Kazimir Malevich: The Knifegrinder, ca.1913,
Yale University Art Gallery
Kazimir Malevich: Hieratic Suprematist Cross (large cross in black over red on white) – , ca.1920-21,
Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam presents ‘Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde’, the largest survey in twenty years devoted to the work of the Russian avant-garde pioneer Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935).
October 19, 2013 — February 2, 2014
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Source: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam holds the largest collection of Malevich’s work outside of Russia, which was the subject of a large-scale exhibition at the museum in 1989. “Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde” is a tribute to the artist and his contemporaries, as well as the culmination of 2013 as the year celebrating Dutch–Russian relations in the Netherlands.
Not only an artist, Malevich was an influential teacher and a passionate advocate of the “new” art. The show is a tribute to the Russian avant- garde of the early 20th century, with Malevich as its focal point. Although best known for his purely abstract work, he was inspired by diverse art movements of his day, including Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism; his own visual language was also influenced by Russian icon painting and folk art. Through oil paintings, gouaches, drawings, and sculptures, the exhibition traces the rich variety of his oeuvre. All the phases in Malevich’s career will be on view, from his Impressionist period to his iconic Suprematist phase—his Black Square was its most radical consequence—to the lesser-known figurative works that followed.
“Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde” unites the exceptional collections of Nikolai Khardzhiev (via the Khardzhiev Foundation under the stewardship of the Stedelijk) and Georges Costakis (housed by the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki) for the first time. Pioneering Russian collectors of the Russian avant-garde, Khardzhiev and Costakis assembled considerable holdings of works during a time when abstract art was forbidden in the Soviet Union.
The exhibition includes works by Marc Chagall, Natalia Goncharova, Wassily Kandinsky, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matyushin, Mikhail Menkov, Ivan Puni, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin and Nadezhda Udaltsova, among others.
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