Malevich and Interwar Modernism

Russian Art and the International of the Square

Éva Forgács

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350204195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte general

This book examines the legacy of international interwar modernism as a case of cultural transfer through the travels of a central motif: the square. The square was the most emblematic and widely known form/motif of the international avant-garde in the interwar years. It originated from the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich who painted The Black Square on White Ground in 1915 and was then picked up by another Russian artist El Lissitzky and the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg. It came to be understood as a symbol of a new internationalism and modernity and while Forgács uses it as part of her overall narrative, she focuses on it and its journey across borders to follow its significance, how it was used by the above key artists and how its meaning became modified in Western Europe. It is unusual to discuss interwar modernism and its postwar survival, but this book's chapters work together to argue that the interwar developments signified a turning point in twentieth-century art that led to much creativity and innovation. Forgács supports her theory with newly found and newly interpreted documents that prove how this exciting legacy was shaped by three major agents: Malevich, Lissitzsky and van Doesburg. She offers a wider interpretation of modernism that examines its postwar significance, reception and history up until the emergence of the New Left in 1956 and the seismic events of 1968.

1

The Sky Is the Limit

Malevich at the Vitebsk Junction, 1919

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

Malevich’s Road to Vitebsk

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was born on February 26, 1879,¹ near Kiev (the Russian name of Kyiv, capital of Ukraine), to parents of Polish descent.² His father worked at a sugar-beet factory. From 1895 to 1896 Malevich studied at the Kiev Art School,³ and in 1898 he moved to Moscow where he studied at various art academies, including the Stroganoff School of Art. Since 1907 he was an increasingly active participant of the emerging new art scene in Russia. During 1908–1914, Malevich was intensely involved in the unfolding art movements and events. He joined Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova in their early naive-folklorist and cubist endeavors. Moscow artists, led by Larionov, formed the Bubnovii valet (Jack of Diamonds) group in 1910 to mark their difference from the new Western art, which was admittedly the model of the formerly dominant Mir iskusstva (World of Art) group. Larionov and his followers embraced both urban and popular culture. They drew on icon painting, but directly religious subject matter was censored from their shows.⁴ The group’s December 1910 exhibition was harshly attacked for being vulgar and even allegedly insane.⁵ Malevich participated in the exhibition along with Larionov, Goncharova, David and Vladimir Burliuk, Piotr Konchalovsky, Ilia Mashkov, Alexandra Exter, and others including contemporary French artists. Following the show’s controversy, a faction of the group spearheaded by Larionov and Goncharova that included Malevich as well as his later adversary Vladimir Tatlin split and launched a more radical program that materialized in March 1912 when they organized the provocatively named Oslinii khvost (Donkey’s Tail) exhibition—a tongue-in-cheek reference to the general public’s view that innovations of the modern painter were little better than the mindless wagging of a donkey’s tail throwing around paint on a canvas.⁶ In 1912, on his way to further radicalization, Malevich associated with the Petersburg-based Sojuz molodozhi (Union of Youth) movement and befriended its leader, painter, and musician Mikhail Matyushin, who would become one of his closest friends and mentor in the coming years. In this same year, the Hylea group of cubo-futurist poets Alexei Kruchenikh, Velimir (Victor) Khlebnikov, Benedikt Livshitz, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the multitalented Burliuk brothers David, Vladimir, and Nikolai also contacted the Union of Youth.⁷ Having chosen the ancient name of a Ukrainian province (Hylea, an estate near Kherson) for their modern group, they radically disrupted and reassessed the concept of art along with the elementary units of expression, dissecting the grammatical and semantic system of the aesthetic and the Russian language. Breaking the Russian language down to “the word as such”⁸ and further to “the letter as such”⁹ was the fundamental gesture of defying the existing culture and inaugurating a more innovative use of the language. These shifts reflected the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s parole in libertà (words-in-freedom), a deliberate bias from the application of the existing syntax and linear typography. The Russian cubo-futurists’ 1912 almanac Slap in the Face of Public Taste ¹⁰ opens with a manifesto of the same title in which they declare: “We alone are the face of our time,”¹¹ and express “insurmountable hatred for the language existing before [their] time.”¹² Kruchenikh and Khlebnikov’s 1913 pamphlet “The Word as Such” mentions Malevich among the new like-minded artists. In this same text, Kruchenikh’s transrational poem of non-existing words, “dyr bul shchyl,” similarly radical to Marinetti’s “Zang Tumb Tumb” (also known as “Zang Tumb Tuuum,” written between 1912 and 1914, published in 1914) was first published as an alternative “model for another sort of sound and word combination.”¹³ The consequent pamphlet “The Letter as Such” raises the stakes, and while breaking down words into letters, it brings into play the typeface as a graphic presence, pointing out that handwriting, as opposed to printing, conveys the author’s—and, as in the case of the Russian futurist books, the visual artist’s—mood “that changes during the process of writing ( . . . ) independently from the words.”¹⁴

In a process parallel to that of the poets, Malevich went through phases of painterly expression—from impressionism to Cézannian structure to Russian-revival-related neo-primitivism to cubism, until in 1912 he formed a closer friendship with the transrational poets Kruchenikh and Khlebnikov who, along with Matyushin, became his closest creative partners. Transrationalism—zaum, short for zaumennii, or “beyond reason,” in apt English translation “beyonsense”¹⁵ —radically overthrew the relationship of form and content, the traditional use of which they saw as the literary materialization of the current power structure. The Russian cubo-futurists declared:

We abolished punctuation marks, which for the first time brought to the fore the role of the verbal mass and made it perceivable. ( . . . ) We understand vowels as time and space ( . . . ) and consonants as color, sound, and smell. ( . . . ) We believe the word to be a creator of myth; in dying, the word gives birth to myth, and not vice versa.¹⁶

The concept of “verbal mass” forecast and inspired Malevich’s concept of “painterly masses” or the “color masses”¹⁷ of his suprematist work, in which he would have color detached from the object and handle the color as an autonomous entity which acts in a way similar to that in which sound detaches from meaning in zaum poetry in order to have its own independent vocal presence.

