ALEKSANDR RODCHENKO 4 page

KAZIMIR MALEVICH

born , Feb 23 [Feb. 11, old style], 1878, near Kiev

died May 15, 1935, Leningrad

Russian painter, who was the founder of the Suprematist school of abstract painting.

Malevich was trained at the Kiev School of Art and the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts. In his early work he followed Impressionism as well as Fauvism, and, after a trip to Paris in 1912, he was influenced by Picasso and Cubism. As a member of the Jack of Diamonds (q.v.) group,he led the Russian Cubist movement.

In 1913 Malevich created abstract geometrical patterns in a manner he called Suprematism (q.v.). From 1919 to 1921 he taught painting in Moscow and Leningrad, where he lived the rest of his life. On a 1926 visit to the Bauhaus in Weimar he met Wassily Kandinsky and published a book on his theory under the title Die gegenstandslose Welt (“The Nonobjective World”). Later, when Soviet politicians decided against modern art, Malevich and his art were doomed. He died in poverty and oblivion.

Malevich was the first to exhibit paintings composed of abstract geometrical elements. He constantly strove to produce pure, cerebral compositions, repudiating all sensuality and representation in art. His well-known “White on White” (1918; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) carries his Suprematist theories to their logical conclusion

VASSILY KANDINSKY

born Dec. 4 [Dec. 16, New Style], 1866, Moscow, Russia

died Dec. 13, 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Fr.

Russian in full Vasily Vasilyevich Kandinsky Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”; 1911–14) and began completely abstract painting. His forms evolved from fluid and organic to geometric and, finally, to pictographic (e.g., “Tempered Élan,” 1944).

Early years

Kandinsky's mother was a Muscovite, one of his great-grandmothers a Mongolian princess, and his father a native of Kyakhta, a Siberian town near the Chinese border; the boy thus grew up with a cultural heritage that was partly European and partly Asian. His family was genteel, well-to-do, and fond of travel; while still a child he became familiar with Venice, Rome, Florence, the Caucasus, and the CrimeanPeninsula. At Odessa, where his parents settled in 1871, he completed his secondary schooling and became an amateur performer on the piano and the cello. He also became an amateur painter, and he later recalled, as a sort of first impulse toward abstraction, an adolescent conviction that each colour had a mysterious life of its own.

In 1886 he began to study law and economics at the University of Moscow, but he continued to have unusual feelings about colour as he contemplated the city's vivid architecture and its collections of icons; in the latter, he once said, could be found the roots ofhis own art. In 1889 the university sent him on an ethnographic mission to the province of Vologda, in the forested north, and he returned with a lasting interest in the often garish, nonrealistic styles of Russian folk painting. During that same year he discovered the Rembrandts in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg, and he furthered his visual education with a trip to Paris. He pursued his academic career and in 1893 was granted the degree equivalent of a doctorate.

By this time, according to his reminiscences, he had lost much of his early enthusiasm for the social sciences. He felt, however, that art was “a luxury forbidden to a Russian.” Eventually, after a period of teaching at the university, he accepted a post as the director of the photographic sectionof a Moscow printing establishment. In 1896, when he was approaching his 30th birthday, he was forced to choose among his possible futures, for he was offered a professorship in jurisprudence at the University of Dorpat (later called Tartu), in Estonia, which was then undergoing Russification. In what he called a “now or never” mood, he turned down the offer and took the train for Germanywith the intention of becoming a painter.

Munich period.

He already had the air of authority that would contribute to his success as a teacher in later years. He was tall, large-framed, impeccably dressed, and equipped with pince-nez glasses; he had a habit of holding his head high and seeming to look down at the universe. He resembled, according to acquaintances, a mixture of diplomat, scientist, and Mongol prince. But for the moment he was simply an average art student, and he enrolled as such in a private school at Munich run by Anton Azbé. Two years of study under Azbé were followed by a year of work alone and then by enrollment at the Munich Academy in the class of Franz von Stuck. Kandinsky emerged from the academy with a diploma in 1900 and, during the next few years, achieved moderate success as a competent professional artist in touch with modern trends. Starting from a basein 19th-century realism, he was influenced by Impressionism, by thewhiplash lines and decorative effects of Art Nouveau (called Jugendstil in Germany), by the dot technique of Neo-Impressionism (or Pointillism), and by the strong, unrealistic colour of central European Expressionism and French Fauvism. Often he revealed that he had not forgotten the icons of Moscow and the folk art of Vologda; sometimes he indulged in patterns of violent hues that would have delighted his Asian ancestors. He exhibited with the vanguard groups and in the big nonacademic shows that had sprung up all over Europe—with the Munich Phalanx group (of which he became president in 1902), with the Berlin Sezession group, in the Paris Salon d'Automne and Salon des Indépendants, and with the Dresden group that called itself Die Brücke (“The Bridge”). In 1903 in Moscow he had his first one-man show, followed the next year by two others in Poland. Between 1903 and 1908 he traveled extensively, from Holland to as far south as Tunisia and from Paris back to Russia, stopping off for stays of several months each in Kairouan (Tunisia), Rapallo (Italy), Dresden, the Parisian suburb of Sèvres, and Berlin.

