0.10 and Victory over the sun



As the culmination of a year celebrating Dutch–Russian relations in the Netherlands The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam organized the largest collection of Malevich’s work outside of Russia. The exhibition shows Malevich’s way to his 'own' Supermatism reinforcing our impression the works of his contemporaries in the Russian avant-garde.

At first I would like to note that the whole exhibition was organized very well. You flow from one year to another and can simply catch the transformation of Malevich's works. There were a lot of his famous works and as in case of my impression from Van Gogh's pictures in Van Gogh's Museum (Amsterdam) the view of ones in real world changed cardinally. But this is not the subject of my article. I would like to present to you three things that surprised and were interesting for me.


One of the central parts of the exhibition was the reconstruction of the wall from The 0.10 Exhibition that took place in Petrograd in 1915 and this wall was a big disappointment for me. You can compare these two photos and understand why.



                exhibition, Petrograd, 1925 [1]                         Malevich at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2013


My first thought was “may be, most of the pictures from those exhibition were lost”? But no. I found information about Malevich's exhibition called 'Autobiography' that was in Berlin in Galerija Gregor Podnar in 2009. You can easily catch the difference between these two walls.




To see the original wall was important for me because in the 0.10 Exhibition in 1915 were shown Malevich's early experiments in suprematist painting and, actually, there was presented his famous “Black square”.

But, anyway, we go further and the second thing is a magic opera “Victory over the sun”.
In 1913 Kazimir Malevich was asked to produce a series of costumes and set design for the scenery for the "first Futurist opera," entitled Victory over the Sun. [5] According to my brochure to the exhibition 'Malevich claimed it was while working on these designs that he first arrived at a complete abstraction'.
The opera was intended to underline parallels between literary text, musical score, and the art of painting, and featured a cast of such extravagant characters as Nero and Caligula in the Same Person, Traveller through All the Ages, Telephone Talker, The New Ones, etc.
The opera was performed in 1913. The audience reacted negatively and even violently to the performance, as have some subsequent critics and historians.[6]
Malevich's sketches of costumes were shown on the exhibition and we could watch on a big screen the record of the opera made in 1980.









Victory over the sun”


I found interesting to compare his costumes with pictures that he did later. You can notice the similar color scheme and somewhere see these images.





Actually, if you suddenly turn in St. Petersburg during next 2 moths I'll recommend you to go to the exhibition “Malevich. Before and after the square” where will be shown the reconstruction of these costumes and scenery to the opera “Victory over the sun” and also the Stas Namin's theatre will reconstruct this opera.

  1. http://monoskop.org/0.10
  2. http://lfeffortposts.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/art2/
  3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.10_Exhibition
  4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimir_Malevich
  5. http://web.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Drama/plays/victory/1victory.html
  6. http://www.pecina.cz/files/www.ce-review.org/99/3/ondisplay3_hunter.html
  7. http://monicadmurgia.com/2013/08/23/kazimir-malevich/
  8. http://www.freelancer-frank.com/opinions/?p=232
Was written by Vera Chernyak

1 comment:

  1. I see it was very interesting for you to research the exhibitions of Malevich to find the difference between them. It is really a shame that you could not see the whole wall from the 0.10 exhibition, however it seems to me that the wall you have seen still reveals the sense of Malevich's concept. Especially I mean the demonstration of the black square. I do not want to explain it to you, but I guess it is necessary for you to find information about it, if you do not know it. In my opinion such densification of paintings on the original exhibition wall happened just because of the leak of the space, but the the presentation of the black square is really conceptual.

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