Almost 60 years ago....

I am in love with 1950's fashion. Oh me, oh my, the striking and defined lines of the pencil suits, the full, flowing skirts and the princess-like evening gowns. Rich fabrics and gorgeous hats, as well as long gloves. I wish I was born 50 years earlier, sometimes...

Lissitzky and Malevich

I dug up an old paper I wrote, about the Russian avant-garde, back in my first year at the SASA. The Russian avant-garde has been back on my mind for a while now, as I am planning to go back to New York next weekend, and I saw many of these artists at the MoMA when I was there 2 months ago. Enjoy.

White on White, Kazimir Malevich, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by me.

Summarise the historical emergence of the ideas of the avant-garde thought in relation to both art and politics. Over the course of the 20th century the political and aesthetic trajectories of avant-garde thought and practice diverged and converged? In the context of this critical interplay of ideologies discuss the work of Kasimir Malevich and El Lissitzky. What ideological tendencies determine their work as avant-garde?

The avant-garde emerged at the beginning of 20th Century Europe as a way to lead society into a world of modernity and progress, as the vanguard in military terms. However, much to the contrary, the beginning of the 20th century saw a political influence, especially in the form of socialism in Russia, that stigmatised the avant-garde as self-indulgent, bourgeois and decadent, but most shockingly, as counter-progressive. The conflict began within the Russian art world at the beginning of the Bolshevik rule, and reached an end in 1924 with the death of Vladimir Illyich Lenin and his succession by Joseph Stalin who declared modern art to be counter-revolutionary. The great irony of Stalin’s views on avant-garde art was that most of Russia’s avant-garde artists were primary members of the Bolshevik party and had strongly supported the 1917 Revolution. Moreover, the roots of the avant-garde were the same as those that fuelled the revolution. However, despite this, avant-garde artists were forced underground, including Kasimir Malevich, El Lissitzky and others of the Suprematist movement, whose work was then only exhibited abroad, clandestinely or after the fall of the USSR in 1991.

Kasimir Malevich penned the Suprematist Manifesto, From Cubism to Suprematism In Art, To the New Realism of Painting, To Absolute Creation, in 1916,[1] a time of unrest in Imperial Russia. At the same time the country was at the brink of revolution spurred by long-term incompetency of the monarchy and the great losses and poor conditions of both soldier and civilian during the First World War acting as a catalyst for the 1917 revolution. Just a few months later, the provisional government would sign a peace accord with Kaiser Wilhelm and the axis powers to avoid even more atrocities in the First World War. Much like the Bolshevik and Menshevik Revolutionaries were propelled to action by the need for a new political, social and economic system, the avant-garde artists were driven by the need for a new art. In the opening clauses of the Suprematist Manifesto, Malevich mentions the need to liberate art from its enslavement by form[2] and denounces all past artists as copiers, legal investigators, police officials, story tellers, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists and engineers, but not art creators, and condemns what he calls their obsession with pornography and “sensual, lascivious rubbish”.[3]

Many of the Suprematist artists became members of the revolutionary Bolshevik party and produced highly political and pro-communist art during the years of the revolution and the civil war that followed between the Red Army and the pro-monarchy White Guard from 1917 till 1923. One such blatantly communist work is El Lissitzky’s 1919 Lithograph Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. In this Lithograph, Lissitzky uses the colours Black, White and Red for many different reasons. Artistically, these colours align him with the Suprematist movement. Malevich himself wrote that Suprematism comes in three stages, all corresponding with his own major works[4]. Firstly there is the Black stage, then the Coloured stage, symbolised by the use of the colour red with political and revolutionary connotations and finally the white stage – the ultimate in creative perfection. Politically, the red wedge shattering the white form, simple as it is, communicates a powerful message about Lissitzky's political alliance to the Bolsheviks and opposition to the White Guard. The use of the wedge was a Suprematist symbol of the new art, change and Modernity while the circle

The same political and social factors of that drove the revolution of 1917 was a main driving force behind the Russian avant-garde movements, one of which was the new industrialisation of Russia. As the Russian way of life was changing to accommodate an industrialised economy, the political and social systems were remaining as they had been for centuries. While the rest of the developed world experienced the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th Century, it only came to touch the Russian way of life about a century later, at the time of growing social and political unrest and the emergence of the avant-garde. The shift towards the avant-garde in art was also inspired by the Italian Futurist movement that was officially introduced to Russia in the Futurist Opera Victory over the Sun in 1913 which was performed in Saint Petersburg that December.[5] The influence of the Italian Futurist movement can be seen in the work of early Suprematist artists and in Malevich’s Suprematist manifesto. Malevich wrote of the new artists’ language which encapsulated that essential spirit of the contemporary world of speed and machinery[6] but despite a brief flirtation with the art of the Cubo-futurist movement he wrote “we see in futurist pictures images of smoke, clouds, sky, horses, automobiles and various other objects ... Shame on them!”[7] To the Suprematists, painting should exist for the sake of painting and free itself from all natural imitation while still retaining the “dynamism of movement in the plastic art of painting.”[8] This new avant-garde movement was the culmination of society, politics, industrialisation and aestheticism – art for the sake of art.

