Unlike the Cubists Futurists Appreciated the Application of Their Movement in the Commercial Arts
Kasimir Malevich, Reservist of the Outset Division, 1914, oil, collage, and thermometer on sail, 21 1/8" x 17 5/8" (MoMA)
Kasimir Malevich created Reservist of the Commencement Sectionalization (1914) in the outset year of Earth War I. The championship refers to a member of the reserve army waiting to be called up for military service, and it had personal significance as Malevich was himself a reservist (although not in the Offset Division). He was anxious near going to war, but the painting does not convey any obvious emotion or fifty-fifty a clear message. It is a combination of oil paint and collage in a manner related to the Synthetic Cubism of Picasso and Braque. At the fourth dimension Malevich was office of a group of Russian modern artists known as Cubo-Futurists, who used pictorial techniques initially developed by modern artists in Western Europe.
Combining representations
Like Constructed Cubist paintings, Malevich's Reservist of the First Division combines unlike systems of representation. Several objects are depicted using naturalistic techniques — a white cylinder projecting towards the viewer in the center of the painting and a greenish cylinder on the left bandage shadows and have traditional chiaroscuro shading to betoken their curved shapes. On the right a human ear is clearly depicted. There are besides two immediately recognizable schematic objects — a aureate cantankerous just to the left of middle at the top, and below it half of a blackness handlebar mustache on a groovy flesh-colored ground; both are symbolic references to a Russian military machine man.
These identifiable objects and symbols are discrete elements in an abstract geometric design of colored shapes, varied textures, and painted lines that includes newspaper collages with printed words, letters, the number 8, a postage depicting the Czar, and a real thermometer. The collaged words are: opera (at the top), Th and tobacconist (in the centre), and (to the left) the proper name of a traditional bookish painter, A. Vasnetzov, who had rejected Malevich's paintings from exhibition. The words, like the represented forms, refer to things without conspicuously relating them to the other elements of the painting.
Zaum Realism
Reservist of the First Division uses fragments of objects, shapes, and words to communicate past non-rational means. This was a key technique of Russian Futurist writers that they called zaum, a neologism usually translated as "transrational." Zaum entailed using not-referential linguistic forms — simple phonemes, letters, and nonsense words — to featherbed rational understanding and communicate emotion directly. The Futurists believed that through zaum they were able to access a higher reality that transcended the limitations of rationality and the material world.
Malevich collaborated with the Futurist writers on several projects, the most important of which was the radically innovative opera Victory over the Dominicus (1913). Like the Futurists, he tried to employ the formal elements of painting (line colour, shape, composition, etc.) as direct means to communicate feeling independent of representation or obvious reference. He described many of his paintings, including Morning in the Village later on Snowstorm (1912-13) and The Knife Grinder (1912-13), as "zaum realism."
Kasimir Malevich, The Knife Grinder, 1912-13, oil on sheet, 79.5 x 79.5 cm (Yale University Art Gallery)
Russian Subjects
Although Malevich explicitly linked these two paintings to zaum'south direct emotional not-rational advice through basic formal units, they are less abstruse and easier to decipher than the slightly later work Reservist of the First Segmentation. Figures and space are simplified into geometric shapes and bundled to create repeating abstruse patterns. The Knife Grinder depicts a man pumping a sharpening wheel as he works. His human foot, hand, and pocketknife announced in multiple positions to convey motion in time. Malevich derived the faceting of infinite and effigy from techniques popular among many well-known Western European Cubists and Futurists whose works were reproduced in art magazines and exhibited in Russia.
Kasimir Malevich, Morning in the Village later on Snowstorm, 1912-thirteen, oil on canvas, fourscore x lxxx cm (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York)
The Italian Futurists oft used modern representational techniques to depict conspicuously mod subjects. Malevich, by contrast, used an avant-garde formal vocabulary to represent traditional (even self-consciously "primitive") subjects. Such subjects were pop amidst Russian advanced painters such as Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, who promoted a specifically Russian approach to modernism past embracing Russian subjects and traditional art forms. Morning in the Hamlet afterward Snowstorm shows Russian peasants carrying buckets and pulling a sled through a snowy village scene. The Pocketknife Grinder uses his foot to pump a unproblematic wheel and pulley mechanism, a marked contrast to the Italian Futurists' passion for depicting electricity and powerful, sometimes fierce, modernistic machines such as automobiles, trains, and car guns.
Kasimir Malevich, Adult female at a Poster Column, 1914, oil, collage and lace on sheet, 71 10 64 cm (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam)
Combining Media and Styles
Malevich combined geometric abstraction, Cubist systems of representation, and collage in an unprecedented way in Reservist of the First Division and related works such every bit Adult female at a Affiche Cavalcade (1914) and Limerick with Mona Lisa (1914). With these works the zaum techniques of non-rational communication using basic formal units are more fully realized and developed to include recognizable images and objects detached from their usual context.
All three use large flat planes of color as a structuring device. These planes seem to hover in forepart of the motion picture plane, creating circuitous layers of space markedly different from the shallow, fractured pictorial space of most Cubist paintings. The inclusion of photographs and objects, such every bit the thermometer in Reservist of the First Division and the strips of lace in Adult female at a Poster Column, was as well an innovative zaum pictorial strategy that foreshadowed the Dada artists' embrace of the casuistic in their strategically disruptive use of collage.
Kasimir Malevich, Composition with Mona Lisa (Partial Eclipse), 1914, oil, graphite, and collage on canvas, 62.4 x 49.two cm (State Russian Museum)
Replacing Conventions
Composition with Mona Lisa combines a collaged reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci'due south Mona Lisa with colored planes and suggestions of cylinders and other objects rendered in a Cubist mode. The painted Russian text translates as "partial eclipse," and the collaged newspaper text straight under the Mona Lisa reproduction declares "flat for rent," while the text collaged on the painted cube below reads, "in Moscow." Two red '10's have been painted on the Mona Lisa'south confront and breast, and the top of her head is torn off. The work seems to thematize also equally embody the fact that the conventions of naturalistic representation, which had dominated Western art since the Renaissance, have been cancelled out. New replacements are available in Moscow, and Malevich puts himself at the forefront of the avant-garde.
Malevich's intense engagement with Cubist and Futurist styles exemplified the Russian avant-garde's adaptation of European modernist techniques to serve their ain distinctive creative aims — almost notably the depiction of specifically Russian subjects. With his later collage works, Malevich ventured into new territory, combining abstruse planes with representational elements. In the following year he would break abroad completely from representation and create a new art movement, Suprematism.
Additional resources:
Read more most Reservist of the First Division
Read more about Morning in the Village After a Snowstorm
Charlotte Douglas, Kazimir Malevich (New York: Harry Abrams, 1994).
Source: https://smarthistory.org/kasimir-malevich-cubo-futurism/
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