MALEVICH’S QUEST FOR UNCONDITIONED CREATIVITY, PART I
I. PRINCIPAL PHASES (1910–20)
These are: (1) colorism; (2) depiction of the eternal peasant; (3) estheticism; (4) simple Suprematism; (5) constructive Suprematism; (6) monumental Suprematism; and (7) depiction of the cross form. Simple Suprematism might also be called axiomatic Suprematism, in the sense that in it Malevich first presents the terms of his Suprematist statement, or more precisely, argument, viz., the geometrical figure and neutral field, presented in a conflict which initially takes the tame, dialectical form of juxtaposition. The Suprematist conflict between figure and field becomes strongly dialectical in the brief but pointed phase of monumental Suprematism, in which figure and field tend to, but never do fuse. The perpetual possibility of their unity gives their conflict a poignant, subtly dynamic edge, telling of Suprematism’s ultimate goal—the communication of pure feeling. Thus, there is continuity between the Suprematist phases, but nonetheless a conflict of motivation, for while simple—straightforward—Suprematism aims to communicate pure feeling, constructive Suprematism with its obvious complication of figural forms aims to communicate pictorial-plastic feeling. Simple Suprematism uncovers the subliminal world of human feeling, making sensuously explicit what is emotionally implicit, while constructive Suprematism uncovers the subliminal world of pictorial forms, which interrelate to ground the sense of plastic movement. Such forms are usually disguised by the world-signifying content of the picture, much as, for Malevich, private emotions are usually hidden by public actions. In the last analysis Malevich’s ambition, in his manifestoes as well as his art, is to communicate as directly as possible the fundamentality of feeling, rather than of action or intellect, in human existence.
Monumental Suprematism is a successful, if momentary attempt to unite simple and constructive Suprematism. It rids simple Suprematism of its intense contrast of form and field, giving form a power dependent on its “community” with field—indicated by their shared whiteness—rather than their geometry (e.g., White on White). The field converts, from the backdrop or setting of the form, explicitly into its ground. No longer simply the site of the form, the field, rather than the innate geometrical nature of the form itself, gives the figure decisive presence. That is, what the form acquires from the field becomes more decisive for its existence than what it is in itself. That the field openly becomes the ground and locates—if not exclusively—within the closed form, exemplifies Malevich’s belief that pure feeling is formed in and echoes an existential situation of void. Monumental Suprematism rids constructive Suprematism of its almost anarchic, certainly arbitrary, abundance of forms: it regresses to the simplicity of the first Suprematist phase, retaining the perceptual ambiguities generated by constructive Suprematism. These irresolvable ambiguities make explicit that neither geometrical form nor neutral void can ever overcome each other in the tense conflict between them.
I will show the dialectical continuity between the phases of Suprematism, and the continuity of purpose between Malevich’s depiction of the eternal peasant and his Suprematism. The latter reveals that figural forms are bound by a “higher” necessity than nature, yet implied by nature. Suprematism treats this necessity—it cannot unqualifiedly be called artistic—as a phenomenon in itself, abstracting it entirely from the context of nature, and presenting it as an implication of forms grounded geometrically. In general, phases one and seven are “conventional,” dominated by stereotype forms and ideas, presented unambiguously. Phases two and three are “stylistic,” in the sense that their major ambition is to manufacture works of art that, whatever else they may imply, are meant to be modern, i.e., au courant and on a par with the advanced style of the day, in Malevich’s case, cubo-futurism. Finally, the Suprematist phases are primarily “creative,” i.e., decidedly unconventional and not so much concerned to participate in the modern revolution in art as to communicate existential feeling.
