Three days later, on November 3, 2008, one of the rarest and, most likely, the most expensive work in the history of Russian art will be sold at Sotheby's with a record result.
Three days later, on November 3, 2008, one of the rarest and, most likely, the most expensive work in the history of Russian art will be sold at Sotheby's with a record result.
Why so much confidence? Yes, because there are no options. After all, as a result of an incredible multi-way restitution combination, a painting comes up for auction, representing the most valuable period of the most recognized Russian artist in the West, who had a significant impact on the ideology of world art in the 20th century. Perhaps enough with epithets. Three words are generally enough on both sides of the ocean: Malevich, Suprematist composition. Well, maybe add a couple more phrases: legally impeccable, without any doubt about the authenticity. The rest is clear: and the fact that the chance to buy a work of this class falls once every 20-30-50 years, and the fact that they can really cost any money - because of the rarity and great value, and so on. That is why the guaranteed irrevocable bid of 60 million dollars, which was made by an anonymous foreigner, is really perceived only as a start. Both 100 and 120 million dollars are possible, why not? One and a half - three million dollars for each of the nearly forty heirs, in whose interests the work will be sold. Although I would be more likely to bet on the $75 million figure.
Interestingly, the "Suprematist composition" is not the last chance for collectors and investors. In the foreseeable future, four more works by Malevich of unparalleled quality will likely come up for auction. With the exception of one Cubist work from 1913, all the rest are Suprematist masterpieces from 1915–1922. And today there is an excellent occasion to recall the history of the issue and talk about the fate of the paintings - especially since the details have not yet been erased from memory.
On April 24, 2008, the world learned that five masterpieces by Malevich would certainly go up for auction. On that day, an agreement was announced between the city authorities of Amsterdam and the heirs of Kazimir Malevich regarding the controversial works of the avant-garde artist from the collection of the Stedelijk Museum. Herrick, Feinstein LLP, a New York law firm representing the interests of the heirs, secured the transfer of five significant works from the museum's collection to them.
It is believed that the Stedelijk Musium himself was a bona fide purchaser of the works. In 1958 they were legally purchased from the architect Hugo Haring. Then it turned out that Haring had no right to dispose of them as his own property. The lawyers of the heirs reminded about this. At first, the situation seemed to be a stalemate: under Dutch law, due to the statute of limitations, claims in Europe had no prospects. But the lawyers found a loophole and ambushed the "Malevichs". When part of the Stedelijk collection, 14 paintings, went to exhibitions in the States in 2003 (to the New York Guggenheim and the Houston Menil Collection), the attack began. In the States, works from the Stedelijk have become vulnerable.
Why "got to the bottom" of the Stedelijk? It is known that there is the largest and most significant collection of works by Malevich. It consists not only of works for the Berlin exhibition in 1927, but also of part of the collection of Nikolai Khardzhiev and his wife Lilia Chaga. The same collection with an archive that was unofficially taken out of the USSR in the 1990s and also causes legal disputes, but that's another story. The battle unfolded precisely for the paintings from the Berlin exhibition in 1927. For Malevich, this was a "breakthrough to the West", a rare opportunity to declare his priority in ideas, so he selected works for her with great care. Malevich was already afraid that his works and innovative solutions could be hidden by the Soviet authorities from the world community. And he had every reason for this - that permission to travel abroad turned out to be the last.
From the publications of press investigations, it is possible to gather the following picture of events. From his Leningrad studio, Malevich brought to Berlin about a hundred works, including about seventy paintings. But even before the expiration of the trip, Malevich was unexpectedly summoned by telegram back to the country. Anticipating something was wrong, but still hoping to return, Malevich left his works for safekeeping to the architect Hugo Haring. However, Malevich was not destined to take them: he was no longer allowed to go abroad until his death in 1935. At the end of the exhibition, Haring sent the works of the Suprematist for safekeeping to the director of the Hannover Museum, Alexander Dorner. It was from him that the then director of MOMA, Alfred Barr, who selected material for the exhibition "Cubism and Abstract Art" in Europe, saw them. Allegedly considering Dorner as the authorized manager of the works, Barr bought two paintings and a couple of drawings from him. He also selected seventeen works for an exhibition in New York. (In different documents, the number of works varies, but this is no longer important.) According to other sources, Dorner had to get a visa at any cost in order to leave Germany, and it is believed that Malevich's paintings were used as an argument in this matter.
By some miracle, this cargo managed to be transported across the ocean. The historical landscape was such that the Nazis were already labeling "degenerate art" to their hearts' content. Confiscations were already underway, and even his own, bought, Malevich, who also represented the “art of degeneration,” director Barr smuggled across the border secretly, hiding the canvases in an umbrella. Three years after the events described, Dorner himself had to emigrate to the United States, taking with him one painting and a drawing. And the rest - to return back to Hugo Haring, with whom it all began. No matter what they say about Haring later, he still managed to safely hide the paintings and drawings and preserve Malevich's legacy during the war's hard times.
Then, in 1958, let me remind you, Haring's works were bought by the Dutch Museum. Thus, in the Stedelijk there was a chic selection of Suprematist oils from the mid-1910s (70 x 60, and sometimes even meters in size), cubist compositions of 1913-1914 and other valuable works. All finished, of the highest quality, masterpieces.
In the meantime, the works that had sailed across the ocean with Barr were regularly exhibited at MOMA. In 1963, when none of the heirs claimed their rights for almost three decades, they became part of the permanent museum collection. Problems began only in 1993, when, after the collapse of the USSR, Malevich's heirs, with the assistance of the German art historian Clemens Toussaint, initiated negotiations with MOMA on the return of the works. As a result, in 1999, the New York Museum of Modern Art agreed to pay monetary compensation to the heirs (the amount was not named, but, according to rumors, about five million dollars were paid) and to return one of the sixteen paintings - "Suprematist composition" with black and red rectangles, forming a cross. The remaining fifteen works seem to have remained in the museum's exposition. So wrote the newspapers of that time. There is also another version that more paintings were returned (which is hard to believe). But it must be admitted that the museum got off lightly anyway.
The fate of the “Suprematist Composition” judged in 1999 by MOMA was immediately clear as daylight. Already in May 2000, at a Phillips auction in New York, the canvas was sold for $ 17 million (5th line in the ranking of the most expensive paintings by Russian artists) against the expected ten million. Perhaps this experience taught the heirs not to exchange for monetary compensation in the future - it is more profitable to take pictures.
Malevich is one of the most forged artists. It is relatively safe to work with his things (usually graphics) only very experienced collectors. Therefore, it is so important that the works sued by the heirs will not only be with iron provenance, but now also completely “white” from a legal point of view: their new owner will no longer be able to terrorize with claims, playing on a dubious origin (as, for example, they tortured Andrew Lloyd Webber with his "Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto" (1903) by Picasso). A completely legal Malevich, freed from a dark past, is a huge rarity on the market, that is, a thing with the highest liquidity. It is safe to buy from all points of view. And beneficial from all points of view. As they say, this is a thing "for a wide range of readers", even in art it is not necessary to understand. So it's not long to wait for a record. Only three days.
Kazimir Malevich is the greatest artist who is honored not only in our country, but all over the world. During his creative life, he created about 300 avant-garde masterpieces that have not lost their relevance to this day.
The genius of the Russian avant-garde
Being the brightest representative of abstractionism in art, the great Kazimir Severinovich Malevich at the beginning of the 20th century became the founder of one of his trends - Suprematism.
A new and such an unfamiliar word meant perfection, superiority, dominance over everything earthly and tangible. Malevich's paintings became a breath of fresh air in art, and their whole essence was an opposition to naturalism in painting.
The essence of Suprematism
The fundamental elements of the canvases were geometric figures of bright colors, depicted in various combinations and directions. The geometry in Supremist paintings is not just an image. It carries a deep meaning, understood by each viewer in his own way. Some will see the originality and innovation of the author, others will understand that ordinary things are not really as simple as they seem.
This direction revealed itself most fully within the framework of the Russian avant-garde.
The innovation in the world of painting was so timely and timely that it was reflected not only in painting, but also in the architecture and everyday life of contemporaries. For example, the facades of houses were decorated with symbols of Suprematism. It corresponded to the spirit of that time and became in demand.
Probably the most striking and exciting was Malevich's Suprematist Composition (a blue rectangle over a red beam), which to this day is the rarest work of fine art of the 20th century in Russia and the most expensive painting by a Russian artist in the world.
The painting is a masterpiece of new art
The painting "Suprematist Composition" is a collection of the main symbols of the new trend of figures with a stripe in a diagonal projection. Rectangles of different sizes and colors seem to hover in the snow-white space, refuting all the laws of statics. This creates the impression of something unknown, something beyond the traditional understanding of the world. Quite earthly tangible objects suddenly appear as symbols of some new fantastic knowledge.
The canvas represents the middle stage between the previously painted "Black Square" and the works included in the cycle of white suprematism. The figures of geometry here are like a microcosm floating in the macrocosm of the white abyss.
The center of the picture is a large bright blue rectangle, close in its parameters to a square, depicted on top of a red beam that pierces the canvas and seems to indicate the direction to all other figures.
According to the laws of Suprematism, the colors of geometric figures come to the background, while the very essence of rectangles and rays, their texture, is paramount.
The fate of a masterpiece in the first half of the twentieth century
The path of this picture to this day is not easy, but very interesting.
Malevich painted Suprematist Composition in 1916. In 1927, the great artist, who was in need in his homeland, had a great opportunity to reveal himself to the world and organize an exhibition in Warsaw, and then in Berlin. Malevich's paintings, exhibited in the hall of the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, made a splash in the art world, and the public accepted them with enthusiasm. Among them was the "Suprematist composition" with a strip in the projection.
When Malevich managed to get about 2,000 rubles for one of his works, he rejoiced. But the dreams of a wonderful future were not destined to come true - shortly after the start of the exhibition, Malevich was summoned by telegram to Leningrad.
Separated from canvases
The great master expected to return to Berlin and continue to popularize the ideology of Suprematism. But he never managed to go abroad again. He, like many of his other compatriots, turned out to be a hostage of the existing political system in his own country. Malevich died in 1935. At home, he remained a disgraced artist without a livelihood.
About 100 works by the unsurpassed artist remained in Germany. The eminent architect Hugo Haring became their keeper, who soon handed them over to the director of the museum in Hannover, Alexander Dorner. Dorner also sold part of the paintings to the curator of the New York Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr. Among them was also the "Suprematist composition" with a strip.
