Artists-composers – Newspaper Kommersant No. 39 (7484) dated 03/07/2023

The Mikhailovsky (Engineering) Castle, one of the palaces of the State Russian Museum (RM), opened the exhibition “Nikolai Suetin. Ilya Chashnik. Two of the closest and most consistent students of Kazimir Malevich are represented by works mainly originating from the famous Leporskaya Archive, which was finally transferred to the museum in 2017. About the third and last exhibition, built on materials from this collection, tells Kira Dolinina.

The Leporskaya Archive is a legend in the history of the Russian avant-garde. Before the long process of gradual transfer to the State Russian Museum of materials saved by Malevich’s student and Suetin’s lover Anna Leporskaya (1900-1982) ended in 2017, the hottest heads assumed the presence of sensations in it. There were no sensations, they had long been removed from this collection by various collectors, but there were enough for three very entertaining exhibitions of works and documents. First, they reported by Malevich himself – the exhibition “Unexpected Malevich” (summer 2018) presented 117 drawings by the artist. The second exposition in the series was the exhibition of Anna Leporskaya herself, who, upon entering the GINKhUK as a student, Malevich diagnosed with a severe diagnosis of “vangogovism, cezannism” and began to consistently fight against it. True, in the early 1930s, the Soviet government helped him in this struggle, banning everything except socialist realism, “-isms”; Leporskaya will spend the rest of her life as an artist at the Leningrad Porcelain Factory.

The third, current exhibition brings together two artists of the same circle: the most faithful, most consistent and most reflective of Malevich’s students. The materials of Nikolai Suetin (1897-1954) remained with Leporskaya after his death, then passed to Suetin’s daughter Nina and, according to her will, were transferred to the Russian Museum. Things and documents of Ilya Chashnik (1902-1929) were preserved in this house for a seemingly purely personal reason: the children of the artists got married. However, a big idea, if not a mission, was invested in this collection itself: Suetin and Leporskaya tried to save everything that could still be saved after Malevich’s arrest in 1930, when many students and friends preferred to burn things that had become dangerous. The latest receipts date back to months after Malevich’s death in 1935, when, under the threat of deprivation of office housing, the artist’s family distributed their then useless inheritance to anyone: it was to the Russian Museum that a magnificent collection of Malevich’s paintings was transferred, but those who wanted to draw, except for the most faithful students, not found.

Two artists, two students of one master, one teaching (Suprematism). The eldest is from a respectable noble family, with a cadet corps behind him, the youngest is from the Jewish town of Lutsin, was an apprentice with a craftsman, but at the age of 15 he got to Yudel Pen himself, from whom the whole color of Vitebsk modernism studied. In the same Vitebsk, their paths converge (Lissitzky’s workshop, Malevich’s class, UNOVIS), since 1922, next to Malevich and in the Museum of Artistic Culture, and in GINKhUK, positions in the Decorative Institute, work on the decor of wallpapers and fabrics in the Committee of the Art Industry of the State Institute of Fine Arts , service at the State Porcelain Factory “as an artist-composer for the study and development of artistic samples of compositional forms”: for Chashnik for only a year, for Suetin with career growth right up to the position of chief artist of the factory – until the end of his life.

There is a striking similarity where the Suprematist theory is primary, and the difference is in how colors, lines, shadows harden or soften where the artist defeats the theoretician. There is no doubt about the loyalty of the teacher – both live according to the precepts of the Vitebsk period of UNOVIS: “Wear the black square as a sign of world economy. Draw a red square in your workshops as a sign of the world art revolution. However, even with such strict discipline, both artists manage to quite clearly pronounce their “I”. Chashnik obviously gravitates towards architecture and volumetric constructions, Suetin is not shy about admiring the beauty of the same seemingly figures and volumes, he is much bolder and brighter in working with color, he is more decorative, which in the end will make him an unsurpassed master of Suprematist porcelain.

Chashnik will be “lucky” to die at the age of 26, he will not see the death and desecration of the teacher, in his coffin the black square will be a banner, while decorating the coffin and the monument to Malevich Suetin will be doomed to many years of forced oblivion of the same symbols. Suetin will live up to obligatory figurativeness, he will try to fit “faces” into Suprematist ovals, it will not turn out very well, but the decorative solution of the exhibition “Heroic Defense of Leningrad” even in the besieged city of 1943 will turn out to be extremely strong. The museum built on this basis will be destroyed almost like a living participant in the “Leningrad cause”. Suetin will save the Porcelain Factory, where he had to figure out a three-meter vase “I. Stalin” on the 70th anniversary of the tyrant, and a mourning porcelain wreath, a trip with which to Stalin’s funeral in March 1953 would end in illness and then death of the artist.

Suetin preserved for history the last words of Chashnik, who was dying of peritonitis: “Tell Malevich that I died as an artist of the new art.” He himself was wary of loud words. His last deeds, not words, were to preserve the archive as the bearer of the main thing in his life, that very “new art” that he and Chashnik once believed in and which, in fact, they never renounced.