Commissar of Space

[Adam Regal]

Through photo digital art works, John Goto reflects upon the final years of
Kasimir Malevich's life in Stalinist Russia. This series juxtaposes two
moments in Russian history; those of the recent past and the early Stalinist
period. In part, the images were made on Goto's travels to the industrial
zones of the Urals in 1993\4. Many of the decaying factories depicted were
built using slave-labour in the thirties and this period is further evoked
through montaged archival material as Goto reflects upon the demise of the
Suprematist painter.The final years of Malevich's life are poorly documented
and the intentions behind the works he made remain uncertain. No historical
consensus has emerged to explain why his paintings seemed to draw ever
closer to the official Socialist Realist style, or to account for his
practice of faking his own earlier works by dating images made during the
early 1930s as if they came from the pre-Revolutionary period.

In an attempt to unravel the mystery surrounding these late works, Goto
makes a speculative reading of Malevich's life and images against the
political and social event of the early Stalinist period. He picks up the
story in 1927 when Malevich toured Poland and Germany with an exhibition
that marked the high point of his career and was to guarantee his reputation
in the West, long after he was all but forgotten in the USSR. Even ' as
glory falls like rain' upon Malevich, a sense of foreboding seems to have
motivated a last will that he wrote in Berlin.

As the 1920s concluded, Malevich like many intellectuals found himself under
increasing pressure as articles and exhibitions were criticised or censored
and his research post terminated. He was arrested in 1930 and questioned
over several months. This period saw the first Five Year Plan introduced and
also one of the first major trials of technicians scapegoated for the
failures of industry. Stalin turned his attention to the countryside where
the Party still lacked complete control and began a programme of forced
collectivisation of the farms. The wealthier peasants, termed 'Kulaks', were
deported in their millions. During the winter of 1932/3 a terrible famine
swept the Ukraine.

The cancer that killed Malevich was probably diagnosed in 1933, but his
requests to be allowed abroad for treatment were refused. After the
assassination in 1934 of his rival, Sergei Kirov , Stalin unleashed the
Great Terror which claimed the lives of countless millions including some of
Malevich's old students and collaborators. Malevich died on 15 May, 1935.

Dessau
Whilst in Berlin in 1927 Malevich wrote a last will, seen here in the
foreground, to cover his 'death or permanent imprisonment'. On a balcony at
the Bauhaus are (from left to right) Freidl Dicker-Brandeis, a Bauhaus
trained artist who died in Auschwitz (see Goto's Terezin series), Malevich's
daughter Una, Walter Gropius and Stalin's court painter Aleksandr Gerasimov.

A Marriage Portrait
On returning to Russia in 1927, Malevich married his third wife, Natalia
Andreevna Manchenko. She is shown here with Malevich and his daughter Una
outside the cathedral of St. Saviour in Moscow which was demolished in 1931
to make way for the aborted Palace of the Soviets.

The Informer
This image is based on Nadezhda Mandelstam's account in Hope Against Hope of
night arrests and informers within her circle. The bust in the alcove is of
Pavlik Morozov, a youth elevated to national hero for denouncing his father
and subsequently murdered by his family.

White Coal
In practice the term Kulak was applied to anyone who resisted
collectivisation in the countryside and here a diverse group await
deportation. Included is Malevich who wrote to Kiril Shutko that the 'hacks'
controlling the Art Workers Union '. . . will soon declare that we are
Kulaks'. Kulaks in transit were referred to as 'White Coal'.

The Collective
Many peasants resisted the forced collectivisation of the farms and by the
spring of 1930, fourteen million cows and a third of all pigs had been
slaughtered by their owners rather than hand them over to the government.
Hundreds of Party officials were assassinated and grain burnt or thrown into
rivers.

Ukraine
As a result of collectivisation and government attempts to suppress
Ukrainian nationalism, a famine took the lives of five million people in the
region in 1932/3. Malevich was born in Kiev and as late as 1929 was a
visiting lecturer at the Kiev Institute of Art. In the foreground ca.1904,
the young Malevich is about to set off to begin his career in Moscow whilst
behind him are bodies in the street from a rare photograph of the famine. In
the field beyond, young Komsomols guard against grain 'snipers'.

Diaghilev's School
On the extreme left is Malevich's 1930s portrait of Anna Alexandrovna
Leporskaya; she appears however remarkably like his first wife Kazimira
Ivanovna Zgleits, whom he married in 1896 and is seen in the foreground. It
was at this time that he discovered the work of the painter Ilya Repin and
to the right of the young Malevich are the seated figures of Maxim Gorki and
his mistress, the actress Maria Andreevna. Repin's portrait of her leans
against the chair. In the mirror is reflected the older Malevich of the
early 1930s.

Babel's New Genre
At the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Isaak Babel
announced that he had invented a new genre, the 'Genre of Silence'. Babel
was executed in 1941.

Kirov
On the 1 December 1934, Leonid Nikolayev assassinated Stalin's rival, the
Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov, with a shot to the back of the head. The
murder was used as a pretext to launch The Great Terror.

Monument
Kasimir Malevich died on 15 May, 1935. His ashes were interned beneath a
cube designed by Suetin, near his Nemchinovka dacha. Assembled here are
(from left to right) Maxim Gorki, Aleksandr Gerasimov, Genrikh Yagoda,
Nikolai Yezhov, Alexei Tolstoi, Fyodor Gladkov, Josef Stalin, Kasimir
Malevich, Sergei Kirov, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Una and Natalia Malevich,
Mikhail Matiushin, Ilya Chashnik, Sergei Eisenstein, Nikolai Suetin, Velimir
Khlebnikov, Vera Ermolaeva, Isaak Babel, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak,
Vsevolod Meyerhold, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin.