Volume 38, Number 1 & 2 · January 17, 1991
Supreme Suprematist
By John Golding
Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935 September–November, 1990; The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Los Angeles, November 28, 1900–January 13, 1991; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 7, 1991–March 24, 1991
an exhibition at The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC,
Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935
catalog of the exhibition, edited by Jeanne D'Andrea
Armand Hammer Museum, 230 pp., $29.95 (paper)
Although Kazimir Malevich became a legend in Russia during his lifetime and is considered by many to be the greatest Russian painter of the century, he is much less well known than his two contemporaries and peers in the creation of abstract art, Kandinsky and Mondrian. When in 1919–1920 the Visual Arts Section of the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment selected works by 143 artists for distribution to various Soviet museums, Malevich's name took precedence over all others; Kandinsky himself, who had returned to Russia from Munich in 1914 and subsequently joined in the revolutionary excitement, chaired the purchasing committee; his own painting was by now acknowledging a debt to Malevich's, to its detriment. But within a couple of years the forces of reaction were already set in motion, and in 1929 the director of the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, Fedor Kumpan, was given a lengthy prison sentence for having organized an exhibition of Malevich's work. It took Malevich two and a half years to retrieve his pictures, and although many of them eventually passed into state collections they were not seen again until relatively recently. In 1930 Malevich was himself interned for questioning. He died in 1935 at the age of fifty-seven, in great poverty.
Review, 5699 words
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