History of Modern Art with Klaire
Explore Modern Art history including Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and other key Modernist art movements. Join artist and educator Klaire Lockheart as she examines famous artists and artwork through a 21st century intersectional feminist lens. Whether you’re an artist, student, or patron of the arts, you will hopefully learn something new about Modern Art.
Suprematism: Not All Modern Art was Made in Paris
Suprematist art appears simple and non-controversial at first glance, but these geometric paintings by Kazimir Malevich, Olga Rozanova, and El Lissitzky were revolutionary. Listen as Klaire Lockheart examines Russian avant-garde artwork and art forgeries.
Artists and Artwork: Mary Cassatt, Kazimir Malevich (The Black Square,Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, Suprematist Composition), Olga Rozanova (Airplanes over the City, Non-Objective Composition. Color Painting,) and El Lissitzky (Prounenraum, Proun 12E)
Additional Topics: Impressionism, Abstract Art, Art Education, 0, 10: The Last Futurist Exhibition, Theosophy, Alphonse Allais, Alexei Kruchenykh, Faktura, and Forged Art
Artists and Artwork: Mary Cassatt, Kazimir Malevich (The Black Square,Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, Suprematist Composition), Olga Rozanova (Airplanes over the City, Non-Objective Composition. Color Painting,) and El Lissitzky (Prounenraum, Proun 12E)
Additional Topics: Impressionism, Abstract Art, Art Education, 0, 10: The Last Futurist Exhibition, Theosophy, Alphonse Allais, Alexei Kruchenykh, Faktura, and Forged Art
Transcript
Hello, my friends! Welcome to the History of Modern Art with Klaire, a 21st century feminist exploration of Modern Art one movement at time. I’m your host Klaire Lockheart, and I’m happy you’re here to learn about Suprematism. If you’re an artist, a patron of the arts, or you’re an art student cramming for an upcoming exam, I hope you’ll find this episode informative.
[Music]
Suprematism was an art movement from Russia that began in 1915 and lasted through the 1920s. It originated during World War I, and this style lasted throughout the Russian revolutions. When looking at art, it is important to consider the political atmosphere of the time and place it was created. Artwork is often political because artists create paintings, prints, and sculptures to express their messages visually, and they often have a lot to say about their contemporary culture, which includes politics. The history of Modern Art is filled with artists who rebelled against institutions, and I’m afraid that contemporary audiences forget this. Many people will look at Impressionist drawings and paintings by Mary Cassatt and think, “Oh, how nice: a mother and child. This non-offensive art will make a perfect print to hang above the sofa. Perhaps I should order a copy for my mom for Mother’s Day.” But, they’re wrong! Cassatt was radical because she became an artist when it was rare for women to have a career outside of the home, let alone work as a professional artist! Her depictions of children and mothers were badass because she was one of the first artists in the Western world to portray babies as actual babies. Cassatt rebelled against the long convention of the archetypical infant from the Christian tradition, who was Jesus with his supernaturally perfect posture. Making artwork of a floppy, squirmy child was unheard of in the late 19th century! There were many avant-garde artists who originally expressed radical and new ideas, but without the proper context their artwork now looks like non-threatening decoration.
I think it’s strange that many people in my region believe that art shouldn’t be political or challenge the viewer in any way. Anything beyond a bland landscape or a quick abstract is seen as too controversial. I live in South Dakota, and the educational system does not believe that the arts are important or necessary, and so it is rare to find a rigorous art program in any of the K-12 schools. As a result, there are many adults who now believe that art should be purely decorative. Many homes only have those big “Eat, Love, Laugh” (or whatever) stickers on the walls, and maybe some framed senior portraits. It’s incredibly weird that the majority of people in my community don’t buy, collect, or display actual art. Now, there is a market for some “art” in this area, but it appears that the edgiest messages popular artists can make are “I like color,” or “I saw a pheasant once.” I know that 21st century Midwestern art trends are not directly related to Suprematism, but I want to address the absurd interpretation that abstract art is non-offensive, which contributes to its current popularity.
At first glance, Suprematism can look deceptively simple; however, it was created during revolutionary times. Kazimir Malevich was one of the more prominent members of this movement. As always, I want to apologize for any names and words that I accidentally mispronounce. I’m especially self-conscious because a friend once told me that when I try to say anything Russian, I sound as though I’m auditioning to play a Bond villain’s understudy. Anyway, Malevich, trained in Moscow, but he displayed his artwork in one of the Independent Salons in Paris. He made art in all the popular styles of the time: Impressionism, Pointillism, Neo-Primitivism, Cubism, Fauvism, and Cubo-Futurism. In 1915, he created his most famous painting The Black Square, but, like some other famous Modernists, he assigned an earlier date to his painting to make himself seem more innovative. Malevich wrote, “In the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the burden of the object, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field.”
The Black Square is literally a black square painted on a white surface. There’s not much more I can do to describe this particular painting. Think of a white square, and then imagine a black square painted on top of it, and the black square fills up most of the space. The painting is now old, cracked, and bits of color from the original painting he covered up show through the splits. This oil on linen artwork is a little over 30 inches wide, and it is currently in Moscow. Malevich made a few of these paintings. He displayed the first one at 0, 10: The Last Futurist Exhibition in 1915 in Petrograd, which is now St. Petersburg. Modernism is the march of isms, and each new generation had to proclaim their superiority to the artists who preceded them. At this particular exhibition, Malevich filled a room with paintings of large, simple geometric shapes on white backgrounds. He hung The Black Square high up in the corner of the room. In Russian Orthodoxy, the corner was the traditional spot to hang an icon. The icon was usually an image of a saint or another Christian figure. People outside of Orthodox faiths sometimes think that the icons were objects to be worshiped, but they were more like intermediaries that could pass on prayers to a higher power. I tend to think of them as celestial walkie-talkies.