1. Colorism. The following works are typical of this phase: Province, 1910 (2); Chiropodist at the Baths, 1910 (3); Greenhouses (Carrying Earth), 1910 (4); Village (5) and (6); The Bather, 1910 (8); On the Boulevard, 1910 (9); and Argentine Polka, 1911 (10). In Man with Sack, 1911 (11) the eternal peasant makes his first appearance, and in Peasant Women at Church, 1911 (25) the type is treated, if not completely, in colorist terms. Beginning with Peasant Woman with Buckets, 1912 (27) color is largely contained by form, and the relationship between colors regularized. This new stability of color correlates with Malevich’s change from gouache and paper to oil and canvas. In general, Malevich’s handling, while loose, tends to confine colors in patterns of contrast within an ever more disciplined picture. In a sense, Malevich’s painting can be understood as a successful attempt to bring coloristic effect under the control of objective order, to rid the perception of color from Dionysian implication by bringing it under the control of Apollonian form. In Suprematism, form so completely constrains and, as it were, sublimates color that it no longer creates the “delirium” Malevich originally meant it to effect. Instead, particularly in axiomatic Suprematism, color becomes meditative, defining the form it marks as a place of entry into clear consciousness of feeling. Only in monumental Suprematism does Malevich dispense with color as a catalyst, realizing it is not essential to the communication of pure feeling.
Malevich’s coloristic pictures, while expressionistically motivated, are less intense than Kandinsky’s almost contemporary Murnau pictures. Malevich never discovers expressionistic antagonism against content—color as an enemy of the conventionally visible world—as Kandinsky does. Nor does he attempt, as Kandinsky does, to bring his pictures under the control of “inner necessity,” to extinguish nature’s appearance into a spiritual pictorial pattern. In fact, at this stage, Malevich lacks a decisive artistic direction, not to speak of an artistic destiny. It will be shown that Malevich comes to these not through art—through a struggle for his own style—but rather through his attempt to master content, in particular to penetrate to the meaning of the peasant. The eternal truth the peasant symbolizes is secularized by Malevich’s cubo-futurization of him—a treatment which has the effect of removing him from nature—and nonnaturally or abstractly articulated in Suprematism. The “message” of the eternal peasant remains in Suprematism, but purified of natural connotation and conventional depiction.
Expressionism confronts natural destiny with artistic destiny. It struggles against the self-evidence of nature to make art’s power evident and to ground it independently of nature. Man is fated by nature; expressionism is one more, if violent attempt to show that art is part of man’s fate, a weapon in the war against natural fate. But Malevich’s colorism offers no alternative to natural appearance, for it neither consistently reduces it to essentials nor does it spiritually transform nature by imbuing it with esthetic purpose. Instead, Malevich simplistically identified with nature, naively translating its obvious vitality into color. This is perhaps evident in Chiropodist at the Baths, 1910 (3), where the pail and the foot on the stool are green and brown, appropriating the colors of the earth they rest on. In a later (1916) rationalization of his extravagant use of color to vitalize natural presence, Malevich makes clear the completeness of his identification with nature and color. Nature is “a living picture” of which we are “the living heart,”1 and color “lies within our organism,” for our nervous system is colored and our brain “burns” with earth colors.2 “Color was oppressed by common-sense, was enslaved by it,” its “spirit . . . weakened and died out”3—until Malevich’s uncommon-sensical pictures freed and revived it. However, Malevich’s words speak louder and stronger than his pictures’ colors, although, admittedly, axiomatic and constructive Suprematism refine colors, particularly blue and yellow, into radical nonnaturalness and powerful concentration.
2. Depiction of the eternal peasant. However vital its implications, the color of Malevich’s first formative phase wears thin because he is ultimately interested less in nature’s vitality than in its eternality, exemplified particularly by the stoical peasants directly dependent on and in communion with nature. Fatalistically, they accept its givenness, their stolid substance and expressionless features corresponding to nature’s own inert durability. They endure its seasons with indifferent bodies, as in Morning in the Village after Snowfall, 1912 (32). Their only activity is whatever is necessary for survival, such as hauling water, as in Peasant Woman with Buckets, 1912 (27; coloristic version) (34; cubo-futurist version); harvesting grain, as in Reaping Woman (26) and Taking in the Rye, 1912 (28); chopping wood, as in The Woodcutter, 1912 (29); and keeping necessary instruments in working condition, as in The Knife-Grinder, 1912 (37). The peasant manifests nature by his survival in it. The primitiveness and simplicity of his life indicate the elementary level on which he endures, and emphasizes his closeness to nature. His plodding character mimics its eternality, duplicates its innocent inevitability. The peasant’s fatalism—sign of his belief that nature is his fate—becomes evident in his face (18–20, 30) and leads to religious resignation, as in The Orthodox (31). Malevich’s peasant ultimately becomes as durable as stone, a dead object in nature rather than a living person in the world, as in the climactic Head of a Peasant Girl, 1912 (33). In this picture the human is decisively objectified into the impassively immortal, its individuality destroyed in the name of its eternality.
