MoMA with Jeff: Kasimir Malevich: White on White, 1918.

It is time. 

Time to delve into the kind of painting that may most frustrate and confound those who bravely confront modernism with me, with open minds and hearts.

Kasimir Malevich was born in 1878 in Kiev when Kiev was part of the Russian Empire, but inhabited by Poles whose country had been dissolved during one of the many times in history Poland would simply be absorbed cruelly and fatally by its neighbors. One of fourteen children, his family was on the move constantly throughout the Ukraine in search of farm work on sugar beet plantations, exposing the young boy to the local culture, particularly embroidery, throughout his youth. At the age of 12, Kasimir began to draw, influenced by Russian folk art which took him to Moscow to formally study art.

His early works are representational, charming, one might say Chekovian in their sentiments. But a major exhibition by Russian Cubist Aristarkh Lentulov transformed the young rebel at heart to his core. So taken by this directness, by the growing definition of art, he tweaked the movement to his own proclivities and by 1915, he had produced a manifesto on a movement he christened Suprematism, based on 'the supremecy of artistic feeling' rather than the depiction of representational objects. 

The palette would be minimal, the planes, flat in execution, perhaps more dimensional in perception, the subjects, geometrical. (And the more I study the Russians of this period, Chagall, Kandinsky, this gravitational leaning towards geometry seems to be cultural or genetic or proximal.)

You may be surprised as I to learn this painting I chose for today from MoMAs collection, Malevich's White on White, dates from 1918. We are nearly one hundred years away from the kind of utter abstraction we often forget has roots so deep in our artistic history.

There is one paramount notion to remember when approaching a painting with this kind of surface simplicity: It has anything but. Malevich was capable of painting the kind of representational work we might consider a masterpiece at face value as much as any neoclassicist. This work does not define his limitations artistically. On the contrary, so avant-garde a work is this, it is a demonstration of how far this artist could think outside of his history, his milieu, his moment in time.

The second notion to bear in mind reminds me of a scene in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Young Cordelia Flyte asks family friend Charles Ryder, "Modern art, it's all bosh, isn't it?" And Charles fobs her off, "Great bosh." But this is Waugh at his satirical best, writing in a memory novel during World War II, a moment that takes place between the Great Wars. As much as abstractionism has been part of our vernacular for nearly a century, we must think back to these artists, Europeans largely, who saw fathers, brothers, sons, marched off to wars, firing squads, camps, blistering gas attacks, whose villages were bombed capriciously, whose families were flung into unwilling diasporas, a rootlessness that haunts later generations even today. The horrors of an entire world at war, the carnage, the terror, the agonizing years of it, only to be plunged into the hell of it some twenty years later, shattered everyone, particularly those whose hearts traded in the human condition, those who chose to document it, and as I suggested at the outset of this journey into MoMA, those who chose to predict where we might go as a community, as a people, as a civilization.

Nothing meant what it had any longer. And the value of everything had to build up a language of currency.

So, after a World War, the death of an empire, a regicide, a Russian, in revolution mind you, paints a white square, off balance, floating in a slightly warmer white field. The elements are so simple as to be discussed in a sentence, the feeling of hovering, the eternity of white, the movement suggested by the tilted square within the square. Malevich will not pretend to have answers, and for someone who produced a fiery manifesto at the age of 37, I find this notion of him supremely egoless. But the implications are legion. I believe at least he is suggesting, we, we humans, we emerge from these crucibles of terror baptismal, transformed by consequence, but unsullied in our capacity for goodness, floating for now, but floating, if anything is for certain, back to earth, where we shall proceed in spite of ourselves, forward. 

I look at this painting, admittedly a lover of Russian plays, Russian music, Russian dance (nearly everything Russian but Russian policy and centuries of oppression), this painting of purity rendered between years of unimaginable bloodshed, and I feel the most unlikely feeling in the midsts of everything chaotic and sentimental and sweeping and inhuman, unbearably beautiful and horrifying that is Russian: Hope.