The end / beginning
Kazimir Malevich spent 56 years on planet Earth. Born in Kiev’s suburbs, the first of the 14 (9 surviving) children of a sugar refinery manager, he died in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1935. He created his most famous (and notorious) painting Black Square (or, more correctly, Black Quadrilateral) in 1915. That year Malevich wrote From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism. The New Realism in Painting:
I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring which confines the artist and the forms of nature.
I have transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation, that is to Suprematism, to the new realism in painting – to non-objective creation.
In 1915 Malevich showed 39 Suprematist paintings at the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings “0.10”. He hung the Black Quadrilateral at the top in the corner of the room – the so called “red corner” where icons would be placed in the homes of believing Russians. He called it “the icon of my time.” And in a 1916 letter to Alexandre Benois, one of the founders of a magazine and movement leaning towards romanticism, World of Art, Malevich wrote, responding to Benois’s unsympathetic reaction to Suprematism, that :
You will never see sweet Psyche’s smile on my square.
And it will never be a mattress for love-making.
Somebody took a picture of Malevich on his death bed in his apartment. Black Square was hung on the wall above his head. Malevich’s body was placed into a Suprematist coffin, built by his colleague and friend Nikolai Suetin according to Malevich’s sketches. One of the sketches had a cross on the lid which did not become part of the final product. The Suprematist coffin was brought to the House of the Artist for public mourning, and then was transported on an open platform truck (with a black square on the hood) to the train station followed by a procession of friends and colleagues. After the cremation, the artist’s ashes were buried under the oak tree in a small village Nemchinovka (then Borvikha) in the vicinity of St. Petersburg and his grave was marked with a cube that had a black square on it. Suetin designed and executed it. There is a photograph from 1935 showing his widow and daughter standing next to it. The grave was lost during the 2nd World War. Malevich’s name was erased from Russian art history during Soviet times; his works were not publicly seen in his own country until 1988. That year, his grave was restored; it retained the form of a cube, but the square on it became red.
The exhibition
The show, organized in collaboration with Malevich’s heirs, takes up all three floors of the Gagosian’s Madison street location. Curator Andrea Crane, with much salesperson flair and special emphasis on the word “fantastic” (used 5 times in 5-minute part 1 of her video) invoking her 3-year old son’s take on Malevich (“he’s coming to this with the most pure eyes”), gives a three part video tour of the exhibition. In the first part, titled Genesis, she tells us that Malevich created approximately 85 Suprematist paintings, 22 of which were lost or destroyed and 47 are in public collections, which leave only 16 in private hands.
Desk and Room, 1913
Oil on canvas
311/4 x 311/4 inches (79.5 x 79.5 cm)
Collection of the Heirs of Kazimir Malevich
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
There are six Maleviches in the show. Desk and Room, 1913, on the 4th floor, is from a pre-Suprematist period and belongs to the heirs of the artist. Four paintings are dated 1915, the birth year of Suprematism. Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, 1915, on the 5th floor, is from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The other three, and the painting dated 1920-27 take up the central wall on the 6th floor of the gallery. Suprematism, 18th Construction, 1915, and Mystic Suprematism, 1920-27, belong to the heirs.
Suprematism, 18th Construction, 1915
Oil on canvas
207/8 x 207/8 inches (53 x 53 cm)
Collection of the Heirs of Kazimir Malevich
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Mystic Suprematism, 1920–27
Oil on canvas
393/8 x 235/8 inches(100.5 x 60 cm)
Collection of the Heirs of Kazimir Malevich
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Suprematist Painting: Rectangle and Circle, 1915, is from the Sepherot Foundation in Liechtenstein. And Painterly Realism of a Football Player – Color Masses in the 4th Dimension, 1915, was just purchased from the heirs by the Art Institute of Chicago which has now become the second public institution in the US to have Suprematist painting by Malevich in its collection.
Painterly Realism of a Football Player— Color Masses in the 4th Dimension, 1915
Oil on canvas
271/2 x 173/8 inches (70 x 44 cm)
The Art Institute of Chicago, through prior gift of Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester
Collection; Art Institute of Chicago
Acquisition Funds, 2011.1
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Malevich’s American legacy includes Richard Serra, Donald Judd, David Smith, James Turrell, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, Cy Twombly, Alexander Calder, Mel Bochner, Mark Grotjahn, John Baldessari, Ellsworth Kelly, Charles Ray, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Ad Reinhardt, Ed Ruscha, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden and Carl Andre. The earliest work, Newman’s By Twos is from 1949, the latest is Turrell’s Untitled: 32LIB+C from 2010. Crane mentions that several artists, including Serra, provided some guidance.
Afterlife
During his lifetime Malevich went abroad only once, in 1927. He had two shows during this trip, the largest shows of his work in the West in his lifetime. He exhibited some of his works in Warsaw, Poland, and took part in the Great Berlin Exhibition (Grosse Beliner Kunstausstellung) – he got a separate hall. After the Berlin show the artist planned to go to Paris, but the Soviet authorities declined the request to extend his stay abroad. He left Berlin entrusting the works he had brought with him and which were still on exhibition, and related documents, to the architect Hugo Häring, and he left his theoretical writings – with his host, engineer Gustav von Riesen. Once the exhibition was closed, most of the works of the artist were stored by Alexander Dorner, then the director of the Provinzialmuseum in Hannover. It was Dorner who introduced Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art at the time, to Malevich’s paintings in 1935 when Barr was traveling in Europe preparing his exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art. Strangely, this was the year Malevich died. By then, Malevich’s works were considered “degenerative art” in Nazi Germany. Barr secretly took several works with him. Dorner sent more by various ways and brought others when Barr helped him to emigrate to the US in the late 1930s. Twenty one works by Malevich came to US this way. Cubism and Abstract Art was on view at the Modern Art Museum in New York and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Fourteen works of Malevich were listed in the exhibition catalogue. Once the show was closed, the works stayed at the MOMA. For a long time, this was the only public collection that boasted Suprematist works by Malevich.
The large scale works from the Berlin exhibition, which were hard to transport, stayed in Germany and were destroyed during WWII. Hugo Häring preserved what he had in his care through the war, but at the end of his life, in 1958, experiencing financial hardships, sold everything he had to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam which now has the most comprehensive Malevich collection in the world. The legal ownership of Malevich’s Berlin legacy and other works he did not sell or gifted himself was brought to court by the artist’ heirs but was resolved: with Stedlijk in 2008, with the Museum of Modern Art and with the Harvard University Busch-Reisinger Museum in 1999. Busch-Reisinger received the 1915 painting Rectangle and Circle and a drawing, through Dorner’s will in 1957 to keep until the owner could be determined. Rectangle and Circle was included in the first retrospective of the artist in the winter of 1919-20 and in the 1927 Berlin exhibition. When Troels Andersen published his catalogue raisonné of the 1927 Berlin show in 1970, the whereabouts of this painting were listed as unknown. The four paintings at the Gagosian marked as belonging to the heirs, were part of the 1958 Stedelijk acquisition from Haring.
It was not until the 1958 Stedelijk purchase from Haring that Malevich’s Suprematist works showed their colors. Stedelijik organized a number of Malevich exhibitions in Europe in the late 1950s and early 60s. The breakthrough exhibition was probably the 1959 show at the Whitechapel gallery in London showing works from the Stedelijk and accompanied by a catalogue with an introduction by Camilla Gray. The 1960s and 1970s saw more shows and publications, including Stedelijk’s curator Troels Andersen’s anthology of the artist’s writings and the catalogue raisonné of the Malevich 1927 Berlin exhibition.
The Guggenheim Museum put up a major show of Malevich in 1973. Donald Judd reviewed it in Art in America in 1974, and Artforum’s editor-in-chief John Coplans interviewed Mel Bochner on Malevich in 1974 as well. Both Judd’s scrupulous review and Bochner’s sublime interview are reprinted in the Gagosian exhibition catalogue.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union brought the artist’s works out of the closets of the Russian State Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery and other smaller institutions. At last, Malevich was re-instated in the history of art. More exhibitions and scholarly publications followed and more of his writings were translated and published.
Since then, the major US exhibitions included the 1990-1991 Kazimir Malevich, 1878-1935, co-organized by the National Gallery of At, The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center and The Metropolitan Museum of Art with loans from European and Russian public and private collections; the 1992 The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde 1915-1932, a collaboration of the Guggenheim, the Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; the 2003 Malevich: Suprematism, a joint project of the Guggenheim and the Menil Foundation, and the Guggenheim’s small show Malevich in Focus: 1912-1922 just last year.
Legacy?
What is Malevich’s legacy, including its American share? In part 1 of her promotion video, Crane asks this question. She acknowledges that his influence could be formal or conceptual; she recognizes that some artists never realized they were influenced by Malevich and some never thought about him for a second. But, she says, the links do exist. Crane gives an example. She connects weightlessness and pure form in Serra’s 1964 Malmo Roll (on view in the show) to Malevich’s 1915 Suprematist Painting: Rectangle and Circle. She continues to talk about dialogues with Malevich (only he can no longer respond).
Larry Gagosian, in the catalogue introduction, insists that “it is not only formal analogy that connects him with American artists, but also deeper aesthetic, conceptual and spiritual correspondences.” And, in the end, “the charged abstractions of Charles Ray, Mark Grotjahn, and Banks Violette testify to Suprematism’s dramatic reach into the present and allow for its future impact.” Legacy? To me this sounds like the genesis of a trust fund for Ray, Grotjahn and Violette.
But what is legacy? Legacy is something handed down from the past. Malevich’s legacy is his paintings and writings. That is not to say that his work in any medium – his legacy - did not influence American or any other artists. But legacy and influence are worlds apart. If legacy is something he left, then influence, including impact contrary to the intention, is out of his hands.
On the other hand, what about ideas? To a certain extent, they live independently of objects, whether paintings or sculptures; to a degree, objects are byproducts. And what are ideas? Stuff an artist left or places he visited? Does idea, as an independent force, create convergences? Doesn’t it happen sometimes that when you are thinking about a certain issue intensely, you come across a record of somebody else’s thinking on the same matter (a book or a painting) as if by a chance? If ideas are places, than one’s intellectual path goes through many; you bump into past visitors, but places change in time. And thinking about a common problem might be akin to staying in the same hotel on a completely different itinerary. And, of course, confusion shapes ideas too.
Curatorial waters are muddy. Magdalena Dabrowski suggests that discourse between American artists and Malevich evolved subconsciously. Yve-Alain Bois ends up on the other side of the world. Talking about Reinhardt’s black cross and the black cross of Malevich which Reinhardt could not have seen when he developed his own similar form, Yve-Alain Bois concludes that it must be what Erwin Panofsky called pseudomorphosis – “the emergence of a form A, morphologically analogous to, or even identical with, a form B, yet entirely unrelated to it from a genetic point of view.” Bois applies this diagnosis to Kelly and Johns. About Kelly he says that the artist might have seen some Malevich’s works at MOMA and in reproduction, but that it was unlikely that they would have fully registered. What does “registered” mean? Bois questions the same limits of what was seen and perceived as Dabrowksi, but on purely rational grounds.
Limits are tricky. It is impossible to really know who saw what and when, who took what and how much. One person can come away with more having seen five paintings by an artist than another who saw fifty. Misunderstanding and misinterpretation can also be liberating in unpredictable ways. And would intentional pondering be decisive? I don’t think that the lack of it necessarily lands an artist into the subconscious. The nature of art is such that an artist also thinks with the brush (or pencil, or whatever). (S)he thinks in and with forms. Common forms might mean pseudomorphosis, might betray a one-way conversation or might constitute independent preoccupation with a related idea but for different means and purposes. But how do you gauge this?
Crane’s statement about unrealized and unknown influence makes artist an orphan who knows nothing about his biological parents, but comes a curator who finds them. Bois locates an ancestor:
Johns seems never to have alluded to Malevich in his statements and interviews, and the resemblance of his surfaces to those of Malevich, in both painting and drawing, is most likely another case of pseudomorphosis, though not a complete one: as Malevich’s Bather (F-193), a large gouache of 1911, attests, there’s a genetic link between the two artists: Paul Cézanne.
Picasso called Cézanne “the father of us all” a while ago. Who wouldn’t be related? But Picasso describes something like a move to a new country in which descendants now have to grow up (until they are ready to leave the family nest). This connection is quite unlike Gagosian’s blanket “spiritual correspondences”, which assign artists to a yahoo group of sorts.
At heart, relationship is a private affair. The way, for example, Judd relates to Malevich is quite different from Bochner as the reproduced essay and interview reveal. For the American artists, the 1973 Guggenheim show was the fist occasion to see Malevich’s works in the flesh in a more or less comprehensive way, although Judd mentions that “the present exhibition seems not to contain the greater portion of either the existing paintings and drawings, or of his total work; and of that portion, more than half are early Fauve or Cubist paintings.” The show included about 50 paintings. Judd said he would have liked to see many more Suprematist paintings. To me reading Judd’s article was like reading travel notes of somebody not just visiting but exploring a new place. Judd was looking carefully. He might have seen some of the works before in reproduction, as James Turrell says he did in his conversation with Mark Francis (also included in the catalogue). Now they are in front of him. Judd’s reference point is his own creative place and time; he looks at Malevich through his personal creative preoccupations. He breaks down Malevich into color, form, surface, and structure when thinking about the artist’s achievements. Judd is like a detective.
Mel Bochner’s view is in a way opposite to Judd’s. He is a peripatetic passerby. His detachment gives him freedom. He tries to understand the artist’s time. If he breaks him down, he is not guided by his creative concerns, but by Malevich’s. He recognizes his own distance and limits. When asked about the relationship of the 1913 Malevich Suprematist drawings to American artists (Kelly, Albers, Reinhardt, and Newman), Bochner said:
I think that the intention of Malevich is so radically different, it’s not beneficial to make comparisons. Those kinds of relationships are really made on formal grounds.
Further, he continues:
Art is not illustrating ideas, particularly received ideas. Art has to do with the intent of the work – how it moves out, how it structures itself from a central preoccupation. A central preoccupation can’t be really a formal problem, such as how you deal with the edge of the canvas. It comes from content.
And content comes from a creator.
Suprematism
In his 1920 essay Suprematism. 34 Drawings Malevich “split” it:
Suprematism falls into three stages, according to the number of squares in black, red and white: the black period, the colored and the white. In the latter, white shapes are painted on white. All three periods of development extend from 1913 to 1918.
Malevich puts 1913 as the beginning of Suprematism, because the first ever black square appeared in the sketch for the backdrop for the 1913 opera Victory over the Sun, but did not become part of the final production.
In December 1919 – January 1920, Malevich’s first retrospective took place as part of the 16th State Exhibition and was titled Kazimir Malevich. His Route from Impressionism towards Suprematism. In this show the works representing different stages and periods of his creative activity were organized chronologically. Suprematism was divided into three stages: black, color, white. The exposition was crowned by two plain white canvases. The same conception of the exhibition was duplicated when Unovis (Creators of New Art - the Vitebsk artistic group founded by Malevich in 1920) exhibited its collective project in “The Exhibition of Petrograd Artists of All Trends 1918 - 1923” which opened in May of 1923. The project exhibited paintings by its members, including paintings of Malevich himself, without any names or attributions. Two plain white canvases also completed it. This was the last Unovis show. Three years lie between these two exhibitions. During those years Malevich did not paint; he taught and wrote articulating and presenting Suprematism and his understanding of art in its context. On the occasion of the 1923 exhibition, Malevich wrote his manifesto Suprematist Mirror in which everything came to zero. He also called his plain empty canvases Suprematist mirrors. He did not create truly new works until his return from Berlin.
I like that Bochner mistrusts Malevich:
Yes, but I think that there is a yawning gap between his theoretical writings and the actual visual facts themselves; I don’t feel that you can use his writings as a key to what the paintings are about.
I agree. To me the question is who wrote? The artist or his alter ego? And what does it mean that for a period of time, it was only writing, and no painting. When Malevich returned to painting, it was no longer non-objective. Was that pause reinvention? What did he leave or loose? Bochner reflects on Malevich’s work just before the pause:
Dead end? – yes, but perhaps more like a “loose end.” People used to talk about White on White as if it had no cause – as if it were sui generis; there it is, it’s a fact, it’s there, there’s nothing before and there’s nothing after. But that relegated it to being a gesture. A one-shot thing. On the contrary, I think it’s one of the prime objects of the twentieth century. A “prime object” exists in such a way that it contains a fundamental set of ideas which don’t have to be seen or known explicitly by anyone else to exert their pressure. The ideas insinuate their way into the world. I think Malevich really represents very major issues to art today.
I think Malevich might have literally actualized a prime object. Several years ago my friend and mentor opened my eyes to the simple fact that Malevich’s square plain canvas, regardless of the artist’s claim of absolute zero, is an object, a canvas on a stretcher. The “world as non-objectivity” hit object head on.
Did Malevich realize this? Was it an idea that, perhaps, made its stark brief appearance in these works? Did the writer not follow the artist? Did the non-realization on the part of Malevich or his “heirs” of the conflict of its object-hood with the artist’s pronouncement of “white free abyss” make it less potent? Did it register in some way once plain canvases were seen in the 1923 Unovis exhibition photograph? In his post-Suprematist figurative painting, Malevich himself went down a different road than his “heirs.”
I don’t think there is plain canvas after all, but a ‘prime object.’ No artist starts with a tabula rasa, but with a set of ideas. Every artist is entangled in genetic links, and influences are many. But in the end, it’s leaving places or dead end.
Malevich and the American Legacy is on view at the Gagosian Gallery through April 30, 2011
980 Madison Avenue (at 77th street)
New York, NY 10075
Hours: Tue-Sat 10-6
The concurrent exhibition The Great Upheaval: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection 1910 - 1918 at the Guggenheim Museum of Art provides a global context for the years surrounding the birth of Suprematism and includes two paintings by Malevich, a cubo-futurist Morning in the Village after Snowstorm, 1912 and Untitled, circa 1916. On view through June 1, 2011.
1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street)
New York, NY 10128-0173
Hours: Sun–Wed 10 am–5:45 pm, Fri 10 am–5:45 pm, Sat 10 am–7:45 pm, closed Thu
The Museum of Modern Art has five Malevichs on view as part of the permanent collection on the 5th floor: two cubo-futurist paintings, Reservist of the First Division, 1914, and Woman with Pails: Dynamic Arrangement, 1912-13, and three Suprematist works: Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918, Suprematist Painting, 1916-1917, and Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapscak – Color Masses in the Forth Dimension, 1915. More holdings can be viewed online.
11 West 53rd St. (betweeen 6th and 5th Avenues)
New York, NY 10019
Hours: Wed – Mon 10:30 am – 5:30pm, Fri 10:30 am – 8:00 pm, closed Tue
Malevich at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow: collection online
More on Malevich’s legal ownership
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