Glorious Leader's Russian Avant-Garde Thread

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Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (Лазарь Маркович Лисицкий, November 23, 1890 – December 30, 1941), better known as El Lissitzky (Эль Лисицкий), was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer, and architect. He was one of the most important figures of the Russian avant garde, helping develop suprematism with his friend and mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designed numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the former Soviet Union. His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus, Constructivist, and De Stijl movements and experimented with production techniques and stylistic devices that would go on to dominate 20th century graphic design.

Lissitzky's entire career was laced with the belief that the artist could be an agent for change, later summarized with his edict, "das zielbewußte Schaffen" (The goal-oriented creation). A Jew, he began his career illustrating Yiddish children's books in an effort to promote Jewish culture in Russia, a country that was undergoing massive change at the time and had just repealed its anti-semitic laws. Starting at the age of 15, he began teaching; a duty he would stay with for the vast majority of his life. Over the years, he taught in a variety of positions, schools, and artistic mediums, spreading and exchanging ideas at a rapid pace. He took this ethic with him when he worked with Malevich in heading the suprematist art group UNOVIS, when he developed a variant suprematist series of his own, Proun, and further still in 1921, when he took up a job as the Russian cultural ambassador in Weimar Germany, working with and influencing important figures of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements during his stay. In his remaining years he brought significant innovation and change to the fields of typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and book design, producing critically respected works and winning international acclaim for his exhibition design. This continued until his deathbed, where in 1941 he produced one of his last known works — a Soviet propaganda poster rallying the people to construct more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany.

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I actually have a poster of "Beat the Whites with the Red wedge".

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With their intersecting planes and precise, sober, crystalline space, organized around the "dynamic" diagonal rather than the "passive" horizontal and the "authoritarian" vertical, they were meant to be "way-stations" between painting, sculpture, and architecture.

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Aleksandr Mikhailovich Rodchenko (Russian: Александр Михайлович Родченко, November 23 (Old Style) December 5 (New Style), 1891 in St. Petersburg, Russia – December 3, 1956 in Moscow, Russia). Russian artist, sculptor, photographer. One of the founders of constructivism and Russian design. Rodchenko was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova.

Rodchenko was one of the most versatile Constructivist and Productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles - usually high above or below - to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: "One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again."

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About the mysterious poster, it's an ad for some books. It says something like "Lengiz books on all spheres of knowledge"

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Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin (Владимир Евграфович Татлин) (December 28 1885 – May 31, 1953) worked as a painter and architect. With Kazimir Malevich he became one of the two most important figures in the Russian avant-garde art movement of the 1920s.

Tatlin achieved fame as the architect who designed the huge Monument to the Third International, also known as Tatlin's Tower. Planned in 1920, the monument, was to be a tall tower in iron, glass and steel which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower in Paris (it was a third taller at 1,300 feet high). Inside the iron-and-steel structure of twin spirals, the design envisaged three building blocks, covered with glass windows, which would rotate at different speeds (the first one, a cube, once a year; the second one, a pyramid, once a month; the third one, a cylinder, once a day). High costs prevented Tatlin from executing the plan.

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It was supposed to be built in Petrograd after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 as the headquarters and monument of the Communist International.

Tatlin's Constructivist tower was to be built from industrial materials: iron, glass and steel. It would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Its main form was a twin helix which spiraled up to 400 meters high. The design envisaged three building blocks, covered with glass windows, which would rotate at different speeds. The first one, a cube, once a year; the second one, a pyramid, once a month; the third one, a cylinder, once a day. The tower was supposed to hold the halls and offices of the Comintern, and also house a telegraph office and several restaurants. Visitors would be moved around mechanically, passing flashing messages on a giant screen showing the latest world news. In its overhead, projections onto clouds would relay messages to the city.

Although there were plans to build Tatlin’s Tower, the monument was never constructed. The Civil War came between and high costs and lack of time and material prevented Tatlin from executing the plan.

