Kazimir Malevich – searching for the absolute

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The story of how a multi-volume work came to be written

The story of how this beautifully produced four-volume set on the life and work of early abstractionist, Kazimir Milevich was written is almost as impressive as the life it documents. From the 1970s onward, Alexéi Nakov exhaustively researched archives and travelled to meet surviving relatives and friends of the great Russian artist, whose parents had emigrated to Russia from Poland. He could not gain access to records within Russia until the disbandment of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Even then, Nakov found that some people were afraid to talk ‘on the record’ or to show him the documents and art works that they owned, for fear of the authorities.

On one occasion, his driver in Moscow warned Nakov not to go by foot, and told him about a man who had fallen foul of the regime. Hired killers had called on him and thrown him out of a window, in front of his wife. They were not secretive about doing this, as they had no expectation of any repercussions. The owner of a large archive of Malevich’s documents fled to Amsterdam in the early 1990s because he was so frightened of the regime. Only when he died was Nakov able to gain access to this material.

All this was revealed one night in April this year, when Richard Cork interviewed Alexéi Nakov in front of an audience of art historians and art critics, at an evening event jointly organised by the Association of Art Historians and the UK branch of the International Association of Art Critics. Alexéi Nakov went to university in Warsaw but fled Poland in the 1960s and now works in Paris as an art historian and writer, having published on the Russian avant-garde, Futurism, Dada and European abstract art. His four volumes on Malevich were originally published in French in 2007 and are now available in a magnificent English translation. Richard Cork is a well-known art historian who has taught at Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute. He was the Evening Standard art critic for 15 years and has curated shows at the Tate, Royal Academy and Serpentine galleries.

Andréi Nakov proved a witty and engaging speaker, ably interviewed by Richard Cork, who has a happy knack of making minimal interventions that nonetheless directed the conversation so that Malevich’s complex life and work were outlined in the space of an hour. We learnt that although both Nakov and Malevich were originally from Poland, Nakov did not really ‘discover’ the artist until he visited London in the early 1970s. There, Minimalist art dominated the art world and Nakov wanted to know the historical roots of the movement. He was surprised to trace it back to Malevich’s work in the early 20th century, in post-Revolutionary Russia. Moving to Paris, Nakov found that although Malevich had shown his work in Paris, he was practically forgotten there. In 1975, the fruits of his early research were published, and to everyone’s surprise this book sold very well.

Nakov found that he could do his research in London, where the Victoria and Albert had material on Russian art that had been used by Camilla Gray, who had written the first art historical account of late 19th and early 20th-century Russian art. It was impossible to go to the USSR to study Malevich as his work was condemned by the Soviet authorities. Only after 1987 was it possible to travel safely to Moscow and have access to the material there.

In the early days after the 1905 Revolution, there was a great flowering of modernist art in Russia. The Futurist Manifesto was available there within weeks of its publication in Paris in 1909. Later on, especially after the Revolution of 1917, the authorities started to become much more restrictive and eventually took a hard line against modernist and abstract art.

Malevich was interested in the theatre, music and philosophy. At the time, ‘music was the model’, Nakov says, for both philosophy and painting. One thinks of how Diaghilev brought the Ballets Russes to Europe from 1909 onwards, combining the work of composers such as Stravinsky with that of painters such as Picasso and Goncharova. At first, Malevich flourished in the exciting environment of Moscow, where artistic experimentation was encouraged, but after 1917 his ideas gradually came to be considered radical and undesirable. It became increasingly difficult for him to work and at one point he was arrested and spent time in police detention.

Nakov explained that while still in his 50s, Malevich developed cancer. In Europe, he could have had an operation that might have saved his life, so he applied for a visa to leave the country. The authorities knew that if he did not get treatment he would die, so they refused the visa and the great artist died in 1935, at the age of 56.

He left behind a large body of work, much of it in Europe where he had had a couple of shows while still able to leave Russia. His non-objective all-black and all-white canvases, and his Suprematist compositions, were shocking and unique in their time. They expressed his interest in spiritual ideas, especially the spirituality of the Russian Orthodox church which held a fascination for Malevich, who was Catholic. And of course, they were as Minimalist as anything produced decades later.