TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031891/0318400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.6 KB | 142 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 77

Modernism's Russian Front


The birth of abstraction is illuminated in the energetic work
of two compatriots

By ROBERT HUGHES


    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  Art.

    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 work (for
Americans) was White Square on White, 1918 -- that
unreproducible, fierce, magical white square, canted on a
slightly warmer white ground, which has been in the Museum of
Modern Art since the '30s and has become a central icon of the
reductive impulse. But now we see in depth what went before and
came after it: a fascinating spectacle.

    One 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 of the Parisian avant-garde, producing
unmistakably Russian paintings as he did so. "I remained on the
side of peasant art and began to paint in the primitive
spirit," he wrote later. The bulky twisting serfs in Floor
Polishers, 1911-12, are the laboring cousins of the ecstatic
figures in Matisse's La Danse, 1909, and the red-hot metallic
forms of The Woodcutter, 1912, are a Tolstoyan version of
Leger's "tubism." Aviator, 1914, plays with the standard
emblems of Cubism -- printed words, a hat, an ace of clubs. But
it has to be the only Cubist painting with a sturgeon in it.

    A 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 as razors: those
forceful, exquisite arrangements of planes, asserting their
aesthetic self-sufficiency on a white ground (which was also
the celestial white background of Moscow icons) have an almost
heroic daring, which he would push still further in the plain
black crosses and black squares of the '20s.

    And 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 at a gaggle of
photographs of Czars and White Russian officers pasted on
upside down and annulled by a white X -- are hopeful agitprop,
infused with the same clean sharp humor that ran through the
work of her German contemporary, the Dadaist Hannah Hoch.

    All the same, Popova's talents as a painter could hardly
have grown as fast and as confidently as they did without the
security of her liberal, upper-middle-class background, the way
of life the revolution mercilessly crushed. She was the adored
child of a rich Moscow textile merchant, whose money enabled
her to go to Paris in 1913 and study under those secondary
Cubists, Jean Metzinger and Henri le Fauconnier. Even her
student work -- the big studio nudes in a Cubist idiom
represented in the show -- has striking analytic toughness. Its
painted planes, jutting and curling in imagined space, become
literal in 1915: painted cardboard still-life sculptures
inspired by Archipenko.

    But 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 note. One example is the
great Painterly Construction of 1920, with its jagged black
shapes and whirling cones of force playing across a landscape
in turmoil. But generally the keel of feeling is even, the
track straight as an arrow. Here was a determined young painter
following her nose, with a passionate sense of the edge where
formal research bursts into sparks and arpeggios of lyric
feeling.