When I first learned about 0, 10: The Last Futurist Exhibition, I was taught that Malevich was incredibly radical because he placed his square in the spot to replace the icon. He was declaring his art was better than God or religion, which would make sense considering that this movement is called Suprematism and the Suprematists believed that their artwork was better than all the other art created. However, this is not the entire picture. At the time in Europe, mysticism and Theosophy were popular. Theosophy was a belief structure that was interested in the unseen world, and it influenced other Modernists including Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. Malevich was also interested in making the invisible visible, and he believed he was communicating esoteric meanings through his paintings by removing discernible subjects from his art. He believed that when he painted simplified forms, he was depicting reality in a more real way than anyone before him.
The Museum of Modern Art houses a vertical canvas titled, Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, which Malevich created in 1915. This 28 inch tall canvas has a dingy white background. In the upper left side of the composition, there is a large black square. Below the black square and a little to the right is a dull red square tilted at a slight angle. If you don’t see how these two squares show a boy and a backpack with “Painterly Realism,” it’s okay. You’re not an avant-garde Russian medium interested in esoteric philosophy and defining the fourth dimension during World War I. This doesn’t mean you’re not smart; it just means that Malevich was confusing. Apparently he was the type of guy who liked to read the titles of books and lecture the content at length, without actually reading the books.
In 2018, Malevich’s 1916 painting called Suprematist Composition was purchased at an auction for $85.8 million. This vertical painting is almost 3 feet tall. The background is white-ish. About a third of the way up from the bottom, there is a thick, horizontal black bar. There is a large blue rectangle overlapping the black bar, and it is tilted so it looks at though it is traveling to the upper right hand corner. There are several yellow rectangles above the big blue one. The top left quadrant of the painting had a big green rectangle and several smaller black ones. The lower third of the composition includes orange, yellow, and black rectangles. There is one pink rhombus. I’m sure this painting represents something very important to Malevich’s magical Suprematism manifestos, but I would bet this high price was achieved simply due of the artist’s fame. Michael Findlay pointed out in his book The Value of Art that as writings about art became more existential and confusing, people outside of academia began to focus on the financial value of art. If you agree that a few geometric shapes painted on a canvas should be worth over $80 million even though there are current living artists who could never dare to dream to earn that much money, then that is okay. If you are baffled that someone paid so much for Suprematist Composition and can’t figure out how these shapes represent reality in a way that is more real than anything else, that is also valid. I want to emphasize that you do not need to think that every single famous painting is a masterpiece to appreciate art in general. If you haven’t invested millions of dollars into this artwork, you’re under no obligation to pretend that you love and understand it.
After the break, I will reveal the controversy about Malevich’s most famous painting.
[Break]
Kazimir Malevich boldly stated that “Black Square is the face of the new art.” This painting has long been upheld as one of the most philosophical and innovative masterpieces of Modern Art by the Guardians of Art History. I have certainly heard the term “genius” applied to Malevich and his creations. However, it appears that The Black Square may not be the result of an esoteric artist who was able to think on a higher plane of existence. In 2015, researchers at the Tretyakov Gallery discovered an inscription on the painting, which was later covered up with paint. The caption was a racist joke under the black square. The offensive text reads, and I quote, “Battle of negroes in a dark cave.” This is the very offensive version of saying that blank piece of white paper is picture of a polar bear in a blizzard. It’s equally unfunny, but Malevich’s caption has the “bonus” of being racist!
Not only is this a bad racist joke, but it wasn’t even Malevich’s own idea. Malevich, who is lauded for being so creative as to remove subject matter from painting, simply reproduced a print created by French writer Alphonse Allais in 1897. This print features a solid black rectangle, and he titled it something along the lines of “Black People Fighting in a Cellar at Night.” Allais was well-known in Russia during Malevich’s time. The Black Square was heralded as an avant-garde masterpiece for 100 years, but now that it’s been revealed to be inspired by a racist quip, I wonder if there will be any real modifications made to the pantheon of Modernism.
Before I learned about this unsavory influence on Malevich’s work, I will admit that I struggled to accept these simple geometric paintings as breakthroughs in art just because everyone else said they were. If I expressed that I didn’t understand Suprematism, I was always instructed to take more time to look at the work, read about it, and dig deeper. Years after I first encountered Suprematism, I went to graduate school, I traveled to see some of the paintings in person, I’ve read far more than I ever intended to on the topic, and I still can’t appreciate these paintings to the degree that I am expected to do so. At the end of the day, The Black Square is still just a square. Whether the artist was truly influenced by spiritual genius or he was copying a racist joke, it’s still simply a square.
Even though Malevich declared, “An artist who creates rather than imitates expresses himself; his works are not reflections of nature but, instead, new realities, which are no less significant than the realities of nature itself,” I don’t buy into the idea that he invented a brand new way to depict reality, because he didn’t invent the square and he wasn’t the first person to paint one. Yes, I understand that he had more intent behind his work than simply, “I know what a square is,” but I will argue that if it takes me longer to investigate the artist’s intent than it took for the artist to create the work, then I feel that particular artwork was a failure. The artist did not successfully communicate the message, especially in the context that Modernism is universal and does’t require formal academic training. I couldn’t interpret the artwork before I pursued a formal education in the arts, and I still don’t fully comprehend it afterwards.
While I am on this tirade, permit me to expand my argument beyond Suprematism specifically. I have witnessed many exhibitions for contemporary artists who post artist statements a mile long to accompany stacks of paintings that took less than an afternoon to complete. I once heard an artist give talk that began with, “My artwork is conceptual, and it doesn’t require further explanation. It’s all there in the composition. However, if you still don’t get it by looking at it, you can go read my artist statement or I suppose I could try to explain it to you.” The artist then paused for their friends to chuckle and gawk at the rest of us rubes who didn’t understand the artwork upon first glance and didn’t find the condescending artist talk helpful. It seems to me that many people already feel alienated from the arts because they didn’t have opportunities to learn about art on a deep level, or they don’t have the luxury to travel to areas where the arts are currently thriving. This is why I do my best to explain art history as clearly as I can because I want you understand what I’m sharing. I’m not an educator because I like showing off all the knowledge I’ve acquired in my big, beautiful brain and I want you to feel foolish in comparison. Art is fascinating, and I want to share what I know with you! I love discussing art with other clever people, and I hope that you also feel excited to talk about art with me and your other friends.
