Future in the Past. Book Collection

This collection presents a selection of theoretical works on art from the past century that have achieved classic status.

Photo: Gosha Bergal

After the line, the figure which soothed him more than all other symmetries was the square.

— Andrei Bely, Squares, Parallelepipeds, Cubes

At a time that saw a rapid acceleration in the pace of life, the rise of high-speed transport, and the emergence of new modes of communication, an artwork appeared that simultaneously defied its time and absorbed its innovations. Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Black Square signalled the “end of painting” while unlocking the potential of non-objectivity. For generations, this iconic piece has shaped the course of artistic exploration, inspiring groundbreaking discoveries in contemporary art.

German art theorist and historian Peter Bürger argued that “it is from the standpoint of the avant-garde that the preceding phases in the development of art as a phenomenon in bourgeois society can be understood, and it is an error to proceed inversely, by approaching the avant-garde via the earlier phases of art.” The book collection accompanying the exhibition Square and Space. From Malevich to GES-2 expands on this concept, examining how avant-garde art became timeless.

Let’s begin with the most common reaction to Kazimir Malevich’s work, which inspired the title of curator Francesco Bonami’s book for the exhibition— I Can Do the Same! (Russian edition). This short book addresses the questions that viewers most frequently ask when confronted with contemporary art. With humour and clarity, Bonami offers answers, weaving in the biographies of key twentieth-century artists.

The emergence of non-objectivity in the mid-1910s stands as one of the most groundbreaking and promising developments in twentieth century art. However, its acceptance was hardly immediate. A notable effort to chronicle the history of the Russian avant-garde can be found in the detailed exhibition catalogue Velikaya utopiya. Russkij i sovetskij avangard 1915–1932 [The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde 1915–1932] (in Russian)*—a project coordinated by Zelfira Tregulova, one of the curators of Square and Space.

Evgeny Kovtun, Margarita Tupitsyn, Svetlana Dzhafarova, Vivian Barnett, and other contributors to the articles in the catalogue create a rich and complex portrait of Russian artistic life in the early twentieth century. Taking 1915 as the starting point—the year when the Russian avant-garde "finally emerged from the shadow of Western European influences such as Cubism and Futurism and made its first statement at the 0.10 exhibition"—the articles explore key moments and developments. Some focus on Saint Petersburg art critic Alexandre Benois’s attendance of this exhibition and the ensuing debate, the creation of the The Museum of Pictorial Culture, and Russia’s participation in the 1924 Venice Biennale.

A strange provincial town. Like many towns of the Western region, it is made of red brick. Sooty and dreary. But this town is especially odd. The main streets here have white paint covering the red bricks. And over this white background, green circles scatter. Orange squares. Blue rectangles. This is Vitebsk in 1920. The brush of Kazimir Malevich passed over its brick walls. “The town squares are our palettes,” these walls tell us.

— Sergei Eisenstein, On Mayakovsky (Iskusstvo kino [Art of Cinema], no. 1, 1958 (in Russian))

This is how Sergei Eisenstein described his visit to Vitebsk where Malevich taught. One can read about this in more detail in the first issue of the Iskusstvo kino [Art of Cinema] (in Russian) magazine for 1958. Painting and cinema intertwined in the public awareness as an expression of disorienting modernity. Additionally, artists of the Russian avantgarde responded to political changes in the country, and left their workshops to reorganize life in public spaces.

Eisenstein’s students, the “technical creators” of UNOVIS, were tasked not only with creating works of art but also ensuring they served a practical purpose for society. The details of this approach are revealed in a unique publication—the reproduction of the UNOVIS* almanac, where articles by members of the group are annotated with insightful commentary and explanations by Tatyana Goryacheva.

In addition to Malevich’s artworks, and his sketches for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun and Black Square, the exhibition Square and Space. From Malevich to GES-2 features works created in Russia before the revolution, in France during the 1950s, and in Germany in the 1980s. Numerous studies explore how the works of artists from different countries and eras intersect and form a unified narrative. Among them are the collective work Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (Russian edition), art critic Benjamin Buchloh’s anthology Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Russian edition), American art historian Rosalind Krauss’s work The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Russian edition), and The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Russian edition) by Peter Bürger, which we have already mentioned.

Ekaterina Andreeva’s Vse i nichto [Everything and Nothing] (in Russian) still merits a separate mention. This work has long become a classic and has already seen four editions. Andreeva’s book is a transcription of her lectures delivered in the 2000s, focused on the history and theory of Western modernism and postmodernism.

Central to her study is the chapter From Malevich to Kharms: The Future in the Past. Ekaterina Andreeva begins her narrative in 1913, the year Victory over the Sun was staged, and gradually untangles a web of complex intellectual and spiritual contexts extending to 1930. Equally important, in the subsequent chapters, Andreeva places Soviet unofficial art in an international context. Like Francesco Bonami, she identifies key symbolic figures in art history and structures her analysis around the interactions between these figures, the intermittent connection of artistic practices and the “survival” of avant-garde ideas.

The changes in our perception of artworks with the advent of new technologies, as well as the emergence of new spaces for exhibiting them, is an important theme that is just beginning to develop. Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age and Art in the Age of Anxiety by Egyptian artist and art theorist Omar Kholeif are books that Francesco Bonami has called “difficult but essential.” They help reconstruct the curator’s process in preparing an exhibition.

In the first of these books, Kholeif analyses the transformation occurring in the art world with the advent of the Internet and the development of digital technologies. Kholeif believes that these transformations affect not only our perception and interaction with artworks but also the methods and practices that artists employ.

Art in the Age of Anxiety offers various ways in which contemporary art engages in dialogue with the key issues of our time, responding to global events and becoming a form of expression for the fears and uncertainties felt not only by artists but also by society as a whole.

* These and several other books on the history of Russian avant-garde presented in the collection were donated to the GES-2 Library by art historian Yakov Vladimirovich Bruk, who collaborated with the Tretyakov Gallery for over thirty years. Any book collection takes shape over decades, requiring significant effort and time. We extend our gratitude to Yakov Vladimirovich for his recommendations of books from his own collection.