It is impossible to accuse Alexander Dorner of self-interest and love of money. The fact is that he struggled to escape from Germany, in which the nationalist ideology was more and more established in rights every year. At that time, to keep works of Jewish-Bolshevik origin, which were the paintings of Malevich in Nazi Germany, was like death. It was thanks to his connection with MoMA that Dorner managed to get an American visa and go overseas. So the masterpieces of Suprematism practically saved the life of an art critic.
Journey of paintings across the ocean
The modern world of art owes the salvation of part of the imperishable canvases to the American Alfred Barr, who, risking his life, took works of fine art to the United States in an umbrella. It's not hard to imagine what would happen to him if the cache was discovered...
The remaining paintings, ironically, once again found themselves under the protection of Hugo Haring, who, regardless of the huge risk to his life, again began to keep them until his death in 1958.
Amsterdam period and litigation
Truly about the fate of an avant-garde masterpiece, it would be worth making a film with an exciting plot.
After the death of Hugo Haring, the paintings, among which was the Suprematist Composition, were sold to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. For some time, the canvas found peace within the walls of this museum, but not for long...
Since the 1970s, the heirs of the great avant-garde artist began to claim their rights to priceless canvases. Since that time there have been legal proceedings on the issue of the right of inheritance. Only in 2002, thanks to one circumstance, the descendants of the artist were able to get what they wanted.
It was in 2002 that 14 paintings from a huge collection from Studelaik were sent to the USA for the grandiose exhibition "Kazimir Malevich. Suprematism". This fact served as a decisive factor in the resolution of many years of litigation. In the United States, lawyers have found loopholes that simply did not exist in the laws of the Netherlands. Thanks to this, the Dutch transferred into the possession of the heirs of Kazimir Malevich 5 of his brightest paintings, among which was the "Suprematist composition" with a rectangle and a red beam.
End of ordeals
The long odyssey of Malevich's work ended in 2008 when it was sold at Sotheby's for an incredibly huge amount of money, namely $60 million. This amount was offered by an anonymous art lover even before the start of the auction.
The popularity of the paintings of the great master is only growing. This is evidenced by the fact of purchase in May 2017 (as part of the same auction) of the painting "Suprematist composition" with a strip in the projection. She was sold for a smaller but still huge amount of $21.2 million.
If only the greatest avant-garde artist knew how much his work is valued today... After all, in his time he turned out to be misunderstood and disgraced, especially after his triumph in the West.
So "Suprematist Composition" by Kazimir Malevich, having endured so many trials in the difficult twentieth century, turned out to be the most expensive painting by a Russian author at a foreign auction. And who knows if this amazing story has come to an end...
SUPREMATISM
Suprematism (from lat. supremus- the highest) - one of the areas of abstract painting, created in the mid-1910s. K. Malevich.
The goal of Suprematism is to express reality in simple forms (straight line, square, triangle, circle) that underlie all other forms of the physical world. In Suprematist paintings, there is no idea of "top" and "bottom", "left" and "right" - all directions are equal, as in outer space. The space of the picture is no longer subject to the earth's gravity (orientation "up - down"), it has ceased to be geocentric, that is, a "special case" of the universe. An independent world appears, closed in itself, and at the same time correlated as equal with the universal world harmony.
Malevich's famous painting "The Black Square" (1915) became the pictorial manifesto of Suprematism. The theoretical justification of the method Malevich outlined in the work "From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism ... New pictorial realism ..." (1916).
Followers and students of Malevich in 1916 united in a group "Supremus". They tried to extend the Suprematist method not only to painting, but also to book graphics, applied art, and architecture.
Having gone beyond the borders of Russia, Suprematism had a noticeable impact on the entire world artistic culture.
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Suprematism (from Latin supremus - highest, highest; first; last, extreme, apparently, through the Polish supremacja - superiority, supremacy) The direction of avant-garde art of the first third of the 20th century, the creator, main representative and theorist of which was the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich. The term itself does not reflect the essence of Suprematism. In fact, in the understanding of Malevich, this is an estimated characteristic.
Suprematism is the highest stage in the development of art on the path of liberation from everything non-artistic, on the path to the ultimate revelation of the non-objective, as the essence of any art. In this sense, Malevich also considered primitive ornamental art to be Suprematist (or "supreme-like").
K. S. Malevich. Suprematism. 1915, Oil on canvas, 35.5x44.5 cm Stedelijk Museum (City Museum), Amsterdam
For the first time, K. S. Malevich applied this term to a large group of his paintings (39 or more) depicting geometric abstractions, including the famous "Black Square" on a white background, "Black Cross", etc., exhibited at the Petrograd futuristic exhibition "zero- ten" in 1915
K. S. Malevich. Black square.
K. S. Malevich. Black cross. Around 1923, Oil on canvas, 106.5x106 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
K. S. Malevich. Suprematism (Supremus No. 56). 1916, Oil on canvas, 71x80.5 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
K. S. Malevich. Suprematism (Supremus No. 57). 1916, Oil on canvas, 80.3x80.2 cm. Tate Gallery, London.
Being a kind of abstract art, Suprematism was embodied in combinations of the simplest multi-colored and different-sized geometric figures (rectangles, triangles, stripes, etc.) devoid of a pictorial beginning, forming balanced asymmetric compositions permeated with internal movement.
K. S. Malevich. Suprematism (Supremus No. 58, yellow and black). 1916, Oil on canvas, 70.5x79.5 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
K. S. Malevich. Suprematism. 1915. Oil on canvas, 62x101.5 cm. Stedelijk Museum (City Museum), Amsterdam.
K. S. Malevich. Suprematism. 1915. Oil on canvas, 60x70 cm. Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Suprematism, the style put by K. S. Malevich as the basis of his artistic experiments of the 1910s, K. S. Malevich considered it the highest point in the development of art (hence the name, derived from the Latin supremus, "highest, last"), which is characterized by geometric abstractions from the simplest shapes (square, rectangle, circle, triangle). He had a great influence on constructivism, industrial art.
It was behind these and similar geometric abstractions that the name Suprematism was attached, although Malevich himself referred to it many of his works of the 20s, which outwardly contained some forms of concrete objects, especially figures of people, but retained the "Suprematist spirit". And in fact, the later theoretical developments of Malevich do not give grounds to reduce Suprematism (at least Malevich himself) only to geometric abstractions, although they, of course, constitute its core, essence, and even (black and white and white and white Suprematism) bring painting to the limit of its existence in general as a form of art, i.e., to the pictorial zero, beyond which there is no longer painting proper. This path in the second half of the century was continued by numerous directions in art activities that abandoned brushes, paints, and canvas.
K. S. Malevich. Suprematism. 1928-1929 State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
Having quickly gone through three main stages in his Suprematist work from 1913 to 1918, he simultaneously, and especially starting from 1919, tried to comprehend the essence of the path and direction he had discovered. At the same time, there is a change in emphasis and tone in understanding the essence and tasks of Suprematism from extremist-outrageous manifestations in the works of 1920-23. to deeper and calmer reasoning in 1927.
In the brochure-album of 1920 "Suprematism. 34 drawings" Malevich defines three periods of development of Suprematism in accordance with the three squares - black, red and white - as black, color and white. "The periods were built in a purely planar development. The basis for their construction was the main economic principle to convey the power of statics or apparent dynamic rest in one plane." In an effort to liberate art from non-artistic elements, Malevich, with his black and white "periods", actually "liberates" it from artistic ones as well, deducing forms and colors "beyond zero" into some other, practically non-artistic and non-aesthetic dimension. "Painting in Suprematism is out of the question. Painting has long been obsolete, and the artist himself is a prejudice of the past," he shocks the public and his fellow artists.
K. S. Malevich. Suprematism. Late 1910s. Paper, pencil, 20.3x21.9 cm. Private collection.
K. S. Malevich. Suprematism. Around 1927 Stedelijk Museum (City Museum), Amsterdam
K. S. Malevich. Suprematism. 1917 Krasnodar Regional Art Museum, Krasnodar
"The construction of the Suprematist forms of the color order is in no way connected with the aesthetic necessity of either color, form or figure; it is also a black period and white." The main parameters of Suprematism at this stage seem to him to be the "economic beginning", the energy of color and form, a kind of cosmism. Echoes of numerous natural-science (physical, in particular), economic, psychological and philosophical theories of that time merge here with Malevich into an eclectic (and today we would say postmodernist, albeit the main avant-garde artist!) theory of art.
As an artist with a subtle pictorial flair, he feels the different energy (real energy) of any object, color, shape and strives to "work" with them, organize them in the plane of the canvas on the basis of the ultimate "economy" (this trend in our time is already in its own way develop minimalism). “Economy” is Malevich’s “fifth measure”, or the fifth dimension of art, which takes him not only from the plane of the canvas, but also beyond the Earth, helping to overcome the force of gravity and, moreover, from our three-four-dimensional space in general into special cosmic-psychic dimensions.
Suprematist iconic constructions, which, as Malevich claimed, replaced the symbols of traditional art, suddenly turned for him into independent “living worlds ready to fly into space” and take a special place there along with other cosmic worlds. Fascinated by these perspectives, Malevich begins to construct spatial "supremuses" - architectons and planets, as prototypes of future space stations, apparatuses, dwellings, etc. Having categorically abandoned one, earthly, utilitarianism, he, under the influence of the latest physical and cosmic theories, leads art to new utilitarianism, already cosmic.
K. S. Malevich. Black square in a white square and black circle in a white square (cover). 1919 State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
The main element of Malevich's Suprematist works is the square. Then there will be combinations of squares, crosses, circles, rectangles, less often - triangles, trapezoids, ellipsoids. The square, however, is the basis of Malevich's geometric Suprematism. It was in the square that he saw some essential signs of human existence (the black square is a “sign of economy”; red is a “signal of revolution”; white is “pure action”, “a sign of the purity of human creative life”), and some deep breakthroughs in Nothing, as something indescribable and unspoken, but felt. The black square is a sign of economy, the fifth dimension of art, "the last Suprematist plane on the line of art, painting, color, aesthetics, which has gone beyond their orbit."
In an effort to leave in art only its essence, non-objective, purely artistic, he goes "beyond their orbit", and he himself painfully tries to understand where. Having minimized materiality, corporality, figurativeness (image) in painting, Malevich leaves only a certain empty element - emptiness itself (black or white) as a sign-invitation to an endless deepening into it - into Zero, into Nothing; or in yourself. He is convinced that one should not look for anything of value in the outside world, because it is not there. All that is good is within us, and Suprematism contributes to the concentration of the contemplative spirit on its own depths. The black square is an invitation to meditation! And way! "...three squares point the way." However, for ordinary consciousness this is too difficult and even scary, a terrible "path" through Nothing to Nothing. And Malevich in his work retreats from the edge of the absolute apophatic abyss into colored Suprematism - simpler, more accessible, artistic and aesthetic.
