeptical last scene of Victory over the Sun. The booklet ends with Lissitzky’s Unovis emblem — a red square inscribed within a white circle. Lissitzky also used the red square, separated from the black square, to signify the New Man in his 1923 Victory over the Sun portfolio of lithographs. In the light of this symbolism, the Tale might be seen to narrate a historical-political rivalry between two look-alike characters: the black square, the original Suprematist element, superseded by the red square, the newer, Unovis element, which, according to Lissitzky’s thinking, becomes the architect of the new face of the earth. The black square is cast as a symbol of the old world, and is gently defeated — not destroyed, not even offended, just shown to be obsolete and dismissed — by the new, energetic, and younger red square, to which the future belongs. In other words, Lissitzky gently places Malevich in the past. Lissitzky’s Victory over the Sun lithographs carry this point further. The opera is transformed into a technologically advanced “electro-mechanical show,” including a mechanical “Stage Master,” an electric brain of sorts, in control of the light, sound, and movements of the marionettes. Modernity and technical superiority are strongly emphasized. Commenting on the sketchiness of the work in his introduction, Lissitzky wrote: “the further adaptation and application of the ideas and forms set down here, I leave to others, while I proceed to my next work,”38 echoing Malevich’s 1920 comment on Lissitzky’s Proun: “I place the further development of architectural Suprematism in the hands of the young architects.” 39 In 1923, Lissitzky appropriated the voice of the founder and father. Some of Lissitzky’s most interesting responses to Malevich can be seen in his selection and translation of Malevich’s text about Lenin, dated just a few days after Lenin’s death, which Lissitzky may have come across soon after in Switzerland, while he was working on his Malevich translations in

Lissitzky, Introduction, Victory over the Sun portfolio (Hanover, 1923); reprinted in Lisstzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, 347–348. 39 Malevich, Suprematism. 34 Drawings,” in Essays on Art, 1:127. 38

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a sanatorium, where he was being treated for tuberculosis.40 This text may have inspired him to contribute his own commemoration of Lenin. He had a copy of Design for a Speaker’s Tribune, created in Vitebsk in 1920 by his former student Ilia Chashnik.41 Lissitzky refined the skeletal structure, and added a photograph of Lenin, which he pasted on the speaker’s platform attached to the diagonal, metal construction, reminiscent of Tatlin’s tower, which had been constructed just a few weeks earlier.42 In the light of Tatlin’s recognition in Berlin — “Long live the machine art of Tatlin!” was one of the slogans of the Dadaists43 — the technical, engineered metal structure of the speaker’s tribune seems the stylistic opposite of Malevich’s lengthy, complicated, and acerbic description of the Lenin cult as a new, ersatz religion, with Lenin as a secular version of Christ. Connecting art with myth and cult, Malevich saw the new era differing from the pre-revolutionary one only in its materialist core. Lissitzky’s German translation of Malevich’s text on Lenin, done with the help of Sophie Küppers, was published in the July 1924 issue of Das Kunstblatt. It is an abridged version — almost an abstract — of the original text.44 Lissitzky, as Yve-Alain Bois has suggested, “censored” Malevich in two important ways: by omitting most of the criticism of the cult of Lenin, and by streamlining Malevich’s writing to focus on a rational line of thought, deleting most of the metaphysical ruminations.45 While in his article “Lenin,” Malevich bitterly contemplated the rising Communist ideology as a new religious system, and was profoundly 40 Excerpts from the text were published by El Lissitzky in German in Das Kunstblatt, 10 (1924): 289–293. An English translation is in Essays on Art, 3:315–357, titled “Appendix,” dated 25 January 1924. See editor’s note, 388. 41 The original version was published under Ilia Chasnik’s name in the 20 November 1920 issue of the UNOVIS leaflet; later captions identified it as “Atelier El Lissitzky. Ilya Chashnik: Design for Tribune” (Zhadova, Malevich, plates 150–154), and “Atelier Lissitzky” (Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, plates 45, 46.) 42 Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 277, notes 101, 102. 43 Dada slogans, Berlin, 1919: “DADA stands on the side of the revolutionary Proletariat/ Open up at last your head/ Leave it free for the demands of our age/ Down with art/ Down with bourgeois intellectualism/ Art is dead/ Long live the machine art of Tatlin/ DADA is the voluntary destruction of the bourgeois world of ideas,” quoted in Edouard Roditi, “Interview with Hannah Höch,” Arts (December 1959): 26. 44 For a discussion of Malevich’s text on Lenin, see the article by Konstantin Akinsha in this volume. 45 Yve-Alain Bois, “Lissitzky: Censeur de Malévich?” Macula, 3–4 (1976): 201.

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convinced that the world is, and will always be, ruled by metaphysical ideas, Lissitzky saw the new state — consistent with dominant German views — as a rational machine, which could be greatly improved by increased effort and active participation. He posited his own work as an “artist-engineer” — eloquently epitomized in his 1924 photomontage Self Portrait with Compass, against the background of graph paper — as a correction of, and contrast to, the “artist-priest” position espoused by Malevich — who first showed the Black Square in an upper corner of the gallery, like some new icon in a domestic shrine. In his 1922 Berlin lecture “New Russian Art,” Lissitzky bluntly stated, “the idea that art is religion and the artist the priest of this religion, we reject forthwith.”46 In the context of Western International Constructivism, the concept of an artist-engineer was certainly more relevant than that of an artist-priest.47 Lissitzky drew one more line between Malevich and the more progressive elements of the Russian Avant-Garde in his Berlin talk. “Two opposite forces characterize present-day Russia,” he said, “the village, close to the soil, . . . and the town . . . now showing a strong tendency towards Americanization.” “Suprematism . . . in the intensity of its colors and its observation of life [is] deeply rooted in the Russian village.” In Lissitzky’s view, work with the new technical materials — glass and iron — was the achievement of Tatlin.48 Lissitzky’s positioning of Malevich as a forefather and important precursor, respectfully seen as a man of the past and somewhat parochial, was parallel to the way Lissitzky’s one-time friend Theo van Doesburg positioned his master, friend, and rival, Piet Mondrian: “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, too much about an ideal image outside normal life.”49 Lissitzky, “New Russian Art,” Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, 330. By the early 1920s, the artist was no longer respected as a high priest; this was exemplified by the expiration of Johannes Itten’s influence in the Bauhaus, and his leaving the school at the end of 1922, as well as by the dismissal of Lothar Schreyer as a director of mystical plays on the Bauhaus stage, and his enforced departure in 1922. 48 Lissitzky, “New Russian Art,” Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, 333. 49 Theo van Doesburg, letter to J. J. P. Oud, 12 September 1921, quoted in Nancy Troy, The De Stijl Environment (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983), 70. 46 47

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12–3. Kazimir Malevich, Die gegenstandslose Welt, Bauhausbücher no. 11 (Munich: Langen, 1927).

Both Lissitzky and Van Doesburg saw themselves as doers, active shapers of the world, unlike their philosophical and spiritual forefathers, who were bound to metaphysical thinking and believed in the power of ideas. Both younger artists were vocal about this difference, and both were in positions — not only as artists, but also as editors, publishers, and organizers — to shape art and the ongoing discourse on art matters. It was Malevich’s perceived position as a living classic, rather than as part of the ongoing live discourse, that made him a highly respected artist who was given a oneman show in Berlin in 1927; but it was also this image of him that made it possible for the German translation of his Objectless World, published by the Bauhaus in 1927 (Fig. 12–3), to be so deliberately distorted from the Russian original, and for László Moholy-Nagy, who invited Malevich to participate in the painting versus photography debate in the journal i 10 that same year,50 to leave his contribution (which expressed pro-painting, rather

See Malevich’s letter of 12 April 1927 accepting Moholy-Nagy’s invitation, and his contribution, in Benson and Forgács, Between Worlds, 698–699. 50

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than pro-photography views) unpublished. The Bauhaus edition of the Objectless World included an editorial note, making the reservations of the publishers clear: “It is our greatest pleasure to have the honor of publishing this significant work of the important Russian painter Malevich in the series of Bauhaus books, although our opinions differ from his in fundamental questions. At the same time, this work reveals the concepts of life and art of the representatives of modern Russian painting, in ways hitherto unknown to us.”51 The translation was streamlined. Important contents were omitted from the very first sentence, where Malevich lists the various components of movement, which, he suggests, has the potential to solidify into forms. Only “lines, planes, and volumes” appear in the German text, omitting “sights, blotches, and sound,” greatly impoverishing Malevich’s more complex concept.52 The deliberate simplification of Malevich’s text is indicative of the Western Avant-Garde’s increasingly pragmatic handling of theoretical questions in the second half of the 1920s. When El Lissitzky struggled with the translation of Malevich’s texts, he understood the problem of the nontransferability of some of the concepts, and made efforts to adjust Malevich’s texts to the Western reader’s mind-frame, and to the ongoing discourse in the art scene. In the late 1920s, cosmic visions such as those of Malevich and Mondrian, were regarded as history. By then, the international Avant-Garde had adapted and downscaled their visions to something that was far more pragmatic in art and design, as well as in politics.

51 K. S. Malevich, Die gegenstandslose Welt, Bauhausbücher no. 11 (Munich: Langen, 1927), editors’ preface, dated Dessau, November 1927; the book was reprinted as Die gegenstandslose Welt (Mainz: Florian Kupferberg Verlag, 1980). Author’s translation. 52 The original Russian text of Part I, “Vvedenie v teoriu pribavichnogo elementa v zhivopisi,” [“Introduction to the Theory of the Additional Element in Painting”] dated 1923, is reprinted in the 1980 German edition (see note 51, above) and in the subsequent Hungarian edition: Kazimir Malevics, A tárgynélküli világ, trans. from the German by Éva Forgács (Budapest: Corvina, 1986). The Russian text, as Hans M. Wingler relates in the Series Editor’s “Preface,” acknowledging the shortcomings of the German translation, is the photocopy of the galleys owned by the archives of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

13 Malevich and De Chirico1 Charlotte Douglas In memory of Marina Bessonova

A

FTER his “white on white” paintings and the exhibition of blank canvases in 1919, Malevich stopped painting in favor of teaching, working on an organo-formalist theory of stylistic transformation, developing a universal architecture, and writing. “There can be no thought of painting in Suprematism,” he declared in 1920, “painting was over long ago.” 2 In 1927, the artist made his first and only trip abroad — to Warsaw and Berlin from 8 March to 5 June — bringing with him a large quantity of paintings. These remained on exhibit as a separate section of the Great Berlin Art Exhibition [Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung] when he left Germany; Malevich planned other exhibitions in the West, but these did not happen, nor did the works ever make their way back to him in Russia. Upon his return home, Malevich began painting a substantial body of new work. Many of the new paintings appeared at a small retrospective exhibition that opened at the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow at the end of 1929, and early in 1930 traveled to the Kiev Art Gallery at the invitation of its director, Fedor Kumpan. The exhibition in Moscow was less than a purely positive event; the artist was presented as a curious example of 1 Versions of this paper were read in November 1990 at the Russian Avant-Garde conference sponsored by the Institute of Modern Russian Culture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and in May 1991 at the Malevich conference at the State Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow. 2 K. Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka (Vitebsk, 1920), 3.

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bourgeois mystical degeneracy from which only certain tenets of industrial design might be drawn.3 Kumpan was later imprisoned, in part for his support at the Kiev venue.4 Malevich had spent some time in Kiev soon after he returned from abroad in 1927; he began to teach regularly there at the Kiev Art Institute in 1928.5 This opportunity in the Ukraine, his native region, was timely, since Malevich, increasingly subject to criticism in the press for his artistic theories and his objectless approach to painting, was having a difficult time working in Leningrad. Between 1928 and the spring of 1930, the artist spent up to half of each month in Kiev. He painted new works there, and a few of these may have gone directly into the Kiev exhibition. In Leningrad, Malevich briefly pursued his architectural projects at the Institute of Art History, but he was soon expelled, and spent the months of October and November 1930 in prison, being questioned about the ideological and political aspects of his art. He had plans to move to Kiev in the fall of 1931, but before then the oppressive “cultural revolution” arrived in that city too, and Malevich remained in Leningrad. More new works made their appearance at the major 1932 exhibition in Leningrad commemorating the 15th anniversary of the Revolution. When the show moved to Moscow in June 1933, many of his works were excluded; the rest were shown in a small room devoted to “bourgeois” artists.6 The new paintings were of various styles. Some were superficially similar to the geometric peasant figures in rural landscapes of the artist’s pre-war period, and some were Impressionist scenes that seemed reminiscent of even earlier times, when he had been a student in Kiev, or at the Rerberg studio 3 A. A. Fedorov-Davydov, “Iskusstvo K. S. Malevicha,” Vystavka proizvendenii K. S. Malevicha (Moscow: Izdanie gosudarstvennoi Tretiakovskoi gallerei, 1929), 5–10. On the details of this exhibition, see Irina Vakar, “The Kazimir Malevich Exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery in 1929,” in The Russian Avant-Garde: Representation and Interpretation (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2001), 121–137. 4 For Malevich in Kiev at this time, see Dmitry Gorbachev, “ ‘We Reminisced about the Ukraine. We Were Both Ukrainians’,” in Ukrajinska avangarda 1910–1930 (Zagreb: Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, 1990), 196–199. 5 Less than a month after his return from Germany, Malevich married his third wife, the 25-year-old Natalia Manchenko. He was 48. For Malevich’s work at the Kiev Art Institute, see Myroslava Mudrak’s article in this volume. 6 The exhibition was entitled Artists of the RSFSR during 15 Years. On the history of this exhibition see A. I. Morozov, “K istorii vystavki ‘Khudozhniki RSFSR za 15 let’,” Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie ’82, 1 (16), (Moscow, 1983): 120–167.

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in Moscow. Some of his late paintings were characterized by new faceless figures, often with an air of indefinable strangeness, and there were others that were hard to classify at all. Between 1928 and 1932, the artist bestowed false dates on work in all these styles.7 After the anniversary exhibitions, and right up until his death in 1935, Malevich continued to paint, developing several further stylistic approaches, which he dated correctly. We know relatively little about the visual origins of Malevich’s late painting. Because he intended to conceal the true time of painting many of these works, he does not refer to their making, even in his late writings.8 We do know that a basic method of Malevich’s creative process involved working from visual sources. In the pre-revolutionary period, he used images drawn from other works of art, and from newspaper advertisements, as creative stimuli.9 Visual sources are readily identifiable for some of the late work also: well-known icons served as his compositional models for such paintings as Head of a Peasant (1928–29) and Sportsmen (1930–31, Fig. 10–2), for example, and he also worked from photographs, such as those of his mother that served as the basis for her portraits of 1932–34. Sometimes, as in this last case, his borrowings are whole and the image is transferred to the canvas almost without alterations, but at times his sources are transformed almost beyond recognition.10 One clearly discernible subtext for the post-1927 painting is the Italian metaphysical painting of the Plastic Values [Valori Plastici] painters, and in particular, the work of the well-known Giorgio De Chirico. The journal

For example, Haymaking (1928–29), Girl without Employment (c. 1930) and Girls in a Field (1928–29). On the dating of the late peasant works see Charlotte Douglas, “Malevich’s Painting: Some Problems in Chronology,” Soviet Union, 5/2 (1978): 301–326, abstracted as “Zhivopis’ Malevicha: nekotorie problemy khronologii,” Iskusstvo, 1 (1992): 35–39. A more recent discussion of a wider variety of Malevich’s late work is Elena Basner, “Malevich’s Paintings in the Collection of the Russian Museum (The Matter of the Artist’s Creative Evolution),” in Kazimir Malevich in the Russian Museum (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000), 15–27. The titles and dating of Malevich’s late paintings in the present article generally follows those suggested by Basner. 8 For a discussion of the relevance of Malevich’s late writings to these paintings, see the article by Adrian Barr in this volume. 9 See, for example, Anatolii Strigalev, “ ‘Krestianskoe’, ‘gorodskoe’ i ‘vselenskoe’ u Malevicha,” Tvorchestvo, 4 (1989). 10 Malevich, Head of a Peasant, 1928–29, oil on plywood, 69 x 55cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; and Sportsmen, 1930–31, oil on canvas, 142 x 164 cm., State State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg (Fig. 10–2). 7

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Valori Plastici was founded by Mario Broglio and published between 1918 and 1922; it was a forum that served to loosely unite the group of artists well beyond the date of its demise. De Chirico, his brother Alberto Savinio, and Carlo Carrà formed the center of Valori Plastici, which also included Giorgio Morandi, Felice Casorati, Ardengo Soffici, and others.11 These artists were not alike in style, but they shared an intellectual approach to painting, an interest in simplicity, formality, and metaphysics, and rejected the dynamic and abstract Futurism that was the inheritance of Italian painters from before the war. The work of the Plastic Values group was widely influential. It affected Max Ernst and René Magritte, and gave stylistic direction to the New Objectivity [Neue Sachlichkeit] movement in Germany, and to American painting of the 1920s and 30s. De Chirico’s fame in the 1920s was increased by public controversies about his art. In the late teens and early twenties, his metaphysical work had been championed by André Breton and Paul Eluard, and the Italian painter had become internationally prominent. But beginning in 1918, De Chirico had in fact moved into a pseudo-Neoclassical style — although retaining many of his earlier metaphysical interests — and by the mid-1920s, he was being fiercely criticized by the Surrealists. In 1926, the journal La révolution surréaliste published a reproduction of his Orestes and Electra that had been defaced by scribbling across its surface, and in 1928, the Surrealists published savage critiques of his solo exhibitions, and staged a counter-exhibition of his metaphysical work. De Chirico in turn alienated his Italian colleagues when in December 1927 he gave an interview to the paper Comœdia in which he spoke disapprovingly of contemporary Italian culture, denying that there was such a thing as a modern art movement in Italy, and saying that only he and Modigliani were genuine representatives of contemporary Italian art, and that they were “almost French.”12 Malevich’s borrowings from De Chirico are numerous, and demonstrate more than a casual interest in this artist.13 Indeed, visual evidence suggests

For a discussion of Malevich’s interest in De Chirico, and in metaphysical painting generally, from a philosophical point of view, see Tat’iana Goriacheva, “Malevich i metafizicheskaia zhivopis’,” Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia, 1 (1993): 49–59. 12 P. Lagarde, “G. de Chirico peintre, prédit et souhaite le triomphe du modernisme,” Comoedia, (12 December 1927). Quoted in Savinio: gli anni di Parigi (Milan, 1990), 341. 13 Limitations of space here do not permit an extensive discussion of the many details Malevich borrowed from De Chirico. 11

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that De Chirico was an unseen — or barely visible — partner in the entire late phase of Malevich’s painting, up until 1933. Malevich’s mining of De Chirico’s images, just like his mining of icons, is very consistent, and indicates that the Russian artist considered the relationship fruitful, and not at all arbitrary. He did not restrict his quotations to the metaphysical work. He adapted images from every phase of De Chirico’s oeuvre, from his Romantic and Neoclassical painting, from the copies of Old Masters, from the portraits of his friends and family. And, indeed, the course of De Chirico’s life and work — his initial acclamation by the Surrealists, the widespread sense of confusion and suspicion in the art world when he abandoned his early style, his repainting and back-dating, the estrangement from the modernists brought on by his Neoclassical paintings and Renaissance-inspired portraits, all bear an uncanny parallel to the course of Malevich’s art and life.14 The association of Malevich’s explorations of this period with the formal and philosophical issues raised by De Chirico illuminates Malevich’s various approaches to painting between 1928 and 1933, and provides a means to unify this richly varied work. It is not surprising that by the late 1920s Malevich’s attention should have been drawn to De Chirico; he occupied a prominent place in both Western and Eastern European art circles. “Two facts dominate twentieth century art,” the critic Waldemar George wrote in 1927, “Picasso and De Chirico.”15 In addition to the appearance of his work in many group exhibitions in the 1920s, in 1926, and again in 1927, De Chirico had solo exhibitions in Paris that were accompanied by catalogues, and received wide notice.16 The 1927 exhibition that opened at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris on 16 May, while Malevich was still in Berlin, was widely reviewed; the exhibition catalogue was written by Waldemar George, a close friend of both De Chirico and of Malevich’s friends and colleagues 14 For a discusion of De Chirico’s repainting and back-dating, see Paolo Baldacci, Giorgio De Chirico: Betraying the Muse (New York: Paolo Baldacci Gallery, 1994). 15 “Deux faits dominent l’art du XX siècle: le fait Picasso et le fait De Chirico.” Waldemar George, “Introduction,” Exposition Giorgio de Chirico à la Galerie Jeanne Bucher (16 May–4 June 1927) (Paris, 1927). 16 Paris, Galerie Paul Guillaume, 4–15 June 1926. Albert Barnes, Exposition de Giorgio De Chirico chez Paul Guillaume (Paris, 1926); Paris, Galerie Jeanne Bucher, 16 May–4 June 1927. George, Esposition Giorgio de Chirico. De Chirico also had a solo exhibition in Hamburg at about this time, and participated in several major group shows. Reviews of all these exhibitions were extensive.

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Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, Russian artists who were then living in Paris.17 De Chirico himself was well known among the Parisian Russians; he was particularly close to the Ukrainian Serge Férat, and to Goncharova and Larionov. Alberto Savinio had even composed a short story about the artistcouple.18 Larionov was also a friend and colleague of Georgii Krol, a theater director, choreographer, and one time student of Meyerhold, who in Paris was working with Larionov on developing a new journal.19 In the mid 1920s, De Chirico met and married Krol’s wife, Raissa, an actress and dancer from St. Petersburg. She later studied archeology at the Sorbonne.20 In Paris in June 1927, Boris Ternovetz, the Director of the Museum of New Western Art in Moscow, was collecting contemporary works for the museum. On the 24th, he had lunch with Larionov, who gave him De 17 The following year George published one of the first books devoted to De Chirico, Giorgio de Chirico avec des fragments littéraires de l’artiste (Paris, 1928). 18 Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, “De Chirico and Savinio: From Metafisica to Surrealism,” in Italian Art 1900–1945, ed. Pontus Hulten and Germano Gelant (New York, 1989); 139. Férat was a native of Kiev; his name was originally Sergei Iastrebzov [Jastrebzoff]. He resided in Paris from 1900, but maintained contacts with the Ukraine and with his fellow Ukrainians in Paris, including Alexander Archipenko, Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné, Hana [Chana] Orloff [Orlova], and Alexandra Exter. De Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio (Andreas de Chirico) met Férat, Goncharova, and Larionov through Guillaume Apollinaire. 19 Georgii [Georgio] Aleksandrovich Krol [Kroll] (1893–1932). On 13 June 1920 Larionov described Krol in a letter to his friend Olga Ivanovna Resnevich-Signorelli as: “our friend and a very interesting person. . . . Natalia Sergeevna [Goncharova] and I are creating a new journal of theater, music and painting. Kroll [sic] also is working on this journal. The journal is called Parallels.” Larionov requested Resnevich-Signorelli to introduce Krol to theater people in Rome, and apparently they became friends. E. Garetto, “Pis’ma N. S. Goncharovoi i M. F. Larionova k Olge Resnevich-Sinorelli,” Minuvshee, 5 (1991), 175. 20 Raissa Samoilova Gurevich Krol apparently met De Chirico in Rome, where she played Niobe in Savinio’s The Death of Niobe, a ballet-pantomime choreographed by her husband and designed by De Chirico. She also took part in a production of Stravinsky’s History of a Soldier, for which Georgii Krol was also the choreographer. To avoid association with her husband’s name in the theater, she used the stage name “Lork” — Krol spelled backward. She did indeed become an archeologist. In 1931 she remarried and adopted her new husband’s name, Calza, but continued for some time to use De Chirico as her professional name; see Raissa de Chirico, “Una Nuova Igea di Ostia,” Bullettino D’Arte (Rome) 30/III, no.11 (May 1937): 518–527. Under the name Raissa Calza she published more than a dozen books on classical antiquity. It is curious that De Chirico’s second wife, Isabella Pakszwer (Far), was also partly Russian.

