Faith in Art

i
 Aesthetics and Contemporary Art

Series Editors: Tiziana Andina and David Carrier

Philosophers and cultural historians typically discuss works of art in abstract

terms. But the true significance of art for philosophy, and of philosophy for art,
can be established only through close analysis of specific examples of artworks
and also of artists’ texts. Art is being used increasingly to introduce and discuss
problems in philosophy. And many works of art raise important philosophical
issues of their own. But the resources available have been limited. Aesthetics and
Contemporary Art, the first series of its kind, will provide a productive context
for that indispensable enterprise.

The series promotes philosophy as a framework for understanding the study of

contemporary arts and artists, showcasing researches that exemplifies cutting-
edge and socially engaged scholarship, bridging theory and practice, academic
rigor, and insight of the contemporary world.

Editorial Board: Alessandro Arbo (University of Strasbourg, Fr.), Carla

Bagnoli (University of Modena and Reggio), Leeza Chebotarev (Private Art
Advisor), Paolo D’Angelo (University of Roma Tre), Noël Carroll (CUNY),
Diarmuid Costello (University of Warwick), Maurizio Ferraris (University of
Turin), Cynthia Freeland (University of Houston), Peter Lamarque (University
of York), Jonathan Gilmore (CUNY), Luca Illetterati (University of Padova),
Gao Jianping (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Birte Kleemann (Michael
Werner Gallery), Joachim Pissarro (CUNY), Sara Protasi (University of Puget
Sound), Shen-yi Liao (University of Puget Sound), Ken-Ichi Sasaki (Nihon
University), Elisabeth Schellekens (University of Uppsala), Vincenzo Trione
(IULM, International University of Language and Comunication, Milano).

Titles published in the Series:

A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art, by Mark Staff Brandl
Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed, edited by Elisabeth Schellekens and
Davide Dal Sasso
Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll, by David Carrier
Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili, by Paul Gladston
Gaga Aesthetics, by Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas
Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art, by David Carrier
The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World, by Richard Kalina
The Philosophy and Art of Wang Guangyi, edited by Tiziana Andina and Erica Onnis
The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art, by Raphael Rubinstein

ii
 Faith in Art
Religion, Aesthetics, and Early Abstraction

Joseph Masheck

iii
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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iv
To Fr Alban McCoy, OFM Conv

v
vi
 Contents

List of Figures viii

Acknowledgments x
List of Abbreviations xiii

Introduction 1

1 An Orthodox Kandinsky 13
2 A Protestant Mondrian 55
3 A Catholic Malevich 93
4 A Jewish Lissitzky 137

Conclusion 173

Notes 179
Bibliography 201
Index 213

vii
 Figures

1.1 Diagram of a typical Christ in Glory icon for a Russian church

iconostasis. 43
1.2 Vasily Kandinsky, Accent in Pink, 1926, oil on canvas. 45
1.3 The Holy Prophet Elijah in the Desert, late fifteenth-century icon,
Novgorod school. 47
1.4 John and Boris (icon writers), Elijah in the Desert, icon, Novgorod
school, March 25, 1670. 48
1.5 Vasily Kandinsky, Yellow Center, 1926, oil on canvas. 49
2.1 Piet Mondrian, Church Façade 1, 1914, charcoal and ink on paper. 59
2.2 Piet Mondrian, Pier and Ocean (Sea and Starry Sky), 1915, charcoal
and watercolor on paper. 60
2.3 Piet Mondrian, Composition with Color Planes 3, 1917, oil on canvas. 61
2.4 Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray,
1921, oil on canvas. 70
2.5 Piet Mondrian, Tableau 2, 1922, oil on canvas. 71
2.6 Piet Mondrian, Composition with Yellow and Double Line, 1932,
oil on canvas. 81
2.7 Piet Mondrian, Painting No. 9, 1939–42, oil on canvas. 83
3.1 Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, oil on canvas. 98
3.2 Kazimir Malevich. Suprematism: Abstract Composition, 1915,
oil on canvas. 103
3.3 Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist Painting: White on White, 1918,
oil on canvas. 105
3.4 Anonymous carte-de-visite photograph, c. 1858–66, of Peter Paul
Rubens, Elevation of the Cross, 1610–11. 113
3.5 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: Expressing the Feeling
of Fading Away, 1916–17, pencil on paper. 113
3.6 Peter Paul Rubens. Saint Athanasius Overcoming Arius, 1620–21;
engraving by Jan Punt after drawing by Jacob de Wit, 1753. 117
3.7 Kasimir Malevich, Suprematism (Supremus No. 58); or, Suprematist
Composition: Black and Yellow, 1916. 117
4.1 Mogilev (or Mohilev) Synagogue, c. 1680. 140

viii
 Figures ix

4.2 El Lissitzky, Preliminary Study for a Project Commemorating Rosa

Luxemburg, 1919[–20?], gouache, ink, pencil. 150
4.3 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting, 1916–17, oil on canvas. 155
4.4 El Lissitzky, Proun (Study for Proun S.K.), 1922–3, watercolor,
gouache, ink, graphite, conté crayon, and varnish on paper. 155
4.5 El Lissitzky, Abstract Cabinet, c. 1920–31 (destroyed 1936). 167
4.6 El Lissitzky, Cover of catalogue for the Russian Exhibition at the
Kunstgewerbe Museum, Zurich, 1929. 171
4.7 El Lissitzky, Give Us More Tanks (poster), 1942. 171
4.8 El Lissitzky, About Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale of Two Squares
in Six Constructions, 1922. 177
 Acknowledgments

Acknowledgment must begin with what might have been an introduction to a

very different book. I am especially grateful to Professor Charlotte Douglas, then
president of the Malevich Society, for a research grant in 2003 that supported a
project exploring Malevich’s relation to the Russian icon with an eye to recent
abstract painting. That award was based on a series of my articles that appeared
in the late 1970s in Artforum, of which I was then editor-in-chief: articles
attempting to overcome the antipainting bias of the day, often by resort to the
Eastern Orthodox icon as an age-old, antinaturalistic, and indeed conceptual
alternative to conventional “Western” painting. I assumed the icon’s religiosity;
but on looking into the topic I often saw “revealed religion” being avoided in our
time even more scrupulously than in 1917, in favor of a non-descript “spirituality”
often inclined, it seemed to me, to purported “mysticism” just because then no
one could track it further. I needed to stand back and see how faith as such might
pertain not only to the case of Malevich but also to the other abstract forebears,
with their quite different backgrounds. Although certain academics clearly
thought I was off course, after a crucial meeting with Professor Douglas some
years ago, I was able to press on. Her breadth of knowledge was inspiring on an
afternoon when, as I riffled through a hefty bale of notes and drafts, she took as
long as necessary to hear out my still only loosely formulated ideas.
To Professor Alexandr Naymark, my Russo-American office roommate at
Hofstra for many years, I am much obliged for his recurrent prodding to write a
book dealing with Malevich, given the role of this artist in many a conversation
between us. In one extraordinary session, he intoned a line-by-line translation,
by no means free of affect for either of us, of the artist’s heartfelt letter to Mikhail
Gershenzon (discussed in Chapter 3). I am also most grateful to Sasha for
organizing an on-campus Festschrift conference for my seventieth birthday, in
which a fine paper (discussed in Chapter 4) was given by Professor Christine
Poggi, now the director of the Institute of Fine Arts at N.Y.U.
Invitations to give two lectures helped me crystallize my views on two of the
artists. I am grateful to the Church of England organization Art and Christianity
for inviting me to give the keynote address at their international conference in
July 2012, under the rubric “Art and Christianity in Revolutionary Times,” which

x
 Acknowledgments xi

resulted in a lecture titled “Convictions of ‘Things Not Seen’: A Change from

Suprematism to Constructivism in Russian Revolutionary Art,” in which El
Lissitzky (Chapter 4) was pivotal. Richard Thompson, then Watson Gordon
Professor of Fine Art at Edinburgh University, invited me to give the 2017
Watson Gordon Lecture at the National Gallery of Scotland. My speaking on
Mondrian and contemporary Dutch neo-Calvinism there was fomented by the
recent translation of Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics (1895–1901); and I
had received cordial advice from the Bavinck editor John Bolt, of Calvin
Theological Seminary in Michigan, in publishing my first text on Mondrian and
Bavinck in his Bavinck Review in 2015.
Much reading, thinking, and writing—particularly about the Mondrian-
Bavinck connection but also about the scope of the larger study—was done at
St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, where the college dean was Father
Alban McCoy, this book’s dedicatee. It was wonderful to be able to discuss
theology, cultural politics, and much else over coffee with the learned and genial
Father McCoy, Dean Emeritus, Praelector, and Wine Steward, with other regulars
in the Senior Combination Room at Eddie’s. He understood my being too
ecumenical to be a secularist, not to mention my political tropism toward
“popular fronts.” I was impressed by his opposition to contemporary Pelagianism
(the notion that humanity can improve itself perfectly well without outside help,
thank you very much!), and what seemed to be the basic answer to it: God’s
action in the world through grace—excellent encouragement for an art historian
considering the respective faiths of modernists—but also monotheists—as
religiously diverse as Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, and Lissitzky.
Others have thoughtfully helped this investigation along its way. Some are old
friends; some are people I would hope to meet, especially once the pandemic is
over. They include Professor Julie Agoos, Brooklyn College; Andrew Attaway;
Professor Emeritus Stephen Bann, C.B.E., F.B.A., University of Bristol; Vivian
Endicott Barnett; Professor William Baumgarth, Fordham University; Margaret
G. Burke, Hofstra University Libraries; Dr. Bernhard Buschendorf; Prof. em. Dr.
Christa Buschendorf, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt-am-Main; Dr. George A.
Falk; Dr. Dan Gilhooley; Maria Godwod-Rożańska; Alexandra Halidisz;
Professor Emeritus Charles Haxthausen, Williams College; Merv Honeywood,
RefineCatch Ltd; Professor Emeritus David Jasper, University of Glasgow; Dr.
Dirk Jonkind, St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge; Joop Koopman; Dr. Alexei
Lidov, Moscow State University; Dr. Roger Lipsey; Professor Emeritus William
Lyons, Trinity College Dublin; Peter McNamara; Dr. Mark McDonald,
Metropolitan Museum of Art; Rev. Subabbot Aidan Nichols, O.P., Blackfriars
xii Acknowledgments

Hall, Cambridge; Dr. Peter J. O’Donnell, St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge;

Professor Joachim Pissarro, Hunter College; Donna Reihing.; Professor Diana
Reynolds-Cordileone, Point Loma Nazarene University; Dr. Lutz Rickelt,
Ikonen-Museum, Recklinghausen; Charlotte Rodziewicz; Haigo Salow; Deborah
Schranz, Jewish Theological Seminary of America Library; Professor Richard
Shiff, University of Texas, Austin; Rev. Ignumen Silouan; Alexander Smiros,
Hofstra University; and Professor Emerita Marjorie Welish, Brooklyn College.
It was Professor David Carrier who encouraged me to write this book for this
series, and at Bloomsbury I thank Colleen Coalter, publisher, and Suzie Nash,
editorial assistant, for patient help with many details of production. Thanks also
to Annika Fisher and Matthew G. Shoaf for helpfully different modes of
copyediting.
The anonymous photograph in Figure 4—altered to remove the painting’s
frame—derives from David and Tamara Rice’s Icons and Their History (1974),
published by the now defunct Overlook Press, but without any record at a
successor press. On application to the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, which
held the painting at that time, I received a photograph of an altogether different
icon; hence I do not even know if this icon is still in the Gallery, given that
numerous icons from the Tretyakov have been returned to churches since the
demise of the Soviet Union. Every effort has been made to secure rights for this
image, but as author I would be pleased update any information relating to it in
a next edition.
 Abbreviations

Biblical quotations from the Revised Standard Version unless otherwise stated.

B Herman Bavinck. Reformed Dogmatics.1895–1901. Translated by John

Vriend. Edited by John Bolt. 4 vols. Grand Rapids, 2003–08.

K Vasili Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art. Edited by Kenneth C.

Lindsay and Peter Vergo. 2 vols. Documents of Twentieth-Century
Art. Boston, 1982.

KB Vasili Kandinsky. “Text Artista: Autobiography.” 1918. Translated by

Boris Berg. In In Memory of Wassily Kandinsky, edited by Hilla von
Rebay, 49–73. New York, 1945.

KD Vasili Kandinsky. Point and Line to Plane. 1926. Translated by Howard

Dearstyne and Hilla von Rebay. New York, 1979.

KH Vasili Kandinsky. “Reminiscences.” 1913. Translated by Eugenia W.

Herbert. In Modern Artists on Art, edited by Robert L. Herbert, 19–44.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964.

KS Vasili Kandinsky. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Translated by Michel

T. H. Sadleir (1914). New York and Dover, 1977.

L El Lissitzky. Life, Letters, Texts. Edited by Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers.

Translated by Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Witthall. London, 1992.

M Piet Mondrian. The New Art—The New Life: The Collected Writings.
Edited and translated by Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James.
Boston, 1987.

MK Kazimir Malevich. 1: Essays on Art: 1915–1928. Edited by Troels

Andersen. Translated by Xenia Glowacki-Prus. Copenhagen, 1968; 2:
Essays on Art: 1928–1933. Edited by Troels Andersen. Translated by
Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin. Copenhagen, 1968; 3: The
World as Non-Objectivity: Unpublished Writings, 1922–25. Edited by

xiii
xiv Abbreviations

Troels Andersen. Translated by Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Edmund T.

Little. Copenhagen, 1976; 4: The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism:
Unpublished Writings 1913–33. Edited by Troels Andersen. Translated
by Xenia Hoffmann. Copenhagen, 1978.

MS Kazimir Malevich. Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism. Edited by

Irina A. Vakar and Tatiana N. Mikhienko. 2 vols. London, 2015.

