Celebrating Suprematism

Russian History and Culture

Editors-in-Chief

Jeffrey P. Brooks (The Johns Hopkins University)

Christina Lodder (University of Kent)

Volume 22

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/rhc

 Celebrating Suprematism
New Approaches to the Art of Kazimir Malevich

Edited by

Christina Lodder
Cover illustration: Installation photograph of Kazimir Malevich’s display of Suprematist Paintings at The
Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero-Ten), in Petrograd, 19 December 1915 – 19 January 1916.
Photograph private collection.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lodder, Christina, 1948- editor.

Title: Celebrating Suprematism : new approaches to the art of Kazimir Malevich / edited by Christina
Lodder.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2019] | Series: Russian history and culture, ISSN 1877-7791 ; Volume 22 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018037205 (print) | LCCN 2018046303 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004384989 (E-book) | ISBN
9789004384873 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich, 1878-1935–Criticism and interpretation. | Suprematism in
art. | UNOVIS (Group)
Classification: LCC N6999.M34 (ebook) | LCC N6999.M34 C45 2019 (print) | DDC 700.92–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018037205

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.

ISSN 1877-7791
ISBN 978-90-04-38487-3 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-38498-9 (e-book)

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii
List of Illustrations ix
Notes on Contributors xvii

Introduction 1
Christina Lodder

1 New Information Concerning The Black Square 11

Irina Vakar

2 Defining Suprematism: The Year of Discovery 29

Charlotte Douglas

3 Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space One

Hundred Years Later 44
Linda Dalrymple Henderson

4 The Path of Empirical Criticism in Russia or ‘The Milky Way of

Inventors’ 81
Alexander Bouras

5 Kazimir Malevich, Unovis, and the Poetics of Materiality 105

Maria Kokkori, Alexander Bouras and Irina Karasik

6 Branches of Unovis in Smolensk and Orenburg 126

Alexander Lisov

7 Suprematism and/or Supremacy of Architecture 144

Samuel Johnson

8 Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism as an Embodiment of the

Infinite 161
Regina Khidekel

9 ‘…In our time, when it became We …’: A Previously Unknown Essay by

Kazimir Malevich 187
Tatiana Goriacheva
vi Contents

10 ‘A thing of quality defies being produced in quantity’: Suprematist

Porcelain and Its Afterlife in Leningrad Design 198
Yulia Karpova

11 Suprematist Textiles 221

Julia Tulovsky

12 Suprematism: A Shortcut into the Future: The Reception of Malevich

by Polish and Hungarian Artists during the Inter-War Period 240
Éva Forgács

13 Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? Suprematism and

Constructivism 259
Christina Lodder

Index 289
Acknowledgements

The contents of this volume are based on papers that were originally delivered
at the conference – ‘Celebrating 100 Years of Suprematism’ – which was held
at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University New York, in December 2015,
under the auspices of the Malevich Society, the Harriman Institute, the Lazar
Khidekel Society, the Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and
Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA), and the organisation Russian Art and
Culture. A great debt of gratitude is owed to the Harriman Institute for host-
ing the conference, and especially to Professor Alan Timberlake and his team
for their exceptional generosity, organisational skill and kindness. In addition,
as President of the Malevich Society, the editor would like to thank every-
one for their co-operation, including Regina and Mark Khidekel of the Lazar
Khidekel Society, Natasha Kurchanova of SHERA, and members of the Board of
the Malevich Society, especially Professor Charlotte Douglas, Dr Maria Kokkori
and Dr Julia Tulovsky. A special debt of gratitude is owed to the Director of the
State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Dr Zelfira Tregulnova for facilitating and
supporting this whole venture in so many ways.
The editor is extremely grateful to all those contributors who agreed to
publish their papers in this collection, for their patience in dealing with end-
less queries and their diligence in meeting deadlines. In addition, the editor
would like to thank Professor Jeffrey Brooks for his invaluable suggestions
and to the various private individuals and institutions that have given per-
mission for works and images to be reproduced, especially The State Tretyakov
Gallery, Moscow; The State Literary Museum, Moscow; The Museum Tsarit-
syno, Moscow; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; The State Mu-
seum of Theatre and Music, St. Petersburg; The State Russian Museum, St.
Petersburg; The State Mustafaev Azerbaijan Museum of Art, Baku; The State
Radishchev Museum, Saratov; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Stedelijk Mu-
seum, Amsterdam; The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; The Houghton
Library, Harvard University, Boston; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,
New York, and The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; The Museum of
Modern Art, New York; Dr Maria Tsantsangolou and The State Museum of
Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki; The Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Collec-
tion, New York; and Dr Alexander Lavrentiev and The Rodchenko-Stepanova
Archive, Moscow.
All the scholars involved in this publication would also like to take this
opportunity to express their particular gratitude to the staff of the follow-
ing archives, libraries, and galleries who gave them assistance and advice in
viii Acknowledgements

the course of their research: The State Russian Museum and The Manuscript
Department of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; The Russian State
Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow; The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow;
The Rodchenko-Stepanova Archive, Moscow; The State Archive of Vitebsk
Province, Vitebsk; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and The Lazar
Khidekel Archive, New York.
Finally, the editor would like to thank all the staff at Brill, especially Ivo
Romein and Saskia van der Knaap for their help and support in realising this
publication, as well as family and friends for being there when things got
tough. A big thank you to you all!
List of Illustrations

Irina Vakar

1.1 Kazimir Malevich, The Black Square, 1915, oil on canvas, 79.5 × 79.5 cm., State
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. 12
1.2 Kazimir Malevich, The Black Square, 1915, pencil on paper, 9 × 8.2 cm., State
Literary Museum, Moscow. 15
1.3 Kazimir Malevich, Design of a Backdrop for the First Act of the Opera ‘Victory
over the Sun’, 1915, pencil on paper, 10 × 9.5 cm., State Literary Museum,
Moscow. 16
1.4 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition, 1915, oil on canvas, 101.5 × 62 cm.,
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 17
1.5 Consolidated Radiograph image of the paintings beneath The Black Square. The
image represents the consolidation of 12 x-rays. Photograph courtesy of The
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. 19
1.6 Radiograph showing a reconstruction of the first painting, a Cubo-Futurist
Composition. Photograph courtesy of The State Tretyakov Gallery,
Moscow. 20
1.7 Kazimir Malevich, The Guardsman, 1913, oil on canvas, 57 × 66.5 cm., Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam. 21
1.8 Radiograph of Kazimir Malevich, The Black Square, 1915, revealing a
Proto-Suprematist Composition underneath. Photograph courtesy of The State
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. 22
1.9 Kazimir Malevich, The Black Square, 1915, oil on canvas, 79.5 × 79.5 cm., State
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Detail. 23
1.10 Kazimir Malevich, Design of a Backcloth for the First Scene of the Second Act of
the Opera ‘Victory over the Sun’, 1913, pencil on paper, 21 × 27 cm., State Museum
of Theatre and Music, St. Petersburg. 25
1.11 Kazimir Malevich, Untitled Alogist Composition, early 1915, pencil on paper,
private collection. 26

Linda Dalrymple Henderson

3.1 Installation photograph of Kazimir Malevich’s display of Suprematist Paintings

at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero-Ten), in Petrograd, 19
December 1915 – 19 January 1916, Petrograd. Photograph private collection. 45
3.2 Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913, oil on canvas, 193.2 ×
201 cm., The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, The Museum of Modern Art,
x List of Illustrations

New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA /
Art Resource, New York. 59
3.3 Kazimir Malevich, Painterly Realism of a Football Player: Colour Masses in the
Fourth Dimension, 1915, oil on canvas, 70.2 × 44.1 cm., The Art Institute of
Chicago. Photograph: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, New
York. 61
3.4 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition, 1915, oil on canvas, 66.5 × 57 cm.,
Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Photograph Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne. 69
3.5 Kazimir Malevich, Stage Design for ‘Victory over the Sun’, 1915 version, graphite
on paper. Reproduced from Benedikt Livshits, Polutorglazy strelets (Leningrad,
1933). 76
3.6 Kazimir Malevich, Composition 14t (Suprematism: Sensation of Electric[ity]),
1915, graphite on paper, 15.3 × 10 cm., (paper), 8.8 × 4.9 cm., (image), Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam. 78
3.7 Kazimir Malevich, Yellow Plane in Dissolution, 1917-18, oil on canvas, 10 6 ×
70.5 cm., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Photograph Art Resource, New
York. 79

Alexander Bouras

4.1 Kazimir Malevich, The Black Quadrilateral, c. 1915, oil on canvas, 17 × 24 cm.,
Collection George Costakis, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki.
© The State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. 103

Maria Kokkori, Alexander Bouras and Irina Karasik

5.1 Unovis members, early 1920s. From left to right: Ivan Chervinka, Lazar Khidekel,
Ilia Chashnik, and Lev Iudin. Photograph courtesy of the Lazar Khidekel Family
Archive & Collection. 107
5.2 Lev Iudin’s table showing the five groups of materials, their signs and associated
movements. © Manuscript Department of the State Russian Museum, St.
Petersburg. 111
5.3a Karl Ioganson, Electrical Circuit (Representation) [Electricheskaia tsep’
(izobrazhenie)], 1922, paper collage and graphite on paper, 45.4 × 33.6 cm.,
Collection George Costakis, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki.
© The State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. 120
5.3b Karl Ioganson, Electrical Circuit (Representation) [Electricheskaia tsep’
/izobrazhenie/], 1922, verso, paper collage and graphite on paper, 45.4 ×
33.6 cm., Collection George Costakis, State Museum of Contemporary Art,
Thessaloniki. © The State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. 121
List of Illustrations xi

Alexander Lisov

6.1 Władysław Strzemiński (Vladislav Strzheminskii), Photograph taken c. 1932,

signed 30 May 1932, private archive. 129
6.2 Katarzyna Kobro (Ekaterina Kobro), Photograph taken c. 1918, private
archive. 130
6.3 Boris Rybchenkov, Photograph taken c. 1918, private archive. 131
6.4 The building of the Proletkult Art Studio in Smolensk. Photograph taken in
2015, private archive. 132
6.5 Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, and others, probably in Orenburg. Photograph
taken in summer 1920, private archive. 134
6.6 Władysław Strzemiński, What Have You Done for the Front? Give Everything to
Those Who Are Dying Defending You, 1920. Political poster produced for the
Smolensk Russian Telegraph Agency (Rosta), during the Polish-Soviet War,
private collection. 136
6.7 Boris Rybchenkov, Forward to Warsaw, 1920. Poster produced for the Smolensk
Russian Telegraph Agency (Rosta), during the Polish-Soviet War, private
collection. 137
6.8 Poster announcing Kazimir Malevich’s Lecture ‘On the Subject of the State,
Society, Criticism and the New Artist Innovator’, Orenburg, 1920, private
collection. 139
6.9 Installation photograph of works from the Orenburg Unovis, at the Unovis
Exhibition at the Moscow Vkhutemas in 1921, private collection. 142
6.10 Installation photograph of works by El Lissitzky, Gustav Klutsis, and Ivan
Kudriashev (of the Orenburg branch) on display at the Unovis exhibition at the
Moscow Vkhutemas in 1921, private collection. 142

Samuel Johnson

7.1 El Lissitzky, Lenin Tribune, 1924, gouache, India ink and photomontage on
cardboard, 63.8 × 48 cm., State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photograph
courtesy of The State Tretyakov Gallery. 147
7.2 Ilia Chashnik, Project for a Tribune for a Smolensk Square, 1920, gouache,
graphite and India ink on paper, 48.2 × 37.8 cm., State Tretyakov Gallery,
Moscow. Photograph courtesy of The State Tretyakov Gallery. 148
7.3 El Lissitzky, Wolkenbügel on Niktiskii Square, c. 1925, gelatin silver print, Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles. Photograph courtesy of The Getty Research
Institute. 149
xii List of Illustrations

7.4 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Structure Among American Skyscrapers, from

Praesens No. 1 (1926). Photograph courtesy of The Getty Research Institute, Los
Angeles. 151
7.5 Kazimir Malevich, Untitled, from Puti tvorchestva [The Paths of Creativity],
No. 5, 1919. Photograph courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University. 153
7.6 El Lissitzky, Town, 1919-20, oil and sand on plywood, 47 × 63.5 cm., State
Mustafaev Azerbaijan Museum of Art, Baku. 155
7.7 Kazimir Malevich, Four Squares, 1915, oil on canvas, 49 × 49 cm., State
Radishchev Museum, Saratov. Photograph courtesy of The State Radishchev
Museum. 156
7.8 Lazar Khidekel, Roads in the Lowlands (Canals): Ray of Light = 45°, pencil on
paper, 17 × 13 cm., private collection. Photograph courtesy of the Lazar
Khidekel Family Archive & Collection. 157

Regina Khidekel

8.1 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism: 34 Drawings (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920). Signed by

Khidekel: ‘Lazar Khidekel 1920 Vitebsk’, Lazar Khidekel Family Archive &
Collection. 163
8.2 Lazar Khidekel, Drawing from the journal AERO: Articles and Projects, No. 1
(1920), India ink on paper, 17.5 × 14.5 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family Archive &
Collection. 168
8.3 Lazar Khidekel, Linear Suprematism, 1920, India ink on paper, 22 × 12.1 cm.,
Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Collection. 169
8.4 Lazar Khidekel, Volumetric Exploration of the Cross: Suprematist Axonometric
Drawing, [Relief] 1921, pencil on paper, 20.5 × 12.6 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family
Archive & Collection. 172
8.5 Lazar Khidekel. Suprematist Composition in the Cosmos, 1922, India ink,
watercolour and pencil on paper, 16 × 12.2 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family Archive
& Collection. 174
8.6 Lazar Khidekel, Suprematist Space, 1921, India ink and silver paint on paper,
15.4 × 20 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Collection. 175
8.7 Lazar Khidekel. Architecton, 1924, pencil on paper, 21 × 13 cm., Lazar Khidekel
Family Archive & Collection. 176
8.8 Lazar Khidekel. Architecton, 1927, India ink, gouache and pencil on paper,
23.8 × 18 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Collection. 177
8.9 Lazar Khidekel, Ashtray, 1922, Photograph of the model, Lazar Khidekel Family
Archive & Collection. 178
List of Illustrations xiii

8.10 Lazar Khidekel. Design for Horizontal Architecton – Aero-Club Axonometry 1923,
pencil on paper, 8.8 × 12.6 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family Archive &
Collection. 179
8.11 Lazar Khidekel, ‘On Painterly Pure Action in Nature’, c. 1920-1921, manuscript,
India ink and watercolour on paper 23.5 × 18.5 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family
Archive & Collection. 180
8.12 Lazar Khidekel, Design for The Workers’ Club, 1926, showing two facades, Lazar
Khidekel Family Archive & Collection. 182
8.13 A page from Malevich’s article, showing reproductions, which are labelled
‘Suprematistische Architektur von K. Malewitsch, Leningrad’, Wasmuths
Monatshefte fur Baukunst (Berlin), No. 10 (1927), p. 413. 183
8.14 Lazar Khidekel. Sketch for a Futuristic City, 1925, gouache, watercolour and
pencil on paper, 24.9 × 29.2 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family Archive &
Collection. 186

Yulia Karpova

10.1 Kazimir Malevich (pattern), A. N. Kudriavtsev (painting), plate ‘Dynamic

Composition’, 1923, porcelain, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photograph by Vladimir
Terebenin. 204
10.2 Ilia Chashnik (pattern), plate from dinner service ‘Black Ribbon’, 1923,
porcelain, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The
State Hermitage Museum. Photograph by Vladimir Terebenin. 206
10.3 Nikolai Suetin (pattern), cup and saucer ‘Black and White’, 1923, porcelain, The
State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage
Museum. Photograph by Vladimir Terebenin. 207
10.4 Kazimir Malevich, Teapot, 1923, porcelain, The State Hermitage Museum, St.
Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photograph by
Vladimir Terebenin. 208
10.5 Nikolai Suetin, ‘Architecton’ vase, 1932-33, porcelain, The State Hermitage
Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum.
Photograph by Vladimir Terebenin. 211
10.6 Nikolai Suetin (form and pattern), Ink-Stand, 1930, porcelain, The State
Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage
Museum. Photograph by Vladimir Terebenin. 212
10.7 Nikolai Suetin (painting), service ‘Agricultural Town’, 1931, porcelain, on the
form ‘Narkompros’ by Sergei Chekhonin, 1923, The State Hermitage Museum, St.
Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photograph by
Vladimir Terebenin. 213
xiv List of Illustrations

10.8 Anna Leporskaia (form), Nina Slavina (pattern), service ‘Chess’, 1963, porcelain,
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State
Hermitage Museum. Photograph by Vladimir Terebenin. 216
10.9 Inna Olevskaia (form and pattern), service ‘Blank Notebook’, 2003-4, porcelain,
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State
Hermitage Museum. Photograph by Vladimir Terebenin. 219
10.10 Mark Khidekel, Architectural Dishes, 1994, porcelain, private collection. © Mark
Khidekel. 220

Julia Tulovsky

11.1 Photograph of the exhibition Modern Decorative Art: Embroidery and Carpets
from Artists’ Designs at the Lemercier Gallery, Moscow, 1915. Reproduced in
Iskry, (Moscow), No. 45 (15 November 1915), p. 8. 223
11.2 Kazimir Malevich, Untitled (Compact Magnetic Cluster), 1916, oil on canvas,
53 × 53 cm., Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, Venice. 224
11.3 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism No. 18, 1915, oil on canvas, 53.3 × 53.3 cm.,
private collection. 225
11.4 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition, 1919-1920, oil on canvas, 80.3 ×
80.3 cm., private collection. 226
11.5 Nadezhda Udaltsova, Suprematist Composition, 1916, gouache on paper, 64 ×
44.5 cm., Collection George Costakis, State Museum of Contemporary Art,
Thessaloniki. © The State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. 228
11.6 Liubov Popova, Sketch for Embroidery for the Verbovka Workshop, 1917, collage on
paper, 12.2 × 18.8 cm., Museum Tsaritsyno, Moscow. 230
11.7 Liubov Popova, Sketch for Embroidery for the Verbovka Workshop, 1917, gouache
and lacquer on paper, 31 × 21.2 cm., private collection. 231
11.8 Oliver Sayler, Photograph of the Second Verbovka Exhibition, 1917, private
collection, New York. 232
11.9 Nadezhda Udaltsova, Suprematist Embroidery. An exhibit from the Second
Verbovka Exhibition, 1917. Photograph by Oliver Sayler, private collection, New
York. 233
11.10 Kazimir Malevich, Textile Design No. 10, 1919, watercolour and pencil on paper,
35.8 × 27.1 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. 234
11.11 Kazimir Malevich, Textile Design No. 15, 1919, watercolour and pencil on paper,
35.6 × 27 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. 235
11.12 Kazimir Malevich, First Suprematist Fabric, 1919, printed fabric glued on paper,
ink and gouache, 20 × 9.6 cm., (fabric); 33.8 × 24 см., (paper), State Russian
Museum, St. Petersburg. 236
List of Illustrations xv

11.13 Nikolai Suetin, Suprematist Forms. Textile Design, 1921, ink on paper, 23.4 ×
32.4 см., private collection. 237
11.14 Nikolai Suetin, Suprematist Forms. Textile Design, 1921-1922, gouache and
watercolour on paper, 27 × 40 cm., private collection. 237
11.15 Ilia Chashnik, Textile Design, 1920s, gouache and watercolour on paper, 14.8 ×
14 cm., private collection. 238
11.16 Ilia Chashnik, Textile Design, 1925-1927, watercolour on paper, 32.4 × 47.1 cm.,
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. 239

Éva Forgács

12.1 Kazimir Malevich with members of the Polish art world, at the Banquet held in
his honour, during his exhibition at the Polonia Hotel, Warsaw, 25 March 1927.
Photographer unknown. 248
12.2 Lajos Vajda, Handwritten copy of Malevich’s article from the Europa Almanach,
c. 1928, private collection, Budapest. 252
12.3 Lajos Vajda, Abstract Composition, 1928, charcoal on paper, 19 × 19 cm., private
collection. 253
12.4 Lajos Vajda, Film, 1928, charcoal and watercolour on paper, 48.69 × 56.8 cm.,
private collection. 254

Christina Lodder

13.1 Installation photograph of Kazimir Malevich’s display of Suprematist Paintings

at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero-Ten), in Petrograd, 19
December 1915 – 19 January 1916. Photograph private collection. 261
13.2 Vladimir Tatlin, Corner Counter-Relief, 1915, paint, wire, wood and various
metals, Lost. Presumed destroyed. 263
13.3 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, 1915, oil on canvas,
57.3 × 47.3 cm., The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Photo SCALA,
Florence. 265
13.4 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, 1915, oil on canvas,
57.3 × 47.3 cm., The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Photo SCALA,
Florence. Details. 266
13.5 Vladimir Tatlin, Model for a Monument to the Third International, 1920, wood,
metal and wire. Lost, presumed destroyed. Drawing from Nikolai Punin,
Pamiatnik III internatsionala (Petrograd: Izdanie Otdela Izobrazitel’nykh
Iskusstv, N. K. P., 1920). 270
xvi List of Illustrations

13.6 Ilia Chashnik, Project for a Tribune for a Smolensk Square, 1920, as reproduced in
Unovis. Listok Vitebskogo Tvorkoma, No. 1 (20 November 1920). Photograph
courtesy of the Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Collection. 271
13.7 Installation photograph of the Constructivist exhibits at the Obmokhu
Exhibition, Moscow, May 1921. Photograph courtesy of the
Rodchenko-Stepanova Archive, Moscow. 276
13.8 Aleksandr Rodchenko, Spatial Constructon No. 12, Oval within an Oval or Ellipse,
1920-1921, plywood, aluminium paint and wire, 61 × 83.7 × 47 cm., Museum of
Modern Art, New York. Photograph courtesy of the Rodchenko-Stepanova
Archive, Moscow. 278
13.9 Aleksandr Rodchenko, The Workers’ Club, Paris, 1925. Photograph courtesy of
the Rodchenko-Stepanova Archive, Moscow. 282
13.10 Gustav Klutsis, Axonometric Painting, 1920, oil and mixed media on canvas,
96 × 57 cm., State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. 284
13.11 Gustav Klutsis, Under the Banner of Lenin for Socialist Construction, 1929,
lithograph on paper, 99.9 × 72.3 cm., private collection. 285
Notes on Contributors

Alexander Bouras
specialises in Russian twentieth-century art and culture. He recently com-
pleted his PhD thesis at the Moscow Architectural Institute, where his re-
search focused on the significances of materiality in Suprematism and Con-
structivism, with reference to late nineteenth and early twentieth-century
philosophy of technology and science. During 2009-2010 he was a research
fellow of the Malevich Society in New York. He has published numerous arti-
cles on the art of the Russian Avant-Garde in Russia and abroad.

Charlotte Douglas
is Emeritus Professor at New York University, and Founding President of The
Malevich Society (New York). She is the author, editor, and co-editor of nu-
merous publications about Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde. A list
of publications and several of her articles are available on the website:
nyu.academia.edu/CharlotteDouglas. Her e-mail address is [email protected].
Douglas’s pioneering book Swans of Other Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the
Origins of Abstraction in Russia, originally published in 1980, is now available
as a Kindle electronic book.

Éva Forgács
is an art historian, art critic and curator. She was professor at the László
Moholy-Nagy University in her native Budapest and worked as curator at the
Hungarian Museum of Decorative Arts. She has a PhD in Art History from the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences and has published several essays and mono-
graphs on various aspects of Modernism in edited volumes, textbooks, and
journals. Her main field of research and study has been the history of the
Bauhaus and the Russian and Central European Avant-Gardes. She relocated
to Los Angeles in 1993 and has been teaching at ArtCenter College of Design in
Pasadena, California, since 1994. Forgacs was co-curator (with Nancy Perloff)
of Monuments of the Future: Designs by El Lisssitzky (Getty Research Institute,
1998), and was consultant for LACMA’s Central European Avant-Gardes exhi-
bition in 2002. 2016-2018 she was President of SHERA (Society of Historians
of Russian and East European Art and Architecture), served as book-review
editor of Centropa, is Advisory Board member of EAM (European Network of
Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies), and is member-elect of the Interna-
tional Academic Committee of the Bauhaus Institute, Chinese Academy of
Art. Forgács was awarded the EURIAS scholarship, and was a research fellow
xviii Notes on Contributors

at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria in 2012-2013. She has

contributed to numerous international conferences on the Bauhaus and Cen-
tral European art and architecture. Her books include The Bauhaus Idea and
Bauhaus Politics (1991, 1995 – also two Greek editions, and a Turkish trans-
lation), Hungarian Art: Confrontation and Revival in the Modern Movement
(2016), and Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes
(co-edited with T. O. Benson, 2002).

Tatiana Goriacheva
is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Twentieth-Century Graphic
Arts at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, where she has worked since
1977. She is a specialist on the Russian Avant-Garde, focusing especially on
Malevich and his circle, including El Lissitzky. Her research interests include
Russian Futurism, Constructivism and Suprematism. She has published widely
on issues concerning the Russian Avant-Garde’s relationship to the broader
cultural context, its links with European creative developments, connections
between art and literature, and art’s association with philosophical and so-
cial ideas. She has also curated numerous exhibitions at the Tretyakov, includ-
ing most recently El Lissitzky (2017). Among her extensive scholarly publica-
tions are Almanac Unovis No 1. Facsimile Edition (2003); Nikolai Suetin (2010);
‘Nas budet troe…’ Kazimir Malevich. Ilya Chashnik. Nikolai Suetin. Paintings and
Drawings from the Collection of the Seuphor Foundation (2012); and Kazimir
Malevich and His School: Graphics from the Collection of the State Tretyakov
Gallery (2015).

Linda Dalrymple Henderson

is the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History and Regents’ Out-
standing Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to
numerous essays, she is the author of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean
Geometry in Modern Art (1983; new, enlarged ed., MIT, 2013), Duchamp in Con-
text: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton,
1998), and Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York
(Blanton Museum of Art, UT, 2008). She co-edited the anthology From Energy
to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature
(Stanford, 2002). Henderson is currently at work on book projects titled ‘The
Energies of Modernism: Art, Science, and Occultism in the Early 20th Century’
and ‘The Fourth Dimension in Art and Culture Decade-by-Decade Through the
20th Century’.
Notes on Contributors xix

Samuel Johnson
received his PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard Uni-
versity in 2015. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leonard A. Lauder Re-
search Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
2015-2017, and is currently Assistant Professor of Art History and Carole &
Alvin I. Schragis Faculty Fellow in the Department of Art & Music Histories at
Syracuse University.

Irina Karasik
is a Chief Curator at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, and Head of
its Department of New Trends in Art. Her extensive publications include more
than 200 articles on the history of the Russian Avant-Garde, Malevich, his con-
temporaries, and his students. In addition, she has curated and co-curated
over 40 exhibitions and museum projects, including From the History of the
Museum: A Collection of Articles and Publications (1995); In Malevich’s Circle:
Confederates, Students and Followers in Russia 1920s-1950s (2000); The Russian
Avant-Garde: Representation and Interpretation (2001); The Adventures of The
Black Square (2007); and Apartment No. 5. From the History of the Petrograd
Avant-Garde (2017). Her latest publication is an anthology of Lev Iudin’s di-
aries and correspondence (2017).

Yulia Karpova
is a research fellow in the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus
University, Denmark. She holds an MA in Art History from the Alexander von
Stieglitz Art and Industry Academy, St. Petersburg, and a PhD in history from
the Central European University, Budapest. Her research interests include the
history of Russian decorative art and design, Soviet design diplomacy during
the Cold War, professional communities under state socialism, and feminist
critiques of design. In 2014, she conducted research into the afterlife of Supre-
matism in Soviet applied arts and design of the late 1950s-1960s. Currently
she is a preparing a monograph on Soviet objects and material culture of the
1960s-1980s.

Regina Khidekel
received her MA and PhD from the Academy of Arts in Leningrad. An art critic
and curator, she was the art director of the Diaghilev Art Center (1990-1993,
the first unofficial art organisation in St. Petersburg following perestroika);
the founding director of the Russian American Cultural Center in New York
(1998); and the founding president of the Lazar Khidekel Society (2010). Regina
Khidekel has frequently contributed to Russian and American journals such
xx Notes on Contributors

as Iskusstvo, Dekorativnoe Iskusstvo, Teatr, Tvorchestvo, and ArtNews, as well

numerous catalogues and books, including It’s the Real Thing: Soviet and Post-
Soviet Sots Art and American Pop Art (Minnesota University Press, 1998). Dr
Khidekel has made a substantial contribution to the scholarship on Lazar
Khidekel through her cataloguing and organisational activities for the Lazar
Khidekel Archive, her research, and her curatorial expertise, which has re-
sulted in several international exhibitions, conferences, lectures and publica-
tions. Above all, she edited and contributed to the monograph Lazar Khidekel
and Suprematism (Prestel Publishing, 2014).

Maria Kokkori
is Associate Scientist for Scholarly Initiatives at the Art Institute of Chicago
and visiting Lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of
Chicago. She received her PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art in Lon-
don in 2008, where her thesis focused on the examination of paintings by
Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Kliun and Liubov Popova. She then completed a post-
doctoral fellowship at the Institute, with a focus on Russian Constructivism.
During 2009-2011, she was a research fellow of the Malevich Society in New
York. Her publications include various articles on the art and design of the
Russian Avant-Garde, as well as Utopian Reality: Reconstructing Culture in Rev-
olutionary Russia and Beyond (2013), for which she was a contributing author
and editor. She is currently writing a book on Malevich and the Unovis group.

Alexander Lisov
has a doctorate in art history and is a Professor of the Department of World
History and Culture, Vitebsk State University (Republic of Belarus). He be-
longs to the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian
Art and Architecture (SHERA), and is a member of the Lissitzky Foundation’s
Board of Directors. Professor Lisov is the author of more than 200 scholarly
publications. He has also participated in the World Congresses of ICCEES held
in Tampere (Finland), Berlin (Germany), Stockholm (Sweden), conferences in
Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Germany, France, Britain, and Canada. His
research interests include the fine arts of Belarus in the 19th-20th centuries;
the history of the Vitebsk Art School; the Russian Avant-Garde; Russian artists
living and working abroad; Kazimir Malevich and his circle; the early period of
the life and art of Marc Chagall; and the art of El Lissitzky.

Christina Lodder
is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, Pres-
ident of the Malevich Society, and co-editor of Brill’s Russian History and
Notes on Contributors xxi

Culture series. She has written extensively on Russian art, architecture and
design of the early twentieth century. Her publications include Russian Con-
structivism (1983); Constructing Modernity: The Art and Career of Naum Gabo
(co-author with Martin Hammer, 2000); Gabo on Gabo (co-editor with Martin
Hammer, 2000); Constructive Strands in Russian Art (2005); Rethinking Male-
vich (co-editor with Charlotte Douglas); Utopian Reality (co-editor with Maria
Kokkori and Maria Mileeva, 2013); and Aleksei Gan, Constructivism (translator,
editor, author of introduction, 2013).

Julia Tulovsky
is an art historian specialising in Russian and European avant-garde art and
design of the 1920s as well as contemporary Russian art. She holds her PhD
from Moscow State University. Her research focuses on the interconnections
between the Russian and European Avant-Gardes, and the extension of avant-
garde ideas into the second half of the twentieth century. She is currently cu-
rator of Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art at the Zimmerli Art Museum
at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Prior to this, she worked as
assistant curator at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. 2001-2016, she was
executive director of the Malevich Society in New York and has remained a
member of the Board. She has published widely on Russian art (avant-garde
and contemporary), both in Russian and in English. Her most recent publica-
tion is Avant-Garde Textiles: Fabric Designs (2016).

Irina Vakar
is an art historian and researcher at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.
She is the author of approximately 100 publications and is a regular partici-
pant in conferences, both in Russia and abroad. Her research interests include
the Russian Avant-Garde, the oeuvre of Kazimir Malevich, Russian-French
exchanges, art criticism, and Russian Symbolism. She has curated numerous
exhibitions, including Cubisme-Cubism-Kubismus (Hannover, Moscow, 2003);
The Jack of Diamonds (Moscow, 2005); Konstantin Rozhdestvenskii (Moscow,
2006); Petr Konchalovskii (Moscow, 2010); Aleksandr Deineka (Moscow, Rome,
2010-2011); Boris Grigoriev (Moscow, 2011); Natalia Goncharova (Moscow,
2013-2014); and Georgii Iakulov (Moscow, 2015). She initiated and co-curated
the major retrospective and catalogue of Malevich’s work at the Tretyakov
Gallery in 1989.
Introduction
Christina Lodder

The contents of Celebrating Suprematism are based on the papers that were
delivered at the conference – ‘Celebrating One Hundred Years of Suprema-
tism’ – which was held at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University, New
York, in December 2015, to mark the centenary of the emergence of Suprema-
tism in May 1915 and its entrance onto the Russian public arena in November
and December that year.1 The conference was arranged by the Malevich So-
ciety, in association with the Harriman Institute, the Lazar Khidekel Society,
the Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and
Architecture (SHERA), and the organisation, Russian Art and Culture.
Conceived as a forum to highlight the latest research into Kazimir Male-
vich’s Suprematism and its aesthetic, philosophical, and theoretical ramifica-
tions, the conference brought together scholars from America, Russia and Eu-
rope. Established specialists as well as a younger generation of experts were
able to share the results of their most recent investigations and engage in very
fruitful discussions. Many of the new insights that they produced have been
facilitated by the increasing accessibility of primary materials.
Since the 2005 conference ‘Rethinking Malevich’, which was also organised
by the Malevich Society, and the publication of the conference proceedings in
2007,2 a significant number of new studies on Malevich have appeared and a
great deal of primary material has been published. Most importantly for the
English-speaking world, Irina Vakar and Tatiana Mikienko’s ground-breaking,
two-volume Malevich about Himself, Contemporaries about Malevich: Letters,
Documents, Memoirs and Criticism [Malevich o sebe. Sovremenniki o Malevich.

1 Malevich showed three Suprematist canvases at The Exhibition of Contemporary Decora-

tive Art. Embroidery and Carpets from Artists’ Designs [Vystavka sovremennogo dekorativnogo
iskusstva. Vyshivki i kovry po eskizam khudozhnikov] (Moscow: Galereia Lemers’e, 1915), which
opened on 6 November 1915, several weeks before Malevich showed thirty-nine Suprematist
paintings at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero-Ten) [Poslednaia futuristich-
eskaia vystavka kartin, 0,10 (nol’-desiat’)] (Petrograd: Khudozhestvennoe Biuro N. E. Dobychi-
noi, 19 November 1915 – 19 January 1916).
2 Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder, eds., Rethinking Malevich: Proceedings of a Confer-
ence in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Birth (London: Pindar Press,
2007). This contains a detailed account by Charlotte Douglas of the various primary mate-
rials that had been published prior to 2005, as well as a brief history by Christina Lodder of
Malevich scholarship in Russia and the West.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_002

2 Lodder

Pis’ma. Dokumenty. Vospominaniia. Kritika] has appeared in an English trans-

lation as Kazimir Malevich, Letters, Documents, Memoirs and Criticism.3
In addition, Malevich’s seminal text on objectless art, Die gegenstandlose
Welt,4 has been issued in a new English translation.5 This more accurate ver-
sion of the text is based on the Russian version and reinstates sections that
were omitted from the highly edited and distorted German translation, which
was published as the 11th Bauhaus Book in 1927. The new translation is ac-
companied and amplified by the inclusion of two hitherto unpublished texts,
produced within the context of the Bauhaus book by Malevich in 1927.6 Both
of these major projects were supported by the Malevich Society.
Alongside this freshly available translated material, numerous exhibitions,
including the Malevich shows at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Tate
Modern in London, have contained new visual material and new research.7
The Stedelijk augmented this information with their impressive and detailed
catalogue of the Collection amassed by Nikolai Khardzhiev, which contains an
extensive section on Malevich, comprising 183 items in all and over fifty Supre-
matist drawings.8 The fact that each item is reproduced and in high quality
means that anyone unable to visit the Collection itself is still able to gain a fine
understanding of the numerous drawings it contains.
The publication of rare or unique documents produced by Malevich and
his colleagues is extremely useful for all scholars studying the artist, wher-
ever they live. Until 2003, the almanac that Malevich and his group of sup-
porters published in 1920 as Unovis No. 1 was only publicly available in the
Manuscript Department of the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow – difficult

3 Kazimir Malevich, Letters, Documents, Memoirs and Criticism, Russian edition: eds., Irina
A. Vakar and Tatiana N. Mikhienko; English edition: trans. Antonina W. Bouis, ed. Wendy
Salmond, general ed. Charlotte Douglas (London: Tate Publishing, 2015)
4 Kasimir Malewitsch, Die gegenstandlose Welt. Bauhausbücher 11 (Munich: Albert Langen Ver-
lag, 1927).
5 Kazimir Malevich, ‘The World as Objectlessness’ in Simon Baier and Britta Tanya Dü mpel-
mann, eds., Kazimir Malevich: The World as Objectlessness, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (Basel:
Kunstmuseum Basel / Hatje Cantz, 2014), 145-200.
6 ‘Two Autograph Manuscripts by Kazimir Malevich within the Context of the Bauhaus Book’,
in Kazimir Malevich: The World as Objectlessness, 203-211.
7 Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde: Featuring Selections from the Khardzhiev and
Costakis Collections (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 2013); and Achim Borchardt-Hume, ed.,
Malevich (London: Tate Publishing, 2014).
8 Gert Imanse and Frank Lamoen, with Anna Ostrovskaya and Elvie Casteleijn, eds., Russian
Avant-Garde, The Khardzhiev Collection, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Amsterdam: nai010
publishers / Khardzhiev Foundation / Stedelijk Museum, 2013). For the extensive Malevich
section, see Ibid., 310-407, nos. 399-582.
Introduction 3

to access and in a rather fragile condition.9 It is now accessible in a facsim-

ile edition meticulously prepared by Dr Tatiana Goriacheva, accompanied by
a convenient supplement, which reprints the texts accurately (and more leg-
ibly than the original) in tandem with an extremely helpful introduction and
enlightening commentaries and notes.10
Until recently, certain archival materials remained closed to Western schol-
ars, most significantly the numerous unpublished manuscripts and other ma-
terials that were confiscated from Nikolai Khardzhiev in 1994 and now form
part of the collection of the Russian State Archives of Literature and Art in
Moscow. Fortunately, this problem was partially rectified in 2017 by the ap-
pearance of the first volume of The Archive of N. I. Khardzhiev: Russian Avant-
Garde: Materials and Documents from the Collection of RGALI.11 The enthusiasm
this development has generated will undoubtedly be matched when the sec-
ond volume appears.
Although many materials have appeared since 2015, the year marking the
centenary of Suprematism, both Russian and Western scholars found them-
selves at that time with more substantial resources at their command than
they had possessed a decade earlier, and thus in a much better position to
study the movement and its founder, to establish a firmer chronology of its
development, to gain insights into the creative process, and to acquire a more
profound understanding of the ideas and impulses that surrounded the emer-
gence and subsequent development of Suprematism.
Obviously, central to any discussion of Suprematism is the role of The Black
Square [Chernyi kvadrat], which was initially simply called The Quadrilateral
[Chetyreugol’nik], but rapidly acquired the present title.12 The painting was
produced in early summer 1915 and publicly exhibited for the first time in De-
cember 1915 in Petrograd at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero-
Ten). In 2015, in recognition of the centenary of the painting’s creation, the
State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, where the work now resides, undertook
a detailed examination of the canvas, using the very latest techniques. Irina
Vakar’s paper details and discusses the results of that scientific scrutiny. Sur-
prisingly, and contrary to the expectations of most scholars, who thought that

9 Manuscript Department, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, fond 76, no. 9.

10 Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. 1920. Faksimil’noe izdanie, ed. Tat’iana Goriacheva (Moscow: State
Tretyakov Gallery / Izdatel’stvo Skanrus, 2003); and Tat’ina Goriacheva, ‘Unovis No. 1,
Vitebsk, 1920. Prilozhenie k faksimil’nomu izdaniiu’, ibid.
11 Arkhiv N. I. Khardzhiev. Russkii avangard: materialy i dokumenty iz sobraniia RGALI, tom 1
(Moscow: RGALI, 2017).
12 See Poslednaia futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin, 0,10 (nol’-desiat’). Katalog (Petrograd,
1915), no. 39.
4 Lodder

the work underneath The Black Square was an earlier Suprematist painting,
the examination revealed that the 1915 painting hides not one, but two com-
positions. The first image, produced in a Cubo-Futurist idiom, was succeeded
by a Proto-Suprematist composition, which was then painted over with the
image of The Black Square. This evidence forces us to reconsider established
theories about the painting’s creation. It suggests that the conception of the
work was far more complicated than is commonly believed, and that The Black
Square may, indeed, have been the first Suprematist painting.
Having produced The Black Square and other Suprematist works, how did
Malevich react and what did he think about his important breakthrough?
Charlotte Douglas tackles the period that immediately followed the comple-
tion of the first Suprematist painting in early summer 1915, and the first public
exhibitions of the Suprematist works in November and December 1915. Us-
ing Malevich’s correspondence, she discusses the artist’s various formal exper-
iments and the ideas that he considered as he struggled to give his radical
new work a solid theoretical grounding. Although scholars have usually dated
Suprematism’s engagement with the wider sphere to the post-revolutionary
period, Professor Douglas reveals that right from the beginning, Malevich con-
strued Suprematism as a way of looking at the entire world, rather than as
merely another style of painting. She argues that Malevich saw it reflected sys-
tematically in music, sculpture, design, painting, architecture, and even the
universe – a kind of natural, visual mathematics. Inevitably, this early under-
standing persisted throughout the course of Suprematism, underpinning and
influencing its evolution.
Among the important ideas that clearly inspired Malevich at this point
were notions concerning the fourth dimension, evident in the subtitle he gave
to his painting Boy with Knapsack – ‘Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimension’.
Linda Dalrymple Henderson had explored the connection between the Rus-
sian Avant-Garde and the writings of Peter Ouspensky and the British ‘hyper-
space philosopher’ Charles Howard Hinton in her earlier work.13 In her essay
for this volume, she relates these ideas (which pre-dated the temporal fourth
dimension of Einsteinian Relativity Theory and its ‘space-time’ continuum),
to the science that actually excited the imaginations of the public and artists
alike in the 1900s and 1910s – the ether physics of the late nineteenth century.
During the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century, the discovery of the
X-ray, radioactivity, and the Hertzian waves that stimulated the development

13 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Mod-
ern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983; rev. ed., Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 2013).
Introduction 5

of wireless telegraphy offered a new image of matter as dematerialising into

space, and of space itself as being filled with electromagnetic waves, vibrat-
ing in the ubiquitous, imponderable medium known as the ether. The fourth
dimension was often discussed in relation to the ether of space, with the two
concepts functioning in tandem as signs of an invisible ‘meta-reality’, just be-
yond the reach of human vision. The subject of the ether is one of the major
lacunae in the history of early-twentieth century art, and Professor Hender-
son restores the concept to the discussion of Malevich and his Suprematist
works, whose titles have long made clear the artist’s interest in topics such as
electromagnetism and wireless telegraphy.
In a further examination of the intersection between art, science and tech-
nology, Dr Alexander Bouras looks at another hitherto neglected aspect of the
cultural and intellectual context surrounding Malevich and the emergence
of Suprematism – the ideas concerning creativity and invention, as formu-
lated and promoted by the thinker Petr Engelmeier. For Engelmeier, creativity
[tvorchestvo] in all fields of human activity resulted from a three-part process:
intuition, reason, and craftsmanship [masterstvo]. Dr Bouras demonstrates
that these concepts were fundamental for the Russian Avant-Garde’s develop-
ment of the theory of ‘artistic culture’ and are crucial to understanding notions
of the creative process as expressed in the theory and practice of Suprematism.
Among the elements constituting the Russian Avant-Garde’s definition of
‘artistic culture’ was the concept of faktura [texture]. Elaborated by Vladimir
Markov and others, it is important for understanding the significance of ma-
teriality and immateriality in Suprematism. Maria Kokkori, Alexander Bouras,
and Irina Karasik have collaborated in their discussion of Malevich’s inter-
est in matter and faktura, placing his investigations within the context of sci-
ence and technology. In Malevich’s teaching, faktura fused the material and
immaterial, challenging preconceptions about its meaning, practice, purpose,
and use. Malevich and his students at Unovis (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva –
Champions of the New Art) explored faktura as an idea, a formless phe-
nomenon, a technological or scientific development, and a focus for future
discoveries. In this respect, the visual and literary Avant-Garde shared certain
interests, especially in carborundum – an electromagnetic, metallic substance.
It was the subject of Aleksei Kruchenykh’s poem ‘Chemical Famine – A Ballad
to the Stone Carborundum’ [Golod khimicheskii – ballady o kamne karborunde]
and at the same time an object of intense theoretical and practical exploration
at Unovis.
Indeed, in the post-revolutionary period, Unovis became a central fac-
tor in Malevich’s further development of Suprematism. Very soon after pro-
ducing his first Suprematist painting, Malevich had sought to organise a
6 Lodder

group of supporters around his approach. In 1916, he had created the short-
lived Supremus group, but it was only after he arrived in the Belorussian
city of Vitebsk, in November 1919, that he finally succeeded in establishing
‘a party of supremacy’ – Unovis – which was set up in January-February 1920,
within the Vitebsk People’s Art School (Vitebskoe narodnoe khudozhestven-
noe uchilishche). By the summer of that year, the Suprematists had come to
dominate the school. Yet as soon as he had founded his Suprematist party,
Malevich wanted to extend it and the influence of his ideas beyond Vitebsk,
hoping to gain the support of art schools in other cities of Soviet Russia,
and above all in Moscow. Dr Alexander Lisov provides an illuminating dis-
cussion of Malevich’s attempts to achieve this goal. Not surprisingly, the ge-
ographical proximity of Smolensk to Vitebsk encouraged the creation of a
branch of Unovis there in April 1920, which was run by the artists Władysław
Strzemiński (Vladislav Strzheminskii) and Katarzyna Kobro (Ekaterina Ko-
bro). Another branch was established in Orenburg, with Ivan Kudriashev at
the helm. Both groups were relatively small and short lived, although the Oren-
burg branch played a major role in organising Unovis’s Moscow exhibition of
1921.
One of Malevich’s most active supporters within the Vitebsk Unovis, was
El Lissitzky. Dr Samuel Johnson examines the relationship between these
two artists through the lens of architecture. An initially productive collabora-
tion between the two men, based on a mutually acceptable division between
theory and practice, was upset when Lissitzky moved to Germany in winter
1921. Their relationship resumed in 1924, when Lissitzky was convalescing in
Switzerland, where he renewed his focus on architecture, working on the de-
sign of his signature building, the Wolkenbügel and publishing articles in Das
Kunstblatt and ABC. At this time, Malevich was also engaged with architecture.
Concentrating on the divergent architectural paths of these former colleagues,
Dr Johnson clarifies aspects of Lissitzky and Malevich’s collaboration and their
respective views on the built environment.
Not surprisingly, architecture was a key concern for Malevich in extending
Suprematism out into the wider world and it played an important role in Un-
ovis’s aspirations. Among the students who were taught by Lissitzky in the
Studio of Architecture and Typography was Lazar Khidekel, who made a ma-
jor contribution to developing a Suprematist architecture. Dr Regina Khidekel
traces his development from planar Suprematism to volumetric Suprematism,
encompassing axonometric projections, three-dimensional models, architec-
tons, and his articulation of what has been called Suprematism’s first truly
architectural project – his design for a Workers’ Club of 1926. In the mid-1920s,
directly inspired by Suprematism and its notion of an organic form-creating
continuum, Khidekel explored various philosophical, scientific and techno-
Introduction 7

logical approaches, and proposed innovative design solutions for creating new
urban environments, where people would be able to live in harmony with na-
ture and would be protected from disasters – both natural and man-made.
Malevich’s aspiration to reconstruct the world according to Suprematist
principles was not only realised in the work undertaken by the members of
Unovis, but was also developed in a whole body of theoretical texts that the
artist wrote while living in Vitebsk. Many of these actually appeared in print,
but some remained as manuscripts. In 1920, in Suprematism: 34 Drawings,
Malevich announced that he would shortly be publishing a text entitled ‘We
as utilitarian perfection’.14 It never appeared, but Dr Tatiana Goriacheva has
discovered a fragment of the missing manuscript in the Nikolai Khardzhiev
papers now in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow. In
her essay, Dr Goriacheva discusses this text, analysing Malevich’s argument
that it is essential to replace individualistic tendencies in art with collective
creativity. At the same time, she places Malevich’s thinking within the wider
context of notions of utility and the concept of the ‘We’ in Russian culture.
In connection with the Suprematists’ collective commitment to using their
artistic skills to reconstruct the environment, they became involved with tex-
tile design. This move predated the Revolution of 1917, and in her essay, Dr Julia
Tulovsky emphasises the significance of textiles for the establishment and ac-
ceptance of the Suprematist movement in the 1910s, and the importance of
Suprematism for developing new approaches in avant-garde textiles during
the 1920s. She points out that the first public manifestation of Suprematism
was in the context of embroidery at the Exhibition of Contemporary Decorative
Art. Embroidery and Carpets from Artists’ Designs, which opened on 6 Novem-
ber 1915, several weeks before the legendary display of Suprematist paintings
at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero-Ten).15 She argues that
Suprematist designs for embroidery were largely the channel through which
other avant-garde artists, such as Nadezhda Udaltsova, absorbed the new style
and that these designs by Malevich and his students became an important
medium for disseminating the visual system of Suprematism into the real
world.
In tandem with textile design, Suprematism also became involved in ceram-
ics. The Black Square, with its immense symbolic meaning and iconic status in
twentieth-century art, acted as a design module and even became a trade-
mark for porcelain. The brief cooperation of Malevich and his students with

14 K. Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920), 4.

15 Katalog vystavki sovremennogo dekorativnogo iskusstva. Vyshivki i kovry po eskizam khu-
dozhnikov (Moscow: Galereia Lemers’e, 1915), and Poslednaia futuristicheskaia vystavka
kartin, 0,10 (nol’-desiat’) (Petrograd: Khudozhestvennoe biuro N. E. Dobychinoi, 1915)
8 Lodder

the State Porcelain Factory, Petrograd, in the early 1920s had a crucial impact
not only on the development of Suprematism’s visual language, but also on
Soviet design. The sensory qualities of porcelain – its whiteness, shine, and
plasticity – made it an excellent medium for experimenting with planar and
volumetric Suprematism. Dr Yulia Karpova discusses the work of Malevich,
Ilia Chashnik, Lazar Khidekel, and Nikolai Suetin in devising new approaches
to designing and decorating porcelain. Tracing the Suprematist legacy in the
post-war production of the Leningrad Porcelain Factory, she examines work by
Suetin, Anna Leporskaia, Eduard Krimmer (Malevich’s students) and others.
Dr Karpova uses Suprematist porcelain to present a nuanced story of Soviet
ceramics, focusing on subtle continuities, rather than shifts and ruptures.
Suprematism was a vital component of Russian and Soviet Culture dur-
ing the 1910s and 1920s, but its influence also spread far beyond the country’s
borders. Professor Éva Forgács looks at the way in which artists in Eastern Eu-
rope came to acquire a knowledge of Malevich and Suprematism during the
1920s. The artist’s most direct contact was with Polish artists, especially Kobro
and Strzemiński whom he had first encountered in Moscow in 1919 and who
had been members of the Smolensk Unovis in 1920. They were among the
founders of the Polish avant-garde group Blok in 1924. Their profound under-
standing and absorption of Suprematism is reflected in the way they criticised
it.16 Yet, for many artists, the first opportunity to encounter Malevich’s actual
works was the First Russian Art Exhibition [Erste russische Kunstausstellung]
in Berlin, in October 1922. This was extensively reviewed by Eastern-European
avant-garde figures, including Lajos Kassák, Ernő Kállai, Alfréd Kemény, and
Branko Ve Poljanski, all of whom singled out Malevich as one of the most out-
standing, or the most outstanding artist in Russia. This set the tone for Male-
vich’s later reception in Eastern Europe. Excerpts from Malevich’s writings,
which appeared in the 1925 Europa Almanach, were widely read, inspiring the
Hungarian painter Lajos Vajda (1908-1941) to make eleven pages of detailed
notes. Malevich and Suprematism were celebrated during the artist’s 1927 trip
to Poland, but they were also attacked in Mieczysław Szczuka’s article ‘The
Funeral of Suprematism’.17 Malevich’s subsequent solo exhibition in Berlin,

16 See, for instance, Henryk Stażewski, ‘O suprematisme w malarstwe’, Blok, 1 (8 March 1924);
English translation as ‘Untitled Statements on Suprematism and Painting’, trans. Wanda
Kemp-Welch, in Timothy O. Benson and Éva Forgács, eds., Between Worlds. A Sourcebook
of Central European Avant-Gardes (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, with LACMA, 2002),
492-493.
17 Mieczysław Szczuka, ‘Pozgonne suprematyzmu’ [The Funeral of Suprematism], Dzwig-
nia, 2-3 (1927); trans. Wanda Kemp-Welch, in Between Worlds, 664-666.
Introduction 9

along with the publication of Die gegenstandslose Welt as a Bauhaus Book that
same year, brought further awareness of his theory and practice to the world
outside Russia. As well as generating highly positive reviews, the exhibition
also prompted László Moholy-Nagy to invite Malevich to join the ‘Painting
and Photography’ debate in the journal i 10. Malevich’s pro-painting contribu-
tion was not published, and his attitude was considered idiosyncratic. In fact,
his reputation for being independent from the mainstream in both his art and
discourse greatly contributed to the post-war myth in Eastern Europe of him
being the most free-spirited artist of his time.
In 1920s Russia, however, Malevich and Unovis’s engagement with archi-
tecture and reconstructing Russian reality operated in parallel with Construc-
tivism, which had emerged in early 1921 with an ostensibly similar aim of har-
nessing artistic skills to create a totally new environment. While Suprematism
has tended to be linked with a quintessentially aesthetic approach as well as
more spiritual and metaphysical values, Constructivism has been firmly con-
nected with materialist attitudes and the practical, industrial and ideological
imperatives associated with Communism and the Bolsheviks. Christina Lod-
der acknowledges the existence of fundamental artistic and theoretical differ-
ences dividing the two movements, but argues for a more nuanced considera-
tion of the relationship between them, identifying affinities (both theoretical
and practical) that the two movements shared, particularly in the early years,
as expressed in their essential approaches towards the analysis of the elements
of art, as well as in their attitudes regarding artistic invention and the role of
art in society.
All the essays in Celebrating Suprematism focus on the creation and imme-
diate development and dissemination of Suprematism in the 1910s and 1920s,
although sometimes hinting at repercussions and influence exerted beyond
that period. In fact, the influence of Suprematism is far more profound and
long-lasting than the chronological parameters of this study suggest. There is
no doubt that interest in Malevich and his objectless art is still an important
factor in the cultural life of Russia and the West. Today, more than one hundred
years after Suprematism emerged, and was unveiled to the public, it continues
to have a visual and theoretical impact on artistic practice across all media and
throughout the world.

1 City Names

Reflecting the troubled history of Russia is the changing name for the city of
Peter the Great, which was founded as St. Petersburg at the beginning of the
10 Lodder

eighteenth century. Following the outbreak of the First World War on 1 August
1914, it was renamed Petrograd, which sounded more patriotic. When Lenin
died ten years later the city became Leningrad in his honour, and that is how
it was known for over seventy years. Only with the fall of Communism in 1991
did it revert to its pre-1914 name of St. Petersburg. In this book, the city is called
by the name current at the time about which the author is writing.
This practice has been adopted throughout the text in relation to the names
of other cities, which were also changed in the wake of the Revolution, al-
though those changes have frequently been reversed since the demise of Com-
munism.

2 The Calendar

On 31 January 1918 Russia caught up with the rest of Europe and adopted the
Gregorian calendar. Before this, dates in Russia were still established on the
basis of the Julian calendar, which, by the twentieth century was 13 days be-
hind the Gregorian calendar and was frequently designated ‘Old Style’. Dates
given according to the Gregorian calendar were designated ‘New Style’. Hence
the Bolshevik uprising took place on 25 October 1917 according to the Russian
calendar (Old Style), but on 7 November according to Western usage (New
Style). This is why it is called the October Revolution, but its anniversary is cel-
ebrated on 7 November. Throughout this book, dates are given in accordance
with the calendar in use at the time.

3 System of Transliteration

The system of transliteration used in this text is the Library of Congress Sys-
tem, with the alteration that a single or double diacritical mark denoting the
Russian hard and soft signs have been omitted from people’s names and sur-
names when they occur in the main body of the text. Russian surnames have
usually been rendered according to this system, except where particular vari-
ants have become well established in Western usage, for example, Wassily
Kandinsky, not Vasilii Kandinskii; El Lissitzky, not Lazar Lisitskii; and Vladimir
Mayakovsky, not Vladimir Maiakovskii. This also extends to institutions, such
as the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, which uses this transliteration rather
than Tretiakov.
 Chapter 1

New Information Concerning The Black Square

Irina Vakar

Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square [Chernyi kvadrat] of 1915 is acknowledged to

be one of the emblematic works of modern culture (Fig. 1.1).1 It is one of those
rare, truly revolutionary works that overturned established notions of art.
There are very few such works, and all of them were created within a decade.
Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907 dramatically pushed the
boundaries of what could be considered aesthetically acceptable, mixing cate-
gories of beauty and ugliness, while the first readymade, Marcel Duchamp’s
Bicycle Wheel of 1913, demonstrated the possibility of removing an object
from its everyday context and providing it with a completely new meaning.
From this perspective, the radicalism of Malevich’s Black Square, produced
two years later, does not seem so striking. Nevertheless, during the 100 years
since its creation, the painting has proved to be of phenomenal heuristic
value.
The Black Square is a paradoxical work. Technically executed as an easel
painting (with oil paint on canvas), it introduced new mechanisms for gen-
erating meaning, which are, in theory, alien to painting as an art form. The
work provokes explanations, interpretations, reminiscences, and brain games,
but it does not exclude the possibility of contemplation or even meditation.
For artists today, it is an object to be manipulated in countless, very diverse
ways. For theoreticians, it has provided the stimulus for numerous specula-
tions. Malevich himself repeatedly returned to this work during the twenty
years after its creation and until the end of his life, finding new meanings in it
as well as semantic overtones. I am going to list some of them.
According to Malevich, the initial idea of The Black Square is related to the
décor and costumes that he designed for the performance in December 1913 of
the opera Victory over the Sun by Aleksei Kruchenykh and Mikhail Matiushin.
This suggests that the image was initially conceived as an antithesis to the
sun (which in itself opens up a wide field for interpretation), and a sign of

1 When the painting was first shown at the The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero-
Ten) it was listed as The Quadrilateral [Chetyreugol’nik], see Poslednaia futuristicheskaia vys-
tavka kartin, 0,10 (nol’-desiat’). Katalog (Petrograd, 1915), no 98.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_003

12 Vakar

Figure 1.1 Kazimir Malevich, The Black Square, 1915, oil on canvas, 79.5 × 79.5 cm., State
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

that victory.2 Malevich also provided an alternative reading, which is purely

formal: The Black Square is ‘the embryo of all possibilities’, the primary ele-
ment, the primary shape, ‘the progenitor of the cube and the sphere’, a circle
and a cross, which then, disintegrating into small elements, forms the Supre-
matist universe.3 In this context, The Black Square acts as an alternative to

2 Konstantin Rozhdestvenskii recorded discussing Malevich’s article ‘The White Sun and the
Black Square’ [Beloe solntse i chernyi kvadrat], dealing with this theme. See Konstantin
Rozhdestvenskii. K 100-letiiu s dnia rozhdeniia (Moscow: State Tretyakov Gallery, 2006), 282.
3 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Mikhail Matiushin [Beginning of June 1915]; English translation
in Kazimir Malevich, Letters, Documents, Memoirs and Criticism, Russian edition: eds., Irina
A. Vakar and Tatiana N. Mikhienko; English edition: trans. Antonina W. Bouis, ed. Wendy
Salmond, general ed. Charlotte Douglas (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), I: 66.
The Black Square 13

natural ‘bodies’, a form born of the creative will (later Malevich would repeat
his favourite example: here is a chair – it does not exist in nature, it has been
invented by a man). From 1916 onwards, the artist opposed the living ‘face’ of
Suprematist forms and The Black Square to the carrion of naturalistic painting,
which he called dead.4 In December 1915, at the The Last Futurist Exhibition
of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero-Ten) [Poslednaia futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin, 0,10
(nol’-desiat’)], Malevich displayed the painting across the corner of the room,
as an ‘icon of my time’.5 During the Vitebsk period, he declared that it embod-
ied the ‘principle of economy’;6 and discovered in it a universal capacity for
replication: the square was used as an emblem, a sign, and a module of the
new style. The author saw the image of the cosmos in it, as well as ‘what, at
one point, people saw in the face of God’.7 At the end of the 1920s, Malevich
claimed that he wanted it to convey ‘infinity and eternity’, and spoke about
the richness of its ‘pure’ objectless sensations. Such a conceptual range is truly
unique, it surpasses even the substantive aspects of mature Suprematism. It
is not by chance that the artist called The Black Square ‘the most objectless
work’.8
I examine at length the history of these and other interpretations of the
painting in my book Kazimir Malevich: ‘The Black Square’,9 which was pub-
lished by the State Tretyakov Gallery as part of the series ‘The History of a Mas-
terpiece’, in order to mark the centenary of the 0.10 exhibition, which opened
in December 1915. The series comprises small-sized books, which are popular
and accessible to the general public, but also incorporate the latest scholarly
research on the work in question. As preparation for this publication, a com-
prehensive study of the painting was carried out by the gallery’s conservation
specialists, Ekaterina Voronina and Irina Rustamova, with contributions from
other members of the conservation team. The results of this intensive exam-
ination have been included in the book as an appendix. Although technical
studies of The Black Square started as early as the 1990s, the latest equipment

4 See, for instance, K. Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi re-
alizm [From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism] (Moscow: Ob-
shchestvennaia pol’za, 1916); English translation in K. S. Malevich: Essays on Art 1915-1933, ed.
Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Borgens
Forlag, 1968), I: 19-41.
5 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Alexandre Benois, May 1916; Malevich, Letters, I: 85.
6 See, for instance, K. Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920); English trans-
lation in Malevich, Essays, I: 127.
7 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Pavel Ettinger, 3 April 1920; Malevich, Letters, I: 127
8 As recorded in Nikolai Khardzhiev, Diary Entries [1931]; English translation in Malevich, Let-
ters, II: 406.
9 Irina Vakar, Kazimir Malevich. Chernyi kvadrat (Moscow: State Tretyakov Gallery, 2015).
14 Vakar

and the use of digital technologies has provided new, more accurate data.10
The results were so unexpected that they demanded a great deal of thought
and a detailed analysis. In this paper, I should like to look at the way in which
this new material, despite its ‘provisional’ character, sheds important light on
the genesis of this famous painting.
Firstly, please, let me remind you of the known facts. Until the 1970s, the au-
thor’s dating of The Black Square was not questioned: Malevich dated it back
to 1913, the time of the production of the opera Victory over the Sun.11 Today,
it has been firmly established that The Black Square was painted in May or
June 1915, when Malevich was making new drawings for the re-publication of
the opera’s libretto, because the previous sketches had remained with Levkii
Zheverzheev, who had sponsored the production.12 For reasons that are not
completely clear, Malevich presented these new drawings as ‘found’ sketches
from 1913.13 By the end of May 1915, three drawings had been finished. On 27
May, Malevich referred to one of these drawings in a letter to his friend the
artist and musician Mikhail Matiushin, stating significantly, ‘This drawing is
going to be important for painting. What has been done unconsciously is now
yielding extraordinary fruits’.14 According to Nikolai Khardzhiev, it was a draw-
ing with the image of a black square (Fig. 1.2), which suggests that the painting
of the same name had already been conceived, or even painted. Despite this,
it was not until almost two weeks later that Malevich informed Matiushin that
he was sending him three pictures, including The Black Square ‘in the form in
which they were executed in 1913’.15 The date of the registered letter, in which

10 For earlier investigations, see Vikturina A. Lukhanov, ‘A Study of Technique: Ten Paintings
by Malevich in the Tretiakov Gallery’, in Kazimir Malevich 1878-1935 (New York: Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art, 1991), 195.
11 See, for instance, K. S. Malevich, ‘Suprematizm’, [Suprematism], Katalog desiatoi Gosu-
darstvennoi vystavki. Bespredmetnoe tvorchestvo i suprematizm (Moscow, 1919); English
translation in Malevich, Essays, I: 121. The date of 1913 for The Black Square was first con-
tested by Troels Andersen, Evgenii Kovtun and Nikolai Khardzhiev. See Troels Andersen,
Malevich (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1970); Evgenii Kovtun, ed., ‘Pis’ma K. S. Male-
vicha k M. V. Matiushinu’, Ezhegodnik Rukopisnogo otedela Pushkinskogo Doma na 1974
(Leningrad, 1976), 177-195; and N. Khardzhiev, K. S. Malevich, and M. V. Matiushin, K is-
torii russkogo avangarda (Stockholm: Gileia, 1976).
12 Aleksandra Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus (Moscow: Tri Kvadrata,
2009), 52-3; English version, Aleksandra Shatskikh, Black Square: Malevich and the Origin
of Suprematism, trans. Marian Schwartz (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2012), 46-7.
13 See, for instance, Kazimir Malevich, letter to Mikhail Matiushin [27 May 1915]; Malevich,
Letters, I: 65. Malevich wrote that ‘I found one draft [of a drawing] here at my place, and
I think that it really should be included in the book’.
14 Malevich, letter to Mikhail Matiushin, [27 May 1915]; Malevich, Letters, I: 65.
15 Malevich, letter to Matiushin, [Beginning of June 1915]; Malevich, Letters, I: 65.
The Black Square 15

Figure 1.2 Kazimir Malevich, The Black Square, 1915, pencil on paper, 9 × 8.2 cm., State Liter-
ary Museum, Moscow.

they were enclosed, has been recently established by Aleksandra Shatskikh –

as 9 June 1915.16
In 2009, Shatskikh presented a new hypothesis about the creation of the
painting. According to her, the drawing with a black square was created imme-
diately after the painting, and on the following day – on 9 June – it was sent
to Matiushin. Consequently, the painted Black Square can be dated to 8 June
1915.17
Yet the question arises: which drawing did Malevich describe on 27 May
as ‘going to be very important for painting’? Shatskikh believes that it is an
objectless image with a black trapezoid and small details (Fig. 1.3). This is the
same composition as one of the Suprematist paintings from 1915, now at the

16 Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus, 52-3; and Shatskikh, Black Square,
46-7.
17 Ibid.
16 Vakar

Figure 1.3 Kazimir Malevich, Design of a Backdrop for the First Act of the Opera ‘Victory over
the Sun’, 1915, pencil on paper, 10 × 9.5 cm., State Literary Museum, Moscow.

Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (Fig. 1.4). It is this painting that Shatskikh

considers to be the first Suprematist painting.18 She argues that it was followed
by other Suprematist works, and only two weeks later was The Black Square
conceived and then executed.
Strictly speaking, the exact date when The Black Square was created is not
of great significance for the history of art. What is important is the logic of the
artist’s creative thought and the sequence of his discoveries. It is in this respect
that the question of what lies beneath the black paint of The Black Square is
especially relevant.
This question has long interested specialists and non-specialists alike. Re-
searchers used to agree that the underlying composition is the direct prede-

18 See also Aleksandra Shatskikh, ‘Malevich, Curator of Malevich’, in The Russian Avant-
Garde: Representation and Interpretation (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2001), 149.
The Black Square 17

Figure 1.4 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition, 1915, oil on canvas, 101.5 × 62 cm.,
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

cessor to The Black Square. Nobody also doubted the explanation of the emer-
gence of The Black Square, which seems rather odd. Malevich knew about the
techniques of painting (he had studied under Fedor Rerberg, a specialist in
this area), but, in this instance, he seems to have broken all the rules, by over-
loading the layer of paint. Specialists used to believe that the reason for this
was the intense creative excitement that he experienced in inventing the con-
18 Vakar

cept of The Black Square. It was assumed that, not having another canvas to
hand, the artist rapidly covered up a work in front of him with black paint,
which eventually led to the development of serious craquelure on the surface
of the painting. According to this narrative, the picture was painted quickly,
over a very short period of time.
The main issue could be reduced to the question: what kind of composition
is beneath The Black Square? Is it Cubo-Futurist or Suprematist? If it is Cubo-
Futurist, then Malevich’s statement that The Black Square was the first Supre-
matist painting would be confirmed. If it is Suprematist, his assertion would be
disproved. Recently, many scholars (including myself) have tended to accept
the second version, because one can see fragments of pure colours through the
craquelure, even with the naked eye, and hints of geometric planes in the over-
all configuration. Consequently, the prevailing view used to be that Malevich
was indulging in mystification and confusing his contemporaries and everyone
ever since by claiming that The Black Square was his first Suprematist painting.
The investigations conducted by Voronina and Rustamova have effectively
destroyed this interpretation. The process of the creation of the paining has
turned out to be far more complicated and time-consuming than was previ-
ously believed. Thus, it has been discovered that there are not just one, but two
images underneath The Black Square – the original one and another one that is
directly beneath the black paint of the central quadrilateral. The initial com-
position is quite clearly visible in the consolidated radiograph, which com-
prises 12 radiographs of separate fragments of the painting, which have been
combined by a graphics editor (Fig. 1.5). The image occupies the entire surface
of the canvas. It was painted on the author’s ground and suffers from minor
craquelure. The borders of the planes are clearly visible, and they allow us to
make an approximate reconstruction of the composition (Fig. 1.6). This image
recalls Malevich’s Cubo-Futurist paintings from 1913-1914, such as The Guards-
man of 1913 (Fig. 1.7). The areas of paint reveal only one definite coloured area,
which is a tiny orange plane to the extreme right of the composition.
Let us consider for a moment what this data tells us. Having conceived a
new picture and not having any blank canvases, Malevich seems to have taken
what was to hand and what was obviously not too valuable to him – a canvas
painted a year or two before, which no longer seemed relevant, and most im-
portantly was of the right size and format for implementing his idea. So, he
started a new, experimental composition.
Malevich applied a layer of white zinc oxide in the form of a square
over the central part of the ‘old’ painting (within the boundaries of the
future Black Square) and started painting a new composition (let’s call it
Proto-Suprematist) (Fig. 1.8). It seems to have consisted of contiguous semi-
The Black Square 19

Figure 1.5 Consolidated X-Ray image of the paintings beneath The Black Square. The image
represents the consolidation of 12 x-rays.
Photograph courtesy of The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

transparent stains of yellow, blue, pink, purple, and other colours; it is these
that can be seen through the craquelure. These are spots of colour, which do
not possess any clear edges (or at least, such edges have not been detected).
Only some of the planes of colour have rectangular shapes (green and yellow),
which are fairly well-defined and possess a pronounced texture, suggesting
that this part of the composition was close to completion. But, apparently,
for some reason, it did not satisfy Malevich. Although the overall composition
does not look finished, the artist covered it with a thin layer of varnish or glue,
and then began to implement a new plan.
Along the borders of the white square, Malevich laid a strip of black paint
with a glossy sheen, about three or four centimetres wide. At the same time,
he began to define the edges of the white margins, using white lead paint.
20 Vakar

Figure 1.6 Reconstruction of the first painting, a Cubo-Futurist Composition.

Photograph courtesy of The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Then, the artist covered the whole field of the square with a different type of
black paint. This has been identified, using an X-ray-fluorescence analyser, as a
black iron oxide pigment, containing a considerable amount of dark green dye
(copper arsenide) and chalk as a filler (chalk was added to impart a cloudiness
to the surface). To complete the work, the margins were covered with a dense
layer of zinc oxide (Fig. 1.1).
What does this information tell us? Firstly, it confirms the testimony of one
memoirist: ‘Malevich said that for The Black Square, he mixed a special paint:
velvety, which did not glitter and did not wither. His student, the unforgettable
Anna Aleksandrovna Leporskaia remembered the recipe’.19 This is especially
important, because, in recent years, experts have too often tended to discount

19 Boris Bezobrazov, ‘At Malevich’s Lectures’, 1998; in Malevich, Letters, II: 373.
The Black Square 21

Figure 1.7 Kazimir Malevich, The Guardsman, 1913, oil on canvas, 57 × 66.5 cm., Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam.

Malevich’s statements as hoaxes, instead of checking them. As we shall see, in

this case, it has turned out that what the artist said actually contains valuable
and accurate information.
Secondly, the results of the analysis contradict the prevailing notion of
the spontaneity and the rapid pace at which the picture was created. The
multi-layered painting of The Black Square indicates that Malevich’s concept
emerged out of explorations that he conducted directly on the surface of
the canvas, and that the process of the work’s execution was thorough and
thoughtful.
Thirdly, although we do not have all the information that would enable us to
reach a final conclusion, the obtained (preliminary) image of the underlying
composition suggests that it was not Suprematist. Here, the colour planes are
contiguous to each other and even seem to flow into one another; they do not
possess strictly geometric shapes; and the white ground is missing. This com-
position denotes some kind of intermediate stage between Cubo-Futurism,
Alogism, and Suprematism. We do not know of any other work in Malevich’s
entire oeuvre that is stylistically similar to the revealed image. There is still,
22 Vakar

Figure 1.8 Radiograph of Kazimir Malevich, The Black Square, 1915, revealing a Proto-
Suprematist Composition underneath.
Photograph courtesy of The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

therefore, much work to be done to analyse the revealed image and to find
analogues.
The Black Square was now complete. What happened next?
According to Leporskaia (as retold in two different memoirs), Malevich said:
‘I could not sleep or eat for a week, I wanted to understand what I had done,
but I could not do that’.20 Even if the words of the artist have been preserved
inaccurately, or he himself exaggerated the extent of his excitement, there is

20 Anna Leporskaia, cited in Hannah Vaitmaier, ed., Sobranie Lentsa Shenberga. Evropeiskoe
dvizhenie v izobrazitel’nom iskusstve s 1958 goda po nastoiashchee vremia (Munich: Edi-
tion Kants, 1989), 98. See also O. V. Pokrovskii, ‘Trevogi i plamenem’, Chasy (Leningrad), 1
(1976): 224; English translation, Oleg Pokrovsky, ‘Alarm and Flames’, in Malevich, Letters,
II: 374.
The Black Square 23

Figure 1.9 Kazimir Malevich, The Black Square, 1915, oil on canvas, 79.5 × 79.5 cm., State
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Detail showing the painting’s white border with the
words ‘Battle of the negroes’ [Битва негров – Bytva negrov], written in pencil,
clearly visible.

no reason to doubt that he actually felt this excitement. The sense of bewil-
derment that everyone who encounters The Black Square instantly feels, must
have been experienced by its author first of all. In this respect, the latest tech-
nological research has revealed some interesting new information, which may
modify our knowledge and understanding.
On the white margin of The Black Square, are the remains of some writing
in pencil, which was clearly inscribed on dry paint (Fig. 1.9). It is difficult to
say with any certainty who is responsible for having written these words. The
writing has been authenticated as Malevich’s by one graphologist, although
other specialists have questioned this attribution. Since the inscription is on
dry paint, it could have been added to the work at any time since 1915. The
first two words can be read as ‘Battle of the Negroes’ [‘Битва негров’ – Bytva
negrov]; the end of the phrase is illegible, but presumably stands for ‘during the
night’, which in Russian could be ‘v temnote’, ‘v peshchere’, or ‘v nochiu’. There
are several ways of explaining this phrase. Of course, it is highly unlikely that
the phrase was written by Malevich himself, but probably by someone who
was mocking The Black Square. Yet, whoever was the author, the words clearly
allude to the monochromatic work by Alphonse Allais, entitled Combat de
Nègres dans une cave, pendant la nuit [Battle of Negroes in a Cellar, at Night] of
1893, which consists of a black rectangle, and had been conceived as an artistic
joke. Since Allais was not a well-known figure in Russia at this time, the author
of the inscription might have been recalling an episode that was recorded
in the newspaper The Russian Word [Russkoe Slovo] in 1911. Apparently, the
students of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture had
organised a joke exhibition, where ‘the first place was occupied by a panel,
A Fight of Negroes at Night’, which consisted of ‘a black ink banner with white
dots – [denoting] stars and the eyes of black fighters’.21

21 [B.A], ‘Khudozhestvennye parodii’, Russkoe slovo, 290 (17 December 1911): 7.

24 Vakar

If Malevich was the author of the inscription, it raises several important is-
sues.22 It would, for instance, suggest that his reaction to the birth of his ‘royal
infant’ was totally unexpected.23 After profound consideration, experimenta-
tion and explorations, the author would seem to have actually doubted his
achievement and raised questions about this abstract image: Is it a painting at
all? Can it be treated seriously?
We are used to regarding Malevich, his personality and his works as being
full of seriousness and dramatic pathos. At the same time, we somehow tend
to forget that a sense of humour and an aptitude for self-irony were integral
to his nature. The incorporation of text, written almost like a piece of graffiti,
would relate The Black Square to the artist’s previous work and the type of
paintings that he was producing before Suprematism. During his Alogist pe-
riod (from 1914 till early 1915), Malevich was actively using texts in his works,
such as An Englishman in Moscow, of 1914, which contains several phrases,
including ‘Racing Society’ [skakovoe obshchestvo] and ‘Partial Eclipse’ [chas-
tichnoe zatmenie].24 There is also a design of a backcloth for the opera Victory
over the Sun of 1913 that contains the word ‘silly’ [glupo] in the margin, as well
as a black and white sketch of early 1915 inscribed with the phrase ‘what im-
pudence’ [kakaia naglost’] (Fig. 1.10, 1.11). Other objectless drawings (including
ones with squares), also contain annotations and inscriptions. Sometimes, the
image has disappeared completely in the drawings, giving way to an arrange-
ment of letters, as in Prografachnik, or a single framed word as in The Village.25
This was typical of Alogism. But in Suprematism, the word was banished from
the painted surface: there are no signatures, no dates, no letters or numbers.
The inscription on The Black Square, if it is in Malevich’s hand, would appear to
confirm the transitional nature of this work, which, it appears, nobody could
have guessed during the last hundred years.
All of this leads us to the conclusion that The Black Square was, almost cer-
tainly, the first Suprematist painting. In my opinion, the prolonged process of
working on the canvas indicates that Malevich approached the development

22 It is highly unlikely that Malevich knew of Allais’s work, so if he did write the inscription,
he would almost certainly have been recalling the 1911 joke exhibition. More research is
needed in order to clarify this and other the issues surrounding the inscription.
23 Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu; Malevich: Essays, I: 38.
24 Kazimir Malevich, An Englishman in Moscow [Anglichanin v Moskve], 1914, oil on canvas,
88 × 57 cm., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
25 Kazimir Malevich, Prografachnik, 1914, pencil on graph paper, 10.6 × 16.8 cm.; and The
Village [Derevnia], 1913-14, pencil on graph paper, 13.3 × 11 cm., both Khardzhiev-Chaga
Art Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
The Black Square 25

Figure 1.10 Kazimir Malevich. Design of a Backcloth for the First Scene of the Second Act of the
Opera ‘Victory over the Sun’, 1913, pencil on paper, 21 × 27 cm. State Museum of
Theatre and Music, St. Petersburg. The word ‘silly’ [глупо – glupo] is to the right of
the design.

of Suprematism in various ways. Firstly, he approached it by restoring and re-

newing colour: the pure colour of the Proto-Suprematist composition beneath
The Black Square was an attempt to move away from the muted colours of Cu-
bism, and towards pure ‘colour-painting’ [tsvetopis’]. Secondly, with The Black
Square, he purified and simplified the forms to produce geometric shapes. Nev-
ertheless, neither in the Proto-Suprematist composition underlying The Black
Square, nor in the square of The Black Square itself could a very important part
of the future system be found – the white ground, regarded as ‘the white abyss’,
which evokes the sensation of weightlessness or flying.26
The most difficult part, I suppose, was this transition to a new understand-
ing of the ground as a conventional designation of space. For the white ground
in a drawing (i.e. on a sheet of paper) or in the applied arts, such as in embroi-
dery, appliqué, painting on ceramics, walls, stoves or shutters (i.e. on a func-
tional surface), is not the same as in a painting, where the ground is always
seen as a spatial environment, conveying meaning and expressing a certain
view of the world.

26 Malevich, ‘Suprematizm’, Katalog desiatoi gosudarstvennoi vystavki; Malevich, Essays, I:

122.
26 Vakar

Figure 1.11 Kazimir Malevich, Alogist drawing, early 1915, pencil on paper, private collection.
The inscription reads ‘What impudence’ [какая наглость – Kakaia naglost’].

That is why it is particularly difficult to accept Shatskikh’s argument that af-

ter having made the drawing of the trapezoid (Fig. 1.3), Malevich immediately
created its pictorial equivalent (Fig. 1.4), which became the first Suprematist
painting. Mentally placing The Black Square and Suprematist Composition with
trapezoid (Fig. 1.4) next to each other, one can feel how different was the cre-
ative self-awareness of their author in each work. The Black Square seems to
reflect the searching, doubt and hesitation of an artist at a crossroads. Supre-
matist Composition with trapezoid, however, looks different: the composition
is precise, the technique is perfected, the texture is not overloaded. The picture
seems to have been born without any pangs – the drawing seems to have been
transferred to the large canvas almost unchanged. If this is the first Suprema-
tist painting, the transition itself, the first step towards the realm of geometric
abstraction, unknown to Malevich, appears to have been quite easy for him,
judging by the precision of the solution. Is that possible? The testimony of
the artist about the long and painful gestation of The Black Square is far more
credible; it denies the possibility of such a sequence of events.
The Black Square 27

Reflecting on the question of which painting was created first – The Black
Square or Suprematist Composition with trapezoid (Fig. 1.4) – one should keep
in mind yet another circumstance. In May and early June of 1915, when The
Black Square was created, Malevich did not have any blank canvases on which
he could carry out experiments freely. At that time, it is possible that he cov-
ered up other earlier paintings. Yet, within a short space of time – by late June
or early July – Ivan Kliun arrived at the dacha in Kuntsevo and witnessed the
following situation:

… on the roof of the shed in the yard there were plenty of sub-frames with
stretched canvases on them drying in the sun. I asked Malevich: for what
purpose? ‘But you see, Ivan Vasilevich, I want to paint forty paintings,
where simple geometric shapes of different colours will be depicted, and
these shapes will be situated in a way that there is no connection or
gravitation between them’.27

Clearly, by this time, Malevich had already fully formulated the concept of
Suprematism. Moreover, he already knew how he would be able to present his
discovery to the public: the artist had already conceived the 0.10 exhibition,
for which he had to create a large body of new paintings. Subsequently, as
preparatory sketches for these new works, he used those first drawings (in par-
ticular, the one with the black trapezoid) which were created simultaneously
with the drawing, The Black Square (Fig. 1.2). If further studies of canvases,
like Suprematist Composition with trapezoid and other Suprematist paintings,
reveal that the supports are identical, we will be able to get closer to a more
accurate understanding of how Suprematism emerged and developed.
Yet among the many riddles that the artist set before us, one remains un-
solved: why did Malevich deceive Matiushin and everyone else, including us,
by stating that he was sending ‘old’ drawings, and thus implying that he had
already conceived The Black Square back in 1913? The answer, in my opinion,
lies in Malevich’s inherent commitment to perfectionism. In 1915, Malevich
did not just want to repeat the drawings for Victory over the Sun, he wanted to
improve them; and he was annoyed that the idea of the black square as the
antithesis of the sun had not come to him back in 1913. One can draw an anal-
ogy with another deception by Malevich, which was discovered many years
ago: in 1928-1929 he gave a series of new paintings early dates – from the 1900s
and 1910s. The reasons for that hoax are known: he had left his early paintings

27 See I. V. Kliun, Moi put’ v iskusstve. Vospominaniia, stat’i, dnevniki (Moscow: RA, 1999), 93.
28 Vakar

in Germany, and it was safer to attribute formal experiments to the pre-Soviet

period.28 All of that is true. But let us not forget that around 1930, Malevich
was also planning to organise a solo exhibition in Paris and was persistently
painting in the spirit of Impressionism, making it an integral element of his
creative evolution. Once, when a student asked him why he had not taken his
exhibition to Paris from Berlin, Malevich replied, ‘Well, you have to … know
where to take it: you can take pottery to Berlin, but you have to take porcelain
to Paris’.29

28 Concerning this issue, see Elena V. Basner, ‘Zhivopis’ Malevicha iz sobraniia Russkogo
museia’, in Kazimir Malevich v Russkom Muzee (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000),
15-27.
29 Konstantin Rozhdestvenskii, ‘Malevich is an Inexhaustible Topic’, 1991; in Malevich, Let-
ters, II: 297.
 Chapter 2

Defining Suprematism: The Year of Discovery

Charlotte Douglas

This essay concerns the period from May 1915 to June 1916, the first year of Kaz-
imir Malevich’s encounter with Suprematism.1 It is an attempt to identify the
artist’s own understanding and explanation of Suprematism at a time when he
was making his initial drawings and paintings, preparing for their first public
exhibition, and attempting to understand their true nature. Relying primarily
on Malevich’s contemporaneous letters and writings, this essay focuses on his
conceptual and philosophical notions regarding Suprematism, and his strug-
gle to provide it with a solid theoretical grounding.2
Suprematism emerged out of Malevich’s search for a new art that would
supersede Russian Futurism and Cubo-Futurism, styles which, although in-
spired initially by Italian Futurism, had themselves dominated avant-garde art
in Russia for several years. In the months leading up to Suprematism, Malevich
had been experimenting with a manner of painting that, at times, combined
uninflected planes with identifiable objects within the same composition, a
style that he termed Alogism or Februaryism [Fevralizm].3 In the course of
this intensive work, he gradually began to perceive the planar objectless pas-
sages, that had been an integral part of the Alogist style, as complete works of
art in themselves. But rather than regard this new approach simply as another
style of painting, from the very beginning Malevich thought of these objectless
compositions as a fundamentally new way of visualising the world.
The artist did not decide upon the name ‘Suprematism’ straight away. Nev-
ertheless, he did understand immediately that it was, in a sense, ‘morpholog-
ical’ or ‘modular’, because of its strictly geometric nature, and that visually it

1 All dates in this essay are those of the Julian calendar, which was used in Russia until 1918. To
convert to the Western (Gregorian) calendar, add 13 days.
2 Quotations in this article come principally – with occasional minor alterations in transla-
tion – from the first volume of Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs and Criticism,
Russian edition compiled and edited by Irina A. Vakar and Tatiana N. Mikhienko, English edi-
tion: trans. Antonina W. Bouis, ed. Wendy Salmond, general ed. Charlotte Douglas (London:
Tate Publishing, 2015), hereafter Malevich, Letters.
3 For a thorough discussion of Alogism and Februaryism, see Aleksandra Shatskikh, Black
Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism, trans. Marion Schwartz (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2012).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_004

30 Douglas

elicited new, underlying concepts that might relate to all the arts. Something
similar had been done before: by 1914, Italian Futurist artists had devised a
comprehensive programme that encompassed Futurist stylistic approaches to
painting, sculpture, photography, cinema, music, stage design, poetry, archi-
tecture, and clothing. So, despite Suprematism’s fundamental structural dif-
ference from Futurism, it is understandable that quite soon after identifying
his new approach to drawing and painting, Malevich turned to developing
Suprematist poetry, sculpture, music, design, architecture and, indeed, a whole
Suprematist universe.4
Malevich made the first Suprematist paintings during May 1915, while
spending the summer at a rented dacha in the village of Kuntsevo, near
Moscow.5 From time to time, his friend the poet and theorist Aleksei
Kruchenykh (1886-1968) stayed there with him.6 Kruchenykh was a principal
figure in the Russian Avant-Garde; among much else, he was one of the initia-
tors of the transrational, beyonsense [zaum’] words and poetry, and had writ-
ten the absurdist libretto for the now-famous Russian Cubo-Futurist ‘opera’
Victory over the Sun.7
Kruchenykh first joined Malevich at the dacha in mid-May, and by late
in the month, under the influence of Malevich’s new painting, they had al-
ready dreamed up a journal entitled Zero. As Malevich explained to Mikhail
Matiushin (1861-1934), a close friend who was a composer and the publisher of
Victory’s libretto, ‘Since we are planning to reduce everything to zero, we have
decided to call it Zero [Nol’], after which we ourselves will move beyond zero’.8
Throughout the summer and into the autumn, Malevich worked on develop-
ing visual Suprematism, sending drawings to Matiushin in Petrograd, and pre-
tending that they came from the original production of Victory that the three
men, Malevich, Kruchenykh and Matiushin, had worked on together two years
previously.9

4 In March 1915, the Italian Futurists Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero also published
‘The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’; English translation in Umbro Apollonio, ed.,
Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973).
5 This date is generally accepted by most Malevich scholars. Malevich spent several summers
in Kuntsevo.
6 Kruchenykh came and went between Moscow and Kuntsevo from May until early August
1915. See Aleksei Kruchenykh, Pis’ma A. Shemshurinu i M. Matiushinu (Moscow: Gileia, 2012).
7 Kruchenykh’s ‘libretto’, illustrated with Malevich’s set and costume designs, and a few bars
of Matiushin’s music was published as a small booklet. See Aleksei Kruchenykh, Pobeda nad
solntsem [Victory over the Sun] (St. Petersburg: Svet, 1913).
8 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Mikhail Matiushin, 29 May 1915; Malevich, Letters, I: 65.
9 For instance, Malevich sent drawings to Matiushin in three undated letters [27 May and two
at the beginning of June 1915]; Malevich, Letters, I: 65-66.
Defining Suprematism: The Year of Discovery 31

After he returned to Moscow that autumn, Malevich began planning for an

exhibition that would introduce his new work. He had no doubt that critics
and viewers would require some explanation of the strange objectless paint-
ings to be presented at the exhibition, but exactly what it meant for him to go
‘beyond zero’ was difficult for him to convey in words. When he tried to write
an explanation of Suprematism for a booklet to be distributed at the exhibi-
tion, a text that would tell a puzzled audience just what Suprematism was – a
guide to what, in fact, they would be seeing at that very moment – he found it
extremely difficult. It was late September before he had even decided what to
call his new work.10
Although Malevich was enthusiastic and fully convinced of Suprematism’s
importance, it was apparently almost impossible for him to express in words
exactly what it was meant to be, or why it was important. What he did manage
to say, however, and what he placed at the very beginning of his text, was the
fact that Suprematism applied equally to all the arts. In part, he was following
the example of his Italian Futurist predecessors, but Malevich’s interpretation
of his new forms was quite different from the Italian theories, which derived
from science, technology, and the rhythms of modern life. Malevich’s text be-
gins:

All former and contemporary painting before Suprematism, and sculp-

ture, the word, and music were enslaved by the form of nature, and they
await their liberation in order to speak their own language, and not rely
upon the intellect, sense, logic, philosophy, psychology, the various laws
of causality and the technical changes in life.11

It was a good beginning, but from that point on, he described only the his-
torical origins of painting styles, especially Cubism. He did not return to the
topic of Suprematism until the last page of the text – and then quite briefly.
He ended abruptly, with a promise to his readers that sometime later he would
write about Suprematism:

I have transformed myself into a zero of form, and gone beyond ‘0’ to ‘1’.

