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Exchange between East and West

The Russian avant-garde is one of the most surprising intellectual and creative movements in the art of the 20^th century. Within a very short time, an immensely concentrated burst of the most varied creative innovations emanated from Moscow and Leningrad. In the 18^th century, Russia had opened itself up to the West, primarily to France and Germany and the lively exchange in the intellectual and artistic spheres between the East and West during the first two decades of the 20^th century unleashed an innovative and mutually enriching art scene of the highest calibre. The new discoveries in the spheres of physics, technology, medicine, and psychology, were the basis of this scientific-artistic questioning. The eastern and western avant-gardes were a closely woven conglomerate of reciprocal inspiration. One cannot imagine the non-representational art of the west without the trail blazing of a Frantisek, Kupka, or Wassily Kandinsky. De Stijl cannot be imagined without Suprematism and eastern Constructivism. Many of the émigrés, who were successful in the west, had their roots in the east like the Romanian Constantin Brancusi, or the Russian Marc Chagall.

The Russians were primarily drawn to France and Germany. Wassily Kandinsky, like Alexej von Jawlensky, and Marianne von Werefkin, had already had travelled to Munich in 1896 and he often returned to Russia. Léon Bakst, Marc Chagall, Antoine Pevsner, and El Lissitzky lived and worked in the years 1910 and 1914 in either France or Germany. Archipenko and Survage went to Paris in 1908, as did Zadkine and Lipchitz a year later. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, they brought their experience back to their Russian homeland. Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Gontcharova went in the opposite direction and immigrated to Paris in 1917.

From around 1905 until the 1920s, Russian art, driven by creative and intellectual energy, developed in an unusually multifaceted manner. This period was opened by Impressionism and Symbolism at the beginning of the century. Neo-Primitivism, Cubo-Futurism and Abstract Expressionism, Rayonism, Suprematism and Constructivism followed this all the way to Analytic Art. With respect to painting, the most outstanding representatives of this multifaceted, yet very intense, period are Natalia Gontcharova, Wassily Kandinsky, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matyuchin, and El Lissitzky.

Symbolism is one of the most important aspects of the spiritual longing at the turn of the century. It is a logical development of Russian culture, not of a decadent atmosphere as in some western countries. Russian Symbolism strove to integrate beauty as a life-giving force into daily life. This was accompanied by a feverish search for the purpose of life after ethical ideals in the background of the impending collapse of old Russia. In contrast to the West, the expressiveness of Russian Symbolism extended until around 1910.

The most brilliant of the Symbolists was Mikhail Vrubel. He created highly psychological portraits, linking the finest lyrical moments with expressive emotions and tragic loneliness. His worldview was imbued with a strange duality. He venerated Goethe and natural philosophy, and internalised the theories of Kant, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

The Russian merchants and collectors, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, were the first to promote the new art movements. Shchukin had already opened his collection of contemporary art to the public in Moscow in 1914. What significance this collection of the French avant-garde had for the specific development of Russian art before the revolutions can be judged by what the painter, David Burliuk, one of the future Cubo-Futurists, said, as he wrote to a friend in St Petersburg:

In Moscow, we often looked at the French collections of both S. I. Shchukin and I. A. Morozov. If I had not, I would not have dared to start. We have been at home now for three days. All the old stuff has been thrown into the rubbish heap, and, oh, it is hard and uplifting to start again from the beginning.

A unique ensemble of paintings by Paul Gauguin, placed close together like a frieze in the manner of an Old Russian iconostasis, was on display in the Shchukin’s dining room. Located in the centre was the painting Obsterte (Fruit Harvest) from the last Tahiti period. Natalia Gontcharova, deeply impressed, responded to Paul Gauguin with her four-piece composition Fruit Harvest. She painted an equally exotic depiction of daily life, however, one with Russian folkloric motifs, lifting the simple, daily life of the Russian peasant to her Tahiti, into her paradise-like state.

Never before had the artistic relations between Russia and France been so intense. The legendary The Golden Fleece exhibition of 1908, named after the journal of the same name, reflected this. On display were 282 paintings, two thirds of which were from Paris. For the first time, many Russian artists saw Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Renoir, Pissarro and the Nabis with Bonnard, Denis, Vuillard, Sérusier, and the Pointillists. What impressed the Russians the most were the Fauves like Derain, Marquet, Matisse and van Dongen. The impact of this exhibit on the evolving Russian avant-garde cannot be overestimated.

