LONDON — There are many aspects to the art and career of Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935). But, especially right now, the most poignant fact about this great pioneer of abstract art is that he came from Ukraine. The son of Polish émigré parents, he was born near Kiev, sometimes signed his name in its Polish form — Kazimierz Malewicz — and did not move to Moscow until he was 25, in 1905. In other words, he was caught between east and west, and that perhaps more than any other factor explains the strange trajectory of his career.
A remarkable exhibition at Tate Modern (through October 26) charts his brilliant but erratic course. First, the young Malevich took an almost delirious plunge into the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century. In the early rooms you see him working his way through the most advanced styles of the day at warp speed: Seurat’s pointillism, Gauguin’s symbolism, Matisse’s fauvism.
Sometimes these idioms appear in odd combinations. “Church,” c. 1908, presents an Eastern Orthodox building, painted in an almost monochrome combination of greys, beiges, and whites — but executed in Van Gogh’s fervent brush-strokes. The effect is odd: Vincent’s Provence transposed into a northern, Slavic key. It was a move he was inclined to make in the years immediately before the First World War. By this time, Malevich had — briefly — settled into an idiom he dubbed “Cubo-Futurism.”
This consisted of liberal borrowings from the almost contemporary works of Picasso, Braque, Léger, and the Italian Futurists, but, again, with an Eastern European twist. “Desk and Room,” 1913, is pure Parisian cubism, except for insistent patches of a very Russian — and very unCubist — red.
“The Woodcutter,” 1912, and “The Mower,” 1911-12, both have a good deal in common with Ferdinand Léger’s personal variant of Cubism — dubbed “Tubism” because of Léger’s reliance on reducing all forms to cylinders. But Malevich’s subjects — in both cases traditional bearded and smocked Russian peasants — have a directness and pared down simplicity that recalls Eastern Orthodox images of saints.
Those modernist peasant icons were to recur in Malevich’s art a decade later. The Cubo-Futurist work that best predicted his own immediate future, however, was “Lady at the Advertising Column,” 1914. This consists of colored rectangles in pink, yellow, and purples, superimposed over Cubist filigree of Cyrillic letters and fractured planes.
Next, it seems, Malevich realized he could do away with the detail, and just make a picture out of those rectangles. The result was one of the most startling and powerful works in the Modernist canon: “Black Square.” This extraordinary painting is like a punctuation mark in the history of art. It is just there, looming in front of you with a force that exceeds any earlier abstract pictures. To find an abstraction of comparable punch, you have to look decades later — at Richard Serra’s work of the 1960s and ’70s, for example.
It is one of the few mistakes in an otherwise well-chorographed exhibition that the biggest and most forceful “Black Square” — Malevich produced several versions starting in 1915 — is hung in the same room as a filmed recreation of an avant-garde theatrical production from 1913, “Victory Over the Sun.” The latter, though no doubt of historical importance, comes across like a rather weird production for children’s television. But because it is noisy, and moves, everyone looks at the film, not the painting.
Actually, what to do with “Black Square” posed a problem for Malevich himself. How do you follow that? His initial response was to retreat a little into more complicated geometric abstract, in a style he called “Suprematism.” But it is obvious from the rooms in which these hang at the Tate, that the simpler — that is, the closest to “Black Square”— the better these are. The more colors and forms he introduced, the less forceful and memorable the results. Better are the pared down works of 1917-18, such as the wedge-shaped “Yellow Plane in Dissolution,” and the audacious white on white paintings of the same period. But none are quite as stunning as “Black Square.”
Malevich tried several directions, including architectural models which should perhaps be classified as Suprematist sculpture, since he doesn’t seem to have devoted much thought to the function of these structures, or what rooms might be made inside them. By the late ’20s and early ’30s, he found himself living inside a totalitarian country — with Stalin firmly in control — where there was no room for a radical artistic avant-garde. That was, after all, an alien idea imported from Paris.
Eventually Malevich returned to painting modernist icons of peasants. This cannot be seen as an attempt to conform to the new state-imposed style of “Socialist Realism.” As the catalogue points out, in the era of forcible collectivization, peasants were not a politically-acceptable subject. It looks more as though Malevich lost his way as the world around him lurched into dictatorship. Even so, his last works do not show a straightforward decline. Admittedly, a few of the late figurative portraits are dire, but others showing Malevich and his friends in Italian Renaissance costume are much stronger: the effect is weirdly retro, but this was also a covert way of flaunting strong, Suprematist color. These are bizarre, but perhaps true images of Russia’s avant-garde, disguised and lost in the era of Stalin’s purges.
