Suprematism is a famous painting. Directions of abstract painting Suprematism - abstract

Fully lithographed edition. 22x18 cm. Of the 34 drawings, most are arranged in pairs on a double folded sheet. Of the 14 known copies, 11 are located abroad. The greatest rarity, perhaps one of the most expensive Russian publications!

Suprematism (from Latin supremus - the highest) - a trend in avant-garde art, founded in the 1st half of the 1910s. K. S. Malevich. Being a kind of abstractionism, Suprematism was expressed in combinations of multi-colored planes of the simplest geometric outlines (in the geometric shapes of a straight line, square, circle and rectangle). The combination of multi-colored and different-sized geometric figures forms balanced asymmetric Suprematist compositions permeated with internal movement. At the initial stage, this term, which goes back to the Latin root suprem, meant the dominance, superiority of color over all other properties of painting. In non-objective canvases, according to KS Malevich, paint was for the first time freed from an auxiliary role, from serving other purposes - Suprematist paintings became the first step of "pure creativity", that is, an act that equalized the creative power of man and Nature (God). Probably, this, in the first place, and not the lack of an equipped printing base in the Vitebsk art school, explains the lithographed nature of Malevich's two most famous manifestos - "On New Systems in Art" and "Suprematism". Both of them have the character of a kind of teaching aids, since they were intended for students of Vitebsk art workshops, and in this regard, they should be considered as two parts of one course. In the first of them, a detailed aesthetic substantiation of new artistic trends is given, in the second, the nature of Suprematism is revealed and the ways of its further development are outlined. Of course, the statement about the "educational" nature of these works cannot be taken literally. If they are "teaching aids", then in a very definite sense, close to that which we usually put in the designation of a religious text as a "textbook of life." Equally, the Efrosian comparison with prophetic writings can be applied to them, it is enough to read the following words of Malevich: ... transforming the world, I go to my transformation and, perhaps, on the last day of my reconstruction, I will pass into a new form, leaving my current image in the fading green animal world. Although both of these books belong to the next, post-futuristic period in the development of the avant-garde, in our study it is impossible to do without them. For it was they who marked the extreme point in the movement towards the fusion of the artistic and the "agitational", which distinguished the development of Russian futurism. For Malevich, in his own words, it was a time when "brushes are moving further and further away" from him. After showing at a personal exhibition in 1919 a series of "white" canvases that completed the four-year period of the development of pictorial Suprematism, the artist faced the fact that artistic means had been exhausted. This state of crisis was captured in one of the most dramatic texts by Malevich - in his manifesto "Suprematism", written for the catalog of the exhibition "Non-Objective Creativity and Suprematism".

The feeling of the immensity of the revolution he accomplished, which excludes any possibility of a return to the world of traditional aesthetic representations, is perhaps the main thing that determines the content of this text. In it, the artist tries to comprehend the meaning of his breakthrough. The "white free abyss" that has opened up to the artist's eyes is perceived as "a true real representation of infinity". The attraction of this abyss turns out to be no less, if not stronger, than the attraction of the "Black Square" for him. In the text, the desire to "stand on the edge" of the abyss sometimes outweighs the desire to understand what is next? However, even here Malevich comes to the idea that Suprematism as a system is a form of manifestation of creative will, capable of "through the Suprematist philosophical color thinking ... to make the justification of new phenomena." Conceptually, this discovery turns out to be extremely significant, heralding the end of traditional forms of visual art. "There can be no talk of painting in Suprematism," Malevich will declare a year later in the introductory text to the album "Suprematism", "painting has long been outlived and the artist himself is a prejudice of the past." The further path of the development of art now lies in the sphere of the pure act of thought. "It turned out, as it were," the artist notes, "that a brush cannot reach what a pen can. It is disheveled and cannot reach in the convolutions of the brain, the pen is sharper."

In these frequently quoted words, the tense relationship between the "pen" and the "brush", which lay at the basis of the manifestation activity of Russian futurists, manifested themselves with the utmost clarity. Malevich was the first to break the delicate balance that existed between them, giving a clear preference to "pen". The substantiation of peacebuilding as a "pure action", to which he came in "Suprematism", already lies outside the framework of the futuristic movement itself, giving impetus to the further development of avant-garde art. Suprematism has become one of the central phenomena of the Russian avant-garde. Since 1915, when the first abstract works of Malevich were exhibited, including "Black Square", the influence of Suprematism was experienced by such artists as Olga Rozanova, Lyubov Popova, Ivan Klyun, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Alexandra Exter, Nikolai Suetin, Ivan Puni, Nina Genke, Alexander Drevin, Alexander Rodchenko and many others. In 1919, Malevich and his students created the UNOVIS group (Hardeners of the New Art), which developed the ideas of Suprematism. Later, even under the conditions of persecution of avant-garde art in the USSR, these ideas were embodied in architecture, design, and scenography. With the onset of the twentieth century, the grandiose processes of the birth of a new era, equal in importance to the Renaissance, were carried out with increasing intensity in art. Then there was a revolutionary discovery of reality. The ideas of "cathedral creativity" cultivated by the Symbolists were specifically refracted among reformer artists who rejected symbolism. At the exhibition Tram V Malevich presented sixteen works: among them are the cubo-futuristic abstruse canvases Lady at the poster post, Lady in the tram, Sewing machine. In the Englishman in Moscow and the Aviator, with their outlandish, mysterious images, incomprehensible phrases, letters, numbers, echoes of December performances sounded latently, as well as in the Portrait of M.V. Matyushin, composer of the opera Victory over the Sun.

Opposite numbers 21-25, ending the list of Malevich's works in the catalog, was defiantly affixed: "The content of the paintings is unknown to the author." Perhaps among them was a picture with the modern name Composition with Mona Lisa. The birth of Suprematism from Malevich's illogical canvases emerged most convincingly in her. There is already everything that in a second will become Suprematism: white space - a plane with an incomprehensible depth, geometric figures of regular outlines and local color. Two key phrases, like the inscriptions-signals of a silent movie, come to the fore in the Composition with Mona Lisa. Partial Eclipse written out twice; a newspaper clipping with a fragment "transferred apartment" is supplemented by collages with one word - "in Moscow" (old spelling) and a mirror-inverted "Petrograd". The "total eclipse" took place in its historical Black Square on a white background (1915), where a real "victory over the Sun" was realized: it, as a natural phenomenon, was replaced, supplanted by a phenomenon that was natural to it, sovereign and natural - the square plane completely eclipsed , overshadowed all the images. The revelation overtook Malevich while he was working on the second (never completed) edition of the Victory over the Sun brochure. Preparing drawings in May 1915, he took the last step on the path to non-objectivity. He realized the weight of this most radical change in his life immediately and fully. In a letter to Matyushin, referring to one of the sketches, the artist wrote: "This drawing will be of great importance in painting. What was done unconsciously now yields extraordinary results." The newborn direction remained without a name for some time, but by the end of the summer the name appeared. "Suprematism" became the most famous among them. Malevich wrote the first brochure "From Cubism to Suprematism". New painterly realism. This book-manifesto, published by a faithful friend Matyushin, was distributed at the opening day of the Last Futuristic Exhibition of Paintings "0.10" (zero-ten), which opened on December 17, 1915 in the premises of the Art Bureau of Nadezhda Dobychina.

Malevich was not entirely in vain worried about his invention. His comrades sharply opposed to declare Suprematism the heir of Futurism and unite under its banner. They explained their rejection by the fact that they were not yet ready to unconditionally take a new direction. Malevich was not allowed to call his paintings "Suprematism" either in the catalog or in the exposition, and he had to hand-write posters with the title Suprematism of painting literally an hour before the opening day and hang them out next to his works. In the "red corner" of the hall, he erected the Black Square, which overshadowed the exhibition of 39 paintings. Those of them that have survived to this day have become high classics of the 20th century. The black square seemed to have absorbed all the forms and all the colors of the world, reducing them to a plastic formula, where the polarity of black (complete absence of color and light) and white (the simultaneous presence of all colors and light) dominate. The emphasized simple geometric form-sign, not linked neither associatively, nor plastically, nor ideologically with any way, object, concept that already existed in the world before it, testified to the absolute freedom of its creator. The black square marked the pure act of creation carried out by the demiurge artist. Malevich called his art "New Realism", which he considered a step in the history of world artistic creation. The background of Suprematist compositions is always a certain white environment - its depth, its capacity are elusive, indefinable, but clear.

The unusual space of pictorial Suprematism, as the artist himself and many researchers of his work said, has the closest analogue to the mystical space of Russian icons, which is not subject to ordinary physical laws. But Suprematist compositions, in contrast to icons, do not represent anyone or anything, they are a product of free creative will and testify only to their own miracle: “The hanging plane of pictorial color on a sheet of white canvas directly gives our consciousness a strong sense of space. desert, where you can creatively feel the points of the universe around you ", - wrote the painter. Disembodied geometric elements soar in a colorless, weightless cosmic dimension, representing pure speculation, manifested with one's own eyes. The white background of Suprematist paintings, an exponent of spatial relativity, is both planes and bottomless, and in both directions, both to the viewer and from the viewer (the reverse perspective of icons revealed infinity only in one direction). Malevich gave the name "Suprematism" to the invented direction - regular geometric figures painted with pure local colors and immersed in a kind of transcendental "white abyss", where the laws of dynamics and statics dominate.

The term coined by him goes back to the Latin root "suprem", which formed the word "supremacy" in the artist's native language, Polish, which in translation meant "superiority", "supremacy", "domination". At the first stage of the existence of the new artistic system, Malevich tried to fix the primacy, the dominance of color over all other components of painting with this word. The 0.10 canvases of geometric abstractivism presented at the exhibition bore complex, detailed names - and not only because Malevich was not allowed to call them "Suprematism". I will list some of them: Picturesque realism of a football player - Colorful masses in the fourth dimension. Painterly realism of a boy with a knapsack - Colorful masses in the fourth dimension. Picturesque realism of a peasant woman in 2 dimensions (this was the original full name of the Red Square), Self-portrait in 2 dimensions. Lady. Colorful masses in the 4th and 2nd dimensions, Picturesque realism of colorful masses in 2 dimensions. Persistent indications of spatial dimensions - two-, four-dimensional - indicate his keen interest in the ideas of the "fourth dimension". Suprematism itself was subdivided into three stages, three periods: "Suprematism in its historical development had three stages of black, color and white," the artist wrote in his book Suprematism. 34 drawings. The black stage also began with three forms - a square, a cross, and a circle. Malevich defined the black square as "zero forms", the basic element of the world and being. The black square was the first figure, the initial element of the new "realistic" creativity.

Thus, the Black Square. The Black Cross and the Black Circle were the "three whales" on which the system of Suprematism in painting was based; their inherent metaphysical meaning in many respects surpassed their visible material embodiment. In a number of Suprematist works, the black first figures had a programmatic meaning, which formed the basis of a clearly built plastic system. These three paintings, which arose not earlier than 1915, were always dated by Malevich in 1913 - the year of the Victory over the Sun staging, which served as a starting point for him in the emergence of Suprematism. At the fifth exhibition "Jack of Diamonds" in November 1916 in Moscow, the artist showed sixty Suprematist paintings, numbered from first to last (now it is rather difficult to restore the sequence of all sixty works, both due to losses and technical reasons, not always attentive attitude in museums to the inscriptions on the revolutions). The first number was the Black Square, then the Black Cross, and the third number was the Black Circle. All sixty exhibited canvases belonged to the first two stages of Suprematism. The color period also began with a square - its red color served, according to Malevich, a sign of color in general. The last canvases of the color stage were distinguished by their multi-figured nature, whimsical organization, and the most complex relationships of geometric elements - they seemed to be held together by an unknown powerful attraction. Suprematism reached its final stage in 1918. Malevich was a courageous artist who followed the chosen path to the end: at the third stage of Suprematism, color also left him. In the middle of 1918 canvases "white on white" appeared, where white forms seemed to melt in the bottomless whiteness. After the October Revolution, Malevich continued his extensive activities - together with Tatlin and other left-wing artists, he held a number of posts in the official bodies of the People's Commissariat of Education. His particular concern was the development of the museum business in Russia; he actively participated in museum construction, developing the concept of a new type of museums, where the works of avant-garde artists were to be presented. Such centers under the name "museum of pictorial culture", "museum of artistic culture" were opened in both capitals and some provincial cities. In the fall of 1918, Malevich's pedagogical work began, which subsequently played a very important role in his theoretical work. He was listed as a master in one of the classes of the Petrograd Free Workshops, and at the end of 1918 he moved to Moscow. In the Moscow Free State Workshops, the reformer painter invited "metalworkers and textile workers" to study - the founder of Suprematism began to realize the growing style-forming possibilities of his brainchild. In July 1919 Malevich wrote his first large theoretical work "On New Systems in Art". The desire to publish it and the growing everyday difficulties - the artist's wife was expecting a child, the family lived near Moscow in a cold unheated house - forced him to accept the invitation to move to the province. In the provincial city of Vitebsk, from the beginning of 1919, the People's Art School, organized and directed by Marc Chagall (1887 - 1985), worked.

The teacher of the Vitebsk school, architect and graphic artist Lazar Lissitsky (1890 - 1941), the future famous designer, during a business trip to Moscow, convinced Malevich of the necessity and benefits of moving. Chagall fully supported Lissitzky's initiative and allocated the newly arrived professor a workshop at the school. The publication of the book "On New Systems in Art" was the first fruit of Kazimir Malevich's Vitebsk life. Its publication seemed to simulate the subsequent relationship of the great initiator with the newly converted adepts: the text, concepts, ideas created by him were designed, implemented, and replicated by students and followers. The release of the theoretical work served as a kind of tuning fork for all Vitebsk years of Malevich, dedicated to the creation of philosophical and literary works. In a letter to his longtime friend and colleague, M.V. Matyushin (1861 - 1934), sent in early 1920, the artist stated: “My book is one lecture. It is recorded as I said and printed. " There was a certain contradiction: at the end of the main text was the date "July 15, 1919", which indicated the completion of the manuscript before arriving in Vitebsk. However, Malevich did deliver a lecture on November 17 in the Vitebsk auditorium; obviously, the statements are true, both about the publication of the recorded lecture and about the finished white paper manuscript. The book "On New Systems in Art" became the forerunner of the subsequent "Suprematism" and is unique in every sense. First of all, its polysyllabic genre is unusual: first, it is a theoretical treatise; secondly, an illustrated textbook; thirdly, a set of prescriptions and postulates (what is Establishment A) and, finally, artistically, Malevich's book was a cycle of stitched lithographs that anticipated the easel compositions of "calligraphers" and "type designers" of the second half of the 20th century, based on the expressiveness of letter rows. The publication "On New Systems ..." was technologically a paperback brochure printed by a lithographic method (sometimes called a booklet). It opened and closed with texts executed in cursive writing by Malevich on a lithographic stone: at the beginning of the book there were epigraphs and an introduction, at the end Establishment A and two postulates placed under the image of a black square. Facsimile reproduction of the leader's own handwritten plans and attitudes acquired the meaning of a personal, personal appeal to each reader-follower. After the introduction, on the folding sheets there were schematic drawings illustrating the techniques of cubist construction; the "educational and visual" part of the brochure ended with a sketch that sketched reproduced the shocking and abstruse Malevich painting "The Cow and the Violin". All these drawings, schemes, offered to students for assimilation, were the autolithographs of Malevich. The main place in the brochure was occupied by the treatise On New Systems in Art. Statics and speed. Several performers - they were Lissitzky's apprentices who entered the Artel of Artistic Labor at Witsvamas - transferred Malevich's composition-lecture in block letters onto lithographic stones; There were few stones, so the written fragment was replicated, the stone was polished and used for the next passage.

The performers were distinguished by different hand firmness, different dexterity, different visual acuity and different literacy: all these individual properties were forever imprinted in the "cuneiform" - very narrow leading made the stripes visually similar to archaic early Eastern writing. Sometimes the dense, weakly dissected type "mirror" of the page was diversified by the introduction of decorative signs and marginal, most often of a geometric shape; however, the bars and circles in the lines often masked mistakes made and noticed. The printed parts were then assembled into a single organism - this work was done by El Lissitzky; he also made the cover using the linocut technique. One sheet with an integral composition formed the front and back sides when folded; it is curious that in the position of the spread, the composition was “read” from right to left - its significant elements were arranged in that order. The cover was cut last, the author and the designer found it necessary to put the names of all parts on it - the front side of the book thus played an additional role of “table of contents”. The external epigraph attracted attention: "Let the overthrow of the old world be drawn on your palms."

Placed at the top on the most significant, striking place of the cover, preceding the title and surname of the author, he made the whole book "text", opening it. The abundance of information, both necessary and secondary, gave the brochure's appearance, as it seemed at first glance, an unprofessional, amateurish character - however, as El Lissitzky's plan was comprehended, it became clear that he needed an abundance of words: the cover of "On New Systems ..." with its dynamics, movable sharp lettering compositions foreshadowed constructivist methods of book design. Especially it is necessary to highlight the abundance of textual information on the cover - this technique will become widespread in the art of the book much, much later. Malevich's book was a collection of fundamental considerations, theses, sayings offered by the leader to new adepts for study and assimilation. Texts inscribed on stone, especially Malevich's own handwritten prescriptions, acquired the rank of certain tablets of a “new artistic testament”. The main visual hero of the book is "Black Square", reproduced four times; the frequency of its use indicated the emergence of a new function of the main suprematist form - the black square turned into an emblem. The growth of the black square into an emblematic sign must be specially highlighted, as well as the persistent repetition of the slogan "Let the overthrow of the old world be drawn on your palms" - this slogan soon acquired the meaning of a motto for the members of Unovis. An equally remarkable role was played by the line of Malevich's sound-abstruse poem, placed inside before the first epigraph:

"I'm going

U - el - el - ul - el - te - ka

My new path ”.

The leader's poem became, as we will see below, a kind of anthem of Malevich's supporters in Vitebsk. Before the self-determination of Unovis, “a new party in art,” as Malevich sometimes called it, there were still months - but the accumulation of its constituent elements, the formation of its framework, had already begun. Malevich, correcting the first page of the book at the request of Lissitzky, made a significant inscription: “With the release of this booklet I greet you Lazar Markovich, it will be the trail of my path and the beginning of our movement team, I expect from you the clothes of structures for those who follow the innovators. But build them in such a way: so that they cannot sit in them for a long time, do not have time to start a bourgeois commotion, do not become obese in its beauty. K. Malevich December 4, 19 Vitebsk ". The book "On New Systems in Art" was published in a huge circulation for those times - 1000 copies, and was printed in a handicraft, in fact, way. Concerned about the distribution of the book, Malevich sent a letter to O.K. Gromozova, wife of M.V. Matyushina: “Dear Olga Konstantinovna! My friends have published a book "On New Systems in Art", 1 000 copies. lithographically with drawings. It is necessary to distribute it, so we ask our friends to get it into proper hands, we give 200-300 copies to Petrograd, the rest is Moscow-Vitebsk; the price is 40 rubles. The giver of this, Elena Arkadyevna Kabischer, is entrusted with making money for the book, if it succeeds. We will brochure the book, send it immediately. Maybe you will leave one shelf for its distribution. I shake your hand firmly in a friendly manner. Hello to all friends, and a kiss to Misha (Matyushin). K. Malevich. Petrograd, Stremyannaya, not far from Nikolaevsky railway station, communal warehouse. Olga Konstantinovna Gromozova, head. warehouse ".

The ideas developed in the first Vitebsk book were very dear to Malevich, and therefore, when the opportunity presented itself, he replicated them in another edition. In 1920, the Fine Arts Department of the People's Commissariat for Education in Petrograd published Malevich's book From Cezanne to Suprematism. Critical essay ". The text of the edition consisted of several large fragments of the Vitebsk brochure "From Cezanne to Suprematism", assembled into an independent book. Malevich himself was clearly aware of the onset of a new stage in his biography, the displacement of painting by purely speculative creativity. In a letter to M.O. Gershenzon, sent on November 7, 1919 in the first days after moving from Moscow, he stated: "... all my energy can go to writing brochures, now I will work hard in Vitebsk" exile "- my brushes are moving further and further away." The aspirations of the initiator to theoretical empyrean paradoxically coincided with the expansion of Suprematism into real life, into the "utilitarian world of things." And although Malevich even at the beginning of this, in 1919, summoned "comrades metalworkers and comrades of textile workers" to his Moscow workshop, he only after moving to Vitebsk clearly saw the horizons of practical application that opened before the system in art he had invented. The possibility of introducing Suprematism into reality appeared immediately. In December 1919, the Vitebsk Committee for Combating Unemployment celebrated its two-year anniversary. The committee was the brainchild of the February bourgeois revolution, although it officially opened a week after the transfer of power into the hands of the Bolsheviks. It must be said that the October coup in general passed somehow unnoticed in Vitebsk: only one local newspaper, on the second page, in a tiny chronicle note, quickly announced the events in Petrograd. The jubilee of the Cabinet was decorated in a bright suprematist way.

The picture taken at the Vitebsk railway station on Saturday, June 5, 1920, has become one of the most famous photographs of the era. It was accidentally preserved by Lev Yudin and his family. Life, as you know, is sometimes more inventive than the most sophisticated novelist - here she played the role of the most perceptive artist, creating an unusually expressive portrait of the "Unovis collective" on the eve of its finest hour. The photo was dated from a note from the Vitebsk newspaper Izvestia for June 6, 1920: “Art excursion. Yesterday an excursion of 60 students from the Vitebsk People's Art School, led by their leaders, went to Moscow. The excursion will take part in an art conference in Moscow, as well as visit all museums and see the artistic sights of the capital. " The freight car, in which the Vitebsk residents went to Moscow, was decorated according to the project of Suetin - it was decorated with the Black Square, the emblem of Unovis. On the project under the square was the slogan "Long live Unovis!" - in nature, it was replaced by a long banner; from the fragment visible in the photograph, the inscription was restored: "A group of sightseers of the Vitebsk state free art workshops, participants of the All-Russian Conference of Art Schools." The photographer filmed the scene of the departure from the car, which stood next to the tracks, and the continuous "panel" of heads and figures, spreading vertically, is somewhat akin to a tiered fresco composition, impeccably centered by the Suprematist tondo in Malevich's hands. His figure, surrounded by a garland of disciples and followers, seemed to ascend in a "mandorla" from their heads (a striking interpretation of the iconography of the Savior in forces in documentary photography). The commanding and pointing movement of the Unovisian leader, with its intentionality and staging, also translated the snapshot into the rank of a historical document - however, the soft touch of Natalya Ivanova, trustingly leaning on Malevich's hand, somehow tamed the authoritarian unambiguity of the gesture. The psychological orchestration of the group portrait is also striking - a gamut of heterogeneous feelings was depicted on the faces of the Unovists who were on their way to conquer Moscow. Sternly inspired dark-faced Malevich; the warlike, disheveled Lazar Khidekel; sad, detached Lazar Zuperman; cheerful, business-like Ivan Gavris (it looks like he has a Unovis almanac under his arm) - and only the ineradicable cheerfulness of Vera Yermolaeva and the naive little apprentice who looked out from under the leader's arm, painted with a smile the intense seriousness of Unovis. In addition to Malevich, the photo shows all the leaders of the United Painting Audience: Nina Kogan, Lazar Lissitsky, Vera Ermolaeva; apprentices of the school - Moisey Veksler, Moisey Kunin, Lazar Khidekel, Yakov Abarbanel, Ivan Gavris, Iosif Baitin, Efim Royak, Ilya Chashnik, Efraim Volkhonsky, Fanya Belostotskaya, Natalya Ivanova, Lev Yudin, Chaim Zeldin, Ievgenia Magersin ; the names of the others have not yet been established. Lissitzky and Baytin, leaning on the shoulders of Gavris, have the Unovisian emblem attached to the sleeve cuff; at Veksler in the front row and at Zeldin in the back of the carriage a black square is pinned on the chest. The round-shaped "suprema" (the word of the Unovists) in Malevich's hands is not a dish, as it might seem at first glance. Its author, obviously, was Chashnik, who was distinguished by his inexhaustible inventiveness and the ability to introduce Suprematist principles into art forms other than easel painting (this was something akin to the analogous skill of Nina Kogan, who invented either a Suprematist ballet or a Suprematist mobile). A white disc with geometric appliqué elements superimposed on it was taken into a freshly painted concave frame (there is a gasket under Malevich's palm so as not to erase the paint). Tondo was undoubtedly one of the exhibits in the exhibition that Unovis was taking to Moscow; its round shape in a 1920 photograph is extremely important evidence of unexpected plastic experiments by the Unovists in the earliest stages of the group's existence. It would be appropriate to say here that Chashnik, who was well-versed in the artisan skills of working on metal, was famous at school for original compositions, known to us only from verbal descriptions: they were a "picture" with planar geometric elements, reinforced with metal pins at different heights from the surface , - a kind of layered spatial-planar composition was obtained. This plastic idea, which dates back to Malevich's Suprematism, many, many years after the death of Chashnik, will be expressed in his own way by the famous Swiss artist Jean Tengeli in reliefs of the 1950s called Meta-Malevich ... Malevich, having arrived in Vitebsk at the very beginning of November 1919, did not imagine that he would stay here for a long time. The birth of Unovis changed his plans - the education of fellow believers has now come to the fore. In letters to David Shterenberg, head of the Department of Public Education of the People's Commissariat for Education, Malevich explained: "I live in Vitebsk not for the sake of improving nutrition, but for the sake of working in the province, to which Moscow luminaries are not particularly willing to go to give an answer to the demanding generation." In early January 1921, this provision was developed in an extensive letter to the same addressee: “Having left Moscow for the mountains. I left Vitebsk to benefit from all my knowledge and experience. Vitebsk workshops not only did not stop, like other cities in the province, but adopted a progressive form of development, despite the most difficult conditions, all together overcome obstacles, go further and further along the road of the new science of painting, I work all day, which can be confirmed by all apprentices in quantity one hundred people. " The Vitebsk apprentices were not the first group of supporters to form around Malevich; Since the invention of Suprematism, circles of followers have constantly formed around the leader. However, it was in Vitebsk that Malevich's organizational and artistic-mentoring activities, relying on the foundation laid in Petrograd and Moscow, acquired stable, developed forms. Malevich arrived in Vitebsk on the eve of an important event in his life, the first monographic exhibition. It was prepared within the framework of state exhibitions organized in the early Soviet years by the All-Russian Central Exhibition Bureau of the People's Commissariat for Education. Malevich's paintings have already been brought to the former salon of K. Mikhailova on Bolshaya Dmitrovka, 11.

Indirect evidence suggests that the exposition was already thought out by the author. On November 7, 1919, he wrote to M.O. Gershenzon about the opening of the exhibition as an already decided matter: “By the way, my exhibition on B. Dmitrovka, Mikhailova's salon, corner of Stoleshnikov, must open in a week; all things could not be collected, but there is impressionism and beyond. I would like to know your opinion about her. " Researchers for many years did not know where Malevich's exhibition took place in the end (some sources indicated the Moscow Museum of Artistic Culture); there were disagreements about the time of its opening. An invitation card to the opening day preserved in the archives of N.I. Khardzhiev, uniquely determines the time and place of Malevich's first solo exhibition: it was opened on March 25, 1920 in the former Mikhailova salon, Bolshaya Dmitrovka, 11. The exhibition, registered as the XVI State Exhibition of the VTsVB, is usually called “Kazimir Malevich. His path from impressionism to suprematism. " To date, no precise documentary evidence has been found about her; the catalog of the exhibition did not exist, although it is known that 153 works were presented there. Photos of the exposition remained from the first exhibition of Malevich; unfortunately, the impressionistic works did not get into the lens. Of the two reviews by A.M. Efros and A.A. Sidorov, you can get only general ideas. Apparently, the paintings remained in the exhibition halls in early June 1920, when Malevich, along with the apprentices of the school, arrived at the All-Russian Conference of Art Students and Students (the next exhibition of the VTsVB was organized only in the summer and autumn of 1920 and its location was not indicated in the sources. The apprentice of the Vitebsk school MM Lerman in conversations more than once returned to Malevich's monographic exhibition, which he happened to see with his own eyes. there were two teplushki; I was in 1919 or 1920 (this was in the summer) and 1921 on excursions in Moscow, lived on Sadovo-Spasskaya, in some kind of hostel. The first excursion is very interesting, we were at Malevich's exhibition. , cubism, cubo-futurism, colored suprematism, black and white suprematism, a black square on a white background and a white square on a white background, and in the last hall there are empty white stretchers "; Yes, we came on an excursion to Moscow, we were starving. .. At the exhibition, one shouted: "Peace be upon your ashes, Kazimir" "; “The exhibition began in 1920 with works from Cezanne - workers were dragging heavy sacks (“ Cezanne’s everything is heavy, ”Malevich said,“ an iron apple ”). In the beginning, there were impressionistic things. Cubism, cubo-futurism, works of "Derenov's" character. Colored Suprematism, a black square, and then empty stretchers walked, they laughed at this. "Peace be upon yours, Kazimir Malevich," someone shouted from the rostrum. I wore a black square, one came up to me and asked: "Are you learning from Malevich?" It was, it seems, Mayakovsky ”; “The first floor is a suite of rooms, an exhibition of Malevich. Malevich made a joke, He said that "the end of art" had come> in this way. " The facts reported by Lerman are verifiable; information about two excursions - summer and winter - coincides with documentary evidence of Unovis's trips to Moscow in 1920 in summer (June) and 1921 in winter (December). The work with the workers who dragged the sacks mentioned by the narrator correlate with the plots of Malevich's large gouaches The Man with the Sack (1911, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) and They Carry the Land (1911, foreign private collection). The message of the meeting with Mayakovsky also deserves confidence; Mayakovsky, as already mentioned, spoke from the rostrum of the All-Russian Conference on June 8, the day Malevich and the Unovists appeared there. Almost all Vitebsk excursionists for the first time in their lives visited the Tretyakov Gallery, the collection of I.A. Morozov and S.I. Shchukin; Malevich himself accompanied them, giving explanations. Sixteen-year-old Semyon Bychenok and Samuil Vikhansky, pupils of Pen's class at the Public School, were shocked to tears by the negative attitude of the stern Suprematist towards Repin, whom he proposed "to throw off the ship of modernity." These young men, however, Malevich did not convince them, they forever remained loyal to Pen and realism. Returning to the artistic concept of Malevich's first solo exhibition, it should be said that her boldness and novelty passed the attention of her contemporaries. For Malevich, going out into the "white desert" was the logical completion of the picturesque path; In December 1920, the following lines appeared: "Painting in Suprematism is out of the question, painting has long been outlived and the artist himself is a prejudice of the past." Painting really left the artist for many years - to return in a completely different guise in difficult times for him. Empty canvases - the screen on which each viewer could project their creative potential - appeared in world art decades after Malevich's death; his priority in the field of conceptual creativity turned out to be firmly forgotten, unclaimed, unknown. Some evidence suggests that during the last public appearance of Unovis, held as part of the "Exhibition of paintings by Petrograd artists of all directions. 1918-1923 ”, the same exposition concept was repeated - a blank canvas was present in the collective exhibit of the Approvers of New Art. Holding the official position of the head of the workshop of the People's Art School, Malevich proposed as a basis a program developed for the Moscow State Agricultural Academy. As already mentioned, the completeness and capacity of Malevich's program could ensure the activity of not one class, but an entire educational institution. This is exactly what happened in Vitebsk - Malevich's plan, which became the basis for the Unovis Painting Audience program, was realized with the help of a "group of senior cubists", which included Lissitsky, Ermolaeva and Kogan. Malevich's own teaching style in Vitebsk acquired a completely different character compared to that in Moscow. Starting from the first days of the rally, the center of gravity shifted to verbal forms that were unusual in art education: lectures, reports and interviews became the main genre in the communication of a mentor with students. In the archives of the Vitebsk school, documents have been preserved that recorded the extraordinary intensity of Malevich's lecturing activity: the statements included payment for many hours of lectures. Vitebsk diaries of L.A. Yudin; messages about Malevich's speeches were published in the press, posters were specially created for them. A visual idea of ​​the setting and nature of these quite academic studies can be obtained from the famous photograph of Unovis, dating back to the fall of 1921: Malevich, taking his usual place at the blackboard, draws an explanatory diagram with chalk.