As a result, two distinct groups arose. In St Petersburg, the Union of Youth, and in Moscow, Jack of Diamonds led by Larionov and Gontcharova. Their place was taken in 1911 by the group Donkey’s Tail, with whom Tatlin and Malevich exhibited, and, in 1913, by the group, Target. For the prerevolutionary Moscow art scene, the activities of Larionov and his wife, Gontcharova, were of crucial importance. Before World War I, both took part in a number of exhibits abroad, for example, in 1912 with the Blaue Reiter in Munich and at the Erste Deutsche Herbstsalon in Berlin. Larionov travelled a further time in 1914 to Paris in order to work there with Diaghilev at his ballet. Together with Gontcharova, he exhibited in Paris, and wrote the foreword to the catalogue.

Italian Futurism also contributed important ideas to the Russian intellectual life. The short-lived Cubo-Futurism group, which in addition to Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Gotcharova, Aleksandra Ekster, David Burliuk, Lyubov Popova and Kazimir Malevich belonged, united Futurist ideas on painting with those of the Russian Neo-Primitivists. Out of this developed the almost object-free Rayonism style. In Saint Petersburg, the Futurists met with Matyuchin and Elena Guro. In addition, the brothers Burliuk, Vasily Kamensky, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Olga Rozanova also took part.

Natalia Gontcharova, The Harvest, 1911. Oil on canvas, 92 × 99 cm.

The Omsk M. A. Vrubel Museum of Fine Arts, Omsk.

Mikhail Vrubel, Fallen Demon, 1901.

Watercolour, gouache on paper, sketch for 1902’s painting, 21 × 30 cm.

Drawings department, The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

Rayonism

From 1912 to 1913, the Russian avant-garde developed a strong sense of personal identity of its own and looked increasingly to the strengths and values of its own national origins. Larionov together with Gontcharova created Rayonism, an early variant of abstract art. They, thereby, sought primarily to differentiate themselves from Italian Futurism. In the Manifesto of Rayonism, written in 1912 and published in 1913, they expressly praised nationalism.

Rayonism combined contemporary European trends. It fused Cubism and Futurism in so far as it fragmented and energised the painting surface. It fused Orphism in so far as it realised the dynamic quality of the light by means of colour contrasts. For Mikhail Larionov, Rayonism (Rayon = beam) meant the dissolution of the painting subject. He referred to the scientific research regarding the materiality of light. This he visualised in his paintings through a bundle of rays and refractions through a prism. A depiction referring to an object had hardly any meaning for him. His concern was only about depicting the phenomenon of radiating energy that attaches to all things. He treated shape and colour as autonomous elements. In the Manifesto of Rayonism, Larionov speaks about ‘… the rays of things that the artist subjects to his expressive desire. The painting appears as such not of space and time; it spews out sensations that let us sense the fourth dimension.’

The Manifesto of Rayonism became instructive for Suprematism to the degree as Malevich states:

Long live our Rayonistic painting style, which is independent of shapes belonging to reality and develops accordingly to artistic laws. It concerns itself with spatial forms that result from the reflection of intersecting rays of various objects, and it rests upon shapes that are determined by the artist himself.

Following his trip to London in 1906, where the watercolours of William Turner had impressed him, Mikhail Larionov had become obsessed with the idea of a non-figurative painting. Now with Rayonism, he had been able to realise his vision.

Mikhail Matyuchin, Moving into Space, 1919.

Oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm. Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square on White Background, dated of 1913, achieved after 1920.

Oil on canvas, 106.2 × 106.5 cm. Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Matyushin and Malevich

The painter and musician, Mikhail Vasilyevich Matyushin, assumed among the Russian avant-garde a leading and, for the younger generation, an influential position. He was a professional musician. In the years between 1903 and 1905 he had experimented in the area of quartertone music. He was a painter and an intellectual. In addition, he was interested in science and philosophy. In the correspondence between Kazimir Severinovich Malevich and Matyushin, it becomes apparent that it was Matyushin, who for a considerable period of time conveyed the developments in philosophical theories such as the teachings of Berdyaev, Fyodorov, or Bergson, as well as mystical theories of the Middle Ages and ancient Indian philosophy to Malevich. Both artists were bound by a lifelong friendship. Of the two, Matyushin was closer to nature, he felt as though elements of painting should be analogous to those found in nature and beings found in the organic world. Matyushin undertook exercises to increase his perception in order to intuitively understand and anticipate the hidden and supernatural. He espoused visualising with the back of one’s head, the temples and the soles of one’s feet.

In 1913 Malevich and Matyushin jointly produced the opera Victory over the Sun. This became a milestone in the development of art in the 20^th century. Malevich designed the costumes and the set. The poet, Kroutchenykh, wrote the libretto and Velemir Khlebnikov wrote the prologue. Matyuchin’s futuristically oriented composition, which incorporated dissonances, unexpected interval jumps, aircraft noises, cannons, and machines, inspired Malevich to develop Suprematism. This opera was the first attempt at a total show, a precursor of later innovation. This caused a scandal and left, as Matyushin reported, a deep impression. The words had a deep inner power, ‘of such power and so frightening were the sets and the futuristic people with such power as one had not seen the likes before.’ On the curtains between the acts, Malevich had painted his first Black Square.

