IN THE ZERO OF FORM

25 pictures each, then it will only just be enough."34 The original ten conrriburors grew
to fourreen, belying the "10" in the title, and in the end only a few more than one hun­
dred fiEry pieces were shown. But Puni need not have worried abour MaleviCh, who
exhibited thirty-nine paintings in what became one of the most famous installations of
the century.
He had been working largely in secret since the spring, hiding what would be
called Suprematism from all but a few intimates. In September, however, Puni sur­
prised Malevich in the studio, and, as he wrote ro Matiushin, "I was caught like a
chicken in SOUp."35 Malevich wanted to exhibit these new painrings at 0-10 under the
banner of Suprematism, bur he was dissuaded by his Moscow circle, who sought to
avoid dividing the group of advanced artists by explicit factionalism. Thus there is no
menrion of that term in the catalogue., However, concerned to establish the correct
understanding of this difficult work, and to safeguard his own priority of discovery,
Malevich decided to print a statement accompanying its presenration-the oracular
pamphlet From Cubism to Suprematism. The New Painterly Realism. 36 It was sold at the
exhibition, for by the opening there was no pretense of unity.
Malevich had been unsuccessful in convincing Puni to deny Tatlin space in
the exhibition, and the iU feeling between the two artists increased as the show
approached. Tatlin for his part refused to exhibit alongside Malevich's new work.
which he considered amateurish, and the two artists reportedly had a fistfight just
before the opening.37 Alexandra Exrer, who did not exhibit in 0-10 despite being in
Tramway V, arranged a compromise whereby Tatlin, Popova, and Udaltsova would
show in a separate section. TarIin pur a sign over the door: Exhibition of Professional
Painters. Malevich now felt free to designate the new work correctly, and labeled his
area Suprematism in Painting, K. Malevich. The opening itself was tumultuous, with
its explosive mix of tense participants and skeptical public. But Puni managed to con­
vince the police that neither the antagonistic artists nor the sculpture blocking the exit
posed a real danger.
Although Puni-only twenty-three years old at the time-had insisted on V/4dimir Tat/in photographed by
the inclusion of Tatlin in the show, he and Boguslavskaia were partisans of Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, ca, 191D.
and showed in the Suprematist section of the exhibition. They produced one of the Photograph courtesy V. A, Rod­
four Suprematist manifestos disseminated at 0-10, an enumeration of simple remarks chenko Collection, Moscow
ranging from the suggestive-''A picture is a new conception of abstracted real ele­
ments, deprived of 'm eaning"-to the obscure-"2 x 2 is anything you like, but not
four."38 It was available without charge at the exhibition, as was another leaflet con­
taining short statements by Kliun on pure sculpture and Mikhail Menkov on pure
painting, and the first eight paragraphs of Malevich's booklet.
Among those who exhibited along with Malevich, Puni and Kliun seem to
have come closest to showing Suprematist works at 0-10. Malevich had urged his asso­
. ciates to develop Suprematism in three dimensions, and some reliefs and sculptures in
the show display their efforts. Although Puni exhibited Cubo-Futurist painrings, such
as Hairdresser, he also developed a reduced geometric imagery in pieces like White Ball
in a Green Box. Most extreme was his work reported in a Perrograd newspaper, the
Evening, as number 107 in the exhibition, "... a simple board about 10 x 35 centi­
meters, painred green. The visitors were perplexed. . . . Some touched it, others
smelled it secretly, for there was nothing to see." According to the Petrograd Bulletin,
Maria Vasileva exhibited a similar work, a white board about 20 x 10 cenrimeters, one
side of which was cut in a semicircle, displayed on a windowsill overlooking the Sum­
mer Garden and called Spanish Landscape. 39 Kliun also mixed Cubist work with Supre­
matist experiments, showing his humorous free-standing figure, Cubist at Her Dressing
Table, along with seven works listed generally as "Basic principles of sculpture,"

87
 opposire:

Ivan Puni. Whire Ball in a Liubov Popova. Ponrair of a

Green Box, I9IJ. Assemblage Lady (Plasric Drawing), I9I5.

(glass and painted wood), I3% x Oil and cardboard relief, 20:1

20:1 x 43,4 in. Musee National x I9% in. Museum Ludwig,

d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Cologne

PompiMu, Paris

88
VOIOd dO 01UIZ tlH.L NI
 -

Bna.o.H1IiI11Yh EBl'pa<l>OBH~'b
TATJI H,H"b.

.I
j,
~~.''JJ.; ..
l . !.

•,r~.I i~~
",.~..
r.".,... .. ,tIa~ n ......

\\' /'
\.
\\ ,,1h.' . IOf'll.t.r....,.,...., ~

,a;II" 0. 1101 ,.. - - . ..

.. . . . . . . .ello••.,.. ~ ......

....tN()IM'.... ,.....,.. . . . . . . . . . . . .
• • p,1 .. """'.tJNllln. .,..,....,.:
..n.,n.lllt lllJllln".
. ""'... . ............

~~"
.
~
Vladimir Tatlin's bookut pub­
lished for o-IO, Vladimir Evgraf­
ovich Tatlin, showing two comer believed to be the "spheres, cubes, bars, etc." described in a newspaper article. 40 The
counter-relieji, and painterly re­ catalogue also lists a collective work by Malevich, Boguslavskaia, Puni, Kliun, and
liefi owned by Ivan Puni and Menkov, but it is not known whether it was painting. relief, or sculpture. 4 !
Auxandra EXler. Its only pro­ Malevich showed only his new Suprematism in an asymmetrical installation
grammatic statement was, "He that seems to both emanate from and culminate in the notorious Black Square. Actu­
has never belonged and does not ally, the black form is not quite square, and in the catalogue the work was talled
belong to Tatlinism, Rayonism, Chetyreugolnik, literally meaning quadrilateral, emphasizing its advance over the trian­
Futurism, the Wanderers or any gle, a traditional spiritual symbol important to both Kandinsky and KulbinY More
other group." suggestive titles were given to his other abstractions, some general-twelve works were
entitled Painterly Masses in Movement-and some as specific as Painterly Realism ofa
Football Player-Color Masses ofthe Fourth Dimension. This dimensionality was a criti­
cal consideration, with four works marked as four-dimensional and twenty-one as two­
dimensional. Eighteen of these fell under the general heading Painterly Masses in Two
Dimemions in a State ofRest. The most complex of his paintings combined these appel­
lations-Lady. Color Masses ofthe Fourth and Second Dimemions. 43 But the catalogue
warns against searching his pictures for the entities mentioned: "In naming several pic­
tures-I do not wish to show that one must look for their form in them, but I want to
indicate that real forms were looked upon as heaps of formless pictorial masses from
which was created the painted picture, which has nothing in common with nature."«
Malevich's warning not to look for objects represented in his Suprematist
compositions, however, should not obscure the nonformal content of these works,
their attempt to depict something beyond an array of shapes and colors. With very dif­
ferent means he returns to the Symbolist quest for a higher metaphysical reality, believ­
ing that the new man-and the new woman-would develop a sensibility able to
transcend gross materiality. As he wrote to Matiushin in June 1916, "My new painting
does not belong to the earth exclusively. The earth is thrown away like a house eaten
up by termites .... The hung plane of painted color on a white canvas sheet gives a
strong sensation of space directly to our consciousness. I am transported into endless
emptiness, where you sense around you the creative points of the universe."45 And
writing about the black square to the critic Pavel Ettinger four years later, he gives the

90
IN THE ZERO OF FORM

. . . 1If8n . . . . . . . . ~-.w.