In general, Malevich’s peasant is heavy in body, mood, and manner, a case study of a possible effect of the eternal on man, particularly the eternal as manifest through nature: it makes him inert, its “gravity” binds him to the earth and makes him inflexible. He endures, but less as a vital self than as a heavy, almost inorganic form. His style of being demonstrates the law of fate determining man’s narrow lot, and the restricted mobility, mental as well as physical, which is its consequence. Thus, there is no play of expression on the face of Malevich’s peasant, his body’s movements seem clumsy and contrived, as those of a tree uprooting itself. To walk, Malevich’s peasant must rip his root-foot from the earth; as it returns, it spontaneously reroots, and must again be uprooted for the next step. In general, Malevich’s treatment of peasant feet, as in Man with Sack, 1911 (11), The Gardener, 1911 (12), Floor Polishers, 1911 (13), Peasant Woman with Buckets, 1912 (27), and Taking in the Rye, 1912 (28), symbolizes the peasant’s closeness to the earth, taking the intention of Van Gogh’s depiction of peasant shoes a step further. In a sense, Malevich’s poor depiction of movement epitomizes his view of eternal nature, which immobilizes man while giving him its strength. Antaeuslike, he is so rooted in nature he cannot adventure from it. The pictures in which Malevich depicts the eternal peasant are pervaded by the stillness of a being, perhaps best represented by the monumental Washing Woman, 1911 (17), that is sure of itself but forever bound by an unchanging—and so ultimate—situation.
Malevich’s attitude to the peasant can be succinctly shown by comparing, in general terms, his treatment with Breugel’s. Breugel’s peasant also labors anonymously in nature, but with a fuller life than Malevich gives him. Breugel’s peasant reflects the power as well as grandeur of Breugel’s nature, which gives him vigor as well as dignity. But Malevich’s nature overwhelms the peasant’s humanity, denying the peasant the heroic intensity and at times ironical relationship with nature that Breugel allows him. Malevich’s peasants labor under a burden and are themselves deadweights. Breugel’s peasants are energized by the nature they are submerged in, and are as likely to be violently and spontaneously erotic as plodding and stoic. Breugel’s peasants are alive with natural instinct, but Malevich’s peasants, inherently dead, are enlivened by the planar disruptions of cubo-futurist style.
The peasant’s totemic integrity remains intact even under these disruptions, which, in fact, articulate his inertia more pointedly. While Malevich reduces the peasant’s body to planes it retains, Léger-like, its bulk and stockiness. It is thus never in as completely an ambiguous relationship with surrounding space as it would be in the customary cubo-futurist work. Moreover, Malevich’s planes tend to be closed rather than open, as in more typical Cubist works, and as in Malevich’s own estheticist phase. The weight and insularity of Malevich’s planes stabilize the peasant figure they constitute, inhibiting the familiar cubo-futurist spatial dynamics. Ultimately, such figural stability reciprocates Malevich’s traditional use of the canvas as a receptacle, particularly his reluctance, in this formative phase, of reconceiving it as a field. For most of its development Malevich’s canvas remains a receptacle into which content is placed, rather than a surface flattening into a field which tends to absorb content—figuratively into the mind which is aware of it. However flat—depthless, spaceless—Malevich’s canvas becomes, it generally preserves a residue of recognizable if ill-defined—peripheral and perspectiveless—space, functionally often no more than a minimal margin, or an incompletely determinate frame for the figural forms. The best Cubist works tend to absorb this margin, or else bring it under strict control by articulating it explicitly, as in the use of the oval, an artist- rather than spectator-imposed frame. But Malevich leaves the margin intact and legible as a suggestion of natural space. The eternal peasant pictures can thus be read discursively—traditionally—however much their content is presented in modern style. This discrepancy on the whole continues into the Suprematist pictures, where it is not always clear that the canvas is a field rather than a receptacle, since it often functions simultaneously as both. However, in Suprematism the discrepancy—in which the geometrical forms seem to fit into the space of the canvas as well as partake of its flatness—is used to advantage to effect a psychic rather than strictly visible content, to evoke the world of pure feeling rather than simply to register the shapes from which perception, when it becomes a picture, is composed. But in his eternal peasant phase Malevich remains committed to a conventional kind of perception, despite his protestations to the contrary—despite his insistence that it is necessary to have a novel kind of consciousness to grasp his works.
