Judd/Malevich, Galerie Gmurzynska 2017

Donald Judd
Galerie Gmurzynska

Contents
7
Black
Flavin Judd
11
Donald Judd Chronology
24
Donald Judd Writings
95
Master of Color
Rudi Fuchs, March 1994
100
“Donald Judd – The Moscow Installation,”
Galerie Gmurzynska,
“Roter Kubus”, Cologne 1994
106
Plates

Black
Flavin Judd
The two squares are neither squares, nor black. Malevich’s Black Square
is slightly brushy, gray in parts, not quite black in others and not quite a
square. Judd’s Untitled is seen as black at first glance but is really cold
rolled steel and not actually flat, the folded metal giving it a shallow
depth. Neither work is black, neither is square and in that they are united.
The word minimalism is easy because it’s a way of determining
something unknown, a way of limiting damage to conventions
and in the same way the Russian Constructivists, Suprematists, and
others are lumped together as one black, slightly unsquare square and
relegated to a filing cabinet of history. The radicality of Malevich’s
work made for a rough time, for ridicule, exile, and dismissal and while
this probably had an effect on him, it did not turn him away from what
he felt was important. There is much more to the so-called reductionist,
minimalist black square. Malevich worked in all forms: designing
stage sets, perfume bottles, children’s book illustrations, and dishes.
In his “architectons,” which he began making in 1923, he moved into
architecture and real space. It would be decades before the “center of
the art world” of New York caught up with the movements in Holland,
Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and France from fifty years prior.
In the intervening years politics and the fake ideologies of competing
governments used to control people made it hard to see the past and
kept it locked away in basements.
The history of art is a shell game according to the current
fashions, a mirror held up to the past for present occupations. For Judd
the discovery of Constructivist art was slow and in small pieces. The
Cold War kept art and ideas from migrating around the world, subjecting
culture to psychotic power games and making for islands of knowledge
without connections. When my father, sister, and I finally visited Melnikov’s
house in Moscow in January 1987 it was a revelation. Here was
a house that in 1929 was as radical in its day as was Malevich’s art. That
it survived was only through the hard work of people who understood
the importance of the art as opposed to the unimportance of political regimes.
The only way political regimes are remembered is either through
7

arbarity or through art, otherwise they are forgotten. Or, possibly, like
Napoleon, they might be remembered for the metric system.
The superficial similarities in the squares of Judd and Malevich
are distanced when one understands the reasons behind them.
For Malevich the abstraction of art, the forgetting of the figure, was a
way to move towards a future of mankind. For Malevich the abstraction
of form and color was towards the biggest thing imaginable: a paradise
of the infinite, power, and spirit.
For Judd’s art it is the reverse. There is no spirit, there is no
infinite, there is just what is there, an empirical radicalness of art that
wants to go back to basics, to stones on a beach, not infinite, just existing
as it is. In this exhibition, Malevich’s grand designs and verbose metaphysics
are met by Judd’s specific locations and a knock on a table. For
Judd there is no possibility of a society beyond a small family; there is
no future that is not just a repetition of the power structure of the past;
there are things and there are people, the two are not the same and the
individuals have to project their own space.
For Malevich, the language provided the engine for his
art. The prevailing culture, the history of art, despite his dismissal of
it, provides the energy for his endeavor. Malevich is inventing a new
culture that responds to the prior Czarist culture that he grew up in.
He is inventing a way to the future that is steeped in revolutionary language
(before the revolution and before Lenin) that is a way of being
for people. For Judd this is not possible as it is all conditional and fake
promises. The prevailing culture is an endless mediocrity and the task
of the individual is to fight back by making an alternative. The culture is
not something that should be made for everybody, but for individuals to
make for themselves; there is no society, only a collection of individuals.
These are two different spheres or, rather, half spheres.
The area of activity for Malevich is that of culture as humans make it,
the language, the art, the way of making soup, the way of eating bread,
the tea in the afternoon in the dacha. Malevich is trying to make a
new culture for everybody and this is half of everything. He wants new
paintings, new buildings, new plates, new pillows. Malevich’s vision of
culture tells us what is valued and what is garbage and what is worth
looking at.
8

