Malevich and Interwar Modernism by Éva Forgács

Author:Éva Forgács
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350204195
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Figure 8.3 El Lissitzky, Ilya Chashnik: Lenin Tribune, pencil, photo on paper, 1924. Photo Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (930030) © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Lissitzky was working on translating writings of Malevich that the latter sent him from Russia in installments throughout the first half of 1924 all while Lissitzky was confined to a sanatorium room hoping to recover from tuberculosis in Orselina, a suburb of Locarno in Switzerland, eventually moving on to other hospitals. Despite having to grapple with Malevich’s convoluted and grammatically problematic Russian, Lissitzky truly admired his thoughts, and together with Sophie Küppers, who in turn corrected Lissitzky’s German, worked hard to make the Malevich book reality.31

Among the texts that Malevich kept sending to him, Lissitzky came across Malevich’s essay on Lenin dating from January 25, 1924, only days after Lenin’s death,32 which he translated and thoroughly edited. This essay, a version of which was published in Das Kunstblatt in the fall of 1924,33 may have prompted Lissitzky to mark the historical event of Lenin’s death with a work of his own as his share of the commemoration. He apparently pulled out of his files his former student Ilya Chashnik’s 1920 Speaker’s Tribune,34 drafted in Vitebsk. Lissitzky pasted Lenin’s photo onto it and changed the words that Chashnik, in one version, had scribbled on the screen above the speaker’s head from Vsja Vlast’ Sovietam (All power to the Soviets)35 for Proletarii, in reference to the more internationalist slogan Proletarii vsekh stran soedinyaites! (Proletarians of all countries unite!), thus redesigning and renaming it the Lenin Tribune. On March 21, 1924, he wrote to Sophie about his ideas for a planned exhibition of his own in Paris and, possibly inspired by Malevich’s Lenin essay, he outlined his further plans: “The next thing is my movie (it will be dedicated to Lenin, and will be called a ‘Lenin Construction’).”36 The idea of a movie was part of the Soviet discourse a bout adequately evoking Lenin in artworks and memorials;37 Lenin having famously declared that film was the most important art for Soviet Russia. Making a film may have been a faraway project, while working on Chashnik’s design was feasible even in the confines of a sanatorium room. Lissitzky included the Lenin Tribune in the proun section of the book Kunstismen,38 which he edited together with Hans Arp at the time, to be published in 1925, with the caption: “Atelier Lissitzky, 1920.”39

The Lenin Tribune is not only different from but also pointedly opposed to Malevich’s anxious vision of Leninism as a new ersatz religion. Transparent, light, optimistically and dynamically diagonal and clearly constructed, bringing to mind Tatlin’s Monument of the Third International,40 the Lenin Tribune posits modern futuristic technology against Malevich’s heavy analysis of an emerging materialist mythology or religion, which replaces Christ with Lenin and the church with the factory.41 Thus, Lissitzky’s version of the Tribune, a streamlined, futuristic design, cast Malevich once again in the role of an honored, though transcended, archaic forefather who

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