In 1909 Kandinsky and the German painter Gabriele Münter, who had been his mistress since 1902, acquired a house in the small town of Murnau, in southern Bavaria. Working part of the timein Murnau and part of the time in Munich, he began the process that led to the emergence of his first strikingly personal style and finally to the historic breakthrough into purely abstract painting. Gradually, the many influences he had undergone coalesced. His impulse to eliminate subject matter altogether was not, it should be noted, due merely or even primarily to strictly aesthetic considerations. No one could have been less of an aesthete, less of an “art for art's sake” addict, than Kandinsky. In addition, he was not the sort of born painter who could enjoy the physical properties of oil and pigment without caring what they meant. He wanted a kind of painting in which colours, lines, and shapes, freed from the distracting business of depicting recognizable objects, might evolve into a visual “language” capable—as was, for him, the abstract “language” ofmusic—of expressing general ideas and evoking deep emotions.

The project was not, of course, entirely new. Analogies between painting and music had long beencommon; many thinkers had attempted to codify the supposed expressiveness of colours, lines, and shapes; and more than one fairly ancient sketch might compete for the honour of being calledthe first abstract picture. Moreover, in these years just before World War I, Kandinsky was by no means alone in his attack on figurative art. By 1909 the Cubists were turning out intellectualized and fragmented visions of reality that baffled the ordinary viewer. Between 1910 and 1914 the listof pioneer abstract artists included many fine painters. A strict examination of works and dates can show, therefore, that Kandinsky does not quite deserve to be called, as he often is, the “founder” of nonfigurative painting; at least he cannot be called the only founder. But, when this historical point is conceded, he remains a pioneer of the first importance.

Kandinsky's widely accepted claim to historical priority rests mainly on an untitled work dated 1910 and commonly referred to as “First Abstract Watercolour.” On the basis of research done in the 1950s, however, this work can be dated somewhat later and can be regarded as a study for the 1913 “Composition VII”; and in any event it must be considered merely an incident—among many for which the evidence has not been preserved—on Kandinsky's route. In “Blue Mountain” (1908) the evolution toward nonrepresentation is already clearly under way; the forms are schematic, the colours nonnaturalistic, and the general effect that of a dream landscape. In “Landscape with Steeple” (1909) similar tendencies are evident, together with the beginning of what might be called an explosion in the composition. By 1910 “Improvisation XIV” is already, as its somewhat musical title suggests, practically abstract; with the 1911 “Encircled,” there has definitely developed a kind of painting that, though not just decoration, has no discernible point ofdeparture in the depiction of recognizable objects. After that come such major works as “With the Black Arch,” “Black Lines,” and “Autumn”; in such pictures, done between 1912 and 1914 in a slashing, splashing, dramatic style that anticipates the New York Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s, most art historians see the peak of the artist's achievement.

Kandinsky was an active animator of the avant-garde movement in Munich, helping to found in 1909 the New Artists' Association ( Neue Künstlervereinigung). Following a disagreement within this group, he and the German painter Franz Marc founded in 1911 an informally organized rival group, which took the name Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”), from the title of one of Kandinsky's 1903 pictures.

Russian interlude.

When World War I was declared in 1914, Kandinsky broke off his relationship with Gabriele Münter and returned to Russia by way of Switzerland, Italy, and the Balkans. An early marriage to a cousin hadbeen dissolved in 1910 after a long period of separation, and in 1917he married a Moscow woman, Nina Andreevskaya, whom he had metthe previous year. Although he was past 50 and his bride was many years younger, the marriage turned out to be extremely successful, and he settled down in Moscow with the intention of reintegrating himself into Russian life. His intention was encouraged by the new Soviet government, which at first showed itself anxious to win the favour and services of avant-garde artists. In 1918 he became a professor at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts and a member of the arts section of the People's Commissariat for Public Instruction. His autobiographical Rückblicke (“Retrospect”) was translated into Russian and published by the Moscow municipal authorities. In 1919 he created the Institute of Artistic Culture, became director of the Moscow Museum for Pictorial Culture, and helped to organize 22 museums across the Soviet Union. In 1920 he was made a professor at the University of Moscow and was honoured with a one-man show organized by the state. In 1921 he founded the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences. But by then the Soviet government was veering from avant-garde art to Social Realism, and so, at the end of the year, he and his wife left Moscow for Berlin.

