615206.T08 Kazimir-Malevich.Pdf

Home , Kazimir Malevich, The Knifegrinder, Victory over the Sun, White on White

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Kazimir Malevich by Diane Waldman and Mimi Poser, 1974

MIMI POSER Good evening. This is Mimi Poser at the Guggenheim. Until 1958, the paintings of Russian artist Kazimir Malevich were largely unknown to the Western world. At that time, a collection of his work, which Malevich had left in Berlin in late 1927, was acquired by the Stedelijk Museum. And I might add parenthetically, at this time, that Malevich was in Berlin with an exhibition of his work, was recalled to Russia, probably for political reasons, and, at that time, left his paintings with his friend, the German architect, Dr. Hugo Häring, and he never again left Russia. Now to continue.

Until last month, when the Stedelijk Collection came to the Guggenheim, most Americans, unless they traveled to Amsterdam, had hardly ever seen Maleviches. There are very few of his paintings in this country. The current exhibition [00:01:00] begins with his early, largely derivative work, goes on to his most important period, suprematism, and includes several very beautiful examples of the white-on-white paintings of this period.

With us this evening is Diane Waldman, the Guggenheim’s Curator of Exhibitions, who organized this show. Mrs. Waldman appeared on this program several weeks ago to discuss Malevich, and we ran out of time and, of course, never got to many topics, so, this evening, we want to discuss Malevich’s mature style, compare his work with that of two other non-objective painters of his time, Kandinsky and Mondrian, and also Malevich’s influence on contemporary art. Good evening and welcome, Diane.

DIANE WALDMAN Good evening.

MIMI POSER Before we get to that, would you, for the benefit of those who didn’t hear the earlier program, give us a word about Malevich himself and the work preceding the suprematist period? [00:02:00]

DIANE WALDMAN To put it very briefly, Malevich was born in 1878, near Kiev, in Russia, in what was then considered to be a very poor situation. His father worked in a sugar refinery. His mother is thought to have been nearly illiterate. As Malevich himself said, he had virtually no introduction to art, never understood what it represented, and had no idea that one could make either a living from art or a lifestyle from being an artist. It was not until several years later, when he went with his father to Kursk, near Kiev, that he saw his first painting, a canvas in the window of a shop, and, shortly thereafter, he saw a painter painting the roof of a house green, and he began to emulate him.

These notations that I mention are from Malevich’s own essays, some of which have [00:03:00] been translated into English by Troels Andersen, who was considered the leading historian on Malevich. As Andersen points out, Malevich moved to Moscow in 1902, after the death of his father, and it was there that he became involved with the Russian avant-garde. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Russian avant-garde was exposed to many movements, which can be seen in Malevich’s early works. Among the most important influences on his early work are

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Kazimir Malevich by Diane Waldman and Mimi Poser, 1974 those of Matisse, whose work was collected by two major collectors in Moscow, and the works of Picasso, [Durand?], Braque -- in other words, all of the major avant-garde movements in France were quickly transported to Russia, either by the collectors themselves or by reproductions. [00:04:00] Malevich went through a series of paintings that show the influence of neo-impressionism, of cubism, before he developed his mature style of suprematism.

MIMI POSER Wasn’t there also an influence of German expressionist -- Burliuk was supposed to have been the go-between between Munich and Moscow?

DIANE WALDMAN Yes, I think it’s reflected in a number of his early works. I think what I would consider the hedonistic color of early works of, I’d say, 1908 to 1910 is clearly reflective of German expressionism, and I have used Nolde as a point of reference because I think the color clearly comes, in part, from German expressionism. I also think what one could call the very heightened color in his early paintings comes from Russian folk art, which became a very important part of the self-awareness in Russia [00:05:00] before the teens, and among the Russian avant-garde, which include such painters as Larionov and Goncharova.

MIMI POSER Well, they were the leading practitioners of neo-Primitivism, were they not?

DIANE WALDMAN Yes, I think they were, and I think Malevich was involved with them until he broke with Larionov in 1912.

MIMI POSER Among other breaks that he made during his life. (laughter)

DIANE WALDMAN Yeah.