N Andréi Nakov. Kazimir Malewicz: Catalogue Raisonné. Paris, 2002. For

this book, catalogue numbers are used instead of pages.
 Introduction

The founders of abstract painting, and hence abstract art—Vasily Kandinsky,

Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich, together with the younger El Lissitzky,
who brought abstraction into the wider world—were, from youth and early
adulthood, adherents of institutional as well as “revealed” (meaning biblical)
religion. I phrase this statement in this way because in three of the four cases,
inquiring art lovers have been told for some two generations that anything that
could be considered “spiritual” in their work must derive from the ersatz religion
of Theosophy. True, probably only one of these four artists remained a religious
practitioner in later life (in at least one case, possibly owing to divorce and
remarriage), but this is a study of the protagonists’ ideological origins and
enduring worldviews on faith, which can resonate in their later work.
None of these painters is a religious artist as such. To make that claim, one
would have to import religion as a moral impetus external to aesthetics. That can
be done only under circumstances of unusual compatibility, such as the influence
of St. Francis of Assisi on Giotto. Kandinsky had to leave Russia once his work
started to seem too private, even when not keyed to religion, which some of it
was. After moving to Paris, Mondrian let his church membership lapse: if there
is any evidence of his seeking out an equivalent church there, in London, or even
in New York, where he lived near two Calvinist churches, I have not seen it.
Malevich, who would have been treated as at least schismatic (if not heretical) by
most Russians, not to mention the secret police, manages in his art practice to
divulge aspects of a more-than-ethnic Catholic identity while maintaining a
“popular front” attitude toward the Communist government. The only one to
succeed in projecting a pursuit of abstract art in concert with the religious
destiny of humanity under Socialism was Lissitzky in his earlier art practice,
where his Jewish messianic and socialist outlooks were effectively one. Later on,
he would have seemed as secular as anybody else—we can only say, perhaps
including to himself.

1
2 Faith in Art

In the end, a semipatrician Kandinsky turned inward. A middle-class honnête-

homme Mondrian, also usually in foreign society, wrote about religion but would
probably have been too polite to talk about it. Malevich and Lissitzky, both
outsiders in different ways, were more social: the one most comfortable as leader
of a revolutionary utopian art sodality, the other a secularized social prophet
with Old Testament roots.
Most Americans were still committed to traditional religious faiths in 1970,
when the art world was excited to learn of dabbling in semioccult Theosophy by
some of the founders of abstraction. At the close of a widely influential book The
Sounding Cosmos: A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of
Abstract Painting, exploring the significance of Theosophy for early abstract
painting, the Finnish art historian Sixten Ringbom avoids discussing the
Christian faith of Kandinsky’s admitted “spirituality” and made creedal culture
sound merely happenstance, akin to what people used to consider a mere change
in cultural style: “By and large, . . . the spiritual message and religious element of
Kandinsky’s art has disappeared from public consciousness, mainly, it appears,
owing to the social mechanisms conditioning twentieth-century taste.”1 I have
found this an exceedingly odd claim to make at that time, when organized
religion was doing so much for social justice on many fronts. No other book did
more to expunge institutional faith from the history of modern art than
Ringbom’s. I know it has often been defended as somehow advancing spirituality
(hence, somehow, religion?) in a nondescript manner; but that is “part of the
problem.” While Faith in Art stands against Ringbom, it is not an anti-
Theosophical tract. It ought only to be considered culturally constructive—or
reconstructive—to highlight the scripturally revealed faiths in which abstraction
was rooted as authentically “spiritual” in telling statements or actions by the
founders of abstraction; that is to say, ecumenically constructive rather than
secularist.
Important cultural background to the topic of religion in early modernism is
the Symbolist aesthetic, into which Theosophy stylistically played. Symbolism,
sometimes distinguished as a style by a capital letter and sometimes by the
French term symbolisme (to avoid confusion with what people ordinarily mean
by literary symbols), originated in the mid-nineteenth century in French poetry
and belles lettres. By the turn of the century, it was rampant in all the arts. Central
to the Symbolist poetic is a sense that the poet or artist or composer, besides
being an extraordinarily sensitive receptor of sensations from the world, can be
a marvelous combiner of material stimulations (spoken words, pigment, the
physically evident tones in music). Such combinations, assembled with
 Introduction 3

sufficiently perceptive sympathy (a Symbolist could say, magic), are to foment in

the receptive sensibility of the spectator the same sensation that had first been
provoked in nature, except now artificially, which is to say, by art—like a drug
whose chemical formula would effect, say, a sensation identical to a humid jungle
or a desert sunset. A very taste for artificiality—for undeniable mediation—
effaced the common sentiments attached to nature, especially on the part of
intellectual city dwellers. This same move away from nature—and almost by
definition towards abstraction (sometimes by way of decoration)—also led
numbers of Symbolists to convert to Catholicism, thanks to the sheer
nonnaturalism of ritual and to the literal aesthetic sensationalism of incense,
mediaeval chant, and organ music (spectacle over and against theology). Since
sensations were to be synthesized into something unique, beyond nature, even
the synthetic, like the artificial (however ironically), became a possible predicate
of aesthetic approbation: sophisticated “artificiality” guaranteed art.
It was a persistent attraction to the more occult resources of Symbolism that
led art historians to ignore biblically centered revealed religion, Jewish or
Christian, in favor of assimilating whatever seemed spiritual in early modern art
to Theosophy: an Orientalizing element of turn-of-the-century culture devised
in New York in 1875 by Madame Helena Blavatsky and a U.S. Army colonel,
Henry Olcott, a Buddhist convert. Like much Buddhism in America, Theosophy
prevaricated about whether it was a religion or not; but in any case, it put itself
odds with the biblical faiths. The Christian painters Kandinsky, Mondrian, and
Malevich all had flirtations with it, but despite its supposed antiquity Theosophy
was only a newly influential type of spiritualism.
Other similar tendencies came to the fore in the culture surrounding
Symbolism. A major case of spiritualism concerns the Swedish occultist painter
Hilma af Klint, claimed by some to have invented abstract painting before
Kandinsky. There has been much speculation about her work since the 2018–19
exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum. My reasons for not including her among the founders of abstraction
reflect what is at stake philosophically, theologically, and art-historically in the
cases of those who did move into full abstraction.
Klint was basking in the glow of Symbolism, as were others who dabbled in
Theosophy without, as she claimed, painting literal transcriptions of directives
sent from another sphere of reality. But her case poses questions. First, a logical
quandary: according to accepted testimony, her breakthrough paintings were
made to order following direct instructions from extraterrestrial powers
named “High Masters” or “Lords of the Mysteries.” She accessed these directives
4 Faith in Art

through séances and similar events. As reportage issuing from outside the artist,
the resultant images want to claim a certain unearthly objectivity (they might
even be subject to “correction” by subsequent extrasensory contact). But then
they cannot also claim to be nonobjective, as proper abstract paintings are
required to be.
There is such a thing as the representation of a naturally impossible thing by
virtue of visible contradiction: one example of this is the mythological gryphon,
part eagle and part lion, a popular motif in Symbolist literature and painting. El
Lissitzky was intrigued by such motifs in baroque synagogue decoration
(Chapter 4), where, precisely as figmental, they satisfy the commandment of not
representing the nature that is divine Creation.
Theologically speaking, if the spiritualist accounts of Klint’s paintings are valid,
she had serious trouble with an avowed Christian faith. In her thirties, before
leaving representational painting behind, she had taught Sunday school as a
member of the Church of Sweden, which is Lutheran. A decade or so later, after
experiments with automatic writing in association with a small group of
spiritualists, Klint became the follower of the spirit Ananda, who told her in 1904
“that she was to execute paintings on the astral plane”; and with that procedure
underway in 1907, “Hilma worked wholly as a medium; she was not aware of what
she did” while painting “without preliminary drawings” (7).2 By 1912, she is said
to have been both unconsciously and consciously painting “as a partial medium,
so she was able to influence the composition of the pictures” (8). But whether fully
or only partially prompted by unearthly guides, it is inconceivable that, as a
Lutheran Sunday-school teacher, Klint never studied Martin Luther’s Large
Catechism, where a heart, misled by an idolatry prohibited by the Commandments,
“seeks help and consolation from creatures, saints, or devils. It neither cares for
God nor expects good things from him sufficiently to trust that he wants to help,
nor does it believe that whatever good it receives comes from God” (§21).
More ordinary theological questions arising in Western painting concern
errors of iconography (mistakes in symbology) or else a vying with divine
creation by extreme naturalism. Explicit false worship is rarely a problem in the
modern West, but it is here. According to another account, in 1905, one of Klint’s
assignments for the High Master Amaliel began with prayer and fasting as well
as preparatory sketches for the “Temple” works of 1907 to 1915.3 She was told to
pray, “O Thou, give me the picture of inner clarity. Teach me to listen and receive
in humility the glorious message that Thee in Thy dignity deign to send the
children of the earth.”4 Here any serious monotheist wants to know, what is the
identity of this “Thee”?5
 Introduction 5

Art-historically speaking, taking Klint’s works as formally original abstractions

runs into problems of sources, for whatever the High Masters said, there
are earthly—indeed, European—stylistic sources for at least some of her
formal vocabulary. Most blatant are the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s
botanical diagrams concerning the Urpflanze: his search for the “primal plant”
(The Metamorphosis of Plants, 1790), a proto-evolutionary concern that by
Klint’s day had already influenced Theosophy. Closer still may be the even earlier
engravings of diatom-like forms and shells, in books of the freewheeling
Protestant mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772)—founder of
Swedenborgianism—whose father had been considered a pietist heretic by
Klint’s own official church.
Klint now joins a queue of aspiring pre-Kandinskyan proto-abstractionists
that includes the Czech František Kupka and the Lithuanian Mikalojus Čiurlionis.
True, the turn-of-the-century reclusive spiritualism that dominates her
production is something that Kandinsky, in the same generation, sometimes
appealed to early on in order to counter the positivism of the time. But after his
first German Expressionist work he went back for a time to a new Russian Soviet
Federated Socialist Republic that, for a precious historical moment, had yet to
force an oppressive Bolshevik disenfranchisement of religion and thus could
appeal to his somewhat upper-crust Christianity as a decent way of finally
getting down to the social brass tacks of the Gospel. After the Russian Civil War,
however, the government reacted with harsh ressentiment against faith—notably
the state church—opting for religious repression instead of reformation.
In the cases of each of the early abstract painters who are the subjects of this
book, I will engage primarily in a critical discussion of their writings since all
four published extensive theoretical texts. Each case will also analyze examples
of the artwork with a view to revealing one form of religious connection or
another with the four artists, in order of birth.
Their social identities are quite different. As a well-heeled young Russian
Orthodox legal scholar turned artist, Kandinsky inherited the local pictorial
context of the Russian icon as an antinaturalistic, schematized sacred image,
while also possessing a sophisticated operational understanding of Holy
Scripture. He eventually transitioned from expressionism to full abstraction, to
the point of adopting a formal geometry parallel to, if not really allied with,
constructivism.
The Dutch Reformed Calvinist Mondrian, son of a school principal, began his
artistic life as a sort of general-purpose Symbolist, gained traction as a post-
impressionist, and then used cubist disassembly of form as a stepping stone to
6 Faith in Art

his pure—some would say purest—form of abstraction, including a kind of

idealist structurality that can be affiliated stylistically with constructivism.6 But
constructivists are usually materialists having nothing to do with theology, and
Mondrian seems to have been affected substantially by the interesting
contemporary revisionist theology coming out of the Free University of
Amsterdam.
Malevich, a Catholic, was the son of a Polish engineer. He was raised in
Ukraine and studied art in Moscow, where he also absorbed the icon tradition—
on, I am convinced, a secondary, non-Orthodox basis. Malevich began (as
provincial art lovers sometimes still do) with an attraction to impressionism,
followed by an interest in a local variety of post-impressionism. He moved closer
to the avant-garde with a still somewhat homemade and remedial “cubo-
futurism,” a phase that, however, made possible suprematism: Malevich’s signal
contribution to the history of art. Malevich shows evidence of religious
instruction only in the family, absorbing certain basics, including prayers and
the explanations that would go with them, from his mother (with whom he lived
for his whole life) and a father who was ecumenically inclined, sometimes
attending Orthodox as well as Catholic services. (Note: in the chapters follow,
only Malevich’s works are titled in accordance with a catalogue raisonné [N],
given discrepancies between sources, as to titles and dates.7)
El Lissitzky, who studied art, architecture, and engineering, concerned himself
with the survival of Jewish culture in the increasingly irreligious new Soviet
Union. If not one of the originators, he was a most important early enthusiast of
abstract painting who proved indispensable to the expansion of its composition-
into-construction aspect (often alluded to from about 1920 by Kandinsky
without engaging this soon politically troublesome subject); this expanded his
purview from painting into graphics, photography, installation, and architecture.
Lissitzky’s involvement with Judaism was more than folkloric: the Bolsheviks
were a blessing to the Russian-Jewish population in terms of social assimilation
only. Yiddish literature and theater were permitted to thrive but only on a
secularist basis. Jewish religiosity is not all centered on the synagogue, yet it
proves possible to see Lissitzky as managing to be somewhat more religiously
Jewish than what the new secularism outwardly obliged. His sense of the future
of human history is also remarkably ecumenical; and as for the human future,
his can be considered more religious than Malevich’s far-fetched, socially
irrelevant late utopianism.
In each of these four artists’ cases, the evidence for various religiosities is
substantial but interestingly different. Still, some might ask, Why write a book
 Introduction 7

that many modernists and contemporary artists would scorn for being slanted
toward religion (and not a postmodern salad either), yet which many remnant
believers would find distastefully devoted to “irreligious” abstract art? Both
difficulties need attention, and both perhaps against the common background of
the abolition of metaphysics that was the legacy of positivism, and another
century of accumulated popular ignorance about art as hopelessly beholden to
nature.
Apropos of antimetaphysicalism: in the aftermath of the First World War,
John Dewey placed what might once have been considered a religious type of
hope in science (Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1920), quite side by side with
“progressive” Soviet atheism, although Kandinsky had already spiritualized
science while by no means discounting religion in Concerning the Spiritual in
Art (1911; see Chapter 1). Religion managed to persist as a major feature in
Western culture beyond the Second World War, despite a cult of science and its
attendant philosophy. Once the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and capitalism
became the only game in town, ever more Americans and Europeans no longer
bothered about God—as if the “jig” were simply “up.” A side benefit of the present
survey, however, is its showing up as at least possible, a certain scope for altruism
in regard to social virtue on the part of believers and nonbelievers alike, before
Stalin.
A century after its beginnings, a peculiar antipathy toward modernist art does
still prevail among many practicing American Christians, as though there were
something ungodly about abstract painting. As essentially aniconic, Judaism
never had a problem with nonobjective art. Given the history of Reformation
iconoclasm, this is a phenomenon peculiar to still supposedly majority Protestant
countries like Britain and America. Those concerned do not as a rule seem
prepared to assume that a picture of nothing (however praised by irreligious
aesthetes for purity) must be even worse than a picture of anything. There are
already too many books on iconoclasm, however: we now need to deal with
affirmative nonobjectivity by investigating how four great pioneers left behind
evidence of their religiosity. Study of the evident religious backgrounds of those
who founded abstraction is unlikely to convince dyed-in-the-wool skeptics of
either God or abstract art, but it might at least stir up new thinking.
As far as terminology is concerned, I try to avoid some words germane to the
subject when I cannot be sure what they mean or connote. This includes “absolute,”
especially as capitalized; I am not qualified to say how much of that problem is
thanks to G. W. F. Hegel and German idealism and consequent romanticism. In
Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko
8 Faith in Art