The other side of this equation is the planet we are on, the
stars, the photons that make it all possible, all that would remain if
humans were to disappear. Take away the people, their buildings, their
plates and pillows and you have what? Nature: the water lapping on
water shaped rocks. This is actuality what Judd is interested in. While
he is interested in the many cultures of humans and how they do things,
the art he is making is art that he wants to remain like the stones, and
stars and photons. He wants art like facts, stones, and culture is not
concerned with facts but only beliefs. The rocks and water exist within
culture only as narratives and myth, and the myths are just what Judd
wants to eliminate.
So the two artists are working in two entirely opposite
demi-spheres and while they intersect (within us specifically) they are
two different worlds. If you put the two demi-spheres together you get
a whole. The cultural landscape overlays the actual and the tea in the
afternoon is sipped as the water shapes the rocks on the shore and the
photons get colder and redder. If you put Malevich and Judd together
you get both the new myths (the new culture) and the facts below your
feet. It is “everything at once” as Judd once described good art.
9

Master of Color
Rudi Fuchs, March 1994
In Donald Judd’s art the presence of color has been pushed to a new
eloquence and clarity, to an incredible beauty. He always resented being
called a minimal artist because he felt that label did not do justice to his
true ambition and achievement. As a description of style, Minimal Art
put the emphasis on aspects of form and formal construction. Although
Judd liked simple forms, they were not really at the center of his artistic
concerns. Then he denied, of course, that simple forms are actually
simple. They are only simple in relation to previous expressionist of
figurative art which only looks more complex. He used simple forms in
relation to color and space – in that relationship his forms, though clear
and precise, often appeared in their visual behavior as quite complex,
sometimes even mystifying. It was because he wanted to concentrate
on articulating color in space, that he preferred those simple forms;
they created spatial clarity in a more precise way than complex forms
which attract too much attention for themselves. Furthermore it was
not difficult to use simple forms. As a young artist he admired the work
of Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Their direct,
abstract art indicated the “tradition” he wanted to belong to and to
take further. In the art of those masters the problem of abstract vs. figurative
art had been solved. Abstractness or simplicity in form were no
longer a serious argument; hence Judd disliked the term Minimal Art
because it in the end refers to a problem of form which no longer was a
problem. His problem was a quite different one: how to get color away
from the enclosed surface of a painting and, as an independent quality,
into real space. That is what he really understood, so to speak, the next
step in abstract (or rather concrete) art to be. In that understanding he
also, quite consciously, saw himself in the great and noble tradition of
abstract art, that fundamental invention of the 20th century which so
profoundly changed the very idea of art.
For Mondrian and Malevich the abstract organization of
simple, geometric shapes had been the essential problem, as it had been
their essential invention. They had to concentrate on abstractness and
simplicity of composition for that was the new pictorial language they
95

were perfecting. For them, therefore, color was a secondary consideration.
They tended to reduce the number of colors and to systematize
their use (Mondrian more so, of course, than Malevich who was the
more experimental of the two). Basically color functions as definition of
shape and thus as an essential factor in the organization of composition.
Color, in the work of Malevich and Mondrian, exists in the shadows of
the composition – it is tied up with it, just as in traditional realism color
is localized in the figuration of the painting. The great contribution of
Mondrian and Malevich lies in the imaginative brilliance of composition:
the new abstract idiom they have given to art.
In the work of Pollock, then, that traditional composition
has been fragmented, literally blown up in his “dripping” technique
which left a surface that, instead of being orderly composed, appeared
as a whole, single field pulsating with energy and color and movement.
Newman and Rothko took a somewhat different approach, more serene
and contemplative, which however brought them to similar and
beautiful results. Their paintings too are single fields that carry color
even more intensely than in Pollock’s, and more enigmatically. At that
point Donald Judd entered the scene.
The color in Rothko’s and Newman’s paintings is painted
color that clings to the surface of the canvas – and it is given its wonderful
life in the slow, deliberate mostly broad brushstrokes by which it is
applied. That handling of the brush determines the appearance of color
just as in the paintings of Mondrian and Malevich the colors are carried
by the composition. Not to interfere with the clarity and equilibrium of
the composition, the two early masters of abstract art, had to maintain
a certain systematic control over color – unlike Newman and Rothko in
whose paintings color and composition mingled into one single field. Judd
then does essentially the opposite of what Mondrian and Malevich did:
he systematizes composition, or, more precisely, he ignores composition.
That is exactly one step beyond Barnett Newman where composition
is reduced to one or two divisions in order to allow maximum space for
color and light. After a few years of “experimentation” with painting
and with pictorial relief, Judd then arrived at those three-dimensional
objects we now know so well and which bring color out into real space.
In Judd’s work color has become really three-dimensional. It is carried
96