In spite of the war, the Russian Revolution, and official duties, he had found time to paint during this Russian interlude and even to begin a quite drastic transformation of his art. Whereas in his Munich work as late as 1914 one can still find occasional allusions to landscape, the canvases and watercolours of his Moscow years show a determination to be completely abstract. They also show a growing tendency to abandon the earlier spontaneous, lyrical, organic style in favour of a more deliberate, rational, and constructional approach. The change is evident in such pictures as “WhiteLine” and “Blue Segment.”

Bauhaus period.

By this time Kandinsky had an international reputation as a painter. He had always, however, been interested in teaching, first as a lecturer in law and economics just after getting his university degree, then as the master of a painting school he had organized in Munich, and more recently as a professor at the University of Moscow. He seems not to have hesitated, therefore, when early in 1922 he was offered a teaching post at Weimar in the already famous Bauhaus school of architecture and applied art. At first his duties were a little remote from his personal activity, for the Bauhauswas not concerned with the formation of “painters” in the traditionalsense of the word. He lectured on the elements of form, gave a course in colour, and directed the mural workshop. Not until 1925, when the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, did he have a class in “free,” nonapplied painting. In spite of the somewhat routine nature of his work, however, he appears to have found life at the Bauhaus rewarding and pleasant.The climate was one of research and craftsmanship combined with a certain amount of aesthetic puritanism; it was classical, to use the term rather loosely, by comparison with the warm romanticism of his pre-1914 days in Munich.

Kandinsky responded to this climate by continuing to evolve in the general direction of geometric abstraction, but with a dynamism and a taste for detail-crowded pictorial space that recall his earlier sweeping-gesture technique. That Kandinsky was keenly interested in theory during these years is evident from his publication in 1926 of his second important treatise, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (“Point and Line to Plane”). In his first treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he had emphasized in particular the supposed expressiveness of colours, comparing yellow, for example, to the aggressive, allegedly earthly sound of a trumpet and comparing blue to the allegedly heavenly sound of the pipe organ. Now, in the same spirit, he analyzed the supposed effects of theabstract elements of drawing, interpreting a horizontal line, for example, as cold and a vertical line as hot.

Paris period.

Although he had been a German citizen since 1928, he emigrated toParis when, in 1933, the Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close. The last, and one of the finest, of his German pictures is the sober “Development in Brown”; its title probably alludes to the Nazi brown-shirted storm troopers, who regarded his abstract art as “degenerate.” He lived for the remaining 11 years of his life in an apartment in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, becoming a naturalized French citizen in 1939.

During this final period his painting, which he began to prefer to call “concrete” rather than “abstract,” became to some extent a synthesis of the organic manner of the Munich period and the geometric manner of the Bauhaus period. The visual language that he had been aiming at since at least 1910 turned into collections of signs that look like almost-decipherable messages written in pictographs and hieroglyphs; many ofthe signs resemble aquatic larvae, and now and then there is a figurative hand or a lunar human face. Typical works are “Violet Dominant,” “Dominant Curve,” “Fifteen,” “Moderation,” and “Tempered Élan.” The production of such works was accompanied by the writing of essays in which the artist stressed the alleged failure of modern scientific positivism and the need to perceive what he termed “the symbolic character of physical substances.”

Kandinsky died in 1944. His influence on 20th-century art, often filtered through the work of more accessible painters, was profound.

CONSTRUCTIVISM

Russian artistic and architectural movement that was first influenced by Cubism and Futurism and is generally considered to have been initiated in 1913 with the “painting reliefs”—abstract geometric constructions—of Vladimir Tatlin. The expatriate Russian sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo joined Tatlin and his followers in Moscow, and upon publication of their jointly written Realist Manifesto in 1920 they became the spokesmen of the movement. It is from the manifesto that the name Constructivism was derived; one of the directives that it contained was “to construct” art. Because of their admiration for machines and technology, functionalism, and modern industrial materials such as plastic, steel, and glass, members of the movement were also called artist-engineers.

