Nina Kogan

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Nina Kogan (1919)
Curtain to the suprematist ballet. UNOWIS Almanac 1920
Suprematist Composition (1921/23)
Tram UNOWIS-Almanac 1920

Nina Iossifowna (Ossipovna) Kogan ( Russian: Нина Йосифовна (Осиповна) Коган ), scientific transliteration Nina Josifovna (Osipovna) Kogan ; (born March 25 . jul / 6. April  1889 greg. in St. Petersburg , died in 1942 in Leningrad ) was a Russian artist, art teacher and stage designer. Kogan joined Suprematism early on and became an important member of the UNOWIS artist group . Her Suprematist Ballet from 1920 is one of the very first kinetic theater performances and is seen as an anticipation of performance as an art form.

life and work

Parental home and education

The father, Iosif (Osip) Kogan, was a military doctor; he was originally a Jew , but converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity in order to have a career. Nina Kogan grew up in a middle-class family.

In 1905 Nina Kogan graduated from the School of the Order of St. Catherine, a school for daughters of the upper class in St. Petersburg. She had top marks in drawing and was well educated. From 1905 to 1908 studied at the drawing school of the Society for the Promotion of the Arts with Alfred Eberling , Arkadi Rylow and Alexei Schusjew. Subsequently, from 1908 to 1911, she took private lessons in Jan Ciągliński's studio and from 1911 to 1913 she attended the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Moscow. In March 1913, she dropped out without a diploma.

In 1913 she returned to Saint Petersburg (from 1914 Petrograd) and taught drawing privately and in schools, she also worked with Nadezhda Lyubavina in the city museum in the department for signs , which was headed by Vera Yermolajewa at this time . Yermolajewa, like Kogan, later became a member of the UNOWIS artist group.

Acquaintance with Malevich and member of UNOWIS

In 1918 she met Kasimir Malewitsch and Marc Chagall , who entrusted her with the management of the basic course at the Vitebsk Art School of the People (Prawdastr. 5), which he organized in 1918 , after the previous art academies were closed in the course of the October Revolution. At first she worked under the direction of Marc Chagall and from autumn 1919 under Kasimir Malewitsch, school director was from 1920 Vera Yermolajewa .

Through Malevich and El Lissitzky , she became a supporter of Suprematism . She also had a close connection to Nikolai Suetin , Iwan Tscherwinko , Ilja Tschaschnik and others. a. from the artist group UNOWIS (advocates of the new art), in which she had a leading position. In 1920 she published the leaflet on graphics and other programmatic contributions in the magazine UNOWIS (No. 1 and No. 2) and in Put Unowisa . She took part in the exhibitions of the UNOWIS group in Vitebsk (1920, 1921) and Moscow (1921, 1922).

Kogan choreographed and designed (stage and costumes) in 1920 the first and only Suprematist ballet , an extension of Suprematism to the performing arts, in the Latvian Club in Vitebsk. So she became part of the renewal movement of the Russian theater after the October Revolution .

In 1922 she moved to Moscow and married the artist Anatoly Borisov (divorced in the early 1930s). There she worked a. a. at the Museum of Picturesque Culture . Kogan took part with works at the First Russian Art Exhibition in 1922, organized by Naum Gabo and El Lissitzky in 1922 at the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin.

In 1926 she moved to Leningrad together with the Malevich group, of which only a few remained in Vitebsk, after the tensions between the Chagall group and also with the party and the local art criticism about the socially required art movements had increased.

Return to realism

In the late 1920s, Kogan gave up Suprematism and returned to realistic art. She curated exhibitions at the Vyborg Culture House and the Museum of the Revolution (1926–27) and contributed works to the permanent exhibition of modern art at the Russian Museum. From 1928, she worked under Vladimir Lebedev in the children's literature department at the State Publishing House. She illustrated books and created portraits of Anna Akhmatova in the early 1930s .

In 1934, like Vera Yermolajewa, she was arrested in the course of the Stalinist purges and remained in prison for three months.

In the second half of the 1930s she taught drawing at a children's art studio and worked on Siskin magazine . Nina Kogan lived in the apartment that had belonged to her parents, but which had now become a community center with twenty tenants. In 1938 she took part in the exhibition of works by Russian artists in Leningrad, and from 1940 to 1941 in the 6th and 7th exhibitions of works by Leningrad artists.