y three-dimensional constructions (directly on the wall, directly on the
floor) that in themselves are simple forms. Because they are simple, not
composed but constructed in a non-hierarchical way, they attract very
little attention to themselves, as forms; they are precise carriers of precise
color. These carriers are made of simple, industrial materials. They either
represent the color and the typical quality of the material (aluminum,
galvanized iron, concrete, plywood, Cor-ten steel: sometimes sharp
and shiny, sometimes soft and sensuous) or they carry directed applied
color. Color is applied by way of various industrial techniques; it is also
“added” in the form of colored plexiglas. In all cases, however, the color
has no handwriting as in a painting. It is always pristine, brilliant and
immaculate. That quality and precision of surface which characterizes
all of Judd’s work, enhances very strongly the impression that color is
independent. Such is the simple shape of the carrier construction that
the presence and appearance of color absorbs the carrying form as if it
dissolves in color. It is at that point that Judd’s work becomes visually
quite complex and enigmatic – a great serenity emanating light and color
like a mysterious diamond.
Over the years Donald Judd became ever more sure in what
he did. In the last years of his life the colors became brighter than ever
before. The pieces he was working on when he died indicated another
brilliant development. There are one or two Cor-ten stack pieces of
which the back of each of the boxes has a different color. He had not
done that before. Even so, although his death came much too early,
his achievement stands undisputed, brilliant and daring and forever
convincing, Master Judd.
97

Kazimir Malevich
Galerie Gmurzynska

“…but what would Malevich say?”
When we first asked Donald Judd in 1992 if he would want to show his
works side by side with Malevich works selected by him, he answered:
“I think it’s good, but what would Malevich say?” Such modesty from
Donald Judd, known for his willpower, showed his enormous respect
for the work of Kazimir Malevich. Galerie Gmurzynska had known
Judd since the 1960’s as a connoisseur, critic and collector, who often
came to the gallery during his frequent trips to Cologne.
After our visit to Marfa and with the continued support of
Rudi Fuchs, as well as Rainer, Flavin and Michèle Judd, the exhibition
entitled “The Moscow Installation” became a reality and opened
on March 5 th , 1994, at the gallery in Cologne. Donald Judd died on
February 12 th , 1994, only weeks before the opening. It thus became
his last exhibition.
Today, 23 years later, it is with tremendous pleasure that we
are inaugurating our new exhibition space in Zurich with an exhibition
of JUDD / MALEVICH, curated by Flavin Judd, accompanied by this
in-depth publication with texts by Flavin Judd, Dr Evgenia Petrova
(Deputy Director of the State Russian Museum) and the historical text
by the famed curator and art-historian Rudi Fuchs. We are grateful to
everyone who has helped in bringing together this historically relevant
exhibition and publication.
Krystyna Gmurzynska and Mathias Rastorfer

Contents
9
Red
Flavin Judd
13
Donald Judd and the Late Kazimir Malevich
Evgenia Petrova
28
Malevich Letters
42
Kazimir Malevich Autobiography
86
Suprematism
112
Plates

