Suprematism
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Suprematism (from old Latin supremus , "the highest") is a modern style of the visual arts, with a relationship to futurism and constructivism . It originated in Russia and was valid from 1915 until the beginning of the 1930s.
terminology
The Russian artist Kasimir Malevich understood supremacy as the primacy of pure sensation over objective nature.
development
After its neo-primitivist and cubo-futurist phase in 1912/13, Suprematism was developed from the ideas of futurism by Malevich . Especially through El Lissitzky , Suprematism influenced De Stijl and the Bauhaus . It is the first consistently non-representational art movement. Non -representational art differs from abstract in that its forms are not abstractions (essentializations / simplifications) of visible objects. Suprematism is a constructive art movement freed from references to objects; it places the reduction to the simplest geometrical forms in the service of illustrating the “highest” human principles of knowledge. The main works of Suprematism include the paintings Black Square on White Ground (1915), Red Square (1915) and White Square on White Ground (1919) created by Malevich . In 1915/16 the art exhibition 0.10 took place in Saint Petersburg.
Background - Russian avant-garde
Parallel to the historical upheavals in Russia from 1905 to 1920, Russian artists were looking for new ways to give their image of the world a new expression. A wide variety of art movements arose in very rapid succession, taking up and developing the art movements of Western Europe. An art exhibition initiated in 1908 by the Russian magazine Das Goldene Vlies with works by the most important contemporary Western European artists was particularly influential . Among others, Henri Matisse , Pierre-Auguste Renoir , Georges Braque , Paul Cézanne , Vincent van Gogh , Kees van Dongen , Alfred Sisley and Pierre Bonnard were represented .
In 1911 an exhibition of the group " Karo-Bube " followed, in which a large number of artists of the Russian avant-garde took part and which established the development of Russian painting and sculpture towards abstraction. The exhibition " 0.10 ", which followed in 1915 and in which Suprematist paintings were exhibited for the first time, marked the breakthrough to non-representational art. The exhibitors included Malevich Vladimir Tatlin , Nadeschda Udalzowa , Lyubow Popowa and Ivan Puni .
How inspiring these encounters was on the development of modern Russian art, is reflected in the artistic development of Malevich, who by the influence of the French Impressionists , the Futurists and Cubists post-impressionist a and neo-primitivist style for Cubo-Futurism was then developed Suprematism.
Victory over the sun
On December 3 and 5, 1913, the opera Victory Over the Sun was performed in the Lunapark Theater in Petersburg. The libretto was by Alexej Krutschonych , the prologue by Velimir Chlebnikow , the music was written by Mikhail Wassiljewitsch Matjuschin and the costumes and set were created by Malevich. Similar to the Commedia dell'arte , the artists used stereotypical characters such as "the strong man", "the coward", "the gravedigger" and "the new one".
The opera was a co-production of the four artists who had been working on it since meeting in July 1913. Her goal was to break with the usual theatrical past and use a "clear, pure, logical Russian language". Malevich implemented this by creating costumes from the simplest of materials and using geometric shapes. Flashing spotlights illuminated the figures in such a way that alternately hands, legs or heads disappeared into the darkness. The stage curtain showed a black square.
The work on the stage curtain inspired Malevich to create the painting The Black Square .
Black square
The painterly initial work of Suprematism was the painting Black Square by Malevich, a pure black oil painting painted on a white background. It was first exhibited with 38 other Suprematist paintings by Malevich at the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd in 1915. In the catalog it was simply referred to as a "square". Malevich himself called it the “unframed icon of my time”. With this designation, he followed on from a discussion that had been going on in Russia since the mid-19th century as to whether Russian painting should orient itself towards Western art or should develop its own visual language that is rooted in Russian tradition. The symbol of the Russian tradition was the icon. Just as the Russian peasants set up their icons in the eastern corner of a room, Malevich also hung his black square in the eastern corner in the exhibition 0.10.