There were several other Suprematist artists other than Malevich. Olga Rosanova is considered important enough that the authors of a few art history textbooks will include her name, but unfortunately won’t bother to include images of her work. I know that women are glaringly absent from the history of Western art because they traditionally weren’t treated as people and lacked access to equal education that their male peers had, thus leading to fewer examples of artwork made by women. Despite the odds, women in the past did persevere and managed to make art. This is the 21st century, and I feel it is our responsibly to make sure women are included in the narrative of Modern Art history so that way current women and girls won’t get discouraged or feel as though they don’t belong in the art world. Women should be included in regular art history textbooks and curricula because tiny tokens of acknowledgment during Women’s History Month doesn’t cut it.
Like other Russian avant-garde artists, Olga Rosanova knew about various Modern Art movements and created work in response to what French artists made. In 1912, she began to collaborate with poet Alexei Kruchenykh. The two of them wrote poems and illustrated books together. In 1916, they published a book called War, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York has a copy. One of the pages is a collage that includes linoleum prints, and it is called Airplanes over the City. It is a warm gray piece of paper covered with five shapes to represent the chaos of a bombing. Most of the composition is filled with a vertical rectangle cut from off-white paper with black ink printed on it. The rectangle takes up top left quadrant, and it tilts a little to the upper left corner. The artist made the image by carving lines and shapes into a piece of linoleum, and then she created the print by applying ink to the linoleum and pressing paper to surface. If you haven’t made a linocut before, just think of it as a big handmade stamp. Airplanes over the City is full of many angular lines. It’s not a representational image, but the lines create geometric shapes and structures. This paper overlaps a smaller rectangle of paper that has a simplified print of an airplane. Close to the center of the composition, Rozanova placed a black circle, which could represent a bomb. The circle overlaps a red shape that is kind of like a rectangle, but she snipped off the top left corner. Another small piece of paper overlaps the red, and there appears to be a red outline of a falling figure printed on the paper. This small print is in the bottom right corner of the composition. Finally, there is one blue triangle in the bottom left corner.
Rozanova used similar elements in her Suprematist paintings as well. Her paintings feature simple geometric shapes and limited colors, and they certainly look like strong predecessors to Minimalism, Color Field Painting, and Post-Painterly Abstraction. In 1917, she made Non-Objective Composition. Color Painting, which is at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. This vertical canvas is about two feet tall, and she used warm colors to create the composition. The background is yellow-orange, but the surface is filled with multiple horizontal rectangles. In the middle, there is a warm red rectangle that almost reaches the sides of the canvas. There is a smaller, darker, cooler red rectangle overlapping the first one I mentioned. Directly below the joined rectangles, there is a wide black bar that crosses all the way across the canvas. Under the black line, there is another warm red horizontal rectangle, but it is a little smaller than the center shape. Near the top of the canvas there is a matching red rectangle that takes up the top third of the picture plane, but it doesn’t touch any of the other shapes.
Olga Rozanova displayed her artwork at the 0, 10: The Last Futurist Exhibition, but she was upset because she felt that the Suprematism movement was based off her ideas and she didn’t receive adequate credit. She wrote a letter to Alexei Kruchenykh to describe her frustration after the show. Rozanova stated that the movement was, “entirely [based on] my paste-ons: a combination of planes, lines, discs (especially discs) and no incorporation whatsoever of real objects. And after all that these scum hide my name.” She had every right to be angry, and I bet she would be unhappy to know that her influence isn’t as well known outside of Russia. She died in 1918, shortly after Suprematism was taking off, and she was only in her thirties. To make matters worse, she didn’t have someone else to promote her work and her legacy to the same extent that Malevich did.
El Lissitzky promoted Malevich, and he was vital to spreading Suprematism’s popularity outside of Russia. He was also an artist, and his artwork incorporated flat, geometric shapes on plain backgrounds. He studied architecture in Germany, but he returned to Russia during World War I. He organized exhibitions to showcase Jewish artwork, and he was interested in the revival of Jewish culture. However, Lissitzky is probably best known for his Prouns. The exact meaning of “Proun” is unknown, but these are compositions with 2D and 3D geometric shapes, forms, and lines. In addition to paintings, he created the Prounenraum, which was a Proun room. The cube environment was filled with flat painted wood rectangles that he attached to the walls, and he created lines with other skinny pieces of materials, which bent around the corners. He designed this installation to make the viewers feel as though they walked into a Suprematist painting.
Lissitzky was also interested in faktura, which refers to the textures of surfaces. His attention to texture is apparent in his painting Proun 12E. He made this picture in 1923 with oil on canvas, and it belongs to the Harvard Art Museums. This is a vertical painting, and it’s almost 2 feet tall. The background is a warm, dull beige. The background subtly showcases the rough texture of the canvas. The artist painted a large, cool gray triangle pointing down from the top center of the composition. The triangle’s point lands about halfway down, and its tip is closer to the right side than the left. Behind the triangle, there is a wide yellow bar that touches the sides of the canvas. This shape tilts down slightly to the right. There is a thick curved white line that overlaps the triangle and the yellow bar. It’s curved and kind of looks like a very fat fettuccini noodle. There is a black horizontal rectangular shape that appears to have one corner overlapping the noodle while another corner goes behind it. It’s near the top, so it looks like the noodle is wearing a small black cape in a strong wind because it’s a pasta superhero. The shapes that El Lissitzky painted on top of the background appear smoother in texture because he applied the paint thicker or added more layers. Some of these small shapes appear very flat in contrast to the bumpy background. Near the bottom center, there is a red circle overlapping a darker beige angular shape, which is overlapping a white rectangle that doesn’t appear as though it is flat on the surface of the canvas. It is propped up on a 3D box made of two shades of gray, and the end of the form is black. There are two thin lines that jut out from the red circle, and there is a horizontal form made of red, gray, and black in the top right corner.
