The Contents of Malevich’s 1929 Tretiakov Exhibition

By contrast with his all-Suprematist room at the 1915 exhibition, Malevich’s (1929) retrospective presented only a handful of nonobjective Suprematist works, representing about a sixth of the total works on display.

Moreover, he added several more recent Suprematist works created after his original Suprematist era, which had lasted from 1915 to approx­imately 1922. For example, the primary Suprematist vocabulary of the Black Square, Circle, and Cross appeared in the exhibition by means of a three-canvas series recreation from 1923 (Malevich, 1923a; 1923b; 1923c). He also painted two new Suprematist works, Suprematism (1928-1929a) and Suprematist Construction of Color (1928-1929b), each with juxtapositions of multicolored rectangular bars.

In Malevich’s retrospective, these two Suprematist works are not the only examples of reinterpretations of past works and styles. Many of Malevich’s figurative paintings from 1928-1929 also reprised works from earlier in his career. For example, an image entitled Haymaking (Malevich, 1929a) appears strikingly similar to a 1911-1912 work of the same title (Malevich, 1911-1912), which a state collection in Nizhni Novgorod had housed since 1920. The 1929 Haymaking replicates important features of the prototype’s central figure while dramatically changing the background. Similarly, Laundress (Malevich, 1928-1929c) reprises a gouache of the same title (Malevich, 1911). However, the oil painting (Malevich, 1928-1929c) differs significantly in style from the gouache (Malevich, 1911); its daubs of unblended paint contrast with the stark delineation of forms in the earlier work.

Despite all of his newly created paintings, which gave his exhibition a quite contemporary character, Malevich made significant efforts to uphold an illusion of historical authenticity in his retrospective. He interspersed the new paintings with several works on loan from state-owned collec­tions, all of which actually dated from the early stages of his career in the 1910s. These included cubist works, such as Perfected Portrait of Ivan Kliun (Malevich, 1913a), and so-called “alogical” abstract works (Harte, 2009, pp. 131-136) that placed objects in absurd juxtapositions, such as Cow and Violin (Malevich, 1913b). All told, approximately one-fifth of the works on display in 1929 were authentically “old,” created between 1913 and 1924; additionally, about one-quarter of the new works that Malevich created in 1928-1929 directly referenced the composition or subject matter of works from his 1911-1913 production. Additional works retained stylistic resem­blances to authentically old works but did not overtly reuse a specific pre­vious work.

Each of the explicitly recreated works contains some modification to the original, as if the artist recreated them not only to commemorate their precedents but also to adapt key moments in his artistic development. Prolific Russian art historian Dmitrii Sarabianov (1988, p. 72) has attrib­uted Malevich’s late-career work to the artist’s “own aspiration to rethink his creative platform, [and] his purely pedagogical desire to ‘process’ all the phases through which he had passed.” As an art educator, Malevich may have been prompted by a pedagogical motivation to revisit stages in his artistic development. However, there is no indication that he communicated such intentions or his revisiting processes to any students. Moreover, he carefully selected which works to revisit, focusing on one particular phase from 1911 to 1913 and his depictions of common people at work. Rather than a way to rethink his present creative endeavors, perhaps Malevich’s processing of his past aimed to recreate it entirely.