Naum Gabo , one of the contemporary witnesses of this development, later wrote:
“The ideology of non-representationalism proclaimed by the Suprematists in 1915 is the result of a rejection of the Cubist experiment, even if art historians still fail to see the true and general influence that the concept of Russian art - the icon as well as that of Wrubel - has had the thinking and the conscious vision of this group of Russian artists. "
At the same time, Malevich understood the black square as the maximum compression of the color mass; for him it was the symbol for "geometric economy". He himself wrote in his Bauhaus book The Objectless World , published in 1927 :
“By suprematism I mean the supremacy of pure sensation in the fine arts. When in 1913, in my desperate endeavor to free art from the ballast of the representational, I fled to the shape of the square and exhibited a picture that represented nothing but a black square on a white field, the criticism sighed and with it society: Everything we loved has been lost: We are in a desert ... In front of us is a black square on a white background! [..] The black square on the white field was the first form of expression of the objective sensation: the square = the sensation, the white field = the nothing outside of this sensation. "
The reaction to The Black Square was clear: an affront to the academic and realistic style of painting, it was called the “dead square”, the “nothing personified”. The art historian Alexander Benois described it in the Petrograd magazine Die Sprache as "the very, most cunning trick in the fairground booth of the very latest art". The Russian writer Dmitri Mereschkowski , who spoke of the "invasion of the bully in culture", joined the slavery.
Red Square followed in 1915 : painterly realism of a peasant woman in two dimensions , a square painted in bright red on a beige background. Today, like the Black Square on a White Background, it is in the State Russian Museum in Petersburg . For Malewitsch it was “the signal of the revolution”, it was followed by other colored pictures, which, however, became increasingly multi-part.
In 1919 Malevich painted The White Square , which temporarily concluded his painterly experiments with Suprematism. For Malewitsch, the white square was the sign of “self-knowledge of a purely utilitarian perfection of all man” and the expression of pure non-objectivity.
Malevich's theoretical approach
The development of Suprematism was accompanied by extensive theoretical concepts from the start. The stage design for the opera Sieg über die Sonne was justified in a manifesto.
Malevich Benois responded to the fierce criticism that the painting The Black Square aroused in a long letter that is now considered to be an early document for Suprematist philosophy:
“..I am happy that the face of my square cannot be made to coincide with a single master and time. Right? I disobey my fathers and I am not like them. And I am one step [...] My philosophy is: Destruction of cities and villages every 50 years, expulsion of nature from art, destruction of love and sincerity in art, for nothing in the world but destruction of the living source in the People [...] And you will never see the smile of the lovely psyche on my square. And my square will never be a mattress for the night of love. "
Malevich was looking for an alternative term for an ideal of art that did not objectify and that corresponded to the term “ God ” in religion , the principle of “objective technical perfection” in science, or “ beauty ” in academic art . These ideals generate goals and methods. Achieving this sets people in motion to deal with their environment . But due to the irreconcilable differences between the three directions of religion, art and science, people begin to understand their environment differently, that is, to classify and objectify depending on the chosen direction . But since the same object can be described by the three perspectives in three different ways, according to Malevich it should be proven that this object has its own basis of being, independent of humans, the essence of which has not yet been fully grasped by humans.
The highest principle that Malevich formulated is therefore that which all three directions of knowledge have in common. Each of their ideals is completely non-representational seen so that the common denominator that objectivity is for Malevich the highest - Suprematism. He derived the term (via the mediating role played by the French and Polish languages) from the Latin word suprematia (superiority, rule or sovereignty).
The formal language of Malevich
Malevich did not paint expressively like Wassily Kandinsky , but constructed his factual squares and rectangles. All shapes used are derived from the square. An example of his more form-rich pictures is Dynamic Suprematism No. 57 , which is in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
The objective freedom he was striving for should not be chaotic, like that of the futurists , but it followed a formal-energetic economy that produces organized structures. His pictures are models of a reality that, although it cannot be captured by conventional means, still exists. However, not only should new possibilities for knowledge be created. Since the old formal languages and concepts determined the old worldview and thus also human actions, the new art is just as capable of renewing human society by creating a new worldview .
Suprematism, which founded abstract art, influenced Ivan Puni , Lyubow Popova and Alexander Michailowitsch Rodchenko in particular from 1916 to 1920/21 , although they continued to develop stylistically after 1921. Popova and Rodchenko became important representatives of constructivism in the succession .
Suprematism in Applied Arts
In 1918 Malevich first headed the painting studio at the First and Second Independent Artistic Workshops in Moscow and - together with Nadezhda Udalzowa - the textile design class. From autumn 1919 he continued his teaching activity at the Art School of Vitebsk (near Minsk Belarus ). Marc Chagall was already working there , although he had a different view of art. The fights for direction at times had a paralyzing effect on school operations; In the end, however, it was Malevich who prevailed and turned the Vitebsk art school into a suprematist center. This Suprematist center included Vera Yermolajewa , El Lissitzky , Varwara Stepanova and Nathan Altman , among others . At the same time, Malevich held important positions in art bodies until the mid-1920s.
