Up The Arts

MALEVICH’S TARDIS: RUSSIAN SUPREMATISM

Of my youthful enthusiasms, I am still rather fond of the Russian avant-garde art movement known as Suprematism (Супрематизм), a movement based on pure geometry – specifically circles and squares (in particular the square and circle) which formed in 1915-1916. Despite various Russian artists being involved at one time or another, all things considered it was a party of one: Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (Казимир Северинович Малевич). Malevich was already an established painter of the avant-garde, having exhibited in the Donkey’s Tail and the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) exhibitions of 1912 with cubo-futurist works.

Malevich was born near Kiev to ethnic Poles Seweryn (a manager of a large sugarworks) and Ludwika Malewicz. He was baptised Roman Catholic. His father was the manager of a sugar factory. Kazimir was the first of fourteen children, of which only nine survived into adulthood. The family moved often for Seweryn’s work, and Malevich’s childhood was spent among the uncultured peasant villages and sugarbeet plantations of rural Ukraine. He taught himself to paint in the naïf folk style of the pesants, and went on to study drawing in Kiev from 1895 to 1896.

After the death of his father, in 1904 he moved to Moscow, the capital of the Russian Empire, where he studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1904 to 1910, and apprenticed in the studio of Fedor Rerberg in Moscow (1904–1910). Malevich’s first flirtations with the Russian avant-garde took place around 1911 when he participated in the second exhibition of the group Soyuz Molodyozhi (Union of Youth) in St. Petersburg alongside Vladimir Tatlin. In 1913 the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun with Malevich’s stage-set design became a great success.

In 1915, Malevich laid down the foundations of Suprematism when he published his manifesto From Cubism to Suprematism. Over the next two years he worked with other artists of a Suprematist bent (though more nominally cubo-futurists) in a rather romantic co-operative of peasants and artisans in the villages Skoptsi and Verbovka. In 1916-1917 he participated in exhibitions of the innovative Jack of Diamonds group in Moscow together with Nathan Altman, David Burliuk and A. Ekster, among others. Famous examples of his Suprematist works include Black Square (1915) and White on White (1918).

People frequently give up on Suprematism – it bores many, and some of the metaphysical associations are a bit fruity. The iconic ‘black square’ is often interpreted as some sort of cosmic egg, a symbol of potential. The blame for this can be partially laid at Malevich’s own door. In his book The Non-Objective World, published as a Bauhaus Book in 1927, Malevich described the inspiration which brought about the powerful image of the black square on a white ground: “I felt only night within me and it was then that I conceived the new art, which I called Suprematism.”

Russian art has always had a spiritual founding going back to medieval icons and in the twentieth century with Kandinsky’s Theosophy and Chagall’s Jewish mysticism, but in order to understand Malevich, one must understand the peculiar relationship between mathematics and mysticism in turn-of-the-century Russia. There were two important centres for mathematical research in Russia. The first of these was at Moscow University, where the math department was dominated by a homosexual cabal belonging to a heretical sect known as Name Worshippers. Name Worshippers, an anathema to the Russian Orthodox Church, made a practice of reciting the name of Jesus over and over again until they entered a fugue or trance state. They made some rather involved advances in the understanding of infinity (which I don’t pretend to understand in any great depth) and the story is detailed in Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor’s delightful Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity (2009).

The other centre was at Kazan University in Kazan, Tatarstan, Russia. Founded in 1804, the Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky was Rector from 1827 until 1846. The university became renowned for its mathematicians and linguists. Among the scholarly graduates, however, we find the bizarre character Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky, a New Age ‘philosopher’ of kooky esoteric ideas that invoked Euclidean and Non-Euclidean geometry in his interpretation of psychology and higher dimensions of existence. Early on he had been influenced by the esoterist George Gurdjieff whom he met in Moscow in 1915. From studying the Sufi mystics, Gurdjieff had developed the theory that modern humanity is basically asleep. Gurdjieff also mentored Katherine Mansfield, and his recommendation that she sleep among the dung of chilly dairy barns probably accelerated the job of killing her that TB was doing anyway.

Ouspensky’s first book, The Fourth Dimension, appeared in 1909; his second book, Tertium Organum, in 1912. Ouspensky’s lectures in London were attended by such literary figures as Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, Gerald Heard and other writers, journalists and doctors. Denying the ultimate reality of motion in his book Tertium Organum (1912), he also questions Aristotle’s Logical Formula of Identification of “A is A” – ultimately this would provide a basis to A. E. van Vogt’s ‘Null-A’ novels and go into the mix that made up Scientology. Ouspensky was particularly interested in the then highly fashionable notion of the fourth dimension. The Fourth Dimension explored the subject along the lines expressed by Charles H. Hinton, in which the fourth dimension is an extension in space. Ouspensky treats time as a fourth dimension indirectly in his novel The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin.