Other important figures associated with Constructivism were Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky. Soviet opposition to the Constructivists' aesthetic radicalism resulted in the group's dispersion. Tatlin and Rodchenko remained in the Soviet Union, but Gabo and Pevsner went first to Germany and then to Paris, where they influenced the Abstract-Creation group with Constructivist theory, and later in the 1930s Gabo spread Constructivism to England and in the 1940s to the United States. Lissitzky's combination of Constructivism and Suprematism influenced the de Stijl artists and architects whom he met in Berlin, as well as the Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy, who was a professor at the Bauhaus. In both Dessau and Chicago, where because of Nazi interference the New Bauhaus was established in 1937, Moholy-Nagy disseminated Constructivist principles. See also Bauhaus; Stijl, de; Suprematism

ALEKSANDR RODCHENKO

born Nov. 23 [Dec. 5, New Style], 1891, St. Petersburg, Russia

died Dec. 3, 1956, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

Soviet painter, sculptor, designer, and photographer, an important member of the Constructivist movement.

Rodchenko studied art at the Kazan School of Art in Odessa from 1910 to 1914 and then went to Moscow. He soon abandoned a Futurist style of painting in favour of a completely abstract, highly geometric style using a ruler and compass. His first major show was part of an exhibition organized in Moscow in 1916 by Vladimir Tatlin, and in 1918 Rodchenko presented a one-man show in Moscow. In the latter year he painted a series of black-on-black geometric paintings in response to the famous “White on White” painting of his rival, Kazimir Malevich. In 1919 Rodchenko began to make three-dimensional constructions out of wood, metal, and other materials, again using geometric shapes in dynamic compositions; some of these hanging sculptures were, in effect, mobiles.

Rodchenko led a wing of artists in the Constructivist movement—the Productivist group—who wanted to forge closer ties between the arts and industry and to produce works that they considered more appropriate in the daily lives of worker-consumers. He thus renounced easel painting in the 1920s and took up other art forms, among them photography; poster, book, and typographic design; furniture design; and stage and motion-picture set design. He held various government offices concerned with art-related projects, helped to establish art museums, and taught art.

EL LISSITZKY

born Nov. 10 [Nov. 22, New Style], 1890, Pochinok, near Smolensk, Russia

died Dec. 30, 1941, Moscow

in full Lazar Markovich Lisitsky, Russian painter, typographer, and designer, a pioneer of non-representational art in the early 20th century. His innovations in typography, advertising, and exhibition design were particularly influential.

Lissitzky studied architecture at Darmstadt, Germany., and, during World War I, at Moscow. In 1919 Marc Chagall appointed him teacher at the revolutionary school of art in Vitebsk. Kasimir Malevich, the painter and founder of the Suprematist movement, which advocated the supremacy of pure geometric form over representation, also taught there, and he greatly influenced Lissitzky. In 1919 Lissitzky began to work on a series of abstract geometric paintings that he named “Proun,”an acronym for the Russian words translated as “Projects for the Affirmation of the New.” These paintings were a major contribution to the Constructivist art movement. In 1921 he became professor at the state art school in Moscow, but he left his country at year's end, when the Soviet government turned against modern art. He went to Germany, where he met the artist-designer László Moholy-Nagy, who transmitted Lissitzky's ideas on art to western Europe and the United States through his teaching at the Bauhaus.

Between 1925 and 1928 Lissitzky lived in Hannover, where he cofounded a number of periodicals propagating the most progressive artistic tendencies of the 1920s. In the winter of 1928–29 he returned to Moscow, where he continued to be an innovative force. His experiments in spatial construction led him to devise new techniques in exhibiting, printing, photomontage, and architecture, which have had much influence in western Europe.

VLADIMIR TATLIN

born Dec. 16 [Dec. 28, New Style], 1885, Kharkov, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine]

died May 31, 1953, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

Ukrainian painter, sculptor, and architect remembered for his visionary “Monument to the Third International” in Moscow, 1920.

Tatlin was educated at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1910. Late in 1913 he went to Paris, where he visited Pablo Picasso, whose reliefs in sheet iron, wood, and cardboard made a deep impression on him. Returning to Moscow, Tatlin created constructions that he called “painting reliefs,” which he exhibited at a Futurist exhibition held in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in February 1915. He became the leader of a group of Moscow artists who tried to apply engineering techniques to the construction of sculpture. This developed into a movement known as Constructivism (q.v.).

This type of avant-garde art continued for a brief period after the Russian Revolution of 1917, during which time Tatlin created his most famous work—the “Monument to the Third International,” which was one of the first buildings conceived entirely in abstract terms. It was commissioned in 1919 by the department of fine arts and exhibited in the form of a model 22 feet (6.7 m) high at the exhibition of the VIII Congress of the Soviets in December 1920. A striking design, it consisted of a leaning spiral iron framework supporting a glass cylinder, a glass cone, and a glass cube, each of which could be rotated at different speeds. The monument's interior would have contained halls for lectures, conferences, and other activities. The monument was to be the world's tallest structure—more than 1,300 feet (396 m) tall—but it was never built owing to the Soviet government's disapproval of nonfigurative art.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 890