Kazimir Malevich: Outliving History

[Editors’ Note: e-flux became aware after the publication of this announcement that the Malevich works on which this exhibition is based are likely forgeries. We apologize for inadvertently disseminating information about this.]

The National Museum of Contemporary Art from Romania—MNAC Bucharest is joining the international debate around the heritage of the Russian avant-garde with an exhibition bringing together three works signed by Kazimir Malevich, and fourteen Romanian abstract art works from the Museum’s collections. Well aware of the turmoil created lately by various claims of unknown Russian avant-garde works uncovered by private collectors, MNAC assumed that the expertise assessing the authorship of the three Malevich pieces, and the explanation of their provenance through an adventurous rescue from the Soviet Union to Israel are solid enough to allow the public exposure.

Through this exhibition, MNAC is challenging several clichés. First of all, the prejudice that an art museum is bound to the rules operating in the commercial environment: museums have the role to harbour contemplation, debate, intelligent comparisons, and should take distance from the financial games that are ruling the art world of today. Secondly, the preconception that the art world operates with a general and unique set of standards: cultural expertise and curatorial strategies are operating today in nuanced environments, where the behavioural patterns of the (former) colonial West should be used with caution. Thirdly, the assumption that cultural endeavours should be without failure: in a world that keeps failing—politically, socially, economically, and so on—museums should assume projects that could generate debate, because debate is better than conformism.

In 1930, the year two of the artworks were acquired, Malevich was arrested and interrogated, being suspected of “deviationism.” “Banned” in the USSR art world, he was forced to flee Leningrad for Kiev and then Kharkiv. Kazimir Malevich’s three paintings have survived in the face of Soviet Formalism due to Benzion Livando, who acquired them in Odessa (1929–1930), during the Bolshevik terror. The works left the city during WWII, along with the cultural heritage of the Odessa Art Museum, and were retrieved after the war by Livando’s daughter, Eva, who safeguarded them by emigrating to Israel.

The rehabilitation of the Russian avant-garde begins with Perestroika, with a major Malevich retrospective happening in 1988, in Sankt Petersburg. His paintings survived thanks to his family and admirers, and thanks to the museographers who refused to destroy them. A witness in this sense is the declaration of Professor Dmitry Gorbachev (b. 1937), a specialist of Russian avant-garde, internationally renowned for his works on Kazimir Malevich, and a former museographer at the Museum of Art in Kiev. The few works that managed to bypass the Iron Curtain continued to decisively influence international art, while the core concepts of Suprematism reach Germany in 1922 through El Lissitzky, further inspiring Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and the Bauhaus School, thus laying the premises of functionalism, formal asceticism, and purification of visual expression. 

This global concern for finding and developing an abstract visual language is concretely demonstrated within the MNAC Collection, through artworks illustrating the influence of Suprematism in Romanian art production. Starting with the imposition of Socialist Realism by the Soviet commissars (1945–1953) and continuing with the ideological censorship of the communist regime through the 1971 “June/November Theses,” the forty years of ideological dictatorship hindered the unconstrained development of local visual expression. Yet, several examples of revolt against the official line and of cultural survival were affirming individual artistic beliefs, in resonance with universal art. Outliving History is one of the rare occasions where various personalities who advocated the same aesthetic creed are exhibited together, beyond time and space.

Curator: Mariana Dragu

Artists from the MNAC Collection: Horia Bernea, Radu Comșa, Roman Cotoșman, Ingo Glass, Viorica Iacob, Iulian Mereuță, Virgil Preda, Diet Sayler, Ștefan Sevastre, Liviu Stoicoviciu

With the support of: Dental Clinic Herăstrău

MNAC Sponsors: Greentek Lighting, DARA Lighting, Grup Transilvae, Crama Oprișor, BRD Groupe Société Générale, Molotow România, ProfiArt, BlackCab, Vitamin Aqua & Pop Cola

Info & press: info@mnac.ro