10 Malevich, letter to Matiushin, 24 September 2015; Malevich, Letters, I: 68.

11 K. Malevich, Ot kubizma k suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm [From Cubism to
Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting] (Petrograd: L. Ia. Ginzburg, 1916); Full En-
glish translation in Charlotte Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the
Origins of Abstraction in Russia (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1980), 107-110; quote, 108.
32 Douglas

Believing that Cubo-Futurism has finished its tasks, I am crossing over

to Suprematism, to a new realism in painting, to objectless creation.
In time, I will say more about Suprematism, painting, sculpture and
the dynamics of musical masses.12

At the end of October, with time before a projected December exhibition be-
coming short, Malevich sent his text for evaluation by Matiushin, his prospec-
tive publisher. In Kuntsevo almost five months previously, he had asked
Matiushin to be his adviser while he wrestled with his new distinctive art:
‘I need a person with whom I can speak frankly and who can help me posit a
theory based on the origins [vozniknoveniia] of painting. I think that person
can only be you’.13 Malevich was aware that his text was not really a satisfac-
tory explanation of Suprematism but, nevertheless, he hoped that Matiushin
would help him to edit and publish it. Matiushin, of course, noticed that it was
not really about Suprematism at all.
In a lengthy six-page letter, which includes a flurry of various reactions to
Matiushin’s objections, Malevich sounds agitated and indecisive:

As for my article being a reiteration, as you write, I don’t think so … I

completely agree with you that it is all about Cubo-Futurism and that
there is very little about Suprematism. But I thought that with this article
I was making a modest explanation of Cubo-Futurism and of Painting in
general and ending with a stipulation to write about Suprematism in the
future … I considered it necessary to write a little about basic ideas. But
I was afraid that the article would be too long, as you wrote. That’s why
I shortened it … I consider that the ending is a little truncated, some-
thing has to be added … It’s missing the main thing, Suprematism. So
now, I’m thinking that it is more sensible not to publish it, and to publish
something on Suprematism … I would just like my article to be pub-
lished, because in it I make a certain analysis and reach a milestone on
the road to Suprematism and document my works, so that no one steals
my [author’s] right from me … I cannot imagine. You write, ‘Delete cer-
tain things from my article in order not to obscure my ideas’ … It seems
to me that if you delete, then that’s it, because my idea is essentially in-
dicated only at the end … I apologise for these troubles, and I am again
thinking of not publishing.14

12 Douglas, Swans, 110.

13 Malevich, letter to Matiushin, [beginning of June 1915]; Malevich, Letters, I: 66.
14 Malevich, letter to Matiushin, [end of October 1915]; Malevich, Letters, I: 70-71.
Defining Suprematism: The Year of Discovery 33

In the end, of course, Matiushin did publish it; the booklet appeared in late
November, in time for the opening of the exhibition in Petrograd on 19 Decem-
ber. Malevich avoided the problem of what to call the exhibition by sticking to
numbers: his initial idea of zero, plus the number ten, signifying the number
of artists who would, he hoped, go beyond zero – and a grudging compromise
with the recalcitrant Russian Futurists: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paint-
ings, 0.10 (Zero-Ten).15
But curiously, throughout October and into November, an intense time lead-
ing up to the exhibition, and a time when he was also having ‘bad premoni-
tions’ about the war and surviving in the army, uppermost in Malevich’s mind
was not painting at all, but music. He first mentioned music to Matiushin on
12 October, saying that he had produced a ‘musical analysis’ of

The musical origin of forms that arise as a soul experiences the condi-
tions of life around it. The ‘I’ within the chaos of things, the origin of
musical melody.
A crossing over to a stasis of musical sound, and to a dynamic move-
ment of musical masses.
A liberation of the instrument and the elevation of the musical wave
above one’s ‘I’.
That is what keeps swirling around in my head.16

At this very early time – October 1915 – a time when Malevich had only just
thought up a name for his new work, when none of that work had ever been
exhibited, and few people knew, or could even imagine, what it looked like,
he began to demand that composers – in particular a childhood friend, the
composer Nikolai Roslavets (1881-1944) – produce a corresponding music of
geometric forms.
Malevich had recently encountered Roslavets – by then a fairly well-known
composer – at an early organisational meeting for a new arts school in
Moscow, which Malevich had been invited to join as a professor of contem-
porary painting. There, during an exchange of views about the mission of the
school, instead of speaking about familiar modes of art, Malevich took the op-
portunity to put forward his ideas about geometric form, (i.e. Suprematism) in
several types of art, especially music. He reported to Matiushin:

15 Poslednaia futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin, 0,10 (nol’-desiat’) [The Last Futurist Exhibition
of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero-Ten)] opened at Nadezhda Dobychina’s gallery [Khudozhestven-
noe biuro N. E. Dobychinoi] in Petrograd on 19 December 1915.
16 Malevich, letter to Matiushin, 12 October 1915; Malevich, Letters, I: 69.
34 Douglas

The views that I expressed about music and the decorative and theatre
arts were received with bewilderment and rejection, because my form
does not express anything.

At the meeting, he had lectured his old friend Roslavets, in particular, on the
primacy of a new music and its proper structure.

I committed a terrible blunder in pointing out to Roslavets that contem-

porary music must move toward expressing musical layers and must have
the length and thickness of a musical mass moving in time, and what’s
more, that a dynamism of musical masses must alternate with stasis, that
is, with delaying the musical sound mass in time.17

When Malevich was sarcastically asked where he had graduated in music, he

abruptly resigned.
Malevich was not the only member of the Russian Avant-Garde to take an
interest in the new music. Alexander Scriabin’s compositions with their associ-
ation of chords and atonal harmonies with specific colours inspired many con-
temporary artists and composers. But unlike Scriabin, and Wassily Kandinsky,
Mikhail Matiushin and Nikolai Kulbin (1868-1917), for example, Malevich does
not seem to have focused on defining new scales or microtones, or exploring
musical colour symbolism, but rather concentrated on geometric forms and
the purely physical qualities of sound – mass, stasis and dynamism.
What could have sparked such a vision of music? Although Malevich was
convinced that music was quite important, initially he did not simply turn to
Matiushin, who, after all, was a violinist and composer, for the task of creating
Suprematist music. This would seem to have been the most natural and con-
venient thing to do, but apparently Malevich felt that Matiushin’s music was
too distant from what he had in mind. Two years earlier, when Matiushin pub-
lished excerpts from Victory over the Sun, he had included a few bars of music
with quarter-tone notes.18 But this music did not in any way suggest musical
masses or geometric forms.
Yet it is not surprising that Malevich so insistently coupled Suprematism
with music, among the other arts. The war-time era just prior to and after the

17 Malevich, letter to Matiushin, 19 October 1915; Malevich, Letters, I: 69.

18 Even so, there does not seem to have been any quarter-tone music in the performances of
Victory, although in 1915 Matiushin did publish A Guide to the Study of Quarter Tone for the
Violin. See Matiushin, Rukovodstvo k izucheniiu chetvertogo tona dlia skripki (Petrograd:
Zhuravl’, 1915).
Defining Suprematism: The Year of Discovery 35

Revolution was a time of intense musical innovation and energetic advance-

ment of new theories in music, which were inevitably associated with modern
and avant-garde art. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Scriabin’s asso-
ciation of musical tones with particular colours, for example, was widely de-
bated among contemporary artists. Kandinsky saw explicit expressive mean-
ings conveyed by sounds, shapes, and colours. But there were even more
radical musical ideas, represented by a pioneering group of composers and
music theorists, such as Nikolai Kulbin, Arthur Lourié (Artur Lur’e, 1892-1966),
Roslavets, and Arsenii Avraamov (1886-1944). Each, in his own way, was intent
on replacing the classical 12-tone scale with new sounds – sounds produced
by nature and the environment, overtones, new harmonies, microtones, disso-
nance and even noises – for the sake of developing a more modern music.19
A possible source of inspiration was the composer Arthur Lourié’s ‘visual
music’, which was notated on the page in isolated sections or blocks, leaving
blank areas between groups of notes. In 1915, he composed a work descriptively
called ‘Forms in the Air’.20 The young Lourié was well known in St. Petersburg
by the time that Victory was staged there at the end of 1913. He was especially
close to Malevich’s colleague, the artist and musical theorist Nikolai Kulbin,
who enthusiastically introduced him to the Petersburg Futurists, including
the habitués of the Stray Dog Cabaret. Although Lourié dressed as a dandy,21
and his music often sounded more romantic than avant-garde, between 1910
and 1916 he could reliably be found at every major avant-garde event in the
city. Vladimir Mayakovsky had good reason to assert, ‘Whoever doesn’t know

19 They all knew each other and were on cordial terms. When Avraamov moved to St. Peters-
burg from Norway, it was Roslavets who wrote a letter of introduction for him to Kulbin.
For more on these composers, see Douglas, Swans; B. M. Kalaushin, ed., Apollon (St. Pe-
tersburg: Apollon, 1995) vol. 1, books 1, 2 [Kulbin]; Klara Moricz and Simon Morrison, eds.,
Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)
[Lourié]; Marina Lobanova, Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets i kul’tura ego vremeni (Moscow:
Petroglif, 2011) [Roslavets]; and Andrey Smirnov, Sound in Z (London: Koenig Books, 2013)
[Avraamov].
20 Aleksandra Shatskikh rejects the idea that Malevich had anything to do with Lourié or
his work, mainly because of the incompatibility of Lourié’s ‘Petersburg decadent’ habits
of dress and behaviour with Malevich’s own manners and activities. See Shatskikh, Black
Square, 203-204.
21 The writer Aleksandr Kuprin described Lourié: ‘Always in a bright green suit of outlandish
cut, decorated with huge, green, saucer-sized buttons in the front and back and on the
cuffs, a great flat collar, and with his long, veined neck with an Adam’s apple left bare,
wearing large open shoes with high heels like a French woman’. Ali-Khan [A. I. Kuprin],
‘Pokhozhdeniia “Zelenoi loshadki”’ [The Escapades of a ‘Green Hobby-Horse’], Novaia
Russkaia zhizn’ (Helsinki), 21 April 1920. Cited in B. Kats and R. Timenchik, Anna Akhma-
tova i muzyka. Issledovatel’skie ocherki (Leningrad: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1989), 32.
36 Douglas

Lourié is a blockhead!’22 Lourié had taken part in the writing and publication
of a manifesto entitled ‘We and the West’, which advocated modern paint-
ing, poetry and music.23 In a photograph of the crowd assembled for Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti’s first lecture in Petersburg on 1 February 1914, Marinetti is
shown seated in the centre, Lourié on his right, and Kulbin on his left.24 Two
days after Marinetti departed for Moscow, a programme entitled ‘Our answer
to Marinetti’ was arranged at the Concert Hall of Petersburg’s Swedish Church.
It began with lectures by the poet Benedikt Livshits and Lourié, two of the
three signatories of the recent ‘We and the West’ manifesto. Livshits spoke
about ‘Italian and Russian Futurism and their Interrelations’, while Lourié lec-
tured on ‘The Music of Italian Futurism’.
A poster announcing the event enumerates Lourié’s theses: 1) ‘The Art of
Sounds of the Italians and their 15 noises [shumikh]’; 2) ‘The Real ‘Art of
Sound’ — the music of interference — higher chromaticism — chromo-
acoustics’.25 The list of the respondents included Kulbin, Roman Jakobson,
Kruchenykh, David Burliuk, and Roslavets.26
An article by Lourié on ‘higher chromaticism’ (microtones) appeared in late
February 1915, in the inaugural issue of the almanac Sagittarius [Strelets], a
publication most likely of special interest to Kruchenykh and Malevich.27 In

22 ‘Tot dur’e, kto ne znaet Lur’e’, cited in Roman Gul’, Ia Unes Rossiiu (New York: Most, 1984),
II: 88.
23 G. Iakulov, B. Livshits, and A. V. Lur’e, ‘My i Zapad’, reprinted in V. N. Terekhina and A. P.
Zemenk, eds., Russkii Futurizm (Moscow: Nasledie, 1999), 243-244.
24 On Marinetti and Lourié, see Aleksandr E. Parnis, ‘K istorii odnoi polemiki. F. T. Marinetti
i russkie futuristi’ [The History of a Polemic: F. T. Marinetti and the Russian Futurists]
in Futurizm – radikal’naia revol’iutsiia. Italiia – Rossiia. K 100 letiiu khudozhestvennogo
dvizheniia (Moscow: Krasnaia Ploshchad, 2008), 183, note 40.
25 The poster is reproduced in Parnis, ‘K istorii’, 184.
26 Roslavets did not appear at the event. At the time, he was a tuberculosis patient at a
sanitarium in Yalta, and so could not participate.
27 Artur Lur’e, ‘K muzike vysshego khromatizma’ [Towards a Music of Greater Chromati-
cism], Strelets, 1 (1915): 81-83. As an illustration of Lourié’s chromaticism, the article
included music for his 1912 piano piece Prélude. In addition to Lourié’s article, the al-
manac contained a poem by Kruchenykh, two new lithographs by his companion Olga
Rozanova, and an article about Wyndham Lewis and the English Vorticists, illustrated
with a reproduction of Lewis’s Portrait of an English Woman. On the possible importance
of this article to Malevich, see Charlotte Douglas, ‘The Art of Pure Design’, in Rosalind
P. Blakesley and Susan E. Reid, eds., Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in
Painting, Architecture and the Decorative Arts (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2006), 86-111; [available online at charlottedouglas.academia.edu.]. The almanac
was published in February 1915; a celebration of the publication was held at the Stray
Dog Cabaret on 25 February 1915. For a description of the festivities see A. E. Parnis and
R. D. Timenchik, ‘Programmy “Brodiachei Sobaki”’, Pamiatniki kul’tury. Ezhegodnik 1983
(Leningrad: Nauka, 1985), 241-242.
Defining Suprematism: The Year of Discovery 37

the spring of 1915, Lourié was pictured in the press with Kulbin, Olga Rozanova,
and Mayakovsky.28 At a gathering later that year, Lourié encountered Malevich
personally at ‘apartment no. 5’ in the Petrograd Academy of Arts, and Lourié
was also present at the 0.10 exhibition, where he played, and perhaps dis-
played, ‘Synthèses’, his 1914 composition for piano.29 Matiushin’s critical review
of the exhibition included the enigmatic phrase, ‘Kulbinism was evidenced …
by Lourié, who played musically with Malevich’s little squares’.30
Undoubtedly, a significant impetus for Malevich’s insistence on a ‘Supre-
matist music’ came from the Italian Futurists’ own bold entry into music,
including the invention and energetic concerts of Luigi Russolo’s ‘noise ma-
chines’, the intoners [intonarumori]. Malevich was a close follower of Italian
Futurist art and theorising. In addition to numerous reports in the Russian
press about the latest Futurist events throughout Europe, and the publication
of individual manifestos, three books of translated Futurist manifestos were
published in Russian in 1914.31 Malevich was quite familiar with this litera-
ture, even copying out passages for his own use.32 He was keenly involved in
Marinetti’s controversial visit to Moscow, arguing publicly in the newspaper
Virgin Soil [Nov’] against Mikhail Larionov’s angry and inhospitable reaction
to the Italian’s visit.33
In publicising Suprematism, Malevich adhered quite closely to the Futurist
model, quickly associating it with the other arts – poetry, sculpture, ornament,

28 The photograph appeared in Sinii zhurnal (Petrograd), 12 (21 March 1915): 7.

29 Shatskikh, Black Square, 204.
30 Mikhail Matiushin, ‘O vystavke “Poslednikh futuristov”’, Al’manakh vesennii (Petrograd,
1916), 17-18; English translation, ‘On the Last Futurist Exhibition’, in Malevich, Letters, II:
123.
31 The three publications are: Genrikh Tasteven, Futurizm: na puti k novomu simvolizmu
(Moscow: Iris, 1914); Mikhail A. Engelgardt, Futurizm (St. Petersburg: Prometei, 1914); and
Vadim Shershenevich, ed. and trans., Manifesty italianskogo futurizma. Sobranie man-
ifestov (Moscow: Tipografiia Russkago tovarishchestva, 1914), which included thirteen
manifestos, among them Umberto Boccioni’s ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture’;
Carlo Carrà’s ‘The Painting of Sounds, Noises, and Smells’; and Filippo Marinetti’s ‘The
Variety Theatre’.
32 On Malevich’s copying and occasionally quoting (and misquoting) from Marinetti, see
Irina Vakar, ‘Afterward: Kazimir Malevich and his Contemporaries: A Biography in Per-
sonalities’, Malevich, Letters, II: 579.
33 See Nov’, 12 (28 January 1914): 5; and Aurora Egidio, ‘The Collision of Italian and Russian
Futurism: Marinetti’s Visit to Russia’, in Rosamund Bartlett and Sarah Dadswell, eds., Vic-
tory over the Sun: The World’s First Futurist Opera (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2012),
310. For Malevich’s letter, see Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed.
A. S. Shatskikh (Moscow: Gileia, 1995), I: 25. For details about press coverage, see Andrei
V. Krusanov, Russkii avangard: 1907-1932 (St. Petersburg: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie,
1996), I: chapter 2, section 4.
38 Douglas

and music. The interest of the Italian Futurists in music stood out sharply in
their manifestos and demonstrations.34 There were performances of the inton-
ers in several European cities in 1914.35 The bold Futurist music was repeatedly
cited in debates, lectures, and the Russian press. At the same time that he was
urging Roslavets to produce geometric music, Malevich was complaining to
Matiushin that Roslavets was behind the times, and was not Futurist enough:

Roslavets understands a little, but as a person he becomes too passion-

ately enthusiastic … He doesn’t have the mind of a Futurist. He is publish-
ing a lot of sheet music for his romances based on poems by Severianin
and Gnedov.36 Damn. It makes me furious that he writes like that. It looks
like I will be giving concerts myself soon to show that it is all wrong. More
and more these musical masses, blocks, layers of some 20 chords hurled
into space, keep appearing [to me], along with the frozen mass of a mu-
sical cube. I keep hearing these 700-pound layers of sound flying about,
and also the alogism of instruments in the music.37

Even so, when Malevich suddenly (and briefly) had some hope of financial
and other support for Suprematism and its world-wide recognition, he finally
resorted to Matiushin for musical help. At the beginning of November, the
wealthy Natalia Davydova had come to see him and viewed his new work en-
thusiastically. She was about to open an exhibition in Moscow of handwork
from Verbovka, her Ukrainian estate. Seizing the opportunity, Malevich swiftly
contributed three Suprematist works to her exhibition, which were shown
simply as designs for two scarfs and a cushion.38 He wrote to Matiushin ex-
citedly, asking him to give up art and concentrate on music:

34 The Italian Futurist music manifestos included Balilla Pratella’s, ‘Manifesto of Futurist
Musicians’, published 1912; Luigi Russolo’s, ‘The Art of Noises’, 1913; and Carlo Carrà’s ‘The
Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells’, 1913.
35 Performances were held in Milan, Genoa, and London in 1914.
36 Igor Severianin (1887-1941) and Vasilisk (Vasilii) Gnedov (1890-1978) were modernist poets
associated with the Ego Futurist group. Their work often exhibited a sentimentality or
self-centered lyricism that had little in common with Malevich’s aesthetic interests.
37 Malevich, letter to Matiushin, [October – November 1915]; Malevich, Letters, I: 72. Male-
vich wrote ‘20 pud layers of sound’, by which he meant something like ‘huge and heavy’
layers. 20 pud is equivalent to 722.3 lbs or 327.6 kilos.
38 The exhibition opened on 6 November 1915, thus becoming the first public showing
of Suprematism anywhere. See Katalog vystavki sovremennogo dekorativnogo iskusstva.
Vyshivki i kovry po eskizam khudozhnikov (Moscow: Galereia Lemers’e, 1915). For a descrip-
tion of the exhibition and a photograph, see Douglas, ‘The Art of Pure Design’, 86-111. For
a detailed biography of Davydova and further analysis of the exhibition, see Shatskikh,
Black Square, 69-81.
Defining Suprematism: The Year of Discovery 39

Throw away your brush and prepare the music, there are enough Painting
warriors in our ranks. But you are the only one with our idea. Search for
new forms for sound, in order to be ready. I will write to Kruchenykh and
tell him to write new words for performances.39

Lurking behind all Malevich’s discussions of early Suprematism is a central

question, similar to one that has plagued mathematicians throughout history:
was Suprematism discovered or invented? Art historians, basing their judge-
ments on the artist’s evolution from his Cubist and Alogist works, tend to say
that Malevich invented or created Suprematism. But initially, Malevich himself
didn’t claim anything of the sort; in fact, that was a good part of the reason
he had such difficulty in formulating the brochure From Cubism to Suprema-
tism. Suprematism seemed so startlingly new to him, that he found it difficult
to trace logically its gradual development from earlier forms. Throughout the
available early letters and texts, he treated Suprematism as a discovery — ei-
ther of a physical space (such as when he wrote, ‘I am crossing over to Supre-
matism’) or the visual revelation of a law of nature. To Malevich, Suprematism
felt like a discovery. He believed that in some significant sense it was true –
that for the first time it made a pre-existing reality visible. Indeed, that was
why he called it the ‘New Reality’.
In early June 1915, while he was still in Kuntsevo and working on the first
Suprematist canvases, Malevich wrote to Matiushin,

In view of the alarming times that the War is bringing upon us, I am being
forced to work terribly intensively, and I am painting pictures (they are
not exactly pictures, the time for pictures is past).40

This observation draws attention to the fact that, from the very beginning,
Malevich regarded Suprematist works as something other than normal paint-
ings. ‘The time for pictures is past’ was a conclusion that Malevich came to
right away, in the very first period of Suprematism. But if he was not painting
pictures, one wonders, what were they?
He himself did not find the answer easy to come by. Even after the 0.10 exhi-
bition had closed, the artist continued his efforts to understand the nature of

39 Malevich, letter to Matiushin, 5 November 1915; Malevich, Letters, I: 72.

40 Malevich, letter to Matiushin, [beginning of June 1915]; Malevich, Letters, I: 66. In De-
cember 1920, Malevich wrote something similar: ‘There can be no talk of painting in
Suprematism. Painting has long ago been outlived, and the painter himself is no more
than a prejudice of the past’. [‘O zhivopisi v suprematizme ne mozhet byt’ rechi, zhivopis’
davno izzhita, i sam khudozhnik predrassudok proshlogo’]; K. Malevich, Suprematizm. 34
risunka (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920); reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 189.
40 Douglas

his new work.41 To him, it seemed to reveal locations in space, where Suprema-
tist forms manifested a logical structure, and demonstrated some fundamental
law.
Early in April 1916, two and a half months after the 0.10 exhibition had
closed, Malevich reported his artistic progress to Matiushin:

The war keeps shortening my days, while I am working diligently on my

Supremus. I am now painting Supremus No. 51, in which I am discovering
very complicated combinations. I am seized by terror, I feel in contact
with space; still, this is not new, though its magnitude exceeds everything
that has happened up to now.
The main thing is that I am finding something new in the picture, a law
of the birth of forms contingent on their distance from each other. But
it’s strange that in the world, their [inter]dependence in space is such
that two forms of the same scale do not exist in a relationship to each

other.

Khlebnikov was at my place and took several drawings to measure

their relationships … but I don’t know if he’ll notice what I noticed: the

attraction of the forms, so that in my painting

No. 51, the law of its construction becomes clearly visible. Perhaps [it is]
how the World and its forms are designed; the connection and attraction

41 The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero-Ten) closed on 19 January 1916.
Defining Suprematism: The Year of Discovery 41

and scale of one form to another establish the placement of their rela-
tionship.42
I have just remembered Khlebnikov’s definition of capital cities, and
their places of origin. Isn’t there an attraction of the sum of the lines
of a person to the sum of the forms in the location of a great node of
settlement?
….
A capital city is a form in relation to which everything else is con-
structed, etc.43 The numbers discovered by Khlebnikov may speak to the
fact that there lies in Supremus something great, possessing a direct law,
or even the actual law of world creation itself. That through me passes
a force, the general harmony of creative laws that guides everyone and
everything, which up until now has not seemed important.
…. I wonder, are there bodies like these in the

world, in space? I think they

exist, but we do not know them.44
It is too bad that Khleb is not here, then I would talk to him about the
forms of paintings; the unconscious is fading more and more, and more
and more you start to feel the clarity of a definite Law.
I almost feel like calling my painting No. 51 some kind of chart, by
which one could read obscure secrets for our ‘I’.
No. 51 is doing a lot of enormous things for me. What a pity that so few
can read it.45

42 Malevich, letter to Matiushin, 4 April 1916; Malevich, Letters, I: 79-80. The force of attrac-
tion to which Malevich was referring is Isaac Newton’s law of Universal Gravitational At-
traction, which states that any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force
that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to
the square of the distance between them.
43 Here, Malevich was referring to Velimir Khlebnikov’s theory that major cities appear
on the surface of the Earth in accordance with a natural order established by plane-
tary forces. It was published in the journal of the Union of Youth, which Malevich knew
well. See Khlebnikov ‘Uchitel’ i uchenik’, Soiuz molodezhi, 3 (1913); reprinted in Velimir
Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, ed. M. Ia. Poliakova (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987), 586; English
translation in The Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov: Volume I, Letters and Theoretical
Writings, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1987), 279-280.
44 Malevich here seems to have been wondering about the ultimate material reality of the
forms in his paintings.
45 Malevich, letter to Matiushin, 4 April 1916; Malevich, Letters, I: 79-80.
42 Douglas

In speaking of ‘the connection and attraction and scale’ in the design of the
world, Malevich was referring to Isaac Newton’s well-known law of Universal
Gravitational Attraction. What was astonishing to the artist was how this law
seems to turn up in Suprematism. It was this apparent power of Suprematism
to penetrate outer space and reveal a working universe that made it something
more than mere picture-making for him; ‘I almost feel like calling my painting
No. 51 some kind of chart on which one could read hidden secrets for our I’.
Suprematism was Malevich’s telescope, his celestial guide, providing glimpses
of the cosmos and us within it, and revealing secrets that might be deciphered.
In April 1916, this was the closest that he could come to explaining his new
Suprematist paintings.
By early May, Malevich had returned to Kuntsevo for the summer. There,
he had time to reflect on his accomplishments during the previous year, to
prepare a new edition of the brochure, to think about Suprematist poetry, and
to get ready to enter the army.46 In June, he wrote to Matiushin, summarising
his ideas:

The keys of Suprematism lead me to the discovery of that which is not

yet recognized. My new painting does not belong solely to the earth.
The earth has been abandoned like a house infested with termites. And,
indeed, in a person, in his consciousness, lies an aspiration to space, the
attraction of a ‘liftoff from planet earth’.
Futurism and Cubism worked almost exclusively on developing space,
but its form, being tied to objectness, did not permit of even imagining
the presence of universal space; its space was bounded by the space that
divided each thing from other things on earth.
But a plane of painterly colour hung on a sheet of white canvas gives a
strong sensation of space directly to our consciousness, it transports me
to a fathomless void, where one senses around oneself the creative nodes
of the universe.47

During the first year of Suprematism, Malevich focused on two major subjects:
music and the cosmos. But why these two? Did he see a connection between

46 Malevich advocated combining letters and sounds in a kind of sound poetry. He ap-
proached poetic structure in the same way as he did music, i.e. as ‘the distribution of
letters and sound masses in space, which resembles Suprematism in painting. These
masses will hang in space and will make it possible for our consciousness to penetrate
further and further from the earth’; Malevich, letter to Matiushin, [before 23 June 1916];
Malevich, Letters, I: 89-90.
47 Malevich, letter to Matiushin, [before 23 June 1916]; Malevich, Letters, I: 89-90.
Defining Suprematism: The Year of Discovery 43

two such apparently disparate domains? While the simple historical analogy
between Italian Futurist music and Malevich’s geometricised music may have
stimulated his initial interest, ultimately this does not seem to have been his
principal motivation for the turn to music. More likely, both the interest in
music, and his cosmic ruminations, were the beginning of his tireless quest for
significant form, form that he believed lay at the origin of all things.
What Malevich seems to have been looking for in music was not written
music especially, but the performance of Suprematism, that which is heard.
In October, Malevich had told Matiushin directly that he was looking for the
origin of forms in music, forms that were created from the environment, the
‘conditions of life’. At the moment when it appeared that his new art would
be financially supported, so that he could do whatever he most desired, he
beseeched Matiushin to give up painting, and to concentrate instead on sound
for a new kind of performance and theatrical presentation. In performance,
invisible sound moves in response to unseen physical laws, quite similar to the
way celestial bodies move in space.
The geometries of Suprematism gave powerful fuel to Malevich’s belief that
such a form or forms were essential, that is, that they lay at the core, not only
of music, but also of the whole natural world, as well as art and culture gener-
ally. Rather than seek inspiration from a particular composer or written piece
of music, Malevich sought evidence of a common pattern in sound and in the
cosmos – a simple form underlying the structure of everything, including mu-
sic and his new painting. By the spring of 1916, he was pondering the existence
in space of specific shapes found in his art. Suprematism, for him, contained
so much latent power that he thought it might lead him to the underlying
organisation of the world.
As time went on, the musings of this initial year would find their way
into the artist’s later work – the art and pedagogical principles developed in
Vitebsk, his central theory of the additional element, and the architectural
models of his space dwellings. These early reflections underlay and sustained
Malevich’s completely autonomous abstract art, born ‘in potential’ – at the
very beginning.
 Chapter 3

Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of

Space One Hundred Years Later

Linda Dalrymple Henderson

The importance of the concept of a fourth dimension of space for Kazimir

Malevich and his colleagues, the musician/painter Mikhail Matiushin and the
poet Aleksei Kruchenykh, has long been acknowledged in scholarship on the
Russian Avant-Garde.1 Malevich made his interest in the subject clear by refer-
ring specifically to the ‘fourth dimension’ in the titles and subtitles of certain
of his Suprematist works shown at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings,
0.10 (Zero-Ten) in December 1915 (Fig. 3.1). Central for Malevich and his friends
were the writings of the Russian mystical philosopher Peter D. Ouspensky (Petr
Demianovich Uspenskii), notably The Fourth Dimension of 1909 and Tertium
Organum of 1911, and, through him, the pioneering ‘hyperspace philosophy’
of the Englishman Charles Howard Hinton (A New Era of Thought, 1888; and
The Fourth Dimension, 1904).2 Yet, the idea of a possible fourth dimension of
space, which might hold a reality truer than that of visual perception, did
not arrive in Russia in a vacuum. Occult publications (both Theosophical and
spiritualist) had been major vehicles for the popularisation of the notion, and

1 The fourth dimension has been a theme in the literature on Malevich and the Russian Avant-
Garde since the early 1970s. Charlotte Douglas and I completed dissertations involving the
topic in 1975 (Henderson, Yale University) and 1976 (Douglas, The University of Texas at
Austin). These subsequently appeared as Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimen-
sion and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1983; rev. ed., Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013); and Charlotte Douglas, Swans of Other
Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the Origins of Abstraction in Russia (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Re-
search Press, 1980). See also Susan Compton, ‘Malevich and the Fourth Dimension’, Studio
International, 187 (April 1974): 190-95.
2 See Petr Demianovich Uspenskii, Chetvertoe izmerenie. Opyt izsledovaniia oblasti neizmer-
imago [The Fourth Dimension: An Experiment in the Examination of the Realm of the Im-
measurable] (St. Petersburg: Trud, 1910 [1909]); and Uspenskii, Tertium Organum. Kliuch k za-
gadkam mira [Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World] (St. Petersburg: ‘Trud’,
1911); English translation, P. D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought, A
Key to the Enigmas of the World, trans. from 2nd Russian ed. (1916) by Claude Bragdon and
Nicholas Bessaraboff (2nd American ed., rev., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). See also ‘The
Fourth Dimension’, in P. D. Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe: Principles of the Psycho-

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_005

Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 45

Figure 3.1 The display of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist canvases at The Last Futurist Exhi-
bition of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero-Ten), December 1915 – January 1916, Petrograd.

from the 1880s onwards it was also often associated with the scientific hypoth-
esis of a space-filling ‘ether’. Both of these concepts figured prominently in the
international cultures of science and occultism, which were often intercon-
nected in this period and which served as the backdrop for the innovations of
many modern artists.3

logical Method in Its Application to Problems of Science, Religion, and Art, trans. R. R. Merton
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1931).
Hinton’s books inaugurated what I have termed ‘hyperspace philosophy’; see Henderson,
Fourth Dimension (1983), 25; (2013), 120; Charles Howard Hinton, A New Era of Thought (Lon-
don: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1888); and Hinton, The Fourth Dimension (London: Swan
Sonnenschein & Co., 1904; and New York: John Lane, 1904). For Russian translations, see
Charles Howard Hinton, Chetvertoe izmerenie i era novoi mysli (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo
Novyi Chelovek, 1915); and Hinton, Vospitanie voobrazhenie i chetvertoe izmerenie (St. Peters-
burg: Trud, 1915).
3 See L. D. Henderson, ‘The Forgotten Meta-Realities of Modernism: Die Uebersinnliche Welt
and the International Cultures of Science and Occultism’, Glass Bead (Paris), 0 (2016), http
://www.glass-bead.org/article/the-forgotten-meta-realities-of-modernism/. For an overview
of the impact of the fourth dimension on modern artists, see Henderson, ‘The Image and
46 Dalrymple Henderson

The fourth dimension and the ether stood as signs of the invisible ‘meta-
realities’ that were a vital part of the layperson’s world view for much of the
first two decades of the twentieth century. At the same time that the psy-
chophysiologist Wilhelm Wundt, so important for the Russian Avant-Garde
and for Ouspensky, was studying the processes of sensation and perception,
discoveries and developments in physics in the 1890s, such as X-rays, the elec-
tron, radioactivity, and wireless telegraphy, were making it evident that ‘nature’
included much more than what the human eye can detect.4 This scientific mi-
lieu, to which the ether was central and which formed the larger context of
interest in a supra-sensible fourth spatial dimension, has long been missing
from histories of modern art and modernism more generally.
Part of the problem in recovering this historical moment is the fact that
Albert Einstein and Relativity Theory, which gained widespread public atten-
tion only in late 1919, subsequently overshadowed our knowledge of the ether
physics that reigned in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century.5 Al-
though Einstein did not declare that there was no ether, he did assert that it
had no mechanical properties and was, therefore, irrelevant to his new physics.
Likewise, General Relativity, incorporating Hermann Minkowski’s 1908 posit-
ing of a four-dimensional space-time continuum, redefined the fourth dimen-
sion as time, the view that would dominate discussions of the fourth dimen-
sion from the 1920s onward. Only the late twentieth-century emergence of

Imagination of the Fourth Dimension in Twentieth-Century Art and Culture’, Configurations,

17 (Winter 2009): 131-60. For the occult context of the ether and its relevance for František
Kupka and Umberto Boccioni, see Henderson, ‘Vibratory Modernism: Kupka, Boccioni, and
the Ether of Space’, in Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, eds., From Energy to In-
formation: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 2002), 126-49. On Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and the ether, see
Henderson, ‘Abstraction, the Ether, and the Fourth Dimension: Kandinsky, Mondrian, and
Malevich in Context’, in Marian Ackermann and Isabelle Malz, eds., Kandinsky, Malewitsch,
Mondrian: Der Weisse Abgrund Unendlichkeit / The Infinite White Abyss (Düsseldorf: Kunst-
sammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2014), 37-55 (German), 233-44 (English), which includes a
brief version of the Hinton-Ouspensky-ether reading of Malevich offered here.
4 For the developments discussed here, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Editor’s Introduc-
tion: II. Cubism, Futurism, and Ether Physics in the Early Twentieth Century’, Science in
Context, 17 (Winter 2004): 445-66. For an excellent introduction to physics in this period, see
Alex Keller, The Infancy of Atomic Physics: Hercules in His Cradle (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1983).
5 On Relativity Theory and the eclipse expedition, see Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A
History of Physics in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999);
and Thomas F. Glick, ed., The Comparative Reception of Relativity (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Pub-
lishing Co., 1987). On the delayed reception of Relativity Theory, see Henderson, ‘Editor’s
Introduction: I. Writing Modern Art and Science—An Overview’, Science in Context, 423-45.
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 47

string theory and new cosmologies involving higher dimensions of space—

along with computer graphics—would bring the fourth dimension back to
widespread popular attention.6
In her 1991 essay ‘Malevich and Western European Art Theory’, Charlotte
Douglas argued for the importance of the transnational circulation of artis-
tic ideas in Europe and Russia and noted ‘changes in the way the world was
viewed due to the popularization of new scientific concepts and the rush of
new technology’, including flight.7 As she states, ‘Abstract styles were the at-
tempt to see deeply into the structure of the world, to bring together former
dichotomies—matter and spirit, material and energy’.8 The essay that follows
owes its inspiration to Douglas’s pioneering exploration of the Russian Avant-
Garde and the stimulus that it derived from the science of figures such as
Wundt and Ernst Mach.9 My goal here, however, is to enlarge that background
by incorporating the popular scientific milieu of ether physics and related sci-
entific discoveries as the setting for the interest of both Ouspensky and the
Russian Avant-Garde in the fourth dimension.

Background: The Fourth Dimension and the Ether

In January 1916, Matiushin, in an article on the 0.10 exhibition, named the

figures who had been crucial sources for the Avant-Garde on the issue of
space: ‘Lobachevsky, Riemann, Poincaré, Bouché, Hinton, and Minkowski’.10
Matiushin emphasised the mathematical sources that had stimulated interest
in new kinds of spaces: the pioneers and advocates of the curvilinear ‘non-
Euclidean’ geometries, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, Georg Friedrich Bern-
hard Riemann, and Henri Poincaré. He concluded with a reference to the very

6 See Henderson, ‘Reintroduction’, in Fourth Dimension (2013), 65-91.

7 Charlotte Douglas, ‘Malevich and Western European Art Theory’, in Malevich: Artist and
Theoretician (New York: Abbeville, 1991), 56.
8 Ibid., 60.
9 On Wundt’s importance, see Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds, 69-70; and Douglas, ‘Male-
vich and Western European Art Theory’, 58-59. See also Gerald Janacek, Zaum: The Tran-
srational Poetry of Russian Futurism (San Diego, CA: San Diego State University, 1996),
14-21. On Mach, see Douglas, ‘Mach and Malevich: Sensation, Suprematism, and the Ob-
jectless World’, The Structurist, 49/50 (2009/2010): 58-65.
10 Mikhail Matiushin, ‘O vystavki poslednikh futuristov’, Ocharovannyi strannik, 10 (Spring
1916): 16 [signed January 1916]; English translation as ‘About the Exhibition of “The Last
Futurists”’, in Matthew Drutt, ed., In Search of 0,10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting
(Basel: Fondation Beyeler / Hatje Cantz, 2015), 247-48. Here, Boucher is misidentified as
‘possibly Maxime Bȏcher’ (ibid., 248).
48 Dalrymple Henderson

latest science, that of Hermann Minkowski, to which he may have been ex-
posed in the popular writings by the physicist Nikolai Alekseevich Umov.11
Matiushin neglected to mention publicly Ouspensky, who was a key source on
the fourth dimension for himself, Kruchenykh, and Malevich, but he did name
Hinton, whom they had discovered through Ouspensky, and whose books Ous-
pensky translated and published in 1915. Matiushin’s omission may be due, in
part, to the fact that Ouspensky had criticised the Avant-Garde in the second
edition of his Fourth Dimension in 1914.12
The previously unidentified presence in this list is that of ‘Bouché’—
Maurice Boucher, whose 1903 Essai sur l’hyperespace: Le Temps, la matière, et
l’énergie was translated into Russian in 1914 as Chetvertoe izmerenie.13 Boucher,
like Poincaré, embraced ether physics, and his book, with its extensive discus-
sion of both the fourth dimension and the ether, had been important for artists
in Paris, including Marcel Duchamp.14 Boucher’s text highlights the contempo-
rary recognition of the limitations of the human eye in the wake of discoveries
such as the X-ray, emphasising that ‘Our senses, on the whole, give us only
deformed images of real phenomena’, a central theme in Ouspensky’s writ-
ing as well.15 Recounting recent developments in science in his discussions of
matter, energy and ether, Boucher connected these topics to the fourth dimen-
sion, drawing on Hinton, as Ouspensky would do extensively as well. Philo-
sophically committed to infinity and continuity, to which he devoted an entire
chapter, Boucher drew on a spatial fourth dimension to explain the penetra-
bility of matter as well as the relation of the ether to the three-dimensional
world, including gravitation.16 Five years before Minkowski, Boucher actu-
ally posited an ‘Espace-Temps à 4 dimensions’. In contrast to Relativity The-
ory’s highly mathematical, finite ‘space-time continuum’, however, Boucher’s

11 On the non-Euclidean geometries and these figures, especially Poincaré, see Henderson,
Fourth Dimension, chap. 1, and the section of chap. 5 on non-Euclidean geometry and
Relativity Theory in Russia. It was the n-dimensional geometry of higher dimensions,
also developed in the nineteenth century, that gave birth to the popular tradition of ‘the
fourth dimension’ (ibid., chap. 1). Poincaré’s opposition to Einstein and continued belief
in the ether kept Relativity Theory from having a major impact in France (see Glick,
Comparative Reception of Relativity, 113-23). On Umov, see note 19 below.
12 See Henderson, Fourth Dimension, chap. 5, at note 158.
13 See Maurice Boucher, Essai sur l’hyperespace: Le Temps, la matière, et l’énergie (Paris: Félix
Alcan, 1903); and Boucher, Chetvertoe izmerenie (St. Petersburg: Izd. B.S. Bychkovskago,
1914).
14 See L. D. Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and
Related Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 167-68.
15 Boucher, Essai, 64.
16 Ibid., chap. 2 (‘L’Infini et le continu’). On the ether and gravitation, see ibid., 156-61.
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 49

‘Espace-Temps’ was filled with ether and was infinite in its extent.17 In 1914, the
Russian translation of Boucher’s book gave the Avant-Garde a strong infusion
of ether physics tied directly to the spatial fourth dimension.
For the 1916 edition of Tertium Organum, Ouspensky added a new chap-
ter recounting a 1911 lecture by Umov before the Mendeleevskian Convention
on Minkowski and the new Relativity physics (with no mention of Einstein’s
name).18 Yet that publication appeared after the emergence of Suprematism
in 1915, and because the new theory was generally so little popularised, apart
from advocates like Umov, early discussions of Relativity Theory would not
have undercut contemporary enthusiasm for the ether—particularly with the
publication of Boucher in 1914.19 Indeed, in contrast to the oft-repeated narra-
tives of the seeming immediate triumph of Einstein, his theories continued to
face resistance in the 1910s, particularly from advocates of the ether, which still
had strong proponents in Russia, Germany, England, France and elsewhere.20

17 Ibid., 169. Typical of the French resistance to Einstein, Boucher’s text was reprinted in
France in 1927, and he continued to promote his views.
18 See Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (1922), chap. 11.
19 On the range of positions within the physics community at this time in Russia, including
Umov and O. D. Khvolson, who were both important advocates of Relativity Theory, see
Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture 1861-1917 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1970), 362-82; and V. P. Vizgin and G. E. Gorelik, ‘The Reception of the Theory of
Relativity in Russia and the USSR’, in Glick, Comparative Reception of Relativity, 265-75.
On Umov’s 1911 lecture and its subsequent publication in several sources, see Douglas,
‘Mach and Malevich’, 59 and note 11, where she also quotes Roman Jakobson’s mention of
Umov and Khvolson.
According to Aleksandr Parnis, Jakobson wrote to Kruchenykh in February 1914, ‘com-
par[ing] the experiments of Marinetti’s innovations with the theory of Albert Einstein’
and telling Kruchenykh, ‘You know, before you, not one of the poets talked about a
“Worldbackwards”’; Biely and Martinetti felt it a little bit, and by the way, this great thesis
is completely scientific (although you were talking about poetry as against mathematics)
and clearly described in the theory of relativity’. See Aleksandr Parnis, ‘K istorii odnoi
polemike: F. T. Marinetti i russkie futuristy’, [Toward the History of One Polemic: F. T.
Marinetti and the Russian Futurists”], in Futurizm. Radikal’naia revoliutsiia. Italiia-Rossiia
(Moscow: Krasnaia Ploshchad, 2008), 179. For the letter, Parnis cites Nikolai Khardzhiev,
‘Polemichnoe imia’, Pamir (Dushambe), 2 (1987): 164. I am indebted to Charlotte Douglas
for this reference. Like others of his age across Europe (he was 18 in 1914), Jakobson was
a member of the younger generation, which would embrace and draw actively upon Ein-
stein’s ideas. In contrast, Kruchenykh was 28 in 1914 and was largely grounded in a world
that preceded that of Einstein.
Although Einstein ultimately triumphed, there was no clear sense for the public be-
fore 1919 that his theories (and especially his denial of the ether) was correct. For a dis-
cussion of the science that attracted the Russian public during this period, see below.
20 See Milena Wazeck, Einstein’s Opponents: The Public Controversy about the Theory of Rela-
tivity in the 1920s, trans. Geoffrey S. Koby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
50 Dalrymple Henderson

The response of Claude Bragdon, Ouspensky’s American counterpart as an ad-

vocate of the fourth dimension and later the translator of Tertium Organum,
was typical. Having heard something of the new Relativity Theory, he com-
plained of the ‘Relativists’ in his 1916 book Four-Dimensional Vistas: ‘If they
take away the ether, they must give something in its stead’.21
Because the ether was largely forgotten in the wake of Einstein’s ascent dur-
ing the 1920s, it is useful to clarify the meaning of this long-forgotten concept
in the later nineteenth century. Although a ‘luminiferous ether’ had first come
to the public’s attention in the context of the wave theory of light in the 1820s,
by the 1890s, a variety of additional functions had been attributed to it by
scientists, so that the ether could seem very new. Writing in 1883 in Nature,
the prominent British physicist Sir Oliver Lodge explained, ‘One continuous
substance filling all space: which can vibrate as light; which can be sheared
into positive and negative electricity; which in whirls constitutes matter; and
which transmits by continuity, and not by impact, every action and reaction
of which matter is capable. This is the modern view of the ether and its func-
tions’.22 In Russia, the interest in Lodge was so great that his 1889 book Modern
Views of Electricity (based on his articles in Nature), appeared in Russian even
before it was published in English, and his writings continued to be translated,
including his important The Ether of Space of 1909.23
While Lord Kelvin’s earlier ‘vortex theory of matter’ had posited matter as
formed from swirling vortices of ether (like smoke rings), after the identifi-
cation of the electron in 1897, Lodge had proposed what he called ‘the elec-
tric theory of matter,’ based on the interaction of electrons and the ether.24
Both Wassily Kandinsky and Umberto Boccioni referred to the theory in their

21 Claude Bragdon, Four-Dimensional Vistas (Rochester, NY: The Manas Press, 1916), 36.
22 Oliver Lodge, ‘The Ether and Its Functions’, Nature, 27 (1 February 1883): 330. On the
history of ether theories, see G. N. Cantor and M. J. S. Hodge, eds., Conceptions of Ether:
Studies in the History of Ether Theories 1740-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), especially Daniel Siegel, ‘Thomson, Maxwell, and the Universal Ether in Victorian
Physics’, ibid., 239-68.
23 See Sir Oliver Lodge, Mirovoi efir (Odessa: Mathesis, 1911). Lodge’s history of astronomy,
Pioneers of Science (1893) was translated as Pionery nauki (St. Petersburg: F. Pavlenkova,
1901). For the Theosophists’ awareness of Lodge, see Maria Carlson, ‘No Religion Higher
Than the Truth’: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1993). She cites Lodge’s article ‘Bessmertie dushi’ [Immortal
Souls], Teosoficheskoe obozrenie, 3 (1907): 115-25. For the Russian translation of Lodge’s
Modern Views of Electricity, see Theodore Besterman, A Bibliography of Sir Oliver Lodge
(London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 23-24.
24 See Sir Oliver Lodge, ‘Electric Theory of Matter’, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 109 (August
1904): 383-89; and Keller, Infancy of Atomic Physics, chap. 8.
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 51

writings, suggesting, in Boccioni’s words, that ‘matter is only energy’.25 Gus-

tave Le Bon was a key populariser of these new ideas and of the ether, and
his bestselling L’Evolution de la matière (1905) appeared in Russian translation
in 1910.26 There he asserted, ‘The greater part of physical phenomena – light,
heat, radiant electricity, etc., are considered to have their seat in the ether … its
existence has forced itself upon us long since, and appears to be more assured
than that of matter itself’.27 A friend of the philosopher Henri Bergson and a
source for the Cubists in Paris, Le Bon viewed matter as merely a temporary
condensation of ‘intra-atomic energy’.28
Le Bon was responding, in part, to the discovery of the first radioactive el-
ements by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898 and their subsequent high-profile
research, along with that of Ernest Rutherford. Radioactivity was a highly pop-
ular topic in both popular scientific and occult writing, since it offered the sur-
prising image of matter as continually emitting alpha and beta particles and
gamma rays, as well as the prospect of an unlimited new source of energy.29
The identification of radioactive beta particles as infinitesimal, speeding elec-
trons, helped keep research on the structure of the atom in the news. Since
radioactivity was widely interpreted as a universal property, matter in general
was often discussed as dematerialising into the ether and, at the same time,
being formed from it, creating an identity for the ether as a liminal realm of
diffusion and cohesion. ‘How much we ourselves are matter and how much
ether is, in these days, a very moot question’, pondered popular science writer
Robert Kennedy Duncan in 1905.30 Not only matter, but space itself had a new

25 See Umberto Boccioni, Pittura scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico) (Milan: Edizioni
Futuriste di ‘Poesia’, 1914), 326; and Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst
(Munich: R. Piper & Co., Verlag, 1912); English translation, On the Spiritual in Art in Ken-
neth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, eds., Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art (New York: Da
Capo, 1994), 142.
26 See Gustave Le Bon, L’Evolution de la matière (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1905), Russian
translation, D-r Gustav Lebon, Evoliutsiia materii (St. Petersburg: Tovarishchestvo ‘Ob-
shchestvennaia pol’za’, 1909). Le Bon’s L’Evolution des forces appeared from the same pub-
lisher in 1910. Both books were reprinted in 1911, and the earlier book was reprinted again
in 1912 and 1914. Douglas documents Mitrofan Vasilevich Lodyzhenskii’s discussion of Le
Bon’s writings in ‘Mach and Malevich’, 64, note 11. Le Bon was a prominent figure because
of the multiple Russian editions of his writings on crowd psychology.
27 Le Bon, L’Evolution de la matière, 82.
28 Ibid., 9. Bergson’s writings were well known in Russia. See Charlotte Douglas, ‘Suprema-
tism: The Sensible Dimension’, The Russian Review, 34 (July 1975): 966-81. On Matiushin
and Elena Guro’s awareness of Le Bon and Bergson, see note 49 below.
29 For the history of radioactivity, see Keller, Infancy of Atomic Physics, chaps. 5, 6.
30 Robert Kennedy Duncan, The New Knowledge (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1905), 5.
52 Dalrymple Henderson

image in this period: it was now understood as filled with ether and vibrating
waves, offering new possibilities for communications. As Sir William Crookes
declared in his 1898 Presidential Address to the British Association for the Ad-
vancement of Science, ‘Ether vibrations have powers and attributes equal to
any demand — even to the transmission of thought’.31

The Russian Avant-Garde, the New Science, and Further Stimuli,

Including Italian Futurism

‘Our energy is the energy of Radium … Our principle = the dazzling renewal of
scientific discoveries’, asserted the Russian Futurist poet Vasilii Kamenskii in
a manuscript of 1914.32 Kamenskii’s fellow Futurist Mikhail Larionov made his
interest in the latest science the most overt of any Russian artist—in the style
of painting he termed ‘Rayism’ and in his manifestos on the topic.33 Larionov
considered Rayism to be an extension of Impressionist painting (inflected by
Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism), in which rays of light themselves were his
subject-matter. As Douglas has written so suggestively, ‘Larionov conceived
of this process almost as putting the canvas into the air to skim off the light
image as it trembled in space like a mirage’.34 What the painter understood
as trembling were vibrating waves in the ether—as he stated, ‘the ceaseless
and intense drama of the rays that constitute the unity of all things’.35 In
addition to visible light, in his 1913 ‘Rayist Painting’ manifesto, Larionov re-
ferred to ‘Radioactive Rays. Ultraviolet rays. Reflectivity’, and his library con-
tained sources on subjects such as X-rays and other related aspects of the new

31 ‘Address by Sir William Crookes, President’, Report of the Sixty-Eighth Meeting of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science (1898) (London: John Murray, 1899),
31.
32 Vasilii Kamenskii, untitled ms., quoted in Anthony Parton, Mikhail Larionov and the Rus-
sian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 137.
33 Parton considers the popular scientific context for Larionov’s Rayism, such as X-rays and
radioactivity, including information about Russian publications focussing on these issues
and works in Larionov’s library (Mikhail Larionov, 137-41). The standard view of the ether
as ‘scientifically discredited’, however, led Parton to wonder how it ‘found its way into the
rayist manifestos’ (ibid. 138).
34 Charlotte Douglas, ‘The New Russian Art and Italian Futurism’, Art Journal, 34 (Spring
1975): 233.
35 Mikhail Larionov, ‘Le Rayonisme Pictural’, Montjoie!, 4/5/6 (April/May/June 1914): 15; En-
glish translation in John E. Bowlt, ed., and trans., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory
and Criticism (rev. ed., London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 101.
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 53

science.36 Although Larionov did not use the term ether, in his 1914 essay ‘Le
Rayonisme Pictural’, he mentioned ‘plastic emanations’ and ‘intangible forms’,
and asserted that ‘Rayism is the painting … of these infinite products with
which the whole of space is filled’.37
Malevich was likewise profoundly interested in energies and invisible re-
alities, and his writings and art reflect the new conceptions of matter and
space, even if he trumpeted those concerns less overtly than Larionov. In his
1916 text, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Re-
alism, Malevich declared, ‘Objects have vanished like smoke; to attain the new
artistic culture, art advances toward creation as an end in itself and toward
domination over the forms of nature’.38 Suprematism focused not on super-
ficial objects or surfaces, but on ‘inherent forms’: ‘Solid matter does not exist
in nature. There is only energy’, the painter declared in 1921.39 The discov-
ery in the Nikolai Khardzhiev Collection of the 1916 drawing Composition 14t
(Suprematism: Sensation of Electric[ity]) (Fig. 3.6) makes Malevich’s scientific
interests clear.40 Here, he seems to have used his newly developed Suprematist

36 Mikhail Larionov, ‘Rayonist [Rayist] Painting’, in Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde,
98. Also see note 33 above.
37 Larionov, ‘Le Rayonisme Pictural’, in Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, 100. Larionov
also referred to the fourth dimension in his text ‘Rayist Painting’. See Henderson, Fourth
Dimension, chap. 5; and Parton, Mikhail Larionov, 131-37.
38 Kazimir Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k Suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm
(Moscow: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1916); English translation ‘From Cubism to Futurism
to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism’, in Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde,
119. Malevich echoed that sentiment in the 1920s, asserting, ‘Everything which we call na-
ture, in the last analysis, is a figment of the imagination, having no relation whatsoever
to reality’ See Kasimir Malewitsch, Die gegenstandlose Welt (Munich: Verlag Albert Lan-
gen, 1927); English translation, Kazimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World (Chicago: Paul
Theobald and Co., 1959), 20.
39 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Futurizm-Suprematizm’, 1921, ms; English translation, ‘Futurism-
Suprematism, 1921: An Extract’, trans. John. E. Bowlt in Kazimir Malevich, 1878-1935 (Wash-
ington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1990), 178. For ‘inherent forms’, see Kazimir Male-
vich, Ot kubizma k suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm (Petrograd: L. Ia Ginzburg,
1916); English translation ‘From Cubism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting’ in
Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds, 109; and Douglas, ‘Malevich and Western European Art
Theory’, 60.
40 Because of the unusual form of the root of ‘electric’ that Malevich recorded on the
drawing, his title has been translated variously as ‘Sensation of Electricity’ and ‘Sen-
sation of the Electron’ (the latter in Aleksandra Shatskikh, ‘The Cosmos and the
Canvas’, Tate Etc., 31 (summer 2014), http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles
/cosmos-and-canvas). Troels Andersen records the inscription as ‘ощущение злектрѝ-
чес’, which he translates as ‘Sensation of Electric(ity)’. See Troels Andersen, K. S. Malevich:
The Leporskaya Archive (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2011), 134. The transliteration
54 Dalrymple Henderson

style, epitomised by The Black Square (centered in the corner like an icon), to
suggest the subatomic realm of electricity within the atom, with what may be
rectilinear signs for electrons in orbit (Fig. 3.1) It is little wonder that Matiushin
referred to Malevich as a ‘galvanic current’ and ‘major accumulating force’ in
describing the affect he had on other artists in his January 1916 review of 0.10.41
In his early 1920s essay ‘Suprematism as Objectlessness’, Malevich, echo-
ing earlier ideas such as the electric theory of matter, wrote that matter ‘does
not have … a material unit or an indivisible particle’.42 He likewise speculated
about X-rays and, ultimately, their limitations: ‘After Roentgen’s ray must come
a more supple light of knowledge’.43 And he presciently predicted the future
discovery of ever smaller subatomic particles, writing that ‘from atoms, and
atoms from electrons and ions, future science will prove that electrons and
ions consist of other x-s’.44 Finally, looking back from the 1920s in ‘Suprema-
tism as Pure Cognition’, the painter confirmed his earlier awareness of radioac-
tivity and ether as he meditated on the scientific explanation of the Northern
Lights as related to nitrogen: ‘If the new science about nitrogen, radium and
ether considers the cause of many phenomena, it will thereby discover a whole
series of these forces, which used to be called God, dispersed through all phe-
nomena’.45
Clearly, along with the fourth dimension, the popularised science of ether
physics and related discoveries was a significant impetus for Malevich’s trans-
formation of painting. The question remains: how did he and his colleagues
encounter the scientific theories and discoveries that were circulating in Eu-
rope in the years before the First World War? And how did he understand
the relation of his Suprematist style to both the fourth dimension and the
ether?

would be elektriches and not elektron, coming closer to the German electrisch for ‘elec-
tric’. Malevich’s usage suggests ideas such as the ‘electric theory of matter’ and electrons
as the substructure of matter.
41 See Matiushin, ‘About the Exhibition of “The Last Futurists”’, In Search of 0,10, 248.
42 Malevich, ‘Suprematism as Objectlessness’, quoted in Douglas, ‘Mach and Malevich’, 59;
Douglas notes that the text was completed by February 1922 (ibid., 58).
43 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Non-Objectivity’, in K. S. Malevich, The World as Non-Objectivity: Un-
published Writings 1922-25, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Edmund
T. Little (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976), 85.
44 Ibid., 66.
45 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Mir kak bespredmetnost’. Trud i otdykh’ [The World as Objectless-
ness: Work and Relaxation], in K. S. Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. A. S.
Shatskikh (Moscow: Gileia, 1995-2004), IV: 234; quoted in Douglas, ‘Mach and Malevich’,
60.
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 55

There is still much to be done to recover the history of science as popu-

larly known in early twentieth-century Russia, since historians of science have
focused primarily on Einstein’s ascent and not on the continued presence of
ether physics in the period before and during the First World War. Although
physics paled in comparison to the prominence of Russian chemistry at this
time, Alexander Vucinich’s scholarly discussion of pre-Einsteinian physics in
Russia provides some clues.46 For example, in 1912 the Moscow Society for
the Study and Popularisation of Physics was founded.47 More widespread was
the impact of the journal Scientific Word [Nauchnoe slovo], which was dedi-
cated to popularising science. In 1905, it published an article in which Umov
asserted that while ‘at the end of the century we thought that science had al-
ready penetrated the innermost depths of nature … now we know that it had
worked on the thin surface of the physical universe’. For Umov, recent work in
physics and chemistry suggested ‘a single reality lying far beyond our senses’.48
As noted earlier, translations of European popular science texts were regularly
published in Russia, including Le Bon’s L’Evolution de la matière, Lodge’s The
Ether of Space, and Poincaré’s La Science et l’hypothèse of 1902. Isabel Wünsche
has documented Matiushin’s knowledge of Le Bon’s L’Evolution de la matière
and the work of the French astronomer Camille Flammarion, whom Ouspen-
sky quoted.49
The international interest in Dimitrii Mendeleev and the periodic table
of elements meant that the field of chemistry in Russia created high-profile
routes for popular information on the latest views on the nature of matter,
including radioactivity and atomic theory.50 Vucinich notes the awareness in
Russia of the British chemist Crookes, who, like Lodge and Flammarion, was
also interested in spiritualism and telepathy. Crookes’s attitudes were shared
by the Russian chemist Aleksandr Butlerov, and Vucinich acknowledges that a

46 See Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 362-82.

47 Ibid., 367.
48 Umov, as quoted in ibid., 371.
49 See Isabel Wünsche, The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde: Nature’s Creative Prin-
ciples (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), 78, note 185, where she discusses the books
with which Matiushin was familiar, including Bergson and Ouspensky. For Ouspensky’s
quote, see note 93 below.
50 Vucinich’s early treatment of Mendeleev (Science in Russian Culture, 147-65) has now
been supplanted by Michael D. Gordin’s A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the
Shadow of the Periodic Table (New York: Basic Books, 2004), which provides an extensive
discussion of Mendeleev’s response to the threat to his system he perceived in radioac-
tivity (chap. 8). Mendeleev’s writings also served to direct attention to the ether, since
he hoped to counter the problem of radioactivity by establishing the ether as a unifying
element in the periodic table (see ibid., 217-27).
56 Dalrymple Henderson

number of chemists in Russia were interested in spiritualism.51 Butlerov was

among the scientists whose researches Kandinsky lauded in his 1911 text On the
Spiritual in Art, along with the Leipzig astronomer, spiritualist, and advocate of
the fourth dimension Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner, the Russian zoologist and
spiritualist Nikolai Petrovich Vagner, Crookes, Flammarion, the French physi-
ologist and founder of Annales des science psychique Charles Richet, and the
Italian criminologist and spiritualism supporter Cesare Lombroso.52
Because of their relevance to Mendeleev’s theories, new developments in
radioactivity and atomic theory were followed closely by Russian scientists
and received considerable popular coverage as well. Two books on radioac-
tivity by Marie Curie were published in Russian in 1912 and 1913, following
upon translations of books by Rutherford’s collaborators, Frederick Soddy and
William Ramsay.53 Radioactivity was often discussed in terms of alchemy, in-
cluding by Soddy and Ramsay, and it is not surprising that chemist N. A. Shilov,
who had worked in Rutherford’s Cambridge laboratory for six months in 1914,
filled the 1,000-seat lecture hall at the Moscow Polytechnical Museum for
four lectures on radioactivity that autumn.54 When the Russian Futurist poet
Benedikt Livshits later described the avant-garde protagonist Nikolai Kulbin’s

51 See Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 138-47. While Vucinich downplays Butlerov’s
spiritualism, Gordin provides a far more balanced treatment of the subject, acknowledg-
ing the way in which science and spiritualism interpenetrated in this period. See his chap-
ter 8 (‘Chasing Ghosts’), which also addresses the commission that the critic Mendeleev
headed to investigate spiritualist phenomena. See also Maria Carlson, ‘Fashionable Oc-
cultism: Spiritualism, Theosophy, Freemasonry, and Hermeticism in Fin-de-Siècle Russia’,
in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed., The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1997), 135-52. For Crookes and spiritualism, see Vucinich, Science
in Russian Culture, 146-47, 392; and Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and
Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
On Crookes’s international reputation among occultists, see Henderson, ‘The Forgotten
Meta-Realities of Modernism’.
Vucinich maintains a strict distinction that was not clear at the time: ‘During this
period, Butlerov the scientist was completely separated from Butlerov the spiritualist’
(Science in Russian Culture, 145).
52 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art; in Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 143. In 1911, Nikolai
Kulbin read a Russian version of Kandinsky’s text at the Second All-Russian Congress
of Artists in St. Petersburg. See John E. Bowlt and Rose-Carol Washton Long, The Life
of Vasilli Kandinsky in Russian Art: A Study of ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ (Newtonville, MA:
Oriental Research Partners, 1980), 1.
53 For the Curie books, see Parton, Mikhail Larionov, 232, note 35; Frederick Soddy, Radii i
ego razgadka (Odessa: Mathesis, 1910); and William Ramsay, Noviieishaia khimiia: v dvukh
chastiakh (Moscow: I. D. Sytina, 1910).
54 See Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 393. N. A. Morozov, who advocated an evolu-
tionary theory of chemical elements, gave highly popular lectures, predicting the future
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 57

lectures of 1912 as ‘a salad of Bergson, Ramsay, and Picasso’, this was the Ram-
say to whom he was referring.55
In addition to popular scientific texts, the occult books and periodicals that
further promulgated these ideas, and sources such as Boucher and Ouspensky,
another direct stimulus for Malevich and his colleagues’ interest in the new
science would have been the manifestos of the Italian Futurists. Scholars have
not been fully alert to the significant role that science played for the Futur-
ists Boccioni and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who lectured in Russia in 1914.56
Futurist manifestos were regularly translated and published in Russia, includ-
ing two major texts that refer specifically to X-rays: ‘Futurist Painting: Techni-
cal Manifesto’ of 1910 and ‘The Exhibitors to the Public’, which accompanied
the Futurists’ 1912 Paris-London-Berlin exhibition. Both manifestos appeared
in the June 1912 issue of the Union of Youth journal, the vehicle for the circle
around Matiushin, which Malevich joined soon afterwards. In addition, thir-
teen manifestos were published in an anthology in 1914, and another Futurist
collection also appeared that year.57 As has been amply documented, mem-
bers of the Avant-Garde, such as David Burliuk, Ilia Zdanevich, and Alexandra
Exter travelled extensively in Europe at this time, offering further opportu-
nities for interchange. In particular, the painter Exter’s close personal rela-
tionship with the Italian Futurist poet Ardengo Soffici in Paris gave her a di-
rect connection to the Futurists’ scientific interests.58 Soffici’s poem ‘Raggio’ of
1914, for example, concerns rays and evokes the ether in treating the universe

alchemical transmutation of elements (ibid., 365). For Ouspensky’s citing of Morozov, see
Ouspensky, ‘The Fourth Dimension’, in New Model of the Universe, 80-85; and Henderson,
Fourth Dimension, chap. 5, at note 31.
55 See Benedikt Livshits, Polutorglazy strelets [The One and a Half-Eyed Archer] (Leningrad,
1933), as quoted in Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1968), 6. I am grateful to Brian Shaw for directing me to this Ramsay
reference.
56 Parton notes Boccioni’s reference to the ‘vivifying current of science’ in the 1910 ‘Fu-
turist Painting: Technical Manifesto’ (Mikhail Larionov, 137). On Futurism in Russia, see
Douglas, ‘New Russian Art and Italian Futurism’. On Marinetti’s visit, see Aurora Egidio,
‘The Collision of Italian and Russian Futurism: Marinetti’s Visit to Russia’, in Rosamund
Bartlett and Sarah Dadswell, eds., Victory over the Sun: The World’s First Futurist Opera
(Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2012), 237-53.
57 For Russian translations of Italian manifestos, see Douglas, ‘New Russian Art and Italian
Futurism’, 230, 232, note 28. Jeremy Howard documents the two manifestos published in
the Union of Youth journal in June 1912. See Howard, The Union of Youth: An Artist’s Society
of the Russian Avant-Garde (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 119.
58 For Exter’s connection to Soffici and her importance for Malevich during 1915, see Alek-
sandra Shatskikh, Black Square: Malevich and the Origins of Suprematism, trans. Marian
Schwartz (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 66-69.
58 Dalrymple Henderson

as a ‘continuous whole’ and ‘a flux of energy with diverse rhythms from granite
to thought’.59
Boccioni was the primary author of the manifestos relating to Futurist
painting, and in the 1910 ‘Technical Manifesto’ he had queried, ‘Why should
we forget in our creations the doubled power of our sight, capable of giving
results analogous to those of the X-rays?’60 Although Boccioni’s treatise Pittura
scultura futuriste was not published until 1914, he had completed the text by
1913, making clear the fundamental importance of the new science for Futurist
creativity:

Why does science have the courage to formulate hypotheses transcend-

ing the experimental, and art, which is intuition itself, still remains at the
stage of making experimental copies of reality … The electric theory of
matter, according to which matter is only energy or, in other words con-
densed electricity, and exists only as force, is a hypothesis confirming my
intuition … Around us pass energies that are being observed and stud-
ied; from our bodies emanate fluids of power, attraction or repulsion …
Hertzian waves carry the feverish pulse of the races thousands of kilome-
tres across oceans, across deserts … Electrons revolve in the atom by tens
of thousands, separated one from the other like the planets of the solar
system and, like them, have an orbit and a speed inconceivable for us.61

Boccioni was a particular enthusiast of the ether, and in Pittura scultura futur-
iste, he equated the ‘unique form of continuity in space’, the title of his most
famous sculpture, with ‘the materialisation of the fluid, of the ethereal, of the
imponderable’.62 In paintings, too, such as Elasticity (1912) and Dynamism of a
Soccer Player (1913; Fig. 3.2), Boccioni sought to materialise the ‘atmosphere’,
as he often termed the ether. From Lodge’s latest theories, he understood
the ether as an elastic, structural field of great energies.63 As he explained

59 Ardengo Soffici, ‘Raggio’, Lacerba (1 July 1914), 195. I am grateful to Elisa Valentini for her
new translation of this important poem.
60 Umberto Boccioni et al., ‘Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto’ (April 1910), in Umbro
Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 28. Douglas argued
that Boccioni was important for Malevich in ‘New Russian Art and Italian Futurism’,
235-38. I initially discussed Boccioni and the ether in Henderson, ‘Vibratory Modernism’,
in Clarke and Henderson, From Energy to Information, 126–49.
61 Boccioni, Pittura scultura futuriste, 326-28.
62 Ibid., 325.
63 I argue this case in ‘Umberto Boccioni’s Elasticity, Italian Futurism, and the Ether of
Space’, in Jaume Navarro, ed., Ether and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 59

Figure 3.2 Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913, oil on canvas, 193.2 ×
201 cm., The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, The Museum of Modern Art,
New York.
Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art
Resource, NY.

in ‘Plastic Foundations of Futurist Sculpture and Painting’ of 1913, ‘The dis-

tances between one object and another are not just empty spaces, but are
occupied by material continuities made up of varying intensities, continuities
which we reveal with perceptible lines that do not correspond to any photo-
graphic truth’.64 In Dynamism of a Soccer Player, Boccioni, as Cubist painters

64 Boccioni, ‘Plastic Foundations of Futurist Sculpture and Painting’, in Lawrence Rainey,

Christine Poggi, Laura Wittman, eds., Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2009), 140-41; see also Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 88-89, with
variations in translation.
60 Dalrymple Henderson

had also done, sought to give visual form to the invisible ether and its ener-
gies, using chiaroscuro modelling to dematerialise the edges of forms, merg-
ing them with their environment, as the new paradigms of space and matter
suggested.65
The subject of Malevich’s Suprematist canvas Painterly Realism of a Foot-
ball Player: Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimension of 1915 (Fig. 3.3) is thought
to be a response to Boccioni’s image, and it serves well in a consideration of
Malevich’s style. While Boccioni had, in passing, claimed the fourth dimen-
sion for Futurism, contrasting the Futurists’ dynamic ‘unfolding of forces and
forms’ to the stasis of Cubism, it was not a major concern for him in com-
parison to the ether.66 In contrast, for Malevich – through Ouspensky – the
fourth dimension was a defining aspect of Suprematism, associated with the
evolution of higher consciousness. Yet, because, at this time, the ether was so
closely tied to the fourth dimension in the context of occultism and because
Ouspensky followed Hinton in emphasising this connection, a re-reading of
the Russian mystic philosopher’s writings offers significant new insights into
the emergence of Malevich’s Suprematist style during 1915.

Re-examining Malevich’s Sources on the Fourth Dimension

In his study of the Union of Youth circle around Matiushin in St. Petersburg,
Jeremy Howard identified what is probably the first statement on the fourth
dimension by a member of the Avant-Garde. In spring 1910, during a lecture,
given at the last of his Triangle Group exhibitions, the physician and artist
Nikolai Kulbin asserted, ‘It is possible to violate all academic rules, trying to
cross to the so-called “fourth dimension”, trying to convey one’s inner spiri-
tual world – thus the artist sincerely represents on the canvas how the envi-
ronment appears to him’.67 Before Howard’s discovery, Kulbin’s early interest
in the fourth dimension was known only through Kruchenykh’s Ouspensky-
inflected reference in his April 1913 Declaration of the Word as Such about es-
caping ‘the limitations of time, space, etc.’, by means of a new language: ‘Here
I agree with N. Kulbin, who uncovered the 4th dimension – gravity, the 5th –
motion, and 6th or 7th time’.68 The two approaches connected with Kulbin –

65 On Le Bon, Bergson, and Cubism, see Henderson, ‘Editor’s Introduction: II. Cubism, Fu-
turism, and Ether Physics in the Early Twentieth Century’, 449-50.
66 On Boccioni and the fourth dimension, see Henderson, Fourth Dimension, at note 192.
67 See Howard, Union of Youth, 30.
68 Quoted in Henderson, Fourth Dimension, chap. 5, at notes 76, 101.
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 61

Figure 3.3 Kazimir Malevich, Painterly Realism of a Football Player: Colour Masses in the
Fourth Dimension, 1915, oil on canvas, 70.2 × 44.1 cm., The Art Institute of Chicago.
Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY.
62 Dalrymple Henderson

spiritual and semi-scientific – suggest the variety of ideas associated with the
fourth dimension that were circulating in the early twentieth century – in the
pioneering writings of Hinton as well as in Theosophical and spiritualist texts,
which often drew upon them. This was rich fodder for Ouspensky as he com-
posed his books in 1909 and 1911.
Kulbin’s first remark reflects the milieu of occultism, nourished by science,
as well as his own Symbolist-oriented interest in the artist’s psyche and ability
to discern a truer reality, which would be shared by Matiushin and the Union
of Youth as well.69 Kulbin, like Ouspensky, was a reader of Wundt’s physiologi-
cal psychology, and, as a medical doctor himself, he was particularly interested
in subliminal sensation and published on the subject.70 Given the importance
of Kulbin and Wundt for the younger Avant-Garde, including Malevich, it is
hardly surprising that ‘subtle sensation’ would also become a key issue in the
young painter’s art and theory. Ouspensky refers numerous times to Wundt in
his writings, and his system of increasingly developed forms of knowledge
presented in Tertium Organum—sensation, perception, concepts, and, ulti-
mately, ‘cosmic consciousness’ of the fourth dimension—was grounded, at its
first three levels, in Wundt’s theories.71 Ouspensky then developed his theo-
ries on higher forms of consciousness, inspired by various mystical traditions
and the writings of figures such as the psychologist William James and Richard
Maurice Bucke, the Canadian author of Cosmic Consciousness (1901).72

69 Howard notes ‘the pervasive atmosphere of science, spiritualism, and occultism in the
intellectual circles of St. Petersburg’ (Union of Youth, 5). On this topic, see note 74 below.
70 On Wundt’s importance for Kulbin and his interest in subliminal sensation, see Dou-
glas, Swans of Other Worlds, 68-71. Wünsche situates Kulbin, the Union of Youth circle,
Matiushin and his wife, the poet Elena Guro, in the context of an organic world view,
which included panpsychism and a belief in evolving consciousness (Organic School of
the Russian Avant-Garde, 41-49).
71 Ouspensky provided an overview of ‘the four forms of the manifestation of conscious-
ness’ at the back of Tertium Organum; see Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, chap. 8, for
his initial discussion. For Ouspensky’s references to Wundt, see Tertium Organum (1922),
41, 139. For Wundt’s theories, see Wilhelm Wundt, Principles of Physiological Psychology,
trans. Edward Bradford Titchener (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1904). See also, S. Feld-
man, ‘Wundt’s Psychology’, in R. W. Rieber, ed., Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scien-
tific Psychology (New York: Plenum Press, 1980).
72 For an introduction to Ouspensky’s philosophy, see Henderson, Fourth Dimension,
chap. 5, section on ‘Hyperspace Philosophy in Russia: Peter Demianovich Ouspensky’;
see also L. D. Henderson, ‘Mysticism, Romanticism, and the Fourth Dimension’, in Mau-
rice Tuchman, ed., The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (Los Angeles, CA: Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986), 219-35. Charlotte Douglas’s essay broadened the
context for Ouspensky and for the Avant-Garde’s move ‘beyond reason’ to include yoga
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 63

Ouspensky was working as a journalist in St. Petersburg and reading a wide

range of European occult sources when he was drawn to Theosophy in 1907.
He was closely associated with the Theosophical Society from 1907 to 1914,
only breaking with the group in early 1915.73 Kulbin was likewise interested in
Theosophy and occultism, and was also an acquaintance of Kandinsky, with
whom he would have shared these interests.74 Both Ouspensky’s and Kulbin’s
language skills would have given them access to the scientific and occult ideas
circulating in a variety of Theosophical and spiritualist journals, such as the
international German spiritualist monthly Die uebersinnliche Welt, which reg-
ularly reported on new scientific developments.75 Kandinsky was a reader of
the Die uebersinnliche Welt, and the journal’s science writer, Robert Blum, had
published a book in 1906 on the most recent science that was relevant to spiri-
tualism, titling it Die vierte Dimension.76 Ouspensky and Kulbin may also have
been acquainted through the Stray Dog Cabaret, as John Bowlt has suggested.77
While Hinton had not connected the fourth dimension to gravity, Ouspensky

and Lodyzhenskii’s writings on ‘superconsciousness’; see Douglas, ‘Beyond Reason: Male-

vich, Matiushin, and Their Circles’, in ibid., 185-99. Wünsche also addresses Ouspensky’s
philosophy in Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde, 22-26.
73 For Ouspensky’s discovery of occult literature, see, for example, his ‘Introduction’ to New
Model, 1-10, where he also documents his extensive travels in Europe, Egypt, India, and
Ceylon (9-10). For further background, including his father’s interest in ‘the problem of
the Fourth Dimension’, see Henderson, Fourth Dimension, chap. 5. Robert Williams dates
Ouspensky’s membership of the Theosophical Society to 1911-14; see Williams, Artists in
Revolution: Portraits of the Avant-Garde, 1905-1925 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1977), 118.
74 On Kulbin’s and Ouspensky’s occult milieu in St. Petersburg, see John E. Bowlt, ‘Esoteric
Culture and Russian Society’, in Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art, 165-83; and Edward Kasinec
and Boris Kerdimun, ‘Occult Literature in Russia’, in ibid., 361-65. On Theosophy in Russia,
see Carlson, ‘No Religion Higher Than the Truth’. For Russian occult journals and other
source materials, see Rosenthal, The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, 414-49.
75 For a sampling of the content of Die uebersinnliche Welt, see Henderson, ‘The Forgot-
ten Meta-Realities of Modernism’. For Kulbin’s French and German reading, see Janacek,
Zaum, 42. Matiushin, who is central to this discussion, also read French (ibid.).
76 See Robert Blum, Die vierte Dimension (Stuttgart: Altmann, 1906). The fourth dimension
had a long association with spiritualism through Zöllner’s activities in Leipzig, where he
was convinced that the medium Henry Slade was untying knots by means of the fourth
dimension (see Henderson, Fourth Dimension, chap. 1). The chemist Butlerov referred
to Zöllner in his spiritualist writings (Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 146), and the
Leipzig astronomer was a continued presence for the readers of Die uebersinnliche Welt.
Kandinsky’s several copies of the journal are preserved in the Gabriele Münter- und Jo-
hannes Eichner-Stiftung at the Lenbachhaus, Munich.
77 Bowlt, ‘Esoteric Culture’, 172.
64 Dalrymple Henderson

would do so in Tertium Organum in 1911 and he could have been one of Kulbin’s
sources on that subject.78
That Ouspensky was attuned to Theosophy and spiritualism is readily ap-
parent from the numerous references in his two books to authors such as He-
lena Petrovna Blavatsky (Elena Petrovna Blavatskaia), Charles Webster Lead-
beater, and others.79 Both the ether and the fourth dimension were impor-
tant for Leadbeater, and, along with Rudolf Steiner’s lectures, his Theosophical
writings (widely translated), were crucial for the international promulgation
of Hinton’s ideas.80 In The Fourth Dimension, for example, Ouspensky wrote of
the world of ‘psychic phenomena’ and ‘thought transfer’ in relation to ‘fluctu-
ations in the etherial medium’, a major theme in Leadbeater’s, as well as spir-
itualist, publications.81 Yet, Ouspensky also differentiated his own views, cri-
tiquing ‘dualistic spiritism’ and, ultimately, making a spatial fourth dimension
the central theme of his mystical philosophy, in contrast to both Leadbeater
and Steiner, for whom it was an auxiliary issue.82
For Ouspensky, the ‘key to the enigmas of the world’ (the subtitle of Ter-
tium Organum) was the existence of a four-dimensional universe, of which
our world must be only a partial section.83 Following Hinton, he argued that
in such a section of higher-dimensional space, the sense of motion or time
itself would result from an incomplete understanding of higher space. Hinton
had illustrated that process in a diagram of a spiral passing through a plane
or fluid film and creating the illusion for a two-dimensional being of a dot

78 For Ouspensky’s mentions of gravity, including the idea that in cosmic consciousness
the ‘center of gravity of everything shall lie for man in the inner world’ (331), see Tertium
Organum, 98, 139, 331.
79 See, Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (1922), 31, 53, 121, 202, 291 (Blavatsky); 37, 134, 240 (Lead-
beater); for spiritualism, see note 82.
80 On Theosophy and Leadbeater as vehicles for popularising the fourth dimension, see
Henderson, Fourth Dimension, chap. 1, note 75; chap. 2, note 3 and following. Leadbeater
discussed Hinton’s ideas, connecting ‘astral vision’ to the fourth dimension in Clairvoy-
ance (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1899), chap. 2. On Leadbeater and the ether,
see Henderson, ‘Forgotten Meta-Realities of Modernism’. For Steiner’s interest in Hinton
and the fourth dimension, see his lectures published as Rudolf Steiner, The Fourth Dimen-
sion: Sacred Geometry, Alchemy, and Mathematics, intro. David Booth (Great Barrington,
MA: Anthroposophic Press, 2001).
81 See Uspenskii, Chetvertoe izmerenie, 39.
82 See Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (1922), 330 for ‘dualistic spiritism’; and ibid., 255.
83 For a useful introduction to the concept of higher-dimensional space, see Rudy Rucker,
The Fourth Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality (Boston, MA: Houghton Mif-
flin Co., 1984).
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 65

moving in a circle in the plane, an image that Ouspensky reproduced in Ter-

tium Organum.84 To overcome the limits of a faulty ‘psychic apparatus’ in the
face of the fourth dimension, Ouspensky urged his readers to escape the limits
of conventional language and traditional ‘three-dimensional logic’ (hence his
new post-Aristotelian ‘organum’) and to cultivate new forms of consciousness,
including a ‘higher intuition’.85
Kruchenykh’s development of zaum’, his transrational or beyonsense lan-
guage and Malevich’s ‘Alogist’ or ‘Transrational Realist’ paintings of 1913-14,
such as An Englishman in Moscow (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) responded
to Ouspensky’s system of an alogical logic, as Kruchenykh noted with a direct
reference to Tertium Organum in his 1913 essay ‘New Ways of the Word’.86 Such
thinking also lies behind the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun of December
1913, the joint project of Kruchenykh, Malevich, and Matiushin, for which one
of Malevich’s stage designs drew on Hinton’s image of the cruciform hyper-
cube to suggest a seemingly nonsensical building with inside and outside vis-
ible simultaneously.87 Matiushin had already responded to Ouspensky’s phi-
losophy in March 1913 in the Union of Youth journal, by juxtaposing passages
from Tertium Organum with excerpts from the most recent publication on
French Cubist theory by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger.88 In making his
case for the further step to the fourth state of consciousness, Ouspensky had

84 See Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (1922), 70, and the related chapter. See also Hinton,
Fourth Dimension, 25.
85 See Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, 84-85 (‘psychic apparatus’); 257 (“three-dimensional’
logic’); 170 (‘higher order of intuition’). For Ouspensky’s alogical logic, see ibid., chap. 21.
In the original 1911 edition of Tertium Organum: Klyuch k zagadkam mira, Ouspensky used
the term ‘higher intuition’, but the phrase does not appear in this form in the 1916 edition
(on this change, see Henderson, Fourth Dimension, chap. 5, note 47).
86 Kruchenykh argued that a new form of communication is possible because beyond ‘sen-
sation, perception, concept (and idea), a fourth unit, “higher intuition” is being formed’
(Henderson, Fourth Dimension, chap. 5, note 130, and section in chapter 5 on Malevich’s
Transrational Realism). On Kruchenykh and Ouspensky’s relevance for Malevich, see
Janacek, Zaum. On Kruchenykh and the Russian Avant-Garde, see Nina Gurianova, The
Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2012).
87 For this set design and Victory over the Sun, see Charlotte Douglas, Kazimir Malevich (New
York: Abrams, 1994), 17-21; note 102 below; and Henderson, Fourth Dimension, fig. 5.9; and
the related discussion. Compton first made this connection in ‘Malevich and the Fourth
Dimension’ (see note 1 above and note 103 below).
88 See Mikhail V. Matiushin, ‘O knige Metzanzhe-Gleza “Du Cubisme”’, Soiuz molodezhi (St.
Petersburg), 3 (March 1913): 25–34; trans. Linda Henderson in Henderson, Fourth Dimen-
sion, Appendix C, as Mikhail Matyushin, ‘Of the Book by Gleizes and Metzinger Du Cu-
bisme’.
66 Dalrymple Henderson

emphasised the important role of emotion in higher consciousness and

pointed to ‘the soul of an artist’ as an especially sensitive instrument for recog-
nising ‘the reflection of the noumenon in the phenomenon’.89 ‘The artist must
be a clairvoyant’, Matiushin quoted Ouspensky, ‘he must see what others do
not see’.90
In hindsight, the resonances Matiushin detected between Ouspensky and
Cubist theory can now be better understood against the shared cultural refer-
ences provided not only by the late-nineteenth-century resurgence of idealist
philosophy and interest in higher-dimensional space as well as the prevalence
of Bergson in this period, but also by the focus on the invisible in popular sci-
entific and occult sources circulating internationally. Indeed, Bergson’s philos-
ophy of flux and continuity was itself a product of a late-nineteenth-century
worldview centred on the ether.91 With this in mind, we can turn to Ouspen-
sky’s writings and consider the broader context for his discussion of the fourth
dimension in 1909 and 1911.
As noted earlier, ether physics and recent scientific discoveries offered
Ouspensky supporting evidence in his argument for the unreality of three-
dimensional existence.92 In The Fourth Dimension, he quoted, for example,
from Flammarion’s 1907 Les Forces naturelles inconnues de la nature: ‘Matter
is not at all what it appears to our senses, to touch or vision … It represents
one single whole with energy and is the manifestation of the motion of in-
visible and imponderable elements’.93 With his determined anti-materialism
and commitment to an absolute four-dimensional reality, however, Ouspen-
sky believed that matter in any form was ‘some sort of blindness’: ‘Matter is a

89 Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (1922), 161-62.

