In the circles of squares – Newspaper Kommersant No. 201 (7402) dated 10/28/2022

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened the exhibition “The World as Non-Objectiveness. The birth of a new art: Kazimir Malevich, Pavel Filonov, Marc Chagall, Anna Leporskaya and others. It refers to the period in the history of the Russian avant-garde, when Malevich and his associates in “Suprematism” in the early 1920s moved from theory to practice, declaring themselves “affirmers of the new art.” Things went briskly, but not for long: already by the beginning of the 1930s, abstractions were replaced by figures with erased faces – the ghosts of the avant-garde, holding the defense against the onslaught of socialist realism. Tells Igor Grebelnikov.

Although the exhibition has the same title as Malevich’s treatise – “The World as Non-Objectivity”, and his name is at the top of the list of artists, its poster is decorated with Anna Leporskaya’s painting “Three Figures” (1932-1934). The canvas became a meme: in December last year, a security guard at the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg, where this exhibition was held, jokingly added eyes to oval heads. For vandalism, he received 180 hours of corrective labor, the painting was restored, now it is exhibited under glass, and the general public learned the name of Leporskaya, a student of Kazimir Malevich.

However, this picture is already worthy of a poster, as well as the work of Malevich’s associates, who remained in the shadow of the glory of the author of Black Square, – more attention. Especially now, when the world’s museums are reconsidering their attitude to “general lines” in art, abandoning strict hierarchies.

The starting point of the exhibition project (curated by Andrey Sarabyanov and Natalya Murray) was the publication in 2017 of the diaries and letters of the artist Lev Yudin (1903–1941), a devoted student of Malevich: together with extensive scientific commentaries, they made up a 902-page volume. He describes in detail how in the Vitebsk Folk Art School, where Malevich taught since the spring of 1920, uniting students and teachers in UNOVIS (a group of “Affirmatives of the New Art”), they taught the “Suprematist” vision of life and art, talks about the torments of his own creativity, reflects on the work of other artists.

Quotations from this book commented on both entire sections of the exhibition and individual works. The verbal “firmware” sets the exposition with an excited intonation. The quivering passages of a man who “wants to be at least the smallest star in the sky, than an important astrologer on a tower … to hobble along in his own small way than to follow the paths of the great ones” (this is how Yudin writes about himself) are a sharp contrast to the strict tone of Malevich’s treatise “The World as pointlessness” (these instructions, in fact, were the basis of the educational process).

This treatise was not only about art – with the advent of the “Black Square” in 1915, the paintings were supposed to represent attraction, repulsion, the imposition of geometric shapes and lines, but also about a radically new vision of the world, the energies of which do not allow real objects to open up and established concepts. “The whole Universe moves in a whirlwind of objectless excitement. A person also moves with his entire objective world into the eternity of the non-objective, and all his objects are essentially non-objective, since they do not reach the final goal, ”conjured Malevich. UNOVIS was considered almost a sect: in the treatise, the degree of anarchism and esotericism goes off scale. And the gap between theory and real life was obvious, especially in the conditions of “war communism”. This gap seems to be the leitmotif of the exhibition.

Its chronology approximately coincides with the years of Yudin’s life, who in 1941 went to the front as a volunteer and died in the very first battle near Leningrad. It begins with the idyll of old Vitebsk: self-portraits in the Renaissance style by Yehudi Pan, who opened a private school of drawing and painting at the end of the 19th century. Nearby are paintings by his student Marc Chagall – the quiet joys of a place where everyday life easily turns into a miracle. With the advent of Malevich, he left the art school, where he taught painting: he left first for Moscow, and then for Paris.

But it is also impressive how fast the supporters of UNOVIS comprehend the techniques of Cezanne, cubism, and then non-objective art, especially since this is happening not in the capital, but in a provincial town (UNOVIS branches also appeared in Orenburg, Samara, Smolensk). The works of Malevich and his most gifted students, Nikolai Suetin and Ilya Chashnik, side by side in the halls of the museum with little-known names: Clara Rozengolts, David Yakerson, the same Lev Yudin.

After the closure of UNOVIS in 1922, Malevich and his followers moved from Vitebsk to Petrograd. There he again rallied the students at the State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINHUK). The section of the exhibition devoted to GINKhUK, which existed until 1926 – Filonov, Matyushin, Tatlin, Mansurov also taught there, is a triumph of the new art. The non-objective world is here in all its variety of forms, sometimes much more exciting than the geometric abstractions of Malevich. Here are Matyushin’s experiments with color and organic forms, including ready-mades in the form of tree roots, and Filonov’s paintings, endlessly crushed, like atoms or crystals. And finally, the paradoxical emergence of non-objective art into everyday life: the Suprematist compositions of Chashnik and Suetin, decorating tea pairs and plates, seem to refute the main theses of “The World as Non-Objectivity”.

After the closing of GINHUK, Malevich’s exhibitions were held in Warsaw and Berlin, his fundamental treatise was published in German at the Bauhaus, but other winds were already blowing in his homeland. Yudin’s diary entries of this period are increasingly doubtful and hesitant, he is increasingly attracted to the “real, tangible, infinitely individual and unique world.” These sentiments are shared by other associates of Malevich, and for his personal exhibition in 1928 he writes the so-called second peasant series, transposing his earliest works in a new way. The figures of peasants with ovals instead of faces become something of a new canon for artists of his circle. In different ways, but consistent in the main thing – the blurring of faces, such paintings began to be painted by Leporskaya and Ermolaeva, Konstantin Rozhdestvensky and Pavel Basmanov. The gallery of these impersonal figures, as if returning from a dizzying journey through the non-objective world into the real world, where there are fields, greenery, huts, rakes, beaches, bright tints of color, is the end of a utopia, as if foreshadowing that someday everything will start all over again.