Red
Flavin Judd
When Kazimir Malevich painted his first Suprematist paintings around
1913 he wanted to create a revolution. After making the first works he
held off showing them to the public until he had carefully orchestrated
the context for an unveiling to maximum effect. It was not simply a new
kind of painting that he wanted to introduce but a whole new way of
looking at the world. The art itself was just an example of what the new
vision should look like. He wanted to go to the zero, the foundation, of
figurative art and then go beyond it, go to the other side. He felt that
the vanishing point of traditional perspective was a demonstration of a
closed future of limited space leading nowhere and he wanted art that
was the reverse: unlimited, open.
The first of Malevich’s works derived from Cubism and
Futurism imported from Western Europe. While designing a set for
the opera “Victory over the Sun” in 1913 he reduced his previously
cubo-futuristic work into something resembling Suprematism: bold
squares and shapes that don’t directly represent anything. This was a
major breakthrough as the black rectangle was just itself. In Peircean
semiotic terms the painting was no longer an icon (a direct representation
of something, the portrait of a person) but the painting was now an
indexical sign (one that has a direct relationship: smoke to fire). The art
was the color, the shape and not the representation of a person formed
from them.
In Malevich’s case there was a strong context for the work
with modernist Russian poets leading the way and the traveling ideas of
cubism and futurism changing the way a small group of artists looked
at the world. Malevich’s art grew out of a whole milieu that existed
prior to the Revolution and a group effort to make art in a determined
direction. For the Constructivists art was a way of changing the world,
a movement forward that encompassed everything. Malevich clearly
stated that representational art was the past and that the future was
with abstraction and his painting of the spirit.
Under the Russian Czar the artists were more or less ignored
because the abstraction allowed them to be seen as non-political,
9

abstraction was seen as childish and benign. This changed after the
Revolution when even abstract squares were seen as threats to Stalin.
Malevich’s idea, that art was not just pretty pictures but was a force, an
embodiment of energy, would later be smothered under the dictates of
a central government which wanted happy peasants and subservient
workers with collectively raised fists.
Malevich’s art lived up to his hyperbolic language and the
Suprematist and later the Constructivist styles would become the vanguard
of the political revolution that followed in their radical wake.
Malevich continued his radical work as the political situation worsened
and the central government dictated more and more what both artists
and citizens could and could not do. Malevich would work in both radical
and representational styles until his death in 1935 when he painted a
social realist self portrait in the state imposed style and signed it with
a small black square.
Read one way the history of Western art since 1930 or so
has been a dark age. De Stijl, the Bauhaus, Dadaists, Constructivists
all were either exiled, killed or swept aside. Their new way of thinking
was stamped out, sometimes forgotten, often ignored and their dystopia
made manifest by politicians, capitalist exploitation and war. The post
WWII art world can be seen as the dystopic vision the Constructivists
were warning us against. We have yet to recover, yet to meet them in
their radicalness, their vision. Radicalness of thought is not only a sign
of freedom but is a freedom, an inventiveness, a way of pushing against
the constraints of a given time. Possibly the lack of radical thought and
art today is a reflection of just how constrained both are today and how
far we have to go back to go forward again.
10