Please stick with me because after the break I will talk about art forgeries.
[Break]
Researchers at Harvard did an in-depth analysis of Lissitzky’s painting Proun 12E to prepare for a 2020 show called Russian Avant-Garde at the Museum Ludwig: Original and Fake. This exhibition included verified authentic paintings as well as imposters. There was a painting attributed to Olga Rozanova, but it was made on a surface that contained fibers that didn’t exist during her lifetime! Almost half of the artwork analyzed for this show proved to be inauthentic. Apparently people love to forge Suprematist paintings because the historical documentation is limited and the paintings can be worth millions of dollars. Malevich's Suprematist Composition sold for $85.8 million in 2018, which provided a nice profit to the owner who paid $60 million only ten years earlier. I would also like to point out how unfathomable it is that the person who bought that painting just had to store it for 10 years in order to make about $25 million, especially considering that the original artist didn’t make that much even though he’s praised for his creativity and inventiveness. Not only would forgers be financially motivated to make fake Suprematist paintings, but I’m going to be snarky and postulate that these paintings would be easy to copy as well. Popping a few rectangles on a canvas is certainly going to be easier than trying to reproduce a portrait by Rembrandt.
Now, I understand that people pay millions of dollars for these paintings because they have a deeper connection than they are just fond of basic shapes in primary colors. They enjoy the stories they’ve heard, they were told that these artists were famous, and that feeds into the cycle. This makes the work created by a select few grow in value, but this results in cutting other artists from the canon of art history in the process. Unfortunately, this can trigger an existential crisis for living artists because why would anyone work so hard to barely make enough money to make ends meet so that one day an unbelievably wealthy person can buy and resell their work for a huge profit? Is this the goal living artists are supposed to aspire to in our culture? Are Suprematist paintings actually objectively the best representations of the world as the artists claimed? If that’s the case, then let me paint a rectangle for you. You can even pick the color, and I’ll give you a discount. You can buy it for only $5 million!
Permit me to conclude with another quote from Olga Rozanova, which will confound or inspire you. Rozanova declared, “The world is a piece of raw material—for the unreceptive soul it is the back of a mirror, but for reflective souls it is a mirror of images appearing continually.” The Suprematists believed they were portraying the world around them in ways beyond the actual world; their paintings were more real than the representational paintings they rebelled against. The Suprematists created their paintings, books, and installations during World War I and through the Russian revolutions. Their work was political, even though it may just look like decoration through contemporary eyes. Malevich, Lissitzky, Rozanova, and other Suprematists used flat shapes with limited colors to express the world around them and push the boundaries of avant-garde art.
[Music]
Thank you for spending time with me to learn about Suprematism. I appreciate it! I hope discovered something new and you’ll join me next time to learn about Dadaism. Please visit my website to find transcripts of this podcast and my resources. Visit klairelockheart.com and then go to the “Media” tab. That’s K-L-A-I-R-E-L-O-C-K-H-E-A-R-T dot com. Find me on Instagram to see my artwork @klairelockheart, or you can join me on Facebook by searching for Klaire A. Lockheart.
The History of Modern Art with Klaire was created by me, Klaire Lockheart. This podcast was recorded with equipment supplied by Aaron C. Packard of Aaron C. Packard Productions. Visit his website at aaronpackard.com, that’s A-A-R-O-N-P-A-C-K-A-R-D dot com. Once again, I truly appreciate your positive feedback and support. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you won’t miss future episodes. Thank you, and I hope you have a great day!
[Music]
Suprematism was an art movement from Russia that began in 1915 and lasted through the 1920s. It originated during World War I, and this style lasted throughout the Russian revolutions. When looking at art, it is important to consider the political atmosphere of the time and place it was created. Artwork is often political because artists create paintings, prints, and sculptures to express their messages visually, and they often have a lot to say about their contemporary culture, which includes politics. The history of Modern Art is filled with artists who rebelled against institutions, and I’m afraid that contemporary audiences forget this. Many people will look at Impressionist drawings and paintings by Mary Cassatt and think, “Oh, how nice: a mother and child. This non-offensive art will make a perfect print to hang above the sofa. Perhaps I should order a copy for my mom for Mother’s Day.” But, they’re wrong! Cassatt was radical because she became an artist when it was rare for women to have a career outside of the home, let alone work as a professional artist! Her depictions of children and mothers were badass because she was one of the first artists in the Western world to portray babies as actual babies. Cassatt rebelled against the long convention of the archetypical infant from the Christian tradition, who was Jesus with his supernaturally perfect posture. Making artwork of a floppy, squirmy child was unheard of in the late 19th century! There were many avant-garde artists who originally expressed radical and new ideas, but without the proper context their artwork now looks like non-threatening decoration.
I think it’s strange that many people in my region believe that art shouldn’t be political or challenge the viewer in any way. Anything beyond a bland landscape or a quick abstract is seen as too controversial. I live in South Dakota, and the educational system does not believe that the arts are important or necessary, and so it is rare to find a rigorous art program in any of the K-12 schools. As a result, there are many adults who now believe that art should be purely decorative. Many homes only have those big “Eat, Love, Laugh” (or whatever) stickers on the walls, and maybe some framed senior portraits. It’s incredibly weird that the majority of people in my community don’t buy, collect, or display actual art. Now, there is a market for some “art” in this area, but it appears that the edgiest messages popular artists can make are “I like color,” or “I saw a pheasant once.” I know that 21st century Midwestern art trends are not directly related to Suprematism, but I want to address the absurd interpretation that abstract art is non-offensive, which contributes to its current popularity.