She fell ill with psychological and nervous disorders and became lonely during the war. Nina Kogan died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad by the German Wehrmacht in the winter of 1942 and was buried in an unknown location. Neither the month nor the day of her death are known. Her property was confiscated after her death, and almost all of her works of art were probably destroyed.

plant

The leaflet on graphics and, above all, her works distinguish Nina Kogan as one of the most exposed artists of post-revolutionary Russia. Her Suprematic Ballet from 1920 had no plot, but was an abstract dance in which the colored forms of the stage set were in constant motion and soon changed into a cross, a circle or a square.

In her oil painting Composition from 1920, too , the strictly geometric forms are in a subtle change, with the cool colors and the clear, almost metallic surface suggesting the quiet functioning of a machine. In the work “ Suprematist Composition ”, created between 1920 and 1922, the idea of ​​a movement of the geometric forms and thus of constantly changing configurations is very much alive in the spirit of her ballet.

She carefully transformed Suprematism into the stricter, purposeful, objectivity-struggling world of constructivism . This process was also incorporated into the pedagogical considerations she conveyed to the art students enrolled in her studio. In the first stage - the “ painting faculty ”, the student learns that all of nature, like every perception, is constructed color. The second level is the “ Faculty of Material ”: dealing with the various materials as a means of transcendence. At the third level, the “ factual faculty ”, technology is primarily used as a means of construction. The task of the new school is to show the pupils the way to the creative and inventive, to guide them in activities that will ultimately produce a new, utilitarian-technical world made up of elements that have been mapped out by Suprematism .

At the end of the 1970s a number of her Suprematist works reappeared, the authenticity of which is doubtful. Nina Kogan's name is misused for fakes due to her unclear biography and her untimely death.

Works (selection)

  • 1920 Composition , oil on canvas, 88 × 66 cm, Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne - 1980 Collection Ludwig, Cologne

Exhibitions

  • 1985 Galerie Schlégl, Zurich, solo exhibition
  • 1986 Russian avant-garde 1910-1930 Collection Ludwig Cologne , Kunsthalle Cologne

Collections

Fonts

  • Nina Kogan: O suprematic balete. In: Almanach Unowis. No. 1, 1920.

literature

  • Nina Ossipovna Kogan: 1887 Vitebsk - 1942?, Suprematist Works 1920 - 1923. Exhibition from May 14th to June 29th and from August 15th to September 14th. Gallery and Edition Schlégl, Zurich 1985.
  • Herbert Gerten (ed.) & Evelyn Weiss (arrangement): Russian Avantgarde 1910–1930, Ludwig Collection, Cologne. Prestel, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-7913-0766-5 , pp. 62f.
  • Christiane Post: Kogan, Nina Iosifovna . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 81, de Gruyter, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-023186-1 , p. 163 f.
  • Beat Wismer (Ed.): Karo-Dame: constructive, concrete and radical art by women from 1914 until today . Baden: Müller, 1995 ISBN 3-906700-95-X , pp. 98f .; P. 416
  • Larissa A. Shadowa: Search and Experiment: From the History of Russian and Soviet Art between 1910 and 1930 . Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1978, Figs. 173, 174

Web links

Commons : Nina Kogan  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Aleksandra Shatskikh, Katherine Foshko Tsan: Vitebsk: The Life of Art. Yale University Press 2008, ISBN 978-0-300-10108-9 , pp. 102-107. Google Books, preview
  2. ↑ Nikolai Suetin: 1897-1954. The State Russian Museum. Palace Editions, [Bad Breisig]; RA, [Moscow] 2008, ISBN 978-3-940761-00-2 , p. 17
  3. ^ Victor Martinovich: Vitebsk Avant-Garde (1918-1922): Social and Cultural Context and Art Criticism. Vilnius Academy of Arts, 2008. (English summary  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. The dissertation from p. 24– 37)@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.ehu.lt  
  4. ↑ Nikolai Suetin: 1897-1954. The State Russian Museum. Palace Editions 2008, p. 61
  5. ↑ Flyer, November 20, 1920 , printed in the Cologne catalog 1979/80, p. 163
  6. ↑ An article in Artnews deals with the phenomenon of numerous art forgeries in the style of the Russian avant-garde.
  7. ↑ With the bicycle to the Milky Way. Hoffmann Collection. König, Cologne 2009, ISBN 978-3-86560-653-2
personal data
SURNAME Kogan, Nina
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Коган, Нина Йосифовна; Коган, Нина Осиповна; Kogan, Nina Iossifovna (full name); Kogan, Nina Osipovna; Kogan, Nina Osipovna
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian painter
DATE OF BIRTH April 6, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Petersburg
DATE OF DEATH 1942
Place of death Leningrad