Читать книгу Malevich - Gerry Souter - Страница 4

Apple Trees in Bloom, motif: c. 1906, version: end of 1920s.

Oil on canvas, 58.5 × 49.5 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Kasimir was twelve years old and had prepared watercolour paints and made his own brushes. He had practised drawing horses in different views placing them in landscapes and with people. He had painted them whatever colour he had mixed, working with a friend who also had ambitions to be an artist. It was here he saw his first professional artists who came from St. Petersburg to decorate a church. Kasimir wrote of this very special event:

“At this time we lived in a small city, Belopolya in the Kharkov province, in which I found a comrade very devoted to drawing. My friend was far ahead of me in manufacturing paint. He had flat stones on which he ground them. We made paints not only of various kinds of clays, but also from some powders. We prepared both watercolour and oil paints. We did not prefer oil paints and worked mostly with watercolours.

One day, my friend came running to my house, pulled me outside behind a gate and, being out of breath, whispered to me, ‘I’ve heard my uncle tell my aunt that the most well-known artists are coming here from St. Petersburg to paint icons in the cathedral.’”

Kasimir and his friend had never seen real artists before. Each day, they eavesdropped on their elders’ conversations and listened at keyholes to find out when the artists were scheduled to arrive.

Finally the three artists arrived by train. The parishioners were more concerned about repairs to the cathedral and gathering money to pay for the work than about the artists. Kasimir and his friend were desperately interested only in the artists. They needed to sneak into the church and watch how these well-known artists worked. For days and nights, the boys examined the windows of the church to find where they might squeeze through. Kasimir’s friend was a well-known resident of Belopolya and his job was to find out where the artists were lodging. Unfortunately he refused to ask his uncle about them, because it was a secret.

The boys spent time walking up and down the main street of Belopolya, Kasimir on one side and his friend on the other, peering into people’s faces, searching for the artists. Any stranger was visible at once in Belopolya. Morning and evening, they stood by the main bakery and the deli market, but the only people on the street were familiar residents of the town. Finally, they decided it was easier to stay by the cathedral.

They tried taking turns when each had to go home for dinner, but finally they took food with them and stayed by the cathedral full time. But there was no sign of the artists.

A few days of fruitless waiting passed but on one hot evening, after a swim in the river, they suddenly saw boys and girls peering in the windows of a house located on the outermost street of Belopolya. They joined the other children and discovered, “…Many small pieces of ‘fabric’ (as we named it) with heads of boys, girls and also cows drinking water painted on them hanging on walls all around the brightly illuminated room. The artists walked in the room. There were three of them. We examined them as an unknown rarity and were amazed by their long hair and special shirts (smocks?).”

After a sleepless night, the boys hurried back to the house before sunrise. The sun rose and the cows were driven out, but the artists remained inside.

“At last, the window opened and an artist looked out on the street. We stepped aside, pretending that we were interested in kitchen gardens nearby. In an hour a gate opened and the artists appeared before our eyes. They had boxes on belts hung upon their shoulders, umbrellas and other strange things. They were dressed in shirts, bluish trousers and boots. The artists went out of town; we followed behind them. There were fields under rye and wheat with mills on them and a forest of oaks in the distance… We sneaked in the rye where we were not visible, but on the wheat field we had to creep. As soon as the artists reached a mill they settled down, set out their boxes, opened umbrellas and began to paint.”

It is instructive to read Kasimir’s words and imagine how these artists, hung about with their paint boxes, easels, water cans, food and wine baskets and dressed in their painter’s smocks must gave looked so alien. Where the artists from the city aware of the two stalking boys and did they put on a show for their amusement? This is a rare look at artistic culture shock.

“Carefully and thoroughly, we examined any detail,” Kasimir went on, “…nothing escaped our attention. We desired to see how and what they were going to do. Holding our breath, we crept on our stomachs in the most cautious way. We managed to crawl up very close. We saw colour tubes from which paint was pressed and that was very interesting. A sky, a mill, and so forth showed up gradually on each ‘fabric’.

There was no end to our excitement. We spent two hours lying there. Then, the artists put aside their work and gathered together in the shade of the mill to have breakfast. They spoke loudly in Russian and laughed. Taking advantage of this occasion, we crept away through the rye the same way back and then, when we got out from the field, we ran away at top speed.”[4]

The experience of seeing these three artists at work creating paintings was so heady that Kasimir and his friend considered running away to St. Petersburg with the men when they returned from working on the cathedral. But their enthusiasm sobered when they considered running out on their parents, and then the two youngsters were separated when Kasmir’s father packed up the family yet again and moved to a sugar factory in Volchok in the Chernigov Province, thirteen miles from Konotop.