..-dnn. ......
..-:.I. ~, ...... II. . . .
.1IJT!I1I1 _ _

"­
(h."lSf'OU1",~Tu."
~ ..... ,)'r.lot"• • o."~

... _ ...
, .......... lOTOpWen . .). . . . ~
~1Ia~.o,.o

•• U_• • • ,JJoe.~~r....
...-al .......... nlltTpo......

show away: "I see in it what people at one time used to see before the face of God."46
Rather than the Gospels, Malevich would have had in mind the views of Uspensky,
who sketched a route of spiritual progress analogous to that followed by Malevich's
own pa.inting, from the apprehension of a higher-dimensional realiry through the
abandonment of logic, to a more advanced stage of consciousness in the "sensation of
infiniry."47 Malevich pushed Suprematism to this edge in his white "square" on a white
background of 1918, and wrote ecstatically of his achievement as he concludes his state­
ment for the 1919 Tenth State Exhibition: "I have breached the blue lampshade of color
limitations and have passed into the white beyond: follow me, comrade aviators, sail
on into the depths-I have established the semaphores of suprematism.... The white,
free depths, eterniry, is before yoU."48
Such high-blown prose was anathema to Tatlin, whose own brochure for
0-10 was written simply and concisely. Prepared with the help of Udaltsova, it repro­
duces photographs of two recent corner counter-reliefs along with two painterly reliefs
owned by Puni and by Exter, and lists exhibitions in which Tatlin had participated. Its
only programmatic statement, apart from the list of materials employed in the reliefs,
is his denial of group affiliation: "He has never belonged and does nO( belong to
Tatlinism, Rayonism, Futurism, the Wanderers or any other group. "49 In the exhibi­
tion Tatlin showed twelve or thirteen constrUctions, both "corner" and "center"
counter-reliefs. One particularly large corner work supports its central assembly of
metal and wood forms on a diagonal rigging of six ropes or cables, evoking both
Tatlin's early days as a sailor and his beloved bandore. Yet despite their radical sculp­
tural achievement, and unique combination of elegance and dynamism, Tatlin's reliefs
at 0-10 received little critical notice compared with that garnered by Malevich and his
colleagues. The exception was a long essay by Sergei Isakov, a central figure in the
Apartment No. 5 group of artists and critics, and publisher of the New Journal for
Everyone. Isakov saw Tatlin as providing a route "out of the frustrating dead-end of
modernity" by discovering the laws of materials and "transposing them into the plane
of the beautiful," achieving the sort of dominance over matter that can "cast off
the humiliating yoke of the machine."5o Equally gratifYing to Tatlin, cenainly, was

91
 opposite:
Nakzhda Udaltsova. Kitchen, Olga Rozanova. Writing Desk,
191f. Oil on canvas, 26 x 31% 1915. Oil on canvas, 26 x 19 14
in. State Russian Museum, St. in. State Russian Museum, St.
Petasburg Petersburg

92
 . /0 1 '0 .' no.en .... aHAA S""c::.TDBKBI CPYTYPH~TOB"J., e ... r.: C TpOrO n .c