The question, then, is why Malevich turned from colorism to cubo-futurism in his depiction of the eternal peasant. Was he updating his style, or was there a reason, inherent to the content, that turned him into a cubo-futurist? The latter is the case, for cubo-futurism is used unconventionally by Malevich. In the depiction of the eternal peasant it is less a means to mobilize immobile matter and to force vision to become spontaneous—to make connections itself, rather than to await them from the picture—than it is a way of emphasizing the passivity of the eternal peasant by reducing his being and world to a residue of inert planes. Cubo-futurism is not used naively to modernize Malevich’s style, but analytically to create unitary, static, elementary planes, making the eternality of the eternal peasant a visible constant. It is given its first formal appearance, in contrast to its informal manner of presence through colorism. In a sense, cubo-futurism phenomenologically reduces perception of the eternal peasant, thus more clearly revealing his meaning. He is no longer seen in his natural existence, but as eternally formed—constituted by universal geometrical shapes—and so as self-evidently eternal.
From another point of view, Malevich’s eternal peasant begins as a plodding beast, as in The Bather, 1910 (8) and Man with Sack, 1911 (11), and ends as a primitive machine, as in Peasant Woman with Buckets, 1912 (34) and The Knife-Grinder, 1912 (37). In cubo-futurism Malevich is already implicitly the Cartesian he will explicitly become in Suprematism, for the cubo-futurized peasant can be conceived as the body-machine of Descartes’ Passions of the Soul. In Suprematism the picture itself can be spoken of as a machine, its physiognomic implications simply the illusion of its “physiology.” Malevich’s cubo-futurist peasant is still physiognomically legible, but only because his planar organs hold together in a body. The question of Suprematism is whether an organization of mechanical forms to create the body of a picture—a “nonhumanistic” holding together of abstract forms—has physiognomic implications. Or is it legible only as an anatomizing of the picture, its forms analytically displayed in one of an infinite number of ways? Is the abstract picture in general and the Suprematist picture in particular an anatomy lesson of art or the revelation of pure, structured form as innately rich with physiognomic implications profounder than any communicated by the familiar surfaces of appearance? Simply put, is the Suprematist picture a “kind of qualitative combinatorics”4 of abstract forms or an existential revelation?
3. Estheticism. Typical of this phase are: Musical Instrument/Lamp, 1913 (39); The Guardsman, 1913 (40); Desk and Room, 1913 (41); Woman at the Tram Stop, 1913 (42); An Englishman in Moscow, 1913–14 (43); Woman at Poster Column, 1914 (44); and Warrior of the First Division, 1914 (45). A regressive interlude, these works show Malevich preoccupied with style and self-consciously modern. Dully successful, they hold their own with similar Cubist school products, and like them include a certain amount of obvious content, in Malevich’s case more nativist. However, Malevich’s estheticist works do not have the Cubist school’s tendency to become poster art.5 Instead, their content is not so much advertised by their style as disruptive of it. Content intrudes through style, and is incompletely assimilated by it. Subject matter is almost anarchistically woven through the estheticist picture, violently contradicting its conventional Cubist synthetic style. For example, in An Englishman in Moscow, 1913–14 (43) content decisively “transcends” estheticist form—the fish is not caught by its net—and is thus revealed as startlingly—unexpectedly—real. Its presence disrupts the organic unity of the work in a way the usual appearance/reality dialectic of Cubism does not.
