Word: malevich
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." For the first 20th century abstract artists, the impossible was "the accreted imagery that has been a characteristic of visual art ever since the Renaissance." First to jettison traditional images altogether, as MacAgy shows, was the Russian suprematist Kasimir Malevich, with his revolutionary 1913 drawings of two squares and a circle...
...Last Ism. Soviet critics, too, were soon after Chagall's hide, dubbing his misbegotten revolution in art a "mystic and formalistic bacchanal." But the purge came from the quarter he least expected. He had hired two painters, Malevich and Lissitzky, members of the suprematist school of painting, to teach in Vitebsk's Free Academy. One day he returned from Moscow to find that they had taken over the school, and based its new curriculum on their brand of geometrical abstraction and pure objectivity...
...legitimate ancestry. Cezanne, Seurat and Monet seized upon newly proposed theories of optics when they painted. In this century, such constructivists as Mondrian and Malevich were the forebears of op art's dry, highly controlled use of color, which sometimes-as in the work of Britain's labyrinth-making Jeffrey Steele, 33 (above) -amounts to rejecting color. When they do use color, however, it is to stimulate the first sense directly rather than to enhance forms...
Abstraction in art seemed to reach some sort of apogee when Kasimir Malevich painted White on White. But Paul Taylor, an avant-garde dancer, may have topped that ploy by choreographing stillness: he once fashioned a dance called Duet in which a cocktail-party couple stood stock still for four minutes. He has composed dances to the sound of rain, and he has taken a collection of human postures and set them to the chant of the telephone operator - "At the tone the time will be . . ." The whole thing lasted 20 minutes, longer than a good many of the audience...
California's Frederick Wight has nothing against abstract art, except when it is used to express abstract ideas. Abstractions of abstractions, he believes, can only lead to pictures like Malevich's notorious White on White at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. That canvas a white patch on a white patch, might be said to express the idea of purity except that it is too thin and bare to carry the weight of the idea; most people think it must be a joke. Wight's own paintings on show this week at the Pasadena Art Museum...