Kazan University thought proved to be a great influence on Malevich, through Ouspensky, and through the artist and Zaum  poet Khlebnikov (who studied linguistics and mathematics at Kazan). One of the central tenets of Khlebnikov’s Zaum language was the transformation of reality into a new non-objective spatial dimension, the source for which lay in the ‘hyperspace’ philosophy of Uspensky. Khlebnikov’s writings make frequent analogies with the cosmos and the constellations to describe the new spatial dimension of his ‘transrational language’, as well as containing mystical and symbolic overtones. His ‘liberation’ of the word and his use of cosmological terminology may be compared to concerns, expressed in Malevich’s Suprematist paintings with the ‘cosmic consciousness’ of a new spatial dimension. Zaum was the literary equivalent of Suprematism.

The study of dimensionality was all the rage. At least two novels were published set in the second dimension (a flat plane populated by squares and triangles): Flatland (written by Edwin A. Abbott under the groan-inducing pseudonym “A. Square”, 1884) and C. H. Hinton’s An Episode of Flatland (1907). And this is H. G. Wells’ take on the dimensions in The Time Machine (1895):

“Filby became pensive. ‘Clearly,’ the Time Traveller proceeded, ‘any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness and – Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three of which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time…”

Wells was well up to date on the subject. Further on in the chapter he name-drops Professor Simon Newcomb in New York and his work on fourth-dimensional geometry.

It must be remembered that in the early twentieth century, the third dimension had only just been meaningfully conquered by the aeroplane. Just as the speed of the aeroplane influenced the Russian Futurists (from which Suprematism first sprang), the flattening perspective of looking down from an aeroplane was a major influence on Malevich.

Flipping through a catalogue of Malevich’s work, certain things are revealed about the mathematical theoretics behind Suprematism. Frequently titles suggest that the squares and triangles are allusions to the figurative interpreted as viewed from a higher dimension, or of duration viewed as a holistic instant (a common Futurist trick): “Painterly Realism. Boy with Knapsack – Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimension” (MoMA, 1915); “Airplane Flying” (MoMA, 1915); “Suprematism: Painterly Realism of a Football player. Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimension” (Stedelijk Museum, 1915); “Red Square (Peasant Woman. Suprematism)” (State Russian Museum, 1915). Increasingly as the squares and narrow rectangles layer up, becoming Constructavist and Architectonic, they begin to resemble the late works of Kandinsky.

From 1917-1918 the colour planes, crosses and circles begin to iconoclastically fade into the ground – the white on white and black on black paintings – space purely beyond comprehension, as if trying to view higher dimensions.

Initially Suprematism was seen as a revolutionary art suitable for a revolutionary culture. After the October Revolution, Malevich became a member of the Collegium on the Arts (IZO) of Narkompros (the People’s Commissariat for Englightenment), the commission for the protection of monuments and antiquities, and the museums commission (all from 1918-1919). He taught at the Vitebsk Practical Art School (UNOVIS) in what was now the USSR (never truly United, Socialist or a Republic and no one ever could satisfactorily explain what a Soviet was. Vitebsk is now part of Belarus) from 1919–1922, the Leningrad Academy of Arts 1922–1927, the Kiev State Art Institute (1927–1929), and the House of the Arts in Leningrad (1930). He wrote the book The World as Non-Objectivity (Munich 1926; English trans. 1959) which outlines his Suprematist theories, although despite some important exhibitions, the Russians don’t get it. Outside was another matter. In 1927, he travelled to Warsaw and then to Berlin and Munich for a retrospective which finally brought him international recognition.

In Malevich’s absence the situation of the arts was rapidly deteriorating and in the Spring of 1927 the Commissariat of Education and the Science Administration suffer increasing political pressure from the agitation and propaganda section of the Communist Party Central Committee to abandon support for pluralism, and abstraction especially.

Before he left, Malevich could already see a sea change in the party line regarding art. On his return it became obvious what was happening. With the death of Lenin and Trotsky’s fall, Stalin’s regime (about the time the purges were starting and the farms being collectivised) took a hard line against any kind of modernist abstraction as bourgeois and incapable of communicating socialist realism. In 1934 the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers met in Moscow, chaired by Maxim Gorky, and closed advocating Socialist Realism as the only acceptable style for the arts in the USSR: “Truth and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the task of the ideological transformation and education of the workers in the spirit of Socialism”.

Although he made a half-hearted attempt to accommodate figurative art (peasants with tractors etc, though still abstract enough to offend party sensibilities) Malevich’s works were confiscated and he was banned from creating and exhibiting similar art. Critics like Alexandre Benois accused him of denying life, love and nature. This could not be further from the truth. Given the number of authors and intellectuals sent to the gulag, yellow-painted mental hospital or otherwise opressed (Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn, Bukovsky, Mandelstam etc) Malevich got off relatively lightly – perhaps because it was felt the masses would not be able to read anything subversive in this peculiar abstract painting. Malevich died a broken man in 1935.