Inscribed Historicity

Malevich’s recreations of his own works are hardly alone in the history of art. Even during the early 20th century, with modernism’s emphasis on originality, it was not unheard of for artists to produce multiple copies of their own works.

While the recreation of paintings itself is not unheard of in the history of modern art, Malevich’s assignment of false dates to most of the works in the 1929 exhibition, both recreations and entirely new compositions, was remarkable. His inscription of these false dates is what solidifies his exhibi­tion as reenactment. Without the false dates, he could not have so explicitly evoked concrete, albeit falsified, evidence of historicity.

The extent to which he pursued his ante-dating practices in 1929 was unprecedented; never before in his career had he applied false dates so exten­sively.

His invented date of 1913 for these works might have been dismissed, if anyone had noticed it in 1923 or 1929, as the result of an eccentric mind with little attention to practicalities like dates and chronologies. Reproducing a few groundbreaking works from his early career for the unusual purposes of display at a major international exhibition would have merited the sub­stitution of replacements for the originals. Deducting just two years from the originals’ actual 1915 date of creation would not have been particularly noteworthy to more than a handful of fellow avant-garde artists, most of whom had left Russia by 1923.

A similar logic might have even justified Malevich’s copies of paintings in 1929; many of the dates he assigned to the replicated works fell a few years before the accurate dates of their prototypes. For example, he inscribed Haymaking (1929a), which reprised a 1912 painting, with “motiv 1909”; Laundress (1928-1929c), whose gouache prototype dates from 1911, received an inscription of “1907”; and To Harvest (Marfa and Vanka) (1928-1929d) is pre-dated by three to four years, with “1909-10” inscribed instead of the accurate date of its 1913 iteration.

However, the extent of Malevich’s false dating project in 1929 well exceeded any such minor adjustments of a few years or elisions between prototypes and copies, as he assigned false dates to almost all of the newly created works exhibited in 1929. For example, he inscribed Harvesting. Study for the Painting (1928-1929e) with a date of 1909 on the reverse. This was con­sistent with the dates he assigned to the reproduced works like Haymaking (1929a), but no early work had ever existed that corresponded to this image of a female peasant standing squarely against a background of multicolored stripes of fields below a blue horizon.

In addition to inscriptions on the works themselves, Malevich also com­municated false dates for his paintings in a document that accompanied the works in their transport from Leningrad, where the artist was living, to the exhibition in Moscow. For example, the packing document lists the paint­ing Woman Reaper (Study) (1928-1929f) with the date range “1907-1908,” consistent with his inscribed date of “1908.” However, many of the pack­ing list dates are even inconsistent with his own inscriptions.

Many of the dates seem to have been assigned haphazardly, as if the artist himself were playing the role of an eccentric old man, guessing the dates in a retrospective fashion. Three Girls (1928), for example, is inscribed “1909 1910-1911,” with dates that the artist himself had scratched out and revised. Overall, the false dates ranged from 1903 to 1916. If the artist was eccentric in his remembrance of this period, he was nonetheless quite deliberate in avoiding dating anything during or after the 1917 October Revolution.

Figure 12.1 Torso (Figure with Pink Face), detail, by Kazimir Malevich (1928-1929). Source: Image by the author.

Most of Malevich’s dated inscriptions appeared on the reverse of the can­vases, where they would have been visible only to the curators and install­ers at the Tretiakov. Only a handful of the 1928-1929 works advertised their false dates boldly on the front for all viewers to see. For example, he inscribed “1910 Moskva” (Figure 12.1) in the lower left-hand corner of the front of Torso (Figure with a Pink Face) (1928-1929g, Figure 12.2), opposite his initials in the lower right-hand corner.

Viewers likely would have had no other indications of dates within the exhibition itself, as it would have been unusual for wall labels to indicate dates. The labels for his 1915 exhibition 0,10 consisted of numbers that cor­responded to large handwritten sheets tacked to the walls, which displayed lists of works with no dates attached; photographs from a 1927 exhibition in Berlin that Malevich staged indicate no wall labels whatsoever. Thus, while there are no known photographs of the 1929 exhibition, it is doubtful that any labels with dates accompanied the paintings.

It would seem, therefore, that unlike the Storming of the Winter Palace, the historically reenacted nature of Malevich’s (1929) painterly endeavors was neither simplified for easy legibility nor directed toward a wide pub­lic audience.

Figure 12.2 Torso (Figure with Pink Face), by Kazimir Malevich (1928-1929).

Source: © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo.

to have invented other dates himself in order to bring Malevich’s works into conformity with an overarching chronological narrative. Malevich’s false dates thus made their way, albeit in a limited fashion, to the general public through a voice that was not the artist’s own. In this way, the repetition of Malevich’s falsified career cemented its place in verified historical nar­rative, in the same way that the falsehoods of the Storming of the Winter Palace would become accepted as historical fact through their repeated reenactment.