I’ve read everything I can get on Malevich, trying to figure out what he meant when he invented Suprematism, but I don’t quite understand it even though I approve of it and like it. I am convinced that it is something, but I can’t convince others.
Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian: the great mystery of their art and the even greater mystery of what they meant by their inscrutable writings about what they were doing…What does it all mean?
Since this is about art, I’ll move it to Cafe Society.
Off to Cafe Society.
DrMatrix - General Questions Moderator
Malevich and Mondrian were interested in creating “pure” paintings. (Kandinsky, a lesser artist, in my opinion, was after something different.)
By pure, I mean paintings that could only be seen for what they are, namely paintings.
That endeavor implied acknowledging the medium, or physical support of the painting in an explicit manner. What are the characteristics of the physical support?
–Flatness and rectilinear dimensions, i.e., square or rectangle (although Mondrian made some diamond shaped paintings late in his career).
Thus, everything in a painting by Malevich or Mondrian is designed to emphasize its flatness and/or its literal shape.
For example, there is no perspective (depth) to contradict the flatness of the canvas, only elementary shapes of color or black/white. Likewise, the shapes are generally geometric, echoing the literal shape of the canvas.
The aesthetic philosophy behind this striving for “purity” has something to do with the collapse of authority in other conventions – such as the concept of “genre” in painting (landscape, portrait, history, etc.) that, having lost their ability to convince, were seen as external and therefore extraneous to painting.
(Malevich and Mondrian were really providing one interpretation of the cubist works of Picasso, Braque and others. Other interpretations were possible, as demonstrated by Surrealism and later more interesting developments.)
One of their stronger points was also that they argued for a universally understandible art-- one that could be understood at face value and which didn’t need any particular cultural upbringing to get (“that is a realistically shadowed house in one-point perspective”) much less 3 semesters of art history. So Mondrian, for example, reduced his painting to primary colors and black and white and horizontal and vertical lines, with no referent object represented (hence the technical term “non-objective” painting rather than the looser term ‘abstract"). As a two-dimensional work it doesn’t make any attempts to pretend to be three-dimensional and is meant to simply be appreciated as a bunch of colors and shapes on a surface-- he trimmed it down to visual concepts that everyone ‘gets’.
I feel that Malevich in his Surpematism phase kind of hints at a three-dimensional space more overtly than Mondrian (although with the receding or projecting properties of colors almost anything can be read as having ‘depth)-- he plays more with diagonals and color recession and such. . . but perhaps it was a kind of pun or problematising of the surface.
Kandinsky, though, was a. . . um. . . borderline nutcase in my opinion-- his paintings are ‘abstract’ and not ‘non-objective’-- in a certain time period for example many of his paintings were stylized representations of the Apocalypse (here’s the flood and some boats and big guns, and here’s Saint George with a lance and this red blob is a dragon. . .), and he dabbled in Theosophy and his own art theory work (a famous work called "Concerning the spiritual in art’ or something close to that) involves a lot of stuff like "blue is the color of the spirit, and yellow means illness, and. . .’ yaddah yaddah. Do you see the difference between abstraction and non-objective art? There’s a slight difference-- I see the later Mondrian and Malevich as closer to truely ‘non-objective.’
Is this the kind of discussion you are looking for?
Yes, this is an excellent discussion and helpful.
I know Malevich was usually flat in his main Suprematist period but he did that one painting of a big yellow patch that was definitely tilting into the third dimension. The two above people seem not to like Kandinsky, but those abstractions in his middle period before he began painting those isolated hard-edge geometric paintings supposedly influenced by Klee are wonderful and even though we know that yellow can’t represent this or that for everybody or that this or that shape means something as definite as Kandinsky said they meant, his paintings and writings are major. And probably fairly internally consistent, so that it would be a worthwhile project for somebody to come along who could understand what he wrote and then see what the paintings meant in terms of those writings. In other words the paintings might mean more than they seem to mean to just the more or less art-educated person (which is already a lot). Duchamp provided an elaborate “explanation” of the Large Glass, which does have something to do with it, and some explanation for and at least elaborate directions for setting up his last work with the long title and the female dummy lying on the grass, and that has been interpreted by countless art interpreters–it doesn’t seem like anybody has done that for Kandinsky. Another artist who was “too” explicit about what he thought colors and shapes and lines meant was Seurat.
But getting back to Malevich, and I to take it that what he meant by pure feeling is you look at these shapes and turn your attention to the feelings in your body that the work elicits, without then assigning any emotional name or idea to them? For instance when I look at WHITE ON WHITE, the white square that is tilted a little to the right on the white ground, is what Malevich wanted me to do to kind of feel myself tilted a little to the right? And several other feelings such as the subtle difference between the two shades of white, which is a feeling of subtlety?
