Suprematism And/Or Supremacy of Architecture

Chapter 7 Suprematism and/or Supremacy of Architecture Samuel Johnson By the end of 1924, Unovis (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva – Champions of the New Art) was on the verge of disbanding. In October that year, Ilia Chashnik and Nikolai Suetin, two of the remaining founding members, wrote to Male- vich, asking him to relax his control over the group, so that it would truly become ‘an association based on equality of initiative’ instead of being identified solely with Malevich’s ideas. The pair insisted that they did not envision a final break from the group, in part because previous disagreements had been met by Malevich’s imperious suggestion that they consider ‘withdrawing from Uno- vis’.1 Chashnik and Suetin’s proposal possesses an unhappy irony, for the name Unovis first appeared in 1920 as a solution to the issue of the master/pupil relationship within the Vitebsk People’s Art School (Vitebskoe narodnoe khu- dozhestvennoe uchilische), replacing as it did the hierarchically inflected Pos- novis (Poslediteli novogo iskusstva – Followers of the New Art). Rather than followers, Unovis strove to produce masters of the new art. By becoming architects, members of Unovis would make Suprematism into the blueprint of a future world of objects. Malevich himself christened the group by ‘placing the further development of architectural Suprematism in the hands of the young architects, in the broad sense of the word’.2 Yet this utopian declaration of equality only set existing differences in relief, particularly in Malevich’s relationship to the group’s co-founder and only professionally trained architect, El Lissitzky. In summer 1924, these differences surfaced in Malevich’s correspondence with Lissitzky. Earlier, as head of the architectural studio at the Vitebsk Peo- ple’s Art School, Lissitzky had created works that functioned as ‘an inter- change station between painting architecture’, which he called Prouns (Proekt 1 Ilia Chashnik and Nikolai Suetin, letter to Kazimir Malevich, October 1924; English translation in Anna Kafetsi, ed., Russian Avant-Garde 1910-1930: The G. Costakis Collection. Theory – Criticism (Athens: National Gallery/Alexander Soutzos Museum; and Dephi: European Cul- tural Centre of Delphi, 1995), 575-576. 2 K. Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 Risunka [Suprematism: 34 Drawings] (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920); English translation in K.S. Malevich, Essays on Art, 1915-1933, ed. Troels Anderson, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (London: Rapp & Whiting, 1969), I: 127-28. © KoninklijkeBrillNV,Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_009 Suprematismand/orSupremacyofArchitecture 145 utverzhdeniia novogo – Project for the Affirmation of the New).3 Following a year spent in Moscow, Lissitzky had decamped to Germany during the winter of 1921-22 and then to Switzerland in early 1924. There, he finally re-established contact with Malevich, who responded to his overtures with accusations of betrayal: ‘you, a constructor, have become frightened by Suprematism … you wanted to free your personality, your ego, from what I had done, you were afraid that I would co-opt you, or that all your work would be attributed to me, and you ended up with Gan, Rodchenko, you became a constructor, not even a Prounist’.4 Churlish as Malevich’s remarks may be, he was right about Lissitzky’s response. Writing to his dealer and confidant Sophie Küppers sev- eral months later, Lissitzky reported on ‘two letters from Malevich … in the second there is a photograph of the new work, BLIND ARCHITECTURE. It is a Proun’.5 If this shift in designation betrays a struggle for primacy, the desire was mutual. Later in their correspondence, Malevich referred to a sketch sent by Lissitzky as a ‘dynamoplanit’, a term that he had coined for his own architectural drawings.6 The tension over terminology between Lissitzky and Malevich serves as a precedent for Chashnik and Suetin’s concerns insofar as it lays bare the prob- lem of Suprematism’s objectivity, in the double sense of its independence from its originator and its three-dimensional manifestations. Far from being the result of a superficial contest of egos, such disagreements raise fundamen- tal questions about the identity of architectural Suprematism—if, that is, any identity is, or can be, inherent in the term. Indeed, we already find ourselves in a very crowded lexical field. On Lissitzky’s side, we have the term Proun, which replaced an earlier neologism, documented in relation to a proposed project of early 1920, ‘Ex-picture and Supremacy of Architecture’.7 On Male- vich’s, we encounter still more coinages. The artist usually called his architectural drawings ‘planits’ [planity] and his models ‘architectons’ [arkhitektony], 3 See El Lissitzky and Hans Arp, Die Kunstismen/ Les Ismes de l’Art/ The Isms of Art (Erlenbach- Zurich, Munich and Leipzig: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1925), xi. 4 Kazimir Malevich, letter to El Lissitzky, 17 June 1924; English translation in Kazimir Male- vich, Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, Russian edition: eds. Irina A. Vakar and Tatiana N. Mikhienko; English edition: trans. Antonina W. Bouis, ed. Wendy Salmond, general ed. Charlotte Douglas (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), I: 168. 5 El Lissitzky, letter to Sophie Küppers, 24 October 1924, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow (RGALI), fond 3145, opis’ 1, edinitsa khraneniia 566, list 1. 6 Malevich, letter to Lissitzky, 8 December 1924; Malevich, Letters, 1: 176. 7 Ekskartina i suprematiia arkhitektury is listed under Lissitzky’s name among the forthcoming publications in Unovis No. 1. See ‘Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. 1920. Prilozhenie k faksimil’nomu izdaniiu’, in Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. 1920. Faksimil’noe izdanie, ed. Tatiana Goriacheva (Moscow: State Tretyakov Gallery / Izdatel’stvo Skanrus, 2003), 105..

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