Malevich vs. Tatlin: The 1915 Exhibit That Forever Ruptured Art Gets An Exhilarating Museum Reboot

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Even the name was a secret. In the autumn of 1915, as the Russian avant-garde prepared to show their latest work in a ramshackle Petrograd apartment, Kazimir Malevich boasted that he’d covertly developed a method of painting that would obliterate Western art. Rumors spread and suspicions mounted until the December 19th opening, when his fellow artists and the Russian public encountered a room full of paintings, some still wet, exhibited under the banner of Suprematism.

Conceptually and visually, the art Malevich showed in that Petrograd group exhibit – which bore the mysterious name 0,10 – was unlike anything ever before seen: arrangements of colored geometric shapes floating on a background of white, bearing titles such as “Painterly Realism of a Football Player – Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension”. Perhaps even more disquieting to traditionalists was a large white canvas painted with a simple black square, hung high in a corner where Orthodox families would typically place a religious icon.

Malevich’s revolution – which can succinctly be explained as a movement to liberate painting from depiction – still poses a challenge to artistic conventions, as can be seen at the Fondation Beyeler’s partial reconstruction of the historic 1915 exhibit. Malevich built upon the turn-of-the-century tendency toward abstraction, only to break away from the dependency on external reality inherent in Cubism and Futurism. (Picasso’s Cubist compositions introduced radically new methods of depiction, but his subject was still a ‘real’ table setting, or his latest mistress.) Malevich was right to be proud. In the history of art, Suprematism was a genuine coup.

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