One of the important later paintings is his Self-Portrait from 1933 with the posture and in the clothing of a reformer. The hand gesture points to the missing square – a challenge to the Stalinist regime. When Malevich died in 1935, the State Russian Museum obtained the largest part of his studio. From then until 1962, no work of Malevich would be exhibited in the USSR. Even at the 1932 Moscow and Leningrad exhibition of 15 Jahre Sowjetkunst (15 Years of Soviet Art), his works had been placed in an isolated room and presented as that of a ‘revolutionary artist.’
The USSR had secreted away whole avant-garde collections, including those of Malevich, into the cellars. Upon the death of Lenin in 1924 at the latest, the avant-garde had lost its momentum. In 1934 under the Stalin dictatorship, Socialist Realism was extolled. Artists who did not fall into line were persecuted, arrested or deported. At the end of the 1950s, under Khrushchev and after Stalin’s death in 1953, a second Russian avant-garde secretly arose, the Soz-Art (Sots Art) a combination of Pop Art and Socialist Realism. Sots Art criticised the excess of ideology in the Soviet Union and the excess consumption in the West. Among the first generation of Sots Art artists were Erik Bulatov and Ilya Kabakov.
Kazimir Malevich, Self-Portrait, 1933.
Oil on canvas, 73 × 66 cm. Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
Vladimir Tatlin, Nude, 1910–1914.
Oil on canvas, 104.5 × 130.5 cm. Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
Constructivism radiated a strong influence over the entire art world. Its roots are found in pre-revolutionary Russia. It used technology and the natural sciences, as well as let the newest innovations in engineering and industry steer its direction. ‘Art is dead – long live the industrial art of Tatlin’, was the slogan referring to the Constructivist works of this inspired inventor, Vladimir Tatlin. In his early years, Tatlin had begun as a painter, and so, like other Russian artists, he had absorbed the innovations of French painting. His paintings from after 1910 show influences that can be traced to the works found in the Shchukin collection. Tatlin’s Female Nude of 1913 shows references to the Sitting Female Nude of 1908–1909. In the course of his artistic development, Tatlin departed from the pictorially illustrated three-dimensionality of Cubo-Futurism. In 1913 he began by continuing with the spatial collages of Picasso with his three-dimensional ‘constructions’ made out of glass, wood, and metal. He invented the three-dimensional flying objects, the Letatlin (letat = to fly + Tatlin). One can, therefore, consider him to have laid the path for the later Action Art.
In Constructivism, pure reason and objectivity were the guiding principles. Tatlin became the antipode of all previous avant-garde movements; he became a fitting expression for the new and the world ruled by technology and the natural sciences. Tatlin tore down the barriers between the individual genres of art, between that which Art Nouveau had tried to do and Futurism had only done theoretically. Technology and utility became the absolute priority. Former followers of Suprematism like Ivan Kliun, Lyubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova were drawn to this production art form, which was conceptualised as a synthesis of the arts.
El Lissitzky, who was the director of the faculty of architecture at the State Higher Artistic and Technical Studios (VKhUTEMAS) in Moscow, was conscious of the effect of technology. In 1919 he created the first Constructivist works. He called them Prouns, derived from the Russian Pro Unovis = for a rejuvenation of art. ‘I created the Proun as a transfer station from painting to architecture. […] It depends upon the organisation of the space by the line, plane, volume, and on their relationships and proportions.’ The structure of painting, according to El Lissitzky, should be executed according to architectural laws. The shapes should be sketched out and then transferred to the canvas. Alexander Rodchenko coined the term Constructivism as the Constructivists were forming themselves into an artist group in 1921.
A short time later, Lenin announced the New Economic Policy, which only permitted art as a means of mass indoctrination. This compelled the Constructivists to retreat officially into the applied arts. Under these circumstances, Lissitzky was nevertheless able to organise exhibitions inside and outside the Soviet Union and in this way make Constructivist painters like Aleksandr Drevin, Lyubov Popova, Yury Annenkov and Alexander Rodchenko known. The first of these exhibitions took place in December 1922 at the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin. The more than 600 works of Constructivist art were met with euphoria, in particular because similar Constructivist tendencies had already developed in Poland, Hungary and Germany. In Hungary, Alexander Bortnyik, Lajos Kassák, László Péri and László Moholy-Nagy developed Constructivist painting ideas. In Germany, Karl Peter Röhl, Walter Dexel, Werner Graeff, Erich Buchholz, Carl Buchheister, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart and also, from time to time, Willi Baumeister, were engaged in this. Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling transferred Constructivist concepts into abstract film. In 1924 Henryk Berlewi, Henryk Stażewski and Władisław Strzemiñski founded the Constructivist group BLOK in Poland. The Italian, Luigi Veronesi, as well as the Belgians, Victor Servranckx and Félix de Boeck, took Lissitsky as their example.
Piet Mondrian, Composition in Red, Blue, Black,Yellow and Grey, 1921.
Oil on canvas, 76 × 52.4 cm.
Gift of John L. Senior, Jr., The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
De Stijl: The Uniformity of the Painting Surface
De Stijl, the Dutch counterpart to Russian Constructivism, was also oriented towards the universal and infinite. However, it was based on the theory of the Dutch theosopher, van Schoenmaeker, concerning the mathematical structure of the universe and did not have any technological visions, as did Constructivism. De Stijl, as did Russian Constructivism, entered into a dialogue with the universe, but not with technological visions as did the Russians. Rather, it did this with a philosophical-anthroposophical orientation. There are:
Two basic opposing forces that have created our earth and all earthly shapes. They are the earth’s horizontal line of energy around the sun and the vertical movement of the earth rays having their origins in the centre of the sun.
Schoemaeker’s teachings became the basis of the art and aesthetics of De Stijl, of which the leading mind was Piet Mondrian. He became acquainted with Synthetic Cubism in Paris and was extremely impressed with the logic of its principles. A short time later in 1913, Mondrian sketched paintings that consisted mostly of horizontal and vertical lines. Apollinaire coined the name Abstract Cubism for this, and this was the basis for De Stijl.
During World War I, Mondrian returned home and found like-minded people there: the painter Bart van der Leck, Theo van Doesburg, Vilmos Huszár from Hungary, the Belgian painter and sculptor Georges Vantongerloo, the architects J. J. P. Oud, R. van’t Hoff and Jan Wils, as well as the poet Antonie Kok. They founded the artist group, De Stijl and, at the same time in 1917, published the first issue of their magazine by the same name that ran until 1931. Later in 1925, César Domela and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart joined the group. The most significant architect of the movement was Gerit Thomas Rietveld, who revolutionised architecture and design under the De Stijl banner. The first De Stijl manifesto appeared in November 1918:
‘There is an old and a new time consciousness. The old one is centred on the individual; the new one is centred on the universal.’ Van Doesburg explained in 1923: Our ‘art is neither proletarian nor bourgeois; moreover it is gathering forces that as far as it is concerned influence the entire cultural spectrum.’
Mondrian limited the forms used in his paintings to simple geometric shapes like the straight line and the rectangle. Using the primary colours blue, yellow and red together with the ‘non-colours’ black, white and gray, he divided the painting surface in an uneven system of grids. With these limited formal means he wanted to create an asymmetrical equilibrium that did away with the traditional rigid and static symmetric system. The Neue Bauen (New Building)