The topics of the reports were closely associated with that gigantic work of a theoretical plan that absorbed almost all the time of the great artist in Vitebsk. The path "from Cubism to Suprematism" was promoted by Malevich both as a road to individual development and as a road to the development of all art as a whole. In Vitebsk, the artist began to be interested in how the transition from one stage to another, from one painting system to another, was accomplished. Considering the work of apprentices at interviews, performed to solve educational and artistic problems, the mentor tried to identify and explain the motivating reasons for this or "painting doing" (such analysis was very soon called "making a diagnosis"). At the Public School, Malevich received a lot of scope for the implementation of the research inclinations of his intellect. The analysis of the work of an individual creative person, the analysis of an integral direction, was based in him on putting forward a hypothesis, setting up experiments, verifying the predicted results and experimental data. Using the old canons of science, Malevich gave the humanitarian sphere the character of a natural scientific sphere. Both the mentor himself and his followers often resorted to consolidating their observations in graphs, diagrams, tables, widely using peculiar statistical methods of accumulating primary material for theoretical and practical conclusions. The scientific visualization of artistic experiments and experiments was supposed to contribute to the identification of the objective laws of the formation of art - this mentality prevailed in the aspirations of Unovis in Vitebsk, Bauhaus in Weimar, Vkhutemas and Inkhuk in Moscow. Malevich, a spontaneous taxonomist, having streamlined his observations and conclusions, put forward a hypothesis, which then grew into an original theory, the substantiation and proof of which were given the years of the life of both the initiator and his Vitebsk adherents. Outlining the foundations of the "theory of the surplus element in painting", Malevich specially emphasized the decisive importance of the Vitebsk years: part of the youth lived with a subconscious, a feeling, an inexplicable rise to a new problem, freeing themselves from the whole past. The opportunity opened before me to carry out all sorts of experiments to study the effect of surplus elements on the pictorial acceptance of the nervous system of subjects. For this analysis, I began to adapt the Institute organized in Vitebsk, which made it possible to work at full speed. " In Vitebsk, at an early stage of the formation of the theory, Malevich was more willing to use the word "additives", which was then transformed into "additions", into "additional element" - one cannot but see in this definition a certain influence of the popular term of Marxist-Leninist political economy. The People's Art School (Vitebsk State Artistic and Technical Workshops) was transformed into the Vitebsk Artistic and Practical Institute in 1921 - in its work, the foundations of scientific and artistic activities were laid in registering, isolating, describing the primary elements that made up the "pictorial body" of one or another directions. The purpose of these experiments was later outlined by Malevich: “So, for example, you can collect typical elements of impressionism, expressionism, Cezanneism, cubism, constructivism, futurism, suprematism (constructivism is the moment of the formation of the system), and compose several cartograms from this, find in them a whole system of development of straight lines and curves, to find the laws of linear and colored structures, to determine the influence on their development of social life of modern and past eras and to determine their pure culture, to establish textured, structural, and so on. differences ". As a result of carefully carried out scientific work, an additional element of one direction or another had to be highlighted - Sezannism, according to Malevich, was built on the basis of a "fiber-shaped additional element", cubism - a "sickle" one; the direct, most economical form, the trace of a moving point in space, turned out to be an additional element of Suprematism. Graphically, iconic additional elements were linked to a specific color scheme in each direction.

Theoretical comprehension of practical experiments, initiated by Malevich, gradually turned into a rule, a law for his most talented students in Vitebsk: the creation of a theoretical treatise was a prerequisite for the Unovist to receive a diploma from the Institute of Art and Practice. In the Scheme for the construction of the Vitebsk state art and technical workshops, developed and drawn by Chashnik, the goal of education is formulated: the emergence of a "completed scientist-builder". In full measure, laboratory research to highlight the "surplus element in painting" was launched by Malevich and members of the Vitebsk Unovis after their move to Petrograd, becoming central to the experimental activities of Ginkhuk. Malevich's first assistants, even to some extent his co-authors, since Vitebsk times were Ermolaeva and Yudin, who became assistants of the formal theoretical department. It should also be noted that in the treatise Introduction to the theory of the surplus element in painting, Vitebsk experiments were largely described, carried out on "individuals struck by painting"; it is no coincidence that Malevich dated the treatise to 1923, as if the sum of the scientific, artistic and pedagogical experience of his life in Vitebsk. The Vitebsk years were fruitful for the artist also in the sense of publishing theoretical works: between the first book, On New Systems in Art, and the last, "God Will Not Throw Off", there was "From Cezanne to Suprematism" (Pg., 1920); “Suprematism. 34 drawings "(Vitebsk, 1920); "On the question of fine art" (Smolensk, 1921). In addition, the treatises On "I" and the collective, Towards pure action, manifestos by Unom and the Declaration - all in the Almanac "Unovis No. 1", as well as the article "Unovis" in the Vitebsk magazine "Art" (1921, No. 1) were published. Almost all the texts were tested by Malevich in oral transmission - they formed the basis of his lectures and speeches. Pronouncing, articulating one's constant reflections - an explanation to both oneself and the listeners of the meaning of the Black Square, the meaning of non-objectivity, their ever-deepening interpretation maintained close communicative ties between the leader and followers, the generator of ideas and adherents. The artist-philosopher's readings were not easy food for the audience; on the contrary, they were also a difficult test for the most advanced of them, who often felt their inadequacy, their inability to follow their mentor. However - and this paradoxical effect is well known in psychology - the distance that the students felt between themselves and the teacher only convinced them of the special greatness of Malevich, surrounded him with a certain aura of supernaturalism - their faith in a mentor was boundless, and it was aroused by the exceptional spiritual talent of the ancestor Suprematism, the bearer of charisma. Lev Yudin, one of the most devoted disciples, wrote on February 12, 1922 (note, a week before the end of the manuscript Mir as non-objective): “Yesterday was a lecture. Continuation of the Picturesque Essence. Much is becoming clear to me. - How hard KS (Kazimir Severinovich) is. When our people begin to whimper and complain about the high cost, it really begins to seem that the light is running out. KS comes and you immediately find yourself in a different atmosphere. He creates a different atmosphere around himself. This is really a leader. " Public acts of thinking demonstrated by Malevich played an exciting, provocative role, and the high intensity of the epicenter inevitably increased the temperature of the environment, contributing to the quickest maturation of the most talented monovists: “15. II. 22. Wednesday. KS got down to business again and raised the group on their hind legs. The lectures go remarkably well and create a lot in the mind ”(Yudin's diary). The book Suprematism stood somewhat apart among the Vitebsk brochures and articles. 34 drawings, published at the very end of 1920. She was the last fruit of the technical cooperation between Malevich and El Lissitzky, who soon left the city. The book was drawn and written, as the author emphasized, in response to the students' request. Therefore, first of all, the brochure-album presented de visu a wide range of Suprematist iconography, that is, it was a kind of exhibition of Malevich's Suprematist creativity. In this capacity, the book was the subject of discussion and reflection of the Unovists; Yudin, for example, noted in his diary entries, evaluating the composition born to him: “December 31, 21 Saturday. Do not be embarrassed by what (picture) K.S. After all, he, in the end, has all ours. " In one of his Suprematist compositions, Chashnik used Malevich's illustration from the Vitebsk edition as a collage inclusion. The concept of the album repeated to a certain extent the exhibition concept of Malevich, implemented in December 1916 at the last exhibition of "Jack of Diamonds": the artist showed 60 Suprematist canvases, numbered from the first - the Black Square to the last (they were obviously Supremus No. 56, Supremus No. 57 , Supremus No. 58). The appeal to time, temporal dynamics as a necessary condition for suprematist transformations served as an essential characteristic of the new direction in art. A thoughtful alternation of Suprematist images, collected under one cover, consistently unfolded plastic changes in geometric elements in the space-time continuum. The undoubted interconnections of the previous illustration with the subsequent one revealed Malevich's desire to master real movement, real time - his creator subsequently tried to realize these potentialities of Suprematism in the language of cinema. In May 1927, while in Berlin, he asked to introduce him to Hans Richter, the initiator and founder of abstract cinema. In the 1950s, a script labeled "for Hans Richter" was discovered in Malevich's papers left with the von Riesen. The script, titled "Artistic and Scientific Film" Painting and Problems of Architectural Approximation of the New Classical Architectural System ", presented" shots "of abstract compositions with explanations linked by semantic and dynamic unity. This script, undoubtedly, had a distant prototype in the first "cropped tape" of the book "Suprematism. 34 drawings ", edited from Suprematist plots and ending with two" close-ups ", large lithographs, much larger than all other illustrations. Malevich's text, which served as an introduction to the album" Suprematism. 34 drawings ”, stunned by the concentration of thought, the unusualness of the projects outlined, the unshakable faith in the Suprematist penetration into the world. “The Suprematist apparatus, so to speak, will be one-whole, without any fastenings. The bar is fused with all the elements like the globe - carrying the life of perfection, so that each built Suprematist body will be included in the natural organization and form a new companion. The Earth and the Moon, but between them a new suprematist satellite can be built, equipped with all the elements, which will move in orbit, forming a new path. Investigating the Suprematist form in motion, we come to the decision that motion in a straight line to any planet cannot be defeated otherwise than through the circular motion of intermediate Suprematist satellites, which form a straight line of rings from satellite to satellite "The theory summarized by Malevich - "Almost astronomy", as he put it from a letter to M.O. Gershenzon - and today it seems incredible, fantastic - perhaps the future will prove the validity of her fundamentally new approach to the technical implementation of the conquest of outer space. Nevertheless, Malevich's ideas were a direct product of their time, their environment. Futurological fantasies about breaking away from the earth, about going out into the Universe were firmly in place in the perception of the world of European futurists, Russian bystanders and cubo-futurists. Back in 1917-1918 Malevich painted "shadow drawings", as Velimir Khlebnikov called these graphic sketches, striking with visionary foresight of images that turned out to be accessible only after the orbital voyages of mankind. On Russian soil, cosmic dreams were supported by philosophical theories, in particular by the philosophy of the Common Cause of N.F. Fedorov with his predictive concepts of human settlement on other planets and stars. Fedorov's ideas inspired the great engineer K.E. Tsiolkovsky, who managed to translate utopian projects into a practical dimension, into the sphere of reality. Perhaps the Vitebsk people had a special predisposition to new impulses coming from the universe; otherwise it is difficult to explain, for example, the appearance in May 1919 of the huge work of G.Ya. Yudin (he argued with Ivan Puni, spreading futurism to smithereens). A fourteen-year-old teenager, preparing for a musical career, wrote an article Interplanetary Travel, which occupied two basements in two issues of the Vitebsk student newspaper. In the concluding paragraph, the young author confidently drew a bold - let me remind you, it was May 1919 - the conclusion: "We must hope that the 20th century will give a decisive impetus to the progress of technology in this area and we will thus witness the first interplanetary journey." The printing of the newspaper was scarce, and therefore an apology was attached to the article: “From the editorial board. For technical reasons, the editorial board is unable to place the details given by the author in the description of individual projects and, in particular, the schematic description of the "Rocket" by K.E. Tsiolkovsky ". G.Ya. Yudin - fate gave him a long century, and he witnessed the flight of Gagarin and the landing of the Americans on the moon - in conversations with the author in the late 1980s, he said that the published article was only a fragment of a large work devoted to Tsiolkovsky's invention; The Vitebsk publication was one of the first to promote the great projects of the provincial Russian genius. Such were the future musicians in Vitebsk - the affirmators of the new art, inspired by Malevich himself, all the more could not but respond to the rhythms of the Universe. ... From unknown distances, two squares, a red and a black one, fell to the Earth in the Suprematist tale about 2 squares, conceived and "built" for the "Common Cause" by N.F. Fedorov with his predictive concepts of human settlement on other planets and stars. Fedorov's ideas inspired the great engineer K.E. Tsiolkovsky, who managed to translate utopian projects into a practical dimension, into the sphere of reality.

