Malevich. Gerry SouterЧитать онлайн книгу.
people were trained in painting, but thought that all those pictures were drawn in the same manner as peasants drew flowers, horses and cocks – by rote and repetition without any schools or studies.
“One displayed picture impressed me strongly. In Kiev art, everything was represented very vivid and natural. The picture that bewitched me was of a girl who sat on a bench and cleaned a potato. I was astounded with the plausibility of the potato and peelings which, like ribbons, lay on the bench near an excellently painted pot. This picture was real revelation for me, so I remembered it for a long time. The style of the expression powerfully disturbed me.
The potatoes and peelings looked so natural that this made a lasting impression, as did nature itself… So I was able to stay in Kiev where, I learned later, there were such ‘great’ artists as Pymonenko, and Murashko. “
Kiev forever left its imprint in Malevich’s mind: the hills, the Dnieper River and its houses constructed of coloured bricks, the distant horizon and the bustle of steamships and dockside activity. He loved to watch the village women who came to town in small boats to sell their butter, milk and sour cream. These colourfully dressed peasants were everywhere along the river banks and streets of Kiev and gave to the city its special atmosphere.
“My father did not like me being keen on art,” Malevich wrote. “He knew that there were many artists around painting pictures, but never talked on this theme. He nevertheless expected that I would follow his way in life. Father told me that an artist’s life is really bad and many of them are in prisons. He didn’t want that lifestyle for his own son. My mother had mastered different embroidery styles and the weaving of laces. She taught me and I learned to embroider and knit with a hook.”
Woman Ironing, c. 1906–1907.
Oil on cardboard, 28.8 × 18.5 cm. Private Collection.
Peasant Head, end of 1911.
Gouache on cardboard, 26.7 × 32 cm.
Musée national d’Art moderne, centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.
Argentine Polka, 1911. Gouache on cardboard, 117 × 70.5 cm. Private Collection.
The Chiropodist, 1911–1912.
Gouache on cardboard, 77.7 × 103 cm.
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Peasant Woman with Buckets and Child I, end of 1911-beginning of 1912. Oil on canvas, 73 × 73 cm.
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Earliest Art Student Days
Kasimir began his first formal art lessons at the Kiev Drawing School, studying under Mykola Pymonenko. To experience a complete foundation in the manipulation of paint and the effect of light on surfaces, Malevich could not have begun his career with a more capable painter.
In his mid-thirties, Pymonenko was at the prime of his realist skills. His seven hundred renditions of peasant life in the Ukraine were in keeping with the prevailing tastes of the time. He began his studies at the Kiev Drawing School at the age of sixteen, was accepted by the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts and then came back to teach at both the Kiev Drawing and Art Schools from 1882 to 1906. In 1909 he was elected a member of the Paris International Association of Arts and Literature and his work hangs in the Louvre as well as illustrating many of Taras Shevchenko’s published poems.
An even greater impression on young Kasimir had to be the work of Oleksander Murashko, an Impressionist painter who also both studied and taught at the Kiev Drawing and Art Schools as well as opening is own studio to students. Murashko’s style evolved from the realism of the Peredvizhniki School into a vivid, colourful Impressionism.
“Peredvizhniki” (Wanderers) was a name applied to members of the Russian Society of Itinerant Art Exhibitions. Ivan Kramskoi, Nikolai Ge, and thirteen other artists who had left the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts in protest against its rigid neo-classical dictates founded the society in 1870. In order to reach the widest audience possible, the society organized regular travelling exhibitions throughout the Russian Empire, including Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa in their tours. Murashko’s work was more widely exhibited than Pymonenko’s, appearing in Paris, Amsterdam and Munich, and there were one-man shows in Berlin, Cologne and Düsseldorf.[5] He was a co-founder of the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts in 1917 and served there as a professor and rector.
Kasimir’s exposure to these academic realist and Impressionist painters with their genre subject matter set him on a path that, though it would eventually veer away from realism and objectivity, remained true to its peasant roots. He began to learn the intricacies of oil and gouache painting. Gouache is a painting medium usually executed on paper that became popular in the mid-nineteenth century and is similar to watercolour, but heavier and more opaque because a gum substance is added to the mixture of ground pigment and water. Gradually, he set himself the goal of attending a Moscow art school to expand his understanding of artistic expression. Towards that end, with his family settled in Kursk, he took a job as a draughtsman in the same railway office as his father. At about this time, he married Kazimira Zgletta, who would become a doctor.
Peasant Women in Church, end of 1911-beginning of 1912.
Oil on canvas, 75 × 97.5 cm.
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
While he lived with his family and then started one of his own, Kasimir was closest to his mother who encouraged his artwork. Throughout his life. he came to her for encouragement and criticism. His father, on the other hand, was critical of his choice of art for a career. But even as his father pushed Kasimir toward more practical application of his drawing talents, he still found time to sketch with the boy.
When his father died in 1904, Malevich took the train to Moscow with the idea of entering the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Because of poor academic grades, he failed to be accepted many times between 1905 and 1907 and finally returned to Kursk to continue painting in a neo-Impressionist style. On top of his striving to become a full-time artist, Kasimir had to cope with the 1905 Revolution.
On 22 January 1905 a priest led a crowd of workers to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to petition Czar Nicholas II. To quell the disorder, troops fired on the crowd, killing many and achieving the predictable result of bloody strikes, savage riots, assassinations, naval mutinies and peasants rushing about in blind fury. At about this same time, the Russian Army was being badly beaten by the Japanese, displaying to the world the corruption and disorganization of the Russian Officer Corps. Out of this hellish turmoil came a manifesto from the Czar granting the establishment of the Russian Duma – an elected representative body – civil liberties and the appearance of democracy. Not satisfied with half a loaf, the Duma split into the Octoberist Party, who went along with the Czarist manifesto, and the opposing Constitutional Democratic Party, who formed a workers’ council to compel adoption of reforms. Once again, to prevent disorder, Czarist troops arrested or shot everyone in sight who embraced the workers’ council.
Kasimir, meanwhile, was trying to feed himself, keep a roof over his head and live in a dry place where he could set up his easel. Malevich wrote in his 1918 biography, describing his grim lifestyle:
“The commune was, beyond any doubt, a hungry bohemia. I looked like a true villager with my appetite, but it was unnecessary for me to buy bacon and garlic daily. The commune collected money for broth bones and artist Ivan Bokhan went to buy them. Butchers asked him, ‘For dogs or for people?’ and it embarrassed him very much. The broth was cooked often. Sometimes the commune ate in a canteen at school. The dinner was not expensive, only twelve kopeks for buckwheat porridge with butter or beef fat and borscht with meat.
In such conditions I worked. It was impossible to say that was easy, but nevertheless I worked. I dreamed about