MIMI POSER He must have been a very bad-tempered man.

DIANE WALDMAN I think he had (laughs) a rather difficult temperament, to say the least. I also think he moved very quickly through a number of styles, and I think that one can see, in the remarkably short time, virtually, in history of the avant-garde in Europe, reflected in his work from his early paintings of about 1904, which are post-impressionist in flavor, to his introduction of suprematism, which is now considered to have originated in 1915, although he himself [00:06:00] says that he conceived of it in 1913.

MIMI POSER Would you like to mention the circumstances under which he said he conceived this, or in which he said he conceived suprematism?

DIANE WALDMAN

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Kazimir Malevich by Diane Waldman and Mimi Poser, 1974

There is a lot of information that has still to be clarified. A number of his papers and documents have not been translated into English, however, in 1913, Malevich was involved in designing the sets for an opera, Victory Over the Sun, which was given two performances in St. Petersburg in December, 1913. The sets consisted of the use of what he later considered the suprematist elements. This is in great contradiction to the work that he was doing at the time, in 1913, which was largely cubist.

MIMI POSER I think it’s very interesting that, because of this opera, he was able to work in what we now call a non-objective style. [00:07:00] And you and I have had discussions on: what was it that liberated him to be able to work in this non-objective style.

I think, at this point, I’d like to quote from John Bowlt’s article, which appeared in ARTnews, and read to our audience what the opera was like. He says, and I quote, “In the opera, a group of strong men, who are dark of face, and whose light is within, capture the sun and liberate it from the weight of universal gravity. All concrete phenomena take on a perverse mirror-like quality. Part of the text was written in zaum, a trans-rational language of neologisms based on existing roots. The music was discordant, although not atonal. Malevich’s sets and costumes were correspondingly illogical, including the famous, but still perplexing, abstract backdrop for the last scene.” And I think perhaps, in part, this explains that, two years before the appearance of the first real suprematist painting, [00:08:00] he was working in a non-objective way. It seems that he was liberated by the music, which is totally abstract -- [after all, music is abstract?] -- and the world of ideas, which was being presented in this play. And, after all, people do accept ideas as being abstract. This seems to have given him the freedom to become visually abstract long before -- two years, in fact, before he was able to do it with his paintings.

DIANE WALDMAN Yeah, I think perhaps that it was easier for him to experiment with virtual abstraction in sets, rather than arrive at such an extreme solution in his own painting. And, as I said before, I think that he really had, literally, to work through a number of styles before he could free himself from the need to work with some form of representation, and I think that the opera gave him the perfect excuse. [00:09:00]

He was also working in collaboration with a number of Russians who were very much in the avant-garde at that time and very involved with abstraction, per se, in terms of music, in terms of literature. And I think that, perhaps, as a collective movement, the opera provided him with the impetus to test something that he himself did not, in fact, formulate until two years later. This is something that I have witnessed in connection with my own contemporaries, people that have discussed ideas, someone like Roy Lichtenstein, for example, who has discussed an idea for a series that he himself does not actually work out until a year or two later. It isn’t uncommon. I find in Malevich the fact that he was fairly methodical in arriving at this working out of virtual abstraction [00:10:00] to be, it seems to me, the most plausible reason for the gap between 1913, when he did the sets, and the introduction of suprematism, which, after all, took place at an exhibition in 1915, so that, in the interim, he must have been experimenting with paintings which he chose not to show until 1915.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Kazimir Malevich by Diane Waldman and Mimi Poser, 1974

MIMI POSER Yes. Would you now give the audience a description of what suprematism meant to Malevich?

DIANE WALDMAN As far as Malevich was concerned, suprematism meant the elimination of any dependence upon nature. It meant the elimination of forms that represented reality. It meant the transformation of the real [00:11:00] into another reality, which was the reality of abstraction, and the reality of feeling, of emotion, of space, of infinity, of ideas that were very common at that time. One thinks of Einstein, for example, and the fourth dimension of space. I think that Malevich was trying to arrive at the equivalent of existence, rather than states that parallel the real world, but that it took him several years to arrive at forms and colors to which he could ascribe the states of sensation, and of feeling, and of affinity.