Malevich had faith in the artistic process, which he had from early childhood and did not leave him until his death. More than once in his life he came into contact with archaic iconic forms of folk art. In the first, he saw the vector of the movement of contemporary art. The second gave him the origins of his own style - flatness, white background and pure color. Such motifs were characteristic of folk art at that time, one has only to remember the embroidery. But no matter how the genesis of Suprematism appeared before us, its main quality was novelty, as well as dissimilarity to everything that was created earlier. Malevich contrasted the traditional image with a Suprematist sign. But you should not understand this word in the generally accepted sense.

One of Malevich's followers said that there are two types of signs, they are already accustomed to some signs, they are already known. And the second category of signs was born in Malevich's head. For the master himself, his brainchild was a great source of interpretation. At different times, he drew various qualities from there. Malevich had his own new system, color painting instead of painting, as well as a new space. He had many sensations, very different. But the master's gaze was constantly changing.

At first, Suprematism was pure painting, which did not depend on reason, meaning, logic, psychology. But after a few years for the author, it turned into a philosophical system. Soon, quite ordinary signs began to appear in such paintings. Soon the cross becomes such a sign for Malevich, which means faith. Malevich felt the exhaustion of his painting already in 1920. He began to switch to other types of work - pedagogy, philosophy, architecture. But Malevich finally parted with painting a little later.

In 1929, at a personal exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery, Malevich unexpectedly presented a series of figurative paintings, presented by him as works of the early period. But soon one thing became clear to many - the Suprematist cycle was completed, Malevich began to return to the fine arts. To begin with, he just made free repetitions of early compositions: for example, the mowing machine kept in the Nizhny Novgorod Museum served as a prototype for the painting "At the Haymaking". All the changes that have taken place in Malevich's life and work become obvious.

In Malevich's paintings, space reappeared - distance, perspective, horizon. The famous master programmatically restores the traditional picture of the world, the inviolability of the top and bottom: the sky, as it were, crowns a person's head (he once wrote: “<...>our head should touch the stars "). This head itself with a thick beard is likened to an icon-painting image, and the vertical axis of the composition, passing through the figure of the mower, together with the horizon line forms a cross. "Cross - peasants" - this is how Malevich himself interpreted the etymology of this word. In his paintings, the peasant world is shown as the world of Christianity, nature, eternal values, in contrast to the city - the focus of dynamism, technology, "futuro-life."

In the late 1920s, the fascination with futurism was gone. It is for this reason that a nostalgically enlightened note appeared in the master's paintings, which sounds everywhere. The retrospective character of the image was seen in the inscription; "Motive 1909" (with this date the work entered the State Tretyakov Gallery). There is something in the image that is unlike the previous images of peasants by Malevich. Here one cannot fail to notice the meek gaze of this awkward, somehow unsteady man, as if resurrected from suprematist nothingness, as well as a colorful, unclouded radiance, heavenly blue. In these canvases, Malevich managed to adhere to the "sociology of color". According to his theory, color is fully inherent only in the village. The city, on the other hand, is more drawn to monochrome, the colors fade away, getting into the urban environment (for example, the clothes of the townspeople). During this period Malevich managed to find something in between - "half-image".

He combines the figurative motive with the principles of Suprematism - the aesthetics of the "right angle" and economy of funds, and most importantly - with the semantic polysemy achieved in it. As an example, you can look at the painting "Woman with a Rake". Malevich gave this canvas a subtitle - "Suprematism in the outline", and it is, the silhouette is simply filled with pointless geometrized elements that give the figure an abstract character that cannot be unambiguously deciphered.

The figure cannot be called neither a peasant, nor a robot, nor a mannequin, nor an inhabitant of an unknown planet - each of the definitions is not exhaustive, but they all "fit" into the artist's creation. Before us appeared an abstracted formula of a person in the world, cleansed of everything accidental and, I would venture to say, beautiful, but with its own architectonics. It was only necessary to appreciate the complex rhythm of lines and curves in the upper part of the figure. You could also look at the structure, into which the thickened paint of the sky is "poured". But nature itself, strictly speaking, shrank to a smooth field, like a sports lawn, with city buildings advancing from all directions; a rake in the hands of a woman is non-functional and conventional, it is something like a rod that confirms the stability of the world order.

We are faced with the main question, why Malevich himself dated his painting to 1915? Perhaps, in the evolution of his work invented by him, the master assigned her the place of the predecessor of constructivist images of the new man. Malevich consistently followed the path in the opposite direction. This path led him to two major motives - nature and man.

During the years of the creation of Suprematism, Malevich angrily thrashed the admiration for the "corners of nature." Now he returns to nature, the transmission of air and sunlight, the feeling of the living thrill of nature; all this can be seen in one of the best impressionistic paintings "Spring - Blooming Garden". At the beginning of 1930 Malevich paints the picture "Sisters", in the picture Malevich places strange, grotesquely disproportionate characters-twins into the picturesque landscape.

“An artist is never alone with the world - it is worth remembering that images always pop up in front of him, on which he learns his skill, which he seeks to imitate. Malevich had his own habits, as if traditions. Russian art has repeatedly tried to break out of it. Suprematism has become such a strong jerk. During this period, Malevich began a return to a new art - impressionism, painting by Cezanne. At one time they very much struck him. In the paintings of the French, Malevich is especially attracted by artistry, which he now considers as a pointless element, because it does not depend on what the artist depicts. For this reason, the new works of the master have nothing to do with what the audience of that time was used to seeing. Malevich understands his return as an inevitable compromise.

Many of his works, both logically and mythologically, represented the path from impressionism to suprematism. And after that, to the last Soviet stage, this was exactly what was confirmed by the author's dating of the received paintings. Such as: "Spring - a blooming garden" - 1904 (a sample of early work); The Sisters - 1910 (Cezanneism); "At the haymaking" - "motive 1909" (the beginning of cubism), "Dressing box", "Station without stopping" - 1911 (cubism), "Black square" - 1913; "Woman with a Rake" - 1915; "Girl with a Crest" and "Girl with a Red Pole" - with actual dates, 1932-1933. Only half a century later the amazing mystification of Malevich was revealed to the eyes of the viewer.

Three days later, on November 3, 2008, one of the rarest and most likely the most expensive work in the history of Russian art will be sold at the Sotheby’s auction with a record result

Three days later, on November 3, 2008, one of the rarest and most likely the most expensive work in the history of Russian art will be sold at a Sotheby’s auction with a record result.

Where does so much confidence come from? Because there are no options. After all, as a result of an incredible multi-pass restorative combination, a painting is submitted to the auction, representing the most valuable period of the most recognized Russian artist in the West, who had a significant impact on the ideology of world art in the 20th century. Perhaps that's enough with epithets. On both sides of the ocean, three words are generally enough: Malevich, Suprematist composition. Well, maybe add a couple more phrases: legally flawless, without any doubt about authenticity. The rest is understandable: both the fact that the chance to buy works of this class falls every 20-30-50 years, and the fact that they can really cost any money - due to their rarity and great importance, and so on. Therefore, the guaranteed irrevocable rate of $ 60 million, which was made by an anonymous foreigner, is really perceived only as a start. Both $ 100 and $ 120 million are possible, why not? One and a half to three million dollars for each of the nearly forty heirs, in whose interests the work will be sold. Although I would be more likely to bet on the $ 75 million figure.

Interestingly, "Suprematist Composition" is not the last chance for collectors and investors. In the foreseeable future, four more works by Malevich of unprecedented quality will probably go to the auction. With the exception of one Cubist work of 1913, everything else is the masterpieces of Suprematism from 1915-1922. And today there is an excellent occasion to recall the history of the issue and talk about the fate of the paintings - especially since the details have not yet been erased in memory.

The world learned that five of Malevich's masterpieces would probably go to the auction on April 24, 2008. On that day, it was announced that an agreement had been reached between the city authorities of Amsterdam and the heirs of Kazimir Malevich over the controversial works of the avant-garde artist from the Stedelijk Museum collection. New York-based law firm Herrick, Feinstein LLP, representing the heirs, secured the transfer of five significant works from the museum collection.

It is believed that Stedelijk Musium himself was a bona fide purchaser of the works. In 1958, they were legally purchased from the architect Hugo Hering. Then it turned out that Haring had no right to dispose of them as his own. This was recalled by the lawyers of the heirs. At first, the situation seemed like a stalemate: according to Dutch law, due to the expiration of the statute of limitations, there was no prospect for claims in Europe. But the lawyers found a loophole and ambushed the "Malevichs". When part of Stedelijk's collection, 14 paintings, went to exhibitions in the States in 2003 (in New York's Guggenheim and Houston's Menil Collection), the attack began. In the States, Stedelijk jobs have become vulnerable.