Both as a teacher and in his function as a member of art committees, Malevich influenced the formal language of sculptors , architects and artisans . In Vitebsk he founded the group Unovis together with other artists, whose aim was to form a suprematist view of art and the world. A Unovis leaflet dated November 20, 1920 states:
"We not only call the designers of art to action, to vote and to exercise, but also our comrades, the blacksmiths , locksmiths , medical professionals, stonemasons , concretes, foundries , carpenters, mechanical engineers, aviators, stone knockers, tusks, textile workers, tailors , Millers and all those who produce the practically useful world of things in order to put on the new form and meaning under the uniform flag of the Unovisse.
The style extended to all areas of the visual arts , such as painting , sculpture , typography , architecture , poster art and design ( furniture , porcelain ). For example, Vitebsk food ration stamps were designed in a suprematist manner during the “ war economy ”; Ilja Tschaschnik , Malevich's research assistant while he was in charge of the State Institute for Artistic Culture (GINChUK), designed tableware for the Lomonossow porcelain factory based on the ideas of Suprematism. Malevich himself also designed porcelain; The teapot he designed, in which colored squares, rod shapes and circles float on white porcelain, can now be found in many design collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York .
The application of the Suprematist principles to the arts and crafts began very early. As early as November 1915, the exhibition in a Moscow gallery showed modern arts and crafts, in which Suprematist designs by Iwan Puni and Alexandra Exter were implemented by women from Ukrainian villages. A second arts and crafts exhibition followed in December 1917 in the Moscow Michailowa Salon, where Suprematist design was often applied in the form of embroidery. In addition to Malevich, Lyubov Popova , Olga Rosanowa and Exter had provided designs for the work, which included pillow cases, scarves and handbags.
El Lissitzky - the bridge to the west
The most important artist who passed on the art form developed by Malewitsch and the ideas connected with it abroad was the painter El Lissitzky . Lissitzky dealt intensively with Suprematism, especially in the years 1919 to 1923. He was deeply impressed by Malevich's Suprematist works; he saw in it the theoretical and visual equivalent of social upheaval - for him, Suprematism with its radicalism was the creative equivalent of a new form of society. Lissitzky transferred Malewitsch's approach to his Proun constructions, which he himself described as a “transfer station from painting to architecture”. However, the Proun constructions were at the same time the sign of the artistic separation from Suprematism. For him, Malevich's “Black Square” was the end point of a consistent thought process, which, however, had to be followed by new constructive development work. He saw this in his Proun constructions, the designation “Proun” (= Pro Unowis) symbolizing the Suprematist origin.
In 1923, Lissitzky set up exhibition rooms for non-representational art in Berlin , Hanover and Dresden . During this trip to the west, El Lissitzky was in close contact with Theo van Doesburg and thus built a bridge to De Stijl and the Bauhaus .
Like Malewitsch, El Lissitzky also contributed to the theoretical underpinning of this art direction: “Suprematism led painting from the state of the ancient named objective number to the state of the modern abstract number, which is purely of the objective, which is a number which by its nature unites takes up its own space next to the objects. "
Changing acceptance in the new Russia
For the short period from 1917 to 1921, the political and artistic revolutions ran parallel. With the support of the People's Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky , a "new" art could develop without direct state interference. In this early phase of the revolution, the new formal language was also used for political propaganda and slogans designed with Suprematist motifs appeared on the walls of houses. Malewitsch's biographer Stachelhaus calls this “an irony in art history”, because the postulate of the intellectual freedom of Suprematism was incompatible with the “ New Economic Policy ”, which was proclaimed by the government from 1921 onwards. Suprematism meant non-representational art without a goal or purpose. The “New Economic Politics”, on the other hand, called for an art that could be politically functionalized. This demand ultimately led to socialist realism .
According to the new communist government, Malevich's art was a product of the bourgeois art tradition and incomprehensible to the proletariat. Even the liberal art commissioner Lunacharsky could not prevent Malevich from increasingly gaining the reputation of a decadent formalist. The State Institute for Artistic Culture (GINChUk), of which Malevich was director, was closed in 1926, and publication of Malevich's theory of the complementary element in painting was prevented.