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich. Suprematism. 1915-1916 State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Harmoniously organized soaring of light colored structures from geometric shapes, although it takes the spirit of the contemplator beyond the limits of the ordinary earthly atmosphere into some higher levels of spiritual and cosmic being, nevertheless does not leave him face to face with the transcendent Nothing. More balanced and thoughtful "philosophy of Suprematism" Malevich outlined by 1927. Here it is once again stated that Suprematism is the highest stage of Art, the essence of which is non-objectivity, comprehended as pure sensation and feeling, without any connection of the mind. Art, having parted with the world of images and ideas, approached the desert filled with "waves of non-objective sensations" and tried to capture it in Suprematist signs. Malevich admits that he himself was terrified of the abyss that opened up, but he stepped into it in order to free art from heaviness and bring it to the top. In his almost mystical and artistic immersion in the "desert" of the all-containing and primordial Nothing (beyond the zero of being), he felt that the essence has nothing to do with the visible forms of the objective world - it is completely objectless, faceless, imageless and can only be expressed "pure feeling". And “Suprematism is that new, non-objective system of relations of elements through which sensations are expressed ...
K. S. Malevich. Suprematist painting: flying airplane. 1915 Museum of Modern Art, New York
Suprematism is the end and the beginning when sensations become naked, when Art becomes faceless as such. "And if life itself and object art contain only "images of sensations", then non-objective art, the peak of which is Suprematism, seeks to convey only "pure sensations" In this regard, the original primary element of Suprematism - a black square on a white background - "is a form that emerged from the feeling of a desert of nothingness. " The square became for Malevich the element with which he was able to express a variety of feelings - peace, dynamics, mystical, gothic etc. "I received that element through which I express one or another of my experiences in various sensations."
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich. Suprematism. 1918 Stedelijk Museum (City Museum), Amsterdam.
Malevich did not give an exact formulation of his understanding of the term "sensation". It seems that he is talking about that psychological attitude, the state that we today call "experience", and the ideas themselves were inspired by the Machist ideas popular at that time. In Malevich's Suprematist theory, an important place is occupied by the concept of "facelessness", which he puts on a par with such concepts as non-objectivity and ugliness. It means, in a broad sense, the refusal of art to depict the appearance of an object (and a person), its visible form. For the appearance, and in man the face, seemed to Malevich only a hard shell, a frozen mask, a mask that hides the essence.
K. S. Malevich. Suprematism (White Cross). Around 1927 Stedelijk Museum (City Museum), Amsterdam
Hence the refusal in purely Suprematist works to depict any visible forms (=images=faces), and in the "second peasant period" (late 20s - early 30s) - a conditionally generalized, schematized depiction of human figures ( peasants) without faces, with "empty faces" - colored or white spots instead of faces (facelessness in the narrow sense). It is clear that these "faceless" figures express the "spirit of Suprematism", perhaps even to a greater extent than actually geometric Suprematism.
K. S. Malevich. Three female figures. Early 1930s State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
K. S. Malevich. Suprematist dress. 1923 State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
The feeling of the "desert of nothingness", the abyss of Nothing, the metaphysical emptiness is expressed here with no less force than in the "Black" or "White" squares. And the color (often bright, local, festive) here only enhances the eerie unreality of these images. Global Suprematist apophatism sounds in the "peasants" of 1928-1932. with ultimate strength. In the scientific literature, it has become almost a common place to recall the phrase from the polemic between Benois and Malevich about the "Black Square" as a "bare icon." The "faceless" peasants of the founder of Suprematism can claim to be called a Suprematist icon no less, if not more, than the "Black Square", if by icon we mean the expression of the essential (eidetic) foundations of the archetype. The apophatic (inexpressible) essence of being, which causes in a non-believer the horror of the Abyss of nothingness and the feeling of his insignificance in front of the greatness of Nothing, and in future existentialists - the fear of the meaninglessness of life, are expressed here with the utmost conciseness and force. For a person who is spiritually and artistically gifted, these images (as well as geometric Suprematism) help to achieve a contemplative state or plunge into meditation.
Malevich had many students and followers in Russia in 1915-1920, who united at one time in the Supremus group, but gradually all moved away from Suprematism.
N. M. Suetin. Woman with a cross. 1928. Paper, watercolor, ink, pencil; 45.8×34 cm
N. M. Suetin. Scarecrow. 1929. Paper, watercolor, ink, pencil; 21.9×20 cm
I. G. Chashnik. architectural volumes. 1925-1926. Paper, pencil; 15×21.5 cm
D. A. Yakerson. Suprematist composition. 1920. Paper, ink, watercolor, graphite pencil; 14.5×11 cm
Malevich himself and his students (N. M. Suetin, I. G. Chashnik and others) repeatedly translated the Suprematist style into architectural projects, the design of household items (especially artistic porcelain), and the design of exhibitions.
K. S. Malevich. Cup and saucer "Suprematism". 1923 State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
Researchers see Malevich's direct influence on all European constructivism. This is both true and false.
K. S. Malevich. Suprematism (Black cross on a red oval). 1921-1927 Stedelijk Museum (City Museum), Amsterdam.
There were many imitators around Malevich, but none of them penetrated the true spirit of Suprematism and could not create anything that somehow in essence (and not in external form) approached his works. This also applies to constructivism. The constructivists borrowed and developed some of Malevich's formal findings without understanding or sharply dissociating themselves (like Tatlin) from the essentially gnostic-hermetic, and in some ways even intuitive-Buddhist spirit of Suprematism. Yes, and Malevich himself, as an intuitive esthete and adherent of "pure art", had a sharply negative attitude towards "materialism" and the utilitarianism of his contemporary constructivism. More consistent successors of Suprematism should rather be sought among the minimalists and some conceptualists of the second half of the 20th century.
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Abstract >> Culture and artEurope and America. Suprematism(from lat supremus - higher) - variety abstract painting, which is based on ... 1. Impressionism (Impressionism, French impression - impression), direction V painting originated in France in the 1860s...
Fully lithographed edition. 22x18 cm. Most of the 34 drawings are arranged in pairs on a double folding sheet. Of the 14 known specimens, 11 are located abroad. The greatest rarity, perhaps one of the most expensive Russian publications!
Suprematism (from lat. supremus - the highest) - a direction in avant-garde art, founded in the 1st half of the 1910s. K. S. Malevich. Being a kind of abstract art, Suprematism was expressed in combinations of multi-colored planes of the simplest geometric outlines (in the geometric forms of a straight line, square, circle and rectangle). The combination of multi-colored and different-sized geometric figures forms balanced asymmetric Suprematist compositions permeated with internal movement. At the initial stage, this term, going back to the Latin root suprem, meant dominance, the superiority of color over all other properties of painting. In non-objective canvases, paint, according to K. S. Malevich, was for the first time freed from an auxiliary role, from serving other purposes - Suprematist paintings became the first step of “pure creativity”, that is, an act that equalized the creative power of man and Nature (God). Probably, this, and not the lack of an equipped printing base at the Vitebsk Art School, explains the lithographed nature of two of Malevich's most famous manifestos - "On New Systems in Art" and "Suprematism". Both of them have the character of original teaching aids, since they were intended for students of the Vitebsk art workshops, and in this regard, they should be considered as two parts of one course. The first of them provides a detailed aesthetic substantiation of new artistic trends, the second reveals the nature of Suprematism and outlines ways for its further development. Of course, the statement about the "educational" nature of these works cannot be taken literally. If they are "teaching aids", then in a very specific sense, close to that which we usually put in the designation of a religious text as a "textbook of life." Efros's comparison with prophetic writings can be equally applied to them, it is enough to read the following words of Malevich: ...transforming the world, I go to my transformation and, perhaps, on the last day of my reorganization, I will move into a new form, leaving my current image in the fading green animal world. Although both of these books already belong to the next, post-futuristic period in the development of the avant-garde, it is impossible to do without them in our study. For it was they who marked the extreme point in that movement towards the merging of the artistic and the "propaganda" that distinguished the development of Russian futurism. For Malevich, in his own words, it was a time when "brushes are moving further and further away" from him. After showing a series of "white" canvases at a solo exhibition in 1919, which completed a four-year period in the development of pictorial Suprematism, the artist faced the fact that artistic means had been exhausted. This state of crisis was captured in one of Malevich's most dramatic texts - in his manifesto "Suprematism", written for the catalog of the exhibition "Non-Objective Creativity and Suprematism".
The feeling of the grandeur of the revolution he made, which excludes any possibility of returning to the world of traditional aesthetic ideas - this is perhaps the main thing that determines the content of this text. In it, the artist tries to comprehend the significance of his breakthrough. The "white free abyss", which opened up to the gaze of the artist, is realized as "the true real representation of infinity". The attraction of this abyss turns out to be no less, if not stronger, for him than the attraction of the Black Square. In the text, the desire to "stand on the edge" of the abyss sometimes outweighs the desire to figure out what's next? However, already here Malevich comes to the conclusion that Suprematism as a system is a form of manifestation of creative will, capable of "through Suprematist philosophical color thinking ... to make a justification for new phenomena." Conceptually, this discovery is extremely significant, marking the end of traditional forms of fine art. “Painting in Suprematism is out of the question,” Malevich declared a year later in the introductory text to the album “Suprematism,” “painting has long been outdated and the artist himself is a prejudice of the past.” The further path of development of art now lies in the realm of a pure mental act. “It turned out, as it were,” the artist remarks, “that a brush cannot get what a pen can. It is disheveled and cannot reach the convolutions of the brain, the pen is sharper.”
In these frequently quoted words, those tense relationships between the "pen" and the "brush" that underlay the manifestation activity of the Russian futurists manifested themselves with the utmost clarity. Malevich was the first to break the delicate balance that existed between them, giving a clear preference to "pen". The substantiation of world-building as "pure action", to which he came in "Suprematism", lies already beyond the scope of the futuristic movement proper, giving impetus to the further development of avant-garde art. Suprematism has become one of the central phenomena of the Russian avant-garde. Since 1915, when the first abstract works by Malevich were exhibited, including Black Square, such artists as Olga Rozanova, Lyubov Popova, Ivan Klyun, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Alexandra Ekster, Nikolai Suetin, Ivan Puni, Nina Genke, Alexander Drevin, Alexander Rodchenko and many others. In 1919, Malevich and his students created the UNOVIS group (Approvers of the New Art), which developed the ideas of Suprematism. In the future, even in the conditions of persecution of avant-garde art in the USSR, these ideas were embodied in architecture, design, and scenography. With the onset of the 20th century, grandiose processes of the birth of a new era, equal in significance to the Renaissance, took place in art with increasing intensity. Then there was a revolutionary discovery of reality. The ideas of "cathedral creativity", cultivated by the symbolists, were specifically refracted among the reforming artists who rejected symbolism. A new attempt to broadly unite leftist painters was made at the First Futurist Exhibition of Paintings "Tram B", which opened in March 1915 in Petrograd. At the exhibition Tramway V, Malevich presented sixteen works: among them are the cubo-futuristic abstruse canvases Lady at a billboard pole, Lady in a tram, Sewing machine. In the Englishman in Moscow and the Aviator, with their outlandish, mysterious images, incomprehensible phrases, letters, numbers, echoes of the December performances sounded latently, as well as in the Portrait of M.V. Matyushin, composer of the opera Victory over the Sun.
Against numbers 21-25, which ended the list of Malevich's works in the catalog, it was defiantly marked: "The content of the paintings is unknown to the author." Perhaps, among them was a painting with the modern name Composition with Mona Lisa. The birth of Suprematism from the illogical canvases of Malevich with the greatest persuasiveness appeared precisely in it. There is already everything here that in a second will become Suprematism: white space-a plane with incomprehensible depth, geometric figures of regular outlines and local coloring. Two key phrases, like the inscriptions-signals of a silent movie, come to the fore in the Composition with the Mona Lisa. Twice issued "Partial Eclipse"; a newspaper clipping with a fragment "the apartment is being transferred" is supplemented by collages with one word - "in Moscow" (the old spelling) and a mirror inverted "Petrograd". A "total eclipse" took place in his historical Black Square on a white background (1915), where a real "victory over the Sun" was carried out: it, as a natural phenomenon, was replaced, supplanted by a phenomenon co-natural to it, sovereign and natural - the square plane completely eclipsed , obscured all images. Revelation overtook Malevich while working on the second (and never implemented) edition of the brochure Victory over the Sun. Preparing drawings in May 1915, he took the last step towards non-objectivity. The weight of this most radical turning point in his life he realized immediately and in full measure. In a letter to Matyushin, speaking about one of the sketches, the artist wrote: "This drawing will be of great importance in painting. What was done unconsciously now gives extraordinary results." The newborn direction remained without a name for some time, but by the end of the summer the name appeared. "Suprematism" became the most famous among them. Malevich wrote the first pamphlet "From Cubism to Suprematism". New pictorial realism. This booklet-manifesto, published by a faithful friend Matyushin, was distributed at the vernissage of the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings "0.10" (zero-ten), which opened on December 17, 1915 in the premises of the Art Bureau of Nadezhda Dobychina.
Malevich was not entirely in vain worried about his invention. His comrades vehemently opposed declaring Suprematism the successor of Futurism and uniting under its banner. They explained their rejection by the fact that they were not yet ready to unconditionally accept a new direction. Malevich was not allowed to call his paintings "Suprematism" either in the catalog or in the exhibition, and he had to hand-paint posters with the title Suprematism of Painting literally an hour before the opening day and hang them up in person next to his works. In the "red corner" of the hall, he erected the Black Square, which overshadowed the exposition of 39 paintings. Those of them that have survived to this day have become high classics of the 20th century. The black square seems to have absorbed all the forms and all the colors of the world, reducing them to a plastic formula dominated by the poles of black (complete absence of color and light) and white (simultaneous presence of all colors and light). Emphasized simple geometric form-sign, not linked either associatively, or plastically, or ideologically with any image, object, concept that already existed in the world before it, testified to the absolute freedom of its creator. The black square marked the pure act of creation carried out by the demiurge artist. "New realism" Malevich called his art, which he considered a step in the history of world artistic creativity. The background of Suprematist compositions is always a kind of white environment - its depth, its capacity are elusive, indefinable, but clear.
The unusual space of pictorial Suprematism, as the artist himself and many researchers of his work said, has the closest analogue to the mystical space of Russian icons, which is not subject to ordinary physical laws. But Suprematist compositions, unlike icons, do not represent anyone or anything, they - the product of free creative will - testify only to their own miracle: "The hung plane of pictorial color on a sheet of white canvas gives directly to our consciousness a strong sense of space. It takes me to the bottomless a desert where you creatively feel the points of the universe all around you," the painter wrote. Incorporeal geometric elements hover in a colorless, weightless cosmic dimension, representing pure speculation, manifested with one's own eyes. The white background of Suprematist paintings, a spokesman for spatial relativity, is both planes and bottomless, and in both directions, both towards the viewer and away from the viewer (the reverse perspective of the icons revealed infinity in only one direction). Malevich gave the name "Suprematism" to the invented direction - regular geometric figures painted in pure local colors and immersed in a kind of transcendental "white abyss", where the laws of dynamics and statics dominate.
The term he composed went back to the Latin root "suprem", which formed the word "suprematia" in the native language of the artist, Polish, which in translation meant "superiority", "dominance", "dominance". At the first stage of the existence of a new artistic system, Malevich sought to fix the primacy, the dominance of color over all other components of painting with this word. The canvases of geometric abstractism presented at the exhibition 0.10 had complex, detailed names - and not only because Malevich was not allowed to call them "Suprematism". I will list some of them: Picturesque realism of a football player - Colorful masses in the fourth dimension. Picturesque realism of a boy with a knapsack - Colorful masses in the fourth dimension. Picturesque realism of a peasant woman in 2 dimensions (this was the original full name of the Red Square), Self-portrait in 2 dimensions. Lady. Colorful masses in the 4th and 2nd dimensions, Painterly realism of colorful masses in 2 dimensions. Persistent indications of spatial dimensions - two -, four-dimensional - speak of his close interest in the ideas of the "fourth dimension". Actually, Suprematism was divided into three stages, three periods: "Suprematism in its historical development had three stages of black, color and white," the artist wrote in the book Suprematism. 34 drawings. The black stage also began with three shapes - a square, a cross, a circle. Malevich defined the black square as the "zero of forms", the basic element of the world and being. The black square was the first figure, the initial element of the new "realistic" creativity.
Thus, Black Square. The Black Cross, the Black Circle were the "three pillars" on which the system of Suprematism in painting was based; their inherent metaphysical meaning in many respects surpassed their visible material embodiment. In a number of Suprematist works, black primary figures had a programmatic significance that formed the basis of a clearly built plastic system. These three paintings, which appeared no earlier than 1915, Malevich always dated 1913 - the year of staging Victory over the Sun, which served for him as the starting point in the emergence of Suprematism. At the fifth exhibition of the "Jack of Diamonds" in November 1916 in Moscow, the artist showed sixty Suprematist paintings, numbered from first to last (now it is rather difficult to restore the sequence of all sixty works due to losses, and for technical reasons, not always attentive attitude in museums to the inscriptions on the back). The Black Square was exhibited under the first number, then the Black Cross, under the third number - the Black Circle. All sixty exhibited paintings belonged to the first two stages of Suprematism. The color period also began with a square - its red color served, according to Malevich, as a sign of color in general. The last canvases of the color stage were distinguished by their multi-figure, whimsical organization, the most complex relationships of geometric elements - they seemed to be held together by an unknown powerful attraction. Suprematism reached its last stage in 1918. Malevich was a courageous artist, going to the end along the chosen path: at the third stage of Suprematism, color also left him. In the middle of 1918, canvases "white on white" appeared, where white forms seemed to melt in the bottomless whiteness. After the October Revolution, Malevich continued his extensive activities - together with Tatlin and other left-wing artists, he held a number of posts in the official bodies of the People's Commissariat of Education. He was especially concerned about the development of the museum business in Russia; he actively participated in museum construction, developing the concepts of a new type of museum, where the works of avant-garde artists were to be presented. Such centers called "Museum of Painting Culture", "Museum of Artistic Culture" were opened in both capitals and some provincial cities. In the autumn of 1918, Malevich's pedagogical work began, which later played a very important role in his theoretical work. He was listed as a master in one of the classes of the Petrograd Free Workshops, and at the end of 1918 he moved to Moscow. In the Moscow Free State Workshops, the painter-reformer invited "metalworkers and textile workers" to study - the ancestor of Suprematism began to realize the rising style-forming possibilities of his offspring. In July 1919, Malevich wrote his first major theoretical work, On New Systems in Art. The desire to publish it and the growing difficulties of life - the artist's wife was expecting a child, the family lived near Moscow in a cold, unheated house - forced him to accept an invitation to move to the provinces. In the provincial city of Vitebsk, from the beginning of 1919, the People's Art School, organized and directed by Marc Chagall (1887 - 1985), worked.
A teacher at the Vitebsk school, architect and graphic artist Lazar Lissitzky (1890 - 1941), the future famous designer, convinced Malevich during a business trip to Moscow of the necessity and benefits of moving. Chagall fully supported Lissitzky's initiative and provided the newly arrived professor with a workshop at the school. The publication of the book "On New Systems in Art" was the first fruit of Kazimir Malevich's life in Vitebsk. Its publication seemed to model the subsequent relationship of the great initiator with the newly converted adherents: the text he created, concepts, ideas were framed, implemented, replicated by students and followers. The release of the theoretical work served as a kind of tuning fork for all the Vitebsk years of Malevich, dedicated to the creation of philosophical and literary works. In a letter to his long-term friend and colleague, M.V. Matyushin (1861 - 1934), sent at the beginning of 1920, the artist stated: “My book is one lecture. It is written down as I said and printed. There was a certain contradiction: at the end of the main text was the date "July 15, 1919", indicating the completion of the manuscript before arriving in Vitebsk. However, Malevich did give a lecture on November 17 in a Vitebsk auditorium; obviously, the statements are true, both about the publication of the recorded lecture, and about the finished white manuscript. The book "On New Systems in Art" became the forerunner of the subsequent "Suprematism" and is unique in every sense. First of all, its polysyllabic genre is unusual: firstly, it is a theoretical treatise; secondly, an illustrated study guide; thirdly, a set of prescriptions and postulates (which is Establishment A) and, finally, artistically, Malevich's book was a cycle of stitched lithographs, anticipating the easel compositions of "calligraphers" and "type designers" of the second half of the 20th century, based on the expressiveness of letter rows. The publication "On New Systems ..." technologically was a paperback brochure printed in a lithographic way (sometimes it was called a booklet). It opened and closed with texts executed by Malevich in cursive on a lithographic stone: at the beginning of the book these were epigraphs and an introduction, at the end Establishment A and two postulates placed under the image of a black square. The facsimile reproduction of the leader's own plans and attitudes acquired the meaning of a personal, personal appeal to each reader-follower. After the introduction, schematic drawings illustrating the techniques of cubist construction were placed on folding sheets; the “educational-visual” part of the brochure ended with a sketch that sketched Malevich’s shockingly abstruse painting “The Cow and the Violin”. All these drawings-schemes offered to students for assimilation were Malevich's autolithographs. The main place in the brochure was occupied by the treatise "On New Systems in Art". static and speed. Several performers - they were Lissitzky's apprentices, who entered the Artel of Artistic Labor under Witsvomas - transferred Malevich's essay-lecture in block letters to lithographic stones; there were few stones, so the written fragment was replicated, the stone was polished and used for the next passage.
The performers were distinguished by different hand hardness, different dexterity, different visual acuity and different literacy: all these individual properties were forever imprinted in "cuneiform" - very narrow leading lines made the strips visually similar to archaic early Eastern writing. Sometimes the dense, weakly divided type "mirror" of the page was diversified by the introduction of decorative icons and marginals, most often of a geometric shape; however, the bars and circles in the lines often masked the mistakes made and noticed. The printed parts were then assembled into a single organism - this work was done by El Lissitzky; he also made the cover using the linocut technique. One sheet with an integral composition formed the front and back sides when folded; it is curious that in the position: nii turn the composition was "read" from right to left - its significant elements were arranged in that order. The cover was cut last, the author and the designer found it necessary to put the names of all parts on it - the front side of the book thus played an additional role of a “table of contents”. The outer epigraph drew attention to itself: "The overthrow of the old world will be drawn on your palms."
Placed at the top on the most significant, striking place of the cover, anticipating the name and surname of the author, he made the whole book a “text”, opening it. The abundance of information, necessary and secondary, gave the external appearance of the brochure, as it seemed at first glance, an unprofessional, amateurish character - however, as El Lissitzky's idea was comprehended, it became clear that he needed an abundance of words: the cover of "On New Systems ..." with its dynamics, moving sharp letter compositions foreshadowed the constructivist techniques of book design. It is especially necessary to highlight the abundance of textual information on the cover - this technique will become widespread in the art of the book much, much later. Malevich's book was a set of fundamental arguments, theses, statements proposed by the leader to new adherents for study and assimilation. The texts inscribed on stone, especially Malevich's handwritten commandments, acquired the rank of some tablets of the "new artistic testament". The main visual hero of the book is the "Black Square", reproduced four times; the frequency of its use testified to the emergence of a new function of the main Suprematist form - the black square turned into an emblem. The development of the black square into an emblematic sign must be specially highlighted, as well as the persistent repetition of the slogan "The overthrow of the old world will be drawn on your palms" - this slogan soon acquired the meaning of a motto for members of UNOVIS. An equally remarkable role was played by the line of Malevich's sound-abstruse poem, placed inside before the first epigraph:
"I'm going
U - el - el - st - el - te - ka
My new path.
The leader's poem became, as we will see below, a kind of anthem for Malevich's supporters in Vitebsk. There were still months before the self-determination of UNOVIS, the “new party in art,” as Malevich sometimes called it, but the accumulation of its constituent elements, the formation of its framework, had already begun. Malevich, correcting the first page of the book at the request of Lissitzky, made a significant inscription: “I greet you Lazar Markovich with the release of this booklet, it will follow my path and the beginning of our collective movement, I expect from you clothing structures for those who follow innovators. But build them in such a way: so that they cannot sit up in them for a long time, do not have time to start a petty-bourgeois hustle, do not become obese in its beauty. K. Malevich December 4, 19 Vitebsk. The book "On New Systems in Art" was published in a huge circulation for those times - 1000 copies, and was printed in a handicraft, in fact, way. Concerned about the distribution of the book, Malevich sent a letter to O.K. Gromozova, wife of M.V. Matyushina: “Dear Olga Konstantinovna! My friends published a book "On New Systems in Art", 1,000 copies. lithographically with drawings. It is necessary to distribute it, so we turn to friends so that it falls into the proper hands, we give 200-300 copies to Petrograd, the rest is Moscow-Vitebsk; price 40 rub. We trust the giver of this, Elena Arkadyevna Kabischer, to make money for the book, if it succeeds. We will brochure the book and send it out immediately. Maybe you will leave one shelf for its distribution. I firmly shake your hand. Hi to all my friends, and kiss Misha (Matyushin). K. Malevich. Petrograd, Stremyannaya, not far from the Nikolaevsky railway station, warehouse-commune. Olga Konstantinovna Gromozova warehouse."
The ideas developed in the first Vitebsk book were very dear to Malevich, and therefore, when the opportunity presented itself, he replicated them in another edition. In 1920, the Fine Arts Department of the People's Commissariat for Education in Petrograd published Malevich's book From Cezanne to Suprematism. Critical Essay". The text of the publication consisted of several large fragments of the Vitebsk brochure "From Cezanne to Suprematism", assembled into an independent book. Malevich himself was clearly aware of the onset of a new stage in his biography, the displacement of painting by purely speculative creativity. In a letter to M.O. Gershenzon, sent on November 7, 1919, in the first days after moving from Moscow, he stated: “... all my energy can be spent on writing pamphlets, now I’ll work diligently in Vitebsk “exile” - my brushes are moving further and further away.” The aspirations of the initiator into theoretical empyreans paradoxically matched with the expansion of Suprematism into real life, into the "utilitarian world of things." And although at the beginning of this year, in 1919, Malevich called on “comrades of metalworkers and comrades of textile workers” to his Moscow workshop, it was only after moving to Vitebsk that he clearly saw the horizons of practical application that opened up before the system he invented in art. The possibility of introducing Suprematism into reality presented itself immediately. In December 1919, the Vitebsk Committee for Combating Unemployment celebrated its two-year anniversary. The committee was the brainchild of the February bourgeois revolution, although it officially opened a week after the transfer of power to the Bolsheviks. It must be said that the October Revolution somehow went unnoticed in Vitebsk: only in one local newspaper, on the second page, in a tiny chronicle note, the events in Petrograd were announced in a patter. We designed the anniversary of the Cabinet in a bright Suprematist way.
A picture taken at the Vitebsk railway station on Saturday, June 5, 1920, has become one of the most famous photographs of the era. It was accidentally preserved by Lev Yudin and his family. Life, as you know, is sometimes more inventive than the most sophisticated novelist - here she acted as the most insightful artist, creating an unusually expressive portrait of the "Unovis team" on the eve of his finest hour. The photograph was dated according to a note from the Vitebsk newspaper Izvestia dated June 6, 1920: “Artistic excursion. Yesterday, an excursion of 60 students from the Vitebsk Folk Art School, led by their leaders, left for Moscow. The tour will take part in an art conference in Moscow, as well as visit all the museums and see the artistic sights of the capital.” The freight car, in which the Vitebsk people went to Moscow, was decorated according to the project of Suetin - it was decorated with the Black Square, the emblem of Unovis. On the project, under the square, there was the slogan "Long live Unovis!" - in nature, it was replaced by a long banner; according to the fragment visible in the picture, the inscription was restored: "A group of sightseers of the Vitebsk state free art workshops, participants in the All-Russian Conference of art schools." The photographer filmed the scene of the departure from the carriage, which was standing nearby on the tracks, and a continuous “panel” of heads and figures, spread out vertically, something akin to a tiered fresco composition, impeccably centered by the Suprematist tondo in the hands of Malevich. His figure, surrounded by a garland of disciples and followers, seemed to ascend in a "mandorla" from their heads (a striking interpretation of the iconography of the Savior in power in a documentary photograph). The imperiously pointing movement of the UNOVIS leader, by its premeditation, staged, also transformed the snapshot into the rank of a historical document - however, the soft touch of Natalia Ivanova, trustingly leaning on Malevich's hand, somehow tamed the authoritarian unambiguity of the gesture. The psychological orchestration of the group portrait is also striking - a gamut of heterogeneous feelings was drawn on the faces of the UNOVIS members who were going to conquer Moscow. Harshly inspired dark-faced Malevich; warlike, disheveled Lazar Khidekel; sad, distant Lazar Zuperman; cheerful, business-like Ivan Gavris (it seems that under his arm he has the Unovis almanac) - and only the indestructible cheerfulness of Vera Ermolaeva and the naive little apprentice, who looked out from under the leader’s hand, brightened the strained seriousness of Unovis with a smile. In the picture, in addition to Malevich, all the leaders of the United Painting Audience are captured: Nina Kogan, Lazar Lissitzky, Vera Ermolaeva; school apprentices - Moses Veksler, Moses Kunin, Lazar Khidekel, Yakov Abarbanel, Ivan Gavris, Iosif Baitin, Efim Royak, Ilya Chashnik, Ephraim Volkhonsky, Fanya Belostotskaya, Natalia Ivanova, Lev Yudin, Khaim Zeldin, Evgenia Magaril, Lev Tsiperson, Isaak Beskin ; The names of the rest have not yet been established. Lissitzky and Baitin, leaning on the shoulders of Gavris, have the UNOVIS emblem attached to the cuff of their sleeves; Veksler in the front row and Zeldin in the back of the carriage have a black square pinned on their chests. The round-shaped "suprema" (the word of the Unovists) in the hands of Malevich is not a dish, as it might seem at first glance. Its author, obviously, was Chashnik, who was distinguished by his inexhaustible inventiveness and the ability to introduce Suprematist principles into forms of art other than easel painting (this was something akin to the similar skill of Nina Kogan, who invented either a Suprematist ballet or a Suprematist mobile). The white disk with geometric appliqué elements superimposed on it was taken into a freshly painted concave frame (Malevich had a pad under his palm so as not to erase the paint). Tondo was undoubtedly one of the exhibits of the exhibition that Unovis was taking to Moscow; its round shape in the photograph of 1920 is an extremely important evidence of the unexpected plastic experiments of the UNOVIS in the very early stages of the group's existence. Here it would be appropriate to say that Chashnik, who had a good command of the craft skills of working with metal, was famous at school for original compositions known to us only from verbal descriptions: they were a “picture” with planar geometric elements reinforced with metal pins at different heights from the surface. , - a kind of layered spatial-planar composition was obtained. This plastic idea, dating back to Malevich's Suprematism, many, many years after Chashnik's death, will be expressed in his own way by the famous Swiss artist Jean Tengueli in the reliefs of the 1950s called Meta-Malevich ... Malevich, having arrived in Vitebsk at the very beginning of November 1919, did not imagine that he would stay here for a long time. The birth of Unovis changed his plans - the upbringing of fellow believers now came to the fore. In letters to David Shterenberg, head of the Fine Arts Department of the Narkompros, Malevich explained: “I live in Vitebsk not for the sake of better nutrition, but for the sake of working in the province, where Moscow luminaries are not particularly willing to go to give an answer to the demanding generation.” At the beginning of January 1921, this provision was developed in an extensive letter to the same addressee: “Having left Moscow for the mountains. I left Vitebsk to benefit from all my knowledge and experience. Vitebsk workshops not only did not freeze like other cities in the province, but took on a progressive form of development, despite the most difficult conditions, everyone together overcome obstacles go further and further along the road of the new science of painting, I work all day, as can be confirmed by all the apprentices in the amount hundred people." The Vitebsk apprentices were not the first group of supporters to form around Malevich; Since the invention of Suprematism, circles of followers have constantly formed around the leader. However, it was in Vitebsk that Malevich's organizational and artistic-mentoring activities, based on the foundation laid in Petrograd and Moscow, acquired stable, developed forms. Malevich arrived in Vitebsk on the eve of an important event in his life, the first monographic exhibition. It was prepared as part of state exhibitions organized in the early Soviet years by the All-Russian Central Exhibition Bureau of the People's Commissariat for Education. Malevich's paintings have already been taken to the former salon of K. Mikhailova on Bolshaya Dmitrovka, 11.
Indirect evidence suggests that the exposition was already thought out by the author. On November 7, 1919, he wrote to M.O. Gershenzon about the opening of the exhibition as a matter already decided: “By the way, my exhibition must open in a week on Bolshaya Dmitrovka, Mikhailova’s salon, Stoleshnikov’s corner, stop by; all things could not be collected, but there is impressionism and beyond. I would like to know your opinion about it." Researchers for many years did not know where Malevich's exhibition eventually took place (in some sources, the Moscow Museum of Artistic Culture was indicated); There were disagreements about the time of its opening. An invitation card to the vernissage, preserved in the archive of N.I. Khardzhiev, unambiguously determines the time and place of Malevich's first solo exhibition: it was opened on March 25, 1920 in the former salon of Mikhailova, Bolshaya Dmitrovka, 11. The exhibition, registered as the XVI State Exhibition of the All-Russian Central Exhibition Center, is usually called “Kazimir Malevich. His path from impressionism to suprematism. To date, no accurate documentary evidence of her has been found; there was no catalog for the exhibition, although 153 works are known to have been presented. From the first exhibition of Malevich there were photographs of the exposition; unfortunately, the impressionist works were not included in the lens. Of the two reviews by A.M. Efros and A.A. Sidorov, only general ideas can be gleaned. Apparently, the paintings remained in the exhibition halls at the beginning of June 1920, when Malevich, together with the apprentices of the school, came to the All-Russian Conference of Art Teachers and Students (the next exhibition of the VTsVB was organized only in the summer-autumn of 1920 and its location is not indicated in the sources. M. M. Lerman, an apprentice of the Vitebsk school, in conversations repeatedly returned to Malevich’s monographic exhibition, which he happened to see with his own eyes. Due to the importance of these testimonies, we will cite them in the form in which they were recorded at one time: “We have I was in 1919 or 1920 (it was summer) and 1921 on excursions in Moscow, lived on Sadovo-Spasskaya, in some kind of hostel.The first excursion was very interesting, we were at the Malevich exhibition. , cubism, cubo-futurism, color suprematism, black and white suprematism, a black square on a white background and a white square on a white background, and in the last room there are empty white stretchers ";" When we arrived on an excursion to Moscow, we were starving. .. At the exhibition, one shouted: “Peace be with you, Casimir””; “The exhibition began in 1920 with Cezanne's works - the workers dragged heavy bags (“Cezanne has everything heavy,” said Malevich, “an iron apple”). In the beginning there were impressionistic things. Cubism, cubo-futurism, works of a "Deren" nature. Colored suprematism, a black square, and then empty stretchers walked, they laughed at it. "Peace be upon your ashes, Kazimir Malevich," someone shouted from the podium. I wore a black square, one approached me and asked: "Are you studying with Malevich?" It was, it seems, Mayakovsky”; “The first floor is a suite of rooms, an exhibition of Malevich. Malevich joked, Conspired that the “end of art” had come>. The facts reported by Lerman are verifiable; information about two excursions - summer and winter - coincides with documentary evidence of Unovis' trips to Moscow in the 1920 summer (June) and 1921 winter (December). The works with workers dragging sacks mentioned by the narrator correlate with the plots of large gouaches by Malevich Man with a sack (1911, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) and Carrying earth (1911, foreign private collection). Deserves trust and a message about a meeting with Mayakovsky; Mayakovsky, as already mentioned, spoke from the rostrum of the All-Russian Conference on June 8, on the day when Malevich and the UNOVIS members appeared there. Almost all Vitebsk sightseers for the first time in their lives visited the Tretyakov Gallery, the collection of I.A. Morozov and S.I. Schukin; accompanied them, giving explanations, Malevich himself. Sixteen-year-old Semyon Bychenok and Samuil Vikhansky, students of Pan's class at the People's School, were shocked to tears by the negative attitude of the stern Suprematist towards Repin, whom he proposed to "throw off the ship of modernity." These young men, however, Malevich did not convince, they forever remained faithful to Pan and realism. Returning to the artistic concept of Malevich's first solo exhibition, it should be said that its boldness and novelty passed the attention of contemporaries. The exit to the "white desert" for Malevich was the logical conclusion of the picturesque path; in December 1920, the lines appeared: “There can be no question of painting in Suprematism; painting has long been outlived and the artist himself is a prejudice of the past.” Painting really left the artist for many years - to return in a completely different guise in difficult times for him. Empty canvases - the screen onto which each viewer could project their creative potential - appeared in world art decades after Malevich's death; his priority in the field of conceptual creativity turned out to be firmly forgotten, unclaimed, unknown. Some evidence suggests that during the last public performance of Unovis, which took place as part of the “Exhibition of Paintings by Petrograd Artists of All Trends. 1918-1923”, the same exposition concept was repeated - an empty canvas was present in the collective exhibit of the Approvers of the New Art. Occupying the official position of the head of the workshop of the People's Art School, Malevich proposed as a basis a program developed for the Moscow State Art Museum. As already mentioned, the completeness and capacity of Malevich's program could ensure the activity of not one class, but an entire educational institution. This is what happened in Vitebsk - Malevich's plan, having become the basis for the program of the Unovis Unified Painting Audience, was implemented with the help of a "group of senior cubists", which included Lissitzky, Ermolaeva and Kogan. The teaching style of Malevich himself in Vitebsk acquired a completely different character compared to Moscow. Starting from the first days of meetings, the center of gravity shifted to verbal forms unusual in art education: lectures, reports and interviews became the main genre in the communication between the mentor and the students. In the archives of the Vitebsk school, documents have been preserved that recorded the extraordinary intensity of Malevich's lecture activity: the payroll for many hours of lectures appeared in the statements. Vitebsk diaries of L.A. Yudin; messages about Malevich's speeches were placed in the press, posters were specially created for them. A visual representation of the atmosphere and the nature of these quite academic studies can be obtained from the famous photograph of Unovis, dated to the autumn of 1921: Malevich, taking his usual place at the blackboard, draws an explanatory diagram with chalk.
The topics of the reports were closely related to that gigantic work of a theoretical nature that absorbed almost all the time of the great artist in Vitebsk. The path "from cubism to suprematism" was promoted by Malevich both as a path for individual development and as a path for the development of all art as a whole. In Vitebsk, the artist began to be interested in how the transition from one stage to another, from one painting system to another, is made. Examining the work of apprentices at interviews, performed to solve educational and artistic problems, the mentor tried to identify and explain the motives for this or “painting doing” (such an analysis was very soon called “diagnosing”). In the National School, Malevich received a lot of space for the implementation of the research inclinations of his intellect. The analysis of the work of an individual creative person, the analysis of an integral direction, was based on putting forward a hypothesis, setting up experiments, reconciling the predicted results and experimental data. Using the old canons of science, Malevich gave the humanitarian sphere the character of a sphere of natural science. Both the mentor himself and his followers often resorted to consolidating their observations in graphs, diagrams, tables, widely using peculiar statistical methods for accumulating primary material for theoretical and practical conclusions. The scientific visualization of artistic experiments and experiments was supposed to help reveal the objective laws of the formation of art - such a mindset dominated the aspirations of Unovis in Vitebsk, the Bauhaus in Weimar, Vkhutemas and Inkhuk in Moscow. Malevich, a spontaneous systematist, having streamlined his observations and conclusions, put forward a hypothesis, which then grew into an original theory, the substantiation and proof of which were devoted to the years of life of both the initiator himself and his Vitebsk adherents. Outlining the foundations of the "theory of the surplus element in painting," Malevich specifically emphasized the decisive significance of the Vitebsk years: part of the youth lived in the subconscious, feeling, inexplicable rise to a new problem, freeing themselves from the whole past. The opportunity opened up before me to carry out all sorts of experiments to study the effect of surplus elements on the pictorial acceptances of the subject's nervous system. For this analysis, I began to adapt the Institute organized in Vitebsk, which made it possible to carry out work in full swing. ” According to Malevich’s theory, the movement from one pictorial trend to another was due to the introduction of specific pathogens, peculiar artistic genes that rebuilt the appearance and image of the “painting body”. In Vitebsk, at an early stage of the formation of the theory, Malevich more readily used the word "additives", which then transformed into "surpluses", into "surplus element" - one cannot but see in this definition a certain influence of the popular term of Marxist-Leninist political economy. The People's Art School (Vitebsk State Artistic and Technical Workshops) was transformed into the Vitebsk Artistic and Practical Institute in 1921 - its work laid the foundations for scientific and artistic activity in registering, identifying, describing the primary elements that made up the "painting body" of one or another directions. The purpose of these experiments was subsequently outlined by Malevich: “So, for example, you can collect typical elements of impressionism, expressionism, cezannism, cubism, constructivism, futurism, suprematism (constructivism is the moment of system formation), and make several cartograms from this, find in them a whole system of development of lines and curves, to find the laws of linear and colored structures, to determine the influence on their development of the social life of modern and past eras and to determine their pure culture, to establish textural, structural, and so on. differences." As a result of carefully conducted scientific work, a surplus element of one direction or another had to be singled out - Cezannism, according to Malevich, was built on the basis of a “fiber-shaped surplus element”, cubism - a “crescent” one; the surplus element of Suprematism turned out to be a direct, most economical form, a trace of a moving point in space. Graphically significant surplus elements were linked to a certain color range in each direction.
The theoretical understanding of practical experiments, initiated by Malevich, gradually turned into a rule, a law for the most talented of his students in Vitebsk: the creation of a theoretical treatise was a prerequisite for obtaining a diploma from the Artistic and Practical Institute. The Scheme for the Construction of the Vitebsk State Artistic and Technical Workshops, developed and drawn by Chashnik, formulated the goal of education: the emergence of a “complete learned builder”. In full measure, laboratory research on the isolation of the “surplus element in painting” was launched by Malevich and members of the Vitebsk Unovis after they moved to Petrograd, becoming central to the experimental activities of Ginkhuk. The first assistants of Malevich, even to some extent his co-authors, since Vitebsk times were Ermolaeva and Yudin, who became assistants in the formal theoretical department. It should also be noted that the treatise Introduction to the theory of the surplus element in painting largely described the Vitebsk experiments carried out on “individuals amazed by painting”; It is no coincidence that Malevich dated the treatise to 1923, as if summing up the scientific, artistic and pedagogical experience of his life in Vitebsk. The Vitebsk years were also fruitful for the artist in terms of publishing theoretical works: between the first book, On New Systems in Art, and the last, “God Will Not Be Thrown Away,” were placed “From Cezanne to Suprematism” (Pg., 1920); "Suprematism. 34 drawings” (Vitebsk, 1920); "On the issue of fine arts" (Smolensk, 1921). In addition, treatises On the "I" and the collective, Towards pure action, manifestos Unom and the Declaration were published - all in the Almanac "Unovis No. 1", as well as the article "Unovis" in the Vitebsk magazine "Art" (1921, No. 1). Almost all the texts were tested by Malevich in oral transmission - they formed the basis of his lectures and speeches. Pronunciation, articulation of one's constant thoughts - an explanation to oneself and to the listeners of the meaning of the Black Square, the meaning of pointlessness, their ever deeper interpretation maintained close communicative ties between the leader and followers, the generator of ideas and adherents. The readings of the artist-philosopher were not easy food for listeners; on the contrary, they were a difficult test for the most advanced of them, who often felt their insufficiency, inability to follow the mentor. However - and this paradoxical effect is well known in psychology - the distance that the students felt between themselves and the teacher only convinced them of the special greatness of Malevich, surrounded him with a certain aura of the supernatural - their faith in the mentor was boundless, and it was excited by the exceptional spiritual talent of the ancestor Suprematism, the bearer of charisma. Lev Yudin, one of the most devoted students, wrote down on February 12, 1922 (I note, a week before the end of the manuscript Mir as non-objective): “Yesterday there was a lecture. Continuation of the picturesque essence. A lot of things are becoming clearer to me. - How hard K.S. (Kazimir Severinovich) is. When our people begin to whimper and complain about the high cost, it really begins to seem that the light is ending. K.S. comes and you immediately find yourself in a different atmosphere. He creates a different atmosphere around him. This is truly a leader." The public acts of thinking demonstrated by Malevich played an exciting, provoking role, and the high intensity of the epicenter inevitably raised the temperature of the environment, contributing to the rapid maturation of the most talented UNOVIS members: “15. II. 22. Wednesday. K.S. again got down to business and raised the group on its hind legs. Lectures go remarkably well and create a lot in the mind ”(Yudin’s diary). Somewhat apart from the Vitebsk pamphlets and articles stood the book Suprematism. 34 drawings, published at the very end of 1920. She was the last fruit of the technical cooperation between Malevich and El Lissitzky, who soon left the city. The book was drawn and written, as the author emphasized, in response to the request of the students. Therefore, first of all, the brochure-album represented de visu a wide range of Suprematist iconography, that is, it was a kind of exhibition of Malevich's Suprematist art. In this capacity, the book was the subject of discussion and reflection among the UNOVIS people; Yudin, for example, noted in his diary entries, evaluating the composition he had born: “December 31, 21 Saturday. Do not be embarrassed by what (drawing) K.S. has. After all, he, after all, has everything of ours.” In one of his Suprematist compositions, Chashnik used as a collage inclusion a Malevichev illustration from the Vitebsk edition. The concept of the album repeated to a certain extent the exhibition concept of Malevich, carried out in December 1916 at the last exhibition of the "Jack of Diamonds": the artist showed 60 Suprematist paintings, numbered from the first - Black Square to the last (they, obviously, were Supremus No. 56, Supremus No. 57 , Supremus No. 58). Appeal to time, temporal dynamics as a necessary condition for Suprematist transformations served as an essential characteristic of a new trend in art. A well-thought-out alternation of Suprematist images, collected under one cover, consistently deployed plastic changes in geometric elements in the space-time continuum. The undoubted interconnections of the previous illustration with the subsequent one revealed Malevich's desire to master real movement, real time - his creator subsequently tried to realize these potentialities of Suprematism in the language of cinema. In May 1927, while in Berlin, he asked to be introduced to Hans Richter, the initiator and founder of abstract cinema. In the 1950s, a script was discovered in Malevich's papers left with the von Rizens, marked "for Hans Richter." The script, called "Artistic and scientific film "Painting and problems of architectural approximation of the new classical architectural system", presented "frames" of abstract compositions with explanations, linked by semantic and dynamic unity. This scenario, undoubtedly, had a distant prototype in the first "cropped tape" of the book "Suprematism. 34 drawings”, assembled from Suprematist scenes and ending with two “close-ups”, large lithographs, significantly larger than all other illustrations. Malevich’s text, which served as an introduction to the album “Suprematism. 34 drawings”, stunned by the concentration of thought, the unusualness of the outlined projects, the unshakable faith in the Suprematist penetration into the world. “The Suprematist apparatus, so to speak, will be one whole, without any bonds. The bar is merged with all the elements like the globe - carrying the life of perfections, so that each constructed Suprematist body will be included in the natural organization and will form a new satellite. The Earth and the Moon, but between them a new Suprematist satellite can be built, equipped with all the elements, which will move in orbit, forming a new path. Exploring the Suprematist form in motion, we come to the decision that the movement in a straight line to any planet cannot be defeated otherwise than through the ring-shaped movement of intermediate Suprematist satellites, which form a straight line of rings from satellite to satellite ”The theory outlined by Malevich, - “almost astronomy,” as he put it in a letter to M.O. Gershenzon - even today it seems incredible, fantastic - perhaps the future will prove the validity of her fundamentally new approach to the technical implementation of the conquest of outer space. Nevertheless, Malevich's ideas were a direct product of their time, their environment. Futurological fantasies about breaking away from the earth, about entering the Universe, were firmly established in the worldview of European futurists, Russian Budutlyans and Cubo-Futurists. Back in 1917-1918, Malevich drew “shadow drawings,” as Velimir Khlebnikov called these graphic studies, striking with visionary foresight of images that turned out to be available only after mankind’s orbital voyages. On Russian soil, cosmic dreams were supported by philosophical theories, in particular, the philosophy of the Common Cause by N.F. Fedorov with his prognostic concepts of human settlement on other planets and stars. Fedorov's ideas inspired the great engineer K.E. Tsiolkovsky, who managed to translate utopian projects into a practical dimension, into the realm of reality. Perhaps the people of Vitebsk had a special predisposition to new impulses coming from the universe; otherwise it is difficult to explain, for example, the appearance in May 1919 of the enormous work of G.Ya. Yudin (it was he who argued with Ivan Puni, smashing futurism to smithereens). A fourteen-year-old teenager who was preparing for a musical career wrote an article Interplanetary Travel, which occupied two basements in two issues of the Vitebsk student newspaper. In the final paragraph, the young author confidently made a bold - let me remind you, it was May 1919 - conclusion: “We must hope that the twentieth century will give a decisive impetus to the progress of technology in this area and we will thus be witnesses of the first interplanetary journey.” The printing of the newspaper was poor, and therefore an apology was added to the article: “From the editorial board. Due to technical circumstances, the editors are deprived of the opportunity to place the details given by the author in the description of individual projects and, in particular, a schematic description of the "Rocket" by K.E. Tsiolkovsky. G.Ya. Yudin - fate took him a long century, and he witnessed Gagarin's flight and the American landing on the moon - in conversations with the author in the late 1980s, he said that the published article was only a fragment of a large work devoted to Tsiolkovsky's invention; the Vitebsk publication was one of the first to promote the great projects of the provincial Russian genius. Such were the future musicians in Vitebsk - the affirmers of the new art, inspired by Malevich himself, all the more could not but respond to the rhythms of the Universe. ... From unknown distances, two squares fell to the Earth, red and black, in the Suprematist tale about 2 squares, conceived and “built” for N.F. Fedorov with his prognostic concepts of human settlement on other planets and stars. Fedorov's ideas inspired the great engineer K.E. Tsiolkovsky, who managed to translate utopian projects into a practical dimension, into the realm of reality.
Suprematism was the most radical art proposal of the 20th century. Its author, Kazimir Malevich, created an intuitive, almost mystical theory that freed painting from plots, tradition and social responsibility, freed its self-sufficient qualities - color and form. Malevich believed that "art should become the content of life", when the artist creates forms for life, and the layman adapts. This totalitarianism is reflected in the concept of Boris Groys, who claims that the roots of Stalinist culture lie in the avant-garde. Due to its radicalism and mysticism, Suprematism remained a marginal phenomenon, did not become mainstream, although it entered the blood and flesh of the art of the 20th century.
Kazimir Malevich
“Icon Moscow overturned my theories<…>. Further, I did not go either by the ancient route, or by the Renaissance, or by the Wanderers. I remained on the side of peasant art" Explaining the emergence of the "Black Square", one should imagine a situation in which the author is between the "peasant" primitivism and the absurdity of Alexei Kruchenykh. He writes "square" intuitively, as if without realizing it. Later, having discovered its meaning, Malevich uses non-objectivity as a plot and infinity as space.
From 1915 to 1918, Malevich created pictures of planar Suprematism, in which color stages are distinguished: black and white, color, white. With simple geometric figures, Malevich does not depict on the surface of the canvas, but affirms a new being. The white background is comparable to space, the figures are hovering in orbits. Eventually "Suprematism<…>was completed by its creator with blank canvases"
Art before 1917 is the decomposition of painting into elements. After the revolution, it is life-building, the material for which are liberated forms and colors.
In 1920, Malevich replaced Marc Chagall in Vitebsk as the leader of the Art School. The city expresses a demand for modern propaganda art, and houses are covered with Suprematist confetti. Posters, panels, flags, ballet, sculptures, monuments - everything is in use. An architectural theme is being developed. Malevich writes: “The black square has grown into architecture in such forms that it is difficult to express the type of architecture, it has taken on such an image that it is impossible to find /its form/. It is the form of some new living organism.” The projection stage of Suprematism begins, the figures no longer float in space, but are layered on top of each other, the compositions become more complex. A point of view from above appears - an aerial view.
Exposition of paintings by Malevich at the exhibition "0.10". 1915
In 1922 Malevich arrived in Petrograd. Works at the Porcelain factory - get half-cups and half-cups. He teaches drawing at the IGI (Institute of Civil Engineers), they pay little money there, and he leaves. He becomes the head of GINHUK (State Institute of Artistic Culture), gathers a unique team. Here, with a group of students, he continues the artistic design started in Vitebsk. Volume building begins. Planar images of previous years become plans for three-dimensional bodies. At the first reporting exhibition of GINKhUK, in the summer of 1924, planites (graphic images of Suprematist structures) were exhibited. On the second, in the summer of 1926 - architectons (gypsum architectural models).
Kazimir Malevich. Architecton Alpha. 1924
Exposition of the Suprematist order at the exhibition "Artists of the RSFSR for 15 years". Russian Museum. 1932
Malevich, having reached the limits of form creation, makes a turn towards the classics. As early as 1924, he writes about the "New Classicism" as an impending ideology. In 1926, the architectons, as soon as they were born, change their orientation from horizontal to vertical. Now his structures do not hover in space orbits, but rise from the earth. A "suprematist order" arises, not as a system of proportions, but as an intuitive tectonics.
At this time, there is still no new architecture in Russia. The first buildings will appear only a year later, in 1927. And Malevich has already completed the line of development of Suprematism, leading him to architecture. All material is shown and ready to use.
Lazar Lissitzky
“Having established certain plans for the Suprematist system, I entrust the further development of already architectural Suprematism to young architects” Malevich handed over the affairs to Lazar Lissitzky, who invited him to Vitebsk, helped design urban spaces and led the architectural department of the school, headed the printing house there and published a treatise On New Systems in Art.
Malevich tried to build his personal line of development, putting early dates on later works, but in fact, the leading role in the appeal of the Suprematists to architecture belongs to Lissitzky. The creative relationship between Malevich and Lissitzky is the path of Suprematist architecture. Malevich established the statics of the "Black Square", Lissitzky - the dynamics of "Beat the whites with a red wedge." Malevich, as if considering the Earth from the sky, develops aeroplanimetry - AERO. Lissitzky invents multidimensional prouns (“Project for the Approval of the New” - projection graphics), climbs inside the canvas. Malevich continues to work and creates planets and architectons. Lissitzky leaves the "Suprematist game" and leaves for Moscow, and then for Europe.
Lazar Lissitzky. "New". Costume design for the opera Victory over the Sun. 1921
Lissitzky gave Suprematism an understanding of the plane as a projection, organized many spaces in prouns. He also began the axonometric construction of objects. The architect Lissitzky organized the chaos of geometric figures with axes. The viewer was immersed in the picture, lost in it, but gradually the architectural purpose took over, and the projections became either bearing or carried elements.
Differences in views on dynamics completed the formation of architectural Suprematism. Malevich sought "... one plane to convey the power of static or apparent dynamic rest", Lissitzky said that "proun is masculinely active dynamic". Malevich soberly assessed the discrepancy with those on whom architectural hopes were placed: “the dynamic forms of the Suprematist structure, which later divided into two types: aero-shaped Suprematism (dynamic) and static Suprematism; the latter goes to the architecture (peace) of art, dynamic<в>construct (labor)
Lazar Lissitzky. Proun. 1920
Construction and architecton are two forms of architecture of the 20th century, which received theoretical substantiation in the dialogue of artists. Crossing Suprematism and Constructivism, Lissitzky created his own version of the international style and successfully demonstrated it in the West. There he also advertised Malevich, it is difficult to imagine what the fate of Suprematism would have been without the services of Lissitzky. However, after moving to Petrograd, the Suprematists had to develop an architectural theme from scratch, but this made it possible to keep Malevich's idea pure, avoiding the influence of constructivism.
Alexander Nikolsky
“Our new reality is now facing the task of a new architectural design. And for this, it is timely to think about organizing such research and experimental-practical workshops ... "
Alexander Nikolsky - civil engineer, before the revolution was a student of Vasily Kosyakov, designed churches. In 1919-1921 he draws arch. schemes that responded to requests for the rationalization of abstract form and were in line with architectural cubism. Since 1922, he got acquainted with the developments of Suprematism. After the closing of GINKhUK in 1926, he took up the banner of the institute and headed the Art Industry Committee at the RIIII (Russian Institute of Art History), where he worked with the students of Malevich and Matyushin. The result of this work was a series of projects exhibited at the First Exhibition of Modern Architecture in Moscow in the summer of 1927. The projects were shown in mock-ups, which was an innovative greeting from Malevich. Stylistically, it was a cross between Suprematism and Constructivism. Khan-Magomedov called this phenomenon “Suprematist constructivism”.
Nikolsky A. and workshop. The project of the hall of public meetings "Lenin". 1926–1927
Nikolsky is simultaneously a member of the OCA (Association of Contemporary Architects) and communicates with Malevich. He is condemned for this connection and for excessive attention to form. With his authority, Nikolsky contributed to the implementation of Suprematist projects. Together with Malevich's student L. Khidekel and N. Demkov, Nikolsky designs the stadium "KSI" ("Red Sports International") in Leningrad. For the first time in Russia, stands are built of reinforced concrete. The club building is the first success of planet tectonics in its characteristic black and white scale. The methods of Suprematism in the organization of volumes are visible in the project of the Giant bathhouse in Leningrad. In the project of round baths, Nikolsky uses the dynamic scheme of Lissitzky. The pointed vestibule cuts into the main volume, visualizing the motif "Beat the whites with a red wedge."
Ushakov baths "Giant", Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Main facade. 1930
"Suprematist constructivism" is comparable in formal qualities with the architecture of the leaders of the international style. Nikolsky is consistently looking for a form of expression of a public idea: halls of public meetings, schools, stadiums are examples of structures that are at the peak of modern social relations. Here Nikolsky concentrated on the task of creating a modern "temple" embodying the ideals of the new era.
Nikolay Suetin
“... if the architect creates<…>a building that will serve as a refuge for others, then let them find free spaces in architecture<…>through artistic decision
Malevich's disciples, it seems, could not achieve the quality of Malevich's thought, but they had the honor of bringing the cause of Suprematism to heights in practice. “After Tatlin left for Kyiv, at the end of 1925, the department of material culture of GINKhUK was reorganized into a laboratory of Suprematist architecture. Nikolai Suetin becomes the leader" Together with Ilya Chashnik, they were Malevich's main support in the development of plans and architectons. Chashnik died in 1929, Malevich - in 1935, hunger and disease were their companions. Suetin escorts the teacher on his last journey - he makes a Suprematist coffin, in which the body will be transported along Nevsky Prospekt. In the same year, he received an order for an interior design project for the USSR Pavilion for the World Exhibition in Paris.
Nikolay Suetin. Interior design of the USSR pavilion at the World Exhibition 1937
The pavilion became the quintessence of pre-war Soviet art. “Mastering the Classical Heritage” took on the form of a style that organically combined the formal ideas of the avant-garde and decorative realism.
Let's offer a version of the appearance of the pavilion's forms: around 1930, Malevich puts the figure of a man on top of a Suprematist skyscraper, this is not long before the approved project of the Palace of Soviets in Moscow appears. Boris Iofan is appointed the author of the project, but behind him you can see the demiurge of social realism himself: on the top of the Tower of Babel stands a statue of the leader.
In 1921, Lissitzky designed the figurine "New" (a costume sketch for the opera "Victory over the Sun"), where two figures merge into one in extreme dynamics. In 1935-1936, the design history of the sculpture "Worker and Collective Farm Girl" was going on. The rallying of the bodies of a man and a woman in a burst of progress and labor is referred to the "New" as the closest example. The architect of the pavilion is the same Iofan, together with Mukhina and their ideological customer, they seem to be hostages of Suprematism.
USSR pavilion at the World Exhibition. 1937
Suetin fills the interior of the pavilion with Malevich's favorite color - white, the color of infinity. White suits on "Noble people of the country of the Soviets" from Deineka's paintings. There is a lot of air in the interior, few objects. The central staircase leads to the layout of the Palace of the Soviets, the marches are flanked by two pairs of architectons. Suprematist relief and ornament cover the walls and ceilings of the pavilion.
Lazar Khidekel
“But experience tells us that since we started building the Tower of Babel, this desire has not given us any useful results ...”
The only real architect in Suprematism was Lazar Khidekel. He studied under Malevich and Lissitzky in Vitebsk, then in Leningrad he became a civil engineer. His 1926 coursework at the IGI would cause a scandal. The project of the Workers' Club, calculated to the smallest detail, will be the first project of Suprematism. Khidekel will teach Nikolsky a new system of shaping and will develop the volume of the KSI stadium club.
Lazar Khidekel. Suprematist project "Aeroclub". 1925
Lazar Khidekel. Course project "Working club". 1926
In 1929 he was sent to the design department of the Dubrovskaya Hydroelectric Power Station (State Power Station) - there he would propose a club in the form of a cube. He actively promotes Suprematism in porcelain, interiors, advertising, and makes projects for cities of the future. In 1933, he realized the construction on his own - the cinema "Moskva" in Leningrad in 1937. Khidekel seems to take his 1924 Aeroclub project as a basis - the cruciform structure is barely visible through the art deco decoration, but is visible from above. Khidekel will accept the rules of the game of classics, but will introduce into it the ornament of the “Suprematist order”, as on the facade of the school building in Leningrad. He will forget the dangerous hobby for a long time, but he will not stop drawing for himself and will live to see the return of interest in Suprematism in the 1970s.
Lazar Khidekel. The project of the cinema "Moscow". 1937
Lazar Khidekel. School in Leningrad. 1940
Suprematists in the history of art are like rebels whose goal is to give the world their highest rules. What they managed to bring into reality is significant for a group of five people. "Black Square" stunned Russia, but not the USSR. Only for a moment Suprematism was at the top of the visual paradigm, then it disappeared into design, leaving only a myth about itself. The list of architects influenced by Malevich's theory of form stretches from Theo van Doesburg to Zaha Hadid. The influence was obvious in the 1920s and 1930s, in post-war modernism it arose subconsciously, in our time it is conceptual aestheticism.
Cit. Quoted from: Ovsyannikova E. "Architecture as a slap in the face of concrete-iron" dialectics of the development of architectural thought / Architecture and construction of Moscow. No. 12, 1988. S. 16.
See: Zhadova L.A. "Suprematist order" / Problems of the history of Soviet architecture. M., 1983. S. 37.
Malevich. K. Biographical sketch. OK. 1930. Cited. by: Malevich K. Sobr. op. v.5. S. 372.
