Page 34 - Studio International - March April 1975

had taken on bright colour, and that as with imitation or 'skilful reproduction', The most significant document for an
these wheeled and drifted to the edges which in the case of painting resulted understanding of his new position is
of the canvas they had paled and faded, often in an insufficient emphasis or perhaps 'God Is Not Cast Down,'
and that as they revolved through an recognition of the integrity of the flat written in 1920 and published in 1922.
infinite space they had regrouped or pictorial support." The third and final It soon becomes obvious that God, as
reassembled to form the purified white stage of Hegel's view of evolution is that viewed by Malevich, is an embodiment
square. As a small boy, when his father in which spirit detaches itself from of the super-artist, and he suggests that
was employed in a sugar factory, nature and achieves total freedom, thus man (the artist) can reach perfection
Malevich had been fascinated by the becoming 'pure universal form . . . in `through all he produces' so that he can
miracle that occurred when the dark, which the spiritual essence attains the achieve 'a state of rest' and act 'no longer
raw molasses was fed into the machines to consciousness and feeling of itself'.26 It as a man but as God'. Simultaneously,
emerge as white, crystalline substances. was this move towards an advanced Malevich announced the death of easel
And now, in 1919, he was able to say: inward spirituality that Malevich felt painting. 'There can be no question of
`The blue colour of the sky has been had been initiated by 'the Realists, painting in Suprematism', he declared,
defeated by the Suprematist system, has Impressionists, Cubism, Futurism and `painting was done for long ago'."
been broken through and entered white Suprematism', and brought to Craftsmanship he had already condemned
as the real concept of infinity'." And a conclusion, presumably, by himself. out of hand: 'the poet is not a craftsman',
year later: 'What is the canvas ? What do Of all the visual arts Hegel had been he writes, 'craftsmanship is nonsense'.29
we see represented on it ? . . . a window prepared to admit only painting in the A year earlier, in 1919, in 'New Systems
through which we discover life . . . blue achievements of the third phase of the of Art' he had given a clue as to how he
does not give a true impression of the evolution of world spirit, precisely had come to see his Suprematism when
infinite. The rays of vision are caught in a because painting is in a sense the most he had written : 'the important thing in
cupola and cannot penetrate the infinite. abstract of the visual arts, conveying as it art is signs flowing from the creative
The Suprematist infinite white allows does a sensation of illusion on a flat brain'. One of the peculiarities of
the beam to pass on without encountering surface. In his initial manifesto Malevich Malevich's writings is the recurrence in
any limit'." had in turn implied that it was the his discussion of creativity of the image of
Throughout his later texts Malevich flatness of much recent art and of his the human skull. And I believe that
makes it obvious that Suprematism was own Suprematism in particular that Malevich's last suprematist paintings at
an attempt to identify with a world that is marked an advance on what had gone least are no longer paintings in the
apprehended through the ideal rather than before. But the fact that he had traditional sense at all. Rather they are
the actual — an attempt to create 'a subsequently sought to introduce a signs, diagrams, messages, pictorial
world within which man experiences sense of infinite recession or a planets, emanating from the artist's
totality with nature'. He appears to have metaphorical sense of movement into skull — in itself, white spherical,
been deeply affected by German unlimited space in the 'beam' paintings translucent — and directed out through
transcendentalism ; 23 and indeed it would suggests that in the last works of his infinite space towards some ultimate,
be strange if he had not, for this had Suprematism, his attitude towards the unknowable Godhead, seat of perfection,
become very much part of the background nature of painting had changed." purity and ultimate repose. Lissitsky, an
of Russian intellectual life in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
He shared with these German thinkers a
hatred of materialism, and like so many
German nineteenth-century philosophers
and mystics he believed that man had
somehow got out of step with nature,
and in the process had depleted the
resources of his spiritual life. Both man
and nature, he felt, aspired to the perfect
and their ways were parallel. However,
whereas nature is constantly changing,
evolving and renewing itself, the
perfection sought by man in an intensified
spiritual life would be represented or
would result in a world, a state of being
not so much immobile, as perfectly at
rest.
It seems fairly clear that Malevich
was deeply steeped in Hegel, whose
thought, again, was very much in the
intellectual air that Malevich was
breathing. And in Hegelian manner
Malevich at least implicitly constructs a
tripartite system to investigate the
history of art." In Hegel's exposition of
the evolution of world spirit he divides
history into three periods. The first is a
period of total unselfconsciousness in
which man intuitively begins to identify
with nature. Malevich equates this
period with primitive art, which he sees
(somewhat surprisingly) as aspiring to
imitate nature, or to copy her slavishly.
Hegel's second phase shows the slow
turn towards a state of consciousness in
which man seeks to separate himself from
nature, although the separation remains
only partial or imperfect. Malevich would
connect this period with classical and
renaissance art, which he seems to have
felt lacked a certain dimension of pictorial
truth because of an excessive concern

104