In the summer of 1913, Malevich and Kruchenikh visited the recently widowed Matyushin in his dacha at Uusikirkko, in Finland. The three of them—Khlebnikov was also expected to join but had lost his travel money—ambitiously called their private meeting the First All-Russian Congress of the Poets of the Future (The Poet-Futurists). They issued a program that included, among other radical points, “To swoop down on the stronghold of artistic weakness—on the Russian theater—and decisively to reform it.”¹⁸ Following up on this Malevich, also on behalf of Mayakovsky, wrote to Matyushin asking him to solicit the Union of Youth’s support “for backing us in our first show”¹⁹ —a move that proved instrumental in the realization of the stage performance of Victory over the Sun, as well as the production of Vladimir Mayakovsky. A Tragedy in the same year.

Malevich at that time was eager to invent a term for his own endeavors. In 1914 he coined the term “fevralism,”²⁰ inspired by an incident when, according to a memoir of his, “On February 19, 1914, I rejected reason in a public lecture.”²¹ Malevi ch thus engaged in “absurdism and provocative attacks against generally accepted taboos.”²² He transferred the concept of zaum into painting as “alogism”—the juxtaposition of motifs that had no logical connection. Malevich wrote on the back of his (probably) 1915 painting Cow and Violin, which followed (or rather paralleled) Vasily Kamensky’s alogical poem Tango with Cows, published in 1914: “Alogical comparison of two forms, ‘violin’ and ‘cow’ as a moment of battle with logism, naturalness, philistine meaning and prejudice.”²³ Juxtaposing unrelated objects as a revolt against conventional linearity and straightforward meaning, Malevich preceded the surrealists’ methodology without the Freudian interpretation of such compositions’ connection to dreams and the unconscious.

Deconstruction of the old aesthetic structure and appeal to “beyonsense,” the intuitive recognition or perception of different realities, were the backbone of the new artistic culture. “A work of the highest art is written in the absence of reason,”²⁴ Malevich wrote in 1916 in the spirit of zaum—a statement he soon corrected as he invented, instead, the concept of “intuitive reason.” “The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason,” he wrote,²⁵ creating an oxymoron in an attempt to reconcile opposing concepts so that neither intuition nor reason would be given up entirely: intuition must be controlled by reason, and reason is enriched by the instinctive. “Beyonsense” was meant to straddle the rift between the intuitive and the rational by a move tantamount to squaring the circle. Malevich’s alogism demonstrated that he considered himself above the perceived rules of thinking. Such transgression greatly contributed to the enigmatic perception of the Square.

The cubo-futurist poets sought to deliberately reinvent and retexture the language to make it flexible in order to convey what they perceived to be radically new meanings. This was an all-out attack on linguistic clarity and the transparency of the fabric of rational, enlightened communication as Kant understood it, who pointed out that “Caesar non est supra grammaticos,”²⁶ “not [even] the king stands above grammar.” Disregard for the rules of language was a rebellious anti-Enlightenment and anticultural stance. Jane Sharp points out that the Jack of Diamonds group’s attitude was already “in distinct contrast to the World of Art group, who invoked the aristocratic, eighteenth-century European Enlightenment as their cultural model,”²⁷ and, consistently with this, the defiance of logic and systems of rules was at the core of the cubo-futurist agenda as well. In an anti-Petrine political gesture, Enlightenment rationalism was rejected—this time not for religion but in favor of occultism, intuition, or trans-scientific spirituality, each of which was considered as ranking higher than reason. As in early romanticism, only the artist of superior talent and sensitivity—a genius—could have access to such higher knowledge. Positioning himself in the virtual space of the future whence the existing culture could be seen as obsolete and underdeveloped, Malevich claimed to have superseded cubo-futurism, too.

Using language acoustically rather than to convey meaning—similarly to the Italian futurists but predating Dada—the cubo-futurist poets inspired and encouraged Malevich to recreate visual language likewise, from the ground up. “We started to endow words with content on the basis of their graphic and phonic characteristics,” the cubo-futurist poets’ untitled manifesto declared.²⁸ They held that existing bits of knowledge and cognitive methods barred real, free perception. Matyushin urged the development of new sensual and intellectual capacities laid out in his “zor-ved,” or “see-hear,” concept that aimed, through the training of the eyes and the eye muscles, to achieve 180- or ultimately 360° vision. The new program was immersion into the unknown. At the same time, the cubo-futurists aspired to own a new authority over the new language that would not be shared with the guardians of the old system.

Malevich’s alogical paintings of 1912–1913 were followed by what Shatskikh calls his fevralist alogism, attempts to break free of all existing painterly systems. His new suprematist works, which he developed from ...