From 1912 and 1913, Malevich’s works become increasingly abstract. Cézanne’s goal to geometrise everything led him more and more to abstract shapes that organise space in three dimensions. Malevich had succeeded in producing a convincing synthesis of Cubism and Futurism in these paintings. He succeeded in the fracturing and energising of the world of shapes and, furthermore, like Matisse, in the emancipation of colour.

Fernand Léger succeeded in arriving at a similar form of expression at the same time in Paris. This was just at the time when in 1912 the vehement dispute over priorities between the Cubists and the Futurists broke out. Léger and Malevich solved this problem in their own way. Indeed, they rather built their paintings, as it were, out of elements shaped like pipes of such volume that they fit one in the other and in this manner create a strong dynamic effect. To the colour they mixed metallic elements, thereby, stressing the mechanical.

In subsequent years, Malevich came ever closer to the higher level of consciousness of ‘pure painting.’ This was certainly encouraged by the theories of Nikolai Berdyaev, who had been teaching in Moscow since 1917 and had founded a Religious Philosophical Academy. His spiritual teachings regarding the relativity and equilibrium of man and the cosmos convinced Malevich that he could create perfect supermatistic shapes that float in themselves.

Fernand Léger, Composition, 1918. Oil on canvas, 146 × 114 cm.

Drawings department, The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

Pure Painting: Suprematism

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich is the leading figure of abstract art. He was a founder of Suprematism and paved the way for Constructivism (which he rejected). He derived his theories mainly from French and German Expressionism, Cubism and Futurism. At the last Futurist Zero-Ten in St Petersburg during the December of 1915, he exhibited his work Black Square on a White Surface, which he himself described as an ‘… icon of the new art.’ Referring to the ‘beautiful corner’ in traditional orthodox homes, he hung his Black Square as if it were an icon high in the corner. Malevich explained:

When in the desperate attempt in 1913 to liberate art from the weight of things, I exhibited a painting that was nothing more than a black square on a white surface. […] It was not an empty square that I exhibited, but rather much more the perception of abstractness. The square = perception, and the white space = the emptiness behind the square.

The Black Square on a White Surface became the icon of modernist art, a key work of abstract art. It has no other meaning than itself. It has no meaning. It is.

Malevich coined the term Suprematism which means the same as ‘totality without a subject’ or ‘new realistic painting.’ Malevich published the Manifesto of Suprematism in 1915. In it he formulated visions that threw overboard all previous ideas about art. He ranked the perception of abstractness above that of shape. A square, a circle, a triangle or a cross on a neutral surface is ‘by its nature no longer an imposing painting.’ His geometric elements were restricted to the greatest simplicity and permitted no relation to reality. He, thereby, had already formulated important concepts at the turn of the century that would be become fundamental for the concept art of the 1970s, American Minimalist art and many contemporary artists. The brothers Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo also spoke out in favour of a new sculpture of the ‘abstract’ in their 1920 manifesto, which they named Realistic Manifesto.

In Suprematism it is not about the shape but rather about sensory impressions. It points the way towards endlessness. In his writing titled From Cézanne to Suprematism, Malevich wrote:

The effort is not directed towards conveying the entirety of the object, but rather the opposite. The pulverisation and dissection of the object into its basic elements is essential in creating contrasts in the painting. The object was understood from its intuitive side.

One should also point to his vision that he expressed in his paper ‘Suprematism’ in 1920. This was, namely, the possibility of interplanetary flight and of earth satellites that would permit man to conquer space.

After the 1917 October Revolution, Malevich taught at the State Art School in Moscow. From 1919 onwards he took part in the creation of the modern teaching institute in Vitebsk. However, in 1921 the official attacks on his art began. Malevich was dismissed from all his official duties; however, he was allowed to travel to the West. He first went to Poland in March 1927 where, he was triumphantly received, and an exhibition was organised. At the end of March, he travelled further onto Berlin and later to the Bauhaus. Here, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Hannes Meyer Lázló Moholy-Nagy and Kandinsky received him with great delight and respect. They had published his works under the title The Abstract World.

With wise foresight, he left all of the works he had brought with him with the architect, Hugo Häring. These were first rediscovered in 1951 and acquired by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, save those that had been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition.

One of the important later paintings is his Self-Portrait from 1933 with the posture and in the clothing of a reformer. The hand gesture points to the missing square – a challenge to the Stalinist regime. When Malevich died in 1935, the State Russian Museum obtained the largest part of his studio. From then until 1962, no work of Malevich would be exhibited in the USSR. Even at the 1932 Moscow and Leningrad exhibition of 15 Jahre Sowjetkunst (15 Years of Soviet Art), his works had been placed in an isolated room and presented as that of a ‘revolutionary artist.’

