Word: malevich
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...Sometimes, as though by a benign but unforeseen planetary conjunction, exhibitions in New York City will light one another up. So it is with the present retrospectives of two of the leading figures of Russian modernism: Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Liubov Popova (1889-1924) at the Museum of Modern...
...Malevich, inevitably, comes out as the more powerful artist (which is not at all to denigrate the brilliant gifts of Popova). His show was seen in Moscow, Amsterdam, Washington and Los Angeles before arriving in New York, but it has special resonance in Manhattan because of the city's history as a forcing bed of abstract art. No single artist "invented" abstraction, but Malevich was certainly one of the first to set forth its claims as a visual language. It was Malevich who did for abstract painting what Picasso, in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, did for the figure. His emblematic...
...should think of Malevich as an iconmaker. He did. He was a very Russian Russian, a kind of starets, or holy man, filled with chiliastic dreams of the future of art, with an eye for promotion and a remarkable ability to get under the skin of other artists. His decisiveness was amazing. A weak start -- some feeble pastiches of Impressionism, and then a brief phase of yearning Symbolist mystagogy. But then the impact of Fauvism kicked in around 1910, and there was no stopping him. With a kind of relentless metabolic energy, Malevich started grinding through the styles...
...vigorous partisan in the art groups of Moscow before, during and after the ^ revolution, Malevich invented a new art movement, consisting essentially of himself: Suprematism. It was based on a slippery idea with vast meaning to him, zaum. It meant "beyond reason": zaum stood for a dismantling of artistic conventions, for putting imagination into free fall and thus, Malevich believed, becoming one with nature: "Nature's perfection lies in the absolute, blind freedom of units within it." One joined nature in its absoluteness by painting abstractly. However cloudy Malevich's voluble theories are, his Suprematist paintings are as decisive...
...KAZIMIR MALEVICH, 1878-1935, National Gallery of Art, Washington. The biggest U.S. retrospective yet of a brilliant, protean member of the Russian avant- garde, too long shrouded in Soviet ideological disfavor. Through...