Donald Judd and the Late Kazimir Malevich
Evgenia Petrova
The Russian avant-garde as a phenomenon was practically erased from
the national artistic legacy in the Soviet Union, where its rediscovery
began only in the 1960s. Meanwhile, the Western world, thanks to
the efforts of enthusiasts, private collectors and a few galleries and
museums, already knew not only the names and works of the masters
of Russia’s innovative artistic trends but also some of their theoretical
writings. One such enthusiast-professional was Donald Judd. In the
mid-1960s to early 1980s he was already devoting articles to Wassily
Kandinsky (Kandinsky in His Citadel, 1963), Kazimir Malevich (Malevich,
1973–1974) and the Russian avant-garde as a whole (Russian
Art in Regard to Myself, 1981). 1
In one article Donald Judd focused his attention on an
analysis of Malevich’s works shown in the Guggenheim Museum in 1955.
More than four decades have passed since that article was written, and
in that time many scholarly works devoted to Malevich have appeared.
Yet to this day there’s never been a more detailed and professional
analysis of Malevich’s Suprematist compositions.
Judging from Judd’s article, he was genuinely passionate
about Malevich the artist and thinker. He read his then-available writings
and carefully studied his paintings and drawings from originals
and reproductions.
One can imagine how surprised Donald Judd would be
if he could see what’s been published about Malevich only recently.
It seems to me that the later period of the artist’s oeuvre would have
aroused Judd’s particular interest. Judd’s characteristic laconism, his
colored objects located in interior spaces, and his focus on architecture
all resonate with many of Malevich’s ideas. In the mid-1970s Judd wrote
very briefly about Malevich’s early-1930s works, linking them with the
totalitarian regime and hinting at the artist’s forced mimicry. 2
However, as testified by Malevich’s oeuvre and his recently-published
epistolary writings, everything about this artist’s life is
much more complicated than it seems at first glance.
13

Top:
Kazimir Malevich and Nikolai
Suetin, ca. 1930
Bottom:
White Barracks in Vitebsk
decorated in Suprematist
decoration by UNOVIS (ca.1919)
14

Above:
Members of the group Unovis,
before the departure to the
exhibition in Moscow, Vitebsk,
1920. In the centre: Kazimir
Malevich holding a suprematist
plate. The train, which took
them to Moscow, was decorated
by Nikolai Suetin
15

Indeed, after the revolution of 1917 in Russia Malevich
developed a new artistic ideology to correspond with the social changes
that had taken place. The artist attached great value then to the organization
of the human environment, which he believed was capable of
cultivating a new world-view in society. After his relocation in 1919 to
Vitebsk Malevich, together with his students and associates, plunged
into creating projects and formulating theoretical foundations for the
next stage of his Suprematist school.
Neither then nor at any time thereafter did Malevich envision
any transformations in his art outside the framework of Suprematism. It
was in Suprematism that he saw a stylistic modulus capable of transforming
man’s surrounding environment. In 1920 he was already proposing
to paint the walls of “rooms or groups of rooms” in “Suprematist color
contrasts (windows and frames in one or two colors, say, doors in others…
the ceiling in one [color] and walls in others)…” (inscription on
the drawing The Principle of Wall Painting, 1920, Rus. Mus.).
Malevich wasn’t at all satisfied with Soviet architects’ orientation
towards Antique forms, and so with all the passion typical for his
nature he plunged into architecture, though he wasn’t a professional in that
field. In August 1924 Malevich sent El Lissitzky his architectural designs
and reported that along with three painted works “Suprematist blind
constructions” had been selected for display at the exhibition in Venice. 3
Judging from the catalogue of the 14th Venice Biennale,
these were watercolors and black-and-white drawings 4 along with, possibly,
the plaster Alpha architecton from the Russian Museum collection.
Later, in the 1926–1928 period, Malevich resumed work on
his architectons. In 1927 his models were exhibited in Warsaw. Upon
seeing them, Polish architect Stanisław Noakowski exclaimed: “So he’s
a magician! No content… No decoration… But what proportions in the
forms! What purity! Archittura 5 [thus in the original—E. P.]”.
Unfortunately, not all of Malevich’s architectons known
from his correspondence have survived. It’s clear, however, that they
were of no small number and belonged to some sort of larger project
that Malevich was undertaking in the 1920s and early 1930s.
In his search for a basic ideological framework Malevich
turned at this time to old traditions. He visited churches, which in the
16

Above:
Kazimir Malevich
Principle of a Wall Painting, 1920
Watercolour, indian ink and graphite
pencil on paper
34 × 24.8 cm (13.38 x 9.76 in.)
The State Russian Museum,
St Petersburg
17

Above:
Kazimir Malevich,
Architecton Alpha, 1920
Gypsum
31.5 × 80.5 × 34 cm (12.40 x 31.69 x 13.38 in.)
The State Russian Museum,
St Petersburg
18

