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Kazimir Malevich, The Aviator, 1914.

Oil on canvas, 125 × 65 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

The Institute of Artistic Culture

Research work was carried out in the Museum of Artistic Culture as early as 1921. Malevich gave lectures there: (‘Light and colour’, ‘The New Proof in Art’), by Matiushin (‘On the new space for the painter’) and by Ermolaeva (‘The System of Cubism’). This was how the idea of creating a research centre to study the new issues in art came about. On 9 June 1923, during the conference of the Museum taking place in Petrograd, Filonov made a report in which he proposed, in the name of the ‘group of left-wing painters’, to transform the museum into a Research Institute on the culture of contemporary art. But why did the creators themselves also want to play the role of researchers? To answer this question, one must highlight several points. Traditional art critics appeared helpless regarding the issues raised by the new art. For twenty years they had mocked the Russian Avant-Garde, making even deeper the divide created between the public and the painters. Even the most open-minded critics, such as Alexander Benois for example, tried to slow the development of the new artistic trends. Beginning in 1912, the Russian Avant-Garde started to ‘break free from Cubism’. Those who remained attached to Cubism missed out to some extent on the new developing avenues of art. These new directions needed a theoretical foundation, as had been the case at the outset of Cubism in France.

The painters working within the organisation of a research centre considered the development of the visual form to possess an inner logic, in which nothing was arbitrary. On the contrary, there is a ‘universal line’ in the movement of art that is consistent and ineluctable. By studying the logic in the development of visual structures, one can not only observe a strict and objective law in the past but also define the ‘vector’ orientated towards the future. Thus, this vector cannot be invented or constructed, one can only ‘help’ this ‘universal line’ of development ‘going through’ by itself, in deleting anything fortuitous. There was still another motive inducing the study of ‘artistic culture’, a motive that was maybe less visible in the arguments of the founders of the Institute, but certainly the most important. Each artwork is a ‘small world’ in itself, the materialised result of the interaction of the spiritual movement of space and time. It is in the universality of this pattern of the Universe that resides the ability of art to pre-empt and anticipate science. That is why the ‘painting’, as Mansurov observed, ‘is a hymn to what has not yet appeared. There are limitations: art and science. Art is the first phase that anticipates a new form of technical and therefore, social relationship.’[30] The painters had observed the prospective significance of the spiritual structures and patterns embodied in works of art and understood the necessity of studying them, though not only for the needs of art.

The Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) opened in August 1923. It was the first research centre in the world where one studied contemporary and living art through its new displays and exhibitions, instead of the art from the past. The Institute mainly intended to examine the Post-cubist phenomena in artistic culture. Malevich was elected Director of the Institute, Punin became his assistant and Tatlin, Matiushin and Mansurov managed various other departments.

The Additional Element

Malevich managed the Pictorial Culture department, Ermolaeva the Laboratory of Colour and Yudin the Laboratory of Form. The department was studying five movements of the new art – Impressionism, Cezannism, Cubism, Futurism and Suprematism – by conceiving the theory of the additional element in painting, an attempt to explain the logical succession of art forms. Kazimir Malevich possessed, in addition to his creative talent as a painter, the mind of a researcher longing to understand the causes for the creation of new forms in art and the logic of their development. The ‘Black Square’ required by Malevich’s intense efforts to demonstrate theoretically that Suprematism was not an isolated and rootless phenomenon but a whole new step in the development of global art culture.

Research became so intense during the Vitebsk period that in December 1920 Malevich declared, ‘I’m going to exhibit what I see in the infinite space of the human skull.’[31] It is difficult to determine exactly when Malevich had the concept of the ‘additional element’ in painting, but according to what he said, he already had this idea in mind when he arrived in Vitebsk. Studying the succession of directions in the new art, Malevich arrived at the conclusion that a given module or an ‘addition’ inserted in the structure of the established visual system, transforms it into a new artistic organism. This module was called the ‘additional element’. In Vitebsk, Malevich met many young people for whom art was an obsession and whose work reflected the clash of the most diverse influences within the new trends in painting. It was the ideal background for his research.

Malevich continued his research at the Institute of Artistic Culture. In conformity with his ‘additional element’ theory, Malevich asked or ‘prescribed’ still lifes to the beginners to determine the painter’s inclinations for one or another pictorial system. After his ‘diagnosis’, he worked with the young painter in developing his/her individual and unique artistic characteristics. During a discussion about the work of Valentin Kurdov, Malevich once said, ‘We must search in Kurdov for all the elements and correct them, but not make a Cubist or a Suprematist of him. We will try to preserve this unknown element; we will try to allow it to develop in the future, and to free it from foreign elements.’ Analysis of the students’ work was done during Malevich’s visits to the art workshops.

As paradoxical as it may seem, Malevich affirmed that a true painter suffers from ‘colourphobia’. This was the fruit of his assiduous research on the essence of painting, which he divided in three categories:

1) Coloured and graphic painting; coloured drawing, and painting in the style of Holbein.

2) Coloured and pictorial painting, founded on the relationship of pure colour, in the style of Matisse, Petrov-Vodkin, and Malevich himself in his Peasant Cycles.

3) Painting itself. Colour is crushed and mixed as in Rembrandt’s paintings, Kontchalovsky and Falk in their late periods. All three categories, however, are equal regarding their authenticity and quality.

Young painters therefore learned the fundamentals of painting and the laws of visual expressivity. The tact of Malevich helped many painters from Leningrad find their colours and forms, and original artistic solutions. Malevich encouraged young artists to discover the primitive expressive principles of the artistic form and taught them how to use these principles with freedom and conscience.

Pavel Filonov, A Man in the World, 1925–1926.

Oil on paper mounted on cardboard, 107 × 71.5 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Mikhail Larionov, A Soldier, Smoking, 1910.

Oil on canvas, 99 × 72 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Elena Guro

Mikhail Matiushin was one of the founders of the Institute of Artistic Culture. He was in charge of its Organic Culture department. The issues studied in this department appeared in 1910–1913 within the common creations of Matiushin and Guro. While everyone had a keen interest for geometricisation and Cubo-Futurism, the art of Matiushin and Guro demonstrated an original return to nature, a small, scarcely noticeable stream in 1913 that would flow like a great river in the 1920s. Matiushin and Guro did not override the new views about space that their comrades of the Union of Youth were passionate about; they simply interpreted them in their own way. A new direction in painting appeared in their work – the synthesis of the original views regarding space to the ‘non-object’, and the natural and live sensations. Elena Guro was ‘a poet as much as a painter. She was constantly writing down her observations in words as well as through drawing and painting.’[32] In her work Guro was searching for harmonious correspondence in the subtle movements of the soul and life of nature, in which for her nothing was sluggish, nothing dead. At the moment in poetry when vile passion was being unleashed and in painting Cubist geometricisation was in full swing, Elena Guro, ahead of her time, made a u-turn towards Nature in her work. Like Filonov, although in a totally different way, she opposed ‘mechanics’ for ‘organics’. Her verses and paintings were orientated towards the first element, i.e., the processes of nature. Guro addressed herself to the ‘saviour earth’ and aspired to assimilate the creative process to the rhythms of live nature: ‘Try to breathe, as the pine trees make a noise in the distance, as the wind unfolds and agitates, as the universe breathes. Try to imitate the breathing of the earth and the filament of the clouds.’[33]

30

P. Mansurov. Letter to E. Kovtun of 3rd August 1970, E. Kovtun’s Archives, St Petersburg.

31

K. Malevich, Suprematism. 34 Drawings, Vitebsk, 1920, p.4.

32

M. Matiushin, The Creative Path of the Artist, 1934, Directory of the Manuscripts Department of the Pushkin House, f.656.

33

E. Guro, The Poor Knight, 1913, Manuscripts Department of the Russian National Library, St Petersburg, f.1116, inv. 3, f.48.