Summer in Belgrade is sluggish and sleepy. The asphalt is soft, on it chewing gum is stretched by the heels of careless girls. In the small room of the student dormitory in Karaburma, I can see the Pančevački bridge, the Danube and the tennis court through the window. Then I put my head down again and immerse myself in the book. The author is Horst Valdemar Jensen. "History of Art" is a book older than me, first published in America in 1962. The Belgrade edition - a white paperback with over 600 pages - was for me, a twenty-five-year-old postgraduate in the sociology of culture, as exciting as a crime novel. The way we create visual art has always said more about us than the wars we fight. Sometimes he speaks impressively about those wars as well. It was one of a series of books I alternated between reading that summer. It could have been 1988.
Looking for the canvas of the clairvoyant Russian
The pleasant emptiness of Belgrade. I walked along the streets where the treetops lay down under the sun, and only an occasional dog would cross from one shade to another. They reminded me of the plane trees left by Giorgio de Chirico in the metaphysical phase. The absence of people as the presence of light and melancholy. I would like to go to the National Museum. The names from Janson's book were waiting for me there. Paintings with the signatures of Picasso and Kandinsky were for me at that time equal to a miracle - fragments of a distant, great world, magically hung in the shade of museum rooms. I loved standing in front of Sava Šumanović's canvases.
I was looking for one name and - I couldn't find it. It was not so important to Janson - in which the old connoisseur was thoroughly mistaken - and it was inaccessible to the Belgrade curators: Kazimir Maljevič.
The very next year, I spent the summer in Krakow, a city that had a solid number of bookstores. In one of them, I recognized a monograph on cubism - which contained Malevich's works from the lesser-known, cubist phase. I bought a book. Released from the obligation to read wise interpretations in a language I did not understand, I casually leafed through the book like a picture book - the brilliant color illustrations suggested to me that a people who, even in a hopelessly realistic socialism, have the need to make such books, have a future. In the Kraków Museum, I saw my first Rembrandt in my life, but I never met Malevich.
Black square
In the late 20s and early 50s, I dealt with avant-garde currents in European art of the first half of the XNUMXth century. Those movements, horrified by the millions dying and the petty bourgeois pathos that made it possible, were ready to condemn that treacherous world to ruin. Ivan Gol writes in the Manifesto of Zenitism: "Let's destroy civilization with the help of new art." Zenitism in the newly created state of the South Slavs was a cousin of similar movements that sprang up like mushrooms after the rain as old Mrs. Europe was reduced to ashes in the fires of the Great War. "My philosophy is: Destruction of cities and villages every XNUMX years". This loud and exaggerated slogan, worthy of the Zenitist barbarogen pose, was thrown out a little earlier by Kazimir Maljevic - promoting a new artistic direction - Suprematism.
One of the most important fine art movements was founded in Saint Petersburg, in the midst of the agony of the Russian Empire. In Latin, supremus meant "highest", supremacy is supremacy. Kazimir Malevich, a man of Polish roots and Ukrainian-Russian-European education explained: "By suprematism I understand the supremacy of pure feeling in fine art."
Malevich did not just talk about supremacy, he achieved it with a radical provocation for the taste of the time: "When in 1913, in my desperate effort to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I escaped into the form of a square and exhibited a painting that represented nothing but a black square on on a white background, the critic sighed along with the company: Everything we loved is lost: We are in the desert... Before us is a black square on a white background! ...The black square on a white background was the first form of expression for an objectless feeling: Square = feeling, white field = Nothing outside that feeling."
It has been recorded that Malevich got the inspiration for his Black Square when he saw a boy in St. Petersburg with a large school backpack on his back walking along a path through shallow snow. The backpack was alive, a black square from which the child was almost invisible. According to Maljevic, that very square represented everything that had happened to that little man until then, as well as everything that would happen to him.
Official criticism in imperial Russia did not spare Malevich. But he didn't care. He did not lack self-confidence. How would an otherwise unknown painter from Ukraine, who was repeatedly rejected at the Moscow Academy, become one of the key names in the fine arts of the 20th century?
It should be said that in 1882 in Paris, the French playwright and librettist Paul Biot exhibited the painting "The Battle of the Negroes in the Underground" - a completely black rectangular surface. What was then a satirical provocation, 33 years later became a paradigm shift in European art.
