Saturated Land

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Two paradigms characterise the Russian agricultural economy, property rights and peasants’ relationship with land from the 19th to the 20th century: Alexander II’s serfdom reforms in 1861 and Stolypin’s agrarian reforms (1906-17). The evolution from Alexander II’s reforms and abolishment of serfdom to Stolypin’s agrarian reforms and privatisation of land created a void in the erstwhile understanding of national identity and individual liberty, represented through realist landscape painting, iconography and cartography. As Russian serfs were tied in an unfree, feudal relationship with the nobility, Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs was a dramatic change in the individual’s relationship with land: where land had effectively been a means to organise and control the workforce, the landscape now embodied the new freedom of the peasant and a luxurious degree of independence.1 The post-serfdom condition did not only register in cartography where new subdivisions occurred as part of the transition from a feudally controlled landscape to a communally owned one, but was also reflected in Russian art through a formation of a new identity for a peasantry with emerging individual liberties and a search to “portray the soul of Mother Russia”2. This gave way to the realist landscape painting movement – spearheaded by Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898), Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi (1842-1910) and Isaak Ilich Levitan (1860-1900) – which saw painting as a means to imagine the essence of the Russian countryside rather than seeking to make art for the sake of art3. Hence, it offered an alternative to the figurative Russian religious icons that represented the values and power of the Russian nobility such as the Vladimir Mother of God depicting the tree of the Tsar’s family – The Tree of the Russian State4 – and through realism abstracted and depoliticised the old forms of power that governed the landscape before 1861. While each peasant household received a land allotment, it was still held collectively in communal land tenures which during the Revolution in 1905 was protested against during violent uprisings. The prime minister at the time, Stolypin, issued a land decree in 1906, passed into legislation in 1910-11, which granted each peasant household individual ownership of a land allotment, primarily to encourage hard-working peasants to form a conservative, stable class of landowners and thus prevent another revolution.5 At this critical time of privatisation of land and liberation of the individual, the Russian Early Modernists and particularly Malevich’s Suprematism movement – arguably most radically manifested in his painting Black Square (1915) and sketch for a curtain from the same year – appear as a paradigm that would “define a new reality in which the part would merge with the whole and human and cosmic laws would be combined”6 – embodying the liberation from – and abstraction of – the authoritative power constructs of the feudal tradition. In x-rays of Malevich’s Black Square, layers of more figurative geometric forms are visible, revealing an archaeology of the history and tradition which the painting profanated and paradigmatically redfined. As an artistic tabula rasa, the canvas of Black Square was saturated to a point where no symbolic, representational, or political meaning or objecthood could escape, and no forms of power could be traced. However, two years after Black Square and six years after the reforms, very few peasants owned their land, causing a chaotic situation where peasants appropriated the land of Stolypin farmers. This eventually led to the Bolshevik Revolution (1919-23), and Malevich who had grown up in a peasant family with a father working in a sugar beet plant was sympathetic to the hardships of peasant life and supportive of Lenin’s approval of the revolutionary Niklay Bukharin’s New Economic Policy that allowed peasants to accumulate their surplus production7. This coincided with Malevich’s production of the second Black Square painting that reappeared as a ghost – a second milestone marking a new paradigm in landownership and individual liberty. This time, the Black Square appeared even more saturated and dense in its blackness without traces of a left-behind tradition; as if it was painted on top of the original Black Square, eradicating its archaeology. In 1929, two years after Malevich’s return to Russia from Berlin, Stalin expelled Bukharin from the politburo8, seized further power, and collectivised agricultural land. The same year, Malevich painted a third Black Square, this time supposedly not celebrating the worsening condition for peasants but, if anything, signalling a fundamental change in the individual’s relationship with land and freedom. As a tombstone, Malevich fourth Black Square comes into being between 1930-32, marking the beginning of the devastating famine that starved and killed millions of peasants9. As an archaeology of the Black Square, the essay speculates on the invisible layers of expression of feudal power, metric transformations of the landscape with collectivisation and privatisation, and the landscape imaginations of a new liberty and a new peasant condition and identity. Tobias Hentzer Dausgaard, Dec. 2018.





