Once again, Kasimir was among new town people, but this time his drawings and paintings attracted the interest of the factory engineers, who prevailed on Severyn Malevich to send his son to art school. Kasimir took up their pestering as he copied pictures from the magazine Niva (“Wheatfield”). This magazine was much like the later New Yorker, a three-column format with poems and illustrations by Russian artists scattered among the pages. Later, when the Bolsheviks came to power, the magazine was shut down.

To silence the constant badgering from his son and his colleagues, the elder Malevich wrote a letter to the Moscow Art School, but instead of mailing it, he hid the letter away in a drawer and three months later announced to Kasimir he had heard from the school and there was no place for his son in its classes.

But Kasimir’s exposure to art had possessed him. The scene of the artists painting at that mill on the steppe continued to haunt his thoughts. He wrote in his 1918 memoir:

Church, c. 1906. Oil on cardboard, 60.3 × 44 cm. Private Collection.

A Garden in Bloom, motif: c. 1906, version: end of 1920s.

Oil on canvas, 45 × 66 cm. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

A River in the Forest, motif: c. 1910–1911, version: 1928–1929.

Oil on canvas, 53 × 41.8 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

“Tubes, palettes, brushes, umbrellas and a folding-chair from Belopolya never left my mind in peace. I was sixteen years old. I already drew everything, cows, horses, and people and I did it, as it seemed to me, as well as artists drew in magazines. At sixteen, I went to Kiev with my mother where she bought me everything that a salesman at the art shop told her to buy.

I spent my time then in Konotop. Oh, a lovely city Konotop; it all shone like slabs of pig fat (salo). On markets and near the train station behind the long lines of tables sat women, whom people called salnitsy. The smell of garlic spread from them. Those tables were overloaded with different kinds of meat and salo, smoked and not smoked, with good crust. There laid rings of sausages: Krakow sausages stuffed with large pieces of meat and pig fat, blood sausages, other sausages with an unusual aroma excited all glands which any person has. Also those tables were piled up with ham with a little fat on the edges, rolls of round porridge mixed with lamb fat (salniky) and variety of round headcheese. The women who sold those delicacies glistened with the grease and their clothes reflected the beams of the sun.

I bought a ring of sausage for five kopeks and then I broke it in pieces and ate like other people did while they walked around the markets. I did not even look at meat or lamb which cost one and a half kopeks for a pound. Pork was my favourite dish, that and fish. Particularly, I liked dry-cured fish, two kopeks apiece, big and fatty, with caviar. I loved to eat pork and fish with white bread. Or, sometimes, I purchased from the salnitsy a whole piglet for forty kopeks, roasted with brown crust which was saturated with fat. The roasted crust crackled in the teeth and I ate the whole piglet, keeping it a secret from my family.”

Kasimir Malevich indulged his senses and made the most of his separation from the restrictions and drabness of the factory towns where his father laboured. That his later recollections seemed to centre around rich food and the abundant markets where tables groaned under these delicacies hints that at the time of writing his own larder was thinly stocked. As a thirsty man can only think of water, so a hungry man feeds his fantasies with imagined and remembered plenty.

But if his gastronomic excesses bordered on gluttony, his observations of the countryside did not ignore some of the downsides to country living.

“I grew up among all that Ukrainian salo and garlic in Konotop. It was one, very pleasant side of Konotop. The other characteristic of Konotop was an impassable swamp when it rained and extreme dust during dry time. When a telega (a long narrow wagon with sides that sloped up and out from the flat bed) went along the street during the dry season, it lifted such dust that neither horses nor houses would visible.”

There were stories told about when Ekaterina II (a familiar nickname of Catherine the Great 1729–1796) passed through this town, her horses sank in a bog of streets. From then, the city became known as Konotop – a swampy landscape or a horse-ford where horses drowned. The main street, as always in cities, was named Nevsky Prospect (after the medieval Russian warrior prince, Alexander Nevsky).

“Wood planks were placed on the both sides of Konotop’s Nevsky Prospect,” he continues his narrative, “just in case of rain. When chernozem (black earth) dissolved to an arshin (28 inches) in depth, people walked on these boards. Pigs with their piglets lay in the middle of Nevsky Prospect, rooting up the ground or rummaging in slops which were poured out from courtyards directly into the street. I lived far away from the Prospect in a very pretty small Ukrainian house which was surrounded by a garden.”

He painted his first picture Moonlight Night by drawing from his imagination, his “impression” as he had done in Belopolya. He drew from memory rather than from nature, because he did not yet have the means or skill to match nature’s colours with his paints. During the shopping trip with his mother, a prudent salesman sold them a book written by Professor F. Lennike that had been translated into Russian in 1895, Practical Guidance of Painting on Porcelain, Faience and So Forth, which stated how to draw portraits and landscapes. According to Lennike, it was necessary to use no less than fifty-four “bodily” paints to paint a portrait and no fewer colours to achieve a “grassy” landscape. Malevich could not understand why that quantity of colours was necessary, and continued to paint as he had with his limited palette that “…matched his impression”.