(1975), Robert Rosenblum calls attention to the emphasis by the Lutheran

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) on interior piety, as provoking a popular
theological sea change: his “theological search for divinity outside the trappings
of the Church lies at the core of many a romantic artist’s dilemma: how to express
experiences of the spiritual, of the transcendental, without having recourse to
such traditional themes as the Adoration, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the
Ascension, whose vitality, in the Age of Enlightenment, was constantly being
sapped.”8 But if that statement strikes me as resting on an inadequate notion of
religion, then what do I mean by religion? I try to hold to the definition put forth
in 1912 by the great sociologist of religion Émile Durkheim: “A religion is a
unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things
set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral
community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (emphasis original).9 As
for God: much that I have read and heard throughout my life convinces me that
I have a decent sense of what believers normally mean by using that word, which,
however difficult to define adequately, seems quite centered, and as such, a lot less
vague than “spiritual”; and as for lacking a definition of “God” as the unmoving
center of the whole problem, we are told that Sir Isaac Newton (who was also a
theologian) was at pains to define gravity.
This explanation will account for distaste on my part toward notions like the
French laicité or the Russian duoverie. Laicité—“laicism”—is an extreme of
sometimes aggressive state “neutrality” toward religion: a phenomenon that
would be inappropriate in Britain, with its state church, or even for the United
States, where pluralism, not to mention ecumenism, promises a more vital unity
than such as operationally atheistic principle. Is it possible that laicité was a
reaction to French symboliste extremism? A century ago, soon before laicité
became law, Téodor de Wyzewa, cofounder of the arch-Symbolist Revue
wagnérienne, in translating into French the classic thirteenth-century book of
the lives of the saints, Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend (1902), observed
in his introduction that the text he had inherited was already “essentially an
attempt to vulgarize or ‘laicize’ religious scholarship” (emphasis mine).10
Duoverie is a special Russian term for the simultaneous practice of two faiths,
especially paganism and Christianity, which occurred in the remote Russian folk
culture explored, early on, by Kandinsky. But Kandinsky certainly understood
that for a literate adult Jew or Christian, subscribing to duoverie would no doubt
break the commandments of any monotheistic faith. Being a Jew or Christian
entails not being a pagan, religion being a social as well as an individual affair.
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (the First Commandment, or the
 Introduction 9

second, Talmudically speaking) cannot be elasticized to include “other gods

beside me.” This must be why, as a Christian, Kandinsky makes a point of
stressing in his “Reminiscences” the two equally objective-scientific determinants
of his early expedition to the Russian hinterlands: to study the principles of
peasant criminal law, on one hand, and the ethnology of pagan and/or dualist
practices of the same indigenes, on the other (K1:365). That meant systematic
analysis on both counts, and sympathy for the people would have entailed no
misplaced sympathy for old pagan practices on the part of this dutiful scholar
who also went to Mass.
I am likewise wary of the word “mystical” in view of its indistinct boundary
with the occult. Nevertheless, the text that follows proves that there is a great deal
of authentic religion left once the matter has been cleared of these few problematic
terms.
Three of our four artists experienced life in revolutionary Russia, from which
the fourth, Mondrian, was culturally cut off by an Allied blockade until 1922.
Western culture has become so thoroughly secular that we now have to stop and
consider how ordinary citizens at the time had been familiar with general
religious concepts taught at school as well as in church, in Russia as well as in
Mondrian’s Netherlands: concepts such as the Kingdom of God.
Soon after the 1905 revolution in Russia, something of a religious revival had
actually ensued in the Russian Orthodox Church, including leftists. During the
portentous year 1917, the situation was remarkably vexed because the church as
well as general society’s contingents of left and right wings. This affected
Alexander Karensky’s inauspicious 1917 Russian provisional government, which
lasted from February to October (or March to November, New Style), when
many Russians were also exercised by the question of reestablishing the state
Church’s high “Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’, ” abolished by Peter the Great
in 1721. Given reform elements within the Church—notably against the power
of tyrannical bishops—an wide range of views was entertained before the
patriarchate was indeed reestablished. Such decisions might be made on
nationalist or other political grounds, but also, not to forget, for a normal
religious reasons. Even as the government moved to take over parish schools, the
Moscow Church Council was asked by General Kornilov (ostensibly supporting
the provisional government but involved in a rightist coup) to pray for his army.
But the Council said no: it would only pray for both sides.11 And the patriarchate
was in fact restored four days after the Bolsheviks took over, on October 28 (N.S.
November 11), 1917.
10 Faith in Art

While it is true that by 1919 a Russian churchgoer could not be a member in

good standing of the Communist Party, it is also true that any sense of immediate
secularization is disproved by the stupefied 1920 report of the British atheist
philosopher Bertrand Russell, who writes about what was still the “Russian
Soviet Republic” just then: “Religion is still very strong. I went into many
churches, where I saw obviously famished priests in gorgeous vestments, and a
congregation enormously devout. Generally more than half the congregation
were men, and among the men were many soldiers. This applies in the towns as
well as in the country. In Moscow I constantly saw people in the streets crossing
themselves.”12 The state church had already been disestablished two years earlier
(with its governmentally restored patriarch). Even into the early 1920s, however,
advocacy of atheism was not obligatory in schools, where many teachers were
still religious, though they could no longer teach religion as a subject.
The deep embeddedness of Christianity in Russian culture in the early
revolutionary period does warrant consideration. For their first ten years, the
Bolsheviks had as People’s Commissar for Education Anatoly Lunacharsky, who,
though totally unreligious himself, understood quite uncynically the Christian
Socialism implicit in Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Of Dostoyevsky, Lunacharsky
wrote: “It . . . seems to him that at least the best of [the] officials of the priesthood
and the very ‘spirit’ that informs them are, in their own way, ‘revolutionary.’
‘Come, oh come!’ exclaim the inspired monks of Dostoyevsky’s works. What is it
that they thus invoke? What is ‘to come’ is that the Church, with its charity and
brotherhood, should, at some stage, overcome the state and all society founded
on property, that—at some future time—the Church would build some special,
almost unearthly socialism.”13
With Kandinsky, Malevich, and Lissitzky, we will often have reason to refer to
the culturally and artistically crucial four to five years after 1917, after the
Bolsheviks won the Civil War. That religion was still alive during this hiatus of
golden-age modernity, when food was very scarce but spirits were very high, is
never brought up in respect to the development of modern Russian and Soviet
art. But it was there, at very least as part of the range of “utopian” possibilities that
opened up until crude atheism stamped everything else out.
As to revealed religion’s foundation in scripture, one particular book of the
Old Testament seems paramount in the artists’ regard: Isaiah, with its inspiring
concern with the coming Kingdom of God. This long prophetic book is best
known for its unforgettable image of beating “swords into ploughshares, and . . .
spears into pruning hooks” (Isa. 2:4), as well as the splendid prophecy, “For
behold, I create new heavens and a new earth” (65:17)—a perfect “New Jerusalem”
 Introduction 11

open to all, including the poor and oppressed. But I cannot help also thinking
that these artists, with plenty of here-and-now practical concerns, would not
also have discovered in Isaiah an intimation of the Marxist notion of art as
compensation or antidote for alienated labor: “They shall not build and another
inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; . . . and my chosen shall long enjoy
the work of their hands. They shall not labour in vain” (65:22–3).
The four artists I discuss in this book diverged in their faith backgrounds.
None was religious in any conspicuous way, but they believed that art had
something formative to say about the possibility of a new, more humane society,
by a faith ultimately based on scriptural, and sometimes surprisingly theological,
intellectual formations.
12
 1

An Orthodox Kandinsky

Background

This chapter is longer than the others, largely because Kandinsky read and wrote
much that was concerned with religion. Also, while three of our four progenitor
artists were also concerned with the Russian icon, Kandinsky had the most
religiously direct experience of that specific, and in a sense timeless, form of
religious art.
Vassily Vassilyevich Kandinsky (1866–1944) might have remained a
provincial landscape painter had it not been for the exalted role of the icon in the
Russian Orthodox Church, of which he was a lifelong member. The term “icon”
has become so abused in present-day culture that it is best to establish its
fundamental meaning as deriving from the Orthodox Church, where it is a
highly regulated image (almost always painted) of a holy person or persons
addressing the spectator by offering intercessory access to God by prayerful
appeal to the holy persons represented. A “cradle Orthodox,” such as Kandinsky,
is taught at an early age to see icons as sacred images akin to Scripture: holy
images standing in for Christ, the angels, the Virgin Mary, and the prophets or
saints, either individually (normally accompanied by an identificatory attribute)
or as part of a known narrative from the Bible or subsequent sacred history.
The role of the icon in Christianity had been seriously vexed in the earlier
Middle Ages—well before the separation between the Eastern Greek (and then
Russian) Orthodox Church and the Western Latin Catholic Church in the Great
Schism of 1054—by iconoclastic disputes that condemned all images as
violations of the Second Commandment (sometimes counted as part of the
First): “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” St. Basil the Great
articulated a justification for images in the fourth century with the principle that
the honor paid to a proper icon passes directly to its prototype. However complex
the argument became, this basic reason for having an image at all was established

13
14 Faith in Art

at the Second Council of Nicaea, in 787. But after the Great Schism, the Eastern
and Western churches developed very different systems of representational
painting.
From an early age, in Russia, Kandinsky was taught Orthodox tenets: notably
the icon as a practically sacramental sign of sacred presence—quite differently
from the Western empirical tendency to think of painting as beholden to nature
(even if, God-in-nature). In the twentieth century, many a modernist seemed to
think the icon put Eastern Christians on an inside track to modern painting, if
only for the icon’s strong conceptual aspect and formal stylization, whereas the
Catholic Church, understanding religious painting as a “Bible for the illiterates”
less stringently (Orthodox icon painters are traditionally called “writers”),
fomented in the West more naturalistic forms and narrative action than was
deemed proper for the nobly static and formulaic-ceremonial icon in the East.
The basic history of Russian icon painting was also something with which
Kandinsky, as a believing intellectual, was familiar, such as the complications
that began when Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, in the seventeenth century, sought
to bring the national church into liturgical alignment with the venerable but
more reformed Greek Orthodox church (heir to Byzantium) —including
openness to a more naturalistic style for icons. The effort backfired, producing
the schismatic Old Believers, especially in remote areas, supported (as perhaps is
ever the case) by wealthy opponents of progressive change in the institutional
church. These schismatics preferred to have old icons copied again and again to
counter the Westernizing icons that they saw, devotionally speaking, as going to
pot side by side with the secular baroque painting (too Catholic) that became
fashionable under Peter the Great. In the early twentieth century, however, a
revived aesthetic and a sustained religious interest in the best mode of the older
icons reemerged, which—to complicate the story still further—even concerned
the anti-religious Soviets insofar as the icons had become a matter of national
treasure. Kandinsky would be active in the midst of that.
One may think of this philosophically inclined painter and Orthodox
Christian who worked for the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic,
relating the old problem of iconic Westernization to Hegel and Marxism. For
what can be considered the earlier, false modernity of Western naturalistic
influence on Russian icon painting, might compare, for Kandinsky, with Ludwig
Feuerbach’s arguing for “perfecting” religion instead of abolishing it under
Marxism—as critiqued by Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels in Ludwig
Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1885; 1888). This book is
the source of the famous idea that Karl Marx took Hegel’s dialectic and “placed
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 15

it on its head; or rather, . . . placed it on its feet” (383).1 In it, Engels criticizes
Feuerbach’s adoption of a form of Enlightenment worldview and “lumps it
together with the shallow, vulgarized form in which the materialism of the
eighteenth century continues to exist today in the heads of the naturalists and
doctors” (369). By analogy (I am presuming), Kandinsky would have recognized
this as akin to the artistic problem of the naturalistic European baroque as in fact
contaminating the Eastern icons under the “reformist” Patriarch Nikon, who had
instituted the Orthodox Westernizations. So Nikon would have seemed to
parallel the false modern start of philosophy when Hegel could proclaim “the
self-movement of the concept going on from all eternity, no one knows where,
but at all events independently of any thinking human brain, . . . [an] ideological
perversion [that] had to be done away with” (383). It also comes closer to both
the icon and to modern painting for Engels to credit Marx, against Hegel, for his
comprehending “concepts in our heads more realistically—as images of real
things instead of regarding the real things as images of some or another stage of
the absolute concept” (383).
Kandinsky was the son of an upper-middle-class tea merchant with a touch
of Asian aristocracy (Mongolian) on his mother’s side. After studying art as a
youth, he was educated as a lawyer; but in 1896, at the age of thirty, he turned
down a law professorship at what is now the University of Tartu, in Estonia (then
in the Russian Empire) and moved to Munich to study painting. As an active
exhibiting painter there, he was an early participant in German Expressionism,
and before long a founder of the group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider),
between 1911 and 1914.
In the countryside outside Munich, Kandinsky took an interest in a local
South German mode of folkloric painting termed Hinterglasmalerei (“painting
on the back of glass”), especially during the writing of Concerning the Spiritual
in Art. It is tempting to parallel this with the icon, but the two modes have little
in common except for both being unnaturalistic (in the Bavarian folk works, by
default?) and both taking stereotypical motifs from the Bible or standard lives of
the saints. Kandinsky’s Hinterglasmalerei also entailed a personal “ecumenism”;
for between about 1909 and 1914, he and his German Lutheran companion the
painter Gabriele Münter enjoyed collecting local Hinterglasbilder, giving these
Catholic “holy pictures” a home in Münter’s country house at Murnau, near
Munich. During that time, half of Kandinsky’s thirty or so known glass paintings
were executed in one year—1911—while he was finishing Concerning the
Spiritual in Art, which was also the pivotal time for emergent abstraction. In that
year, only three of his Hinterglasbilder are secular.2
16 Faith in Art

That his Hinterglasmalerei was sentimentally—and indirectly, religiously—

connected to Münter as much as excuses Kandinsky’s coming surprisingly close
to touristic or “airport” art. In 1914, the radical Russian formalist critic Viktor
Shklovsky would publish a denunciation of such in an essay that would have
drawn Kandinsky’s interest just by its title: “The Resurrection of the Word.” A
quotation will show how, despite not finding Kandinsky’s Hinterglasmalerei as
lacking interest, I do see it approaching populism:

The broad masses are satisfied with market-place art, but market-place art shows
the death of art. . . . In eras when the forms of art were alive no-one would have
brought bazaar monstrosities into the house. When artisan icon-painting spread
in Russia in the 17th century, and ‘in the icons there appeared such violence and
absurdities as were not fitting for a Christian even to look at,’ this meant that the
old forms were already superseded. Nowadays, the old art has already died, and
the new has not yet been born . . . Only the creation of new forms of art can
restore to man sensation of the world, can resurrect things and kill pessimism.3

Also relevant to Kandinsky would have been Shklovsky’s 1919 theorization of a

non-narrative element in folk literature, “syuzhet constuctions” (emphasis
original), whereby motif complexes are subject to thematic abbreviation and
condensation (the complex of a diagonal lance plus a mounted rider and even
just a dark blob might as well equal St. George).4
There is a tendency to lump Hinterglasmalerei together with icons, which
smacks of the secularism that would prefer reducing both to a common
denominator of ethnology by the simplistic exclusion of religion; but in truth,
the problem is really more dialectical. By about 1920 it would become a political
matter, in art, to oppose (old) idealistic composition with (modern) materialistic
construction. In regard to Hinterglasmalerei, however, church legalities would
have excluded Hinterglasbilder from counting as icons; but they already took
materiality into account in their own way. For it was, and presumably still is,
forbidden to paint a proper Russian Orthodox icon on glass “inasmuch as it is a
thing that can be shattered.”5
As an enemy alien, Kandinsky had to leave Germany during the First World
War, only to have to return when, after the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks
finally clamped down on religion and anything thought to be related, such as
philosophical idealism (not a very dialectically materialist approach, but there
we are). In the early revolutionary period, Kandinsky was busy “down on the
ground,” with art in public service, including museum reorganization. This was
obviously “his world,” in something of a proprietary way, and he even managed
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 17

to regain the large apartment he had owned before the revolution. In 1919, he
not only lived there but rented space to a pair of young artists who would wind
up in the opposite aesthetic party of constructivism (versus composition):
Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vavara Stepanova. He even joined with them to form
the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK), under the IZO-NARKOMPROS
(Department of Fine Arts, in the People’s Commissariat for Education), where
he worked and of which he would soon become president. Unfortunately, the
triumph of the Bolsheviks meant that all aesthetic concern with composition in
painting would be ruled out officially as deplorably bourgeois. As a government
official, Kandinsky must already have had to keep mum about that development
as he pulled up stakes in December 1921 to leave Russia, as it turned out for
good, returning to Germany to teach at the Bauhaus.
The last year or so in Russia must have been strained, even at home in his
apartment building. As a responsible Russian patrician, Kandinsky had the
decency to hold on as an arts administrator, giving the new Russia his best shot,
with no time to paint. His arch-constructivist housemate Rodchenko, albeit a
brilliant photographer, was principally a graphic designer (though Kandinsky, at
about the same age, actually had once worked as a graphic designer in Moscow).
But Kandinsky’s sense of Christian fellowship likely encouraged amity: he was
aware of that notion of progressive thinkers in the Russian Orthodox Church
around the turn of the century called sobornost’—“catholicity,” a real-world,
altruistic sense of commonality to which Christians were meant to aspire, like an
accessible idealization of what Durkheim meant by church.
In my view, Kandinsky’s works that come closest to iconic tradition were
painted at the Bauhaus, in Germany, in the 1920s (as if thinking of home), as will
be considered below. Kandinsky clearly understood the lingering problem of
Old Believers demanding repetition of traditional types, giving the icon, as such,
an onus of cultural conservatism in the modern world. Fortunately, that view of
icon painting is a romantic and reactionary exaggeration. It is not necessarily
dishonorable for an icon to differ from classic types: if that were the case, none
could ever bear the designation “first appeared.” That the Russian icon tradition
tends to consider originality a Western folly, does not mean that inspired
compositions are not valued.6 One can think of this situation as analogous to
military discipline, whereby officers trained to respond to situations by routine
are nevertheless aware that, in a tight spot, the nonstandard solution may win the
respect of history.
It is interesting that the devout believer Kandinsky never presumed to paint
official church icons (it would be interestingly ironic if Rodchenko had, early on,
18 Faith in Art

mother being an Old Believer). Neither do his Hinterglasbilder impinge upon the
formation of abstraction. I can imagine them as a diversion during the writing of
the artist’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
On turning to his texts, it is evident that Kandinsky was well read, including
in philosophy, even as Orthodox Christian theology—with a capital O—was
likely the core of his worldview. Hegel was obviously important, as were latter-
day Russian religious philosophers and likely advocates for Christian anarchism,
including Tolstoy (Kandinsky’s own early anarchist side involved participation
in demonstrations at Moscow University as a student).
Evident in Kandinsky’s thinking about art is the Hegelian pressure of history.
Art, in Hegel’s Aesthetics, having already moved through two of its three great
stages, is “now” (meaning starting then) positioned—first in the Romanticism of
1818–29 but somehow lastingly in modernity—not so much to “end” art as to
realize or fulfill it in modern form. Art does this after emerging from religion
(stage two): specifically from Christianity, where Protestantism is Christianity’s
final form—something no doubt more troubling than a mere detail for
Kandinsky’s Orthodoxy. Hegel’s three stages (not always consistent) are intended
successively to approach “the Absolute” (basically, God), as follows. “Now the
first form of [art] . . . is an immediate and therefore sensuous knowing, a
knowing in the form and shape of the sensuous and objective itself, in which the
Absolute is presented to contemplation and feeling”; primeval symbolic idols
are art’s starting point. In the next steps, the implications for Kandinsky are
clear: “Then the second form [religion] is a pictorial thinking, while the third
and last [philosophy] is the free thinking of absolute spirit.”7 Hovering at the
threshold of self-conscious modernity, this tipping point must have coincided
with what Russian religious Hegelians—that is, “Right” Hegelians, like Sergei
Bulgakov (1871–1944), a college friend of Kandinsky (more on him below)—
saw as the transition from the second to the third phase in the great sequence
from art to religion to philosophy, functioning in analogy with the Christian
Trinity.8
So much for the metaphysical framework. One can hardly read two pages of
Kandinsky without encountering the concept of “inner need” or the more logical
“inner necessity.” At the time, artists and art people involved with German
Expressionism were already acquainted with such figures of speech owing,
especially, to the art historian Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy: A
Contribution to the Psychology of Style (1908). But while these and kindred terms
are mainstays of Kandinsky’s thinking, Hegel himself finds a similar way of
speaking, though his words also resonate with Luther’s translation of the Bible.
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 19

Notable (using the 1545 version) is the verse, “Though our outer nature is wasting
away, our inner (innerliche) nature is being renewed every day” (2 Cor. 4:16); or
the blessing, “That, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be
strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man” (Eph. 3:16). This
usage, predicated on an authenticity of the inner that extends back to Luther,
suggests that whenever Kandinsky charges meaning to “internal necessity,” he
may also imply the needs of the soul in an ultimately religious sense. Eventually
he will also speak of the needs of the artwork with a similar empathy.
Kandinsky was indeed a prolific and articulate writer as well as a great
painter, notably in terms of the intuitive aspect of painting; and his intellectual
viewpoint is quite available (very few of the 900 pages of his Collected Writings
concern specific works of art). So it is quite possible to discuss religion as part
of his outlook, seeing that he took it seriously. In the early twenty-first
century, many people in the Western world take pride in considering themselves
“spiritual but not religious.” I believe that Kandinsky would consider that view
deficiently spiritual, being aware, from his own experience, of how spirituality—
never a solitary state if it includes the divine—grows out of religion, which is
social.
Kandinsky, on the contrary, was religious, period. Trained as an academic
lawyer, his interest shifted from social science to studying painting and then to
teaching it and writing about it. In an early exhibition review written for a St.
Petersburg (Russia) journal in 1910, he praises some Persian miniature paintings
by saying that each “seemed unbelievable [in] that [it] could have been created
by human hands. Standing before it, I felt it had come into being of its own
accord, as if it had come down from heaven, like a revelation” (K1:74). The
description may now sound commonplace, but many Russians would have
understood these words as an allusion to the principle of the acheiropoieta—an
Orthodox icon so excellent as to be considered “not made by human hands.”
Other theological themes enter the artist’s theorizations. An example from
1910/11: “As long as the soul remains joined to the body it can as a rule only
receive vibrations via the medium of the senses, which form a bridge from the
immaterial to the material (in the case of an artist) and from the material to the
immaterial (in the case of the spectator)” (K1:87); and that now marks the
beginning of a new age, “the epoch of the great Spiritual,” already beginning in
art as social counterpoint to a hopelessly materialistic world (K1:88). Evoking
the Hegelian historical procession, not to mention semitheosophical, this
statement also highlights Kandinsky’s enduring sense of painting as capable of
being spiritually utilitarian or soulfully efficacious.
20 Faith in Art

Concerning the Spiritual in Art and a

Russian Shadow Text

The question of religiosity arose as Kandinsky began to experiment with

nonobjective or abstract art. Much evidence rests in his book Concerning the
Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular, published at Munich in German, in
December 1911. As the painter’s single most influential piece of theory, it has
often been discussed, if not usually from the viewpoint of religion.
Translations of the book differ, sometimes even omitting entire sections of
text; hence it is advisable to consult more than one. Omissions do seem to
concern religion, especially when that is being considered a disputable—if not
disposable—subject. For example, the Peter Vergo translation of Concerning the
Spiritual states that painting can be spiritually efficacious as likened to Holy
Communion, since certain “periods of decline in the spiritual world” are like
times “when the transubstantiated bread remains inaccessible” (K1:135). Other
translators may have misunderstood that, but it does support the notion that if
art can aspire to something like sacramental reality, it might make for a
communion of souls. In the otherwise important translation by Michael Sadleir
(born Sadler), the same statement is rendered much less sacramentally: “Such
periods, during which art has no noble champion, during which the true spiritual
food is wanting, are periods of retrogression in the spiritual world” (KS7). What
is the upshot there? Possibly a desire to be neutral; but if you want to make a
Kandinsky statement sound as Protestant as Hegel, it may miss something of
what this artist means by the spiritual office of painting.
We must face up to the concept of spiritual in the title. Students of Kandinsky
are aware of the ambiguity in German of the word Geist, spirit, what with geistig
and geistlich meaning mainly mental and spiritual. In German these are less than
synonymous, but not so much in English, where reader and writer must settle on
what is meant. Kandinsky knew the value that Hegel invested in these terms,
which for Right Hegelians, at least, can connote the Holy Spirit. Many
nonbelievers, including the old Bolsheviks, would take all religion (not to
mention all metaphysics) as “mystical,” however at odds that is with Durkheim’s
fairly centrist, social conception of religion.
The larger problem at hand concerns the extent to which the “spiritual” of
Kandinsky’s title relates to or is a function of religion, especially revealed
religion—meaning, once again, religion constitutionally founded on singularly
sacred texts whose meanings have venerable histories of hermeneutical critique.
To rein in the term Geistige in Kandinsky’s title —Über das Geistige in der
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 21

Kunst—as, by standard usage, purely “mental,” would purport to present it as a

treatise in psychological science: Concerning the Mental in Art, at serious odds
with the drift of the book. One would have had to think that art has no intellectual
content to begin with to take that in stride as an alternative title. On the other
hand, anyone who believes in, and worships, God, as Kandinsky did, is unlikely
to take as spiritual anything too removed from divinity to permit auratic
implication. Around 1900 there was widespread reaction against the severe
materialism of the previous century, which, everyone agrees, concerned
Kandinsky. He could deal with science as inquiry into created nature; but he was
concerned about materialism as, ever increasingly, modern culture’s default
philosophy. In reaction, he sometimes makes common cause with features of
late nineteenth-century Symbolist (or symboliste) culture, a tendency I discount
for two reasons: it tends to make painting the acolyte of a literary movement;
and it makes it more difficult to define a self-sufficiently nondecorative and
nonobjective painting approach as more than visual mood music.9
Worse: after the Russian Revolution, the Communist government considered
formulating a new atheistic religion, as had happened after the French Revolution.
The Russians called this “God-Building,” and Kandinsky’s boss, the otherwise
intelligent and often liberal Commissar of Education Lunacharsky, was
involved—in this case, all too liberally. It is inconceivable to think of Kandinsky
being a willing party to such a project, being too Christian not to see it as false,
idolatrous, and massively contrary to the precedent of Judeo-Christian revealed
religion. Both before and after the Revolution it is possible to track Kandinsky’s
characteristically spiritual ideas and expressions to the Bible and relevant
theology.
For Concerning the Spiritualt, I tend to rely on Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter
Vergo’s Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, except that on the subject of
religion I favor Sadleir’s first English translation, of 1914—almost stubbornly
titled The Art of Spiritual Harmony—which has almost no qualms about faith.
He and his father met Kandinsky, bought his work, and were the first to bring it
to Britain. Sadleir says in his introduction, “Religion, in the sense of awe, is
present in all true art. But here I use the term in the narrower sense to mean
pictures of which the subject is connected with Christian or other worship” (KS
xvi:n1). Frankly, while I would never use the word “picture” for an abstract
painting, which depicts nothing, I respect Sadleir for already establishing that
religiosity is indeed in Kandinsky’s work, including theory. He has Kandinsky
say, “Our minds, which are even now only just awakening after years of
materialism are infected with the despair of unbelief, of lack of purpose and ideal.
22 Faith in Art

The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into
an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul in its grip”
(KS1–2; emphasis added).10 Furthermore, Sadleir’s version was also chosen as
the basis of a posthumous edition with unpublished artist’s emendations
copyright by Nina Kandinsky.11) What Kandinsky himself would have meant by
Spirit (though all nouns are capitalized in German) probably did extend to the
third person of the Blessed Trinity, der Heilige Geist: the Holy Ghost or Holy
Spirit, given the many ostensible signs of faith even in this his primary book.
Whatever, exactly, our painter meant by geistige, he was certainly not “spiritual
but not religious.”
Concerning the Spiritual in Art has two parts, “About General Aesthetic” and
“About Painting,” as well as an introduction containing the “despair of unbelief ”
passage quoted above. Kandinsky invites the reader to imagine first a gallery of
paintings devoted to heartless art-for-art’s- sake. Next, he invokes the vision of
an art of “deep and powerful prophetic strength,” inspiring one’s spirit to move
“upwards and forwards,” even though the effort required to do so entails “a bitter
cross to bear” (KS3–4)—a recurrent motif in Kandinsky’s writing that alludes to
the Passion of Christ (or the Stations of the Cross).12
Chapter 1, “The Movement of the Triangle,” condenses the notion of upward
and forward movement into a “spiritual triangle” (or pyramid) diagramming the
progressive sociocultural effect of art as an altruistic social force. The painter
pictures a gamut of low to high cultural understanding thusly: “A large acute-
angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts with the narrowest
segment uppermost. . . . The whole triangle is moving slowly, almost invisibly
forwards and upwards.” The lowest and widest level of the triangle represents
ignorant mass culture, and at times there is only one artist at the triangle’s apex,
such as Beethoven, “standing solitary and insulted,” until he is joined, in time, by
those who can comprehend his genius (KS6-7). There is the implication that art
makes upward movement possible.
Speculating on the origin of this device, I want to call attention to a thought-
motif used by Arthur Schopenhauer to exemplify the human lordship over
nature: “Accompanied by all the grades downward through all the forms of
animals, through the plant kingdom to the inorganic. . . . They form a pyramid,
of which the highest point is man[kind].”13 Kandinsky’s notion is more dynamic
than that of Schopenhauer, which smacks of the Hindu caste system. A closer
parallel for the triangle or pyramid motif may come from a Russian literary
artist who was also an aesthetician and a serious Christian (even when the
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 23

Russian Orthodox Church would not have him)—Leo Tolstoy. I will discuss him
further as a source in an alternative text to Concerning the Spiritual in Art, below.
In any case, Kandinsky’s choice of this geometrically triangular figure to
explain how art assists in the upward and ongoing efforts of humanity concerns,
in Christian terms, the Trinity, with its Third Person—the Holy Spirit—inspiring
human creativity. The conception of the Holy Spirit as generated eternally by the
interacting love of the Father and the Son, implicit not only in Hegel but in
Bulgakov and other Russian religious philosophers, belongs to a prevalent
commonality of thought. From it, theological religiosity breaks free of the
obfuscating quasi-religious mistiness of late nineteenth-century Symbolism.
Art, instead of providing pseudo-spiritual aesthetic perfume for naturalistic
bodily figuration, is being called upon, as Kandinsky writes, to supply “the
spiritual food of the newly awakened spiritual life. . . . no longer the material,
objective ‘what’ of the former period, but the internal truth of art, the soul
without which the body . . . can never be healthy, whether in the individual or in
a whole people” (KS9).
“Spiritual Revolution,” Kandinsky’s third chapter, tells it like it is on behalf of
modern art (and music). As an artist, he starts out confrontationally prophetic,
like the great Lutheran theologian of the early nineteenth century Søren
Kierkegaard (whose text can seem sometimes rudely to talk back to the reader:
“You’re no believer: if you were, you would . . .”). Kandinsky claims that, as
members of society priding themselves on their progressive attitudes, most of
his readers think of themselves as Jews, Catholics, or Protestants but they’re
functional atheists; politically, they are “democrats and republicans” (not, of
course, in modern American sense), and economically, most of them seem like
mild-mannered democratic socialists. In fact, Kandinsky continues, society’s
“higher segments are not only blind atheists but can justify their godlessness
with strange words, for example, those of Virchow, so unworthy of a learned
man.” This remark takes on the late Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), a leading
pathologist whose recklessly antimetaphysical positivism is enshrined in his
legendary comment that Kandinsky references in Concerning the Spiritual: “I
have seen many corpses, but never yet discovered a soul in any of them” (KS11).
A believer can only wonder what foolish definition of the soul Virchow had in
mind: obviously not that of Baruch Spinoza, who dressed down René Descartes
for expecting to locate the soul in the pineal gland in the Ethics (Pt. V, preface).
Naturalism was obviously the dominant aesthetic of this positivist ilk—if, in
such hands, it can be considered aesthetic at all.
24 Faith in Art

Kandinsky had already employed the Virchow anecdote in 1911, in an

opening remark in his essay “Whither the ‘New’ Art?” in an Odessa journal. He
accompanied it with a statement more optimistic than the present “Jews,
Catholics and Protestants” quip: an allusion to the theologically complex but
magnificent passage in the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, where
the wild shoots of gentiles come to be grafted onto the same olive tree as the
Jews, all thriving through the one trunk from the same venerable roots (another
biblical idea touched on in Concerning the Spiritual in Art). In “Whither the
‘New’ Art?,” the metaphor is evoked when Kandinsky writes—partly inspired by
the new work of his friend, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of
Harmony—about modern versus classic art: “So the new branch is the
continuation of the same tree. And the leaf is of the same branch” (K1:102). The
scriptural trope of the olive tree becomes a favored figure in Kandinsky’s
writing.
Still in the chapter “Spiritual Revolution,” Kandinsky touches on the question
of Theosophy, a movement that he never actually joined. That Theosophists
ordinarily hold all gods equal to that of Abraham, violates the First and
theologically most important Commandment: precisely what led Rudolf Steiner
to found the rival movement Anthroposophy, about a year after Concerning the
Spiritual in Art was published, to avoid that imputation. Spiritualism did belong
to the Symbolist cultural prelude to abstract art, concerned as it was invisible
forces and disembodied entities; though it probably also disguised the
embarrassment of divergent religious systems to people too unsure of their own
groundings to pursue ecumenism.
By illuminating the past as well as signaling the future, the same chapter looks
back to already notable modern masters. To Kandinsky, Cézanne’s inherently
phenomenological attitude disposes him to a God-in-everything immanentism:
he “made a living thing out of a teacup, or rather in a teacup he realized the
existence of something alive. . . . he was endowed with the gift of divining
the inner life in everything. His colour and form are alike suitable to the
spiritual harmony” (KS17). And saying that Henri Matisse “endeavours to
reproduce the divine” (KS18), Kandinsky cites the recent German translation of
his “Notes of a Painter” (in Kunst und Künstler, 1909), singling out an expressivity
beyond formalism in its statement: “When I see Giotto’s frescoes in Padua, I
don’t worry about knowing which scene from the life of Christ I have before my
eyes; but at the same time, I understand the feeling (Gefühl) that these frescoes
are developing. It is in the lines, in the composition, in the color; and the titling
can only confirm my impression.”14 Some might take this comment as a
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 25

sidestepping of religion, but in context it seems rather a retrieval of religious

significance.
The first half of Concerning the Spiritual in Art closes with a summary
statement based on Kandinsky’s trope of the progressive cultural pyramid in
which the vast majority of people, down below, have no concern with the world
of the spirit, while the prophetic artists at its apex deal with art’s salvific role. In
between, the creative individual can ascend: “Every[one] who steeps himself in
the spiritual possibilities of his art is a valuable helper in the building of the
spiritual pyramid which will some day reach to heaven” (KS20).
The second half of the book, titled “About Painting,” begins with Chapter 5,
“The Psychological Working of Colour,” in which the word “soul” is used
repeatedly. The chapter ends with an emphatic, italicized statement: “It is evident
therefore that colour harmony must rest only on a corresponding vibration in the
human soul; and this is one of the guiding principles of the inner need” (KS26;
emphasis original). To this Sadleir adds a note that, without turning religious,
serves to objectify the matter: “The phrase ‘inner need’ (innere Notwendigkeit)
means primarily the impulse felt by the artist for spiritual expression, . . . but also
the actual expression itself ” (KS26n4).
In the more densely technical chapter that follows, Chapter 6, “The Language
of Form and Colour,” the phrase “outer meaning” consists of the limiting
boundaries between colors on a surface, but it can also be “abstract, describing
only a non-material, spiritual entity . . . with life and value as such” (KS29). Such
outer meaning can seem anything but willed: Sadleir notes: “Form often is most
expressive when least coherent. It is often most expressive when outwardly most
imperfect, perhaps only a stroke, a mere hint of outer meaning” (KS29n7). It is
exciting for us to realize, retrospectively, how one important Kandinsky claim
would soon be out of date: “Purely abstract forms are beyond the reach of the
artist at present; they are too indefinite for him” (KS30), a thought that concerns
the spiritual because “the abstract idea is creeping into art, although, only
yesterday, it was scorned and obscured by purely material ideals” (KS31).
An important detail omitted from this chapter by Sadleir concerns the word
“talent” (also Talent in German), despite his previous translation of the same
word without incident. In the Vergo-Lindsay translation, for example, a sentence
appears: “The sense of feeling with which the artist is born resembles the talent
of which the Bible speaks, which is not to be buried. The artist who does not use
his gifts is a lazy servant” (K1:177); here Sadleir is oddly silent: the sentence is
simply missing. But talent is a word occasionally found in the artist’s writing,
and one whose biblically figurative origin is often thoroughly blended into
26 Faith in Art

ordinary discourse. Here Kandinsky himself makes a point of scriptural sources:

the “Parable of the Talents” in the Gospels (Mt. 25:14–30; Lk. 19:12–27). In the
story, a rich man who needs to travel leaves with his servants many “talents” (an
ancient coin whose name was already a metaphor for a material weight). These
coins can be either buried, safely but unproductively (= negative), or else their
value can be increased by economic activity (= positive). The scriptural metaphor
in this parable is so forceful that both the German and English words derive
from it, and the connection is even retained in today’s ordinary notion of a
personal talent, such as a talent for music. Although Luther’s German translation
of the Bible did not use the word Talent, Huldrych Zwingli’s did, and the near-
pun of the ordinary word still holds true of the word talent in Russian, so that a
biblical sense of talent was clearly in play when Kandinsky employed it here.
Acknowledging the talent provides a vivid point of contact with the New
Testament, but others are equally so.
In the same chapter, Kandinsky speaks of blue as “the typical heavenly color,”
saying,“The ultimate feeling it creates is one of rest” (KS38)—possibly supernatural
rest. His remark is supported not only scripturally but also by an emphasis on
materiality as the basis of transcendence, putting many a materialist disqualification
of metaphysics dialectically to shame. Stadleir must know that Kandinsky’s claim
that “the way to the supernatural lies through the natural” (KS38n20) is an allusion
to St. Paul: “Take note, the spiritual was not first: first came the natural and after
that the spiritual” (1 Cor. 15:46; NAB). Another telling religious detail, one that
most Europeans would once have understood, appears here too in regard to orange:
“Orange is like a man convinced of his own powers. Its note is that of
the angelus, or of an old violin” (KS41). Here Kandinsky refers to the Angelus,
a brief devotion sometimes used in the Anglican or Lutheran churches as well
as the Catholic; practiced wherever out of doors one happens to be, it is signaled by
the ringing of a church bell, and involves recalling the Annunciation by
saying the Ave Maria and a special prayer.15 Having the Angelus bell normally rung
at 6:00 a.m., noon, and 6:00 p.m., also lent meaning to the secular work day.16
Under “Theory,” in Chapter 7, Kandinsky discusses the analogy of music and
abstract painting. Many readers will think of the renowned observation of Walter
Pater that all the arts “aspire to the condition of music,” expressed in his essay “
The School of Giorgione” (1877).17 But as a reader of the late eighteenthcentury
German poet-philosopher Novalis, Pater may have been aware of Novalis’
pointing to the music–painting affinity, and in fact taking painting, where “each
element in abstracto appears so incomplete,” as “ ‘nobler’ than music, . . . one step
closer to the holy place of the spirit” (Logological Fragments, II.17). Just as a
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 27

composer can compose sounds in imagination, so “in a similar way a painter, as a

master and inventor of colored shapes, knows how to change them at will, place
them against and next to, to multiply them, and produce all possible kinds and
single examples” (Last Fragments, no. 42).18 Perhaps Kandinsky, so fond of musical
analogies, knew of this more directly philosophical route from German
romanticism to what he was saying. While this passage has only an incidental
connection with religion, it helps to establish an aesthetic concern with music as
often taken as a matter of immaterial form.
Wherever Concerning the Spiritual in Art posits an analogy between abstract
painting and music, it benefits by considering instrumental music is the purest
form of music for being unencumbered and uncompromised by literary
meaning. Any such conviction would have been strengthened by resort to a
widely read treatise in the modern Viennese musical tradition, Eduard Hanslick’s
On the Musically Beautiful (1854). Ten German editions had already appeared
when Hanslick died in 1904, and his book has never been out of print. Thanks to
Hanslick the instrumental-music notion is no stray conceit, but rather an
accepted critical principle. There is even forensic evidence that On the Musically
Beautiful was a direct influence on our painter. Both Hanslick’s book and Chapter
7 of Concerning the Spiritual in Art cite the nonobjective patterns of a kaleidoscope
(KS47). Hanslick does so just before he also cites nonobjective arabesques as
specifically important in dance history, while Kandinsky adds dance’s origins in
primitive sexuality and, importantly, religious ritual (KS50)—in a manner that
plausibly suggests he is elaborating on Hanslick.19
“Art and Artists,” Kandinsky’s eighth and last chapter, presents the practicing
painter as a “spiritual” leader anchored in religious faith, and includes connections
with his own Russian Orthodoxy. In negotiating them, a view emerges that there
is a difference between a call for “absolute freedom” from artistic convention
(KS53) and being “free in art but not in life” (KS54) by commitment to altruistic
purposes. Science is something that it would actually be better to follow blindly
than to reject. He seems to have in mind the laws of created nature, perhaps
including evolution—certainly something more than the inert “nature” of
academic art. Science-as-truth prepares one to return to the triangle of progress:
“Painting is an art, and art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a
power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human
soul—to, in fact the raising of the spiritual triangle”; thus, “When the soul tends
to be choked by material disbelief, art becomes purposeless and talk is heard that
art exists for art’s sake alone” (KS54). Even art for art’s sake, however, is at least
“an unconscious protest against materialism, against the demand that everything
28 Faith in Art

should have a use and a practical value,” and “further proof of the indestructability
of art and of the human soul, which can never be killed but only temporarily
smothered” (KS54n4), as Kandinsky notes.
At this point, however, Sadleir leaves out something else that can work against
disbelief, namely, prayer. For he omits Kandinsky’s vivid allusion to the Lord’s
Prayer—taught by Christ himself, as Communion services testify—as an antidote
for mere aestheticism:

Painting is . . . a language that speaks in its own unique way to the soul about the
things that are for the soul its daily bread [tägliche Brot], which it can only obtain
in this form. . . . Always at those times when the human soul leads a stronger life,
art too becomes more alive, for soul and art complement and interact upon each
other. While in those periods in which the soul is neglected and deadened by
materialistic views, by disbelief, and their resultant, purely practical strivings, the
opinion arises that “pure” art is not given to [people] for a special reason, but is
purposeless; and that art exists only for art’s sake. [l’art pour l’art].
K1: 212

And in a footnote, the artist continues: “This view is one of the few expressions of
idealism to be found at such times. It is an unconscious protest against materialism,
which would have everything practical and purposeful. It is further proof of how
strong and inviolable art is, and of the power of the human soul, which is living
and eternal, which can be numbed, but never killed” (K1: 212n).20
Having explained in various citations what Kandinsky means by the spiritual,
including authentic art’s overall altruism, its “nobler purpose,” one can understand
how much religion is entailed in the statement: “Painting is an art, and art is not
a vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed
to the improvement and refinement of the human soul—to, in fact, the raising of
the spiritual triangle. . . . when the soul tends to be choked by material disbelief,
art becomes purposeless and talk is heard that art exists for art’s sake alone. Then
is the bond between art and the soul, as it were, drugged into unconsciousness.”
We can even be reminded by one of several instances of Kandinsky’s Passion
motif that this may mean “hard work . . . which often proves a cross to be borne”
(KS54).
“Art and Artists,” which concludes Concerning the Spiritual in Art, sees
Kandinsky asserting that the artist is a “priest of beauty” who must seek beauty
“according to the principle of the inner need, . . . measured only according to the
size and intensity of that need. That is beautiful which is produced by the inner
need, which springs from the soul; . . . And this property of the soul is the oil,
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 29

which facilitates the slow, scarcely visible but irresistible movement of the
triangle, onwards and upwards” (KS55; emphasis original).
Yet at the last minute, he winds up thinking of something more conscious,
almost as if to intimate Point and Line to Plane before the fact. I infer that in
thinking of himself as a serious priest of art, Kandinsky may have realized that
deriving one’s priestly efficacy from “inner” capabilities alone is not only
egotistical but also theologically suspect. It would bring him close to the
Protestant (and anciently Donatist) tendency to hold that the efficacy of a
sacrament depends on the moral worthiness of the priest, which is heresy in
both Orthodoxy and Catholicism, and Anglicanism too (where it is even part of
the Articles of Religion). The learned Kandinsky would have known that he
could not push this notion without running into the formidable opposition of
Augustine. The idea that the artist-priest could be “free in art but not in life” may
have been an attempt to save the theological day, conceivably based on the
scrupulosity of old-school icon painters who not only hoped to be in a state of
grace but also to purge their bodies before painting.
Kandinsky also composed a shorter version of his treatise as a lecture, written
in his mother tongue and delivered by another artist at the meeting of the Second
All-Russian Congress of Artists at St. Petersburg held on either December 29 or 31,
1911. The lecture, known as “On the Spiritual in Art (Painting),” was published in
the congress’s Transactions in 1914. Differences between Concerning the Spiritual
and this text are significant. In addressing Russian artists specifically, Kandinsky
seems less inhibited here about religious display. For example, when he states that
modern art resembles forms of past ages in two opposite ways, he dismisses the
first—“outward resemblance”—as being that of “faithlessness” and having “no
potential.” The second way—“inward resemblance”—he introduces through an
initially Hegelian figure: it “contains the seeds of the future. . . . After the era of
materialist trial and temptation which seemed to enslave the soul, but which the
soul, in fact, rejected as the temptation of Satan, the soul is being born again,
refined by its struggle and its sufferings”; as such, this type of modern art is less apt
to fall into the “vulgar feelings such as fear, joy and sadness which were available as
subject-matter during the period of temptation” (64).21 This second form allows a
“stirring prophetic force” in the artist-seer, which, however, “can become a cross to
bear” (65; emphasis original)—in that recurrent Kandinskyan figure.
For this Russian and considerably Orthodox audience, Kandinsky’s special
motif of the forward-moving triangle not only carries over but takes on distinctly
Eucharistic overtones, as Kandinsky explains that the “Spirit of Evil” is countered
by Holy Communion’s overcoming of “spiritual hunger (consciously or, more
30 Faith in Art

often than not, unconsciously) for spiritual bread” (66)—a sustenance that “often
becomes the food of those who already abide in the higher segment” of the
triangle. If the sacrament is taken for granted, the soul of the artist as a supposedly
superior person becomes corrupt, and a person’s “gift, his [or her] talent ([N.B.]
in the Biblical sense) can become a curse. The artist [then] uses his [or her]
strength to serve vulgar demands; . . . introduces impure content into . . .
ostensibly artistic form; . . . deceives people and helps them to deceive themselves
into imagining that they suffer a spiritual thirst and that they can quench it at a
pure spring.” In such circumstances, “creative works do not assist the movement
upwards: they impede it, they repel that which would forge ahead . . . (67).”
Kandinsky’s audience of Russian artists would surely have recalled here a
well-known and originally Byzantine icon theme: in stating, “Art is deprived of a
noble creator and of the bread of enlightenment, . . . Souls fall constantly from
higher segments into lower ones” (67), there is surely understood an allusion
(again) to the popular icon type of St. John Climacus’s vision of a ladder from
earth to heaven (derived from Jacob’s Ladder) with many souls falling off before
reaching the top.
Another sort of point that never seems to intrude on Concerning the
Spiritual in Art is that an element of its intellectual support—especially against
art for art’s sake and anything like a bourgeois sense of beauty—likely gained
impetus from a widely read Russian aesthetic classic of the generation before
Kandinsky: Tolstoy’s What Is Art? (first published in English at Philadelphia
in 1898 but circulated illegally in Russian beforehand). Tolstoy’s overall religiosity
may be more important to Kandinsky than is generally supposed, despite the
anarchist Christian novelist’s excommunication from the Russian Church. I am
not the first to adduce Tolstoy as an influence on Kandinsky’s theory of art,
but a relevant article on the subject only touches once, and incidentally, on
religion.22
With Kandinsky’s spiritual triangle in mind, consider Tolstoy’s previous
stratification: “The appreciation of the merits of art—that is, of the feelings it
conveys—depends on people’s understanding of the meaning of life, on what they
see as good and evil in life. Good and evil in life are determined by what are called
religions. Mankind ceaselessly moves from a lower, more partial and less clear
understanding of life to one that is higher, more general and clearer. . . . Religions
are indicators of the highest understanding of life accessible at a given time in a
given society . . . ”(42).23 Tolstoy says, quite adumbrating Kandinsky, that an artist
“must experience an inner need to express the feeling he conveys”; and if a work
“does not proceed from the author’s inner need, then it is not a work of art” (122;
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 31

emphases added). He even wants to think that good art can lead people, on utterly
Christian terms, to “sacrifice themselves to serve others freely and joyfully [such
a Kandinskyan phrase!] without noticing it” (166). The link between Tolstoy and
Kandinsky would seem inherently religious, including Tolstoy’s concern with the
Russian icon.24
Stepping back from the two Kandinsky texts, it seems possible to affirm that
a major difference between Kandinsky’s published Concerning the Spiritual in
Art, still read by art students today, and his much more obscure lecture “On the
Spiritual in Art (Painting),” is how much more evidently the latter encourages an
artist to take the activity of painting as almost sacramental.

“On the Question of Form”

The Blaue Reiter Almanac (1912), edited by Kandinsky and his friend Franz
Marc (who as a youth intended to study for the Lutheran ministry), still interests
artists and art lovers for the global diversity of “spiritual” art, including tribal art,
illustrated in this first and only issue of the journal. Here Kandinsky’s dense
essay “On the Question of Form” functions mainly as a text for those who can
already understand “the external expression of inner content” as a good definition
of form (K1:237), “especially today, [when] many people cannot see the spirit in
religion, in art” (K1:235). This motif of not seeing the spirit is a version of the
essentially biblical figure, in both testaments, of “eyes that see not” (Is. 6:10, Jer.
5:21, Mt. 13:15, Acts 28:27, Rom. 11:8). And speaking to the at least artistically
converted, Kandinsky says, “It is not in the form (materialism) that the absolute
is to be sought,” and an artist “should not . . . seek . . . salvation in any one form”
(K1:237, emphasis added).
There is a firm religious basis here. The word God—not just a generalized
“absolute”—is invoked in an allusion to idolatry (K1:239); and when Kandinsky
reinforces his appreciation of a children’s art unspoiled by teachers, he cites
Christ’s words, “[Suffer] the little children [to] come unto me, for theirs is the
kingdom of Heaven” (K1:252; Mt. 19:14; Mk. 10:24; Lk. 18:15–17). In context, the
essay’s penultimate sentence—“Only through freedom can what is to come be
received” (K1:257)—may even allude to “The truth will make you free” (Jn. 8:32).
By this point in the text, the reader is aware that what is at stake in
nonrepresentational art requires a leap of faith.
The essay’s last sentence betokens Gospel rhetoric, only to turn unexpectedly
obscure: “And one should not stand to one side like the barren tree under which
32 Faith in Art

Christ saw lying, already prepared, the sword” (K1:257). By its parabolic drift,
this statement conveys something despite its ultimately vague final remark—
almost as if a willing misprision might indicate the authenticity of quoting by
memory. The sentence shows three points of contact with the Gospels: twice the
simple cursing of the fig tree, called barren, which fails to supply a hungry Jesus
with food (Mt. 21:18–22; Mk. 11:12–14), and then the more full-blown parable
of the fig tree in the vineyard that Jesus allows to be given one last chance, with
cultivation, to prove itself before being cut down (Lk.13:6–9). That none of the
references conflated here mentions a sword does not spoil the overall drift,
despite eliciting a gnostical air. But here, at the end of the text, Kandinsky
advances the sense of an urgency that we must rise to the occasion of modernity
and not hold back. (Liturgically speaking, the simpler story from Matthew and
Mark could also have reminded observant Russian Orthodox believers of a
chant during the Great Monday service in what Westerners call Holy Week, prior
to Easter.)

“Reminiscences” and a Russian Shadow Text

“Reminiscences,” published in German for a 1913 exhibition at Der Sturm

Gallery, Berlin, and revised in Russian in 1918 (although published later), is a
major document of Kandinsky’s return to Russia from late 1914 to late 1921.
Comparing the well-known original text with that eventually published in
Moscow highlights changes in the relation of the writing to the outside world. It
places the painter on the side of Socialism even as it identifies him as religiously
aware. Up to a certain point, one sees the painter in some basic social agreement
while holding privately onto his religious faith, even as others lost theirs.
Not that it is always easy to distinguish who holds onto a belief from those to
whom it is merely a figure of speech. A good example of this ambiguity occurs in
a Kandinsky text of this period: “On the Artist,” published in an exhibition
catalogue of 1916: “The unfree individual recognizes life only in the form, and
thereby often mistakes the dead for the living” (K1:410), which alludes—if you
know your Gospels—to Luke, at the Resurrection: “Why do you seek the living
among the dead” (Lk. 24:6). (A skeptic could probably not assume the moral
weight of supposing that many would look at an insipid form in a painting and
pronounce it organically dead.)
In “Reminiscences,” Kandinsky writes, “The word composition moved me
spiritually . . . This word affected me like a prayer. It filled me with awe” (KH30;
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 33

emphasis original). As a state official after the Revolution, his 1918 Russian
version of the essay does not include the word “prayer” but “inner vibration,”
though, like the word “palette,” it “filled me with reverence” (KB57). Before the
very end of the Civil War in 1922, composition would be the usual position of
artistic conservatives, while leftist artists rallied to construction: that Kandinsky
typically respected both is already evident in Concerning the Spiritual in Art. But
things were changing.
Until the end of the Civil War, atheism was not obligatory, and the Revolution
might even have raised messianic hopes in our fairly religious painter, at least
until matters became impossible. It would have been unlikely for an artist so
drawn to the Apocalypse not to think of the consequent coming of the Kingdom
of God. Millions of Russian Orthodox believers, most of whom were hardly
“mystics,” were prepared by their very faith for a new age of justice.
“Reminiscences” documents Kandinsky’s life and artistic outlook all the more
when its two versions are read together. Appropriately, this text is self-reflective.
The artist is inclined to pair up analogous topics, stressing underlying principles.
For example, he highlights the connection of his political activities as a student
activist at Moscow University against “violations of the old liberal Moscow
traditions” (KH24) with the leftist politics of his successful merchant father.
Likewise, writing about his early postgraduate ethnological trip to remote
Vologda, where some prefer to imagine Kandinsky condoning pre-Christian
paganism, despite his mentioning here “the remnants of their heathenish
religion” (KH28). There in the backwaters he had actually met “many solitary
and deeply devoted workers of future Russia, content to remain in the obscurity
of their humble surroundings. Not least amongst them were the village priests,
who deserve the very highest praise” (KB59n)—phraseology here retained,
believe it or not, in the (admittedly then unpublished) Moscow version.
Kandinsky pairs this same recollection with his boyhood memory of his father’s
faith: “It was a special treat for me to hear him, with love and affection, enumerate
the ancient, haunting names of the ‘Forty times Forty’ Moscow churches” (KB72).
Aesthetically speaking, after an initial insight thanks to one of the Haystacks
of Claude Monet—“Previously I had only known realistic art, . . . And suddenly
for the first time I saw a painting” (KH26, emphasis original)—there came an
unforgettable epiphany, for pure abstraction to come. On walking into his studio
at the approach of dusk, he noticed what turned out to be one of his canvases
lying on its side: “I saw an indescribably beautiful picture drenched with an inner
glowing. At first I hesitated, then I rushed toward this mysterious picture, of
which I saw nothing but forms and colors, and whose content was
34 Faith in Art

incomprehensible. . . . Now I knew for certain that the object harmed my

paintings” (KH32).
Another point in Kandinsky’s essay concerns a simplistic notion of both sexual
and colonialist conquest that will be developed more sophisticatedly in Point and
Line to Plane and is here intertwined with other figures of speech. The passage, “I
learned to battle with the canvas, to come to know it as resisting my wish [= dream]
[sic], and to bend it forcibly to this wish,” is followed up by one not carried over into
the 1918 Russian version, where virgin imagery takes on an political tinge: “At first
[the canvas] stands there like a pure, chaste virgin, with clear eye and heavenly
joy—this pure canvas which is itself as beautiful as a painting. And then comes the
willful brush which first here, then there, gradually conquers it with all the energy
peculiar to it, like a European colonist, who pushes into the wild virgin nature,
hitherto untouched, using axe, spade, hammer, and saw to shape it to his wishes”
(KH35). (We will see similar imagery used very differently.)
The version of Kandinsky’s essay revised in Moscow in 1918 recalls the
difficulty of life at the time, when food was scarce, even as the new Russia
produced a cornucopian outpouring of avant-garde artistic activity; this new
Russia was an enterprise for which Kandinsky put his own art aside in order to
play a major governmental role. The native Muscovian who had returned at the
end of 1914 (owing to the First World War), took up several positions as of 1918,
before leaving at the end of 1921. Lunacharsky hired him for the Department of
Pictorial Art (IZO) of that commissariat, whose acronym was NARKOMPROS;
Kandinsky’s wife, Nina, also worked there.25 His work at IZO involved organizing
a constellation of provincial museums, while teaching at the great Vkhutemas
(Higher Art and Technical Studios) and editing a journal titled Visual Arts. In
1919, Kandinsky also became director of the Museum of Pictorial Culture in
Moscow; in 1920 he founded and directed the Institute of Artistic Culture
(INKhUK), and in 1921 the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN).
Certain key points concerning faith can be singled out from the Moscow
version of the memoir. Kandinsky speaks enigmatically of a time of “unbelief” on
his part (KB68), as if of a passing phase. The whole memoir has an air of hope, even
of sobornost’, that special Russian, mainly churchly emphasis on a community of
many sorts of people thriving in social harmony. Four areas of specific religious
mention in Kandinsky’s Russian “Reminiscences” merit attention.
(1) A paragraph that begins “Art is like religion in many respects” (KH39) in
the Munich version becomes utterly tongue-tied in the Russian (without its
seeming to be a question of translation): “The development of art, like that of
abstract knowledge, is not governed by new discoveries which take the place of
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 35

the older truths and proclaim the latter to be illusions and falsehoods (as is
apparently the case in science)” (KB68).
(2) A favored symbol expounded: “When a new branch grows on a tree, the
trunk does not become superfluous, for it must feed the growing branch. And
the latter is but a new part of the tree trunk from which it sprang. All his
continuous and unceasing ramification, which may seem so hopelessly confusing,
is, in fact, nothing else but the inevitable development of the same body, which,
in its entirety, forms the green mass of the tree itself ” (KB68). This metaphor
seems fresh, despite Kandinsky’s having used it twice before—if not so
powerfully—pertaining to society as well as artistic style. In its fullness, it derives,
once again, from the wonderful eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans,
where a venerable olive tree first represents the eternal Old Covenant, however
detached and reattached its branches may become; this as joined by outsider,
gentile branches of the New Covenant that will eventually, in the Kingdom of
God to come, belong to the same living tree.26
(3) A Christian view of Old Testament legalities as (problematically if
understandably) warranting a sense of general moral progress in society: “The
same can be said for moral evolution, which has for its origin the religious rules
and directives. The original, Biblical laws of morality are simple and unequivocal,
as, for example—‘Do not slay; do not commit adultery.’ In the next, Christian,
period, they are couched in gentler, more elastic form. Their primitive angularity
gives way to a less stark and freer outline” (KB68). But here the modernist
Kandinsky may also be rediscovering the “third-age” theory (A is to B as B is to
C) of the coming Kingdom of God and of justice, as framed by the twelfth-
century Christian theologian Joachim of Fiore’s exegesis of the book of Revelation
(see Chapter 4). In the 1913 version Kandinsky understands that he had no
intention to “overthrow” the old art and hopes only for “the demand of inner life
in painting,” writes: “To my astonishment I realized that this demand grew on the
same foundations which Christ set forth as the foundation for moral qualification.
I realized that this view of art is Christian and that at the same time it shelters
within itself the necessary elements for the development of the ‘third’ revelation,
the revelation of the Holy Spirit” (KH41; emphasis original).
(4) How it is that even the Russian Revolution would seem to have a role in
this development: “Christianity in its evolution weighs not so much the rigid
outer actions, as the more flexible inner impulses and thoughts. Herein lies the
root of the continuous, ever [sic]27 new revaluation of values, which eternally
(and now as always), slowly creates the future, and is the foundation of that inner
spirituality which we are gradually able to discern in art, and which actually is
36 Faith in Art

occurring in a vigorous and revolutionary way” (KB69). There could not be a

more forthright statement of revolutionary political philosophy by a person of
faith during these contentious years.

Point and Line to Plane

Kandinsky went back to Germany to teach at the Bauhaus (i.e., the Staatliches
Bauhaus, or literally, State Constructional Institute), which, founded in Weimar
in 1919, relocated to Dessau as of 1925. The extraordinary school was
understandably associated with an antimetaphysical viewpoint and a consequent
constructivist style—very much what came to dominate the newly named USSR
just as Kandinsky left. But the Bauhaus faculty included Jews and Christians, and
even a neo-Nestorian who taught in a cassock, Johannes Itten (then on his way
out). There was at least one practicing Catholic, Josef Albers, who married Anni,
who was Jewish, at a church in Berlin in 1925.28 It was here that Kandinsky
prepared and published his other theoretical book, Point and Line to Plane
(1926), an official “Bauhaus Book” designed in-house. If Kandinsky felt expelled
from his native Moscow, here he could prepare to spell out his message,
like a missionary writing a dictionary for indigenous peoples whose language he
had already mastered, even as his painting style proved itself surprisingly
adaptable to the times, while some features of the new book seem surprisingly
theological.
Important points do carry over from Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which of
course had also been written and published in Germany. But even as the
“spiritual” pitch has changed from the expressionist ambience of the first book,
in accord with prevailing Constructivist thinking, religion—however less
likely—is still in evidence. Kandinsky notes that art study now entails two
aspects: “the analysis [which] borders on the problems of the ‘positive’ sciences”
and “the nature of the development [which] touches the problems of philosophy”
(KD19). The book begins systematically by discussing the point but for less
simple a reason than one would expect: “Only by means of a microscopic analysis
can the science of art lead to a comprehensive synthesis, which will extend far
beyond the confines of art into the realm of the ‘oneness’ of the ‘human’ and the
‘divine’ ” (KD21).
In the “Point” chapter, the single point emerges in drawing and painting
thanks to an “initial collision” between a tool with the material plane, the “basic
plane”: “The basic plane is impregnated by this first collision” (KD28). This figure
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 37

of speech develops metaphorically and metaphysically. As the physical point

takes on dimensionality, it disappears as a point, and “the plane in its stead
embarks upon its embryonic existence” (KD30).
This is even true in printmaking. For in dry-point etching, it is possible to say
that color can be “applied thickly to the whole plate, and then cleaned off in such
a way that the little point lies simply and naturally in its bright womb” (K2:564,
emphasis added). And in lithography, one can sand color off so that “the stone
returns . . . to its original [N.B.] chaste condition.” Thus, in printing, we have the
paper touch “impartially the entire block and reflect only the parts which have
been fructified” (KD49; “fertilized,” in K2:566). Meanwhile,“technical possibilities
[have grown] in just as functional and purposeful a manner as any other
potentiality, whether it be ‘material life’ (spruce tree, lion, star, louse) or in the
spiritual realm (art work, moral principle, scientific method, religious idea)”
(KD47).
Making an apparently evidential mistake while advancing his case at the end
of this section, Kandinsky criticizes “prints composed entirely of points, . . . in
which the points are intended to produce the effect of lines,” adducing the
example of “a famous Head of Christ.” He says: “It is clear that this is an
unjustifiable use of the point, since the latter, stifled by the representation and
with its inner sound weakened, is condemned to a poverty-stricken half-life [zu
einem armseligen Halbleben]” (KD53).29 Kandinsky here is likely thinking of
Claude Mellan’s Head of Christ or The Sudarium (Veil) of St. Veronica (1649), a
stipple engraving known, if not quite for points becoming lines, rather for a
single line constituting an entire image: a line that starts on the tip of the figure’s
nose.30 This error cannot be excused on grounds that stipple engraving produces
what could be considered micropoints because Kandinsky already says that
properties “dictated by technical necessity” are something else entirely
(KD53n1).31 However, in terms of visual thinking, this is a clever way for
Kandinsky, on the cusp between a chapter devoted to that geometrically
nondimensional entity, the point, and that geometrically single-dimensional
entity, the line, to negotiate conceptually their practically undepictable
distinction.
The chapter titled “Line” includes the only place in Kandinsky’s writings
where the theology seems irregular. Comparing traditional Christian and
traditional Chinese attitudes toward color and death, the idea concerns the
visually opposite but equivalent sign values of black and white. But the
ethnological problem is not the theological problem, which concerns ignoring
the notion of the immortality of the soul and personal resurrection in an effort
38 Faith in Art

to equate with Chinese understanding. Yes, the Chinese customarily use white
for mourning whereas Christians traditionally use black;32 yet Kandinsky
infringes on both the Apostles’ Creed (“resurrection of the body”) and the
Nicene Creed (“resurrection of the dead”) by saying, “After thousands of years of
Christianity, we Christians experience death as a final silence, or, according to
my characterization, as a ‘bottomless pit’ [unendliches Loch], whereas the heathen
Chinese look upon silence as a first step to the new language, or, in my way of
putting it, as ‘birth’ ” (KD76–7). For once, our ex-lawyer artist seems to be asleep
at the wheel, though it was a theological wheel.33
In the next chapter, “The Basic Plane,” Kandinsky develops an earlier line of
thought that might have easily been ignored or merely touched upon, into an
incisive aesthetic application of the Christian theology of the Annunciation (Lk.
1:25–38), whereby the Virgin Mary received the archangel Gabriel and assented
to becoming the Theotokos (the Greek Orthodox term for the Mother of God). If
there was a premonition of this symbolism in Kandinsky’s use of the “chaste
maiden” in the “Reminiscences,” now the idea has become striking. The operative
passage begins with a likely mention of the venerable celestial hierarchy apropos
of the basic plane:

That every living thing stands in a fixed relationship to “above” and “below” and
must without question remain that way, is a fact true also of the BP [Kandinsky’s
abbreviation for “basic plane”] which, as such, is also a living thing. This can be
partly explained as association or as transference of one’s own observations. We
must assume without question, however, that this fact has deeper roots and that
the BP is a living being. . . . We must . . . definitely assume that every artist feels—
even though unconsciously—the “breathing” of the still untouched BP and that
he feels—more or less consciously—a responsibility toward this being and is
aware of the fact that frivolous abuse of it is akin to murder. The artist “fertilizes”
this being and knows how obediently and “joyfully” the BP receives the right
elements in the right order. This somewhat primitive and yet living organism is
transformed by the right treatment into a new living organism, which is no
longer primitive but which reveals, on the contrary, all of the characteristics of a
fully developed organism.
KD116–17

This formula might have induced a spiritualistic reading, except that all its
features constitute elements of an Annunciation, which is to say, an extraordinary
scriptural event despite being a biological, and thus earthly, figure.
For decades I have discussed this explication in college classes, where it has
always been found convincing. Certainly any Christian who understands the
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 39

Annunciation ought to find it a telling analogy to the painter’s appeal to

inspiration in approaching the “virgin canvas.” A decade later than Point and
Line to Plane, in an article on the “Empty Canvas, etc.” (1935), Kandinsky
develops the last footnote of Concerning the Spiritual in Art into an interesting
Old Testament parallel for the Virgin’s acceptance at the Annunciation. For if the
empty canvas is somewhat frightening “because it can be violated” (though being
“more beautiful than some paintings”), Kandinsky reminds his reader, in relation
to the Virgin’s Annunciational yes-saying, of several of the Hebrew prophets’
enthusiastic responses to God’s appeal: Hineni, in Hebrew: “HERE I AM!”
(K2:780–83).