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Chirico’s address; in spite of rain, he took a bus out to the suburbs to see the artist. He had tea with Giorgio, Raissa, and Alberto Savinio, and was shown through De Chirico’s studio.21 That same day Ternovetz wrote to the publisher Giovanni Scheiwiller in Milan, agreeing to write a book on De Chirico for his series “Arte Moderna Italiana.”22 At the time of their meeting, Ternovetz was already well acquainted with De Chirico’s art; he had seen and appreciated his work during a trip to Italy three years previously.23 In an article of January 1926, he had published De Chirico’s Enigma of an Autumnal Afternoon (1910), and Self-Portrait (ET QUID AMABO NISI QUOD RERUM METAPHYSICA EST?) (1920), and made clear his approval of De Chirico’s most recent work. Although in the article he warned of a certain “trivial fantasy” derived from Böcklin, he saw the new work as the product of a “simpler and clearer imagination.” De Chirico is leaving the heights of abstraction; he is becoming more human, more lyrical, and deeper. Severity is being exchanged for poignancy. Reality is entering into his pictures in happier and richer forms. As before, the picture is “constructed,” the “cubist” form of the buildings can be felt, many figures in the strength of their tectonics remind one of Hans von Marées.24

B. N. Ternovets, Pis’ma, dnevniki, stat’ i (Moscow, 1977), 227–228. Iz arkhiva GMII, vyp. II: K istorii mezhdunarodnykh sviazei gosudarstvennogo muzeia novogo zapadnogo iskusstva (1922–1939) (Moscow, 1978), 113–114. In memory of their friendly meeting, De Chirico presented his Russian visitor with a drawing, which Ternovetz donated to the museum upon his return to Moscow. De Chirico, The Poet Consoled by his Muse, 1925, pen, ink on paper, 32.2 x 24.7 cm., inscribed upper right: “à Mr. Boris Ternovetz/ bien cordialement/ G. d. Chirico/ Paris Juin 1927.” No. 682, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Reproduced in Marina Maiskaja, I grandi disegni italiani del Museo Puškin di Mosca (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 1986), 73. Ternovetz had met Scheiwiller the previous April in Milan, and he in turn had taken Ternovetz to meet Carlo Carrà, Felice Casorati, Arturo Tosi, and Ugo Bernasconi. Ternovets, Pis’ma, 231–239. 23 Ternovetz had been in Italy late in 1924 in connection with the Soviet entry for the Venice Biennale, and had undoubtedly seen De Chirico’s works at that exhibition; at the same time he also had become acquainted in Rome with De Chirico’s collector and critic Roberto Longhi. Ternovets, Pis’ma, 218. 24 Boris Ternovets, “Novaia italianskaia zhivopis’,” Nauka i iskusstvo, 1 (1926): 137– 138. 21

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Ternovetz read a major paper on “The Art of De Chirico” at Moscow’s State Academy of Artistic Sciences in the fall of 1927.25 There he examined De Chirico’s artistic biography, dividing it into early work (1910–1914), the metaphysical period (1914–1919), romantic Neoclassicism (1919–1925), and a “Parisian cycle” (1925–1927). Again, Ternovetz characterized the changes in De Chirico’s work positively, pointing out the artist’s defense of “the poetic story” in painting, finding a “spirit of tragedy,” in his work, and detailing De Chirico’s various “devices” for “making it strange.”26 Ternovetz’s discussion of the artist’s most recent work was analytically detailed, and pointed to connections with Picasso’s recent classicizing, as well as De Chirico’s influence on New Objectivity [Neue Sachlichkeit] painting and French Surrealism. He characterized De Chirico as “one of the active factors in the evolution of contemporary art.”27 When he returned home from his visit to France and Italy in 1927, Ternovetz brought with him more than twenty drawings by Italian artists, given in exchange for Russian work, which allowed the museum to mount a small display of contemporary Italian art.28 The room of Italian drawings in the Museum of New Western Art officially opened on 1 July 1928 with works by Arturo Tosi, Felice Casorati, Achille Funi, Alberto Salietti, Ugo Bernasconi, Pietro Marussig, Libero Andreotti, Felice Carena, as well as De Chirico and Carrà. Later more works were added as other exchanges took place. Because of Ternovetz’s contacts abroad, the museum was also able to open the exhibition Contemporary French Art two months later, in September 1928. For purposes of the exhibition, the “French” designation was quite broadly interpreted; the show included such painters as Massimo Campigli, Max Ernst, and De Chirico, as well as a substantial contingent of Russians living abroad.29 Three paintings and a drawing by De Chirico were

25 The paper was read on 24 October 1927 to the Subsection on Contemporary Art. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), fond 941, op. 2, ed. khr. 18, l. 20. 26 The vocabulary here is related to that of the contemporary literary formalists, especially Viktor Shklovsky. Ternovetz customarily made astute use of formalist principles in his analyzes of contemporary art. 27 RGALI, fond 941, op. 2, ed. khr. 18, l. 20. 28 The “Italian room” was one of several “national rooms” contemplated by the museum. 29 In his correspondence, Ternovetz seems to ascribe this idea to the artist Viktor Midler. Ternovets, Pis’ma, 228. A French and Russian exhibition that would demonstrate

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shown: Roman Women, Horses on the Shore, Archeologists, and Drawing for the Painting “Archeologists.”30 The exhibition was immensely popular with the public; some 20,000 people saw it during its six week run.31 This exhibition, together with the room of Italian drawings, offered Russian viewers a ready comparison among contemporary schools of art. Critics noted with some relief that the “formal experiments” of previous years seemed to be over; it was no longer necessary to worry about the abstraction and expressionism so frowned upon by the Bolshevik promoters of a classbased proletarian art. Professional critical opinion repeatedly came down on the side of De Chirico and the Italians. The compositional stability and symmetry of their works were noted favorably, and — in counterdistinction to French emotionalism — their “rationality.” In the introductory essay to the French exhibition catalogue, Ternovetz wrote: The Italian room of painters allows one to draw certain parallels between the painterly sensation of the Italians and the French. . . . The art of the Italians is colder, deliberate, intellectual. An element of conscious will power is expressed more clearly here. A Neoclassicism that brings a return to old artistic traditions is more logical on Italian ground, and actually plays a more significant role here. The classical tradition is easily guessed at in the complex, sometimes disturbing experiments of De Chirico, and in the schematization of

the influence of French art on the development of Russian art was proposed at a museum staff meeting in May 1926, but this exhibition did not take place. The subject of a French exhibition was raised in the museum again the following year, after Ternovetz’s return from abroad. This time an exhibition of contemporary French art, with a section devoted to Russian artists living abroad who had a “Soviet orientation,” was proposed. Protocol of 28 July 1927, Manuscript Department Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. The exhibition opened on 16 September 1928. The Russian section of the French exhibition included work by Exter, Iury Annenkov, Goncharova, Leon Zack, Orloff [Orlova], Ossip Zadkine, Jacques Lipchitz, and, of course, Larionov. Sovremennoe frantsuzskoe iskusstvo. Katalog vystavki (Moscow, 1928). 30 De Chirico, Roman Women, 1926, oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm.; Horses on the Shore, 1927, oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm.; Archeologists, 1927, oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm. (Fig. 13–21); Drawing for the painting “Archeologists,” 1927, pencil and black ink on paper, 24 x 33 cm. The exhibition also included work by Severini, Campigli, and, interestingly, Max Ernst (La lumière à son passage nocturne, oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm.) 31 Ternovets, Pis’ma, 139.

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Campigli, which is [only] decorated with modernism. . . . The figure of De Chirico is richer and more complex. The works sent to the exhibition are characteristic of his last Parisian period, and display his favorite themes — “Horses on the Shore,” “Mannequins,” “Roman Women.” The art of De Chirico is the antipode of Naturalism; it is built completely on inner form. The depth and wholeness of his experience produces an intense effect on the viewer. Behind the everydayness, De Chirico’s art desires to reveal new strange worlds. Not for nothing did the earlier work of De Chirico (1910–1917) serve as one of the sources for the development of Surrealism in French painting.32 In his review of the exhibit, the critic Iakov Tugendkhold wrote: What was shown at the exhibition is sufficient to confirm that Western contemporary art is now not formal only, and for that reason one shouldn’t turn away from it, as if from a product of the “decadent” West. . . . Of course we should have our own subjects, our revolutionary content, but we must learn all the lessons of high Western European skill: the richness of color of the French, the compositional strength of the Italians.33 The museum (and its funding agency Glaviskusstvo) were sufficiently impressed by the Western art to purchase Ozenfant’s Graphic on a Black Ground, Campigli’s Sewing, and De Chirico’s major Roman Women, among other works, from the exhibition.34 The book on De Chirico that Ternovetz had contracted after his visit with the artist was published in Milan in the middle of December 1927. Ternovetz’s Russian text had been translated into Italian by Giacomo

“Frantsuzskaia zhivopis’ na vystavke,” in Sovremennoe frantsuzskoe iskusstvo, 21. Ternovetz also had a long article on the exhibition and its reviews in “Vystavka sovremennogo frantsuzskogo iskusstva v Moskve,” Iskusstvo, 3–4 (1928): 115–120. Other reviews are quoted extensively in L. S. Aleshina, N. V. Iavorskaia, Iz istorii khudozhestvennoi zhizni SSSR: Internatsional’nye sviazi v oblasti izobrazitel’nogo iskusstva 1917–1940 (Moscow, 1987), 138 ff. 33 Ia.Tugendkhol’d, “Parizhskaia shkola,” Novyi mir, 10 (1928). Quoted from Aleshina and Iavorskaia, Iz istorii, 139. 34 Ternovets, “Vystavka sovremennogo frantsuzskogo iskusstva,” 120. 32

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Prampolini.35 Although small in format, the book was notable; in addition to Ternovetz’s substantial and well-balanced essay, it contained twentynine reproductions, several of them published for the first time.36 Upon receiving his copy, De Chirico wrote to Scheiwiller: “I received the little book and I thank you for it; it is very well done, with great attentiveness. The reproductions are excellent, and the article by our friend Ternovetz is very intelligent, exact, and tactful. I am very pleased.”37 De Chirico’s Russian contacts in Paris extended also to his art. In the spring of 1929, he created the curtain, scenery, and costumes for Diaghilev’s production of a ballet called The Ball. De Chirico’s costumes transformed the dancers at the ball into columns and pediments of classical architecture that bobbed across the stage as they moved to the music. The Parisian premiere at the end of May was attended by a large contingent of Russians, including the artists Igor Grabar and Kliment Redko, the composer Sergei Prokofiev, and of course, Larionov, and Goncharova.38 In the Ukraine, artists maintained a close connection with the Parisian art world in the 1920s and 1930s.39 De Chirico was widely known among 35 Giacomo Prampolini (born 22 June 1898) not to be confused, as has sometimes happened, with the artist Enrico Prampolini. Giacomo was a poet, a literary historian, and a professional translator. In addition to three books of poetry, he published a multivolume universal edition of literary history, and translations from the German, Dutch, English, and French. His Russian translations include works by Sergei Esenin, Alexander Blok, and Boris Pasternak. 36 Boris Ternovetz, Giorgio De Chirico (Milan, 1928 [1927]). Scheiwiller hoped to arrange for a German edition, but this did not happen. Recently a Russian translation (slightly abbreviated) of the Ternovetz book appeared in the Moscow journal Pinakotheke [Pinakoteka], 16–17, no. 1–2 (2003): 106–111. 37 Iz arkhiva GMII, 130. After the De Chirico book, Ternovetz and Scheiwiller made plans to produce a book on contemporary Italian art, but Ternovetz was not permitted further travel, and this project could not go forward. 38 With scenario by Boris Kochno, music by Vittorio Rieti, and choreography by George Balanchine, Le Bal opened in Monte Carlo early in May 1929, and moved to Paris at the end of the month. On the premiere, see Kliment Redko, Parizhskii dnevnik, (Moscow, 1992), 82, and Sergei Diagilev i russkoe iskusstvo, ed. I. S. Zil’bershtein and V.A. Samkov, 2 (Moscow, 1982), 209. In addition to those mentioned, the Paris contingent of Russian artists at this time included Petr Konchalovsky, Nikolai Miliuti, Alexandre Benois, Zinaida Serebriakova, Robert Falk, Alexandra Exter, Mistislav Dobuzhinsky, Sergei Chekhonin, Martiros Sarian, Iury [Yurii, Georges] Annenkov, Vasily Shukhaev, and many others. 39 On connections between Paris and the Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s, see N. Iu. Aseeva, “Khudozhestvennye kontakty Sovetskoi Ukrainy i Frantsii v 20–30-e gody,” Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie ’81, 1 (Moscow, 1982): 293–307.

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Kiev’s artists, and regarded there as one of the most important representatives of modern painting. Malevich’s close friend Lev Kramarenko knew De Chirico’s work, and the work of the artist Irina Zhdanko, then Kramarenko’s wife, was also clearly influenced by De Chirico.40 Speaking about Malevich’s time in Kiev, she wrote in a memoir, “At that time, [we] were very attracted to the Italians – De Chirico (I first saw his work in 1928–1929), we knew all the journals with the reproductions of his pictures.”41 In Kiev, too, Malevich was in contact with Mikhail Boichuk and Andrei Taran, artists who had been sent to Paris in 1927 at the height of the interest in De Chirico, and who maintained Parisian contacts.42 Reproductions of De Chirico’s work appeared in the Ukrainian press, including a full page illustration of Mannequins on the Seacoast in New Generation [Nova generatsiia], the Ukrainian journal of the Avant-Garde, which also published Malevich’s historical-stylistic essays. A textbook approved for use in Ukrainian art schools as late as 1931 included a discussion and reproductions of De Chirico.43 De Chirico’s international reputation, the domestic interest and exhibitions, the tone of the Russian and Ukrainian publications concerning De Chirico, and the reproductions of his work, would have served to confirm Malevich’s belief in the international importance — and perhaps even the socio-political acceptability — of this artist. But more than this, at a time of great creative quandary, De Chirico’s allusive evocations of higher planes of existence — Malevich’s artistic goal throughout his career — would seem

40 Personal communication. Irina Zhdanko kindly showed this author several of her paintings and drawings clearly done under the influence of De Chirico. 41 I. A. Zhdanko, “Vstrechi v Kieve i Moskve,” in Malevich o sebe. Sovremenniki o Malevicha. Pis’ma. Dokumenty. Vospominaniia. Kritika, ed. I. A. Vakar and T. N. Mikhienko, 2 (Moscow: RA, 2004), 407. 42 See entries for February 1927 in Redko, Parizhskii dnevnik, 74. Mikhail [Mykhailo] Boichuk, Andrei [Andrij] Taran, and Vasily [Vasyl’] Sedliar were sent to Western Europe for three months in early 1927 by the Main Academic Administration (Glavnauka), expressly to make contacts with Western artists, and to familiarize themselves with contemporary art. Aseeva, “Khudozhestvennye kontakty,” 295–6. 43 De Chirico’s Mannequins on the Seacoast (1925–1926) appeared in Nova generatsiia, 2, no. 3 (1928): plate 28. R. Kutepiv in his textbook Novi techii v maliarstvi (Kharkov, 1931) reproduced the same work, along with De Chirico’s Shores of Thessaly (1926) and The Joys and Enigma of a Strange Hour (1913). I am grateful to Myroslava Mudrak for pointing out this publication to me, and to Boris Kerdimun for graciously lending me his copy.

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13–1. Giorgio De Chirico, The Disquieting Muses, 1917, oil on canvas, 97.1 x 66 cm., private collection © DACS 2007.

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13–2. Giorgio De Chirico, The Faithful Wife, 1917, pencil on paper, 32 x 22 cm., Galleria Nationale d’Arte Moderna, Rome © DACS 2007.

to have offered the Russian painter another means to his own philosophical and aesthetic ends. The most obvious visual ideas that Malevich derived from De Chirico and the metaphysical painters are related to the featureless mannequinlike figures that impart a sense of supernatural oddity to Malevich’s late paintings. De Chirico’s models for these figures were tailors’ dummies with plugs instead of arms and sometimes with small vestigial heads (Fig. 13–1, 2). Similar images first appear in Malevich’s late Cubist peasant scenes,

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13–3. Kazimir Malevich, Peasant in a Field, 1928–29, oil on plywood, 71.3 x 44.2 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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13–4. Kazimir Malevich, Torso (Prototype of a New Image), 1928–29, oil on canvas, 46 x 37 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

such as the unsuccessful Peasant in a Field (1928–29) (Fig. 13–3). Here are the mannequin’s characteristic broad shoulders and small head, although Malevich has given his subject very long thin arms, schematic features, and a rectangular red and white beard. In this work there is also another motif drawn from De Chirico: the train puffing white smoke that runs behind the figure near the horizon line.44 In works such as Torso (Figure with a Pink Face) (1928–29) and Torso (Prototype of a New Image) (1928–29) (Fig. 13–4), both shown at the 1930 Kiev exhibition, Malevich eliminated one or both of the arms and the facial features, bringing the image closer to its source. These figures, which still exhibit the “Suprematist” geometric divisions of the body, soon were subject 44 De Chirico took two different types of mannequins as models in his work. Malevich followed him in this practice, producing images with both small and large heads. The train

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to a more imaginative and expressionist treatment, in paintings such as the two works entitled Female Figure, both (1928–29), and they become Malevich’s most poignant, naive peasants in Man and Horse (c. 1929–32) (Fig. 13–5), and the moving Peasants (1928–29).45 But mannequins were not the only motif suggested by De Chirico. In the painting Peasant (1930–32) (Fig. 13–6), for example, Malevich has directly quoted the pose of the statue from De Chirico’s Enigma of a Day (1914) (Fig. 13–7),46 but he has isolated and rotated the figure to face the viewer directly. The sense of emptiness and ambiguity that De Chirico achieved through an exaggerated view from the side into the distance, Malevich has replaced with a confrontation close to the picture plane, with the demand that the viewer understand and acknowledge that revelation is taking place. Malevich has raised the psychic anté of De Chirico’s image; what was a puzzling gesture in mysterious surroundings has become a singular and demonstrative one,

is present in such De Chirico paintings as The Philosopher’s Conquest (1914), The Enigma of a Day (1914) (Fig. 13–7), The Lassitude of the Infinite (1912–13), The Delights of the Poet (1913), The Dream Transformed (1913), The Joys and Enigmas of a Strange Hour (1913), and others. Several of these paintings also contain his tower, a motif that became extremely productive for Malevich. Like the tower, the red rectangles of the train cars in Peasant in a Field are an objectification of Suprematist rectangles for Malevich; ultimately, however, he did not find the train useful, although he adopted a similar device of headlong movement along a distant horizon in the painting Red Cavalry (c. 1932). In Peasant in a Field, the train, like the horizon, is at a higher level on the right side of the figure than on the left, and thus is made to create the same “shift” or dislocation as the uneven shoulders in Malevich’s other depictions of peasants. 45 Malevich, Torso (Figure with a Pink Face), 1928–29, oil on canvas, 72 x 65 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; Torso (Prototype of a New Image), 1928–29, oil on canvas, 46 x 37 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg (Fig. 13–4). Female Figure, 1928–29, oil on plywood, 84.5 x 48 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Female Figure, 1928–29, oil on canvas, 126 x 106 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Man and Horse, c. 1929–32, oil on canvas, 66.5 x 51.5 cm., Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (Fig. 13–5). Peasants, 1928–29, oil on canvas, 77.5 x 88 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. 46 Malevich, Peasant (also known as Man in a Red Shirt), 1930–32, oil on canvas, 120 x 100 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. De Chirico, The Enigma of a Day, 1914, oil on canvas, 185 x 140 cm., The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Fig. 13–7). This painting, sometimes called The Enigma of a Journey, was first shown at the 1914 Salon des Indépendents in Paris, an exhibition in which Malevich and other Russian artists participated. Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, L’opera completa di De Chirico, 1908–1924 (Milan, 1984), 85.

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13–5. Kazimir Malevich, Man and Horse, c. 1929–32, oil on canvas, 66.5 x 51.5 cm., Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris.

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13–6. Kazimir Malevich, Peasant, 1930–32, oil on canvas, 120 x 100 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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but still indefinite, which allows the figure simultaneously to resonate with transcendental meaning and to allude concretely to the plight of the peasantry, references that would not have been lost on contemporary Russian viewers.47

13–7. Giorgio De Chirico, Enigma of a Day, 1914, oil on canvas, 185.5 x 139.7 cm., The Museum of Modern Art, New York. James Thrall Soby Bequest © DACS 2007.

In a later version, roughly contemporaneous with the Malevich painting, De Chirico also turned the figure parallel to the picture plane, but it faces away from the viewer. See Piazza of Italy, c. 1930, oil on canvas, private collection, in Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, I Bagni Misteriosi: De Chirico anni trenta: Parigi, Italia, New York (Milan, 1991), 110. For a discussion of Malevich’s late series of peasants and their connection with the tragic state of the Soviet peasantry in the 1920s and 1930s, see Dmitry Sarabianov, “Malevich at the Time of the ‘Great Break’,” Malevich: Artist and Theoretician (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), 146–147. 47

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13–8. Kazimir Malevich, The Red House, 1932, oil on canvas, 63 x 55 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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13–9. Giorgio De Chirico, The Red Tower, 1913, oil on canvas, 75 x 100 cm., The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York © DACS 2007.

Totemic “houses” or ‘buildings” are a motif that appears repeatedly in Malevich’s work of the late period, most emblematically in The Red House (1932) (Fig. 13–8).48 Undoubtedly the object-equivalent of the red rectangles of Suprematism, it is also clearly inspired by De Chirico’s frequent motif of a tower, most directly presented in his classic Red Tower (1913) (Fig. 13–9).49 One should note that the usual English translation of the Russian title Krasnyi dom as “Red House” is based on a selective interpretation of the word dom. In this case a better translation might be the more generic “building”. Similarly shaped buildings appear in Woman with a Rake, Complicated Premonition (Fig. 13–19) Landscape with a White House, Landscape with Five Houses, and Running Man. An urban variant of the same structure appears in Malevich’s late Impressionist works, such as The Flower Seller (Fig. 1–14), The Boulevard (Fig. 1–13), and On the Boulevard, all of about the same time. It is possible that De Chirico also prompted other details of Malevich’s late Impressionism, for example, his white figures in the Bathers (Fig. 13–11). 49 De Chirico’s Red Tower was first shown at the 1913 Salon d’Automne in Paris. Fagiolo dell’Arco, L’opera completa di De Chirico, 86. 48

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13–10. Giorgio De Chirico, Odysseus, 1922, tempera on canvas, 90 x 70 cm., private collection © DACS 2007.

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13–11. Kazimir Malevich, Bathers, early 1930s, oil on canvas, 98.5 x 79 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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Malevich’s red house in this work is quite close to De Chirico’s structure; the shape and color are similar, the horizon meets the tower in the same place, and it has the three small high openings visible in most reproductions of the De Chirico. As he did in Peasant, Malevich has isolated the image and flattened the perspective, and the “house” itself with it. Like De Chirico, he is establishing a vocabulary of object-symbols, but unlike the Western artist, he does so through the psychic elevation of an a-historical, undifferentiated, archetypal image, rather than through appeals to the Romantic antique. From Malevich’s sketches it is apparent that this building, like its source, was associated originally with the literal notion of imprisonment, but it quickly acquired a metaphorical dimension, and came more broadly to signify the confined condition of human life on earth. In several paintings Malevich masks this archetypal image behind the facade of the everyday. In Landscape with a White House, the motif appears as a simple colorful country scene, but the source is still evident in the blue shadow that falls mysteriously between the viewer and the house.50 In his portraits De Chirico telescoped the new and the old, the contemporary and the antique, taking the subject out of time and hinting at another level of reality. Malevich’s structural subtext, when drawn from icons, intensified this process, and was calculated to induce even more strongly in the Russian viewer the sensation of an archetypal timelessness that lay behind the visible forms. De Chirico’s Odysseus (1922) (Fig. 13–10)51 apparently provided an impetus for Malevich’s Bathers (early 1930s) (Fig. 13–11). Malevich has quoted the shape of the face, features, hair and beard, and musculature, and retained the seaside locale. But in a composition reminiscent of icons, he has repeated the figure three times in a standing position, and set them in his color-striped, universal landscape.52

50 Malevich, Landscape with a White House, 1928–29, oil on canvas, 59 x 59.5 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. For the source of the shadow, see De Chirico’s Red Tower (Fig. 13–9), The Enigma of Day (Fig. 13–7), and other paintings. 51 There is another, slightly later, version of this work: Self-Portrait as Odysseus, 1924, tempera on canvas, 92 x 71.5 cm., private collection, Milan. 52 Similar stances (although in reverse) and articulation of the bodies can be seen in Malevich’s Bathers and De Chirico’s Three Figures. Malevich’s composition singles out the faceless central figure who stands sideways as the “artist” personage. A similar image of blowing hair is depicted in Running Man, c. 1930–32, oil on canvas, 79 x 65cm., Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. See also the drawing of a man’s head with blowing hair in the collection of Lev Nussberg, illustrated in Osteuropäische

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13–12. Kazimir Malevich, Self-Portrait (“Artist”), 1933, oil on canvas, 73 x 66 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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13–13. Kazimir Malevich, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, 1933, oil on canvas, 66 x 56 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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The reference to Northern Renaissance styles and the emphasis on gesture in works such as Self Portrait (“Artist”) (1933), (Fig. 13–12) and Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (1933) (Fig. 13–13), which evoke the canonical gestures of icons, has an analogy in De Chirico’s gestural language in the mythologized portraits of himself and his family. The position of the fingers in Malevich’s portrait of his wife is, in fact, closer to De Chirico’s Self-Portrait as an Orator (1919) (Fig. 13–14), than to the gesture common in icons. De Chirico made

13–14. Giorgio De Chirico, Self-Portrait as an Orator, 1919, oil on canvas, 74 x 55 cm., private collection © DACS 2007.

Avantgarde (Bochum: Museum Bochum, 1988). Such images are related to the child’s blowing hair in De Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy of the Street (1914). Several of Malevich’s other faceless “portraits”, such as Two Male Figures, early 1930s, oil on canvas, 99 x 74 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, have “blowing” beards. Like De Chirico’s flags waving in otherwise static landscapes, they indicate the presence of some unseen force acting upon the seemingly frozen scene.

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13–15. Giorgio De Chirico, La Muta, 1920, oil on canvas, 65 x 47 cm., private collection © DACS 2007.

copies of Renaissance works, such as La Muta (1920) (Fig. 13–15), a copy from Raphael. Such works frequently provided the stimulus for De Chirico’s gestures. In Self Portrait with Head of Mercury (1923) (Fig. 13–16), he has quoted the gesture from an annunciation, but he has replaced the traditional angel with the winged Mercury, and the virgin with himself, thus creating his own inspiring “annunciation.” A similar approach was adopted by Malevich, for example in Woman Worker (1933) (Fig. 13–17), where he repeated the position of a madonna’s arms and hands, but eliminated the infant. Not only does the painting thus form an ironic commentary on the proletarian subject matter so demanded by ideological fundamentalists, the

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13–16. Giorgio De Chirico, Self Portrait with Head of Mercury, 1923, tempera on canvas, 65 x 50 cm., private collection, Florence © DACS 2007.