REFERENCES AND FOOTNOTES: Note: The size of the Black Square is abstracted not just in its platonic purity and geometric scalelessness but also through the means of repetition of the painting. All four Black Squares have different measures – 1915: 9x8.2cm, 1915: 79.9x79.5cm, 1924:?, 1929:?, 1939/32: 53.5x53.5cm. The booklet becomes yet another physical Black Square assembling an alternative archaeology – an X-ray from the first Black Square to the last. Page 1: Malevich, Kazimir. Black Square, 1915, oil on canvas, 79.9 x 79.5 cm (The State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow); X-ray photograph of the Black Square. Page 2: 1 Encyclopedia Britannica. 2018. Stolypin land reform | Russian agricultural history | Britannica.com. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www. britannica.com/event/Stolypin-land-reform. [Accessed 6 December 2018]. 2 Studio International - Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. 2018. Russian Landscape in the Age of Tolstoy, Studio International. [ONLINE] Available at: https:// www.studiointernational.com/index.php/russian-landscape-in-the-age-of-tolstoy. [Accessed 6 December 2018]. 3 Studio International - Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. 2018. Russian Landscape in the Age of Tolstoy, Studio International. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/russian-landscape-in-theage-of-tolstoy. [Accessed 6 December 2018]. 4 Tarasov, O. and Milner-Gulland, R. (2002). Icon and devotion. 1st ed. Reaktionbooks, p.145. 5 Encyclopedia Britannica. 2018. Stolypin land reform | Russian agricultural history | Britannica. com. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/event/Stolypin-land-reform. [Accessed 6 December 2018]. 6 Michael Brenson and Special To the New York Times. 2018. Review/Art; Malevich’s Search for a New Reality - The New York Times. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/17/arts/review-art-malevich-s-search-for-anew-reality.html. [Accessed 6 December 2018]. 7 Souter, G. (2012). Malevich. 1st ed. Parkstone International, p.222. Encyclopedia Britannica. 2018. Nikolay Bukharin | Soviet political leader | Britannica.com. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nikolay-Ivanovich-Bukharin. [Accessed 6 December 2018]. 8 ibid. 9 Internet Archive. 2018. Famine in USSR : A. Markoff : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive. [ONLINE] Available at: https://archive.org/details/FamineInUssr. [Accessed 6 December 2018]. Page 3: Malevich, Kazimir. Black Square, 1915, oil on canvas, 79.9 x 79.5 cm (The State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow). Page 4: Malevich, Kazimir. Black Square (curtain design), 1915, pencil on paper, 9 x 8.2 cm (Museum of Literature, Moscow, S-115). Page 5: Kuindzhi, Arkhip Ivanovich. The Steppe. 1890, State Tretyakov gallery, Moscow, oil on canvas, 33x61cm. Page 6: Kuindzhi, Arkhip Ivanovich. After the Rain. 1879, State Tretyakov gallery, Moscow, oil on canvas, 102 x 159 cm. Page 7: Shishkin, Ivan. Rye. 1878, State Tretyakov gallery, Moscow, 107x187cm. Page 8: Levitan, Isaac. In the vicinity of the Savvino - Storozhevsky monastery, 1880. Page 9: Nesterov, Mikhail. The vision of the Youth Bartholomew, 1891. Page 10: Dubowski, Nikolai. Silence, 1890. Page 11: Kuindzhi, Arkhip Ivanovich, Red Sunset on the Dnieper, 1905, oil on canvas, 134.6x188. Page 12: Vasilyev, Fyodor. After a Thunderstorm, 1868. Page 13: Malevich, Kazimir. Black Square, 1924. Page 14-17: Ushakov, Simon. Genealogy of the state of Muscovy (Panegyric to the Virgin of Vladimirsk), 1668. Page 18: Malevich, Kazimir. Black Square, 1929. (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow). Page 19: Map XXII-18, IBesdesh, Russia, 1898. Page 20: Map, XXII-18, Se Syjmonowitschi, Russia, 1998. Page 21: Malevich, Kazimir. Black Square, c. 1930-32, oil on canvas, 53.5 x 53.4 cm (The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, S-124).


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