Two Sisters II, motif: 1910, version: 1928–1929.

Oil on canvas, 76 × 101 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

The Unemployed Girl, motif: 1904, version: end of 1920s.

Oil on canvas, 80 × 66 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

The Flower Girl III, motif: 1904–1905, version: end of 1920s. Oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Kasimir remembered, “My first painting on a canvas, a size of one and three quarter arshin, was titled Moonlight Night. It was a landscape with a river, stones and a moored little boat. The reflection of beams of the moon in the picture, as I’ve been told, was like reality. This picture made a really big impression on all of my friends. One of them, with a commercial vein, urged me to display this picture in stationer’s shop on Nevsky Prospect, but I was against it because I was terribly over-modest. That was a strange condition – I, if it is possible to say, was ashamed to show my work which I had made with great pleasure. But my comrade took away my Moonlight Night without my permission. The owner of the shop was amazed by this picture. With pleasure, he took my work and, as my friend said, displayed it in a window of the shop. I went to take a look at my first exhibition too, but I was afraid that others might find out that I was the artist. Officials stopped, looked and looked… The picture was not displayed for long; it was purchased for five roubles. It was a fortune: it was possible to eat sausages – a ring daily – for a whole month. The owner of the shop asked me to bring another Moonlight Night but this time with a windmill. Actually, I painted a different picture, double the size of my first one. It represented a grove with storks. It was sold too.”

It is interesting to watch Malevich come out of his shell and be less defensive about his peasant status. Through his own talent, he managed to raise his self-esteem to the level of the artists he admired. He had painted for people he did not know, who were not relatives, and had admired and paid good roubles for his efforts. His success only fired his need to learn more.

By 1896, Severyn Malevich moved his sizeable family to even more permanent quarters in Kursk and went to work for the railway as a clerk in the management office. While there, he made a journey to Kiev and Kasimir accompanied him, remembering the trip later.

“Once a year all sugar factories met in Kiev. At the same time a great fair was arranged and merchants from all countries came there. Sugar-factory owners or managing directors came to the fair to make new contracts and hire different specialists or experts in sugar refining. That is why among barracks dwellers and famers the fair was important to receive future contracts. My father, as a highly skilled sugar maker, came to get these contracts too and took me with him. Consequently, I got acquainted with the city and its life as well as with art which was shown in show-windows of stationery shops.”

Kasimir wasn’t much interested in the fair although it was a remarkable event. While his father tended to business, Kasimir hurried from shop to shop and looked for hours at pictures. Thus, little by little, Kiev became a new environment that influenced him and opened a new appreciation of art.

He understood nothing then about the difference between the art of the Kiev painters and the folk art of the villagers, but emotionally he accepted them both – with excitement and a great desire to draw the same skilfully-done pictures himself. He did not know that there were many art schools where people were trained in painting, but thought that all those pictures were drawn in the same manner as peasants drew flowers, horses and cocks – by rote and repetition without any schools or studies.

“One displayed picture impressed me strongly. In Kiev art, everything was represented very vivid and natural. The picture that bewitched me was of a girl who sat on a bench and cleaned a potato. I was astounded with the plausibility of the potato and peelings which, like ribbons, lay on the bench near an excellently painted pot. This picture was real revelation for me, so I remembered it for a long time. The style of the expression powerfully disturbed me.

The potatoes and peelings looked so natural that this made a lasting impression, as did nature itself… So I was able to stay in Kiev where, I learned later, there were such ‘great’ artists as Pymonenko, and Murashko. “

Kiev forever left its imprint in Malevich’s mind: the hills, the Dnieper River and its houses constructed of coloured bricks, the distant horizon and the bustle of steamships and dockside activity. He loved to watch the village women who came to town in small boats to sell their butter, milk and sour cream. These colourfully dressed peasants were everywhere along the river banks and streets of Kiev and gave to the city its special atmosphere.

“My father did not like me being keen on art,” Malevich wrote. “He knew that there were many artists around painting pictures, but never talked on this theme. He nevertheless expected that I would follow his way in life. Father told me that an artist’s life is really bad and many of them are in prisons. He didn’t want that lifestyle for his own son. My mother had mastered different embroidery styles and the weaving of laces. She taught me and I learned to embroider and knit with a hook.”

Woman Ironing, c. 1906–1907.

Oil on cardboard, 28.8 × 18.5 cm. Private Collection.

Peasant Head, end of 1911.

Gouache on cardboard, 26.7 × 32 cm.

Musée national d’Art moderne, centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.

Argentine Polka, 1911. Gouache on cardboard, 117 × 70.5 cm. Private Collection.

The Chiropodist, 1911–1912.

Gouache on cardboard, 77.7 × 103 cm.

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Peasant Woman with Buckets and Child I, end of 1911-beginning of 1912. Oil on canvas, 73 × 73 cm.

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.