In general, there is no subtlety in the way reality breaks through the stylistic facade of Malevich’s estheticist works, almost redeeming them. It is a blustering, blunt invasion of Russian reality into Francophiliac style, suggesting that Malevich’s first priority remains the revelation of reality rather than the creation of his own style. Many of the estheticist works, particularly those of 1914, have a patriotic impetus, having to do with Russia’s involvement in World War I and the resulting awareness of a larger world. But the main “creative” point is the refusal of reality to submit to art, even modern beauty’s inability to overcome reality’s coarse givenness. In Malevich’s estheticist works reality is as much an untransformed content as a pictorial constituent. This ambiguity is in the end resolved by a leap beyond it and all estheticism to a Suprematist sense of reality as feeling—rather than object-oriented, and into a Suprematist sense of style as directly mediating reality rather than unwittingly obscuring it by beautifying it.
4. Simple or axiomatic Suprematism. Typical are: Suprematist Painting, Black and Red Square, 1915 (46); Suprematist Painting, Eight Red Rectangles, 1915 (47); Aeroplane Flying, 1915 (49); Football Match, 1915 (51); Suprematism, Eighteenth Construction, 1915 (52); Suprematist Painting, 1915 (53); and Suprematist Painting, Black Rectangle, Blue Triangle, 1915 (54). From one point of view these works are a radical clarification of Cubism, in the Purist vein, but one reductionist step further. However, where Purism restores cognizable conventional content, Suprematism cuts the Gordian knot that ties the recognizable to the habitually objective. Unlike Cubism, Suprematism is concerned neither with the painting’s objecthood nor the vestige or phantom of reality remembered in it, but rather, communicates straightforwardly a primordial objective content—geometrical forms—meant to imply primordial subjectivity. In Suprematism there is no echo of familiar reality. The integrity the work wins over against the world is a Pyrrhic victory if it does not lead to a new sense of ultimate subjective reality. The question of Suprematism is whether indeed the world of feeling it is meant to imply is in fact evoked by its works. As later indicated the answer cannot be unequivocally affirmative.
Simple Suprematism primitively deploys universal forms to construct a purely visual world. It is a trial run in launching a world of appearances altogether free of the world of customary appearances, however much the titles of the works refer to that world. Such a nonnatural or abstract world is postulated on the assumption that it in some sense corresponds to, or is a privileged means of evoking, a more essential world than is ordinarily apparent. In a sense, it is this more essential world that is the true content of the Suprematist picture, for the possibility of revealing it is the only justification—apart from the myth of or a priori belief in pure art—for transcending the world of ordinary perception. Either the Suprematist picture is an empty image, a purification of forms in the name of a tautologous—hermetic and narcissistic—art, or it is a depth experience of a more meaningful world than the immediately given one.
That the Suprematist work is the latter rather than the former is apparent only after its physical forms have been struggled with, in effect forcefully asked to disclose their meaning. To presume this meaning—the implication of primordial feeling—from the beginning is to short-circuit its full effect, to trivialize its presence. The Suprematist picture is an anvil on which the spectator hammers his consciousness into an instrument for perceiving its subtleties. In the course of refining his awareness of the work he comes to make demands on it which it cannot satisfy. These demands are neither excessive nor inappropriate. They show consciousness its need for meaning, and work to the advantage of the Suprematist picture, giving its seemingly mechanical forms a depth of possible meaning. Because consciousness expects the Suprematist work to have meaning, its forms become revolutionized in significance. Consciousness, strained by the Suprematist work by being disrupted in its relations with—in effect being ripped away from—the world of ordinary perception, demands such significance. The world becomes invisible in the simple Suprematist picture, and in compensation for its sacrifice consciousness must be given entry into a world of extraordinary significance. Unless the sacrifice of the world of ordinary perception is made in the name of a higher purpose it becomes a meaningless gesture of pure art. The result is not so much high abstract art as a new estheticism.
