ZAHA HADID ON KAZIMIR MALEVICH

ZAHA HADID ON KAZIMIR MALEVICH

Zaha Hadid on Kazimir Malevich

The Russian Avantgarde

The Russian avant-garde was a large, influential wave of avant-garde modern art that flourished in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, approximately from 1890 to 1930—although some have placed its beginning as early as 1850 and its end as late as 1960. The term covers many separate, but inextricably related, art movements that flourished at the time; namely Suprematism, Constructivism, Russian Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Zaum and Neo-primitivism. Given that many avant-garde artists involved were born or grew up in what is present day Belarus and Ukraine (including Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandra Ekster, Vladimir Tatlin, Wassily Kandinsky, David Burliuk, Alexander Archipenko), some sources also talk about Ukrainian avant-garde, etc.

The Russian avant-garde reached its creative and popular height in the period between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and 1932, at which point the ideas of the avant-garde clashed with the newly emerged state-sponsored direction of Socialist Realism.

In 1915, Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935) radically transformed the course of twentieth-century art with his "Black Square" painting and his manifesto "From Cubism to Suprematism." These works espoused a new art of pure geometricism, intended to be universally comprehensible regardless of cultural origin. Although he is famed for his rigorous pursuit of the "non-objective," Malevich in fact explored many strands of painting, embracing at various stages Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism and Cubism, as well as traditional Russian folk art. Drawing on the collections of Nikolai Khardzhiev and Georges Costakis--the two leading collectors of Russian avant-garde art, whose collections were largely assembled at a time when abstract art was banned in the Soviet Union--this catalogue traces the breadth of Malevich’s career through his oil paintings, gouaches, drawings, sculptures and designs for opera and film. All phases of his development are represented here, from his early Impressionist-style work to his iconic Suprematist pieces, as well as his lesser-known figurative paintings and works on paper. These are contextualized alongside work by Malevich’s contemporaries, such as Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Natalia Goncharova, Vera Pester, Ivan Puni and Mikhail Meno.

Kazimir Malevich was one of the most extraordinary and innovative artists of the twentieth century. As one of the founders of abstract art, Malevich has had an indelible impact of the course of history. Not only an artist, he was an influential teacher and a passionate advocate of the ‘new’ art. Charismatic and self-assured, 11

Malevich became the leader of a new generation of Russian avant-garde artists, which would go on to create a new art for a new era. Featured image, “Yellow Plane in Dissolution” (1917), is reproduced from the Spring 2014 title, Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde, published to accompany the first major survey of the artist’s work in 20 years, currently on view at the Stedelijk Museum.

Constructivism presents a particular problem for contemporary artists who must produce art within capitalism. The entire meaning of Constructivism is bound up with the period of socialist construction (such as it was) in the USSR. Without the revolution Constructivism was not possible. This explains why contemporary anti-capitalist artists tend to look to different models — Brecht, Dada, Heartfield, Fluxus, Situationism, Godard, Fo, Hip Hop, punk, folk music, Surrealism, the Mexican muralists, etc. We have no socialist world in which to construct our art. Moreover, the ideological origins of Constructivism, between the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, are problematic for an over-determined “Marxist” conception of art. Many of the artists who gave birth to the most important art movement in Marxist history were essentially mystics.

Those artists, however, rallied around the Bolshevik revolution. As academic hacks fled in the wake of February and October, avant-garde artists took the reigns of Russian cultural institutions. Most rejected (in theory) the concept of artistic subjectivity. But they remained largely free actors constructing images, objects, events and propaganda in support of the revolution; seeking a decidedly modernist fusion of concept, form and content. Most of all they attempted to fuse art and everyday life (although it must be said they conceived of their own role as a relatively privileged one in that dynamic). They planned monuments, public art and workers’ lounges: new forms for the new world.

It seemed as if dreams could become real, even when they couldn’t (see Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International).

It was revolution that transformed the “laboratory experiments” of Vladimir Tatlin into a (sometimes) haltering fusion of the modernist avant-garde and social life. It was revolution that translated Kazimir Malevich’s abstract Suprematism into a (potentially) mass visual language.

The Russian avant-garde, in the years between the 1905 revolution and the Stalinist counter-revolution, bore many similarities to other early 20th century European modern art movements. There was a tension between (a sometimes positivist) futurism and (a sometimes obfuscating) mysticism. There were new abstract gestures, new materials, the mining of supposedly primitive or more pure artistic forms (Russian icon-painting in particular). But, in Russia, the avant-garde was given unprecedented influence, an influence born of its support for the workers’ revolution — until Stalinism eclipsed both the political and cultural gains of October.

If the most important factor in the Russian avant-garde was the revolution itself, the second most important factor was its combined and uneven development.

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Suprematist Composition Blue rectangle over red beam

The list of the most expensive paintings according to results of world auctions opens with Paul Cezanne’s work and goes on with Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon. Russian paintings are presented in the top list with one work

by Kazimir Malevich.

