Monday, December 19, 2016

Russian Painters in Madrid

Ilyá Chashnik
Composición suprematista
1923
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

"I have ripped through the blue lampshade of the constraints of color. I have come out into the white. Follow me, comrade aviators. Swim into the abyss."

 Kazimir Malevich (1919)

Liubov Popova
Painterly Architectonic
1918
oil on linen-burlap
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Liubov Popova
Painterly Architectonic
1918
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

"My research has shown that color in its basic state is autonomous; that is, each ray has its own energy and characteristics . . . I think that freedom can be attained only after our ideas about the organization of solids have been completely smashed . . Nature's perfection lies in the absolute blind freedom of units within it  units which are at the same time absolutely interdependent."

 Kazimir Malevich (1921)

Nikolai Suetin
Suprematism
1920-21
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

El Lissitsky
Proun 4B
1919-20
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

"All the arts are mortal, and not just the individual artwork, but Art as a whole. One day Rembrandt's last portrait will cease to exist, even though the painted canvas will still be intact; because the eye that can apprehend this language of forms will have disappeared."

 quoted in 1920 by El Lissitsky from Spengler's Decline of the West

Nadeshda Udaltsova
Cubism
1914
canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Olga Rozanova
Man on the Street (Analysis of volumes)
1913
canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Varvara Stepanova
Billiard Players
1920
canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

"The workers of the towns and some of the villages choke in the throes of hunger. The railroads barely crawl. The houses are crumbling. The towns are full of garbage. Epidemics spread and death strikes out right and left. Industry is mined from within."

 report in Pravda, 26 February 1920

David Kakabadze
Untitled
1920
oil on cardboard
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

David Burliuk
Landscape
1912
canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Mikhail Larionov
Street with Lanterns
1913
oil on burlap
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Mikhail Larionov
Blue Nude
ca. 1908
canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Wassily Kandinsky
Picture with Three Spots No. 196
1914
canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Wassily Kandinsky
In the Bright Oval
1925
oil on cardboard
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

"The world is like a hole and the hole itself is not hollow. I can cut a section across the emptiness, a grid or a sieve . . . and maybe here  out of the grid  I can extract a point or a line  . . . but once again Man will fall into the error of taking the point  or line for reality, for things that exist . . ."

 from God is Not Cast Down, a 1922 essay by Kazimir Malevich, the English translation revised and published by T.J. Clark in Farewell to an Idea : Episodes from a History of Modernism (Yale, 1999), from which all quoted passages used here are drawn.

I am grateful to Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid for making these excellent reproductions available.