Kazimir Malevich and the Art of Geometry
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Kazimir Malevich and the Art of Geometry Details
During 1915, in the midst of the war years that preceded the Russian Revolution, Kazimir Malevich devised and displayed a completely unprecedented geometric style of painting that he called Suprematism. By the 1920s, geometric art had become an international phenomenon. John Milner examines Malevich's art of geometry by looking at its sources of inspiration, its methods and its meanings and, arguing persuasively that it is based on obsolete Russian units of measurement rather than the decimal system, has found a new interpretative tool with which to understand this pioneering art.Milner describes Malevich's early work (pointing out his sensitivity to Russian and West European art, with their diverse traditions of depicting time and space) alongside contemporary developments in physics and mathematics, including theories such as that of the fourth dimension. He closely examines Malevich's designs for the 1913 futurist opera Victory over the Sun, the first major public manifestation of the artist's remarkable synthesis of proportion, perspective, mathematics, and futurist imagery.Malevich's subsequent display of Suprematist paintings, in 1915, was based on an elaborate system of space and proportion which even determined the actual hanging of the exhibition. Milner shows that his proportional system derived from the ancient Russian units of the arshin and the vershok. Sixteen vershok make one arshin, and one arshin is equal to 71.12cm. Malevich, along with his contemporaries, was drawing upon both traditional and modern mathematical theory to create some of the most influential, coherent and dynamic non-objective paintings of this century.
Reviews
Although we associate Piet Mondrian as the father of abstract geometric art, a somewhat earlier pioneer, paralleling his development through Cubism, was Malevich. This book may have its central thesis of describing the influence of the old Russian spatial measure of the arshin, 16 of which consist a vershok, but what is more important to this reader is how Russian artists learned what was happening in Paris, with the Impressionists and later the Cubists, and how the solid tones of Paul Gauguin brought forth Malevich's producive experiments in geometric conical solids of Suprematism, that in turn was reduced to the radically minimalistic black square on white square canvas. From this single element, the subsequent proportional arrangements of square, rectangle, and line elements upon the canvas offered psychological studies of form and space. As so well described, the importance of rich Russian merchant collectors of contemporary novel art and the exhibition of these work cannot be underestimated. In the turbulent times of late Czarist and early Bolshevik Russia, artists were far from the Parisian center of innovation, but from this backwater came a new vision: pure abstraction of forms. The book is a tad dry in prose, with perhaps too much emphasis on the author's pet concepts of measure and proportion, but the information on the artistic development of this pioneer painter is exceedingly worthy.