In 1927 the Soviet avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich intended to organize his exhibition abroad and brought nearly one hundred works, which remained with the architect Hugo Hering in Berlin. The latter preserved them through the era of Nazism, and sold them in the 1950s, after the death of Kazimir Malevich. Not long ago nearly 40 people of Malevich' inheritors quite proved to the court that Hugo Hering did not own the paintings and so had no right to trade in them. Therefore one of the buyers — the Stedelek state museum in Holland was compelled to give away the masterpiece, which was immediately put up for auction by Malevich’ heirs. The procedure of returning his other works from the Berlin exhibition is under way.

Since the mid-1800s artists have written more than 60 major manifestos.

Each identifies a specific set of concerns and artistic practices. With these written manifestos artists were commu55

nicating to the entire world their aesthetic intentions and making clear who’s with them and who’s against them.

Suprematist Composition (Blue Rectangle Over Red Beam), a painting by the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, is a sort of visual manifesto. Although Malevich wrote a 4000+-word essay explaining Suprematism’s philosophies and goals, all of the concepts and concerns outlined in it are also visible in the visual language of this one painting. All we have to do is learn how to read it.

From the Suprematist Manifesto:

“Forms must be given life and the right to individual existence…this is possible when we free all our art from vulgar subject-matter and teach our consciousness to see everything in nature not as real forms and objects, but as material masses…”

Each form in the above Suprematist Composition has an existence of its own, an outer life that suggests an inner life. The forms are isolated and yet they exist in a composition: individual forms in harmony with each other, together expressing an ideal.

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Airplane Flying

The language of Suprematist Composition (Blue Rectangle Over Red Beam) consists of paint, surface, geometric shapes and primary colors. It communicates that there’s something more pure, more universal and truer than the images of the natural world.

As Malevich’s written manifesto says, “I have destroyed the ring of the horizon…

To reproduce beloved objects and little corners of nature is just like a thief being enraptured by his legs in irons.

Things have disappeared like smoke; to gain the new artistic culture, art approaches creation as an end in itself and domination over the forms of nature.”

When we decipher the language of this painting and understand its statements, we connect with universalities rather than specifics. We comprehend the concepts of space, movement, form, togetherness, isolation and relativity. We notice similarities and differences but that there is no hierarchy of importance between the aesthetic elements. We see shapes stripped of their symbolism. We see a composition that’s open to introspective interpretation rather than being burdened by objective meaning.

This single painting announces a separation from history. It announces Malevich’s intention to make a new art 77

for a new world. Even after a careful reading of Malevich’s written Suprematist manifesto, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting we can see that this painting communicates it all, and in some ways says it more clearly and directly.

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Suprematist Composition

That this painting has survived long enough to inspire us is a bit of a miracle. Malevich painted Suprematist Composition (Blue Rectangle Over Red Beam) in 1916, in the middle of World War I and just one year before the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. The painting was part of a massive creative output through which Malevich was attempting to create what he called “a pure living art.” By working entirely abstractly, painting universal geometric forms that had no relationship to the figurative external world, he was challenging the ego-driven, individualistic power struggle that he believed had led the world to the brink of self-destruction.

Malevich exhibited this painting multiple times but resisted selling it. He held it in his personal collection until 1927. That’s the year, when after exhibiting it in Berlin, he entrusted it with a friend, Hugo Häring, a German architect.

Häring protected the painting throughout WWII, saving it from annihilation during the Nazi campaign to destroy “degenerate” art. When Malevich died in 1935, Häring still had the painting. He eventually sold it to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where it remained for 50 years. Then, after a 17-year legal battle, Malevich’s heirs won possession 99

of it and subsequently sold it through Sotheby’s in 2008 for $60 Million, making it the most expensive work of Russian art in history.

From the Suprematist Manifesto: “Color and texture in painting are ends in themselves. They are the essence of painting, but this essence has always been destroyed by the subject. The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. It is the face of the new art. The square is a living, royal infant. It is the first step of pure creation in art. Before it, there were naive deformities and copies of nature. Our world of art has become new, non-objective, pure.”

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Horizontal Tektonik 1977

From the beginning of her career Zaha Hadid was influenced by the artist Kazimir Malevich, who led her to use paint as a tool for architectonic exploration. During the 1980s, before Zaha had realized any of her works, she was faced with many fruitful years of theoretical architectural design. In these years she created a precedent for her entire career, with these explorations later consolidated in material form in her works.

“I was very fascinated by abstraction and how it really could lead to abstracting plans, moving away from certain dogmas about what architecture is” – Zaha Hadid

Hadid also used this graphic research to rethink existing urban spaces, as in the case of “Grand Buildings Trafalgar Square.” In this painting, in addition to inserting a public podium recognizing the tradition of public meetings in the square, Hadid introduced tall buildings with public terraces, whose height would correspond with various landmarks in the city.