To Malevich, the creation of a Suprematist movement was also a way to throw off his own traditional and simple upbringing just as it was a product of the conditions faced by Russian artists in the immediate pre-revolutionary period. Until entering the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture and Construction in 1904[9] aged 26, Malevich had received minimal training in traditional art work and woodcuts of the Ukrainian peasants. [10]Despite his complete denunciation of tradition and the old order in his writings and in the Suprematist Manifesto, the Suprematists could never be completely free from what they came from, their new art ultimately carried a commentary on the older, increasingly more outdated form of art. The first official Suprematist exhibition was presented in the traditional way of religious iconography displayed in the Russian Orthodox Church and the homes of the devout. Many religious homes in Russia have icons hanging on the wall in the krasny ugol, the "red" or "beautiful" corner[11]. At 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting in December 1915, Malevich displayed his Black Square in the “red” corner[12]. This was definitely seen as a sacrilegious act at the time and is still referenced by art historians and writers as a bold statement against the traditional Orthodoxy, and the Suprematist goal to replace it with the non-imitational pure art.

Following from this sacrilegious display of his controversial Suprematist works, Malevich explained it by stating that Black Square will become the “icon of my time”[13] and should thus be awarded the place reserved for the Orthodox icon. However, Black Square was only part of the first stage of Suprematism. Malevich moved on to produce many works or basic geometric shapes in red and white, the subsequent stages of suprematism[14], culminating in Suprematist Composition: White on White, one of his life’s major works.

The concept of the Tabula Rasa[15], or blank state was another driving force of the Suprematist movement. The artistic blank state compared to the other Suprematist works which were complex compositions made up of varied colour, scale and an irregular geometric aesthetic. Along with the tri-colour stages of suprematism, one can understand the pre-revolutionary politic in the work of the Suprematists like Malevich and Lissitzky. The blank, flat canvases of Malevich’s earlier work crave a new beginning, a tabula rasa of culture in which there is no history or pre-conceived ideas but most importantly, there is no aesthetic based on the imitation of life, that art could exist independent of the world. In fact, Malevich had begun introducing the theory of aestheticism into artistic practice. However the more complex works of Malevich and the Suprematists conjure up a more alogical concept. Similarly to the Dadaist theory of chaotic art produced by artists in the confines of a chaotic world, the Suprematists were producing art in an environment of chaos and social and political turmoil and uncertainty. The idea of alogical painting and art was inspired by the Russian avant-garde poets Velemir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh as zaum[16], which they used in literary terms by rejecting any conventional meaning of words and sentences creating a trans-sensical and irrational work. This was applied by the Suprematists in the field of visual arts with a completely abstract and irrational visual narrative.

Lissitzky’s work tends to focus more on the political and social chaos from which his art emerged. Most of his compositions involve a more complex visual motif rather than recreating the flatness of Malevich’s most celebrated works. This can be credited to the fact that Lissitzky was younger than Malevich and his work can be seen more as a continuation of the original manifesto than that of a direct contemporary of Malevich. It could be argued that the original Russian avant-garde, artists such as Kandinsky and Malevich could only, in their careers, anticipate rather than fulfil the demands of the avant-garde artists’ politics[17] and the work of younger artists, like Lissitzky, can be seen as their extension. But also, no one artist, or even a group could fulfil what suprematism had set out to achieve, especially since the end of the avant-garde was approaching as soon as the revolution became a civil war in 1918. Despite their support of the revolution and the establishment of the communist state, their art was deemed unconstructive, unnecessary and contrary to the values of the system they fought to create.

For a revolution that claimed to advocate modernity and progress in economics, society and politics, the Soviet philosophy neglected the same aspects within art, leaving its revolutionary artists as pariahs, exiled abroad and underground. Malevich died of cancer in the recently renamed city of Leningrad in 1935. He died in poverty and obscurity within the new Russian art world with his Black Square above his deathbed, a motif that has become and icon the life and work of Malevich and the avant-garde experiment within Russian art. Lissitzky managed to establish himself in the new Russia and adapt to the socialist realist style, working, in his later years, on propaganda posters after his application for an extended Swiss visa was denied in 1924. Privately, he translated many of Malevich’s texts into German and sent them abroad for publication. The avant-garde may be defined mainly within the context of the Russian society in which Malevich and Lissitzky lived and worked, what they believed the role of the artist was within that society and, conversely, how that society viewed these artists. However, there is also another aspect poignant to the definition of the Russian avant-garde and that is within their tragic end. The society which they so tirelessly worked to build cast them away and it was not until the end of communism in 1991, almost a century later, that their revolutionary and conceptual work could be appreciated. The genius of their art, created for the revolution, was only discovered and understood within Russia long after the dream of that revolutionary freedom had died, replaced by dictatorship, repression and corruption.

