Kazimir Malevich was a revolutionary. In Petrograd in 1915, two years before the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace, Malevich exhibited “Black Square”, the first completely non-representational painting. Even more forcefully than Picasso’s Cubist masterpieces and Kandinsky’s abstract canvases, “Black Square” turned conventional assumptions about art on their head and became Malevich’s most famous work.
Just as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”, first performed in 1913, came to be seen as the most important musical work of the 20th century, so Malevich’s “Black Square” is the most important painting of the last century. We know a great deal about the revolution that brought the Communists to power in 1917, but less about Russia’s other revolution — the one that radically changed both the language and subject matter of art, transcending national boundaries.
Of the two, Russia’s other revolution was in certain respects more significant. While the calamitous demise of the Tsarist regime was predictable, the revolution in art wrought by Russian painters and musicians was not. Before Diaghilev began to export Russian ballet to Paris in 1909, and translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy launched a vogue for its literature, Russian culture was little known abroad.
Indeed, not least due to their late start under Peter the Great in the 18th century, Russian arts were widely seen as backward and derivative, if not downright primitive. So it is all the more remarkable that it was Russian artists who had become the leaders of the European avant-garde by the outbreak of the First World War. And the supreme figure of the Russian avant-garde is, appropriately enough, the founder of “Suprematism”, Kazimir Malevich, described in 1919 as “the missile launched by the human spirit into non-being”. The ecstatic, uncompromising, turbulent and ultimately tragic path Malevich blazed embodies better than any other the movement’s utopian aspirations, myriad achievements and fatal contradictions. There was also nothing predictable about Malevich’s artistic journey.
The eldest son of humble Polish parents, he was born in Kiev in February 1879, a few months after the birth of Stalin, and in the same year as Trotsky. He seemed destined to follow his father into working on the railways. He had little school education, but his passionate desire to paint, coupled with an indomitable nature, finally led him to Moscow, where he received a few years of formal training and launched himself as a professional artist. Moscow in the early years of the 20th century was an exciting place to be. The business capital of Russia, the city had become a burgeoning metropolis after the country had belatedly embraced industrialisation, with dozens of millionaires ploughing their considerable fortunes into the arts. Pavel Tretyakov bought Russian art (“Black Square” was later acquired for the gallery that bears his name), but two others, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, turned their gaze westwards.
After establishing unparalleled collections of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Cubist paintings during trips to Paris, they enabled young Russian artists such as Malevich to acquire a bird’s-eye view of the latest artistic developments without having to make the journey themselves. Malevich was astounded by what he saw, and his brightly coloured if not terribly original early work betrays his debt to artists such as Van Gogh, Cezanne and Matisse.
Like many of his contemporaries, however, he soon resolutely turned his back on foreign influences to draw inspiration from primitive sources closer to home than those Gauguin found in Polynesia. Russian orthodox icons (now appreciated for the first time as works of art rather than as religious artefacts) and peasant art offered an exciting escape from “academic” realism into pure art.
Malevich followed Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov in moving from Primitivism to “Cubo-Futurism”, a Russian hybrid produced from a cocktail of French Cubism and Italian Futurism. Between 1907 and 1912, Malevich became a key figure in the radical Russian avant-garde by contributing to exhibitions given deliberately incongruous names such as “The Jack of Diamonds” and “The Donkey’s Tail”.
But in 1913 he embarked on his own journey towards non-representational art when he completed the first abstract theatre designs for “the World’s First Futurist Opera”, Victory over the Sun, which launched a vigorous assault on traditional aesthetic values, featured a libretto written in “trans-rational” language by the leading Futurists Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, and backdrops by Malevich consisting of geometric shapes, one of which was a bisected black square.
Later he would rewrite history to date “Black Square” from 1913 rather than 1915. The stakes were high in the world of the pre-revolutionary Russian avant-garde, with fierce competition to be its leader.
The relationship between Malevich and his younger rival Vladimir Tatlin, the future founder of Constructivism, was particularly tense, and sometimes degenerated into physical violence.
When preparing their works for the legendary 0.10 exhibition in December 1915, Tatlin kept the windows of his studio tightly sealed, to prevent Malevich peering in and stealing his ideas. Malevich also worked in secret, but was compelled into print to defend his work after a chance visit to his studio by a passing critic.
