If you can't sell a Malevich, buy American

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Malevich and the American Legacy

By Magdalena Dabrowski, Yve-Alain Bois, Aleksandra Shatskikh, James Turrell

In a flashy but desperate attempt to sell four unsaleable paintings by Kazimir Malevich (they have been priced out of the market and so have remained, forlorn, in vaults or on gallery walls for as many as ten years), the Larry Gagosian Gallery in New York turned to making art history.

This ‘art history’ is in the form of ‘references’ to the Russian Suprematist painter (1879–1935) in works of American artists from 1949 to the present. Indeed, this show was a beautiful installation of over 40 large-scale works by Carl Andre, John Baldessari, Mel Bochner, Walter de Maria, Dan Flavin, Mark Grotjahn, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol Lewitt, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Steven Parrino, Charles Ray, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Ed Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, David Smith, Frank Stella, James Turrell, Cy Twombly, and Banks Violette.

Most of these works came from private and public collections and were not for sale. Malevich was represented by six small-scale paintings of which four were for sale. As Marion Maneker of the New York Observer wrote, ‘The Malevich show [at Gagosian Gallery] came with a savvy sales pitch: It argues that the Russian Constructivist [Suprematist] master was a key influence on such artists as Ed Ruscha and Cy Twombly. This is a very good way to sell Ruschas and Twomblys to deep-pocketed Russians.’

The premise of the show, as Larry Gagosian writes in his presentation, was ‘not only [the] formal analogy that connects [Malevich] with American artists, but also deeper aesthetic, conceptual, and spiritual correspondences. This exhibition attests to the search by modern and contemporary American artists ... for elemental and universal forms consistent with simplified aesthetic aims.’

Certainly something of the formal concerns of Kazimir Malevich and the history of the works exhibited is well documented in Aleksandra Shatskikh’s ‘Kazimir Malevich: From Cubo-Futurism to Suprematism’.The weight of the show, however, is on the Americans whose work, it is implied, was, in one way or another, indebted to Kazimir Malevich.

This is an exceedingly tenuous premise, however, on which two contributors to the catalogue make remark. Both Magdalena Dabrowski and Yve-Alain Bois point out that American painters and sculptors did not really know Malevich’s Suprematism until the 1973 Guggenheim Museum show in New York but that by that time, American Colour Field and Minimalism had already flowered, and this from other roots.

In ‘The availability of Malevich’, Bois traces the history of the ‘making known’ of Kazimir Malevich in American art. Bois characterizes the first generation of painters – which included Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and Ellsworth Kelly – by the notion of pseudomorphosis. That is how the influential art historian, Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), described in biological terms the phenomenon of ‘the emergence of a form A, morphologically analogous to, or even identical with, a form B, yet entirely unrelated to it from a genetic point of view’. This was the case for these three painters. Bois says of Kelly’s  Black Square and White Square (1953) that the artist ‘simply did not need Malevich to arrive at his black and white 1953 couple’.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Malevich’s Suprematist painting was becoming more widely known in the artists’ world but mainly through reproductions in books. Bois phrases the correspondence between the works of Malevich and the young Americans as ‘the American artists of this period singled out within Malevich’s vast and diverse corpus only the characteristics they recognized in their own work’. This was largely the phenomenon of ‘reduction’. There were parallels, then, but they do not establish a ‘legacy’.

Finally, Bois introduces what he calls a ‘conceptual’ trend in Malevich’s alogical work, suggesting a link to Cy Twombly’s playful and ironic, Malevich in Point Pitre Jan 1980. Or to Ed Ruscha’s ‘slogan’ pictures which, should they be seen in this same light, are nothing but a pseudomorphosis if anything at all. The ideas behind Malevich’s trans-rational poetic declarations and Ruscha’s slogan pictures are worlds (if not cosmoses) apart and, contrary to received belief, the alogical and the trans-rational in Malevich’s work in no way led to Suprematism, whose roots are entirely other.

In ‘Malevich: A new perspective on the American legacy’, Magdalena Dabrowski also outlines the sparse history of Malevich in America prior to the 1973 New York show, and then comments on the lack of philosophical threads that would establish connections between the Russian and the American artists. ‘In the early sixties there seemed to be no active interest on the part of these artists in the various exhibitions that included Malevich’s Suprematist work, in the specific context of his works’ creation, or in the underlying intellectual, spiritual, and metaphysical premises, including his notions of the fourth and fifth dimensions’.

So where, then, is the ‘legacy’ that would bring together the two creative traditions in this exhibition?

Apart from the formal analogies of geometric shapes and the monochromatic canvases, there is actually very little. What is made evident in the texts, on the other hand, is the immense admiration that the artists have for Malevich. This is documented by the two well-known 1974 articles on the Malevich retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum (which are reproduced in this catalogue), Donald Judd’s ‘Malevich: Independent form, color, surface’, and John Coplans’ ‘Mel Bochner on Malevich, an interview’. There are also the catalogue statements of Ad Reinhardt, Dan Flavin, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Richard Serra, and Frank Stella that refer directly to Malevich or to the vocabulary they share.  Finally, James Turrell gave an interview, ‘On Kazimir Malevich’. Malevich has a high status amongst artists.

As a concept for an exhibition, however, New York critic Alex Allenchy put the whole project into perspective. ‘By placing some of the artists it [Gagosian Gallery] represents among other more well-established names, it dictates and manufactures reputation by association. Rather than clearly defining lines of artistic genealogy, Malevich and the American Legacy has only muddled the Malevich lineage, making the process of determining true progenies more problematic.’

As an exhibition, this could not be more evident. The catalogue, on the other hand, contains beautiful photographs of beautiful works of art, and the articles openly and candidly present the difficulties of establishing a genealogy if, indeed, there is one. It is as if the premise and the project have cancelled each other out. Indeed, the interviews with artists of 1974 and 2010 and the artists’ statements reveal that it is not a ‘legacy’ that should be spoken of but, rather, a ‘historical precedent’ and a ‘convergence’. This may be in the art works themselves but is seen above all in the artistic minds at work in a stream that runs through the 20th century.

As Sol Lewitt put it, ‘The area of the main convergence between the Russians and Americans in the 1960s was the search for the most basic forms, to reveal the simplicity of aesthetic intentions’.

Malevich and the American Legacy by Magdalena Dabrowski, Yve-Alain Bois, Aleksandra Shatskikh, James Turrell is distributed by Prestel Verlag. 243 pp., illustrated in full colour, $100.00. ISBN 978-1-935263-31-9