The first retrospective exhibition of her work in Russia, Zaha Hadid at The State Hermitage Museum provides unprecedented insight into the work of Zaha Hadid in a mid-career retrospective highlighting her exploration of the Russian Avant-garde at the beginning of 13 13

her career, and the continuing influence of its core principles on her work today.

The exhibition, in the historic Nicolaevsky Hall of the Winter Palace, showcases many of the seminal paintings, drawings, models and design objects of Hadid’s forty-year repertoire; conveying the ingenuity and dynamism of her architectural projects in variety of media including film, photography and installations.

In 2004, Hadid was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in the theatre of the State Hermitage Museum.

Accepting the prize, Hadid stated, “The spirit of adventure to embrace the new and the incredible belief in the power of invention attracted me to the Russian Avant-garde. I realized how Modern architecture built upon the breakthrough achieved by abstract art as the conquest of a previously unimaginable realm of creative freedom. The idea that space itself might be warped and distorted to gain in dynamism and complexity without losing its coherence and continuity.”

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The Peak 1983

Schumacher met Hadid in 1988 at a symposium at the Tate gallery in London to coincide with the New York Museum of Modern Art’s Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition.

With no built projects, Hadid was building a reputation as a radical architect through her artwork. The huge paintings of her competition entry for The Peak Leisure Club in Hong Kong were included in the show, alongside projects by the likes of Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind and Bernard Tschumi.

Schumacher says that even amongst such esteemed company Hadid stood out.

“Her work was the most intense, intriguing and opened up the discipline to unexpected potentials of exploration,” he says in the movie, which Dezeen filmed at the Architectural Association in London.

“I was intrigued by the frankness and openness of her presentation. She was quite genuine in respect to letting the audience into her work and the way she was working.”

Schumacher was an architecture student at the time and was looking to join a practice to complete his qualification.

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“I was just sure that I would pick her when my studies finished,” he recalls.

“So I did. And I was hired.”

In 1990, Vitra appointed Zaha Hadid Architects to design a new fire station on the Swiss design brand’s campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany. Vitra Fire Station – the firm’s first built project – was completed in 1993.

Schumacher would go on to become a champion of Parametricism – a style of architecture that creates organic forms from computer algorithms – but for Vitra Fire Station most of the design work had to be done by hand.

The complex form of of the building ensured this was an extremely time-consuming process.

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Hafenstrasse Development 1992

The Hafenstrasse development was designed by Hadid to fill intermediate spaces in a zone of traditional vertical housing in Hamburg. The graphic essays propose a succession of permeable constructions with terraces that connect to the river Elbe.

In 1992 Zaha Hadid was called on to develop a collection of paintings and drawings for “The Great Utopia,” an exhibition on Russian Constructivism at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

In response, Hadid realized an interpretation of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919-1920), in addition to experimenting with recreations of other Russian artists such as Kazimir Malevich.

In her studies for the Vitra Fire Station, Hadid’s paintings materialize and freeze the movement of the work, tracing the plan’s emerging and inter-connected walls, and giving a sensation of suspense before imminent movement.

From her student days onward, Zaha Hadid used painting as a part of her broad and profound process of architectural creation, demonstrating that we must never stop experimenting.

Despite painting throughout her career and realizing multiple exhibitions of her painted work, she never accepted the 17 17

definition of artist, since all her graphic explorations were part of her ongoing architectural exploration; using the flexibility inherent in art to delve freely into her experimentation as an architect.

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MAXXI Museum 2010

The museum in Rome is one of the projects that Hadid is the most proud of and excited about (Charlie Rose Interview). It is yet another design for which she won first place, but unlike the Peak and others, this one was built.

The paintings Hadid did while designing this structure give us a lot of insight into what she was experimenting with.

The interwoven layers that we are ale to see through are another way in which Hadid has created innovative structure, with great functionality. The layers are transparent so that exhibits can be seen from all sides, all angles within the building (A Day With Zaha Hadid, Flim). Displays are on display to the extreme. The way the building extends into disappearing brushstrokes leaves us curious as to where the building ends and begins, another way in which Hadid is controlling and manipulating our understanding of space. We are unable to decipher what space is museum space and what space is public space. The extension and transparency of the building, once again, bring the outside public space into the structure and share the insides of the structure with the outside world. The structure is, in essence, gutted for functionality and access for all to experience.

Our proposal offers a quasi-ur19 19

ban field, a ‘world’ to dive into rather than a building as signature object. The campus is organized and navigated on the basis of directional drifts and the distribution of densities rather than key points. This is indicative of the character of the MAXXI as a whole: porous, immersive, a field space. An inferred mass is subverted by vectors of circulation.

The external as well as internal circulation follows the overall drift of the geometry. Vertical and oblique circulation elements are located at areas of confluence, interference and turbulence.

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CONTENTS

The Russian Avantgarde Kazimir Malevich Zaha Hadid

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