Word: malevich
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...constructions of workers' materials like tin and rope and painted wood; the disembodied black and red squares of now cracking paint. French gallerygoers 100 years ago never felt like this about the art of the French Revolution. Jacques-Louis David looked old-fashioned by then, whereas Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Liubov Popova and all their colleagues in the ism soup of the Russian artistic vanguard still look fresh and daring...
...desire to get art down to its ultimate components and endow it with the communicative power of total austerity is very much a 20th century one. It begins with Mondrian's grids and Malevich's black square, sheds its mysticism in America and re-emerges as factual, what-you-see-is-what-you-get Minimalism. Reinhardt's work was part of this process: he cleared the way for Minimalism without being at all interested in its factuality...
...then came the ice of Stalinism, the crushing of the cultural avant- garde. Malevich retracted; he went back to painting cutouts of peasants in the field; his last picture, from 1933, is a realist self-portrait in which the primary colors of Suprematism are shifted into the panels of the costume he wears. He looks like Christopher Columbus, as well he might...
...Unlike Malevich, Liubov Popova died young -- scarlet fever got her in 1924, before Stalin's purges could. She was only 35. At least she was spared the miseries of censorship and persecution visited on other Russian avant-gardists by Stalin. Moreover, she died at a time when it was still possible for an idealistic, exuberantly gifted young artist like herself to believe in the promise of Leninism. Her last works, such as the 1923 collage stage design for a play about the revolution called Earth in Turmoil -- showing a helmeted aviator, prototype of the new Soviet Man, gazing...
...sculpture was basically too material an art for Popova. A gifted colorist, she wanted to explore what illusions of visual depth and energy a flat surface could contain. One sees this ambition unfolding phase by phase with a steadfast, though unprogrammed, logic. Malevich catalyzed her in 1915, but her series of "Painterly Architectonics" is by no means an imitation of the look of his Suprematism. They are equally inspired by the planes and colors of ancient Russian and Islamic architecture; she married an architectural historian and went as far afield as Samarkand. Occasionally her work strikes an apocalyptic, Kandinsky-like...