For Christmas, I received the perfect gift for an academic: Books! And most of them focus on Ukraine. Given that that my semester is in full swing, my posts will be fewer; however, I want to highlight from time to time a paragraph or two from some of the books I’m reading about Ukrainian art, history, music, and, of course, Russian’s war of aggression against Ukraine. (Note: I have opted to use the Ukrainian spelling of Malevych’s name); however, when I directly quote from Shkandrij’s text, I will use his spelling—namely, Malevich.)
In Avant-Garde Art in Ukraine (1910-1930) Contested Memory, Myroslav Shkandrij devotes a chapter to Kazymyr Malevych, who has been, until recently, described as a Russian artist. Shkandrij, however, argues that Malevych’s autobiographies, especially the longer one, written near the end of life, reveal that Malevych was significantly shaped by his early life experiences in Ukraine and provide crucial insights into his art. Commenting on the significance of Malevych’s autobiographies, Shkandrij states, “One of the crucial and most puzzling issues they raise is the artist’s continual focus on the rural-urban divide, which appears to confound any narrative that concentrates on Malevich as a defender of a revolutionary, urban, machine art. Instead, [. . . he] emerges in these autobiographies as an artist inspired by peasant primitivism” (103).
In his longer autobiography of 1933, Malevych describes his early childhood through late teen experiences of life in Ukrainian villages. His father, Seweryn, was a director/engineer, who oversaw various sugar-plantations throughout Ukraine. As a result, the young Malyvich travelled extensively with his family across Ukraine’s vast landscape and lived in multiple small towns and villages, including Yampil (until age 12), Avdiivka, Maivka, Parkhomivka, Vovchok, and Konotop and Bilopillia, near Chernihiv and Sumy (until age 17) (p. 104).
Malevych’s impressions of Ukrainian peasant and village life are extremely positive. For example, he finds the land, customs, food, and dress of the peasants not only beautiful but also superior to the dull, mechanistic, oppressive, and uncreative life characteristic of the sugar factories. As Shkandrij observes, “his contact with the peasantry imprinted him with an aesthetic. [. . . ] At the end of his description of life in the countryside, he emphasizes that his sympathies for the village lie above all in the way the people practiced art” (p. 105). Here Shkandrij quotes a relevant excerpt from Malevych’s autobiography: “‘I watched with great excitement how the peasants made wall paintings, and would help them cover the floors of their huts with clay and make designs on the stove. The peasant women were excellent at drawing roosters, horses and flowers. The paints were all prepared on the spot from various clays and dyes. I tried to transfer this culture onto the stoves in my own house, but it didn’t work. They told me I was making a mess, so I worked on fences, barn walls, etc.’” (p. 105). Malevych goes on to say, that this “‘was the background against which the feeling for art and artistry [khudozhestvu] developed within me’ (Vakar and Mikhienko, 20)” (p. 105).
Shkandrij also highlights various examples of the Malevych family’s liminal existence in which they constantly found themselves embodying and negotiating in-between or pluralistic spaces. For example, they lived and worked in urban and rural spaces, participated in religious (formally Catholic) and non-religious customs and rituals, and they spoke, sung, and created poems and other writings in Polish and Ukrainian.
During his twenties, Malevych went through, what Shkandrij calls, a “radicalization” and became, for a time, something of a nihilist. He had been living in Moscow since 1904, and it was there that he had yet another transformative experience with icons—an experience that brought him back to his fond childhood memories of Ukraine. Through the icons he encountered in Moscow, he came to have a deeper understanding of Ukrainian art, as an extraordinary and emotionally rich this-world beauty. With his new insight and appreciation of the peasant’s artistry, his approach to his own art changed. That is, he now “rejected perspective, anatomy and the entire realist-naturalist approach that he had cultivated while studying the Wanderers [Peredvizhniki]. He decided that icon painters had achieved a high degree of technical mastery, and had succeeded in conveying content in an anti-anotamical way, outside the laws of perspective. They created color and form through a purely emotional way of approaching a theme. It was then, he tells us, that he realized there was a direct artistic connection between the icon, on the one hand, and the little horses and roosters on peasant walls, along with peasant costumes and domestic tools, on the other” (p. 108). This new way of thinking about his art can be seen especially in some of his works of the early part of the 20th century—i.e., 1910-1913. During these years, he paints some of his own icon-inspired works, as well as depictions of peasants at work and people living in small towns. While Shkandrij does not deny that the artworks of 1910-1913 reflect Malevych’s “Cubo-Futurist” phase, his point is to highlight that Malevych was at the same time influenced by his experiences in Ukraine and seeking new ways to understand and grapple with the “antithesis between village and city, nature and civilization” (p. 110).
Shkandrij’s account of Malevych problematizes narratives that (over)emphasize Malevych’s move to Moscow as leading to his embrace of the “new art of the city and the machine” (p. 108). Rather, Malevych’s autobiographies reveal that his Ukrainian roots were fecund sources of inspiration from which he drew to develop his innovative artworks. Stated otherwise, his artistic inspiration and experimentation did not emerge solely from his time spent in Moscow and St. Petersburg—i.e., city “centers.” Rather, Malevych’s revolutionary art exhibits critical, anti-colonial, anti-imperial inflections, animated by his Ukrainian roots and his own identification with Ukraine. In this way, Malevych follows in the footsteps of Ukraine’s most famous 19th century poet, Taras Shevchenko. As Shkandrij explains, “Young people who journey to capitals can and often do make the trip with a view to overthrowing dominant intellectual and artistic trends, and to introducing a radical perspective that they have incubated elsewhere. This kind of oppositional stance toward the imperial capitals has frequently appeared in Ukrainian cultural history as an anti-colonial reflex. It can be read clearly, for example, in the work of Taras Shevchenko, who elevated Ukrainian history and culture as part of a romantic discovery of native traditions. Both tsarist officials and metropolitan intellectuals quickly rejected this poet’s construction of what they considered a highly problematic identity and assessed his writings as an anti-colonial ‘writing back’ against imperial civilization” (p. 109). With this in mind, we can describe Malevych’s complex artworks as anti-colonial instances of “painting back” against imperial Russia.
There is so much more to say about Malevych’s Ukrainian roots and how his experiences of Ukrainian folk art, people, culture, landscape, etc. influenced his art, but alas I have to turn to lecture prep for my classes. If Malevych’s art interests you, I highly recommend listening to the following Ukraine World: Explaining Ukraine podcast episode, “Malevych: A Symbol of the Ukrainian Avant-Garde.” In the episode, Volodymyr Yermolenko, a Ukrainian philosopher and journalist, interviews Tetyana Ogarkova, a Ukrainian scholar who has co-authored a book on Malevych.