Malevich and a Fire Alarm

I am being super efficient today - it is a bank holiday Monday but it is tipping it down with rain and I have nothing else to do so I may as well work. I have a few things I could do with catching up with anyway so I think it is probably no bad thing (even if it does make me feel like I need to sort my social life out).

I visited a couple of exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London a little over a week ago so I guess I had better tell you about them. The first one was on Malevich - a Russian Suprematist and the second one a focus on Matisse's Cut Outs (You can read about that one tomorrow).

I didn't really have enough time to do Malevich justice - there was a lot to see and two rooms in - BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, the Tate suffered from a Fire Alarm. An hour and a half of waiting outside in the just not quite raining and it was time to see Matisse. I had half an hour at the end to rush around the 12 rooms, but at least I read the booklet back to back whilst I was waiting and knew what to look out for.

I actually don't really know what to say or where to start. There was a lot going on at the exhibition and a lot of interruptions and inspiration drawn from, and because of, the politics and the turbulence of Russia at the time Malevich was prevalent. There were small works because paper was so expensive, there were school diagrams from when he taught at an Art School in Vitebsk, there were cubist and impressionist works from when he was first starting out and then a group of Suprematist works fading away to nothing.

Clockwise from Top left, The Scyther, Black Square, Suprematist composition, Suprematist composition, Self Portrait.

The Suprematist works were definitely the most interesting, at least, to me. The impressionist and cubist paintings were very accomplished, in fact, I love one of his self portraits but it is in the Suprematist works that you find the man and the manifesto. I still don't really understand what Suprematism is - the idea an artist is only a creator if his artistry has nothing in common with nature. That is fair enough, if you are painting landscapes/people you are just reinterpreting something that already exists, not creating something new, but I think that is how you teach people to see something they might have missed, so I don't think it is an unnecessary creation.

With the previous nature orientated and 'peasant' class of Russia and the eruption of 1914 and a 'modern war' these de naturalised and futuristic images make more sense. They are the perfect capture of an explosive moment in Russian history and a jump from one culture to another, and in fact how Malevich jumped from one style to another almost instantly with the iconic 'Black Square'. I feel like I don't entirely understand mentally what Malevich was about but I understand him by eye and by heart, and I would like to know more. That means in one way or another he has inspired me, and that is all I want from an exhibition. I also know that when I want to paint but I equally need a rest I will just copy a piece of scenery or a landscape as it is good therapy for me. If I want to create something, I do usually try a bit harder and the image usually becomes more abstract. In that way, Suprematism is exactly as it says and a higher form of perception and creativity. Malevich was obviously more focused than me....