In general, in the perception of the Suprematist work consciousness itself becomes revolutionized. Its response to the Suprematist picture’s radical simplicity—to the picture’s mechanical forms and seeming emptiness—leads consciousness to discover its need for meaning, to become aware of its original motivation. Self-conscious, it affirms the integrity of its own existence over against the world’s. It is neither the mirror of the world nor the picture, as the abstract picture is no longer the mirror of ordinary consciousness or of other pictures. Thus the abstract picture is the catalyst for pure or self-reflexive consciousness—consciousness aware of its implicit purpose—and such consciousness, purified by perception of the abstract picture, becomes aware of its existence as primordial feeling, or the feeling of creative potential. Thus, deviously, Suprematism realizes its purpose—the revelation of the world of pure feeling, the disclosure of the innate nature of consciousness.
How and in what specific terms does the depth experience of the Suprematist picture operate? Reduced to two essential terms, form and field, the picture shocks perception. The shock of reduction, contradicting the conventional expectation that a picture mirror a given world, is sufficient to make the spectator self-conscious. Today no longer shocking, such reduction has become matter-of-fact. The original contempt, outrage, skepticism—all attempts to keep the status quo of consciousness—with which it was countered have dissipated, and abstraction has become a convention. Yet it was the original negative response to abstraction that created the possibility of a depth experience of it. To deal with his defensive doubt and bafflement and to overcome the Suprematist picture, the shocked, skeptical spectator must examine the intention of the work and conceptually reconstitute it. He can, of course, naively dismiss it, but he cannot remain in the precarious state of contemptuously perceiving it. Committing himself to examining the work, he changes his consciousness, putting it on the path to self-discovery. But he can satisfy his hunger for understanding only after he denies the dumb, mechanical character the picture had to contemptuous perception, and allows it a dialectical character, experiences it as a conflict between form and field. The Suprematist picture becomes the tension between value- (color-) charged form and neutral (uncharged) field. The picture becomes—and Suprematism is the unfolding of—the paradoxical relation between the two. The picture becomes a contradiction between the forms it thrusts at the spectator and the field that falls back to its own foundation. It wavers between colored forms which project it beyond itself and flat forms which are reabsorbed by the field from which they emerged.
The tension heightens as, in the course of perception, the field seems overly neutral, overly white. It comes to seem almost monstrous when it is realized that its total emptiness—consummate nothingness—makes it a poor foundation for the forms. Thus, in simple Suprematism, the field is neither easily characterized in itself nor necessarily linked to forms. It is essentially an absence that is in fundamental contradiction to the forms’ presence, neither grounding nor opposing them, but simply altogether other than what they are. As such, it creates an uncertainty which undermines the forms’ certainty. The field is an invisibility that becomes a possible alternative to the forms’ visibility, an indeterminate constituent that is as essential to the picture as their determinate character. The simple integrity of the forms seems to resist the field’s barrenness. Because the Suprematist picture was meant to exist on a philosophical plane, as Malevich implied when he asserted that “The square=feeling, the white field=the void beyond this feeling,”6 the conflict between form and field becomes an ontic expression of the ontological tension between primordial something or “thereness” and primordial nothing (nonbeing). This tension, which existentially cannot be lessened because of the presence of death, lets us view Suprematism as an endless ontological debate about the very possibility of being.