Above:
Photo of an Architecton, made
by Kazimir Malevich
19

Top:
Kazimir Malevich
Girls in the Field, 1928-1929
Oil on canvas
106 × 125 cm (41.73 x 49.21 in.)
Bottom:
Alexei Pakhomov
Reaper, 1928
Oil on canvas
85 × 106 cm (33 x 41.73 in.)
The State Russian Museum,
St Petersburg
20

1920s didn’t arouse enthusiasm in official circles, and studied the structure
and design of ecclesiastical architecture. Comparing the church
rituals familiar from his childhood with the customs of Soviet clubs
and palaces of culture, Malevich came to the very radical conclusion
for those times that churches and Soviet public institutions had much
in common: “The walls of both are decorated with portraits arranged
according to esteem and rank. Both have their martyrs and heroes
whose names are recorded in books of saints…”. 6
Here Malevich is referring of course to the so-called “walls
of honor” bearing the names and photographs of the most productive
workers, a mandatory feature of nearly all clubs and houses of culture.
This discovery led Malevich to alter the character of his
Suprematism.
Malevich understood perfectly well that the dynamic
Suprematism he’d developed in the mid-1910s no longer answered
the demands of the times. “Non-objective art stands there without
windows and doors, like pure sensation, in which life, like a homeless
vagabond, desires to spend the night and demands that an opening
be made,” 7 he wrote in May 1927. The allegorical meaning of this
statement is quite clear and can be deciphered as follows: the non-objectivity
Malevich had discovered in the mid-1910s, which he called
Suprematism, had now become a “homeless vagabond” for the artist
himself and arrived at a dead end. At this new stage it was necessary
to breathe life into non-objectivity, to open up some windows and
doors into it.
“Supronaturalism”: this is how Malevich denotes the painting
Girls in the Field (1928–1929) on the stretcher. On the one hand, this
designation serves as an admission that the image is based on real-life
impressions. Yet on the other, it underlines the work’s stylistic connection
with Suprematism, the new pictorial realism, and with all the artist’s
other Suprematist compositions. If in the mid-1910s Malevich had
often associated his non-objective works with real life (Red Square, for
example, bears the artist’s title “Pictorial Realism of a Peasant Woman
in Two Dimensions” on the back of the canvas), from the late 1920s
onwards, to the contrary, he subsumes all outward similarity with real-life
motives into the framework of Suprematism, which he now calls
21

“Supronaturalism”. And he does this textually, as on the back of the
canvas Girls in the Field.
Like many Soviet artists of the 1920s, Malevich was searching
for themes relevant for modernity as well as a big style capable of
expressing the new reality of the times. However, if we compare works
on one and the same theme executed by Malevich (Girls in the Field,
1928–1929; Sportsmen, 1930–1931) and, for example, Alexei Pakhomov
(Reaper, 1928) or Alexander Samokhvalov (At the Stadium, 1931), the
fundamental differences in artistic attitude are obvious. The works
of Pakhomov or Samokhvalov, as well those of other first-rank Soviet
artists, aren’t only figurative: they’re always filled with pathos and oriented
towards real life. The themes in Malevich’s pictures, on the other
hand, are designated very conditionally. Their figures are weightless and
remain essentially non-objective, detached, just like their backgrounds,
from any particular place of action or the surrounding world in general.
For Malevich it is artistic language that’s important above all
else. He attains that degree of abstraction which allows him to express
a theme without narrative, using only color, rhythm and form, that is,
using the characteristic methods of Suprematism. And for Malevich it’s
of little importance whether the reality he paints is Soviet reality or some
other kind. Socialism (not communism, towards which Malevich held
sharply negative views 8 ) suits him precisely because it’s anti-bourgeois
and espouses equality, just like his own Suprematism. Malevich dreams
of a future when “art won’t be agitational… it won’t serve the people,
because the people will understand that it has no need of lackeys” and
when “there will be no ideas… only a single world-view”. 9
Basing himself on this idea of an ideal society, Malevich
began work on a large project called “The Socialist City”. How it actually
looked is unknown but several passages in the memoirs of the artist’s
contemporaries provide us with a certain notion of its appearance. “In
particular, he was working on a Suprematist urban space,” wrote Konstantin
Rozhdestvensky. “He was designing on the streets of future cities
bottomless glowing wells ending somewhere below, in the depths, in an
infinitude of bright colored light; people walked along the firm ground
of the sidewalk and suddenly found themselves hanging weightless over
the abyss.” 10
22

