Kazimir Malevich’s Negative Theology and Mystical Suprematism

This article examines Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist art in the context of negative (apophatic) theology, as a crucial tool in analyzing both the artist’s theoretical conclusions and his new visual optics. Our analysis rests on the point that the artist intuitively moved towards recognizing the ineffability of the multidimensional universe and perceiving God as the Spiritual Absolute. In his attempt to see the invisible in the formulas of Emptiness and Nothingness, Malevich turned to the primary forms of geometric abstraction—the square, circle and cross—which he endows with symbolic concepts and meanings. Malevich treats his Suprematism as a method of perceiving the ineffability of the Absolute. With the Black Square seen as a face of God, the patterns of negative theology rise to become the philosophical formula of primary importance. Malevich’s Mystical Suprematism series (1920–1922) confirms the presence of complex metaphysical reflection and apophatic thought in his art. Not only does the series contain icon paraphrases and the Christian symbolism of the cross and mandorla, but it also advances the formulas of the apophatic faith of the modern times, since Suprematism presents primary forms as the universals of “the face of the future” and the energy of the non-objective art.

Toward a Common Configurative Impulse

Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa’s theorization of art’s affective power, whereby the relational contract with the spectator is neither rational nor purely visual but is infused with feeling, was decisive for understandings of geometric abstraction as expressive in the 1950s. “Toward a Common Configurative Impulse” turns to another modernism, nestled alongside the geometric ones that would come to define the aesthetic of artists associated with Concrete Art in these years. Beyond Concrete Art, Pedrosa’s modernism also encompassed the creative production of diverse practitioners, among them, popular artists, self-taught artists and psychiatric patients (the latter is the subject of my book Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art). With this in mind, this essay tracks the historical and discursive origins for such an inclusive modernism and how Pedrosa’s embrace of different artistic subjectivities calls for a necessary shift in the historiography of Brazilian modernism at mid-century.

Acrobatic Modernism from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory

This is a book about artistic modernism contending with the historical transfigurations of modernity. As a conscientious engagement with modernity’s restructuring of the lifeworld, the modernist avant-garde raised the stakes of this engagement to programmatic explicitness. But even beyond the vanguard, the global phenomenon of jazz combined somatic assault with sensory tutelage. Jazz, like the new technologies of modernity, recalibrated sensory ratios. The criterion of the new as self-making also extended to names: pseudonyms and heteronyms. The protocols of modernism solicited a pragmatic arousal of bodily sensation as artistic resource, validating an acrobatic sensibility ranging from slapstick and laughter to the pathos of bereavement. Expressivity trumped representation. The artwork was a diagram of perception, not a mimetic rendering. For artists, the historical pressures of altered perception provoked new models, and Ezra Pound’s slogan “Make It New” became the generic rallying cry of renovation. The paradigmatic stance of the avant-garde was established by Futurism, but the discovery of prehistoric art added another provocation to artists. Paleolithic caves validated the spirit of all-over composition, unframed and dynamic. Geometric abstraction, Constructivism and Purism, and Surrealism were all in quest of a new mythology. “Making it new” yielded a new pathos in the sensation of radical discrepancy between futurist striving and remotest antiquity. The Paleolithic cave and the USSR emitted comparable siren calls on behalf of the remote past and the desired future. As such, the present was suffused with the pathos of being neither, but subject to both.

On a Curious Chance Resemblance: Rudolf von Laban’s Kinetography and the Geometric Abstractions of Sophie Taeuber-Arp

This paper investigates a case of historical co-emergence between a modern system of dance notation and the rise of geometric abstraction in the applied arts during the first decades of the 20th century. It does so by bringing together the artistic careers of the choreographer Rudolf von Laban and the visual artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Comparing their pedagogical agendas and visual aesthetics, this paper argues that the resemblances between Laban’s Kinetography and Taeuber-Arp’s early geometric compositions cannot be a matter of pure coincidence. The paper therefore presents and supports the hypothesis of a co-constitutive relationship between visual abstraction and the dancing body in the European avant-garde.

The Site of Paradise

Chapter 1 maps how petroleum development revenue allowed Venezuelans to acquire and not produce the same type of modernity that had been created elsewhere in response to vastly different conditions. Instead functionalism and the varied genealogies of Constructivism, geometric abstraction and kinetic art in particular, became the architectural and aesthetic signposts of this elusive paradigm. Yet internal conditions limited the reach of these ideologically “neutral” international tendencies as well as of the overarching national modernization project of which they were a part. A close examination of extant texts and photographs by El Techo reveals how the group challenged the cultural establishment, exposed its political dissidence, and anchored its project in the harsh material reality of the human underbelly that fuelled the dreams of progress in Venezuela.

Dead Matter for an Enlivened Practice

Chapter 5 considers the exhibition Homenaje a la necrofilia (November 1962) by artist Carlos Contramaestre (1933−96) as an extreme example of how El Techo subverted nationalized aesthetic values associated with petroleum-driven capitalism to create art that reflected the grit of contemporaneity. Through a series of twelve ephemeral assemblages created from disintegrating cattle carcasses, viscera, and blood, Contramaestre confronted death and decomposition with forceful vivid assertions of physical love. The conflation of the Freudian sexual and death drives was a direct affront against the technological utopia projected by hegemonic tendencies such as geometric-abstraction or the restrictive unanimity of (far less popular) strains of folkloric landscapes and genre scenes that circulated in Venezuela at this time.But the strategy also allowed the artist and the collective to challenge an atmosphere of political repression, torture, disappearances, and a corrosive culture of cyclical violence that accompanied a fast-tracked national project of socioeconomic modernization in the country.