He worked through a cubist phase, which I consider to be the most important stage in his development, as well as --

MIMI POSER Why do you consider that [00:12:00] to be the most important stage?

DIANE WALDMAN Because I think that cubism was primarily the most radical development in terms of form, which I think one can see in Malevich, as reflected by his elimination of every form but the circle and the square, which he introduced in 1915, and the elimination of color, to arrive at the purity of the circle and the square. The circle and the square, of course, have represented ideal states going back to Platonic times, and I think that Malevich was very much aware of these states of being. I think that cubism gave him the underpinning that he needed to make these innovations, which were very drastic, and very clearly his own, and having nothing to do with cubism, which was still tied to reality.

I think that futurism gave him a sense of [00:13:00] the dynamic of form, which he put into such paintings as The Knifegrinder of 1912, but that futurism in itself, in purely formal terms, was much more literary than the cubist movement, which was purely visual, from my point of view. I think that his attraction to the futurists was based upon their political activity, and one must, of course, see Malevich’s work in the context of the later Russian Revolution of 1917 and the activities of the total Russian avant-garde, which had its headquarters in Moscow among the writers, the poets --

MIMI POSER Yes, you can see the attraction. The revolutionary attitudes of the futurists to the Russians of that time --

DIANE WALDMAN Yeah I mean it’s --

MIMI POSER You had to throw over the entire old order.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Kazimir Malevich by Diane Waldman and Mimi Poser, 1974

DIANE WALDMAN It’s ironical, of course, that the futurist movement became devoted to fascism [00:14:00] and the suprematist movement and the Russian avant-garde became devoted to communism, although Malevich was not a member of the Communist Party. Nonetheless, I think it was the revolutionary spirit, rather than any ideology, as such, that attracted him to futurism. As I said, it was the culmination of the dynamics of speed, which futurism introduced, and the revolutionary potential of form, which the cubists introduced, that I think he had to work through to arrive at the very pure abstraction of suprematism.

MIMI POSER I have a quote here, and I really don’t remember where I got it. It’s either from Camilla Gray or from Troels Andersen, and it says, “Malevich dedicated himself to the idea of man’s psychic possibilities beyond the earthly range of ideas relating to things.” In other words -- I think you probably agree -- [00:15:00] he completely liberated himself from any idea of narration or specific relation to an idea.

DIANE WALDMAN I think so. I think that the best of his paintings in the suprematist period, which lasted only a very short time -- again, according to Troels Andersen from 1915 until sometime into the ’20s, when he gave up painting to teach -- represents one of the greatest movements away from the real world, nonetheless retaining the sensations, the feelings, the emotions of reality, but without attempting to describe a formula for that reality. One thinks in terms of Picasso and the cafe, as we mentioned in the last program, of Kandinsky and the landscape, of Mondrian and his trees, and I think, in suprematism, one sees just how far, [00:16:00] in fact, Malevich did go in eliminating even these last vestiges of realism in his work or of reality.

MIMI POSER Or of description or narration.

DIANE WALDMAN Yeah, whatever the term may be.

MIMI POSER I would like to get on, now, to Malevich’s use of white, which stands out in the exhibition up at the Guggenheim.

DIANE WALDMAN The paintings that we were talking about date to the latter part of suprematism, from about 1918 to 1920. One of the most famous paintings is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and it’s White on White. It’s a square canvas, rather small in size. Malevich, by the way, never worked on a very large scale, which is something that historians have noted in connection with, for example, Picasso’s Guernica and any number of other large-scale paintings. He never felt the need to go into [00:17:00] mural-size paintings, but within --

MIMI POSER I think he, also, never abandoned the idea of easel painting.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Kazimir Malevich by Diane Waldman and Mimi Poser, 1974

DIANE WALDMAN Apparently not. I don’t think that that was a concern of his at this particular time. I think what was of concern to him was the elimination of color, partly because color, at least in terms of Kandinsky and Mondrian, came to be symbolic of states of feeling, and I think that, for Malevich, the use of white meant that there was no symbolism attached to his expression of feeling, his expression of space, his expression of infinity, and that white, as such, enabled him to break away from any pre-conceived formula as to what color could be.