Why "got to the bottom" of Stedelijk? It is known that the largest and most significant collection of Malevich's works is located there. It consists not only of works for the Berlin exhibition in 1927, but also of part of the collection of Nikolai Khardzhiev and his wife Lilia Chaga. The very same collection with an archive, which was unofficially taken out of the USSR in the 1990s and also causes legal disputes, but that's another story. The battle unfolded precisely for the paintings from the Berlin exhibition in 1927. For Malevich, it was a "breakthrough to the West", a rare opportunity to declare his priority in ideas, so he selected works for her with great care. Even then Malevich feared that his works and innovative solutions might be hidden by the Soviet government from the world community. And he had every reason for this - that permission to travel abroad turned out to be the last one.

From the publications of the press investigations, it is possible to collect the following picture of events. Malevich brought about a hundred works to Berlin from his Leningrad studio, including about seventy paintings. But even before the expiry of the trip, Malevich was unexpectedly summoned back to the country by telegram. Anticipating something was wrong, but still hoping to return, Malevich left his works for safekeeping to the architect Hugo Hering. However, Malevich was not destined to take them away: he was no longer allowed abroad until his death in 1935. At the end of the exhibition, Haring sent the works of the Suprematist for safekeeping to the director of the Hanover Museum, Alexander Dorner. He had them and saw the then director of MOMA Alfred Barr, who selected material in Europe for the exhibition "Cubism and Abstract Art". Allegedly considering Dorner the rightful manager of the work, Barr bought two paintings and a couple of drawings from him. He also selected seventeen works for an exhibition in New York. (The number of works differs in different documents, but now this is no longer important.) According to other sources, Dorner had to get a visa at any cost to leave Germany, and it is believed that Malevich's paintings were used as an argument in this matter.

By some miracle, this cargo was transported overseas. The historical landscape was such that the Nazis were already labeling themselves as "degenerate art." There were already confiscations, and even his own, bought, Malevich, who also represented the "art of degeneration," Director Barr smuggled across the border, hiding the canvases in an umbrella. Three years after the events described, Dorner himself had to emigrate to the United States, taking with him one painting and drawing. And the rest - to return back to Hugo Haring, with whom it all began. No matter what they say about Hering later, he still managed to reliably hide paintings and drawings and preserve Malevich's legacy during the war period.

Then, in 1958, let me remind you that Hering's works were bought by a Dutch museum. So in Stedelijk there was a gorgeous selection of Suprematist oils from the mid-1910s (70 x 60, and sometimes meter), cubist compositions from 1913-1914 and other valuable works. All finished masterpieces of the highest quality.

Meanwhile, the works that had sailed overseas with Barr were regularly exhibited at MOMA. In 1963, when for almost three decades none of the heirs claimed their rights, they became part of the permanent museum collection. Problems began only in 1993, when, after the collapse of the USSR, Malevich's heirs, with the assistance of the German art historian Clemens Toussaint, initiated negotiations with MOMA to return the works. As a result, in 1999, the New York Museum of Modern Art agreed to pay monetary compensation to the heirs (the size was not named, but, according to rumors, about five million dollars were paid) and to return one of the sixteen paintings - "Suprematist Composition" with black and red rectangles. forming a cross. The remaining fifteen works seem to have remained on display at the museum. This is what the newspapers of the time wrote. There is another version that more paintings were returned (which is hard to believe). But I must admit that the museum got off easy anyway.

The fate of the "Suprematist Composition" judged from MOMA in 1999 was immediately clear as day. Already in May 2000, at the Phillips auction in New York, the canvas was sold for 17 million dollars (5th line in the rating of the most expensive paintings by Russian artists) against the expected ten million. Perhaps this experience taught the heirs not to exchange money for monetary compensation in the future - it is more profitable to take pictures.

Malevich is one of the most forged artists. Relatively safe to work with his things (usually graphics) can only be very experienced collectors. Therefore, it is so important that the works sued by the heirs will not only have an iron provenance, but now they will also be completely "white" from a legal point of view: their new owner will no longer be able to terrorize with claims, playing on dubious origins (as, for example, they tortured Andrew Lloyd Webber with his "Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto" (1903) by Picasso). Completely legal Malevich, freed from the dark past, is a huge rarity on the market, that is, a thing with the highest liquidity. It is safe to buy it from all points of view. And beneficial from all points of view. As they say, this is a thing "for a wide range of readers", even in art it is not necessary to understand. So it won't be long to wait for the record. Only three days.

Malevich's Suprematist works are the first purely geometric abstractions in the history of painting. First shown in 1914 at the Petrograd art bureau of Nadezhda Dobychina, abstract compositions marked the beginning of a new history of painting. "Suprematist Composition" of 1916 is one of the best and most complex works of the revolutionary series, the embodiment of what Malevich described as his "Suprematist" vision of the world.

As Loic Guser, co-chairman of Christie's post-war and contemporary art department, wrote on Instagram: “Created in 1916, Kazimir Malevich's Suprematist Composition is a kind of Big Bang, a starting point in the history of modernism. From a historical point of view, a work of art from all that I was lucky enough to deal with throughout my career. Rothko, not Barnett Newman, not even those artists who denied the basic principles of his work, such as Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning. completely different and, most likely, much less interesting.This is not just Malevich, this is the best Malevich and period (I even remember how I studied this particular p work at one of the classes at University College London). This work is perhaps better than any of those that we see today in any private or museum collection in the world. A work like this deserves to be the cornerstone of any large private or museum collection. If the market was focused on the historical significance of works of art, this work would be worth a billion dollars (although, as specialists, we must take into account natural laws, so the estimate would be about $ 70 million). "

"Suprematist Composition" was included in all of the artist's lifetime retrospectives, from the first major exhibition in Moscow in 1919 to the Berlin exhibition in 1927. Due to his urgent return to the USSR, Malevich left more than a hundred works in Berlin, including "Suprematist Composition". The architect Hugo Goering saved the painting from destruction in Nazi Germany as an object of "degenerate art" by transferring Malevich's archive to Amsterdam.

After World War II, Goering's heirs sold the work to the collection of the Amsterdam City Museum. In 2004, the City Museum of Amsterdam exhibited "Suprematist Composition" in the United States, where the heirs of Kazimir Malevich demanded restitution. After several years of lawsuits, the work was returned to the heirs. In 2008, Kazimir Malevich's "Suprematist Composition" was sold at the Sotheby's New York auction with a world record of $ 60,002,500. Christie "s put the" Suprematist Composition "up for auction on May 15 with an estimate of $ 70 million, initially exceeding world record.

Malevich's second work at the Christie's auction this summer - Landscape in 1911 at auction in London on June 20. Landscape - a sample of a "pure" landscape painting - was first shown at the Moscow Salon in February – March 1911. In In 1927, "Landscape" was also exhibited at Malevich's retrospective in Berlin, and was also left by the artist in Germany. The work was discovered after the war, acquired by the Basel Museum of Art, in the collection of which was for more than 50 years, and then returned to the heirs of the artist. Landscape ”is exhibited for the first time.

What is the interest: an original view of art and the creative process, as a reflection of a person's cognition of reality. In Malevich's concept, the main emphasis is placed on feelings and sensations transmitted (evoked) by art, pure in their natural primordiality.

I didn’t put notes about where Malevich’s work and what was crossed out and what was corrected. Who is interested in such details - read the book.

A source: « Kazimir Malevich. Collected works in five volumes » ... Vol.2, 1998

This part of the book was written during Malevich's stay in Berlin specifically for publication (the manuscript, as well as the layout of Part I, were received by the CMA from the von Riesen archive). Unfortunately, the manuscript is incomplete - it lacks the “brief information” about Suprematism mentioned by Malevich in the first lines. In order to get as close as possible to the German publication and to preserve the coherence of the text, we were forced to give a short introduction (before the text repeating the existing original) in a “reverse” translation, that is, from German into Russian. This beginning is broken off from the further text. Malevich's identified text begins with the words: "So, from this short reference ..."

The original, kept at the Museum of Art (Inventory No. 17), consists of 11 handwritten sheets of an elongated format. Sheets starting from No. 3 are double numbered. The manuscript ends at sheet 11 (13). The beginning (introduction), intermediate pages and the end of the manuscript have not yet been found.

In this publication, based on the original source from the AGR archive, the main premises of the publication are preserved:

- the desire to preserve as much as possible the coherence of the publication, identical to the German version;
- make the original text of Malevich as fully accessible as possible;
- it seems most expedient to keep in the publication the composition of the text chosen in the first publication in Russian in the book: D. Sarabyanov, A. Shatskikh. Kazimir Malevich. Painting. Theory. M., 1993.

This publication has been revised from the 1993 publication after verification against the original manuscript. The notes mark (and publish) parts of the manuscript that were omitted in the German version and in the publication of 1993, as well as some paragraphs crossed out by Malevich that are of substantial interest. All such cases are negotiable.

Under Suprematism I understand the supremacy of pure sensation in the visual arts.

From the point of view of the Suprematist, the phenomena of the objective nature, as such, do not matter; only the feeling as such is essential, completely independent of the environment in which it was evoked.

The so-called "concentration" of sensation in consciousness means, in essence, the concretization of the reflection of sensation through a real representation. Such a real representation in the art of Suprematism is of no value ... And not only in the art of Suprematism, but also in Art in general, for the constant, actual value of a work of Art (no matter what “school” it belongs to) consists only in the expression of sensation.

Academic Naturalism, Impressionist Naturalism, Cezanneism, Cubism, etc. - all of them are, to some extent, nothing more than dialectical methods, which in themselves in no way determine the intrinsic value of a work of Art.

The objective image in itself (objective as the goal of the image) is something that has nothing to do with Art, but the use of the objective in a work of Art does not exclude the high artistic value of such. Therefore, for the Suprematist, that means of expression is always given, which expresses sensation as such as fully as possible and ignores the familiarity of objectivity. The objective in itself does not matter to him; representations of consciousness - have no value.

Feeling is the most important thing ... And thus Art comes to non-objective image- to Suprematism.

* * *

So, from this brief reference, it can be seen that, and I called this output the leading one, i.e. suprematist. Art came out to the desert, in which there is nothing but the feeling of the desert. The artist freed himself from all ideas - images and representations and the objects that flow from them, and the entire structure of dialectical life.

This is the philosophy of Suprematism, leading Art to itself, i.e. Art as such, not considering the world, but sensing, not to the awareness and touch of the world, but to feeling and sensation.

The philosophy of Suprematism dares to think that Art, which has so far been on the services of formalizing religious ideas and government, will be able to build the world of Art as a world of sensations and formalize its production in those relations that will stem from its attitude.