At first glance, Suprematism can look deceptively simple; however, it was created during revolutionary times. Kazimir Malevich was one of the more prominent members of this movement. As always, I want to apologize for any names and words that I accidentally mispronounce. I’m especially self-conscious because a friend once told me that when I try to say anything Russian, I sound as though I’m auditioning to play a Bond villain’s understudy. Anyway, Malevich, trained in Moscow, but he displayed his artwork in one of the Independent Salons in Paris. He made art in all the popular styles of the time: Impressionism, Pointillism, Neo-Primitivism, Cubism, Fauvism, and Cubo-Futurism. In 1915, he created his most famous painting The Black Square, but, like some other famous Modernists, he assigned an earlier date to his painting to make himself seem more innovative. Malevich wrote, “In the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the burden of the object, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field.”
The Black Square is literally a black square painted on a white surface. There’s not much more I can do to describe this particular painting. Think of a white square, and then imagine a black square painted on top of it, and the black square fills up most of the space. The painting is now old, cracked, and bits of color from the original painting he covered up show through the splits. This oil on linen artwork is a little over 30 inches wide, and it is currently in Moscow. Malevich made a few of these paintings. He displayed the first one at 0, 10: The Last Futurist Exhibition in 1915 in Petrograd, which is now St. Petersburg. Modernism is the march of isms, and each new generation had to proclaim their superiority to the artists who preceded them. At this particular exhibition, Malevich filled a room with paintings of large, simple geometric shapes on white backgrounds. He hung The Black Square high up in the corner of the room. In Russian Orthodoxy, the corner was the traditional spot to hang an icon. The icon was usually an image of a saint or another Christian figure. People outside of Orthodox faiths sometimes think that the icons were objects to be worshiped, but they were more like intermediaries that could pass on prayers to a higher power. I tend to think of them as celestial walkie-talkies.
When I first learned about 0, 10: The Last Futurist Exhibition, I was taught that Malevich was incredibly radical because he placed his square in the spot to replace the icon. He was declaring his art was better than God or religion, which would make sense considering that this movement is called Suprematism and the Suprematists believed that their artwork was better than all the other art created. However, this is not the entire picture. At the time in Europe, mysticism and Theosophy were popular. Theosophy was a belief structure that was interested in the unseen world, and it influenced other Modernists including Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. Malevich was also interested in making the invisible visible, and he believed he was communicating esoteric meanings through his paintings by removing discernible subjects from his art. He believed that when he painted simplified forms, he was depicting reality in a more real way than anyone before him.
The Museum of Modern Art houses a vertical canvas titled, Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, which Malevich created in 1915. This 28 inch tall canvas has a dingy white background. In the upper left side of the composition, there is a large black square. Below the black square and a little to the right is a dull red square tilted at a slight angle. If you don’t see how these two squares show a boy and a backpack with “Painterly Realism,” it’s okay. You’re not an avant-garde Russian medium interested in esoteric philosophy and defining the fourth dimension during World War I. This doesn’t mean you’re not smart; it just means that Malevich was confusing. Apparently he was the type of guy who liked to read the titles of books and lecture the content at length, without actually reading the books.
In 2018, Malevich’s 1916 painting called Suprematist Composition was purchased at an auction for $85.8 million. This vertical painting is almost 3 feet tall. The background is white-ish. About a third of the way up from the bottom, there is a thick, horizontal black bar. There is a large blue rectangle overlapping the black bar, and it is tilted so it looks at though it is traveling to the upper right hand corner. There are several yellow rectangles above the big blue one. The top left quadrant of the painting had a big green rectangle and several smaller black ones. The lower third of the composition includes orange, yellow, and black rectangles. There is one pink rhombus. I’m sure this painting represents something very important to Malevich’s magical Suprematism manifestos, but I would bet this high price was achieved simply due of the artist’s fame. Michael Findlay pointed out in his book The Value of Art that as writings about art became more existential and confusing, people outside of academia began to focus on the financial value of art. If you agree that a few geometric shapes painted on a canvas should be worth over $80 million even though there are current living artists who could never dare to dream to earn that much money, then that is okay. If you are baffled that someone paid so much for Suprematist Composition and can’t figure out how these shapes represent reality in a way that is more real than anything else, that is also valid. I want to emphasize that you do not need to think that every single famous painting is a masterpiece to appreciate art in general. If you haven’t invested millions of dollars into this artwork, you’re under no obligation to pretend that you love and understand it.
After the break, I will reveal the controversy about Malevich’s most famous painting.
[Break]
Kazimir Malevich boldly stated that “Black Square is the face of the new art.” This painting has long been upheld as one of the most philosophical and innovative masterpieces of Modern Art by the Guardians of Art History. I have certainly heard the term “genius” applied to Malevich and his creations. However, it appears that The Black Square may not be the result of an esoteric artist who was able to think on a higher plane of existence. In 2015, researchers at the Tretyakov Gallery discovered an inscription on the painting, which was later covered up with paint. The caption was a racist joke under the black square. The offensive text reads, and I quote, “Battle of negroes in a dark cave.” This is the very offensive version of saying that blank piece of white paper is picture of a polar bear in a blizzard. It’s equally unfunny, but Malevich’s caption has the “bonus” of being racist!
Not only is this a bad racist joke, but it wasn’t even Malevich’s own idea. Malevich, who is lauded for being so creative as to remove subject matter from painting, simply reproduced a print created by French writer Alphonse Allais in 1897. This print features a solid black rectangle, and he titled it something along the lines of “Black People Fighting in a Cellar at Night.” Allais was well-known in Russia during Malevich’s time. The Black Square was heralded as an avant-garde masterpiece for 100 years, but now that it’s been revealed to be inspired by a racist quip, I wonder if there will be any real modifications made to the pantheon of Modernism.