Mondrian, Piet (1872–1944)

The Dutch artist Piet Mondrian was one of the pioneers of abstract art, producing some of the most radical painting of the 20th century. The early influence of Cubism led him to adopt a semi-abstract linear style, as in the paintings of trees and buildings he made in Paris and Holland over 1912–1914. During the inter-war years, Mondrian developed an esoteric theory of art and an austere style of geometric abstraction he called Neo-Plasticism. In this work, for which he is best known, Mondrian abandoned all reference to nature and aimed to express a higher reality beyond the world of appearances. He reduced his painting to basic elements and their interplay: black horizontal and vertical lines, planes of primary colors, grey and white as exemplified in Composition C (III) with Red, Yellow and Blue from 1935. His final paintings, made in America in the early 1940s, are characterized by vibrant grids animated by small colored squares reflecting an interest in the syncopated rhythms of popular music and urban life. Mondrian was also a consummate draughtsman, prolific writer and member of the influential De Stijl [The Style] group, which sought to reform the arts and society.

Camargo, Iberê (1914–1994)

One of the most prominent 20th-century Brazilian artists, Iberê Camargo remains virtually unknown outside of his country. A painter, printmaker, and draughtsman who created over 7,000 pieces or art across more than five decades, Camargo never subscribed to the geometric abstraction adopted by more well-known post-war Brazilian artists. He insisted that his works were figurative, even though some of his pieces push the limits between abstraction and figuration and call into question the simplistic definitions of these categories. Camargo asserted his independence as an artist by declining to acknowledge any influences. Early in his career, he created landscape paintings and engravings, but in the mid-1950s health problems forced him to stay indoors, and he directed his attention toward objects he could manipulate in the studio. He developed his series, Carretéis (Spools), for over 20 years. Camargo deconstructs the simple shapes of the objects he uses the series, or uses them as an organizing structure for the surface of his paintings and prints. In the series Ciclistas (Cyclists), which he began in the 1980s, expressive brushstrokes delineate figures floating on dark-colored backgrounds, thick with impasto. In the series Idiotas (Idiots), disfigured women haunt obscure spaces, and appear as if waiting for a person who will never come.

Rendón, Manuel (1894–1980)

The French-born Ecuadorian painter Manuel Rendón Seminario (also known as Manuel Rendón) is credited for introducing Geometric Abstraction to Ecuador together with compatriot Areceli Gilbert de Blomberg. As a member of the Post-Cubist L’École de Paris in the 1920s, Rendón’s early oeuvre synthesized avant-garde styles, notably Cubo-Futurism, Purism, and Surrealism, reminiscent of the techniques of modern masters such as Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant, and Giorgio de Chirico, artists whom he greatly admired. In 1911, Rendón exhibited at the Café de la Rotonde (whose curator was Henri Matisse), followed by the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1916, the Salon des Indépendants, Société du Salon d’Automne, Salon des Tuileries, and the Salon des Surindépendants. He also exhibited with the vanguard "La Horde de Montparnasse" and joined "Clarté," the pro-Communist youth group commanded by the French novelist Henri Barbusse. Rendón’s indigenist works of the 1930s and 1940s, however, were painted in a Neo-realist figurative mode, depicting the exotic Ecuadorian landscape and the plight of the native population, while his mature practice of the 1950s to 1970s was characterized by geometric abstraction and pure linearity, culminating in kaleidoscopic color and rhythmical kinetic qualities, as in the manner of the Divisionists.

Gharbaoui, Jilali (1930–1971)

Jilali Gharbaoui was a sculptor and painter born in Jorf El Melh, Sidi Kacem region in Morocco. Along with Ahmed Cherkaoui, Jilali Gharbaoui is considered one of the founders of modernism in Morocco. He played a major role in furthering the debates around Moroccan modernism, and his work focuses on the gesture of painting itself. Although Gharbaoui worked with both sculpture and painting, he is best known for the striking colors and violent brush strokes of his gestural abstractions on canvas, paper, and wood. Very early works by Gharbaoui are relatively representational or focus on geometric abstraction, but later works are identified by a consistent style of loose abstract work that emphasizes the movement of the brush itself. The paintings deliberately highlight the hand of the artist and often build up texture through thick layers of paint, showcasing both the interplay of colors and lines as well as the materiality of the paint itself. He was introduced as part of the groupe des informels at the Salon Comparaison in Paris in 1959 by art critic Pierre Restany. Gharbaoui suffered from severe mental illness, and was hosted on multiple occasions by Father Denis Martin at the monastery of Toumliline in the Middle Atlas mountains. He committed suicide and his body was found on a public bench in the Champ de Mars. His body was repatriated to Morocco by André Malraux, and he is buried in Fes.