Black Square, Dark Horse

Peter Plagens asks in Newsweek: Which is the most influential work of art of the last 100 years? Plagens lists the candidates commanding the most support in the primaries (Kazimir Malevich, Jackson Pollock*, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol). The presumed frontrunner has the critics sounding a lot like the pundits this week: How are Les Dems doing in the polls?

Les desmoiselles d'avignon, the inevitable victor, is doing just fine—though it's hardly garnered the support of the talking heads. Beyond Plagens, who sums up the conventional support for Picasso's cubist invention, and Clare Margetson, who remembers in hushed tones seeing a slide of the painting for the first time, no one's taken up the funky femmes in their Fortress of Solitude.

Jeffry Cudlin and Tyler Green form a Matissian bloc, backing, respectively, The Red Studio** (1939) and Blue Nude (1907). I've a hunch that when The Modern Kicks weighs in on the campaign, JL joins the Matissian center, too.

[Sidebar: You know, I wish that there were still sculptors. Like Dick Gephardt wished there was Big Labor in 2004, I wish there were sculptors. Some party to take up Alexander Calder's standard, boasting that no painter reshaped painting like Calder reshaped sculpture. I could get behind that. But sculptors don't identify "sculptor" these days—they all work in "media".]

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1913

I'll take a leftist tack and argue for Malevich's Black Square.

Now, as far as influence goes, Malevich runs into the same problem that Matisse's supporters have to argue down: Malevich's collectors and boosters were the wrong sort of people. Cudlin notes that "the wrong Steins—Sarah and Michael, not Gertrude and Leo—bought some of [Matisse's] boldest early pieces." Of course, in Malevich's case, the consequences of ignominy were somewhat more dire—and also ran the opposite direction. Consider poor Fedor Kumpan, director of the Kiev Art Gallery, arrested and sentenced to prison in 1929 for mounting a one-man exhibition of Malevich's work.

By that point, Malevich had long since completed his grand Suprematist experiment, which lasted him all of three years. That's all it took him to grandfather automatic painting. He identified with Black Square a singular form that could not be found in nature, and in ensuing paintings, transposed and commuted and revolved that square like a four-letter sequence of DNA to build his Suprematist body: up, over, through, in color. His 1913 masterpiece opened up a unique set of strategies that later artists, gratefully or not, would adopt and expand. I see towering over Frank Stella the shadow of the Kaz.***

Malevich later deviated from strict formalism to re-imagine the peasant, to create the new Soviet man. This work looks less good, and it was the work that found him trouble. But it was work not unlike that being done by Malevich's art-historical cohort—Arp, the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, Schwitters, and to lesser extents Chagall and then Mondrian, all artists of immense influence. Malevich's project ground to a halt by the forced collapse of the kulak class under collectivization, and he wasn't seen again until Glasnost. His work collected actual dust for something like six decades. That'll cut short an artist's reach.

Nevertheless several questions survive him. One question that surrounds him is immediate and apparent to artists today: the nexus of art and politics and the will to power and the responsibility or usefulness of art within a society. One question that Malevich himself asked was how paint could operate as pure abstraction, entirely removed from a representational context, a question that artists continue to quote and critique.

* Confidential to MSNBC: The name is Pollock.
** Which of these is The Red Studio?
*** Every time I close my eyes, in fact.