Summary Arnason week 1 - Chapter 9 – From: Popova and Cubo-Futurism:
- Lyubov Popova: developed a mature Cubo-Futurist style showing a complete
assimilation of Western pictorial devices into her own dynamic idiom.
- Rich chromatics from interest in Russian folk art.
- Began constructing totally abstract paintings from 1916, she called them Painterly
Architectonics. In these works, she focused on building up her paint surfaces with
strong textures.
- After the Russian Revolution, Constructivist artists abandoned traditional media like
panting and dedicated themselves to production art goal: merge art with
technology.
Malevich and Suprematism:
- Kazimir Malevich took Cubist geometry to its most radical conclusion. 1912: painted
in a Cubist manner Morning in the Village after a snowstorm = figures moving
through a mechanized landscape.
- Malevich experimented with the combination of Cubism and Futurism and called it
Cubo-Futurism.
- 1915: he unveils totally nonrepresentational paintings, in the style he called
Suprematism. Included the painting Black Square = most reductive abstract painting
of its time. Malevich described Suprematism as: “The supremacy of pure feeling in
creative art”. The creation of a simple square on a plain ground was a moment of
spiritual revelation to Malevich. He felt that for the first time in history, it had been
demonstrated that a painting could exist completely independent of any reflection or
imitation of the external world. Malevich carried abstraction to an ultimate
geometric simplification – the black square. This was a new beginning that
corresponded to the social transformation occurring in these years.
- Two dominant wings of 20th century abstraction – expressionism of Kandinsky and
geometric purity of Malevich – have been founded by two Russians, both had
spiritual visions rooted in the traditions of old Russia.
- Malevich established three stages of Suprematism: the black, the red or coloured,
and the white.
- The last stage: white symbolizes the “real concept of infinity”. It’s a reduction of
painting to the simplest relations of geometric shapes.
- Malevich understood the historic importance of architecture as an abstract visual art
and he experimented with drawings and models in the early 1920s, in which he
studied the problems of form in three dimensions and crafted visions of Suprematist
cities, planets and satellites suspended in space. His abstract three-dimensional
models, called Arkhitektons, were significant to the growth of Constructivism in
Russia and even influenced the design teachings of Bauhaus.
El Lissitzky’s Prouns:
- El Lissitzky was passionately interested in Jewish culture and he was a major figure in
the Jewish Renaissance in Russia around the time of the 1917 Revolution.
- Lissitzky developed his own form of abstraction, called Prouns: diverse compositions
made up of two- and three-dimensional geometric shapes floating in space, who
represent the artist’s extension of Suprematist theories into the realm of
architecture.
- Lyubov Popova: developed a mature Cubo-Futurist style showing a complete
assimilation of Western pictorial devices into her own dynamic idiom.
- Rich chromatics from interest in Russian folk art.
- Began constructing totally abstract paintings from 1916, she called them Painterly
Architectonics. In these works, she focused on building up her paint surfaces with
strong textures.
- After the Russian Revolution, Constructivist artists abandoned traditional media like
panting and dedicated themselves to production art goal: merge art with
technology.
Malevich and Suprematism:
- Kazimir Malevich took Cubist geometry to its most radical conclusion. 1912: painted
in a Cubist manner Morning in the Village after a snowstorm = figures moving
through a mechanized landscape.
- Malevich experimented with the combination of Cubism and Futurism and called it
Cubo-Futurism.
- 1915: he unveils totally nonrepresentational paintings, in the style he called
Suprematism. Included the painting Black Square = most reductive abstract painting
of its time. Malevich described Suprematism as: “The supremacy of pure feeling in
creative art”. The creation of a simple square on a plain ground was a moment of
spiritual revelation to Malevich. He felt that for the first time in history, it had been
demonstrated that a painting could exist completely independent of any reflection or
imitation of the external world. Malevich carried abstraction to an ultimate
geometric simplification – the black square. This was a new beginning that
corresponded to the social transformation occurring in these years.
- Two dominant wings of 20th century abstraction – expressionism of Kandinsky and
geometric purity of Malevich – have been founded by two Russians, both had
spiritual visions rooted in the traditions of old Russia.
- Malevich established three stages of Suprematism: the black, the red or coloured,
and the white.
- The last stage: white symbolizes the “real concept of infinity”. It’s a reduction of
painting to the simplest relations of geometric shapes.
- Malevich understood the historic importance of architecture as an abstract visual art
and he experimented with drawings and models in the early 1920s, in which he
studied the problems of form in three dimensions and crafted visions of Suprematist
cities, planets and satellites suspended in space. His abstract three-dimensional
models, called Arkhitektons, were significant to the growth of Constructivism in
Russia and even influenced the design teachings of Bauhaus.
El Lissitzky’s Prouns:
- El Lissitzky was passionately interested in Jewish culture and he was a major figure in
the Jewish Renaissance in Russia around the time of the 1917 Revolution.
- Lissitzky developed his own form of abstraction, called Prouns: diverse compositions
made up of two- and three-dimensional geometric shapes floating in space, who
represent the artist’s extension of Suprematist theories into the realm of
architecture.
