Kazimir Malevich at Tate Modern

Malevich at Tate Modern is a major and chronologically-organised retrospective of one of the most influential painters of the last century, Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935). It is a moot point whether being born in Kiev to Polish parents makes him a Russian or a Polish artist or even a Ukrainian one, but his major achievements as a pioneer of Modernism were realised in Moscow and St Petersburg (Petrograd). It was in the capital when in his twenties he was introduced to French modern art and his Self-Portrait, 1908-1910 (left) shows the influence of artists like Gaugin and Matisse.

In 1909 Marinetti had published the Futurist Manifesto and the Russian avant garde response attempted to blend Futurism with traditional Russian rural themes, for example Morning in the Village After a Snowstorm (below left) and The Woodcutter (below right) both 1912:

By 1914 Malevich had adopted Cubo-Futurism showing the additional influence of Cubism in works like An Englishman in Moscow (below):

He then moved on to more abstract forms, with the first version of the famous Black Square being painted in 1915. A 1923 version is on show, the original being too fragile to go on loan. Malevich has partially recreated the Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10 (Zero-Ten) which was held in Petrograd in 1916 (below top). Some of the works are lost but nine out of the twelve known to survive are on show (below lower).

This exhibition marked the launch of Suprematism which Malevich saw as art with forms having no link to nature but being an exercise in colour and geometry, like Suprematist Painting(with Black trapezium and Red Square), 1915 below and Supremus No.55, 1916 (detail in the poster above).

He would take this to the extreme of painting in white with very simple shapes and then turned to experimenting with architectural models and lecturing. However, Malevich’s career was disrupted by events leading up to the Russian revolution in 1917 and the following civil war. In the early years of the Soviet regime, Suprematism and its associated architectural movement Constructivism were accepted, but with Stalin came disfavour and a preference for Social Realism.

In the late 1920s Malevich returned to painting in a style more acceptable to the authorities. Could Head of a Peasant, 1928-29 been an influence on Abram Games’ Festival of Britain poster in 1951, (below left and right)?
 

In the years before his death he produced figurative portraiture as in his Renaissance-style Self-Portrait of

1933 (right). After 1935 his work was kept from public view until the 1950s. As late as 1971, when the British Council put on the exhibition Art in Revolution: Soviet art and design since 1917 at the Hayward Gallery, the Soviet Ministry of Culture, a major source of the exhibits, demanded and achieved the removal of all works by Malevich.  Black Square would not be seen until the 1980s.

Malevich continues until 26 October. The high standard of the catalogue matches that of the exhibition. 

The exhibition was at the Stedilijk Museum, Amsterdam, October 2013 to February 2014 and at the Bundeskunsthalle (Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany), Bonn, March to June 2014.

Paul Klee at Tate Modern

A post here last year about the Bauhaus exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery mentioned three painters who had spent time in Weimar and Dessau: Paul Citroën, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Searching on Google, I can find no evidence of a recent retrospective of Citroën’s non-photographic work but Kandinsky is widely exhibited (eg currently at the Guggenheim in New York), and Klee almost as much (eg earlier this year in Rome). Nonetheless, a full retrospective is always worth seeing for any artist and The EY Exhibition: Paul Klee – Making Visible at Tate Modern is the first large-scale showing for Klee in London for over 10 years.

Klee was born in Bern in 1879 and moved to Munich to study painting when he was 19. He began to establish himself as an artist in his early thirties and the Tate exhibition shows 128 examples of his work from 1912 until his death in 1940. Klee produced and carefully catalogued about 10,000 paintings, drawings and other works. In 1911 Klee met Jawlensky, Marc, Kandinsky and others and joined the Blaue Reiter group (Landscape with Flags 1915, left). In 1914 he travelled to Tunisia and its colour, light and landscape would influence his subsequent work. From 1916 to 1918 Klee served with the German air force. His 1920 Aerial Combat (below left) is in sardonic contrast to Nevinson’s Futurist Spiral Descent 1915, seen recently at Dulwich, while his experience of the chaos of postwar Germany reflected in Memorial to the Kaiser (also 1920, below right) shares the viewpoint of his contemporaries like Grosz. Both these works were produced by the oil-transfer method, tracing over painted paper then transferring onto a blank sheet.

