Malewicz
Beyond Censorship
Description:... Erased from the cultural scene for decades ? even during his lifetime ? Kazimir Malewicz?s (1879?1935) œuvre was only rediscovered in the West in the late 1950s. Three more decades passed before it could be accessible to the Russian public. It was gradually assimilated through a series of interpretative filters ? aesthetic, political, cultural and others ? but the extraordinary potential of the artist?s work has been hampered by fantastical elucidations, several of which persist to this day. A number of foundational myths about the artist?s ethnic background (his relationship to his mother tongue), his rapport to the religious culture of his Russian environment and, chiefly, his place in modern European art to which he was deeply attached, are considered here. Our reading of Suprematist forms is still an essential aspect of his art: beyond his numerous writings it shapes a decisive understanding of his artistic message.00The aim of this book is to question a certain number of anti-modernist visual and cultural prejudices. Advancing ever further in his interpretation of the artist?s œuvre, Andréi Nakov uncovers hidden layers of a creative production that shows itself to be increasingly important to our comprehension of 20th-century modernity.00Andréi Nakov is the author ofnumerous works on the artist, includinghis monumental four-volume monograph Malevich, Painting the Absolute publishedin English in 2010, not to mention a numerof other works written in French and translatedinto English, Russian, Italian and other languages. Recently Nakov has publishedstudies on Wassily Kandinsky (Kandinsky, the Enigma of the First Abstract Painting, 2015)and Vladimir Tatlin (Tatlin?s Reliefs: From Cubism to Abstraction, 2020) with the IRSAInstitute in Kraków, Poland, as well as severalessays on Polish art since 1945. The latest ofthe numerous museum shows he curated was The Advent of Abstraction, Russia, 1914?1923 at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, in 2017.
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