Page 32 - Studio International - March April 1975

Tatlin appears to have misunderstood
Picasso's intentions (which were to
reinvent the language of representational
art), and to have viewed Picasso's work as
the springboard towards total abstraction.
Tatlin's influence may have been
decisive in encouraging Malevich to take
his own leap into the unknown. Relations
between the two were stormy, but each
remained one of the artists the other
most respected. Proof of the fact that
Malevich followed his colleague's work
with interest is perhaps to be found in
the fact that certain suprematist canvases
of 1916, which make use of thin, linear
elements projecting outwards from a
complex of larger, angular, interlocking
shapes, reflect the configurations of
Tatlin's corner reliefs of 1915, exhibited
across the hall from Malevich's first
suprematist paintings at 0.10.
The two final sources (to be discussed
here) for the imagery of the Black Square
are the simplest and the most direct. In
1913 Malevich had executed the sets and
costumes for 'Victory Over the Sun', a
futurist opera, which had a prologue by
Khlebnikov (the most radical writer of
the period), and a non-sense libretto by
Kruchenik to be sung to music by
Matiushim; and Malevich's association
with the literary avant garde was to be as immersed in the study of natural (Left) Malevich, The Guardsman, 1913,
important for his development as an appearances, and the stages by which 57 x 66.5 cm. Oil on canvas.
artist as were his contacts with they eliminated all references to external Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
contemporary painting. Some of the reality in their art can, in retrospect, be (Right) Malevich, Suprematist Painting
drop and back curtains were executed in easily charted. But once they had (Yellow Quadrilateral), 1917, 106 x 70.5 cm.
Malevich's cubo-futurist style, but achieved an abstract idiom (and this is Oil on canvas. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
others consisted of simple geometric particularly true of Mondrian, the artist
shapes; a sketch showing a single square, with whom Malevich appears in many Some suprematist drawings can be read
bisected diagonally (and inscribed ways to have more in common) they turned in terms of body imagery and several of
`square') is known, and Lissitsky talks, in their backs on nature, which Mondrian the canvases at 0.10 bore descriptive
connection with the opera, of a black saw as somehow in conflict with the titles: for example Painterly Realism of a
square," symbolizing perhaps the theme aspirations of art. Malevich's attitude Foot-Ball Player — Colour masses of the
of the opera which concerned the towards nature on the other hand was Fourth Dimension and so on." The
capturing of the sun and its enclosure in much more passive, much more costumes of the masked players in
a simple box. It is possible that seeing sympathetic. While he condemns all `Victory Over the Sun' had been
what he had conceived of as a decorative imitative art he never denies the validity decorated with bold abstract shapes and
emblem, hanging motionless under the of studying nature, although he insists motifs, and one of the revolutionary
theatrical arc lights, it appeared to him that the end products of art are of a features of the production had been the
all of a sudden strangely numinous, completely different order; one of his imaginative use of lighting: strong arc
filled with some breathless, expectant, aims, set forth in the initial manifesto is lights had been poured over the actors
hidden truth. Simultaneously Malevich `to teach our consciousness to see from the wings of the stage in such a way
appears to have been exploring literature everything in nature not as real forms and that at certain moments, for example,
on planar geometry and the fourth objects, but as material masses from only their heads and legs were visible, at
dimension (a concept which for some which forms must be made which have others their seemingly disembodied
years had been an obsession for the nothing in common with nature'. There trunks and arms. The players must have
avant garde), in which the square appears are in his writings, underlying his presented an appearance not unlike the
as a basic form, capable of endless exaltation of modern technology and configurations of certain coloured forms
modification in an infinite space." urban life, hints of an undercurrent of in some of the first suprematist canvases.
I have suggested certain visual and nostalgia for the green pastures and But already in the first suprematist
intellectual avenues which led up to the meadows of his youth. And both these paintings Malevich had found what was
creation of the Black Square: but I think factors, the suddeness of his entry into in some ways to be the true subject of art.
it is still fair to say that Malevich's abstraction and his belief that natural It was an art about flight, about man's
abstraction sprang, Athena-like, ready forms could provide artistic stimulus ascent into the ether and into the
formed from the brow of its creator; and perhaps help to account for the fact planetary world of the future." On the
this distinguishes Malevich's approach that his career as a revolutionary page showing 'the Environment that
very sharply from that of his two great painter was to be so breathlessly short. Stimulates the Suprematist' in 'The
contemporary abstractionists, Kandinsky In the case of Mondrian and Kandinsky Non Objective World', he illustrates
and Mondrian, who had inched and eased the truths they were seeking to reveal had photographs of airplanes in formation
their way into abstraction over a period become embodied in the abstract forms and aerial views, and these patterns of
of many years. Kandinsky in his famous and relationships in which they dealt. flight clearly formed the basis for many
`Concerning the Spiritual in Art', which Malevich had sensed that it was possible of the compositions of tipping, tilting
appeared simultaneously in Munich and to convey a sense of profundity through planes and shapes that appear almost at
Moscow in 1912, distinguishes two major simple, non-referential forms, but in the once in his Suprematism. The concept of
ways into abstraction, veiling and early years of Suprematism he seems to flight was one that was obsessive in
stripping bare or rendering more skeletal; have felt the need of an external vehicle Russia in the period before 1917, and it
and if the first method is perhaps more to provoke their configurations, and it became, in a sense, one of the leitmotifs
marked in his own approach, the second was probably to this that Tatlin was of the great revolution itself. To mention
describes very aptly that of Mondrian. referring when he attacked Suprematism only a few examples : in 1912 the futurist
Both painters had originally been as 'the sum of the errors of the past'. journal 'Ego' published Olimpov's

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