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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

THE BLACK SQUARE: A WELL OF PRIMEVAL MEMORY 120th jubilee of artist Kazymyr Malevych

3 March, 1998 - 00:00

A wall covered by wild grapevines. An empty patio and a fragment of bare wall with hooks for halters, where a stable had been. A narrow stairway leading to the verandah on the second floor and thence to two adjoining rooms. An oval tiled stove in the middle of the first room. A hundred years ago this house was inhabited by the family of Severyn Malevych, an accountant at a Tereshchenko factories. Here, on Bulyonna St., not far from Kyiv's Baikove Cemetery, Kazymyr Malevych, one of the prominent artists of the twentieth century, spent his childhood. There is no memorial plaque and most of the structure was torn down — not when the Bolsheviks were blowing up churches, but during perestroika. And nothing is left of the grave of the avant-garde genius (he was buried in a place near Moscow, put under the plow to yield the first postwar crops).

Malevych's creative legacy is remarkably diverse. As a young man he was very fond of Pymonenko's art. In the 1910s, when futurism appeared (Oleksandr Zakrevsky, a man of letters from Kyiv, called them knights of madness), Malevych found himself on the threshold of a world with no objects. He started with abstract drawings lines, circles, dots, and finally a black square. Shocking, out of nowhere, absolutely meaningless. Just a black square on white. A bottomless well leading to an invisible world. A formula of philosophical cognition of image-bearing art, a laconic epitaph to naive archaic realism, cheerful baroque forms, bright impressionism, and techniques of the nineteenth century Russian Peredvizhnik school. Malevych considered them all naturalists and said so in his lectures and papers published in Ukraine, mostly by Kharkiv magazines, in the late 1920s.

The artist called his own transfer to a world without objects suprematism. Something to do with the summit of pictorial art, soaring over ramshackle one-story buildings in a poverty-stricken starving country, reaching for the stars. In a way, Malevych's suprematism became Cape Canaveral for the coming innovating generations. Toward the end of his life, in Leningrad, Kazymyr Malevych made a picture lauding the Red Army (which originated from Ukraine, precisely from the Red Cossacks led by Vitaly Primakov maybe his real name was Primakov, which was not pleasing to the Russian bureaucratic ear). A flying squad of black cavalrymen (black square again?) racing under deep blue skies strongly reminiscent of Renaissance. Instead of a green steppe, a Ukrainian embroidered rushnyk towel.

Malevych's supremacist compositions would rank among the high points of twentieth century fine arts, architecture, design, and even the formal disciplines. One is tempted to believe that their genesis is rooted in Ukrainian folk creativeness. As in Mendeleev's periodic law, Malevych's works bring to life the archaic symbols of life and death, variations on the favorite Slavic motif, Tree of Life. Of course, there are other interpretations. One of the prophets of modern Russian neo-academism said that Malevych's suprematism reminded him of road signs.

His techniques were unusual, and the same applied to human figures. Tall, motionless peasants like Scythian statues, here and there holding a rake or a spade. Every figure seems to be driven into the ground. And no details, no buttons or belts. Just figures looking like dry doomed trees. A prophecy? Foretelling the tragedy of expropriating the kulaks, setting up reservation-like collective farms, instituting serfdom in the name of a "bright communist future"?

No characters in this "peasant" series have faces. Just white oval spots, sometimes with a dark line in place of the eyes. Add another vertical one and you have a cross. And giant dolls village children made of straw and colored pieces of cloth. A prelude to the Stalinist anti-utopia?

Kazymyr Malevych sent letters to Ukraine (fortunately preserved), written in Ukrainian. Once he forgot the Ukrainian for strawberry, so he wrote that he was longing for dumplings with red berries growing from earth.

He spent his last years in poverty. At the last art show during his lifetime, among pictures glorifying revolutionary leaders and socialist construction, was Malevych's self-portrait. The artist looked solemn, clad in Renaissance attire, holding a brush, staring ahead, into the future. Below, beside his signature, is a small square on the dark canvas, scratched probably with the other end of the brush. Forever an archaic innovator, a twig on the Tree of Life, and the one who planted it.

Kazymyr Malevych, "Portrait of a Woman," 1919

 

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