Работа над фальшивками, или Подлинная история дамы с театральной сумочкой

Andrei Nakov

In this poignant painting we come full circle from the Black Square, from color being sublimated in order to heighten the dramatic impact of the birth of suprematism, to color being one of the few ways in which Malevich could tacitly allude to the innovations he had pioneered ad that were now themselves suppressed.

DR. NICHOLAS CULLINAN, Director National Portrait Gallery, London

RETHINKING MALEVICH: NEW SCHOLARSHIP

Following Malevich's untimely death in 1935, Socialist Realism was declared to be the official artistic doctrine of the Soviet Union, pushing Malevich's art completely out of the public reach. It was only in 1962 that pressures on art and culture had eased, and these works surfaced again and research begun to investigate the importance of this impressive body of works. In this context, the works from the late 1920s and 1930s and until the artist's death, have proven very interesting to analyze as initially these late works, in which Malevich returned to a figurative content, used to be regarded as an ideological and aesthetic retreat from the high point of Suprematism. They were seen in an entirely negative light as being symptomatic of Malevich's compromise with (and ultimately defeat by) the Soviet regime, as well as epitomizing his betrayal of modernism. They were, as the art historian T. J. Clark put it so succinctly, “the scandal of modernist orthodoxy”.

As post-modernism replaced modernism as a dominant approach in Western art history, the emphasis in Malevich studies also changed, especially in relation to the artist's paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Since the extensive display at the major retrospective of 1988-9, however, these paintings have become more of a focus of interest in their own right. Instead of being dismissed as merely repetitive and defeatist, they have been reassessed and reinterpreted. Now, instead of representing the eclipse of Suprematism, they are considered to be innovative and a continuation of the Suprematist enterprise, and even to represent a new phase of Suprematism.

Christina Lodder, “Malevich Scholarship: A Brief Introduction” in ed. Charlotte Douglas & Christina Lodder, Rethinking Malevich, London, The Pindar Press, 2007, pp. xix-xx

Self-Portrait (“Artist“), 1933

State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Portrait of Artist's Wife, 1933

State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Portrait of E. Yakovleva, 1932

Private Collection, The Netherlands

Portrait of Nikolai Punin, 1933

State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Portrait of the Artist's Wife, 1934

State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

ARTISTIC CONTEXT OF THE LATE WORKS

In the context of the political changes occurring in Russia in the 1920s, modernist aesthetics have been declared bourgeois, while growing conservatism was imposed by Soviet cultural politics. The new aesthetics imposed by the system propagated a return to type of realism resembling late nineteenth century pictorial traditions. Nevertheless, it would be simplistic and reductive to solely interpret Malevich's late works solely through the prism of this political context.