Suprematist references in the work suggest a transcendent state, a being, formerly human, transformed by the contemplation of an unseen divine.53 De Chirico’s Self Portrait with Head of Mercury was reproduced in Ternovetz’s Giorgio De Chirico. The similarity of De Chirico’s gesture to that in Antonello da Mesina’s Vergine annunciata is pointed out in Fagiolo dell’Arco, L’opera completa, 115–116. Malevich, Self Portrait (“Artist”), 1933, oil on canvas, 73 x 66 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg (Fig. 13–12); Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, 1933, oil on canvas, 66 x 56 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg (Fig. 13–13); Woman Worker, 1933, oil on canvas, 70 x 58 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg (Fig. 13–17). The presentation gesture in the self portrait is related both to De Chirico’s Portrait of the Artist with his Mother (1919), which was reproduced in Ternovetz’s book, as well as to Dürer’s well-known Self Portrait (1500). 53

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13–17. Kazimir Malevich, Woman Worker, 1933, oil on canvas, 70 x 58 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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Malevich’s own self portrait, Self Portrait (“Artist” ) (1933), bears a certain general resemblance to De Chirico’s Amelia (Portrait of Signora Bontempelli (1922) (Fig. 13–18), but the more significant point of comparison is the composition, which incorporates the totemic red tower set at a distance behind Signora Bontempelli. The tower occupies a similar position in Malevich’s Complicated Premonition (c. 1932) (Fig. 13–19), one of the most successful of Malevich’s metaphysical paintings. Complicated Premonition conveys the nobility and spiritual grace of the archetypal peasant, a literal and metaphorical link between heaven and earth. Malevich always equated the peasant and the artist in his work; here that equation is suffused with an otherworldly harmony that, although it may refer to an earthly prison, points also to redemption and an ultimate release from suffering — the

13–18. Giorgio De Chirico, Amelia (Portrait of Signora Bontempelli), 1922, tempera on cardboard, 44 x 30 cm., private collection © DACS 2007.

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13–19. Kazimir Malevich, Complicated Premonition (Torso in a Yellow Shirt), c. 1932, oil on canvas, 99 x 79 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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promise of life on a higher, non-material plane. With this painting Malevich once again made his bid for the attention of history. On the reverse of the canvas he wrote, “The elements of this composition are the sensation of emptiness, solitude, and the exitlessness of life.” Clearly, the title and the explication echo the “mystery,” “enigma,” and “melancholy” of De Chirico’s titles. Similarly, on the reverse of another late painting, Girls in a Field (c. 1929) (Fig. 13–20), a work that made its debut at the 1929 exhibition, Malevich lettered the word “Supranaturalism.” The repainting of his artistic career in the 1920s and 30s not only allowed Malevich to continue painting without retracting his farewell to easel art or acceding to the requirements of proletarian realism, it also furnished him with an opportunity to establish stylistic precedence over the Western trend. His visual similarity to De Chirico was immediately remarked by a reviewer of the retrospective exhibition when it went to Kiev early in 1930: 13–20. Kazimir Malevich, Girls in a Field, 1928–29, oil on canvas, 106 x 125 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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In the Torsos of 1910–1911, . . . the heads are treated in a SurRealist style, on the model of the work of the contemporary Italian artist De Chirico, who used this same method in the 1920s.54 . . . Thus the elements of Sur-Realism appeared in Malevich’s works much earlier than in Western Europe. . . . In the exhibition, an increase in the Sur-Realist aspects can be noticed in Malevich’s work during the war years. In Girls in the Field (1915), a marvelous canvas from the point of view of composition, there is the same SurRealist treatment of the heads of the three women.55 But Malevich’s metaphysical surrealism was more than just a means to lay claim to historical precedence; it promised a way out of the dead end of the “white on white” paintings, and suggested a productive response to the current demands for a new and figurative Soviet art. “The world of art is an objectless world,” he wrote in October 1931 to his friend Lev Kramarenko, “but Soviet art, that is a symbolic art, and neither naturalistic nor realistic.”56 Under cover of the false dates, Malevich explored a style of painting that continued and expanded the philosophy of Suprematism, while at the same time making room for a covert response to the social calamities of the time. De Chirico provided a model that enabled Malevich to return to figuration without abandoning the central themes of his art. His manipulation of the Italian painter’s imagery is somewhat different from other instances of his borrowing. In this case he seems to have been interested, not in just reworking a single image or reproducing a structure, but in developing a visual vocabulary of sign-objects that pointed to a higher reality, just as Suprematism had done. Malevich isolated and simplified still further the 54 Malevich’s Torso (Figure with a Pink Face), 1928–29, and Torso (Prototype of a New Image) 1928–29, were shown in the 1929 exhibition. These are probably the same works that were offered early in May to Nikolai Radlov. K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art 1915–1933, 4, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism: Unpublished Writings 1913–1915, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Hoffmann (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1978), 215; and also Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:203. 55 S. Efimovich, “Vistavka tvoriv khudozhnyka K. S. Malevicha,” Riadianske mystetsvo, 14 (1930): 4. 56 Malevich, letter to Lev Kramarenko, 2 October 1931, in I. Zhdanko, “De zh vin milii chornobrivii? 3 listiv K. Malevicha do kiyvskikh hudozhnikov Lva Kramarenka i Irini Zhdanko,” Ukraina (Kiev), 29 (1988): 14. See also Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, 1:229–230.

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already abstract elements from De Chirico’s compositions, and did it in such a way as to force upon individual objects an iconographic and metaphysical significance that in De Chirico they were more apt to acquire through their relationship to one another. Malevich sought images — houses, figures — that would serve as elements in a system of painting that was just as abstract, just as elevated, as Suprematism, but one step beyond it. Malevich may have been attracted to De Chirico because De Chirico had never been an abstract painter, but yet had established himself as a major twentieth-century figure. The Italian artist had found a legitimate modern idiom outside of abstraction, a way to transcend time and the world, while still depicting objects. Although he, like Malevich, aspired to a system of plastic signs, De Chirico had by-passed the Cubism-Futurism-Suprematism evolution that Malevich had undergone, and that, up until his trip abroad, he had understood to be the ineluctable course of the history of modern art. De Chirico had an alternative path to offer someone who was at a loss of how to take the step beyond Suprematism. For Malevich, De Chirico’s art presented productive ideas outside the stylistic sequence, ideas that might, nevertheless, ultimately be incorporated into it. In the two and a half years from early 1928 through the middle of 1930, Malevich published more than a dozen articles on the history of modern art, sculpture, and architecture in the Ukrainian journals Nova generatsiia and Avangard. Taken together, they were intended to be the basis of a book on the history and theory of twentieth-century art. By early 1930, the projected book had acquired the title Artology [Izologiia], and Malevich had added a chapter on Surrealism to follow the penultimate one on Suprematism.57 The ideas and artists introduced at the Contemporary French Art exhibition circulated for some time. More than a year after it opened in Moscow, the November/December 1929 issue of the journal Art to the Masses [Iskusstvo v massy] published a lengthy discussion of contemporary French art, which was illustrated, among other artworks, by De Chirico’s The Philosopher’s Conquest (1914). The organ of the Association of Artists of the Revolution (Akhr), Malevich’s arch-enemies, the journal took an unenthusiastic view of De Chirico; while acknowledging his continuing influence as a Surrealist

At this time Malevich also added an initial chapter on Impressionism. See his proposal to the publisher citing chapters on “Impressionism, Cézannism, Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism, and Surrealism,” quoted in N. Khardzhiev, K. Malevich, M. Matiushin, K istorii russkogo avangarda, ed. N. Khardzhiev (Stockholm: Hylaea, 1976), 100. 57

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on “young French and European artists,” his art was dismissed as “masked symbolics,” and “metaphysical excessive literariness.”58 Interest in the Valori Plastici artists, Surrealism, and surrounding ideas, however, was widespread among the group of artists around Malevich at this time.59 Echoes of De Chirico can be seen in the work of Vera Ermolaeva, Anna Leporskaia, and Konstantin Rozhdestvensky, among others. Writing about his visit to De Chirico in 1963, Rozhdestvensky, who was once a student of Malevich, says, “I didn’t go to visit De Chirico by accident. In conversations at the Institute of Artistic Culture [Ginkhuk], De Chirico was always being mentioned. For Malevich, he was the most interesting, and the closest modern artist. We used to talk about his [De Chirico’s] feeling for the Classical — in form, in proportion, in color — and for the space of “the other side.”60 By early 1933, Malevich was urging his students to study both De Chirico and ancient art, and to do as De Chirico had done, that is, to look to a translation of the past as the basis of a new idiom: It is necessary to isolate the painterly understanding of color and the sensation of the other world. We can understand it through something new, as De Chirico understood when he looked at the Greeks. . . . The most important work is on the isolation of this sensation, and quickly to move toward new sensations.61 The Greeks — that’s what is cleanest. Get to work. It must be done more naturally, more life like. The Venus de Milo is for study. Draw the Greeks. Try to draw Venus lying down and upright.62 Sergei Romov, “Sovremennaia frantsuzskaia zhivopis’,” Iskusstvo v massy, 7–8 (November/December, 1929): 17. Most likely the image was taken from a 1927 issue of La révolution surréaliste, where, although the painting dates from 1914, it was first published. 59 On the interest in Surrealism, especially as noted in the 1928–1929 diary entries of Malevich’s student Lev Iudin, see Irina Karasik, “From Suprematism to . . . the Paths of the New Figurativeness,” in The Russian Avant-Garde: Personality and School (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2003), 75–83. 60 Konstantin Ivanovich Rozhdestvensky, unpublished manuscript, 1991, collection of the author. 61 Entry from 12 January 1933 in diary kept by Konstantin Rozhdestvensky. Personal communication. 62 Entry from 1933 in diary kept by Mariia Gorokhova, the wife of Malevich’s student Lev Iudin. Quoted in Larissa A. Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910–1930, trans. Alexander Lieven (New York, 1982), 133. 58

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13–21. De Chirico, The Archeologists, 1927, oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm., Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome © DACS 2007.

The year 1933 proved to be the time when Malevich made his own breakthrough to a new sensation, to the other world, in a series of portraits of family and friends that at once resemble Renaissance portraits, icons of the deesis tier, and Suprematist beings. Painted in the year of the Moscow anniversary show and the abolition of all artists’ organizations by the government, these works go beyond the search for isolated object-signs and quotations from De Chirico, but they too bear a relationship to De Chirico’s art, albeit of a different sort. In 1927 and 1928 De Chirico created a series of works in which the interiors of his mannequin-subjects were made visible. In a realized metaphor in several of these works, he depicted archeologists who have literally become their scholarly interests. One such canvas, The Archeologists, was shown at Moscow’s Contemporary French Art exhibition (Fig. 13–21).63 In 1929, the museum also acquired by exchange a print by De Chirico entitled The Archeologists, no. 22/75, signed lower right: “G. de Chirico.” 63

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Rooted into living room chairs, they sit side by side, being, as well as gazing at, the monuments and ruins of antiquity. De Chirico’s subjects have been transmuted; human form has become stone, organic curves have been pierced by extrusions of man-made arches and pediments. These specialists are more than engrossed in their work; they have been transformed into the very objects of their contemplation; their mental state is not only internal but external; what was mental has become physical. For De Chirico, this was at once an aesthetic and personal encumbrance with the past, and a humorous comment on a domestic situation. Malevich’s 1933 portraits lack De Chirico’s sense of absurd humor, but here, too, the subjects have been transformed into the state of their being. Their Suprematist “clothes” are not worn, but are rather the signs of their essence and “colorous existence” in a higher realm. Sign-objects from the archetypal subtexts have been fully integrated into the portraits — a horizon has become a pole, a halo a hat (Fig. 13–13). The subjects of Malevich’s portraits are transcendent beings; not only do they lack De Chirico’s clanking humor, they are also beyond his humanity and his aura of tragedy. By 1933, rejected, unemployed, his works all but barred from exhibition, Malevich emerged in his art on a plane of cosmic harmony that contemplated a divine infinite, rather than a human past. In these most terrible of times, and just prior to the onset of his final illness, Malevich produced images beyond human concerns; he took his loved ones fully into a dimension only hinted at by De Chirico. Clearly the Russian artist had hoped that the Western one could lead him successfully out of the deadends of objectless art and through the uncharted visual heterodoxies of the new age — and perhaps, in fact, he did. * * * * * * Malevich’s involvement with De Chirico’s work is exemplary of his overriding concern for the verdict of history, a concern that began the moment he invented Suprematism in the spring of 1915. Then, attempting to securely anchor his place in a future history of art, he immediately engaged in subtle subterfuges calculated to date his discovery back to 1913. Similarly, he bolstered history’s view of his trip to Germany in 1927 — a trip that he hoped would spread his fame abroad — with false labeling of a photograph

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of himself, meant to imply to contemporary acquaintances and future researchers his friendship with a well-known Western artist.64 His redating of late paintings of every artistic style in the 1920s was a sustained effort to control history; over and over he repainted time gone by, in order to reshape the path already traversed, filling in past episodes with new, inventing different directions and new vocabularies, recasting and recreating, mentally jumping ahead to look back, in anticipation of how the present would be seen as the past in the future. Malevich had a use for history; his method was not to catch up with current trends, but to anticipate and control the view from times yet to come. Having once genuinely created a disjunction with a leap ahead that altered the progression of modern art, Malevich sought to do it again, this time using visual and stylistic clues that hinted strongly of the work of De Chirico, hints left for others to notice in the fullness of time. His encounter with the Italian artist, which began as camouflage that concealed his search for a way out of a political and aesthetic impasse, and ended with the move into his own new and successful totemic surrealism, ultimately reveals the anxieties and determination of an artist beset by the cruel vagaries of the history he sought so hard to control. In a sense, the De Chirico affair was about Malevich’s relentless defiance of the overwhelming political and historical odds he faced. Now, at last, as he wished, history is his.

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See Linda S. Boersma’s article in this volume.

14 Back to Square One James Lawrence

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N an article written for Arts Magazine in 1973, and published to coincide with the Kazimir Malevich retrospective that she had organized at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Diane Waldman considered the painter’s reputation: Unlike Mondrian, Picasso, Matisse, and even Kandinsky, Malevich has not been absorbed into the popular culture of the art world. Each of the others has achieved greater acclaim than Malevich, in part because of the lack of concrete information about his life, but more specifically because of the radical position that he established with Suprematism.1 Yet Malevich’s enduring artistic influence may have been enhanced precisely by the possibilities for creative reinterpretation that such a lack of information allows and even encourages. It is possible that in the short term Malevich’s reputation was constrained by the lack of concrete information and context, and early accounts of Suprematism seem at odds with what we know today. Certainly his challenge to conventional aesthetics was sufficiently drastic that no final evaluation of Suprematism can be complete without access to Malevich’s words and ideas. In the United States, from the 1930s until extensive contextual material began to appear in the 1960s and early 1970s, most analyses of Malevich’s work perforce concentrated on

1 Diane Waldman, “Kasimir Malevich: The Supremacy of Pure Feeling,” Arts Magazine, 48, no. 3 (December 1973): 28.

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wholly formal considerations. But the radical position he established in art was apparent despite this lack of context, because Suprematism considered in isolation pointed to the irreducible qualities of abstraction, and the possibility of a universal aesthetic code. When Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, wrote the catalogue for the museum’s 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, he ascribed to Malevich’s Suprematist works a sudden formal break, the first “system of absolutely pure geometrical abstract composition.” He attributed to Malevich a moment of foresight, in which the “logical and inevitable conclusion” of European art revealed itself.2 The philosophical and metaphysical aspects of Malevich’s system are absent from Barr’s account, leaving visitors to Cubism and Abstract Art, and readers of the catalogue, only the forms, material, and a few carefully chosen words. The genealogical diagram that Barr developed for the catalogue draws no direct line from Futurism to Suprematism (Fig. 14–1). The catalogue’s section on Italian Futurism acknowledges its influence “in Russian Constructivism and Cubo-Futurism” between 1913 and 1922, but not the influence of Futurism on Suprematism.3 Although Futurism was a precursor in terms of Malevich’s artistic development, the relationship was not apparent in the Suprematist works themselves. Barr emphasized the quality that was apparent: Malevich’s development of a visual syntax that allowed sustained re-arrangement without acquiring conventional meaning. Whereas Kandinsky’s formal lexicon suggested, at the very least, the possibility of interpretation, Malevich worked at the level of structure. Thus, for Barr, when Malevich worked with the axial distortion that allows perspective in representational painting, he did not imply an illusion of three-dimensional space. Nor did the shift from parallelogram to trapezoid imply a meaningful change in aspect or viewpoint. To Barr, Suprematism seemed pure, uninflected, and flat — a code without a message. Although he recognized the influence of visual reality, including aerial views of cities and the references provided by subtitles appended to some of the works, these signified little beyond the geometries of viewpoint. The stylistic and

2 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 122. 3 Ibid., 61.

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14–1. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cover of exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936. Offset, printed in color, 19.7 x 26 cm., Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, 3.C.4, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York (MA208). Photo credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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developmental achievement of Suprematism flowed from its refutation of contingency and contiguity, and thus from its tendency towards general, rather than specific, compositional relationships. The spatial arrangements of forms in Futurist works, as in Cubist compositions, imply a temporal component in outcome if not intention. The viewer “reads” the work, relating one sign to another, according to an approach that depends upon the conventions of Western art. Suprematism denies this temporal aspect, since the content cannot be deciphered simply through concentrated inquiry into the relationships of forms. Suprematism denies sequential examination, unlike Cubist and Futurist works that present simultaneity by challenging the conventions of fixed viewpoint and duration. These challenges provided new metaphors that carried meaning in relation to established ones, but the criteria for successful communication remained essentially unchanged. The governing principles were still oriented towards meanings that could be put into words, and the constituent parts of the painting remained available for reconstitution as metaphor. The constituent parts of a Suprematist work eluded just this kind of definition, and thus remained open and indeterminate. Although Barr drew a connection between Cubism and Suprematism in his diagram, his description of Suprematism in the catalogue suggests that he thought the connection tenuous. At best, he might have identified the disruption of spatial relations as the common ground, but the tone of Barr’s text indicates that he saw Suprematism as a genuine break from the conventions of artistic development in which he placed an almost unquestioned trust. Were it not for the exhibition’s emphasis on Cubism as a pivotal movement, Barr’s diagram might have conferred upon Suprematism the distinction of true originality that his catalogue text implies. Ambiguities of installation and reproduction also suggest the tension that exists between the conventions (and institutions) of Western art, and the radical break from convention that underpinned Suprematism. The Museum of Modern Art had established a definite orientation for its Malevich paintings by 1936. A corrections slip inserted into some editions of Cubism and Abstract Art states that figure 114 — Suprematist Composition (1915, dated 1914) subsequently subtitled Airplane Flying — is inverted, thus indicating that the museum preferred a defined, consistent orientation. If current practice is a guide, the corrections slip should have referred to figure 113, Suprematist Composition: Red Square and Black Square

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14–2. Kazimir Malevich, Painterly Realism: Boy with Knapsack — Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, 1915, oil on canvas, 71.1 x 44.5 cm., The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 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). Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, N. Y.

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(1915, Fig. 14–2). In some printings of the 1966 reprint, Red Square and Black Square is “correctly” oriented, but Airplane Flying is inverted. Other printings simply reproduce the 1936 edition. In addition, both the 1936 and 1966 editions show Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918) rotated through 90˚ in comparison with current preference (Fig. 14–3). Unlike Malevich, who showed some of his works in various positions, the Museum of Modern Art tried to establish conventional orientations. A portrait or a landscape invariably suggests an appropriate orientation, but an abstract painting, such as White on White, betrays no such imperative. Barr’s training in connoisseurship may have led him to decide the orientation of Red Square and Black Square and White on White according to his highly

14–3. Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918, oil on canvas, 79.4 x 79.4 cm., The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 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). Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, N. Y.

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developed sense of how these radical works should look if they were indeed anticipating the “logical conclusion” of European painting. As Barr described it, the “inverted” Red Square and Black Square somehow seems comfortingly balanced: “the red square, smaller but more intense in color and more active on its diagonal axis, holds its own against the black square which is larger but negative in color and static in position.”4 Put in these terms, Red Square and Black Square is a fine distillation of convention, a masterful reduction, in which one may find something of painting’s essence. The relationship between the figures — and in Barr’s reading they are still figures with vestiges of metaphor — provides an object lesson in abstraction, but little that could be called absolute. As a contingent part of the exhibition, Red Square and Black Square is a symptom of art, and the forms in it are manifestations, not of sensation, but of history. However sensitively he examined Malevich’s paintings, Barr understood and interpreted them in formal isolation rather than in relation to the complex set of philosophical and scientific ideas that had been current before the Great War. His discussion of abstract art barely included references to the mystical content of early twentieth-century work. He was mainly interested in tracing lines of influence, evaluating the degree of abstraction, and setting up criteria for the formal judgment of abstract art. Yet when he discusses Alexander Rodchenko, Barr observes that Rodchenko’s style is “entirely removed from the vaguely mystical atmosphere of the older man’s work.” 5 Barr, who had met Rodchenko in 1929, was not entirely unaware of either the “mystical atmosphere,” or the richness of the ideas contained within that sweeping and almost dismissive term. Why, then, did Barr pay so little attention to the philosophical aspects of the art? The context and agenda of the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition provides several possible answers. First, Barr’s methodological training, which followed a Berensonian model of scientific connoisseurship, gave primacy to qualitative and comparative assessments of artistic marks rather than artistic ideas. Those ideas had value insofar as they gave impetus to individual artists and the general tendencies of art, but their specifics were, for Barr, beside the point.

4 5

Ibid., 124. Ibid., 126.

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Secondly, Malevich and Barr shared little common ground in their intellectual tradition or interests. Barr ignored the religious or spiritual aspects of Malevich’s work, and treated Kandinsky similarly. In response to the catalogue, Kandinsky complained that in discussing his work Barr had given undue primacy to extrinsic influences — such as a deterministic formal development — over inner influences.6 Barr, though, rejected any mode of analysis that depended upon psychological or biographical information, and paid little heed to artists’ explanations of their own works. In this respect, his method reflected both the orthodoxy of modernism that held sway in the middle third of the twentieth century, and a more distinctively American pragmatism that stressed self-evident process and manifest outcome. In contrast, Malevich’s immersion in Bergsonian philosophy, theosophical metaphysics, speculative theories of the fourth dimension, and sensation, placed a complex belief-system at the heart of Suprematist experimentation. Whatever understanding of these ideas Barr might have possessed, they had no place in his systemic sense of aesthetic relations or in his systematic categorization of artistic purpose. More to the point, they could contribute little to his advocacy of avant-garde art, an advocacy that required the clarity of a system and the plausibility of a practical outcome. This leads us to the third, and possibly most important, reason for Barr’s approach to Suprematism. Cubism and Abstract Art was organized against a backdrop of political oppression and economic malaise. Avant-garde art had fallen from favor under totalitarian regimes in Germany and the Soviet Union, and in the United States abstract art seemed incompatible with the conditions of the Depression and the purposes of the Works Progress Administration. Rarefied art with the taint of elitism did not fit the temper of the times. Barr set out to defend this art against “philistines with political power,” without making a great effort to differentiate between totalitarian dictatorships and the United States Customs, which sequestered abstract sculptures because they did not represent an animal or human form.7 He recognized, however, that abstract art often has to prove its value to a skeptical public. His discussion

6 Susan Noyes Platt, “Modernism, Formalism, and Politics: The ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ Exhibition of 1936 at The Museum of Modern Art,” Art Journal, 47, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 292. 7 Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 18.