This fundamental level is not always sustained, and in the second Suprematist phase seems altogether lost. In that “constructive” phase Malevich’s pictorial-plastic instinct—his wish to make art objects—interferes with it. His desire to relate forms rhythmically mutes awareness of the field. One suspects, in view of the succeeding phase of monumental Suprematism, which achieves a final solution to the problem of the relationship of form and field, that Malevich’s desire to create a rhythm of forms—to give them organic power—is compensatory for the field’s complete lack of plasticity. It also amounts to an attempt to ignore the form-field distinction, emphasizing instead the interrelation of forms. This is indicative of a desire to abandon the ontological implications of Suprematism—perhaps because they are difficult to sustain—and simply create a “dynamic” picture, muting all existential appeal and restoring the picture to ordinary perception. An incidental character of the Suprematist picture is its lack of value for survival, which might seem irrelevant were it not for the fact that an important purpose of the traditional picture is to orient the spectator to a familiar world. This lack of survival value unconsciously adds to abstraction’s shock value. It leaves the spectator in the lurch, for it does not confirm familiar beliefs about the world as representational art usually does. Like the new mathematically grounded science the new abstractionism in art created an apparently unbridgeable gap between the reality it “described”—to the ordinary mind, arbitrarily created—and ordinarily experienced reality. And like the new science neither the truth-value nor the human use of the new abstractionism were self-evident. Only after Malevich began to “engineer” his forms did Suprematism seem to have implications for the human world, for it acquired architectural implications and became a playful lesson in making art. But this heralded the collapse of Suprematism’s deeper human purpose, the revelation of primordial consciousness, which Malevich eventually codified in the religious form—and cliché—of the cross.
5. Constructive Suprematism. Typical works are: Suprematist Painting, 1915 (48, 55), 1915–16 (57, 58), 1916 (60), and 1917 (61); and Supremus No. 50, 1915 (56). Constructive Suprematism establishes Suprematism as a full-blown artistic phenomenon, no longer fragile and perishable, but full of modern bravado about a new destiny for art. The import of this phase is in its turbulence, geometry and color becoming increasingly various and complicated, as if to imply the infinite possibilities of their interaction. In general, constructive Suprematism is a tour de force of artistic creation, reasserted as a phenomenon sui generis, and strictly physical rather than psychic in its effect.
However, one might argue that the informational bits—the facts of form—exist as suspended particles in “Brownian movement.” The field in this phase is more a continuum than an absence. Forms are suspended in it, tentatively moving in an overall pattern approximating a message. In a sense, constructive Suprematism creates an abstractly picturesque world from bits and pieces of forms. The continuum gives it life, and deemphasizes the primordial character of the forms by giving them momentum. A world of its own inhabited by intelligible forms, the constructive Suprematist picture foreshadows Malevich’s regressive and didactic attempt to conceive the abstract picture as a reconstructed natural world. It foreshadows the attempt to reduce abstraction to a novel source of dynamic effect, giving it a fixed role in art, and to establish a relationship between ordinary perception and transcendental consciousness by fiat.
6. Monumental Suprematism. Only a few works exemplify Suprematism’s climax: Suprematist Painting, 1917 (63), 1917–18 (64, 65), and after 1920 (70); and White Square on White, 1918 (66). Monumental Suprematism fulfills the promise of axiomatic Suprematism, creating an even more consummate simplicity. The reciprocity of form and field is definitively asserted: they are shown to be distinct but not separate, in effect rooted in one another. Fewer forms are used than in axiomatic Suprematism, and their color is neutralized in all but one of the works (65). Even it implies, by reason of the fact that one of the edges of its form is open, the bleeding or fading away of colorful form into the neutral field.
Form and field differentiate yet fuse, unify yet declare themselves antithetical to one another. By reason of its constituents, the monumental Suprematist picture becomes subtly and vibrantly self-contradictory, and thus freshly charged. Abstract form reduces to an essential minimum, as if to generate a maximum effect—as if, in compensation for its own superficiality, it must deepen consciousness. Despite its monumentality, the form loses in forcefulness because it blends into the field however much its outline makes it distinct. Analogously, consciousness of the picture becomes equivocal, for while one is aware of the iconic power of the singular form its integrity is undermined by the field, and loses clear meaning. Thus, the conflict between form and field begun in the first Suprematist phase is more intense than ever. The ontological import is more subtle, and the monumental Suprematist picture acquires the clarity and distinctness of an idea, as if to transcend its own facticity.