The USSR had secreted away whole avant-garde collections, including those of Malevich, into the cellars. Upon the death of Lenin in 1924 at the latest, the avant-garde had lost its momentum. In 1934 under the Stalin dictatorship, Socialist Realism was extolled. Artists who did not fall into line were persecuted, arrested or deported. At the end of the 1950s, under Khrushchev and after Stalin’s death in 1953, a second Russian avant-garde secretly arose, the Soz-Art (Sots Art) a combination of Pop Art and Socialist Realism. Sots Art criticised the excess of ideology in the Soviet Union and the excess consumption in the West. Among the first generation of Sots Art artists were Erik Bulatov and Ilya Kabakov.

Kazimir Malevich, Self-Portrait, 1933.

Oil on canvas, 73 × 66 cm. Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Vladimir Tatlin, Nude, 1910–1914.

Oil on canvas, 104.5 × 130.5 cm. Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Constructivism

Constructivism radiated a strong influence over the entire art world. Its roots are found in pre-revolutionary Russia. It used technology and the natural sciences, as well as let the newest innovations in engineering and industry steer its direction. ‘Art is dead – long live the industrial art of Tatlin’, was the slogan referring to the Constructivist works of this inspired inventor, Vladimir Tatlin. In his early years, Tatlin had begun as a painter, and so, like other Russian artists, he had absorbed the innovations of French painting. His paintings from after 1910 show influences that can be traced to the works found in the Shchukin collection. Tatlin’s Female Nude of 1913 shows references to the Sitting Female Nude of 1908–1909. In the course of his artistic development, Tatlin departed from the pictorially illustrated three-dimensionality of Cubo-Futurism. In 1913 he began by continuing with the spatial collages of Picasso with his three-dimensional ‘constructions’ made out of glass, wood, and metal. He invented the three-dimensional flying objects, the Letatlin (letat = to fly + Tatlin). One can, therefore, consider him to have laid the path for the later Action Art.

In Constructivism, pure reason and objectivity were the guiding principles. Tatlin became the antipode of all previous avant-garde movements; he became a fitting expression for the new and the world ruled by technology and the natural sciences. Tatlin tore down the barriers between the individual genres of art, between that which Art Nouveau had tried to do and Futurism had only done theoretically. Technology and utility became the absolute priority. Former followers of Suprematism like Ivan Kliun, Lyubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova were drawn to this production art form, which was conceptualised as a synthesis of the arts.

El Lissitzky, who was the director of the faculty of architecture at the State Higher Artistic and Technical Studios (VKhUTEMAS) in Moscow, was conscious of the effect of technology. In 1919 he created the first Constructivist works. He called them Prouns, derived from the Russian Pro Unovis = for a rejuvenation of art. ‘I created the Proun as a transfer station from painting to architecture. […] It depends upon the organisation of the space by the line, plane, volume, and on their relationships and proportions.’ The structure of painting, according to El Lissitzky, should be executed according to architectural laws. The shapes should be sketched out and then transferred to the canvas. Alexander Rodchenko coined the term Constructivism as the Constructivists were forming themselves into an artist group in 1921.

A short time later, Lenin announced the New Economic Policy, which only permitted art as a means of mass indoctrination. This compelled the Constructivists to retreat officially into the applied arts. Under these circumstances, Lissitzky was nevertheless able to organise exhibitions inside and outside the Soviet Union and in this way make Constructivist painters like Aleksandr Drevin, Lyubov Popova, Yury Annenkov and Alexander Rodchenko known. The first of these exhibitions took place in December 1922 at the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin. The more than 600 works of Constructivist art were met with euphoria, in particular because similar Constructivist tendencies had already developed in Poland, Hungary and Germany. In Hungary, Alexander Bortnyik, Lajos Kassák, László Péri and László Moholy-Nagy developed Constructivist painting ideas. In Germany, Karl Peter Röhl, Walter Dexel, Werner Graeff, Erich Buchholz, Carl Buchheister, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart and also, from time to time, Willi Baumeister, were engaged in this. Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling transferred Constructivist concepts into abstract film. In 1924 Henryk Berlewi, Henryk Stażewski and Władisław Strzemiñski founded the Constructivist group BLOK in Poland. The Italian, Luigi Veronesi, as well as the Belgians, Victor Servranckx and Félix de Boeck, took Lissitsky as their example.

Piet Mondrian, Composition in Red, Blue, Black,Yellow and Grey, 1921.

Oil on canvas, 76 × 52.4 cm.

Gift of John L. Senior, Jr., The Museum of Modern Art, New York.