Word: malevich
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...even among practitioners that contemporary abstract art bores the hell out of people. Stella attributes this yawning chasm between potential and performance to the flat, two-dimensional quality of the abstraction of the 1970s and '80s, heir to the tradition of highly colored "decorative" paintings exemplified by Delacroix and Malevich...
...make the mundane suggest the divine. At first glance, the scientific exactness of his still lifes makes them look as though they were descended from the nature sketches of Albrecht Durer. But in ambition they were more akin to the work of the European abstractionist painters. Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian wanted not only to wipe clean the slate of Western art but to scrub consciousness itself, clearing it of worldly distractions as a way of opening it up to the beyond. Though Weston kept some distance from the California versions of Theosophy and Zen, he too regarded his still lifes...
...there are two main patterns of appropriation. The first is literal copying with intent to "deconstruct" the original, as done by Sherrie Levine, 38. Levine rephotographs photos by "classic" figures like Walker Evans and does small, exact, curiously loving copies of paintings by noted early modernists like Kasimir Malevich or Arthur Dove. The aim is to make people think about the status of originality; the work has a real and precise, if muted, aesthetic dimension...
...speed and urgency, leaping beyond their prototypes like pole vaulters. To see this at work, one need only look at the development of Vladimir Tallin's sculpture after his first contact with Picasso's tin cubist Guitar, 1912, in Paris, or at the conviction with which Kasimir Malevich moved from cubism to a purely abstract painting...
This deep hostility to modernism, a permanent legacy of Stalin, seems especially ironic to Western eyes because it was in Russia, between 1910 and 1925, that one of the great experiments of modern art was carried out. The leaders of the avantgarde, among them Kasimir Malevich, Naum Gabo, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, wanted to serve the new power of the left by combining revolutionary art with revolutionary politics. Russian constructivism was, in fact, the only heroic modernist style that drew its strength from the revolutionary impetus. Yet its sin was in being abstract, and for that...