Page ftom journal Ogonek, Jan­

uary 3, 1910, showing work ftom
0-10: (ufo to right) Ivan Kliuns
Cubist at Her Dressing Table;
(above) Olga Rozanova's Bicyclist
and (below) Aucornobile; and
(above) Ivan Punis The Hair­
dresser and (below) Window f} rl{~":-4 IS -ry-:..·-:Jno•. · 2) -tJt:-X:.:-Ino •• J.) :'r·~..",,,. lJ .f.1z;...:u~" !) l~ ..." ' " ~ ...
Dressing.
the poem that Khlebnikov wrote about him, and whose manuscript he treasured. Hav­
ing visited 0--10, the poet spoke ofTatlin's "spidery vale of rigging" and "the tin objects
which he had worked with a brush."51
The two other "Professional Painters" who showed with Tatlin, Popova and
Udaltsova, exhibited works largely influenced by the Cubism that they had studied
together in Paris. Close friends from before Paris, when they shared a Moscow studio
and worked with Tatlin, they came again within his orbit on their return to Russia.
Popova showed stililifes and portraits, three of which were designated "plastic" works
in the catalogue. These pieces-Portrait ofa Lady, The Jug on the Table, and Compote
with Fruit-were fully three-dimensional sculpto-paintings, reflecting the influence of
Archipenko's innovations in Paris. Popova also displayed some strong Futurist
dynamism in her large painting Traveling \%rnan. As for Udaltsova, her paintings were
interiors and still lifes. Though her work was little mentioned in reviews, Tatlin
thought well enough of her Bottle and Glass to acquire it, and the next year to exhibit
the piece at his exhibition the Store. He must have thought his support poorly repaid,
however, when Udaltsova soon moved to the Suprematist camp, and her Moscow
apartment became the group's meeting place and the office of its ultimately unpub­
lished journal. By the end of 1916 both Udaltsova and Popova, and their friend Vera
Pestel, had abandoned Tatlin and were working in the Suprematist style of overlapping
planar elements.
The editorial secretary of the Supremus journal was Olga Rozanova, whose
work at 0--10 included two constructed reliefs and collage-like paintings combining
flat geometric areas of color with realistically rendered objects. Rozanova had never
been to Paris, and she developed among the Futurist poets whose books she was active
in illustrating. Her two reliefs, Bicyclist (Devils Walk) and Automobile, were reduced

94
IN THE ZERO OF FORM

compositions using raw materials (glass, tin, wood) along with painted elements, and
Automobile even contained a rubber ball and a brick or cobblestone. Probably alluding
to Khlebnikov's obsession with the planet Mars, Matiushin described them as "humor­
ous works for young Martians. "52 In 1916 Rozanova married the poet Kruchenykh, and
after the Revolution she worked reorganizing the craft workshops with Rodchenko.
But in November 1918 she died at age thirty-two from diphtheria, stricken in Moscow
while decorating an airplane for the first anniversary of the October Revolution. She
was the first of the new artists honored by the Bolshevik regime, with a large posthu­
mous show of her work the following January. Both Kliun and Rodchenko designed
monuments for Rozanova, Kliun's fearuring imagery from the Biryclist. At her funeral
Malevich carried a black flag with a white square, reversing his signature image.
Other artists in 0-10 marked their sympathies with either Tatlin or Malevich
in the titles of works. Natan Altman, who would decorate the square around the Win­
ter Palace with Cubo-Futurist designs when he was in charge of Petrograd events on
the first anniversary of the October Revolution, showed a single still life subtitled flk­
tura, space, volume. Mikhail Menkov called his works Painting in Four Dimemiom. But
the press generally was unable to keep the parties apart and seemed to lump everything
under the new word, Suprematism.
Although the exhibition was well atrended, reportedly seen by 6,000 people,
it was a disappointment to the press. 53 B. Lopatin wrQ[e that he missed the colors of
the old Futurists, finding the work in the show "dry and monotonous, without art and
without individuality." For the critic of the Petrograd Bulletin, the exhibition signaled
an impasse reached by advanced art, a dead end of anarchy. "The public roars with
laughter, but for me, I am bored, bored .... After this, what can be done?"54
Malevich atrempted to explain his new theoretical position at an evening lec­
ture on January 12. Part of a performance with Puni and Boguslavskaia at the concert
hall ofTenishevo College, the talk contained such sections as "The spread of the Inqui­
sition in painting" and "Nero and yoU."55 Judging by newspaper reports, Malevich
failed to convince the unconverted, his messianic words provoking many to leave the
hall-"I am the royal infant ... before me there have been only stillborn children.
Tens of thousands of years have prepared my birth. "56
Despite their continuing antagonism, Malevich agreed to exhibit in a show
that Tatlin organized in March in Moscow, the Store. Held in an empty storefront at 17
Petrovka Street, the exhibition oddly contrasted Tatlin's new formal innovations in the
counter-reliefs with pre-Suprematist works by Malevich. While Tatlin's display seemed
very much like that at 0-10 (with two corner counter-reliefs, a relief from 1915, and
four reliefs from 1913-14), Malevich exhibited only earlier works. The catalogue lists
the ten pieces under the heading Alogism offorms, and they include two paintings
shown at Tramway V, Aviator and An Englishman in Moscow, and the absurdist Cow
and Violin-with its vertical image of a violin superimposed on a synthetic Cubist
composition, over which is set a realistic rendering of a cow. The two protagonists were
accompanied by Udaltsova, Popova, Kliun, Exter, Vasileva, and Morgunov. Tatlin's
friend, Lev Bruni, provocatively displayed a smashed barrel of cement and a pane of
glass marked by a bullet-hole, in addition to a sculptural reliefY Unfortunately the
press again was unappreciative, saying that the exhibition indeed resembled a store­
an old junk sho~and repeating their claim that the new work was passe and boring,
and the artists "in the grip of a senile and conservative stubbornness."58
The Store, however, introduced an important artist t9 the advanced group,
Alexander Rodchenko. After seeing his work Tatlin had invited Rodchenko to partici­
pate without contributing any money-all of the other artists did so-if he would
help sell tickets and hang the show. At the opening Malevich tried to lure the new­

95
 comer into his camp through disparaging remarks about the other participants, but
Rodchenko maintained his loyalty to Tadin. 59 The sculptor later asked him to help
with the designs for the Cafe Pittoresque in Moscow, a project involving partisans of
both Tadin and Malevich. Opening on January 30, 1918, the Cafe Pittoresque became
a lively meeting place for advanced artists through the early revolutionary years. It was
there that Khlebnikov wanted to assemble all the "Presidents of the Globe"-a group
in which he included H. G . Wells, no doubt for his familiarity with Martians-­
announced by a banner over the float on which he rode up the Nevsky Prospect in
early 1917, predicting a revolution before the end of the year. For his part, Rodchenko
remembered Malevich's ill behavior at the Store, and in 1918 he mocked the latter's
White Square with his own Black on Black.
Although Suprematism seemed stalled at the Store, by the end of 1916 it
clearly was ascendant. At the eclectic Knave of Diamonds exhibition in November in
Moscow, much attention went to Malevich and others working in a similar vein, with
Apollo announcing that a journal called Supremuswould appear in January or February.
Despite the Russian WOrd's view that Malevich and K1iun showed only "some crude
daubings alternating with lines that exhaust the eyes," the future belonged to their
Suprematism. 60 Recendy so close to Tatlin, Udaltsova noted a change of heart in her
diary entry of November 26, and she seemed to speak for many artists: "I have sud­
denly fallen for decorative drawing and Malevich."61
This was the last important exhibition of the Russian avant-garde' before the
Revolution, after which the advanced artists became highly involved with propaganda
activities and the reorganization of art institutions. Unlike the political revolutionaries,
avant-garde artists and poets had been largely free of Czarist censorship before the Rev­
olution. Most were apolitical in the fall of 1917, but they would enthusiastically
embrace the new regime insofar as it ~upported artistic programs and expressed their
utopian aspirations. And the Bolshevik regime encouraged avant-garde activities in an
unprecedented way. During the precarious early years of the Revolution, artists deco­
rated the cities for political anniversaries, created temporary monuments and struc­
tures of inexpensive materials, and painted the "agit trains" that spread the Bolshevik
message during the civil war. As Mayakovsky wrote in the first issue of Art ofthe Com­
mune in 1918, "the streets are our brushes, the squares are our palettes."62
More long-term activity revolved around the state institutions for artistic
training and research, in which virtually all of the prerevolutionary avant-garde par­
ticipated. Under the leadership of Anatoly Lunacharsky, head of the People's Com­
missariat for Public Enlightenment (Narkompros), the most advanced artists were
appointed to positions of power. Not surprisingly, factionalism was rampant in the
politicized environment, and changes were many. Chagall was made director of the
Popular Art Institute in his home town of Vitebsk in August 1918, and developed a
program fostering abstract art, bringing his student EI Lissitsky to the faculty. After
Lissitsky encouraged the invitation of Malevich to join them, Chagall found himself
displaced as the dominant influence in the school and departed early in 1920.63 In 1918
Taclin .asked Kandinsky to become active in the newly established Department of Fine
Arts (IZO) ofNarkom pros, which Taclin headed. Through 1919 Kandinsky worked on
the installation of provincial museums and became the first director of the Museum of
Artistic Culture in Moscow. He was chosen to lead the Institute of Artistic Culture
(Inkhuk) when it was established in Moscow in 1920, and he sought to direct its
research programs to the psychologistic and mystical orientation of his own art. In this
Kandinsky was opposed by those who considered his approach too aestheticized­
including Lissitzky, Malevich, Popova, Taclin, and Rodchenko--and he left Russia in
1921 for Berlin, and then a teaching position at the Bauhaus. Under Rodchenko and

96
IN THE ZERO OF FORM

his colleagues, Inkhuk was reorganized along Constructivist lines, in May 1921 issuing
a declaration against easel painting and in the next three years focusing on "production
art." State exhibitions displayed the history of the Russian avant-garde, and the indi­
vidual institutions organized their own shows of current research. But by this time
Lenin was beginning to move against the independence of the avant-garde in the name
of democratic centralism, and against Constructivist abstraction toward what would
become Socialist Realism. Initially resisting Lenin's pressure, Lunacharsky would turn
to the right by 1924 and support more rigid state control of artistic production. By 1929
all artists were organized into a single cooperative, and within a few years every inde­
pendent artists' organi2ation was abolished and the Communist Parry assumed control
of artistic content. 64
Through these years Malevich and Tatlin remained on poor terms, involved
in their teaching and organi2ational work in both Moscow and Petrograd. Commis­
sioned by Narkompros in 1919 to design a monument to the Third International,
Taclin conceived of an immense tower, twice as high as the Empire State Building later
would rise. A dynamic abstract construction of steel and glass, its spirallanice around
an inclined cone enclosed four working structures, different geometrical forms devoted
to particular levels of government activiry and each revolving at its own speed. With
three assistants he built a large model, which was exhibited in Petrograd in November
1920 and reassembled the next month in Moscow at the Eighth Soviet Congress.
Mayakovsky called it "the first object of Ocwber"-the first to truly express the princi­
ples of the Revolution-and "the first monument without a beard."65 Needless to say,
it remained unbuilt, but "Taclin's Tower" received great notoriery and must have rein­
flamed Malevich's jealousy. For when Taclin organized a commemorative performance
of Khlebnikov's long work Zangezi in May 1923-the poet had died the previous
June-at the Petrograd Inkhuk, where both Malevich and Matiushin were teaching,
Malevich forbade his students to anend. Malevich lived for the rest of his life in two
rooms there, and while Tatlin never spoke well of his rival, Udaltsova reported that he
shed tears on learning of Malevich's death in 1935. 66
In the early 1920S Berlin became a center for advanced artists who had
decided to leave Russia, and Puni and Boguslavskaia emigrated there in 1920 before
resettling permanently in Paris in 1923. A show of Puni's work was held at the Sturm
gallery in February 1921, providing the Germans with a hint of what had occurred in
Russia since its isolation at the outset of the war. It rook another year, however, before
the Russian avant-garde could be seen in depth, when IZO sent a major exhibition to
the Van Dieman gallery in Berlin. No longer would the West think of advanced Rus­
sian art only in terms of Chagall and Kandinsky. Yet some ideas had circulated in
abbreviated form in 1920, when the nineteen-year-old Konstantin Umanskij published
his book New Art In Russia 1914-1919, along with an article devoted to Taclin in Der
Ararat 1.67 It was in Umanskij that the Berlin Dadaists read of "the machine art of
Taclin," and embraced the phrase as suitable for revolutionary use. Without much
understanding the nature of Taclin's work, Berlin Dada incorporated it in their collage
of anger and disgust at the First International Dada Fair.

97