White square
In those years, which were also crucial for Maljevic, the October Revolution marked a change of era. After it, the Red Square appears, which Malevich said was a symbol of the revolution, then the White Square - pure objectlessness. At the beginning, the avant-garde expression in the arts was a companion of the revolution, and as early as 1921, it began to interfere with the new political reality. The total freedom of art arouses the distrust of revolutionaries who want total power and monopoly in the reshaping of society. The State Institute for Artistic Culture, headed by Malevich, was closed in 1926, and his theoretical works were no longer printed.
Malevich's explanation of Suprematism under the title The Objectless World was published in 1927 by the German Bauhaus. The writing was written at the end of the suprematist self-proclaimed supremacy. Kazimir Maljevic visited Germany that year. The local police arrest him as a Soviet spy, but release him after a few weeks. The Bauhaus avant-gardists welcomed him, published his book, but he did not find himself there. A big exhibition was made for him in Berlin, he leaves his canvases in Germany, perhaps sensing what awaits him, and returns to the Soviet Union.
His formulations like "geometric economy" or "condensation of the mass of paint" were no longer needed by the Soviet government - socialist realism was becoming a state doctrine, and avant-garde currents were already viewed as a bourgeois, decadent fad. Malevich changes radically again. He paints "cubofuturist" as art historians like to say, trying to continue where the radical escape into the square left off. Even the Soviet authorities did not believe him, they arrested him in the fall of 1930 on the charge of being a German spy. At the intervention of a friend, he was released in December of the same year.
Dead avant-garde
Why was Kazimir Malevich important to me? His radicalization of the question - what to paint and why - was close to me. With the invention of photography in the 19th century, the maneuvering space of fine art became, paradoxically, larger. Fine art - at least for a few decades - was freed from the obligation to faithfully portray a representative segment of reality. Various directions tried to find a new language. Malevich searched for it in Paris and Munich, then, combining the Fauvist and Futurist impulses received there, he found his language in St. Petersburg, staring at a school backpack in the snow, quite far from the dominant avant-garde trends in the West.
Our paths crossed in Bonn, seven years ago. Malevich was given a representative exhibition in a museum that was a five-minute walk from where I worked. One Sunday I stopped in front of the ticket office. I looked at the poster. I remembered that more than a quarter of a century before that moment in Belgrade I had searched in vain for Malevich's canvas. I realized that I needed it much earlier, and that I would just be participating in the futile ritual of staring at the black square and nodding my head. Suprematism in the eighties in Belgrade had a taste of freedom, in Bonn it took on a consumerist note. The avant-garde that reaches elite museums is actually dead. I did not enter. Maybe also so that I wouldn't have to deny the old master who wrote when he was young: "And my square will never be a mattress for a night of love." His paintings have long since become "icons of modernity" reaching astronomical prices on the market.
Absolute painting
The German art historian Werner Haftman wrote in his work "Painting of the 20th century": "The square on the surface was not only a spontaneous symbol of the experience of objectlessness, it proved to be the first stepping stone of absolute painting." Few people today remember that in 1915 the Black Square was part of a triptych that included the Black Circle and the Black Cross.
In his last Soviet years, Malevich was no longer in search of that absolute painting. He paints peasants. But again in a way that was far from socialist realism. The painter spent his childhood in Ukrainian villages. He understood that forced collectivization condemned an entire class to extermination. He called his figures "budetljanje" - Budućnici. Those characters in the later phase did not have faces. Malevich said that this is because he cannot see the man of the future or because "the future of man is an unsolvable puzzle."
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich died on May 15, 1935 in poverty, in the city then called Leningrad. He was 56 years old - younger than I am now, at the time I am writing about him. His art, reduced to a pure, economical form, will outlive the state that cut it short. Only perestroika will thaw the Soviet ideological stubbornness, so that more than half a century after the artist's death, in 1988, the first retrospective of his work will be possible in his country.
Because already tomorrow...
It is an interesting fact that on the day Malevich died, another great Russian artist, Mikhail Bulgakov, celebrated his forty-fourth birthday. The writer Bulgakov, like the painter Malevich, was born in Kiev. Bulgakov will have five years left to live. It was little, but enough to create the novel Master and Margarita, one of the most significant prose books of the last century. Bulgakov left eight manuscript versions of the book in which thoughts such as the one that all power is violence against others circulate.
One of the greatest avant-garde painters of the 20th century, Kazimir Maljevic, felt this violence on his own skin. In one of his numerous writings, he noted: "We, the Suprematists, are paving the way for you. Hurry up! Because tomorrow you won't recognize us!"
Bonus video:
