Page 29 - Studio International - December 1973

constructive power (cf. illustration 104, in 1921 (as one can see in the installation explosion of Russian Futurism and the extreme
`Catalogue de l'oeuvre') with the organizational photographs, p. 128, 'Catalogue de l'Oeuvre'; it tension which preceded Suprematism.
requirement of dynamic Suprematism (as in the is hanging on the door, left). This work Malevich and Morgunov paraded in the streets
painted work of Exter, Popova and Udalzova). demonstrates Puni's return to the post-cubist of Moscow with wooden spoons in their
When he fled to Finland and Germany in syntax which one notices already in the Vitebsk buttonholes, Larionov exhibited a real top-hat
1919-1920, Puni brought with him only a few drawings and is pronounced in the Berlin work; cut in cross section, and Kliun his Portable
small drawings, leaving his many canvases and also, in Puni's copy of Daniel Henry's Electric Ventilator. To this Puni added his
sculptures in a studio in Petrograd. At his (Kahnweiler) Der Weg zum Kubismus (Munich relief sculpture with a saw (1915) (`Catalogue de
exhibition at Herwarth Walden's Der Sturm 1920). In this book Puni made pencil drawings l'Oeuvre', p. 70, no 104), a White Ball
Gallery (February 1921) he redrew a great after the Picasso illustrations, and used them to (`Catalogue de l'Oeuvre' p. 73; Musée d'Art
number of sculptures on paper (Puni indicated illustrate his text, Contemporary Painting Moderne, Paris), and a plate which was glued
them as `variations'). As one can see in the (Berlin 1923), especially pp 26, 27. They reveal directly on to a panel (`Catalogue de l'Oeuvre',
photographs of the gallery installation and from his return to Suprematism (which he himself no 114, p. 199, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart). The
the catalogue, Puni showed no suprematist criticized in 1923) while using cubist technique, inscription 'Baths' (Bani) is equally
sculpture other than by a drawing. However, and this led him to his nascent Neue provocative in that it contrasts with the norms
the sculptures were not destroyed as Puni had Sachlichkeit. of what a painting is supposed to represent in
feared, for when Madame Xana Puni was in the The bottle, the lace and the cap and pipe of a the eyes of a 'cultivated' public, used to seeing
USSR during the fifties she discovered them at person are inscribed in a rotative movement of an image. The futurist works of this type,
friends of Puni's brother. She dismantled them abstract forms which organize the centre of the challenging the work of art to violently destroy
and brought some to France while the others composition.The freshness of the yellow and its arbitrary illustration of the image, confirms
were sent. Not long before the artist's death the blue remind one of the suprematist period of the statement of Viktor Schklovsky : 'Works of
reassembling of the parts began, thanks to 1916, just as the presence of the lace on the right art are not windows opening on to another
preparatory drawings. Some works had to be is reminiscent of work from 1914 (Malevich, world, they are objects'. This refers to the
repaired and certain elements replaced, such as Woman at aPoster Column, no 44 in Andersen, plastic object which at this moment in the
bits of glass and cardboard. Unable to leave them `Malevich'). In Puni's gouache one can see a history of the visual arts affirmed with a
in their miserable 'dadaist' state, Madame Puni, sort of self-portrait (the pipe and cap) catching particular bravura an independence from the
the only witness to their original version (in something of the suprematist experience before extra-pictorial subject, literarity' being finally
the Tatlin ideal of the wellmade object), did not the descriptions and commentaries in banished by Malevich and Tatlin.
hesitate to retouch certain elements and to Contemporary Painting. Puni organized 'The Last Futurist Exhibition,
completely restore others. The first sculptures Exhibited in 1915 at '0.10' Baths 1915 0.10' where Window Washing was first
were seen in public exhibitions at the end of the provokes the sense of the image, a stage which exhibited. It perfectly translates the spirit of
fifties (notably the Puni retrospective in 1959 at can justly be compared to the iconoclasm of the voluntary and anxious confusion of 1915. The
the time of the Paris Biennale). Fountain by Marcel Duchamp. A great number accidental and 'a-logical' arrangement of
The work illustrated below is also absent of extremist gestures (which can now be called objects or their fragments reveals a transition
from the 'Catalogue de l'Oeuvre', yet it was dadaist) took place during the winter of 1915, to the stage of irrational manipulation of objects.
exhibited in the Der Sturm Gallery Puni show describing the height of excitation behind the This spirit is far from the cubist dependence on
the exact placement of the object as a pretext
Puni Cubist Composition 1919 for formal experiments. Here it is the sense of
Gouache on paper laid in canvas the objects within the work which is attacked and
41 3/8 x 29 1/8 in. not their appearance. This process is illustrated
Fischer Fine Art, London
with much daring by the transrational drawings
and paintings of Malevich in 1914 (An
Englishman in Moscow). Puni's colour was also
influenced by Malevich. On a purely formal
level, Window Washing comes close to
Rozanova's cubo-futurist compositions (cf. her
work with sewing objects, Tret'jakov Gallery,
Moscow). The inscription scattered across the
painting is 'Eat Lactobacillus' which,
juxtaposed to the title, creates a contrast of
sense as well as formal logic. q

Bibliography
Ivan Puni, Sovremennaja Zivopis (Contemporary
Painting), Berlin 1923.
H. Berninger, J. A. Cartier, Pougny, Catalogue de
l'Oeuvre: Les Années de l'Avant-garde, Russie-Berlin
1910-1923, Tubingen 1972. Cited as Benninger and
Cartier or Catalogue de l'Oeuvre.
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