90 Ouspensky, as quoted in Matyushin, ‘Of the Book by Gleizes and Metzinger’, in Hender-
son, Fourth Dimension, Appendix C.
91 Bergson discussed nineteenth-century theories of matter, including those of Michael
Faraday and Lord Kelvin, who ‘supposes a perfect, continuous, homogenous and incom-
pressible fluid, filling space: what we term an atom he makes into a vortex ring, ever
whirling in this continuity’. See Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire (1896); English trans-
lation, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul (New York: Zone Books, 1988),
200-201.
92 Ouspensky purged ‘The Fourth Dimension’ of references to the ether for its inclusion in
A New Model of the Universe in 1931, but they are present in the 1909 and 1914 editions
of The Fourth Dimension and in the 1911 and 1916 editions of Tertium Organum. In his
revised chapter, ‘A New Model of the Universe’, in the 1931 book, Ouspensky provided
a typical account of Relativity Theory, adopting the archaic spelling of ‘aether’, while
noting Lodge’s ideas on its density, which had, in fact, been highly influential for Boccioni,
among others (Ouspensky, New Model of the Universe, 404).
93 Flammarion, as quoted in Ouspensky, ‘The Fourth Dimension’, in A New Model of the
Universe, 107 (the ellipses are Ouspensky’s).
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 67

section of something; a non-existent imaginary something. But that, of which

matter is a section, exists. This is the real, four-dimensional world’.94 With his
view of time as an incompletely understood manifestation of higher dimen-
sions, Ouspensky associated the rarefication of matter with increasing rates of
molecular motion: ‘each finer state [of matter] contains more time and less
matter than a coarser state’.95 Although, in general, even the most rarefied
form of matter or ether remained too material and three-dimensional for Ous-
pensky, he nonetheless provided important information on the ether. Thus,
in The Fourth Dimension, he mentioned ‘the hypothesis of the ether, which is
an ultra-fine, all-pervading material and which doesn’t possess many material
properties’; but he also suggested the inadequacy of the current understand-
ing of the ether: ‘We considered this ether, in itself, uniform[,] and with the
varied speeds and varied rhythms of its vibrations we attempted to explain all
of life’s phenomena’.96
It was in Hinton’s explanation of the ether in relation to the fourth dimen-
sion that Ouspensky found an acceptable interpretation of the concept, and
he discussed this model in Tertium Organum, with ramifications for Malevich,
as we shall see below. Ouspensky began by quoting from Hinton’s A New Era
of Thought, where the Englishman had elaborated on his model of a two-
dimensional surface plane or film, through which three-dimensional forms
pass:

A surface is nothing more nor less than the relation between two things.
Two bodies touch each other. The surface is the relationship of one to the
other …
And it may well be that the laws of our universe are the surface ten-
sions of a higher universe.
If the surface be regarded as a medium lying between bodies, then
indeed it will have no weight, but be a powerful means of transmitting
vibrations … Matter would pass freely though this medium …
Do we suppose the existence of any medium through which mat-
ter freely moves, which by its vibrations destroys the combinations of
matter—some medium which is present in every vacuum however per-
fect, which penetrates all bodies, is weightless, and yet never can be laid
hold of.
The ‘substance’ which possesses all these qualities is called the ‘ether’.

94 Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (1922), 190. For ‘blindness’, see ibid., 277.
95 Ouspensky, ‘The Fourth Dimension’, in A New Model of the Universe, 105.
96 Uspenskii, Chetvertoe izmerenie, 57.
68 Dalrymple Henderson

… [T]aking into consideration the ideas expressed before it would be

interesting to look at the world supposing that we are not in it but on the
ether; where the ‘ether’ is the surface of contact of two bodies of higher
dimensions.97

Ouspensky then continued in his own words:

Hinton here expresses an unusually interesting thought, and brings the

idea of the ‘ether’ nearer the idea of time. The materialistic, or even the
energetic understanding of contemporary physics of the ether is per-
fectly fruitless—a dead-end siding. For Hinton, the ether is not a sub-
stance but only a ‘surface,’ the ‘boundary’ of something. But of what?
Again not that of a substance, but the boundary, the surface, the limit of
one form of receptivity and the beginning of another …
In one sentence, the walls and fences of the materialistic dead-end
siding are broken down and before our thought open wide horizons of
regions unexplored.98

Responding to the Fourth Dimension and the Ether in Suprematist

Painting

The Suprematist paintings that Malevich displayed at the 0.10 exhibition re-
ferred to both the fourth dimension and the second dimension: he used the
title Movement of Painterly Masses in the Fourth Dimension for one work, and
in a number of cases, added the subtitles Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimen-
sion (Fig. 3.3) or Colour Masses in the Second Dimension or (in Two Dimensions).
Works such as Eight Red Rectangles (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) or Supre-
matist Composition (Fig. 3.4) probably belong to the latter group.99 In inter-
preting the paintings that refer to the second dimension in my 1983 book, I
focused on Ouspensky’s recounting of Hinton’s analogy of a two-dimensional
world’s relationship to three dimensions in order to explain how our three-
dimensional world would relate to a fourth dimension. Hinton’s model of a

97 Hinton, as quoted in Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (1922), 50-51. In the 1922 English trans-
lation, Ouspensky provided a footnote for this passage: ‘Hinton, A New Era of Thought, 52,
56, 57. (ibid.).
98 Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (1922), 51 (the ellipses are Ouspensky’s).
99 For the catalogue list, see Drutt, In Search of 0,10, 228-29. For the identification of the titles
with specific Suprematist paintings, see Anatoly Strigalev, ‘An Excursion Around the 0,10
Exhibition’, in ibid., 66-70.
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 69

Figure 3.4 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition, 1915, oil on canvas, 66.5 × 57 cm.,
Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln.

two-dimensional surface registering traces of three-dimensional forms was

widely cited in this period: Ouspensky discussed it in both The Fourth Dimen-
sion and Tertium Organum, and Boucher recounted it in the 1914 translation of
his L’Essai sur l’hyperespace, Chetvertoe izmerenie.100 As I suggested then, this

100 See Hinton, A New Era of Thought, Part II, chaps. 1, 2; Hinton, Fourth Dimension, chaps. 2, 4;
Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (1922), chap. 4; and Boucher, L’Essai sur l’hyperespace,
chap. 5.
70 Dalrymple Henderson

well-known model of two-dimensional sections or traces would have been

reinforced by the illustrations in Claude Bragdon’s 1912 Man the Square and
in his 1913 A Primer of Higher Space (The Fourth Dimension), if they reached
the Avant-Garde. Although the books were published in Rochester, New York,
Bragdon had sent copies to Theosophical Society offices in Europe, and Ous-
pensky recorded having seen a copy of Man the Square in St. Petersburg.101
Malevich would also have had direct access to Hinton’s two books in Ouspen-
sky’s translated editions, which appeared in May 1915.102
Yet Malevich’s interest in hard-edged geometric forms did not begin with
such sources. He had been growing increasingly interested in geometric planes
from his observation of Synthetic Cubist collage, as well as from his experi-
ence of Victory over the Sun in 1913, when spotlights played across the stage,
highlighting segments of both his costumes and freestanding objects on the
stage.103 It was in spring 1915 that the painter developed his new style, moving
from the Alogism of what he termed his ‘Fevralist’ style to Suprematism during
those months, when he created a new set of designs for Victory over the Sun in
May 1915, including Fig. 3.5, which is discussed further below.104 The geomet-
ric language of form that emerged in his experiments that spring would have
acquired particular significance in the context of Hinton, Ouspensky, Boucher
and, possibly, Bragdon. Thus, I have argued that monochromatic (or primarily
monochromatic) paintings such as Suprematist Painting (Fig. 3.4) can be read
as two-dimensional sections or traces of three-dimensional objects. Their con-
nection to hyperspace was implied and would have been further reinforced by
Leadbeater’s discussion (recounted by Ouspensky), of the way in which five
fingertips placed on a table would be misread by a ‘flatlander’ as five discrete

101 For this discussion, see Henderson, Fourth Dimension, chap. 5, note 164 and related text;
and Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (1922), ‘Author’s Preface to the Second Edition’, xv.
On Bragdon, see Henderson, Fourth Dimension, chap. 4, section on ‘Claude Bragdon’. For
Bragdon’s record of his distribution of various books, see the Bragdon Family Papers at
the University of Rochester Libraries.
102 See note 1 above.
103 On Victory over the Sun, its lighting effects, and the geometric qualities of Malevich’s
sets, see Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds, 42-47; and Christina Lodder, ‘Kazimir Malevich
and the Designs for Victory over the Sun’, in Bartlett and Dodswell, Victory over the Sun,
179-93. For many of the documents relating to Victory over the Sun, see Patricia Railing,
ed., Victory Over the Sun, 2 vols (Forest Row, East Sussex: Artists Bookworks, 2009).
104 For Malevich’s development of Suprematism, see Douglas, Kazimir Malevich, including
the discussion of individual images. For Malevich’s so-called ‘Fevralist’ style of 1914-spring
1915, from which his Suprematist style emerged in May-June 1915, see Shatskikh Black
Square, chap. 1. Shatskikh’s dating of two fully developed Malevich Suprematist canvases
to May 1915, however, remains controversial (ibid., 43).
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 71

objects, pointing up the danger of accepting objects in a given dimension as

complete.105
However, in Malevich’s multi-coloured Suprematist works, such as Painterly
Realism of a Football Player: Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimension (Fig. 3.3),
the two-dimensional analogy clearly does not apply. Instead, planes of various
colours and sizes float independently of one another in space, occasionally
overlapping and uniformly creating a definite sense of movement and spa-
tial extension. Malevich’s use of the preposition ‘в’ (‘v’ in the Latin alphabet)
allows these subtitles to be translated as either ‘in’ or ‘of the fourth dimen-
sion’. Re-reading Ouspensky in the light of Hinton’s commitment to the ether
offers new insights into how Malevich may have understood these paintings
in terms of the fourth dimension as well as the ether. Before turning to that
discussion, however, it is useful to reprise other associations with the fourth-
dimension that these paintings may have had for Malevich. Indeed, certain of
these themes were linked not only to the fourth dimension, but also to the
ether.
Both infinity/infinite vastness and freedom from specific orientation and
gravity had become closely linked to the popular concept of the fourth dimen-
sion by the late nineteenth century. Infinity was a central theme in Boucher’s
book, and, in Tertium Organum, Ouspensky specifically connected a ‘sensa-
tion of infinity’ and vastness with the first moments of the transition to four-
dimensional cosmic consciousness, as the familiar world fell away.106 Male-
vich, likewise, referred to the space of his Suprematist paintings as ‘the white,
free, chasm-infinity’, and his cosmic white space definitively distances his
paintings from associations with the blue sky.107 His canvases are also free of
any specific orientation and a sense of gravity, characteristics that Hinton had
asserted must be cultivated in order to enlarge one’s ‘space sense’.108 Hinton’s
prediction took on new currency with the advent of the aeroplane, flying, and,
especially in Russia, speculation about rocketry and travel in outer space. In
1916, Malevich described Suprematism as ‘not belong[ing] solely to the earth’,
and he had responded specifically to this theme in paintings such as the 1915

105 See Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (1922), 37.

106 See Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (1922), 258. For Boucher and infinity, see L’Essai sur
l’hyperespace, chap. 2.
107 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Suprematizm’, Katalog desiatoi gosudarstvennoi vystavki. Bespredmet-
noe tvorchestvo i suprematizm (Moscow, 1919); English translation, ‘Non-Objective Cre-
ation and Suprematism’, in K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art 1915-1933, ed. Troels Andersen,
trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Borgens Forlag, 1968), 1:
122.
108 See Hinton, A New Era of Thought, Part I, Introduction.
72 Dalrymple Henderson

Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying (Museum of Modern Art, New York,

see Fig. 13.3).109 In the tradition of the Russian ‘cosmists’, Malevich developed
a growing fascination with astronomy and the cosmos in the later 1910s and
dreamed of setting his planity satellites in orbit, free of gravity.110
In fact, the ether, too, was closely identified with both infinity and the in-
terstellar space of the cosmos. Boucher linked the ether and infinity in his
four-dimensional ‘espace-temps’, as noted earlier. And Lodge in The Ether of
Space, translated as ‘The Universal Ether’ [Mirovoi efir], quoted James Clerk
Maxwell’s statement that ‘the vast interplanetary and interstellar regions’ of
the universe are so ‘full of this wonderful medium … that no human power
can remove it from the smallest portion of space, or produce the slightest flaw
in its infinite continuity’.111
In his multi-coloured Suprematist paintings, Malevich set his planar ele-
ments in dynamic motion, employing the phenomenon that both Hinton and
Ouspensky treated as a provisional means of acquiring a higher spatial un-
derstanding. These were concerns that Malevich shared with his close friends
Kruchenykh and Matiushin. The poet had written in his 1913 text ‘New Ways of
the Word’ that ‘the incorrect structure of sentences brings about motion and
a new perception of the world’.112 Similarly, Matiushin recorded in his diary in
May 1915, ‘Only in motion does vastness reside … When at last we shall rush

109 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Mikhail Matiushin [before 23 June 1916], in Kazimir Male-
vich, Letters, Documents, Memoirs and Criticism, Russian edition: eds., Irina A. Vakar and
Tatiana N. Mikhienko; English edition: trans. Antonina W. Bouis, ed. Wendy Salmond,
general ed. Charlotte Douglas (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), I: 89.
110 See Charlotte Douglas, ‘Aero Art, The Planetary View: Kazimir Malevich and Lazar
Khidekel’, in Regina Khidekel, ed., Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism (Munich: Prestel,
2014), 27-33; Christina Lodder, ‘Man, Space, and the Zero of Form: Kazimir Malevich’s
Suprematism and the Natural World’, in Paul Crowther and Isabel Wünsche, eds., Mean-
ings of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2012),
47-61; Christina Lodder, ‘Living in Space: Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Architecture
and the Philosophy of Nikolai Fedorov’ in Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder, eds.,
Rethinking Malevich: Proceedings of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of
Kazimir Malevich’s Birth (London: Pindar Press, 2007), 172-202; Christina Lodder, ‘Trans-
figuring Reality: Suprematism and the Aerial View’ in Mark Dorrian and Frederic Pousin,
eds., Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture (London and New York: I. B.
Tauris, 2013), pp. 95-117; Shatskikh, ‘The Cosmos and the Canvas’; and George M. Young,
The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012).
111 Oliver Lodge, The Ether of Space (London: Harper & Brothers, 1909), 104-5.
112 Kruchenykh, ‘New Ways of the Word’, quoted in Henderson, Fourth Dimension, chap. 5,
note 134. The poet also observed that artists’ purposeful use of ‘incorrect perspective
brings about a new, fourth dimension’ (ibid.).
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 73

rapidly past objectness we shall probably see the totality of the whole world’.
Matiushin’s quote had also included the comment, ‘The faster you move near
a thick garden lattice, the more clearly you see the general mass behind it’.113
Malevich had demonstrated his own interest in such pulsating, perceptual
‘flickering’ in the subtitle of his 1912 painting The Knife Grinder: Principle of
Flickering (Yale University Art Gallery, Newhaven, CT).
A similar kind of flicker or pulsing had actually figured in Hinton’s and Ous-
pensky’s writings. In order to explain the relationship of time and motion to
space, Ouspensky had argued that a multi-layered, three-dimensional form
passing through a two-dimensional space would be perceived as a succession
of coloured lines, possibly in motion, if the object’s size changed. As Ouspen-
sky phrased it, our limited three-dimensional spatial perception means that
we, too, ‘see the world as through a narrow slit’, mistaking as time and motion
what are actually four-dimensional spatial phenomena.114
He wrote:

That conception of the world which we deduce from our usual view of
time makes the world appear like a continuously gushing out igneous
fountain of fireworks, each spark of which flashes for a moment and dis-
appears, never to appear any more. Flashes are going on continuously,
following one after another, there are an infinite number of sparks, and
everything together produces the impression of a flame, though it does
not exist in reality.115

For Ouspensky, this ‘fountain of fireworks’ was a transitory illusion of true,

timeless four-dimensional reality. Yet, following Hinton’s view, such sparks
flashing – or flickering – could be understood positively as the first signs or
sections of higher dimensional forms. And the ether, as a three-dimensional
‘surface of contact’ or boundary of two four-dimensional spaces would be
the context within which these flashes occurred, as four-dimensional forms
penetrated it. It was in this very chapter of Tertium Organum that Ouspensky
reprinted Hinton’s discussion of this topic, quoted above.116
In A New Era of Thought, Hinton had explained, ‘[W]hen we study a higher
solid, we must suppose that it passes through the aether, and that we only
see that thin three-dimensional section of it which is just about to pass from

113 Mikhail Matiushin, diary entry, 29 May 1915, quoted in Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds, 61.
114 Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, 46.
115 Ibid., 40-41.
116 See the passage quoted at note 98 above.
74 Dalrymple Henderson

one side to the other of the aether’ – or, in Malevich’s case, the first planar
face of a solid breaking through.117 Although his painting technique varied in
different works, many of his canvases give the impression of coloured planes
surrounded by a white field, so that the forms appear to break through the
surface in the kind of ‘cut’ the Englishman described.118 According to Hinton,
‘[W]e have to suppose the aether broken through, only we must suppose that it
runs up to the edge of the body which is penetrating it, so that we are aware of
no breach of continuity’.119 Malevich’s ‘semaphores’ of colour, as he termed his
planes, breakthrough in just this way – like Ouspensky’s ‘fireworks’ flickering
forth before our eyes.120
Following his ‘fireworks’ discussion, Ouspensky also paraphrased a passage
from Wundt that is highly relevant to Malevich’s Suprematist focus on discern-
ing a subtle ‘sensation’ or ‘feeling’, as the term oshchushchenie has often been
translated. As further support for his argument (paralleling Boucher) about
the inadequacy of perception, Ouspensky wrote, ‘Wundt, in one of his books,
called attention to the fact that our vaunted five organs of sense are in real-
ity just feelers by which we feel the world around us. We live groping about.
We never see anything. We are always just feeling everything’.121 Affirming
Wundt’s importance, one of Malevich’s best-known statements about Supre-
matism centres on this same issue of sensing or feeling by means of subtle
sensation: ‘[A] blissful sense of liberating objectlessness drew me forth into
the “desert”, where nothing is real except feeling [sensation] … and so feeling
[sensation] became the substance of my life’.122

117 Hinton, New Era of Thought, 59.

118 I am grateful to conservator Maria Kokkori for clarifying Malevich’s differing techniques,
which included occasionally painting over the white ground.
119 Ibid., 60
120 For ‘semaphores’, see Malevich, ‘Non-Objective Creation and Suprematism’, in Malevich,
Essays, 1: 122.
121 Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (1922), 41.
122 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Suprematism’, Part I of The Non-Objective World (Chicago: Paul
Theobald and Co, 1959) 68; originally published as Die gegendstandslose Welt as one of
the Bauhausbücher in 1927. My use of ‘sensation’ in brackets follows Charlotte Douglas’s
translation of oshchushchenie as ‘sensation’ rather the more emotionally suggestive ‘feel-
ing’ used in the 1959 translation (see Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds, 57-58). Accordingly,
Malevich’s description of The Black Square would read: ‘The square = feeling [sensation],
the white field = the void beyond this feeling [sensation]’ (Malevich, ‘Suprematism’, in
Non-Objective World, 76).
‘Objectlessness’ has long been recognised as the translation preferable to ‘non-
objectivity,’ and is used in the new translation of the Russian manuscript for Malevich’s
Bauhaus book. See Britta Tanja Dümpelmann, ‘The World as Objectlessness: A Snapshot
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 75

Malevich’s one known reference to ether in the year of Suprematism’s birth

occurs in the 1915 stage set design for Victory over the Sun mentioned above
(Fig. 3.5).123 Halfway down the right edge, he included the phrase ‘putting the
ether inside’, adding references elsewhere to ‘helium’, ‘the gas is gathered’, and
‘blue gas’, which may reflect contemporary discussions about radioactive em-
anations and the decay that transformed radium into helium.124 Here, with
his Suprematist style developing, Malevich’s design includes geometric forms
that not only ‘eclipse’ the Cubist-collage-like figurative elements, but also float
free on the surface, as they had not done in works of 1913 and 1914. No longer
creating an illogical spatial structure based on an ‘incorrect perspective’ of the
hypercube, as he had done in 1913, he encoded links to the fourth dimension
in his new formal language and sectioning.125
‘We have split the object open! We started seeing the world through to the
core’, Kruchenykh had declared in ‘New Ways of the Word’.126 Or, as Male-
vich wrote in his 1915 text From Cubism to Suprematism concerning the means
‘to transmit purely coloured motion’: ‘[I]t is necessary to turn directly to the
painted masses as such, to look for inherent forms in them’.127 From the
rhetoric surrounding the X-ray and its penetration of the skin to the cautions
of writers like Boucher and Ouspensky that we only see surfaces, this was now
a style that sliced and sectioned to reveal the traces or first intimations of
higher-dimensional forms, signified by planes as their essences.

of an Artistic Universe’, in Kazimir Malevich: The World as Objectlessness (Basel: Kunstmu-

seum, 2014), 11-59; and Kazimir Malevich, ‘The World as Objectlessness’, in ibid., 145-200.
While recognising the importance of ‘sensation’ and ‘objectlessness’ as used in the new
translation, I have chosen to preserve the well-known language of the 1959 translation
cited above. For the new translation, see Kazimir Malevich: The World as Objectlessness,
188.
123 For this drawing of May 1915, which is one of three that Malevich made for a possible
new publication of Victory over the Sun, see Shatskikh, Black Square, 49 and the related
discussion.
124 I am grateful to Shatskikh for bringing this image and its notations to my attention. Troels
Andersen reproduced the drawing in Malevich (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1970), 24.
His source was Benedikt Livshits, Polutorglazy strelets [The One and a Half-Eyed Archer]
(Leningrad, 1933). The drawing parallels a work in the Khardzhiev-Chaga Collection with-
out the multiple annotations; see Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde (Ams-
terdam: Stedelijk Museum, 2013), 59.
125 See note 112 above for ‘incorrect perspective’.
126 Aleksei Kruchenykh, ‘New Ways of the Word’, in Anna Lawton, ed., Russian Futurism
Through Its Manifestoes, 1912-1928, trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1998), 76.
127 Malevich, ‘From Cubism to Suprematism’, in Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds, 109;
rephrased in Douglas, ‘Western European Art Theory’, 60.
76 Dalrymple Henderson

Figure 3.5 Kazimir Malevich, Stage Design for Victory over the Sun, 1915 version, gaphite on
paper. Reproduced from Benedikt Livshits, Polutorglazy strelets (Leningrad, 1933).

Malevich’s focus on the invisible had been crucial to the development of

Suprematism, but his style stands in marked contrast to the appearance of
Boccioni’s Soccer Player, with its fluid edges suggesting the dematerialisation
of matter into the ether (or its formation from it). Instead, Malevich commu-
nicated his ideas about higher-dimensional reality in a diagrammatic, hard-
edged formal language. If Boccioni sought to create a ‘window’ on an invisible
reality, Malevich in 1915 seems to have tried to represent the initial experience
of four-dimensional, cosmic consciousness, the ‘sensation of infinity’ that Ous-
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 77

Figure 3.6
Kazimir Malevich, Composition 14t (Suprematism: Sen-
sation of Electric[ity], 1915, graphite on paper, 15.3 × 10
cm., (paper), 8.8 × 4.9 cm., (image), Stedelijk Muse-
um, Amsterdam.

pensky had predicted. Here, higher dimensional reality is conveyed through

objectless geometric ‘units’ that incorporate concepts long associated with the
fourth dimension – infinity, freedom from gravity or specific orientation, and
implied motion – as well as the infinite, world-filling ether via the discussions
of Hinton, Ouspensky, and very likely others, such as Boucher and Lodge.128
Liberated from traditional objects by the model of the supra-sensible reali-
ties of the new science and the fourth dimension, Malevich by 1916 could also
use his new vocabulary of Suprematist forms to comment on the invisible pro-
cesses of nature, as in Composition 14t (Suprematism: Sensation of Electric(ity)
(Fig. 3.6). In contrast to Boccioni’s attempt to embody the speeding electrons
or other particles making up ‘matter [that] is only energy’, Malevich used his
Suprematist elements to create a diagram of electrical forces within the atom
(possibly as signs for revolving electrons) in the upper half of the drawing.129 It

128 For ‘unit’, see Malevich, ‘Futurism-Suprematism’, in Kazimir Malevich, 1878-1935 (1990),
177.
129 For Boccioni’s quotation, see note 60 above. For Malevich’s title, see notes 40 and 61
above.
78 Dalrymple Henderson

was in 1916, too, that the artist began a series of drawings on the theme of mag-
netism, such as Composition 2 z (Sensation of Magnetism), a group to which he
gave the designation ‘Suprematism (The Shaping of the Magnetic Field)’.130 In
fact, magnetism is closely tied to electrons, since it is the orbits of electrons
within atoms that produce the slight magnetism in every substance. Magnetic
effects, however, become much stronger when the electron-produced poles of
the molecules of a substance align, as in a magnetic field. That phenomenon
was often illustrated in popular science books with bars or other signs with
positive and negative poles, aligning themselves in response to the field, just
as Malevich’s forms register invisible forces drawing them together.131
In his hard-edged Suprematist canvases of 1915 and 1916 Malevich avoided
the issue of the interpenetration of matter and ether, which was so central for
artists like Boccioni and Kandinsky, and only began to explore such transitions
actively from late 1916 to 1918. This shift is apparent in drawings such as Supre-
matism: Two Intersecting Planes, Fading of 1917 or Suprematism: Interacting El-
ements, Fading of 1917-18 (both, Khardzhiev-Chaga Collection, Stedelijk Mu-
seum, Amsterdam) and paintings such as Yellow Plane in Dissolution of 1917-18
(Fig. 3.7). Now, the chiaroscuro modelling that Boccioni and Kandinsky had
used to dematerialise the edges of forms comes into play in Malevich’s works
for a time.132 Such works strongly suggest the transition between material and
immaterial worlds, which was understood during this period in terms of a con-
tinuum from matter to ether. Malevich’s drawings, in particular, demonstrate
the way in which chiaroscuro – that staple of the volumetric rendering that
he had used in his earlier Cubo-Futurist works – could now have exactly the
reverse effect. As he described the series, ‘One side of the element begins to
disintegrate evoking a sensation of definitive non-existence’.133 These were ob-
viously also works about subtle sensation, testing a threshold of the perception
of ‘fading away’ or ‘dissolution’.

130 For these drawings, see Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde (2013), 122-23; and
Andersen, Leporskaya Archive, 140-43, where the phrase ‘the shaping of the magnetic
field’ is noted on the envelope containing the drawings (ibid., 140).
131 See Robert Andrews Millikan and Henry Gordon Gale, Practical Physics (Boston, MA:
Ginna and Co., 1922), 221, with figures typical across a range of physics books in the 1910s.
132 For these drawings and paintings, see Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde
(2013), 122-23, 101, 103-105.; and Andersen, Leporskaya Archive, 121-23. For Kandinsky and
ether-like dematerialisation, see Henderson, ‘Abstraction, the Ether, and the Fourth Di-
mension’, 236-38.
133 See Andersen, Leporskaya Archive, 121. On the theme of dissolution in Malevich’s paint-
ing, see also Charlotte Douglas, ‘Supremus: The Dissolution of Sensation’, in Zahia Hadid
and Suprematism (Ostildern: Hatje Cantz; and Zurich: Galerie Gmurzynska, 2012), 84-89.
Malevich, the Fourth Dimension, and the Ether of Space 79

Figure 3.7 Kazimir Malevich, Yellow Plane in Dissolution, 1917-18, oil on canvas, 106 × 70.5 cm.,
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Photo: Art Resource, NY.
80 Dalrymple Henderson

In his 1927 Bauhaus book, Die gegenstandslose Welt, Malevich reproduced

drawings re-made after works of the mid-1910s, including those on the themes
of magnetism and fading. In addition, his remarkable Suprematist Composi-
tion (Feeling of Wireless Telegraphy) (Kunstmuseum, Basel) evokes the heyday
of Hertzian waves and the ether, featuring Morse code-like dashes and dots
moving through space among circular Suprematist forms.134
Malevich’s commitment to the theme of energy as present in science and
technology remained strong in the 1920s. By the later 1910s and 1920s, however,
he was also hearing more about the new Relativity Theory from associates like
El Lissitzky and, as Douglas has documented, he was increasingly interested in
the theories of Ernst Mach.135 Yet one of the places the ether lived on in the
1920s was in popular radio culture, and, appropriately, Malevich chose that
metaphor for the process of perception in a statement included in The World
as Objectlessness: ‘Our life is a radio station that receives waves of various sen-
sations that are realised into one thing or another. These waves are turned
on and off depending on the sensation of the person who controls the radio
station’.136
Recovering the prevalence of the ether in the international cultures of sci-
ence and occultism – along with the spatial fourth dimension – allows us to
understand the goals of Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde in ways that
have not been possible before. Clearly, the fourth dimension was not an iso-
lated concept during this period, but one that was very much inflected by con-
temporary ether physics. The X-ray’s proof of the inadequacy of the human
eye had made it impossible to deny the existence of higher dimensions sim-
ply because they could not be seen. Moreover, following upon the pioneering
work of Hinton, popular scientific and occult publications regularly connected
the fourth dimension and the ether. It was this exhilarating context (which
radically redefined matter and space), that encouraged artists like Malevich to
leave behind the world of objects and their superficial surface appearances. In-
stead, the ‘clairvoyant’ artist would focus on the essences of nature, giving form
to various kinds of energies and seeking to evoke higher-dimensional realities,
ideally expanding the sensory capabilities and consciousness of viewers in the
process.

134 For this drawing, see Kazimir Malevich: The World as Objectlessness, 121. For the earlier
version, see Andersen, Leporskaya Archive, 152.
135 See Douglas, ‘Mach and Malevich’. On El Lissitzky and Relativity Theory, see Henderson,
Fourth Dimension, chap. 5, section on ‘The 1920s: El Lissitzky and Others’.
136 Malevich, ‘Suprematism’, in Kazimir Malevich: The World as Objectlessness, 195.
 Chapter 4

The Path of Empirical Criticism in Russia or

‘The Milky Way of Inventors’1

Alexander Bouras

The Russian Avant-Garde inherited from Symbolism a complete rejection of

naturalism (a by-product of nineteenth-century positivism), as well as the
defining philosophical concepts of fin-de siècle European and Russian culture.
Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche had developed
a critical approach to reason and science, through their ‘dancing in the misty
divine’ as Aleksei Kruchenykh put it.2 For them, human existence and the uni-
verse could not be understood by reason alone, but could only be fully com-
prehended if irrational approaches, such as intuition, were also employed.
In response to this philosophical position, thinkers like Ernst Mach and
Richard Avenarius began to reconsider positivism, and developed what has
been called a second positivism, also known as empirio-criticism, empirical
criticism, or Machism. They argued that scientific knowledge is not absolute,
but relative: science is not able to produce a completely true image of the
world, but is only able to convey its sensations, signs and symbols. Empirical
criticism posed the question of the connection between science and philos-
ophy and this ensured its popularity among thinkers in both camps, influ-
encing the thinking of Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, Heinrich
Rickert, Théodule-Armand Ribot, Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann, Wilhelm
Ostwald, Rudolf Steiner, Henri Poincaré, Henri Bergson, and others.
In Russia, empirical criticism became ‘an intellectual fashion’ amongst
the younger generation. Promoted by popular and specialist journals alike,
it became ‘the new paradigm of a completely scientific and moral outlook’,
able to overcome the current ‘crisis’ and restore a belief in science and
progress.3 Empirical criticism’s influence on the art world was mainly chan-
nelled through the journal Questions Concerning the Theory and Psychology

1 Velimir Khlebnikov, Truba marsian (Moscow: Liren’, 1916).

2 Aleksei Кruchenykh, Apokalipsis v russkoi literature (Moscow: MAF, 1922 [cover gives 1923]),
29.
3 Daniela Steila, Nauka i revoliutsiia. Retseptsiia empiriokritsizma v russkoi literature (1877-1910)
(Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2013), 122.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_006

82 Bouras

of Creativity [Voprosy teorii i psikhologii tvorchestva], edited and published by

Boris Lezin in Kharkov (1907-1923). The journal became the main mouthpiece
for the followers of the philosophy and linguistics of Аleksandr Potebnia, ad-
dressing issues concerning the psychology of creativity and the creative pro-
cess, all of which brought it close to Machism. Among the journal’s contribu-
tors were Dmitrii Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, Petr Engelmeier, Boris Lezin, Evgenii
Anchikov, Аrkadii Gornfeld, Aleksandr Pogodin, Ivan Lapshin, Semyon Frank,
Timofei Rainov, Henri Poincaré, Vladimir Korolenko and Mikhail Gershen-
zon. The publication first appeared in 1907, when the Russian intelligentsia
was still confronting the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution. Social conscious-
ness was becoming democratised, people were beginning to recognise the in-
evitability of revolutionary action, and numerous professional, cultural and
educational organisations were being set up throughout the country. In this
situation, social and artistic creativity became a central issue for intellectuals
thinking about radically reconstructing social life. Empirical criticism became
the subject of heated discussions among the political left. But the growing
popularity of the new philosophical trend also determined its fate. In his strug-
gle with fellow Party members, Aleksandr Bogdanov, Leonid Krasin, Anatolii
Lunacharskii and others, Lenin wrote his only philosophical work, Material-
ism and Empirio-Criticism [Materializm i empiriokrititsizm], 1909, in which he
characterised empirical criticism as ‘a path into the quagmire’,4 and accused its
followers of being reactionaries, idealists, agnostics, and scholastics. Naturally,
after the Bolsheviks came to power, Mach’s followers hid their philosophical
roots for fear of being persecuted as ideological enemies.
This essay will focus on the influence that Lezin’s literary and psychological
empiricism, in tandem with Engelmeier’s technical and philosophical empir-
ical criticism, exerted on Russian avant-garde ideas in general and on Supre-
matism in particular. I will mainly focus on examining the way in which these
ideas affected the development of the formulations and principles of artistic
culture, a process in which Kazimir Malevich played a leading role, especially
as regards the notions of invention and experimentation and the role of intu-
ition and logic in the creative process.

The Philosophy of Technology and the Work of Petr Engelmeier

Petr Klimentevich Engelmeier (1855-1942), was a multi-talented individual:

he was an engineer and mechanic who promoted the motor car in Russia,

4 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1968),

XVIII: 262; English translation http://marxistphilosophy.org/LenEmpCrit1.pdf.
The Path of Empirical Criticism in Russia 83

an inventor, a philosopher of technology and the creative process, an ama-

teur artist, a musician, and a member of the Moscow Society for Art Photog-
raphy (Moskovskoe khudozhestvenno-fotograficheskoe obshchestvo). In his
writings, published in Russian and German, he analysed the creative process
as it related to technology, but he also stressed the traits that it shared with the
creative processes in art, science, religion and everyday life. In other words,
he explored creativity as manifest in all areas of human activity. His philo-
sophical position was based on Schopenhauer, but also embraced the ideas of
Mach, whom he knew personally. In fact, Engelmeier was responsible for pre-
senting Mach’s ideas to the Russian public, especially Mach’s first book, which
he edited and published in Russian.
In formulating his philosophy of technology, Engelmeier devoted a lot of
attention to art, including painting, and emphasised the characteristics that
art and technology shared. For instance, he pointed out that both could be
produced by collective work. In technology, the solution of a particular task
is the result of a creative process and is always presented ‘as a single speci-
men’, before being produced in multiple copies by a collective. His theory that
creativity comprised three stages also endowed art with a collective content,
since the final act of actually creating the work, the materialisation of the idea
(the craft or mechanical stage), could be executed in a studio, workshop, or
laboratory.
Engelmeier acknowledged that there was a difference between technical
and artistic activity – that technology was directed towards utility and art to-
wards beauty.5 Nevertheless, he discussed the usefulness of a purely artistic
product and the aesthetic qualities of a technical creation. He considered that
machines, like the steam ship and the bicycle, acted as symbols of the modern
world and as examples of objects that simultaneously embody beauty both
in their external form and in their conception. On seeing the Eiffel Tower, he

5 Russian avant-garde artists approached this idea in various ways. Malevich, for instance,
acknowledged that ‘we can find beauty in any household machine’, but at the same time
stressed that not all elements of a utilitarian machine will create pleasant sensations, so that
‘if we add what pleases us to what seems beautiful to us in a machine, then the sum of these
beautiful elements will produce a work which does not resemble any object’. Malevich’s
statement should be considered within the context of his polemic with the Constructivists
and Productivists, who didn’t simply destroy the border between artistic and utilitarian ac-
tivity but regarded the two activities as equal. Malevich considered that art and technology
possess much in common, but that each field of activity should remain autonomous, be-
cause ‘an eclectic marriage between aesthetics and a practical object’ will produce ‘an eclec-
tic offspring – a telephone with peacock feathers’. See К. Мalevich, ‘Suprematizm. Mir kak
bespredmetnost’, ili vechnyi pokoi’ [Suprematism. The World as Objectlessness, or Eternal
Peace], 1922, ms; reprinted in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. A. S.
Shatskhikh (Moscow: Gileia, 2000), III: 69-324.
84 Bouras

remarked that people ‘walking under this arch of fantastic beauty for the first
time or being elevated in the mechanised lift past this metal lacework, will un-
intentionally receive a truly aesthetic feeling of amazement and rapture before
the power of human genius’.6
In comparing the professional activities of the artist and the technician-
inventor, Engelmeier came to the conclusion that there were ‘astonishing’ sim-
ilarities between technical (or utilitarian) creativity and artistic creativity. He
pointed out that both processes started out with the need to create a new
idea and then realise that idea ‘in metal, wood, stone, etc’.7 These parallels
were completely natural and were embodied in the etymology of the word
‘tekhnika’ which means both technology and technique. The Greek τέχνη and
the Latin techna were both used in relation to industry, commerce, craftwork,
the arts, rhetoric, science, and literature, and denoted skill and the means nec-
essary to bring a specific plan to completion. The Latin technikus means both
‘a master of the arts’ and ‘a practical person’. The idea of ‘art’ can be applied
to the creative activity of the artist as well as to the professional (both techni-
cal and craft) activity of the tailor, carpenter, shoemaker, and lawyer. In both
instances, ‘art’ refers to a person’s skill to overcome any difficulties encoun-
tered in the execution of his ideas.8 So, despite the diverse and wide-ranging
disparities, Engelmeier concluded that there are more similarities than differ-
ences between art and technology, and that, therefore, the creative process is
identical in both areas.
Englemeier detected similar correspondences between science and art.
Both convey an understanding of phenomena and facts. Despite the different
methods used by each discipline to achieve their aims, very often an artistic
element plays a role in scientific discoveries, and science in artistic creations.
Engelmeier wrote:

When a scientist creates a new concept or a new law, he begins, like an

artist, with an intuition. A hypothesis emerges. Then he develops that
hypothesis, by thinking in a scientific way. But the artistic element does
not disappear. Let’s take … Newton’s law of universal attraction. It clearly
contains both elements: the visual artistic image of the invisible but real
power, acting between bodies through cosmic space, and the scientific
and mental formula concerning the quantitative action of this power …

6 Petr Engel’meier, ‘Tekhnika kak iskusstvo’, Nauchnoe obozrenie, 8 (1900): 1374.

7 P. Engel’meier, Filosofiia tekhniki (Moscow: Levenson, 1912), 40.
8 Ibid., 41.
The Path of Empirical Criticism in Russia 85

If the great scientific writings … of Newton, Laplace, and Darwin are pro-
foundly artistic, then conversely the influence of artistic works like the
Bible, the Odyssey and the works of Shakespeare … which are profoundly
wise … often teaches us that science is inadequate, and that understand-
ing can flow directly into the innermost essence of the universe.9

In 1909, Engelmeier proposed a new scientific discipline ‘evrologiia’.10 This was

intended to study every aspect of creativity in science, technology, art, every-
day life, and religion, i.e. ‘the inner content of creativity in all of its manifes-
tations’,11 or, in other words, creativity ‘as such’. Engelmeier drafted a general
theory of creativity, consisting of what he called ‘empty vessels’,12 the filling
of which he proposed would be the work of specialists from various fields of
human creativity. For them, ‘analysing technical creativity will act as a model
for their own analyses’ enabling them to conduct ‘similar analyses of their own
fields of expertise’.13
For Engelmeier, creation entailed creating ‘something from nothing’.14 He
explained: ‘… we take a new theory … a new artistic work, a virtuous new
deed … in a word, a new value created by man. This new value did not exist
before: it came into being and was created from nothing’.15 He argued that
human creativity was nothing more than the efficient or expedient action of
energy on material. It was a result of the interaction between the artist, the
work, and the viewer or consumer. Engelmeier regarded the viewer’s scrutiny
and interpretation of a work of art as a creative act. In other words, creativity
could be non-material or immaterial – ‘to read is to create’.16
Later in 1914, Engelmeier considered creativity from the point of view of
psychology, concluding that creativity is ‘the constructive imagination, which
integrates new forms with past experience’.17 Understanding the new or the
innovative occupied a complex place in Engelmeier’s thinking: ‘The search for
new paths is the slogan of our time’.18 At the same time, he suggested that a

9 P. Engel’meier, Tekhnicheskii itog XIX v (Moscow: Tipografiia K. A. Kaznacheeva, 1898),

60-61, 67.
10 Sometimes this is written as ‘evrilogiia’.
11 P. Engel’meier, Teoriia tvorchestva (St. Petersburg: Obrazovanie, 1910), 116.
12 P. Engel’meier, Evrologiia, ili Vseobshchaia teoriia tvorchestva. Voprosy teorii i psikhologii
tvorchestva (Kharkov, 1914), V: 134.
13 Engel’meier, Teoriia tvorchestva, 67.
14 Engel’meier, Evrologiia, 155.
15 Ibid., 157.
16 Engel’meier, Tekhnicheskii itog XIX v., 64.
17 Engel’meier, Evrologiia, 155.
18 Ibid., 133.
86 Bouras

new form is never completely new, but emerges from the old: past experiences
are analysed into their component elements and from these something new is
constructed. It could, however, be debated by philosophers as to whether this
new form, having absorbed the old, could actually be considered to be totally
new. Citing the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, Engelmeier answered
this question positively, arguing that ‘a new form is more than the sum of its
parts’.19 Moreover, he insisted that it is essential to promote the new against the
resistance of the old, and prove, through action, its power to live and survive.
Mach’s influence is particularly evident in Engelmeier’s approach to the
principle of economy. Citing Mach,20 Engelmeier asserted that the philistine
and the scholar think in identical ways. The difference is that the scholar
spends less time thinking and achieves greater results, because he thinks eco-
nomically. Economy in science is attained first of all through the use of the
collective i.e. of somebody else’s experiment undertaken for its own purpose,
and secondly through the application of proven methods of reasoning. He con-
cluded that ‘science is simple, healthy and worldly thinking, systematised ac-
cording to the principle of economy’.21 Similarly, technology employs the prin-
ciple of economy, striving to attain the highest technological achievements,
with the minimum of expenditure.
Engelmeier’s new term ‘evrologiia’ for his new scientific approach comes
from the Greek word ευρίσκω, meaning to find, discover, or invent. Indeed,
invention became one of the core concepts of his new discipline, and later be-
came central to the concept of ‘artistic culture’. For Engelmeier, any invention
was the solution to a particular problem: ‘The technician confronts the task
of removing a problem or achieving a positive result. The artist confronts the
task of expressing his experiences. The scientist confronts the task of applying
his ideas to a new experiment. Essentially, all three are confronting the task
of exposing themselves, their thoughts, feelings, and images, which emanate
from the subconscious depths of their souls’.22
Engelmeier examined invention within its historical and social contexts,
stressing the enormous role that invention had played in transforming vari-
ous civilisations. He connected the blossoming of science and art during the
Renaissance with technical inventions, such as gunpowder, the compass, the

19 Ibid., 131.
20 Engelmeier cited Ernst Mach, Die Principien der Wä rmelehre: historisch-kritisch entwickelt
(Leipzig: Barth, 1900), 2; and Ernst Makh, Analiz oshchushchenii i otnoshenie fizicheskogo
i psikhicheskomu (Moscow: Skirmunt, 1908).
21 Engel’meier, Evrologiia, 143.
22 Ibid., 141.
The Path of Empirical Criticism in Russia 87

telescope, and the printing press. Similarly, he associated the capitalist era
with the invention of the machine and the development of machine produc-
tion, which replaced manufacturing by hand.23 He introduced into his stud-
ies of various fields of human activity, including art, the factor of materiality
(material culture), borrowed from archaeology, as a defining characteristic of
the epoch.24 For Engelmeier, material culture represented a second, artificial
nature, which was specifically adapted to human requirements and replaced
the culture of nature.25 It should be noted that endowing technology with a
humanitarian content was characteristic of the thinking of the technical intel-
ligentsia at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century,
and it led to the notion of the culture of technology.
Central to Engelmeier’s evrologiia was the ‘theory of the three stages’ which
characterised inventive activity. These comprised desire (intuition), knowl-
edge (reasoning), and skill (routine).26 A similar three-stage creative process
had been enunciated by the psychologist, empiricist and philosopher, Alexan-
der Bain, and the philosopher, biologist and sociologist Herbert Spencer in the
mid-nineteenth century. The first stage entailed the emergence of the idea of
satisfying a concrete need, generated by a discovery, a hunch, an invention or
intuition. According to Engelmeier, this involved the mental synthesis of new
knowledge with past experience. Introspection characterised the method of
this first stage: man tried to read the ‘hieroglyph’ that had developed in his
mind without his conscious participation.27 At this stage, a ‘concept’ emerged,
which consisted of various ‘mental elements’, such as ideas, notions, judge-
ments, images, forms and movements, tones, emotions, and desires.
The conscious elaboration of the idea comprised the second stage. On the
one hand, it involved solving the initial task and, on the other, executing the
idea and making it a reality. The method employed in the second stage was
logic,28 which was responsible for developing a plan for a specific piece of

23 Engel’meier, Filosofiia tekhniki, 47.

24 This position is directly reflected in the Avant-Garde’s theoretical discussions concerning
materiality and the new art. Malevich, for instance, wrote, ‘that [if] art in the stone age
consisted of stone images, and in the Bronze Age comprised images in bronze … it is evi-
dent that in the age of electricity, radio and magnetics, art will be endowed with dynamic
forms’. See K. Malevich, ‘1/47. Suprematizm. Mir kak bespredmetnost” [1/47. Suprema-
tism. The World as Objectlessness], 1924, ms; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii,
IV: 192.
25 Engel’meier, Filosofiia tekhniki, 48.
26 Engel’meier, Teoriia tvorchestva, 116.
27 Ibid., 119.
28 Ibid.
88 Bouras

work (a scheme, project or image). In art, the result of this stage was a model,
a script or ‘a sketch for a work of art’.29
The third stage comprised the materialisation of the non-material (imma-
terial) idea, ‘bringing it to the status of a construction’.30 This is the final stage,
because the creative process ends ‘when the creation is actually made’.31 En-
gelmeier called this third stage, in art, technique, because it entailed the com-
pletion of the plan using the skills of the artist’s craft.32 At this point, ‘man en-
gages in a struggle with the surrounding [world] and transforms it according
to his own plan’.33 The creative process delves into the subconscious, produces
a reflex and is transformed into dexterity, skill, routine, flair, and craftmanship.
According to Engelmeier, reflex is a particularly important stage because ‘it is
only then that man is ready for action, ready to pursue his spiritual goals, and
realise his ideals’.34 At the same time, the reflex (repetition, habitual action)
is not able to produce something new; for this, it is necessary ‘to create, to in-
vent’.35 Engelmeier concluded that although creative activity encompasses the
whole of human activity, it is only one of its manifestations, ‘defined mainly
by the fact that a certain deed is completed for the first time. Repeating the
same deed is called imitation’.36 Hence, ‘evrologiia’, the theory of creativity,
essentially developed towards a general theory of human activity, which the
author called ‘activism’. The result of the three stages is man’s creation of a
second, artificial nature, a kind of ‘microcosm’, called culture or civilisation,
which surrounds us and in which we live.37
Engelmeier’s theory of creativity had an immediate impact on the formula-
tion of the principles of artistic culture, as developed by leading avant-garde
artists and theorists in the 1910s and 1920s. Mach laid the foundation for En-
gelmeier’s inter-disciplinary approach and can help us to understand one of
the reasons why the theorists of progressive art were attracted to the phi-
losophy of technology: ‘When the generally accepted ideas of one area are
transferred into another area, this always revitalises that field … enriches
it and promotes its development’.38 The notions of inventiveness, mastery,
materiality, scientific objectivity, economy, and activism became crucial both

29 Engel’meier, Evrologiia, 151-152.

30 Engel’meier, Teoriia tvorchestva, 117.
31 Engel’meier, Evrologiia, 131.
32 Ibid., 149.
33 Engel’meier, Teoriia tvorchestva, 117.
34 P. Engel’meier, Evrologiia (Kharkov, 1916), VII: 86.
35 Ibid., 87.
36 Ibid., 80.
37 Engel’meier, Teoriia tvorchestva, 116.
38 Ibid., 3.
The Path of Empirical Criticism in Russia 89

for avant-garde practice and for developing a new theory of art under the label
of artistic culture.

Artistic Creativity and the Avant-Garde

In Russia it was only during the first decade of the twentieth century that
artists and theoreticians of the new art followed the thinking of Engelmeier,
Lezin and others, and actually began to consider the creative process in art,
the role, form and content of art, as well as art’s connection with science,
philosophy, technology, and psychology.
Nikolai Kulbin was probably the first avant-garde figure to point out the
need for developing a specific theory for the fine arts. He wrote, ‘An eagle’s
wings do not operate in a disorderly way, but according to strict laws which
comprise the theory of eagles’.39 Kulbin’s professional interest in medicine,
psychology and neurology led him to explore the psychological aspects of the
creative process. In 1910, Kulbin stated, in relation to the sources and nature
of the new art, ‘my materials mainly concern the theory of artistic creativity.
I consider that this comprises three parts, which relate to the psychology of the
artist, the painting, and the viewer’.40 In his theory and practice, in his lectures
in St. Petersburg 1907-8, and in his exhibited works, Kulbin elaborated these
ideas and, in so doing, enunciated the basic tenets of Futurism, as Kruchenykh
later acknowledged.41
From the very beginning, theory went hand in hand with avant-garde prac-
tice. At the 1907 exhibition, The Wreath [Στέφανος, Venok], which marked
the real beginning of avant-garde activity, it was precisely the technical ex-
periments of the ‘explorers of new techniques’42 that attracted reviewers.
Critics mentioned the ‘crafted painting’ [remeslennaia zhivopis’] of Aristarkh

39 Nikolai Kul’bin, ‘Svobodnoe iskusstvo kak osnova zhizni. Garmoniia i dissonans’, in

N. Kul’bin et al, eds., Studiia impressionistov (St. Petersburg: N. I. Butkovskoi, 1910), 9;
reprinted in Vladimir Markov, ed., Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov (Munich:
Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1967), 21.
In 1919, Malevich repeated Kulbin’s statement: ‘nothing, anywhere in the world of
painting, develops unsystematically’. See K. Malevich, O novykh sistemakh v iskusstve.
Statika i skorost’. Ustanovlenie A (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1919); reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie
sochinenii, I: 169.
40 Kul’bin, ‘Svobodnoe iskusstvo’, 13.
41 A. Kruchenykh and N. Kul’bin, Dekalratsiia slova kak takovogo, 1913; reprinted in V. N.
Terekhin and A. P. Zimenkov, eds., Russkii futurizm. Stikhi. Stat’i. Vospominaniia (St. Pe-
tersburg: Poligraf, 2009), 70.
42 Andrei V. Krusanov, Russkii avangard 1907-1932 (St. Petersburg: Novoe literaturnoe obozre-
nie, 1996), I: 10.
90 Bouras

Lentulov and the new techniques, ‘the rectanglular strokes of pigment with
a dot in the middle’ of Vladimir Burliuk.43 The critic A. Timofeev even dis-
cerned the birth of ‘a new tendency in painting’ in which ‘purely technical
tasks’ played a central role.44
Nevertheless, as Malevich observed, the revolution in ‘the state of the arts’
only really began in 1908.45 He may have had in mind the exhibition Contem-
porary Trends in Art [Sovremennye techeniia v iskusstve], organised by Kulbin
in St. Petersburg. Reviewers once again noted Vladimir Burliuk’s technical de-
ficiencies – ‘an outrageous scribble, recalling a sign painted by a decorator’.46
‘An enthusiasm for pictorial technique’, explained the Burliuk brothers’ devel-
opment of ‘psychological pictures’ in which the painter essentially becomes
an image of the viewer.47 To achieve this, Vladimir Burliuk painted ‘a human
body, face and ground with squares, small circles, and similar geometric and
non-geometric forms’.48 Kulbin’s ‘artistic and psychological group’, The Tri-
angle, made their appearance for the first time at this exhibition. The critic
K. Ldov exclaimed, ‘This is the art of the future, a courageous art and …. an in-
escapable search for innovation in artistic creation’.49 But what ideas from the
psychology of creativity were capable of radically transforming the fine arts?
As one critic wrote, ‘the three sides of the Triangle: blue, red and yellow – sym-
bolically express the representation, the feeling, and the will, and all together
form the spirit’.50 In this way, Kulbin’s ‘psychological approach to the prob-
lems of the creative process’, was like Engelmeier’s ‘technical’ approach, which
underpinned his three-part theory of creativity and relied on Schopenhauer’s
philosophy. The fundamental idea is that the whole world of human creation
comprises three basic spiritual functions, reflecting three aspects of human-
ity: instinct (feeling, sensation); consciousness (conception, reason, idea); and
effective action (will, emanating from Kant’s ding an sich).
A little later, in 1912, Vladimir Markov published his article, ‘The Principles
of the New Art’.51 In developing his ‘principle of free creativity’, analogous to

43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 K. Malevich, ‘V gosudarstve iskusstv’ [In the Government of the Arts], Anarkhiia, 54
(9 May 1918): 4; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 89.
46 Krusanov, Russkii avangard, I: 14.
47 Ibid., 15.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., 17.
50 Ibid., 16.
51 Vladimir Markov, ‘Printsipy novogo iskusstva’, Soiuz molodezhi, 2 (April 1912): 5-15; and 3
(June 1912): 5-18.
The Path of Empirical Criticism in Russia 91

‘vers libre’, Markov, like Kulbin, paid particular attention to the three-stage
creative process, describing it now as three different expressions of the self
(the ‘I’). The self or ‘I’ is expressed by means of:
1. Intuition, which is felt ‘in a religious ecstasy, at the moment of inspira-
tion or even at normal times’, as an influx of strange, as if ‘from outside’,
unexpected ideas and experiences.52 At this point, ‘bold leaps’ and ‘clear
shifts of purpose’ occur.53 Markov argued that it was then that the creator
acted as a medium or intermediary between two worlds – the earthly
and the other. The idea itself chooses the creator and the form in which
it is embodied. Therefore, the creator is not responsible for it, however
‘stupid’ or ‘gaudy’ it might be.54
2. Consciousness, when the inner ‘impulses’ and ‘promptings’ ripen and,
like a seed, demand an exit from the individual.55
3. The external manifestation of the results of intuition and consciousness,
i.e. the physical emergence of the work itself. Markov noted that in this
phase the ‘I’ does not appear as a ‘direct echo’ of the two previous ‘I’s
‘because a lot is lost … on the path to its manifestation’.56 Also, the fin-
ished product, is affected by ‘alien elements’ and ‘substitutes’,57 such as
‘the struggle with materials’, ‘life experience’ and ‘the psychological state’
of the creator.58 Markov followed Kant’s thinking about the ‘second-class’
nature of materials, and reduced the significance of the materialisation
of the work in the third and final stage of the creative process.
Based on the idea that ‘aspiring to another world is integral to human na-
ture’ and that ‘man does not desire the earth, but hungers for heaven’, Markov
stressed that the aim of free creativity is the transmission of what could be
‘truer and stronger than an echo’ of those other worlds that man could only
sense.59 To attain this goal, taking into account obstacles and substitutes (as
mentioned above), free creativity uses the principle of economy, i.e. ‘the least
expenditure of technical means’.60
From this, we conclude that a synthesis of creation and cognition lay at the
very foundation of the Avant-Garde, while the creative process, as described

52 Ibid., (June 1912): 11.

53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid., 13.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., 14.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid., 17.
60 Ibid., 16.
92 Bouras

by Engelmeier and others,61 became integral to generating artistic innovation,

from the very first steps towards abstract art.
The February and October Revolutions of 1917 had a profound impact on
Russia’s social and cultural life. While the new government demanded that
art should now represent the new social and political realities, artists hoped
that artistic innovation and radicalism could now become integral to the new
social structure. The immediate post-revolutionary period witnessed an un-
precedented merging of the Avant-Garde and politics: the new artistic culture
acquired government status, and investigations were conducted into the re-
lationship between art and different disciplines such as science, social recon-
struction, technology, artistic education, and cultural transformation.
Towards the end of 1918, the Moscow Department of Fine Arts within the
Commissariat of Enlightenment (Otdel izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv – IZO, Naro-
dnyi komissariat prosveshcheniia – Narkompros) set up an International Of-
fice (Mezhdunarodnoe biuro). Hoping to unify ‘progressive fighters for art in
the name of the new universal artistic culture’,62 it launched the journal Art
International [Internatsional iskusstva], devoted to the theory of contempo-
rary art. Contributions were commissioned from the artists Kazimir Malevich,
Vladimir Tatlin, Aleksei Morgunov, Pavel Kuznetsov, Mikhail Matiushin, and
Sofia Dymshits-Tolstaia; as well as from the art critics Ivan Aksenov, Niko-
lai Punin, Aleksandr Toporkov, and Osip Brik, and the poets Velemir Khleb-
nikov, Andrei Belyi, and Viacheslav Ivanov. The inclusion in the first issue of
an article by Anatolii Lunacharskii (‘Art as the world’s creative laboratory’ –
‘Iskusstvo kak tvorcheskaia laboratoriia mira’), indicates the ambitious scale
of the plans, as does Malevich, Tatlin and Morgunov’s appeal to the world’s
progressive artists.63 Unfortunately, because of economic and political diffi-
culties, the journal was never published. Nevertheless, the International Office
accepted Malevich’s proposal to organise a conference ‘to reconsider the for-
mer principles and methods of science and art’.64 No such event seems to have
taken place. Yet Malevich’s idea seems to have taken root: under the auspices
of a meeting to consider the more pragmatic topic of the museum, the princi-
ple of artistic culture became the main theme of discussion.

61 Among Russian thinkers, it is appropriate to recall Vladimir Solovev who in his 1880 book,
Kritiki otvlechennykh nachal, mentioned will, reason and embodiment in relation to art
and the idea of total unity. See Vladimir Solov’ev, Sobranie sochinenii v dvukh tomakh
(Moscow, 1988), I: 745; and D. V. Sarab’ianov, Russkaia zhivopis’. Probuzhdenie pamiati
(Moscow: Iskusstvoznanie, 1998), 334.
62 Nikolai Khardzhiev, ‘Internatsional iskusstva. Iz materialov po istorii sovetskogo
iskusstva’, Russian Literature, 6 (1974): 55-57.
63 Ibid., 56.
64 Ibid.
The Path of Empirical Criticism in Russia 93

This ‘Conference Concerning Museums’ was held in February 1919, and, de-
spite its title, had an important impact on the Avant-Garde’s creative activity.
Nikolai Punin read a statement on behalf of IZO, announcing the principles
that would direct the organisation and development of new museums. All
questions connected with artistic creativity, as well as the formation, and the
acquisition of contemporary works of art were to be placed in the hands of
artists, because they (rather than museum professionals and scholars) were
able to evaluate the quality of the works and discern new elements of artis-
tic invention.65 The principle of scientific objectivity and creative activism
were presented as aspects of Marxism, although, in reality, the fundamental
principles of ‘artistic culture’ do not have a Marxist origin.66 On the contrary,
the statement’s emphasis on art’s autonomy, and its assertion of artistic self-
government and independence of all interference from the regime, society
and the market indicates an allegiance to ideological trends such as Fourierist
socialism, anarchist socialism, revolutionary syndicalism, anarchist individu-
alism, and the co-operative movement.
In 1918-1919, leading avant-garde artists and theorists helped to develop the
principle of artistic culture. The position of Lunacharskii, the Commissar for
Enlightenment, indicates that the concept of artistic culture emerged and was
developed within the Avant-Garde and was not imposed by the Party. Lu-
nacharskii did not support the idea that the history of art was the history of in-
novation and invention. He considered that ‘professional technical formalism’

65 ‘Deklaratsiia Otdela izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv i khudozhestennoi promyshlennosti

Narkomprosa po voprosu o printsipakh muzeevedeniia’, Iskusstvo kommuny, 11 (16 Febru-
ary 1919): 1.
66 Punin popularised the concept, but he was not alone in masking its origin by using Marx-
ist terminology. For instance, Ivan Puni (Jean Pougny) used the term ‘painterly material-
ism’ which he defined as the general platform for all progressive trends in painting from
Cézanne onwards. Puni defined ‘painterly materialism’ as ‘the unified and principled re-
lationship to a painting as an end in itself, as a constructive system of form and pigment’,
i.e. what was later called formalism. See Iv. Puni, ‘Sovremennye gruppirovki v russkom
levom iskusstve’, Iskusstvo kommuny, 19 (13 April 1919): 2-3. Contemporaries recognised
such deceptive uses of Marxist terminology. The old Bolshevik, literary critic and produc-
tivist, Nikolai Chuzhak, for instance, observed, ‘Using Marxist phraseology in a clever way,
although not thinking in a Marxist way – N. N. Punin’. See N. F. Chuzhak, ‘Pod znakom
zhisnestroeniia. Opyt osoznaniia iskusstva dnia’, Lef, 1 (1923): 28.
Boris Arvatov accused Malevich of similarly misrepresenting The Red Square, because
while ‘embodying an individualistic aesthetic,’ it was ‘presented as a completely social-
istic aesthetic’. See B. Arvatov, ‘Malevich. “Bog ne skinut (Iskusstvo. Tserkov’. Fabrika)”,
Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, 7 (1922): 343-344. The accusation was justified. The tactic was fre-
quently adopted by avant-garde artists to hide their true ideology (anarchism) and their
philosophical roots (empirical criticism).
94 Bouras

was less important for art than factors like ‘inspiration’ and ‘imagination’.67
He even criticised the principle that lay at the basis of the concept of artis-
tic culture – the autonomy of the art work, which organically arose from the
avant-garde notions concerning ‘the thing in itself’ and ‘painting as such’. Nev-
ertheless, Lunacharskii acknowledged that the principle of artistic culture rep-
resented the general position of leftist artists and he, therefore, respected and
tolerated it.
The new concept had enormous importance for artistic innovation in gen-
eral, but especially for the Avant-Garde: ‘The understanding of artistic culture
comprises, by virtue of the meaning of the very word culture as vigorous ac-
tivity, a creative moment; creation comprises the production of the new, in-
vention; [consequently] artistic culture is nothing other than the culture of
artistic invention’.68 Formal, stylistic and technical innovation became the cri-
teria of aesthetic value, and so naturally museums had to be devoted to the
history of artistic innovation.
Artistic culture was considered a result of the creative process, which pos-
sesses specific characteristics, such as inventiveness (innovation), skill (pro-
fessionalism), and objectivity (science). It includes a range of elements, such
as:
1) material – surface, texture [faktura], elasticity, density, weight and other
properties of material
2) colour – saturation, strength, relationship to light, purity, transparency,
independence and other qualities
3) space – volume, depth, dimension and other properties of space
4) time (movement) – in its spatial expression and in connection with
colour, material, composition, etc
5) form as a result of the interaction of material, colour, space, and, in its
distinctive form, composition
6) technique [tekhnika] – painting, mosaic, reliefs of various kinds, sculp-
ture, masonry, and other artistic techniques.69
Artistic culture, as a culture of invention, emerged only when the artist radi-
cally changed his attitude or invented in accordance with the elements listed
above.70

67 ‘Rech’ Lunacharskogo’, Iskusstvo kommuny, 11 (16 February 1919): 3.

68 Ibid., 4.
69 ‘Polozhenie Otdela izobrazitel’nyh iskusstv i khudozhestvennoi promyshlennosti NKP po
voprosu “o khudozhestvennoi kul’ture”’, Iskusstvo kommuny, 11 (16 February 1919): 4.
70 Ibid.
The Path of Empirical Criticism in Russia 95

The principles of artistic culture provided the foundation for the cultural
policy of the new government. ‘Artistic culture’ was the subject of scientific
and artistic investigations at the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture (Insti-
tut khudozhestvennoi kul’tury – Inkhuk), conducted by Nikolai Tarabukin,
Boris Arvatov, Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alek-
sandr Vesnin, Gustav Klutsis (Gustavs Klucis), Karl Ioganson (Kārlis Johan-
sons), Nikolai Ladovskii and others, as well as underpinning the investi-
gations of the State Institute of Artistic Culture (Gosudarstvennyi Institut
khudozhestvennoi kul’tury – Ginkhuk) in Petrograd where Malevich, Tatlin,
Mikhail Matiushin, Pavel Filonov, Nikolai Puni, Pavel Mansurov, Ilia Chash-
nik and others worked. The concept of ‘artistic culture’ also provided the
theoretical foundation for the radical reform of artistic education and the
setting up of the State Free Art Studios (Svobodnye gosudarstvennye khu-
dozhestvennye masterskie – Svomas), the Vkhutemas (Vysshie gosudarstven-
nye khudozhestvenno-teknicheskie masterskie – Higher Artistic and Techni-
cal Workshops), and Unovis (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva – Champions of the
New Art). The new principles also determined the state’s policy towards mu-
seums and the foundation of the museums of artistic culture, including the
Museum of Painterly Culture in Moscow and the Museum of Artistic Culture
in Petrograd, which were run by Kandinsky, Rodchenko and Malevich.
In accordance with artistic culture, the new approach to museums empha-
sised creative invention, innovation, skill, and experimentation in the area of
artistic techniques and materials, as well as producing new approaches to dis-
play.71 Kandinsky, for instance, proposed ‘opening the doors of the artist’s stu-
dio’ to ‘reveal’ the skill and craftsmanship of artistic creation, arguing that this
reflected the new social requirements and the democratisation of all areas of
life.72 The task of the new museum was to present the most important artistic
movements, like Impressionism, Cézannism, Cubism and Futurism as well as
contemporary trends. In other words, the new museum was to stress formal in-
vention, the materials and how they were used, and not the artists themselves.
Maria Gough has suggested that this is based on Heinrich Wölfflin’s idea of
‘the history of art without names’.73 I would also like to mention the influence

71 In 1913, David Burliuk ‘the father of Russian Futurism’, observed at one of the Knave (Jack)
of Diamonds debates, that the method of investigating artistic principles, rather than the
content of paintings, would provide the foundation for the still-to-be-written scientific
history of painting. See Benedikt Livshits, Polutoroglazyi strelets (Leningrad, 1933; and
Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1989), 361.
72 Vasilii Kandinskii, ‘Muzei zhivopisnoi kul’tury’, Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’, 2 (1920): 18.
73 Maria Gough, ‘Futurist Museology’, Modernism/Modernity, X, 2 (April 2003): 328.
96 Bouras

of the German engineer, Alois Riedler, whom Engelmeier called ‘a pillar of

machine production’. Riedler taught ‘intellectual culture’, not chronologically,
but ‘as the history of culture and cultural resources’.74 This approach relates
to Kandinsky’s statement that the Museum of Painterly Culture ‘has the aim
of presenting the stages of purely painterly achievements, painterly methods
and means completely, as they are manifest in the painting of all epochs and
nations’.75
Faktura was one of the most important elements of artistic culture. While
Kandinsky simply wanted to collect all significant works related to the appli-
cation of faktura, Rodchenko intended to make faktura the unifying strand,
replacing any chronological or thematic narrative.76 Kandinsky’s more conser-
vative approach did not address the difference between an experiment and
a work of art, or between art and non-art, but trusted that the new theory
of painting, ‘of which we already have a premonition’, would provide the an-
swers.77 In contrast, Rodchenko completely rejected the traditional distinc-
tions between an experiment and a work of art. Like Engelmeier earlier, he
equated the creative process in art with that in other areas of human activity.

Creativity and Suprematism

For Malevich, the creative process related not only to artistic activity but also
to the construction of the entire universe. He wrote, ‘Suprematist artists …
have moved towards creation i.e. now they have become a part of the universal
law of nature’.78 This stance reflects Potebnia’s view, popularised by his follow-
ers, such as Lezin, who argued, ‘in actual fact, we do not know nature, but the
human spirit, and cognition of the world is cognition of the ‘I’ [the Self], and
vice-versa … we only know as much of the external world as is reflected in us’.79
But the ‘Suprematist Mirror’ was called upon to reflect not only the world’s ob-
jects, but also the very essence of the universe, or at least that part that was
accessible to the artist. All past experiences were diminished, forms were split

74 Alois Riedler, ‘Tseli vysshikh tekhnicheskikh shkol’, Biulleten’ politekhnicheskogo obshch-

estvo, 3 (1901): 154.
75 Kandinskii, ‘Muzei zhivopisnoi kul’tury’, 19.
76 See Gough, ‘Futurist Museology’, 340.
77 Kandinskii, ‘Muzei zhivopisnoi kul’tury’, 20.
78 K. Malevich, ‘Rodonachalo suprematizma’ [The Birth of Suprematism], Anarkhiia, 81
(1918): 4; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 111.
79 B. Lezin, ‘Khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo kak osobyi vid ekonomii mysli’, Voprosy teorii i
psikhologii tvorchestva, 1 (1907): 308.
The Path of Empirical Criticism in Russia 97

into their component elements, and the artist arrived at ‘the zero of form’.80
The creative method that was employed at this stage of invention and which
could be labelled ‘the dispersive stage’, corresponds to Mikhail Bakunin’s no-
tion that ‘the destructive spirit is a creative spirit’.81 Unlike Nikolai Berdiaev,
for whom, Cubism and the new art represented a degeneration and destruc-
tion of the past, Malevich and the Avant-Garde saw it as a liberation of ‘the
‘I’ from things and a move towards direct creation’.82 It was precisely in order
to move ‘through zero’ and towards direct creation, that artists came to con-
sider the theories of creativity discussed above. At this point, elements were
synthesised and there was a move towards establishing a single foundation or
primordial entity. Malevich coined the neologism ‘spylenie’ [consolidation] to
describe this process. In Suprematist philosophy, the universe is characterised
by an endless cycle of processes: ‘In the world there are only two actions –
consolidation [spylenie] and dispersion [raspylenie]’83 of a single indestruc-
tible entity, without colour and without form, that Malevich called ‘nothing’.
It was not just creative necessity that made theories of creativity attrac-
tive to the Avant-Garde. As already noted, the intellectual debate following
the failed 1905 Revolution possessed wider social ramifications. These were
manifest in Signposts [Vekhi] of 1909, a collection of essays by Berdiaev, Sergei
Bulgakov, Mikhail Gershenzon, Petr Struve, Semyon Frank, and others. The
publication discussed the role of the intelligentsia, and criticised positivism,
in line with the metaphysics of Mach and Avenarius. Gershenzon, for instance,
advised the intelligentsia, as a first step, ‘to withdraw into themselves’,84 pay at-
tention to their inner consciousness, and ‘here, in constant contact with the ir-
rational elements of the spirit, continuously commune with the world essence,
because through the will of each individual, flows the united cosmic will’.85 It

80 K. Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k Suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm [From Cu-

bism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism] (Moscow: Obshchestven-
naia pol’za, 1916); English translation, in K. S. Malevich: Essays on Art 1915-1933, ed. Troels
Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Borgens For-
lag, 1968), I: 19.
81 See Nina Gourianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian
Avant-Garde (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012).
82 K. Malevich, ‘Vystavka professional’nogo soiuza khudozhnikov-zhivopistsev. Levaia fed-
eratsiia (molodaia fraktsiia)’ [The Exhibition of the Professional Union of Artist Painters.
The Leftist Federation (The Young Section)], Anarkhiia, 89 (20 June 1918): 4; reprinted in
Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 119.
83 K. Malevich, ‘Svet i tsvet’ [Light and Colour], 1923, ms; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie
sochinenii, IV: 271.
84 Mikhail Gershenzon, ‘Tvorcheskoe samosoznanie’, Vekhi. Sbornik statei o russkoi intelli-
gentsii (Moscow, 1909), 83.
85 Ibid., 82.
98 Bouras

was precisely in this historical context that Russian society, including progres-
sive artists, manifested a growing interest in empirical criticism and the cre-
ative process. Malevich was correct in 1918, when he wrote ironically about the
Petersburg artists separating creativity from art: ‘As for us Muscovites, putting
on separators to distinguish creation from art: this has been done for a long
time, and for many years now we have not been taking part where art flour-
ishes like lilies in a swamp’.86
The principle of economy played a central role in Malevich’s thinking.87
Mach and Avenarius established the principle of the ‘least expenditure of
power’ at the basis of scientific thinking (the systematisation of facts and ab-
stract modes of thinking are among the essential instruments for achieving
economy of thought). Economy as a scientific principle was applied to var-
ious fields by their Russian followers in the pre-revolutionary period. Lezin,
for instance, wrote that ‘like science, art is condensed thinking [and] econom-
ical; the difference is only in the means employed and the speed of famil-
iarisation’.88 He explained that while science progresses slowly, religion and
art, employing the same intuitive method, progress much more quickly and
boldly, frequently anticipating scientific conclusions.89 Although Lezin was
thinking primarily of literature, artists would not have been indifferent to the
idea of art’s superiority to scientific thinking. Malevich applied the principle of
economy (freely interpreted) to ‘the science of painting’, where it became art’s
‘fifth dimension’. In Suprematism’s creative method, it became the foundation
‘on which the forms of all the creative conditions for inventions and the arts
should develop’.90 It denoted a work of art’s ‘perfection and contemporane-
ity’.91 Malevich wrote, ‘every invention, developing the movement of pictorial
elements … is valued in terms of the fifth dimension’.92 It formed the basis for
Malevich’s approach to the history of the new art and his development of the

86 K. Malevich, ‘K priezdu vol’tero-terroristov iz Peterburga’, Anarkhiia, 41 (11 April 1918): 4;

reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 73; English translation, ‘On the Arrival of
Voltarian Terrorists from Petersburg’, in Malevich, Essays, I: 59.
87 See also T. Goriacheva, ‘K poniatiiu ekonomii tvorchestva’, in G. Kovalenko, ed., Russkii
avangard 1910-1920-kh godov v evropeiskom kontekste (Moscow: Nauka, 2000), 263-274.
88 Lezin, ‘Khudozhestennoe tvorchestvo’, 275.
89 Ibid., 275-6.
90 K. Malevich, ‘Ustanovlenie A v iskusstve’ [Resolution A in Art] in O novykh sistemakh
v iskusstve. Statika i skorost’. Ustanovlenie A [On New Systems in Art: Stasis and Speed:
Resolution A] (Vitebsk, 1919); reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 184; English
translation in Malevich, Essays, I: 119.
91 Malevich, ‘Ustanovlenie A v iskusstve’; Malevich Sobranie sochinenii, I: 183; Malevich, Es-
says, I: 117.
92 Ibid.
The Path of Empirical Criticism in Russia 99

sign – his theory of the additional element, which was the primordial element
of each system within the new art. Of course, the principle of economy had
guided him in creating The Black Square, from which other forms of Suprema-
tism had developed: coloured, black and white, planar and volumetric.93
Lezin linked economy with the unconscious selection of a single ‘type’ from
a varied mass. For Lezin, ‘type-ism’ was one of the basic laws of creativity,
without which there could be no scientific or artistic creativity. The type is as-
sociated with the accumulation of mental energy that provided an enormous
power for thinking. Citing Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, Lezin talked of ‘artistic gen-
eralisations, typical images and sources of intellectual light, from which ideas
are distributed over vast areas of factual reality’.94 In essence, the artistic type
is ‘a fusion of the concrete and the abstract’.95 The artist’s task is ‘to depict,
employing one or two features, a person rather than a group of people, a face
instead of faces, so that it would be minimal, eloquent’.96 Inevitably, this re-
calls Malevich’s Black Square, as both the abstract and concrete ‘face of the
new art’.97
For Lezin, the word ‘type’ possessed great significance as a mark, a form,
and a representation.98 This could not satisfy Malevich. The product of Supre-
matist creative thinking was not a representation or an image, but a sensation,
a sign and a symbol of the world’s essence, liberated from all figuration. Ob-
jectlessness was easy to find in the creative processes of technology. Malevich
observed, ‘our time is enriched by the creativity of the technician – the tech-
nician is the true action man of our time’.99 He considered the motor car to
be one of the fundamental symbols of the modern world and argued that ‘the
art of painting advanced in the wake of the contemporary technology of ma-
chines’.100

93 K. Malevich, K voprosu izobrazitel’nogo iskusstva [On the Question of Fine Art] (Smolensk:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1921); reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 221.
94 Lezin, ‘Khudozhestvennoe tvorchesto’, 304.
95 Ibid.
96 Ibid.
97 Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu; Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 53;
Malevich, Essays, I: 38.
98 Lezin, ‘Khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo’, 301.
99 K. Malevich, ‘Gosudarstvennikam ot iskusstva’ [To the Officials from Art], Anarkhiia, 53
(4 May 1918): 4; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 85.
For Malevich’s thinking about the characteristics shared by Suprematist and techni-
cal creativity, see Malevich, ‘Suprematizm. Mir kak bespredmetnost’ ili vechnyi pokoi’;
Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, III: 69-324.
100 K. Malevich, ‘Arkhitektura kak poshchechina betono-zhelezu’ [Architecture as a Slap in
the Face to Ferro-Concrete], Anarkhiia, 37 (6 April 1918): 4; reprinted in Malevich, So-
branie sochinenii, I: 69; English translation, in Malevich, Essays, I: 60.
100 Bouras

Engelmeier stated his three-stage creative process with reference to the in-
vention of machines in his book Invention and Privilege: Guidance for Inventors
[Izobreteniia i privilegii: Rukovodstvo dlia izobretatelei] of 1897. He identified
‘pure creativity’ as playing the main role in the first stage of the creative pro-
cess, just as Malevich did later, calling The Black Square ‘the first step of pure
creation in art’.101 During this first stage, the germ of an idea is born in the
mind of the inventor. To clarify this idea, it is essential to ‘look with an inner
eye’ and analyse its essential components.102 Engelmeier compared the idea to
the sphinx, the image of which the constructor-inventor must discover: ‘Some-
thing like a search in music begins within. The imagination runs over various
mechanisms from memory, and the idea – the sphinx – notes’ the appropri-
ate forms.103 According to Engelmeier, this work can only occur and evolve in
the imagination, because ‘the variation in these imagined insubstantial forms,
their flexibility to change, their obedience and readiness to become one in-
stead of another’, i.e. their ‘activity’ is limited by paper and pencil.104 Of course,
at the beginning of the twentieth century, psychology emerged and identi-
fied ‘activity’ as a fundamental characteristic of the subconscious (intuitive)
sphere. Richard von Krafft-Ebing observed that ‘the subconscious spiritual life
is constantly active; it transforms nervous excitement into a spiritual mood …
it develops ideas, images and so forth into thoughts, impulses and other com-
plex psychological processes’.105 Numerous scientific and artistic texts of this
period relate directly, or indirectly, to the beginning of the creative process, its
characteristic ‘activity’ or vitality embodied in the image of a seed, a nucleus,
an infant, or a child.
Engelmeier stated that the free combination of forms and the selection of
viable mixtures produces the idea of ‘a centre of gravity’; ‘this is a living em-
bryo, which … gives the idea a natural fulcrum’.106 Malevich wrote that ‘The
Square … is a living infant’.107 Engelmeier continued ‘Then more and more
new parts quickly attach themselves to this nucleus, producing a new harmo-
nious entity’.108 Malevich observed, ‘It is possible that this entity denotes the

101 Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu; Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 53;

Malevich, Essays, I: 38.
102 P. Engelmeier, Izobreteniia i privilegii. Rukovodstvo dlia izobretatelei (Moscow, 1897), 19.
103 Ibid., 20.
104 Ibid.
105 Lezin, ‘Khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo’, 259.
106 Engel’meier, Izobreteniia i privilegii, 21.
107 Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu’; Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 53;
Malevich, Essays, I: 38.
108 Engel’meier, Izobreteniia i privilegii, 21.
The Path of Empirical Criticism in Russia 101

world seed … it is necessary to find in it the beginning or the infinity of weight.

