A square in the corner
Petrograd, December 1915. At an exhibition with the cryptic title 0.10, a picture hung high up in the corner of a room: a black square on a white ground. In Russian homes, precisely that spot, the “beautiful corner”, traditionally held icons. Kazimir Malevich called his new art Suprematism, the supremacy of pure feeling over the depiction of the world.
The Black Square became an icon of modernism. It is not a picture of something but the picture itself, a zero point from which painting was to begin anew.
Russia: art for the revolution
After the Revolution of 1917, many artists hoped to help build a new society through their art. In 1919 and 1920 Vladimir Tatlin designed a monument to the Third International, a spiralling tower of steel and glass that was to be taller than the Eiffel Tower. It was never built. The model does not survive and is known only through photographs and reconstructions.
In 1921 a group around Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova declared painting to be finished. Artists were to become “constructors” and design posters, books, furniture, textiles and stage sets for the new life; hence the name Constructivism. El Lissitzky designed the poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, in which a red triangle pierces a white circle.
A remarkable number of women belonged to the Russian avant-garde: Lyubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, Alexandra Exter, Olga Rozanova and Natalia Goncharova. Popova and Stepanova designed fabric patterns for a Moscow textile factory.
Under Stalin this freedom came to an end. From the early 1930s, Socialist Realism became the mandatory state art. In the end, Malevich painted figures again.
The Netherlands: De Stijl
Almost at the same time, a related movement emerged in the neutral Netherlands. In 1917 Theo van Doesburg founded the magazine De Stijl, whose circle included Piet Mondrian, Bart van der Leck, Vilmos Huszár and the architect J. J. P. Oud. The furniture maker and architect Gerrit Rietveld joined later.
Mondrian reduced his painting to the bare essentials: horizontal and vertical black lines, the three primary colours red, blue and yellow, and the “non-colours” white, grey and black. He called this Neoplasticism. When van Doesburg introduced the diagonal in the mid-1920s, their friendship broke down. Rietveld carried the principles into space. His house for Truus Schröder-Schräder in Utrecht of 1924, which he developed together with her, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Paths to Germany and America
Lissitzky lived in Germany for periods in the 1920s and in 1927 designed the Abstract Cabinet in Hanover, an exhibition room with movable walls. Van Doesburg spent 1921 and 1922 in Weimar and influenced the Bauhaus. In 1940 Mondrian fled the war to New York. There he painted Broadway Boogie Woogie, in which the black lines dissolve into colourful, pulsating squares, like the traffic and jazz of the big city.
Why they still matter
Suprematism, Constructivism and De Stijl freed art from the duty of depiction and created a visual language that is still everywhere: in graphic design and typography, in architecture, in furniture and fashion. Mondrian’s grid appears on dresses, posters and packaging. The works of Malevich, Mondrian, Lissitzky and van Doesburg are now in the public domain in the EU.
Further reading
- Christina Lodder: Russian Constructivism (1983).
- Carel Blotkamp (ed.): De Stijl: The Formative Years 1917–1922 (English edition 1986).