Having formulated his artistic approach, Malevich welcomed
the Russian Revolution, which broke out in 1917, as a political act
that would wipe out past traditions and begin a new culture. He be-
lieved his art could play a major role because of its universal accessi-
bility. In actuality, after a short period when the new regime her-
alded avant-garde art, the political leaders of the postrevolution
Soviet Union decided the new society needed a more “practical” art.
Soviet authorities promoted a “realistic,” illusionistic art that they
believed a wide public could understand and that they hoped would
teach citizens about their new government. This horrified Malevich.
To him, true art could never have a practical connection with life. As
he explained, “Every social idea, however great and important it may
be, stems from the sensation of hunger; every art work, regardless of
how small and insignificant it may seem, originates in pictorial or
plastic feeling. It is high time for us to realize that the problems of art
lie far apart from those of the stomach or the intellect.”^39 Disap-
pointed and unappreciated in his own country, Malevich eventually
gravitated toward other disciplines, such as mathematical theory
and geometry, logical fields given his interest in pure abstraction.
NAUM GABO Like Malevich, the Russian-born sculptor Naum
Gabo(1890–1977) wanted to create an innovative art to express a
new reality, and, also like Malevich, Gabo believed art should spring
from sources separate from the everyday world. For Gabo, the new
reality was the space-time world described by early-20th-century
scientists (see “Science and Art,” page 915). As he wrote in The Realis-
tic Manifesto,published with his brother Anton Pevsner (1886–1962)
in 1920:Space and time are the only forms on which life is built and hence
art must be constructed....The realization of our perceptions of
the world in the forms of space and time is the only aim of our pic-
torial and plastic art....We renounce the thousand-year-old delu-
sion in art that held the static rhythms as the only elements of the
plastic and pictorial arts. We affirm in these arts a new element, the
kinetic rhythms, as the basic forms of our perception of real time.^40
Gabo was one of the Russian sculptors known as Constructivists.
The name Constructivism may have come originally from the title
Construction,which the Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin (FIG. 35-70)
used for some relief sculptures he made in 1913 and 1914. Gabo ex-
plained that he called himself a Constructivist partly because he built
up his sculptures piece by piece in space, instead of carving or model-
ing them in the traditional way. Although Gabo experimented briefly
with real motion in his work, most of his sculptures relied on the rela-
tionship of mass and space to suggest the nature of space-time. To in-
dicate the volumes of mass and space more clearly in his sculpture,
Gabo used some of the new synthetic plastic materials, including cel-
luloid, nylon, and Lucite, to create constructions whose space seems to
flow through as well as around the transparent materials. In works
such as Column (FIG. 35-55), the sculptor opened up the column’s
circular mass so that the viewer can experience the volume of space itEurope, 1920 to 1945 94935-54Kazimir Malevich,Suprematist Composition: Airplane
Flying,1915 (dated 1914). Oil on canvas, 1 10 – 87 1 7 . Museum of
Modern Art, New York.
Malevich developed an abstract style he called Suprematism to convey
that the supreme reality in the world is pure feeling. In this work, the
brightly colored rectilinear shapes float against white space. 35-55Naum Gabo,Column,ca. 1923 (reconstructed 1937). Perspex,
wood, metal, glass, 3 5 2 5 2 5 . Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York.
Gabo’s Constructivist sculptures rely on the relationship of mass and
space to suggest the nature of space-time. Space seems to flow through
as well as around the transparent materials he used.1 in.
1 ft.