The Challenge of "Rethinking Malevich"
By By Masha Chlenova
Few would question the fact that in the west Kazimir Malevich remains one of the best-known and most widely studied Russian modern artists. This pioneer of abstraction occupies a place of honor within the history of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde. Scholarly studies of his work abound, yet his artistic legacy continues to puzzle art historians and critics. While commonly seen in western art history as an inventor of geometric abstraction of the same rank as Piet Mondrian, Malevich nevertheless formulated an artistic program that transcended the boundaries of any given painterly style. At the famous ‘0-10’ exhibition held in Petrograd in 1915 Malevich made public his revolutionary "Suprematism of painting"; shortly after 1920, after exhibiting two blank canvases, the artist abandoned painterly practice altogether, in favor of writing and three-dimensional projects – only to return to a kind of painterly figuration after 1927. This schematic trajectory shows the scope and complexity of the artistic project that still hasn’t been understood in its entirety. Until recently, scholars have been preoccupied predominantly with the Suprematist paintings, which indeed made the strongest and most lasting impact both in Russia and in the West. However, in the recent decades, with the opening of the Russian archives, our understanding of Malevich and his work has been completely transformed. Suprematism is now increasingly understood within the broader scope of the artist’s trajectory and the larger historical context. As a result, Malevich’s place within the western modernist canon is up for debate with a renewed intensity. A two-day international conference, devoted exclusively to Kazimir Malevich and held in New York this past February, demonstrated the range and depth of critical issues provoked by his artistic legacy. The conference was organized and sponsored by The Malevich Society, a private not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001 in New York by members of the artist’s family in order to advance knowledge about him and his work. The society has since funded a five-volume publication of Malevich’s writings in Russia as well as numerous research projects worldwide. Ambitiously entitled "Rethinking Malevich," the conference was truly international in the literal sense, bringing together a number of leading Russian scholars of Malevich and important western scholars of the Russian avant-garde. Yet it was also international in its conceptual scope, as a number of papers focused on the legacy of Malevich across the geographical and historical field: ranging from the more predicable comparisons to Kandinsky’s abstraction and the Dutch DeStijl movement to the more intriguing examinations of the reception of Malevich in America and the critical engagement of his legacy in postwar Russian art. Most importantly, the conference made apparent the directions Malevich scholarship has taken in the recent years and suggested new avenues for examination and research. A major focus of several presentations was the history of the reception of Malevich in western modernism. Tatiana Goriacheva traced the very beginning of this process by outlining the complex relations between Suprematism and Constructivism; Eva Forgacs and Linda Boersma analyzed the roles of El Lissitzky and Van Doesburg in shaping the understanding of Suprematism among the European avant-gardes of the 1920s. James Lawrence reconstructed the complex history of the reception of Malevich by American modernism, beginning with Alfred Barr’s seminal 1936 exhibition of abstract art at the Museum of Modern Art and continuing with ‘creative misreadings’ of Suprematism by such key figures as Barnet Newman and Donald Judd. The very status of Malevich as the founder of geometric abstraction has by now been thoroughly questioned by art historians: a closer study of his paintings reveals that Malevich always deliberately avoided exact geometric shapes, and Judd was among the first Americans to point this out. Lawrence argues that at the core of the misunderstandings lies a fundamental incompatibility between the philosophical utopianism of the Russian artist and the American tradition of philosophical pragmatism. Meanwhile, for Alfred Barr, a young scholar from New Zealand, the complex philosophical system of Malevich, expounded in his voluminous writings, provides valuable clues for an understanding of a central enigma in the artist’s biography, his sudden return to figurative painting soon after his return from Berlin in 1927. By way of a detailed analysis of Malevich’s philosophical texts, Barr argues for a fundamental continuity in the creative project of the artist, maintaining that Malevich’s ontological views evolved allowing him by the mid-1920s to encompass representational painting while remaining faithful to the basic tenets of Suprematism. The artist’s return to a kind of figurative painting in the last eight years of his life continues to puzzle art historians and a definitive answer has not yet been found. Did Malevich abandon Suprematism, retreating in the face of the increasingly authoritarian Stalinist regime, or did he continue to propagate the tenets of the new art through a style of painting he found most effective at the given historical moment? Why did the artist backdate most of his late paintings and why did he shift between a number of pictorial styles in his last years? And finally, how can we understand his late work within the broader historical context of the transition from the multifaceted culture of the avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s to the at least apparently more uniform style of Socialist Realism that became predominant beginning in the later 1930s? Clearly, to this day, the legacy of Malevich poses more questions than it provides answers, and thus continues to sustain a strong interest among art historians, curators and critics. As new documents are still becoming available, we should expect more productive publications to appear. The Malevich Society, in its turn, is planning to publish the papers delivered at the conference in the near future.