This would be a little different from Constructivism (Gabo) where “color, line, and shape correspond to feelings and ideas without having to represent anything in the natural world,” or words to that effect. This would be the same as Mondrian in that he intended that we are to feel the horizontals as evoking the feelings that are the opposite of the feelings we get when we feel the verticals; ie., as we look around in a given painting, we are feeling these opposites because these are two opposites in our visual field, and moreover, he intended that these opposites, the horizontal and the vertical, should be composed (by him in the painting) in such a way that they were BALANCED. This would be art as therapy, meaning that he meant his paintings to be psychological diagrams that would readjust us.
Behind the veil of mere appearance, we have the fact that humans are filled with oppositions, the violent hierarchies as Derrida calls them, but the oppositions conceived of by all societies in one way or another, and Mondrian felt his task, as I understand it, was to harmonize these opposites in the visual medium. Another opposition he used was the three intense colors as the opposite of the colorlessness, so thought of, of black, white, and gray. He also began to write about how music should start being composed that did the same thing as he was doing in painting, but he didn’t get very far, although he talked to composers about it. He thought in his day that jazz came closest to presenting the opposites. (I myself hear no particular oppositions in jazz, it all just sounds like upsetting noise to me as I have no ear for it for some unknown reason). He also said that some day painting wouldn’t be necessary, but I can’t recall why.
No no no no-- I got the wrong sense across, I see. I LOVE Kandinsky; I absolutely adore that period of his stuff. However he IS a nutcase. Two are not mutually exclusive.
Thanks for this interesting discussion.
I find it beneficial to more or less ignore what an artist like Kandinsky says about the “meaning” of his art because it makes the art somewhat less interesting in my mind. Specifically, I think his desire to attach specific “spiritual” meanings or references to his work only shows that his conception of what he was up to was not as evolved as what his paintings in fact, in the history of art, were up to, and that was, during the early years of abstract painting (meaning post-cubist painting), exploring (attempting to discover) which conventions were necessary, and which could be discarded, in order for an object to be experienced as a painting. I think that Kandinsky’s work (like that of Mondrian and Malevich) is significant in that regard, and I really don’t get anything out of his talk about “spiritual meanings,” certainly nothing that allows me any particular insight into the paintings themselves.
It seems to me that Kandinsky’s pictures are about liberating line from its traditional function of defining shapes, and color from its function of mining a three dimensional space for objects; the weakness (in my opinion, and I’m no expert on Kandinsky) is that he tends to treat line and color as objects in their own right, thus leaving unquestioned the distinction between, say, figure and ground. The lines and colors, while not referring to ordinary objects in the world, seem like some other sort of objects floating around in a space of undetermined depth.
I really don’t like Duchamp for this reason: without the “explanations” (whether provided by the artist himself, or by others), the works themselves aren’t very interesting or moving. In other words, Duchamp’s stuff is entirely literary, and the modern art that I enjoy is not literary at all; it is visual with a vengeance. I think Duchamp was essentially a failed cubist painter who overcame that failure by creating Dada, the interest of which is entirely exhausted in the irony that anything whatsoever can be made to fit into the category of “art,” which, with the hindsight provided by Pop and conceptual art, isn’t much of a discovery, and not at all a discovery about what distinguishes “good” from “bad” art, which is the question I’m interested in. (When I think of a recent analogue for Duchamp, I think of Frank Zappa, a failed classical musician who made a lucrative career out of poking ironic fun at pop music.)
I think that the “art as therapy” notion – in the literalist sense intended – represents a real degradation of the value of art insofar as if I need therapy, there are many other places I would look (like in the shrink’s office) before I’d look at a Mondrian painting. Mondrian wanted to make pictures that had nothing at all to do with “nature,” meaning he wanted to make pictures that would be experienced as paintings, without any external references or connotations. It is for that reason that Mondrian’s work explicitely acknowledges purely pictoral values like flatness and shape, i.e., the literal shape of the canvas.
Finally, I suspect that Mondrian’s interest in jazz has to do with the idea of improvisation, a subject I hope to talk about on this forum. The improvised performance does not depend or admit the existence of a score; in severing his work from the model provided by “nature,” Mondrian may have seen the necessity for a kind of visual improvisation. I’m not too sure about this, but the relationship between Pollack’s “overall” works in the 1940s show a very interesting affinity with improvised music.