Работа над фальшивками, или Подлинная история дамы с театральной сумочкой - [160]

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.

[…] the work from the late 1920s and early 1930s roughly falls into two categories. The first is a series of often featureless figurines, whose stylized bodies, typically depicted against an equally stylized landscape, act as hybrids of the earlier suprematist compositions and themes and subjects from the very beginning of Malevich's career. Peasants has always been a common subject, as were woodcutters, group and close-up portraits, but now they are rendered in strident color schemes that bear no relation to observed reality, instead following a rationale that is determined from within the paintings themselves, very much in accordance with the logic of suprematism.

The secondis an altogether different body of portraits, some of them painted in a more overtly realist style, others with an oddly mannered posture evocative of early Italian Renaissance portraiture. Frequently, the sitters, whether members of the artist's family or more generic male or female workers, are dressed in garments that seem infused with suprematist color schemes or ornaments, such as coats or hats trimmed with contrasting stripes or a bright red bodice transfiguring the torso of its wearer into a solid volume of primary color. Neither of these groupings suggests that Malevich was inclined to abjure his radical pictorial inventions of the second half of the 1910s, nor do they suggest that he understood abstraction and figuration as mutually exclusive in the way in which he have come to view them under the influence of much later art-historical writing. This is made even more explicit by the fact that he frequently signed these canvases not just with his name, but with a small square. It is as if the more political pressures on avant-garde aesthetics grew and the more he ran the risk of his late work being mistaken for a “return to order“, the more Malevich wanted to make sure that his name became inseparable from the icon of suprematism, the Black Square.

AchimBorchardt-Hume, “An Icon for a Modern Age”, in Malevich, ed. Achim Borchardt-Hume, London, Tate Publishing, 2014, pp. 28-29

[The late works] are considered to be innovative and a continuation of the Suprematist enterprise, and even to represent a new phase of Suprematism.

PROF. CHRISTINA LODDER, President of the Malevich Society

Portrait of E. Yakovleva, 1932

Portrait of Nikolai Punin, 1933

Suprematist Composition, c. 1919-1920

Mystic Suprematism (red cross on black circle), 1920-1922

The crucial example with which to conclude a consideration of various guises and shades of suprematism with the still-enigmatic late figurative works of Malevich's so- called 'Second Peasant Cycle' from the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the role and the function of color therein. These range from overly emphatic bands of pure color in works such as Head of a Peasant 1928-9 (illustrated on page 207 of the catalog), with blocks of red and green gesturing towards the furrow of a ploughed field, or the striated bands of pure color that act as horizon lines in Running Man 1930-1 (Centre Pompidou, Paris) and Three Female Figures c. 1930 (illustrated on page 212 of the catalog), through to the seemingly more orthodox figurative paintings such as Portrait of E. Yakolevna of 1932 (illustrated on page 120 of the catalog). In all of these, it is color that effects a rapprochement between the compositional norms of suprematism and the conflicting demands of figuration.