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Liubov Sergeyevna Popova (Любовь Сергеевна Попова) (1889-1924) was one of the most talented, prolific, and influential women artists of the Russian avant-garde. She was born in the village of Ivanovskoe in Moscow province, in a family of a wealthy and cultured merchant. After attending the private high schools of Yaltinskaia and Arsen'eva, she began to take art lessons with Zhukovskii and Yuon in Moscow. In 1910, Popova went to Italy and became acquainted with the works of Giotto and Pintoriccio. The rest of that year and in 1911, the artist traveled to St. Petersburg, Rostov, Yaroslavl, Suzdal, Pereslavl, and Kiev and discovered the work of Vrubel and icon painting. In 1912, she set up a studio in Moscow with N. Udal'tsova, her friend from Arsen'eva's school, and both women worked in Tatlin's studio The Tower, where Popova met her life-long friend Vesnin. The same year she traveled to Paris and studied Cubism with Le Fauconnier and Metzinger. After returning to Moscow in 1913, she became interested in Futurism. A year later, just before the war, she went to France and Italy again. In 1915, she developed her own variant of non-objective art based on a dynamic combination of principles of icon painting (flatness, linearity) and avant-garde ideas.

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Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (Казимир Северинович Малевич, Polish Malewicz, Ukrainian transliteration Malevych, German Kasimir Malewitsch), (February 23, 1878 – May 15, 1935) was a painter and art theoretician, pioneer of geometric abstract art and one of the most important members of the Russian avant-garde.

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NEW YORK -- In Moscow around the time of the Russian Revolution, Kazimir Malevich made some of the most gorgeous and important paintings ever. He managed to pare European art to the bare minimum of what it takes to make a picture: a black square on a white ground, a red square on white, eventually even a white cross on white. These abstract paintings, some of the first ones ever made, are overwhelmingly potent studies in pure form. They achieve a radical, electrifying balance among shape, color and composition that's rarely been matched, and never surpassed.

But Malevich would have considered such praise faint, and damning. He thought his art should do more than just change how art looks, and how we look at art. It had to change the fabric of the world. His language is as overheated, and about as impenetrable, as the talk of some street-corner prophet: "The new existence has entered the fifth dimension. . . . All will obtain existence only when they travel along this path of perfection; it always was, is and will be; but it must be revealed, seen and also be seen as moving toward that great perfection -- victory over time. . . . I have seen the concordance of millions of elements that form the instruments of infinite overcoming."

He called his radical new abstraction Suprematism, thus asserting its right to reign supreme over the less ambitious stuff his rivals were so proud of. As one of his followers put it, "Suprematism is to all previously existing painting as philosophy is to journalism."

"Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism," a touring show now at the Guggenheim Museum, gives us a closer look than ever before at this crucial epoch in the artist's career -- and may help explain away the gulf between his rigorous works and his vaporous words.

The exhibition's 85 paintings, sculptures and drawings, several newly rediscovered and others never before seen outside Russia, give us unprecedented access to one of the most astonishing moments in the history of Western art. Despite being tucked away in a remote corner of the museum, it is one of the crucial shows of recent years.

Malevich was born near Kiev in 1878, and trained in that city and in Moscow in all the newer European styles of the day. This exhibition picks him up about midway through his career, when he was doing good figurative work that hints at later abstract greatness, but only just. (He died of cancer in 1935, a few years after having turned back to figurative painting.)

Drawings done in 1913 for the stage designs of an avant-gardist play have moments where they rely on simple forms played off of other simple forms -- and other moments where they're full of images of socks and bombs and shining suns.

Then, sometime in 1915, lightning strikes. Malevich paints "Black Square," which is precisely what its title says it is: a square of black oil paint, now badly cracked, that fills the middle of a 30-inch canvas, leaving only a four-inch band or so of empty white around its edges. (This is the original's first trip outside Russia.)