Top:
Kazimir Malevich
Athletes, 1930–1931
Oil on canvas
142 × 164 cm (55.90 x 64.56 in.)
Bottom:
Alexander Samokhvalov
At the stadium, 1934–1935
Tempera on canvas
121 × 140.5 cm (47.63 x 55.31 in.)
The State Russian Museum,
St Petersburg
23

Above:
Anna Leporskaya and Kazimir Malevich
Ceiling of an arch in the iron hall of the
State People’s House (Gosnardom), 1931
Pencil and gouache on paper
44 × 63.5 cm (17.32 x 24.99 in.)
Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich
24

Above:
Anna Leporskaya and Kazimir Malevich
Design for the color decoration of a wall in the
Theater of the Musical Comedy of the State
People’s House (Gosnardom), 1931
Pencil and gouache on paper
31 × 87 cm (12.20 x 34.25 in.)
Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich
25

Above:
Anna Leporskaya and Kazimir Malevich,
Design for the decorative painting of the iron
staircase in the Red Theater, 1931
Pencil and gouache on paper
64 × 44 cm (25.19 x 17.32 in.)
Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich
26

According to Rozhdestvensky, the architecture of Malevich’s
city grew not only vertically, from the ground up, but took on a
new spatial dimension. 11 We can observe something similar today in the
translucent glass elevators, illuminated underground shopping centers
and moving walkways of our modern cities.
In the early 1930s Malevich submitted the blueprints for
his Socialist City to the government. According to the testimony of the
artist’s wife, Natalia Malevich, the Suprematist architectural project
was presented by the artist in literary form accompanied by sketches.
The whereabouts of these blueprints remain unknown
to this day. But we know that the quest for a synthesis of architecture,
painting and design intensely excited the artist’s imagination in the
final decade of his life, and he was looking for a way of at least partially
realizing it. In the early 1930s he created a draft project for the Red
Theater in Leningrad. Malevich’s correspondence reveals that he also
intended to design twelve movie theaters in Moscow and take part in
the construction of the grandiose Palace of Soviets. 12
As these projects reveal, architecture was unthinkable for
Malevich without painting and sculpture. The new Palace of Culture
on Vasilievsky Island in Leningrad was to contain “ten large murals
and five to eight small sculptures”, 13 in the artist’s words. Malevich saw
the future of art in a synthesis of creative disciplines, and the final decade
of his life was devoted to attempts to embody this idea. Through
Supronaturalism Malevich developed and continued the Suprematism
he’d invented in the mid-1910s.
1 Donald Judd Writings (Judd Foundation, 2016), 254–267; 92–97; 294–300.
2 Ibid., 265.
3 Malevich o sebe. Sovremenniki o Maleviche. Pis’ma. Dokumenty. Vospominaniya. Kritika
[Malevich on Himself. Contemporaries on Malevich. Letters. Documents. Memoirs.
Criticism], 2 vols., comp. I. A. Vakar, T. N. Mikhienko (Moscow: RA, 2004), 1:161.
4 Ibid., 2:263.
5 Ibid., 2:367.
6 Kazimir Malevich. Sobr. soch. [Kazimir Malevich. Collected Works], 5 vols. (Moscow, 1995),
1:248.
7 Malevich o sebe, 1:189.
8 Collected Works, 5:409.
9 Ibid., 5:350.
10 Malevich o sebe, 2:290.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 1:229.
13 Ibid., 1:225.
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