Thus, on the objectless desert of Art, a new world of sensations will be erected, the world of Art, expressing all its sensations in the form of Art.

Moving in the general flow of Art, freeing itself from objectivity as a world-consciousness, in 1913 I came to the shape of a square, which was greeted by critics as a feeling of a complete desert. Criticism, together with society, exclaimed: “Everything that we loved, everything has disappeared. Before us is a black square in a white frame. " The society tried to find the words of the spell, together with criticism, in order to destroy the desert with them and to evoke on the square again the images of those phenomena that restore a world full of love, subject and spiritual relationships.

And indeed, this moment of the ascent of Art higher and higher up the mountain becomes with each step eerie and at the same time light, objects went further and further, deeper and deeper in the blue of the distance the outlines of life were hidden, and the path of Art went higher and higher and ended only where all the contours of things had already disappeared, everything that we loved and lived with, there were no images, no representations, and instead a desert opened up, in which consciousness, subconsciousness and the idea of ​​space were lost. The desert was filled with piercing waves of pointless sensations.

It was also terrifying for me to part with the figurative world, the will and the idea in which I lived and which reproduced and took for the reality of being. But the feeling of lightness pulled me and brought me to a complete desert, which became ugly, but only a sensation, and this became my content.

But the desert only seemed like a desert both to society and to criticism, because they got used to recognizing milk only in a bottle, and when Art showed sensations as such, naked, they were not recognized. But not a bare square in a white frame was exposed by me, but only the feeling of a desert, and this was already the content. Art has gone up to the top of the mountain, so that objects gradually fall asleep from it as false concepts of will and representations from the image. The forms that we see, and in which the images of one or another sensation are contained, have disappeared; in other words, they took a bottle of milk for the image of milk. Thus, Art carried away with itself only the sense of sensations in their pure primitive Suprematist beginning.

And maybe, in the form of Art that I call suprematist, Art has come again to its primitive stage of pure sensation, which later turned into a shell of a shell, behind which the creature itself is not visible.

The shell grew out of sensations and hid in itself a being that neither awareness nor imagination can imagine. Hence it seems to me that Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian and others are only that beautiful shell, that body, behind which the essence of the sensations of Art is not visible to society. And when these sensations were removed from the frames of the body, the society would not recognize him. Therefore, society takes the image for the image of a hidden entity in it, which has nothing similar to the image. And the face of the hidden essence of sensations can be completely contradictory to the image, if, of course, it is completely faceless, imageless, objectless.

That is why the Suprematist square at one time seemed naked, for the shell was sleeping, the image painted in a multi-colored mother-of-pearl overflow of painting was sleeping. That is why society, even now, is still convinced that Art is heading towards destruction, for it has lost the image, the one that was loved and lived with, lost touch with life itself and became an abstract phenomenon. He is no longer interested in either Religion, or the State, or the social side of life, he is not interested in what Art creates, as society thinks. Art has departed from its source and therefore must perish.

But this is not the case. Non-objective-Suprematist art is full of sensations, and the feelings remained the same in the artist, which he had in his objective-figurative, ideological life. The only question is that the objectlessness of Art is the art of pure sensations, it is milk without a bottle, living by itself, in its own form, having its own life, and it does not depend on the shape of the bottle, which does not at all express its essence and taste sensations ...

Just as a dynamic sensation is not expressed by the form of a person. After all, if a person expressed the full force of dynamic sensation, then there would be no need to build a machine; if he could express his sense of speed, he wouldn't have to build a train.

Therefore, he expresses the sensation existing in him in forms other than himself, and if an airplane appeared, then it appeared not because social conditions, economic, expedient, were the reason for this, but only because a sensation of speed, movement, which was looking for a way out in it and eventually took the shape of an airplane.

It is another matter when this form was adapted to commercial economic affairs, and the result was the same picture as with a picturesque feeling - behind the face of "Ivan Petrovich", or "State leader", or "bagel merchant" the essence and reason of the origin of the species is not visible, because the “face of Ivan Petrovich” became that shell with pearlescent tints, behind which the essence of Art is not visible.

And Art became, as it were, a special method and technique for depicting the face of "Ivan Petrovich". Thus, airplanes also became expedient objects.

In fact, there is no goal in either one or the other, for this or that phenomenon arises from this or that being of sensation. An airplane is a cross between a wagon and a steam locomotive, like a Demon between God and the Devil. Just as the Demon was not intended to tempt young nuns, as Lermontov intended him, so the airplane is not intended to carry letters or chocolate from place to place. An airplane is a sensation, but not a useful postage thing. The work is a sensation, but not a canvas in which you can wrap a potato.

So, certain sensations must find their way out and be expressed by a person only because the strength of the incoming sensation is more than a person is able to withstand, therefore, only those constructions that we see in the whole life of sensations appear. If the human body could not give way to its sensations, then it would perish, because sensation would unwind its entire nervous system.

Is this not the cause of all the various kinds of life and at the same time the depiction of new forms, new methods for creating systems of one or another sensation?

Suprematism is that new objectless system of relations between elements through which sensations are expressed. The Suprematist square is the first element from which the Suprematist method was built.

Without them, i.e. without faces and things, says society, Art has doomed itself to complete non-existence.

But this is not the case. Non-objective art is full of the same sensations and the same feelings that were in it earlier in the life of objective, figurative, ideological, which was shaped by the need for ideas, that all sensations and representations were told in forms that were created by other reasons and for other purposes. So, for example, if a painter wanted to convey a mystical or dynamic sensation, then he expressed them through the form of a person or a machine.

In other words, to say, the painter told his feeling, showing that these or those objects that were completely not intended for this. Therefore, it seems to me that Art is now in a non-objective way finds its own language, its form of expression, arising from this or that sensation.

The Suprematist square was the first element from which a new form of expression of sensations in general was built in Suprematism. And the square itself on white is a form arising from the feeling of the desert of nothingness.

So, these or those sensations must find their way out and be expressed in form, according to their rhythm. This form will be the sign in which the sensation flows. One form or another will be conducive to the contact of sensation, realized through feeling.

The white-framed square was already the first form of pointless sensation. White fields are not fields framing a black square, but only a desert sensation, a sensation of nothingness, in which the appearance of a square-shaped form is the first objectless element of sensation. This is not the end of Art, as it is still believed, but the beginning of the real essence. The society does not recognize this essence, just as it does not recognize the artist in the theater in the role of this or that face, for the face of the other covers the real face of the artist.

But perhaps this example also points to the other side - because therefore the artist is clothed in a different face, in a role, for Art has no face. Indeed, each artist in his role does not feel the face, but only the feeling of the represented face.

Suprematism is that end and beginning when sensations become naked, when Art becomes as such, without a face. The Suprematist square is the same element as the dash of primitive man, which in its repetition subsequently expressed feelings not of ornament, but only of rhythm.

The Suprematist square in its changes creates new types of elements and relationships between them, depending on one or another sensation. Suprematism tries to understand for itself the impersonality of the world and the objectlessness of Art. And this is equal to get out of the circle of efforts to understand the world, its ideas and touch.

The Suprematist Square in the world of Art as an element of pure Art of sensations was not something new in its sensation. The antique column, freed from the service of life, received its real essence, it became only a sensation of Art, it became Art as such, pointless.

Life as a social relationship, like a homeless vagabond, enters any form of Art and makes it a living space. In addition, she was convinced that she was the cause of the emergence of one or another form of Art. After spending the night, she abandons this lodging house as an unnecessary thing, but it turns out that after life freed Art, it became even more valuable, it is stored in museums no longer as an expedient thing, but as an objectless Art as such, for it has never did not follow from a purposeful life.

The only difference between non-objective art and the past will be that the latter became non-objective after the passing life went into more favorable searches for economic conditions, and the square of Suprematism in particular and the non-objectiveness of Art in general appeared in the life ahead.

There is a pointless Art without windows and doors, as a spiritual sensation that does not seek for itself any benefit, no expedient things, no commercial benefits of ideas, no good, no "promised lands."

The art of Moses is a path, the goal of which is to bring you to the “promised land”. Therefore, he still builds expedient objects and railways, for on foot the humanity brought out of "Egypt" is tired of walking. But mankind is tired of traveling by train, now it is beginning to learn to fly and is already climbing high, but the "promised land" is not visible.

This is the only reason why Moses was never interested in Art and is not interested now, because first of all he wants to find the “promised land”.

Therefore, only he expels abstract phenomena and affirms concrete ones. Therefore, his life is not in a pointless spirit, only in mathematical calculations of gain. Hence, Christ did not come to affirm the expedient laws of Moses, as soon as to annul them, for he said: "The kingdom of heaven is within us." By this he said that there are no paths to the promised lands, therefore there is no expedient railway, no one can even indicate that it is there or in another place, therefore, no one can lead the road to it. Thousands of years have passed in man's journey, but there is no "promised land".

Despite all the already historical experience of finding the true road to the promised land and attempts to make an expedient object, society is still trying to find it, more and more straining its muscles, raising the blade and striving to break through all obstacles, but the blade only slid in the air, for in the space was not obstructed, but only the hallucinations of the performance.

Historical experience shows us that only Art was able to make phenomena that remain absolute, constant. Everything has disappeared, only the monuments remain to live for centuries.

Hence, in Suprematism there arises the idea of ​​revising life from the point of feeling of Art, the idea of ​​opposing Art to objective life, utilitarianism, and purposefulness to aimlessness. It is at this moment that the strongest attack of Mosesism on non-objective art begins, Moiseism, which requires the immediate opening of a hole into supra-like architectonic sensations, for it requires rest after work on purposeful objects. Demands to take off the measure and arrange for him a den, a co-operative tavern. Prepare more gasoline, oil for the further journey.

But the appetites of locusts are different from those of bees, the dimensions of Art are different from those of Moiseism, its economic laws cannot be the laws of Art, for sensations do not know economy. Religious ancient temples are not beautiful because they were the den of this or that form of life, but because their forms were formed from the feeling of plastic relations. Therefore, only they are vital now, and therefore the forms of the social life that surrounded them are non-vital.

Until now, life has developed from two points of view for the good: the first is material, food-economic, the second is religious; there should have been a third - the point of view of Art, but the last was considered by the first two points as an applied phenomenon, the forms of which follow from the first two. Economic life was not considered from the point of view of Art, for Art was not yet that sun, in whose warmth grasping life would blossom.

In fact, Art plays a huge role in the construction of life and leaves exceptionally beautiful forms for thousands of years. It has that ability, a technique that people cannot achieve in the purely material way of seeking a good land. Is it not surprising that with a bristle brush and a chisel, the artist creates great things, creates what the technical sophistication of utilitarian mechanics cannot create.