Before I learned about this unsavory influence on Malevich’s work, I will admit that I struggled to accept these simple geometric paintings as breakthroughs in art just because everyone else said they were. If I expressed that I didn’t understand Suprematism, I was always instructed to take more time to look at the work, read about it, and dig deeper. Years after I first encountered Suprematism, I went to graduate school, I traveled to see some of the paintings in person, I’ve read far more than I ever intended to on the topic, and I still can’t appreciate these paintings to the degree that I am expected to do so. At the end of the day, The Black Square is still just a square. Whether the artist was truly influenced by spiritual genius or he was copying a racist joke, it’s still simply a square.
Even though Malevich declared, “An artist who creates rather than imitates expresses himself; his works are not reflections of nature but, instead, new realities, which are no less significant than the realities of nature itself,” I don’t buy into the idea that he invented a brand new way to depict reality, because he didn’t invent the square and he wasn’t the first person to paint one. Yes, I understand that he had more intent behind his work than simply, “I know what a square is,” but I will argue that if it takes me longer to investigate the artist’s intent than it took for the artist to create the work, then I feel that particular artwork was a failure. The artist did not successfully communicate the message, especially in the context that Modernism is universal and does’t require formal academic training. I couldn’t interpret the artwork before I pursued a formal education in the arts, and I still don’t fully comprehend it afterwards.
While I am on this tirade, permit me to expand my argument beyond Suprematism specifically. I have witnessed many exhibitions for contemporary artists who post artist statements a mile long to accompany stacks of paintings that took less than an afternoon to complete. I once heard an artist give talk that began with, “My artwork is conceptual, and it doesn’t require further explanation. It’s all there in the composition. However, if you still don’t get it by looking at it, you can go read my artist statement or I suppose I could try to explain it to you.” The artist then paused for their friends to chuckle and gawk at the rest of us rubes who didn’t understand the artwork upon first glance and didn’t find the condescending artist talk helpful. It seems to me that many people already feel alienated from the arts because they didn’t have opportunities to learn about art on a deep level, or they don’t have the luxury to travel to areas where the arts are currently thriving. This is why I do my best to explain art history as clearly as I can because I want you understand what I’m sharing. I’m not an educator because I like showing off all the knowledge I’ve acquired in my big, beautiful brain and I want you to feel foolish in comparison. Art is fascinating, and I want to share what I know with you! I love discussing art with other clever people, and I hope that you also feel excited to talk about art with me and your other friends.
There were several other Suprematist artists other than Malevich. Olga Rosanova is considered important enough that the authors of a few art history textbooks will include her name, but unfortunately won’t bother to include images of her work. I know that women are glaringly absent from the history of Western art because they traditionally weren’t treated as people and lacked access to equal education that their male peers had, thus leading to fewer examples of artwork made by women. Despite the odds, women in the past did persevere and managed to make art. This is the 21st century, and I feel it is our responsibly to make sure women are included in the narrative of Modern Art history so that way current women and girls won’t get discouraged or feel as though they don’t belong in the art world. Women should be included in regular art history textbooks and curricula because tiny tokens of acknowledgment during Women’s History Month doesn’t cut it.
Like other Russian avant-garde artists, Olga Rosanova knew about various Modern Art movements and created work in response to what French artists made. In 1912, she began to collaborate with poet Alexei Kruchenykh. The two of them wrote poems and illustrated books together. In 1916, they published a book called War, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York has a copy. One of the pages is a collage that includes linoleum prints, and it is called Airplanes over the City. It is a warm gray piece of paper covered with five shapes to represent the chaos of a bombing. Most of the composition is filled with a vertical rectangle cut from off-white paper with black ink printed on it. The rectangle takes up top left quadrant, and it tilts a little to the upper left corner. The artist made the image by carving lines and shapes into a piece of linoleum, and then she created the print by applying ink to the linoleum and pressing paper to surface. If you haven’t made a linocut before, just think of it as a big handmade stamp. Airplanes over the City is full of many angular lines. It’s not a representational image, but the lines create geometric shapes and structures. This paper overlaps a smaller rectangle of paper that has a simplified print of an airplane. Close to the center of the composition, Rozanova placed a black circle, which could represent a bomb. The circle overlaps a red shape that is kind of like a rectangle, but she snipped off the top left corner. Another small piece of paper overlaps the red, and there appears to be a red outline of a falling figure printed on the paper. This small print is in the bottom right corner of the composition. Finally, there is one blue triangle in the bottom left corner.
Rozanova used similar elements in her Suprematist paintings as well. Her paintings feature simple geometric shapes and limited colors, and they certainly look like strong predecessors to Minimalism, Color Field Painting, and Post-Painterly Abstraction. In 1917, she made Non-Objective Composition. Color Painting, which is at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. This vertical canvas is about two feet tall, and she used warm colors to create the composition. The background is yellow-orange, but the surface is filled with multiple horizontal rectangles. In the middle, there is a warm red rectangle that almost reaches the sides of the canvas. There is a smaller, darker, cooler red rectangle overlapping the first one I mentioned. Directly below the joined rectangles, there is a wide black bar that crosses all the way across the canvas. Under the black line, there is another warm red horizontal rectangle, but it is a little smaller than the center shape. Near the top of the canvas there is a matching red rectangle that takes up the top third of the picture plane, but it doesn’t touch any of the other shapes.
Olga Rozanova displayed her artwork at the 0, 10: The Last Futurist Exhibition, but she was upset because she felt that the Suprematism movement was based off her ideas and she didn’t receive adequate credit. She wrote a letter to Alexei Kruchenykh to describe her frustration after the show. Rozanova stated that the movement was, “entirely [based on] my paste-ons: a combination of planes, lines, discs (especially discs) and no incorporation whatsoever of real objects. And after all that these scum hide my name.” She had every right to be angry, and I bet she would be unhappy to know that her influence isn’t as well known outside of Russia. She died in 1918, shortly after Suprematism was taking off, and she was only in her thirties. To make matters worse, she didn’t have someone else to promote her work and her legacy to the same extent that Malevich did.