The “world seed” is created through action, as the heaviest nucleus, found in
the action of eternal reasoning [and] of continuous modification of one and
the same essence in different forms’.109
The movement of ‘the point of a pictorial nucleus’,110 or simply a point, ‘cre-
ates a line, the movement of a line – a plane, and the plane – a cube. The
movement of the cube – a sphere, a point’.111 Thus, the circle is complete, and
the new-born infant has become royal. The image of the crowned infant, came
to the Russian Avant-Garde from alchemy, deriving from entelechy,112 and de-
noting an inner power, possessing both the potential aim and end result. In
other words, the nucleus, the beginning of creativity, becomes the ‘ding an
sich’, ‘the object as such’, ‘the original’, completely autonomous object, inde-
pendent of the external world. Similarly, Malevich’s Black Square transforms
the creative process in art from a means into a goal, into a non-reflective,
blind and opaque form,113 becoming ‘pure, self-made, self-created’.114 There-
fore, Malevich observed that the new art, ‘pursuing a purely creative path’, per-
forms in the same way as technical creativity, where the object only represents
itself: ‘It has nothing to do with your life, because it is in itself a living form
and lives in life. The created motor-car, aeroplane, gun, building, and wood are
indifferent and cold – they are unsmiling forms – to our sorrow’.115
Up to now, we have been examining creativity in its initial, intuitive, and
subconscious stage. Malevich, however, stated that ‘the square is not a sub-
conscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason’.116 Intuition and reason

109 Malevich, ‘Suprematizm. Mir kak bespredmetnost’ ili vechnyi pokoi’; Malevich, Sobranie
sochinenii, III: 193.
110 K. Malevich, ‘Konchalovskii’, 1924, ms; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, V: 261.
111 K. Malevich, ‘O sud’be’, c. 1924, ms; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, V: 405.
112 For Aristotle, entelechy was a vital power inherent in an entity, embodying that entity’s
potential, such as enabling a seed to grow. Leibniz later regarded it in more metaphysical
terms: each un-extended thinking substance or monad possessed its own universe. This
idea is found in Kant, Schopenhauer, and others. In 1910, Nikolai Kulbin, in his analysis of
the principles of the new art, used this concept when he described harmony (to which
the ‘I’, weary of life, aspired) as a closed spring; its power latent, but inactive. He wrote,
‘The power is at rest, in a state of possibility (with potential), a potential sleeping power’.
See Kul’bin, ‘Svobodnoe iskusstvo’, 3; Markov, Manifesty, 15.
113 Malevich, ‘1/40. Zhivopisnyi opyt’ [1/40. Pictorial Experience]; Malevich, Sobranie sochi-
nenii, IV: 46.
114 Malevich, ‘Gosudarstvennikam ot iskusstva’; Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 87.
115 K. Malevich, ‘Cherez mnogovekovoi put’ iskusstva…’, [Through the Centuries-Old Path of
Art], [1916], ms; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, V: 56.
116 Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu; Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 53;
Malevich, Essays, I: 38.
102 Bouras

as tools for understanding the world were popular with nineteenth-century

philosophers like Kant and Schopenhauer. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, the term ‘intuitive reason’, first coined by Aristotle, was given a reli-
gious content and used in theosophical texts,117 with which we may assume
that Malevich was familiar.118 What is important for us is that the term fused
two stages of the creative process – the intuitive and the logical.
Malevich also related to Engelmeier’s definition of the second stage of the
creative process, when the idea moves (with the help of pencil and paper)
from the three-dimensional realm of the imagination into two-dimensions
and is developed as the scheme or plan of a machine. Malevich explained,
‘The art of painting moved away from the business of representation and ar-
rived at planarity, at the objectless structured volume as a completely normal
development of an autonomous form. In so far as the structure occupies a
place not on the canvas, but in space, it must be classified as an objectless,
technical-school structure’.119
In technology, this move into two dimensions is realised through the ap-
plication of technical and scientific laws, such as those pertaining to physics,
chemistry, and mathematics. Malevich considered art to be an autonomous
sphere of activity, stressing that ‘the paths of science are one thing, the paths
of art another’.120 Even so, he emphasised that they interacted precisely dur-
ing this ‘second stage’, at the moment, ‘when the process moved to the stage
of representation,121 when the psychological state of tension begins to emit

117 D. Stranden mentioned ‘a higher intuitive reason’ [vysshii intuitivnyi razum]. See D. Stran-
den, ‘Sem’ nachal cheloveka po ucheniiu teosofii’, Vestnik teosofii, 3 (1908): 46. Charlotte
Douglas relates this term to the philosophy of Henri Bergson. See Charlotte Douglas,
Swans of Other Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the Origins of Abstraction in Russia (Ann
Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1980).
118 For Malevich and theosophy, see Maria Carlson, No Religion Higher Than Truth: A History
of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1993); Charlotte Douglas, ‘Suprematism: The Sensible Dimension’, The Russian Re-
view, XXXIV, 3 (July 1975): 266-281; Susan P. Compton, ‘Malevich’s Suprematism – The
Higher Intuition’, The Burlington Magazine, CXVIII, 881 (August 1976): 576-583, 585; Linda
Dalrymple Henderson, ‘The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern
Art: Conclusion’, Leonardo, XVII, 3 (1984): 205-210; and Tom H. Gibbons, ‘Cubism and “The
Fourth Dimension” in the Context of the Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-
Century Revival of Occult Idealism’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 44
(1981): 130-147.
119 Malevich, ‘Mir kak bespredmetnost’ ili vechnyi pokoi’; Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, III:
108.
120 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Forma, tsvet i oshchushchenie’ [Form, Colour and Sensation], Sovre-
mennaia arkhitektura, 5 (1928): 159.
121 Here, Malevich was referring to art in general and not only to Suprematism.
The Path of Empirical Criticism in Russia 103

Figure 4.1 Kazimir Malevich, The Black Quadrilateral, c. 1915, oil on canvas, 17 × 24 cm., Col-
lection G. Costakis, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki.
© The State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki.

an image … the artist has to solve the question, in which of the centres of its
organism to give form to the image that has emerged. The structure, faktura,
painting, and the form of the image depends on the solution of this; the ap-
plication of one or another science to the image depends on this question’.122
To describe this relationship, Malevich used the analogy of the astronomical
phenomenon of a binary star, i.e. the system of two stars, connected by grav-
ity, moving in a restricted orbit around a common centre. In specific circum-
stances, these stars exchange masses, but Malevich explained that the star of
art exists ‘with its own logic of movement, with its own mathematics, with its
own reason or irrationality’.123 In this context, science acts as material, which
art, with its complete freedom of action, interprets, transforms and submits to
its own aims.
The theory of the creative process can also illuminate the colours of The
Black Square. Lezin, like many psychologists, equated the conscious sphere
with light, arguing that ‘with distance’ from this light and with an approach to

122 Malevich, ‘Forma, tsvet i oshchushchenie’, 159.

123 K. Malevich, ‘1/46 (Eklektika)’ [1/46. Eclecticism], 1924-1925, ms; reprinted in Malevich,
Sobranie sochinenii, IV: 144.
104 Bouras

the subconscious sphere, ‘the image darkens more and more’.124 Applying this
idea to Malevich’s painting would suggest that some kind of black prototype
of the square begins to take shape in the intuitive or subconscious sphere, and
then at the stage of reason and logic (consciousness), when the scientific prin-
ciple of economy is applied, the form of the quadrilateral emerges, depicted
within the white frame of consciousness. The technical investigation of Male-
vich’s Black Quadrilateral in the Costakis Collection indicates that the artist
painted the black geometric form first, and then the white ground (Fig. 4.1).125
For Engelmeier, the creative process for designing a motor car is completed
with the elaboration of the plans and not with the actual construction.126 Like-
wise, ‘intuitive reason’ does not provide for the materialisation of the actual
work. Hence, Malevich’s Black Square did not transport him into the sphere of
spatial objects; it remains in the sphere of conscious ideas, like a mathemati-
cal or scientific discovery, where the final product of the creative process is a
formula, not a material object.127 The Black Square is a symbol of the creative
process, a ‘ding an sich’, only accessible to the ‘god in humanity’, consisting of
primordial, immaterial or ‘non-material’ material.

124 Lezin, ‘Khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo’, 258.

125 For the technical details, see Maria Kokkori, ‘Russian Avant-Garde: A Historical Contex-
tualization of Selected Paintings by Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Kliun and Liubov Popova
c.1905-25’ (PhD Thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2007), 152-158.
126 Engel’meier, Izobreteniia i privilegii, 28.
127 Engel’meier, Filosofiia tekhniki, 91-93.
 Chapter 5

Kazimir Malevich, Unovis, and the Poetics of

Materiality

Maria Kokkori, Alexander Bouras and Irina Karasik

In 1921, Kazimir Malevich formulated a radically new understanding of ma-

teriality and the nature of creativity. He stated, ‘The new war on materials
has been declared. Materials will be defeated by the production processes,
and in the course of this war they will be transformed’.1 From 1920 to 1922
at the Vitebsk People’s Art School (Vitebskoe narodnoe khudozhestvennoe
uchilishche) and later at the State Institute for Artistic Culture in Petrograd
(Gosudarstvennyi institut khudozhestvennoi kul’tury – Ginkhuk), Malevich
and the Unovis group investigated art through laboratory research, focusing
on the ‘science of painting’ [zhivopisnaia nauka], as Malevich described it, and
examining the painterly processes involved in the ‘new systems of art’.2 Cen-
tral to their explorations was the study of faktura, in both its material and
immaterial aspects, fusing the two and thus challenging preconceptions about
its meaning, practice, purpose, essence, and use.3
When Malevich set up Unovis (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva – Champions
of the New Art) in early 1920 in Vitebsk, he deliberately set out to create a

1 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Unovis’, Iskusstvo, 1 (Vitebsk, 1921): 9-10.

2 K. Malevich, O novykh sistemakh v iskusstve. Statika i skorost’. Ustanovlenie A [On New Systems
in Art. Stasis and Speed. Resolution A] (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1919); reprinted in Kazimir Malevich,
Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. Aleksandra Shatskikh (Moscow: Gileia, 1995), I: 153-183;
English translation in K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art 1915-1933, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia
Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Borgens Forlag, 1968), 1: 83-119.
3 For further discussions of faktura, see Vladimir Markov, Printsipy tvorchestva v plasticheskikh
iskusstvakh. Faktura (St. Petersburg: Izdanie obshchestva khudozhnikov ‘Soiuz Molodezhi’,
1914); A. Hanse-Löve, ‘Faktura, Fakturnost’, Russian Literature, XVII: 1 (1985): 29-38; Benjamin
H. D. Buchloh, ‘From Faktura to Factography’, October, 30 (Fall 1984): 82-119; Maria Gough,
‘Faktura: The Making of the Russian Avant-Garde’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 36 (Fall
1999): 32-59; Maria Kokkori and Alexander Bouras, ‘Charting Modernism: Malevich’s Re-
search Tables’, in Achim Borchardt-Hume, ed., Kazimir Malevich (London: Tate Publishing,
2014), 164-195; A. Bouras, ‘Faktura utopii’, in ‘Khudozhestvennaia tekhnika i materialy v teorii
i praktike russkogo avangarda’ (PhD Thesis, Moscow Architecture Institute, 2016); and Maria
Kokkori and Alexander Bouras, ‘Metallic Factures: László Moholy-Nagy and Kazimir Male-
vich’, Leonardo, L, 3 (June 2017): 287-291.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_007

106 Kokkori, Bouras and Karasik

new kind of artistic education with the broad aim of applying the principles of
Suprematism to the work of designing a new world. Malevich and the Un-
ovis collective, comprising El Lissitzky, Vera Ermolaeva, Nina Kogan, Lazar
Khidekel, Nikolai Suetin, Ilia Chashnik, Lev Iudin, as well as associates Gus-
tav Klutsis (Gustavs Klucis) and Aleksei Kruchenykh, envisaged Suprematist
experiments not as concrete manifestations, but as tentative steps towards a
future that they imagined to be inescapable: as radical gestures, the presence
of which would encourage a leap forward. These explorations were theoretical
activities that shortly came to assume a ground-breaking strength and influ-
ence over the creative energy of subsequent Avant-Gardes. The goal was the
fulfillment of an unattainable promise, the advent of an all-encompassing art
of form, space, faktura, and colour that would result in an ideal fusion be-
tween art, technology, and society. This was manifested in the artists’ collec-
tive projects and publications. These included the typewritten almanac, Uno-
vis No. 1, which was produced in 1920 by Malevich and Lissitzky, along with a
number of their students and colleagues. This publication presented the Uno-
vis programme of cultural reforms in a series of essays and declarations on art,
art teaching, the theatre, music, and poetry.
The present essay discusses the Unovis group’s engagement with material
through a reading of the artists’ reflections on the subject, as well as an anal-
ysis of the origins and development of Suprematist ‘materials’ and a consid-
eration of the strong links between these material explorations and Aleksei
Kruchenykh’s poetry. These materials were not incorporated into the Supre-
matist palette but were discussed as abstract ideas. Ultimately, the authors aim
to illuminate how the members of the Unovis collective promoted themselves
as belonging to a laboratory, where both staff and students worked experimen-
tally and speculatively to materialise modernity.

The Material Spectrum: a New Taxonomy

Lev Iudin’s project at the Vitebsk People’s Art School on the spectrum of mate-
rials and their transformations is a striking example of the fusion of Suprema-
tism and substance, technological advances and utopianism, abstraction and
poetry. Lev Iudin (1904-41) was a student and colleague of Malevich. He grad-
uated in 1922 and followed Malevich to Petrograd, where he worked alongside
him at Ginkhuk (Fig. 5.1). Iudin’s diaries of 1921-22 record his work on Suprema-
tism and often resemble exercise books. Iudin was very young, only 17 at the
time, suggesting that all the concepts that he explored were actually formu-
lated by Malevich. The diaries include brief summaries of several of Malevich’s
lectures, outlines of specific experiments, details of the school’s curricula, and
Kazimir Malevich, Unovis, and the Poetics of Materiality 107

Figure 5.1 Unovis members in the early 1920s. From left to right: Ivan Chervinka, Lazar
Khidekel, Ilia Chashnik, and Lev Iudin.
Photograph courtesy of the Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Collec-
tion.

sketches; they reflect on the progress of his various assignments and detail his
own research. There are many drawings and diagrams that elaborate Supre-
matist constructions and reveal his search for the necessary compositional,
colour, and textural combinations. In his diaries, Iudin touched upon an as-
tonishing number of subjects, and seemed to be engaged in proving some kind
of plastic theorem formulated by his mentor. Iudin mastered concepts that
were important within the Suprematist system, such as movement, weight and
weightlessness, force, density, tension, and economy.
Iudin was an active member of Unovis, which he called ‘the second cul-
ture’,4 and was engaged on the experimental development and classifica-
tion of materials (Fig. 5.2). Through his use of neologisms – ‘suprematerial’
[suprematerial], ‘metallotsvet’ [metallo-colour] and ‘elektromaterial’ [electro-
material]5 – Iudin established a verbal map, the organically-linked contours

4 Lev Iudin, Diary entry, 11 August 1921; English translation in Kazimir Malevich, Letters, Docu-
ments, Memoirs and Criticism, Russian edition: eds., Irina A. Vakar and Tatiana N. Mikhienko;
English edition: trans. Antonina W. Bouis, ed. Wendy Salmond, general ed. Charlotte Douglas
(London: Tate Publishing, 2015), II: 216.
5 Iudin, Diary entry, 18 November 1921, ms, Manuscript Department of the State Russian Mu-
seum, St. Petersburg (Otdel rukopisei, Gosudarstvennyi Russkii Muzei – OR GRM), fond 205,
dokument 1, list 11 verso.
108 Kokkori, Bouras and Karasik

of which generated concepts related to science and technology.6 According

to Iudin, every material object possessed properties either of metallotsvet or
elektromaterial. Metallotsvet denoted the sensations of colours – the property
of having been deprived of materiality and being pure energy.7 Iudin’s project
highlighted the utopian potential of materials, diverting attention away from
any immediate practical applications, in favour of a less defined, but undeni-
ably richer range of associations. The invention of new words to designate this
activity was critical in order to facilitate this focus on hitherto unidentified
possibilities. As implied in Malevich’s writings, new materials could promis-
ingly alert viewers to the potential for fundamental transformations in their
sense of space, order, movement, and physical appearance. These transforma-
tions could themselves be metaphors or even necessary preconditions for the
radical restructuring of society.
Iudin’s project on material taxonomy was clearly inspired by scientific ideas
and methodology. He wrote:

Economy and aesthetics are becoming clear. In this case, this is the first
time that I have had to consciously figure out the economy. All the draw-
ings that I’ve done for the project so far were just not to the point. Here I
have had to act like K. S. [Kazimir Severinovich Malevich] did. Energeti-
cally conduct a battle against any individual relations; simplify the goal,
reduce it to the most typical general form, and then solve it … I clearly
sense the entire abyss between us and the old. We are innovators.8

In his diaries, Iudin posed questions reflecting various levels of his method-
ological and analytical approaches: ‘the scientific method in art, what does it
comprise? Is it the only possible path for an artist at the present time, or is
it just a small aspect of theoretical work? The task of the scientific method.
Does it help or hinder a master in his work? Its role? Is it that it connects

6 An interest in neologisms and their deployment within literary works was also central to the
activities of the previous generation of Russian avant-garde poets and painters. For exam-
ple, Aleksei Kruchenykh’s famous manifesto of 1913 ‘Declaration of the Word as Such’ had
extolled the value of newly invented words and had advocated the freedom of the artist ‘to
express himself not only in a common language (concepts), but also in a personal one (the
creator is an individual), as well as in a language that does not have a definite meaning (is
not frozen), that is a transrational language. A common language is binding; a free language
allows for more complete expression’. English translation adapted from Anna Lawton and
Herbert Eagle, eds., Russian Futurism through its Manifestoes, 1912-1928 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1988), 67.
7 Iudin, Diary entry, 1 December 1921; Malevich, Letters, II: 219.
8 Iudin, Diary entries, 26 October 1921 and 29 October 1921; Malevich, Letters, II: 220.
Kazimir Malevich, Unovis, and the Poetics of Materiality 109

previous phenomena of painting and creates a ‘psychological milieu’ for the

development of a new form’.9
From 1920 to 1922, Iudin focused on clarifying the concept of material, com-
piling and indexing a chart of textures of the ‘material spectrum’ [tablitsy
stroeniia faktur material’nogo spectra],10 in which each group of materials cor-
responds to a complex of sensations, relating primarily to the nature and
tempo of their movement. By studying the materials and their faktura, Iudin
hoped ‘to find an idea, a connection and a meaning, and not to make an in-
dex of samples’.11 He related materials to movement in time, where any change
of the motion resulted in the transition of the material from one state (or
group) to another. Movement occurred in the creation of the material – de-
scribed by Iudin as ‘collecting’, ‘connecting’, or ‘coupling’ – and was followed
by the sensation of its physical presence (‘radiating’, ‘deviating’, ‘diffusing’),
suggesting a transition or transformation from the material to the immate-
rial, similar to that present in the white material/colour.12,13 As Malevich had
explained, quite in accordance with the definitions in contemporary physics,
white and black were not colours, instead they were ideas coming from the fu-
ture, not-yet-materialised,14 defined only by their energy: ‘colour is light, light
is light depending on the circumstances’.15 Regarding the immateriality of mat-
ter, Malevich explained: ‘if the world is matter, then that does not mean that it
is material. Material arises when an idea appears’.16

9 Iudin, Diary entry, 22 March 1924; Malevich, Letters, II: 234.

10 Iudin, Diary entry, 4 January 1922, OR GRM, fond 205, document 1, list 32 verso. The tables
form part of Iudin’s diaries.
11 Iudin, Diary entry, 4 January 1922, OR GRM, fond 205, document 1, list 32.
12 Iudin, Diary entry, 5 January 1922, OR GRM, fond 205, document 1, list 33 verso.
13 ‘Colour’ is a visual quality and its relation to its corresponding materiality is complex.
There are opposing approaches to the science and philosophy of colour, contrasting
‘colour-as-in-physical-objects’ with ‘colour-as-in-experience’. Due to the contradictions
between scientific definitions, objectivity, subjectivity, and illusion, colour cannot be di-
rectly addressed in its complete existence. See John Maund and E. Sosa, eds., Colours:
Their Nature and Representation (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press
1995).
14 K. Malevich, Suprematizm: 34 risunka [Suprematism: 34 Drawings] (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920),
reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 187; English translation in Malevich, Essays,
I: 125.
15 K. Malevich, ‘1/42. Non-Objectivity’, [c. 1924], ms; English translation in The World as Non-
Objectivity: Unpublished Writings 1922-25, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus,
(Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976), 90-91.
16 K. Malevich, ‘Formula Suprematizma’ [The Formula of Suprematism], 1923, ms; English
translation in A Legacy Regained: Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-Garde, ed.
John E. Bowlt and Mark Konecny (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2002), 231.
110 Kokkori, Bouras and Karasik

The notion of the transformation of materials from one state to another and
the complexities that arise during this process – from solid masses to liquids
and from liquids to gases and invisible energies – seems to have been inspired
by Herbert Spencer’s theory of universal evolution and dissolution. According
to Spencer, evolution was a circular transformation from the imperceptible to
the perceptible; any organic substance could be converted from solid to liq-
uid and from liquid to gas and, by the elimination of heat and condensation,
from a diffused and incoherent condition, to once again resume first its liquid
and then its solid state.17 Thus, Spencer defined evolution as an integration of
matter and the concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter
passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent het-
erogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes transformation.
The opposite of this, repeated in reverse, was dissolution. Spencer applied his
theory to the life of every atom and of every aggregate, from the microscopic
cell to the globe itself, and from the solar system to the universe.
Iudin divided materials into five distinctive groups: each group was asso-
ciated with a complex set of qualities and sensations deriving from the na-
ture of its movement, and described by a unique sign or symbol (Fig. 5.2). As
Iudin explained, ‘material is a sign of speed … different forms of movement
are the consequences of different speeds … but what they have in common
is the force that destroys materiality. The same force that in Suprematist con-
structions makes squares and other forms objectless’.18 Following Malevich’s
interpretation, Iudin further suggested that the manifestation of every idea,
in any artistic system, required the correct material. He stated, ‘The idea is
born in the material’,19 and in accordance with Malevich’s teaching, he related
all systems of art, from Cézanne to Suprematism, with a culture of materi-
als. Thus, Cubism was associated with the use of plaster, sand, pasted papers,
glass, wood, metal, plywood, and marble dust, whereas Futurism was related
to complex, ‘slippery and running’ textures, and Suprematism was connected
with the potentiality of materials, with materials that could not even be fully
predicted.20 Every system was a function of the materials through which, and
only through which, the system existed; conversely, every material was appro-
priate to and could only be used in its own system. Thus, material was defined

17 Herbert Spencer, First Principles (2nd edition, London: Williams and Norgate, 1867), 285,
396. Russian translation, G. Spenser, Osnovnyi nachala [First Principles] (St. Petersburg:
Izdanie L. F. Panteleeva, 1897).
18 Iudin, Diary entry, 17 January 1922; Malevich, Letters, II: 223.
19 Iudin, Diary entry, 26 December 1921; Malevich, Letters, II: 220.
20 See Bouras, ‘Faktura utopii’.
Kazimir Malevich, Unovis, and the Poetics of Materiality 111

Figure 5.2 Lev Iudin’s table showing the five groups of materials, their signs and associated
movements.
© Manuscript Department of the State Russian Museum, St Peters-
burg.

as the form, while the art system (Cézannism, Cubism, Futurism, or Suprema-
tism) provided the content.
Iudin’s project can be seen as part of the larger thrust of avant-garde culture
at this time, which undertook to complicate the status of the sign in both ver-
bal and visual representations. Lissitzky had presented the idea that artworks
can be understood as ‘sign systems’ in two essays, published in Unovis No. 1 in
1920, ‘The Suprematism of World Construction’ and ‘The Communism of Work
112 Kokkori, Bouras and Karasik

and the Suprematism of Creativity’.21 He wrote, ‘a living painting is an event, a

sign. The sign is the form in which the world is understood. Thus, a portrait, a
map of a hilly city sketched on paper is a single sign of a comprehensive order
and system, inside the varied and multi-layered body of which we are but one
element’.22 As Peter Nisbet points out Lissitzky also used a schematic illustra-
tion of a street layout of Manhattan to demonstrate the difference between the
random street pattern of the earliest settlers, and the implicitly infinite grid of
later expansion. The map of Manhattan was primarily introduced as part of
a discussion about signs. Lissitzky argued that maps (whether of street plans,
the globe, or the heavens) are abstracted representations of things with which
we are already familiar. Signifier and signified are stable, even if the complex
relations between them, ‘the secrets’, as Lissitzky put it, are underpinned only
by the intricate evolution of the human brain, from its very beginnings in a
microbe, through all the stages of development to its final manifestation in
homo sapiens. Lissitzky asserted that we do not yet know the secrets of the
sign created by the artist, because the intricacies of something other than the
brain are not yet sufficiently developed in humanity. In other words, the ref-
erentiality and meaning of the artist’s sign will become comprehensible only
after humans have developed some further cognitive capacity.23
According to Lissitzky, the artist not only uses known signs to present differ-
ent phenomena, but he also has the knowledge to create new signs, plans and
projects: ‘with the brush the artist builds a new sign. This sign is not a form of
something that already exists, and built readymade in the world – it is a sign of
something new, still to be built, arriving at nature through the world of man’.24
Lissitzky argued that there are two different kinds of sign, one that refers to
what is already known, the other to what is not yet known:

21 L. Lisitskii, ‘Kommunizm truda i suprematizm tvorchestva’ [The Communism of Work

and the Suprematism of Creativity], and ‘Suprematizm mirostroitel’stva’ [The Supre-
matism of World Construction], Unovis No. 1 (Vitebsk: Unovis 1920), [sheet 11-12 and
13-15]; reprinted in ‘Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. 1920. Prilozhenie k faksimil’nomu izdaniiu’, in
Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. 1920. Faksimil’noe izdanie, ed. Tat’iana Goriacheva (Moscow: State
Tretyakov Gallery / Izdatel’stvo Skanrus, 2003), 69-70, and 70-73. For an English transla-
tion of ‘Suprematizm mirostroitel’stva’, see ‘Suprematism in World Construction’ in So-
phie Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, trans. Helene Aldwinckle (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1980), 327-330.
22 Lisitskii, ‘Kommunizm truda i suprematizm tvorchestva’, [sheet 12v]; ‘Unovis No. 1.
Vitebsk. 1920. Prilozhenie’, 70.
23 Peter Nisbet, ‘El Lissitzky in the Proun Years: A Study of His Work and Thought, 1919-1927’
(PhD Thesis, Yale University, 1995), 79-80.
24 Lisitskii, ‘Kommunizm truda i suprematizm tvorchestva’, [sheet 12v]; ‘Unovis No. 1.
Vitebsk. 1920. Prilozhenie’, 70.
Kazimir Malevich, Unovis, and the Poetics of Materiality 113

Every flat surface designed is a sign – not a mystical symbol, but a con-
crete sketch of reality. A sign is a form through which we express phe-
nomena. It can originate in two ways. Firstly: by agreement as to what
meaning these signs shall have … Now the second possibility: a sign is de-
signed, much later it is given its name, and later still its meaning becomes
clear. So we do not understand the signs, the shapes, which the artist cre-
ated, because man’s brain has not yet reached the corresponding stage of
development. Suprematism has a new criterion for evaluating everything
created in plastic design. Instead of beauty, it is economy.25

Lissitzky used an illustration of Mars and its canals at the end of his essay ‘The
Communism of Work and the Suprematism of Creativity’, as part of his argu-
ment about symbols and semiotics of the unknown. In the essay’s penultimate
paragraph, drawings of Earth and Mars accompany the following statement:
‘Here are the signs of Earth and Mars. The savage does not understand the
content of the first. We do not understand the content of the other. Is it not
the result of the creative activity of the inhabitants of Mars? In any case, we
must reconstruct the sign of the Earth, its map, so that its form comes into
correspondence with the creative growth of its humankind’.26
Both Lissitzky and Iudin emphasised the metaphorical force of a Suprema-
tist work as a sign, a map, or a mirror, as opposed to its material content.27 In
the context of semiotics, it is perhaps worthwhile to remember Malevich’s con-
ception of Suprematism as a ‘semaphore’, the system of geometric coloured
shapes on rectangular grounds, which was used to communicate messages at

25 El Lissitzky, ‘Neue Russische Kunst’ [New Russian Art], 1922, ms, Russian State Archive
of Literature and Art (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva – RGALI),
Moscow, fond 2361, opis’ 1, edinitsa khraneniia 26, list 1-30; English translation in
Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, 338-339.
26 Lisitskii, ‘Kommunizm truda i suprematizm tvorchestva’, [sheet 12], ‘Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk.
1920. Prilozhenie’, 73; and Nisbet, ‘El Lissitzky’, 175.
27 For a further analysis on the sign within linguistics and semiology, see Ferdinand de
Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy
Harris (La Salle, ILL: Open Court, 1986); and Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans.
Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Noonday Press of Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1968). On indexes and taxonomy, see C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders
Peirce, vol. II, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Raul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1932). See also Yve-Alain Bois, ‘The Semiology of Cubism’ and Rosalind Krauss, ‘The
Motivation of the Sign’, in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 169-195 and 261-286. See also Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes
on the Index: Part 1’ and ‘Notes on the Index: Part 2’ in The Originality of the Avant-Garde
and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), 196-219.
114 Kokkori, Bouras and Karasik

sea. In April 1919, the artist had written, ‘At the present time, man’s path lies
through space, and Suprematism is a colour semaphore in its infinite abyss’.28

Carborundum, Metallic, Metallo-Electric, Electric, and Meteoric

Faktura

In Iudin’s material spectrum, the first group of materials was associated with
the substance carborundum. As he wrote: ‘I’m the first to work the carborun-
dum. It can be white too, in K. S. [Kazimir Severinovich]’s opinion’.29 Car-
borundum is a silicon carbide (SiC). It is a crystalline material with a diamond-
like tetrahedral structure, and its colour varies from a nearly clear yellow,
through to pale yellow, green, and even black, depending on the amount of
impurities. It is characterised by its high thermal conductivity and extreme
hardness. Enriched with philosophical and technological allusions, carborun-
dum possessed enormous importance in the early 1920s. In its natural state
(natural moissanite), carborundum was first discovered in 1893 in the remains
of the Canyon Diablo meteorite in Arizona by Ferdinand Henri Moissan.30
Surprisingly, synthetic carborundum was first produced in 1890, three years
before Moissan discovered it as a natural substance.31 The anachronism of this

28 K. Malevich, ‘Suprematizm’, [Suprematism], Katalog desiatoi Gosudarstvennoi vystavki.

Bespredmetnoe tvorchestvo i suprematizm (Moscow, 1919); English translation, ‘Non-
Objective Creation and Suprematism’, in Malevich, Essays, I: 121.
29 Iudin, Diary entry, 12 January 1922; Malevich, Letters, II: 223.
30 Henri Moissan, ‘Nouvelles recherches sur la météorité de Cañon Diablo’, Comptes rendus,
139 (1904): 773–86.
31 In Russia, the first silicon carbide was manufactured in 1921 at the Ural electrometallur-
gical plant ‘Porogi’. For a further analysis on the use of carborundum and the material’s
historical and philosophical context, see Bouras, ‘Faktura utopii’. For a further discussion
on carborundum’s physical and chemical properties, see: ‘The manufacture of carborun-
dum: a new industry’, Scientific American (7 April 1894); Ch. Mabery, ‘Notes on carborun-
dum’, Journal of the American Chemical Society, XXII (1900): 706–707; S. Di Pierro, E. Gnos,
B. Grobety, T. Armbruster, and S. Bernasconi, ‘Rock-forming moissanite (natural a-silicon
carbide)’, American Mineralogist, 88 (2003): 1817–21; J. Kelly, ‘The astrophysical nature of
silicon carbide’, 2001, http://img.chem.ucl.ac.uk/www/kelly/history.htm, cited in Philo-
sophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sci-
ences (London), CCCLIX: 1787 (2001): 1989; E. Anders and E. Zinner, ‘Interstellar Grains
in Primitive Meteorites: Diamond, Silicon Carbide, and Graphite’, Meteoritics, 28 (1993):
490-514; D. D. Clayton, ‘Placing the Sun and SiC Particles in Galactic Chemodynamic Evo-
lution’, Astrophysical Journal, 484 (1997): 67-70; and C.T. Pillinger and S.S. Russell, ‘Inter-
stellar SiC grains in Meteorites’, Journal of the Chemical Society, Faraday Transactions, 89
(1993): 2297-2304.
Kazimir Malevich, Unovis, and the Poetics of Materiality 115

invention can be read as a Suprematist narrative, suggesting both a continu-

ity and discontinuity between past and present. Carborundum had been used
in industry and technology extensively because of its physical and chemical
properties – it does not melt at any known pressure and it is highly inert chem-
ically. Initially, it was used as an abrasive in grinding, as well as in metallurgy
since it remained stable at high temperatures. One of the most famous ap-
plications was in radio engineering, where carborundum was used as a signal
detector.32 Nikola Tesla also used carborundum in his demonstrations of the
sparks produced by high frequency electricity, which were the most spectac-
ular demonstrations of energy in the early twentieth century, making invisi-
ble energies visible. Subsequently, his experiments laid the foundation for the
present alternating current electrical supply system.
In Iudin’s spectrum of materials, carborundum was associated with the sen-
sations of ‘collecting’, ‘joining’, ‘coming together’, and ‘linking’, while its tex-
ture was described as ‘radiating’, ‘dispersing’, ‘fragmenting’, and ‘distributing’.
The sensations associated with carborundum, such as collecting [sobiranie]
and connecting [soedinenie], can be considered in relation to the concepts of
‘communality’ and ‘cathedral’ [sobornost’ and sobor].
The notion of unity was an important and perennial theme in Russian
religious-philosophical thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century.33 Nikolai Fedorov’s cosmism, for example, suggested a universal
union. He preached that it was mankind’s Christian duty to expand into and
explore the cosmos, achieve immortality, find the atoms of our dead human
ancestors, use science to resurrect them in some form, and so to populate the
solar system and beyond with the whole of humankind, present and past.34

32 In Malevich and Lissitzky’s writings, radio was often used as a metaphor for the trans-
mission and reception of intangible and invisible forces. Lissitzky stated: ‘The centre of
collective effort is the radio transmitting mast which sends out bursts of creative en-
ergy into the world. By means of it we are able to throw off the shackles that bind us
to the earth and rise above it’. A few years later, Malevich added: ‘our life is a radio sta-
tion that receives waves of various sensations that are realised in one thing or another’.
See Lisitskii, ‘Suprematizm mirostroitel’stva’, 14; ‘Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. Prilozhenie’, 71;
Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, 328. See also, Kasimir Malewitsch, Die gegenstandlose Welt
(Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1927); English translation in Simon Baier and Britta Tanya
Dü mpelmann, eds., Kazimir Malevich: The World as Objectlessness, trans. Antonina W.
Bouis (Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel / Hatje Cantz, 2014), 195.
33 Several philosophers focused on these topics, including Aleksei Khomiakov, Vladimir
Soloviev, Nikolai Fedorov, Pavel Florenskii, Sergei Bulgakov, and Nikolai Berdiaev.
34 Nikolai Fedorov, ‘Supramoralism or General Synthesis (Universal Union)’, in Nikolai Fe-
dorov, What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task, ed. and trans.
Elisabeth Koutaisoff and Marilyn Minto (London: Honeyglen Publishing, 1990), 105-136.
116 Kokkori, Bouras and Karasik

This process involved space travel and colonisation as a means of providing

habitation for the resurrected beings.
The concept of community or communality [sobornost’] was also central to
Viacheslav Ivanov’s writings, which had a great influence on Malevich’s philo-
sophical thought.35 Advocating sobornost’, Ivanov prophesised the advent of
a ‘new organic society’, in which the artist would act as priest. In the spirit
of mystical anarchism, he was committed to a ‘synthesis of individualism and
sobornost’’.36 According to Ivanov, sobornost’ was nurtured by the freedom of
the individual, and it was where individuals – the ‘anarchist rebellions’ – could
unite in communities.37 At the same time, the community-based union had to
be ‘imbued with one supreme consciousness, one supreme idea’, for in this
resides ‘true liberty’.38 This concept clearly has affinities with Malevich’s vi-
sion of Unovis as a creative collective working towards the realisation of a
Suprematist worldview. The notions of individualism and sobornost’ were also
particularly relevant to the definitions of ‘culture’ formulated by the Suprema-
tists and the leaders of Proletkult. While for Aleksandr Bogdanov, culture was
‘the totality of the organisational methods and forms of the collective’,39 for
Malevich, it was a creative process balanced between the individual and the
collective. As Ilia Chashnik observed, when an artist ‘enters the Suprematist
system, he encounters entirely new sensations and states, in which the indi-
vidual’s initiative is greatly developed’.40
By articulating the ‘centripetal’ sensations and visual properties of car-
borundum in a formal language – that of a sign/symbol in a diagram/table –
Iudin negotiated the delimitation of Suprematism and materiality as a ‘labo-
ratory’ task. The sign that represented carborundum in Iudin’s table appears
to have been borrowed from the descriptive language of chemistry, and it thus
seems plausible to suggest that Iudin attempted to read the material (i.e. car-
borundum) through the lens of science and technology. Of course, we should
stress that our purpose is not to suggest that Iudin’s table represents some
kind of technological or scientific exercise. On the contrary, his resort to tech-
nology is, we would argue, not based on reason, but on the transrational. He

35 Tat’iana Goriacheva, ‘Suprematicheskii order filosofii Kazimira Malevicha: “edinolikii

obraz sovershenstva”’, in ‘Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. Prilozhenie’, 26-27.
36 Viacheslav Ivanov, Rodnoe i vselenskoe (Moscow: Leman & Sacharov, 1917) reprinted in
Rodnoe i vselenskoe, ed. V. M. Tomachev (Мoscow: Izdatel’stvo Respublika, 1994), 22.
37 V. Ivanov, Po zvezdam [By the Stars] (St. Petersburg: Ory, 1909), 128.
38 Ibid., 184-185.
39 Aleksandr Bogdanov, O proletarskoi kul’ture. 1904-1924 (Leningrad/Moscow: Izd. tov.
Kniga, 1924), 328.
40 Vasilii Rakitin, Il’ia Chashnik. Khudozhnik novogo vremeni (Мoscow: RA / Palace Editions,
2000), 112.
Kazimir Malevich, Unovis, and the Poetics of Materiality 117

presented carborundum as an idea, as a paradoxical future potentiality, and he

studied the example of the crystal, its faktura and related sensations precisely
because these cannot be obtained in painting with existing materials. It seems
likely that carborundum and its chemical structure were being discussed in
the literature by this time, although Iudin’s sign/symbol is not a drawing of a
structure, but rather a rhetorically expressive representation of the principle
of Suprematist faktura. Since representational painting and its techniques had
been abandoned, science and scientific theories became not only a source of
inspiration, but acquired the role of the ‘still life’ in abstract art. Iudin sought
out a key sign and pivotal associated sensations in order to present faktura
as a vital, experiential entity, intimately connected with the viewer’s percep-
tion of the Suprematist work of art. In this transformation of faktura into a
‘symbolic form’, the viewer rediscovered faktura in terms of its primary qual-
ities: solid, horizontal, vertical, cross, weight, weightless, its colour and trans-
parency, while also perceiving that their integrations within an aesthetic sys-
tem allowed for the extraction of a world of new possibilities.
For Iudin, textures should ‘be deprived of materiality, but at the same time
not be pure colour energy’, and, as he wrote, this would be only found in ‘the
property of metallo-colour’.41 In Iudin’s table, metallic textures were associ-
ated with the sensation of light and were described as ‘radiating’, ‘fragmenting’,
‘passing’, ‘running’, ‘flying’, and ‘slipping’. The metallic condition of colour was
further linked to specific chemical elements: ‘Scintillating Zinc, molten yellow
Copper, Iron rusted in spots, white Tin sparkles, dull-brown Cast Iron’.42 He
recorded in his diaries that the metallic spectrum was developed with refer-
ence to Fernand Léger’s works. He associated the metallic sensations and the
‘monotonous, smooth tension of metallic textures’43 in Léger’s 1914 works with
the experience of the First World War.
The ‘metallic spectrum’ was also central to Malevich’s explorations of colour
and light. As he wrote in his 1919 text ‘Resolution A in Art’, ‘To recognise light
as well as colour of metallic origin, and the discovery of light rays as equiva-
lent to the city’s economic development’.44 A few years later, he elaborated his

41 Iudin, Diary entry, 1 December 1921; Malevich, Letters, II: 219. The Russian phrase is ‘oni
dolzhny byt’ lisheny’, which suggests that ‘deprived’ might be a more appropriate transla-
tion than the ‘devoid’ used in Letters.
42 Iudin, Diary entry, 19 July 1923; Malevich, Letters, II: 229.
43 Iudin, ‘Otryvok iz doklada o tvorchestve Fernane Lezhe’ [Excerpt from the Report on the
Creative Work of Fernand Léger], undated ms, OR GRM, fond 205, edinitsa khraneniia 16,
list 8.
44 K. Malevich, ‘Ustanovlenie A v iskusstve’ [Resolution A in Art] in O novykh sistemakh v
iskusstve. Statika i skorost’. Ustanovlenie A (Vitebsk: 1919); reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie
sochinenii, I: 183; English translation in Malevich, Essays, I: 118.
118 Kokkori, Bouras and Karasik

ideas concerning the energy of light and its refractive and reflective qualities:
‘the capital city produces a new spectrum of chromaticity, which does not pre-
vent brightness. This special spectrum is what I would call the “metallic colour
spectrum”. Technology expresses itself as a new prism, through which the light
beam is refracted through the metal. Then, the beam comes from metal dis-
placements into a special metallic conductor of light.’45
The potential energy of materials was fundamental to the development
of Suprematism. Energy, movement, economy, and material sensations were
interwoven into an organic whole in Malevich’s writings. In Suprematism: 34
Drawings, Malevich proposed a model that presents a dynamic system of ac-
tion and reaction, energy and excitation, which constituted his conception of
the spatial economy of painting. This model was understood as a system of
interacting coordinates and forms in ‘magnetic interrelations’. According to
Malevich, the magnetic forces between geometric forms – tilted, vertical or
horizontal bars, which overlap or cross and are held together by the forces
of attraction – create a new, dynamic, material sensation. He wrote, ‘a metal
bar is fused with all the elements … and carries within itself a life of perfec-
tion’,46 thus suggesting not a particular materiality in the application of colour
or its relation to the surface, but rather an energy that was able to activate the
space. Later, in his Bauhaus publication of 1927, Malevich explored painting as
an object, a work of painted ‘signs’, set in motion. Among these ‘signs’, he listed
the ‘organic and sensual lines’, which in Suprematism were in ‘metallic ten-
sions’.47 By mixing metaphors, he proposed a ‘metallic material organisation’,
and a ‘metallic culture of dynamic painting’. A number of drawings included
in the publication referred the observer to technologically enhanced sensa-
tions, such as ‘the sensation of metallic sounds’ or ‘magnetic attractions’. In
titling his drawings according to their sensual qualities – Sensation of Metal-
lic Noise with Strong Dynamic Tendency: Colouration of a Pale Metallic Copper
Tone Scale and Feeling of Magnetic Attraction – Malevich attempted to trans-
late into objectlessness both the materials and the textures, along with the
invisible, immaterial associations that these elements evoked.
The discussion about metallic faktura was continued in Lissitzky’s proposal
for a new dynamic, Suprematist architecture, which he presented in his 1920
essay ‘The Suprematism of World Construction’:

45 K. Malevich, ‘Svet i tsvet’ [Light and Colour], 1923, ms; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie
sochinenii, IV: 239-272.
46 Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka; Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 188; Malevich, Essays,
I: 124.
47 Malevich, Die gegenstandlose Welt; Kazimir Malevich: The World as Objectlessness, 176.
Kazimir Malevich, Unovis, and the Poetics of Materiality 119

… after the archaic horizontals, the spheres of the classical and the gothic
verticals of the building styles which preceded our own, we are now en-
tering upon a fourth stage as we achieve economy and spatial diagonals
… This dynamic architecture provides us with a new theatre of life … The
new element of faktura, which we have brought to the fore in our paint-
ing, will be applied to the whole of the world, which we are still to build,
and will transform the roughness of concrete, the smoothness of metal,
and the reflectivity of glass into the skin of the new life.48

The third and fourth groups of textures in Iudin’s table – metallo-electric and
electric respectively – refer not only to the contemporary discourse concerning
the government’s plan for the electrification of Russia, announced by Lenin in
late 1920, but also to the notion of light as a material. Describing the faktura
or textures as ‘radiating’, ‘glowing’, ‘proceeding’, ‘spreading’, ‘dispersing’, and
‘diffusing’, Iudin reassessed the roles of the real, the visible, and the invisible.
As Malevich had already described in his 1916 letter to Mikhail Matiushin: ‘The
planes that I have founded on canvas give me a great deal of what artists had
only imprecisely grasped before … Here I am able to receive the current of
movement itself, as if by contact with an electrical wire’.49
In the years 1917-1922, abstract art was often described as ‘laboratory art’,
the product of experiments into the objective qualities of materials, form,
and colour. The codification of art’s essential characteristics was pursued as
a scientific inquiry, in order to understand painting’s basic intrinsic elements:
colour, line, form, and the laws governing their interactions. The most pro-
nounced evidence of this trend was to be found in the work of the various
research institutes, such as the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture (Institut
khudozhestvennoi kul’tury – Inkhuk), which were committed to researching
all aspects of the science of art. Set up in 1920, Inkhuk’s programme stated
that ‘the aim of Inkhuk’s work is science, the investigation of the analytical
and the synthetic basic elements of the separate arts and of art as a whole’.50
A similar spirit dominated the Unovis group. One of the central debates con-
ducted at the Moscow Inkhuk in 1921 concerned the relative merits of com-
position versus construction as the basis for contemporary creative activity.

48 Lisitskii, ‘Suprematizm mirostroitel’stva’, [sheet 14]; ‘Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. 1920. Prilozhe-
nie’, 71; Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: 328.
49 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Mikhail Matiushin [before 23 June 1916]; Malevich, Letters, I:
90.
50 Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1987), 79.
120 Kokkori, Bouras and Karasik

Figure 5.3a Karl Ioganson, Electrical Circuit (Representation) [Electricheskaia tsep’ (izo-
brazhenie)], 1922, paper collage and graphite on paper, 45.4 × 33.6 cm., George
Costakis Collection, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki.
© The State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki.

Among the drawings that one participant Karl Ioganson (Kārlis Johansons)
submitted to the project was the Electrical Circuit (Representation) [Electrich-
eskaia tsep’ (izobrazhenie)], which was painted on the verso of a schematic
drawing (Fig. 5.3a, b). As Maria Gough argues, the work was part of Ioganson’s
‘attempt to articulate the Inkhuk’s productivist shift … most likely framed in
the teleological terms of the journey that he delineates in his kredo – from
construction to the domain of technics and invention’.51 In fact, the tech-
niques of invention, or ‘technical creativity’, as Malevich put it in his 1919 text
‘Resolution A in Art’, constituted the common ground of Constructivism and

51 Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer. Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley CA:
University of California Press, 2005), 112.
Kazimir Malevich, Unovis, and the Poetics of Materiality 121

Figure 5.3b Karl Ioganson, Electrical Circuit (Representation) [Electricheskaia tsep’ (izo-
brazhenie)], 1922, verso of 5.3a, paper collage and graphite on paper, 45.4 ×
33.6 cm., George Costakis Collection, State Museum of Contemporary Art,
Thessaloniki.
© The State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki.

Suprematism.52 Although the subordination of art to industry and pure utility

as epitomised by productivism was anathema to Suprematist artists, Malevich
had suggested an alternative way to relate art and industrial processes; through
the sensations of dynamism, motion, acceleration, materiality and force.
Just as in an electrical circuit, there is a flow of energy in Iudin’s material
spectrum, where the materials’ complexity and transrational [zaum’] quali-
ties can be experienced and read as a metaphor or analogy for aspects of the
utopian world of the future: dematerialised, non-hierarchical, and transforma-
tive.
The last group in Iudin’s material spectrum was the ‘meteoric’. Its faktura or
textures (presented as ‘devouring’, ‘absorbing’, ‘extinguishing’, and ‘departing’),
resemble those of carborundum.53 Malevich used similes and metaphors of

52 Malevich, ‘Ustanovlenie A v iskusstve’; Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 183; Malevich,

Essays, I: 118.
53 Malevich described the meteoric textures as ‘cosmic’, while Iudin called them ‘lunar’. See
Iudin, Diary entry, 2 January 1922; Malevich, Letters, II: 221.
122 Kokkori, Bouras and Karasik

meteors, fire, flames, and burning with a frequency that indicates they pos-
sessed a special meaning for him, perhaps derived from alchemy or occult
writings, suggesting a tautology between the macro-cosmos and man’s inner
world. He wrote, ‘the brain as it travelled the world burns, disappears and reap-
pears. Through the brain, like a meteor through the atmosphere, the world will
slip, light up, and go out again’.54 In his 1922 text, ‘Suprematism: The World as
Objectlessness or Eternal Peace’, Malevich suggested that all earthy materi-
als have a cosmic provenance and are burnt materials. In order to animate
these ‘passive’ materials, he proposed incorporating meteoric force (move-
ment), which can initiate a broad spectrum of meteoric stimulations. He fur-
ther attempted to restore meteoric sensations to the world of experience: ‘Cul-
ture is the result of excitation and relationships: the excitation is generated
by judgment and creates the forms of phenomena. Excitation so far is gen-
erated mainly from the need to devour, to absorb the phenomenon. Hence,
what might be called culture is the culture of mechano-technical absorption,
or biotechnical culture.’55 In his tables, Iudin developed a system that estab-
lished a network of interrelated components, where various types of faktura
were associated with a complex of sensations, which formed a system or rep-
resented a kind of non-corporeal energy.
But why did Iudin employ the fields of electrotechnology and metallurgy to
categorise Suprematist faktura? And what does this choice suggest with regard
to painting? Iudin suggested a new system, a feeling or sensation of materials,
as they are perceived or sensed, and not as they are visually recognised. Within
this system of materials, which could transform into one another, faktura al-
lowed the object to act not as an hermetic or fixed entity, but as a matrix open
for re-signification.

The Poetics of Carborundum

There are two references in Iudin’s diaries written at the end of December 1921,
which indicate that he was reading Kruchenykh’s poetry. Carborundum, a ma-
terial of the new industrial world, was a theme in Kruchenykh’s poem ‘Chem-
ical Famine: Ballads About the Carborundum Stone’ [Golod khimicheskii:

54 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Filosofiia kaleidoskopa’ [The Philosophy of the Kaleidoscope], 1922,

ms; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, IV: 48-67.
55 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Suprematizm. Mir kak bespredmetnost’ ili vechnyi pokoi’ [Suprema-
tism: The World as Objectlessness or Eternal Peace], 1922, ms; reprinted in Malevich,
Sobranie sochinenii, III: 225.
Kazimir Malevich, Unovis, and the Poetics of Materiality 123

Ballady o kamne karborunde],56,57 in which the poet presented silicon carbide’s

two main technological applications – metal cutting and metal smelting: ‘Кар-
борунд – алмазный клац/ Солью брызжет на точиле’ and ‘В чем бессилен
Крупповский снаряд – /Ты танцуя проскользнешь!’.58 The poem concludes
with a sign, the chemical formula for carborundum (SiC) and its spelling – a
zaum’ interplay of symbols and meanings, with material and immaterial con-
notations: ‘Перед гибелью металы…На ребре прочтут насечку/ SiC – (эс и
це) …Твой родословный Гордый знак’.
Tatiana Tolstaia-Vechorka in her essay on Kruchenykh’s ‘Droolings of a
Black Genius’ [Stiuni chernogo geniia] made a special reference to his poem
about carborundum, referring to it as ‘Kruchenykh’s hymn’. She explained
Kruchenykh and his zaum’ poetry: ‘This [poetry] is a black diamond drilling
and spinning into infinity. In Kruchenykh’s poems, there is a coexistence
of nonsense and chemical formulas, personal and public thoughts, transra-
tionality and logos, cacophony and melody. There is no exact formula for the
synthesis of science and art – it is still zaum’, but it verges on the side of
logos’.59
The second application of carborundum, which is implied in the poem,
is its use for smelting solid metals at high temperatures in industrial furnaces.
This was evoked by arranging the verses into a shape reminiscent of a crucible:

56 Aleksei Kruchenykh, Golodniak (Moscow: Tipografiia Tsit, 1922). Kruchenykh’s poem may
refer to the Russian famine of 1921-22, although the theme of hunger dates back to
Arthur Rimbaud’s poem ‘Fêtes de la Faim’ [Feasts of Hunger] of 1872, freely translated by
David Burliuk as ‘Prazdnik goloda’ [Feast of Hunger] in 1913. See Konstantin Bol’shakov,
David Burliuk, Nikolai Burliuk, Vladimir Burliuk, Vasilii Kamenskii, Velimir Khlebnikov,
Benedikt Livshits, and Vladimir Maiakovskii, Dokhlaia luna. Stikhi, proza, stat’i, risunki,
oforty (Moscow: Gileia, 1913). Hunger was also evident in the writings of the biocosmists:
‘The mass starvation of the eternal, the hunger of the Americas — that’s our base’. See
Aleksandr Sviatogor, ‘Radost’ igraiushchego zveria’, Biokosmist, 2 (April 1922): 2.
57 Daniil Kharms also praised carborundum’s properties, writing in his 1927 ‘Elizaveta Bam’:
‘Хвала железу – карборунду! /Оно скрепляет мостовые /и, электричеством сияя,
/терзает до смерти врага!’ Daniil Kharms, ‘Elizaveta Bam’, in V. N. Sazhin, ed., D. Kharms:
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnoe agentstvo “Akademicheskiĭ
proekt” 1997), II: 238-69. See also Mikhail Meilakh, ‘O “Elizavete Bam” Daniila Kharmsa’,
Stanford Slavic Studies, 1 (1987): 163-246.
58 Zaum’ poetry is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to translate. The text has, therefore,
been left in the original Russian
59 Tat’iana Tolstaia-Vechorka, ‘Stiuni chenogo geniia’ [Droolings of a Black Genius], in Buka
russkoi literatury [The Bogyman of Russian Literature], (Moscow: Moskovskaia assotsiat-
siia futuristov, 1923), 36-37. See also Bela Tsipuria, ‘Tatiana Vechorka: A Futurist Poetess in
Tbilisi, Baku and Moscow’, International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, 5 (2015): 226-251.
124 Kokkori, Bouras and Karasik

…Восстань праматерь60 чугуна

Ревущая лахань, руда, железо
Излей из груды глин стальное молоко
Утробу шли по жирным жилам
БРЫЗНИ —
Все выпивает он
ГЛУШИТЕЛЬ
Марборунд!

Through his use of a volatile mix of poetic and conventional or rational lan-
guage, Kruchenykh de-contextualised semiotic material to find new meanings.
This experimental approach brings technology’s language into a specific mo-
ment of relationality, heterogeneity and fluidity and reifies something timeless
and immaterial, replacing metaphor with literalism. Simultaneously, the poem
contains several zaum’ traits, such as paired sound repetitions with variations
(krepche/kremnia, zhurnym/zhilam, grudy/glin/glushitel’), visually highlighted
rhymes, onomatopoeia, neologisms, and words which evoke sounds and ef-
fects.
The poem was included in Kruchenykh’s 1923 booklet Texture of the Word:
A Declaration [Faktura slova. Deklaratsiia].61 In his brief introductory essay,
Kruchenykh went into particular detail, trying to establish different kinds of
sound texture in words: tender, heavy, coarse, harsh, muted, dry, or moist. In
addition to phonetic texture, Kruchenykh identified textures relating to sylla-
bles, rhythms, syntax, graphics, colour and sound. He also referred to textural
effects and sensations such as ‘euphony’ [sladkoglasie or pleasant to the ear],
‘picrophony’ [gorkoglasie or bitter to the ear] and even ‘cacophony’ [zloglasie –
a harsh mixture of sounds].62 As Kruchenykh explained, zaum’ language is

60 The notions of origin, prime matter [pramater’] and primal element were central to
Monism, a philosophical theory that influenced Kruchenykh and Malevich significantly.
It provided an explanation of the physical world by suggesting that a variety of existing
things derives from a single substance, which precedes its elements. Malevich named the
movement from the whole to its parts as ‘diffusion’ [raspylenie], and the movement in the
opposite direction, from the discrete elements to the whole, as ‘fusion’ [spylenie]. See also
Annie Besant, ‘Drevniaia mudrost” [Ancient Wisdom], Vestnik Teosofii, 2 (February 1908):
18; and Maximilian Voloshin’s poem ‘Gnosticheskii gimn’ [Gnostic Hymn], dedicated to
Viacheslav Ivanov, with a particular reference to ‘pramater’ – materiia’ [primordial mat-
ter]. See M. Voloshin, ‘Gnosticheskii gimn’, Vestnik Teosofii, 2 (February 1908): 58.
61 A. Kruchenykh, Faktura slova. Deklaratsiia: MAF Seriia teorii, no. 1 (Moscow: Moskovskaia
assotsiatsiia futuristov, 1922)
62 Kruchenykh further focused on the use of the sound ‘z’, which he considered harsh and
piercing, and he delighted in filling his poems with it, often substituting it for other
Kazimir Malevich, Unovis, and the Poetics of Materiality 125

used when the artist wishes to create images that are not fully defined, either
internally or externally.63
In his ‘Ballads About the Carborundum Stone’, Kruchenykh verbalised
what Iudin and Malevich had visualised, and vice versa. The words that both
Kruchenykh and Iudin used appear like visual, spatial planes. Kruchenykh
opened the way for what Boris Arvatov called a new ‘linguistic-technology’.64
Kruchenykh generated a sense of frantic motion, of explosion; his words con-
vey the sensations of metal, electricity, opacity and transparency, silence and
noise. At the same time, Iudin created an entire new syntax of materials, which
generated new sensations, and while all these sensations operated separately,
they all interacted. But what were all these materials? Perhaps they were ma-
terials ‘that dreams are made on’,65 or devices for producing new ideas and
concepts: quests to develop a universal language of Suprematism.

consonants in a word. He also provided a list of neologisms based on z, which he inter-

preted in detail, on the basis of a morphological analogy with existing words. See Vladimir
Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1968), 341-342; and Gerald Janecek, Zaum: the Transrational Poetry of Russian
Futurism (San Diego, CA: San Diego University Press, 1996). 294-295
63 Aleksei Kruchenykh, ‘Deklaratsiia zaumnogo iazyka’ [Declaration of Zaum’ Language], in
Aleksei Kruchenykh, Grigorii Petnikov, Velimir Khlebnikov, Zaumniki (Moscow: EUY, 1921
[1922 on cover]), 94.
64 Boris Arvatov, ‘Rechetvorchestvo (Po povodu zaumnoi poezii)’ [The Creation of Words
(Concerning Zaum’ Poetry)], Lef, 2 (1923): 91-92.
65 See Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but also Vladimir Markov’s statement of 1912: ‘there are
times when a particular order of ideas, colours, tones and melodies simply thrust them-
selves upon us and we cannot escape them for, like a volcano, they need their outlet …
We cannot be responsible for these phenomena. We cannot be charged for their appear-
ance, just as we cannot be charged for our daydreams and dreams’. See Vladimir Markov,
‘Printsipy novogo iskusstva’ [Principles of the New Art], Soiuz molodezhi, 2 (June 1912):
11-12.
 Chapter 6

Branches of Unovis in Smolensk and Orenburg

Alexander Lisov

Kazimir Malevich realised that Suprematism could only be firmly established

as a substantial art movement in Russia with the support of an association
of like-minded individuals. He had thought about this a long time before he
arrived in Vitebsk on 5 November 1919, but he only succeeded in actually or-
ganising such an association in Vitebsk, where he established a ‘party of Supre-
matism’, Unovis (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva – Champions of the New Art), in
January-February of 1920. By the summer of that year, the Suprematists dom-
inated the school. From the very beginning of Unovis, Malevich intended to
extend the influence of his ideas beyond Vitebsk. He counted on gaining the
support of art schools in other Russian cities, including Moscow, and securing
the assistance of artists with whom he had already cooperated.
The author of the first brief account of the group’s origin, published in the
Unovis almanac, was probably Ivan Gavris. At the end of May 1920, he reported
that ‘during the comparatively short period of its existence, Unovis has man-
aged to make contact with and organise Unovis in other cities’.1 It is clear from
the text that one of these branches was in Smolensk. In fact, Gavris names
no other cities in which branches were established. Evidently, the possibility
of setting up other branches of Unovis had been discussed from the moment
of its creation in Vitebsk. In this endeavour, Malevich’s working relations with
his former students at the Second State Free Art Studios (Gosudarstvennye
svobodnye khudozhestvennye masterskie – Svomas) in Moscow were vital.
The artist evidently worked on creating other branches of Unovis by corre-
spondence, which unfortunately is not preserved in its entirety.2 First of all,

1 [I.T. Gavris], ‘Kratkaia istoriia vozniknoveniia “Unovis”’, Unovis No. 1 (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920),
[sheet 44]; reprinted in ‘Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. 1920. Prilozhenie k faksimil’nomu izdaniiu’,
in Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. 1920. Faksimil’noe izdanie, ed. Tat’iana Goriacheva (Moscow: State
Tretyakov Gallery / Izdatel’stvo Skanrus, 2003), 88-90; English translation as ‘A Short History
of the Origins of Unovis’, in Larissa A. Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in
Russian Art 1910-1930, trans. Alexander Lieven (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 305-309.
2 For surviving items of correspondence, see Kazimir Malevich, Letters, Documents, Memoirs
and Criticism, Russian edition: eds., Irina A. Vakar and Tatiana N. Mikhienko; English edition:
trans. Antonina W. Bouis, ed. Wendy Salmond, general ed. Charlotte Douglas (London: Tate
Publishing, 2015), 2 vols.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_008

Branches of Unovis in Smolensk and Orenburg 127

Malevich turned to Petr Miturich in Moscow who was close to Velimir Khleb-
nikov and to Grigorii Petnikov in Kharkov. It is revealing that Unovis, like the
earlier Supremus group, was conceived as an alliance of innovators, not only
in the field of fine arts, but also in literature, music, and the theatre.
Malevich placed great hopes on the conference at the State Free Art Studios
in Moscow and on the accompanying exhibition of the Vitebsk Unovis in June
1920. The exhibition was intended to demonstrate the organisation’s successes
and the quality of Malevich’s pedagogical system. He was not disappointed.
Branches of Unovis began to be set up in Perm, Ekaterinburg, Samara, Saratov,
and Odessa. A special role was played by the branches in nearby Smolensk
and Orenburg, where some degree of success was achieved in developing and
applying the principles of Malevich’s system, and where the artist himself be-
came directly involved in their activities.
Malevich regarded Unovis as an organisation of representatives of the most
recent art trends – Cubism, Futurism and Suprematism. Among these, Supre-
matism was naturally the ultimate goal and was seen as the culmination of
painting’s evolution. He called Unovis ‘a party in art’, an association of like-
minded creative figures, who would fight for Suprematism, its philosophy and
world view. Malevich made these attitudes clear in his article entitled ‘Con-
cerning a Party in Art’.3 Yet Malevich also thought about Unovis in relation
to the practical tasks of art education. He realised that, in the current situa-
tion, he needed to promote the programme of artistic training (that he had
developed) in the provincial art schools and gain support there, before he
would be able to introduce his approach to the capital. It would clearly not
be possible for his ideas to gain immediate acceptance in the centre, since he
had encountered such strong opposition from the leadership of the Moscow
State Free Art Studios, as well as from the Department of Fine Arts within
the People’s Commissariat of Education (Otdel izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv, Nar-
odnyi komissariat prosveshcheniia – IZO Narkompros) in the person of David
Shterenberg. Malevich counted on gaining the support of the student masses
and like-minded artists in the provinces. He thought of his stay in Vitebsk as
temporary and forced. Once he had acquired support, then his new pedagog-
ical system would be approved and implemented throughout the new Russia.
This was one of his main concerns in 1920-1921.

3 Kazimir Malevich, ‘O partii v iskusstve’ [Concerning a Party in Art], Put’ Unovisa, 1 (Jan-
uary 1921); reprinted in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. Aleksandra
Shatskikh (Moscow: Gileia, 1995), I: 223-230; English translation in Anna Kafetsi, ed., Russian
Avant-Garde 1910-1930: The G. Costakis Collection: Theory – Criticism (Athens: Ministry of Cul-
ture, National Gallery / Alexandros Soutzos Museum; and Delphi: European Cultural Centre
of Delphi, 1995), 556-558.
128 Lisov

Speculation concerning the special role of the Vitebsk Unovis in relation to

the other branches only makes sense because its director was Malevich him-
self, the organisation existed for a longer time than the others, and because
to a large extent it realised Malevich’s ideas. As the documents indicate, how-
ever, at the beginning, Malevich was not even chairman of Unovis’s governing
body – the Creative Committee (Tvorcheskii komitet – Tvorkom). In fact, in
1920, the chairman of the Unovis committee was Ivan Gavris. All the same,
some authors consider the Vitebsk Creative Committee central.4
Various Unovis texts and Malevich’s letters frequently assert that, even in
the initial stage of its existence, the Vitebsk Unovis was supported by a num-
ber of other artistic groups. Nevertheless, these are merely declarations. The
list of Unovis members in the archive of Lazar Khidekel, which is dated 14 Au-
gust 1920, contains the names of 36 individuals.5 Let us turn our attention
to the date. If one is to accept this date, then the list was compiled with-
out Malevich’s participation. He was not in Vitebsk at this time, but was on
an extended trip to Orenburg together with El Lissitzky. The list of Unovis
members only contains two names of individuals who were not directly con-
nected with the Vitebsk studios – Petr Miturich and Władysław Strzemiński
(Vladislav Strzheminskii) (Fig. 6.1). Moreover, certain names are missing, in-
cluding, most significantly, Katarzyna Kobro (Ekaterina Kobro), Strzemiński’s
comrade in arms in Smolensk (Fig. 6.2). The list also doesn’t mention Grigorii
Petnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Ivan Kudriashev, who are named in con-
nection with other supposed branches of Unovis. This suggests that, by the
summer of 1920, Malevich may have received some support in the task of cre-
ating further branches, but that this process was not complete, and a broad
discussion of the names of members in other cities had not taken place within
the Vitebsk Unovis.
With regard to established branches, we should speak first and foremost
about the Smolensk Unovis. The city was located close to Vitebsk. At about
this time, Strzemiński, Malevich’s student from the Moscow State Free Art Stu-
dios, moved to Smolensk. Their contacts in the province date from November
1919. Both contributed works to the Vitebsk show, The First State Exhibition of
Works by Local and Moscow Artists. It is sometimes asserted that Malevich and
Strzemiński took part in arranging the exhibition, but this could hardly be the

4 Tat’iana Goriiacheva, ‘Direktoriia novatorov UNOVIS – gruppa, ideologiia, almanakh’, in ‘Un-

ovis No. 1. Vitebsk. 1920. Prilozhenie’, 10.
5 See Vasilii Rakitin, ‘Unovis as Mirror of an Epoch and as Anti-Epoch’ in Kafetsi, Russian
Avant-Garde 1910–1930, 551-2; and Lazar Markovich Khidekel. Suprematism and Architecture.
Paintings. Watercolors. Drawings (New York: Leonard Hutton Galleries, 1995).
Branches of Unovis in Smolensk and Orenburg 129

Figure 6.1 Władysław Strzemiński (Vladislav Strzheminskii), photograph taken c. 1932, signed
30 May 1932, private archive.

case, since preparations for the show had begun in September, before either
of them had even arrived in the city. The exhibition opened on the second
anniversary of the October Revolution i.e. 7 November 1919, and Malevich did
not arrive in Vitebsk until 5 November 1919.6 In the catalogue, both Malevich
and Strzemiński are described as Moscow artists.7 Their arrival in Vitebsk not
long before the show’s opening affords no grounds for suggesting that either of
them took part in its preparation. In December 1919, a group of teachers and
students began to gather around Malevich in the process of preparing designs
for celebrating the second anniversary of the Committee Fighting Unemploy-
ment. Strzemiński may have witnessed these events.
The date of 18 April 1920 is given for the formation of the Smolensk Uno-
vis in the chronicle ‘Notes on the Unovis Movement’, published in the Unovis

6 See Aleksandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art, trans. Katherine Foshko Tsan (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 67.
7 1-ia gosudarstvennaia vystavka kartin mestnykh i moskovskikh khudozhnikov (Vitebsk: Gu-
bernskaia tipografiia, 1919).
130 Lisov

Figure 6.2 Katarzyna Kobro (Ekaterina Kobro), photograph taken c. 1918, private archive.

almanac.8 At that time, its members turned to their Vitebsk colleagues with a
proposal for cooperation. Strzemiński and his wife Kobro were named as or-
ganisers of the Smolensk Unovis, but according to Olga Shikhireva and Tatiana
Goriacheva, they were the only two members.9 In other cities, too, Unovis ad-
herents were rare. Only in the Vitebsk art studios did an association of Supre-
matists become dominant. This explains the fact that Unovis soon ceased to
exist almost everywhere.
In Smolensk, students could become familiar with Malevich’s innovative
system not only through explanations from their teachers, his followers,
but also from the persuasive words of the master himself. Malevich visited

8 [I. T. Gavris], ‘Primechaniia k dvizheniiu Unovisa’, Unovis No. 1 (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920) [sheet
44 verso]; reprinted in ‘Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. 1920. Prilozhenie’, 90-92; English translation as
‘Notes on the Unovis Movement’, in Zhadova, Malevich, 305-309.
9 See Goriacheva, ‘Direktoriia novatorov’, 15; and Olga Shikhireva, ‘Władysław Strzemiński’,
In Malevich’s Circle: Confederates, Students, Followers, 1920s-1950s (St. Petersburg: Palace Edi-
tions, 2000), 85-90.
Branches of Unovis in Smolensk and Orenburg 131

Figure 6.3 Boris Rybchenkov, photograph taken c. 1918, private archive.

Smolensk more than once in the course of 1920. This was confirmed by
Strzemiński’s former student Nadezhda Khodasevich (Nadia Léger) and Boris
Rybchenkov (Fig. 6.3), who had begun his teaching career in Smolensk.
From 1918 onwards, Smolensk possessed several fine art studios. The Pro-
letkult Art Studio was the most important (Fig. 6.4) and was well supplied
with artistic materials and food. It had been assigned excellent premises in the
Palace of Labour, on the city’s Pushkin Street. At the beginning, there were no
more than 20 students. The first director of the school was the drawing teacher
from the local secondary school, Sergei Shvedov. Classes were taught by artists
who were committed to a variety of styles, ranging from academic approaches
to Realism and Impressionism. At the Moscow exhibition of the studio in
1921, the works produced by students from the studios of Nil Iablonskii and
Vladimir Shtranikh attracted some attention. One exhibition review stated:
‘The Smolensk Proletkult, in contrast to that of the capital, has favoured pre-
serving the cultural legacy of the past, displaying a respectful relationship to
132 Lisov

Figure 6.4 The building of the Proletkult Art Studio in Smolensk. Photograph taken in 2015,
private archive.

the traditions of realistic and academic painting, and the absence of the dom-
inance of experimental, abstract schematised forms’.10
In 1920, a subdivision for art was organised within Smolensk’s Provincial
Department of Education. It was headed by the Petrograd art historian Sergei
Shiriaev. There were four sections in the subdivision, including one for muse-
ums and another for the fine arts. Strzemiński became director of the Section
of Fine Arts. His appointment was exceptionally important for Malevich and
for introducing Malevich’s pedagogical system. The Provincial Department of
Education also created a Fine Arts’ Studio, which later became the State Free
Art Studios, and it was here that the Smolensk branch of Unovis was set up.
The story of the Smolensk Unovis in Aleksandra Shatskikh’s book on
Vitebsk, was based on the oral reminiscences of the artist Boris Rybchenkov
from 1988.11 One should not, however, neglect other witnesses, such as
Nadezhda Khodasevich and Konstantin Dorokhov, who was one of Ry-
bchenkov’s Smolensk students.

10 Cited by E.V. Komissarova, ‘Razvitie khudozhestvennogo obrazovaniia na Smolenshchine

v nachale 20 veka’, in Kul’tura, iskusstvo, obrazovanie: problemy i perspektivy razvitiia:
materialy nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii s mezhdunarodnym uchastiem (8 fevralia
2013 g.) (Smolensk: Smolenskii gosudarstvennyi institut iskusstv, 2013), 36.
11 Shatskikh, Vitebsk, 73-230.
Branches of Unovis in Smolensk and Orenburg 133

Fragments of Boris Rybchenkov’s memoirs have been published.12 He stud-

ied at the Kiev Art Institute from 1915-1918 and then at the Petrograd State Free
Art Studios, 1918-1919. In 1919-1921, he lived periodically in Smolensk, teach-
ing at the Proletkult Art Studio. His memoirs describe the general charac-
teristics of the city’s artistic life and the artists teaching and working there
at that time. Even before Malevich visited the city, Rybchenkov had already
heard about the founder of Suprematism and his art. His source was one of
Malevich’s Vitebsk students, Moisei (Mikhail) Kunin, whom Rybchenko called
‘a true arms bearer for the prophet of the Suprematists’.13 Rybchenko’s recol-
lections relate to 1920, when Kunin was an enthusiastic supporter of Supre-
matism. His studies were interrupted by military service, which he performed
with Rybchenkov in Smolensk, working in the Political Section of the Western
Front. By the time he returned to Vitebsk in 1921, Kunin had rejected Suprema-
tism and had even publicly criticised Malevich.14
Rybchenkov came into direct contact with Malevich, thanks to Strzemiński,
during one of Malevich’s first trips to Smolensk. Irina Vakar dates their meet-
ing, which is described in Rybchenkov’s memoirs, to the end of June-July
1920.15 It has been suggested that it was this visit that was recorded in the well-
known group photograph of Malevich with Lissitzky and others (Fig. 6.5).16
Rybchenkov’s memoirs do not mention Lissitzky. Malevich probably decided
to make the trip to Smolensk and Orenburg after the All-Russian Conference
of Art Teachers and Students in Moscow (2–9 June 1920). If so, then he would
have arrived in Smolensk around mid-July 1920. Rybchenkov wrote about this
in his memoirs. At Strzemiński’s request, Malevich ‘patiently examined’ the
work of Rybchenkov and concluded that he was ‘not without talent’, although
he added that ‘he has a long way to go to achieve abstraction along the lines
of Suprematism. He is completely in the Earth’s gravity’.17 By this, Malevich
presumably meant that his work was still fairly figurative.

12 B. F. Rybchenkov, ‘Zapfront Rosta. Rasskaz-vospominanie’, in Boris Rybchenkov. Zhivopis‘ i

grafika. Katalog vystavki (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1989), 14-22; English translation
of extracts in Malevich, Letters, II: 207-8. See also, B. F. Rybchenkov, ‘Smolensk. 1919 god’‚
Krai Smolenskii, 3 (1992): 18; and B. F. Rybchenkov, ‘Smolensk. 1918 god’, Krai Smolenskii, 1
(5) (1993): 33-40.
13 Rybchenkov, ‘Zapfront Rosta’, 15.
14 M. Kunin, ‘Ob Unovise’, Iskusstvo (Vitebsk), 2-3 (1921): 15-16.
15 Malevich, Letters, II: 207, n. 1.
16 Shatskikh states that this photograph was taken in Smolensk and identifies the figure
third from the right as Strzemiński (Shatskikh, Vitebsk, 160, fig. 127). This has been ques-
tioned by Igor Smekalov, who has suggested that this photograph was probably taken in
Orenburg. See I. V. Smekalov, Unovis v Orenburge. K istorii khudozhestvennoi zhizni rossi-
iskoi provintsii. 1919-1921 (Orenburg: Orenburgskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 2011).
17 Rybchenkov, ‘Zapfront ROSTA’, 14; English translation, Malevich, Letters, II: 207.
134 Lisov

Figure 6.5 Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, and others, probably in Orenburg. Photograph
taken in Summer 1920, private archive.

Malevich gave a lecture at the Smolensk Proletkult, entitled ‘From Cézanne

to Suprematism’. He was a forceful speaker and ‘Using logic, historical par-
allels, and other rhetorical devices, he let his speech run along well-oiled
lines. He spoke so reasonably and interestingly that, without saying a single
word about Suprematism, he instilled in his listeners the belief that they had
learned something new and necessary’.18 Even so, Rybchenkov acknowledges
that Malevich was not understood by the majority of the audience.
The publication Unovis. Bulletin of the Vitebsk Creative Committee, No. 1, of
20 November 1920, mentions that Malevich gave another lecture in Smolensk
on 21 October. This talk would almost certainly have been related to Malevich’s
well-known brochure On the Question of Fine Art, published at that time in
Smolensk.19 As its subtitle, he used the Unovis slogan: ‘May the overthrow of
the old world of art be drawn on the palms of your hands’. This slogan also
appeared in the first book that Malevich published in Vitebsk, On New Systems

18 Ibid., 17.
19 K. Malevich, K voprosu izobrazitel’nogo iskusstva [On the Question of Fine Art] (Smolensk:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1921); reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 208-222.
Branches of Unovis in Smolensk and Orenburg 135

in Art, and in other Unovis publications.20 Malevich’s lecture in Smolensk took

place in the former home of the merchant Pavlov on Great Soviet Street, in the
same building that housed Strzemiński’s studio, and which remains standing
today.
Nadezhda Khodasevich, who was Strzemiński’s student and heard Male-
vich’s lectures, found them entrancing.21 She was convinced that Strzemiński
built his studies ‘on the programmatic objectives of the association’, and ob-
served that ‘the students lived in an atmosphere of general revolutionary up-
heaval’.22
Teachers and students at the Smolensk art studios who attended Malevich’s
lectures were not ready to accept his ideas, but they were infected with the
spirit of revolutionary experimentation. Konstantin Dorokhov recalled the ef-
forts of his young teacher Boris Rybchenkov in Smolensk to master French
Neo-Impressionism: ‘These etudes, inspired by Paul Signac, amazed me … And
I was especially amazed by … a thing, that in some way recalled the abstrac-
tionists, under the intriguing title “In search of oneself”’.23 Dorokhov described
the success of the Proletkult Art Studio at the 1920 Moscow exhibition, and
the works produced in Professor Shtranikh’s class, which were based on Paul
Gauguin’s approach, and proclaimed that ‘the picture first and foremost must
resemble a brightly coloured carpet’.24 Dorokhov wrote: ‘The works by those
in the studio amazed viewers, although they were far from comprehensible’,
while ‘Work on compositions with a subject was virtually non-existent’.25 It
seems from Dorokhov’s descriptions that both teachers and students were at-
tracted to innovative painting, but in a fairly unsystematic way.
Amongst the earliest records of contacts between the Suprematists in
Vitebsk and Smolensk is a message from the Smolensk section of the Worker
and Peasant Theatre to the Vitebsk Unovis, inviting them to produce the spec-
tacle Victory over the Sun and a Suprematist ballet. This invitation came about
because Strzemiński was involved in producing decorations for the city’s the-
atre. Nadezhda Khodasevich recalled that he produced ‘designs for produc-

20 K. Malevich, O novykh sistemakh v iskusstve. Statika i skorost. Ustanovlenie A [On New Sys-
tems in Art. Stasis and Speed. Resolution A] (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1919); reprinted in Malevich,
Sobranie sochinenii, I: 153-184; English translation in K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art, 1915-1933,
ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Bor-
gens Forlag, 1968), I: 83-117.
21 L. Dubenskaia, Rasskazyvaet Nadia Lezhe (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1983), 37.
22 Ibid., 30.
23 K. G. Dorokhov, Zapiski khudozhnika (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1974), 15.
24 Ibid., 17.
25 Ibid.
136 Lisov

Figure 6.6 Władysław Strzemiński, What Have You Done for The Front? Give Everything to
Those Who Are Dying Defending You. Political poster produced for the Smolensk
Russian Telegraph Agency (Rosta), during the Polish-Soviet War, private collection.

tions with so little of the recognisable real world in them that directors …
either sent them back to their creator or redid them in their own way’.26
It is important to note that the direct contacts with Malevich and his circle
of artists encouraged the Smolensk Unovis to embrace ideas concerning the
artistic design of the city and engage in agitational art for the masses (Fig. 6.6,
6.7). In Smolensk, Strzemiński was also active in organising the city’s Museum
of Contemporary Art.
In summer 1920, on the eve of Malevich and Lissitzky’s trip to Smolensk and
Orenburg, the Vitebsk Unovis announced a conference of practitioners of the
new art to be held that November, in the town of Kozelsk, in Kaluga province.
Unfortunately, there is no evidence that this meeting actually took place.
In Smolensk, Malevich’s followers had begun to embrace Suprematism even
before the artist’s first visit to the city, but in Orenburg it was his visit that stim-
ulated the creation of a local branch of Unovis. Igor Smekalov has provided a
detailed history of the Orenburg Unovis, which not surprisingly reveals that
it shares several common characteristics with the way in which the Smolensk
group emerged and developed.27
The organisation of the Orenburg branch of Unovis is firmly connected with
the name of Ivan Kudriashev (Kudriashov), who had trained at the Stroganov
School for Technical Drawing and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture

26 Ibid., 16.
27 Smekalov, Unovis v Orenburge.
Branches of Unovis in Smolensk and Orenburg 137

Figure 6.7 Boris Rybchenkov, Forward to Warsaw, 1920. Poster produced for the Smolensk Rus-
sian Telegraph Agency (Rosta), during the Polish-Soviet War, private collection.

and Architecture. From January to October 1919, he had attended Malevich’s

studio at the Second State Free Art Studios in Moscow. In December 1919, the
People’s Commissariat of Education sent him and his wife, Nadezhda Timo-
feeva, who had also studied with Malevich, to the provincial city of Orenburg.
Artistic life in Orenburg was very difficult and complicated, because the events
of the Civil War led to frequent changes in the occupying powers, many of
which only lasted a short while. This was very different to life in the cities
of Vitebsk and Smolensk, which were not directly affected by the fighting,
although they were located near the front line. Because of the unsettled ad-
ministration and frequent changes of government in Orenburg, a small but
dedicated group of local artists took the initiative in arranging exhibitions and
running the art schools.
The appointment of Kudriashev and Timofeeva coincided with the organ-
isation of the Orenburg State Free Art Studios, which were officially opened
on 15 January 1920. The sculptor Beatrisa Sandomirskaia, who was head of
138 Lisov

the People’s Department of Education in Orenburg province, had been instru-

mental in setting up the studios. She was drawn to Cubism, and this may have
been a decisive factor in allowing Malevich’s pedagogical system to be imple-
mented in the studios. Unfortunately, Sandomirskaia only remained in Oren-
burg about six months, which adversely affected the completion of the organ-
isation of the studios. The teaching staff embraced a wide variety of artistic
trends, from academic approaches to Cubism and Expressionism. In this re-
spect, the situation was very similar to that of Vitebsk and Smolensk.
A branch of Unovis was set up in the Orenburg Art Studios after the First
All-Russian Conference of Art Teachers and Students in Moscow and imme-
diately after Malevich and Lissitzky visited Orenburg. Igor Smekalov, however,
predates this development, stating that, ‘Kudriashev, as a zealous follower of
Malevich, began to act in Orenburg a year earlier – in December 1919’ and that
‘the town was more “ready” than others to realise Unovis ideas’ and ‘therefore
the proclamation of the Orenburg branch of Unovis in 1920 should be con-
sidered not the beginning, but rather the intermediate result of the work of
local Suprematists’.28 This is doubtful for a number of reasons: first, from Jan-
uary to May 1920, the Orenburg studios were being established as a teaching
venue. The teaching staff were poorly organised, and student numbers fluctu-
ated. As a result, in September 1920, at the start of the new academic year, the
studios had to publish another announcement welcoming the recruitment,
selection and registration of students for all classes. Documents in the State
Archive of Orenburg Province show that the local Section of Fine Arts within
the Provincial Department of Education was very weak after the departure of
Sandomirskaia. Without a director, it was unable to complete the initial stage
of setting up the art studios.29 Even in Vitebsk, where the art school had al-
ready been in existence for a year by December 1920, and had passed through
the formative stage, Malevich himself had to work very hard to organise an
artistic community around himself.
Malevich and Lissitzky probably arrived in Orenburg towards the end of
July 1920. The visit could not have been ‘the inspection’ that Smekalov de-
scribed, because there was still nothing to inspect.30 According to the poster,
Malevich’s lecture in Orenburg took place on 25 July 1920, in the ‘Lux’ theatre,
on the subject ‘The State, Society, Criticism and the New Artist Innovator’, a
theme that does not seem to relate to any of the artist’s known texts (Fig. 6.8).

28 Ibid., 56.
29 Ibid., 74.
30 Ibid., 59.
Branches of Unovis in Smolensk and Orenburg 139

Figure 6.8 Poster announcing Kazimir Malevich’s Lecture ‘On the Subject of the State, Society,
Criticism and the New Artist Innovator’, Orenburg, 1920, private collection.

