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Invisible Face and in Black Square

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Invisible Face and in Black Square Paper prepared for The 7th Euroacademia International Conference Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities Lucca, Italy 14 – 15 June 2018 This paper is a draft Please do not cite or circulate Invisible Face and/in Black Square: Strategy of Self-expression and Identity of Malevich’s Suprematism Xin Ai Peking University / University of Amsterdam Abstract: The self-acclaimed originality of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century was largely based on the rebellion against the visual tradition and the creation of the new “ism”. As a classic genre of painting and the stubborn carrier of the figurative art, portraiture naturally suffered from the strong impact of avant-garde's radical ideology. Rosalind Krauss notes that the "grids" paradigm that emerged since Cubism has acted as an anti-narrative, anti-historical model of the avant-garde thus ended the possibilities of plastic arts imitating the real world. Malevich's Suprematism has pushed the abstract exploration of the avant-garde to the extreme and the pure. The function of depicting the figure's face in traditional portraiture completely failed here, focusing instead on the expression of the mysterious, transcendent and accessible metaphysical thoughts. From Portrait of Matiushin (1913) to Self Portrait: Color Masses in Two Dimensions (1915), the erasure of the face in portraiture played an important role in the maturation of the Suprematist identity and the "Black Square" modality, forming the intertextuality and dialogue with other Suprematist paintings in the same period, both formally and conceptually. This article aims to clarify the evolutionary process of "replacing iconic face with black square" by Malevich, as well as to explore the philosophical, religious and scientific synthetically motivations behind this phenomenon, namely how the fourth dimension and theosophy, doctrines that were extremely popular in avant-garde circle then, influenced on Malevich's strategy of self-expression and identity. At the same time, this article will also attempt to give some response and development on Krauss’ "myth of originality" from the perspective of “faceless portraiture”. Keywords: black square, invisible face, Suprematism, fourth dimension, theosophy Since the birth of Cubism, the fragmentation of reality and nature has become more apparent in western modernist art. Artists like Picasso and Braque further detached and reorganized the objects of painting around 1910, creating a multi-angle spatial illusion that is different from the traditional perspective in a two-dimensional plane with the use of a large number of straight lines and right angles. Synthetic Cubism, rose in 1912, was the first to use collage in painting planes, and the "hard-edged square-cut diamonds" structure 1 it created became the main source for European avant-garde’s "grids" paradigm. As a result of the introduction of French Cubism by Alexandra Exter, who was frequently traveling between France and Russia at that time, and the collection and display of Picasso’s works by Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin, the Russian avant-garde led by Malevich at this moment has been keeping pace with their French colleagues in artistic concepts, and seeking new breakthroughs based on them. In 1913 the unique Cubo-Futurism was formed, in combination with Italian Futurism and Russian primitive art. Interestingly, Malevich also dated that year as the birth year of his "black square" 2, while it was not until the end of the 20th century that art historians finally discovered that the real creation time of the world-famous painting Black Square was actually two years later, i.e. 1915, the same year when the "0.10" exhibition was organized and the first Suprematist manifesto "From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism" ( От кубизма и футуризма к супрематизму ) was issued. Therefrom, art historians reached a new consensus on the founding date of his new "ism". 3 This anecdote of art history that was known as "Malevich's mystification" undoubtedly became the evidence of the academia to attack on the avant-garde’s self-declared originality. However, if we carefully analyze the evolution of Malevich's creative thinking from 1913 to 1915, it will not be difficult to find the direct connection between the birth process of "black square" and the initiation of Suprematism. It seems that the process of the growth of the "black square" or Malevich’s "grid" paradigm, from its beginning to appear to its occupation of the dominant position on the canvas, happens to be accompanied by the disappearance of the face in the Malevich portraits. Thus, this article attempts to reveal the truth and the underlying reasons behind the "Malevich's mystification" by analyzing the historical and metaphysical dimensions of the creation of the geometric abstract portraits in this period. The geometric and abstract expression of the portraits by Malevich during these three years, along with the eventual replacement of the face with the black square, is actually connected with the comprehensive motivation of philosophy, religion and science, and is closely linked to the ideas of the "fourth dimension" and Theosophy that were popular in that time's avant-garde art circles – they provided a unique and rich ideological core while promoting the maturation of the "grid" paradigm of Suprematism. It can be said that these mystic theories are the real keys to solving the "myth of originality" of the Russian avant-garde as well as the "Malevich's mystification". 