People of the most utilitarian outlook still see in Art the apotheosis of the day - it is true that in this apotheosis there is "Ivan Petrovich", the face of life personification, but nevertheless, with the help of Art, this face became the apotheosis. Thus, pure Art is still covered by the face-mask of life, and therefore the form of life that could be developed from the point of view of Art is not visible.

It would seem that the entire mechanical utilitarian world should have a single goal - to free up time for a person for his main life - making Art "as such", to limit the feeling of hunger in favor of the feeling of Art.

The tendency developed by people to design purposefully useful and purposeful things, striving to overcome the sensations of Art, should pay attention to the fact that, in fact, there are no things in a pure utilitarian form, more than ninety-five percent of things result from the sensation of plastic.

There is no need to look for convenient and expedient things, because historical experience has already proved that people could never do such a thing: everything that is now collected in museums will prove that not a single thing is convenient and does not achieve its goal. Otherwise, it would not have stood in museums, so if it seemed comfortable before, it only seemed, and this is now proven by the fact that the collected things are inconvenient in everyday life, and our modern "expedient things" only seem to us as such, tomorrow is will prove that they couldn't be comfortable. All the same, what is done by Art is beautiful, and it is confirmed by all the future; therefore, we only have Art.

Perhaps, due to its personal fear, Suprematism left objective life in order to reach the peak of naked Art and from its pure peak to look at life and refract it in the plastic sensation of Art. And indeed, not everything is so firmly and not all phenomena are firmly and authentically established in it, so that it would be impossible to establish Art in its pure sensation.

I discovered a great struggle between sensations - the sensation of God was struggling with the sensation of the Devil, the sensation of hunger with the sensation of beauty, etc. But, analyzing further, I learned that images and representations fought as reflexes of sensations, causing visions and concepts of the differences and advantages of sensations.

Thus, the sensation of God sought to conquer the sensation of the Devil and conquer at the same time the body, i.e. all material care, convincing people "not to collect gold for themselves on the ground." The destruction, therefore, of all wealth, the destruction of even Art, which was only later used as a bait for people who in their essence were rich were a sense of splendor in Art.

By virtue of the sensation of God, religion arose "as production" and all industrial religious utensils, etc.

Due to the feeling of hunger, factories, factories, bakeries and all economic food items were built. The body is chanted. This sensation also calls on Art to apply itself to the forms of utilitarian objects, all for the same bait of people, because purely utilitarian things are not accepted by people, for this they are made of two sensations - "beautiful-utilitarian" ("pleasant and useful", as society says ). Even food - and that is served in artistic dishes, as if inedible in other dishes.

We see even in life an interesting phenomenon that the materialist-atheist takes the religious side, and vice versa. The latter means its transition from one sensation to another or the disappearance of one of the sensations in it. The reason for this action, I attribute to the impact of reflexes of sensations, setting in motion "consciousness".

Hence, our life is that radio station, into which waves of different sensations fall and are realized in this or that kind of things. Turning on and off these waves again depends on the feeling in whose hands the radio station is.

It is also interesting that one or another sensation is being squeezed in under the guise of Art. The atheists keep the icon in museums only because it has taken on the form of an Art sensation.

From this it is clear that Art occupies the most important role in life, but nevertheless does not occupy the main starting point from which it was possible to look at bread with different eyes.

We cannot say that life exists only in this or that sensation, or that this or that sensation is the main base of all the others, or that everything else is intoxication and deception. Life is a theater of images of sensations, in one case, and in the other - pure sensations, non-objective, extraordinary, non-ideological.

Aren't all people artists who strive to represent this or that sensation in images? Isn't the Spiritual Patriarch an artist in vestments when expressing a religious feeling? General, soldier, bookkeeper, clerk, hammer - aren't these roles in these or other plays that they play and go into ecstasy, as if such plays actually exist in the world?

In this eternal theater of life, we never yet see the true face of a person, for whoever you ask who he is, he will say: “I am an artist of this or that theater of sensations, I am a merchant, an accountant, an officer,” and such accuracy is even spelled out in the passport and the name and patronymic and surname of the person are accurately written out, which should convince anyone that this person is really not Ivan, but Casimir.

We are a mystery to ourselves that hides the human image. Suprematist philosophy is skeptical about this mystery as well, for it doubts whether there really is a human image or face that would have to be hidden in a secret.

Not a single work that depicts a face depicts a person, it only depicts a mask through which this or that imageless sensation flows, and what we call a person will be a beast tomorrow, and an angel the day after tomorrow - it will depend on whether or not another being of sensation.

Artists, perhaps, stick to the human face, because they see in it the best mask through which they can express certain sensations.

The New Art, like Suprematism, turned off a person's face, just as the Chinese turned off the object-pictorial from the alphabet, establishing a different sign for the transmission of certain sensations. Because they feel in the latter an exceptionally pure sensation. Thus, a sign that expresses this or that sensation is not an image of sensation. A button that passes a current is not an image of a current. The painting is not a real image of a face, for there is no such face.

Hence, the philosophy of Suprematism does not consider the world, does not perceive it, does not see it, but only feels it.

* * *

So, on the border of the 19th and 20th centuries, Art came to itself - to a pure expression of sensation, throwing off other sensations of religious and social ideas imposed on it. It puts itself on a par with other sensations. Therefore, each form of it has its source only the last basis. And from this basis all life can be viewed.

The built temple was not built otherwise, but only in this way; each thing in it is not a thing, as it is understood in a utilitarian-religious sensation, but only a composition of a plastic sensation, despite the fact that it consists of two sensations, God and Art, i.e. from a coming idea and a constant feeling of unchanging. Such a temple is only eternal in its form, because in it there is a composition of the unchanging sensation of Art. It is a monument of Art, but not of a religious form, for we do not even know it.

The “utilitarian” things would not have been preserved in museums if the hand of the artist had not touched them, who had drawn a sense of Art between them and man. This also proves that their sense of utilitarianism is accidental, it has never been significant.

Things created apart from the feeling of Art do not contain an absolute, unchanging element. Such things are not preserved in museums, but betrayed by their time, and if they are preserved, they are preserved as a fact of human thoughtlessness. Such a thing is an object, i.e. instability, temporality, while artistic things are non-objective, the so-called. stable, unchanging. It seems to society that the artist does unnecessary things, it turns out that his unnecessary thing exists for centuries, and the necessary one - one day.

This implies the idea that if society aims to achieve such a composition of human life so that "peace and goodwill" occurs, then this composition needs to be built so that it cannot change, because if at least one element changes its position, then its change will entail a violation of the established composition.

We see that the artists' sense of Art sets the composition of the elements into a relationship that becomes unchanged. Consequently, they can build the Unchanging World. Museums, which have already collected "unnecessary" things, can confirm this - the unnecessary turned out to be more important than the necessary things.

Society does not notice this, does not notice that it is looking at authentic things behind the necessary things; also, for the same reason, it cannot build the World among itself, - non-peaceful things close the World, the non-value darkens the valuable.

Thus, artistic things that are in life are of little value, obviously because they carry a lot of unnecessary, everyday, everyday things. But when they are freed from unnecessary, i.e. strangers, then acquire great value and are stored in special rooms called museums. The latter proves that utilitarianism imposed on Art only devalues ​​it.

Is it possible now to evaluate Art from the point of view of the feeling of hunger, i.e. its utilitarian constructiveness, and take the "necessary life" as the measurement of the "unnecessary", i.e. Arts? It seems to me that it is impossible. This gives the most absurd result and an estimate of the latter. Hunger is only one of the sensations and cannot be measured in terms of other sensations.

* * *

The sensation that requires sitting, lying, standing is, first of all, a plastic sensation that evokes the corresponding plastic forms, therefore the chair, the bed, and the table are not utilitarian phenomena, but only plastic ones, otherwise the artist cannot feel them. So if we say that all objects in their form follow from the feeling of hunger (utilitarianism), then this is not true; you need to analyze them carefully to make sure of this.

Generally speaking, we do not know utilitarian objects, for if we knew them, then, obviously, they would have been built long ago, and it is obvious that we will not have to recognize them; maybe we only feel them, and since the sensation is both non-figurative and non-objective, it is impossible to see an object in it, therefore the attempt of representation to overcome the sensation of “knowledge” gives the sum of unnecessary utilitarian objects.

Along with this, plastic works of artists are known to them, and only because of this they can do them. The work they make remains for us forever a work that satisfies our sense of beauty. The artist, therefore, is a good conductor of sensation.

Any thing arising from social conditions is temporary, and works arising from the sensation of Art are timeless. If social elements are included in the work that have taken on a plastic sensation, then in the near future, with the slightest change in social conditions, they lose their strength, fall out of order - only plastic sensations remain, which are unchanged in all changes in social life.

* * *

The Contemporary New Art of the sensation of the pictorial indicated the form of new architecture; the new element, which was named Suprematist, became an architectural element. This element did not in any way flow out of this or that social structure of life. This phenomenon of New Art is not even recognizable either by the bourgeois structure of life, or by the socialist, Bolshevik; the former believe that the New Art is Bolshevik, and the latter that it is bourgeois (see the newspaper of April 2, 1927 - article "Kathedrall sozialistische", "Leningradskaya Pravda" for 1926, May).

Social conditions result from the sensation of hunger, they can only give appropriate things, they do not seek plastic norms, but purely material ones. They cannot create art, just as ants cannot produce honey. Therefore, there are artists who, in fact, create the values ​​of the state.

New Art is a vivid proof that it is the result of a plastic sensation, there are no signs of a social system in it, and therefore it seems to the socialists unnecessary, because they do not see a social structure in it, they do not see in it either images of political or agitational moments, although the latter does not exclude the possibility that the artist can also be a socialist, anarchist, etc.

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At the present time, Art has come out, as I said, to itself for the construction of its own world, arising from the plastic sensation of Art. This aspiration led to the disappearance of objects in him, the disappearance of images of the phenomena and social conditions around us.

Thus, it has lost the ability or function to represent life; for this each of these artists is paid dearly by the masters of life, who cannot exploit him in any way for their own benefit.

But such phenomena in the history of Art are not something new. Art has always built its own world, and in the fact that other ideas found an apartment in its world, it is innocent, a hollow in a tree was not at all intended for a bird's nest, and the created temple was not at all intended for a dwelling of a religious idea, for it is primarily a temple of Art , which still remains a temple, just as a hollow remains a hollow first of all, but not a nest.

So now we are faced with a new fact, when the New Art begins to build its plastic world of sensations - it translates from a project drawn on a canvas to the construction of these relations in space.

Die Gegenstandslose Welt (Bauhausbucher, 11). Munich, 1927.