Because I was alone this christmas, except from sunday dinner, I had time to relax and go to some of the artbooks I have, and I looked into two books about Russian art in the 20th century.
When I looked in the book Sovjet Art 1920s-1930 I was
attracted to the work of Zinaida Serebriakova, a selfportait of herself in 1922 (oil on canvas. 27 1/8 x
22" (69x56 cm). Wonderful, gentile face.
A Amsterdam friend of mine and his wife who went to
Moscow and St.Petersburg said that they were suprised about the beauty of Russian girls and women.
Maybe Slavian women in general are pretty, because I found the Chech and Polish women very beautiful and elegant as well. Zinaida shows a vulnerable but open woman in a room. It is a simple room with a woman in ordinairy clothes, but in her face, her skin, the form of her face, her nek chin, mouth, nose eyes, eyebrows and hair you can see that she must have been a very
attractive lady and good painter.
In another painting she painted children playing with cards, in "House of Cards, 1919", Oil on canvas (65X75,5 cm), a good observation of five Russian boys playing. Important for me is that art is identifiable, that you can put your own refelction in a piece of art, that is an expressionist feeling, I know.
That woman in that room is real to me and in that boys I can identify, when I see myself playing as a boy in my childhood. With non-ralistic art, abstract, assemblage, collage, sculpture (3D) or audio-visual art I can relate, because it communicates with your imagination, the world of ideas, with the inventor in yourself.
This I can find in the designs, concepts, architectural drawings, paintings and mechanical sculptures of El Lissitzky (1890-1941) , Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) and Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953).
I like the artists above her, because although they had to work under the Sovjet-regime, their work rose out above the dull "Social-realism" policy, in which stile a lot of boring "sentimental" and "heroic" workers, workersfamilies and farmers of collective farms were painted. Even Malevich realistic work of the thirtees has some independant quality, likw Portrait of Natalia Malevich, the artists wife in 1933.
Mondriaan first painted in a realistic stile and later became abstract. Malevich carreer went the other way around. He first became known with abstract work and later was forced to paint realistic by the Stalinist art policy.
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 concept of abstact paintings. Malevich, Kasimir (1878-1935). Russian painter and designer, with Mondrian the most important pioneer of geometric abstract art.
Born near Kiev; Malevich trained at Kiev School of Art and Moscow Academy of Fine Arts; 1913 began creating abstract geometric patterns in style he called suprematism; taught painting in Moscow and Leningrad 1919-21; published book, The Nonobjective World (1926), on his theory; first to exhibit abstract geometric paintings; strove to produce pure, cerebral compositions; famous painting White on White (1918) carries suprematist theories to absolute conclusion; Soviet politics turned against modern art, and he died in poverty and oblivion.
Before "De Stijl" of Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck and Mondriaan, Malevich started making Geometrical abstract art for the first time.
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
Sources:
www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/malevich/ - 7k -
Soviet art 1920s-1930s, Russian Museum, Leningrad
(introduction of the book by Mikhail Guerman)
and,
The poets' visible voice, Mikhail Guerman.
