Malevich (Mal-yea-vitch) is necessarily one of my favorite Suprematist painters, since he was the only one around. The display of “Black Square” “number 2” pictured in the article does not fit the intended display he had in mind when he painted the piece. Every household in pre-industrial Russia had a painted icon of the family’s patron saint, revered and treasured over many generations, each possessor often adding adornments to it, some often having the icon stand as godparent to their children. These icons were always placed in a shelf in an upper corner of the house to watch over it.
Kasimir in his Suprematism essays wanted to place this big black square, one of the first abstract paintings, in that sacred space, so viewers would look up to where the traditional icons were and see this symbol of his new age, an age of Communism supreme. The Communists, though, wanted art of a more instructive bent, bourgeois sloganeering and happy workers smiling in a proletariat triumph.
And it really is not simply a black square; there are subtleties of paint layering and position against the white square of a canvas that differentiate it from someone stamping a black square on a sheet of paper and calling it “art.” He created several of these “Black Square”s, and created a number of abstract Suprematist paintings depicting geometric figures in flight. He may have done a Communist graphic novel about a red square against bourgeois figures, I don’t recall. I remember a piece that looks almost representational, with three peasant figures stooping for mowed grain.
From a Crate of Potatoes, a Noteworthy Gift Emerges. A version of Kasimir Malevich's "Black Square" was unveiled at St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum last month, bringing to a close a long saga in the history of the Russian avant-garde. By Sophia Kishkovsky. [from New York Times: Arts]
4:40:25 PM 
|
|