Malevich and Lissitzky stayed in Orenburg throughout August, as Kudri-

ashev’s reminiscences indicate. The artists spent the time resting in the lo-
cal santorium. The trip resulted in the formation of a creative committee for
the local branch of Unovis, consisting of the artist-teachers Ivan Kudriashev,
Nadezhda Timofeeva and Sergei Kalmykov. It was only in the autumn of 1920
that real work began on forming the organisation, which coincided with the
strengthening of the school. At that point, Kudriashev began to receive Male-
vich’s advice and suggestions by mail from Vitebsk.
Smekalov has correctly observed that the Orenburg artistic studios did not
accept Malevich’s system in its entirety, nor did they ‘turn themselves’ into
an Unovis, as happened in Vitebsk.31 By autumn 1920, the Orenburg studios
had acquired a firmer structure, comprising three sections, which were de-
voted respectively to painting, graphics, and the decorative arts. Some aspects
of Malevich’s system of teaching were successfully implemented. Assistant
masters in the preparatory studio and two other studios studied Impression-
ism and Cubism, but there was no ‘final stage (that is, Suprematism) in the

31 Ibid., 75.
140 Lisov

Orenburg studio’.32 Even in the Vitebsk studios, where Malevich’s pedagogical

system was more fully implemented under his personal direction, only a few
individuals managed to reach the Suprematist stage. Malevich’s teaching pro-
gramme was not comprehensively or universally adopted either in Smolensk
or in Orenburg, and it clearly needed to mature and establish its niche in these
cities, before Malevich could hope to achieve his aspiration of having it ac-
cepted throughout Russia.
The Orenburg Unovis only existed for a brief time – from September
through December 1920. At the beginning of 1921, a split occurred in the cre-
ative committee. It happened at the time of the First State Art Exhibition. Artis-
tic activity reached a peak in the city during the exhibition, which was open
from 6-28 February 1921, because, at the same time as the show, a great deal of
work was being done on designing the city and a municipal theatre. A dispute
developed between adherents of abstraction and more conservative artistic
trends. On 21 February 1921, Sergei Kalmykov gave a lecture on ‘Naturalism and
Abstractionism in the Fine Arts’.33 Kalmykov was a member of Unovis and pro-
duced Suprematist works, although none of these were listed in the exhibition
catalogue. He was interested in various manifestations of abstraction. Timo-
feeva exhibited Cubist works, and only Kudriashev exhibited works under the
general title of ‘Suprematism’. Thus, the exhibition revealed that the Orenburg
‘leftist’ artists were not entirely united in their creative commitments, while
the local press enthusiastically criticised the abstract artists.
As his correspondence with Malevich indicates, in spring 1921, Kudriashev
tried to keep the Orenburg Unovis going, despite a split in the creative com-
mittee.34 He described the difficult situation in the school: ‘the majority of
teachers and students of the Orenburg GSKhM [State Free Art Studios] un-
doubtedly remained adherents of traditional systems of teaching and actively
opposed the innovations of Unovis’.35 Malevich was supportive and responded
on 14 April 1921, with a plan to visit the city in the summer and rescue the
situation.36 Smekalov suggests that ‘Malevich’s second trip to Orenburg (sum-
mer 1921) could not take place. This was not because he stopped being con-
cerned about the problem or because his interest in local adherents became

32 Ibid., 77.
33 The Russian term is abstraktivizm. The full title of the lecture was ‘Naturalizm i ab-
strakivizm v izobrazitel’nom iskusstve’.
34 See Ivan Kudriashev, letter to Unovis, 13 March 1921; reprinted alongside Malevich, letter
to Kudriashev, 14 April 1921; Malevich, Letters, I: 140.
35 Ibid., and Smekalov, Unovis v Orenburge, 121.
36 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Ivan Kudriashev, 14 April 1921; Malevich, Letters, I: 139-40.
Branches of Unovis in Smolensk and Orenburg 141

weaker. It is more likely that it was prevented by the terrible famine that raged
through the province at this time’.37 Could famine alone really have stopped
Malevich? There were clearly other factors involved. In spring-summer 1921,
he was engaged in a bitter struggle with David Shterenberg, who was the head
of IZO Narkompros, over official approval for his teaching programme to be
introduced into the whole of Russia. Malevich was also being sharply criti-
cised in both Moscow and Vitebsk by Narkompros, the local Department of
Education, and by the Trades Union of Workers in the Arts (Soiuz rabotnikov
iskusstv – Sorabis or Rabis). In August 1921, Malevich even spent a short time
in the Vitebsk prison of the secret police, then known as the Cheka (Chrezvy-
chainaia komissiia – Extraordinary Commission). One should also add that, at
the end of 1920, Lissitzky had left the city to work in Moscow.
In 1921, the government instituted a reform of all the art schools in the
Russian provinces (in Vitebsk, Orenburg and elsewhere), in accordance with
the scheme adopted at the Moscow Vkhutemas (Vysshie gosudarstvennye
khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie – Higher State Artistic and Tech-
nical Workshops). In summer 1921, Kudriashev and Timofeeva left Orenburg
for Moscow. Their departure marked the end of the brief existence of the
Orenburg Unovis. At about this time, the Smolensk Unovis also fell apart. By
the summer of 1922, many provincial art schools had been reformed or closed.
It has been said that the Orenburg branch collaborated with the Vitebsk Uno-
vis in organising the Moscow exhibition of 1921.38 But this was not so much a
collaboration of the two Unovis groups, as a co-operation between those few
artists who had maintained contact with Malevich. On 15 March 1921, Kudria-
shev wrote to Malevich from Orenburg, explaining that there were now only
two Suprematists in the city.39 He was clearly thinking of himself and his wife
Nadezhda Timofeeva, who were teachers, and was evidently reluctant to iden-
tify any of his students as members of Unovis. Yet even this statement was
optimistic, since Timofeeva was not really a committed Suprematist.
Originally, Malevich had considered organising branches of Unovis in Rus-
sian art schools, and especially in Russia’s provincial art schools, as a vital step
towards securing the country-wide adoption of his pedagogical system, which
was organically connected to his theory of the evolution of artistic forms. From
the examples of the branches of Unovis considered here, it is only possible to
speak about the system’s influence, but not about its realisation, because the
experiences of the branches of Unovis were too brief. Would it really have been

37 Smekalov, Unovis v Orenburge, 64.

38 Smekalov, Unovis v Orenburge.
39 Kudriashev, letter to Unovis, 13 March 1921; Malevich, Letters, I: 140.
142 Lisov

Figure 6.9 Installation photograph of works from the Orenburg Unovis, at the Unovis Exhibi-
tion at the Moscow Vkhutemas in 1921, private collection.

Figure 6.10 Installation photograph of works by El Lissitzky, Gustav Klutsis, and Ivan Kudri-
ashov (of the Orenburg branch) on display at the Unovis exhibition at the Moscow
Vkhutemas in 1921, private collection.
Branches of Unovis in Smolensk and Orenburg 143

possible to develop and implement Malevich’s new approach to art teaching

and secure its acceptance in such a short time? The answer to this question has
to be ‘No’. Of course, in the long run, the pedagogical experience might have
contributed to the implementation of the system throughout Russia. Never-
theless, even in Vitebsk, during the two years of Unovis’s existence, Malevich’s
system had not been fully realised. Both the graduation of the ten students
who completed the course in 1922 and the awarding of diplomas to them were
highly problematic.40
It is even more problematic to speak about the complete implementation
of ‘the principle of collective creative work’ in the various branches of Unovis,
since this principle clearly come into conflict with the actual experience of
working in individual studios.
Neither Strzemiński in Smolensk nor Kudriashev in Orenburg made any ef-
fort to develop their own creative or pedagogical theories. In their teaching,
they both attempted to introduce their students to Malevich’s main ideas con-
cerning the evolution of artistic forms, as they themselves understood these.
The experience of organising branches of Unovis was necessary, but it was
not sufficient to establish Suprematism as the official system of art education
in Russia, nor as the goal of artistic creativity, and, much less, to establish it as
a world phenomenon (Fig. 6.9, 6.10).

40 State Archive of Vitebsk Province, fond 246, opis’ 1, dokument 260, list 391.
 Chapter 7

Suprematism and/or Supremacy of Architecture

Samuel Johnson

By the end of 1924, Unovis (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva – Champions of the

New Art) was on the verge of disbanding. In October that year, Ilia Chashnik
and Nikolai Suetin, two of the remaining founding members, wrote to Male-
vich, asking him to relax his control over the group, so that it would truly be-
come ‘an association based on equality of initiative’ instead of being identified
solely with Malevich’s ideas. The pair insisted that they did not envision a final
break from the group, in part because previous disagreements had been met by
Malevich’s imperious suggestion that they consider ‘withdrawing from Uno-
vis’.1 Chashnik and Suetin’s proposal possesses an unhappy irony, for the name
Unovis first appeared in 1920 as a solution to the issue of the master/pupil
relationship within the Vitebsk People’s Art School (Vitebskoe narodnoe khu-
dozhestvennoe uchilische), replacing as it did the hierarchically inflected Pos-
novis (Poslediteli novogo iskusstva – Followers of the New Art). Rather than
followers, Unovis strove to produce masters of the new art. By becoming ar-
chitects, members of Unovis would make Suprematism into the blueprint of a
future world of objects. Malevich himself christened the group by ‘placing the
further development of architectural Suprematism in the hands of the young
architects, in the broad sense of the word’.2 Yet this utopian declaration of
equality only set existing differences in relief, particularly in Malevich’s rela-
tionship to the group’s co-founder and only professionally trained architect, El
Lissitzky.
In summer 1924, these differences surfaced in Malevich’s correspondence
with Lissitzky. Earlier, as head of the architectural studio at the Vitebsk Peo-
ple’s Art School, Lissitzky had created works that functioned as ‘an inter-
change station between painting architecture’, which he called Prouns (Proekt

1 Ilia Chashnik and Nikolai Suetin, letter to Kazimir Malevich, October 1924; English transla-
tion in Anna Kafetsi, ed., Russian Avant-Garde 1910-1930: The G. Costakis Collection. Theory –
Criticism (Athens: National Gallery/Alexander Soutzos Museum; and Dephi: European Cul-
tural Centre of Delphi, 1995), 575-576.
2 K. Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 Risunka [Suprematism: 34 Drawings] (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920);
English translation in K.S. Malevich, Essays on Art, 1915-1933, ed. Troels Anderson, trans. Xenia
Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (London: Rapp & Whiting, 1969), I: 127-28.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_009

Suprematism and/or Supremacy of Architecture 145

utverzhdeniia novogo – Project for the Affirmation of the New).3 Following a

year spent in Moscow, Lissitzky had decamped to Germany during the winter
of 1921-22 and then to Switzerland in early 1924. There, he finally re-established
contact with Malevich, who responded to his overtures with accusations of
betrayal: ‘you, a constructor, have become frightened by Suprematism … you
wanted to free your personality, your ego, from what I had done, you were
afraid that I would co-opt you, or that all your work would be attributed to
me, and you ended up with Gan, Rodchenko, you became a constructor, not
even a Prounist’.4 Churlish as Malevich’s remarks may be, he was right about
Lissitzky’s response. Writing to his dealer and confidant Sophie Küppers sev-
eral months later, Lissitzky reported on ‘two letters from Malevich … in the
second there is a photograph of the new work, BLIND ARCHITECTURE. It is
a Proun’.5 If this shift in designation betrays a struggle for primacy, the desire
was mutual. Later in their correspondence, Malevich referred to a sketch sent
by Lissitzky as a ‘dynamoplanit’, a term that he had coined for his own archi-
tectural drawings.6
The tension over terminology between Lissitzky and Malevich serves as a
precedent for Chashnik and Suetin’s concerns insofar as it lays bare the prob-
lem of Suprematism’s objectivity, in the double sense of its independence
from its originator and its three-dimensional manifestations. Far from being
the result of a superficial contest of egos, such disagreements raise fundamen-
tal questions about the identity of architectural Suprematism—if, that is, any
identity is, or can be, inherent in the term. Indeed, we already find ourselves
in a very crowded lexical field. On Lissitzky’s side, we have the term Proun,
which replaced an earlier neologism, documented in relation to a proposed
project of early 1920, ‘Ex-picture and Supremacy of Architecture’.7 On Male-
vich’s, we encounter still more coinages. The artist usually called his architec-
tural drawings ‘planits’ [planity] and his models ‘architectons’ [arkhitektony],

3 See El Lissitzky and Hans Arp, Die Kunstismen/ Les Ismes de l’Art/ The Isms of Art (Erlenbach-
Zurich, Munich and Leipzig: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1925), xi.
4 Kazimir Malevich, letter to El Lissitzky, 17 June 1924; English translation in Kazimir Male-
vich, Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, Russian edition: eds. Irina A. Vakar and Tatiana
N. Mikhienko; English edition: trans. Antonina W. Bouis, ed. Wendy Salmond, general ed.
Charlotte Douglas (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), I: 168.
5 El Lissitzky, letter to Sophie Küppers, 24 October 1924, Russian State Archive of Literature
and Art, Moscow (RGALI), fond 3145, opis’ 1, edinitsa khraneniia 566, list 1.
6 Malevich, letter to Lissitzky, 8 December 1924; Malevich, Letters, 1: 176.
7 Ekskartina i suprematiia arkhitektury is listed under Lissitzky’s name among the forthcoming
publications in Unovis No. 1. See ‘Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. 1920. Prilozhenie k faksimil’nomu
izdaniiu’, in Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. 1920. Faksimil’noe izdanie, ed. Tatiana Goriacheva (Moscow:
State Tretyakov Gallery / Izdatel’stvo Skanrus, 2003), 105.
146 Johnson

but he also referred to them as ‘blind’, ‘sighted’ and ‘dynamic constructions’.

It was not always clear to their creators whether this bevy of terms converged
on a common object. At one point in their correspondence, Malevich claimed
that Lissitzky had abandoned Suprematism when he turned away from his
Prouns, but in another letter, Malevich made the apparently contradictory
claim that the Prouns and Suprematism had always been distinct phenom-
ena.8 This vacillation reveals a certain anxiety over the common object of ar-
chitectural Suprematism and the order of precedence it assumed. Did it entail
an end to painting and a recognition of the ‘Supremacy of Architecture’, as Lis-
sitzky’s phrase implies? Or, as a grammatical reading of the designation ‘archi-
tectural Suprematism’ would suggest, did it lack an object entirely, appearing
as the mere instantiation in architecture of an already substantialised ‘ism’?
The two artists’ correspondence of 1924-25 provides an unusually direct view
on the unresolved questions that haunted the remaining Unovis members, but
we must also look to their respective practices for answers.
By the time that Lissitzky and Malevich resumed their correspondence in
the summer of 1924, both artists had completed their respective transitions
to architecture, placing the relevance of Unovis’s collective practice in ques-
tion. Some of Lissitzky’s projects suggest that the group’s aims still held sway
over his activities. For much of 1924, he worked on a collection of Malevich’s
writings in his own German translation;9 he also prepared (for an exhibition
in Vienna) a version of a speaker’s rostrum that Chashnik had executed in his
Vitebsk studio, signing it ‘Unovis, 1920’ (Fig. 7.1, 7.2). From May until Decem-
ber 1924, he worked on an essay surveying architectural activities in the USSR,
which was intended for publication in L’esprit nouveau, but which eventually
appeared in Das Kunstblatt as ‘SSSRs Architektur’.10 In the first drafts of his
essay, Lissitzky portrayed himself as the first public critic of Vladimir Tatlin’s
Model for a Monument to the Third International, recounting his role as a par-
tisan of Unovis in the debates of the early 1920s.11 Yet, when he wrote to Le
Corbusier about the article, Lissitzky identified himself not as a member of
Unovis, but as an associate of Asnova (Assotsiatsiia novykh arkhitektorov –
Association of New Architects), a group of rationalist architects spearheaded

8 Malevich, letter to Lissitzky, 8 December 1924; Malevich, Letters, 1: 176.

9 Lissitzky, letter to Küppers, 11 May 1924; English translation in Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers,
El Lissitzky: Life Letters, Texts, trans. Helene Aldwinckle (London: Thames and Hudson,
1968), 49.
10 El Lissitzky, ‘SSSRs Arkhitektur’, Das Kunstblatt, IX, 2 (February 1925): 49-53; English trans-
lation in Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, 367-369.
11 Lissitzky’s original typescript is in RGALI, fond 2361, op. 1, ed. khr. 27, ll. 1-8.
Suprematism and/or Supremacy of Architecture 147

Figure 7.1 El Lissitzky, Lenin Tribune, 1924, gouache, India ink and photomontage on card-
board, 63.8 × 48 cm., State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Photograph courtesy of the State Tretyakov Gallery.

by Nikolai Ladovskii, who had asked Lissitzky to serve as their foreign repre-
sentative the previous year.12

12 El Lissitzky, letter to Le Corbusier, 23 March 1924; reprinted in El Lissitzky: The Experi-

ence of Totality (Madrid: La Fabrica, 2014), 178-79. For Lissitzky’s correspondence with
Ladovskii, see Jen Lissitzky and Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, eds., El Lissitzky: Proun und
Wolkenbügel. Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977), 177-79.
148 Johnson

Figure 7.2 Ilia Chashnik, Project for a Tribune for a Smolensk Square, 1920, gouache, graphite
and India ink on paper, 48.2 × 37.8 cm., State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Photograph courtesy of the State Tretyakov Gallery.

Another element in the correspondence between Lissitzky and Malevich

was Lissitzky’s own visionary architectural project, der Wolkenbügel. During
the spring of 1924, he had begun working on a grandiose building that would
come to fruition during the winter 1924-25, with the aid of the engineer Emil
Roth (Fig. 7.3). Literally overturning the skyscraper as a formal concept, Lis-
sitzky envisioned a horizontal structure held aloft on massive piers fifty metres
above the city streets, as if floating. The supports of the building fairly literalise
Suprematism and/or Supremacy of Architecture 149

Figure 7.3 El Lissitzky, Wolkenbügel on Niktiskii Square, ca. 1925, gelatin silver print, Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles.
Photograph courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

the artist’s characterisation of the Proun as a station: one leg was to act as a
link to an underground railway system, while the others would function as bus
stops. From below ground, a lift or continuously circulating paternoster would
take people to the building’s functional spaces, which Lissitzky intended as
an administrative centre. A planned series of eight Wolkenbügels, each posi-
tioned at an intersection of Moscow’s first or second ring road with a major
arterial, would link the civic functions of government to the infrastructure of
the city, while also serving as monumental signposts for pedestrian and auto-
mobile traffic. The building was to be maximally functional; indeed, while it
may have been conceived as an autonomous formal exercise, the Wolkenbügel
manifested itself almost entirely as the meeting place for a series of transport
systems.13

13 L. Lisitskii, ‘Seriia neboskrebov dlia Moskvy.WB1 (1923-25). Proekt El’ Lisitskogo’ [Series of
Skyscrapers for Moscow: WB1 (1923-25). El Lissitzky’s Design], Izvestiia Asnova, 1 (1926):
[2-3]. For a detailed account of the building’s development and the pivotal contributions
of Emil Roth, see J. Christoph Bürkle, El Lissitzky: Der Traum vom Wolkenbügel (Zurich:
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der
Architektur, 1991).
150 Johnson

Malevich’s activities had also come to inhabit an almost exclusively archi-

tectural sphere, albeit from a position quite opposed to Lissitzky’s. In 1923,
Malevich had begun to construct architectural models in plaster which he
called architectons and made with the aid of his students and assistants at the
Petrograd Ginkhuk (Gosudarstvennyi insitut khudozhestvennoi kul’tury, State
Institute of Artistic Culture). By the time he resumed his correspondence with
Lissitzky, Malevich had completed fifteen such structures, on the strength of
which he was allowed to serve as an instructor at the Leningrad Institute of
Civil Engineers.14 Over the course of 1924, in tandem with his architectural
activity, he wrote a lengthy tract devoted to the ‘Ideology of Architecture’ for
inclusion in his magnum opus, The World as Non-Objectivity.15 Towards the
end of the year, he adapted this text for delivery as a lecture to the Leningrad
Society of Architects, mailing a copy to Lissitzky shortly afterwards.16 As its
title suggests, this text is not concerned with the history and development of
the discipline, but with its ideological essence, which, for Malevich, resided
in freedom from the burden of weight, as distinct from all practical methods
of liberation. These latter are construed so broadly as to include all exercise
of reason and even movement, determined as flight from, or struggle with,
resistance.
If Lissitzky’s vision of architecture in 1924 betrays a fascination with the way
that steel and glass can articulate a volume not determined by mass, Male-
vich’s architectons equate the two to a surprising degree. In his concern for the
integrity of the unbroken plane, Malevich transformed the architectons into
windowless monads that obliterate architectural space. Refusing all relation of
inside and outside, these structures strive to attain a definitive simultaneity
of pure exterior and pure interior, indifferent to the flux of the world. They
are, in this sense, anti-buildings.17 A rare image of an architecton relating to an
existing built environment, published in the Warsaw journal Praesens in 1926,
emphasises the absolute discontinuity between the Suprematist structure and
its surroundings (Fig. 7.4). In contrast, Lissitzky presented his Wolkenbügel as
an exactly scaled, perspectival drawing mapped almost seamlessly onto a pho-
tograph of its site, in order to reinforce the possibility of erecting the structure.

14 Malevich, letter to Lissitzky, 14 August 1924; Malevich, Letters, 1: 170.

15 Kazimir Malevich, ‘1/48. The World as Non-Objectivity’, in K.S. Malevich, The World as
Non-Objectivity: Unpublished Writings 1922-25, ed. Troels Anderson, trans. Xenia Glowacki-
Prus and Edmund T. Little (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976), 270-291.
16 Malevich, letter to Lissitzky, 22 December 1924; Malevich, Letters, 1: 177-78.
17 See, for instance, Maria Gough, ‘Architecture as Such’, in Achim Borchardt-Hume, ed.,
Malevich (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 158-63.
Suprematism and/or Supremacy of Architecture 151

Figure 7.4 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Structure Among American Skyscrapers, from Prae-
sens No. 1, (1926).
Photograph courtesy of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

In Lissitzky’s montage, the photograph disappears behind its referent, rather

than exposing the mechanism of the camera, as photomontage so often does.
Both images turn on the radical estrangement of the buildings’ horizontal and
vertical axes, but their functions are opposed. Lissitzky’s image allows the real,
indexical referent of the photograph to seep into the superimposed drawing
of the Wolkenbügel, while the building re-enchants the quotidian streetscape
with the hypnotic power of its megastructural feat of engineering. It was ex-
actly this effect that Malevich’s rotation refused.
The commonalities here are more striking than the differences, for even
where the two approaches diverge, they reveal a close kinship. Malevich ac-
knowledged as much in his letter of 8 December 1924, where he remarked that
‘although the Prouns are close to Suprematism, still their dynamic relations
are not the same as Suprematism … you have a different approach and even
the chess pieces are different, although the game is chess’.18 This judgment is
fair enough. Lissitzky’s Prouns frequently traffic in an unreconstructed Futur-
ist dynamism that Suprematism just as often holds in reserve. But Malevich

18 Malevich, letter to Lissitzky, 8 December 1924; Malevich, Letters, 1: 176.

152 Johnson

also closed the distance that he had asserted by calling Lissitzky’s sketch a ‘dy-
namoplanit’ in the very same sentence. By this logic, Malevich could consider a
Proun to be a type of planit, although not a Suprematist one, even while admit-
ting that in his own architectural studies, ‘Suprematism seems to enter another
sphere, perhaps, in its ideological essence’.19 This admission suggests that, by
1924, Malevich was comfortable reverting to the position of the master and
treating Suprematism as a personal style, developing through his work alone.
Although this view persists in the scholarly literature on Suprematism,20 it has
to be regarded with scepticism, for here the artist acknowledged the change-
ability of his own project. Unless we view such changes as proceeding tele-
ologically, in accordance with the original essence of Suprematism (a claim
Malevich himself seemed to rule out here, although he had recourse to it on
other occasions), we cannot treat his example as the stable term in a compar-
ative analysis. Rather, we are faced with a multi-agent development within a
common framework. For the rules of the game, we must return to the forma-
tion of Unovis, with its dream of a truly collective endeavour undertaken by a
plural subject.
Malevich affirmed the task of developing a collectively articulated architec-
ture in the introduction to his Suprematism: 34 Drawings, but a fuller under-
standing of this project can be gleaned from his other statements. Prior to the
foundation of Unovis, Malevich had outlined some key terms in his 1918 arti-
cle, ‘Architecture as a Slap in the Face to Ferro-Concrete’, which praises ‘our
ferro-concrete life’ in opposition to the stagnation of a discipline steeped in
Beaux-Arts traditions; describing the railway station as ‘a door, a tunnel, the
nervous pulse of trembling, a town’s breathing’, Malevich called for the erec-
tion of new buildings on the ‘square fields of the revolution’.21 He also returned
to the volumetric Suprematist canvas included in the 0.10 exhibition, publish-
ing a lithographic version in the spring of 1919 (Fig. 7.5).
The same year, he penned a long text, On New Systems in Art: Stasis and
Speed, which he published in Vitebsk with Lissitzky’s assistance. Although this
text says nothing about architecture, it returns to the theme of the railroad as
an expression of the dynamism of a universal intuition opposed to economic
and materialist ratiocination. Malevich’s essay closes with the image of a uni-
fied network of towns, ‘a supreme town … formed as a product of the forces of

19 Ibid., 177.
20 The most pronounced example is Andréi Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, trans.
Michael Taylor with Helen Knox (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2010), III: 13-110.
21 K. Malevich, ‘Arkhitektura kak poshchechina betono-zhelezu’, Anarkhiia, 37 (6 April 1918);
English translation. ‘Architecture as a Slap in the Face to Ferro-Concrete’, in Malevich,
Essays, I: 63.
Suprematism and/or Supremacy of Architecture 153

Figure 7.5 Kazimir Malevich, Untitled, from Puti tvorchestva, No. 5 (1919).
Photograph courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

the towns of whole peoples’, embodying the ‘intuitive universal movement of

energic forces’.22 These were the salient features of Malevich’s thinking when
he and Lissitzky first began to collaborate: an affirmation of the Futurist dy-
namism of modern transit infrastructures, an interest in the tendency of urban
networks toward centralisation, and a return to the volumetric possibilities of
Suprematism.
The elements present in Malevich’s writings circa 1919 were resolved into
an architectural mode of Suprematism in the space of a few short months in
Vitebsk. By March 1920, Malevich could write that ‘a lot of aspects of Supre-
matism have become clear, in particular, when The Black Square grew into
architecture in such forms that it was difficult to identify these forms as archi-
tecture’.23 Although Malevich was initially less than fluent in Suprematism’s
new developments, Lissitzky was well equipped to discern the components
of a synthesis. In an essay of 1920, ‘Suprematism of World-Construction’, he
outlined

22 K. S. Malevich, O novykh sistemakh v iskusstve. Statika i skorost’. Ustanovlenie A [On New

Systems in Art: Stasis and Speed: Resolution A] (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920); English translation
Malevich, Essays, I: 83-119.
23 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Mikhail Gershenzon, 18 March 1920; Malevich, Letters, 1: 126.
154 Johnson

the task of creating the town, the unified creative depot, the centre of
collective effort, the radio tower sending out bursts of creative activity
into the world. In this, we overcome the fettered foundation of the Earth
and rise above it. This is the answer to all questions of movement. This
dynamic architecture creates a new theatre of life and because we are
capable, at any moment, of embedding the whole town in any plan, the
task of architecture—the rhythmic articulation of space and time—will
be perfectly and simply fulfilled.24

Even after Lissitzky’s departure for Moscow, this transformation of Suprema-

tism into a concrete proposal was practised in the architectural programme of
the Vitebsk People’s Art School. Malevich described the process of ‘discover-
ing the Suprematism of the World’ to Ivan Kudriashev in April 1921, writing of
the ‘plans of a utilitarian order … an Economic-agricultural agronomic centre,
the lay-out of fields, roads, all the out-buildings … a plan for railway stations,
an aeroplane hangar, a port and so on,’, which were being developed by mem-
bers of Unovis.25 Among the few surviving examples of architectural projects
from the Vitebsk period are Lissitzky’s own earliest efforts at Suprematism,
dating from the winter of 1919-20, which he seems to have initially grouped un-
der the terms ‘Ex-picture and Supremacy of Architecture’. The titles Lissitzky
used for these pictures before introducing the Proun concept—Arch, Bridge,
Town, House Above the Earth—make their connection to a nascent architec-
tural Suprematism explicit.26
Lissitzky’s Town may be his most significant contribution to the develop-
ment of architectural Suprematism (Fig. 7.6). Painted in oil and sand on ply-
wood in an extremely ascetic palette (one could call the work grisaille, save for
two bars of ochre flanking a small black square in the centre), the unassum-
ing Town revealed a ‘Suprematism of the World’ in a manner that has often
gone unnoticed. In it, Lissitzky arrayed a rhythmic sequence of bars—some
axonometric, others perfectly flat—along the diagonal axis of a black square
placed within a white oval, the perimeter of which nearly touches the upper
and lower edges of the board. Extending through the oval and meeting the
cut edges of the board are three flat rectangular bars, which place the square

24 El Lissitzky, ‘Suprematizm mirostroitel’stva’, Unovis No 1 (1920) [sheet 13]; reprinted in

‘Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. 1920. Prilozhenie k faksimil’nomu izdaniiu’, 71.
25 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Ivan Kudriashev, 14 April 1921; Malevich, Letters, I: 140.
26 For a discussion of Lissitzky’s early titles, see Peter Nisbet, ‘El Lissitzky in the Proun Years,
1919-1927: A Study of his Work and Thought’ (PhD Thesis, Yale University, New Haven, CT,
1995), 66-76.
Suprematism and/or Supremacy of Architecture 155

Figure 7.6 El Lissitzky, Town, 1919-20, oil and sand on plywood, 47 × 63.5 cm., State Mustafaev
Azerbaijan Museum of Art, Baku.

within a grid; a light grey square contiguous to the oval replaces the missing
fourth arm of the grid, overlapping the board’s edges at the top right-hand
corner. To be sure, the constituent elements of Town mostly derive from Male-
vich’s work.
Several of Malevich’s canvases of 1915, like the strikingly literal Four Squares
(Fig. 7.7), had mapped the flat plane of canvas to its framing edges, and his
few experiments with volumetric Suprematism had already introduced the
parallelepiped. Still, Malevich had never combined the two. Like two horns of
a dilemma, Malevich’s occasional attempts to re-state the flat picture plane
compositionally remained opposed to his experiments in volume, which al-
ways rely on the illusion of an infinite expanse provided by the white ground.
The perceptual habits of Lissitzky’s architectural training provided the essen-
tial element of his synthesis: Lissitzky regarded the flat Suprematist plane
as infinitely extendable beyond its framing edges, rather than infinitely deep
within them, and had no qualms about laying a sequence of volumes upon
it, as upon the surface of the Earth. Rudimentary as it may seem, Malevich
himself never reached this conclusion. His Four Squares would not yield an
156 Johnson

Figure 7.7 Kazimir Malevich, Four Squares, 1915, oil on canvas, 49 × 49 cm., State Radishchev
Museum, Saratov.
Photograph courtesy of the State Radishchev Museum.

experiment like Lazar Khidekel’s 1923 Roads in the Lowlands (Canals) without
the mediation of Town, despite their inarguable kinship (Fig. 7.8).
Nevertheless, the accomplishments of Town remain exceptional within Lis-
sitzky’s oeuvre. As an aesthetic category, the so-called ‘Ex-picture’ traced no
firm line between volumetric and architectural Suprematism, and Lissitzky in-
creasingly tended to explore the infinite expanse of Suprematist space in a
painterly idiom of his own. Perhaps for this reason, he also decided to intro-
duce a new term for his work: Proun. Even in the first recorded use of this term,
in a lecture of October 1920, Lissitzky acknowledged his errant path by admit-
ting almost apologetically that ‘it is necessary for me to further resolve those
axial and chromatic foundations that I realised in the easel-Proun in actual
space, in the model and in technical material’.27 While his written statements
continued to define the Proun as a transition from painting to architecture,
Lissitzky seems to have been plagued by the suspicion that it meant the oppo-
site. In one of the most compelling exchanges of their 1924 correspondence,

27 El Lissitzky, ‘Doklad o tekushchem momente’ [Lecture About the Present Moment], 27

October 1920, ms; Nikolai Khardzhiev archive, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, inventory
no. 716, sheet 2.
Suprematism and/or Supremacy of Architecture 157

Figure 7.8 Lazar Khidekel, Roads in the Lowlands (Canals): Ray of Light = 45°, 1923, pencil on
paper, 17 × 13 cm., private collection.
Photograph courtesy of the Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Collec-
tion.

Malevich vehemently rejected Lissitzky’s assertion that ‘our apprentices [in

Vitebsk] under my influence have moved away from architecture’.28 Referring
to the ‘civil-engineer’, Khidekel, and the ‘easel painter[s]’, Chashnik and Suetin,

28 Malevich letter to Lissitzky, 8 December 1924; Malevich, Letters, I: 176-177. In this letter
Malevich quoted from Lissitzky’s previous letter, now lost.
158 Johnson

Malevich insisted that ‘if they were under your influence, then they would ar-
rive at good architecture’.29 These disagreements, like the differences over ter-
minology, appear to be the psychological correlative of the group’s collective
activity, in which the boundaries between actors are effaced while the individ-
ual conscience survives.
When he settled on his neologism, Proun, in summer or autumn 1920, Lis-
sitzky abandoned his early architectural titles and, for a time, his foray into
architectural projects. That winter, he assembled his works into a portfolio of
lithographs. He grouped them into series, retitled them like chemical com-
pounds (P1a through P1e, P2d through P2e, etc.), and confined his early, ex-
plicitly architectural compositions to his first series. One factor in this digres-
sion from architectural Suprematism was probably Viktor Shklovskii’s essay,
‘Space in Painting and Suprematism’, which appeared just as Lissitzky took
up Suprematism. Shklovskii’s conclusion, that Suprematism’s main contribu-
tion to the history of art was not its compositional system but its critique of
representation, may have diverted Lissitzky’s Prouns away from concrete ar-
chitectural tasks onto the same path as Malevich’s subsequent bacteriological
theory of painting. Explaining the optical reversibility of depicted volumes, a
phenomenon noted by Broder Christiansen and shown experimentally by Wil-
helm Wundt, Shklovskii argued that ‘the Suprematists did for art what chem-
istry has done for medicine: they isolated the active factor in the remedies’.30
Language close to Shklovskii’s appeared in Lissitzky’s letter to Malevich of 1
July 1924, which explained their divergent approaches ‘in terms of the growth
of the scientific method, where one person discovered that microbes are the
cause of the illness, and the next discovered the antiviral serum … I believe
that there is not only a no in what you created, but also a new yes, and I am
now occupied only with the yes’.31 In Lissitzky’s belated ‘now’, we can hear
some acknowledgement of his recent return to architecture.
It was not only Lissitzky who diverged from the Unovis consensus. Together
with the rise of Constructivism, Lissitzky’s departure for Moscow pushed
Malevich toward an increasingly phobic rejection of technology. While On New
Systems in Art had praised the dynamism of the railway and aeroplane as man-
ifestations of an intuition caught in a dialectic of dispersal and centralisation,

29 Ibid.
30 V. Shklovskii, ‘Prostranstvo v zhivopisi i suprematizm’ [Space in Painting and Suprema-
tism] Iskusstvo, 8 (3 September 1919); English translation in Larissa Zhadova, Malevich:
Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art, 1910-1930, trans. Alexander Lieven (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1982), 326.
31 El Lissitzky, letter to Kazimir Malevich, 1 July 1924; reprinted in Aleksandra Shatskikh, ed.,
Pis’ma Kazimira Malevicha El’ Lisitskomu i Nikolaiu Puninu (Moscow: Pinakoteka, 2000), 7.
Suprematism and/or Supremacy of Architecture 159

‘The Ideology of Architecture’ weighed ‘what is more necessary, more correct

… the picture or the aeroplane?’ By the time Malevich posed the question,
however, he had already categorically asserted that ‘technology has proved to
be a mistake, for it has emerged from the unfulfilled historical, technical, me-
chanical intentions of the past, from the historical experience’.32 This outright
rejection of history as the history of instrumental reason provided the basis
for Malevich’s definition of ‘architecture as such’ as freedom from all purpose.
And while it constitutes a striking attempt at a purely phenomenological def-
inition of architecture, it also invokes the authority of a transcendental realm
of forms. By 1924, Malevich had claimed that ‘The civil engineer does not pos-
sess an eternal basis and equilibrium, for he always depends on the changing
condition of social relations, utilitarian or ideological differences; the artist is
outside of this … his ‘eternally beautiful’ basis is eternally beautiful in its equi-
librium’.33 This line of argument led Malevich to conclude that ‘civic buildings
are not architecture’, architecture is ‘the house as rest’, i.e. the temple of the
spirit. ‘The architectural universe’, he soon affirmed, ‘represents the ecumeni-
cal universe, the universe without walls, windows, doors, columns, without
roofs and foundations’.34 This justification of Malevich’s ‘blind constructions’,
Lissitzky likely concluded, offered only the solipsistic comfort of a transcen-
dent ‘no’.
The ‘yes’ that Lissitzky proposed in response remained close to the Uno-
vis position that he represented in 1920. Whereas Malevich derived his term
architecton from architectonics, Lissitzky concluded that ‘nowhere is there a
new architectonic culture … At the same time, modern architects in various
countries have been fighting for some decades to establish a new tectonics’.35
Counting himself among them, he described his Wolkenbügel as a ‘great tec-
tonic task’, and boasted that ‘neither the French nor the Dutch can really grasp
our [Soviet] tectonic volition’.36 In this, Lissitzky drew on the position outlined

32 Malevich, ‘1/48. The World as Non-Objectivity’, 276 and 274-75.

33 Ibid., 282. Emphasis as in the original.
34 These formulations appear in Malevich, ‘1/49. The World as Non-Objectivity’, 292 and
291. It could be objected that this change in Malevich’s thinking began with God is Not
Cast Down: Art, The Factory, The Church [Bog ne skinut. Iskusstvo, tserkov’, fabrika], which
was written in Vitebsk in 1920-21 and printed in 1922. In that text, however, Malevich
stressed the experience of the pulse of sensation prior to all thought, in order to show the
groundlessness of economic and religious discourses. When art appears in the text, it is
characterised as the harmony of rhythms, but not as eternal harmony.
35 El Lissitzky, ‘Architecture in the USSR 1925’; English translation in Lissitzky-Küppers, El
Lissitzky, 367.
36 Bürkle, Der Traum vom Wolkenbügel, 34; and Lissitzky, letter to Küppers, 14 January 1925;
English translation in Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, 57-58 (translation modified).
160 Johnson

by the theorist of the German Werkbund, Hermann Muthesius, who saw the
seeds of an emergent building style in ‘those modern creations that truly serve
our newly established needs and that have absolutely no relation to the old for-
malities of architecture … in the general tectonic realm, in our large bridges,
steamships, railway cars, bicycles and the like’.37 As a member of Unovis, Lis-
sitzky had mobilised this distinction to criticise the teaching of architecture
as a discrete discipline, asking polemically, ‘must the art of building obtain its
raison d’être from the art of architecture? … does not architecture appear to
be a parasite on the healthy body of building?’38 For Lissitzky, Suprematism
had accomplished the final negation of all established architectural traditions,
but it also affirmed new constructions and the new needs to which they were
responding.
Ultimately, this is a disagreement over the grounds of architecture. For
Malevich, the original architectural motive lies with the subject, and archi-
tecture is only possible as the recovery of its origin, freed from history.39 Lis-
sitzky’s view, like Muthesius’s, is closer to the empiricism of architectural his-
torian Gottfried Semper, who stressed that ‘tectonic root forms are much older
than architecture’ and condition its emergence.40 From this perspective, an ar-
chitecture purged of technology is a contradiction, since architecture emerges
in the immobilisation of structures already in use: it has empirical beginnings
rather than a phenomenological origin. It is tempting to conclude that these
positions complemented one another in the formation of Unovis, but perhaps
that is too utopian a view. Perhaps it is better to acknowledge that architec-
tural Suprematism had its beginnings in Lissitzky’s early experiments and dis-
covered its origin only later — to say that it was Malevich who finally affirmed
the supremacy of Architecture in the face of mere architectural Suprematism.

37 Hermann Muthesius, Style-Architecture and Building-Art: Transformations of Architecture

in the Nineteenth Century and its Present Condition, trans. Stanford Anderson (Los Ange-
les, CA: Getty Research Institute, 1994), 79.
38 L. Lisitskii, ‘Katastrofa arkhitektury’, IZO: Vestnik otdela izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv N.K.P., 1
(10 March 1921): 3; English translation, ‘Catastrophe of Architecture’, in Lissitzky-Küppers,
El Lissitzky, 369.
39 Thus, ‘weight lies on me rather than in nature, which is why I wish to throw it off, or move
it or scatter it … so that it does not oppress me, and therefore I wish to change it into an
architectural form’. Malevich, ‘1/48. The World as Non-Objectivity’, 277.
40 Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, trans.
Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Insti-
tute, 2004), 623-24.
 Chapter 8

Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism as an

Embodiment of the Infinite

Regina Khidekel

In developing Suprematism as a universal system of form making that could be

extended out into the real world and used to transform it, Kazimir Malevich
began to explore its volumetric potential and architectural possibilities. His
first publication on the subject was his 1918 article, ‘Architecture as a Slap in
the Face to Ferro-Concrete’, the title of which was based on the famous man-
ifesto of Russian Futurism, ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste’ of December
1911. In his text, Malevich acknowledged that although other art forms, notably
literature and music, had found ways to define the ‘word as such’ and ‘sound
as such’, architecture remained stuck in the ‘tunnels of the past’.1 He believed
that Suprematism was a versatile system for organising space and form that
would be able to create an authentically modern architecture and resolve the
current contradictions between the new forms of art, scientific and techno-
logical progress, and those outdated eclectic practices posing as architecture
which dressed buildings, such as railway stations, in historical costumes.
Malevich foresaw that the 1920s would be a decade of architectural innova-
tions, just as the 1910s had witnessed enormous transformations in painting.
The destruction wrought by the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the
Civil War, and the social upheavals in Europe meant that architecture had be-
come a significant and critical force in changing the world both socially and
visually. It was an opportune moment for Suprematism to become universal
and aspire to unite the entire world under a global Suprematist aegis.
The next step in this trajectory was taken after Malevich arrived in Vitebsk
on 5 November 1919.2 Inspired by this new environment, he became the
founder and leader of Unovis (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva – Champions of

1 K. Malevich, ‘Arkhitektura kak poshchechina betona-zhelezu’, Anarkhiia, 37 (6 April 1918):

4; reprinted in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. A. S. Shatskikh,
(Moscow: Gileia, 1995), I: 69; English translation, ‘Architecture as a Slap in the Face to
Ferro-Concrete’, in K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art 1915-1933, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia
Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Borgens Forlag, 1968), I: 60-64.
2 See Aleksandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art, trans. Katherine Foshko Tsan (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 67.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_010

162 Khidekel

the New Art) and announced his vision for a Suprematist architecture. Argu-
ing that painting was now, to all intents and purposes, dead, Malevich directed
his disciples and followers towards new challenges to fire their creativity and
imagination.
By the time that Malevich joined the staff at the Vitebsk People’s Art School
(Vitebskoe narodnoe khudozhestvennoe uchilishche), a group of students, in-
cluding Lazar Khidekel, had already been studying in the Studio of Architec-
ture and Typography. This was run by El Lissitzky, who taught technical draw-
ing using rulers and compasses, while developing the students’ cross-media
spatial perception, and encouraging experiments with typography and archi-
tecture. His students became familiar with axonometric projection as a means
of transforming flat drawings into three-dimensional forms; these forms then
became the skeletal elements for new architectural structures and were used
to generate models for buildings.
Lissitzky became committed to Suprematism and, in the course of his
search for a Suprematist architecture in the early 1920s, invented the Proun
(Proekt utverzhdeniia novogo – Project for the Affirmation of the New), a
stereometric perception of the plane in Suprematism, utilising axonometric
drawing and architectural innovations such as shifting axes, as well as mul-
tiple perspectives. Lissitzky defined the Proun as an interchange station be-
tween painting and architecture,3 but also could not resist seeing it as an
entirely new art form – a fusion of painting and architectonic projections,
which represented his own contribution to avant-garde developments after
they had reached zero.4 Lissitzky’s individual approach became a point of dis-
agreement with Malevich, who defended the idea of the creative collective
and was not at all interested in developing a new pictorial style, especially as
he considered that conventional painting was dead.5 Malevich also perceived
fundamental methodological differences between his own attitude towards
volumetric Suprematism and Lissitzky’s axonometric projections.
Malevich’s small book, Suprematism: 34 Drawings became a bible for his
students, especially for Khidekel, who was involved in its printing in 1920,

3 See El Lissitzky and Hans Arp, Die Kunstismen/ Les Ismes de l’Art/ The Isms of Art (Erlenbach-
Zurich, Munich and Leipzig: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1925), xi.
4 Kazimir Malevich wrote, ‘I have transformed myself into the zero of form’. See K. Malevich,
Ot kubizma i futurizma k Suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm [From Cubism and Futur-
ism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism] (Moscow: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1916);
English translation in Malevich, Essays, I: 19.
5 In 1920, Malevich wrote, ‘There can be no talk of painting in Suprematism. Painting has
long ago been outlived, and the painter himself is no more than a prejudice of the past’. See
K. Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka [Suprematism: 34 Drawings] (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920);
reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I; 189; English translation in Malevich, Essays, I:
127.
Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism 163

Figure 8.1 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism: 34 Drawings (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920). Signed by
Khidekel: ‘Lazar Khidekel 1920 Vitebsk’, Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Collec-
tion.

and treasured his own copy (Fig. 8.1). In this text, Malevich established the
bar [brusok], which derived from the square and the cube, as the funda-
mental element for constructing Suprematist volumes. Consequently, in his
charts, Khidekel frequently used the term ‘utilitarian assemblages’ [utilitarnie
slozheniia],6 which essentially denoted the method of assembling a volume
using bars. This process is similar to the procedure for creating sculpture and
ultimately led to the production of the so-called ‘blind architectons’ [arkhitek-
tony]. According to Khidekel, descriptive geometry helped him to create reliefs
and multi-layered compositions on the plane, which he made during the pe-
riod 1921-1922.
In mid-1920, in Lissitzky’s workshop, Ilia Chashnik conceived his project
for a Tribune (Fig. 7.2).7 The structure was initially intended to be built in
Smolensk, but the design became the subject of vigorous and lengthy debates

6 Lazar Khidekel. ‘Notes for an Exam’, undated ms, Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Collec-
tion.
7 For details, see Vasilii Rakitin, Ilia Chashnik. Khudozhnik novogo vremeni (Moscow: RA /
Palace Editions, 2000), 16-18.
164 Khidekel

at Unovis concerning the ‘implementation’ of Suprematism’ and the issue of

taking ‘construction out into the streets’. These discussions naturally produced
feelings of profound frustration in Chashnik, as he explained to Khidekel in
March 1921:

I find myself in an isolated position in relation to what is happening

here. Judging from your letter, the fight is just beginning. This is for the
best. Although I have already formed my opinion of [Nikolai] Suetin and
[Mark] Noskov.
The main thing is that you must speak out and present our position
clearly, because the longer it goes on without a decision, the more diffi-
cult it will then become to abandon it, and undoubtedly it will eventually
have to be abandoned. It is true that you are increasingly convinced that
the work can almost be carried out and only by us, but that with us it
might lead to absolute absurdity, and that it is also essential to prevent
this. And, therefore, I was not wrong when I wrote to you that you are
standing there as one of the revolutionary Suprematists, who will un-
doubtedly come to defend your statement about the Suprematist revolu-
tion, about taking constructions out into the street, as we have already
talked about with them.8

In fact, Suprematism had already been used in the applied arts and had al-
ready been taken ‘out into the street’ in Vitebsk. Malevich himself had cre-
ated Suprematist agitational art, such as his Tribune for Orators and his Prin-
ciple of Painting Walls (the Plane) or an Entire Room or Complete Apartment
according to the System of Suprematism (Death to Wallpaper) (1920).9 Never-
theless, he adamantly rejected this first three-dimensional interpretation of
Suprematism by Chashnik. In addition to the general question concerning the
implementation of Suprematism in architecture, as discussed within Unovis,
Malevich may have rejected Chashnik’s Tribune because he did not consider
it to be Suprematist. The skeletal iron joist was not associated with the solid
Suprematist ‘bar’ nor with any of the current experiments with volumetric
Suprematism, but was far more closely related to the engineering and indus-
trial aesthetic of the Eiffel Tower, which had inspired Vladimir Tatlin’s Model
for a Monument to the Third International of 1920.10 Both Lissitzky and Male-

8 Ilia Chashnik, letter to Lazar Khidekel, March 1921, Khidekel Archive.

9 Kazimir Malevich in The Russian Museum (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000), nos. 122
and 123
10 See Fig. 12.3.
Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism 165

vich criticised Tatlin’s project precisely because it merely exploited Western

technology.11
Lissitzky valued the work that had been undertaken in Vitebsk, and, after
his departure for Moscow in November 1920, maintained a correspondence
with Khidekel and Chashnik: ‘I am asking you to inform me about your ac-
complishments in words and sketches … In order to see the big picture of
something, it’s necessary to have some distance from it, so that with each of
my departures from Vitebsk I have been able to grasp the significance of what
we’re creating. The question of space and the living form of construction is on
everyone’s lips; I’m also confident, and I know that it’s also on our tables’.12 He
did not forget his students and later, in 1924, he argued about them with Male-
vich who considered that they had ‘moved away from architecture’.13 In 1925,
Lissitzky visited Leningrad to see them and, as a sign of a deep affection, gave
Khidekel his painting, Synagogue Interior in Druia, which had been inspired
by his expedition with Issachar Ber Ryback to the old synagogues in Mogilev
and Druia during the summer of 1916. Khidekel cherished the painting all his
life.
In 1919-1920, Khidekel was simultaneously studying painting with Marc
Chagall, drawing with Mstislav Dobuzhinskii, architecture and typography
with El Lissitzky, and Suprematism with Malevich. For a time, Khidekel was
taught by Malevich personally and was the only student in Malevich’s Dy-
namic Studio.
Khidekel contributed to the legendary 1919 First State Exhibition of Paintings
by Local and Moscow Artists, which also contained work by Wassily Kandin-
sky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, Alexandra Exter, Lissitzky, Male-
vich and others.14 Khidekel’s participation in The Second Exhibition of Current-
Year Work in February 1920 brought him recognition, notably a prize ‘probably
for the works he had completed in Chagall’s studio—a fitting epilogue to his

11 Malevich wrote ‘Tatlin’s tower is a fiction of Western technology’. See Kazimir Malevich,
letter to El Lissitzky, 11 February 1925; English translation in Kazimir Malevich, Letters,
Documents, Memoirs and Criticism, Russian edition: eds., Irina A. Vakar and Tatiana N.
Mikhienko; English edition: trans. Antonina W. Bouis, ed. Wendy Salmond, general ed.
Charlotte Douglas (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), I: 182.
12 El Lissitzky, letter to Lazar Khidekel and Ilia Chashnik, 12 November 1920, Khidekel
Archive.
13 Malevich, letter to Lissitzky, 8 December 1924; in Malevich, Letters, I: 176-177.
14 1-ia Gosudarstvennaia vystavka kartin mestnykh i moskovskikh khudozhnikov. Katalog
(Vitebsk, 1919). For details of contributors, see Vystavki sovetskogo izobrazitel’nogo
iskusstva. Spravochnik. Tom 1. 1917-1932 (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1965), 59.
166 Khidekel

brief yet productive period of study with the master’.15 Khidekel also showed
work in all the Unovis exhibitions, which took place in Vitebsk, Moscow and
Petrograd, 1920-1923.
According to Khidekel’s ‘Notes for an Exam’, he studied Cézannism (‘the
geometrization of the forms of visible objects’), Cubism (‘work with materi-
als’), and Futurism (‘the development of speed through the movement of ob-
jects and abstract geometric velocity’), as stages on the path towards a mastery
of Suprematism.16 He then experimented with all the stages of Suprematism:
Black – Colour – White – Metallic – Cosmic, consistently and simultaneously
working on a variety of formal ideas, having, from his earliest work, identified
his own personal style as minimalist avant la lettre, although he always kept
his explorations within the boundaries of the Suprematist canon.
According to Tatiana Goriacheva, ‘Khidekel was apparently guided by the
use of an analytical method and a striving for Constructivist sharpness’ and
his ‘explorations of the black square … revealed the compositional potential
of this most important Suprematist form’.17 Khidekel’s exploration of space,
concentration on a limited number of elements and colours, and his emphasis
on texture became important components in developing his theory. Khidekel’s
sophisticated drawing technique started with multi-layered hatching strokes –
an almost meditative process of overlaying pencil strokes in different direc-
tions to create a dense, opaque surface. His use of small formats intensified
the inherent energy of the dynamic tensions produced by the Suprematist el-
ements, which were defined by colour, weight, density, and their position in
space. As Lev Iudin noted in his diaries: ‘Khidekel’s work was infused with an
unexpected spark of creativity … in particular, Khidekel’s little drawings were
very sharp’.18
Khidekel defined Suprematism as ‘absolute objectlessness and the manifes-
tation of the higher dynamic tension of rhythmic accumulations in the space
of the white field of the canvas’.19 Although several of Malevich’s students from

15 Tatiana Goriacheva, ‘Research in the Plane of the Suprematist Field: Lazar Khidekel’s
Suprematism’, in Regina Khidekel, ed., Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism (Munich: Prestel,
2014), 16.
16 Khidekel. ‘Notes for an Exam’.
17 Goriacheva, ‘Research in the Plane of the Suprematist Field’, 20.
18 Lev Iudin, Diary entry, 11 August 1921, Khidekel Archive.
19 Lazar Khidekel, ‘Plan for Explanatory Statements to Include in a Group Tour on the New
Painting’, [after 12 November 1922], ms, Khidekel Archive; English translation in Irina
Karasik ‘Lazar Khidekel and his Role in the Development of Suprematism: Documents
from the State Institute of Artistic Culture and the State Institute of Art History’, Lazar
Khidekel and Suprematism, 198.
Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism 167

the Unovis group effectively absorbed the Suprematist system, very few man-
aged to cross the threshold to abstraction. Khidekel did, and he went on to
become, in Chashnik’s words, a truly ‘revolutionary Suprematist’,20 who devel-
oped his own Suprematist idioms and solutions.
Khidekel regarded some of his compositions, such as Intersecting Lines
(1920); Kinetic Elements of Suprematism: Circular Movement (1920); and Black
Square Split by a Cross (1920), as his contribution to the development of Supre-
matism and to its structural transformation.21 The cruciform composition he
developed became the basis for future constructions. As Selim Omarovich
Khan-Magomedov noted, these extremely laconic structures, built on the in-
teraction between geometric figures, such as the square and the cross (which
earlier floated freely in white space), created a new constructive morphogene-
sis: ‘extended rectangles joined in a rigid cross-like composition … Those new
pictorial compositions, emerging in Vitebsk in the works of Malevich’s pupils,
can be seen as a sort of a stage in the compositional and structural preparation
of planar Suprematism for its breakthrough into volume’.22
The extremely rapid advance that Khidekel achieved in these years was a
result of his profound understanding of the theory of Suprematism, which es-
tablished the basis for his own artistic and architectural explorations. Khidekel
realised that modern art is not only about skills, but also about thinking and
conceptualising, so he began investigating the philosophical and scientific
bases of art. Khidekel was a founding member of Unovis, a member of its
Creative Committee (Tvorcheskii komitet – Tvorkom), and both a contributor
to, and editor of, the group’s publications. In fact, he contributed more articles
to Unovis publications than any other member of the group.
In 1920, Khidekel and Chashnik jointly produced the hand-written, typed
and lithographed journal-manifesto, AERO: Articles and Projects (Fig. 8.2).23
Khidekel’s version of AERO includes an introductory preface, his handwrit-
ten and signed statement, four of his original drawings, and two typed articles:
Khidekel’s ‘The Canvas Serves…’ [Polotno sluzhit …] and Chashnik’s ‘The World
Creative Collective’ [Vsemirnyi tvorcheskii kollektiv].24 There is no mention of
Unovis, although Khidekel added the name by hand to the front page, using his
distinctive calligraphy. Nevertheless, AERO was considered an Unovis publica-
tion and was included in the chronicle, ‘Notes on the Development of Unovis’

20 Chashnik, letter to Khidekel, [March 1921], Khidekel Archive.

21 For reproductions, see Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism, plates 28, 24, 31.
22 S. O. Khan-Magomedov, Lazar’ Khidekel (Moscow: Russkii avangard, 2010), 38-39.
23 Lazar Khidekel and Ilia Chashnik, AERO. Stat’i i proekty (Vitebsk, 1920), Khidekel Archive.
24 The whereabouts of Ilia Chashnik’s copy of AERO is unknown.
168 Khidekel

Figure 8.2 Lazar Khidekel, Drawing from the journal AERO: Articles and Projects (Vitebsk: Un-
ovis, 1920), 1920, India ink on paper, 17.5 × 14.5 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family Archive
& Collection. Khidekel’s composition recalls El Lissitzky’s Prouns, such as Proun
4B, 1919-1920, oil on canvas, 70 × 55.5 cm., Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

in the group’s leaflet, issued by the Unovis Creative Committee and dated 20
November 1920: ‘The journal AERO, is published by Unovis, with articles and
projects by Chashnik and Khidekel’.25

25 See [I. T. Gavris], ‘Rost Unovisa (khronika)’, Unovis. Listok Vitebskogo Tvorkoma, 1 (20
November 1920); English translation, ‘The Growth of Unovis’, in Larissa A. Zhadova, Male-
vich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910-1930, trans. Alexander Lieven (Lon-
don: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 303. The single-page leaflet also contained another ar-
ticle by Khidekel, ‘The New Realism – Our Contemporaneity’ [Novyi realizm – nasha
sovremennost’].
Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism 169

Figure 8.3 Lazar Khidekel, Linear Suprematism, 1920, India ink on paper, 22 × 12.1 cm., Lazar
Khidekel Family Archive & Collection. The Horizontal borderless composition il-
lustrates the “utilitarian assembly” of the bars.

The appearance of AERO coincided with Khidekel’s completion of his train-

ing in Lissitzky’s Studio of Architecture and Typography, and the conclusion of
his first year of study with Malevich. The title AERO (air – as associated with
air, space and aviation) reflected Khidekel’s commitment to the new ‘world
of space’ (as the realm of art that would include the universe) and defined
his ‘ethereal vision’. The sub-title, ‘Articles and Projects’, indicated that his cre-
ative activity was both practical and conceptual, and that he was presenting a
blueprint for a future world, supported by theoretical statements, which reveal
the influence of Malevich, who sought to advance the analytical component
of the creative process.
Khidekel’s AERO images and his Linear Suprematism (Fig. 8.3) demonstrate
a new attitude towards drawing as architectural representation, involving the
spatial exploration of Suprematism’s visual language. This process of trans-
lating art into the language of architecture reflected his involvement in the
historical transition from planar to volumetric Suprematism, which led to
the development of the first real Suprematist architectural project. Khidekel
used Lissitzky’s architectural training without compromising the integrity of
Suprematism. In 1920, Khidekel was creating horizontally layered composi-
tions from rectangular bars, which exemplified the principle of ‘utilitarian as-
sembly’ (Fig. 8.3) and his progress towards developing ‘architectural Suprema-
tism’, as stated in his ‘Notes for an Exam’.26

26 Khidekel, ‘Notes for an Exam’.

170 Khidekel

In AERO, Khidekel articulated for the first time his view that ecology is cru-
cial for the new architecture. He argued that architecture should not conquer
nature by forcing it into a workable shape, but, on the contrary, develop new
solutions, enabling humanity to exist in harmony with the natural environ-
ment. Consequently, AERO is regarded as the first ecological manifesto in mod-
ern art and architecture, and it was presented as such at the Concrete Complete
exhibition of 2010.27 As Ettore Robbiani explained, ‘To this day, “AERO” re-
mains the earliest example of a manifesto combining philosophical views on
art with new and futuristic architectural visions and unprecedented insights
into the emerging ecological impact on civilization’.28
Khidekel was passionate about the built environment. He wrote: ‘Our
present spirit, and consciousness of innovative creativity building a new world
in the rhythm of the present, demands a constant pursuit of perfection and the
conquest of speed on a global scale, leading to an economy of means, which
like truth will sweep away the world’s stagnation and chaos, producing a state
of maximum dynamism’.29 He focused on the concept of construction, which
became a key element within the Suprematist system. It was ‘a quality that was
not merely exclusive to machines’ but vital to ‘world construction’, ‘a sense of
global design’ [chuvstvo mirovoi konstruktsii], and ‘a like-minded organism of
creativity’ [edinomyshlennii organizm tvorchestva], which has only one goal –
not to waste energy but to accumulate it on its path to … embody the creativ-
ity of the whole human race’. Khidekel concluded: ‘Construction for creating
a new life is directed not at the destruction of energy, cities, or itself, but at
perfecting and conquering the world’s space and removing contradictions be-
tween human civilizations’.30
For Khidekel, the Suprematist architects’ ‘interaction with surrounding na-
ture’ had to be different from the approach adopted by ‘the artists of the past
[who] perceived only the external aspect of nature’. He stressed that, ‘Together
with the discovery of the internal, hidden forces of nature, a new, higher civil-
isation is born, in which the architecture of the future must be based on its
own laws which, instead of destroying the natural environment, will enter into
a beneficial and special relationship with surrounding nature’.31
Khidekel foresaw that modern artistic practice would fuse art, philosophy,
and science, and he emphasised this in his theory and practice, consistently

27 See Concrete Complete (Zurich: Museum Haus Konstruktiv, 2010).

28 Ettore Gualtiero Robbiani, ‘A Utopian Vision. Lazar Khidekel – the Rediscovered Supre-
matist’, AHEAD (Zurich), 3 (2011): 38.
29 Khidekel, ‘Polotno sluzhit…’ [The Canvas Serves …], AERO, unpaginated.
30 Ibid.
31 Lazar Khidekel, ‘Put’ Unovisa’ [The Path of Unovis], AERO, 2 (1921), Khidekel Archive.
Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism 171

highlighting the affinities between scientific and artistic processes. He be-

longed to the new category of ‘scholar-artist’ that Malevich advocated and
promoted in 1923, when he established the State Institute of Artistic Culture
(Gosudarstvennyi insitut khudozhestvennoi kul’tury – Ginkhuk) in Petrograd.
For Khidekel, Suprematism represented a synthesis of intuition and analyt-
ical investigation, creative imagination and exploration. It embraced revolu-
tionary scientific developments, such as the concepts of Non-Euclidean Ge-
ometry, atomic theory, ideas relating to the infinity of the cosmos, the new
understanding of energy, and the notion of expanded dimensions – the fourth
dimension of time and speed (movement), and the fifth dimension of the
economy of means. Khidekel’s library in Vitebsk contained books by Nikolai
Lobachevsky, Henri Poincaré and others, which are inscribed ‘Lazar Khidekel,
Vitebsk’.
In his work at Vitebsk, Khidekel mixed words and images to explore and
convey the invisible energies and atomic processes of the ‘hidden forces of
nature’. He focused on the drawn line as a means of transmitting concep-
tual thinking, and sought ways of expressing speed, energy, dimensions, anti-
gravity, and geometrical economy, all of which became the basis for his cre-
ative work – whether it was for actual buildings to be erected in the present
or for visions of a future world. Khidekel contributed to the Suprematist trans-
formation of drawing through his efforts to visualise the intangible – ther-
mal energy flows, speed, sound waves, and even the ‘movement of conscious-
ness’. He considered the line to be a sign of the so-called ‘infinite world line’, a
term coined by Hermann Minkowski to denote the path of an object in four-
dimensional space-time.32
For Khidekel, thinking about art became an important means of artistic
expression in itself. He developed a special interest in creating methodological
programmes and charts, which systemised his thinking and underpinned his
writings and teaching programmes at Ginkhuk and the State Institute for the
History of Art (Gosudarstvennyi institut istorii iskusstv – GIII.)
In 1924, Khidekel used the term ‘Suprematist Order’ for the first time in
one of his Ginkhuk programmes. Malevich subsequently adopted the phrase
to denote the whole ‘Suprematist Art of Volume Construction’.33 Khidekel’s
‘Description of the Premises of the Laboratory of Suprematist Architecture’
provides details of the room and the materials, as well as outlining the five

32 See Hermann Minkowski, ‘Raum und Zeit’, Physikalische Zeitschrift, 10 (1909): 75-88.
33 Lazar Khidekel, ‘Information on Work Completed in the Suprematist Department during
the 1923-24 Semester’, 1923; English translation in Karasik, ‘Documents’, 199.
172 Khidekel

stages entailed in working on the architectons. The process began with mea-
suring and ‘tracing Suprematist drawings’, the forms of which could be seen in
his Horizontal Suprematist Structure (1921),34 which combines two projections:
a front façade and a view from above, showing how the ‘three-dimensional
structure was composed’.35
In his ‘Biography’, Khidekel stated:

From 1920 to 1922, I participated in the publication of Unovis collections,

contributing a series of articles on questions of art and its relationship to
production. I spent the last two years at the Vitebsk Artistic and Prac-
tical Institute; in addition to coursework assignments, I was engaged
with questions concerning the ties between constructive art (Cubism,
the ‘relief’, Constructivism, Suprematism) and architecture. I presented
my findings – work that involved not only a painterly but also an archi-
tectural content – at the Second Unovis Exhibition in Moscow.36

Khidekel’s statement is supported by Malevich’s letter of May 1921 to the

Unovis Creative Committee. This mentions Khidekel in connection with the
Moscow exhibition which, Malevich insisted, ‘must conclude with the sen-
sation of Suprematist architectural volume’ and where ‘Suprematist volume
should replace the word architecture for us’.37 According to his note, ‘On the
exhibition of Unovis’, written a few months later, but before the show actually
opened, Malevich intended to display ‘the progressive development of the sys-
tem through objectless … constructions up to projects for Suprematist struc-
tures’.38 The exhibition was divided into four parts, corresponding to the vari-
ous stages of this process. Khidekel’s works were shown as products of the final
phase, i.e. when sensations of the economy of movement, the mutual attrac-
tion of forms, the intensity of energy, rupture and dynamism (relating to the
various stages) had been completely assimilated and embodied in the creation
of Suprematist volume. Khidekel spent most of 1921 developing his composi-
tions of Suprematist cruciform plans into stratified multi-layered structures

34 For a reproduction, see Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism, pate 38.

35 Lazar Khidekel, ‘Opisanie pomeshcheniia zanimaemogo laboratoiei suprematicheskoi
arkhitektury’ [Description of the Premises of the Laboratory of Suprematist Architec-
ture], 1924, ms., Khidekel Archive; English translation in Karasik, ‘Documents’, 199-200.
36 Lazar Khidekel, ‘Biography’, 3 January 1928, ms; reprinted in Karasik, ‘Documents’, 202.
37 Kazimir Malevich, letter to the Creative Committee of Unovis (Tvorkom), 6-7 May 1921;
Malevich, Letters, 1: 145.
38 Kazimir Malevich, ‘K vystavke Unovisa’ [On the Exhibition of Unovis], 1921, ms, Nikolai
Khardzhiev Archive, Khardzhiev-Chaga Collection, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism 173

Figure 8.4 Lazar Khidekel, Volumetric Exploration of the Cross: Suprematist Axonometric
Drawing, [Relief], 1921, pencil on paper, 20.5 × 12.6 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family
Archive & Collection.

or collages of paper strips (Fig. 8.4). He may have shown this type of relief at
the important 1921 Unovis exhibition, because, according to Khidekel, at this
stage, Malevich believed that architecture would be Suprematism’s crowning
achievement. Malevich himself wrote, ‘In this way, the entire path of the new
art in all its cultural manifestations arrived at contemporary art, which is ar-
chitecture’.39
Malevich was also convinced that architecture would liberate humanity
from gravity. Indeed, in 1924, he wrote an article ‘Architecture as the Greatest
Step in Liberating Humanity from Weight’, subtitled ‘The Aim of Life is Libera-

39 See Kazimir Malevich, ‘Pis’mo v redaktsiu’ [Letter to the Editors], Sovremennaia arkhitek-
tura, 5 (1928); reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 310.
174 Khidekel

Figure 8.5 Lazar Khidekel. Suprematist Composition in the Cosmos, 1922, India ink, water-
colour and pencil on paper, 16 × 12.2 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Collec-
tion.

tion from the Weight of Gravity’.40 Consequently, Khidekel’s ‘cosmic drawings’

explored the ‘free flight’ of forms. As the highest stage of Suprematism, Cos-
mic Suprematism became important for developing architectural forms that
would overcome gravity and exist entirely in space (Fig. 8.5). The atmosphere
between deep space and the earth (encompassing the troposphere, the strato-
sphere and mesosphere) was the ideal place for Suprematist structures, which
would develop like crystals, relying on the natural law of development.
In his experiments with texture, Khidekel came to associate silver (as a
colour and texture) with speed and the displacement of weight in move-
ment. Indeed, Unovis’s investigations into the tension between the energy
of colour and texture had given rise to terms such as ‘metallic’ [metallik],

40 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Arkhitektura kak stepen’ naibol’shego osvobozhdeniia cheolveka ot

vesa. Tsel’ zhizni – osvobozhdenie ot vesa tiazhest’, [Architecture as the Greatest Step
in Liberating Humanity from Weight: The Aim of Life is Liberation from the Weight of
Gravity], [1924], ms; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, IV: 273-285.
Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism 175

Figure 8.6 Lazar Khidekel, Suprematist Space, 1921, india ink and silver paint on paper, 15.4 ×
20 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Collection. This is an example of Metallic
Suprematism.

‘metallic colour’ [metallicheskii tsvet] and ‘tonal metallic state’ [tonal’noe met-
allischeskoe sostoianie].41 Silver had been selected as the property of flying
structures, because, as a material and a texture, it conveyed a sensation of
weightlessness [bezvesie] in modern architecture (Fig. 8.6).
All these considerations played a vital role in Khidekel’s explorations. Float-
ing layered structures emerge from the clouds, while flying devices such as
satellites overcome the force of gravity. As scholars have observed, his ‘work
demonstrates the manner in which art and architecture become fused, mak-
ing Suprematism and its element, the line, relevant to both the material and
immaterial world’.42

41 Lev Iudin, ‘Ot metallov k metallicheskomu tsvetu [From Metals to Metallic Colour], in
Iudin, Diaries, 1921-1922, 61, 63-4, 66.
42 Maria Kokkori and Alexander Bouras, ‘The Suprematist Line: Kazimir Malevich and Lazar
Khidekel’, in Lazar Khidekel: Floating Worlds and Future Cities (New York: Lazar Khidekel
Society, 2013), 10.
176 Khidekel

Figure 8.7
Lazar Khidekel, Architecton, 1924, pencil on paper,
21 × 13 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Col-
lection.

In one of his charts, Khidekel defined the ‘fading of tone’43 as an expression

of dematerialisation, the dispersal of light, and the nebula-like atmosphere
of moist air. His works of 1921-1922, like Shadow in the Cosmos, Nebulas, and
Suprematist Topography could be classified as ‘Tonal Suprematism’,44 convey-
ing the process of dematerialisation, while visualising the movement of celes-
tial bodies or the urban grid, as if viewed from the imaginary vantage point
of air travel. These drawings prefigure Khidekel’s 1927 series of tonal vertical
architectons – skyscrapers that are very different from Malevich’s white, blind,
sculptural architectons. Khidekel’s architectons resemble, in part, the struc-
ture that Malevich inserted into his collage of the American skyline of 1926

43 Lazar Khidekel, ‘Plan raboty suprematicheskogo otdeleniia’ [Work Plan of the Suprema-
tist Department], 1924, ms Khidekel Archive; English translation in Karasik, ‘Documents’,
199.
44 Lazar Khidekel, ‘Institut velikoi arkhitektury’ [The Institute of Great Architecture], un-
dated ms., Khidekel Archive.
Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism 177

Figure 8.8 Lazar Khidekel. Architecton 1927, India ink, gouache and pencil on paper, 23.8 ×
18 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Collection.

(Fig. 7.4), but instead of Malevich’s black vertical planes, Khidekel envisioned
tonal panels, which could easily be translated into building materials and glass
(Fig. 8.7, 8.8).45
Khidekel’s ‘Tonal Suprematism’ also relates to post-war minimalistic mono-
chrome painting, in which the emotional power derives from the sensual im-
pact of colour, texture, and light. Khidekel’s refined white monochrome Roads
in the Lowlands (Canals) – Ray of Light = 45 ° (1923, Fig. 7.8) seems to have an-
ticipated Lucio Fontana’s works through the absence of paint and sculpting in
the pure space of the ground plane.
The ‘introduction of volume’, which was the primary goal of Suprematist
explorations in Vitebsk, was realised by Khidekel in various media – drawing,
paper collages, mixed-media reliefs, and plaster models, of which only one
survives – Khidekel’s Model for an Ashtray (1922, Fig. 8.9).

45 See Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Structure Among American Skyscrapers, reproduced in

Praesens (Warsaw), 1 (1926). For further discussion of Malevich’s architecture, see Samuel
Johnson’s essay in this volume.
178 Khidekel

Figure 8.9 Lazar Khidekel, Ashtray, 1922, photograph of the model, Lazar Khidekel Family
Archive & Collection.

A type of Suprematist composition, which Malevich called ‘dissection’

[rassechenie], when referring to the 1921 exhibition, could be identified with
Khidekel’s series ‘Black Square Split by a Cross’. The evolution of the cross-
shaped structure into a three-dimensional body, illustrating the invisible en-
ergies that straighten the line despite the curvature of space (Lobachevsky),
could be seen in the series ‘Suprematist Structures in the Cosmos’ of 1921,
which includes the dynamic axonometric compositions Suprematist Horizon-
tal Architecton: Aero-Club (Axonometry) (1922-1923, Fig. 8.10). The Aero-Club
combines features inspired by aeroplanes and rocketry, but it is also a fully
articulated project and includes detailed building plans. According to Khan-
Magomedov, Khidekel’s Aero-Club was not only the first architecton, but it
was also ‘virtually the first truly architectural composition based on Suprema-
tism’.46

46 Khan-Magomedov, Lazar Khidekel, 77.

Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism 179

Figure 8.10 Lazar Khidekel. Design for Horizontal Architecton – Aero-Club Axonometry 1923,
pencil on paper, 8.8 × 12.6 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Collection.
The design is for a building erected over and encompassing a traffic tunnel.

Khidekel absorbed important lessons from Lissitzky and Malevich, but he

developed his own understanding of the process of constructing as object-
less ‘pure painterly action in nature’ (Fig. 8.11),47 creating what he called ‘aero-
visual’ or ‘aerially visual’ [aerovidnie] compositions. Malevich also referred to
Khidekel’s works as ‘aerovisual’ in his instructions for a ‘Suprematist film’ in
February 1927. He wrote: ‘We need Khidekel to create an architectural design,
but if there’s not enough time, let him take a shot from [Matvei] Petin for
the film crew. We need to show the entire development of volumetric Supre-
matism in accordance with the sensation of aerially visual [aerovidnie] and
dynamic constructions’.48
In 1922, after graduating from the Vitebsk Artistic and Practical Institute,
Khidekel moved to Petrograd and continued working with Malevich, initially
at Ginkhuk, where he ran the Architectural Studio (1923-1926) and then at
GIII (1927-1929). At Ginkhuk, Khidekel became deeply involved with theoret-

47 Lazar Khidekel, ‘O zhivopisnom chistom deistvii v prirode’ [On Painterly Pure Action in
Nature], c. 1920, ms; Khidekel Archive.
48 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Nikolai Suetin and Valentin Vorobev, [21-28 February 1927];
English translation in Malevich, Letters, 1: 194.
180 Khidekel

Figure 8.11 Lazar Khidekel, ‘On Painterly Pure Action in Nature’, c. 1920-1921, manuscript,
India ink and watercolour on paper 23.5 × 18.5 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family
Archive & Collection.

ical and practical work on Suprematist volume, as indicated in a number of

important documents.49 In his biography of 1928, he explained:

49 See Karasik, ‘Documents’, 196-207

Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism 181

Assuming that my only possible involvement in architecture would oc-

cur through the assimilation of the [technical] knowledge on which it is
based, in 1922 I enrolled in the Department of Architecture at the Insti-
tute of Civil Engineers. I am now a student on the final course. Between
the time of my arrival in Leningrad in 1922 and the present, I participated
in the Fifth-Year Exhibition at the Academy of Arts in 1923. In 1923, I be-
came a member of the Art and Literature Department of the literary and
artistic journal Vulcan [Vulkan], published by Leningrad State University.
I served as the head of tours in the Painting Department of the Russian
Museum (formerly the Museum of Painterly Culture).50

During the summers of 1923 and 1924, Khidekel worked at the Vitebsk airfield
on the construction of a hangar. By 1925, he had already started exploring ideas
for his futuristic Aero-City. In 1926, he caused a sensation with his student
design for The Workers’ Club, which was the first professionally developed
Suprematist architectural project (Fig. 8.12). The presentation was spectacu-
lar – white and black façades were arranged against a background of dark blue
gouache. The project was fully developed, with perspective views, façades,
plans, and cross-sections, all of which exceeded the stipulations of the stu-
dents’ brief. Khidekel even described the facilities to be provided within the
building, such as a canteen, library, reading room, and theatre, all of which
were intended to promote the creation a new collective society. The project
was applauded and recommended for the Museum of the Leningrad Institute
of Civil Engineers, as well as receiving national and international coverage.
It was reproduced in the journal Contemporary Architecture [Sovremennaia
arkhitektura],51 and displayed at the First Exhibition of Contemporary Architec-
ture in Moscow in 1927, the most prestigious international show of contempo-
rary architecture, which had been organised by the Constructivist group, the
Society of Contemporary Architects (Obshchestvo sovremennykh arkiteko-
rov – OSA).52 Khidekel joined OSA and was a delegate to the first OSA confer-
ence in Moscow in 1928.53 Khidekel’s design also exerted a stylistic influence
on architectural developments in Leningrad, and its importance continues to

50 Khidekel, ‘Biography’, 1928; Karasik, ‘Documents’, 202.

51 See Sovremennia arkhitektura, 6 (1927): 188.
52 See Katalog pervoi vystavki sovremennoi arkhitektury (Moscow, 1927), no. 182; and Alla
Rosenfeld, ‘Between Suprematist Utopia and Stalinist Reality’, Lazar Khidekel and Supre-
matism, 40.
53 Khidekel, along with Aleksandr Nikolskii and Fedor Terekhin represented the Leningrad
OSA at the first OSA conference held in Moscow in 1928; Rosenfeld, ‘Between Suprematist
Utopia and Stalinist Reality’, 45, n. 12.
182 Khidekel

Figure 8.12 Lazar Khidekel, The Workers’ Club, 1926, two views. Lazar Khidekel Family
Archive & Collection.

be acknowledged today. In 2011, Jonathan Willet wrote: ‘Under Malevich’s di-

rection, the architect and painter Lazar Khidekel was instrumental in the shift
toward an architectural Suprematism and was the first to translate the abstract
model of the Architekton into residential complexes, offices and more.’54

54 Jonathan Willett, ‘Unmapping the City: Perspectives of Flatness’, in Alfredo Cramerotti,

ed., Unmapping the City: Perspectives of Flatness (London: Intellect Ltd., 2011), 44.
Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism 183

Figure 8.13 A page from Malevich’s article, showing reproductions, which are labelled
‘Suprematistische Architektur von K. Malewitsch, Leningrad’, Wasmuths
Monatshefte fur Baukunst (Berlin), No. 10 (1927), p. 413. This includes a façade
and two ground plans of Lazar Kidekel’s design for the Workers’ Club.

Malevich, himself, accepted The Workers’ Club as the first example of a truly
dynamic Suprematist architecture. In his article, ‘Suprematist Architecture’,
published in Germany in 1927,55 he reproduced The Workers’ Club – façade
and two plans – which was placed above his own architectons (Fig. 8.13). Per-
haps, through the force of habit, Malevich appropriated the project, naming
himself as architect and Khidekel as designer, even misspelling his name. He

55 K. Malewitsch, ‘Suprematische Architektur’, Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst (Berlin),

10 (1927): 413.
184 Khidekel

sent a letter of apology, but to Khidekel’s deep regret, it was lost. At Malevich’s
request, the magazine published an apology and acknowledged Khidekel as
the architect, but unfortunately the original error continues to be repeated.56
Apparently, Malevich signed the project, described himself as an architect
and presented himself as the head of the Architecture School of the Institute
of Higher Education, because he wanted to promote himself as a designer in
Germany. After his 1927 trip to Warsaw and Berlin, Malevich hoped to return
to the West, and thought that these credentials would help him to obtain a
teaching position at the Dessau Bauhaus. Nikolai Suetin seems to have shared
these aspirations,57 and even considered taking a degree in architecture in
order to be eligible to teach at the Bauhaus with Malevich.
In their introduction to Malevich’s article in Wasmuths Monatshefte für
Baukunst, the publishers noted that the new materiality [novaia veshchestven-
nost’] had not found universal recognition in the Soviet Union. They noted,
however, that the Club’s ‘plan and the inner spatial arrangement … were later
implanted in the model, which was created without any purpose’. In con-
clusion, they added: ‘This project received first prize in the competition and
has been recommended for execution’.58 Clearly, they were trying to reconcile
Malevich’s position that Suprematist architecture should be ‘purpose-free, ab-
solute architectonics’, with the fact that the project had been recommended
for construction as an actual building.
In Russia, The Workers’ Club influenced the development of Leningrad’s
avant-garde architecture. While still a student, Khidekel had collaborated with
his professors, Aleksandr Nikolskii and Grigorii Simonov, introducing them
to Suprematism and the principles of Suprematist architecture. Their assim-
ilation of these ideas indicates the influence that Khidekel exerted over his
colleagues and underpins the emergence of a distinctive architectural style,
sometimes described as Suprematist Constructivism, which characterised
Leningrad avant-garde architecture and secured Khidekel’s position as one of
four ‘key figures of the Leningrad school’, along with Nikolskii, Simonov and
Noi Trotskii.59
Malevich’s ambiguous attitude to the success of Khidekel’s project reflected
a residual attachment to the principles of the Unovis collective. Neverthe-
less, Malevich’s legacy of ‘purpose-free, absolute architectonics’ continued to

56 Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst, 12 (1927): 484.

57 Vasilii Rakitin, Nikolai Mikhailovich Suetin (Moscow: RA, 1998), 83.
58 Malewitsch, ‘Suprematistche Architektur’.
59 Boris Kirikov, ‘The Leningrad Avant-Garde and Its Legacy’, Future Anterior, V, 1 (Summer
2008): 16-26; http://muse.jhu.edu/article/246736.
Lazar Khidekel and Suprematism 185

influence Khidekel’s belief that architecture should not just be confined to

constructing actual buildings, but should also entail creating forms inspired
by artistic visions and conceptual thinking about the nature, meaning and
mission of architecture, as well as taking into consideration the correlation
between the process of drawing and representation in architecture in the
broader artistic and social context, which ultimately determines the function
of the architectural object. This belief governed both his work and his teach-
ing, and it continues to be relevant today.
Khidekel continued to cooperate with Malevich, contributing extensively
to the development of the ‘Suprematist Art of Volume-Construction’. His ar-
chitectons from 1922 to 1927 went through a significant evolution and were
almost ready for implementation. Abstract geometry was expressed through a
dynamic and minimalist composition of vertical ‘flat-like’ tonal rectangles and
lightweight materiality shown in colour – with texture and the play of shadows
contributing to the structure.
In 1927, Nikolskii appointed Khidekel to the Committee of Contemporary
Art Industry, set up to preserve and extend Malevich’s research into Supre-
matist architecture. While Nikolskii regarded Khidekel as both Malevich’s fol-
lower and his own student, he also valued the fact that he was an artist as well
as an architect. Nikolskii emphasised this latter ‘fortunate quality’, when he
recommended Khidekel as a candidate to the governing body of GIII, stressing
that he was ‘a figure who could creatively unite the two camps’.60
Khidekel pledged his allegiance to architecture in his youth, but he also con-
tinued to be an artist throughout his career. For him, architectonics [arkhitek-
tonika] remained a purely artistic form, committed to exploring the dynam-
ics of life and determining the shape of the material world as it develops in
the future. At the beginning of his architectural career, Khidekel devised a se-
ries of futuristic Suprematist projects, which were technologically viable, but
could not be realised in the immediate future (Fig. 8.14). These projects ad-
dressed issues of environmental sustainability and defence from natural and
man-made disasters, in accordance with the Suprematist notion of an organic
form-creating continuum and ‘the harmonious introduction of form into nat-
ural action’.61
Khidekel’s aerial and environmental vision resulted in projects for architec-
tural structures over wild terrain, or elevated on poles, with transportation

60 Karasik, ‘Documents’, 197. Khidekel’s archive contains a folder with papers relating to
the scientific research on acoustics, optics, and perception that he conducted while em-
ployed at the Institute of Construction.
61 Malevich. Suprematizm. 34 risunka, 1; Malevich, Essays, I: 123.
186 Khidekel

Figure 8.14 Lazar Khidekel. Sketch for a Futuristic City, 1925, gouache, watercolour and pen-
cil on paper, 24.9 × 29.2 cm., Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Collection. The
horizontal structure is supported above the land on pillars.

tunnels built underground as in his first Horizontal Architecton (1922-1923,

Fig. 8.10). He advocated flat garden roofs in the 1920s,62 and eco-parks in
the 1960s. He placed abstract Suprematist structures within figurative land-
scapes, which provided a backdrop for his Suprematist designs for future
cities and symbolised the preservation of life (Fig. 8.14). This quality distin-
guishes Khidekel’s futuristic visions from those of his contemporaries, who
envisaged the victory of technology over nature. Khidekel anticipated modern
approaches to environmental change and the developments of the 1950-1960s,
which posited a new relationship between art and nature as enunciated by
numerous groups, such as Zero, Metabolism in Japan, Concrete, the Russian
Dvizhenie [Movement], and Moscow-based Collective Actions. Towards the
end of his life, Khidekel admitted that he had always been haunted by his ‘fly-
ing structures in space’ – a dream that he hoped the rest of humanity would
eventually share.