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of Suprematism in the exhibition catalogue cites its influence on graphic design in the 1920s, and between the preface and introduction he compares two advertising posters from 1928 (Fig. 14–4). The one that is described as “fairly realistic” and “mediocre,” was intended for the Anglo-American public. The other is “by contrast highly abstract,” executed “under the influence of Russian Suprematism,” and intended for the German public during the Weimar years. To conclude, he points out that “the style of the abstract poster, which is just beginning to interest our American advertisers, is now discouraged in Germany.”8 The American reader is being encouraged to accept abstract art as his or her inheritance, not only because it soon passes into mass taste, but also because it was being disowned elsewhere. Suprematism, as an influence, thus acquires a social relevance that transcends its specific qualities. Suprematism was propelled into American art as an element in a stylistic progression, abducted from its own circumstances but with its formal integrity intact. Cubism and Abstract Art put forward Suprematism as a code without a message, because the philosophical messages had evaporated. In 1936, the dimensional modifiers in subtitles from the 0.10 exhibition (“Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension” and “Color Masses in the Second Dimension”) were unavailable; Malevich’s writings were inaccessible; and Bergsonian ideas, theosophy, and notions of “higher space” had receded. Suprematism became a semiotic orphan, waiting to be adopted. Within a decade of the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition, the interests of the American Avant-Garde had shifted towards the search for new modes of artistic evaluation. During 1958 and 1959, the Museum of Modern Art’s traveling exhibition The New American Painting visited eight European cities before a final showing in New York. Barnett Newman, a “genial theoretician” of Abstract Expressionism as well as one of its most noted practitioners,9 wrote a statement for the accompanying catalogue in which he set out the blind alleys he wished to avoid: To reject Cubism or Purism, whether it is Picasso’s or Mondrian’s, only to end up with the collage scheme of free-associated forms,

Ibid., 10. Thomas B. Hess, “Reviews and Previews: Barnet Newmann [sic],” Art News, 50, no. 4 (Summer 1951): 47. 8 9

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14–4. Cubism and Abstract Art (New York, 1936), page 10, showing reproductions of posters by H. Nöckur (left) and F. H. Ehmcke (right) for the Pressa (World Press Exhibition), Cologne, 1928. Text by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

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whether it is Miró’s or Malevich’s, is to be caught in the same geometric trap. Only an art free from any kind of the geometry principles of World War I, only an art of no geometry, can be a new beginning.10 In a then-unpublished preface to his catalogue statement, Newman referred to critical misconceptions: My work, they say, is more advanced than Malevich’s, when what they really mean is that I have reduced Malevich to yet another color scheme, so that his white-on-white is just another syntactical device no more significant than black-on-white.11 Newman’s words are instructive. He refers to “free-associated forms,” the “syntactical device” of white-on-white, and the “geometric trap.” Newman had written several essays during the 1940s in which he had castigated the European Avant-Garde for its insincerity and lack of authenticity. According to Newman, the choice between (for example) Mondrian’s dogmatic NeoPlasticism and Surrealism’s illusionistic refinement was of little value. Neither seemed adequate to the task of providing an art that suited an age in which industrialized genocide and nuclear annihilation were not only possible, but also inevitable. This was a theme he explored in “Surrealism and the War” (1945), “The New Sense of Fate” (1947–48), and several other essays written during and after the Second World War.12 For Newman, the problem with abstraction was not that it was intrinsically limited, but that it was extrinsically limited by the European tradition, pushing at its own boundaries, seeking the logical conclusion of itself, and ultimately reflecting the limits that society had set upon it. One way to think of this is as a problem of language. However distinctively an individual speaker or writer selects and expresses words, their significance depends upon a consensual interpretation of those words. They originate

Barnett Newman, “Statement by the Artist,” in The New American Painting: As Shown in Eight European Countries 1958–59 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 60. 11 Barnett Newman, “From The New American Painting” (1958), in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 180. 12 O’Neill, Barnett Newman. 10

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14–5. Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948, oil on canvas, 69.2 x 41.3 cm., gift of Annalee Newman, The Museum of Modern Art, New York © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2007. Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

not in the individual, but in a shared system. Language is instrumental, and it also uses individuals as instruments. Simply by participating within a language system, one becomes conditioned by that system. One way out of this situation is to dispense with overt subject matter, and concentrate instead on the structure of the language itself. Writing in the 1940s, this is what Newman thought had been the achievement of Piet Mondrian and James Joyce, in painting and literature respectively.13 Inevitably, though, that revised sense of structure can be co-opted by other painters and writers; or, thinking back to the German advertising posters in Barr’s catalogue, mass culture. One might thus be tempted to seek a zero, a posited null that is primarily characterized by its lack of properties: a blank slate. The idea of a tabula rasa, though useful, is insufficient to describe the radical nature of the projects that Newman and Malevich pursued. The blank slate can always be filled up again, and perhaps this is the difference between “breakthrough” works such as Newman’s Onement I (1948, Fig. 14–5) or Barnett Newman, “Painting and Prose/Frankenstein” (1945), in O’Neill, Barnett Newman, 86–93; Barnett Newman, “The Plasmic Image” (1945), in O’Neill, Barnett Newman, 138–55. 13

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Malevich’s Black Square project (1915 and later, Fig. 3–4), and those that approach absolute conditions, such as Newman’s white near-monochrome The Name II (1950, Fig. 14–6) or Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White. Onement I and Black Square might be described as microcosmic: they are simple instances of extremely complex formal reconfigurations, and they indicate the possibilities that can follow. Ostensibly reductive, they can just as easily be thought of as all encompassing, because, although they allow few interpretations according to convention, they point to the possibility of unbounded experience. The poverty of verbal interpretation forces non-verbal or pre-verbal engagement. The viewer is comparatively unhindered by the habits of language. The Name II and White on White, on the other hand, seem to approach the limits of engagement by indicating the point where opposites are true. Just as silence is a form of utterance, so these paintings emphasize appearance by threatening to disappear. If this kind of work marks the end of art, it marks a boundary of meaning rather than a termination of it. The difference between absolute indeterminacy of meaning and meaninglessness is crucial. After seeing Newman’s work with a restricted palette of white and cream, Robert Rauschenberg made white paintings at Black Mountain College. Newman found Rauschenberg’s works facile; too smooth, too easy, and without an artistic investment. They lacked any inflection that could make their silence speak.14 Their lack of texture made them a blank slate ready to be filled up again, whereas Newman’s treatment of material left no room for anonymity, absence, or retreat into nothingness. Rauschenberg’s paintings fitted into a then-current interest in the void, but noumenal states of emptiness are analogous to neither the positive noumena of higher space, nor the elision of material, idea, and experience that Newman sought. Newman may have understood the significance of Malevich’s achievement better than most. In his search for formal approaches that undermined the general problem of form — its availability for perpetual reconfiguration according to shifting intentions — Newman displayed an aspect of his deeply held anarchist beliefs. The convictions that led him to teach by “not-teaching,” as he put it, and to resist acknowledging his

Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks (New York: Horizon Press, 1972), 91. 14

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14–6. Barnett Newman, The Name II, 1950, magna and oil on canvas, 264.2 x 240 cm., gift of Annalee Newman, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the National Gallery of Art © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2007. Image © 2006 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

influence on younger artists, also led him to treat Malevich’s innovations as contributions to a “new beginning.” By “not-studying” Malevich, or at least the Malevich he knew as a mid-century American painter, Newman took the lessons without the limits. Having participated in one major disruption of the painting tradition, Malevich was now participating in another. Awareness of the Russian Avant-Garde increased during the 1960s. Camilla Gray’s The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922 provided the general reader of English with a broader perspective on events and antecedents than had previously been available.15 An extensive Malevich 15 Camilla Gray, The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922 (London: Thames and Hudson; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1962). Republished as The Russian Experiment in Art 1863–1922 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986).

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retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York opened in 1973, just as a great deal of advanced research on the Russian Avant-Garde was reaching fruition. The March-April 1974 issue of Art in America included an article by Charlotte Douglas on Malevich’s 1913 designs for the opera Victory Over the Sun, and John Bowlt’s review of a Bulgarian book on Constructivism.16 It also included “Malevich: Independent Form, Color, Surface" by Donald Judd, a leading exponent of the 1960s approach to art most commonly known as Minimalism.17 From its first appearance, Minimalism seemed uncomfortable with its own tradition. Perhaps as the result of its apparent structural simplicity, it lends itself not only to “reading in,” or forcing one’s own significance onto the work, but also to “reading instead,” or disregarding the qualities that make it distinctive, in favor of those that make it generic. The artists themselves understood the problem; as Donald Judd said in response to a comment about the possible relationship between Barnett Newman’s vertical bands and figures in Byzantine mosaics, “a lot of things look alike, but they’re not necessarily very much alike.”18 The common ground is not on the surface, nor is it in the structure. It is in the structure of structure; or, in other words, in the artistic choices that precede composition. In her 1965 essay “ABC Art,” Barbara Rose set out to explain a set of practices that had been emerging for some time, but were neither codified nor identified with a tradition. She invokes Malevich’s Suprematism as a benchmark and, more to the point, as a formal exemplar that is sufficient prior to any consideration of the metaphysical content of the work. Rose describes Malevich as “the poetic Slav . . . turning inwards toward an inspirational mysticism,” in contrast to Marcel Duchamp’s rationalist cessation of painting, but sees both as “urban modernists who rejected the possibility of turning back to a naïve primitivism in disgusted reaction to the excesses of civilization.” The crucial point for Rose, and for Minimalism in general, is that there is a relationship between cultural surfeit (war,

Charlotte Douglas, “Birth of a ‘Royal Infant’: Malevich and ‘Victory Over the Sun’,” Art in America, 62, no. 2 (March–April 1974): 45–51; John E. Bowlt, “Books: Bulgaria Rehabilitates the Soviet Avant-Garde,” Art in America, 62, no. 2 (March–April 1974): 93. 17 Donald Judd, “Malevich: Independent Form, Color, Surface,” Art in America, 62, no. 2 (March–April 1974): 52–58. 18 Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” Art News, 65, no. 5 (September 1966): 61. 16

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technological change, or the accelerated conditions of modernity) and “art stripped to its bare, irreducible minimum.”19 Furthermore, this kind of art is also a response to aesthetic excess, be it the relentless experimentation of Cubism or the autobiographical emotionalism of Expressionism, abstract or otherwise. As Newman concluded, the value of the “bare, irreducible minimum” is its simultaneous completeness and incompleteness. It neither requires conventional meaning nor imposes one. “Reduction” in this sense is not subtraction, but concentration. Although the absence of semiotic handles is initially disconcerting, the self-sufficient qualities of reductive abstraction confer a presence that illusionistic or referential art implies, but does not really possess for itself. In Judd’s 1965 essay “Specific Objects,” the problem of spatial limitations in painting leads to a crucial distinction between those works that continue to construct and organize an illusionistic space, and those that focus on the non-relational specificity of the object.20 The literalism that Judd espoused was not simply a formal strategy; it was also a deeply skeptical and anarchic refutation of subjective doubt as a positive trait in art or in life. Judd’s objection to the rhetorical projection of order onto the unknowable was easily the equal of Newman’s. Malevich’s transcendental spirituality is thus incompatible with Judd’s skeptical pragmatism, but the formal lexicon of Suprematism is not. “Malevich: Independent Form, Color, Surface” provides evidence of Judd’s resistance to any kind of noumenon. Throughout the article, he avoids any mention of the spiritual intentions behind Suprematism. Judd writes about the painting technique, the loose treatment, the liveliness of Malevich’s changes of style, and the lack of “doctrine about geometry itself,” but almost ignores Malevich’s understanding of space, except to say that “despite Malevich’s talk of space and infinity, his paintings are not very spatial.”21 Had Judd understood the significance of higher space for Malevich, he would have been deeply unimpressed. In “Specific Objects” he argued that

19

Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” Art in America, 53, no. 5 (October–November 1965):

20

Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook, 8, ed. William Seitz (1965). Judd, “Malevich,” 53, 54.

58. 21

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the three-dimensional work that impressed him rendered painting obsolete, and argued that “actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.”22 Given Judd’s rejection of two-dimensionality as obsolete and of four-dimensionality as essentially unknowable, Malevich’s understanding of the relationship between the two would not have entered into Judd’s evaluation of Malevich as a painter. In this sense, the incomplete reading of Malevich that had characterized American modernist thinking was irrelevant. No complete reading would have interested Judd, unless it reflected only what was strictly apparent, without reference to interpretive conventions. Strict appearance, though, ultimately places Suprematism and Judd’s brand of Minimalism in close proximity. The looseness in Malevich’s handling of paint, his pragmatic sense of line, the juxtaposition of elements without discernible system, all point back to the absence of contingency and contiguity. The relationship of parts to each other, and to the whole, is mediated only by the material characteristics that draw attention to themselves. In “Malevich: Independent Form, Color, Surface,” Judd describes Suprematist Painting (1916, Fig. 14–7) thus: “most of the shapes follow a diagonal slightly off that of the painting.”23 That curt sentence encapsulates the principles identified in the essay’s title, and in its opening line: “It’s obvious now that the forms and colors in the paintings that Malevich began in 1915 are the first instances of form and color.”24 To understand this point, one need only look at a typical work by Judd (Fig. 14–8). No theory is necessary to read Judd’s work, nor is any specific kind of literacy. It is made to be experienced and assimilated with great rapidity and without recourse to conventions of meaning. The effective surfaces are in plain view, alike, and differentiated by viewing position. Each element relates to each other element in a direct manner, but each is single. The part does not stand for the whole, but part and whole are presented simultaneously. Unlike Cubist and Futurist figures of time and space, Judd’s work presents real time and space by refusing to represent them. Judd thus achieves, and saw in Malevich’s work, a disconnection of artwork from

Judd, “Specific Objects,” 77. Judd, “Malevich,” 57. 24 Ibid, 52. 22 23

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14–7. Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting, 1916, oil on canvas, 88 x 70.5 cm., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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14–8. Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969, brass and colored fluorescent plexiglass on steel brackets, ten pieces, each 15.6 x 61 x 68.6 cm. with 15.2 cm. between; overall 295.9 x 61 x 68.6 cm., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972. Photograph: Lee Stalsworth. Art © Judd Foundation. Licensed by VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2007.

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illusion. The elements of their works are not figures or metaphors; they are discrete manifestations of specific qualities in a field of open possibilities. Alfred Barr’s pioneering work on the genealogy of modern art opened terrain that continues to invite dispute and exploration. Barnett Newman and Donald Judd did not rethink Malevich so much as discover him. But the essence of discovery is that something is waiting to be found. Malevich’s contribution to the language and semiotic richness of art makes that process of discovery available in different times, places, and intellectual climates. The dynamics of artistic influence usually confer primacy on those works whose qualities conform to evolving conventions. Malevich’s Suprematist works accord to no such habits of thought, and might be said to operate without habits of their own. Their intrinsic universality remains a rich field of investigation for those who wish to return to Square One without repeating history.

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15 Aspects of Kazimir Malevich’s Literary Legacy: a Summary Aleksandra Shatskikh

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HE publication of Malevich’s written works was begun during his lifetime, but only a very small part of his enormous body of writings appeared in print before his death. In the 1920s, he was published both in Russia and in Europe, but publication was interrupted for many decades in both places. In Europe this period of non-publication was short, only a little more than two decades; in Russia it was twice as long.1 Malevich’s deliberate mystification in defining his path in art, Soviet history, and the censorship of both his contemporaries and his artistic descendants led to distortions of his biography, and gave rise to all sorts of legends. Around the centenary of Malevich’s birth (1979), a whole “Malevich industry” was launched. From an historical point of view, the quarter century that has passed since then has been a time for taking stock of the artist’s life and work. 1 The last publication of a text by Malevich in the Soviet Union during his lifetime was “Arkhitektura, stankovaia zhivopis’ i skul’ptura,” Avangard (almanakh), 2 (1930): 274– 280. The last publication in the West was K. Malewitsch, “Suprematische Architektur,” Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst, 4 (1928): 168–169. In the Soviet Union, fragments of his previous publications appeared also as “Manifestos of Malevich” in Sovetskoe iskusstvo za 15 let. Sbornik materialov i dokumentov. Materialy i dokumentatsiia, ed. I. Matsa, L. Reingardt, and L. Rempel’ (Moscow-Leningrad, 1933), 297–299. In the West: “Suprematismus. From the Writings 1915–1925 (Malevich in memorium),” Plastique, 1 (1937): 1, 3. The next publication in the Soviet Union was “Pis’ma K.S. Malevicha M. V. Matuishinu,” ed. E. F. Kovtun, Ezhegodnik Rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo Doma na 1974 god (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976). In the West, it was Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company, 1959).

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This critical re-thinking of Malevich’s biography cleared the way for establishing his real history. The re-dating of Malevich’s works, begun in an article in 1975 by Charlotte Douglas,2 was largely completed by the end of the twentieth century.3 Now, we can’t really expect any sensational revelations, such as those connected with the re-dating of all his Impressionist art. There are also no longer any political anxieties regarding Malevich’s late work — the so-called Socialist Realism. For the titans of modernism, writing their thoughts on paper was the rule rather than an exception — even though Picasso was one such exception. Kandinsky, Mondrian, and many others loved to write, and wrote well. Their texts are published today as an accompaniment to their art. The publication of Malevich’s writings belongs to this type of art-historical enterprise. The four-volume collected work in English, edited by Troels Andersen, was published by Borgen Publishers in a special series devoted to artists’ writings.4 Andersen included texts that were first published during Malevich’s lifetime, and items from archives that were drawn partly from the Stedelijk Museum’s collection, and partly from the private archives of Anna A. Leporskaia (1900–1982). A pupil of Malevich and an artist herself, Leporskaia had amassed a large amount of her great teacher’s art and writings. The abundance of legends about Malevich’s life, and interviews with people who knew him, led to rumors that many of his writings had perished at the time of his arrest in the fall of 1930. Leporskaia told Andersen that his wife had burned some bags of Malevich’s manuscripts immediately after his arrest. I do not doubt Leporskaia’s information (she was a devoted pupil and an artistic descendant of her great teacher), but even she could not know everything for certain. Until the end of the twentieth century no one knew the full scale of Malevich’s archives. The most representative part of those archives is now in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. It was acquired from the von Riesen family, who had preserved the manuscripts and documents that Malevich brought with

2 Charlotte Douglas, “Malevich’s Painting — Some Problems of Chronology,” Soviet Union/ Union Sovietique, 5/2 (1978): 301–326. 3 Kazimir Malevich in the Russian Museum, ed. Yevgenia Petrova, trans. Kenneth MacInnes (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000). 4 K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art 1915–1933, ed. Troels Andersen, 4 vols. (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968–1978).

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him on his visit to the West in 1927. The huge size of Malevich’s archives testifies to his intention to move the center of his activities to Europe. The leader of Suprematism took almost everything he had written before March 1927 out of Russia, and brought it to Berlin. His will, written just before his departure from Germany, indicated his hope that in the future someone would publish them.5 But not all of Malevich’s manuscripts were in his possession. After the scandalous export from Russia of Nikolai Khardzhiev’s collection and archives, it became clear that many papers that might have been from before 1927 were, for various reasons, in the possession of certain people close to Malevich, such as Mikhail Matiushin, El Lissitzky, and Malevich’s brother, Mechislav [Mieczysław]. The papers had moved slowly but surely from them to the secret archive of the Moscow collector. Khardzhiev’s collection also included a number of Malevich’s writings produced after his return from Berlin. One part of Khardzhiev’s former archive is now in the KhardzhievChaga Cultural Foundation, held by the Stedelijk Museum. I was fortunate to have a chance to become acquainted with the portion of Malevich’s papers that were confiscated by Russian customs in 1994, and which then reappeared at the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art in Moscow. They are now there, but closed for twenty-five years at Khardzhiev’s stipulation. Having studied Malevich’s archives at the Stedelijk Museum, the Russian and the Amsterdam parts of Khardzhiev’s collection, Leporskaia’s archive, the papers in the possession of the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art, the archives of the Russian Museum and the Tretiakov Gallery, and some private collections, I can declare with certainty that the larger part of Malevich’s written legacy has survived to the present day. Malevich’s philosophical writings have almost all been preserved, thanks to specific features of his creative work. By this I mean that his creative projects form closed cycles, and possess a certain organic character. Suprematist painting, as we know, had a pre-natal period — from 1913 to the spring of 1915. It was properly born in 1915, developed quickly during 1916–18, and by 1919 its life was concluded with empty canvases, symbolizing the death of painting as such. The meaning of those empty canvases was articulated in Malevich’s own words in his unpublished notes:

5 The last will of Kazimir Malevich, dated “Berlin, May 30, 1927,” inv. no. 14. Malevich Archive, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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Usually the public says, “But the canvas is empty?” How do you mean it’s empty, when you can see that the canvas is painted with white paint? Consequently, it is not empty. If among Suprematist compositions made of color surfaces there is one painted a certain tone of white, then it obviously carries some sort of a meaning. If that meaning is not clear to someone, it is only because he is not well-informed. But if this person sees two color spots on the surface, he begins to see some meaning in it. In reality, he is not clear at all either about the first or the second composition. Consequently, [he believes that the white canvas] is empty. But this is not the case. If the white canvas were empty, then it would not inspire any questions or indignation. For us researchers, on the contrary, it is of much importance within the entire ideology of Suprematism and its abstract essence. Having completed his work on Suprematist painting, Malevich was aware of its potential for the future. All the subsequent work, both by the founder of Suprematism and his followers, was based on this polished system of visual abstraction, effectively using its style-forming potential. In other spheres, too, Malevich’s work was distinguished by its highly organic development. Each of his trend-setting initiatives was nurtured for a long time “in the depths of the intuitive mind,” before it was properly born. It then grew and matured, as if it were some biomorphous phenomenon, reaching its full bloom and triumph in the work of Malevich’s own art. Malevich’s mature artistic projects were ready as models for approval and possible realization in the objective world, for a variety of further elaborations by the author himself, as well as by his followers. This is the case with Suprematism, the three-dimensional architectons, and the postSuprematist painting. It’s a different matter that Malevich’s historical “here and now” was not suitable for the realization of these projects, and, moreover, even tried to eliminate the very memory of them. The philosophy of Suprematism had been nurtured by Malevich from the era of the Supremus journal, that is, from 1916. “The death of art,” declared as the 1910s turned into the 1920s, was the cause, as it seemed at the time, of an inevitable outcome: the artist’s entry into the realm of the intellect. Work on the philosophy of Suprematism reached its climax in the years of Malevich’s stay in Vitebsk. It was then that he created his first “architexton,” as I have called it, using Malevich’s own logic of

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creating terminological neologisms.6 Later it became an ideological basis for Suprematist classicism. It embodied the results of research carried out at the State Institute for Artistic Culture (Ginkhuk), provided the foundation for teaching methods, and so on. In 1923, the edifice of philosophical Suprematism was crowned with a linguistic-mathematical formula, the so-called “Suprematist Mirror,” in which Malevich expressed the quintessence of his notions on being. It was published in May 1923, on the occasion of the exhibition Petrograd Artists of All Trends.7 In Malevich’s last Suprematist manifesto, all phenomena of the world were equated to zero.8 Suprematist painting had many followers, and it exerted an obvious influence on many artistic processes. Architectural models — the so-called architectons — and Post-Suprematism attracted the attention of contemporaries. Malevich’s theoretical writings had quite a different fate; he did not have any followers or disciples in the intellectual sphere, and could not possibly have had them. This concerned both the philosophy of Suprematism and its applied aspects, which Malevich called “the ideology of art.” Malevich the thinker always found himself in isolation. Any manifestation of his views invariably occurred against the background of the patriarchal Russian empire, the bourgeois-capitalistic West, the early Communist Russian Federation, or the totalitarian Socialist Soviet Union. Everywhere, and at all times, Malevich the thinker and theoretician was an alien and a stranger. This lifetime autonomy was due to numerous reasons. The revolutionary paradigm change in the early twentieth century led to the appearance of an insurmountable gap between people belonging to the same profession. Figures such as Alexandre Benois and Kazimir Malevich became virtual symbols.9 Both of these Russian artists, almost coevals, in actual fact belonged to two parallel worlds, which did not intersect. For Benois, Malevich had always been a marginal character, a hooligan completely without talent, as is

A. Shatskikh, “Filosofskii arkhitekton Malevicha,” De Visu, 11 (1993): 39–45. K. Malevich, “Suprematicheskoe zerkalo,” Zhizn’ iskusstva, 20 (895), (22 May 1923): 15–16. 8 For a detailed discussion of this manifesto, see Adrian Barr’s article in this volume. 9 See Jane Sharp, “The Critical Reception of the 0,10 Exhibition: Malevich and Benua,” in The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1992), 39–52. 6 7

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evident from Benois’ diaries of 1916–17 that have been published recently.10 In the intellectual sphere, Malevich was not even considered a marginal figure (which, at least, implies a certain commonality). For educated and enlightened contemporaries, the founder of Suprematism was a wild man (a “Papuan”), that is, a person simply having no contact with civilization. Even after the two Russian revolutions of 1917 and the complete change of the social system, it was apparent that there was a wide gap between Malevich and the new ideologists, who were openly biased, and held classoriented principles. In the 1920s, Malevich’s attempts to introduce visual and verbal Suprematism in the West were met with polite attention, and equally polite rejection.11 The subjective reasons for Malevich’s alienation as a thinker are based on objective causes. His existence outside tradition was conditioned by his freedom from any formal education, that is, from the labor-intensive training of learning how to establish mutual understanding in an intellectual environment. The language and style that Malevich developed effectively reflected this freedom, which conventional people called ignorance and boorishness. His philosophical “architexton” was designed and assumed its final form in Vitebsk. During the Petrograd period, a number of new texts were added; these were similar to the existing ones, and formed a single composition with them. It was in Vitebsk, under conditions of relative freedom, that Malevich saw the publication of his philosophical treatise God is not Cast Down (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1922). It could not fail to generate a heated response; Malevich was already a major figure in the early Soviet years. The Constructivist theoretician Boris Arvatov called Malevich a confirmed solipsist and mystic, in other words, characterized the artist as a representative of a certain philosophical tradition.12 Whether or not it had anything to do with Malevich was of little importance; for the reviewer, it was crucial to categorize the artist, and express his own attitude. This tendency of reviewers and scholars to interpret Malevich’s theory in accordance with their own discourse and strategies persisted throughout the twentieth century. Aleksandr Benua, Moi dnevnik: 1916–1917–1918 (Moscow: Moi put’, 2003), 89. Hans Richter, Köpfe und Hinterkopfe (Zurich, 1967), 10l–109. 12 B. Arvatov, “Malevich. Bog ne skinut. (Isskustvo. Tserkov’. Fabrika),” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, 7 (1922): 344. 10 11

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In the West, and in today’s Russia as well, Malevich’s worldview is being legitimized with the help of extremely varied, occasionally very distant, philosophical discourses. Scholars contradict one another even regarding the definitions of his epistemological principles; some declare him a mystically oriented, irrational thinker, who discovered his truths in the depths of his own intuition, while others call him a confirmed rationalist and a cerebral analyst. At the same time, interpreters are convinced that Malevich drew his ideas from texts by influential thinkers of his day, especially Arthur Schopenhauer, who was the “ruler of minds” at that time. In this connection, I’d like to reiterate my position, which I have expressed in articles before: looking for traces of influence in various contemporary discourses is only worthwhile in terms of the intellectual atmosphere of those days. Throughout his life, Malevich was known for his aversion to bookish culture. The founder of Suprematism never had a concealed interest in certain philosophical books, although some scholars have thought that he did, that he wanted to appear as an original and independent-minded thinker. On the basis of my work with Malevich’s archives, I can state that he did react to various texts he read — he copied passages from them and often made brief comments. The longest excerpts that he copied were from the Gospels.13 Prompted by the thinker, literary historian, and great authority on Russian culture Mikhail Gershenzon to define his relationship towards other people’s texts, Malevich made it quite clear that he mistrusted bookish wisdom in general. He wrote in his notes: You should never assume that in order to understand a certain thing you should study a particular text, buy this or that book, and then you become learned and wise. Thinking thus, I forget that I am myself a wise book, and that all the books emerged from me, from the nature of my organic development. I bear within me all the wisdom of everything that has been inherent in me long before I had time to examine a plant; but we should be able to examine ourselves, because from this ability of self-examination our actions depend, and this is our distinction from other species; this is what we call

13 Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomov, ed. A. S. Shatskikh, 5 vols. (Moscow: Gileia, 1995–2004), 5 (2004), 399–404.