1. The Black Square’s Disenfranchisement of the Portrait Face It is no accident that Malevich used portraits as a testing ground for the creation of his new "ism" as well as a strategy of his artistic identification. First of all, portraiture occupies a large proportion in his earlier career when he was still following the existed styles – from the initial Realism, Impressionism, to the later Fauvism and Cubo-Futurism, Malevich had created a large number of women portraits, farmers portraits and self-portraits in different styles. Second, portraiture, as an important genre of traditional Russian art since the 17th century (especially the peredvizhniki of the second half of the 19th century pushed it to the summit) has been interiorized in the soul of Russian artists. Third, the modern art as a whole faced the loss of connection between the signifier and the signified, while the portraiture was relative lagging behind in the "modernization process" of all artistic genres because of its function of portraying the details of the realistic human face, 4 thus, it has always been a stubborn carrier of figurative art. Therefore, it was inevitable that the abstract art would make a "major transformation" for portraiture in the early twentieth century. In the autumn of 1913, Alexis Gritchenko, a Russian avant-garde painter who was expert in art theory, held a lecture in the Moscow salon of Mikhailova, presenting Picasso's latest creative methods and ideas, 5 and so, the mature "grids" paradigm of Synthetic Cubism was introduced into the Moscow avant-garde circle. A Portrait of Matiushin (Fig. 1) created by Malevich this year aroused Gritchenko's attention. In this typical Cubo-Futurist painting, squares of different colors and styles overlap and stack together while the face of the painter's friend, Russian avant-garde musician Matiushin is almost completely obscured, showing only a small part of the upper left corner of his head. Although no collage has been used in the work, Gritchenko believed that Malevich had had a better understanding than other artists on the visual effect of this new technique – the natural objects are obscured by plane geometry and the formal value of the painting can be highlighted. 6 The eagerness of Malevich's search for the new "ism" appears to stem from the contest of originality with two other major avant-gardists of the same period. As early as 1912, Mikhail Larionov and his partner, Natalia Goncharova, had claimed that they had invented a new "ism" of painting – Rayonnism, and had for the first time wrote a theoretical manifesto in 1913, stating that "the whole world can be expressed fully in painterly forms: life, poetry, music, philosophy." 7 In Larionov's Portrait of a Fool (Fig. 2), created in 1913, we can completely no longer recognize the contours of the human face and any facial feature. Instead, he replaces this face with the so-called “doctrine of luminosity, radioactive rays, ultraviolet rays, reflectivity” and other new tenets of the painting. 8 Facing such a powerful competitor, if Malevich, who already inherited the "grids" paradigm, wants to make further breakthroughs, he must construct his originality at the height of its thinking. From this, we can further understand the rationality of Malevich's dating of the year 1913 as the starting point of his "black square". In the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun at the end of the year, Malevich designed a diagonal-cut square to replace the spherical sun (Fig. 3), indicating that art is splitting and surpassing the nature. Regarding this as a starting point, the monochromatic grid gradually invaded all the painting genres used by Malevich. Two pieces of little-known pencil on paper works now belong to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam allow us to glimpse Malevich's expression of the metaphysical meanings of "black square" from 1914 to 1915 and his further handling of portraiture. In a picture entitled Village (1914, Fig. 4), an independent grid totally breaks down all the possibilities of depicting reality. By presenting the word "Village" ( Деревня ) Malevich raised or reverted the actual village and the artistically depicted village to the Platonic idealistic "village", and he wrote the motivation of this operation beneath the grid: “Instead of drawing the huts of nature's nooks, better to write ‘Village’ and it will appear to each with finer details and the sweep of an entire village.” 9 Half a century later, this creative idea was "embezzled" by Joseph Kosuth in his famous conceptual installation One and Three Chairs (1965).
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