62 Lazar Khidekel, ‘Ploskie krishi’ [Flat Roofs], Nauka i tekhnika (Leningrad), 18 (1928): 3-4.
 Chapter 9

‘… In our time, when it became We …’: A Previously

Unknown Essay by Kazimir Malevich

Tatiana Goriacheva

In the 1920s, Kazimir Malevich considered that it was absolutely essential for
him to produce a theoretical justification for Suprematism, both as a new type
of art and as a way of understanding the world. In relation to this, he consid-
ered that it was vital for him to present a clear statement of his own views
concerning religion, human nature, and the concepts of perfection and util-
ity. The need to do this became more compelling than making art. He wrote,
‘It seems that one cannot attain with a brush what can be attained with a
pen. It is tousled and cannot get into the inner reaches of the brain – the pen
is finer’.1 The development of a Suprematist philosophy provided the foun-
dation for transforming Suprematism into a comprehensive doctrine, a kind
of meta-theory of the universe. Malevich diligently developed particular as-
pects of this theory in the series of treatises and texts that he published in
Vitebsk, 1919-1922. These include Suprematism: 34 Drawings [Suprematizm. 34
risunka]; ‘Concerning “I” and the Collective’ [O ‘ia’ i kollektive]; ‘On the Ques-
tion of Fine Art’ [K voprosu izobrazitel’nogo iskusstva]; ‘On Pure Action’ [K chis-
tomu deistviiu]; God is not Cast Down: Art, The Church, The Factory [Bog ne
skinut. Iskusstvo, tserkov’, fabrika]; ‘Production as Madness’ [Proizvodstvo kak
bezumie] and ‘Laziness as the Real Truth about Humanity’ [Len’ kak deistvi-
tel’naia istina chelovechestva]. These culminated in Malevich’s book, Supre-
matism: The World as Non-Objectivity or Eternal Rest [Suprematizm. Mir kak
bespredmetnost’ ili vechnyi nokoi].2 This book was his principal theoretical

1 K. Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka [Suprematism: 34 Drawings] (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920),

3; reprinted in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. A. S. Shatskikh
(Moscow: Gileia, 1995), I: 188; English translation in K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art, 1915-1933,
ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Borgens
Forlag, 1968), I: 127.
2 First published as the eleventh Bauhaus book, in a heavily edited German translation, as
Kasimir Malewitsch, Die gegenstandlose Welt (Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1927). For the
new English translation of Malevich’s original Russian text, see Simon Baier and Britta
Tanya Dü mpelmann, eds., Kazimir Malevich: The World as Objectlessness, trans. Antonina

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_011

188 Goriacheva

statement, on which he worked for several years and which he completed in

1922.3
In addition to art, Malevich’s writings focused on science, religion, and phi-
losophy, as well as on social and political events. It should be noted that Male-
vich avoided using specialist philosophical and scientific terminology, and he
often replaced such terms with words that he had invented himself, or with
more traditional concepts and a more conventional vocabulary (using terms
such as ‘the civil community’, ‘the religious community’, ‘the economy’, ‘eco-
nomic’ etc.), all of which acquired completely new meanings in the framework
of his theory.
The writings that Malevich produced in Vitebsk form a coherent and in-
tegrated corpus of treatises, which act as a series of sub-texts, each of which
develops a single theme that complements and enriches the others. The ma-
jority of these texts have been published — either during the artist’s lifetime or
more recently. However, there are some manuscripts that are considered lost,
since they are only known from references in Malevich’s statements or from
the lists of his works that were compiled by his students and followers. Among
these is the essay, ‘We as Utilitarian Perfection’ [My kak ulitarnoe sovershen-
stvo]. A fragment of this text, entitled ‘We’ and tentatively dated to Summer
or Autumn 1920, has recently been found among Nikolai Khardzhiev’s papers,
housed in the Russian Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow.4
Malevich mentioned the manuscript ‘We’ twice, once at the end of 1920 and
then again in early 1921. In his preface to the album of lithographs, Suprema-
tism: 34 Drawings, published in December 1920, Malevich wrote: ‘I substanti-
ated these questions in my booklet, We as Utilitarian Perfection’.5 In January
1921, Malevich wrote to the literary scholar, Mikhail Gershenzon:

I work all the time, and I think that I’m using up an awful lot of paper; it’s
all unfortunate: I simply can’t link up the themes, each theme contains
the same thing, but I can’t put them together. I wrote a whole 22 pages
about ‘WE’, then 20 pages about Creativity, and now I’m writing about

W. Bouis (Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel / Hatje Cantz, 2014), 147-199. The original Russian
text is reprinted in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. A. S. Shatskikh
(Moscow: Gileia, 1995), II: 55-123.
3 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Suprematizm. Mir kak bespredmetnost’ ili vechnyi nokoi’, 1922, ms;
reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, III: 69-216.
4 Kazimir Malevich, ‘My kak ulitarnoe sovershenstvo’, [1920], ms, Russian State Russian State
Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow (RGALI), fond 3145, opis’ 1, delo 592, list 1-7.
5 Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka, 4; Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 189; Malevich, Essays,
I: 127. There the title is given as ‘Us – as Utilitarian Perfection’.
‘… In our time, when it became We …’ 189

Production, and ‘White Problems’ of some kind are still looming, coming
out of the white Suprematist square.6

The text that Malevich called ‘We as Utilitarian Perfection’ was never pub-
lished, either as a separate booklet or as an article in one of the Vitebsk litho-
graphic editions, but there is no doubt that the newly discovered manuscript
fragment represents a draft version of this work. According to Malevich’s letter
to Gershenzon, he made attempts to rearrange the texts in relation to their
topics, in order to make them more coherent and complete. In fact, Malevich
managed to finalise the text he referred to as ‘Production’: his article ‘Produc-
tion as Madness’ [Proizvodstvo kak bezumie] was finished in 1921. The paper
on ‘White Problems’ was presumably included in the book, Suprematism: The
World as Non-Objectivity or Eternal Rest. As far as the paper entitled ‘We’ is
concerned, it seems that its publication was no longer needed because its ar-
guments had been absorbed into Malevich’s other theoretical works.
Malevich admitted, ‘I simply can’t link up the themes, each theme contains
the same thing, but I can’t put them together’.7 This confession identifies quite
accurately the basic problem of the manuscripts that he wrote during the years
1919-1921, when he was feverishly trying to produce numerous texts. His pen
simply could not keep up with his thoughts, which overwhelmed him.
Malevich wrote very quickly. He omitted necessary words, varied or re-
peated the same arguments in the drafts of different articles, revised essays
that were already finished, and gave them new titles,8 frequently making inser-
tions and additions. Many manuscripts remained unfinished. From the point
of view of the classical criteria for literary and philosophical writing, his works
lack narrative logic and contain a superfluity of semantic repetitions. He fre-
quently digressed from discussing artistic problems to addressing religious

6 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Mikhail Gershenzon, 1 January 1921; English translation in Kaz-
imir Malevich, Letters, Documents, Memoirs and Criticism, Russian edition: eds., Irina A.
Vakar and Tatiana N. Mikhienko; English edition: trans. Antonina W. Bouis, ed. Wendy
Salmond, general ed. Charlotte Douglas (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), I: 135-136.
7 Malevich, letter to Gershenzon, 1 January 1921; Malevich, Letters, I: 135.
8 For instance, the article ‘Concerning “I” and the Collective’ [O ‘Ia’ i kollektive] was based on
a 1919 variant entitled ‘On Being’ [O sushchestve].
See K. Malevich, ‘O “Ia” i kollektive’, Unovis No. 1 (Vitebsk, 1920), [sheet 6-9]; reprinted
in ‘Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. 1920. Prilozhenie k faksimil’nomu izdaniiu’, in Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk.
1920. Faksimil’noe izdanie, ed. Tat’iana Goriacheva (Moscow: State Tretyakov Gallery / Izda-
tel’stvo Skanrus, 2003), 60-67. Also see Kazimir Malevich, ‘O sushchestve’, 1919, ms; English
translation as ‘The Being’ in K. S. Malevich, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism: Unpublished
Writings 1913-33, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Hoffmann (Copenhagen, Borgen, 1978),
54-72.
190 Goriacheva

and philosophical issues and then just as unexpectedly returned to artistic

questions. Meanings are often unclear or almost lost through awkward gram-
matical constructions and cobwebs of tropes. Nevertheless, these texts possess
their own logic, which reflects Malevich’s own distinctive thought processes.
His imprecise style and excessive repetitions echo the complex way in which
his thinking developed. The incomprehensibility of many formulations was
sometimes the result of the fact that substantiations and justifications of the
same proposition were scattered in several articles.
The text of ‘We’ mirrors Malevich’s article, ‘On the Need for a Commune
of Suprematist Economists’ (of December 1919),9 and the essay ‘Concerning
“I” and the Collective’, published in the anthology, Unovis No 1, in May 1920.10
Malevich’s ideas about the need for an association or a party of Suprematists
were, to some extent, also presented in his article, ‘Concerning a Party in Art’,11
written in January 1921, his treatise God is not Cast Down,12 and in other texts.
Only one third of the draft of the article referred to as ‘We’ has survived.
Malevich told Gershenzon that the text was 22 pages long, but only seven of
these still exist. Nevertheless, even this fragment reveals the fact that the text
entitled ‘We as Utilitarian Perfection’ was one of the links in the chain of the
artist’s argument that collective creativity must replace individualistic artis-
tic thinking, and that collective representation is the only possible form of
creative activity in the context of contemporary culture. Malevich, however,
always inclined towards metaphysical justifications, even in his journalistic
writings, and so projected the principles concerning the interaction between
man and God onto the sphere of culture, stating:

The culture of creating Gods passed unnoticed in our time, when ‘We’
started [to exist]. Try as we might to overthrow the idols on the square, to
throw them down from the altars, all of a sudden you look and see that
one of our comrades has inconspicuously become a God. Art will make
him an icon, distribute [it] among us, so that everyone may know and
see the new God.13

9 Кazimir Malevich, ‘O neobkhodimosti kommuny ekonomistov-suprematistov’ [On the

Need for a Commune of Suprematist Economists], 1919, ms; reprinted in Malevich, So-
branie sochinenii, V: 166
10 See Malevich, ‘O “Ia” i kollektive’.
11 K. Malevich, ‘O partii v iskusstve’, Put’ Unovisa 1 (January 1921).
12 K. Malevich, Bog ne skinut. Iskusstvo, tserkov, fabrika [God is not Cast Down: Art, The
Church, The Factory] (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1922); English translation in Malevich, Essays, I:
188-223.
13 Malevich, ‘My kak utilitarnoe sovershenstvo’, RGALI, fond 3145, opis’ 1, delo 592, list 2.
‘… In our time, when it became We …’ 191

Malevich described humanity’s striving for dependence on idols as the in-

dividualistic system of relations between ‘I’ (the individual) and ‘Thou’ (the
Divine). He regarded such social psychology to be opposed to Lucifer’s love of
freedom: Lucifer overthrew the gods and redeems people from the slavery of
obedience, encouraging them to recognise themselves as a community. Male-
vich wrote: ‘Now, in the name of Lucifer, all the “I”s have been taken out of
the kingdom of God and into the kingdom of the unity of the “We” — into a
non-divine kingdom.’14
In this new world of freedom, Malevich considered that figurative art would
not only be useless — but also alien, because figurative art is only able to ex-
press personal experience and personal feelings. Malevich found an alterna-
tive to figurative art in the art of world creation. He wrote:

Then it would be surprising to see how ‘We’ portrays our self-portraits.

The ‘We’ does not know the fine arts, it knows the invention of itself.
From the moment that the ‘I’s change into ‘We’, all art has to be trans-
formed into the organic action of the invention of perfection. There are
no such things as glorifying poetry, representational theatre, entertaining
music, or figurative art, and there is no art of the personal ‘I’, because ‘We’
are a single organism.15

‘We as Utilitarian Perfection’ represents the quintessence of Malevich’s views

concerning the role of art and the artist in contemporary society. In this text,
he proclaimed his own concept of utility, advocating the right of art not to
be ‘useful’ in the conventional sense of the word, but affirming the innate
utility of the creative act, which is aimed at pure form-building and is inde-
pendent of any considerations of practical application. In Malevich’s frame of
reference, ‘utility’ did not lose its connotations of practical usefulness, but the
meaning of usefulness shifted to a different sphere, to one that was ideal and
utopian. Essentially, it was all about strategy and tactics. The ‘utilitarian’, or
the productive, denoted pure conceptual creativity, entailing the creation of
universal aesthetic principles for a world that was still in the process of be-
ing projected. This type of creative work was opposed to contemporary art’s
attempts to serve the short-term needs of society. For Malevich, the strategy
of directing pure creativity towards the future represented the highest degree
of utilitarianism, that is its perfection. A pre-condition for achieving this was
clearly a collective entelecheia, i.e. a collective that possessed and used the

14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
192 Goriacheva

vital power directing it towards self-fulfillment. Malevich wrote, ‘Of course, in

the non-divine kingdom there is neither God, nor angels, nor saints, i.e. those
people who were the most obedient. There, “We” are unified, and “We” are not
divided into Gods, prophets, or saints, and in that “We” is our perfection.’16
At the same time, the dichotomy between the individual and the collec-
tive that we find in Malevich’s writings, as well as the way in which he pre-
sented it, possess rather distinctive sources and parallels. The definition of
‘We’, which transmitted the ambitions of the collective conquest of cultural
space, came into use at end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twenti-
eth century. Declarations of collective representation by an artistic or liter-
ary movement strengthened its position, giving more weight to the disparate
artistic gestures of its participants, and sometimes camouflaging the actual
numerical paucity of the group. The most vivid and imaginative statements on
behalf of the ‘We’ certainly belonged to avant-garde artists and poets – above
all to the Russian and Italian Futurists. Their rich style, the energy of their
passionate statements, and the abundance of their striking rhetorical devices
and slogans, governed by the general rules of the poetics of the manifesto as a
genre — all of these features gave their manifestos the status of self-sufficient
works of art.
The emphatic use of the pronoun ‘We’ reveals a strong need for consoli-
dation on a common ideological platform. This self-definition mythologised
the community, and created a specific and conventional intellectual space,
in which the rules of the game were introduced and roles were assigned.17
Depending on the actual tasks of self-identification involved, the conceptual
parameters of the ‘We’ could vary, so that it could denote a hermetic caste of
the elect, or, on the contrary, be extended to almost universal dimensions, em-
bracing ‘the Innovators of the Whole World’ (Malevich) or ‘the World Union of
Young People’ (Velimir Khlebnikov), etc.
In addition to the announcement of particular art programmes, presenta-
tions of the ‘We’ featured two main themes: reconstruction of the world and
a confrontation with opponents. In 1913, the Russian Futurists declared: ‘We
are the new people of the new life’.18 In 1923, Ilia Zdanevich recalled: ‘Ten years
ago, we first started painting our faces, arranging disputes, printing manifestos,
and [producing] hand-written books every day. We threatened to change the

16 Ibid.
17 See Tat’iana Goriacheva, ‘Utopiia v sisteme russkogo avangarda. Futurizm i suprematizm’,
in Avangard v kul’ture ХХ veka (1900 – 1930-kh). Teoriia, istoriia, poetika. Kniga 2 (Moscow:
IMLI RAN, 2010).
18 Sadok Sudei II (St. Petersburg, 1913), 2.
‘… In our time, when it became We …’ 193

world, rearrange the Earth, and we praised the new spirit.’19 In similar terms,
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti proclaimed, ‘We stand on the last promontory of
the centuries! … Why should we look back, when what we want to do is to
break down the mysterious doors of the impossible?’20
One type of ‘We’ could confront another type of ‘We’, either real or fictitious,
or, vice versa, press the other ‘We’ to be recruited as allies and make generous
advances. For example, Khlebnikov, when inviting H.G. Wells and Marinetti
to join the Russian Futurists (who called themselves budetliane, that is ‘peo-
ple of the future’), introduced the latter as the Martians: ‘The glorious partici-
pants of the budetlianes’ publications have been transferred from the class of
humans to the class of Martians … The following are invited to become hon-
orary, non-voting members of the Martian Parliament [Duma]: [H.G.] Wells
and Marinetti.’21 It is curious to note that this invitation was never sent to the
addressees and so did not exist outside the Futurists’ literary domain.
The objects of confrontation declared by the avant-garde community, who
referred to themselves as ‘We’, were not only their adversaries, but also the
art and literature of the past. Often traditions were not attacked directly, but
personified as contemporary writers and artists. The notable exceptions were
Aleksandr Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, whom the Russian
Futurists ‘threw overboard from the steamer of modernity’, and Michelangelo,
whose statue of David was described as a ‘monstrosity’ by Malevich.22 The ‘We’
addressed Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Kuprin, Aleksandr Blok, Fedor Sologub,
and Aleksei Remizov,23 as well as Konstantin Somov and Boris Kustodiev.24
The rhetorical strategy of these appeals was constructed differently, de-
pending on whether the tactics being adopted were offensive or defensive.
Italian Futurism was characterised by a more aggressive tone and destructive

19 Ilia Zdanevich, ‘Nabrosok predisloviia’, cited in Aleksandr Lavrent’ev. Laboratoriia kon-

struktivizma. Opyty graficheskogo modelirovaniia (Moscow: Grant, 2000), 36.
20 F-T Marinetti, ‘Le Futurisme’, Le Figaro (20 February 1909): 1; English translation as ‘The
Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (Lon-
don: Thames and Hudson, 1970), 19-24.
21 Velimir Khlebnikov, ‘Truba Marsian’, in Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’,
1986), 603.
22 K. Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm [From Cu-
bism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism] (Moscow: Obshchestven-
naia pol’za, 1916); reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 39; English translation, in
Malevich: Essays, I: 23.
23 Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu [A Slap in The Face of Public Taste] (Moscow,
1912), 4.
24 Malevich. Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu; Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 43;
Malevich, Essays, 27.
194 Goriacheva

fury than Russian Futurism, which was generally only prepared to repulse all
attacks from opponents. Thus, Marinetti wrote, ‘We intend to exalt aggressive
action, feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch, and
the slap … We will destroy the museums, libraries’.25 In contrast, the Russian
Futurists intended ‘to stand on the rock of the word “we” amidst the sea of
boos and outrage’,26 and their belligerence was rather defensive in nature: ‘We
have gathered together in order to arm the world against us’.27 A few years later,
Malevich wrote: ‘We stood firm against the barrage of stinking waves from the
deep see of ignorance – the criticism that was hurled at us.’28
Malevich’s article, ‘We as Utilitarian Perfection’, developed this tradition
and at the same time manifested itself as part of a new phase in represent-
ing the ‘We’. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, avant-garde artists frequently
equated their artistic radicalism with the aspiration for revolutionary social
change. Between 1920 and 1925 about thirty literary anthologies, entitled ‘We’,
were published in various Russian cities, including Samara, Vladimir, Kharkov,
Yakutsk, Moscow, Petrograd (Leningrad), Nizhny Novgorod, Kiev, and Rostov-
on-Don. The ‘We’ acted as a personification of the spiritual revolution, which,
in turn, anticipated the social revolution and therefore acquired additional
justification for the confirmation of its authority. Accordingly, the pronoun
‘We’ was even more emphasised when it reappeared in the titles of these texts.
In 1919, Aleksei Gan worked on a play entitled ‘We’.29 In Spring 1920, Unovis
(Utverditeli novogo iskusstva – Champions of the New Art), published a litho-
graphic leaflet with the title ‘We want’ [My khotim], in which Malevich and his
comrades proclaimed: ‘We must gather together like a strong hurricane to de-
stroy the old and create the new … we will create a new garb and meaning for
the world, such as there have never been … we shall create the new world’.30
In Autumn 1920, as Ilia Chashnik was encouraging Unovis to publish this
leaflet of the group’s Creative Committee, Malevich was working on the article,

25 F-T Marinetti, ‘Le Futurisme’; Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 21-22.

26 Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu. 4.
27 М. Matiushin, А. Kruchenyh, К. Malevich, ‘Pervy vserossiiskii s‘ezd baiachei budushchego
(poetov-futuristov). Zasedaniia 18 i 19 iiulia 1913 goda v Usikiro (Finlandiia)’, Za 7 dnei (St.
Petersburg), 28 (15 August 1913): 605-606; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I: 23.
28 К. Malevich. ‘K novoi grani’, Anarkhiia, 31 (30 March 1918): 4; reprinted in Malevich, So-
branie sochinenii, I: 66; English translation ‘To the New Limit’ in Malevich, Essays, I: 55.
29 For details see A. N. Lavrent’ev, Aleksei Gan (Moscow: S. E. Gordeev, 2010), 60; and
Christina Lodder, ‘Aleksei Gan: A Pivotal Figure in Russian Constructivism’ in Aleksei
Gan, Constructivism, ed. and trans. Christina Lodder (Barcelona: Tenov, 2013), xvi.
30 Ot Unovisa – My khotim (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920); English translation, ‘From Unovis –
We Want’, in Larissa A. Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art
1910-1930, trans. Alexander Lieven (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 298.
‘… In our time, when it became We …’ 195

‘We as Utilitarian Perfection’. The year before, Aleksei Gastev had published a
collection of poems, The Poetry of the Workers’ Fight, which begins with the
words: ‘We grow from iron’, and features poems entitled ‘We have encroached’,
‘We are together’, ‘We are everywhere’, and ‘We are coming’.31
Khlebnikov wrote of Gastev: ‘He bravely envisages the time when “the
gods of Hellas wake up for the atheists, the giants of thought babble child-
ish prayers, thousands of the best poets throw themselves into the sea”; and
the “We”, in the columns of which Gastev’s “I” is enclosed, bravely exclaims
“Let it be”.’32 In 1922, Gan, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova issued
a manifesto of the Constructivist group with the title ‘Who we are’.33 In the
same year, Dziga Vertov published a manifesto of the filmmakers of the new
formation, entitled ‘We’, in the first issue of the magazine, Kino-Fot.34 Besides
purely professional postulates, Vertov’s manifesto featured motifs that were
familiar to those who remembered the days of Futurism: ‘We train the new
men’,35 ‘Our path [leads] through the poetry of machines, from the bungling
citizen to the perfect electric man’.36
Many of these popular myths and utopian scenarios mirrored a concep-
tion of the relationship between the individual and the community that was
rooted in Futurism. These included ideas about the advantage of the techno-
logical world over the imperfections of the individual, as well as notions of
abolishing all state borders and destroying all divisions between nations, dif-
ferent ethnicities and languages, in the name of the unity of mankind. In post-
revolutionary Russia, these ideas were given slightly different connotations,
which reflected a common ideological orientation toward the unification of
the individual with the community.
In this context, the appearance of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We
should come as no surprise. Not only did Zamyatin react against the pervasive

31 A. K. Gastev, Poeziia rabochego udara (Petrograd: Proletkul’t, 1919).

32 Velimir Khlebnikov, ‘O stikhakh’, in Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel‘,
1986), 633.
33 Aleksei Gan, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, ‘Kto my. Manifest gruppy kon-
struktivistov’ [Who we are: Manifesto of the Constructivist Group], c. 1922, ms; English
translation in Aleksandr Rodchenko, Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters
and Other Writings, ed. Alexander N. Lavrentiev, trans. Jamey Gambrell (New York: Mu-
seum of Modern Art, 2005), 143-145.
34 Dziga Vertov, ‘My. Variant manifesta’, Kino-fot, 1 (25-31 August 1922): 11-12; English trans-
lation ‘We: A Version of a Manifesto’, in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film
Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1988), 69-70.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
196 Goriacheva

ideas of collectivism and depersonalisation in his novel, but he also used the
eloquent title We, which parodied the common passion for representing the
‘We’. Among the opponents of collectivism was Viktor Shklovskii, who sharply
criticised Proletkult in 1919 in his article ‘Collective Creativity’, ending with the
words, ‘Caring about the creation of a collective art is as useless as pleading
with the Volga to flow into the Caspian Sea’.37
Nevertheless, when Malevich and other avant-garde artists proclaimed
community and collectivism as priorities, they were mainly exploiting the
conventional ideological rhetoric, adapting it to the needs of their own cre-
ative manifestos, and transplanting it into the fabric of their own speculative
theories. This first and foremost concerns Malevich, whose statements often
possess a certain resemblance to revolutionary ideology, although their actual
meaning is frequently in opposition to that ideology.
Malevich’s writings of the early 1920s discuss various aspects of the ideas of
community and collectivism. The artist understood collectivism as a restora-
tion of those bonds that had previously been broken, a return to the lost har-
mony of a single universal origin, and a fusion of all individuals into a single,
perfect system of world order. For Malevich, the unification of individuals in
the name of the collective community was the corollary of this perfect system.
Indeed, this was among his most important theories. In the domain of art,
Malevich’s Unovis group implemented this idea by stressing the anonymity of
their creative work.
Malevich’s passion for philosophising was accompanied by the need to as-
sert and justify his leadership, and to present Unovis not merely as a group of
disciples, but as an artistic association or a party, with its own strategy. Male-
vich argued that this task was essential for coordinating collective actions, in
order to develop a contemporary culture on the basis of the most progres-
sive systems of art — Cubism, Futurism and Suprematism. Although Unovis
is sometimes not even mentioned in these texts, its leading role was obviously
implied: it was Malevich who based the educational programme of Unovis on
Cubism, Futurism and Suprematism.
In 1919, and later in the summer of 1922, an unsuccessful attempt was made
to unite all left-wing forces, including the Suprematists and the Construc-
tivists. On both occasions, the aspiration did not really entail an unconditional
alliance or a true federation: every ‘We’ wanted to play a leading role. Malevich

37 V. B. Shklovskii, ‘Kollektivnoe tvorchestvo’, 1919; reprinted in Shklovskii, Gamburgskii schet

(First ed. 1928; Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1990), 89.
‘… In our time, when it became We …’ 197

advocated the priority of Suprematism, while Rodchenko, Stepanova, Gan,38

and Vertov advocated the priority of Constructivism, although they all rep-
resented different factions of this movement. Both the Suprematists and the
Constructivists continually appealed to a wide circle of associates (who pre-
sumed that they were communicating with each other), but these appeals
tended to end with statements of self-affirmation. As early as December 1919,
Malevich wrote in his article, ‘On the Need for a Commune of Suprematist
Economists’: ‘Therefore, I shall summon you all, not only those working in the
art school, but all young people in general, to unite under the banner of the
ideas of the Suprematist Economists, whose goal will be “the Overthrow of the
old World of the Arts” and the restoration of new forms.’39 During the winter
of 1919 and the spring of 1920, the name of Malevich’s party was constantly
changing: ‘Suprematist Economists’,40 Molposnovis, Posnovis, Unovis, but the
hermetic nature of representing the ‘We’ remained constant. The intensity of
the party’s self-affirmation was typical of the Vitebsk period, and only started
to decline when Malevich and some of his students moved to Petrograd and
worked together at the State Institute of Artistic Culture (Gosudarstvennyi in-
stitut khudozhestvennoi kul’tury – Ginkhuk), where the institutional circum-
stances and the general atmosphere of artistic life were completely different.
The ‘utilitarian perfection’ embraced by Malevich and his followers was
never implemented to the extent that they had initially envisaged. The global
social and aesthetic problems may not have resolved themselves as the group
wished, but there were compensations in the vibrant and palpable artistic pro-
cess that had been achieved and in the significant impact that the art of Male-
vich and Unovis had made on Soviet culture and aesthetic consciousness.

38 It was Gan who initiated the consolidation of avant-garde forces, but he also seems to
have had no intention of building relations between the Suprematists and the Construc-
tivists based on parity.
39 Malevich, ‘O neobkhodimosti kommuny ekonomistov-suprematistov’; Malevich, So-
branie sochinenii, V: 166.
40 In early 1920, Malevich announced that he was forming ‘a party of Suprematist
economists in art’. See Kazimir Malevich, letter to Mikhail Matiushin, [21 January 1920];
English translation in Malevich, Letters, I: 123.
 Chapter 10

‘A thing of quality defies being produced in

quantity’: Suprematist Porcelain and Its Afterlife in
Leningrad Design
Yulia Karpova

‘If every form is an expression of purely utilitarian perfection, then surely a

Suprematist form also represents the signs of a force that has been recog-
nised – the effective force of utilitarian perfection in the coming concrete
world’, wrote Kazimir Malevich in his famous book Suprematism: 34 Draw-
ings, published in Vitebsk in 1920.1 Later, in the same text, he explained that
‘the utilitarian perfection’ of Suprematist forms was beyond the immediate
needs of the earthly world. Instead, it foresaw the ‘technical organisms of the
Suprematist world to come’.2 Is this the voice of Malevich the designer? Can
this statement be read as the prolegomena to a broad-sweeping design pro-
gramme?
Suprematism’s contribution to twentieth-century design has been acknowl-
edged and analysed by several scholars.3 Larissa Zhadova, the author of the
first comprehensive monograph about Malevich, used the concept ‘Design Art’
to characterise the entry of Suprematism into three-dimensional space. This
was, she explained, ‘an attempt to create a new universal system of art based
on painting’,4 which, like Constructivism, reflected ‘the wish of modern man
for an integrated and harmonious world’.5 Analysing a range of Suprematist

1 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka [Suprematism: 34 Drawings] (Vitebsk: Unovis,

1920); English translation in K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art, 1915-1933, ed. Troels Andersen,
trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Borgens Forlag, 1968), I: 123.
Translation adapted by the author.
2 Ibid., I: 124. Translation adapted by the author.
3 For studies of Suprematist design, see, for instance, Larissa A. Zhadova, ‘The Step into Vol-
umes and Space’, in Larissa A. Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian
Art, 1910-1930, trans. Alexander Lieven (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 73-116; Charlotte
Douglas, ‘Suprematist Embroidered Ornament’, Art Journal, LIV, 1 (1995): 42-45; S. O. Khan-
Magomedov, Pionery sovetskogo dizaina (Moscow: Galart, 1995); and Vasilii Rakitin, Nikolai
Mikhailovich Suetin (Moscow: RA, 1998).
4 Zhadova, Malevich, 85.
5 Ibid., 109.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_012

Suprematist Porcelain and Its Afterlife in Leningrad Design 199

designs – from handbags to town planning – Zhadova showed that Suprema-

tism was quite close to its ‘rival’ Constructivism in its vision of a perfectly
planned material environment. For Zhadova, the main difference was Supre-
matism’s emphasis on art, rather than engineering. She concluded that even
though most Suprematist designs remained on the drawing board, they are
valuable in so far as they constitute an attempt at ‘integrating the most diverse
fields of human activity’.6 The outstanding scholar of Russian avant-garde ar-
chitecture and design, Selim Khan-Magomedov, was sceptical about the philo-
sophical and theoretical value of Malevich’s writings. He characterised Supre-
matism as a ‘project of specific stylistics for the world’, but argued that from
its very beginning, it ‘contained a style-constituting kernel with general stylis-
tic tendencies, even though it was conceived within painting’.7 This ‘stylistic
kernel’ was developed in two ways – as décor (super-graphics and colour, ac-
cording to Khan-Magomedov’s classification) and as volumetric forms – and
was realised in various areas of design activity, including textiles, street decora-
tions for the revolutionary festivals, furniture, graphics, interiors, exhibitions,
and architectural models.
Sharing these scholars’ vision of Suprematism as a model for universal de-
sign, I shall focus on the Suprematist approach to the material object [veshch’].
As is well known, the key concept of Malevich’s radically new art was non-
objectivity or objectlessness, which implies transcendence over the world of
everyday useful objects. Even though he vehemently rejected the depiction of
‘object [veshchevykh] forms’ on a canvas, Malevich was concerned with the
way Suprematist artists related to actual objects. In his 1919 article for the cat-
alogue of the Tenth State Exhibition: Objectless Creation and Suprematism, he
explained: ‘At one of its stages, Suprematism is a purely philosophical move-
ment based on the cognition of colour, while at another stage it appears as a
form that can be applied and produce a new type of Suprematist decoration’.8
Here, Malevich was not suggesting that Suprematism should be downgraded
to creating mere ornament. Instead of ‘catering to philistine taste’, Malevich
argued that this decoration would ‘appear on objects as the transformation
or embodiment of space, removing an object’s integrity from [the viewer’s]

6 Ibid.
7 S. O. Khan-Magomedov, Suprematizm i arkhitektura (problemy formoobrazovaniia) (Moscow:
Arkhitektura-S, 2007), 15-16. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations from Russian are by
the author.
8 K. Malevich, ‘Suprematizm’, Katalog desiatoi gosudarstvennoi vystavki. Bespredmetnoe tvorch-
estvo i suprematizm (Moscow, 1919); reprinted in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v
piati tomakh, ed. A. S. Shatskikh, (Moscow: Gileia, 1995), I: 151; English translation as ‘Non-
Objective Creation and Suprematism’, in Malevich, Essays, I: 121-122.
200 Karpova

consciousness’.9 The idea of decoration as transforming or disintegrating con-

ventional forms appears in various design projects of the Vitebsk Unovis
(Utverditeli novogo iskusstva – Champions of the New Art), and in those pro-
duced at the Petrograd State Institute for Artistic Culture (Gosudarstvennyi
institut khudozhestvennoi kul’tury – Ginkhuk). Nevertheless, I would argue
that this function of decoration was most vividly implemented in porcelain –
the only sphere in which the Suprematists established a long-term connection
with the industrial production of objects. The State Porcelain Factory in Pet-
rograd (subsequently Leningrad) became the locus of the embodiment and
evolution of Suprematist ideas starting from the era of the New Economic Pol-
icy or NEP right up to the late 1930s. Moreover, the Suprematist legacy left an
impact on the factory’s artistic production, which could be discerned during
the gradual rehabilitation of the Avant-Garde in the 1960s-1990s.
My article has two aims – to examine the application of Suprematist prin-
ciples to concrete objects and to show the continuity between avant-garde de-
sign work and designs produced during the period of late socialism. I shall be-
gin by discussing the initial temporal context and institutional setting for the
emergence of Suprematist porcelain and will then go on to explore the Supre-
matist approach to material objects as embodied in several porcelain designs.
This will be followed by an investigation of the Post-Suprematist changes in
porcelain design during the 1930s and late 1940s, and, finally, an assessment of
the Suprematist legacy in Leningrad porcelain design of the 1960s-1980s.

Initial Setting: The State Porcelain Factory in 1923

The story of Suprematist porcelain began in 1923, when Malevich and his
two students from Unovis, Nikolai Suetin and Ilia Chashnik, began working
at the State Porcelain Factory in Petrograd, which had formerly been the Im-
perial Porcelain Factory. By the early 1920s, the nationalised factory had al-
ready achieved some prominence in manufacturing what is famously known
as ‘revolutionary porcelain’ or ‘agitational porcelain’. Traditionally a precious
material for the upper classes, during the Civil War, porcelain turned out to be
a convenient propaganda medium because of an institutional arrangement. In
March 1919, control of the Porcelain Factory was transferred from the People’s
Commissariat for Agriculture to the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment
(Narodnyi komissariat prosveshcheniia – Narkompros). According to the Na-
tionalisation Decree of June 1918, the factory’s task was to develop the artistic

9 Ibid.
Suprematist Porcelain and Its Afterlife in Leningrad Design 201

aspects of the state porcelain and glass industries, elaborate new production
techniques, and thus respond to the needs of the Russian art industry.10 The
factory had to change from being the supplier of luxury dinnerware to the Im-
perial court and the aristocracy to becoming a ‘supplier to all people’.11 The
more immediate task of the Soviet government was to disseminate revolution-
ary ideas in accordance with the Plan of Monumental Propaganda, launched
by the Soviet government in the spring of 1918.12 Whereas paper and other ma-
terials were in short supply during the Civil War, the factory had a large stock
of blank porcelain, which had been produced during the Imperial period, and
was at the ‘biscuit’ stage (the so-called bel’e or white phase), all ready to be
painted.
Naturally, new artists and technical specialists were gradually appointed
to replace the former personnel. The factory’s director, Petr Vaulin, recruited
the graphic artist Sergei Chekhonin, who was a member of the World of Art
group, which had developed its own sophisticated version of artistic synthe-
sis in the early 1900s.13 As art director, Chekhonin guided and inevitably in-
fluenced the stylistic development of porcelain decoration. Although one of
the factory’s painters, Elena Danko, identified what she called the ‘Chekhonin
style’,14 agitational porcelain was, in fact, quite eclectic. It employed refined
linear drawings and calligraphy, adapted from the World of Art, as well as
Cubist and abstract motifs introduced by avant-garde, ‘leftist’ artists such as
Wassily Kandinsky, David Shterenberg, Natan Altman, Ksenia Boguslavskaia,
Ivan Puni and others, whom Chekhonin invited to work with the factory’s own
professional artists. The ‘agitational porcelain’ that was produced frequently
featured Soviet emblems and stylised figurative images, including portraits of
Soviet leaders, especially Lenin. The factory’s administration did not aspire
to stylistic unity but aimed at (in the words of a 1919 exhibition catalogue),

10 I. A. Pronina et al, Sovetskoe dekorativnoe iskusstvo. Materialy i dokumenty, 1917-1932. Farfor.

Faians. Steklo (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1980), 58.
11 E. F. Gollerbakh, Farfor gosudarastvennogo farforovogo zavoda. Grafika I. Rerberga i
S. Chekhonina (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Sredi kollektsionerov, 1922), 9.
12 For the Plan of Monumental Propaganda, see Christina Lodder, ‘Lenin’s Plan for Mon-
umental Propaganda’, in eds., Matthew Collerne Bown and Brandon Taylor, Art of the
Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917-1992 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1993), 16-32.
13 On this group’s cross-disciplinary activities, see Anna Winestein, ‘Quiet Revolutionaries:
The ‘Mir Iskusstva’ Movement and Russian Design’, Journal of Design History, XXI, 4 (Win-
ter 2008): 315-333.
14 Elena Dan’ko, ‘Novoe Petrogradskogo farforovogo zavoda’, Khudozhestvennyi trud, 4
(1923): 17-18.
202 Karpova

‘stimulating the people’s genuine creative powers’.15 In fact, the factory did be-
come a supplier to the masses, but it supplied propaganda rather than useful
artefacts that might improve people’s daily lives. Painting by hand could only
produce limited editions, which were shown at exhibitions, used as gifts for
native and foreign delegates attending various congresses, and were exported,
since porcelain was an important source of obtaining much needed foreign
currency.16
In late 1922, Nikolai Punin, the art critic and famous advocate of the Avant-
Garde, who replaced Chekhonin as art director, invited Suetin to work at the
factory. Chashnik also joined the staff, and even Malevich submitted several of
his designs without being an actual employee.17 This event is often perceived
as a turning point in the factory’s history. More broadly, it can be considered
one of the factors inaugurating a new stage in the development of Soviet de-
sign. By this time, the everyday material environment had become a subject of
considerable public interest. Leon Trotsky’s essays on the problems of every-
day life [byt] generated a great deal of discussion. The essays had first appeared
in the newspaper Pravda, and were subsequently published as a collection.
In particular, Trotsky stressed the conservative and spontaneous character of
byt, which, he argued, hindered the development of proletarian consciousness
and, therefore, had to be overcome through cultural education.18 In March and
April 1923, the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences (Rossiiskaia akademiia
khudozhestvennykh nauk – RAKhN) convened the First All-Russian Exhibition
of Artistic Industry [Pervaia Vserossiiskaia khudozhestvenno-promyshelennaia
vystavka], which was intended to unite all organisations concerned with artis-
tic production in the Soviet Union, suggest improvements, and explore op-
portunities for export.19 The exhibition was harshly criticised by the Con-
structivists and Productivists, who, as Christina Kiaer has demonstrated, were
committed to creating socialist objects and counteracting the petty-bourgeois
tastes that were being fostered by the market economy of NEP.20 In 1923, in

15 See Catalogue of the Exhibition of Products from the State Porcelain Factory, the National
Peterhof Grinding Factory and Smalt Workshop (Petrograd: Dom Miatleva, August-October
1919), 8; and Tamara Kudryavtseva, Circling the Square: Avant-Garde Porcelain from Revo-
lutionary Russia (London: Fontanka, 2004), 16. Translation adjusted.
16 Kudryavtseva, Circling the Square, 25-28.
17 Rakitin, Nikolai Mikhailovich Suetin, 52.
18 Lev’ Trotskii, ‘Chtoby perestroit’ byt, nuzhno poznat’ ego’ [In Order to Reconstruct Every-
day Life, it is Necessary to Understand it], in Voprosy byta (Moscow: Krasnaia Nov’, 1923),
25.
19 A. I. Kondratiev, ‘Rossiiskaia akademiia khudozhestvennykh nauk’, Iskusstvo 1 (1923):
439-41.
20 Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008).
Suprematist Porcelain and Its Afterlife in Leningrad Design 203

the first issue of the journal Lef – The Left Front of the Arts [Lef – Levyi front
iskusstv], the critic and theoretician Nikolai Tarabukin argued that the exhibi-
tion epitomised the wrong approach to reforming artistic production: instead
of developing new production methods, it applied a new subject matter to old
forms and resorted to antiquated techniques of decorating. Chekhonin was
the main target, and Tarabukin disdainfully described his decorative style as
‘little strokes’ [mazochki].21 The article highlighted the need to create material
objects that would be appropriate to the new socialist society. The problem of
developing such items provoked a famous response from the Constructivists
in 1923, when Varvara Stepanova and Liubov Popova produced bold and orig-
inal textile designs for Moscow’s First Textile Printing Factory.22 Suprematist
porcelain was another powerful response; the path having been prepared by
the experiments in embroidery design that had been produced in the 1910s
for the Verbovka workshop23 and then by various types of design work un-
dertaken at Unovis after 1919. A fine and fragile material, porcelain happened
to be the early experimental ground for Malevich’s vision of a utilitarian yet
sublime Suprematist world.

Suprematist Objects and Suprematist Materiality

During their initial cooperation with the State Porcelain factory, the Supre-
matists produced a whole range of bold original designs. They worked in two
directions, as noted by Khan-Magomedov: decoration and form-making. The
first direction answered the need to use the porcelain forms that the factory
had inherited from the pre-revolutionary period. Malevich was not interested
in designing compositions specifically for dinnerware. Instead, he submitted
his drawings to be reproduced on porcelain by the factory’s painters. The fac-
tory’s archive preserves two such drawings: one is based on the 1916 paint-
ing Dynamic Suprematism (Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Fig. 10.1), and the other
was developed from one of the illustrations in Suprematism: 34 Drawings,

21 Nikolai Tarabukin, ‘Pervaia Vserossiiskaia khudozhestvenno-promyshelennaia vystavka’,

Lef, 1 (1923): 250-251.
22 Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 89-142. On Constructivist textile design, see also Iu-
lia Tulovskii, Tekstil avangarda. Risunki dlia tkani (Ekaterinburg: Tatlin, 2016); and
Christina Lodder, ‘Liubov Popova: From Painting to Textile Design’, Tate Papers, 14 (Au-
tumn 2010), http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/liubov-popova
-from-painting-to-textile-design.htm.
23 See Douglas, ‘Suprematist Embroidered Ornament’; and Julia Tulovsky’s article in this
volume.
204 Karpova

Figure 10.1 Kazimir Malevich (pattern design), A. N. Kudriavtsev (painting), ‘Dynamic

Composition’ Plate, 1923, porcelain, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Peters-
burg.
Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir
Terebenin.

published in 1920 in Vitebsk.24 The painter A. N. Kudriavtsev transferred both

compositions to the wells of plates and outlined them, keeping Malevich’s
thin rectangular frames. These are eloquent examples of the conflict between
the utility of a tangible object for everyday use and the Suprematist notion
of utility, described by Malevich as removed from the Earth and foreshadow-
ing the future world. According to the art historian, Tamara Kudriavtseva, this

24 The drawing for Malevich’s plate design ‘Dynamic Composition’, is reproduced in Kudry-
atseva, Circling the Square, 58. For the other drawing submitted to the factory, see
Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka, [20]; reproduced in Donald Karshan, Malevich: The
Graphic Work 1913-1930: A Print Catalogue Raisonné (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1975),
no. 53. This image closely resembles the painting Airplane Flying (Suprematist Composi-
tion), 1915, oil on canvas, 58.1 × 48.3 cm., Museum of Modern Art, New York. See Fig. 13.3.
Suprematist Porcelain and Its Afterlife in Leningrad Design 205

actually represented a continuation of the factory’s nineteenth-century prac-

tice of copying paintings onto porcelain, although now the practice was based
on avant-garde, objectless painted compositions.25
This opinion was refuted by Khan-Magomedov, who interpreted Suprema-
tist graphics as a self-sufficient, artistic and ornamental system, which relates
to the form, while retaining its compositional autonomy.26 He argued that this
approach allows for the preservation of the inherent logic of both artistic sys-
tems: that concerning the ‘architectonic’ as well as that relating to ‘the colour,
the decorative and the graphic’. Disturbed by the disparity between the volu-
metric form and the flat decoration of an object, the viewer is forced to make a
mental effort to unite them. Consequently, ‘this internal tension activates and
sharpens the perception of an image, producing a special effect, which was
never achieved in objects in historical styles, where the applied decoration is
in traditional harmony with the volumetric and spatial composition’.27
It can be further argued that the nineteenth-century practice of reproduc-
ing paintings on porcelain was still about harmonising the decorative and tec-
tonic systems. Illusory figurative compositions were adjusted to the wells of
plates or the surfaces of vases, while the lips of plates or surrounding elements
of dinnerware were often gilded and covered with ornament, thereby trans-
forming such borders into lavish frames. In contrast, Malevich’s thinly-framed
Suprematist compositions ignore the curvatures of the conventional porcelain
forms and thus make them more evident: the object does not frame the picture
but stands out against it. The object is affected by a relationship identified by
Branislav Jakovljevic: ‘the [thin] frame does not protect the painting from its
milieu, but the other way around. By framing the picture in, the world frames
itself out’.28
Unlike Malevich, Suetin and Chashnik actually painted directly onto the
porcelain. Their patterns, although designed specifically for porcelain, resem-
ble or closely repeat their Suprematist easel paintings and were applied to
objects possessing widely different shapes and functions. These compositions
are always singular: repeating them as ornamental modules would destroy the
autonomy of the graphics and thus, also, of the forms, thereby deadening the
viewer’s perception. In some cases, however, the décor assumes a structuring
role. For example, Chashnik frequently accentuated the rims of plates or the

25 Kudryavtseva, Circling the Square, 34.

26 Khan-Magomedov, Suprematizm i arkhitektura, 237.
27 Ibid., 185.
28 Branislav Jakovljevic, ‘Unframe Malevich! – Ineffability and Sublimity in Suprematism’,
Art Journal, LXIII, 3 (Fall 2004): 28.
206 Karpova

Figure 10.2 Ilia Chashnik (pattern design), Plate from the ‘Black Ribbon’ Dinner Service,
1923, porcelain, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir
Terebenin.

edges of dinnerware with broad black or red rims – which at the same time
serve as solid frames for his Suprematist compositions (Fig. 10.2).29
In the case of Suetin’s cup-and-saucer set ‘Black and White’, the Suprematist
pattern is as elementary as the iconic Black Square, yet without ‘the hierarchi-
cal ordering of foreground and background’, as Jakovlevich writes.30 The verti-
cal division into black and white organises and structures the objects’ forms,
emphasising their symmetry and simplicity, and anticipating Soviet minimal-
ist design of the 1960s (Fig. 10.3).
Another way of looking at the relationship between form and decoration
in Suprematist porcelain is by considering the nature of the material. White

29 Khan-Magomedov, Suprematizm i arkhitektura, 237, 244.

30 Jakovljevic, ‘Unframe Malevich!’, 21.
Suprematist Porcelain and Its Afterlife in Leningrad Design 207

Figure 10.3 Nikolai Suetin (pattern design ‘Black and White’), Cup and Saucer, 1923, porce-
lain, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir
Terebenin.

porcelain offered a cosmic background for Suprematist forms, in the same way
as the white ground of the canvas did. Indeed, white porcelain might have
been even more effective. As Elena Ivanova observed, ‘Shining with glaze and
reflecting the light, the white pottery seemed to evoke the sensation of endless
cosmic space even better than the white texture of the canvas’.31 Porcelain’s
whiteness and shine evoke the Suprematist concept of the ‘white abyss’. The
perceived immateriality or trans-materiality of Suprematist porcelain stems,
paradoxically, from its sensuous qualities. Yet the qualities of porcelain – its
fragility and plasticity – enter into conflict with the Suprematist cult of eter-
nity, which adds to the impact and power of Suprematist dinnerware.

31 Elena Ivanova, ‘Nikolai Suetin’s Porcelain’, in Elena V. Basner, et al, In Malevich’s Circle:
Confederates. Students. Followers in Russia 1920s-1950s (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions,
2000), 142.
208 Karpova

Figure 10.4 Kazimir Malevich, Teapot, 1923, porcelain, The State Hermitage Museum, St.
Petersburg.
Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir
Terebenin.

More importantly for Malevich was the development of new porcelain

forms. The most famous example of these is his Teapot (Fig. 10.4), in which the
tension is not between ornament and form, but between the round and rect-
angular shapes: ‘the faceted front part of the teapot, which looks as though it
had been drawn out of the cylindrical body, cuts edgewise into the succulent
curvature of the spout’.32 Unlike the ceramics developed in the mid-1920s by
Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksei Filippov at the Moscow Vkhutemas (Vysshie go-
sudarstvennye khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie – Higher Artistic
and Technical Workshops), Malevich’s Teapot does not perform its function
well and is not effective as a useful object. It could not, therefore, be used for
the actual reorganisation of everyday life. It is difficult to produce, and its lid
does not fit properly, although this small fault was corrected in later manufac-
turing.33 The Teapot, however, demonstrates more than the artist’s ‘contempt

32 Zhadova, Malevich, 106.

33 Inna Solomonovna Olevskaia, Interview with the author, recorded 21 February 2014, in St.
Petersburg.
Suprematist Porcelain and Its Afterlife in Leningrad Design 209

for utilitarian application’.34 Malevich’s approach to form-making echoes Vik-

tor Shklovskii’s notion of defamiliarisation [ostranenie].35 Composed of geo-
metric shapes, the Teapot makes the user highly conscious of the process of
making and pouring tea – a process that is otherwise almost automatic. In this
way, Malevich’s Teapot helps to overcome the unconscious habits of everyday
life, which Trotsky identified as one of the main obstacles to social progress.
By the same token, Malevich’s famous half-cup represents a deconstruction,
or, more precisely, a dissection of a banal, everyday object. Suetin’s remark-
able contribution to Suprematist design comprises his two variations for an
ink-stand, each of which consists of porcelain bars, a cube, and, in one case,
a vertical disk. In these instances, Suetin’s designs seem to have been inspired
by his architectonic models.36
Like so-called revolutionary or agitational porcelain, Suprematist porcelain
was remote from the everyday life of the workers, but very attractive as an
item for export and for display at international exhibitions. Pondering the so-
cial role of Suprematist porcelain, Vasilii Rakitin observed, ‘But what kind of
way of life was there in 1923 – after the demolition of the way of life of the old-
time aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, after the demolition of
any way of life at all during the Civil War? Was it the way of life of the new
bourgeoisie, the Nepmen, the proletariat, or the new nomenklatura [elite]?’37
Controversially, he asserted that Suprematist dinnerware was actually ‘elitist’
and as unsuitable for mass production as the ‘op-art’ fabrics of Popova and
Stepanova: in both cases, the object could only really be appreciated, admired,
and enjoyed by the privileged, sophisticated consumers, and exhibition audi-
ences.38 To support his argument, Rakitin cited Suetin’s note on a 1927 draw-
ing: ‘A thing of quality defies being produced in quantity’.39 I would suggest,
however, that the unique and limited-edition Suprematist dinnerware was not
merely a luxury commodity with a modernist touch. Instead, through its inner
tensions – between the conventional forms and the innovative ornament, be-
tween the traditional idea of dinnerware and the new counter-intuitive forms,

34 Kudryavtseva, Circling the Square, 34.

35 See Viktor Shklovskii, ‘Iskusstvo kak tekhnika’ [Art as Technique], in O teorii prozy
(Moscow: Krug, 1925), 7-20.
36 Ivanova, ‘Nikolai Suetin’s Porcelain’, 143; and Rakitin, Nikolai Mikhailovich Suetin, 59.
37 Vasily Rakitin, ‘The innovators’ system offerred a way of developing the system. Or about
“red” and “white” porcelain’, in Nikolai Suetin. 1897-1954, trans. Kenneth MacInnes (St. Pe-
tersburg: RA / Palace Editions, 2008), 28.
38 Ibid.
39 Nikolai Suetin, inscription on an untitled drawing, 26 June 1967, private archive; quoted
by Rakitin, ‘A thing of quality defies being produced in quantity’, in Nikolai Suetin, 43.
210 Karpova

and between the perceived ‘cosmic whiteness’ and the physical fragility of the
material – it offered an escape from the conservatism and passivity of con-
temporary everyday life, as well as providing a glimpse into the future world of
objects.

Nikolai Suetin’s Post-Suprematist Porcelain

In accordance with the economic reforms of 1922, the Soviet state stopped
financing the First State Porcelain Factory, which now had to become self-
supporting. In order to counteract the resulting losses, the administration
had to cut artistic personnel and focus on producing technical porcelain.
From 1924 onwards, Chashnik and Suetin were no longer factory employees,
although they continued to undertake commissions.40 Ultimately, however,
Suetin enjoyed a long career at the factory, which in 1925 became answerable
to the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy and was renamed after the
eighteenth-century polymath Mikhail Lomonosov. In the late 1920s and early
1930s, Suetin became a prolific designer of patterns and forms for porcelain,
and in 1932 he became the head of the newly created art laboratory at the
Lomonosov Factory.41
There were two major factors that inspired Suetin’s work during this pe-
riod: firstly, the practice of Suprematist architectonic modelling, with which
he was actively involved, as Malevich’s assistant at Ginkhuk and later at the
State Institute of Art History (Gosudarstvennyi institut istorii iksusstv – GIII);
and secondly, his growing interest in nature as a source for artistic images.
In the first instance, Suetin used his experience with vertical architectons
[arkhitektony] or experimental architectural models to design a new form of
vase, which he called a Sueton (Fig. 10.5). The Suetons closely resemble designs
for vases and ashtrays that were being produced by another outstanding stu-
dent of Malevich, the architect Lazar Khidekel, as early as 1923-1924.42 Prob-
ably, this borrowing was not perceived as plagiarism, but, rather, the result
of the shared creative experience at Ginkhuk. Suetin’s 1930 Ink-Stand com-
bines round and rectangular shapes, like Malevich’s Teapot, yet here they are
not juxtaposed but harmonised, as if flowing into one another. Art histori-
ans often compare this object to the white-stone medieval churches of Pskov,

40 Kudryavtseva, Circling the Square, 23.

41 See illustrations in Nikolai Suetin 1897-1954, 208-251.
42 Khan-Magomedov, Suprematizm i arkhitektura, 237, 244. Unfortunately, no items of
porcelain seem to have been made to Khidekel’s designs.
Suprematist Porcelain and Its Afterlife in Leningrad Design 211

Figure 10.5 Nikolai Suetin, ‘Architecton’ Vase, 1932-33, porcelain, The State Hermitage Mu-
seum, St. Petersburg.
Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir
Terebenin.

which Suetin actually visited in 1929.43 The Ink-Stand’s coloured variant was
obviously inspired by Suetin’s experience of working with architectural poly-
chromy: in 1926-27, he and Chashnik, worked on the colour schemes for some

43 Rakitin, Nikolai Mikhailovich Suetin, 148.

212 Karpova

Figure 10.6 Nikolai Suetin (form and pattern design), Ink-Stand, 1930, porcelain, The State
Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir
Terebenin.

new buildings being designed in the studio of the Leningrad architect Alek-
sandr Nikolskii (Fig. 10.6).44 The Sueton vases and the ‘Pskov Church’ Ink-Stand
function in three ways: as experimental architectural models, as utilitarian ob-
jects with a concrete function, and also, potentially, as ‘fashionable’ decora-
tions for a table or a glass case.45
In the second instance, Suetin sought a way to bring Suprematism closer to
reality, tangible matter, nature, and human needs. As early as 1922, he wrote
in his diary, ‘Suprematism is an abstraction. It is unprecedented and colos-
sal in the sphere of thought, but it transcends time. It lacks [contact with]
the earth and the human element is lacking’ [v nem net zemli i khochetsia

44 Khan-Magomedov, Suprematizm i arkhitektura, 250-251.

45 Suprematist architectural experiments also influenced porcelain decoration. Around
1930 Suetin painted colourful axonometric compositions, resembling Malevich’s archi-
tectural drawings of planits [planity], on cups, saucers and plates.
Suprematist Porcelain and Its Afterlife in Leningrad Design 213

Figure 10.7 Nikolai Suetin (painting), ‘Agricultural Town’ Service, 1931, porcelain, on the
form ‘Narkompros’ by Sergei Chekhonin, 1923, The State Hermitage Museum,
St. Petersburg.
Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir
Terebenin.

chelovecheskogo].46 By the late 1920s, this belief led Suetin to study nature and
agricultural work as sources for his art and design. His new forms for porcelain
became smooth and, in a way, ‘organic’. His 1929 jug, for instance, combines
an architecton-type vertical profile with an almost biomorphic shape, while
his oval vases of the early 1930s recall the schematic faces of peasant women
from his painterly ‘peasant series’. Motifs from this series were also translated
into a number of porcelain ornaments. At this time, Suetin was exploring a
range of intermediary options between figuration and abstraction. For exam-
ple, the decoration on the service ‘Agricultural Town’ [Agrograd] (Fig. 10.7),
compositionally echoes Malevich’s Post-Suprematist paintings, especially the
famous Red Cavalry of 1928-1932 (State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg). Like

46 Nikolai Suetin, Diary entry, 5 October 1922, private archive, quoted by Natalia Kozyreva,
‘Nikolai Mikhailovich Suetin’, in In Malevich’s Circle, 140. Translation adapted. For the
Russian text, see Natalia Kozyreva, ‘Nikolai Mikhailovich Sutein’, in Elena V. Basner, et al,
V kruge Malevicha: soratniki, ucheniki, posledovateli v Rossii 1920-kh – 1950-kh godov (St.
Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000), 140.
214 Karpova

the painting, the ‘Agricultural Town’ design focuses on a politically relevant

topic (in this case, collectivisation), and was, as Rakitin suggested, a response
to current official demands.47 Yet the design also demonstrates Suetin’s mas-
tery of proportions, which was admired by all his students. Here, the ornament
does not conflict with the form, but structures it.
In the 1930s, even when the precepts of Socialist Realism dominated So-
viet visual arts, Suetin managed to include Suprematist elements in the fac-
tory’s production.48 After surviving the siege of Leningrad and designing The
Heroic Defence of Leningrad exhibition in 1944, Suetin resumed working at the
Lomonosov Factory, which had been evacuated to Western Siberia during the
Second World War. The last decade of Suetin’s work as the factory’s art direc-
tor (he died in 1954) was marked by a new wave of Stalin’s repressions and
a renewed campaign against formalism. Suetin had to be very cautious, and
Suprematist experiments were now unthinkable. Nevertheless, Suetin’s 1949
sketch for a monumental vase to be given to Stalin for his 70th birthday, con-
tains a pedestal that closely resembles an architecton.49 Although he had to
abandon Suprematism in his designs, Suetin remained true to the approach
that Malevich had developed at Ginkhuk. Like his teacher, Suetin treated each
student as an individual, urging everyone to develop his or her own distinc-
tive talent and insisting that ‘everyone is a genius’.50 His teaching provided
a link with the 1920s, at a time when the very word ‘Suprematism’ could
not be spoken. Fortunately, the situation began to change soon after Suetin’s
death.

Suprematist Echoes in Late Socialism

Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw witnessed the gradual rehabilitation of the Avant-

Garde. Historians of architecture and design, such as Larissa Zhadova and Se-
lim Khan-Magomedov, were especially interested in presenting Suprematism
as a valuable legacy, although they did this very cautiously. In 1964, Suetin was
the first Suprematist to be mentioned in an officially approved publication, as

47 Rakitin, Nikolai Mikhailovich Suetin, 152.

48 Suetin even used volumetric Suprematist elements in his columns for the interior of the
Soviet Pavilion at the 1937 Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie mod-
erne, in Paris. See illustrations in Nikolai Suetin 1897-1954, 70-78.
49 See Nikolai Suetin 1897-1954, 198-199.
50 Ivan Rizninch, ‘Vospominaniia o N. M. Suetine’ [Reminiscences of N. M. Suetin], 10
November 1982, ms; cited in Rakitin, Nikolai Mikhailovich Suetin, 155.
Suprematist Porcelain and Its Afterlife in Leningrad Design 215

an outstanding ‘mentor of artists’.51 Anna Leporskaia replaced Suetin as the

leading instructor at the Lomonosov Factory and worked there as a porcelain
artist until her death in 1983. She had studied with Malevich at Ginkhuk and
had been Suetin’s partner. According to one of her students, she remained
loyal to the precepts of both men.52 In 1971, Leporskaia recalled:

High demands as to the form, the precision of the smallest relationships,

which was perfectly mastered by K. S. Malevich and his only [true] pupil,
N. M. Suetin, became for me a really wonderful discovery. Working with
them gave me a sense of the basic origins of the plasticity of any form,
its development like a living natural element, flower or plant, and ‘a tiny
bit’ [‘chut’- chut’] of understanding of this magic, which can either create
amazing harmony in an object, or make it ugly. In working on form in
porcelain, it is clear that neither function nor technology should destroy
the main principle – the harmony of the object.53

This idea of a naturally developed and ‘organic’ form was realised in the
smooth circular shapes of vases and dinner services.54 Working like a sculp-
tor,55 Leporskaia tended to leave them white. They were then produced in lim-
ited editions and decorated by her colleagues. For example, in 1963, the porce-
lain painter Nina Slavina designed a geometric ornament for Leporskaia’s ser-
vice ‘Flowers and Leaves’ (Fig. 10.8). This recalls certain minimalistic patterns
by Suetin and Khidekel from 1923, but the image is figurative or, rather, the-
matic: it represents a game of chess.
In the 1960s, combinations of geometric elements and stylised figurative
images, in achromatic as well as saturated colours, became popular among

51 B. Alekseev, ‘Suetin – vospitatel’ khudozhikov’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, 11 (November

1964): 19-23.
52 Olevskaia, Interview, 2014; and Olga Leonidovna Nekrasova-Karateeva, Interview with the
author, recorded 17 March 2014, in St. Petersburg.
53 ‘Anna Aleksandrovna Leporskaia’, in Khudozhniki ob iskusstve keramiki. 1954-1964
(Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971), 148.
54 This dinner set also resembles the works of the prominent Hungarian-born artist Eva
Zeisel, who, between her Bauhaus experience and her long-term career in the United
States, worked for the Lomonosov Factory with Suetin in 1932-1934. It is highly likely that
Suetin’s ‘organic’ vases were inspired by Zeisel.
55 Until the mid-1960s, the Lomonosov Factory’s employees were divided into the ‘sculptors’,
who designed the forms, and the ‘painters’, who decorated these forms. There were, how-
ever, a few exceptions, like Suetin himself. See Marina Tikhomirova, Anna Aleksandrovna
Leporskaia (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1970), 80.
216 Karpova

Figure 10.8 Anna Leporskaia (the form), Nina Slavina (the pattern), ‘Chess’ Service, 1963,
porcelain, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir
Terebenin.

painters at the Lomonosov Factory. Apart from Slavina, the most enthusias-
tic producers of such designs were Eduard Krimmer (another of Malevich’s
students from Ginkhuk), and the younger artists Vladimir Semenov and Nina
Pavlova. This was not a direct tribute to Suprematist porcelain, which, accord-
ing to the factory artist Inna Olevskaia, was still hidden in storage and barely
accessible even in the 1970s. Despite this, Olevskaia believes that it was Suetin’s
and Leporskaia’s excellent mastery of proportions, as it was communicated to
younger artists, that provided a subtle link back to Suprematism.56

56 Olevskaia, Interview, 2014. In addition, from 1969 to mid-1970s Leporskaia gave semi-
nars in her home to a small group of young ceramic artists, fresh graduates of the Vera
Mukhina School for Art and Industry, which was not affiliated to the Lomonosov Factory.
According to two of the participants, Leporskaia taught them painting using the same
methodology that Malevich had used at Ginkhuk: moving from Impressionism through
Cézannism and Cubism to Suprematism. Unfortunately, the resulting Suprematist stud-
ies are not preserved. The students also read Malevich’s texts. This semi-clandestine
‘Academy’ (as Leporskaia called it) was part of an artistic circle, also attended by Nina
Suetina and Irina Punina (daughters of Nikolai Suetin and Nikolai Punin), and some-
Suprematist Porcelain and Its Afterlife in Leningrad Design 217

When Leporskaia started working as a porcelain painter in the late 1960s,

she often produced variations on Post-Suprematist compositions, colourful
horizontal friezes, reminiscent of Suetin’s ‘Agricultural Town’. However, it was
the white porcelain for which she became celebrated. Leporskaia’s dinner-
ware was reproduced for sale only with decorations, whereas her white vases
garnered awards at exhibitions – both domestic and international. Her 1978
personal exhibition at the Leningrad Union of Artists was a landmark event
for Soviet decorative artists. The exhibition’s designer Leonid Liak arranged
pedestals covered with bright blue fabric. This setting highlighted the white-
ness, shine and architectonic clarity of Leporskaia’s undecorated objects and
made them look strikingly similar to architectons. The central wall, which
was also covered with blue fabric, featured three white frames, with vases ar-
ranged in front of them – in effect, presenting utilitarian objects as if they
were easel paintings. In this way, Liak demonstrated the ambiguity and flex-
ibility of the divide between art and design. When she reviewed this exhibi-
tion, Zhadova suggested that Leporskaia’s works were significant not as indi-
vidual objects, but as elements of an organic whole: ‘White porcelain, with its
semi-transparent structure and with its intrinsic spatiality, was especially ad-
vantageous for the development of a new concept of the environment’.57 This
echoed the ambitions of Malevich and the Unovis group to create ‘a utilitarian
and dynamically spiritual world of objects’.58
In the late 1970s, Leporskaia’s exhibition alone resonated with the still half-
prohibited Suprematism. During the following decade, Suprematist artworks
became increasingly visible for the Soviet public, starting with the land-mark
exhibition Moscow-Paris [Moskva-Parizh], held at the Pushkin State Museum
of Fine Arts, in Moscow in 1981. Leningrad porcelain artists, who had hith-
erto only learnt about the Avant-Garde from journals and Leporskaia, were
now able for the very first time to see actual examples of Suprematist porce-
lain from the 1920s. This particular recovery of the avant-garde heritage owed
a great deal to the efforts of Tamara Kudriavtseva, then curator of the porce-
lain collection at the State Hermitage Museum, Leningrad.59 Malevich’s Teapot
made a particularly strong impression. Subsequently, the young artist Mikhail

times by the art historian Evgenii Kovtun. See Nekrasova-Karateeva, Interview, 2014; and
Natalia Malevskaia-Malevich, Interview with the author, recorded 18 March 2014, in St.
Petersburg.
57 Larisa Zhadova, ‘Belyi farfor Anny Leporskoi’, Dekorativnoe Iskusstvo SSSR, 6 (June 1979):
42.
58 Ot Unovisa – my khotim [From Unovis – We Want] (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920); English transla-
tion in Zhadova, Malevich, 298.
59 Olevskaia, Interview, 2014.
218 Karpova

Sorokin designed several objects that synthesised classical and Suprematist

forms. Apparently, he was less interested in continuing Malevich’s bold exper-
iments than in developing artistic images with allusions to St. Petersburg’s ar-
chitecture and various periods in the Porcelain Factory’s history.60 Olevskaia,
too, started developing rectangular elements in her dining sets of the late
1980s. In 2003, she was the first porcelain artist to create a Post-Suprematist
decorative scheme for Malevich’s Teapot, and confessed that it was a highly
responsible and stressful task. In her three versions for the decoration, she
used large-scale Suprematist forms (the cross, rectangle and triangle) and, in
one instance, a portrait of Malevich. This experience inspired Olevskaia to use
rectangular elements in her own designs, like the 2003 service ‘Blank Note-
book’ (Fig. 10.9).
A different approach to the legacy of Suprematist porcelain was adopted
by the Leningrad architect Mark Khidekel, who is the son of Lazar Khidekel.
In the late 1980s, Mark Khidekel started working on a series of ‘Architectural
Dishes’, employing the principles of Suprematist form-making that he had
elaborated in his architectural designs of the 1960s – 1980s. He realised his
designs at the Lomonosov Factory, and then in the United States, after emigrat-
ing in 1993. His dishes include Lazar Khidekel’s models of architectonic vases
(also, as shown above, repeated by Suetin) and demonstrate a great diversity
of forms, based on the harmonic relationships between round and rectangu-
lar modules. Mark Khidekel’s dishes are neither decorative nor utilitarian, but
architectonic models, complementing his Suprematist tea-sets, which also act
as small-scale models of a Suprematist environment (Fig. 10.10).61

Epilogue: Suprematist Porcelain in the Age of Global

Commodification

For Malevich, designing porcelain acted as preparation for creating a per-

fectly harmonised earthly and cosmic environment. Despite this, Suprematist

60 Some of Sorokin’s works are on permanent display at the State Hermitage Museum, St.
Petersburg, and some can be seen in the catalogue, N. S. Petrova, Leningradskii farforovyi
zavod imeni M. V. Lomonosova. 1944-2004, Vol. 2 (Moscow and St. Petersburg: Global View,
2006-2007), 544-553.
61 I would like to thank Dr Regina Khidekel for bringing Mark Khidekel’s porcelain de-
signs to my attention and providing valuable visual and factual information. On Mark
Khidekel’s work, see the article on the Russian American Cultural Center website:
http://www.russianamericanculture.com/lazar-khidekel-society/lazar-khidekel-brand/.
Suprematist Porcelain and Its Afterlife in Leningrad Design 219

Figure 10.9 Inna Olevskaia (form and pattern), ‘Blank Notebook’ Service, 2003-4, porcelain,
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir
Terebenin.
220 Karpova

Figure 10.10 Mark Khidekel, Architectural Dishes, 1994, porcelain, private collection.
Copyright Mark Khidekel.

porcelain acquired its own significance as a standard of artistic quality in the

context of a planned economy that prioritised quantity. In dramatic histori-
cal circumstances, Suprematist porcelain objects underwent several transfor-
mations and, in this way, lost their original sharpness and their power to de-
familiarise the habitual. By the end of the socialist era, they had become mod-
ern classics, akin to Picasso’s ceramics – but also commodities, albeit rather ex-
pensive ones. Today, Suprematist objects are copied in large editions, in what
is once again called the Imperial Porcelain Factory. These copies are always on
sale in the factory’s shop, next to the copies of royal dinner sets. Anyone can
purchase a Malevich Teapot for about 700 US dollars, or even order it online.
The development of 3D printing technology will allow cheaper reproductions
of Suprematist designs. Will such pseudo-porcelain objects represent a corrup-
tion of Malevich’s dream of utilitarian perfection or its ultimate realisation?

Acknowledgments

Research for this article was made possible by a grant from the Malevich So-
ciety. The author wishes to thank the Society, as well as Nina Suetina, Inna
Olevskaia, Natalia Petrova and Sergei Rudakov for supplying valuable informa-
tion, and Irina Denischenko for her useful suggestions.
 Chapter 11

Suprematist Textiles
Julia Tulovsky

This paper1 examines the involvement of Suprematism in textile design during

the 1910s and 1920s,2 but it is also part of a larger research project, which is
concerned with exploring the area of avant-garde textile design in general and
its importance for the development of abstract art.
Textiles played an important role in the emergence and development of
abstract art, both in theory and in practice. Theoretical writings based on tex-
tiles provided the ideological background for artists to break with figuration
and representation in their painting. Indeed, the analysis of textiles formed
the basis for numerous writings on art-historical methodology and art theory
by Gottfried Semper, Alois Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer, as well as inspiring
treatises by Charles Blanc, the formalist theories of the early Boston thinkers
Denman Ross and Ernest Fenollosa, and theories about colour relationships
by Michel Chevreul.3
Textiles were also instrumental in the move toward abstraction in practi-
cal terms. On an artist’s way to abstraction, the ‘lesser’ arts, particularly tex-
tiles, often acted as a useful laboratory for the articulation of new ideas, offer-
ing a field for experimentation that was free from ideological considerations
and from that sense of creative responsibility, which is often associated with
painting. In the early twentieth century, a number of European artists, such
as those associated with the Vienna Secession, Maurice Denis and Sonia De-
launay in France, and members of the Bloomsbury group in England, turned

1 Throughout, I am indebted to the editorial suggestions of Sarah Pollack.

2 Important publications on the topic include Charlotte Douglas, ‘The Art of Pure Design: The
Move to Abstraction in Russian and English Art and Textiles’, in Rosalind Blakesley and Susan
Reid, eds., Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture and Deco-
rative Arts (Dekalb IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 86–111; Aleksandra Shatskikh,
Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus (Moscow: Tri Kvadrata, 2009); English version as
Aleksandra Shatskikh, Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism, trans. Marian
Schwartz (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012); and Iulia Tulovskii, Tekstil’
avangarda. Risunki dlia tkani [Avant-Garde Textiles: Fabric Designs] (Ekaterinburg: Tatlin,
2016).
3 For a more detailed summary of textile-based, theoretical writings, see the introduction to
Tulovskii, Tekstil’ avangarda, 11-17.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_013

222 Tulovsky

to the design of utilitarian objects in general and textiles in particular. For in-
stance, in 1913, Bloomsbury artists produced five abstract fabric designs, based
on drawings by Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant. These designs were
created by reducing and schematising elements of their figurative art, and so
served as experiments in abstract form, and acted as catalysts for the move to
abstraction in their painting.4
In Russia, the first involvement of avant-garde artists with utilitarian ob-
jects took place in 1915, in the area of textiles. The artist Natalia Davydova,
in collaboration with Alexandra Exter, produced innovative embroidery de-
signs and commissioned them from other avant-garde artists, such as Ksenia
Boguslavskaia, Ivan Puni, Georgii Iakulov, and Kazimir Malevich. The actual
pieces of embroidery based on these sketches were then executed in work-
shops in the Ukrainian villages of Skoptsy and Verbovka. Subsequently, these
designs were displayed at the Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art: Embroidery
and Carpets from Artists’ Designs, which opened on 6 November 1915 at the
Lemercier [Lemers’e] Gallery in the centre of Moscow.5
It is hard to exaggerate the imporatance of this event. Not only was it the
first Russian exhibition of functional objects based on innovative designs by
avant-garde artists, but it was also the first public display of Kazimir Malevich’s
new abstract style of Suprematism.6
The catalogue for the exhibition lists three works by Malevich: No. 90 and
91 are designs for scarves, and No. 92 is a design for a cushion. These works
were prominently displayed in the main hall, which ensured that they received
equally prominent coverage in the press. In the photograph published in the
weekly newspaper Sparks [Iskry] on 15 November 1915, all three Suprematist
works are clearly visible. Two are in the centre of the photograph, on either
side of the cushion, and the third is hanging on the wall to the right. It is
clear from the photograph that Malevich’s works are not textiles or embroi-
deries, but actually independent Suprematist compositions (comprising paint
on canvas), exhibited in the context of applied-art objects (Fig. 11.1).
As Aleksandra Shatskikh pointed out in her book Malevich and the Supre-
mus Society, the exhibit to the left of the cushion in the photograph is similar
to the Suprematist painting of 1916 from The Peggy Guggenheim Collection
in Venice. The work in the middle, to the right of the cushion, corresponds

4 Douglas, ‘The Art of Pure Design’, 91-93.

5 See Katalog vystavki sovremennogo dekorativnogo iskusstva. Vyshivki i kovry po eskizam khu-
dozhnikov (Moscow: Galereia Lemers’e, 1915).
6 The question of the importance of textiles for the emergence of Suprematism was first ad-
dressed by Charlotte Douglas, ‘Bespredmetnost’ i dekorativnost”, Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia,
2-3 (1993): 96-106.
Suprematism and Textile Design 223

Figure 11.1 Photograph of the exhibition Modern Decorative Art: Embroidery and Carpets
from Artist’ Designs at the Lemercier Gallery, Moscow, 1915. Reproduced in Iskry
(Moscow), No. 45 (15 November 1915), p. 8.

to Suprematism. No. 18, and the third design hanging on the wall is an earlier
version of Suprematist Composition with a cross (Fig. 11.2-11.4).7
Modern Decorative Art took place six weeks before the legendary Last Futur-
ist Exhibition of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero-Ten) [Poslednaia futuristicheskaia vystavka
kartin, 0,10 (nol’ desiat’)], which opened in Petrograd on 19 December 1915.
From this, two questions naturally arise. The first of these is why did Malevich
choose to present his newly invented style of Suprematism for the first time
at the Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art, rather than wait and launch it at
the fine-art, avant-garde exhibition 0.10? Secondly, did textile design exert any
influence on the inception and development of Suprematism, in the same way
that it encouraged other European artists to move toward abstraction?
Today, it is well established that Malevich arrived at his abstract, non-
objective or objectless style of Suprematism in the late spring and early sum-
mer of 1915, while reworking the designs for the 1913 opera Victory over the Sun.8

7 Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus, 100-101; and Shatskikh, Black Square,
88-93.
8 See K. S. Malevich, ‘Pis’ma k M.V. Matiushinu’, ed. E. F. Kovtun, Ezhegodnik Rukopisnogo ot-
dela Pushkinskogo doma na 1974 god (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976), 177-195; and Charlotte Douglas,
Swans of Other Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the Origins of Abstraction in Russia (Ann Arbor,
MI: UMI Research Press, 1980).
224 Tulovsky

Figure 11.2 Kazimir Malevich, Untitled (Compact Magnetic Cluster), 1916, oil on canvas,
53 × 53 cm., Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Col-
lection, Venice.

By October 1915, Suprematism had already emerged as a fully articulated and

well-developed pictorial system with a distinct conceptual paradigm, which
Malevich presented to Alexandra Exter during her visit to his studio that
month.9 It was almost certainly Exter who introduced Malevich to Natalia
Davydova, the organiser of the Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art. Malevich
probably received his invitation to participate in the show quite late, almost
certainly in October 1915, only a few weeks before the exhibition opening, so
there would have been no time to execute his designs. This would explain why
Malevich showed Suprematist easel paintings rather than executed embroi-
deries at the Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art.10

9 Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus, 68.

10 Ibid., 95.
Suprematism and Textile Design 225

Figure 11.3 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism No. 18, 1915, oil on canvas, 53.3 × 53.3 cm., pri-
vate collection.

Malevich’s decision to exhibit Suprematist projects in the context of an ex-

hibition of applied art may also be explained by the fact that he conceived
Suprematism as a universal visual system, which was not confined to painting,
but embraced all the arts, including sculpture, theatrical design and music.
Perhaps his acquaintance with Davydova, who had ambitious plans for the fu-
ture dissemination of innovative applied art in the everyday world, gave Male-
vich an additional incentive to participate in this initiative. In a postcard to
his friend Mikhail Matiushin, he announced, ‘A great treasure trove [the trea-
sure being Davydova – JT] is being dug up, and as soon as the war ends, we
will be on the crest of a wave … London—Paris—America have already been
selected by this Treasure Trove, I think this should be enough for us’.11 Davy-
dova’s impressive plans, however, were postponed by the outbreak of the First
World War, and then were completely abandoned in the wake of the October

11 Kazimir Malevich, postcard to Mikhail Matiushin, 5 November 1915; English translation in

Kazimir Malevich, Letters, Documents, Memoirs and Criticism, Russian edition: eds., Irina
A. Vakar and Tatiana N. Mikhienko; English edition: trans. Antonina W. Bouis, ed. Wendy
Salmond, general ed. Charlotte Douglas (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), I: 72.
226 Tulovsky

Figure 11.4 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition, 1919-1920, oil on canvas, 8.3 ×
80.3 cm., private collection.

Revolution of 1917. Despite this, in 1915, Malevich, with his refined innovator’s
intuition, did not miss the opportunity to be represented in the very first Rus-
sian exhibition of works that were concerned with translating innovative and
radical visual forms from works of art into objects of everyday use – something
that opened endless possibilities for the wider promotion and dissemination
of his ideas.
I will allow myself to speculate that Malevich’s participation in Davydova’s
show might have also been influenced by his youthful partiality for textiles.
His memoirs indicate that as a teenager he liked to knit and sew. He wrote: ‘My
mother also liked to embroider and to do lacework. She taught me this art, and
I also embroidered and knitted with a crochet hook.’12

12 See K. Malevich, ‘Glavy iz abtobiografii khudozhnika’, in N. I. Khardzhiev, Stat’i ob avan-

garde v dvykh tomakh, eds. Rudolf Duganov, Iurii Arpishkin, and Andrei Sarabianov
(Moscow: RA, 1997), I: 114; English translation in John E. Bowlt and Mark Konecny
eds., A Legacy Regained: Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-Garde (St. Petersburg:
Palace Editions, 2002), 159.
Suprematism and Textile Design 227

From the perspective of history, we might further suggest that Malevich’s

decision to exhibit Suprematist paintings as projects for items of applied art
testifies to his bold inner freedom as an artist, and corresponds to his disregard
for the traditional hierarchy of art. Yet, within his immediate context, this ges-
ture might have had a negative impact on the wider dissemination of his new
style.
Malevich’s colleagues, especially the Moscow-based artists, such as Na-
dezhda Udaltsova and Liubov Popova, who later became ardent disciples of
Suprematism, did not immediately recognise the potential of the new style
and initially considered its minimalistic symplicity to be ‘dilettante’ and ‘deco-
rative’.13 As Shatskikh has demonstrated, the tension among the participants of
the 0.10 exhibition, which was initially explained by critics and artists alike as
owing to inter-personal issues, was in fact based purely on artistic considera-
tions: the refined Cubist artists were perplexed by the ‘decorative’, even ‘child-
ish’ qualities of Suprematist art, which they felt damaged notions of artistic
skill and so undermined their status as artists and their dignity as ‘profession-
als of painting’.14
Nevertheless, it was actually through embroidery that these very same Cu-
bist artists came to understand and embrace Suprematism over the course
of the next two years. In 1916 and 1917, a number of avant-garde artists, such
as Olga Rozanova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Liubov Popova and Vera Pestel, also
became involved in the production of embroidery designs for the Verbovka
workshops.
Udaltsova described her initial involvement with Verbovka, embroidery and
Suprematism in her diary. On 10 October 1916, she wrote: ‘I am invited … to the
embroidery society. A drawing costs 20 roubles. I can give them five drawings a
month. But if they accept all of them, I could make ten a month, or even more.
I could give up painting for three months and only make money’.15 A month
later, on 29 November 1916, she confessed: ‘I am unexpectedly fascinated by the
decorative drawings and Malevich … The embroideries came out quite nicely
and I earned 230 rubles’.16 In fact, all of Udaltsova’s non-objective Suprema-
tist compositions are derived from her projects for the Verbovka embroidery
workshop (Fig. 11.5).

13 Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus, 104.

14 Ibid.
15 N. Udal’tsova, Dnevnik russkoi kubistki. Dnevniki, stat’i, vospominaniia, eds. E.A. Drevina
and V. I. Rakitin (Moscow: RA, 1994), 29.
16 Ibid., 30.
228 Tulovsky

Figure 11.5 Nadezhda Udaltsova, Suprematist Composition, 1916, gouache on paper, 64 ×

44.5 cm., Collection George Costakis, State Museum of Contemporary Art,
Thessaloniki.
© The State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki.

Popova also seems to have been encouraged to begin creating Suprematist

easel paintings through her design work for Verbovka and her involvement in
the activities of the Supremus Society.17 Her Verbovka designs are based on
the constructive relationship of form and colours, which she continued to ex-
plore in her series of Suprematist-inspired canvases, which she called Painterly

17 Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus, 174-179.

Suprematism and Textile Design 229

Achitechtonics [zhivopisnaia arkhitektonika] Popova’s experience of producing

designs for Verbovka represented her first involvement with applied art and
acted as an important precedent for her work in textile design under the aegis
of Constructivism, six years later.18 In addition to Udaltsova and Popova, Ver-
bovka provided a forum for experimentation for other artists, including Puni,
Rozanova and Exter. Their collaboration with the workshop exerted an enor-
mous influence on their easel painting, and stimulated them to develop new
approaches to non-objective forms (Fig. 11.6, 11.7).19
In December 1917, the second and final Verbovka exhibition opened at the
Mikhailova Salon, Moscow. The exhibition contained around 400 works, all
of which were based on the objectless style of Suprematism.20 While the first
Verbovka exhibition of 1915 witnessed the inaugural manifestation of Supre-
matism, the second Verbovka exhibition of 1917 was the most representative
display of the new style, in terms of the sheer number of items on show. For
a long time, there were no known images from this exhibition, until Charlotte
Douglas discovered by chance, in a second-hand book shop in New York City,
negatives of photographs that the American photographer Oliver Sayler had
taken during his trip to Moscow in 1917 (Fig. 11.8, 11.9).21
The eagerness with which Russian avant-garde artists used Suprematism
for their embroidery designs prompts the question: Why did these artists, who
actually practised other styles of painting, choose Suprematism for their ap-
plied art? It is highly probable that Suprematism, with its clarity, minimal vi-
sual schemes, brightness of colour, and fresh contemporaneity of forms stood
out advantageously in comparison to, for instance, the complexity of Cubism’s
stylistic devices. Suprematist decoration turned useful items into emblematic
art objects. It may have been precisely this emblematic quality that attracted
the artists who were designing for the Verbovka workshops.
The potential of Suprematist textile design was further explored after the
October Revolution of 1917, when the issue of designing items for everyday
use came to the fore. The building of the ‘new world’ that the Bolsheviks

18 See, for example, Dmitri V. Sarabianov and Natalia L. Adaskina, Popova (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1990); Tulovskii, Tekstil avantgarda; and Christina Lodder. ‘Liubov Popova:
From Painting to Textile Design’, Tate Papers, 14 (Autumn 2010), http://www.tate.org
.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/liubov-popova-from-painting-to-textile-design
.htm.
19 For a more detailed discussion of the role that Suprematism played in these artists’ move
to abstraction, see Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus, 169-171.
20 See Katalog 2-i vystavki sovremennogo dekorativnogo iskusstva (Moscow, 1917).
21 Charlotte Douglas, ‘Oliver Sayler in Russia’, Pinakotheke (Moscow), XXII-XXIII, 1-2 (2006):
284-287. For attempts to attribute the various works in Sayler’s exhibition photographs,
see Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus, 292.
230 Tulovsky

Figure 11.6 Liubov Popova, Sketch for Embroidery for the Verbovka Workshop, 1917, collage
on paper, 12.2 × 18.8 cm., Museum Tsaritsyno, Moscow.

proclaimed, mandated and inspired the broader artistic task of designing a

completely new environment for the new proletarian state.
In tandem with these new creative perspectives, a network of State Free
Art Studios (Svobodnye gosudarstvennye khudozhestvennye masterskie –
Svomas) was set up in October 1918, under the auspices of the Fine Art De-
partment within the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Otdel izobrazitel’nykh
Suprematism and Textile Design 231

Figure 11.7 Liubov Popova, Sketch for Embroidery for the Verbovka Workshop, 1917, gouache
and lacquer on paper, 31 × 21.2 cm., private collection.

iskusstv, Narodnyi komissariat prosveshcheniia – IZO Narkompros). Malevich

taught at the Moscow Svomas, where, among other activities, he headed the
textile department, together with Udaltsova.22 Several of Malevich’s textile de-
signs survive from that period (Fig. 11.10, 11.11).

22 S.O. Khan-Magomedov, Pionery sovetskogo dizaina (Moscow: Galart, 1995), 276.

232 Tulovsky

Figure 11.8 Oliver Sayler, Photograph of the second Verbovka exhibition, 1917, private col-
lection, New York. This shows a cushion produced to Malevich’s design.

