NEWS AND VIEWS: Kazimir Malevich at the Guggenheim (08/31/03)

NEWS AND VIEWS

Kazimir Malevich at the Guggenheim

The Kazimir Malevich exhibit at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, "Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism," opened on May 13, following its critically acclaimed presentation at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin. The exhibition brings together approximately 120 paintings, drawings, and objects drawn from major public and private collections from around the world and is sponsored in New York by Alfa Bank.

The exhibition, which was co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Menil Collection, Houston, is curated by Matthew Drutt and will be on view at the Guggenheim through September 7. Following the Guggenheim presentation the exhibition will be presented at The Menil Collection from October 3, 2003, through January 11, 2004.

by Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj

NEW YORK - Kazimir Malevich's reductive and abstract art, which goes under the term Suprematism, is so bereft of graspable "ideas," familiar images and worldly objects that it might very well create its own kind of disturbance in any viewer overly anchored in mimetic art and "reality." Not only are there almost no real-world objects to be found in this exhibit of paintings and drawing, but the traditional perspectives and dimensions (whether of 19th century art or Hollywood cinema) are missing, replaced with a strange visual logic made of flat planes and simple geometric forms such as crosses, squares and circles.

Malevich strove for an art that would be universally comprehensible, but his contemporaries, not conversant with his new painterly language, tended to see this type of work as a "sermon of nothingness and destruction" (Alexandre Benois).

Today, Malevich is obviously not very shocking and, moreover, universally recognized for the breakthrough he helped initiate in the development of 20th century non-objective art. His works mark a pivotal moment when art from Paris to Kharkiv overturned centuries of convention in order to reinvent for itself a new logic and ontology. With almost a whole century of the new art behind us, the revolutionary nature of Malevich is easy to overlook, but, on the other hand, the aesthetic impact of his shapes and colors is probably stronger now than ever before.

Malevich's exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which runs until September 7, is not a retrospective but a rather narrowly focused investigation of the historical moment that gave birth to Suprematism, with the magnificent compositions from 1915 serving as the highlight.

First we see the influence of Cubism on Malevich, then his struggle (captured by pencil drawings) to develop an essentialist vocabulary consisting of painting's basic elements (geometry, colors, flat planes). His success emerges initially as a kind of monumental non-objective stasis, with black and white forms dominating.

Soon, however, probably through the influence of Futurism, his pure forms attain another feature: dynamism and more variegated colors. This creative process and transformation is wonderfully presented through several celebrated but rarely exhibited works. This includes the original version of the famous (or infamous) "Black Square."

In all, there are over 100 pieces in this exhibit, including reconstructions of his Suprematist architectural models (so-called "architektons"), as well as some Suprematist-inspired porcelain teacups and saucers.

Malevich was born and trained near Kyiv, referred to himself as a Ukrainian, spent most of his career in Russia and had his last solo exhibit (of which he had only five) in Kyiv (1930). In the late 1920s, Ukrainian Futurist journals published 14 of his articles on the theory and history of art.

Jean-Claude Marcadé, in an article that appears in the very nice catalog (edited by Matthew Drutt), to the exhibit, "Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism," calls Malevich a "Polish-Ukrainian-Russian" painter and notes the "Ukrainian expressions" in his writings. Most other references, however, see no need to problematize his nationality or cultural attribution, speaking of Malevich simply as a "Russian"; the audio tour to this exhibit makes reference to his "Russian roots," and Matthew Drutt clearly cannot distinguish between Ukrainian and Russian sources, since he treats a Ukrainian commentary on Malevich (page 262 of the catalog) as if it were Russian ("Radians'ke mystetstvo" becomes "Radziansko mistetstvo").

While none of this ultimately detracts from a truly excellent exhibit, it is sad that, more than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is still so little sophistication on questions that relate to the cultural heritage of the Russian Empire. Even as facts betray how woefully inadequate and crude the national term "Russian" is for much of the culture production of the empire, art historians continue to use it without any caveat.

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Dr. Oleh Ilnytzkyj is a full professor in the department of modern languages and cultural studies at the University of Alberta, where he teaches courses in Ukrainian language and literature. His 1997 book, "Ukrainian Futurism, 1914-1930: An Historical and Critical Study" won the 1997 Best Book of the Year Award from the American Association of Ukrainian Studies and will shortly appear in a Ukrainian translation. Prof. Ilnytzkyj's "A Concordance to the Poetic Works of Taras Shevchenko" (2001), a four-volume work co-authored with Dr. George Hawrysch, was also awarded a shared 2003 Best Book of the Year Award from the American Association of Ukrainian Studies.

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