Aesthetics of Anarchy by Gurianova Nina

Author:Gurianova, Nina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

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The Suprematist Party

Kazimir Malevich introduced Suprematism to the public in December 1915 at the “0.10” The Last Futurist Painting exhibition in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed in 1914). In his brochure From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, printed for the opening of the show, he described Suprematism as a “nonobjective” (better translated as “objectless”) art, an art freed from any representation of objects and based on the purity of abstract geometric forms. This was the first publication to announce the new movement. Malevich originally considered his style to be synthetic and universal: in his grandiose vision, Suprematism was to be applied to painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, theater, and book design. These aspirations were supposed to be partly realized in his journal Supremus. The philosophy of Suprematism contained the element of the great illusion of creating “beyond zero”: “creating from nothing,” as Berdyaev ironically and aptly defined its spirit, writing, “Brand-new currents such as Suprematism are incisively formulating the long-since-matured need to free the purely creative act once and for all from the power of the natural objective world…. This is not only the liberation of art from figurative and narrative qualities, but a liberation, based on creation from nothing, from the entire created world.”1

Berdyaev was in fact wrong on this point. Paradoxically, the very “realization” of “nothingness” in Malevich's painting is material. It is realized in the pronounced “hand-made” quality and the unique material texture of his paintings: this particular, tactile painterly surface, where every brushstroke is distinct, and every straight line is slightly uneven, distinguishes Malevich's abstractions from Mondrian's, for example, or from later artistic production that originated in Moscow Constructivist workshops or at the German Bauhaus. In spite of all of Malevich's proclamations of dehumanization, man is still present in his works—no longer as a representation, but through the physical touch and creative will of the author, and through his provocative challenge, always to be found behind any abstraction in the early avant-garde. However paradoxical it may seem, in the midst of his “nonobjective” world Malevich still sees the presence of the artist-creator. In his Suprematist “manifesto” he writes:

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