"People always demand that art be comprehensible, but they never demand of themselves that they adapt their mind to comprehension."
- Kazimir Malevich, 1920
When abstraction first arrived in the United States from Europe via the 1913 Armory Show, public and critical response was harsh. At the time, American artists were still largely in thrall to Impressionism, and the Europeans' more adventurous distortions of conventional reality were greeted with epithets of outrage: "An explosion in a shingle factory" was how Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase was described; another critic deemed Matisse's Blue Nude and example of "leering effrontery." Cezanne was proclaimed "an idiot," and Gauguin a "decorator tainted with insanity."
Yet, as the century wore on, the style that the nazis labeled degenerate and the communists reviled in favor of Socialist Realism found a spiritual and material home in the United States, which by the 1950s was exporting around the world its own, home-grown brand of abstraction as a symbol of American freedom and individuality.
In the ideological battle of the Cold War, Abstract Expressionism was enlisted as a potent cultural weapon. At the time, few would have believed that some three-and-a-half decades later Russian abstraction would be performing a similar symbolic function its acknowledgement at home and proud export abroad offering convincing cultural evidence of a post-Cold War Soviet society's dedication to the development of freedom and democracy. Yet, as demonstrated by the opening of a major exhibit of works by the leading Russian abstractionist Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (1878-1935) at the National Gallery of Art on September 16, this is precisely what has happened.
The Malevich exhibit, organized by the National Gallery with the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and sponsored by Philip Morris, affords an opportunity to reconstruct for Russians - and the world - a Russian art history interrupted by Stalin and long obscured by subsequent Soviet regimes.
Art for Itself
After the 1905 uprising, Russia under the semiconstitutional regime of Nicholas II, until Stalin's clampdown in the 1920s, was a seedbed of avant-garde activity, in which Malevich, as well as Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, and others variously thrived and argued. The two most important artistic movements to emerge from this period were Constructivism, exemplified by the works of Rodchenko and Tatlin and propounding a utilitarian concept of art, and Suprematism, the invention of Malevich, who proclaimed, "Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, … it can exist, in and for itself."
Where the Constructivists were willing to place art in the service of what they saw as progressive ideology - for them, art was a form of "laboratory work" whose discoveries might ultimately be applied toward the material improvement of society - Malevich was adamant that art must be totally free from any claim by the outside world. While such differences made for lively exchanges in the art publications of
...
Read Full Article
|