The negative nature of the field and the positive nature of the form are affirmed through one another, showing polarity—the ultimate source of plasticity—necessary to constitute a picture. This was less evident in axiomatic Suprematism, where form and field are exaggeratedly independent of one another, each challenging the other with its own autonomy. But in monumental Suprematism the abstract form seems a consequence of the self-differentiation or individuation of the field. The picture as a whole becomes a kind of transcendental illusion, or evokes what is called “Maya.” The feeling of nothingness symbolized by the field and the sensation of being symbolized by the minimal form exist simultaneously, the one spontaneously evoking the other, because neither can exist without the other. The ontological import of Suprematism acquires new depth, for it is created by a union of ultimate opposites. Malevich criticizes Cubism by giving it; although in a different form, the “philosophical freedom” Duchamp thought it needed. Through Suprematism as well as Dadaism art acquires the philosophical dimension without which it is nothing but a matter of style.
7. Depiction of the cross form. Examples are: Suprematist Painting, after 1920 (68, 69, 71–73); and Suprematist Cross Painting, 1920 (67). The Suprematist picture declines in significance when it unites the horizontal and vertical in a conventional cross form, restoring a naive frame of mind. The typical sense of tilting in the simple Suprematist picture reduces to cheap magic, becoming an ornamental backdrop (67, 72, 73) for the cross. When the cross itself tilts a naively picturesque effect results (68). This picturesqueness helps convey the cross’s Christian message, for by the use of the circle (72) or oval (73) to frame the cross it becomes conventionally orthodox (Celtic). Malevich’s cross works are a shortcut to a sense of eternality. They trivialize his intentions and dogmatize his philosophy, not to speak of his art.
The cross works lack Suprematist constructive power or impacted monumentality. They are a false climax, attempting to usurp the power of monumental Suprematism, from which they are a decline. They give an answer where other Suprematist works raise a question. In them Suprematism’s metaphysical ambitions collapse, and end in the old faith. Following the first three Suprematist phases they seem inexcusably reactionary, and antithetical to philosophical freedom, which is replaced by religious faith. Suprematism, which was a heroically inadequate art, has now become a trivially adequate art offering no subtle uncertainty to explore. The Suprematist cross appears less as an unexpected revelation, conveying miraculous meaning, than as the relic of an alien world. It is a regression to ordinary representation and conventional meaning, signifying that apprehension of content has again become riskless for content has again become obvious. Malevich’s consciousness becomes so completely one with the cross as to be not only its mirror but the grave it marks. The Suprematist cross is the sign of Malevich’s weariness with primordiality, and of a retreat from it into a conventional consciousness of ultimacy.
—Donald Kuspit
—————————
NOTES
The numbers in parenthesis are those used by Troels Anderson in his Malevich catalogue (Amsterdam, 1970) to chronologically order the works. An English translation of this catalogue accompanied the recent Malevich show at the Guggenheim Museum and is available there for $12.00.
1. Quoted by Andersen, p. 51.
2. Quoted by Andersen, p. 52.
3. Ibid.
4. James K. Feibleman, Inside the Great Mirror, The Hague, 1958, p. 61.
5. Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch, London, 1970, p. 84. Malevich repeatedly denies estheticist intention (see Andersen, pp. 51–52) but his disclaimers offer a dogmatic religious alternative. In general, he tries to avoid discussion of the concrete character of his work by attributing cosmic implications to it. Thus, he remarks: “Neither color nor form are elements with which it would be possible to reveal or give shape to various sensations, since each sensation is an element of the whole sum of the forces of the universe” (quoted in Andersen, p. 53). This 1930 statement retrospectively acknowledges the existence in Suprematism of the Cartesian paradox which will be discussed in this paper’s second part. However, it devalues the physical constituents of pictorial form in the name of inflated claims for its potential psychic effect.
6. Kasimir Malevich, “Suprematism,” Modern Artists on Art, ed. Robert L. Herbert, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1964, p. 96.