El Lissitzky promoted Malevich, and he was vital to spreading Suprematism’s popularity outside of Russia. He was also an artist, and his artwork incorporated flat, geometric shapes on plain backgrounds. He studied architecture in Germany, but he returned to Russia during World War I. He organized exhibitions to showcase Jewish artwork, and he was interested in the revival of Jewish culture. However, Lissitzky is probably best known for his Prouns. The exact meaning of “Proun” is unknown, but these are compositions with 2D and 3D geometric shapes, forms, and lines. In addition to paintings, he created the Prounenraum, which was a Proun room. The cube environment was filled with flat painted wood rectangles that he attached to the walls, and he created lines with other skinny pieces of materials, which bent around the corners. He designed this installation to make the viewers feel as though they walked into a Suprematist painting.
Lissitzky was also interested in faktura, which refers to the textures of surfaces. His attention to texture is apparent in his painting Proun 12E. He made this picture in 1923 with oil on canvas, and it belongs to the Harvard Art Museums. This is a vertical painting, and it’s almost 2 feet tall. The background is a warm, dull beige. The background subtly showcases the rough texture of the canvas. The artist painted a large, cool gray triangle pointing down from the top center of the composition. The triangle’s point lands about halfway down, and its tip is closer to the right side than the left. Behind the triangle, there is a wide yellow bar that touches the sides of the canvas. This shape tilts down slightly to the right. There is a thick curved white line that overlaps the triangle and the yellow bar. It’s curved and kind of looks like a very fat fettuccini noodle. There is a black horizontal rectangular shape that appears to have one corner overlapping the noodle while another corner goes behind it. It’s near the top, so it looks like the noodle is wearing a small black cape in a strong wind because it’s a pasta superhero. The shapes that El Lissitzky painted on top of the background appear smoother in texture because he applied the paint thicker or added more layers. Some of these small shapes appear very flat in contrast to the bumpy background. Near the bottom center, there is a red circle overlapping a darker beige angular shape, which is overlapping a white rectangle that doesn’t appear as though it is flat on the surface of the canvas. It is propped up on a 3D box made of two shades of gray, and the end of the form is black. There are two thin lines that jut out from the red circle, and there is a horizontal form made of red, gray, and black in the top right corner.
Please stick with me because after the break I will talk about art forgeries.
[Break]
Researchers at Harvard did an in-depth analysis of Lissitzky’s painting Proun 12E to prepare for a 2020 show called Russian Avant-Garde at the Museum Ludwig: Original and Fake. This exhibition included verified authentic paintings as well as imposters. There was a painting attributed to Olga Rozanova, but it was made on a surface that contained fibers that didn’t exist during her lifetime! Almost half of the artwork analyzed for this show proved to be inauthentic. Apparently people love to forge Suprematist paintings because the historical documentation is limited and the paintings can be worth millions of dollars. Malevich's Suprematist Composition sold for $85.8 million in 2018, which provided a nice profit to the owner who paid $60 million only ten years earlier. I would also like to point out how unfathomable it is that the person who bought that painting just had to store it for 10 years in order to make about $25 million, especially considering that the original artist didn’t make that much even though he’s praised for his creativity and inventiveness. Not only would forgers be financially motivated to make fake Suprematist paintings, but I’m going to be snarky and postulate that these paintings would be easy to copy as well. Popping a few rectangles on a canvas is certainly going to be easier than trying to reproduce a portrait by Rembrandt.
Now, I understand that people pay millions of dollars for these paintings because they have a deeper connection than they are just fond of basic shapes in primary colors. They enjoy the stories they’ve heard, they were told that these artists were famous, and that feeds into the cycle. This makes the work created by a select few grow in value, but this results in cutting other artists from the canon of art history in the process. Unfortunately, this can trigger an existential crisis for living artists because why would anyone work so hard to barely make enough money to make ends meet so that one day an unbelievably wealthy person can buy and resell their work for a huge profit? Is this the goal living artists are supposed to aspire to in our culture? Are Suprematist paintings actually objectively the best representations of the world as the artists claimed? If that’s the case, then let me paint a rectangle for you. You can even pick the color, and I’ll give you a discount. You can buy it for only $5 million!
Permit me to conclude with another quote from Olga Rozanova, which will confound or inspire you. Rozanova declared, “The world is a piece of raw material—for the unreceptive soul it is the back of a mirror, but for reflective souls it is a mirror of images appearing continually.” The Suprematists believed they were portraying the world around them in ways beyond the actual world; their paintings were more real than the representational paintings they rebelled against. The Suprematists created their paintings, books, and installations during World War I and through the Russian revolutions. Their work was political, even though it may just look like decoration through contemporary eyes. Malevich, Lissitzky, Rozanova, and other Suprematists used flat shapes with limited colors to express the world around them and push the boundaries of avant-garde art.
[Music]
Thank you for spending time with me to learn about Suprematism. I appreciate it! I hope discovered something new and you’ll join me next time to learn about Dadaism. Please visit my website to find transcripts of this podcast and my resources. Visit klairelockheart.com and then go to the “Media” tab. That’s K-L-A-I-R-E-L-O-C-K-H-E-A-R-T dot com. Find me on Instagram to see my artwork @klairelockheart, or you can join me on Facebook by searching for Klaire A. Lockheart.
The History of Modern Art with Klaire was created by me, Klaire Lockheart. This podcast was recorded with equipment supplied by Aaron C. Packard of Aaron C. Packard Productions. Visit his website at aaronpackard.com, that’s A-A-R-O-N-P-A-C-K-A-R-D dot com. Once again, I truly appreciate your positive feedback and support. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you won’t miss future episodes. Thank you, and I hope you have a great day!