The resulting manifesto, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting”, was the first of many dense theoretical works in which Malevich attempted in mystical terms to explain what his art was about, and why colour and texture in painting had to be seen as ends in themselves.
The artist can be a creator, he claimed, “only when the forms in his pictures have nothing in common with nature”, and are freed from “vulgar subject matter”. Suprematism embodied a new perception of reality, and a spiritual system which would transfigure the world, with Malevich asserting himself as its leader. Exhibited across the corner of two walls, the traditional place for a Russian Orthodox icon, “Black Square” took pride of place in the 0.10 show, and immediately provoked intense debate about its meaning.
Lacking a frame, it was no longer a window into another world, its black nothingness anticipating by many decades such groundbreaking works as 4’33” — the four minutes and 33 seconds of silence created by John Cage in 1952. Seeming also to draw a line under 500 years of mimetic art produced since the Renaissance, “Black Square” was Malevich’s transcendental icon for the new age of non-representational art.
The launch in 1916 of Suprematism was just the beginning for Malevich, who that same year was called up to serve in the war effort, having earlier contributed propaganda posters in the style of popular peasant prints. After the revolution he moved to take up a job at the Vitebsk Art School, which became one of the country’s most vibrant centres of creative life, but the ravages of civil war and political realities made Malevich’s creative life, and then the possibility of eking any kind of living, increasingly difficult.
By 1923, he was reduced to producing designs for the former Imperial porcelain factory. When critics complained that his teapot didn’t pour well, he replied, “it is not a teapot, but the idea of one”. The enthusiasm with which the Russian avant-garde embraced the revolution was only reciprocated for a time by party apparatchiks. One by one, Russia’s revolutionary artists fell silent as the screws were turned at the end of the Twenties, and conformity and accessibility was demanded of them.
The 70 or so works Malevich managed to take with him on his only trip abroad in 1927 brought him international recognition, but also arrest on espionage charges when he returned home. He lost his precious laboratory, and his livelihood, and was clearly a broken man when he returned to figurative painting in his last years. If Malevich’s cardinal importance in the history of art is only now beginning to be fully recognised, it is because our understanding of his life and work is still far from complete.
As an incorrigible mythmaker, Malevich himself did not help this process: he painted as many as four versions of “Black Square”, for example, and for a long time scholars unquestioningly accepted his fabricated version of events.
Then for decades following his lonely death in Moscow in 1935 at the height of Stalinism, the artist who proclaimed back in 1916 that he had transformed himself in the “zero of form” was transformed into a zero of being by the Soviet state: his works disappeared into the vaults and were not spoken about. Malevich’s friend Nikolai Khardzhiev saved a large number of his paintings, drawings and writings for posterity, but his resolve to refuse “cockroach scholars” access hardened after a Swedish Slavist supposedly absconded with several canvases he secreted out of Russia via the diplomatic bag in the Seventies.
Khardzhiev emigrated in 1993 at the age of 90 to Holland, where he died three years later.
The story of how one part of his extraordinary collection ended up in Amsterdam, one part went missing, and one part was confiscated at Moscow’s Sheremetevo airport, reads like a thriller with a plot more sensational than that of “Red Square”, the bestselling crime novel by Martin Cruz Smith, whose title alludes to another of Malevich’s key works. More than 100 drawings from the Amsterdam part of the Khardzhiev Collection are included in the Malevich exhibition.
The Russian scholar Alexandra Shatskikh was able to consult the collection’s documentary materials once they arrived in Amsterdam, and construct the first accurate history of “Black Square”. In 2011, those materials were returned to Russia, to join the part of the collection now housed in the Central State Archive. When it is unsealed in 2019, our picture of Malevich may finally be complete.
–The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2014
Malevich: Revolutionary of Russian Art is on at Tate Modern, London until October 26
Rosamund Bartlett’s books include Victory over the Sun: The World’s First Futurist Opera (Exeter University Press, 2012), co-edited with Sarah Dadswell. Her new translation of Anna Karenina is published by Oxford World’s Classics in August.
