By 1913, Malevich was experimenting with cubist compositions clearly
inspired by Picasso, whose early
cubist work was well known to Russian artists through the impressive
holdings of the Moscow collector
Sergei Shchukin as well as through numerous reproductions in the leading
Russian journals. As always, however, the
Russian avant-garde artists did not merely imitate their French contemporaries.
The Russian avant-garde painters of
this inclination called themselves cubo-futurists, to signify their
synthesis of cubist technique and futurist ideology.
Malevich's composition in "Cow and Violin" (1913) differs sharply from
Picasso's work both in its more colorful
palate and in its playful use of an entire miniature cow superimposed
on the fragmented instrument. The latter lends
Malevich's painting a humorously grotesque note absent in Picasso's
more analytic canvases. In this same year,
Malevich designed his pathbreaking sets and costumes for the futurist
opera "Victory Over the Sun"
By 1913, Natalia Goncharova, too,
had moved from primitivist to completely non- objective painting. This
"Abstract Composition" still contains
her typically bright palate, but it no longer refers even nominally to
any
external reality. It is, rather, an example of pure painting for its
own sake.
In 1913, Larionov and Goncharova developed what may have been the first
original Russian school of
non-objective painting, Rayonnism. According to the first Rayonnist
manifesto, written by Larionov and
Goncharova in 1913, "The style of Rayonnist painting that we advance
signifies spatial forms which are obtained
arising from the intersection of the reflected rays of various objects,
and forms chosen by the artist's will. The ray is
depicted provisionally on the surface by a colored line. That which
is valuable for the lover of painting finds its
maximum expression in a rayonnist picture. The objects that we see
in life play no role here, but that which is the
essence of painting itself can be shown here best of all--the combination
of color, its saturation, the relation of
colored masses, depth, texture." (for a full text, see Bowlt, pp. 87-91).
Like cubism, however, the non-objectivity of
rayonnism initially grew out the analytic deconstruction of real objects,
evolving gradually into pure abstraction, as in
this composition of Larionov which probably dates from 1913.
Working in parallel, Malevich also
created a system of abstract painting that he would call suprematism.
Unlike cubism and rayonnism, suprematism
did not gradually evolve from figurative painting. Rather, it began
abruptly with the production of stark, geometrically-organized canvases
like "Red Square" (1913). Of this style,
Malevich said in his treatise "From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism:
The New Painterly Realism"; "I have
transformed myself in the zero of form and have fished myself out of
the rubbishy slough of academic art.. I have
destroyed the ring of the horizon and got out of the circle of objects,
the horizon ring that has imprisoned the artist
and the forms of nature." (For a fuller text, see Bowlt 116-135) Malevich's
suprematism was already apparent in his
designs for the Futurist opera "Victory Over the Sun", 1913
From the simplest geometric, monochrome shapes, Malevich built an entire
suprematist universe in a series
of stunning canvases like this composition painted around 1916. Unlike
Goncharova and Larionov, Malevich
remained in the Soviet Union after the Revolution. In the first years
after 1917, he held a series of major teaching
posts in Moscow, Petrograd, and Vitebsk. There he tried to systematize
the insights he had gained in his suprematist
period, and apply them to the creation of a scientific school of art
teaching and production.
While Larionov, Goncharova, and Malevich worked almost exclusively on
canvas, Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) achieved his greatest success in three-dimensional
media, often using materials salvaged from scrap or chosen for their specific
texture as well as shape. Like Malevich, Tatlin was interested in material
as such,
rather than in imitating any external objects. This relief (1916) is
typical of Tatlin's early abstract work. Sculptures
such as this had a crucial influence on the Constructivist movement
after the Russian Revolution. See also see how
Tatlin's early reliefs were transferred to the stage in his designs
for the 1923 production of "Zangezi".