In the spring of 1927 Malevich traveled to Germany to examine the possibility of working at the Bauhaus . Although the Bauhaus was also influenced by Malevich's artistic ideas through El Lissitzky, the Bauhaus and Malevich's conceptions of art were too different for Malevich to have a job there. Although the Bauhaus published Malevich's The Objectless World in its book series in 1927 , it wrote in the foreword: “We are pleased to be able to publish the present work by the important Russian painter Malevich in the series of Bauhaus books , although it deviates from our point of view on fundamental issues. "
While an exhibition of works by Malevich was still being shown in Berlin, he traveled back to Russia on June 5, 1927 and left his paintings in the West. The radical change that occurred in Malevich's painting after his return to Russia is seen by some art historians as his attempt to recreate the paintings left behind in Berlin. He broke away from Suprematism and painted again in a late Impressionist and Cubo-Futurist style, drawing on his people and peasant depictions as he had created them before his Suprematist period. He backdated many of his paintings. In contrast, the pictures he created in the last years of his life, in which he ties in with the imagery of the Italian Renaissance , are signed by him with a small black square.
The suprematism repressed in Russian art perception continued for a long time. In 1984, in the preface to the exhibition catalog Russian Art of the 20th Century , the Russian Vitalij S. Manin wrote about the art scene at the beginning of the 20th century:
“The Russian art life of the pre-revolution was characterized by its colourfulness and the variety of emerging and sometimes very short-lived art innovations. Some directions of this time formed the pride of Russian art, others were a kind of preliminary study for later reflection, the third served for a long time as a breeding ground for a multitude of creative side paths, very complexly transformed over time and even with noticeable resonance in Soviet art of later years . "
Suprematism, one of the most important art developments of the time, is not mentioned.
The rehabilitation of the avant-garde of Russian art in the first third of the 20th century did not take place until perestroika . It was not until 1988 that there was a comprehensive retrospective of Malevich's works in Saint Petersburg .
literature
swell
- Michael Maegraith, Alexander Tolnay (Ed.): Russian Art of the 20th Century - Semjonow Collection. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1984, p. 17. ISBN 3-608-76171-3
- El Lissitzky. Exhibition catalog Galerie Gmurzynska. Cologne 1976, p. 64.
- Heiner Stachelhaus; Kazimir Malevich - A tragic conflict. Claassen, Düsseldorf 1989, p. 20ff, p. 49. ISBN 3-546-48681-1
- Stephan Diederich: Suprematism in everyday garb - Malevich and the applied arts. in: Evelyn Weiss (ed.): Kasimir Malewitsch - work and effect. Dumont, Cologne 1995. ISBN 3-7701-3707-8 (especially Unowis leaflet)
- Naum Gabo: Of Divers Arts. New York 1962. p. 172.
Further literature
- Camilla Gray: The Great Experiment. Russian art 1863–1922 . Cologne 1974.
- Kai-Uwe Hemken: El Lissitzky - revolution and avant-garde . DuMont, Cologne 1990. ISBN 3-7701-2613-0
- Marie-Luise Heuser : Russian cosmism and extraterrestrial suprematism , in: Planetarian Perspektiven , Marburg 2009, pp. 62–75. ISSN 2197-7410
- Kazimir Malevich: The question of imitative art . in: Essay on art 1915–1928 Ed. Troels Andersen. Vol. I. Copenhagen 1968.
- Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism - the non-representational world . Vitebsk 1922. ( German National Library )
- Karin Thomas: Until today - style history of the fine arts in the 20th century . Dumont, Cologne 1998. ISBN 3-7701-1939-8
- Evelyn Weiss (Hrsg.): Kasimir Malewitsch - work and effect . Dumont, Cologne 1995. ISBN 3-7701-3707-8
- Hans-Peter Riese: Kasimir Malewitsch . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1999. ISBN 3-499-50465-0
- Dmytro Gorbachev: Malevich and Ukraine . Kiev, Ukraine 2006. ISBN 966-96670-0-3
- Hans-Peter Riese: From the avant-garde to the underground. Texts on Russian Art 1968-2006 . Wienand, 2009. ISBN 978-3-86832-017-6