Resources
Ada Ackerman, “Olga Vladimirovna Rozanova,” Aware, 2013, https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/olga-vladimirovna-rozanova/
Chistiane Berdes, “Replicas and Reconstructions in Twentieth-Century Art,” Tate Papers, Autumn 2007, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/08/replicas-and-reconstructions-in-twentieth-century-art
Elizabeth Berkowitz, “Olga Rozanova Artist Overview and Analysis,” Art Story, May 02, 2018, https://www.theartstory.org/artist/rozanova-olga/life-and-legacy/
Ellen Davis, “Faktura, Not Fiction: El Lissitzky’s Proun 12E,” Harvard Art Museums, June 10, 2020, https://harvardartmuseums.org/article/em-faktura-em-not-fiction-el-lissitzky-s-em-proun-12e-em
Carey Dunne, “Art Historians Find Racist Joke Hidden Under Malevich's ‘Black Square,’” Hyperallergic, November 13, 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/253361/art-historian-finds-racist-joke-hidden-under-malevichs-black-square/
William V. Dunning, Changing Images of Pictorial Space. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991.
Michael Findlay, The Value of Art. (New York: Prestel, 2014).
Nate Freeman, “A Malevich Suprematist Composition sold for $85.8 million at Christie’s, breaking the record for a work of Russian art,” Artsy, May 15, 2018, https://www.artsy.net/news/artsy-editorial-malevich-suprematist-composition-sold-858-million-christies-breaking-record-work-russian-art
Allyson Healey, “Episode 5: Hip to Be Square,” Art History for All, podcast audio, June 20, 2018, https://arthistoryforall.com/episode-5-hip-to-be-square
Peter Kalb, ed., H. H. Arnason History of Modern Art, 5th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, Inc, 2004.
Kasimir Malevich, “Non-Objective Art and Suprematism,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 292-293.
Sam Phillips, …isms: Understanding Modern Art. New York: Universe, 2013.
Noemi Smolik, “Impostor Syndrome,” Art Forum, December 30, 2020, https://www.artforum.com/slant/noemi-smolik-on-russian-avant-garde-at-the-museum-ludwig-original-and-fake-84727
Mildred Strange, “42-Kazimir Malevich with Dr. Irina,” History Lessons for Misanthropes, podcast audio, June 30, 2020, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/42-bonusode-kazimir-malevich-with-dr-irina/id1448954083?i=1000480318952
Marina V, “Olga Rozanova,” WomensActivism.NYC, January 07, 2021, https://womensactivism.nyc/stories/8612
Shira Wolfe, “Art Movement: Suprematism,” Artland, https://magazine.artland.com/art-movement-suprematism/
Mechella Yezernitskaya, “Away from the Frontlines: Olga Rozanova and Aleksei Kruchenykh’s 1916 Album War,” Museum of Modern Art, January 29, 2020, https://post.moma.org/away-from-the-frontlines-olga-rozanova-and-aleksei-kruchenykhs-1916-album-war/
Chistiane Berdes, “Replicas and Reconstructions in Twentieth-Century Art,” Tate Papers, Autumn 2007, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/08/replicas-and-reconstructions-in-twentieth-century-art
Elizabeth Berkowitz, “Olga Rozanova Artist Overview and Analysis,” Art Story, May 02, 2018, https://www.theartstory.org/artist/rozanova-olga/life-and-legacy/
Ellen Davis, “Faktura, Not Fiction: El Lissitzky’s Proun 12E,” Harvard Art Museums, June 10, 2020, https://harvardartmuseums.org/article/em-faktura-em-not-fiction-el-lissitzky-s-em-proun-12e-em
Carey Dunne, “Art Historians Find Racist Joke Hidden Under Malevich's ‘Black Square,’” Hyperallergic, November 13, 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/253361/art-historian-finds-racist-joke-hidden-under-malevichs-black-square/
William V. Dunning, Changing Images of Pictorial Space. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991.
Michael Findlay, The Value of Art. (New York: Prestel, 2014).
Nate Freeman, “A Malevich Suprematist Composition sold for $85.8 million at Christie’s, breaking the record for a work of Russian art,” Artsy, May 15, 2018, https://www.artsy.net/news/artsy-editorial-malevich-suprematist-composition-sold-858-million-christies-breaking-record-work-russian-art
Allyson Healey, “Episode 5: Hip to Be Square,” Art History for All, podcast audio, June 20, 2018, https://arthistoryforall.com/episode-5-hip-to-be-square
Peter Kalb, ed., H. H. Arnason History of Modern Art, 5th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, Inc, 2004.
Kasimir Malevich, “Non-Objective Art and Suprematism,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 292-293.
Sam Phillips, …isms: Understanding Modern Art. New York: Universe, 2013.
Noemi Smolik, “Impostor Syndrome,” Art Forum, December 30, 2020, https://www.artforum.com/slant/noemi-smolik-on-russian-avant-garde-at-the-museum-ludwig-original-and-fake-84727
Mildred Strange, “42-Kazimir Malevich with Dr. Irina,” History Lessons for Misanthropes, podcast audio, June 30, 2020, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/42-bonusode-kazimir-malevich-with-dr-irina/id1448954083?i=1000480318952
Marina V, “Olga Rozanova,” WomensActivism.NYC, January 07, 2021, https://womensactivism.nyc/stories/8612
Shira Wolfe, “Art Movement: Suprematism,” Artland, https://magazine.artland.com/art-movement-suprematism/
Mechella Yezernitskaya, “Away from the Frontlines: Olga Rozanova and Aleksei Kruchenykh’s 1916 Album War,” Museum of Modern Art, January 29, 2020, https://post.moma.org/away-from-the-frontlines-olga-rozanova-and-aleksei-kruchenykhs-1916-album-war/