In a painting like the White on White at the Museum of Modern Art, the square, which, in his earlier suprematist paintings [00:18:00] of 1915, had been symmetrically placed in opposition to the ground, is placed at an angle to the edges of the canvas, and I think that this is partly still what one could say would be a semblance of the dynamics of futurism or of movement or of space, but, again, it isn’t a literal concept, as such. I think that Malevich used color in a fairly arbitrary way, unlike Mondrian. Mondrian’s reasons for selecting the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue had a fundamental purpose, somewhat like Kandinsky’s. They had a symbolic intent, which I do not believe to have existed in Malevich’s work, and I think that Mondrian’s theory of the vertical and the horizontal, as relating to [00:19:00] the male and the female, and as relating to nature, is something that Malevich did not intend in his own work. So there is a great difference in what one could call “the painter’s intention,” as well as the result.

MIMI POSER Would you briefly compare Malevich to Kandinsky?

DIANE WALDMAN I think the same thing is true of the relationship between Kandinsky and Malevich, although the result is quite different. I think that Kandinsky was involved with the spiritual in art, as he himself pointed out. He was involved with Eastern philosophy, and he was involved with giving color, again, like Mondrian, a symbolic content. And I think that his intention was to use color to induce or represent a state of emotion. Yellow represented one thing. Red represented another. Blue represented another. [00:20:00] We are all aware of color theories of the twentieth century, and the moods that each particular color is supposed to invoke in us as individuals. I think Kandinsky was certainly an innovator in that extent, and I think that he had a very specific set of theories to which he used color. I think Mondrian had another set of theories, but was somewhat related to Kandinsky. Malevich was the opposite.

MIMI POSER We have very little time left, (clears throat) and one thing I do want to get to is the influence that Malevich had, first, on the Bauhaus, and, secondly, on contemporary painters. Tom Hess, in his article in New York magazine, said that he’s one of the greatest heroes of contemporary art.

DIANE WALDMAN He certainly is. He’s been, I think, one of the leading figures for the Minimalist movement, which became dominant in New York, [00:21:00] at any rate, in 1965. Artists like Robert Ryman, who worked predominately in white, have acknowledged Malevich’s influence. The Russian avant-garde, as such, by which I mean Tatlin, Rodchenko, and Malevich, have been

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Kazimir Malevich by Diane Waldman and Mimi Poser, 1974 heroic figures, not only in terms of art, but in terms of their revolutionary thinking and their political activities, to the Minimalists.

MIMI POSER What specifically about the political activities?

DIANE WALDMAN The idea of the artist as worker, which was a very important part of Malevich’s belief and a very important part of the art activity, not only in Russia, at the time, but, of course, among the futurists, as well. The idea of the hierarchy in art, of the establishment, was anathema to the Russian avant-garde, and it was adopted by the Minimalists, of course, within a capitalist system, (laughter) and took [00:22:00] a very different form, but nonetheless is reflected in the works of Ryman, of Carl Andre, of Dan Flavin, to name just a few, and even earlier in such mystical works as the black works of Ad Reinhardt, who, I think, approached, whether knowingly or unknowingly, The White Cross of Malevich.

MIMI POSER It’d be interesting to know how much they knew about Malevich, but I’m afraid we’ve done it again, Diane. We’ve run out of time before touching all the bases we wanted to. (clears throat) Before we leave the air, I want to just tell our audience that the exhibition of Malevich’s work will be at the Guggenheim until -- is it January 13 or 14?

DIANE WALDMAN January 13.

MIMI POSER January 13. And I highly recommend to the audience a visit. And now, thank you very much, Diane Waldman, for having been with us this evening, and, to our audience, good night and thank you. [00:23:00]

END OF AUDIO FILE 615206.T08.mp3

Kazimir Malevich / Mimi Poser, Diane Waldman. 1974/1/3. Reel-to-Reel collection. A0004. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York