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intellect. We keep forgetting that our thinking ([that is,] nature’s) is always reasonable, although it exists without either letters or figures [despite the fact that we] have never studied; we keep forgetting that [since] we are able to invent and build creative forms, arranging them into organized bodies, we can join the creative world system of nature, and do as it does.14 It is well known that philosophers, especially philosophers of the early modern times and the present, have an abiding interest in art. As seekers of fundamental truths, they assimilate the territory of art as one of the most convenient proving grounds for developing and polishing their various speculative structures. In world history, Malevich was probably one of the very few thinkers, if not the only one, who came to philosophical speculation from the realm of art. His personal vision of the world evolved as a result of his actual artistic experience as a painter, at first non-verbally, and later converting this experience to verbal expression. Positioning himself as a “proto-philosopher,” Malevich became a kind of “phenomenologist,” connecting to the twentieth century’s most powerful intellectual currents. Due to his intellectual independence and his thinking skills, he found a way to these currents all by himself, without any knowledge of his predecessors or contemporaries. His freedom from tradition and conventional norms and rules, and his mistrust of people devoted to reading and bookish culture, inspired Malevich to strive independently and directly through empirical experience towards the essence of being, and to pose questions to himself that humanity will always pose, and to which, as Malevich believed, probably quite correctly, no definite answers will ever be found. It should be added that the insight and depth of some of Malevich’s ideas have become apparent only many years after his death, in connection with new theories and ideas in philosophy and the sciences. Malevich’s intuitive ideas are being seriously discussed by physicists and by humanitarian interpreters who have been able to find parallels with Malevich’s utterances in certain theories by the most brilliant thinkers in history.15

Ibid., 169–170. See E. Martineau, Malevitch et la philosophy (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1977); Boris Groys, “Malevich i Khaidegger,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 9 (1982): 355–366. 14 15

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It must be emphasized once more that Malevich’s written legacy, as it has been assimilated in the twentieth century, incorporates, in my opinion, arbitrary interpretations of the artist’s statements. Yet students of Malevich’s writings may be excused for their shortcomings in understanding his texts. Since it was impossible to get a full picture of Malevich’s work due to insufficient publication — and, moreover, it was believed that most of his writings had been irretrievably lost — interpreters had a moral right to generalize on the basis of one or a series of similar statements, and to construct their own theories, successful or otherwise. For the sake of justice, it should be noted that the contradictory nature and lack of consistency in Malevich’s thinking also provided some grounds for such interpretations. For the sake of the same justice, it should also be said that non-Russian speakers face additional problems, since Malevich’s texts are available to them only in translation. I have commented elsewhere on Malevich’s major treatise as translated by Hans von Riesen, and first published in 1962. To this day it is the only translation of Suprematism. The World as Objectlessness.16 Hans von Riesen practically retold, rather than translated, this treatise. He eliminated passages that he did not understand, censored and severely abridged the text, changed the title, and removed the name of Mikhail Gershenzon, whom he did not know, from the dedication. The result was a streamlined, adapted Malevich. One-dimensional simplification of Malevich’s theories is also obvious in the American scholar Nina Tumarkin’s perception of Malevich’s treatise on Lenin. She suggested in her book Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia that Malevich had attempted to glorify the Lenin cult.17 Malevich’s real attitude towards the active “sowing and sprouting” of a cult of Lenin, a rehearsal of, and a prologue to, another cult of the epoch, was marked by his remarkable insight, and offered accurate diagnoses and conclusions. For an adequate understanding of Malevich, one should at least be familiar with his original texts. However, sometimes the personal strategies

16 Hans von Riesen, Suprematismus: Die gegenstandlose Welt (Cologne: Dumont Schauberg, 1962). The entire treatise, under its original title – Suprematizm. Mir kak bezpredmetnost’, ili Vechnyi pokoi — has now been published in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 3 (Moscow, 2000). 17 Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1983). For further discussion of Malevich’s text on Lenin, see the article by Konstantin Akinsha in this volume.

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of bookish academics compel them to simply invent striking theories. Declaring Malevich to be one of the founding fathers of totalitarianism has become one such theory, bringing its authors rich dividends; Malevich was proclaimed a prophet and leader of the “Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin.”18 This is said about a man who in 1924 gave an accurate diagnosis of Communism’s lethal pathology: “Communism is nothing but constant hostility and lack of peace, because it strives to subjugate any ideas and suppress them. No other type of slavery was as harsh as Communism, because the life of anyone depends on the elder [that is, on the Communist leader].”19 The five-volume collected writings of Malevich that was published in Russian between 1995 and 2004,20 and a two-volume collection of his letters and documents,21 have now created a new situation in Malevich studies. First, his main treatise has been published in Russian with very careful editing — Suprematism: The World as Objectlessness, or Eternal Peace. And what I call Malevich’s “architexton” has also been published in full.22 Close to 250 titles of Malevich’s writings have now been published. The quality and quantity of Malevich’s work that has recently been made public compel us to review the situation and pose a number of questions, which we can now answer more responsibly than before. In my opinion, Malevich the painter is only one component of Malevich the thinker; of primary importance is what this great man has created in the intellectual sphere. Having conceived his entire creation at the pre-verbal level, he completed and crowned it with a multi-dimensional and multi-faceted body of writings. A comprehensive and unbiased study of this body of work will inevitably change the course of the one-sided interpretations that have until now enveloped the legacy of Malevich. Far from suggesting any general devaluation of the existing interpretations of his texts, I believe they are sometimes very valuable. Nevertheless, I venture a cautious hope that in the twenty-first century, with more works by

See Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 19 This quotation was published for the first time in D. V. Sarab’ianov and A. S. Shatskikh, Malevich. Zhivopis’. Teoriia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1993), 363. 20 Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii. 21 Malevich o sebe. Sovremenniki o Maleviche. Pis’ma. Dokumenty. Vospominania. Kritika, ed. I. A. Vakar and T. N. Mikhienko, 2 vols. (Moscow: RA, 2004). 22 Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 3 and 4. 18

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Malevich published, the interpretive strategies of researchers will introduce and establish, not only their personal discourses, but the artist’s own worldview as well. In conclusion, I reiterate these points: 1. Contrary to accepted notions, Malevich’s theoretical and philosophical legacy has been preserved practically in full. 2. The publication of his texts in the original has laid the basis for the study and adequate interpretation of the philosophy of Suprematism. 3. The volume and significance of Malevich’s theoretical and philosophical ideas place him in the category of thinkers whose views and ideas should be studied for their own value, and not just as subsidiary material to his art. 4. The study and positioning of the Suprematist philosophy is a task for the twenty-first century. The volume and the quality of Malevich’s texts suggest that his theories will occupy a worthy place in the panoply of philosophical perceptions of the universe. 5. The study of Malevich’s “architexton” has another important function. In his writings, we find original theories and creative concepts that ordinarily could not have been realized, not only in Soviet times, but in general during his lifetime, because he was much ahead of his time. Establishing and articulating these concepts will create opportunities for forming more accurate notions of the activities of this leader of the Russian Avant-Garde.

16 Extending Malevich in Russian Contemporary Art Irina Karasik

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Y essay addresses the book’s subject “Rethinking Malevich” quite literally, for this is a good way to describe the constantly changing relation to (and relationship with) Kazimir Malevich and his work, on the part of contemporary Russian artists during the past two decades. To imagine the scale and significance of this process, it is enough to recall some of the titles of the exhibitions and happenings, or to list some of the artists who have referred in one way or another to the personality, ideas, and works of Malevich. The numerous projects include performances of the group Passions after Kazimir (New York, 1980s), Contemporary Artists for Malevich (group show, 1991, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow), Towards Malevich (Sterligov School, 1992, Vienna), An X-ray of the ‘Black Square’ (Alexei Kostroma, 1992, Moscow), Malevich’s Kitchen Garden (Here and There, 1992, St. Petersburg), To and From Malevich (1998, St. Petersburg), Malevich and Visual Thinking (Alexander Pankin, 1998), Dedicated to Malevich (Leonid Borisov, St. Petersburg, 1999), Square, Square Again (Eduard Gorohovsky, MZI, 2001), and Malevich’s . . . (Dmitry Prigov, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, 2002). The most serious and famous contemporary artists working in Moscow and St. Petersburg have created art related to Malevich. These include Ilya Kabakov, Eduard Shteinberg, Francesco Infante, Alexander Kosolapov, Leonid Sokov, Rostislav Lebedev, Vladimir Nemukhin, Ivan Chuikov, Viktor Pivovarov, Leonid Lamm, Iury Zolotnikov, Vyacheslav Koleichuk, Erik Bulatov, Nikita Alekseev, Dmitry Prigov, Alexander Pankin, Georgy

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Puzenkov, Vadim Voinov, Leonid Borisov, Sergei Bugaev Afrika, Timur Novikov, and Alexei Kostroma. The sheer number of variations on the Black Square comes close to a large two-digit number. The State Russian Museum is planning to show all of them in the fall of 2007 in an exhibition entitled The Adventures of the ‘Black Square’. To mention just two extreme examples: Georgy Puzenkov transported Malevich’s creation into virtual reality, while Vadim Voinov, on the other hand, turned this cult symbol into a material, everyday object made of mundane materials. He created a metaphysical “nothingness” out of ordinary plastic. A question mark on a black field is made out of real materials — a bent screw and the top of a nail. Black Square — a painting-provocation, “the meaning of which is unknown to the author,” is the eternal question left to us by Malevich, offering an infinity of possible interpretations.1 In the words of Vladimir Maiakovsky on a different subject, one can be sure that Malevich “is still more alive today than all those who are alive,” a fully functioning member of the contemporary art scene. Only a small part of the references to Malevich made in Russian art in the last two decades of the twentieth century can be described in terms of tradition, continuity, heritage, influence, or development. Rather, relations exist on the level of “motif,” “symbol,” or “subject matter.” Malevich is the object of reflection; an excuse for numerous commentaries; a new kind of model, hero, or character; or a ready-made image. His name is used as a means of self-assertion, and as a symbol of aesthetic radicalism. An extreme example is the Herostratic fame acquired by Alexander Brenner, who turned the act of vandalizing a painting by Malevich at the Stedelijk Museum into an artistic performance. All of this makes contemporary Russian art not an art after Malevich, but rather an art about Malevich. Such an art has many inner trajectories, many individual versions. I am interested primarily in the works that are inspired by Malevich as a personality, and that, in the words of Nikolai Burliuk, “define what is created by the creator,” by working with the symbolic image of the artist. The conceptual attractiveness of Malevich as a figure does not need explaining. No other artist among his brilliant contemporaries is surrounded by such a dense layering of myths. As is well

1 In the catalogue for the March 1915 exhibition The First Futurist Exhibition: “Tramway V,” Malevich labeled nos. 21–25: “The contents of the pictures are unknown to the artist.”

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known, an enduring attribute of postmodern artistic practice is to work with mythologized material, or with the very process of mythologizing. In Russia “Malevich studies” by artists go back to the 1960s and 1970s, and are associated primarily with the names of Francisco Infante and Eduard Shteinberg (Fig. 16–1). However, the issues in which I am interested emerged distinctly in the early 1980s, after the seminal exhibition Moscow-Paris.2 Two crucial texts appeared at that moment, articulating two diametrically opposed positions: one might be called “myth-producing,” which was written by Eduard Shteinberg, while the other might be categorized as “myth-dislodging,” and was the work of Ilya Kabakov. Shteinberg summed up his rich personal experience in an imaginary dialog with Malevich, while Kabakov proposed a new conceptual model of this relationship. The relationship between Shteinberg and Malevich has been analyzed in the literature more than once; I will emphasize only one aspect of it here.3 Shteinberg not only entered into a dialogue with Malevich, but also made this dialogue the main subject of his own creative process. His painting figures nothing but this symbolic dialogue. On 17 September 1981, Shteinberg wrote a letter to Malevich, which was disseminated throughout Moscow, both by rewriting and by word of mouth. This was not simply a conventional literary genre, but a passionate and personal address. A message to the other world is a gesture of ultimate sacralization, the highest point of the posthumous mythology of Malevich, comparable in its effect perhaps only to the Suprematist funeral itself. Malevich was acknowledged in his status of being “eternally alive,” and always present. He was held up as the highest spiritual authority, a prophet who foretold the future of Russia. The Black Square, symbolizing the country’s ultimate “godforsaken” state, became “reality incarnate” in the The Moskva–Parizh exhibition took place in Moscow at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in 1981. (As Paris–Moscou, it had been shown in 1979 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris). In Russia it was the first large-scale showing of the Russian Avant-Garde after decades of silence. All forms of fine and decorative art from 1900 to 1930 were displayed, as well as examples of architecture, literature, and theatrical art. 3 See, for example, Eduard Shteinberg, Opyt monografii (Moscow, 1992); E. Dergot, Russkoe iskusstvo XX veka (Moscow, 2002); E. Barabanov, “Zerkal’nye misterii nulia,” in Sobranie Lentsa Shenberga (Munich, 1989); Jean-Claude Marcadé, “Suprematicheskaia metageometriia Eduarda Shteinberga, ili Zhivopisnoe kak dnevnik,” in Eduard Shteinberg (St. Petersburg: State Russian Museum; Moscow: State Tretiakov Gallery, 2004); E. Barabanov, “Nebo i zemlia odnoi kartiny,” in Eduard Shteinberg, Eduard Shteinberg. Zemlia i nebo. Razmyshleniia v kraskakh (St. Petersberg: Palace Editions, 2004). 2

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16–1. Eduard Shteinberg, Malevich’s Square and the Window of the House of Fisa Zaitseva, triptych, 1985, oil on canvas, 120 x 97 cm., collection of Ia. and K. Bar-Ger.

land of “night and death.” Shteinberg stressed the metaphysical and openly religious aspects of Malevich’s worldview, and saw the language of geometry as their universal expression, but one of “tragic muteness.” It is telling that Shteinberg understood the Black Square, not as a self-sufficient plastic form, and not even as a sign, but rather as a historically specific and existentialist metaphor. “For me, your language became a way of existence in the night, which you called the Black Square,” he wrote. “It seems that the memory of humanity will always see it as the tragedy of being godforsaken.”4 In 1983, the magazine A-Z [A-Ya] published an essay by Ilya Kabakov. His deeply ironic text almost parodies the pathos of Shteinberg’s letter: “One doesn’t even know what to say about Malevich. A great artist. Inspires fear. A big boss.”5 Shteinberg’s elevated style is here replaced by everyday speech, existential experience, and petty impressions of the everyday. The historical background is limited by the frame of Kabakov’s own Soviet childhood, and totalizing lofty metaphysical metaphors are replaced by low-key daily anecdotes. Here the perceptive and evaluative context underwent striking changes; instead of Plato and religious philosophy, a dry, regulative typology of Soviet bureaucratic mentality prevails. Kabakov destroyed the existing iconography of Malevich-the-Prophet who dictated forms to the world, and replaced it with another, taken from 4 5

Shteinberg, Zemlia i nebo, 31. Il’ia Kabakov, “V budushchee voz’mut ne vsekh,” A-Ia, 5 (1983): 34.

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Soviet reality. His was an operation of debunking the idol; the frightening features of a big boss are detected in the revered figure. Kabakov verbally created a “great epoch-making” image, giving it a title that carries the doomed overtones of a verdict: “Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future.” It is filled with an almost apocalyptic trembling: Europe. A high mountain. Not even a mountain, but a kind of plateau. At the edge of the plateau, where its continuity brakes off like a sliced-off piece of cheese, there is a small group of grim people. Before them, right at their feet, where the ground, going downhill, ends abruptly, a sea of mist is spread out. How are they to go forward and to where? Behind the group of leaders, at a respectful distance so as not to disturb their meeting, stands frightened, huddled humanity . . . Silence. A great historical moment . . . Among the other great leaders is Malevich. He is calm. Poised. Completely ready to take on the huge responsibility that has befallen him. He recommends moving on, straight to the sky . . . At this great moment the horizon is open for him in both directions. The future is clear, and therefore so is the past. He has completely mastered the old existence and understood it, seized it in his hand. Here it is, silent, shrunk, and wrinkled, lying on his broad palm as a tiny square . . . Only a few will follow him into this new, elevated world . . . How to become part of this select company? How to buy a ticket for the departing train? There is a system of tests for this . . . If, for those remaining, a square is simply a square, and five colored rectangles are only five rectangles, for those who have grasped the new spirit and entered into it, these are signs of the new spiritual space… The ‘new ones,’ those initiated into the new life, will have a task to fulfill there: to mark the ‘new’ . . . land . . . with Suprematist signs, as if filling everything with Suprematist energy, so that nothing on this or other planets, nothing in the cosmos, remains without the enlivening force of the Suprematist consciousness . . . Let’s move forward — only with Malevich. Only a few will be taken along — only the best.6 Kabakov’s text marks a new, distanced and analytical, purely postmodernist, position, which we can call — using a fashionable word — a 6

Ibid., 34–35.

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16–2. Alexander Kosolapov, Malevich Country, 1987, oil on canvas, 137.2 x 177.8 cm. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2007.

deconstruction of the Malevich mythology. This position is best illustrated visually by the works of Sots-Art.7 As is well known, the original goals of Sots-Art were to discover and demonstrate the historical Avant-Garde’s will to power, to uncover its utopian illusions, and to analyze the intricacies of its later — posthumous — destiny and fame. Irony, parody, appropriation, debasing substitutions, and shifts into unexpected contexts became Sots Art’s key means of achieving these goals. The most direct and explicit example of these artistic strategies is Malevich Country by Alexander Kosolapov, painted in 1987 (Fig. 16–2). Using the radical gesture of identification, Kosolapov overlaps the canonical Socialist Realist painting Stalin and Voroshilov — its popular title is Two Leaders after the Rain — with the inscription “Malevich,” written in red block English letters that greatly exceed the scale of the painting 7 Sots-Art is one of the most important styles in Russian Unofficial Art of the second half of the twentieth century, as well as in the art of the Russian diaspora. Understood as a kind of conceptual art, it analyzed Soviet ideology and mythology by means of imitative

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itself. A judgment is clearly given by the title — Malevich Country. The apparent effectiveness of this rhetorical gesture is reinforced by the visual contradiction between the image and the inscription and by the shock of collapsing their very different meanings into a single context. What is it — a stamp, a humorous reference to an American cigarette ad, an establishment of equal responsibility? According to Boris Groys, “Socialist Realism is the Stalinist version of the Avant-Garde.” 8 This work, however, also seems to offer the possibility of a different, less critical, reading; the deconstructive arrow may be pointed in the opposite direction. Kosolapov’s painting may symbolize the return of Malevich; the process of rehabilitation had only just begun at the time the work was created. The bright, large inscription may be understood as a joyous exclamation. Malevich has won; the name of the artist has acquired international recognition (hence the English letters), it has overcome Socialist Realism, along with those who once ruled over people’s lives. Russia is now, in fact, Malevich country. In the process of further exploring the relationship between the title and the content of the image, one can think of yet another reading, which might be called historical. Perhaps the artist is showing us who is to blame, and what the country where Malevich had to live was like. The possibility of such differing readings further underscores the multidimensionality of the Malevich myth. For Kosolapov, this very mythology becomes the object of analysis, and can be explained as an “aesthetic provocation” which lies at the heart of the artistic image. The witty installation “Russian Revolutionary Chinaware” (1989) further expands our subject. It is centered on a satirical debasing of meaning — the agitational meaning is literally flushed down the toilet. The metaphysics of Suprematism turns into banal physiology; its all-encompassing idea of world building is confronted by the most utilitarian object. The installation becomes a visual metaphor for the fate of the Russian Avant-Garde; its alliance with the revolutionary power did not help, and it was washed away language, tautalogies, irony, and parody. The method, a combination of Socialist Realism and Pop-Art, was invented in 1972 by the artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. Artists such as Alexander Kosolapov, Boris Orlov, Rostislav Lebedev, Leonid Sokov, and others are also related to Sots-Art. 8 Boris Groys is a philosopher, theoretician, and critic of contemporary art. He has written several studies in the culture of contemporary art. His article “Socialist Realism is the Stalinist version of the Avant-Garde” was published in Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, 5 (1990).

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16–3. Alexander Kosolopov, Malevich Sold Out, front cover of the magazine ARTKhronika, 3 (2002) © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2007.

by its own history, almost identified with impure waste. The meaning of the image is enhanced by other aspects. It is clearly related to contemporary perceptions of the Avant-Garde, to the tendency to turn it into an object of mass culture, to its being “digested” and appropriated by a consumer society. It is interesting to look at yet another associative historiographic layer of this work. One could say that Kosolapov sets up a kind of meeting of two key discoveries of twentieth-century art (although presenting them in a slightly modified version) — Malevich’s square and Duchamp’s urinal. As with Malevich Country, the artist seems to leave open the possibility of a positive, although no less ironic, meaning. Suprematism vigorously marks any territory. Malevich’s prophecy did come true — everything became Suprematist — even the toilets. In his compositions Malevich-Marlboro and Malevich Sold Here, Kosolapov conclusively transforms the real Malevich into an image, a universal sign of symbolic exchange, a trademark. It is as if the artist foresaw the situation that later involved the rousing of his heirs, and the selling of the Black Square. It was not accidental that the cover of the issue of the ARTChronicle magazine that was devoted to its sale by the auction house Gelos used the painting by Kosolapov with a slightly modified title Malevich Sold Out (Fig. 16–3).9 9

ARTkhronika, 3 (2002).

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16–4. Leonid Borisov at the exhibition Dedicated to Malevich, St Petersburg, 1999.

Nevertheless, the subject of a dialogue with Malevich, first proposed by Shteinberg, did not disappear under the pressure of Sots-Art. The St. Petersburg artist Leonid Borisov continued a relation with Malevich along the same lines. The formal preoccupations of Suprematism undoubtedly served as one of the strongest impulses for his own geometric minimalism (Fig. 16–4). In the 1990s, Borisov complemented the experience of individual existence within a tradition, with its analytical reproduction and commentary. In his project called Dedicated to Malevich, he “repainted” famous works by Malevich, turned fragments of his works into finished paintings, completed his sketches and “authored” the Black Square. When this painting was exhibited in a museum, Borisov had his picture taken with it. Borisov’s “remakes” approximate original paintings, because they include both Suprematist and Post-Suprematist elements. The stylistic qualities of Borisov’s “copies” are quite remarkable and are far from being fortuitous. The original undergoes considerable, although not immediately noticeable, transformation: the image is enlarged, simplified, cleared of the smallest details, reduced to a visual symbol. This is especially visible in the remakes

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16–5. Leonid Borisov, sheet from the series Dedicated to Malevich, 1999, tempera on paper, 40 x 30 cm., collection of the artist.

16–6. Alexander Pankin, The Red Square, 1994, oil on canvas, 100 x 90 cm., collection of the artist.