In 1919, for the first time, Malevich also began to conceptualise the use of
Suprematism for applied art in his theoretical writings. In the catalogue for
the Tenth State Exhibition, he wrote: ‘Suprematism, on the one hand, has a
purely philosophical, cognitive movement through colour. On the other, as a
form, it can be applied to objects to create a new style of Suprematist decora-
tion. But it also can appear on objects, as the transformation or embodiment
of space, disintegrating the very notion of these objects in [the viewer’s] con-
sciousness.’23 In other words, Suprematism not only replaced traditional dec-
oration with the nuclei of Suprematist ornamentation, but in doing this it also
transformed these items and objects into elements of a Suprematist cosmos.
Later, in 1919, Malevich accepted an invitation to teach at the Vitebsk Peo-
ple’s Art School (Vitebskoe narodnoe khudozhestvennoe uchilishche). There

23 K. Malevich, ‘Suprematizm’, in Katalog desiatoi gosudarstvennoi vystavki. Bespredmetnoe

tvorchestvo i suprematizm (Moscow, 1919), 18; English translation, as ‘Non-Objective Cre-
ation and Suprematism’, in K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art, 1915-1933, ed. Troels Andersen,
trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Borgens Forlag, 1968), I:
121. Translation adjusted.
Suprematism and Textile Design 233

Figure 11.9 Nadezhda Udaltsova, Suprematist Embroidery. An exhibit from the second Ver-
bovka exhibition, 1917.
Photograph by Oliver Sayler, private collection, New York.

he inspired the foundation of Unovis (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva – Cham-

pions of the New Art), and further developed Suprematism’s design potential
with the help of his students. Among other projects, the group devoted their
attention to textile design. The first Suprematist fabric printed in the Vitebsk
workshop was also reproduced in the Unovis almanac.24 This is the only known
example of a Suprematist textile design that was actually realised as printed
cloth (Fig. 11.12).
In the 1920s, Malevich’s students Ilia Chashnik and Nikolai Suetin pro-
duced a number of Suprematist textile designs. Their initial interest in this
area seems to have been awakened during the Vitebsk period, but they later
continued creating Suprematist fabric designs parallel to their production of
Suprematist porcelain in Petrograd (subsequently Leningrad). In fact, the pat-
terns created in Vitebsk were often adapted from Malevich’s easel paintings.
For example, one of Suetin’s designs, which dates from 1921, possesses strong

24 Unovis No. 1 (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920), [sheet 42 verso], State Tretyakov Gallery, Manuscript
Department, fond 76, no. 9; reprinted in Unovis No. 1. Vitebsk. 1920. Faksimil’noe izdanie,
ed. Tat’iana Goriacheva (Moscow: State Tretyakov Gallery / Izdatel’stvo Skanrus, 2003),
[sheet 42 verso].
234 Tulovsky

Figure 11.10 Kazimir Malevich, Textile Design No. 10, 1919, watercolour and pencil on paper,
35.8 × 27.1 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

affinities with Malevich’s oil painting from 1915, Eight Red Rectangles (Fig. 11.13).
Another of Suetin’s designs, which is based on the combination of a pale pink
triangle with a black circle and some smaller forms, resembles Malevich’s Dy-
namic Suprematism (Supremus 57), 1916, Tate Modern, London (Fig. 11.14).
In the late 1920s, the formal components of the textile designs created by
Chashnik (and to a lesser extent those produced by Suetin) became more
interdependent and constructively connected, while the colours tended to
become more gentle and sometimes subdued. It is possible that these later de-
signs were influenced by Constructivist approaches to fabric design. Alterna-
Suprematism and Textile Design 235

Figure 11.11 Kazimir Malevich, Textile Design No. 15, 1919, watercolour and pencil on paper,
35.6 × 27 cm., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

tively, this change may have been inherent in the very logic of the development
of Suprematist textile patterns, in that the freed geometric elements, hovering
in white nothingness, later acquired a more rigorous order (Fig. 11.15, 11.16).
The years 1923-24 marked a new stage in Russian avant-garde textile de-
sign, which was characterised by an approach in which the basic geometric
elements became organised into tight, interlocking entities. This more mathe-
matical and rational approach emerged under the auspices of Constructivism.
In 1923, Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova responded to an advertisement
236 Tulovsky

Figure 11.12 Kazimir Malevich, First Suprematist Fabric, 1919, printed fabric glued onto pa-
per, ink and gouache, 20 × 9.6 cm., (fabric); 33.8 × 24 см., (paper), State Rus-
sian Museum, St. Petersburg. The fabric was actually printed by Ivan Chervinka.

in the newspaper Pravda, and went to work for Moscow’s First Textile Print-
ing Factory.25 In the designs that they devised for mass production, they em-
ployed the same basic geometric elements that had earlier been established

25 A. Abramova, ‘Odna iz pervykh’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, 9 (1963): 19.

Suprematism and Textile Design 237

Figure 11.13 Nikolai Suetin, Suprematist Forms. Textile Design, 1921, ink on paper, 23.4 ×
32.4 см., private collection.

Figure 11.14 Nikolai Suetin, Suprematist Forms. Textile Design, 1921-1922, gouache and water-
colour on paper, 27 × 40 cm., private collection.

as the artistic vocabulary of Suprematism, but they now combined them into
strict patterns, which were created in accordance with one of the main postu-
lates of Constructivism, namely that the design of an object should relate to its
construction: in this case, the warp and weft of the woven fabric.26 Stepanova

26 Tulovskii, Tekstil avantgarda, 33 ff.

238 Tulovsky

Figure 11.15 Ilia Chashnik, Textile Design, 1920s, gouache and watercolour on paper, 14.8 ×
14 cm., private collection.

made the relationship between the design and the structure of the cloth ex-
plicit in 1928 when she wrote: ‘The artist’s whole attention should be focused
on the processing and colouring of the fabric, and on developing new types of
fabric … Like everything else, the pattern will be subjected to the standard re-
quirements for the fabric and will ultimately be expressed through the fabric’s
structure.’27
As was the case with the Suprematist designs for the Verbovka workshop,
Constructivist textiles also served as a laboratory for innovative ideas and
prompted the artists to create new forms and devices. These forms and de-

27 V.F. Stepanova, ‘Ot kostiuma k rusunku tkani’, Vechernaia Moskva (29 February 1928); En-
glish translation in Alexander Lavrentiev, Varvara Stepanova: A Constructivist Life, trans.
Wendy Salmond (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 180.
Suprematism and Textile Design 239

Figure 11.16 Ilia Chashnik, Textile Design, 1925-1927, watercolour on paper, 32.4 × 47.1 cm.,
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

vices anticipated key features that emerged in painting several decades later,
in particular in movements such as Op Art and Minimalism of 1950-60.28
The interrelations between textiles and various approaches to abstraction
constitute one of the most fascinating themes in the history of art during the
twentieth century. This paper is but a brief summary of the symbiotic relation-
ship of the textile medium and one of the most important art movements of
that period – Suprematism. Although textiles did not play such as an impor-
tant role in the formation of Suprematism as they did in the development of
some other abstract styles, they certainly served as mediators for stimulating
an understanding of the movement and attracting artists to it. In turn, Supre-
matism helped prepare the ground for further innovations and achievements
in the realm of avant-garde textiles.

28 Tulovskii, Tekstil avantgarda, 33 ff.

 Chapter 12

Suprematism: A Shortcut into the Future: The

Reception of Malevich by Polish and Hungarian
Artists during the Inter-War Period
Éva Forgács

When considering the reception and influence of Kazimir Malevich in some

of the cultures of Eastern and Central Europe, we need to keep in mind that
artistic styles and concepts are rarely absorbed into other cultures with their
original forms, intentions or meanings completely intact. One of the reasons
for their mutations is that the original context within which they developed
cannot be transferred in its entirety. Removed from the historical and social
fabric of their time and place, they enter another environment, where they
will inevitably be seen and interpreted in different terms. The Hungarian the-
orist and artist Leo Popper (1886-1911), one of the most original thinkers of his
time and a very close friend of the young Georg Lukács, left us, among other
sketchy writings on aesthetics, a half-page text, entitled ‘The Theory of Misun-
derstanding’, which he produced towards the end of his short life.1 He wrote:

One cannot know another man intimately, and cannot understand what
the other person wants, and it is even more impossible to understand
a previous age (because we cannot ‘go there’). If, however, one adapts
something from someone else, or from another era, one does it falsely,
misunderstanding it – and preparing a further concatenation of misun-
derstandings. Thus, the engine driving the development of the arts is
misunderstanding.2

Although Popper was making a casual observation, rather than articulating a

fully formulated argument, he was not alone in attributing importance to this
phenomenon in relation to the art scene in Eastern and Central Europe during

1 Leo Popper was a trained musician, artist, art critic and thinker, who died at the age of 25,
from tuberculosis.
2 Leo Popper: ‘Félreértési elmélet’ [Theorem of Misunderstanding], in L. Popper, Esszék és
kritikák [Essays and Reviews] (Budapest: Magvető Könyvkiadó, 1983), 116-117. Author’s trans-
lation.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_014

Malevich in Eastern Europe during the Inter-War Period 241

the early years of the twentieth century. The idiosyncratic and multi-talented
Polish artist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939) also tackled this issue
in an essay entitled ‘The New Forms in Painting and the Misunderstanding
Arising Therefrom’.3 He argued that it is not possible to find truth in philoso-
phy, and the concept of the metaphysical is disappearing from society, which
is increasingly prey to self-styled rulers. He was prescient in describing the
mass society that was becoming a reality soon after he wrote his essay, and he
thought that the falling apart of the once supposedly homogenous process of
artistic creation, which led to the misunderstanding of artworks, was part and
parcel of the changes in modern society.
In addition to the local prehistories of modernism and the Avant-Gardes
in Poland and Hungary respectively, another important aspect that relates to
the assimilation of Malevich’s ideas in these countries is the time lapse. Male-
vich developed Suprematism during the early years of the First World War, and
this context inevitably shaped his futuristic visions styled as Suprematism. The
Central Europeans, however, only acquired information about his work after
the conflict was over, when concepts of the future were heavily coloured, both
pessimistically and optimistically, by experiences of the war. In her excellent
book on Olga Rozanova, Nina Gourianova observes that for the Russian Avant-
Garde, war was ‘more a metaphor than a subject’ and that ‘The concept was
bound up with the idea of innovation and the destruction of the old forms and
aesthetics for the sake of a new creativity’.4 Nevertheless, the actual cataclysm
of the war shook these artists profoundly. Aaron J. Cohen observes that the
war changed the position of the Russian avant-garde artists, ‘as an overarch-
ing public mobilization brought together antagonistic artistic milieus. Radical
artists joined the country’s culture of war … At the same time the war desta-
bilized the avant-garde’s pre-war public culture and unleashed a scramble to
find a new basis to justify radical art’.5
Cohen argues that the emergence of non-objective art was part of this latter
development, as part of the process of the artists’ proclaiming ‘their contribu-
tions to Russian culture inside a mobilized civil society’.6

3 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, ‘Nowe formy w malarstwie i wynikające stąd nieporozumienia’

[New Forms in Painting and the Misunderstanding Arising Therefrom], 1919; trans. Daniel
Gerould, in Timothy O. Benson and Éva Forgács, eds., Between Worlds. A Sourcebook of Central
European Avant-Gardes (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, with LACMA, 2002), 245-251.
4 Nina Gourianova, Exploring Color. Olga Rozanova and the Early Russian Avant-Garde 1910-1918,
trans. Charles Rougle (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2000), 71.
5 Aaron J. Cohen: Imagining the Unimaginable. World War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public
Culture in Russia, 1914-1917 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 115.
6 Ibid.
242 Forgács

The First World War changed the world fundamentally, both in and beyond
Russia. Thirteen new countries appeared on the map of Central and East-
ern Europe as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was disassembled, the Ottoman
Empire was partitioned, and Soviet Russia relinquished the Baltic countries,
Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. Beside these political and geographic changes,
it was impossible to ignore the horrific reality of the war and what it had re-
vealed about human nature. At the same time, it had fuelled visions of a bet-
ter, supra-national future among the international Avant-Garde, who hoped to
avoid in the future the kinds of national conflicts that had led to the recent
carnage. The visions of the post-war Avant-Garde were undoubtedly utopian.
Witkiewicz, for one, dismissed them as deeply delusional as soon as they ap-
peared: ‘Today’s liberals see the future of the broad masses through the prism
of their own present psychology’,7 he wrote, implying that the liberals were
projecting their own attitudes onto the masses, and misunderstanding ev-
erything that originated from the psychology of others. Not surprisingly, in
the post-1918 world, the supra-national motifs of Suprematism’s geometric ab-
straction resonated in Eastern and Central Europe as more programmatically
international and political than Malevich had ever intended them to be. Kállai
called it a ‘collective art’,8 and, in his review of Malevich’s 1927 Berlin exhibi-
tion, underlined the parallel between Malevich’s Suprematist abstraction and
his architectural imagination, which he saw as practical as the West European
architecture of the time.9 Until about the mid-1920s, both Suprematism and
Constructivism were seen as projections of an imminent collective, commu-
nist future in the West.10
Suprematism was not the only artistic development to be harnessed and
adapted to local circumstances, the results of a totally different culture and
history. Futurism had undergone a similar adjustment. In Russia, for instance,
Futurism lacked the nationalist and military overtones that it had possessed
in Italy, its place of origin.11 Similarly, in Hungary, Futurism did not refer to the

7 Witkiewicz, ‘Nowe formy’; Between Worlds, 248.

8 Ernő Kállai, ‘Konstruktivizmus’ [Constructivism], Ma, VIII, 7-8 (1 May 1923).
9 Ernst Kállai, ‘Kazimir Malewitsch’, Das Kunstblatt (July 1927): 264-266.
10 For more detailed discussion, see Tatiana Goriacheva, ‘Suprematism and Constructivism:
An Intersection of Parallels’, in Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder, eds., Rethinking
Malevich: Proceedings of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir
Malevich’s Birth (London: The Pindar Press, 2007), 67-8; and Éva Forgács, ‘Malevich and
Western Modernism’, in Rethinking Malevich, 237-253.
11 ‘We Russians… must overcome Futurism both in life and in art … by going deeper, by
moving into another dimension, the dimension of depth rather than the surface, through
knowledge, not abstract … but of life, knowledge of being’, Olga Rozanova, letter to Alek-
sei Khruchenykh, cited in Gourianova, Exploring Color, 74.
Malevich in Eastern Europe during the Inter-War Period 243

anticipation of a coming modernised age, but was a word used to describe any
kind of modernist art or literature that was incomprehensible to the general
public. As the writer István Vas recalled, the term was ‘indiscriminately used
for everything new and crazy’.12 Likewise, the Hungarian version of Cubism
ignored the restrained tonalities of the French originals as well as their ref-
erences to urban life, only adopting the fragmentation of forms, while using
bold, intense colours. In tandem with such aesthetic transformations, artis-
tic terminology also underwent a metamorphosis. Words such as ‘plane’ and
‘space’ took on different meanings in different conceptual systems, depending
on whether they referred to abstract or figurative imagery. El Lissitzky ranked
space higher than a flat picture plane,13 while Władysław Strzemiński declared
that the ‘plane should be the only constructional element of the picture’ in his
Unism manifesto.14
Like Futurism and other artistic concepts and styles, Suprematism occu-
pied a different cultural space in Eastern and Central Europe than it did in its
country of origin. Malevich’s objectless works of 1915 were rooted in a context
that included the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory over the Sun; exchanges with
Mikhail Matiushin, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov; rivalry with
Vladimir Tatlin; a painterly dialogue with Olga Rozanova; and a compulsion to-
wards self-promotion that was fostered by the highly competitive Russian art
world of the mid-1910s. Ilia Repin and Russian Realist and historical painters
were much farther away from this art world than their equivalents were from
progressive artists in Eastern and Central Europe. By the mid-1910s, the Rus-
sian Avant-Garde was no longer engaging in debates to oppose such obsolete
styles, whereas in Hungary, for example, one of the early programmatic points
of modern painting was to reject and disregard stuffy Realism and stale his-
toricism.15 The most vocal opponent of it was painter Károly Kernstok, who
founded the modernist group The Seekers in 1909 (re-named The Eight in
1910). He gave a programmatic talk titled ‘Investigative Art’ in 1910, lampooning
the not so remote past when ‘sights and delights accompanied the … paintings

12 See István Vas’s autobiographical novel, Nehéz szerelem [Hard love] (Budapest: Szépiro-
dalmi Könyvkiadó, 1972), 308; and Béla Balázs, ‘Futuristák’ [Futurists], Nyugat, 1 (1912):
645-647. Author’s translation.
13 El Lissitzky, ‘K. und Pangeometrie’, in Paul Westheim and Carl Einstein, eds., Europa Ala-
manch (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenhauer Verlag, 1925), 103.
14 Władysław Strzemiński, Unizm w malarstwie [Unism in Painting] (Warsaw, 1928); trans.
Wanda Kemp-Welch, in Between Worlds, 655
15 See, for example, Károly Kernstok’s lecture delivered to the Galileo Circle in Budapest
on 9 January 1910; published as Kernstok, ‘Kutató művészet’ [Investigative Art], Nyugat, 1
(1910): 95-99, trans. John Bátki, in Between Worlds, 121-125.
244 Forgács

depicting Gypsies, peasants, and great festive assemblies and processions in

traditional ceremonial garb’.16
The actual level of information about Suprematism and other innovative
artistic trends in Russia also differed from country to country in Eastern
and Central Europe. While Polish artists, some of whom had actually stud-
ied with Malevich, acquired first-hand knowledge about Suprematism, Hun-
garians learned about both the artist and his work via Berlin. The art critic
and communist theorist Alfréd Kemény had visited Russia and given a talk at
the Moscow Inkhuk (Institut khudozhestvennoi kul’tury – Institute of Artis-
tic Culture) in December 1920. He had engaged in a debate about the ‘tech-
nical naturalism’ that he had observed during his stay, before returning to
Berlin and telling his colleagues about Russian developments.17 The Hungar-
ian avant-garde group in Viennese exile between 1920-1926 learned about the
new Russian art directly from Konstantin Umanskii, whom they invited to give
an illustrated slide talk in November 1920.18 As is well known, Germany, Russia,
and Eastern and Central Europe were politically and culturally interconnected
in many ways throughout the inter-war era. Exhibitions and publications, orig-
inating from Germany, which presented the new Russian art, influenced the
Eastern-European reception of the Russian Avant-Garde.

Malevich and Suprematism in Poland

Malevich had the closest ties to Poland of all the countries in Eastern and Cen-
tral Europe. Because of his family background and personal contacts,19 Polish
artists regarded him as a fellow countryman, who just happened to be living in
Russia. The leading Polish Constructivists Władysław Strzemiński (1893-1952)
and his wife Katarżyna Kobro (Ekaterina Kobro, 1898-1951)20 had both studied

16 Ibid., 125.
17 Oliver Botar, ‘Constructivism, International Constructivism, and the Hungarian Emigra-
tion’, The Hungarian Avant-Garde 1914-1933 (Storrs, CT: University of Connecticut / The
William Benton Museum of Art, 1987), 95.
18 An announcement of the event was published in Ma, VI, 3 (1 January 1921); Béla Uitz’s
detailed account ‘Jegyzetek a Ma orosz estélyéhez’ [Notes to Ma’s Russian Evening] was
published in Ma, VI, 4 (15 February 1921): 52.
19 Malevich’s brothers Antoni, Bolesław, and Stanisław Malewicz lived in Warsaw, but, ac-
cording to Andrzej Turowski, he was not close to them. For more details, see Andrzej
Turowski, Malewicz v Warszawe: Rekonstrukcje i Symulacje (Cracow: Universitas, 2002),
190-192.
20 Kobro was born in Moscow, of Russian, Latvian, and German extraction.
Malevich in Eastern Europe during the Inter-War Period 245

with Malevich and others at Moscow’s State Free Art Studios (Gosudarstven-
nye svobodnye khudozhestvennye masterskie – Svomas) in 1918 and belonged
to the Smolensk branch of Unovis (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva – Champions
of the New Art). Until about 1921, they were the only artists outside Russia
who had first-hand experience of Malevich’s work and ideas. After the couple
moved to Poland in 1922, Strzemiński published ‘Notes on Russian Art’ in the
Polish journal Switch-Points [Zwrotnica]. The editors of the journal appended
a note, stating:

The author of the following article recently came back from Russia,
where he took an active part in artistic movements. In the letter ad-
dressed to our editorial board, he asks for help to bring Mr. Malevich,
our countryman and one of the leading artists in the Russian art world,
to Poland. We draw the matter to the attention of the Department of
Culture and Art.21

Indeed, in 1922, Strzemiński declared that Malevich was ‘a giant’, whose de-
velopment had been ‘blocked by Lunacharsky’, who had failed to recognise
true artistic value. Instead, the Commissar of Enlightenment had supported
the Productivists, whom Strzemiński criticised for having ‘no idea about the
efforts that have led to Cubist and Suprematist developments’.22
In inter-war Poland, unlike Soviet Russia, positions adopted towards pro-
gressive art were theoretical, rather than practical. They indicated the situ-
ation of avant-garde artists in relation to the group dynamics of the Polish
progressive art scene, but they did not have any political relevance in the
Second Polish Republic.23 While progressive artists did not adopt a stance of
militant opposition – regained Polish independence made everyone enthusi-
astically patriotic – they were marginalised by both the public and official-
dom. Mainstream art in Poland consisted of Neo-Classicism and Neo-Realism,
both of which, as Irena Kossowska observes, ‘resulted from a rejection of the
self-referential experimentation with non-representational and abstract form
manifest in modernism, and a denunciation of the intellectual speculation

21 Władysław Strzemiński, ‘O sztuce rosyskiej – notatki’ [Notes on Russian Art], Zwrotnica,

3, (1922); translation adapted from Wanda Kemp-Welch in Between Worlds, 272-280; this
quote, 272.
22 Strzemiński, ‘O sztuce rosyskiej – notatki’; Between Worlds, 279.
23 The Second Polish Republic was also called The Commonwealth of Poland, or Rzecz-
pospolita Polska.
246 Forgács

typical of the Avant-Garde’.24 This was a general trend, which accompanied

and went in parallel with a thriving international Avant-Garde during the
first half of the 1920s. This anti-modernist development prompted Benjamin
Buchloh to note that just ‘after the Readymade and The Black Square’ audi-
ences were craving ‘the restoration of the visual codes of recognizability’.25
Suprematism, therefore, reached the small minority of avant-garde artists in
Eastern and Central Europe, at a time when these were working in the shadow
of the increasingly mainstream trends of Neo-Realism and Neo-Classicism.
Buchloh also pointed to the First World War as a watershed, stating, ‘The first
major breakdown of the modernist idiom in twentieth-century painting oc-
curs at the beginning of the First World War, signalled by the end of Cubism
and Futurism and the abandonment of critical ideals by the very artists who
had initiated those movements’.26 Malevich’s work, reaching Eastern and Cen-
tral Europe in the wake of the War, resonated as a continuation of the pre-war
Avant-Garde’s critical stance of opposition.
Strzemiński’s ‘Notes on Russian Art’ was controversial from the very begin-
ning. The rampant anti-Russian and anti-Soviet feeling in Poland made any ar-
ticle about Russian culture provocative. The author, therefore, stressed Male-
vich’s Polish ethnicity, by pointing out that he ‘is not the first pre-eminent
Pole in Russian art’.27 Of course, Strzemiński‘s unequivocal admiration for
Malevich had changed by 1924, when he founded the Blok Circle and journal
with Kobro, Henryk Stażewski (1894-1988), Mieczysław Szczuka (1898-1927),
Teresa Żarnower (1895-1950), and others. Typically, these self-confessed ‘Cu-
bists, Suprematists and Constructivists’ blurred the boundaries between these
various aesthetic trends, although the group became increasingly committed
to Constructivism. In the first issue of Blok in March 1924, Stażewski already
identified what he called ‘Post-Suprematism’ and the ‘bankruptcy of Suprema-
tism’, maintaining that since the latter’s emergence ‘A new notion of beauty is

24 Irena Kossowska, ‘Introduction: Reframing Tradition – Art in Central and Eastern Europe
between the two World Wars’, in Kossowska, ed., Reinterpreting the Past: Traditionalist
Artistic trends in Central and Eastern Europe of the 1920s and 1930s (Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki
Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2010), 10.
25 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Re-
turn of Representation in European Painting’, October, 6 (Spring 1981): 39-68; reprinted in
Marcia Tucker, ed., Art After Modernism (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary
Art, 1984), 107.
26 Buchloh, ‘Figures of Authority’, 110.
27 Strzemiński, ‘O sztuce rosyskiej – notatki’; Between Worlds, 275. The Russian artists cited
are Vladimir Orlovsky and Mikhail Vrubel.
Malevich in Eastern Europe during the Inter-War Period 247

born – the beauty of utilitarianism’.28 Blok started to criticise Malevich in harsh

terms, deliberately skewing the arguments in its favour, by using the editors’
and contributors’ own definition of the terms of the debate. ‘Suprematism did
not define the concept of shape in painting’,29 Strzemiński stated, and he re-
proached Malevich for misunderstanding the relations ‘between art and tech-
nology, art and astronomy, and art and [geometry]’.30 By this time, Strzemiński
was developing his own rigorous concept of ‘absolute painting’, which he as-
serted had to be absolutely flat and avoid any interaction between the forms –
a system that he fully elaborated in his manifesto, Unism in Painting, which
was published in 1928.31
Strzemiński‘s Unism was indebted to Malevich; the author acknowledged
that ‘The introduction of the plane into the picture, several years ahead of all
the other modern movements, was the contribution of Suprematism’.32 Then,
however, the text declares that dynamism in painting (also a feature of Supre-
matism), and every tension between the pictorial components are baroque –
which is clearly intended to be a highly derogatory term here. The text stresses
that every dualism has to be eliminated in painting and ‘be replaced by the
Unist conception’.33 For Strzemiński, the solidity and integrity of the painting,
which are its unique values, could only be guaranteed by absolute flatness.
The painting must be free from every kind of contrast and must move ‘from
the baroque drama to the mystical conception of the picture as …. uniform
and flat’.34 Both Malevich and Mondrian were rejected because they failed to
achieve the ethereal level of perfect balance – a sort of Zen – that Strzemiński
demanded.
When Malevich arrived in Warsaw in March 1927, on his way to Berlin, he
received a mixed reception. On the one hand, he was enthusiastically wel-
comed and celebrated by some Polish artists, who organised an exhibition
of his works and arranged a festive banquet in his honour. Tadeusz Peiper,
for instance, greeted him warmly and expressed the hope that he could be-
come a permanent member of the Polish art world, stating: ‘Polish artists are

28 Henryk Stażewski, ‘O suprematisme w malarstwe’ [Concerning Suprematism in Paint-

ing], Blok, 1 (8 March 1924); trans. Wanda Kemp-Welch, as ‘Untitled Statements on Supre-
matism and Painting’, in Between Worlds, 492-493, these quotes, 492.
29 Władysław Strzemiński, ‘B=2’, Blok, 8/9 (1924); trans. Wanda Kemp-Welch in Between
Worlds, 497-503; this quote, 501
30 Strzemiński, ‘B=2’; Between Worlds, 501.
31 Strzemiński, Unizm w malarstwie; Between Worlds, 649-657.
32 Ibid., 655.
33 Ibid., 653.
34 Ibid., 657.
248 Forgács

Figure 12.1 Kazimir Malevich with members of the Polish art world, at the Banquet held in
his honour, during his exhibition at the Polonia Hotel, Warsaw, 25 March 1927.
Photographer unknown.

overcome with melancholy at the thought that the Pole Malevich is not here
working at their side [because] our artistic life is not exactly rich with artists
of his calibre. We miss Malevich … Malevich should not just visit us!’35 As
Turowski relates, Malevich first of all met members of the Praesens group, in-
cluding Henryk Stażewski, Helena and Szymon Syrkus, as well as Strzemiński
and Kobro:

Malevich’s exhibition in Warsaw was held at the Polish Arts Club … in

the Polonia Hotel, where the club took up the entire first floor … The
Polonia occupied an important place on the social, cultural and political
map of the capital. Its position, beyond the traditional city centre and in
direct proximity to the international railway station, bestowed a certain
prestige.36

An improvised exhibition of Malevich’s paintings was arranged in the large

club room of the hotel (Fig. 12.1). The show lasted for a week, during which a

35 Tadeusz Peiper, ‘Malewicz w Polsce’ [Malevich in Poland], Zwrotnica, 11 (1927); trans.

Wanda Kemp-Welch, in Between Worlds, 664.
36 Turowski, Malewicz w Warszawie, 196, 199, 202.
Malevich in Eastern Europe during the Inter-War Period 249

festive banquet was held to welcome and celebrate the painter. Subsequently,
a large number of reviews and articles on Malevich appeared in the Polish
press.37
Despite the adulation, Malevich was sharply criticised by some artists and
critics, including Szczuka, who attacked him in an article entitled ‘The Funeral
of Suprematism’.38 Szczuka pointed to the many strong modernists in Poland
who had come a long way since they had admired Malevich. He stressed that,
‘Malevich’s exhibition is a little too late for our country’,39 and explained that
‘Kazimir Malevich is the founder of Eastern-European Suprematism’ which,
he emphasised, has failed to achieve ‘complete flatness’ such as dictated by
Unism. Szczuka admitted that complete flatness is ‘an unattainable objective’,
but, short of this achievement, Suprematism has ended up being merely a
form of ‘abstract museum painting’.40 ‘Eastern-European Suprematism’ lacks
dynamism, while, disturbingly, it features ‘a certain literary character, result-
ing from the juxtaposition of abstract shapes, thrown onto an unrelated back-
ground’.41 In other words, the painter (i.e. Malevich) failed to keep the picture
non-referential. It is, in Strzemiński’s terms, baroque. More profoundly detach-
ing himself and all true Polish modernists from Malevich, Szczuka asserted
that ‘the characteristic feature of Malevich’s psychology is an abhorrence of
the word “construction”, applied to works of art. He is a Romantic who loves
painterly means for their own sake.’42
This last statement marks a turning point in the Polish interpretation of
Malevich’s work as well as indicating a fundamental change within the Polish
Avant-Garde, which was now firmly committed to utilitarianism. The earlier
fascination with Malevich’s cosmic abstraction was turning into contempt for
‘Art for art’s sake, served up by the artist priest … [and] Mystical and theo-
logical speculations in which Malevich attempted to contain his conception
of art’.43 Szczuka’s rant has more to do with the change in the Polish Avant-
Garde than with Malevich’s art and philosophy and, precisely because of this,
it vividly conveys the sharp tone that characterised Polish avant-garde dis-
course of the late 1920s. The multitude of views expressed in the numerous
articles implies a serious and informed discussion of the future possibilities
for the visual arts. Unism was not the only authoritative voice in the debate.

37 See a list of the publications in Turowski, Malewicz w Warszawie, 206.

38 Mieczysław Szczuka, ‘Pozgonne suprematyzmu’ [The Funeral of Suprematism], Dzwig-
nia, 2-3 (1927); trans. Wanda Kemp-Welch, in Between Worlds, 664-666.
39 Szczuka, ‘Pozgonne suprematyzmu’; Between Worlds, 665.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 666.
43 Ibid.
250 Forgács

Malevich’s Suprematism and its concepts functioned as bouncing boards for

various artistic ideas – perfectionist, absolutist – and for those who dismissed
him as imperfect or obsolete. Yet whatever standpoint artists adopted, both
Malevich’s theory and practice remained constant points of reference.

The Hungarian Artists’ Response to Suprematism

In contrast to the Polish art scene, the generation of Hungarian modernists

who came of age in the late 1920s discovered Malevich and the Russian Avant-
Garde indirectly and often by chance, through sources and information, some
of which had been mediated by Lajos Kassák’s journals, Today [Ma], Budapest
1916-1919, Vienna 1920-1925, Document [Dokumentum], 1926-1927, and Work
[Munka], 1928-1939. Every article about the Russian Avant-Garde and every
reproduction of their works that came via Vienna or Berlin inevitably pos-
sessed strong political overtones in Hungary, after the short-lived Communist
Republic was defeated in 1919 and the country became staunchly right-wing
and nationalist. The Russian Avant-Garde was summarily dismissed as com-
munist, so that every bit of news about it resonated with socialists, young peo-
ple, and anyone who sympathised with radical objectives in politics or art. In
1928, some students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest formed a group
called The Young Progressives. It included Lajos Vajda (1908-1941), Dezső Kor-
niss (1908-1984), Béla Veszelszky (1905-1977), György Kepes (1906-2001), Sándor
Trauner (1906-1993), Béla Hegedüs (1910-1940), and Ernő Schubert (1903-1960),
all of whom had attempted to reconcile their own ideas with the dynamics
of a loosely understood Russian Constructivism and the visual and thematic
freedom of French Surrealism. The former inspired geometric compositions,
the latter photomontages. Of course, these artists had all been children in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time when Malevich had launched Supre-
matism. They were outsiders, who did not accept the officially encouraged,
conservative and Catholic Neo-Classicism that dominated Hungarian art at
this time. The group’s first public exhibition in 1928 at the Budapest Hall of
Arts caused a scandal, and a committee was set up to investigate the stu-
dents’ politically unacceptable interest in abstraction in general and their
enthusiasm for the Soviet-Russian version in particular. As a result of the
committee’s findings, the students were expelled from the Academy of Fine
Arts along with their professors who were held responsible for the group’s
works. Thereupon, the young artists joined the avant-garde Work [Munka] cir-
cle of Lajos Kassák, who had returned to Hungary from his Viennese exile in
1926.
Malevich in Eastern Europe during the Inter-War Period 251

Kassák and his publications proved to be a treasure trove of information

about Malevich and his Russian colleagues. He had seen and reviewed the First
Russian Art Exhibition (1922) in Berlin and, as mentioned above, had invited
Konstantin Umanskii to give an illustrated talk about the Russian Avant-Garde
in Vienna,44 where Malevich’s work was briefly characterised as ‘the most ab-
stract geometry, the purest negation of material’. Kassák was also in personal
contact with Lissitzky, who designed a cover for Today [Ma].45 Reproductions
of Lissitzky’s works were also published in the journal, as well as in The Book of
New Artists [Új művészek könyve], a visual compilation of art works and tech-
nical objects, edited by Kassák and László Moholy-Nagy in Vienna in 1922.46
The issues of Ma published during Kassák’s exile in Vienna were more or
less systematically smuggled into Hungary by his wife Jolán Simon. They pro-
vided news about artistic innovations that were otherwise completely inac-
cessible. The Young Progressives, in all probability, first learnt about Malevich
from Kassák’s publications.
It was not known until his retrospective in 2009 at the Hungarian National
Gallery in Budapest that Lajos Vajda had been extremely keen to acquaint
himself with the writings and ideas of Malevich and Lissitzky. A manuscript in
Vajda’s handwriting was displayed for the first time at this exhibition, although
the source was not identified (Fig. 12.2). It turned out to be a handwritten copy
that Vajda had made of Malevich and Lissitzky’s texts that had been published
in the 1925 Europa Almanach, entitled respectively, ‘Kazimir Malevich / Supre-
matism (from the Writings 1915-20) [‘K. Malewitsch / Suprematismus (aus den
Schriften 1915-20)’],47 and Lissitzky’s ‘A. and Pangeometry’ [‘K. und Pangeome-
trie’ – ‘K’ standing for ‘Kunst’, or art].
Vajda must have thought that these texts were very important because he
carefully copied both articles, without skipping a word, and made sketches of
the images. He had probably borrowed the book and wanted to own these ar-
ticles in full before returning the volume. Subsequently, Vajda produced paint-
ings akin to those created by the Russian Avant-Garde. His 1928 Abstract Com-
position in charcoal on paper (Fig. 12.3) reflects his interest in Russian Con-
structivism’s geometric rigour, but it also conveys a dreamy vision, which ap-
pears to have been inspired by Paul Klee. The fact that Vajda read and copied

44 See Note 18.

45 Lissitzky designed the cover of Ma, VII, 8 (August 1922).
46 The book was published by Julius Fischer Verlag, Vienna.
47 ‘K. Malewitsch / Suprematismus (Aus den Schriften 1915-20)’, in Paul Westheim and Carl
Einstein, eds., Europa Alamanch (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenhauer Verlag, 1925), 142-144; and
El Lissitzky, ‘K. und Pangeometrie’, in Europa Alamanch 103-113.
252 Forgács

Figure 12.2 Lajos Vajda, Handwritten copy of Malevich article from the Europa Almanach,
c. 1928, private collection, Budapest.

Malevich and Lissitzky’s articles suggests that he did not have access to many
other sources of information and, therefore, did not possess a very profound
or detailed understanding of creative developments in Russia. Rather than
sorting out the various trends, groups, styles, and individual approaches, he
formed a fairly general understanding of the Russian Avant-Garde’s achieve-
ments. In this respect, he mirrors the way in which Soviet and Russian art
generally tended to be received in the West. In two 1928 paintings, entitled
Malevich in Eastern Europe during the Inter-War Period 253

Figure 12.3 Lajos Vajda, Abstract Composition, 1928, charcoal on paper, 19 × 19 cm., private
collection.

Film and Fics (pronounced as ‘Fich’), Vadja combined Cubist, Constructivist,

and Suprematist motifs with what he considered to be the most progressive
medium of modern expression – film. In Film (Fig. 12.4), he replicated the Rus-
sian word for film (фильм), but he made the mistake of omitting the ‘soft sign’,
probably because he knew Serbian but apparently not Russian. Appropriately,
Film includes Suprematist motifs such as a circle, half-circles, and rectangular
shapes; while Fics features rectangles, the segment of an arch, a circle, a guitar-
shape and rectangular forms fragmented in a Cubist manner. Neither of these
Russian-inspired pictures displays any real knowledge of the formal language
of Suprematism, but they do suggest that Vajda was adopting and combining
various motifs from a wide range of Russian avant-garde art.
It is not absolutely clear how the Malevich article – a medley of excerpts
from the artist’s writings – came to be printed in the Europa Almanach, and
thus how it fell into the hands of many artists in Eastern and Central Europe.
Certainly, there is no evidence whatsoever that Malevich submitted the text,
254 Forgács

Figure 12.4 Lajos Vajda, Film, 1928, charcoal and watercolour on paper, 48.69 × 56.8 cm.,
private collection.

saw it or edited it prior to publication. The aphoristic statements were clearly

taken from some of his writings that Lissitzky had translated into German with
the help of Sophie Küppers.48 In fact, the publication of such a collection of
excerpts had actually been suggested by Theo van Doesburg in his reader’s
report of 1924 concerning Lissitzky’s proposal for a volume of Malevich’s writ-
ings, which had probably been submitted to the same Gustav Kiepenhauer
Verlag that published the Europa Almanach.49 Scrutinising the history of how
Van Doesburg killed the planned volume of Malevich’s writings, and the role

48 See the many letters concerning this work that El Lissitzky wrote to Sophie Küppers,
mostly in 1924 and early 1925, in the Archives of the Getty Research Institute, Box 950076,
F 1-F 3. For example, on 4 February 1924, Lissitzky wrote about translating Malevich’s
writings: ‘Mit Malewitsch ist noch viel zu tun aber es wird schon werden’ [There is still
a lot to do about Malevich but it will soon be done]; On 25 March 1925, he thanked
Sophie for correcting his translation drafts and complained that Malevich’s faulty Russian
complicated his work of translating.
49 Theo van Doesburg’s reader’s report, Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Dokumentatie,
The Hague.
Malevich in Eastern Europe during the Inter-War Period 255

that his conflict-ridden relationship with Lissitzky may have played in it, is be-
yond the frames of the present paper.50 Suffice it to quote from Van Doesburg’s
report:

The contents [of Malevich’s writings] are mostly vague, murky, and with-
out any consequence on the development of thinking. The ideas are,
inasmuch as they are enveloped in romantic-symbolist phraseology, nei-
ther new, nor important, and they are full of contradictions … Maybe a
short article of 3, or at most 4 pages could be put together out of the
whole in an aphoristic format.51

The published few pages in ‘an aphoristic format’ are exactly what Vajda found
in the Europa Almanach, which was co-edited by Paul Westheim, who had also
published Lissitzky’s translation of Malevich’s article on Lenin in his journal
Das Kunstblatt in 1924,52 also issued by the Gustav Kiepenhauer Verlag. In this
way, the edited excerpts from Malevich’s essays – most likely put together by
Lissitzky – were able to find their way into the anthology, which also included
Lissitzky’s essay.
In contrast to the Polish art scene, where an aesthetic of perfectionist ab-
straction was unfolding amidst a number of other trends, there was a lot of
uncertainty in Hungary about the possibilities of painting and the direction
that it should take in the late 1920s. Politically-charged geometric abstraction
was not even on the agenda of Kassák’s leftist Work [Munka] circle, which
most of the Young Progressives had joined. Vajda was also active as a member
of the Recital Choir, which performed socially-progressive poems, exploiting
the compelling effect of orchestrated human voices. The Young Progressives,
however, soon found themselves in conflict with Kassák who wanted an ide-
ologically homogenous group and did not tolerate any kind of dissent. He
considered abstract painting, for example, to be elitist and incomprehensi-
ble to the working class, so replaced it with socially-committed photography,

50 Lissitzky and Van Doesburg’s relationship was complicated. They were close friends un-
til c. 1923, when they quarreled, and were reconciled only when Lissitzky informed van
Doesburg about his illness in 1924. For details, see Kai-Uwe Hemken, El Lissitzky. Rev-
olution und Avantgarde (Cologne: DuMont, 1990), and Lissitzky’s letters to his wife in
Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, trans. Helen Aldwinckle (Lon-
don: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 331, 332. See also Linda S. Boersma, ‘Malevich, Lissitzky,
Van Doesburg: Suprematism’, in Rethinking Malevich, 223-236.
51 Van Doesburg’s report, as in Note 49.
52 Kasimir Malewitsch, ‘Lenin. Aus dem Buch “Über das Ungegenständliche”’, Das Kunst-
blatt, 10 (1924): 289-293, trans. El Lissitzky.
256 Forgács

founding the ‘Socio-Photo Movement’. Authoritarian and rather dogmatic, he

demanded more political and aesthetic loyalty than the young artists were
willing to give. Unlike Strzemiński, Kassák was not a purist, but he did de-
mand social consciousness in art and a comprehensible visual language. He
did not champion utilitarianism, although he was close to Proletkult (The Pro-
letarian Culture Movement), which promoted culture among the masses and
considered that art should perform a socially and politically educative role. In
Kassák’s group, Proletkult was championed by Béla Uitz, who visited the So-
viet Union in 1921 and later moved there. Nevertheless, Kassák maintained his
conviction that art should make some concessions to audiences who were not
educated enough to understand modern forms of expression.53 The Russian-
inspired paintings of Vajda did not quite fit into this increasingly populist and,
at the same time, classicist left-wing style. Kassák was a socialist rather than a
communist, and he wanted to control the group’s artistic and political orienta-
tion. In contrast to Poland, in Hungary, the art world did not offer a wide range
of alternative avant-garde circles and directions, so that Vajda and the other
Young Progressives had nowhere to go outside the circle of the Work [Munka]
journal. By 1930, every member of the Young Progressives had left Hungary,
without either fully assimilating Suprematism or formulating a substantial cri-
tique of its theory and practice.

Geometric Abstraction as a Shortcut into the Future

While Malevich had constructed a lineage from ‘Cubism and Futurism to

Suprematism’ in 1915, achieving a closure of the previous era with the radi-
cal Black Square as the ‘zero of form’,54 many Eastern and Central Europeans’
primary understanding of Suprematism and geometric abstraction in general

53 In this respect, Kassák was more consistent in words than deeds. His public presentations
had changed enormously in Budapest in 1919. After his 1926 return to Hungary from Vi-
enna, he increasingly adjusted to his working-class audiences, simplifying the language
and style of his journal Work [Munka] and the performing activities of his circle. For
more details, see Éva Forgács, ‘The Avant-Garde in Hungary and Its Audience’, in Tsukasa
Kodera, ed., Modernism and Central- and East European Art & Culture (Osaka: Osaka Uni-
versity/ The 21st Century COE Program, 2007).
54 Kazimir Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k Suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm
[From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism] (Moscow: Ob-
shchestvennaia pol’za, 1916); English translation, in K. S. Malevich: Essays on Art, 1915-1933,
ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Bor-
gens Forlag, 1968), I: 19.
Malevich in Eastern Europe during the Inter-War Period 257

was defined by the fact that this visual language was not tied to the historical
style of any one particular culture. Adapting such a modern visual expression
appeared to ensure a rapid integration into a newly emerging international-
ism. In this respect, Suprematism was regarded, just like any other version of
abstraction, as a shortcut to a utopian future, which artists believed was im-
minent – at least until about the mid-1920s. As the Hungarian art critic Ernő
Kállai observed in 1926:

It seemed that [abstraction] would fit immediately, without the detour

of evolution through national traditions, into the overall artistic frame-
work of the longed-for new, collective world. For artists coming from
the uncertain peripheries of this emerging international Europe, this was
bound to seem an extraordinary opportunity: the utopian prospects that
[abstraction] presented to the Eastern temperament, with its unfailing
capacity for enthusiasm and overactive imagination, had the force of a
new Revelation.55

Many works and writings by Eastern and Central European artists from the
early 1920s prove that Kállai was right. The international Avant-Garde’s dis-
course clearly anticipated a new art for a new historical era – a new art that
would use a visual language identical to or close to that of Suprematism. El
Lissitzky’s Tale of Two Squares ‘constructed’ (in his words) earlier but only
published in De Stijl in 1922, addresses children, the citizens of that new in-
ternational republic.

Shift in Focus 1927

In his review of Malevich’s 1927 Berlin exhibition, which formed part of the
Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung, Kállai offered a more detailed analysis of
Suprematism.56 The text surveys Malevich’s career from Post-Impressionism,
through Cubism and Cubo-Futurism to Suprematism, considering the latter
to be ‘Intensely personal and unique, organically fusing West-European ele-
ments with original and ancient Russian ones’.57 Kállai identified a continuity
between the religiosity of Malevich’s early primitivist works and the visionary,
cosmic ‘enthusiasm’ of his Suprematist imagery, which for Kállai anticipated

55 Ernő Kállai: Új magyar piktúra [New Hungarian Painting] (Budapest: Amicus, 1926), 181.
56 Ernst Kállai, ‘Kasimir Malewitsch’, Das Kunstblatt (July 1927): 264-266.
57 Ibid.
258 Forgács

an entirely new understanding of the Universe. He attributed the change to

the new perspectives generated in the aftermath of the First World War and
the Russian Revolution of 1917. He argued that from contemplating the mystery
of nature, Malevich was propelled into the ‘trans-natural world of dynamism
and unimpeded freedom’.58
At the time of writing his review, Kállai was living in Berlin and was fully ac-
quainted with the German and international art scenes, which were both am-
ply represented in the city. His understanding and interpretation of Malevich
was also influenced by his concept of Hungarian and, more broadly, Eastern
and Central European art of the late 1920s. Unlike Szczuka in Warsaw, Kállai
did not condemn Malevich for his abstract idiom, but he was much less enthu-
siastic about it than about some of his other painterly attainments. Although
sensitive to the religious, confessional, and utopian dimensions of Malevich’s
art, Kállai ended up appreciating Suprematism for its bravura in creating a
sense of space in painting by minimising its formal elements. It would not
be correct to say that Kállai misunderstood Suprematism, but his emphasis
on Malevich’s professional achievements rather than on his visionary power
reflects the post-utopian moment of the inter-war period, when wit and the
inventive use of painterly elements carried more weight than the universal
anticipation of an emerging new world.

58 Ibid., 265.
 Chapter 13

Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? Suprematism

and Constructivism

Christina Lodder

We tend to think of Suprematism and Constructivism as being diametrically

opposed in their approach to the work of art and the process of creativity.
In part, this is because of the overt animosity that existed between Kazimir
Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, who are regarded as the leaders of these two
movements. This enmity has usually been regarded as the result of the long-
standing rivalry between the two artists, which had been strengthened by the
competitive atmosphere that characterised the pre-revolutionary Russian art
world.1 By the early 1920s, personal antagonisms had been reinforced by sev-
eral crucial and substantial creative and theoretical differences, some of which
pre-dated the Revolution, although many had appeared with particular inten-
sity after the emergence of Constructivism in March 1921.
Constructivism’s emphasis on industry, technology, utility, and Commu-
nism seemed completely at odds with Suprematism’s more explicitly aesthetic,
spiritual and metaphysical content. In 1924, Malevich stressed, ‘those who
know Suprematism and Constructivism will not confuse these two phenom-
ena’.2 He was particularly opposed to the importance that the Constructivists
gave to technology and utility. For Malevich, Constructivism represented the
‘academicism of technology’,3 and its focus on objects of practical necessity

1 For a penetrating analysis of the relationship between Malevich and Tatlin, see Charlotte
Douglas, ‘Tatlin und Malewitsch: Geschichte und Theorie 1914-1915 / Tatlin i Malevich: istoriia
i teoriia 1914-1915’, in Jürgen Harten, ed., Vladimir Tatlin: Leben, Werk, Wirkung. Eine inter-
nationales Symposium (Cologne: Dumont Buchverlag, 1983), 210-218 (German) and 430-437
(Russian). See also Christina Lodder ‘Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich: A Creative Di-
alogue’ in Tatlin: New Art for a New World: International Symposium (Basel: The Museum
Tinguely, 2013), 243-247.
2 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Zapiski ob arkhitektury’ [Notes on Architecture], 1924, ms; English trans-
lation in K. S. Malevich, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism: Unpublished Writings 1913-1933, ed.
Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Hoffmann (Copenhagen: Borgens Forlag, 1978), 109.
3 Kazimir Malevich, letter to the Dutch Artists, 7 September 1921; English translation in Kaz-
imir Malevich, Letters, Documents, Memoirs and Criticism, Russian edition: eds., Irina A.
Vakar and Tatiana N. Mikhienko; English edition: trans. Antonina W. Bouis, ed. Wendy
Salmond, general ed. Charlotte Douglas (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), I: 153.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_015

260 Lodder

was completely antithetical to the spiritual ambitions of Suprematism. He in-

sisted that ‘utilitarian functions have one role in life, the functions of art a
different one’.4 For the Constructivists, Suprematism seemed too much con-
cerned with art itself, rather than concentrating on reconstructing the external
world. It seemed to ignore communist ideology, and the demands of industry,
engineering, science, and technology in favour of aesthetics.
While acknowledging this incontrovertible opposition in terms of creative
outlook, I would like to suggest that the Suprematists and Constructivists also
shared certain fundamental values and principles in their approaches to the
creative process and the nature of artistic form. I shall argue that these shared
values, which were rooted in the pre-revolutionary period, continued through-
out the existence of the two movements in the 1920s.5 While their common
commitment to using their artistic skill to reconstruct and reconfigure physical
reality may have been stimulated by the October Revolution, other concerns,
such as their dedication to creative invention and their steadfast involvement
in exploring the elements of artistic culture, such as space, material, form,
colour, faktura [texture], and technique, have their origin in the 1910s when
Suprematist painting first emerged and constructed sculpture developed (on
the basis of which the more ideologically and industrially charged Construc-
tivism was later formulated in March 1921).
Indeed, although Constructivism as a term and set of creative principles
only materialised in 1921, Suprematism and constructed sculpture developed
in close proximity in the 1910s. Suprematism as a pictorial style appeared in
early summer 1915, when Malevich painted the first Suprematist composition,
and it became public knowledge in November and December 1915 (Fig. 13.1).6

4 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Maliarstvo v problemi arkhitekury’, Nova generatsiia, 2 (Kharkov /

Kharkiv, 1928): 116-124; English translation, as ‘Painting and the Problem of Architecture’,
in K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art, 1915-1933, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus
and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Borgens Forlag, 1968), II: 11.
5 For an excellent discussion of the relationship between Suprematism and Constructivism
which focuses on the evolution of terminological and theoretical distinctions, see Tatiana
Goriacheva, ‘Suprematism and Constructivism: An Intersection of Parallels’ in Charlotte
Douglas and Christina Lodder, eds., Rethinking Malevich: Proceedings of a Conference in Cel-
ebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Birth (London: Pindar Press, 2007),
67-81.
6 Malevich showed three Suprematist canvases at The Exhibition of Contemporary Decora-
tive Art. Embroidery and Carpets from Artists’ Designs [Vystavka sovremennogo dekorativnogo
iskusstva. Vyshivki i kovry po eskizam khudozhnikov] (Moscow: Galereia Lemers’e, 1915), which
opened on 6 November 1915, several weeks before Malevich showed thirty-nine Suprematist
paintings at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero-Ten) [Poslednaia futuristich-
eskaia vystavka kartin, 0,10 (nol’-desiat’)] (Petrograd: Khudozhestvennoe Biuro N. E. Dobuchi-
noi, 19 November 1915 – 19 January 1916). See Julia Tulovsky’s essay in this volume.
Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? 261

Figure 13.1 The display of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist canvases at The Last Futurist
Exhibition of Paintings, 0.10 (Zero-Ten), December 1915 – January 1916, Petrograd.

A year earlier, in 1914, Tatlin had produced his first reliefs, and subsequently he
and other artists made constructed sculptures, which lay the formal basis for
Constructivism.
Both Suprematist painting and constructed sculpture (what might be called
Proto-Constructivism), had been stimulated by the inventions of Cubism, but
both went beyond Cubism, in rejecting figurative subject matter and embrac-
ing what Malevich called ‘objectless art’ [bespredmetnoe iskusstvo]. As Male-
vich acknowledged in 1915, ‘Through the destruction of the object, Cubism
[moves] towards pure painting’.7 Malevich had worked through Cubism to
Suprematism via Cubo-Futurism and Alogism from 1912 onwards. Tatlin, how-
ever, had not engaged with Cubist painting, but had first been stimulated to
create reliefs when he encountered the Cubist constructions of Pablo Picasso
and Georges Braque, during his visit to Paris in spring 1914. Following his re-
turn to Moscow, Tatlin began producing ‘synthetic-static compositions’ and

7 K. Malevich, Ot kubizma k suprematiszmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm [From Cubism to Supre-

matism: The New Painterly Realism] (Petrograd: L. Ia. Ginzburg, 1916), 10; English translation
in Charlotte Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the Origins of Abstraction
in Russia (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1980), 107-110; quote, 109.
262 Lodder

‘pictorial reliefs’, which he presented to the Moscow public for the first time
in his studio, 10-14 May that year.8 These constructed works rapidly became
less figurative and moved beyond the frame and the base, becoming objectless
assemblages of real materials built up in space and fully integrating space into
their centre, focusing on the nature of the materials, their inter-relationships
and their dynamic interaction with their immediate spatial environment.
Given their mutual origins in Cubism, it is not surprising that, in the pre-
revolutionary period, strong affinities existed between Suprematist painting
and constructed sculpture, between the pictorial and the sculptural, between
the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional explorations of abstract form.
These affinities were based on a shared approach to artistic invention and to
the work of art as a constructed material entity – a ding an sich, which in-
volved a common interest in exploring the potential of the medium, the na-
ture of artistic elements and how each distinct feature operated in relation to
each other and within the whole. This general avant-garde approach came to
be called ‘artistic culture’ and was later defined and formulated in more de-
tail in an important statement produced in 1919 when avant-garde artists were
working together in the Department of Fine Arts within the People’s Commis-
sariat of Enlightenment (Otdel izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv, Narodnyi komissariat
prosveshcheniia – IZO, Narkompros). This statement defined the essential
qualities of artistic culture as follows:
1) material – surface, texture [faktura], elasticity, density, weight and other
properties of material
2) colour – saturation, strength, relationship to light, purity, transparency,
independence and other qualities
3) space – volume, depth, dimension and other properties of space
4) time (movement) – in its spatial expression and in connection with
colour, material, composition, etc
5) form as a result of the interaction of material, colour, space, and, in its
distinctive form, composition
6) technique [tekhnika] – painting, mosaic, reliefs of various kinds, sculp-
ture, masonry, and other artistic techniques.9
In effect, this statement on artistic culture summed up the creative values of
the pre-revolutionary Avant-Garde and is as relevant to Suprematist painting

8 Vystavka sintezo-statichnykh kompozitsii (Pervaia vystavka zhivopisnykh rel’efov) (Moscow:

Studio No. 3, at 37 Ostozhenka, 10-14 May 1914). See Anatolii Strigalev and Jürgen Harten,
eds., Vladimir Tatlin: Retrospektive (Dusseldorf: Kunsthalle, 1993), 400.
9 ‘Polozhenie Otdela izobrazitel’nyh iskusstv i khudozhestvennoi promyshlennosti NKP po vo-
prosu “o khudozhestvennoi kul’ture”’, Iskusstvo kommuny, 11 (16 February 1919): 4.
Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? 263

Figure 13.2 Vladimir Tatlin, Corner Counter-Relief, 1915, paint, wire, wood and various met-
als, Lost. Presumed destroyed.

as it is to constructed sculpture. Both creative approaches emphasised the ma-

teriality of the art object, its existence as an independent and autonomous
phenomenon, an object complete unto itself, distinct from the everyday world.
Material, texture or faktura were fundamental to both idioms. This empha-
sis is perhaps more immediately evident in Tatlin’s reliefs, which were made of
‘wood, metals, glass, plaster, cardboard, gesso, tar’, each possessing a different
texture, such as the smooth and cold shiny surface of the metal and the rough
warm graining of the wood. The effects of various tones, colours and textures,
were enhanced with ‘putty, gloss paints, steam, sprinkled with dust, and other
means’.10 This is evident in Corner Counter Relief, where the light metals con-
trast with darker components, and the shading reinforces the shape of the bil-
lowing forms, intensifying the work’s material and spatial presence (Fig. 13.2).
The texture of the ragged edges of the metal indicates how the artist cut and

10 Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin (Petrograd: Zhurnal dlia vsekh, 1915), 3; reproduced in Larissa
Alekseevna Zhadova, ed., Tatlin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), plate 125; En-
glish translation, ibid., 331. The text of Tatlin’s 1915 brochure was apparently written
by Nadezhda Udaltsova, see Vasilii Rakitin, ‘Nadezhda Udaltsova’, in John E. Bowlt and
Matthew Drutt eds., Amazons of the Avant-Garde: Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova,
Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova (London: Royal Academy,
1999), 273.
264 Lodder

shaped the metal, evoking the physical process of creation. The inherent tones
of the materials employed serve to enhance the complexity of the structure
and the identity of the discrete components, intensifying the work’s spatial
impact.
Although it is perhaps less obvious, faktura is equally central to Suprema-
tist painting.11 Malevich stated, ‘Faktura is the body of colour’,12 and stressed
that ‘Faktura is the essence of painting’.13 Malevich’s explorations of faktura
focused on the nature of the pigment, its viscosity, thickness, manner of ap-
plication (thinly or thickly), the nature of the brush strokes, and the variety
of pictorial textures created within the painting as a whole. In Airplane Flying
of 1915 (Fig. 13.3, 13.4), faktura intensifies the quality of the forms. The scum-
bling painting technique that Malevich used for the grounds contrasts with
the more smoothly painted elements of the composition. Sometimes there
are gaps around the forms which reveal pencil marks or bare sized canvas – a
different texture to that of the ground and the shapes themselves. Occasion-
ally, the colour defining the form overlaps the white ground, creating a lighter
border to the shape, adding vibrancy to its presence on the canvas.
Malevich had insisted that ‘Colour and texture in paintings are ends in
themselves. They are the essence of painting’.14 His subtle orchestrations of
texture enhance the effects of the various tones, saturations and intensities of
colour that he employed to produce sensations of dynamism and space within
the composition. He admitted, ‘the power of space in painting depends on
faktura’.15 Whereas constructed sculptures exploit actual space as a material
component and directly interact with their spatial environment, Suprematist
paintings evoke sensations of space and movement, creating pictorial equiva-
lents for them by means of the white ground, the variations in texture, colour,
and tonal density of the pictorial elements, the asymmetrical qualities of the
composition, and the irregular articulation and slight distortion of the forms

11 This concern continued in Suprematism during the post-revolutionary period, when fak-
tura became a means of expressing less material ideas. For a fascinating discussion of
this aspect of post-revolutionay Suprematism, see the essay by Maria Kokkori, Alexander
Bouras and Irina Karasik in this volume.
12 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Supremus. Kubizm i futurizm’ [Supremus: Cubism and Futurism], c.
December 1916, ms; reprinted in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh,
ed. Aleksandra Shatskikh, (Moscow: Gileia, 2004), V: 40-53; English translation in Patricia
Railing, ed., Malevich Writes: A Theory of Creativity: Cubism to Suprematism (Forest Row:
Artists Bookworks, 2014), 66-82, quote, 75.
13 Ibid.
14 K. Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm [From Cu-
bism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism] (Moscow: Obshchestven-
naia pol’za, 1916); English translation in Malevich: Essays, I: 25.
15 Malevich, ‘Supremus. Kubizm i futurizm’; Railing, Malevich Writes, 75.
Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? 265

Figure 13.3 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, 1915, oil on canvas,
57.3 × 47.3 cm., The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
© Photo SCALA, Florence.

in relation to the plane, which imply motion and twisting in space as well as
movement between the forms. Malevich deliberately chose the colour white
for his grounds, explaining that ‘The blue colour of the sky has been defeated
by the Suprematist system, has been broken through and entered white, as
the true, real conception of infinity’.16 In Airplane Flying of 1915 (Fig. 13.4),
all the elements are organised along a diagonal, indicating movement across

16 K. Malevich, ‘Suprematizm’, Katalog desiatoi gosudarstvennoi vystavki. Bespredmetnoe

tvorchestvo i suprematizm (Moscow, 1919); reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, I:
151; English translation as ‘Non-Objective Creation and Suprematism’, in Malevich, Es-
says, I: 121.
266 Lodder

Figure 13.4 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, 1915, oil on canvas,
57.3 × 47.3 cm., The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Details.
© Photo SCALA, Florence.

the plane, while the subtle differences in tonalities and textures between the
various yellow shapes suggest that they exist in different spatial planes, im-
plying movement. The paler yellow shapes give the impression that they have
receded slightly or exist in deeper space, while the brighter colours advance.
Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? 267

In contrast, Tatlin used actual space as a material component of his sculp-

tures, which inherently create a dynamic relationship with space. Corner
Counter Relief of 1915 (Fig. 13.2), for instance, is built up in space around a core
structure and is liberated from the plane, the frame, the wall, the floor, and
gravity. Slung across the corners of the room, it appears to float effortlessly in
its own spatial environment, interacting dynamically with it. Tatlin explained
that he was concerned to explore ‘the manifestations of material as such
and its consequences – movement, tension, and their inter-relationship’.17 Dy-
namism was also inherent in the way the configuration changed with different
angles of viewing, in the juxtapositions of the material components and in
the overall effect it produced. One contemporary critic even observed that the
Corner Counter-Relief (Fig. 13.2), resembled ‘Something like an aeroplane in
full flight’.18
Despite the shared interest in space, dynamism and faktura, which resulted
in an intensive exploration of the potential of the medium (whether sculpture
or painting), there were important differences, even at this stage. In 1915, Male-
vich had hung his Black Square across the corners of a room, alluding to the
role of the icon in the domestic Russian Orthodox interior, and imbuing his im-
age with a metaphysical resonance (Fig. 13.1). He called The Black Square ‘the
icon of my time’.19 At the same time, he affixed titles to his work explicitly refer-
encing the fourth dimension, for example, Boy with a Knapsack: Colour Masses
in the Fourth Dimension.20 He explained, Suprematism is ‘a purely painterly
trend that is two-dimensional as a painterly plane’, while ‘the fourth dimen-
sion … is time in the painterly movement of colour in space’.21

17 Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin; Zhadova, Tatlin, 331.

18 A. Rostislavov, ‘O vystvke futuristov’, Rech’ (January 1916); reproduced in Hermann
Berninger and Jean-Albert Cartier, Pougny: Jean Pougny (Iwan Puni) 1892–1956: Catalogue
de l’œuvre, Tome 1: Les Années de l’avant-garde, Russie–Berlin, 1910–1923 (Tübingen: Editions
Ernst Wasmuth; and Paris: Office du Livre, 1972), 62.
19 Kazimir Malevich, letter to Alexandre Benois, May 1916; English translation in Malevich,
Letters, I: 85.
Irina Vakar has suggested that Benois’s response may actually have prompted Male-
vich to think about the icon in relation to The Black Square, and that he may not have
originally intended to make this connection. See Irina Vakar, Kazimir Malevich. Chernyi
kvadrat (Moscow: State Tretyakov Gallery, 2015), 28-33.
20 Kazimir Malevich, Painterly Realism. Boy with a Knapsack – Colour Masses in the Fourth
Dimension [Zhivopisnyi realizm, malchik c rantsem – krasochnyii massy v 4-m izmerenii],
1915, oil on canvas, 71.1 × 44.4 cm., Museum of Modern Art, New York.
21 Malevich, ‘Kubizm’ [Cubism], c.1917, ms; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, V:
60-63; English translation in Railing, Malevich Writes, 91-94; quote, 94.
268 Lodder

Tatlin’s works seem remote from such notions, being emphatically ‘con-
structed of earthly material facts’.22 Yet the use of found objects, bearing the
marks of human use and possessing their own history, also introduced a notion
of time into the works. Moreover, the Corner Counter-Reliefs, hung across the
corners of the room, also recalled the position of icons in a Russian Orthodox
domestic interior, invoking a higher state of consciousness, a spiritual reality
and a metaphysical truth. The Corner Counter-Relief (Fig. 13.2) billows out to-
wards the observer, inferring sensations of material, movement and absolute
space. As the spectator moves in an arc across the corner, the relief reveals
different aspects of its form, inviting a viewing process that itself unfolds over
time. Perhaps in these various ways, Tatlin may also have been referring to the
nexus of ideas connected with the fourth dimension.
Such affinities became less evident during the revolutionary period, when
the approaches adopted by the Suprematists and the future Constructivists
began to diverge more markedly, although they continued to share certain
fundamental creative values. Of course, Malevich, Tatlin and their entourages,
like other avant-garde artists, responded positively to the October Revolution
of 1917. They joined IZO Narkompros, where they became involved in running
the artistic life of the country, organising museums, art schools, artistic pub-
lications, producing decorations for the revolutionary festivals, designing pro-
paganda posters and devising programmes for revolutionary events. They also
became inspired by visions of building a new world – visions that did not nec-
essarily correspond to those of the Bolsheviks themselves.
From the beginning, Malevich had considered Suprematist elements to be
integral ingredients of an entire new system which would be able to function
within every medium of creativity – painting, sculpture, poetry and music.23
In November 1915, he had initiated Suprematism’s move into the wider world
of more practical activity when he exhibited three paintings at the exhibi-
tion Modern Decorative Art: Embroidery and Carpets from Artists’ Designs, in
Moscow.24 Subsequently, in the aftermath of 1917, Malevich came to consider
that Suprematist elements provided the foundation for a future formal style,
which could provide the basis for a systematisation of art, architecture and de-
sign.25 Malevich insisted that ‘art must become the content of life, since only

22 Norbert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2009), 51.
23 For a fascinating examination of this aspect of early Suprematism, see Charlotte Dou-
glas’s essay in this volume.
24 Katalog vystavki sovremennogo dekorativnogo iskusstva. Vyshivki i kovry po eskizam khu-
dozhnikov. For more details, see Julia Tulovsky’s essay in this volume.
25 Douglas, ‘Tatlin i Malevich’, 436
Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? 269

then can life be beautiful’,26 and explained, ‘We wish to build the world up
according to an objectless system, departing further and further from the ob-
ject, like the cosmos’s creation of nature’.27 The role of the artist and of art was
no longer simply to reflect reality, but to create it. Hence Unovis (Utverditeli
novogo iskusstva – Champions of the New Art), set up in Vitebsk in early 1920,
was committed to extending Suprematism into all realms of human life, in-
cluding architecture.28 Unovis declared, ‘Our workshops no longer paint pic-
tures, they construct the forms of life’.29 The group envisaged and wanted to
create ‘a utilitarian and dynamically spiritual world of objects’.30 This involved
a range of activities. Later Lissitzky recalled: ‘In Vitebsk … for a factory festi-
val, Malevich and I painted fifteen hundred square metres of canvas, designed
three buildings, and built a stage in the civic theatre for a ceremonial session
of the factory committee’.31 Members of Unovis, as individuals and as part of
a team, devised schemes for decorating the exteriors and interiors of build-
ings, developed designs for posters, books, ration cards, clothes, textiles, and
later ceramics, furniture and buildings.32 In 1920, Malevich observed that ‘at
the present time, Suprematism is growing, as a new architectural construction
in space and time’.33
Suprematism and constructed sculpture moved into architecture around
the same time. In 1920, Tatlin created his Model for a Monument to the Third In-
ternational (Fig. 13.5) and Malevich’s student Ilia Chashnik in Vitebsk devised

26 Malevich, ‘Maliarstvo v problemi arkhitekury’; Malevich, Essays, II: 18.

27 Kazimir Malevich, letter to the Dutch Artists, 12 February 1922; English translation in
Malevich, Letters, I: 151-155, where it is printed alongside an earlier draft.
28 For an illuminating discussion of Suprematist architecture, see Samuel Johnson’s essay
in this volume. See also, for example, Tatiana Mikhienko, ‘The Suprematist Column – A
Monument to Non-Objective Art’, in Matthew Drutt, ed., Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism
(New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2003), 79-87; Christina Lodder, ‘Living in
Space: Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Architecture and the Philosophy of Nikolai Fe-
dorov’ in Douglas and Lodder, eds., Rethinking Malevich, 172-202; and Maria Gough, ‘Ar-
chitecture as Such’, in Achim Borchardt-Hume, ed., Malevich (London: Tate Publishing,
2014), 158-163.
29 Ot Unovisa – my khotim [From Unovis – We Want] (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920); English transla-
tion in Larissa A. Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910-1930,
trans. Alexander Lieven (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 298.
30 Ot Uovisa – my khotim; Zhadova, Malevich, 298.
31 El Lissitzky, ‘New Russian Art: A Lecture, 1922’, in Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky:
Life, Letters, Texts (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 338.
32 For the discussion of some of these areas of Unovis design, please see the essays by Yulia
Karpova, Regina Khidekel, Samuel Johnson and Julia Tulovsky in this volume.
33 K. Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka [Suprematism: 34 Drawings] (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1920);
English translation in Malevich, Essays, 1: 126.
270 Lodder

Figure 13.5 Vladimir Tatlin, Model for a Monument to the Third International, 1920, wood,
metal and wire, c. 5 metres high, Lost, presumed destroyed. Drawing from Niko-
lai Punin, Pamiatnik III internatsionala (Petrograd: Izdanie Otdela Izobrazitel’-
nykh Iskusstv, N. K. P., 1920).

a speaker’s tribune for Smolensk (Fig. 13.6). The two projects mark the point
of greatest affinity between emergent Constructivism and post-revolutionary
Suprematism. In Chashnik’s project, the girder construction creates an em-
phatic aura of industrial utility as it soars upwards at a dramatic angle, while
the cube at its base emphatically links the structure to pictorial Suprema-
tism and its seminal image The Black Square. Likewise, the skeletal structure
of Tatlin’s monument supported several large geometric bodies (a cylinder –
originally intended to be a cube, a pyramid and a hemisphere) which also
seem to allude to the geometric language of Suprematism. Both Tatlin and
Chashnik’s projects are indebted to the I and T beam structures of contempo-
rary engineering and both designs express the precision of the machine and
Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? 271

Figure 13.6 Ilia Chashnik, Project for a Tribune for a Smolensk Square, 1920, as reproduced
in Unovis. Listok Vitebskogo Tvorkoma, No. 1 (20 November 1920).
Photograph courtesy of the Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Col-
lection.

combine it with an explicitly ideological function. Chashnik’s design was for a

speaker’s platform, Tatlin’s Tower was to act as a centre for the Comintern (The
Third Communist International), which was dedicated to promoting socialism
and world revolution. Although both Chashnik and Tatlin emphasised the role
of art in their designs, Tatlin also stressed the superiority of technology and
functionality: the banner that he displayed with his monument in Petrograd,
stressed the role of politics, utility, and technology, calling on engineers to in-
vent new forms.34 Malevich disapproved of Tatlin’s Tower and seems to have
equally disliked the celebration of technology in Chashnik’s design, which had
been produced in El Lissitzky’s studio at the Vitebsk People’s Art School.35 This
point of Suprematism’s convergence with Constructivism has to be attributed

34 See photographs of the installation of the Model for the Monument to the Third Interna-
tional in November 1920, as reproduced, for instance, in Zhadova, Tatlin, fig. 177. A banner
in the background is unclear but seems to contain the message: ‘Engineers and Bridge
Builders make the calculations for the invention of a new form’ [Inzhinery-Mostoviki de-
laite raschet izobretaniia [?] novoi formy]. Tatlin’s Tower was displayed in the Mosaics
Studio of the former Imperial Academy of Arts, which was the Petrograd State Free Art
Studios in 1920. Today the school is called the St. Petersburg Institute for Painting, Sculp-
ture and Architecture, but is still located in the Academy’s former premises on Vasilii
Island in St. Petersburg.
35 Ilia Chashnik, letter to Lazar Khidekel, March 1921, Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Col-
lection. Władysław Strzemiński was enthusiastic about Chashnik’s tribune and wanted to
272 Lodder

to Lissitzky, who had a received a technical and architectural training in Ger-

many before the First World War.36 The incident also revealed the seeds of
future discord between Lissitzky and Malevich.37
The importance of industry and technology to the survival of the work-
ers’ state and the construction of a communist future had stimulated a re-
evaluation of art’s social role and had led to the formulation of the concept of
production art by the theorists attached to the newspaper Art of the Commune
[Iskusstvo kommuny]. These theorists argued that artistic creation should be
more closely related to the needs of industry, society and the realisation of a
future communist collective. While the future Constructivists embraced this
notion, Malevich seems to have become more immersed in the mystical ele-
ments of his approach. In 1918, he wrote ‘The field of colour must be annihi-
lated, i.e. it must transform itself into white’, explaining that ‘white … points to
my transformation in time’.38 The White on White paintings of 1918 epitomise
the ‘philosophical sublime’.39
Towards the end of 1920, as soon as the Bolsheviks were assured of victory
in the Civil War, they began to exert control over art and culture. The gov-

see it erected on Smolensk’s Red Square in November 1920, as part of the city’s decora-
tions marking the anniversary of the Revolution. Strzemiński issued an official invitation
to Chashnik on 23 October 1920. See Vasilii Rakitin, Il’ia Chashnik. Khudozhnik novogo
vremeni (Moscow: RA / Palace Editions, 2000), 16.
Two drawings of Chashnik’s project were published in Unovis. Listok Vitebskogo
Tvorkoma, 1 (20 November 1920), where they accompanied several articles, including
Khidekel, ‘The New Realism – Our Contemporaneity’ [Novyi realizm – nasha sovremen-
nost’], and Nina Kogan, ‘On Graphics’ [O grafike].
36 Elements of Lissitzky’s practice from the very beginning possessed parallels with the early
work produced by the Constructivists. Even in his early Proun paintings, Lissitzky inten-
sified the faktura of his compositions by employing a variety of real materials in com-
bination with compositional structures inspired by Malevich’s Suprematism, although
often with a three-dimensional resonance, which was missing in Malevich’s works. See,
for instance, Lissitzky, Proun 19D, 1920-1921, gesso, oil, varnish, crayon, coloured papers,
sandpaper, graph paper, cardboard, metallic paint and metal foil on plywood, 97.5 ×
97.2 cm., Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In 1922, in Germany, Lissitzky adopted a position that straddled Suprematism and
Constructivism. On the one hand, he began to use the term Constructivism, and became
a founding member of the International Faction of Constructivists. On the other, he gave
his own meaning to the term, so that it combined a respect for technology and a desire
to participate in rebuilding the world with a continued commitment to creating works of
art. This stance became typical of International Constructivism.
37 For a more detailed exploration of the relationship between Malevich and Lissitzky in
terms of their architectural visions, see Samuel Johnson’s essay in this volume.
38 Kazimir Malevich, untitled, c. 1918, ms; English translation in Railing, Malevich Writes, 118.
39 Charlotte Douglas, Malevich (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 24.
Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? 273

ernment purged IZO of avant-garde elements and began to emphasise official

requirements and use financial and administrative controls to promote an ac-
cessible figurative art that could act as effective propaganda for the regime. At
the same time, the New Economic Policy (NEP), instituted by Lenin in early
1921, restored small-scale private enterprise. Having run the show prior to this,
avant-garde artists of all persuasions (including both Suprematist painters and
artists who had been producing constructed sculptures) now had to adapt to a
very different situation.
The Working Group of Constructivists (along with its programme written
by Aleksei Gan in March 1921) can be seen as a response to these new con-
ditions. The Constructivists rejected art as a self-contained activity, and de-
clared, ‘Death to Art’. They wanted to relegate their purely artistic explorations
to the role of ‘laboratory work’, and to extend their experiments with manip-
ulating three-dimensional abstract forms into the real environment by partic-
ipating in the industrial manufacture of useful objects. They called the new
type of activity that they envisaged ‘intellectual production’, proclaiming that
their ideological foundation was ‘scientific Communism, built on the theory of
historical materialism’. Their ultimate goal was ‘the communistic expression
of material structures’, which they hoped to attain by organising their material
according to the three principles of tektonika (‘tectonics’, or the socially and
politically appropriate use of industrial material), construction (the organisa-
tion of this material for a given purpose) and faktura (the conscious handling
and manipulation of it). In other words, the Constructivists wanted to use their
artistic skills not to create art works for the delectation of the privileged indi-
vidual, but to design everyday objects, which could be used by the masses. In
this way, they hoped to participate in the building of a new communist society
in Russia.40
The programme introduced several new terms: the word ‘Constructivist’,
which denoted the new kind of creative figure; the concept of ‘intellectual
and material production’ which conveyed a new type of creative activity
(corresponding to what we today call design); the notion of ‘the communist
expression of material structures’, which indicated the new type of product

40 See ‘Programme of the Working Group of Constructivists of Inkhuk’ in S. O. Khan-

Magomedov, Rodchenko: The Complete Work (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 290.
The programme was published in 1922 in A. Gan ‘Front khudozhestvennogo truda.
Materialy k Vserossiiskoi konferentsii levykh v iskusstve. Konstruktivisty’, Ermitazh, 13
(1922): 3. The essential approach was elaborated in Aleksei Gan, Konstruktivizm (Tver’,
1922). For an English translation, see Aleksei Gan, Constructivism, ed. and trans. Christina
Lodder (Barcelona: Tenov, 2013).
274 Lodder

that was to result from this new approach to creative activity; and the princi-
ple of ‘tectonics’, which went hand in hand with faktura and construction.
The terms faktura and construction had a long-established currency in Rus-
sian artistic discourse, but tectonics [tektonika] was completely new. In Con-
structivism, Gan wrote that ‘The word ‘tectonics’ is taken from geology, where
it is used to define the eruptions coming from the Earth’s core’.41 Just as a
volcano could suddenly destroy its existing surroundings and transform them
completely, so tectonics could revolutionise reality. The Constructivists’ pro-
gramme made the ideological connotations explicit: ‘Tectonics or the tectonic
style is organically smelted and forged from the qualities of Communism itself
on the one hand, and from the purposeful use of industrial material on the
other’.42
In contrast, faktura was a pre-revolutionary term, introduced by David
Burliuk in 1912 as the Russian equivalent for the French term facture, denot-
ing the texture of the painted surface.43 As discussed above, Malevich had
used it with this meaning in his statements, while his paintings exemplified
the importance of the technique in conveying sensations of spatial tension
and dynamism. In 1914, Vladimir Markov (Voldemārs Matvejs) had explored
the practical and philosophical ramifications of faktura in relation to sculp-
ture, architecture, and icon painting, as well as nature and the machine.44
His concepts relate directly to Tatlin’s counter-reliefs, and to the Monument
to the Third International, where the smoothness and strength of metal was
to express not merely the individual sensibilities of the artist, but also the
power and might of the collective will of the industrial proletariat, while glass
was to convey the transparency and accessibility of the new form of gov-
ernment for all.45 In many ways, the Constructivists’ definition of faktura, as
‘the conscious choice of material and its appropriate utilisation without inter-
rupting the dynamics of construction or limiting its tectonics’, corresponded

41 Gan, Konstruktivizm, 61.

42 ‘Programme of the Working Group of Constructivists’; Khan-Magomedov, Rodchenko,
290.
43 See David Burliuk, ‘Kubizm’ and ‘Faktura’ in Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu
(Moscow, 1912), 95-101, and 102-110; English translation of ‘Cubism’ in John E. Bowlt, ed.,
and trans., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902-1934 (New York: The
Viking Press, 1976), 70-77.
44 Vladimir Markov, Printsipy tvorchestva v plasticheskikh iskusstvakh. Faktura (St. Peters-
burg: Izdanie obshchestva khudozhnikov ‘Souiz Molodezhi,’ 1914).
45 See, for instance, Nikolai Punin, Pamiatnik III internatsionala (Petrograd: Izdanie Otdela
Izobrazitel’nykh Iskusstv, N. K. P., 1920); and Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 65.
Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? 275

directly to the practical example of Tatlin’s monument and the identifica-

tion between the proletariat and the machine that it celebrated.46 In fact,
for the Constructivists, material became almost synonymous with faktura and
largely supplanted it. Tatlin announced his ‘culture of materials’, but Malevich
emphatically rejected it, asserting, ‘Suprematism’s attitude to materials is di-
rectly opposed to the agitation that is now growing in favour of the culture
of materials’.47 He insisted that Suprematism was concerned with ‘produc-
ing the image through the utilitarian perfections of economic necessity’, and
‘The elaboration of the surfaces of materials is the psychosis of contemporary
artists’.48
The Constructivists also gave a slightly different meaning to the term ‘con-
struction’ [konstruktsiia]. The word had first appeared in Russian artistic dis-
course after the Parisian Cubists referred to construction in Cubist painting
in 1912: ‘To compose, to construct, to design, reduces itself to this: to deter-
mine by our own activity the dynamism of form’.49 That same year, Markov
adopted the term ‘constructiveness’ or ‘constructivity’ [konstruktivnost’] to de-
note the rational, logical aspect of art.50 Malevich was clearly in line with these
ideas when he praised Cubist construction, and wrote that ‘painterly essence
emerged from constructiveness [konstruktivnost’] i.e. it arrived at the general
constructive [konstruktivnyi] art of structures [sooruzheniia]’.51 Yet from be-
ing a general characteristic of form making, ‘construction’ came to denote a
completely new approach to that process. During the Composition/Construc-
tion debates within the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture (Institut khu-
dozhestvennoi kul’tury – Inkhuk) in the winter and early spring of 1920-1921,
Aleksandr Rodchenko concluded that: ‘All new approaches to art arise from
technology and engineering and move towards organisation and construction’

46 ‘Programme of the Working Group of Constructivists’, Khan-Magomedov, Rodchenko,

290.
47 Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka; Malevich, Essays, I: 126.
48 Ibid.
49 See Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du ‘Cubisme’ (Paris: Eugène Figuière, 1912); English
translation in Edward Fry, Cubism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 107. Two Russian
translations of Du ‘Cubisme’ were published in 1913.
50 Vladimir Markov, ‘Printsipy novogo iskusstva’, Soiuz molodezhi (St. Petersburg), no. 1, April
1912, pp. 5-14, and no. 2, June 1912, pp. 5-18; English translation in Bowlt, Russian Art of the
Avant-Garde, pp. 25-38.
51 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Kubizm, razrushitel’ idei veshchi’, c. 1918, ms; reprinted in Malevich,
Sobranie sochinenii, V: 275; English translation, as ‘Cubism Destroys the Idea of the Object’,
in Railing, Malevich Writes, 113.
276 Lodder

Figure 13.7 Installation photograph of the Constructivist exhibits at the Obmokhu Exhibi-
tion, Moscow, May 1921.
Photograph courtesy of the Rodchenko-Stepanova Archive,
Moscow.

and ‘real construction is utilitarian necessity’.52 Later Malevich dated the

emergence of Constructivism back to the moment when Cubist construction
moved from the canvas into three dimensions.53 Nevertheless, as Tatiana Go-
riacheva points out, Malevich continued to use the terms ‘construction’, ‘con-
structiveness’, ‘constructivity’, and ‘constructive’ within the context of Supre-
matism and Unovis, after 1921, to a large extent retaining the meanings that
he had given to these terms previously, so that construction still denoted per-
fected, pure form.54
In May 1921, the Constructivists launched their new approach by showing a
range of three-dimensional works at the Moscow exhibition of the Obmokhu
(Obshchestvo molodykh khudozhnikov – Society of Young Artists), a fact that
serves to highlight the strong link between pre- and post-revolutionary con-
structed sculpture and the new movement of Constructivism (Fig. 13.7). Alek-

52 See ‘Protokol zasedaniia Inkhuka’, 1 January 1921 and 21 January 1921, ms, Rodchenko-
Stepanova archive, Moscow.
53 Malevich, ‘Maliarstvo v problemi arkhitekury’; Malevich, Essays, II: 10-11.
54 Goriacheva, ‘Suprematism and Constructivism’, 69-70.
Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? 277

sandr Rodchenko, Karl Ioganson (Kārlis Johansons), Konstantin Medunetskii

and the Stenberg brothes, Georgii and Vladimir, all showed constructions that
had been assembled from various materials: metal, wood, wood painted to em-
ulate metal, and glass. Tatlin had described iron and glass as ‘the materials of
modern classicism’.55 The resonance and faktura of metal and glass expressed
modernity, epitomising the machine, technology, and the grandiose structures
of contemporary engineering, effectively announcing the construction of a
new world, in line with the vision of a future communist utopia. The Con-
structivists’ works imitated the precision and clarity of industrial materials.
There were no ragged edges, no sense of the artist’s individual touch. Instead,
these materials were smooth, machine tooled, and their faktura possessed an
impersonal or collective ethos.
Similarly, all the constructions exhibited in May 1921 used space as an inte-
gral and, indeed, a major component of the overall structure. The configura-
tions were based on mathematics and engineering, and the components em-
ployed were more precise than those that Tatlin had used, and often defined
space rather than merely incorporating it or existing within it. Rodchenko’s se-
ries of geometric hanging structures literally moved from the two-dimensional
plane into three-dimensional space. The shape (whether for the ellipse, cir-
cle, hexagon, triangle or square) had been cut concentrically from a sheet of
plywood and then the individual shapes had been rotated and positioned in
space (Fig. 13.8). Dynamism was inherent in the process of construction, but
the works were also suspended from the ceiling, where they moved constantly
(within very limited parameters) in accordance with the ambient motion of
the atmosphere. The effect was enhanced by the aluminium paint applied to
the wood, which gave the illusion of metal, but also acted as a reflective sur-
face, dematerialising the object further.
Some of these constructions, notably those by Rodchenko, combined the
geometry pioneered by Suprematism (now systematised, regularised and ra-
tionalised) with concerns for defining space, as well as an interest in material,
mathematics, geometric form, and the process of constructing forms in three-
dimensional space. Although Rodchenko was a founding member of the Work-
ing Group of Constructivists, he had earlier experimented with Malevich’s
approach and had produced objectless paintings with white grounds, which
possess strong affinities with Suprematism, such as Objectless Composition

55 V. E. Tatlin, T. Shapiro, I. Meerzon, and P. Vinogradov, ‘Nasha predstoiashaia rabota’, VIII

s’ezd sovetov. Ezhednevnyi biulleten’ s’ezda VTsIK, 13 (1 January 1921): 11; English translation
in Zhadova, Tatlin, 239.
278 Lodder

Figure 13.8 Aleksandr Rodchenko, Spatial Constructon No. 12, Oval within an Oval or Ellipse,
1920-1921, plywood, aluminium paint and wire, 61 × 83.7 × 47 cm., Museum of
Modern Art, New York.
Photograph courtesy of the Rodchenko-Stepanova Archive,
Moscow.

