I really got impressed by Russian art at the "Great Utopia" art exhibition in 1990 in the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam which has paintings of Malevich and El Lissitzki. I was fascinated by Suprematism, because it was the first Geomaterical abstract painting, constructivist work, invented by Kazimir Malevich.
His famous "Black Square on White" had a great influence of my vision of Modern art and conept of abstact paintings. Toghether with "De Stijl" of Tho van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck and Mondriaan.
I think that these Duch painters were influenced by Malevich (in that time) radical paintings and esthetic theory. I also liked the revolutionary sculputers of Tatlin and the paintings of Il'ia Chashnik.
Wassily Kandinsky was another one who had a differant approach as his constructivist fellow artist.
Like his fellow Russian
El Lissitzky he became a teacher at the German Bauhaus school in Weimar. In his abstract paintings he tried to express the sound of music in colours. In his painting he wanted to create the same emotional power as a musical composition.
Like in later contemporary art these early twentiers tried to cross borders between disciplines.
I regard these Russian artists as much important for the development of Western Modern art as Kubism, Surealism and the American abstract "action painting"
or "Abstract expressionism". The conceptual and esthetic power of these abstact works were of great importance to me in my early development in the ninetees. In their naive belief in the bright future of Communist ideology and revolutionary changes in the Russian society, they were like the Italian Futurists, who saw in Italian Fascism a power of modern dynanism,
mechanism and speed.
Architecture, design, graphical art/typography, color theory and vision were combined in the differant forms of Russian constructivist art, from Malevich Suprematism to Lissitzky's PROUN. Some nice paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures came out of that. In many museums their work is preserved for the future. I saw their work in Amsterdam and the J.P, Getty center in LA. From a Russian friend from Amsterdam I received the book "The poet's visible voice" of Mikhail Guerman, Mayakovsky's verses published in two small books. Lazar (El) Lissitzky designed or rather constructed these books. Although I can't read Russian it is a typographic artwork, and great to have.
Lissitzky was trained in Darmstadt in Germany, at the department of Architecture of the famous high technical school of Darmstadt, a major centre where the foundations of the industrial aesthetics of early Constructivism were laid at the time. But Lissitzky did not became a fanatic of the doctrines incalculated there. Perceiving the book as a qualitively new object characteristic of a qualitatively new reality, Lissitzky discovered for it not merely a new form but also a basically new structure. He visualized the book of the future in the environment he himself and his fellow artists were creating, amidst new unconventional buildings, furniture and, of course, in the hands of new people. His artistic gift happily combined with his excellent knowledge of the technical possibilities inherent in civil enginering, polygraphy and photography. He was not afraid of machines as some 20th-century artists did. On the contrary, he intently examined his epoch, trying to catch in it glimpses of the future.
Pieter
