Bookvica

[MALEVICH] Vystavka proizvedeniy K.S. Malevicha [i.e.Exhibition of works by K.S. Malevich]

Fedorov-Davydov, A.

Item #2483

Moscow: State Tretyakov Gallery, 1929. 12 p. with covers. 17.5×13 cm. Covers are detached, but preserved in full in a plexiglass cover. Otherwise very good.

Reproduction of one of Malevich’s works included in the brochure.
This booklet, published in conjunction with an exhibition of Malevich’s works at the Tret’iakov Gallery, includes a biography of the artist. The author, Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov (1900-1969), at the time the head of the Department of modern Russian art at the Tret’iakov, was a prominent art historian. Malevich produced forty new works for this show. He had left behind the bulk of his mature works in Europe when he returned to Russia in 1927. IIn this new series of works the artist attempted to redefine himself, given that he had abandoned painting by 1922. In light of the current prevailing conditions he seemed to be reinventing himself in producing new works and antedating them back into the first decade of the century which would produce an historical narrative more suited to the homo sovieticus than can be discerned from the verified works on hand we have and details of his biography. No
photographs exist of this exhibition. A fully illustrated catalogue was promised but never materialized, and this is the sole documentation for the event. Some of the work was exhibited in Ukraine in 1930, where the authorities closed down the show and confiscated the items, a dark portent. Within two years of this exhibition at the Tret’iakov Gallery the Stalinist regime had rejected bourgeois abstract art, and Malevich was banned from creating anything of the sort. The paintings from this exhibition were stored in the Russian Museum and not available for view until almost 1980. Fedorov-Davydov’s text seems to reflect the tension between Malevich’s prominence and the pending rejection of his aesthetic, as he stresses exhibit’s importance to up-and-coming artists. “On the one hand,” he writes, “this era reached its climax with the whole system engendered by the isolation of bourgeois culture of art from life; on the other, it constructed the germs of those new forms of art that are now growing in front of our eyes”.

Price: $1,500.00