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of Malevich’s late figurative paintings (Fig. 16–5). Malevich’s art is seen as if through a magnifying glass; it is brought closer to the viewer, taken out of its original context and brought into ours. Malevich’s signature, blown up to the full size of the paper or canvas support, and thus turned into the main subject, underlines the role of the individual in history. Borisov does not so much appropriate Malevich, as symbolically replaces, or substitutes for him. Borisov’s own monogram is barely visible, while Malevich’s ‘facsimile’ signature is significantly magnified, as if to demonstrate its authenticity. The image looks like the microphotographs made during tests for authenticity. The artist thus actualizes the presence of Malevich in contemporary culture. Alexander Pankin constructs his relationship to Malevich as that of an artist-researcher. He makes analytical copies, measures Suprematist figures, and draws their geometrical schema, in an attempt to find a mathematically precise formula of the Suprematist harmony transmitted to the viewer through vision (Figs. 16–6, 7, 8, 9, 10). Pankin also translates drawings into three-dimensional objects, imitating the process of perception. Thus, using different means, Pankin achieves an effect similar to that of Borisov, in Pankin’s own words, of bringing the artwork from “the space of Malevich” into “our own.” The results of these studies are conceptual paintings, the so-called painting-tables, painting-texts, and painting-improvisations. They illustrate the very energy of scientific research, its method, processes, and results. Suprematism appears as “an objectively appearing and objectively developing form.”10 Thus, through his own creative processes, Pankin recreates the position of Malevich-the-researcher, the Director of The State Institute of Artistic Culture, who sought to establish a significant “scientific method in art,” and develop the concept of “art as a science.” One would think that Pankin’s numerical technologies should disperse the mythical aura around the figure of Malevich, yet they sacralize him no less than Shteinberg’s symbolic transformations. The thick rows of calculations and formulas that fill Pankin’s canvases multiply the power of Malevich’s intuitive findings, which require such complex explanations. Moreover, Pankin himself has confessed that his calculations led him to conclude that Malevich’s art goes beyond the rules of geometry and mathematics, and “is based primarily on irrational impulses, on intuition.”11 10 11

A. Pankin, Malevich i visual’noe myshlenie (Moscow, 1998), 2. Ibid.

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16–7. Alexander Pankin, The Black Square of 1915, 1994, oil on canvas, 100 x 90 cm., collection of the artist.

16–8. Alexander Pankin, The Black Cross of the 1920s, 1994, oil on canvas, 100 x 90 cm., collection of the artist.

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16–9. Alexander Pankin, The Black Circle, 1994, oil on canvas, 100 x 90 cm., collection of the artist.

16–10. Alexander Pankin, Two Squares, 1994, oil on canvas, 100 x 90 cm., collection of the artist.

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16–11. Alexei Kostroma, X-Ray of “The Black Square,” 1992, mixed media, plaster, condoms, water, candles, 700 x 700 x 700 cm. Photograph of the installation in Moscow, collection of the artist.

The generation of artists that was formed in the 1980s maintained a critical attitude toward Malevich. However, unlike Sots-Art, the debunking of the idol here looks more like an amusing competitive game, during which the attackers, clearly having a good time, seek to neutralize the opponent, and having domesticated him, use him to achieve their own goals. The driving force behind such competition was the desire to break free from the psychological complexes associated with the cultural legacy of Malevich, such as power, fear, and dependence. Let’s remember Kabakov’s description, “A great artist. He inspires fear.” This is why the ideas of adoption, assimilation, and organic transformation are of primary importance for the St. Petersburg artist Alexei Kostroma. One of his first Malevich-related performances was called “An X-ray of the Black Square”(1992, Fig. 16–11, 12). Malevich’s famous new “icon” was put to a harsh test, which in the end destroyed the sacred object. The artist placed a gigantic square (5 x 5 meters) into a plastic cube, and lit it in a special way along its perimeter. By alternately turning on and off the lights, the artist transferred his breath to the form. The cube came to life and started “breathing.” At that moment, a supposed X-ray of the square was taken — it became the only remaining documentation of

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16–12. Alexei Kostroma, X-Ray of “The Black Square,” 1992, mixed media, plaster, condoms, water, candles, 700 x 700 x 700 cm. Photograph showing a detail of the installation, Moscow, collection of the artist.

the long life of this form, which was destroyed by light. Kostroma recorded this action as “Kostroma + Malevich = 0,” adapting Malevich’s own energy formula from his 1923 manifesto “The Suprematist Mirror.”12 The square built by Kostroma consisted of “atoms,” comprising 900 condoms filled with water. Under the influence of light the condoms started to break and the action resulted in the death of the square, which turned into a black puddle. The choice of the materials used in the performance is also related to Malevich, to his images, his thought processes, and his rhetorical figures of speech. It is not accidental that Kostroma used an imitation of X-rays — Malevich loved the metaphor of X-ray examination. By making his square “breathe,” by turning it into a live substance, Kostroma addressed Malevich’s description of the Black Square as “a living, royal infant,” and his pronouncement that “all my forms will live like living forms in nature.” 12

15–16.

K. Malevich, “Suprematicheskoe zerkalo,” Zhizn’ iskusstva, 20 (895), (22 May 1923):

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16–13. Alexei Kostroma, Plumage of the Black Square, 1994, oil and ballpoint pen on canvas, collection of the artist.

Another, less radical, but no less exemplary, transformation of the Black Square took place in 1994, when Kostroma applied to it his favorite technology of “feathering” (Fig. 16–13).13 As a result of such “feathering,” the square became “white and fluffy” and thus less scary. The Black Square begins to resemble a small, homey piece of carpet, while all of its grim power shrinks to the size of a tiny little benign square. In yet another project, executed under Kostroma’s supervision, “the introversion of the Black Square, its inaccessibility to the uninitiated” was overcome by a biological

Kostroma created a pun here by using the usually reflexive verb “operit’sia” (to grow feathers, which also figuratively means “to become mature”) in its active form “operit’,” which literally means “to cover something with feathers.” 13

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16–14. Alexei Kostroma, Malevich’s Kitchen Garden, 1992, an introspective performance and video installation.

method (Fig. 16–14). The idea of the project was described in the following energetic way by Ivan Govorkov: “To dig a hole in the round courtyard of the orthodox Academy of Fine Arts in the shape of the Black Square of Suprematism, to plant seeds . . . and wait until the form that grows from within the surface is born and consummed in life.” And this is exactly how it happened: in the center of the Academy’s round courtyard, a group of artists plowed the earth in the shape of a giant black square, and planted the resulting Malevich’s Kitchen Garden (this was also the title of the project) with carrots (Fig. 16–15, 16). In the fall, the crop was gathered (Fig. 16–17). The process took half a year (from May to November 1992), and resulted in a large-scale video installation, which actively engaged the viewers. It was preceded by a symbolic “organic demonstration,” during which the “demonstrators” walked through St. Petersburg holding two large artificial carrots as

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16–15. Participants in the performance of Malevich’s Kitchen Garden; Alexei Kostroma, N. Burkreeva, I. Govorkov, E. Gubanova and others in the Circular Courtyard of the Academy of Arts, St Petersburg, 1992.

16–16. Malevich’s Kitchen Garden in the Circular Courtyard of the Academy of Arts, St Petersburg, 1992.

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theatrical props, and wearing carrots in their buttonholes (Fig. 16–18). This was a kind of “remake” of the famous walk that Malevich and Alexei Morgunov took along Kuznetsky Bridge in Moscow with wooden spoons in their buttonholes on 8 February 1914. The monumental carrots were thus delivered from the Academy of Fine Arts to the Marble Hall of the Museum of Ethnography, where the exhibit was to be held. The two large props were set on each side of the museum entrance like two monumental columns at the entrance of a temple — a long white corridor or tunnel, made from white sailcloth with a long black carpet. Deep inside the hall stood a table with a tray on it, filled with 300 bright orange, peeled carrots. Behind it towered the figure of the great Kazimir marked by a Black Square (Fig. 16–19). On both sides of the entrance stood two screens, one of which showed a sequence of Malevich’s peasant paintings, while the other simultaneously showed scenes of the ‘garden work’ in the courtyard of the Academy. Only one person at a time was allowed to enter the inner room; however, a video screen placed above the entrance broadcast the secret sacrament, turning it into a mass action for those awaiting their turn. Each person took a carrot, and, while eating it, made their way back out. In the end, the “icon” was eaten in the most prosaic way, the “fruits” of Suprematism were digested on an individual biological level, and the “idol” was completely buried. This action exemplifies an extreme case of desacralization of the Suprematist myth; the process of creation and perception was likened to the biological process of digesting food, while the elevated name of Malevich was ironically related to an everyday notion from the sphere of debased consumption that Malevich despised. The artists again used their hero’s own ideas; we may recall the comparison, typical for Malevich, between the human organism and a biological one, as well as his frequent use of biological terminology. In their relation to the legacy of Malevich, the so-called neo-academic painters from St. Petersburg also employ the method of domestication. Timur Novikov even described a possible way of humanizing the Black Square: “One needs to put in the middle some kind of little sign” that will stimulate visual associations (a small white circle on a black ground, for example, will look like a moon). In Novikov’s later works, the Black Square has been conquered by Apollo, who stands on it, as on a pedestal. The square, thus, turns into the opposite of itself, and begins to worship other gods; a kind of Victory over the Sun, the other way around. Novikov reinforces this victory by creating several versions of victory banners that symbolize the total and

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16–17. The Carrot Harvest from Malevich’s Kitchen Garden, September 1992, in the Circular Courtyard of the Academy of Arts, St Petersburg. The performance was accompanied by an extended video installation in the Museum of Ethnography. Photograph by V. Eremeev.

16–18. Going over Palace Bridge, 1 November 1992, a performance in connection with the opening of the exhibition Malevich’s Kitchen Garden at the Russian Museum of Ethnography, St Petersburg. Alexei Kostroma (in front) and Ivan Govorkov are carrying an enormous carrot and wearing smaller carrots in their buttonholes. Another gigantic carrot is being carried behind. Photograph by D. Dovetsky.

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16–19. Alexei Kostroma, Malevich’s Kitchen Garden, 1992, Russian Museum of Ethnography, St Petersburg. Installation photograph, collection of the artist.

16–20. Dmitry Prigov, Malevich’s Square, 1989, ink and ballpoint pen on newspaper, 180 x 416 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

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final triumph of the formerly defeated sun. Novikov was clearly engaging in a polemical dialogue with Malevich. Malevich was important for him both as a powerful enemy who often reinforced the actions of the victors, and as an authoritative ally, who confirmed the correct choice of direction. Novikov stated unequivocally and repeatedly that the New Academy continued the traditions of the “correct” Malevich, who admitted his sins and at the end of his life created a “typical classical art.”14 Dmitry Prigov’s relationship with Malevich barely fits within the framework of these classifications. His work from 1989, Malevich’s Square, might well be interpreted as a Sots-Art deconstruction, that is, an identification of the Avant-Garde with Socialist Realism (Fig. 16–20). The Black Square, the great icon of Suprematism, has been turned into a sheet from the despised newspaper Pravda. Besides ideology, Prigov also works with other contexts, perhaps more important ones, such as the visual stereotypes of Malevich’s art, and the mechanisms of myth creation; for example, the words “horror” and “mystery” can be seen on the sheet of newspaper. Ultimately, Malevich’s Square is not a square at all, but rather a large irregular blotch. In a recent installation at the Russian Museum, Prigov’s sensibility was close to that of the younger generation of artists. He assaulted the sacred object, creating a mock version of the myth of greatness, but not dismissing it. The artist translated the idea of Malevich as the beginning of all beginnings into a witty and spectacular plastic form. Malevich created the Black Square — his “living, royal infant” — from which in turn sprung forth all twentieth century art. Therefore, Prigov created a form that symbolically resembles the female reproductive organs containing the generative power of the Black Square (Fig. 16–21). The literal identification with the female organs has an obvious comical effect, further reinforced by the blunt title Malevich’s Vagina (although during its exhibition at the State Russian Museum the title word “vagina” was replaced by a series of dots), and “risky” details, such as a glass with red liquid denoting the bodily fluids of Mother-Malevich. At the same time, Prigov filled his object with “metaphysical power and magical mysteriousness,”15 using scale, empty space, and semi-darkness. Yet

Timur Novikov, “Moe raskaianie Malevicha. (Interv’iu Iu. Dvorkina, VGTRK, 1995 goda),” in Timur Petrovich Novikov. Lektsii (St. Petersburg, 2002), 126. 15 The artist’s descriptive annotation at the Russian Museum exhibition. 14

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16–21. Dmitry Prigov, Malevich’s . . ., 2002, installation detail, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

he built the sacred space from perishable materials — newpapers that are associated with the quick flow of time and the ephemeral nature of life itself — thus erasing all traces of any remaining suggestion of a great experience and image of Malevich. Also important is the connotation newspapers have with publicity and buzz, including the buzz created around Malevich. Prigov’s installation presented Malevich as “our everything,” even on the biological level. Meanwhile, everyday life provided examples that were no less explicit. Alfa-Bank, which was the general sponsor of a Malevich exhibition at the New York Guggenheim Museum in 2003, not only mentioned this fact in its annual report, but gave to that entire document a Malevichean look. The skillful use of an elegantly framed parallel to Malevich was an educated and well-thought-out public relations move: a display of the bank’s radicalism, success, and promising future. The leading people in the bank are placed, seated and standing, against a background of figures painted by Malevich — an unexpected, and expressive move, in the spirit of the new Russian journalism. Malevich’s own silent “shadow”

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presence advertises the life force of the intellectual elite, reminiscent of a time to which there is no return. The inside covers of the reports carry reproductions of paintings and brief quotations by Malevich. Their choice is not unplanned — they characterize the contemporary situation in Russia and they point to new historical tasks that will change the country’s destiny, the realization of which ostensibly constitutes one of the goals of the bank’s activity. Moreover, Malevich’s energetic statements are directly related to specific sections of the report, and function as their epigrams. The bank’s achievements, for example, are illustrated by The Red Cavalry and the words, “Everything runs forward from the past toward the future, but everything has to live in the present.” The quotation “Life grows, and its growth can be seen in the emergence of new forms. It is in this new form that today’s life is different from yesterday’s,” opens the section “Change of form: Constancy of movement.” And so on, all in the same vein.16 The process of appropriation is not always artistic. In the village of Nemchinovka, an elite housing development recently grew up, entirely surrounding Malevich’s small memorial grave. The main street has been called “Malevich Street.” Life’s projects often clearly anticipate artistic projects. I will end with a satirical poem that conveys the essence of my subject: Malevich just dashed off a square That sells like hot cakes everywhere, Now all the people, high and low, The talented Malevich know.17 16 The report starts with the bank’s interesting manifesto, in which Malevich appears as the author of a new national idea, which echoes the well-known words of the poet Fedor Tiutchev: “Russia cannot be understood through reasoning, it cannot be measured linearly, it has a special stature — one can only believe in Russia.” Here is the bank’s statement: “How will the success of Russia be measured many years from now — in the middle, or at the end of the next century? We at Alfa-Bank are convinced it will be measured not with a common ruler, but with the Black Square, since its special stature affirms a belief in the genius of Russia. To be an exemplary form, and to set the standards of content among thousands of one’s peers — such is the path of searching for truth that Alfa-Bank walks, following the Suprematists, the Futurists, and the innovators. The path toward complete knowledge is endless, but to follow it, step by step, is our task. In the name of those who led the way. For the sake of those who will follow us.” 17 Malevich namakhal kvadrat/ Teper’ kvadraty naraskhvat/ Prostoludin i korolevich / Vse znaiut kto takoi Malevich.

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Notes on Contributors Konstantin Akinsha is an art historian and journalist, whose main interests are Russian art of the first half of the twentieth century, and the restitution of cultural property. He has published more than one hundred articles on these topics in American, British, Dutch, German, and Russian publications. Akinsha was awarded the George Polk Memorial Award for Reporting on Culture (1991) and the National Headliner Award (1996). His books include Beautiful Loot: Soviet Plunder of European Art Treasures (1995, with Grigorii Kozlov and Sylvia Hochfield); The American Association of Museum’s Guide for Provenance Research (2001; with Nancy Yeide and Amy Walsh); and The Holy Place (2007; with Grigorii Kozlov and Sylvia Hochfield). At present, Konstantin Akinsha is the Eugene and Daymel Shklar Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University, and is writing a doctoral dissertation on photomontage and the Russian Avant-Garde for the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Natalia Avtonomova graduated from the Department of Art History at Moscow State University in 1970, and began working at the State Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, where she remained until 2000, rising to be Head of the Department of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Painting. In 1989, she organized the first exhibition in Russia devoted exclusively to the art of Vasily Kandinsky. In 1994, she published (with Dmitry Sarabianov) a major monograph on this painter, and organized a conference exploring his life and work. She published a two-volume collection of the artist’s theoretical writings in Russian in 2001. In addition to her work on Kandinsky, Natalia Avtonomova has curated and helped to curate numerous exhibitions of the Russian Avant-Garde, including The Great Utopia, and major retrospectives of individual artists, such as Chagall, Malevich, Goncharova and Larionov, and Kliun.

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Since 2000, Avtonomova has been Head of the Museum of Private Collections within the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, where she is responsible for promoting links between the museum and private collectors. She also regularly organizes exhibitions and catalogues pertaining to works drawn from private collections. Adrian Barr completed a monumental masters thesis on the theoretical writings of Malevich at the University of Otago in New Zealand. At present he is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Rutgers University in the U. S., where he is writing a doctoral dissertation on early Soviet art. The dissertation focuses on debates surrounding the form and content of the “New Soviet Man,” whose appearance was supposed to offer material proof of the death of capitalism and the transition to Communism. In particular, Barr is interested in how art articulated and framed this debate, which offered multiple, and often competing, models to the public as exemplars of Sovietness. He also continues to research and write about Malevich. Elena Basner is an art historian and exhibition curator, who wrote her doctoral thesis on Malevich’s late works and the re-invention of his creative development. She worked for a considerable time (1978–2003) at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, where, with the personal support of Evgeny Kovtun, she specialized in Russian avant-garde art. A memorable event of her museum career was working on the Larionov exhibition in 1980 with Kovtun and Gleb Pospelov. From the late 1980s, she participated in numerous exhibitions and international symposia; she was curator of the historic Malevich exhibitions of 1988 and 2000 at the museum. Her final show was the exhibition devoted to the work of Natalia Goncharova (2002). Basner is currently working at the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, where she has organized the Museum of the Avant-Garde Movement in St. Petersburg (“Matiushin’s House”). Linda S. Boersma received her Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of Amsterdam, and teaches art history at the University of Utrecht and the Utrecht University College. Her dissertation concerned Malevich’s 1927 exhibition at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung in Berlin. In English, she has published The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1994), and “On Art, Art Analysis and Art Education: the Theoretical Charts of Kazimir Malevich,” in Kazimir

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Malevich 1878-1935, exhibition catalogue (1988). In addition to the history of Russian avant-garde art, she is interested in art theory, and Western modern and contemporary art, in particular, abstract art. In this area, she has published “Neo-Abstract” in Neo. Visies op Neo, exhibition catalogue (Utrecht: The Centraal Museum, 2003), on American abstract painting after modernism, and articles in Dutch art magazines such as Jong Holland, Metropolis M, and Museumtijdschrift; and in Bomb magazine, N.Y. She lives in Amsterdam. John E. Bowlt teaches the history of Russian art at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA, where he is also Director of the Institute of Modern Russian Culture. Trained as a specialist in Russian language and literature (Ph.D.: University of St. Andrews, Scotland), he developed a particular interest in the relationship between the literary and visual arts of the early twentieth century, a major stimulus being his extended periods of research in Russian archives and museums from the late 1960s onwards. Much of his scholarly enquiry is concerned with individual writers who manifested a particular capacity for painting (e.g. Bely, Maiakovsky), or painters who explored poetry and prose as a means of expression (Bakst, Kandinsky, Malevich). He is also drawn to the theoretical and critical statements made by writers and artists about the interaction of the disciplines, esthetic synthesis, and synaesthesia, and some of his lengthier publications, such as Russian Art of the Avant-Garde and The Life of Kandinsky in Russian Art, have explored such topics. His current major research project, the literary and artistic legacy of Léon Bakst, continues and modifies his preceding concerns. In collaboration with Russian colleagues, Bowlt will soon be publishing Bakst’s critical and creative prose in three volumes. Charlotte Douglas has been fascinated by Malevich since she was a young girl. When she was a teenager, a photograph of the White Square (published by the Museum of Modern Art) hung on the wall above her bed. She also frequently saw Malevich’s Knife Grinder in Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme collection at the Yale University Art Gallery. Now in her 70s, she keeps trying to give up the study of Malevich, but so far has not succeeded. douglas @ nyu.edu.

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Éva Forgács is Adjunct Professor of Art History at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and formerly an Associate Professor at the László Moholy-Nagy University in Budapest, Hungary. Her major field of research is the Avant-Garde in Central Europe and Russia in the early twentieth century, with special emphasis on the Russian Avant-Garde’s impact on modernism in Central Europe, and the Hungarian avant-garde movements. Her main publications include The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics (1995), Between Worlds: A Source Book of Central European AvantGardes 1910–1930 (co-edited with Timothy O. Benson), as well as volumes of her selected essays Az ellopott pillanat (The Stolen Moment, 1994) and A Duna Los Angelesben (Los Angeles on the Danube, 2006), published in Hungary. She edited Művészet veszélyes csillagzat alatt. Válogatás Kállai Ernő írásaiból (Art under a Dangerous Constellation: Selected writings of Ernő Kállai), a sourcebook of the late art critic’s articles (1981). She co-curated (with Nancy Perloff ) the exhibition Monuments of the Future. Designs by El Lissitzky at the Getty Research Institute in 1998. Forgács is also active as an art critic, and has published essays, reviews, and monographs on contemporary artists, including László Fehér (1993, 1999), El Kazovsky (1996), and Michal Rovner (2003). Tatiana Goriacheva is a Senior Researcher in the Modern Graphics Department of the State Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, and a member of the Russian Avant-Garde Research Commission of the Literature and Language Section of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dr. Goriacheva’s general area of interest is the history and interconnections of Russian avant-garde art and literature, with a particular focus on Futurism, Constructivism, and Suprematism. She has published numerous articles placing the Avant-Garde in a wide social and cultural context, and has discussed its work in relation to parallel phenomena in literature, philosophy, and West European art. She has also written about the influence of specific social doctrines and philosophical ideas on the theory and practice of the Russian Avant-Garde. Goriacheva is especially interested in the social and philosophical aspects of Malevich’s utopia, and the activity of the Unovis group. In this connection, she prepared the text, commentary, and introductory article for a facsimile edition of the Unovis Almanac (Moscow, 2003). She has also done some teaching, including lectures on the theory and practice of Russian Design at the Higher Polytechnic School in Cologne, Germany.

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Pamela Kachurin earned her Ph.D. in Modern Russian Art from Indiana University in 1998. She has published articles on a wide variety of subjects related to Russian and Soviet art, including the art market in early Soviet Russia, Vladimir Tatlin, and exhibitions during the Cold War. She was curator of the exhibition Designing the Modern Utopia: Soviet Textiles from the Lloyd Cotsen Collection, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and author of the exhibition catalogue. Dr. Kachurin currently teaches courses on Russian art at Duke University. Irina Karasik is a Chief Curator at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, and Head of its Department of New Trends in Art. She has published extensively about Malevich, his contemporaries and his students, and the history of the Russian Avant-Garde. She was an editor of From the History of the Museum: A Collection of Articles and Publications (St. Petersburg, 1995); In Malevich’s Circle: Confederates, Students, and Followers in Russia 1920s – 1950’s (St. Petersburg, 2000); and The Russian Avant-Garde: Representation and Interpretation (St. Petersburg, 2001). Karasik also has a major interest in Russian art and artists of today, and has published a number of articles and catalogues in this area. James Lawrence recently completed a doctoral dissertation for the University of Texas at Austin on critical problems in the work of Barnett Newman and Donald Judd. He has published numerous reviews and articles on modern and contemporary art, and is a regular contributor to the Burlington Magazine. Christina Lodder is Professor of Art History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. The focus of her research is the art of the Russian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s, with a particular interest in Constructivism, extending into International Constructivism and design. Her main publications include Russian Constructivism (1983); “Catalogue Raisonné of the Constructions and Sculptures of Naum Gabo” (1985, with Colin Sanderson); Constructing Modernity: The Art and Career of Naum Gabo (2000, with Martin Hammer); Gabo on Gabo: Texts and Interviews (2000, co-editor with Martin Hammer); and Constructive Strands in Russian Art (2005). She was one of the curatorial team for the Modernism exhibition (2006, Victoria and Albert Museum, London), and her book Malevich is to be published by Phaidon Press. She is currently working on Malevich’s architectural projects.

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Myroslava M. Mudrak is Professor of History of Art at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. Her scholarly interests center on the art of Eastern and Central Europe, Ukraine, and Russia, and she has published on topics ranging from the Studio of Plastic Arts in Prague to the semiotics of Suprematism in the art of the Neue Slowenische Kunst in Slovenia. Her book The New Generation and Artistic Modernism in Ukraine 1927–1930, published in 1986, won the Kovaliw Prize for Ukrainian Studies. Professor Mudrak has recently completed a catalogue of Ukrainian modernist book covers from 1914 to 1945 in the collection of the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art in Kiev, and is currently preparing a study of photomontage in Eastern Europe. Aleksandra Shatskikh gained her Ph.D. in Russia, and is a leading authority on the history of the Russian Avant-Garde, with a particular focus on Malevich and Suprematism. She has written extensively (about 200 articles and 10 books) on these topics, including the invaluable Kazimir Malevich: Collected Works in Five Volumes (Moscow: Gilea, 1995–2004), which she edited. Her article “Malevich and Film” has been published in The Burlington Magazine: A Centenary Anthology” (Yale University Press, 2003). Her most recent book is Vitebsk: Life of Art 1917–1922 (Yale University Press, 2007). Irina Vakar is a Chief Curator at the State Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, and co-author, with Tatiana Mikhienko, of the major two-volume edition of Malevich’s letters, documents, and memoirs about him, Malevich about Himself: Contemporaries about Malevich (Moscow, 2004). In addition to several articles elucidating the art and biography of Malevich, she is the author of some forty articles concerning other aspects of twentieth-century Russian art, including essays on the genesis of the Avant-Garde, painting and the theater, the connection between the Russian and French schools of artistic modernism, and the fate of the Russian Avant-Garde in the 1920s and 1930s. Most recently, Vakar has published an exhibition catalogue article about Konstantin Rozhdestvensky, a former student of Malevich, in honor of the hundred-year anniversary of his birth.

Index Numbers in italics indicate illustrations A A–Z (A–Ya, Moscow) 331 abstract art, see objectless art Abstract Expressionism xviii, 302–309 academicism 72, 87, 104 Academy of Arts, St. Petersburg/ Petrograd 2, 6, 9, 85, 126, 344, 345, 345, 346 Adaskina, Natalia xiv advertising posters 302, 303, 303, 305 airplanes 208 Akinsha, Konstantin vi, 139, 355 Akhrr, see Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia Akhr, see Association of Artists of the Revolution Alekseev, Nikita 328 Alfa-Bank, Russia 350–351 All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kiev 113 Alma, Pieter 74 Altman, Natan Isaevich 241 American art 64, 257, 302–313 American Avant-Garde 302–313 American skyscrapers 188–189 anarchism 306 Anarchy (Anarkhia, Moscow) iv Andersen, Troels ii, xi–xii, 318

Andriotti, Libero 261 anti-intelligentsia campaign 116, 126, 127 Apollinaire, Guillaume 95n17, 104–105 Apollo 346 appropriateness (tselesobraznost’), concept of 70–71 Der Ararat (Munich) 239 Archipenko, Alexander Profirevich 86n8 architectonics 190 architecture 51, 80–81, 172–202, 249 Arp, Jean (Hans) 55–56, 231 art and politics ix–x, xviii, 51, 52–53, 62, 111, 114–115, 121– 138, 139–158, 168–171, 262, 282, 287, 291 art and society 164, 169–171, 213 art, role of 192, 209, 211–214 artistic form 165, 213–214, 215– 216, artistic sensation 164–165 ARTChronicle (ARTKhronika, Moscow) 335, 335 Art Nouveau 6, 30, 33–35, 42 Art in America (New York) 308 Art to the Masses (Iskusstvo v massy, Moscow) 289

362 ARTnews (New York) 156–158 Arts Magazine (New York) 294 Arvatov, Boris Ignatevich 77, 322 Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (Akhrr) 121, 128, 130n38, 137 Association of Artists of the Revolution (Akhr) 289–290 Association of Contemporary Artists of Ukraine (OSMU) 112 Association of Revolutionary Artists of Ukraine (ARMU) 112 Association of Wandering Exhibitions (the Wanderers) 2, 165 Austria 2 Avant-Garde and society 162–169 Avant-Garde Almanac (Avangard almanakh, Kiev) 103, 289 Avramov, Arseny 154 Avtonomova, Natalia vi, 40, 355– 356 B The Ball, ballet (Monte Carlo, 1929) 264 Barbizon painters 92 Baroque art 216, 217 Baku, Azerbaijan 154 Barr, Adrian vii, 203, 356 Barr, Alfred H. vi, xi, 55–56, 295– 302, 305, 313, 356 Basner, Elena v, vi, xvi, 16, 27, 356 Bauhaus, Germany xi, 51, 52, 57, 61, 234, 236, 239, 243, 252 Beekman, Chris 73, 223, 226 Behne, Adolf 241 Beklemishev, Vladimir 11 Belarus xvi Benois, Alexandre (Alexander Nikolaevich Benua) 44, 53–55, 167, 321–322 and Malevich 167, 321–322

Beraud, Henri 148–149 Berdiaev, Nikolai Alexandrovich 175, 176, 177 Berenson, Bernard 300 Bergson, Henri xix, 179, 301 Berlin, Germany i, xi, 51, 61, 224, 227, 234, 242, 247, 248, 252, 254, 258, 319 Bernasconi, Ugo 261 Bessonova, Marina 254 Bible 323 biocosmism 180 Black Mountain College, North Carolina, USA 306 blockade of Russia 73 Blue Rider (Blaue Reiter) group 50 Second Blue Rider Exhibition (Munich, 1912) 239 Blue Rose exhibition (Moscow, 1907) 26, 34 Blue Rose group 94 Böchlin, Arnold 260 Boccioni, Umberto 94 Bogdanov (Malinovsky), Alexander Alexandrovich 180 Boersma, Linda S. vi, 223, 356–357 Bohomazov, Oleksander (Alexander Konstantinovich Bogomazov) 86n8, 92–104, 93, 101 and Malevich 92–104 Böhme, Jakob 239 Boichuk, Mykhailo (Mikhail Lvovich Boichuk) 86n8, 104–118, 106, 265 and Malevich 104–107, 115– 118, 265 Boichukism 105, 115–118 Bois, Yve-Alain 250 Bolshakov, Anatoly 10 Bolshevik Party and art 123–125 Bolshevik ritual 152–155 Borisov, Leonid 328, 329, 336,

363

INDEX

336–338, 337 Borisov-Musatov, Viktor Elpidiforovich 26, 94 Botticelli, Sandro 25 Bowlt, John E. vi, xii, 1, 308, 357 Braque, Georges 95n17 Brenner, Alexander 329 Breton, André 257 Brik, Osip Maximovich 76, 81, 150 Brodsky, Isaak Izrailovich 147 Broglio, Mario 257 Buchloh, Benjamin 203 Bugaev Afrika, Sergei 329 Burkreeva, N. 345 Bulatov, Erik 328 Burliuk, David Davidovich 9, 87n9, 95n19 Burliuk, Nikolai Davidovich 329 Burliuk, Vladimir Davidovich 26 Byzantine art 104, 105, 110, 308 Byzantine mosaics 308 Byzantine revival 104 C Campanella, Tommaso 109 Campigli, Massimo 261, 263 Carena, Felice 261 Carrà, Carlo 257, 261 Casorati, Felice 257, 261 Ceasar 167 censorship 317 Central Telegraph and Post-Office, Moscow 2, 10 Cézanne, Paul 68, 163, 164, 168, 212 Cézannism 30 Chagall, Marc (Mark Zakharovich Shagal) 245 Champions of the New Art (Unovis), Vitebsk xvi, 49, 71, 73, 74, 77, 78–79, 80, 124,130,182–183, 189, 227, 238, 241, 243, 244,

248 Unovis Exhibition, Moscow, 1921 69 Chasnik, Ilia Grigorevich 78, 158, 189, 250 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Gavrilovich 180 chiaroscuro 216 Chirico, Giorgio de vii, 254–293, 266, 267, 273, 275, 276, 281, 282, 283, 285, 291 and Malevich 256–259, 265–293, Chistye prudy, Moscow 16 Christ 154, 250 Christianity 140, 174–175, 229 Chuikov, Ivan 328 Cimabue (Cenni di Pepo/Peppi) 105 City Council of Petrograd, see Petrograd City Soviet Civil War in Russia xvi, 226 Clark, Timothy James xix classicism 64, 187–188, 290 Cold War ii, xiv coldness in art 167 collage 94, 157 color 18–24, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 48, 57, 88, 100, 101–2, 290 colorgraphy 101 Commission for Immortalising Lenin’s Memory 142 Committee on Art Affairs x Committee for the Experimental Study of Artistic Culture 136 Communism xiii, xv, 73, 239, 245, 326 Communist Youth Movement, see Komsomol Communist Party of the Soviet Union 128, 139 and art ix–x, xviii, 25, 62, 114, 128, 262, 282, 287, 291

364 Comœdia (Paris) 257 composition 45–47, 67–68 Compton, Susan xii construction 67–68, 243 Constructivism 308 distinction between Russian and International Constructivism 71, 81 International Constructivism 71, 81, 168, 243 relation to Suprematism vii, 67–81 Russian Constructivism 52, 69–81, 128, 295, 322 Constructivist Congress (Weimar, 1922) 230 Constructivists, Working Group of, Moscow 52, 75, 78 Contemporary Architecture (Sovremennaia arkhitektura, Moscow) xiv Contemporary French Art Exhibition (Moscow, 1928) 261–262, 289, 291 contemporary Russian art vii, 328–351 content in art 163, 164, 165–166 Corn, Arthur 80 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille 3, 56 Crowther, Paul xix Crystal Palace, London 180 cube, symbolism of 155–156 Cubism 30, 38–39, 67–68, 70, 78, 92, 94, 95, 168, 176, 260, 289, 297, 302, 309, 310 Malevich on Cubism 38–39, 92, 205, 211, 213 Cubism and Abstract Art Exhibition (New York, 1936) vi, xi, 55–56, 295–297, 296, 301, 303, 303, 305 Cubo-Futurism 37, 39, 42, 59, 84, 85, 88–90, 92, 94, 100, 177–

178, 295, Cultural Foundation, “KhardzhievChaga Center”, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam iii, 319 D Dada 147, 168, 250 Dali, Salvador 171 Davos, Switzerland 234 De Stijl 73–75, 232, De Stijl (Leiden) 73–75, 103, 223, 227, 228, 229, 230, 232, 233, 235, 236, 239–240 Debussy, Claude 161 Decorative Art (Dekorativnoe iskusstvo, Moscow) xv Decorative Institute, Leningrad 133, 135, 136 Decree “On the Reformation of Literary and Artistic Organisations”, 1932 x defamiliarization (ostranenie) 90–92, 90n11 Degenerate Art Exhibition (Munich, 1937) 50 democracy and art 169 Demosfenova, Galina iv Denisov, Vasily Ivanovich 26 Department of General Ideology, Ginkhuk 126, 129, 131 Department of Material Culture, Ginkhuk 126 Department of Methodology, Ginkhuk 135 Department of Organic Culture, Ginkhuk 126, 131 Department of Physiology, Ginkhuk 134 Depression 301 Dessau, Germany 234, 235 Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin iii Diaghilev (Diagilev), Sergei Pavlovich

INDEX

264 Dictatorship of the proletariat 125 Doesburg, Nelly van 234 Doesburg, Theo van vi, 73, 76, 80, 223ff, 230, 239–240 on the quadrilateral and the square 228–229 and Lissitzky 227–231, 232, 234, 235, 251–252 Donatello (Donato di Nicolo Bardi) 25 Donkey’s Tail group 2, 39 Dorner, Alexander xi Dostoevsky, Fedor Mikhailovich 175 Douglas, Charlotte i, vii, xii, xix, 16, 30–31, 134, 254, 308, 318, 357 Drutt, Matthew 203 Duccio di Buoninsegna 105 Duchamp, Marcel 308, 335 Düsseldorf, Germany xx Dutch modernist artists vi, 73–75, 223–236 E Eastern Europe xvi eclipse 90 education policy in the Soviet state 126 Efimovych, Serhij 100n28 Egyptian art 105 Ehmeke (Fritz Helmut Ehmke) 303 Ehrenburg (Erenburg), Ilia Grigorevich 70, 76, 154, 228 Einstein, Carl 232 Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich 150–151 Elementarism 225–226 Eluard, Paul 257 Ender, Boris Vladimirovich 134, 136, 137 Ender, Maria Vladimirovna 136,

365 137 Engels, Otton 11 the environment 218 Ermolaeva, Vera Mikhailovna 121, 124, 135, 136, 137, 195, 290 Ernst, Max 257, 261 Erste Russische Kunstausstellung, see First Russian Art Exhibition L’Esprit Nouveau (Paris) 103 Ettinger, Pavel 6–8 Europa Almanach (Potsdam) 232 Europe i, ii, 111 Expressionism 35, 36, 38, 73, 223, 232, 262, 309 Exter (née Grigorevich), Alexandra Alexandrovna 86n8, 94–97 Extraordinary Commission for Lenin’s Funeral 155 Experimental Laboratory of Art, Committee for the Experimental Study of Artistic Culture, Leningrad 138 F factory 154, 155 factory sirens, 154, 155 Fainberg, Leonid 2 Falk, Robert Rafailovich 124 Fauconnier, Henri Le 94n16 Fauvism 36 Fedorov, Nikolai Fedorovich vii, 140n8, 172–202 Fedorov-Davydov, Alexei Alexandrovich 30 Férat, Serge (Sergei Iastrebtsov) 95n17, 259 film 141, 148, 150–151 Filonov, Pavel Nikolaevich 1, 125 Finkel, Stuart 124 Finland Railway Station, Petrograd 156 First International Dada Fair (Berlin,

366 1920) 243 First Russian Art Exhibition (Berlin/ Amsterdam, 1922–23) 51, 73, 228, 240–241, 243 First World War i, 88, 226, 239, 300, 304 Fisher, Vladimir 10 Florentine Renaissance painting 1, 25 folk art 96–97 Forgács, Éva vi, 237, 358 Formal and Theoretical Department, Ginkhuk 52, 126, 128–129, 131 formalism x, xiii, xviii fourth dimension xii, xviii, 176, 179, 301 France 2 French art 261–263 fresco 112n45, 112–113, 115 Funi, Achille 261 Futurism 30, 70, 77, 87n9, 88, 94, 95, 128, 205, 211, 213, 242, 257, 289, 295, 297, 310 G Gabo, Naum Borisovich (Neemiia Abramovich Pevzner) 241 Gakhn, see State Academy of Artistic Sciences, Moscow Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris 258 Gan, Alexei Mikhailovich xiv, 70, 79, 81 Ginkhuk, see State Institute of Artistic Culture geometrical abstraction 161 geometry in art 24, 77, 155–156, 161, 309 George, Waldemar 258 Gerasimov, Alexander Mikhailovich 147 German art 54, 257

German Consulate, Paris 53 Germany iv, xi, xiii, 2, 52, 53, 62, 73, 234, 235, 239, 301, 302, 319 Germans 74 Gershenzon, Mikhail Osipovich iv, 199, 200–201, 323, 325 Giii, see State Institute of Art History, Leningrad Ginkhuk, see State Institute of Artistic Culture Giotto di Bondone 105 Glagol, Sergei (Sergei Sergeevich Goloushev) 11 glasnost’ iii Glaviskusstvo, see Main Arts Administration Glavnauka, see Main Academic Administration Glavpolitprosvet, see Main Political Education Administration Gleizes, Albert 94 Golubkina, Anna Semenovna 6 Goncharova, Natalia Sergeevna 11, 26, 259, 264 Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeevich iii Gorky, country estate near Moscow 153 Goriacheva, Tatiana vii, xvi, 63, 238, 358 Gorokhovsky, Eduard 328 Govorkov, Ivan 344, 345, 347 Grabar, Igor Emmanuilovich 264 Graham, Loren 126 Gray, Camilla xii, 307 graphic design 302 Great Berlin Art Exhibition (Berlin, 1927) i, ii, 254 Great War, see First World War Greeks 68, 290 Greenberg, Clement xiii, xviii Groys, Boris 326, 334

INDEX

Gropius, Walter 243 Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung, see Great Berlin Art Exhibition, 1927 Guggenheim Museum, see Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Gugunov, Ivan 11 Gubanova, Elena 345 Guro, Elena Genrikhovna 237 H Hahl-Koch, Jelena 37 handicraft 96–97 Häring, Hugo xi Harmsen, Ger 73 Haussmann, Raoul 243 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple xii Hermitage (Ermitazh, Moscow) 75 Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops (Vkhutemas), Moscow 136 Higher Scientific and Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics, Moscow xiv Hoff, Robert van ’t 73, 74, 226 Holubiatnykiv, Pavlo 101 Horbachov, Dmytro 84 Hotel Polonia, Warsaw i House of the Soviets (Dom sovetov), Moscow 153, 154 human consciousness 207ff Hungarian artists 74 I i 10 (Amsterdam) 252–253 Iakerson, David Aronovich 124 Iakulov, Georgy Bogdanovich 26 Iasinsky, Konstantin Alexeevich 6 icon painting 1, 62, 68, 88, 101, 105, 140, 179, 214–216, 256, 258, 281, 291 Impressionism 6, 13, 16, 18, 26, 29,

367 31, 33, 42, 96, 118, 161 Impressionists 6 industrialization 91 Infante, Francesco 328, 330 infinity 63, 78, 179–180, 309 Institute of Artistic Culture (Inkhuk), Moscow 51, 71, 123, 242 Institute of Plastic Arts, Kiev 110 intellectuals, purge of 114, 124–125 International Congress of Progressive Artists (Düsseldorf, 1922) 229 International Constructivism, see Constructivism Ioganson, Karl (Karlis Johansons) 77–78 Iron Curtain xiv Isakov, Sergei Konstantinovich 136 Italian Futurism 94, 95 Italian painting 256–257, 261, 262–263 Italy 2, 105 Itten, Johannes 239 Iudin, Lev Alexandrovich 63, 70, 136 Iuon, Konstantin Fedorovich 10, 127 J Jack (Knave) of Diamonds group 11 Jacob, Max 95n17 Jeanneret, Charles-Edouard (Le Corbusier) 60, 235 Jewish cultural Renaissance 245 Joyce, James 305 Judd, Donald vi, 308, 309–313, 312 Jugendstil, see Art Nouveau Jupiter 202 K Kabakov, Ilya Iosifovich 328, 330, 331–332, 341

368 Kachurin, Pamela vii, 121, 359 Kállai, Ernst (Ernö) 240 Kandinsky, Vasily (Wassily) Vasilevich vi, 27–39, 31, 31, 32, 40–64, 41, 42, 45, 46, 50, 56, 61, 67, 123, 127, 232, 294, 295, 300, 318 and Malevich 27–39, 40–64 Kant, Immanuel xix Karasik, Irina vii, xvi, 350, 359 Karshan, Donald xii Kassák, Lajos 242 Kemény, Alfréd 76–77, 242 Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover 248 Kerzhentsev, Platon Mikhailovich x Khan-Magomedov, Selim Omarovich xiv Khardzhiev, Nikolai Ivanovich iii, xiv, xvi, 6, 176, 319 Khardzhiev-Chaga Foundation, see Cultural Foundation, “Khardzhiev-Chaga Center” Kharlamov, Matvei E. 156 Khlebnikov, Velimir (Viktor) Vladimirovich 40,176, 237 Khodasevich, Valentina Mikhailovna 2 Kiev, Ukraine vii, 16, 83, 83, 85, 92, 94, 95, 96, 99, 113, 115, 177, Malevich and Kiev 112–113, 118– 120, 254–255 Kiev Art Gallery ix, 100n28, 115, 254 Kiev Art Institute 84, 85, 86n8, 99, 99–101, 103–104, 110, 111, 114, 120, 255 Kiev Drawing School 85, 86n8, 92, 95 Kiev Art School 86, 86n8 Kiev–Pechersk Monastery 85 Kiev Railroad Station, Moscow 2

King Lear 60 Kliun (Kliunkov), Ivan Vasilevich 2, 6, 10, 11, 13, 24, 26, 57–61, 58 Portrait of Malevich, 1933 59 The Dying Malevich, 1935 157 and Malevich 57–61 Klutsis, Gustav Gustavovich (Gustavs Klucis) 78, 145, 146, 147, 149 Koleichuk, Viacheslav 328 Kollwitz, Käthe 140–141n9 Komarov, Vasily 11, 26 Komsomol (Communist Youth) 141 Korolev, Boris Danilevich 2 Kosolapov, Alexander 328, 333, 333–335 Kostroma, Alexei 328, 329, 341, 341–346, 342, 343, 344, 345, 345, 347, 347, 348 Kotkin, Steven 122 Kovtun, Evgeny Fedorovich xiii, xiv, 28, 172 Kozhevnikov, Alexander 55 Kramarenko, Lev 99, 111 –112, 114, 115, 265 and Malevich 112n43, 114n47 Krasin, Leonid 140n8, 142 Krimmer, Eduard Mikhailovich 37–38 Kristi, Mikhail 135 Krol (Kroll), Georgii Alexandrovich 259 Krol (Kroll, Lork, Calza), Raissa 259 Kruchenykh, Alexei (Alexander) Eliseevich xx, 42–43, 48, 60, 237, 238 Krupskaia, Nadezhda Konstantinovna 141, 151 Krutikov, Georgy Tikhonovich 181 Kulbin, Nikolai Ivanovich 95n19 Kumpan, Fedor ix, 100n28, 254–

INDEX

255 Das Kunstblatt (Berlin) 139, 250 Küppers, Sophie 231, 250 Kuznetsky Bridge, Moscow 346 Kuznetsov, Pavel Varfolomeevich 26 L Laboratory of Artistic Industry, Committee for the Experimental Study of Artistic Culture, Leningrad 136 Laboratory of Organic Culture, Committee for the Experimental Study of Artistic Culture, Leningrad 136 Lamač, Miroslav xiv Lamm, Leonid 328 Lapshin, Nikolai Fedorovich 125 Larionov, Mikhail Fedorovich 11, 26, 39, 121, 259–260, 264 The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10 (Zero Ten) (Petrograd, 1915/1916) 1, 44, 173–174, 174, 182–183 Lavinsky, Anton Mikhailovich 181 Lawrence, James vi, 294, 359 Le Dantiu, Mikhail Vasilevich 67, 68 Lebedev, Rostislav 328 Lef (Left Front of the Arts) (Moscow) 142–147, 150, 151 Lefortovo Hostel, Moscow 10 Léger, Fernand 75–76, 95n17 Lekht, Mikhail 130 Lenin (Ulianov) Vladimir Ilich vii, xiv, 128, 139–158, 325 cult of Lenin 139–158, 250, 325 images of Lenin 140–152, 143, 144, 145, 149, 156, 190 Lenin Mausoleum 154, 156, 158

369 Leningrad, Russia iii, vii, x, xiii, 16, 115, 118, 121, 195, 255 Leningradskaia Pravda (Leningrad) 133–134 Leonardo da Vinci 55 Leporskaia, Anna Alexandrovna 290, 318 The Link exhibition (Kiev, 1908) 95 Lissitzky, El (Lazar Markovich Lisitsky) iv, vi, 62, 70, 73, 76, 78, 79, 186, 223, 227, 228ff, 230, 245ff, 252, 319 “A[rt] and Pangeometry” 231– 232 and Constructivism 78, 79–80, 81 and Malevich 79–81, 139, 239–251 Prouns 228, 247, 249 and Suprematism 78, 79–80, 81 A Tale of Two Squares 229–230, 248–249 and Van Doesburg 227–231, 232, 234, 235, 251–252 Livshits, Benedikt Konstantinovich 87n9 Lobachevsky, Nikolai Ivanovich 40 Lodder, Christina vii, ix, 172, 242, 359 London, UK 180 Los Angeles, California, USA iii Lunacharsky, Anatoly Vasilevich 127 Lysippus 212 M Ma (Today, Vienna) 239 Madonna, imagery of 282–283 Maiakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich 11, 147, 150, 329 machine and art 72, 75

370 Magritte, René 257 Main Arts Administration (Glaviskusstvo) 137, 263 Main Academic Administration (Glavnauka) 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 132–133, 134 Glavnauka Exhibition (Moscow, 1925) 132 Main Museum Administration (Glavmuzei) 127, 128 Main Political Education Administration (Glavpolitprosvet) 133 Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich 52, 60, 234, 246



Life arrest ix, x, 64, 318 biography vi and bookish culture 323–324 burial 160, 202 early training 3, 11, 12, 13 education 322 finances 12 gravestone 351 relations with Soviet officialdom x, xvi, 52, 53, 62, 112, 113, 116, 123–140 status in the Soviet Union ii–iii, ix, x trip to Poland and Germany, 1927 i, ii, v, vii, xi, 59–60, 61, 82, 224, 234, 254, 292, 319



Work: General analytical/theoretical charts 100, 234 architectons vii, xi, 158, 172– 173, 185–195, 173, 187, 5ff, 190 architectural ideas vii, xvii, 49, 74, 80–81, 172–173, 183–185, 191, 249



artistic biography, reconstruction of 28–32, 33, 292–293 concept of economy 238 concern with verdict of history 293–294 creative influence 62, 294–313 dating and re–dating works 31, 293, 318 empty canvases 319–320 heritage vii, 328–351 landscapes 218–219 late paintings ii–iii, xix–xx, 14–18, 62–64, 110, 255–293, 318 leadership of the Avant–Garde 37 literary legacy 317–327 memoirs 26 metaphysical surrealism 288 mystification 317 publication of writings i–ii, iv, v, vii, xi–xii, 317 peasant paintings 101, 107 peasant paintings, late 62, 115, 118, 267ff planits 185, 193, 193, 194, 195–202 portraits 291, 292 rejection of painting 51, 181– 183, 238, 254, 320 relationship to the work of art 164 return to figuration 60–62, 120, 203, 204, 288 return to painting 61 satirical poem about him 351 satirical poem by him 61 on viewer response 164 on ways of looking 163 “white on white” paintings vii, 57, 180, 254, 288, 304 works left in the West ii

371

INDEX





Work: Paintings Automobile and Lady: Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension (1915) xx Bather (1911) 37 Bathers (early 1930s) 277, 278 Bathing (1908) 32 Black Square (1915) ix, xvii, 24, 42, 43, 43–44, 48, 54, 57, 74, 97–99, 158, 173–174, 174, 178–179, 182–183, 199, 223, 227, 228, 229, 237, 244, 306, 329, 330–331, 336, 341–350 Black Cross (1915) 243 Black Circle (1915) 243 Blue Portrait (1929) 32, n.12 The Boulevard (1903/c.1930) 14, 15, 16 Complicated Premonition (1928–32) 216–217, 217, 285–287, 286 Cow and Violin (1913) 92, 93 Dissolution of a Plane (1917) 23, 24 Dissolution of Sensation (1917) 24 An Englishman in Moscow (1914) 88, 89 Female Figure (1928–29) 270 Female Figure (1928–29) 270 The Flower Seller (1903/1930) 16, 17, 85n6 Girl in the Countryside (1928–29) 108 Girl without Employment (c.1930) 118, 119 Girls in a Field (1928–29) 287, 287, 288 Haymaking (1928–29) 108, 109 Head of a Peasant (1911–12)