No. 58 / Suprematism, 1918.56 In 1919, Rodchenko had written the ‘Manifesto

of the Suprematist and Objectless Painters’, for the Tenth State Exhibition: Ob-
jectless Creation and Suprematism.57 He had also painted a series of Black on
Black paintings as a challenge to Malevich’s White on White works, and had
announced the end of painting with three canvases in the three primary

56 Aleksandr Rodchenko, Objectless Composition No. 58 / Suprematism [Bespredmetnaia

kompozitsiia No. 58 / Suprematizm], 1918, oil on canvas, 73 × 50 cm., Nizhni Novgorod
State Museum; reproduced in A. L. Lavrent’ev, Aleksandr Rodchenko (Moscow: S. E.
Gordeev, 2011), 66, fig. 14.
57 Aleksandr Rodchenko, ‘Iz manifesta suprematistov i bespredmetnikov’ [From the Man-
ifesto of Suprematists and Non-Objective Painters], 1919, ms, Rodchenko-Stepanova
Archive, Moscow; English translation in Aleksander Rodchenko, Experiments for the Fu-
ture: Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings, ed. Alexander N. Lavrentiev, trans. Jamey
Gambrell (New York: Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2005), 85.
Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? 279

colours – red yellow and blue.58 It could be argued that his Suprematist ex-
perience was reflected in works like Ellipse, where the geometric forms of
Suprematism had been translated into skeletal three-dimensional structures,
while the white grounds of Suprematist painting, denoting space, had been
transformed into real space (Fig. 13.8). The inherent dynamism of Malevich’s
paintings had been transmuted into actual dynamism, inherent in the pro-
cess of construction and in the way the objects moved with the air currents.
Malevich’s weightless forms floating in the white space of the canvas had been
transformed into material constructions hanging in space and shifting slightly
with the ambient breeze. These affinities with Suprematism are reinforced by
the fact that Rodchenko called this series of spatial constructions ‘Planes Re-
flecting Light’ [Ploskosti otrazhaiushchie svet].59
Despite these similarities and possible connections, the Suprematists and
Constructivists approached design differently. Lissitzky, as a Suprematist sym-
pathetic to science and technology, observed that the Constructivists worked
‘in material and space’, while the designers of Unovis worked ‘in material and
on a plane’. He stressed that ‘They are opposed to each other in their concepts
of the practicality and utility of created things’. For Lissitzky, some Construc-
tivists mistakenly ‘went as far as a complete disavowal of art and, in their urge
to be inventors, devoted their energies to pure technology’. In contrast, ‘Unovis
distinguished between the concept of functionality, meaning the necessity for
the creation of new forms, and the question of direct serviceableness’. Never-
theless, he observed that ‘Both groups strove after one and the same result –
the creation of real things and architecture’.60
Certainly, alongside their design work, Malevich and his Suprematist fol-
lowers retained a strong and explicit belief in the role of art. In 1920, Malevich
had declared, ‘There can be no talk of painting in Suprematism. Painting has
long ago been outlived, and the painter himself is no more than a prejudice of
the past’.61 Painting had been abandoned, but art and Suprematist principles
remained crucial to Suprematist design. Malevich believed in ‘Suprematism

58 Aleksandr Rodchenko, ‘Smooth Colour’ Triptych: Pure Red Colour, Pure Yellow Colour, Pure
Blue Colour [Triptikh ‘Gladkii tsvet’, Chistyi krasnyi, chistyi zheltyi i chistyi sinii tsvet], 1921,
oil on canvas, 62.5 × 52.7 cm., Rodchenko-Stepanova Archive, Moscow; reproduced in
Lavrent’ev, Rodchenko, 146-147, fig. 9-11.
59 Lavrent’ev, Rodchenko, 392, caption for figs. 28-32.
60 All the quotes in this paragraph are taken from Lissitzky, ‘New Russian Art: A Lecture,
1922’, in Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, 336.
61 Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka; Malevich, Essays, I: 27.
280 Lodder

as the concept of a new world system’,62 and was adamant that ‘art plays an
enormous role in the building of life’.63 Malevich criticised the Constructivist
approach precisely because it prioritised non-aesthetic factors: function, util-
ity, material, politics, economics and industry over form. He especially disliked
the way in which the Constructivists elevated utility above art.64 For Malevich,
art was ‘an activity free from all economical, practical and religious ideolo-
gies’,65 and ‘utilitarianism imposed on art renders it useless’.66 He argued not
only that art was superior, but that it was actually an important factor in the
creation of objects of utility. He stated, ‘Utilitarian form is not created without
the participation of aesthetic action’,67 and ‘strictly speaking, there is not one
thing with a purely utilitarian aspect’.68 For Malevich, pure conceptual cre-
ativity was in, and of, itself utilitarian. He insisted that ‘Suprematist forms, as
abstraction [objectlessness], have achieved utilitarian perfection’.69
Malevich’s belief in the supreme role of art and Suprematism underpinned
all his design activity, including his explorations of architectural composition
with a series of plaster models that he called ‘architectons’ [arkhitektony].
A year after he started making these, he wrote ‘The architect is by nature al-
ways abstract, but life sets him the task to build his abstract forms and sit-
uate them in such a way that useful space for life may be created amidst
them … I understand architecture as an activity outside all utilitarianism, a
non-objective architecture, consequently possessing its own ideology, differ-
ent from that of other ideas’.70 This approach produced models like Architecton
Alpha, without the usual details concerning function, placement of windows
or doors, ground plans, descriptions of interior space or construction details.71

62 Ilia Chashnik, ‘The Suprematist Method’, 1922, ms; English translation in Railing, Malevich
Writes, 315.
63 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Suprematizm’, c. 1927, ms; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii,
II: 105-123; English translation in Malevich, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism, 144-156, quote
149.
64 For a discussion of the Suprematist notion of utility, see the essay by Tatiana Goriacheva
in this volume.
65 Malevich, ‘Zapiski ob arkhitektury’; Malevich, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism, 102.
66 Malevich, ‘Suprematizm’ (c. 1927); Malevich, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism, 154.
67 K. Malevich, O novykh sistemakh v iskusstve. Statika i skorost. Ustanovlenie A [On New
Systems in Art. Stasis and Speed. Resolution A] (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1919); English translation
in Malevich, Essays, I: 83.
68 Malevich, ‘Suprematizm’, (c. 1927); Malevich, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism, 149.
69 Malevich, Suprematizm. 34 risunka; Malevich Essays, I: 124.
70 Malevich, ‘Zapiski ob arkhitektury’; Malevich, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism, 102.
71 Kazimir Malevich, Architecton Alpha [Arkhitekton ‘Alfa’], 1923, plaster, 31.5 × 80.5 × 34,
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? 281

The smooth white surfaces of the model possess some visual resemblance to
a Constructivist building, such as Moscow’s Narkomfin building of 1928-1932,
but this was designed by the Constructivist architects, Moisei Ginzburg and
Ignatii Milinis, whose approach was the antithesis of Malevich’s. They had de-
veloped and applied what they called the functional method, which was based
on analysing the precise nature of all the different practical functions that the
building had to perform, along with structural, political and social factors. This
detailed analysis determined the spatial flow of the building, the allocation of
interior spaces, as well as the overall external massing.72
In tandem with the architectons, Malevich devised ‘planits’ [planity], resi-
dences for individuals that were located in space, rather than on the ground.
From the very beginning, Malevich had related Suprematism to cosmic space
and had written in 1916, ‘Suprematism … begins a new era beyond the bound-
aries of the earth’.73 As well as epitomising this spatial dimension of Supre-
matism, the planity also reflected the post-revolutionary notion that space,
in the sense of freedom from the Earth’s gravity, could also act as a powerful
metaphor for social and personal liberation. This idea was common to both
the planity and Tatlin’s air bicycle (The Letalin) of 1929-1932, which was also in-
tended to liberate the individual from gravity and enable them to move freely
through space.
Despite Malevich’s vehement opposition to Constructivism on principle,
certain elements that were fundamental to Suprematism can be detected in
Constructivist design. This is not surprising since many artists had actually ex-
perimented with Suprematist ideas before becoming committed to Construc-
tivism. Rodchenko was among this number. As indicated above, the hanging
constructions that he exhibited in 1921 possessed some affinities with Supre-
matism, and in 1925, he applied the experience of this ‘laboratory work’ to
designing various items of furniture the Workers’ Club, manufactured in Paris
for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Art [Ex-
position internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes] (Fig. 13.9).
All the items of furniture had been devised to perform various functions that
related to the Club’s events and activities. The table, for instance, could be
extended for making posters, while the flaps could also be lowered to act as
supports for books when the occupants wished to read. All items were space-
saving, so were frequently collapsible or multifunctional. They were based on
a commitment to utility, hygiene, and economy of materials, but the designs

72 See S.O. Khan-Magomedov, Moisei Ginzburg (Moscow: Arkhitekura S, 2007), 80-86.

73 Malevich, ‘Supremus. Kubizm i futurizm’; Railing, Malevich Writes, 76.
282 Lodder

Figure 13.9 Aleksandr Rodchenko, The Workers’ Club, Paris, 1925.

Photograph courtesy of the Rodchenko-Stepanova Archive,
Moscow.

also epitomised an inventive approach to the manipulation of the shapes used

to perform a specific function and they exploited the same kind of geomet-
ric form that that had been pioneered by Malevich in 1915. For example, the
chair consisted of strictly semi-circular and rectilinear components: the semi-
circular seat and the upper ring for the arms were supported by three rec-
tilinear uprights and three elongated cuboid elements at floor level. The de-
sign also employed grey along with the colour code of the Revolution – red
and black in conjunction with white – a combination that was also rooted in
Suprematism.74
The principle of economy was enshrined in the Workers’ Club. Rodchenko
explained that his design had been determined by several factors, including
‘economy in the use of the floor surface [and] economy of the space an object

74 In 1920, for instance, Malevich wrote, ‘The three squares of Suprematism represent the es-
tablishment of definite types of … world building … the black one as the sign of economy,
the red one as the signal for revolution, and the white one as pure action’ (Suprematism:
34 Drawings; Malevich, Essays, I: 126-127).
Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? 283

occupies for maximum capacity and use’.75 Yet the principle of economy was
also valued by the Suprematists. For Malevich, the ‘Suprematist surface of the
Square as the absolute expression of modernity’ meant that it had to ‘serve as
the basis for the economic extension of life’s action’, and he declared ‘Economy
to be the new fifth dimension, which evaluates and defines the Modernity
of the Arts and Creative Works’.76 Clearly, Malevich regarded economy as a
creative principle, while Rodchenko and his colleagues attached it firmly to
functionality, the machine and industrial production. With these variations,
the principle operated in all areas of Suprematist and Constructivist design.
For example, both groups used the forms of Euclidean geometry in their textile
designs, creating configurations of a few forms and colours, but while these
Suprematist arrangements floated against white grounds, the Constructivists
related their patterns closely to the manufacturing process and the structure of
the fabric, creating interlocking formations that related to the warp and weft
of the cloth.77
Official demands for a figurative art that could operate effectively as pro-
paganda intensified with the end of NEP, the implementation of the First
Five-Year Plan and the Collectivisation of Agriculture in 1928-9. Artists al-
lied with Constructivism, such as Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, who
had been working in typography, photography and photomontage during the
1920s, harnessed these skills to produce propaganda, creating inventive photo-
graphic layouts for magazines such as USSR in Construction [SSSR na stroike].
Gustav Klutsis (Gustavs Klucis), in particular, produced numerous propa-
ganda posters that manipulated photographic images. Earlier, he had studied
with Malevich, visited Vitebsk, and was affiliated with Unovis, despite study-
ing and then working at the Moscow Vkhutemas (Vysshie gosudarstvennye
khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie – Higher State Artistic and Tech-
nical Workshops). In 1920, he had produced works like Axonometric Painting,
which was based on one of Malevich’s compositions reproduced in Suprema-
tism: 34 Drawings (Fig. 13.10). Klutsis had subsequently become allied with the
Constructivists in 1922, when he designed a series of agitational stands for
the Third Congress of the Comintern and the Fifth Anniversary of the Revo-
lution. In posters like Under the Banner of Lenin for Socialist Construction of
1929 (Fig. 13.11), he used diagonal compositional principles, reminiscent of his

75 Varst, ‘Rabochii klub. Konstruktivist A. M. Rodcenko’, Sovremennaia arkhitektura, 1 (1926):

36.
76 Malevich, O novykh sistemakh v iskusstve; Malevich, Essays, I: 83.
77 For more details and reproductions of designs, see the essay by Julia Tulovsky in this
volume.
284 Lodder

Figure 13.10 Gustav Klutsis, Axonometric Painting [Aksonometricheskaia zhivopis’], 1920, oil
and mixed media on canvas, 96 × 57 cm., State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Suprematist painting, to convey a sense of dynamism, and he orchestrated

the ground using the texture of the photographs, translucent and transpar-
ent planes, colour and various tonalities to reinforce the ideological message,
giving the abstract idea a strikingly visual reality. In this poster, Klutsis used
principles and techniques developed in his explorations of pictorial Suprema-
tism within a more explicitly Constructivist framework of propaganda in the
service of the state. An erstwhile Suprematist like Lissitzky also used photo-
graphic material to document and celebrate the achievements of the Five-Year
Plans in the journal USSR in Construction and in his designs for international
exhibitions, which projected a positive image of the Soviet Union to the world.
In all these works, the artists continued to employ – albeit in a muted form –
Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? 285

Figure 13.11 Gustav Klutsis, Under the Banner of Lenin for Socialist Construction, 1929, litho-
graph.

some of the compositional and formal principles derived from their previous
experiments with Suprematism, objectless painting and constructed sculp-
ture. Despite the Constructivists’ emphatic rhetoric of utility, their designs of
the 1920s demonstrated essentially the same type of commitment to exploring
faktura, space, spatial dynamism, and technique that had underpinned their
earlier explorations.
In the late 1920s, in response to the virulence of the officially-supported
criticism directed against notions of formalism, both Suprematists and Con-
structivists returned to a measure of figuration. Malevich’s late paintings such
286 Lodder

as his Self Portrait are matched by Tatlin’s still lives, while the more functional
porcelain designs of Nikolai Suetin78 complement the more realistic and ide-
ologically pragmatic content of the photographic work of Constructivists like
Rodchenko and Stepanova.
The evidence of underlying affinities, which were masked by the rhetoric
and realities of the art world, can also be found in the personal connections
that straddled the evident creative divides, such as the long-lasting relation-
ship between Malevich and Aleksei Gan, the ideologue of Constructivism who
often supported Malevich and Suprematism. The friendship went back to 1918,
when Gan was editor of the art section in the anarchist newspaper Anar-
chy [Anarkhiia] and published several of Malevich’s articles.79 Malevich and
Gan had also written a manifesto together, ‘The Tasks of Art and the Role of
Art’s Suppressors’.80 For Gan, Malevich was ‘a great and eminent figure’.81 In
1920, Gan organised and collected the works for Malevich’s Moscow exhibi-
tion, wrote a small essay and produced wall texts for the show.82 In recogni-
tion of their association, Malevich made Gan an honorary member of Unovis,
although Gan apparently declined to become involved.83 Subsequently, Male-
vich calmly wondered how Gan would define ‘constructive art’ now that he
had founded the Constructivists.84

78 For details concerning Suprematist porcelain design, see the essay by Yulia Karpova in
this volume.
79 The articles that Malevich wrote for Anarchy [Anarkhiia] are reprinted in Malevich, So-
branie sochinenii, I: 61-125
80 Al. Gan, A. Morgunov and K. Malevich, ‘Zadachi iskusstva i rol’ dushitelei iskusstva’ [The
Tasks of Art and the Role of Art’s Suppressors], Anarkhiia, 25 (23 March 1918): 4; English
translation in Malevich, Essays, I: 49-50.
81 As reported in Varvara Stepanova, Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda. Pis’ma. Poeticheskie
opyty. Zapiski khudozhnitsy, ed. O. V. Melnikov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Sfera, 1994), 65.
82 See A. A. Sidorov, ‘Khudozhestvennye vystavki’ [Art Exhibitions], Tvorchestvo, 2-4 (1920):
34; English translation in Malevich, Letters, II: 518.
The exhibition was The Sixteenth State Exhibition: Solo Exhibition of K. Malevich:
His Path from Impressionism to Suprematism [16-aia gos[udarstvennaia] vystavka: Per-
sonal’naia vystavka K. Malevicha: Ego put’ ot impressionizma k suprematizmu], which
opened in Moscow on 25 March 1920.
83 Stepanova, Chelovek, 109.
84 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Suprematizm kak Unovisskoe dokazatel’stvo’ [Suprematism as Unovis
Proof], late 1921 – early 1922, ms; reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, V: 195-199;
English translation in Anna Kafetsi, ed., Russian Avant-Garde 1910-1930: The G. Costakis
Collection: Theory – Criticism (Athens: Ministry of Culture, National Gallery / Alexandros
Soutzos Museum; and Delphi: European Cultural Centre of Delphi, 1996), 571. The text
was written for a collection of articles entitled From Representation to Construction [Ot
izobrazheniia k konstruktsii], planned by the Moscow Inkhuk.
Conflicting Approaches to Creativity? 287

Even when Malevich became vehemently critical of Constructivism, he

seems to have retained a relationship with Gan and stored some works in Gan’s
Moscow studio when he was moving from Vitebsk to Petrograd in 1922.85 There
seem to have been some problems that summer, concerning the planned con-
ference of left-wing artists and the return of Malevich’s paintings.86 Neverthe-
less, despite this, Gan remained loyal to his old comrade and, in the late 1920s,
when Malevich was being attacked for his formalism, Gan supported him by
publishing his texts in the Constructivist journal, Contemporary Architecture
[Sovremennaia arkhitektura].87 He also wrote about Malevich in the magazine.
Although he acknowledged that the artist’s ‘three-dimensional Suprematist
compositions … have no concrete or social value’, Gan praised Malevich’s work
and stressed that ‘the novelty, purity and originality of abstract Suprematist
compositions will undoubtedly cultivate a new psychology of the perception
of volumetric and spatial masses’.88 Even later, in 1929, when Malevich’s large
retrospective opened at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow to relative si-
lence in the Soviet press, Gan reviewed it positively, emphasising the way in
which Malevich was exploring ‘the language of painting’ in his work and pur-
suing his task with honesty and dedication.89 The ideologue of Constructivism
continued to offer some support to the leader of Suprematism, expressing
admiration for Malevich’s formal explorations and his experimentation with
form and space, while completely ignoring his mystical ideas.
It is precisely Gan’s appreciation of Malevich’s consistent commitment to
creative innovation, experimentation, and an intense investigation of the es-
sential nature of form and technique, that indicates the values that Construc-
tivism and Suprematism shared. Constructivists did not mention art in their
rhetoric of utility and ideology, but a respect for, and engagement with, formal
innovation clearly underpinned their work.
As this indicates, the relationship between Suprematism and Construc-
tivism is not as clear cut as one would like it to be. It is, in fact, highly com-

85 A. I. Konopleva, ‘Aleksei Mikhailovich Gan’, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, 49 (2006): 212-221.

86 For details, see Tatiana Goriacheva, ‘Aleksei Gan i Kazimir Malevich’, in Arkhiv N I.
Khardzhieva. Russkii Avangard: Materialy i dokumenti iz sobraniia RGALI (Moscow: Defi,
2017), I: 160-221.
87 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Forma, tsvet i oshchushschenie’ [Form, Colour and Sensation], Sovre-
mennaia arkhitektura, 5 (1928): 157-159; English translation in Architectural Design (Lon-
don), V: 5/6 (1989: 45-47
88 See Aleksei Gan, ‘Spravka o Kazimire Maleviche’ [Note on Kazimir Malevich], Sovremen-
naia arkhitektura, 3 (1927): 104, 106; reprinted in Malevich, Letters, II: 539-541; English
translation in Architectural Design, V: 5/6 (1989): 35-36.
89 Alexej Gan, ‘Kasimir Malewitsch’, Moskauer Rundschau (24 November 1929).
288 Lodder

plicated and fraught with ambiguities. In many ways, both groups shared el-
ements of a formal language and the underlying premises on which that lan-
guage was based. There were strong aesthetic and sometimes even visual con-
tinuities between the languages of Constructivism and Suprematism. Both
groups were interested in space, faktura and in the fundamental building
blocks of artistic form and material. Not surprisingly, therefore, allegiances
were somewhat fluid: Rodchenko had experimented with Suprematist forms
before formulating and embracing a Constructivist position; Klutsis had also
moved from one group to the other; while Lissitzky clearly shared a respect for
technology, Communism and photography with his Constructivist colleagues.
Both groups had moved into architecture and design and both embraced el-
ements of utopian thinking. The groups had much in common, despite the
Constructivists’ rhetorical rejection of the value of art, their emphasis on util-
ity, functionality, materiality, and industry, their enthusiasm for Communism
and the specific requirements of constructing a new communist society and
environment, including their engagement with communist propaganda, and
their attachment to photography – which Malevich despised.
Unfortunately, the atmosphere of internecine strife between competing
artistic groups in the 1920s obscured the deeper and enduring affinities be-
tween the two movements in terms of their consistent avant-garde commit-
ment to aesthetic experimentation and to the principles of ‘artistic culture’.
Ultimately this attachment to exploration, invention, and innovation in rela-
tionship to the essential qualities of the work of art came to be known, some-
what derogatorily, as formalism. But until formalism was banned, those funda-
mental precepts developed by Malevich and Suprematism continued to echo
in the work of the Constructivists as well as in the productions of the Supre-
matists. Ultimately, in their approach to the creative process, the Suprematists
and the Constructivists had much more in common than they were willing to
acknowledge, especially while they were competing for resources and recog-
nition.
Index

Numbers in italics indicate illustrations.

ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen (Zurich) 6 Art International (Internatsional iskusstva,

abstract art. See objectless art Moscow) 92
academic art 132 art’s role in society 272
Academy of Arts (Akademiia khudozhestv), artistic creativity 89ff
Petrograd 37, 181, 271n34 artistic culture 5, 82, 86, 89ff, 93, 94ff, 262
Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest 250 definition 94, 262
aeroplane 71, 101, 154, 158, 159, 169, 176, 178, artistic form 260
267 Arvatov, Boris Ignatevich (1896-1940)
aeroplane hangar 154, 181 93n66, 95, 125
agitational art 136, 136, 137, 199, 201-202, Asnova (Assotsiatsiia novykh arkhitektorov –
209, 269, 283 Association of New Architects)
agitational porcelain 201-202, 209 146-147
agriculture 213, 214 astronomy 72, 247
air travel. See aeroplane atom 54, 58, 77, 110, 115, 171
Aksenov, Ivan Aleksandrovich (1883-1935) atomic theory 56
92 Austro-Hungarian Empire 242, 250
alchemy 56, 101, 122 Avant-Garde in Russia. See Russian
Allais Alphonse (1854-1905) 23 Avant-Garde
All-Russian Conference of Art Teachers and Avenarius, Richard Ludwig Heinrich
Students, Moscow June 1920 133, 138 (1843-1896) 81, 97, 98
Alogism 21, 24, 29, 39, 65, 70, 261 aviation. See aeroplane
Altman, Natan Isaevich (1889-1970) 201 Avramov, Arsenii Mikhailovich (1886-1944)
anarchism 93n66, 116 35
anarchist individualism 93
anarchist socialism 93 Bain, Alexander (1810-1877) 87
Anarchy (Anarkhiia, Moscow) 286 Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1814-1876)
Anchikov, Evgenii Vasilevich (1866-1937) 82 97
Andersen, Troels 14n11, 53n39 Baltic States 242
applied art 25, 198-220, 221-239, 268-269, Bauhaus, Germany 9, 184
273-274, 279, 281-285 beauty 83, 159, 246-247
architectonics 159 Belarus 242
architecture 6, 43, 144-160, 162-186, 279, Bell, Vanessa (née Stephen) (1879-1961) 222
280-281, 288 Belyi, Andrei (Bely; Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev;
architectons 145, 150, 159, 163, 178, 182, 183, 1880-1934) 92
183, 185, 210, 213, 214, 217, 280. Benois, Alexandre (Aleksandr Nikolaevich
See also Malevich Works Benua, 1870-1960) 13n5
Aristotle 101n112, 102 Berdiaev (Berdyaev), Nikolai Aleksandrovich
art education 92, 196 (1874-1948) 97
Art of the Commune (Iskusstvo kommuny, Bergson, Henri (Henri-Louis, 1859-1941) 51,
Petrograd) 272 56, 66, 81, 102n117
Art Institute of Chicago 61 Berlin, Germany 28, 184, 242, 244, 247, 250,
251, 258
290 Index

Bible 85 Champions of the New Art. See Unovis

bicycles 83, 160 Chashnik, Ilia Grigorevich (1902-1929) 95,
Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna (Elena Petrovna 106, 107, 144, 157, 163-165, 269-270
Blavatskaia, 1831-1891) 64 AERO: Articles and Projects (1920)
Blok (Warsaw) 246-247 167-168
Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (1880-1921) architectural colour schemes 211-212
193 porcelain 8, 200, 202, 205-206, 206, 210
Bloomsbury group, England 221-222 Project for a Tribune for a Smolensk
Blum, Robert 63 Square 146, 148, 163-164, 269-272, 271
Boccioni, Umberto (1882-1916) 50-51, 56ff, on Suprematism 116
59, 76, 78 textile design 233-235, 238, 239
Bogdanov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Cheka (Chrezvychainaia komissiia –
(Aliasandr Malinovskii, 1873-1928) 82 Extraordinary Commission) 141
Boguslavskaia, Ksenia (Kseniia; 1892-1972) Chekhonin, Sergei Vasilevich (Sergey
201, 222 Tchehonine, 1870-1936) 201-202, 203
Bolshevik Party and art 9, 92, 95, 214, chemistry 55, 102, 123, 158
229-230, 273, 283 Chervinka (Chervinko), Ivan Ivanovich
Boucher, Maurice 48-49, 56, 69, 70, 72, 74, (1891-1950s) 107, 236
75, 77 Chevreul, Michel Eugène (1786-1889) 221
Bouras, Alexander 5, 81, 105 chiaroscuro 60, 78
bourgeoisie 209 christianity 115
Bowlt, John E. 63 Christiansen, Broder (1869-1958) 158
Bragdon, Claude Fayette (1866-1946) 50, 70 cities/towns 152-154, 170, 186
Braque, Georges (1882-1963) 261 Civil War in Russia 137, 161, 200-201, 209,
bridges 160, 271n34 273
Brik, Osip Maksimovich (1888-1945) 92 Cohen, Aaron J. 241
British Association for the Advancement of collage 70, 75, 176, 177
Science 52 Collective Actions (Kollektivnye deistviia)
Buchloh, Benjamin 246 group 186
Bucke, Maurice (Richard Maurice; 1837-1902) collective, concept of the collective in Russia
62 art and literature 7, 192ff
Bulgakov, Sergei Nikolaevich (1871-1944) 97 collective creative work/collective creativity
Burliuk, David Davidovich (1882-1967) 36, 7, 116, 143
57, 95n71, 274 Collectivisation of Agriculture 214, 283
Burliuk, Vladimir Davidovich (1886-1917) 90 collectivism 196
Butlerov, Aleksandr Mikhailovich (1826-1886) colour 94, 103, 117, 124, 166, 174, 185, 262
55-56, 63n76 Committee Fighting Unemployment, Vitebsk
129
Canyon Diablo, Arizona, meteorite 114 Communism 259, 272, 288
carborundum 5, 114-125 community 115, 116, 192, 196
Caspian Sea 196 composition 47-49, 69-70, 275-276
Central European art 240-258 Conference on Museums (Moscow, 1919) 93
ceramics 8, 200, 202, 205-206, 206, 210. consciousness 90-91, 97, 171
See also Suprematist porcelain constructed sculpture 163, 260, 261-264,
Cézanne, Paul (1839-1906) 110, 111, 134 267, 268, 276
Cézannism 95, 111, 166 construction 275-276
Chagall, Marc (Mark Zakharovich Shagal, Constructivism 52, 130, 166, 202, 242, 253,
1887-1985) 165 283
Index 291

International Constructivism 272n36 Darwin, Charles Robert (1809-1882) 85

Polish Constructivism 244-250 Davydova, Natalia Mikhailovna (1875-1933)
Russian Constructivism 158, 195, 198, 38, 222, 224, 225, 226
250, 251, 259-288 De Stijl (Leiden) 257
Russian Constructivism and architecture Decree on Nationalisation (1918) 200
281 defamiliarisation (ostranenie) 92-94, 92n11,
Russian and International Constructivism 220
253 Delaunay, Sonia (née Sara Ilinchna Shtern;
Russian Constructivism and the principle 1890 Sonia Terk; 1885-1979) 221
of economy 281-283 dematerialisation 5, 60, 78, 110, 121, 176, 277
Russian Constructivism and Suprematism Denis, Maurice (1870-1943) 221
9, 120-121, 196-197, 234-238, 259-288 Denischenko, Irina 220
Russian Constructivism and textile design density of materials 107
234-239, 283 Department of Fine Art within the People’s
Working Group of Constructivists, Commissariat of Enlightenment
Moscow 273-279 (Otdel izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv,
Contemporary Architecture (Sovremennaia Narodnyi komissariat
arkhitektura, Moscow) 181, 287 prosveshcheniia – IZO, Narkompros)
Contemporary Trends in Art (St. Petersburg, 92, 93, 127, 137, 141, 230-231, 262, 268,
1908) 90 273. See also People’s Commissariat of
co-operative movement 93 Enlightenment
copper 117 Dessau, Germany 184
Costakis Collection. See The State Museum of Dobuzhinskii (Dobuzhinsky, Dobujinsky)
Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki Mstislav Valerianovich (1875-1957)
cosmic consciousness 71, 76 165
cosmic space 207, 281 Document (Dokumentum, Budapest,
cosmic will 97 1926-1927) 250
cosmism 72 Doesburg, Theo van (Christian Emil Marie
cosmos 42, 72, 115, 171, 174 Küpper, 1883-1931) 254-255
creativity and the creative process 5, 7, 83, Dorokhov, Konstantin Gavrilovich
85ff, 89, 90, 91, 96, 260 (1906-1960) 132, 135
Crookes, Sir William (1832-1919) 52, 55, 56 Dostoevsky, Fedor Mikhailovich (1821-1881)
Cubism 31, 42, 51, 52, 59-60, 65-66, 75, 95, 193
97, 110, 111, 127, 139, 140, 166, 196, 201, Douglas, Charlotte 4, 47, 29, 52, 80, 229
243, 245, 246, 253, 256, 257, 261, 262, 275 Druia, Belarus 165
Cubist collage 75 Duchamp, Marcel (Henri-Robert-Marcel,
Malevich and Cubism 39, 70 1887-1968) 11, 48
Malevich on Cubism 42, 261, 275 readymade 246
Cubo-Futurism 4, 18, 21, 29, 32, 57, 78, 261 Duncan, Robert Kennedy (1868-1914) 51
Cultural Foundation, ‘Khardzhiev-Chaga Dvizhenie (Movement) group 186
Center’, Stedelijk Museum, Dymshits-Tolstaia, Sofia Isaakovna (aka
Amsterdam 2, 53, 78 Sarah, Passati, 1889-1963) 92
cultural transformation 92 dynamism 170, 179. See also speed
Curie, Marie (née Skłodowska, 1862-1934) dynamoplanit 145, 152
51, 56
Curie, Pierre (1859-1906) 51 Earth 42, 71, 91, 113, 133, 155, 174, 193, 204, 212,
281
Danko, Elena 201 Eastern European art 8, 240-258
292 Index

ecology 170, 185, 186 as symbolic form 117

economics 280 investigations of 105-125
economy as the fifth dimension 171 Farraday, Michael (1791-1867) 66
economy, principle of 86, 9, 98, 107, 170, Februaryism (Fevralizm) 29, 70
281, 282-283 Fedorov, Nikolai Fedorovich (1829-1903) 115
Eiffel Tower, Paris 83-84, 164 Fenollosa, Ernest Francisco (1853-1908) 221
The Eight (previously The Seekers) 243 festival decorations. See agitational art
Einstein, Albert (1879-1955) 4, 46, 49, 49n19, Fifth Anniversary of the Revolution 283
50, 55 figurative art 191, 213, 243, 285
Ekaterinburg, Russia 127 Filippov, Aleksei Vasilevich (1882-1956) 208
Electromagnetic waves 5 First All-Russian Exhibition of Artistic Industry
electron 46, 51, 54, 58, 77, 78 (Moscow, 1923) 202
electricity 50, 51, 54, 58, 78, 119, 121, 122, 195 First Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture
Electrification of Russia, Plan for 119 (Moscow, 1927) 181
embroidery 25 First Five-Year Plan 283
empirical criticism 81-104 First Russian Art Exhibition (Berlin, 1922) 8,
and artistic culture 82-104 251
energy 48, 51, 58, 77, 121, 107, 117, 166, 170, 171 First State Art Exhibition (Orenburg, 1921).
Engelmeier, Petr Klimentevich (1855-1942) See Orenburg
5, 82-104 The First State Exhibition of Works by Local
concept of the creative process 87-88 and Moscow Artists (Vitebsk, 1919)
evrologiia (theory of creativity) 85ff 128-129, 165
engineering 150, 270-271 First Textile Printing Factory, Moscow 203,
environmental concerns 185-186 235-236
equating artistic and ideological radicalism First World War 39-40, 54, 117, 161, 225, 241,
194 242, 246, 258, 272
Ermolaeva, Vera Mikhailovna (1893-1937) Flammarion, Camille (Nicolas Camille,
106 1842-1925) 55, 56, 66
L’Esprit Nouveau (Paris) 146 flying 25
eternity 13, 207 Fontana, Lucio (1899-1968) 177
ether 4-5, 44-80 force. See energy
definition 50 Forgács, Éva 8, 240
Ettinger, Pavel Davidovich (1866-1948) 13n7 formalism 285, 288
Europa Almanach 8, 251-252, 255 campaign against formalism 214, 285
everyday life (byt) in Soviet Russia 85, fourth dimension 4, 44-80, 171, 267-268
202-203, 209-210, 225, 226, 229 and spiritualism 63n76
Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art: and the ether 5
Embroidery and Carpets from Artists’ Frank, Semyon Liudvigovich (1877-1950) 82
Designs (Moscow 1915) 7, 38, 222-226, function/functionality 215, 283
223, 268 furniture 281
Expressionism 138 Futurism 29, 89, 95, 110, 111, 127, 151, 153, 161,
Exter, Alexandra (Ekster Aleksandra 166, 192, 196, 242, 242n11, 24, 256
Aleksandrovna; née Grigorevich; and science 57ff
1882-1949) 57, 165, 222, 224, 229 Italian Futurism 29, 30, 37, 192, 193-194
Italian Futurist manifestos in Russian
factory 37n31, 57
faktura (texture) 5, 94, 96, 103, 166, 174-175, Russian Futurism 29, 161, 192, 193-194
185, 260, 262-267, 273, 274, 285, 288
Index 293

Russian and Italian Futurism 36, 57ff, Hall of Art, Budapest 250
193-194, 242 harmony 215
Harriman Institute, Columbia University,
Gakhn. See State Academy of Artistic New York 1
Sciences, Moscow Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard von
Gan, Aleksei Mikhailovich (c. 1887-1942) (1842-1906) 81
145, 194, 195, 196, 273, 274 Hegedüs, Béla (1910-1940) 250
on architectons 287 helium 75
and Malevich 196-197, 286-287 Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von
Gastev, Aleksei Kapitonovich (1882-1939) (1821-1894) 81
195 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple 4-5, 44
Gauguin, Paul (Eugène Henri Paul, 1848-1903) Heroic Defence of Leningrad (Leningrad,
135 1944) 214
Gavris, Ivan Trofimovich (1890-1937) 126 Hertzian waves 4, 58, 80
geometry and geometric form 247, 251, 277, Higher State Artistic and Technical
279, 282, 283 Workshops, Moscow. See Vkhutemas
George Costakis Collection. See The State Hinton, Charles Howard (1853-1907) 4, 44,
Museum of Contemporary Art, 48, 60, 62, 64, 65, 67-68, 70ff, 77, 80
Thessaloniki Houghton Library, Harvard University 153
Germany 6, 28, 184, 244 Howard, Jeremy 60
Gershenzon, Mikhail Osipovich (1869-1925) Hungary 242, 250
82, 97, 188, 190 Hungarian Avant-Garde 242, 243, 244,
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles 149, 250-256
151 Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest 251
GIII. See State Institute of Art History, hypercube 75
Leningrad
Ginkhuk. See State Institute of Artistic i 10 (Amsterdam) 9
Culture Iablonskii, Nil Aleksandrovich (1888-1944)
Ginzburg, Moisei Yakovlevich (1892-1946) 131
281 Iakulov, Georgii Bogdanovich (Georgy
glass 201, 263, 274, 277 Bogdanovich Yakulov, 1884-1928) 222
Gleizes, Albert (1881-1953) 65 icon painting 13, 267, 268
Gnedov, Vasilisk (Vasilii Ivanovich; 1890-1978) Impressionism 28, 52, 95, 131, 139
38 industry 259, 272
God 190-191 infinity 13, 71-72, 76-77, 171
Gorky, Maxim (Aleksei Maksimovich Inkhuk. See Institute of Artistic Culture,
Peshkov, 1868-1936) 193 Moscow
Gorianova, Nina 241 Institute of Artistic Culture (Institut
Goriacheva, Tatiana 3, 7, 130, 165, 187, 276 khudozhestvennoi kul’tury – Inkhuk),
Gornfeld, Arkadii Georgievich (1867-1941) Moscow 95, 119-120, 244, 275
82 ‘Composition-Construction’ debate 275
Gough, Maria 95, 120 Institute of Civil Engineers, Petrograd.
Grant, Duncan James Corrowr (1885-1978) See Petrograd Institute of Civil
222 Engineers
graphic design 283-285 Institute of Higher Education, Petrograd
gravity 48, 71, 72, 77, 171, 174, 281 184
guns 101
Gustav Kiepenhauer Verlag, Potsdam 254
294 Index

International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Kassák, Lajos (1887-1967) 8, 250, 251,

and Industrial Art (Paris 1925) 255-256
281-282 Kelvin, Lord (William Thomson, 1824-1907)
International Office (Mezhdunarodnoe 50, 66n91
biuro) of IZO 92 Kemény, Alfréd (1895-1945) 8, 244
Internationalism 242 Kepes, György (1906-2001) 250
intuition 90-91 Kernstok, Károly (1873-1940) 243
intuitive reason 5, 101-102 Khan-Magomedov, Selim Omarovich
invention/innovation 5, 86ff, 94, 241, 287 (1928-2011) 167, 178, 199, 203, 205 214
Ioganson, Karl (Kārlis Johansons, 1890-1929) Khardzhiev, Nikolai Ivanovich (1903-1996)
95, 120, 121, 276, 277 2, 3, 7, 13n8, 14, 188
iron 117, 277 Khardzhiev-Chaga Foundation, Stedelijk
Italian Futurism. See Futurism Museum, Amsterdam. See Cultural
Iudin, Lev Aleksandrovich (1904-1941) 107, Foundation, ‘Khardzhiev-Chaga
111, 166 Center’, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
concept of the artist’s role 108 Kharkov, Ukraine 82, 127
investigation of materials 106-122 Kharms, Daniil Ivanovich (1905-1942)
Ivanov, Viacheslav Ivanovich (1866-1949) 123n56
92, 116 Khidekel, Lazar Markovich (1904-1986) 6, 8,
Ivanova, Elena 207 106, 107, 128, 141, 156, 157, 157, 161-186,
IZO Narkompros. See Department of Fine Art 210, 215
within the Commissariat of AERO: Articles and Projects (1920)
Enlightenment 167-170
concern for the environment 6, 170,
Jakobson (Iakobson), Roman Osipovich 185-186
(1896-1982) 36 and Constructivism 181
Jakovljevic, Branislav 205, 206 and Ginkhuk 179, 210
James, William (1842-1910) 62 and Lissitzky 165, 169
Jeanneret, Charles-Édouard. See Le Corbusier and Malevich 163, 165, 169, 171, 172,
Johnson, Samuel 6, 144 176-177, 178, 179, 183-185
on Suprematism 166
Kállai, Ernst (Ernő, 1890-1954) 8, 242, and Suprematist architecture 6, 161-186
257-258 technique 166
on Suprematism 257-258 The Workers’ Club (1926) 6, 181-184, 182,
Kalmykov, Sergei Ivanovich (1891-1967) 139, 183
140 Works 168, 169, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178,
Kaluga province, Russia 136 179, 180, 182, 183, 186
Kamenskii, Vasilii Vasilevich (1884-1961) 52 Khidekel, Mark Lazarovich 218, 220
Kandinsky, Wassily (Vasilii Vasilevich Khidekel, Regina 6, 161
Kandinskii, 1866-1944) 50-51, 56, 78, Khlebnikov, Velimir (Viktor) Vladimirovich
95, 96, 165 (1885-1922) 41-42, 92, 127, 192, 195, 243
and Malevich Khodasevich, Nadezhda (Wanda
and music 34, 35 Chodasiewicz, Nadia Léger, 1904-1972)
and porcelain 201 131, 132, 135
and spiritualism 63 on Malevich’s lectures 135
Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804) 81, 90, 91, 102 Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich (1894-1971)
Karasik, Irina 5, 105 214
Karpova, Yulia 8, 198 Kiaer, Christina 202
Index 295

Kiev Art Institute 133 Kuprin, Aleksandr Ivanovich (1870-1938)

Kino-fot (Cinema-Photo, Moscow) 195 35n21, 193
Klee, Paul (1879-1940) 251 Kustodiev, Boris Mikhailovich (1878-1927)
Kliun (Kliunkov) Ivan Vasilevich (1873-1943) 193
27 Kuznetsov, Pavel Varfolomeevich (1878-1968)
Klutsis, Gustav Gustavovich (Gustavs Klucis, 92
1895-1938) 95, 106, 142, 283ff, 284, 285
Kobro, Katarżyna (Ekaterina, 1898-1951) 8, Ladovskii, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1881-1941)
128, 130, 244-245, 246, 248 95, 147
and Smolensk Unovis 6, 8, 130 Lapshin, Ivan Ivanovich (1870-1952) 82
Kogan, Nina Osipovna (Iosifovna, 1889-1942) Larionov, Mikhail Fedorovich (1881-1964)
10 37, 52-53
Kokkori, Maria 5, 105 The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, 0.10
Korniss, Dezsö (1908-1984) 250 (Zero-Ten) (Petrograd, 1915/1916) 3, 7,
Kossowska, Irena 245 13, 33, 37, 44, 45, 47, 68, 222, 227, 261.
Kovtun, Evgeny Fedorovich (1928-1996) See also Malevich Exhibitions
14n11, 216-217n56 Lavrentiev, Alexander 278n56, 278n57
Kozelsk, Russia 136 Lazar Khidekel Family Archive & Collection
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von (Freiherr 1, 157, 163, 168, 169, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177,
Krafft-Ebing, 1840-1902) 100 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 186, 271
Krasin, Leonid Borisovich (1870-1926) 82 Ldov, K. 90
Krimmer, Edouard Mikhailovich (1900-1974) Leadbeater, Charles Webster (1854-1934)
8, 39-40 64, 70-71
Kruchenykh, Aleksei Eliseevich (1886-1968) Le Bon, Gustave (Charles-Marie Gustave,
5, 11, 30, 36n27, 44, 48, 60, 81, 106, 128, 1841-1931) 51, 55
242n11, 243 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret,
‘Chemical Famine: Ballads About the 1887-1965) 146
Carborundum Stone’ 122-125 Lef: Left Front of the Arts (Lef. Levyi front
and the fourth dimension 72, 75 iskusstv, Moscow) 203
and zaum’ 65, 123, 124-125 Léger, Fernand (Joseph Fernand Henri,
Kudriashev (Kudriashov) Ivan Alekseevich 1881-1955) 117
(1896-1972) 6, 128, 136, 137, 139, 140, Lemercier (Lemers’e) Gallery, Moscow 222
141 142, 143, 154 Lenin (Ulianov) Vladimir Ilich (1870-1924)
Kudriavtsev, A. N. 204 82, 119, 201
Kudriavtseva (Kudryavtseva), Tamara Leningrad, Russia. See St. Petersburg
204-205, 217 Leningrad Institute of Civil Engineers
Kulbin, Nikolai Ivanovich (1868-1917) 36, (Leningradskii institut grazhdanskikh
56-57, 89, 90-91 inzhenerov) 150. See also Museum of
and the fourth dimension 60-62 Leningrad Institute of Civil Engineers
and music 34, 35 Leningrad Society of Architects 150
Kunin, Moisei Abramovich (Mikhail Kuni, Leningrad State University (Leningradskii
1897-1972) 133 gosudarstvennyi universitet) 181
Das Kunstblatt (Berlin) 6, 146, 255 Leningrad Union of Artists 217
Kuntsevo, Moscow 27, 30, 39, 42 Lentulov, Aristarkh Vasilevich (1882-1943)
Kunstmuseum, Basel 80 90
Küppers, Sophie (Lissitzky-Küppers, née Leporskaia, Anna Aleksandrovna (1900-1982)
Schneider, 1891-1978) 145 8, 20, 22, 215ff, 216
296 Index

Lewis, Wyndham (Percy Wyndham; Lukács, Georg (György, 1885-1971) 240

1882-1957) 36n27 Lunacharskii, Anatolii Vasilevich (Anatoly
Lezin, Boris Andreevich (1880-1924) 82, 89, Vasilevich Lunacharsky, 1875-1933)
96, 98-99, 103 81, 92, 93-94, 245
Liak, Leonid 217
light 119, 279 Ma. See Today
Lisov, Alexander 6, 126 Mach, Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel
Lissitzky, El (Lazar Markovich Lisitskii, (1838-1916) 47, 80, 81, 83, 86, 97, 98
1890-1941) 6, 106, 111-113, 128, 133, 134, machine 87, 99, 102, 170, 195, 270-271, 283
138, 142, 144-160, 162, 163, 165, 169, 179, Machism 81
243, 251, 254, 255, 257, 269, 271-272, 284, magnetism 78
288 Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich (1879-1935)
and Constructivism 272n36, 279 54, 62, 234, 246
dynamoplanit 145 Life
‘Ex-Picture and Supremacy of arrival in Vitebsk 128-129
Architecture’ 145, 146, 154, 156 early life (crochet, embroidery,
Lenin Tribune (1924) 146, 147 knitting) 226
and Malevich 6, 80, 144-160, 162 imprisonment in Vitebsk 1921 141
Prouns 144-145, 151, 156-157, 162, 168 mother 226
on the sign 111-113 visit to Orenburg 133, 136, 138-139,
Studio of Architecture and Typography at 140-141
the Vitebsk People’s Art School 6, visit to Smolensk 131, 133-136
162, 169, 271 visit to Warsaw 184, 247, 248
Suprematist architecture 6, 144-160, Work
162-163, 165, 169 agitational work 164
on Tatlin’s Model for a Monument to the Alchemy 122
Third International 146, 164 Alogism 65
tectonics 159 analytical/theoretical charts 102, 234
Town (1919-1920) 154-156, 155 angels 192
translating Malevich 146, 254n48 applied art 232
on Unovis 279 architectons (arkhitektony) 150, 159,
visit to Orenburg 136, 138, 139 183, 280
Wolkenbügel (c. 1925) 6, 148-149, 149, architecture 43, 118-119, 144-160, 173,
150-151, 159 183-184, 280-281
Livshits, Benedikt Konstantinovich on art and life 280
(1887-1938) 36, 56-57, 76 on art and science 4-5, 102-103
Lobachevsky, Nikolai Ivanovich (1792-1856) art and society 191
47, 171, 178 on art and technology 83n5, 102n118
Lodder, Christina 9, 259 and Art International 92
Lodge, Sir Oliver Joseph (1851-1940) 50, 55, astronomy 72
58, 72, 77 atomic theory 54
Lombroso, Cesare (1835-1909) 56 atoms 54
Lomonosov, Mikhail Vasilevich (1711-1765) bacteriological theory of painting
210 158
London, UK 225 Celebrations for Second anniversary of
Lourié, Arthur (Artur Lur’e, 1892-1966) Committee Fighting
35-37 Unemployment, Vitebsk 1919 129
Lucifer 191 Chashnik’s Tribune for Smolensk 164
Index 297

cities/towns 117-118, 152-153 and Leningrad Institute of Civil

colour 117, 264, 272 Engineers 150
concept of the collective 116, 190-192, light 117-118
196 and Lissitzky 144-160, 271-272
collective vs individual 190-192 and Lourié 37
on ‘construction’ 276 on Lucifer 191
on Constructivism 259-260, 276, 280 on materials 87n24, 275
cosmos 42-43, 72 on matter 53, 54, 109, 118
on the creative process 116 meteors 122
on creativity 96-104, 120 motion/movement 72, 118, 119, 121
and Cubism 39, 70 on motor cars 99, 101
on Cubism 42, 261, 275, 276 music/sound 33ff, 37, 42-43, 118
on Cubo-Futurism 32 mystification 18, 27-28
dating and re-dating works 27-28 and nature 31, 77, 258
on Davydova 225 Neoprimitivism 257
design 199-200 on nitrogen 54
Dynamic Studio, Vitebsk 165 on objectlessness 102
on economy 98, 99, 283 on painting 102, 279
on electrons 54 painting technique 74
on energy 53, 80, 117-118, 121 pedagogical system/teaching 5, 43,
on engineering 159 106-107, 127, 138-140, 141, 143, 196
the ether 75, 76 photography 9
exhibition plans 28, 31 planits (planity) 43, 72, 145-146, 281
on faktura 103, 264 and the Polish Avant-Garde 240-250
on figurative art 191 porcelain 200ff, 203-205, 208
flickering evoking time and motion on Prouns 151
72 radio 80, 115n32
and the fourth dimension 44, 53-54, on radium 54
57, 60, 65, 68-70, 74-75 railway stations 152, 154
on Futurism 42 rejection of painting 39, 279
and Ginkhuk 95, 150, 171, 197 religion/religious resonances 258
on God 13, 54, 190, 191, 192 return to figuration 64, 122, 203, 204,
and Hinton 65, 68-70 288
on history 159 and revolutionary terminology 93,
and the Hungarian Avant-Garde 196
240-244, 250ff and Roslavets 33-34, 36, 38
icons 276, 267n19 on saints 192
on industry 121 ‘scholar-artist’ 171
on infinity 71, 76 science 80, 102
on intuitive reason 101-102 on science 54
on ions 54 self-promotion 243
and Italian Futurism 31, 37 on sensation 74, 76, 78, 99
and IZO, Narkompros 127, 141 the sign 98ff, 118, 122
on Khidekel 157, 179 similies 122
and Khlebnikov 40-41 and space 40-41, 42, 53, 71, 118, 154,
late paintings 27, 285 199, 258, 281
lecture in Orenburg 138, 139 on space 42, 71, 154
lecturing 134, 135
298 Index

Work (cont.) Dynamic Suprematism (1916, Museum

and State Free Art Studios Moscow Ludwig) 203-204
126, 127, 137, 231 Dynamic Suprematism (Supremus 57)
and Suprematism 40-41, 268 (1916) 234
on Suprematism 29-43, 42, 74, 113-114 Eight Red Rectangles (1915) 68, 233
on Suprematism and Constructivism An Englishman in Moscow (1914) 24,
259 65
on Suprematist decoration 199-200 Four Squares (1915) 155, 156
Suprematist philosophy 187 The Guardsman (1913) 18, 21
and Tatlin 165, 259-260, 264-268 The Knife Grinder: Principle of
on Tatlin’s Model for a Monument to the Flickering (1912) 73
Third International (1920) 165n11 Painterly Realism: Boy with Knapsack –
on technology 80, 83n5, 99, 116, 118, Colour Masses in the Fourth
158, 159 Dimension. See Suprematist
textiles 221-227, 231-233, 234, 235, 236 Composition: Red Square and Black
theory of the additional element 43, Square
98-99, 141, 158 Painterly Realism of a Football Player:
time 154, 272 Colour Masses in the Fourth
on utility 83n5, 120-121, 191-192, 204, Dimension (1915) 60, 62, 71
208-209, 280 The Red Cavalry (1928-32) 213
utopia 218, 258 Red Square (1915) 93n66
on viewer response 166 Suprematism No. 18 (1915) 222-223,
white grounds 265, 272 225
‘white problems’ 189 Suprematist Composition (1915;
works left in the West 27-28 Museum Ludwig) 68, 69, 70
writing 7, 187-188, 189 Suprematist Composition (1919-1920)
writing style 188, 189-190 226
on X-rays 54 Suprematist Composition (with
on zero 31-32 trapezoid) (1915) 16, 17, 26-27
Paintings Suprematist Composition: Airplane
The Black Circle (1915) 218 Flying (1915) 72, 264-6, 265, 266
The Black Cross (1915) 218 Suprematist Composition: Red Square
The Black Square (1915) 3-4, 7-8, 11-28, and Black Square (Painterly
12, 54, 99-104, 153, 166, 206, 218, 246, Realism: Boy with Knapsack –
256, 267, 270 Colour Masses in the Fourth
date 14-16 Dimension) (1915) 267
detail 23 Supremus No. 51 (1916) 40-42
first painting beneath the final Untitled (Compact, Magnetic Cluster)
work 18, 20 (1916) 224
inscription 23-24 White on White (1918) 272, 278
Malevich on The Black Square Yellow Plane in Dissolution (1917-1918)
11-13, 20, 22, 26 78, 79
process of creation 20-21 Other Works
Radiograph revealing second Architecton Alpha (c. 1923) 280
painting 22 Architecton Zeta (1923-27) 183
second painting 18-22 Architectons (1920s) 145
X-ray of 19 Composition 2 z (Sensation of
Magnetism) (1915) 78
Index 299

Composition 14t (Suprematism: ‘Concerning “I” and the Collective’

Sensation of Electricity) (1915) (1920) 187, 189n8
53-4, 77, 77 ‘Concerning a Party in Art’ (1921) 127,
Feeling of Magnetic Attraction (1927) 190
118 From Cubism and Futurism to
First Suprematist Fabric (1919) 236 Suprematism: The New Painterly
Porcelain designs 203-205, 204, 208 Realism (1916) 53, 256
Principle of Painting Walls (the Plane) From Cubism to Suprematism: The New
or an Entire Room or Complete Realism in Painting (1916) 31-33,
Apartment according to the System 39, 53n39, 75
of Suprematism (Death to Die gegenstandlose Welt (1927) 2, 9,
Wallpaper), 1920 164 80, 118, 150, 187n2
Sensation of Metallic Noise with Strong God is not Cast Down: Art, The Church,
Dynamic Tendency: Colouration of a The Factory (1922) 93n66, 187
Pale Metallic Copper Tone Scale ‘The Ideology of Architecture’
(1927) 118 (1922-1925) 150, 159
Suprematism: Interacting Elements, ‘Laziness as the Real Truth about
Fading (1917-1918) 78 Humanity’ (1919) 187
Suprematism: Two Intersecting Planes, ‘Lenin’ (1924) 255
Fading (1917) 78 ‘On Being’ (1919) 189n8
‘Suprematism (The Shaping of the ‘On the Need for a Commune of
Magnetic Field)’ 78 Economist Suprematists’ (1919)
Suprematist Composition (Feeling of 190
Wireless Telegraphy) (1915) 80 On New Systems in Art. Stasis and
Suprematatist Structure Among Speed. Resolution A (1920) 89, 117,
American Skyscrapers (1926) 120, 134-135, 152, 158
150-151, 151, 176-177 ‘Production as Madness’ (1921) 187,
Teapot (1923) 208, 208-209, 217, 218, 189
220 ‘On the Exhibition of Unovis’ (1921)
Textile Design No. 10 (1919) 234 172
Textile Design No. 15 (1919) 235 ‘On Pure Action’ (1920) 187
Tribune for Orators (1920) 164 On the Question of Fine Art (1921) 99,
Untitled Alogist Drawing (c. 1914) 24, 134, 187
26 ‘Suprematism’ (1919) 199, 232
Untitled Suprematist Drawing with Suprematism: 34 Drawings (1920) 7,
three-dimensional element (c. 118, 152, 163, 163, 187, 188, 198,
1915) 152, 153 203-204, 283
Victory over the Sun, set design and ‘Suprematism as Pure Cognition’ 54
drawings (1913) 11, 14, 16, 24, 25, 27, ‘Suprematism as Unovis Proof’
65, 70, 75, 76, 223 (1921-1922) 286n84
Writings ‘Suprematism as Objectlessness’ (1922)
‘Architecture as a Slap in the Face to 54
Ferro-Concrete’ (1918) 152, 161 ‘Suprematism as Pure Cognition’(1923)
‘Architecture as the Greatest Step in 54
Liberating Humanity from Weight’ ‘Suprematism: The World as
(1924) 173-174 Objectlessness or Eternal Peace’
‘The Birth of Suprematism’ (1918) (1927) 80, 83n5, 122, 187, 189
96n78
300 Index

Writings (cont.) mass production/industrial manufacture

‘Suprematismus (aus den Schriften 236, 273, 283
1915-20)’ (1925) 251-252, 253-254 materials 9, 94, 105-125, 260, 262, 267, 274
‘Suprematistische Architektur’ (1927) material culture 87
183 mathematics 102
‘The Suprematist Mirror’ (1923) 96 Matiushin, Mikhail Vasilevich (1861-1934)
‘We as Utilitarian Perfection’ (1920) 11, 14-15, 27, 30, 32, 33, 38, 39, 40-41, 44,
187ff 47-48, 57, 92, 95, 119, 225, 243
The World as Non-Objectivity (1927) and the fourth dimension 62, 65-66,
150 72-73
Exhibitions on Malevich 54
Exhibition of Modern Decorative and music 34, 38-39, 43
Art: Embroidery and Carpets from and science 47-48, 55
Artists’ Designs (Moscow, 1915) and Victory over the Sun 34, 65
222-22, 223 on the Zero-Ten exhibition 37
Great Berlin Art Exhibition matter 5, 48, 51, 66-67, 77, 80, 105-125
(Berlin, 1927) 242, 257 Maxwell, James Clerk (1831-1879) 72
The Last Futurist Exhibition of Mayakovsky (Maiakovskii), Vladimir
Paintings, 0.10 (Zero-Ten) Vladimirovich (1893-1930) 35-37
(Petrograd, 1915/1916) 27, 33, 39, medicine 158
68, 152, 222, 227 Medunetskii, Konstantin Konstantinovich
Malevich (Warsaw, 1927) (1899-c.1935) 276, 277
248-249, 248 Mendeleev, Dmitrii Ivanovich (184-1907) 55
Malevich (Moscow and Kiev, Metabolism group, Japan 186
1929) 287 metal 263, 264, 277
The Sixteenth State Exhibition: Metzinger, Jean Dominique Antony
Solo Exhibition of K Malevich: His (1883-1956) 65
Path from Impressionism to Michelangelo 193
Suprematism (Moscow, 1920) Mikhailova Salon, Moscow 229
286, 286n82 Mikienko, Tatiana 1
The Tenth State Exhibition: Milinis, Ignatii Frantsevich (1899-1974) 281
Objectless Creation and Minimalism 239
Suprematism (Moscow, 1919) 198, Minkowski, Hermann (1864-1909) 46, 47-8,
232, 278 171
The Malevich Society, New York 1, 220 Miturich, Petr Vasilevich (1887-1956) 127,
Manhattan, New York 112 128
Mansurov, Pavel Andreevich (Paul Mogilev, Belarus 165
Mansouroff, 1896-1983) 95 Moholy-Nagy, László (1895-1946) 9, 251
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso Emilio Moissan, Fedinand Frederick Henri
(1876-1944) 56ff, 193, 194 (1852-1907) 114
visit to Russia 36, 37, 37n33 Mondrian, Piet (Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan,
Markov, Vladimir (Voldemārs Matvejs, 1872-1944) 247
1877-1914) 5, 90-91, 125n64, 274, 275 Monism 124n60
Mars 113 Morgunov, Aleksei Alekseevich (1884-1935)
Marxism 93 92
use/misuse of Marxist terminology 93, Morse code 80
196
Index 301

Moscow, Russia 30, 31, 33, 36, 56, 98, 126, New York, USA 229
141, 145, 149, 158, 165, 181, 222, 229, 244, Newton, Sir Isaac (1643-1727) 42, 84, 85
261, 262, 281, 287 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900) 81
Moscow-Paris (Moskva-Parizh, Moscow, 1981) Nikitskii Square, Moscow 149
217 Nikolskii, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1884-1953)
Moscow Polytechnical Museum 56 181n53, 184-185, 211-212
Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Nisbet, Peter 112
Architecture (Moskovskoe uchilishche Nomenklatura (elite) 209
zhivopisi, vaianiia i zodchestva) 23, Non-Euclidean geometry 171
136 non-figurative art. See objectless art
Moscow Society for Art Photography Northern Lights 54
(Moskovskoe Noskov, Mark (Mikhail) Ivanovich 164
khudozhestvenno-fotograficheskoe
obshchestvo) 83 objectless art 9, 13, 24, 31, 32, 42, 43, 47, 77,
Moscow Society for the Study and 102, 106, 110, 119, 133, 199, 213, 221-222,
Popularisation of Physics 54 229, 239, 241, 243, 245, 250, 261, 277-278
motor car 99, 101, 103 and internationalism 257
movement/motion 64, 72-73, 77, 94, 107, and utopian future 257
109-110, 125, 151, 153, 166, 171, 174, 247, objectlessness 13
267, 277, 285 Obmokhu (Obshchestvo molodykh
Museum of Artistic Culture (Muzei khudozhnikov – Society of Young
khudozhestvennoi kul’tury), Petrograd Artists), Moscow 276, 276-277
95 occult 44, 57, 63, 66, 80
Museum of Leningrad Institute of Civil October Revolution. See Russian Revolution
Engineers 181 Odessa, Russia 127
Museum Ludwig, Cologne 69 The Odyssey of Homer 85
Museum of Modern Art, New York 59, 72, Olevskaia, Inna 216, 218, 219, 220
265, 267 Op Art 239
Museum of Painterly Culture (Muzei Orenburg, Russia 6, 127, 128, 134, 134,
zhivopisnoi kul’tury), Moscow 95, 136-144, 142
96, 181 Art Section of the Provincial Department
Museum Tsaritsyno, Moscow 230 of Education, Orebburg 138
museums, new concept of 93-95 First State Art Exhibition (Orenburg, 1921)
music 33-39, 100, 124, 268 140
Muthesius, Hermann (Adam Gottlieb Orenburg State Free Art Studios
Hermann Muthesius, 1861-1927) 160 (Gosudarstvennye svobodnye
mystical ideas 259, 272, 287 khudozhestvennye masterskie –
GSKhM) 137-138, 139, 140
Narkomfin building, Moscow 281 Orenburg Unovis. See Unovis in Orenburg
Narkompros. See People’s Commissariat of organic form 213, 215
Enlightenment Orphism 52
Naturalism 81 Ostwald, Wilhelm (Friedrich Wilhelm,
nature 55, 66, 77, 80, 170, 171, 179, 180, 212, 1853-1932) 81
213 Ottoman Empire 242
Neo-Classicism 245, 246, 250 Ouspensky, Peter D. (Petr Demianovich
Neo-Realism 245, 246 Uspenskii, 1878-1947) 4, 44, 48, 55,
New Economic Policy (NEP) 200, 202, 209, 56, 60, 62-68, 69, 70-73, 77
273, 283
302 Index

Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, Dmitrii Nikolaevich Polish Avant-Garde 8, 244-250

(1853-1920) 82, 99 and patriotism 245
Political Section of the Western Front 133
Palace of Labour, Vitebsk 131 politics and art. See Bolshevik Party and Art
Paris, France 28, 225, 261, 281 Poljanski, Branko ve (Branislav Virgilije
Pavlova, Nina Mikhailovna (b. 1924) 216 Micić; 1889-1947) 8
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 222 Pollack, Sarah 221
Peiper, Tadeusz (1891-1969) 247-8 Polonia Hotel, Warsaw 248, 248
People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment Popova, Liubov Sergeevna (1889-1924) 95,
(Narodnyi komissariat 203, 209, 227, 228-229, 230, 231, 235
prosveshcheniia, Narkompros) 92, Popper, Leo (1886-1911) 241
93, 127, 137, 138, 141, 200, 230-323, 262, Positivism 81
273. See also Department of Fine Art Post-Impressionism 257
within the People’s Commissariat of Post-Suprematism 246
Enlightenment post-Suprematist porcelain 217
People’s Commissariat for Agriculture posters 283-285, 285
(Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia) Potebnia, Aleksandr (Alexander Potebnja,
200 1835-1941) 82, 96
perfect man 195 Praesens (Warsaw) 150, 151, 248
Perm, Russia 127 Pravda (Moscow) 202, 235
Pestel, Vera Efremovna (1887-1952) 227 printing, invention of 87
Petin, Matvei Fedorovich 179 production art 120-121, 272
Petnikov, Grigorii Nikolaevich (1894-1971) Productivists 202, 245
127, 128 progress 81
Petrograd, Russia. See St. Petersburg Proletkult (Proletarian Cultural Movement)
Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineers 116, 131, 196, 256
(Petrogradskii institut grazhdanskikh Proletariat 209, 274
ingenerov) 181 propaganda 283, 284
Petrograd State Free Art Studios Proto-Suprematism 4, 18-19, 25
(Petrogradskie gosudarstvennye Pskov, Russia 210-211
svobodnye khudozhestvennye psychology 81-82, 85, 89, 90, 100
uchebnye masterskie) 133 and creativity 85, 89
Petrova, Natalia 220 Puni, Ivan Albertovich (Jean Pougny,
petty-bourgeois tastes 209 1892-1956) 93n66, 201, 221, 229
philosophy 81 Punin, Nikolai Nikolaevich (1888-1953) 92,
photograph/photography 9, 150-151, 256, 93, 95, 202, 270
283, 284, 288 Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1799-1837)
painting vs photography debate 9 193
photomontage 150-151, 283 Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow
physics 4, 46, 47, 48, 49, 55, 80, 102 217
Picasso, Pablo 11, 56, 220, 261
Plan of Monumental Propaganda 201 Questions Concerning the Theory and
poetry 191, 268 Psychology of Creativity [Voprosy teorii i
Pogodin, Aleksandr Lvovich (1872-1947) 82 psikhologii tvorchestva], (Kharkov)
Poincaré, Henri (Jules Henri; 1854-1912) 47, 81-82
55, 81, 171
Poland 242 radio 80, 115, 154
Polish Arts’Club 248 radioactivity 4, 51, 52, 56, 57
Index 303

radium 52, 75 Roslavets, Nikolai Andreevich (1881-1944) 3,

railways 152, 154, 158, 160, 161 33-34, 36, 38
Rakitin, Vasilii Ivanovich (1939-2017) 209, Ross, Denman Waldo (1853-1935) 221
214 Roth, Emil (1893-1980) 148
Rainov, Timofei Ivanovich (1888-1958) 82 Rozanova, Olga Vladimirovna (1886-1918)
Ramsay, Sir William (1852-1916) 56-57 36n27, 37, 165, 227, 229, 241, 242n11, 243
Rayism 52 Rozhdestvenskii, Konstantin Ivanovich
Realism 131, 132, 243 (1906-1997) 12n2, 28n2
Recital Choir 255 Rudakov, Sergei 220
reconstructing reality 229, 269 Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences
Reflectivity 52 (Rossiiskaia akademiia
Rejection of extreme innovation 245-6 khudozhestvennykh nauk – RAKhN)
Relativity Theory 4, 46, 48-49, 49n19, 50, 80 202
reliefs 177, 261-264, 267, 268, 274. Russian Avant-Garde 30, 34, 46, 47, 48, 62,
See also constructed sculpture 70, 80, 82, 83, 89, 91, 97, 101, 106, 200,
religion and religious resonances. 201, 202, 241, 243, 244, 251, 252, 262-263
See spiritual impact beyond Russia 244, 250, 252
Remizov, Aleksei (Aleksey) Mikhailovich literary and artistic Avant-Garde 5, 106,
(1877-1957) 193 122-125
Renaissance 86 and Marxism/politics 92, 93, 250
Repin, Ilia Efimovich (1844-1930) 243 and notions of creativity 83n5, 96-104
Rerberg, Fedor Ivanovich (1865-1938) 17 rehabilitation of 214-215, 217
resurrection 201 Russian Revolution (February 1905) 82, 97
Revolution. See Russian Revolution Russian Revolution (February 1917) 92
revolutionary syndicalism 93 Russian Revolution (October 1917) 7, 92,
Ribot, Théodule-Armand (1839-1916) 81 129, 161, 225-226, 229, 258
Richet, Charles Robert (1850-1935) 56 and art 92, 268
Rickert, Heinrich John (1863-1936) 81 Russian State Archive of Literature and Art
Riedler, Alois (1850-1936) 96 (RGALI), Moscow 3, 7, 188
Riegl, Alois (1858-1905) 221 The Russian Word (Russkoe Slovo) 23
Riemann, Georg Friedrich Bernhard Russolo, Luigi Carlo Filippo (1885-1947) 37
(1826-1866) 47 Rustamova, Irina 13, 18
Rimbaud, Jean Nicolas Arthur (1851-1891) Rutherford, Ernest (1871-1937) 56
123n55 Ryback (Riback), Issaachar Ber (1897-1935)
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Andreevich 165
(1844-1908) 35 Rybchenkov, Boris Fedorovich (1899-1994)
Robbiani, Ettore 170 131, 131, 132-133, 135, 137
Rochester, New York 70 on Malevich’s lecture 134
rocketry 178 Malevich on Rybchenkov 133
Rodchenko, Aleksander Mikhailovich
(1891-1956) 95, 96, 145, 165, 195, 196, Sagittarius (Strelets, 1915) 36
275-279, 276, 278, 283, 286 Samara, Russia 127
and Malevich 278-279 Sandomirskaia, Beatrisa Iurevna (1894-1974)
and Suprematism 278-279 137-138
The Workers’ Club (1925) 281-282, 282 Saratov, Russia 127
Rodchenko-Stepanova Archive, Moscow Sayler, Oliver 229, 232, 233
276, 278, 282 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860) 81, 82,
Roentgen, Wilhelm Conrad (1845-1923) 54 90, 102
304 Index

Schubert, Ernő (1903-1960) 250 Smolensk Proletkult Art Studio 131-132, 132,
science 5, 46ff, 54ff, 63, 66, 80, 81, 83ff, 98, 135
115, 170, 207, 208, 279 Smolensk Provincial Department of
and art 83ff, 105, 108, 117, 123, 171 Education 132
and the occult 80 Smolensk State Art Studios 132, 133
and spiritualism 55-56 Smolensk Worker and Peasant Theatre 135
scientific method 158 Smolensk Unovis. See Unovis in Smolensk
Scientific Word (Nauchnoe slovo) 55 Socialist Realism 214
Scriabin, Alexander Nikolaevich (1871-1915) social reconstruction 92
34, 35 Society of Contemporary Architects
The Second Exhibition of Current-Year Work (Obshchestvo sovremennykh
(Vitebsk, 1920) 165-166 arkitekorov – OSA) 181
Second World War 214 Society of Historians of Eastern European,
The Seekers 243 Eurasian and Russian Art and
Semenov, Vladimir Lavrentevich (1914-1978) Architecture (SHERA) 1
216 Society of Young Artists, Moscow.
semiotics 113-114 See Obmokhu
Semper, Gottfried (1803-1879) 160, 221 Socio-Photo Movmeent 256
sensation/feeling 74, 76, 77, 80, 90, 125 Soddy, Frederick 56
Severianin, Igor (Igor Vasilevich Lotarev, Soffici, Ardengo (1879-1964) 57-58
1887-1941) 38 Soiuz molodezhi. See Union of Youth
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) 85, 125n65 solar system 58, 110
Shatskikh, Aleksandra 14-16, 26-27, 53n39, Sologub, Fedor (Fedor Kuzmich Teternikov;
132, 222, 227 1863-1927) 193
Shikhireva, Olga 130 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New
Shilov, N. A. 56 York 224
Shklovskii, Viktor Borisovich (1893-1984) Solovev (Solovyov) Vladimir Sergeevich
158, 196, 209 (1853-1900) 92n61
Shterenberg, David Petrovich (1881-1948) Somov, Konstantin Andreevich (1869-1939)
127, 141, 201 193
Shvedov, Sergei 131 Sorokin, Mikhail 217-218
Siberia, Russia 214 soul 86
Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944) 214 sound waves 171
Signac, Paul Victor Jules (1863-1935) 135 Soviet authorities and art 214
Signposts (Vekhi) 97 space 5, 25, 40-42, 46-47, 51, 53, 59, 64, 71,
silver 174, 175 73, 80, 94, 108, 125, 154, 166, 169, 171, 174,
Simonov, Grigorii Aleksandrovich (1893-1974) 207, 243, 258, 260, 262, 267, 277, 279,
184 281, 285, 288
Simon, Jolán (1885-1938) 251 space-time continuum 46, 48-49
Skoptsy, Ukraine, embroidery workshop space travel 71
222 Sparks (Iskry, Moscow) 222
Slavina Nina 215, 216 speed 51, 58, 67, 77, 166, 170, 171, 174
Smekalov, Igor 138, 140 Spencer, Herbert (1820-1903) 87, 110
Smolensk, Belarus 6, 126, 130-136, 132, 137, spiritualism 55-56, 63, 64
164, 269 spiritual values 60, 85, 90, 91, 97, 100, 257,
Smolensk Museum of Contemporary Art 259
136 square 229, 244
Smolensk Proletkult 134
Index 305

St. Petersburg (Petrograd, Leningrad), Russia Stenberg, Georgii Avgustovich (1900-1933)

36, 70, 89, 98, 165, 197, 218, 223 276, 277
Stalin, Joseph (Iosif Vissarionovich Stenberg, Vladimir Avgustovich (1899-1982)
Dzhugashvilli, 1878-1953) 214 276, 277
State Archive of Orenburg Province Stepanova, Varvara Fedorovna (1894-1958)
(Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv 95, 195, 196, 203, 209, 235, 237-238, 283,
Orenburgskoi oblasti) 138 286
State Free Art Studios (Svobodnye Stranikh, Vladimir Fedorovich (1888-1981)
gosudarstvennye khudozhestvennye 131, 135
masterskie – Svomas), Moscow 95, Stray Dog Cabaret 35, 63
126, 127, 128, 137, 230-231, 245 string theory 47
State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg Stroganov School of Technical Drawing,
204, 206, 207, 208, 211, 212, 213, 216, 217, Moscow 136
219 Struve, Petr Berngardovich (1870-1944) 97
State Institute of Art History Strzemiński, Władysław (Vladislav
(Gosudarstvennyi institut istorii Strzheminski; 1893-1957) 8, 128ff, 129,
iskusstv – GIII), Leningrad 171, 179, 133, 136, 143, 243, 244-247, 256
185, 210 and the Smolensk Unovis 6, 8, 128ff
State Institute of Artistic Culture on Suprematism 247
(Gosudarstvennyi institut Suetin, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1897-1954)
khudozhestvennoi kul’tury – 106, 144, 157, 164, 184, 214-215, 286
Ginkhuk), Petrograd/Leningrad 95, architectural colour schemes 211-212
105, 106, 171, 179, 197, 200, 210, 214, 216 concept of Suprematism 152, 212-213
State Literary Museum, Moscow 15, 16 exhibition design 214, 214n48
State Museum of Contemporary Art, Post-Suprematist porcelain 210-214, 211,
Thessaloniki 103, 104, 120, 121, 228 212, 213
State Museum of Theatre and Music, St. Suprematist porcelain 8, 200, 202,
Petersburg 25 205-206, 207, 209, 210, 215, 217
State Mustafaev Azerbaijan Museum of Art, teaching 214
Baku 155 textile designs 233-234, 237, 237
State Porcelain Factory, Petrograd/Leningrad Suetin, Nina 220
(later the Leningrad Lomonosov Sun 11, 27
Porcelain Factory, now the Imperial Suprematism
Porcelain Factory, St. Petersburg) 8, and Communism 80, 242
200, 210, 215, 216, 218 and Constructivism 9, 120-121, 181, 184,
State Radishchev Museum, Saratov 156 259-288
State Russian Museum (Gosudarstvennyi Cosmic Suprematism 174
Russkii Muzei), Leningrad/St. and creativity 96-104
Petersburg 111, 213 and Cubism 205, 211-212
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow 2, 3, 12, 13, development of Suprematism 223-224
19, 20, 22, 23, 147, 148, 234, 235, 236, 239, difficulty formulating Suprematism 31
284 difficulty naming Suprematism 31
Stażewski, Henryk (1894-1988) 246, 248 and economy 98ff, 107
steamships 160 and Futurism 205, 211-212
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 2, 16, 17, 2, invented or discovered 39
78, 79 and material 111
Steiner, Rudolf Joseph Lorenz (1861-1925) Polish criticisms of 247, 249
64, 81 promotion of 226
306 Index

Suprematism (cont.) Tarabukin, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1889-1956)

and reconstructing reality 198, 208, 269 95, 203
stages of 99, 166 Tate Modern, London 2, 234
term Suprematism 29-30, 31 Tatlin, Vladimir Evgrafovich (1885-1953) 92,
universal language 125, 225 243, 208, 275, 281, 286
and utopia 257 culture of materials 275
and the white ground 25, 166 Letatlin 281
Suprematist architecture 6, 30, 118-119, and Malevich 259-260, 264-268, 271
144-160, 167ff, 199, 268-270 materials 277
Suprematist Art of Volume-Construction Model for a Monument to the Third
185 International 146, 164-165, 269-271,
Suprematist ballet 135 270, 274-275
Suprematist Constructivism 184 reliefs 261-264, 263, 267, 268, 274
Suprematist decoration 199-200, 205-207 and space 263, 267, 281
Suprematist design 30, 198-220, 269 technique 94, 262, 287
Suprematist graphic design 199, 269 technology 5, 83ff, 87, 92, 99, 106, 116, 160,
Suprematist music 30, 33-39, 225, 268 215, 247, 259, 272, 279, 288
Suprematist painting 3-5, 11-28, 12, 17, 29-30, Malevich on technology 83n5, 99n99,
31-32, 39, 40-42, 44, 45, 53-54, 60, 61, 158-159
68-69, 69, 70-72, 76, 78-79, 79, 103-104, technology, philosophy of 83ff
103, 142, 152, 155-156, 156, 203-205, technology and art 83ff
222-226, 223, 224, 225, 226, 233-234, 249, tectonics 159-160, 273, 274
256, 257-258, 261, 261, 264-267, 265, 266, telepathy 55
268, 284 telescope, the invention of 87
Suprematist poetry 30, 42, 268 tension in materials 107
Suprematist porcelain 198-220, 233, 269 Terekhin, Fedor 181n53
Suprematist sculpture 30, 225, 268 Tesla, Nikola (1856-1943) 115
Suprematist textiles 7, 199, 221-239, 232, 233, textiles 7, 199, 203, 221-239, 223, 228, 230, 231,
234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 269 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 269,
and Constructivist textiles 234-237, 283 283
Suprematist town planning 154, 198 texture. See faktura
Suprematist notion of utility 191-192, The Thaw 214
204-205 theosophy 44, 62ff, 102
Suprematist utopia 209-210, 218, 268-269 Theosophical Society, St. Petersburg 63
Supreme Soviet of the National Economy Third Congress of the Comintern, Moscow,
(Vysshii sovet narodnogo khoziaistva – 1921 283
VSNKh) 210 time 48, 64, 68, 73, 94, 154, 171, 212, 262, 272
Supremus, journal and group 6, 127, 228 Timofeev, A. 90
Surrealism 250 Timofeeva, Nadezhda Konstantinovna
Swedish Church, St. Petersburg 36 (1900-1973) 137, 139, 140, 141
Switch-Points (Zwrotnica, Krakow) 245 tin 117
Switzerland 6 Today (Ma, Budapest 1916-1919; Vienna
Syrkus, Helena (1900-1982) 248 1920-1925) 250, 251
Syrkus, Szymon (1893-1964) 248 Tolstaia-Vechorka, Tatiana Vladimirovna (née
Szczuka, Mieczysław (1898-1927) 8, 246, Efimova; 1892-1965) 123
249, 258 Tolstoy, Leo (Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi,
1828-1910) 193
Toporkov, Aleksandr 92
Index 307

towns. See cities Unovis exhibition (Moscow, June 1921)

Trades Union of Workers in the Arts (Soiuz 6, 141, 142, 142, 166, 172, 173
rabotnikov iskusstv – Sorabis or Rabis) Unovis explorations of faktura (texture)
141 105-125, 174-175
transportation 149, 179, 185-186 Unovis in Orenburg 6, 127, 136-141,
transrational 65, 116, 124 142,143-144
Trauner, Sándor (1906-1993) 250 Unovis in Perm 127
Tretyakov Gallery. See State Tretyakov Gallery Unovis in Smolensk 6, 126, 127, 128-136,
The Triangle group 60, 90 140, 141, 143
Trotskii, Noi Abramovich (1895-1940) 184 Unovis Creative Committee (Tvorcheskii
Trotsky, Leon (Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, komitet – Tvorkom) 128, 167, 168, 172
1879-1940) 202, 209 Unovis. Bulletin of the Vitebsk Creative
Tulovsky, Julia 7, 221 Committee (Vitebsk) 134
Turowski, Andrzej 248 USSR in Construction (SSSR na stroike,
typography 283 Moscow) 283, 284
utilitarianism 247, 249, 256
Udaltsova, Nadezhda Andreevna (1885-1961) utility 83, 212, 259, 279, 283
7, 227, 228, 231, 233 utopia/utopian visions 106, 121, 194, 195, 198,
Uitz, Béla (1887-1972) 256 203, 204, 218, 257, 288
Ukraine 242
Ultraviolet waves 52 Vagner, Nikolai Petrovich (1829-1907) 56
Umanskii (Umansky/Krainy), Konstantin Vajda, Lajos (1908-1941) 8, 250, 251-254, 252,
Aleksandrovich (1902-1945) 244, 251 253, 254, 255
Umov, Nikolai Alekseevich (1846-1915) 48, Vakar, Irina 1, 3-4, 11, 133
55 Van Doesburg, Theo. See Doesburg, Theo van
Union of Youth (Soiuz molodezhi, St. Vas, István (1910-199) 243
Petersburg) 65 Vaulin, Petr Kuzmich (1870-1943) 201
Union of Youth group 57, 60, 62 Verbovka (Verbivka), Ukraine 38, 203, 222,
Unism 243, 247, 249 227-229, 238
United States of America (USA) 225 Vertov, Dziga (Denis Arkadevich Kaufman,
universe 42, 110, 258 1896-1954) 195, 197
Unovis (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva – Veszelszky, Béla (1905-1977) 250
Champions of the New Art), 126-143 Victory over the Sun (St. Petersburg, 1913)
Unovis (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva – 30, 70, 135, 243. See also Malevich
Champions of the New Art), Vitebsk Vienna, Austria 244, 250
43, 95, 119-120, 105, 126, 127ff, 136, 143, Vienna Secession 221
144, 160, 161-162, 166, 167, 184, 194, 196, Virgin Soil (Nov’) 37
200, 217, 232-233, 269, 286 Vitebsk, Belarus 6, 43, 126-143, 161, 165, 171,
collective creativity 145, 147, 152, 158 172, 181, 197, 269
development of the name 144, 197 Vitebsk People’s Art School (Vitebskoe
teaching 5 narodnoe khudozhestvennoe
textile design 233-236, 234, 235, 236, 237, uchilishche; subsequently Vitebsk
237, 238, 239 Artistic and Practical Institute) 6,
Unovis No. 1 (May 1920) 2, 111, 190, 196, 105, 138, 154, 162, 179, 232
233 Vitebsk Department of Education 141
Unovis exhibition (Moscow, June 1920) Vkhutemas (Vysshie gosudarstvennye
127, 166 khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie
masterskie – Higher State Artistic and
308 Index

Technical Workshops), Moscow 95, Wreath (Venok-Stefanos) exhibition (Moscow,

283, 141, 142, 208 1907) 89
Volga River, Russia 196 Wundt, Wilhelm Maximilian (1832-1920)
Voronina, Ekaterina 13, 18 46, 62, 81, 86, 158
Vorticism 36n27 Wünsche, Isabel 55
Vucinich, Alexander 54, 55-56
Vulcan (Vulcan, Leningrad) 181 X-Rays 4, 46, 48, 52, 58, 80

Warsaw, Poland 247, 258 The Young Progressives 250, 251, 255-256
Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst (Berlin)
183-184 Zamyatin, Yevgeny (Evgenii Ivanovich
Washington, National Gallery. See National Zamiatin, 1884-1937) 195-196
Gallery, Washington Żarnower, Teresa (1895-1950) 246
weightlessness 25 zaum’ 30, 65, 121-124
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George, 1866-1946) 193 Zdanevich, Ilia Mikhailovich (1894-1975)
Werkbund 160 57, 192-193
Westheim, Paul (1886-1963) 255 Zeisel, Eva (Éva Amália Striker, 1906-2011)
Willet, Jonathan 182 215n54
wireless telegraphy 5, 80 Zen 247
Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy (1885-1939) Zero group, Germany 186
241, 242 Zero (Nol’, 1915) 30, 31
wood 263, 277 Zhadova, Larissa Sergeevna (1927-1981)
Work (Munka, 1928-1939, Budapest) 250, 198-199, 214, 217
255, 256 Zheverzheev, Levkii Ivanovich (1887-1941)
Wölfflin, Heinrich (1864-1945) 95 14
Workers’s Club. See Rodchenko zinc 117
Working Group of Constructivists, Moscow. Zöllner, Johann Karl Friedrich (1834-1882)
See Constructivists, Working Group 56
Worringer, Wilhelm Robert (1881-1965) 221