Scandalous painting by Anna Leporskaya was shown at the exhibition at the Tolerance Center

Moscow opened its eyes to the avant-garde

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened the exhibition “The World as Non-objectivity. The Birth of a New Art”, which was presented a year ago at the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg. The one where the paradoxical act of vandalism took place: the museum guard painted eyes on the figures of Anna Leporskaya’s painting. Later it turned out that Alexander Vasiliev, a veteran of the Chechen war, was mentally ill. The court appointed him 180 hours of compulsory work. The painting from the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery has been restored, and now the Moscow public can see it in its original form, but under glass. What else, in addition to anti-vandal measures, distinguishes the sensational exhibition, MK estimated.

In the Yeltsin Center, the exhibition, whose title bears the title of one of Kazimir Malevich’s key philosophical treatises, The World as Non-objectivity, was built on the principle of movement. The viewer could trace how Suprematism began, how Malevich gathered hundreds of followers around him, how, after a dizzying success, a decline occurred. In Yekaterinburg, the project occupied two floors: the first one told about the rise of the art movement, and the second one told about its decline. “The funeral of Malevich became the funeral of the avant-garde,” curator Andrey Sarabyanov told MK at the opening of that project. In Moscow, the exhibition turned out to be different, although the composition of the works almost did not change, and the concept, where quotes from the diaries of Malevich’s student Lev Yudin, became the red line of the story, was preserved. In the Jewish Museum, the viewer does not move through the history of the avant-garde, but rather soars in the Universe of non-objectivity, finding itself in one chapter, then another, and then returns again to the beginning.

And it all starts with Vitebsk, where Malevich was invited to teach by Marc Chagall, who eventually lost his students due to the charisma of the Suprematist and was forced to leave for Paris (which eventually brought Chagall worldwide fame and a long life). Then there was Petrograd, where Suprematism unfolded on a grand scale, despite the collapse of UNOVIS (the association “Affirmative of the New Art”). Ginhuk (State Institute of Artistic Culture) arose here, in which they not only created, but studied non-objectivity at the laboratory, scientific level. The rating of Malevich and his ideas grew by leaps and bounds. He was even given a special certificate for free travel on the tram. This curious detail is emphasized exposition: the “ksiva” is placed on a conditional tram with screens-windows, where historical shots are broadcast, and visual quotations of Suprematist works. This emphasis is due, of course, not only to the certificate. Avant-gardists decorated buildings and public transport, that is, they took to the streets. Suprematism became mass and popular. However, not for long.

Post-Suprematism – the final section of the exhibition – tells about the decline of the movement in the 1930s and shows the works of Malevich’s like-minded people of that time. Here we find the painting by Anna Leporskaya “Three Figures”, which received scandalous fame thanks to the security guard of the Yeltsin Center. The work is now exhibited under anti-reflective glass. If you look closely at Three Figures, you can see pencil eyes, which, according to Andrey Sarabyanov, Leporskaya apparently drew “just in case” to avoid accusations of formalism (they say, this is an unfinished thing).

By the way, it was Anna Leporskaya, the wife of one of Malevich’s closest friends and followers, Nikolai Suetin, who preserved the archive of the author of Black Square. However, not only thanks to her, the Russian avant-garde resurrected decades later. If not for the artist Vera Ermolaeva, who saw to it that the works of the Suprematists were transported from Vitebsk to Petrograd, the paintings would certainly have been destroyed during the Second World War.

In general, this project is about the fact that Suprematism is many-sided and multifaceted. The Russian avant-garde is not only Malevich, it is a whole galaxy of artists, each of whom has his own difficult fate and each of whom has contributed to the art movement. We see portraits of the main characters on one of the walls. If you press the red button under the portrait gallery, applause will be heard. Thus, each viewer can leave his “thank you” (and one will be taken into account on a special scoreboard) to the heroes of the Russian avant-garde. Among them is Lev Yudin, who opens at the exhibition as a chronicler of the Russian avant-garde (his detailed diaries are no thinner than Tolstoy’s War and Peace); and Anna Leporskaya, who became a well-known ceramic artist after Malevich’s death, her services and vases were known throughout the country and Suprematism continued in them. Largely thanks to the followers of Malevich’s ideas in the 1960s-1980s, they again captured the minds and hearts.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 28894 dated October 20, 2022

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Moscow opened its eyes to the avant-garde