KASIMIR MALEVICH AT THE TATE MODERN

KASIMIR MALEVICH AT THE TATE MODERN

 Born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1879 to Polish parents, Kasimir Malevich (1879-1935) could hardly be said to be Russian so unsurprisingly his initial attempts at art sought to establish his personal surroundings and then his”Russian” identity. Malevich lived through a time of incredible turmoil and rapid change in Russia. The serfs had only just been emancipated in 1861, a liberal constitution was still a dream and an ineffectual Duma (Parliament) largely served the Tsar's interests. Opponents of autocracy included Liberals, Social Revolutionaries, Social Democrats and Anarchists. Some of these groups had indeed given up democratic politics in the face of intense repression on the part of the Tsarist regime and had begun to embrace political violence and assassination as legitimate forms of dissent. Malevich represented a new class of artist revolutionaries who were rapidly outpacing both anti and pro democracy groupings. He recognised that his task was to establish himself as a Russian artist then as a member of the international avante garde. It seems that Malevich managed to react to and anticipate new gestures in art and brand new art movements most of which originated in the West. He began by absorbing the 19th century tradition of realist painting which is exemplified in the early painting of his father. Then he succumbed to the influence of Paul Gaugin which can be seen in his early self-portrait from 1910 and also began using impasto techniques too. Malevich was clearly keeping a close eye on developments in Paris although he didn't have to go there to see the art of Gaugin since Russian collectors were eagerly buying Gaugin's work when it was shunned by the collectors in the salons of Paris. Malevich began to integrate elements from Russian folk culture such as his early painting The Scyther from 1912-13 with elements from the new dominant aesthetic of Cubism which was being pioneered in Paris by Picasso and Braque. This was then fused with the new hysterically self-propagating art movement of Futurism which was announced by the poet Filippo Marinetti. Out of this mix came a distinctively Russian movement which went beyond the principles of Futurism and was known as Constructivism.

 Malevich was establishing himself as a member of the avante garde and by 1913 he had begun to collaborate with other artists such as the poet Velimir Khlebnikov on a Constructivist opera Victory over the Sun an implausible and abstract political allegory in which the sun is finally destroyed to make way for a new political order. In the same year Malevich was making preparatory sketches for his most iconic work The Black Square which was actually painted in June 1915. (the version presented at the Tate Modern dates from 1923 since the original is too fragile to move from Moscow) This work was defiantly abstract. Malevich's contemporaries might have wondered at its value or the artist's sanity. But the painting was not a depiction of melancholia. The painting's statement, its plain and iconic stillness is recognisable in the works of Russian icon makers. In fact The Black Square was placed at the exhibition 0.10 (or the The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting) in 1915 in Petrograd in the place where an icon traditionally sits on a wall in Russia. In fact Malevich constantly references such religious icons and deploys traditional Christian iconography in a range of paintings which are sometimes also suffused with eastern mysticism as in the early work Shroud of Christ from 1908.

 Malevich was a reservist in 1916 and by that time Russia had suffered devestating defeats in WW1 which ensured that Russia would be ineffective in the conflict. During 1917 great changes occurred in Russia. Firstly, a revolution in February 1917 replaced the Tsar with the Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky. Then, after continual disturbances and continual agitation by the Bolshevik Party, a further revolution in October brought down Kerensky's administration and Lenin's party entered power. Simultaneously Malevich was struggling to survive and so he became a teacher of art at the People's Art College of Vitebsk which is near Moscow. He became interested in art theory which can be seen in a series of art theoretical posters which he made for a tour of Germany in the 1920s. These posters are odd, unintelligible, defiantly eccentric, defiantly Malevich. He was also interested in things which he called architectons, his name for the plaster models that he made which anticipated Soviet architecture designs. He became engrossed in theory and his art movement Suprematism and sought to spread its message with the help of his students.

 In the mid–late 1920s Malevich's painting became increasingly realist. This phase of his career coincided with Stalin's consolidation of power after Lenin's death in 1924. The age of experiment and Suprematism was perhaps coming to an end although Malevich never quite abandoned the movement leaving a signature black square in the corner of his late realist paintings. In the late 1920s Malevich returned to depictions of traditional Russian peasants and farm workers yet they were emptied of the echoes of cubism and futurism which had summarised his work at the beginning of the century. Still tantalisingly abstract they represent the late works of a Russian artist who endured Stalinism yet refused to leave for the West. Malevich returned to realism in the early 1930s in a series of personal portraits and self-portraits and, at one point, was arrested under suspicion of being a German spy as a consequence of his trip to Germany a few years earlier.

 Malevich died of cancer in 1935. The mourners at his funeral procession all bore flags embellished with the black square and the image was placed on his tomb. Malevich’s last self-portrait depicts himself as a Renaissance prince clad in slightly abstracted gear which wuld not look out of place in a Derek Jarman film or Pet Shop Boys DVD in its sene of abstracted anachronism. Malevich lived far beyond his present which he mst have regarded as quite dismal and pervasively repressive. 

Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London, August 2014