Just taken on its own, this is a powerful canvas, a kind of distillation of the classic problem of the relationship between a figure and its ground -- between a painted portrait head, say, and the curtains behind it -- and an attempt to resolve that problem with a maximum economy of means. (Notions of radical economy, of cutting things away until only essences are left, are central in the more lucid moments in Malevich's writings.) Can a picture keep its charge once it has become pure composition, and has lost the subject matter that used to be the thing artists composed? Growing numbers of viewers have answered that it can, from the few close colleagues whom Malevich first convinced to the many fans he has today. And no one can deny the daring of the question, especially when it was first asked.

In the context of every bit of art that had ever come before it, even right before it, this picture is truly revolutionary.

The history of Western art after the Renaissance had produced pictures that mostly ranged from the overwhelmingly ornate to the substantially eventful. The world's a complicated place, and except for a very few seascapes and sky paintings, the pictures that represented it were likely to be complicated, too.

Then comes Malevich.

Even after modern art had left old-fashioned realism behind, the habit of filling up the picture plane with lots of stuff was hard to shake. Think of the tangled forms of Picasso's cubism or the flood of line and color in Matisse and other fauves.

Then comes Malevich.

Suddenly, the fundamental structures that had governed Western art for centuries -- structures based in how our complex world is put together -- get tossed out with the trash. Suddenly, a painting could be no more than a black circle floating off-center in a void of white; "Try it," says a painting by Malevich, "you'll like it." Or it could be a black plus sign or a simple rectangle that barely registers as a ground-filling "figure" at all. Or a checkerboard of two black squares alongside two in white that absolutely refuses to say what's figure and what's ground. Part of the charge we get from looking at this work comes from knowing what a risk it represented. Like watching a diver leap from a high cliff, it's not only about the beauty of the dive itself, but the fact that the jump took place at all.

But sometimes it seems as though Malevich's ideas about his art couldn't quite keep up with the daring of what he'd actually turned out. The picture now accurately called "Red Square" was also once subtitled "Pictorial Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions." But it's hard to imagine this picture as abstracting from some scene in reality, as that subtitle suggests -- the subtitle supposes ties to the world that the painting had in fact already broken.

And the way Malevich paints can seem old-fashioned, too. There's still something very handmade about his art, with painterly grounds covered in brushed-on shapes. It's as though he were using all the old techniques of portraiture to capture a new world of pure forms; as though he weren't painting squares, so much as portraits of squares. (This technique actually gives his pictures special charm, tying them to the old masters even as he breaks with them for good.)

That brings us to the problem of his obscure words and thoughts, which are also tied down to old ways of thinking about art. For the first time in history, the paintings of Malevich managed to break with the old idea that pictures had to show their viewers things. The words of Malevich, however, never really dared to follow where his pictures led.

Pictures had always been talked about in terms of the stuff they showed, and Malevich the writer simply could not escape from that tradition. Faced with the task of deciding what a black square could be a picture of -- forced, that is, to find a subject in it that can be talked about -- he pulls out lots of esoteric gibberish about timeless forces and mystic ideals. Since it clearly doesn't show something down here on this Earth, he seems to say, it must show something weird up in the heavens. Most writers have said that Malevich used his abstract canvases to try to represent the states of nonrational higher consciousness that mystical philosophies like his were keen on. But I think things worked the other way around: He used incoherent talk of mystic higher consciousness to try to represent in words the new things he was finding in his art, but not quite understanding.

But maybe all of Malevich's blather can be thought of as no more than a kind of metaphor for what happens in his art, rather than as a cogent set of arguments about it. His empty words in fact mirror the profound wordlessness of his abstract art; they collapse under their own weight into silence, which is where his purely visual objects live most comfortably.

And the radical illogic of his writings, though useless on its own, stands for the radical departure of his art from everything that came before it. "Malevich painted a black square," said El Lissitzky, Malevich's follower, close colleague and eventual rival. "The artist dared to risk destruction."

The writings of Malevich are an inchoate yell of shock, screamed by an artist who can't believe the strange and dangerous things he sees coming from his brush.

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repression of the arts? no