Klee joined the staff of the Bauhaus in 1921 at Weimar, moving in 1926 to Dessau. In 1922 in Berlin he encountered Russian constructivism in the form of works by Malevich, Tatlin and others. Klee’s work in his Bauhaus years involved colour investigation in both constructions and imaginative surreal pieces (Pictorial Architecture Red, Yellow, Blue 1923 and Around the Fish 1926, below left and right). In 1930 his work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and that year he left the Bauhaus to teach in Dusseldorf. In 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and within a few months the Bauhaus closed. Klee and his family left for Switzerland in December. In poor health after 1935, he died in 1940, the same year as his father.

Brian Sewell in the London Evening Standard liked the Tate’s catalogue but had reservations about both the exhibition and the artist, as did Andrew Lambirth in the Spectator, although of a different kind. Klee described himself as possessed by colour and since reproductions fail to do justice to the subtlety with which he used it, the opportunity to visit The EY Exhibition: Paul Klee – Making Visible and view source works is worth taking. The exhibition continues until 9 March 2014.

Constructivists at the RA

Back in June I posted about the 2011 Tate St Ives Summer Exhibition which had included works by Naum Gabo. Gabo and his wife moved to Cornwall from Hampstead at the outbreak of war in 1939, but Gabo had been born a Russian in 1890. He studied in Germany, returning home after the Revolution in 1917. Avant-garde art, in particular the Suprematist movement led by Malevich, had already appeared in Russia. After the Revolution the associated Constructivist movement in art and architecture, which Gabo joined, embraced the Communist cause. It did so by drawing on the non-bourgeois abstract language of Suprematism and by adopting new materials and three-dimensionality.

The Royal Academy exhibition, Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935, examines the Russian avant-garde architecture which its designers intended to reflect the energy and optimism of the new Soviet Socialist state. As well as some Suprematist pictures, the exhibition shows black and white photographs and drawings of the buildings when newly-constructed alongside excellent large-scale colour photographs taken by Richard Pare, mostly in the 1990s. I thought the Melnikov House and the Gosplan Garage to be particularly striking. The difficulties of long-term maintenance of these and later Modernist buildings, given the nature of their steel and concrete construction and the large flat rendered surfaces, were apparent in many of Pare’s photographs (see an English Heritage Conservation Bulletin article about the restoration of the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill). The Chekist Housing (left), perhaps not surprisingly, seemed to be one of the few exceptions in terms of its condition.

Of all the many striking images available, the one chosen by the RA for publicity is a vertical view through a piece of engineering as much as architecture, Vladimir Shukhov’s Shabolovka Radio Tower, innovatively formed by steel-lattice hyperboloids (left). This was planned to be taller than the Eiffel Tower but was never fully implemented due to steel shortages. Never realised at all was Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, (known as ‘Tatlin’s Tower’). It was intended to be constructed as the headquarters of the Comintern in St Petersburg (Petrograd, then Leningrad, at the time) with a height of 400 metres. The courtyard of the RA is currently exhibiting a 1:40 scale model built by Dixon Jones Architects, probably the first to be seen in London for decades. In 1971, a similar model appeared on the balcony outside the Hayward Gallery during the British Council’s tribulated exhibition, Art in Revolution: Soviet art and design since 1917. The Soviet Ministry of Culture, a major source of the exhibits, demanded and achieved the removal of all works by Malevich, and insisted that a reconstruction of El Lissitzky’s Proun Room be blocked off.

Tatlin's Tower; USSR 1920, London 1971 and 2011

In 1934 the Lawn Road Flats (known as the Isokon Building) opened in Hampstead, London. Now a Grade 1 listed building, this is a clear descendant of the Moscow communal housing constructed in the previous decade. The restaurant and bar, the Isobar, soon became a meeting place for Hampstead’s artistic community including Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and Naum Gabo after his arrival in 1936.

The Ove Arup and Norman Foster Foundations, and Richard and Ruth Rogers have supported the exhibition. Lords Foster of Thames Bank and Rogers of Riverside are the UK’s most prominent architects, with international practices, and Ove Arup is one of the world’s leading consultancies providing related services. Building the Revolution runs to 22 January 2012.