239 Head of a Peasant (1928–29) 256 Knife Grinder (1912) 243 Landscape, (c.1906) 32, 33 Landscape with Yellow House (c.1906) 33 Landscape with a White House (1928–29) 278 Man and Horse (c.1929–32) 270, 271 On the Boulevard (1903/ 1930) 14 Painterly Realism: Boy with Knapsack — Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension (1915), see Suprematist Composition: Red Square and Black Square Peasant (1930–32) 270, 272, 273, 278 Peasant in a Field (1928–29) 268, 269 Peasant Woman (early 1930s) 218–219, 219 Peasants (1928–29) 270 Perfected Portrait of Ivan Kliun (1913) 58, 59, 177–178 Picking Flowers (c. 1909) 26 Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter Una (1934) 117, 117–118 Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (1933) 280, 281 Province (1911–12) 37, 37 The Red Cavalry (1928–32) 351 The Red House (1932) 274, 275, 278– Red Square (1915) 243 Repose: Society in Top Hats (1908) 32 Self-Portrait (1908) 41 Self-Portrait (“Artist”) (1933) 63, 63–64, 279 281, 285

372





Shroud of Christ (1908) 32, 33 Sisters (1903/ 1930) 16 Sketch for the Conference Hall of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kiev, (1930) 113, 113–114, 114 Sportsmen [Athletes] (1930–31) x, 214–216, 215, 256 Spring (1928–29) 13, 13–14 Strolling (c. 1909) 14 Suprematism (1916) 241 Suprematism. (Supremus No. 58) (1916) 49 Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying (1915) 297, 299 Suprematist Composition: Red Square and Black Square (Painterly Realism: Boy with Knapsack — Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension) (1915) 179, 298, 297–300 Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918) 99, 242, 243, 299–230, 299, 306 Suprematist Painting (1916) 310, 311 Three Female Figures (early 1930s) 62, 62 Torso (Figure with a Pink Face) (1928–29) 269–270 Torso (Prototype of a New Image) (1928–29) 269, 269–270 Triumph of Heaven (c. 1908) 26 Woman with Rake (1928–32) 107 Woman Worker (1933) 282, 284 Women Reapers (1928–29) 118, 119 Works: Drawings, Models, etc. Architecton Alpha (1923) 186,

186–187 Architecton Beta (before 1926) 186–187 Architecton Gota (1923–27) 186, 189, 189–190 Architecton Lukos (c. 1928) 190 Architecton Zeta (1923–27) 186, 189–190 Future Planits for Earthlings (1923–24) 194 Future Planits for Leningrad: The Pilot’s Planit (1924) 193 Modern Buildings (1923–24) 193 Monument to Lenin (1924) 152 Set design for Victory over the Sun, 1913 519, 177–178 Suprematist Skyscraper (1925) 188 Table No. 1, Formula of Suprematism (1920s) 184–185, 185 Theoretical Chart no. 6 (1926/27) 224–225, 225







Works: Writings “Aesthetics” 216–217, 218 “An Analysis of the New and the Figurative Art” 162 “Artistic Research Film ‘Painting and the problems of architectural approach to the new classical architectural system’” 192–193 Artology 103n33, 115, 289 “An Attempt to Determine the Relationship between Form and Color in Painting” 213–214, 219 “The Book about Objectlessness” 139 “The First Task” 71 From Cubism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism

373

INDEX

204–205 From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism 28–29, 204, 205, 243 Die gegenstandlose Welt i–ii, xi, 252, 252–253, 325 God is not Cast Down. Art. The Church. The Factory 200, 203– 204, 205–209, 215, 218, 322 “Introduction to the Theory of the Additional Element in Painting” i–ii, 51 “Lenin” 139, 156, 250–251 Letter to Dutch Artists 226 “New and Figurative Art” 162 Nova generatsiia articles 103, 112, 203–204, 204n.2, 211– 220, 289 On New Systems in Art 163 “Painting and the Problem of Architecture” 204n2, 211–213 “Suprematism” i–ii Suprematism: The World as Objectlessness 325, 326 “The Suprematist Mirror” 209– 211, 210, 213, 214, 321, 342 Exhibitions 14th Exhibition of the Moscow Association of Artists, (Moscow, 1907) 26 17th Exhibition of the Moscow Association of Artists (Moscow, 1909–10) 14 Art from the Imperialist Epoch (Moscow/Leningrad, 1931–2) x Artists of the RSFSR during 15 Years (Moscow/Leningrad, 1932) x, 190, 191, 255 Exhibition of Works by Touring Artists (1933) x First Moscow Salon (Moscow,

1911) 112 The First Exhibition of Leningrad Artists (Leningrad, 1935) x Futurist Exhibition: The Store (Moscow, 1916) 48 Great Berlin Art Exhibition (Berlin, 1927) i, ii, 254 The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10 (Zero Ten) (Petrograd, 1915/1916) xx, 1, 44, 98, 174 K. S. Malevich, solo exhibition (Warsaw, 1927) i K. S. Malevich, solo exhibition (Moscow and Kiev, 1929–1930) ix, 30, 108, 108n38, 254–255, 287–288 Petrograd Artists of All Trends (Petrograd, 1923) 321 Tenth State Exhibition: Objectless Creation and Suprematism (Moscow, 1919) 57, 240 Unovis Exhibition (Moscow 1922) 124 Unovis Exhibition (Vitebsk, 1922) 124 The Woman in Socialist Construction (1934) x Posthumous Exhibitions Cubism and Abstract Art (New York, 1936) vi, xi, 55–56, 295 Kazimir Malevich (New York, 1973) 294, 308 Kazimir Malevich 1878–1935 (Leningrad, etc., 1988–1990) iii, xv Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism (New York, etc, 2003) iii–iv, 350

Malevich, Mechislav Severinovich

374 (Mieczysław Malewicz) 319 The Malevich Society, New York i, iv, v, vi Mallarmé, Stéphane 166 Manchenko, Natalia Andreevna v Mandelshtam, Nadezhda Iakovlevna 154 Mandelshtam, Osip Emileevich 154 Manevych, Abram (Abram Anshelevich Manevich) 86n8 Mansurov, Pavel Adreevich 130– 131, 134 Marcadé, Jean-Claude xii, 83–84 Marcadé, Valentine xii Marées, Hans von 260 Mars 180 Mars Field, Petrograd 44 Marussig, Pietro 261 Marxism xiii Mashkov, Ilia Ivanovich 10 Masiutin, Vasily Nikolaevich 2 the masses and art 162, 169 material in art 77 materialism xiii, 140, 154 mathematics xix Matisse, Henri 294 Matiushin, Mikhail Vasilevich xiii, 48, 125, 131, 136, 176, 189, 237, 243, 319 Medunetsky, Konstantin Konstantinovich 70 Meerson, I. 78n.50 Meller, Vadym (Vadim) Georgievich 86n8 Mendelevich, Leonid 148 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry Sergeevich 169 Merkulov, Sergei 142 Meshkov, Vasily Nikitich 10 Messenger of the Arts (Vestnik iskusstv, Moscow) 78 Metzinger, Jean 94n16

Meyer, Hannes 76 Meyerhold, Vsevolod Emilevich 259 Miasnitskaia Street, Moscow 10, 16 microscopic imagery 57 Michelangelo Buonarroti 24 Mikhienko, Irina v, xvi Milan, Italy 260 Milner, John xix Minimalism vi, 308–313, 336 Miró, Joan 55–56, 304 Misler, Nicoletta 127 modernism ix, xix, 26, 301, 318 modernity 309 Modigliani, Amedeo 257 Moholy-Nagy, László 252–253 Molnár, Farkas 80 Mondrian, Piet 226, 229, 232, 251–252, 253, 294, 302, 304, 305, 318 monumentalism 105, 120 monuments 190 Moon 197 Morandi, Georgio 257 Morgunov, Alexei Alexeevich 13, 26 Morozov, Ivan Vladimirovich 16 mosaics 308 Moscow, Russia iii, x, 2, 26, 51, 53, 94, 118, 124, 232 Moscow Association of Artists 2, 14, 26 Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture 9, 25, 177 Motovilov, Georgy Ivanovich 11 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 153– 154 Mudrak, Myroslava M. vii, 82, 360 Munich, Germany 52 Münter, Gabriele 41 Murashko, Mykola 95–96 Murnau, Germany 35

INDEX

Museum of Artistic Culture, Petrograd 124 –128,129 Museum of Ethnography, St. Petersburg 346 Museum of Modern Art, New York vi, ix, xi, 55, 295, 297, 299, 302 Museum of New Western Art, Moscow 53, 259, 261–263 Museum of Painterly Culture, Moscow 51, 57, 123, 127–129 music 47, 54–55, 153–155 mystical ideas 300–301, 308 N Nakov, Andrei xii, xviii, 16 Narbut, Hoerhii (Georgy) 86n8 Narkompros, see People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. iii Naturalism 91, 96 nature and art 25, 57, 178, 231 Nazis xi, 52, 53 Nemchinovka, Russia 351 Nemukhin, Vladimir 328 Néobyzantinisme 105 Neoclassicism 258, 261, 262 Neoplasticism vi, 224, 225, 227, 304 and Suprematism 228 Neo-Primitivism 38, 39, 42 new art 161–171 Neue Sachlichkeit, see New Objectivity The New American Painting Exhibition (New York, Moscow, etc, 1958–9) 302 New Artists’ Association (Neue Kunstlervereinigung), Munich 48–50 New Economic Policy (NEP) 123 New Generation (Nova generatsiia,

375 Kharkhov) 103, 112, 161, 203, 265, 289 New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) 257, 261 New York, USA i, iii, iv, xi, 308 Newman, Barnett vi, 302–307, 305, 307, 308, 313 Nikandrov, Vasily 150–151 Nikritin, Solomon Borisovich 1 nineteenth–century art 167 Nöckur 303 non-figurative art, see objectless art Northern Renaissance painting 281 Nova generatsiia, see New Generation Novgorod, Russia 68 Novikov, Timur 329, 346–349 O Object (Veshch’/Gegenstand/Objet, Berlin) 228, 240 objectless art xvii, xviii, xx, 28–29, 36, 37–39, 40–64, 71, 77, 79, 84, 115, 139, 151–152, 161– 171, 204–211, 288–289, 295, 301–313 and Surrealism 55–56 objectlessness 204–211 Obmokhu, see Society of Young Artists Odessa, Russia 95 Ortega-y-Gasset, José vii, 161–171 Ostwald, Wilhelm 100 Ozenfant, Amédée 60, 263 P Padalka, Ivan 86n8 Padrta, Juři xiv n18 Painting Section, Kiev Art Institute 111 Palace Bridge, St. Petersburg 347 Palace of Soviets competition 187, 190

376 Palmov, Viktor 101, 101–2n29 Panfuturism 103–104, 110, 112 Pankin, Alexander 328, 337, 338, 339, 339, 340, 340, Paris, France 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 258 partial eclipse 90 Pasternak, Leonid Osipovich 11 Pavlenko, Oksana 86n8 Paveletskaia Railway Station, Moscow 153 peasant art 133 Peiper, Tadeusz 234, 234, 236 Pen, Yehuda (Iury Moiseevich) 124 People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) 123, 131, 135, 245 perestroika xv Petrograd, Russia 51, 124 Petrograd Art Department 129 Petrograd City Soviet 142, 156 Petrov, Fedor Nikolaevich 136 Petrova, Yevgenia v, xvi Petrytskyi, Anatol (Anatoly Petritsky) 86n8 phenomenology 324 philosophy xix, 323–325, 326 photography 24, 147–148, 252– 253, 256 photomontage 147–148 Picasso, Pablo 38, 55, 95n17, 168, 173, 258, 261, 294, 302, 318 Pimonenko, Nikolai Kornilovich, see Pymonenko, Mykola Pivovarov, Viktor 328 Plan of Monumental Propaganda 140n6 Plastic Values (Valori Plastici) journal and group 256ff, 290 Plato 331 plein-air painting 6, 87 Pointillism 30,33

Pokrovsky Boulevard, Moscow 10, 16, 18 Poland iv, v, vii, xvi, xi, 80, 234 Politburo 153, 155 politics and art ix, x, xix, 121–134, 168, 192, 203, 207, 208, 238, 293 Pope 111 Popova, Liubov Sergeevna 25, 75, 228 Post–Impressionism 6, 33 post–modernism xix, 332 Post-Suprematism vii, 14, 20, 62–64, 203, 211–220, 255–256, 265–293, 320, 321, 336 posters 302, 303, 303 Povelikhina, Al1a Vasilevna xiv, 172 Praesens (Warsaw) 188 Prampolini, Giacomo 263–264 Pravda (Moscow) x, 151, 349 Pressa exhibition (Cologne, 1928) 303, 303 Prigov, Dmitry 328, 348, 350 progress 207 Prokofiev, Sergei Sergeevich 264 Proletkult (Proletarian Cultural Movement) 154 proletarian subject matter 282–83 proto-Renaissance art 104 Proust, Marcel 161 Puni, Ivan Albertovich (Jean Pougny) 73, 228 Punin, Nikolai Nikolaevich 77, 125, 129, 130, 131, 134, 135–136 pure art 165–166 Purism 302 Purists 60 Pushkin House (Pushkinsky Dom), Leningrad xiii Puteaux cubists 94 Puzenkov, Georgy 328–329

INDEX

Pymonenko, Mykola (Nikolai Kornilovich Pimonenko) 85–92, 90, 91, 94, 118 Q Quattrocento 104 R Railing, Patricia xix Rakitin, Vasily xiv, 243 Raphael (Raffaello), Sanzio 282 rationality in art 308 Rauschenberg, Robert 306 Razin, Stepan 40 Realism 25, 87, 91, 96, 104, 118, 139, 151–152, 165, 167, 178– 179, 287 Red Army Theater, Leningrad 112n45 Red Square, Moscow 139 Redko, Kliment Nikolaevich 264 religion 111, 140, 155, 199–201, 208–209, 239, 323 religious imagery 113, 282–283 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn 212, 216 Renaissance art 1, 25, 60, 105, 115, 281, 282, 291 Rerberg, Fedor Ivanovich vi, 1–26, 3, 177 Art Institute, Moscow 1, 9–12, 59, 92–94, 177, 255 on color 18–24, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 and Malevich 13–26 painting 4, 7, 8, 8–9, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16 Rerberg, Ivan Ivanovich 2 Rerberg, Ivan Fedorovich 2 resurrection 201 Rethinking Malevich conference i La révolution surréaliste (Paris) 257

377 Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, Rhode Island, USA xi Riesen, Gustav von xi, 318 Riesen, Hans von 318, 325 Rietveld, Gerrit 80 Rimskaia-Korsakova, Svetlana v Rinsema, Evert 229 Rodchenko, Alexander Mikhailovich 27, 52, 69, 72, 76, 77, 79, 80, 143, 147, 148, 228, 241, 300 Roman Catholic Church 111 Romanticism 87, 162 Romm, Mikhail Ilich 151 Rose, Barbara 308–309 Roskin, Vladimir Osipovich 2 Die Rote Fahne (Berlin) 242 Rozanova, Olga Vladimirovna xx, 27, 67 Rozhdestvensky, Konstantin Ivanovich 158, 290 Russia i, ii, iii, vi, xiii, xx, 53, 62 Russian Avant-Garde vi, x, xiv, xx, 6, 26, 37, 42, 64, 168, 169, 307, 308, 327, 333, 334, 335, 349 and society 169–170, 170n30 Russian emigration 53 Russian Museum, see State Russian Museum Russian Orthodox religion 111, 152, 179 Russian Revolution (October 1917) 51, 168, 180, 226, 245, 322 and art 168, 334 Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) 71 Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), Moscow vi, 6, 319 Russian Thought (Russkaia mysl’, Moscow) 175 Rybnikov, Alexei Alexandrovich 2

378

S Salietti, Alberto 261 Salon d’Automne, Paris 104 Salon des Indépendants, Paris 104 Sarabianov, Andrei iv Sarabianov, Dmitry xvi, 48, 203 satire 61, 351 Savinio, Alberto 257, 259, 260 science 129, 198–199, 207, 208 Scheiwiller, Giovanni 260, 264 scholarship concerning Malevich iv–v, ix–xxii Schopenhauer, Arthur xix Schreyer, Lothar 239 science 207, 208 Second Congress of the Comintern (Moscow, 1920) 73 Second Congress of the Soviets (Moscow, 1924) 148 Second World War xi, 158, 304 Sedliar, Vasyl 116, 117 Semenko, Mykhail 102–103 semiotics xix Senkin, Sergei Iakovlevich 78, 144, 147 Seurat, Georges 9 Seryi, Grigory 133–134, 135 Severini, Gino 94 Shatskikh, Alexandra iv, v–vi, xvi, 244, 317, 360 Shchukin, Sergei Ivanovich 6, 16 Sheptytskyi, Andrei 111 Shevchenko, Alexander Vasilievich 26 Shevchenko, Taras 103n31 Shishkin, Ivan Ivanovich 165, 212 Shkurupij, Geo 103 Shteinberg, Eduard 328, 330–331, 331, 336 Sidorina, Elena xiv Signac, Paul 34

Simmons, William Sherwin xii Simonov, Konstantin Mikhailovich xiii–xiv Skrypnyk, Mykola 99, 102 social function of art 162, 168–169 Socialist Realism x, xviii, 62, 115, 288, 318, 333, 334, 349 society and the Avant–Garde 169 Society of Young Artists (Obmokhu), Moscow 75, 80, 240, 241 Soffici, Ardengo 257 Sofronova, Antonina Fedorovna 6, 10 Sokov, Leonid 328 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York iv, 294, 308, 350 Sorbonne, Paris 259 Sots Art 333–340, 341, 349 Soviet Architecture (Sovetskaia arkhitektura, Moscow) 161 Soviet authorities and art x, xvi, 50, 51, 60, 110, 111, 114 Soviet Byzantium 154 Soviet history 317 Soviet Union ii, iii, xv, 301 space 44, 48, 63, 78, 105, 179–180, 309, 310 space travel 172, 175, 176, 196– 202 spiritual values in art 72, 177, 178–179, 309 square 229, 244 St. George 88 St. Petersburg, Russia iii, 118, 336, 344 Stalin (Dzhugashvilli) Iosif Vissarionovich ii, 110, 114, 151, 245, 326, 333, 333 State Academy of Artistic Sciences (Gakhn), Moscow 49, 51, 127, 137, 261 State Courses of Painting and Draw-

INDEX

ing for the Bauman District Department of Popular Education, Moscow 25 State Free Art Studios, Moscow 51, 170 State Institute of Art History (Giii), Leningrad 99, 136, 137, 161, 255 State Institute of Artistic Culture (Ginkhuk), Petrograd/Leningrad 24, 49, 50, 50, 99, 100, 111, 121–137, 161, 184–185, 224, 290, 321, 338 State Museum Collection, Moscow 133 State Russian Museum, Leningrad/St Petersburg ii, iii, v, x, 133, 349 State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow ix, x, 6, 16, 30, 53, 128, 254 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam ii, iii, xi, xii, 36, 318, 329 Stenberg, Georgy Avgustovich 70 Stenberg, Vladimir Avgustovich 70 Stepanova, Varvara Fedorovna 147 Strasbourg, France 235 Storozhenko, Sergei A. 6 Strigalev, Anatoly xiv Studio (London) 6 Studio of Monumental Art, Institute of Plastic Arts, Kiev 110 Studio of Religious Painting, Frescoes, and Icons, Ukrainian Academy of Arts, Kiev 110 style in art 224 subject matter in art 163 Suetin, Nikolai Mikhailovich 136, 137, 202n102 Supramoralism 175 Suprematism i, v, vi, vii, x, xii, xvi, xvii, xviii, xx, 18, 27–29, 30, 38–39, 40, 42–44, 48–52, 59, 60–62, 63, 64, 84, 96, 97–99,

379 104, 113–114, 115, 124, 128, 161, 177, 178–180, 197–198, 201, 204–211, 223, 232, 234, 283, 288–289, 294–313, 319– 320, 336–350 and American art 294–313 and architecture 172, 180–202, 249 and Communism 78 and Constructivism 67–81, 207, 240–242 and Cubism 205, 211–212 and Futurism 205, 211–212 and late works 62 and Neoplasticism 228 philosophy 203–219, 320–321, 327 Suprematist funeral ritual 155, 158, 330 Suprematist porcelain 232, 233 Supremus journal and group 50, 320 Surrealism 52, 55, 261, 263, 288, 289–290, 304 Surrealists 52, 55–56, 58, 257, 258 Svitoslavskyi, Serhij (Sergei Ivanovich Svetoslavsky) 92 Switzerland 231 Symbolism 1, 12, 25, 26, 33–34 T Takke, Boris Alexandrovich 11 Taran, Andrij (Andrei) Ivanovich 99, 265 Tatlin, Vladimir Evgrafovich 27, 50, 69, 72, 76, 77–78, 130n38, 170, 243 and Ginkhuk 125, 129, 130 and Malevich 50, 130 Technical Aesthetics (Tekhnicheskaia estetika, Moscow) xiv technology xix, 72, 198–199, 201, 208, 238, 249, 309

380 Tenth State Exhibition: Objectless Creation and Suprematism (Moscow, 1919) 55 Ternovetz (Ternovets), Boris 75–76, 259–261 texture 25, 46 theater 45–48 theosophy 301 time 47, 176, 310 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) 25 Tolstoy, Leo 175 Tosi, Arturo 261 trompe l’oeil 92 Third Congress of the Comintern (Moscow, 1921) 74 Tretiakov Gallery, see State Tretiakov Gallery Tristan and Isolde 163 Trotsky, Leon (Lev Davidovich Bronshtein) 152–153, 154 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin Eduardovich 175, 180–181 Tugendkhold, Iakov Alexandrovich 263 Tumarkin, Nina 325 Tupitsyn, Margarita xix Turner, Joseph Mallord William 87 Turowski, Andrzej v, xvi, 82, 83 Turzhansky, Lev 9 U Ukraine i, iv, vii, ix, xvi, 82–120, 124, 245 and Paris 264–265 Ukrainian Academy of Art 110 Ukrainian folk art 83ff Ukrainization 102–103, 110 Ulianov, Nikolai Pavlovich 10, 11 Umanskij (Umansky, Krainy), Konstantin Alexandrovich 226, 239 Uniate Church of Ukraine 111

United States Customs 301 Unovis, see Champions of the New Art Uspensky, Petr Demianovich 176, 179 utility in art and design 70, 71–72, 185, 192, 197, 200, 212–213 utopia and art 77, 109, 169, 172– 173, 177, 180–182, 192, 201, 239, 333 Utkin, Petr Savvich 26 V Vainer, Lazar Iakovlevich 127–128 Vakar, Irina v, vii, xvi, 360 Vantongerloo, Georges 74 Vatican 111 Velásquez (Velázquez), Diego 56 Venetsianov, Alexei Gavrilovich 14 Venus 167 Venus de Milo 24, 290 Verbivka (Verbovka) embroidery workshop 96 Vermel, Vitaly Solomonovich 6 Vertov, Dziga (Denis Arkadevich Kaufman) 153 Vestnik iskusstv, see Messenger of the Arts Victory over the Sun, opera (St. Petersburg, 1913) 48, 49, 88, 176, 177–178, 237, 249, 308, 346 Vienna, Austria 239 Viliams, Piotr Vladimirovich 127– 128 Vitebsk, Belarus xvi, 49, 74, 118, 123, 130, 182, 199, 200, 201, 205, 226, 227, 238, 248, 322 Vitebsk Art–Practical Institute 123–124 Vitebsk Conservatory 124 Vitebsk Free Art Studios 124 Vitebsk School of Art 69, 123n8

381

INDEX

Vkhutemas, see Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops Voinov, Vadim 329 Von Riesen, Gustav, see Riesen, Gustav von Voroshilov, Kliment Efremovich 333, 333 Vrona, Ivan Ivanovich 86n8, 99, 114n48 W Wagner, Richard 154 Waldman, Diane 294 Wanderers, see Association of Wandering Exhibitions Warsaw, Poland i, 61, 82, 224, 232, 234, 254 Weimar, Germany 226 The West ii, iii, vi, xi, ix, xiii, xxii, 61 Westheim, Paul 232, 242 Wijnkoop, David 73 Working Group of Constructivists, Moscow, see Constructivists, Working Group

Works Progress Administration, USA 301 World of Art (St Petersburg) 54, 169 World’s Fair (St Louis, Missouri, USA, 1904) 2 X X–ray 342 Y Young, George 172 Z Zakharov, Fedor 11 Zakharov, Ivan Ivanovich 11 zaum ie zaum’ xviii, 60, 88, 237 Zavialov, Nikolai Vasilevich 11 Zeitgeist and art 167 Zernova, Ekaterina Alexeevna 6, 10, 11 Zhadova, Larissa Sergeevna xiii–xv Zhdanko, Irina Alexandrova 265 Zhukovsky, Stanislav Iulianovich 9 Zolotnikov, Iury 328 Zurich, Switzerland 231