[1] Malevich, K From Cubism to Suprematism in Art in Douglas, C, Swans of Other Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the Origins of Abstraction in Russia, UMI Research Press, Michigan, 1980 pg 105
[2] Ibid, pg 106
[3] Ibid
[4] Malevich, K, Suprematism: 34 Drawings, Editions de Massons, Lausanne, 1974, pg 42
[5] Gray, C, The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863-1922, Abrams Inc., New York, 1971, pg 185
[6] Lodder, C, Russian Painting of the Avant-Garde, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1993, pg 18
[7] Malevich, K From Cubism to Suprematism in Art in Douglas, C, Swans of Other Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the Origins of Abstraction in Russia, UMI Research Press, Michigan, 1980 pg 108
[8] Ibid
[9] Zhadova, L A, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910-1930, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London, 1982, pg 11
[10] Ibid
[11] Gray, C, The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863-1922, Abrams Inc., New York, 1971,pg 206
[12] Ibid
[13] Lodder, C, Russian Painting of the Avant-Garde, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1993, pg 18
[14] Malevich, K, Suprematism: 34 Drawings, Editions de Massons, Lausanne, 1974, pg 42
[15] Lodder, C, Russian Painting of the Avant-Garde, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1993, pg 17
[16] Lodder, C, Russian Painting of the Avant-Garde, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1993, pg 18
[17]Galerie Gmurzynska, The Isms of Russian Art 1907-1930, Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne, 1977, pg 5

Cracked Leather

Today, I found this great shot by Camilla Engman [camilla engman]

It is so beautiful - it has such a sense of comfort and it's so aesthetically interesting, with the cracks in the leather making such intricate organic lines and shapes contrasted with the regimented stitching. It's quite abstract, really, even though we can easily tell what it is.

I love this aspect of an image, and through my time at art school, I've learned to look at something familiar in a different way, to break down the quotidien into a collection of abstract forms and colours - a necessity for analysing an image. Whether it be a constructivist sculpture, a renaissance painting or Engman's lovely photo; art is never just an image but a conglomerate of shapes, forms, lines and colours that need to be recognised and appreciated in the abstract but also in the harmony they have in composition.

To appreciate a piece, one needs to analyse it, so that the individual components can be seen for their beauty, autonomously from the work as a whole, and from the viewers own preconceived ideas, biases and aesthetic preferences.

To like a piece, to feel inspired by it, to feel some sort of visual pleasure or to experience the sublimity of a work, the individual components need to be seen coexisting with each other harmoniously.

There's a big difference between these two experiences, although they are so dependent on each other and interlocking but yet need to be separated and then considered in context of each other.

...aye, there's the rub.

Architectural Love

On my daily blog-surfing, I discovered this amazing building on [http://lolitas.se]

I love the deep multi-level projected cornice, beautiful iron balconies, art nouveau detailing, the pilasters, the columns, projected side bay, somewhat asymmetrical composition, and the unusual windows, not to mention the colour and the all-round atmosphere of the photo. Also, I love the context: that this unusual building is right next to what looks like a modern, somewhat anonymous, tall building.

Unfortunately, I couldnt find the name of the architect, or even the location.

Dada Mamma!

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919

[image source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6b/Hoch-Cut_With_the_Kitchen_Knife.jpg]

sometimes random things are the most beautiful

Somehow today, while writing another paper, I started thinking about an Art History class back in my first year at university. We were learning about Dada (Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp and all his alter-egos, George Grosz and Francis Picabia etc.) and played some Dada games in class. One was 'Beautiful Corpses', when each person would draw a head, pass of the paper. The next would draw a torso and pass on the paper... etc.

Also, I discovered on my computer the dozens of Dadaist poems we wrote. They really are beautiful. We had a formula, like a literary version of 'Beautiful Corpses', someone would write a line, fold the paper (but leave the last word visible) and pass it along. Its amazing how they fit and conjour up some amazing imagery. I guess we were all art students, and would write in images.

Most people don't see how dada can be art. Which is a fair point, as dada is the 'non-art', working on the basis that nothing is art... a group of aesthetically-fixated pseudo-philestines. However, my thoughts are a bit different. Perhaps, springing out of the horror of WWI, their randomness and the non-sensical nature of their art was simply to reflect the non-sensical, random and unforgiving war-machine. Perhaps.

Either way, dada, in all its glory and anti-art-ism, is a wonderful enigma that I could spend days, weeks, months and years contemplating and writing about.... but I wont. Instead, I'll post Tristan Tzara's tips on writing poetry.

TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM

Tristan Tzara

"Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag The poem will resemble you. And there you are -- an infinitely original author of charming sensibility even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd."

[source: http://mama.indstate.edu/users/dada/howto.html]