Iconic Inheritance

Kandinsky was from childhood onward cognizant of the Orthodox icon and the
Orthodox faith. As an artist just beginning his career at middle age, he would
have been interested in the modern reputation of the Russian icon as something
more than either a distant remnant of late Byzantine art or a matter of folk art.34
Certainly he was aware of the historically crucial 1904 cleaning of centuries’ of
candle smoke and incense vapor from Andrei Rublev’s large Old Testament
Trinity icon (or The Hospitality of Abraham), painted in either 1411 or between
1425 and 1427 for the Trinity Lavra (monastery) of St. Sergius at Sergiyev Posad,
not far from Moscow. Not to mention, soon after entering the realm of abstraction,
the exhibition of great icons, cleaned and restored, in celebration of 300 years of
the Romanov dynasty, titled “Masterworks of Ecclesiastical History” in the
Kremlin Armory, held from March 14 to October 1, 1913. At that time Kandinsky
was in Germany, but he went home for the summer. Revealingly, he would tell
Lothar Schreyer, first master of scenography at the Bauhaus, in 1922, “not [to] . . .
be . . . dismayed when I tell you that I understood my images as Christian,
particularly since I started making abstract [paintings] . . . This became
undeniably clear to me ten years ago”—that is, in the time of that exhibition.
Kandinsky also told Schreyer that he learned much about both art and religion
from icons.35
Many discussions of the impact of Russian Orthodox icon painting on
Kandinsky concentrate on abstract or quasi-abstract compositions that can be
formally affiliated with St. George and the Dragon, for they are many and easily
recognized. A large pole-like diagonal, indicating a lance, will be obvious: it can
be associated with anything resembling a mounted figure; often, the lower end of
40 Faith in Art

the lance will poke a dragon, as a metaphoric devil or the Devil as such—though
even an indistinct blob at the bottom of the pole will do, so long as the basic set-
up is established. I tend to ignore the St. George motif, in spite of its commonness,
mainly because George is also semiotically emblematic of the city of Moscow.36
Thus, as Kandinsky’s interest in St. George might will have stemmed as readily
from his home town as his religion, I find the motif too compromised to function
as evidence for religiosity.
Other common icon motifs do occur in Kandinsky’s pre-abstract and abstract
paintings, and his Russian contemporaries;37 for example, the inclusion of a large
red disc as perhaps a wheel may be derived from motifs of “Elijah and the fiery
chariot.”38 Visually literate observers may also trust their own “inner necessity” to
pick up on less obvious correspondences, which others may then accept as
relevant.
The eminent late Soviet art historian Dmitrii Sarabianov pointed out that
once Kandinsky had “found eyes” for abstract painting through Impressionism
(wherein “painting . . . com[es] to the fore”), the Russian icon highly influenced
him. “I value no painting as highly as our icons,” the painter later recalled: from
them he learned “the best . . . not only artistically, but religiously.” Finding the
early Mountain (1909; Stätisches Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich), Kandinsky’s
most “icon-like” work, Sarabianov says it rises to the abstraction of “plastic signs,
almost losing their semantic connection with real prototypes, but retaining in
themselves . . . some excit[ations]of impressions.” By scale and centrality,
Kandinsky’s metaphorical mountain portends the Mount Tabor of
Transfiguration icons, even as brushstrokes of the iconic mountain may connote
a poetic hoeing of earth; and “the red and yellow stripes, flowing around the
silhouette of the mountain, resemble the Tabor light coming from Christ [in a
Transfiguration icon, as] conventionally interpreted by iconographers.”39 If not a
believer, Sarabianov was nevertheless willing to meet Kandinsky halfway as one
developing a fundamentally new principle inspired by the quasi-abstract
meaningfulness of the Orthodox icon.
By 1920, the German art world had incorporated a modern, albeit secular,
interest in the Orthodox icon, due, to some extent, to the influence of Kandinsky.40
Except for variations on St. George, and apocalyptic All Saints, I do not think
many paintings by Kandinsky have specific iconic prototypes. Proper cases
include the large diagonal ladder with figures falling off, comparing a
famous Byzantine icon type of St. John Climacus with his Ladder of Heavenly
Ascent, with Kandinsky’s Ladder Form (1929; Kunstmuseum, Winterthur).
One might also regard the strikingly tumbling figures of the sleeping apostles
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 41

on the hillside in the lower half of Theophanes the Greek’s icon of the
Transfiguration (1403; State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) as akin to certain
Kandinsky paintings featuring small rambunctious forms in a field, such as
Relations (1934; private collection), Capricious Forms (1937; Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York), or Sky Blue (1940; Musée National d’Art
Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris).
Two mid-career paintings do seem to derive from icons, in one case from a
strong traditional type, and in the other from a surprisingly affective icon which,
though not popular, is renowned among devotees. Both were painted in 1926 at
the Bauhaus, just as Kandinsky was attaining fame. If this marvelous school,
known for the rationalization of artistic processes in response to industrial
culture, was hardly an incubator of religion, we have already noted the surprising
“confessional” diversity of its staff. Years later, living in Paris, Kandinsky
frequented the St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral there, and apparently was also a
churchgoer in some measure in Dessau (with two Orthodox churches an hour
away) or, for a grander Mass, at Dresden, where he and his wife often visited
friends.
Before proceeding to these two Bauhaus works, it is worth considering how
personally invested in religious devotion Kandinsky likely was. More so than our
other artists, especially if one acknowledges as worship the Orthodox monastic
Hesychast (from the Greek for “quiet”) tradition, originating in monasteries on
Mt. Athos, of silent prayer.41 This practice traces back to the Gospel of Matthew:
“But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your
Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Mt.
6:6). The character of Kandinsky’s paintings surely benefitted from a Hesychastic
encouragement to free the prayerful imagination from attachment to the
ordinary world, in harmony with Kandinsky’s striving for nonobjectivity.
For this practice, prayerful Orthodox rely on an extensive collection of texts
called the Philokalia (Love of the Beautiful), used for prayer by laypeople as well
as clergy. The Philokalia, compiled by St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and
St. Makarios of Corinth at Mt. Athos from writings of the fourth to the fifteenth
centuries (first published in 1782), contains a multitude of brief texts ready to
complement Kandinsky’s abstract aesthetic by positively discouraging the
believer from imagining anything pictorial. Two typical samples will show its
remarkably antipictorial emphasis. The first is from the fourth-century Evagrios
the Solitary’s “On Prayer”: “When you are praying, do not shape within yourself
any image of the Deity, and do not let your intellect be stamped with the impress
of any form; but approach the Immaterial in an immaterial manner, and then
42 Faith in Art

you will understand.”42 The second is from the eleventh- or twelfth-century

St. Peter of Damascus: “The devil will fail in his purpose if we apply the counsel
of the holy fathers: that during the time of prayer we should keep our intellect
free from form, shape, and colour, and not give access to anything at all, . . . and
that we should do we can to confine our mind solely to the words we are saying.”43
Such a well-read Orthodox as Kandinsky could not have been unaware of these
hallowed texts, which he may have used devotionally himself.
Turning to the two mid-career Kandinsky paintings: one implicates a
specifically Russian icon type by its unique symmetrical structure: the 1926
Accent in Pink (Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Figure
1.2). Nothing else in the painter’s oeuvre could more specifically evoke the
Russian icon than this compositional scheme, which clearly derives from the
prominent centerpiece of many an important Russian church’s iconostasis.
(The iconostasis is a partition, a sanctuary barrier reminiscent of the Holy of
Holies in Solomon’s Temple, that was probably first structurally effected in
eleventh-century Russia.44) Typically covered with icons arranged in horizontal
registers, and separating the sanctuary of the ordained from the nave of the
congregation, an iconostasis has a central “holy” or “royal” door, opened during
Mass only when the people are permitted to see the otherwise hidden liturgical
actions taking place behind—a ritual practice often taken as a virtual glimpse
into the heavenly Kingdom of God. Such an iconostasis “has long been
inseparably associated in people’s minds with the concept of ‘Russia.’ ”45
The presentation of icons on a classic iconostasis conforms to set patterns of
saints in the tiers, but prominent at the center of many Russian ones, over the
“holy door,” is an icon type generally called Christ in Glory: see Figure 1.1 for the
basic structure.
Important examples of the type are by Theophanes the Greek (1405), for the
iconostasis of the Annunciation Cathedral in the Kremlin; by Andrei Rublev and
Daniel Chorny (1408); from the Dormition Cathedral at Vladimir (1408); by
Rublev on his own (dated c. 1414); and by Dionisius (1500)—all, at one time or
another, in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow—plus another of the late fifteenth
century, possibly from Novgorod, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
All these display a rectangular cloth of honor, usually of rose color, appearing
as if tacked up like a blanket or tarpaulin at the corners. Upon this stretched
fabric-like form is a mandorla, atop which appears another, smaller rose-colored
cloth, tilted to make a rhomboid or diamond-shaped form (with corners
extending to the top, bottom, and sides of the mandorla, as shown in the diagram
in Figure 1.1. The tilting of the smaller background cloth against the perpendicular
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 43

Figure 1.1 Diagram of a typical Christ in Glory icon for a Russian church
iconostasis. Courtesy of Alexandra Halidisz.

produces an eight-pointed star, said to allude to the eighth day of Creation as the
commencement of the Kingdom of God. Finally, in the middle of this structure
would normally sit the enthroned Christ.
Kandinsky knew the greatest examples of this Christ in Glory icon type,
whether in their assigned positions in prominent Moscow churches, as seen
during boyhood visits, or at the State Tretyakov Gallery, where many such
paintings were moved to save them during the Revolution (perhaps with
Kandinsky’s own assent as a bureaucrat active in museum reorganization). Some
of the icons moved to the Tretyakov have since been returned to their home
churches. Theophanes the Greek’s Christ in Glory, for example, is now restored
to the Annunciation Cathedral in the Kremlin, where Kandinsky was first
introduced to it by his father. A version painted by Andrei Rublev and Danill
Chorny is still in the Tretykov; and Rublev’s own example, called The Savior
Among the Heavenly Powers (and now dated to c. 1425), has been returned to the
cathedral of the Trinity Lavra.
44 Faith in Art

Comparing the insistently symmetrical Christ in Glory structure to

Kandinsky’s Accent in Pink makes apparent a structural influence of the basic
gestalt of the icon on the abstract painting. In Kandinsky’s work the largest form,
normally associated with the rose “tarpaulin” of the lowest layer, is mottled
yellow, suggesting burnished gold (see Figure 1.2). In parallel with the iconic
Christ in Glory is a conceivably torso-like central area (replacing the figure) of a
dark-blue square bulging with overlapping disk forms, while the layering of
forms distinctly recalls the iconic source.
Nobody is going to mistake Kandinsky’s painting for a representation of
Christ in Glory that deserves a kiss and a prayer from an Orthodox believer. But
the religious Kandinsky would not have thought aesthetic contemplation as
something to be despised, either. Does Kandinsky’s adaptation, in effect, secularize
the iconic source, even if the artist had the sacred subject in mind? Not necessarily.
For a knowledgeable viewer, contours and tensions of the believer’s icon may be
confirmed by contours and tensions of forms and colors in an abstract painting,
without necessarily collapsing the whole effect into just another case of the
mood-music of spiritualistic Symbolism. The relevant question would be,
Whether Accent in Pink could be used to substitute for a Christ in Glory in a
culturally sophisticated church, by allusion to the familiarity of the basic pattern
as a predisposition to prayer. One can imagine differing responses.
The other case from 1926, Kandinsky’s Yellow Center (Museum Boijmans-
Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Figure 1.5) may entail two historical iconic lineages,
one general and the one specific. On the general side, many surveys of Russian
icons begin with a great Byzantine Virgin of Vladimir, originally from the late
eleventh or early twelfth centuries, a highly recognizable, archetypal icon, even
for people who have never known its name.46 In it, the curved edge of Mary’s
dark maphorion (head cloth) is articulated by a fine sequence of angles
emphasized by folds in their striped edging ribbon. Plausibly, a combination like
the forehead’s curvature and its accompanying sequence of angles—indeed, such
a famous sequence of them—might appear echoed in several Kandinsky
paintings with an irregular polygon as a central form, such as Yellow Center.
The more specific historical icon type that may adumbrate Yellow Center has
a much different central feature consisting, not of a face at all, but of a cavity that
finds an analogue in the (often stony) cave at the center of icons of Elijah in the
Wilderness. St. Elijah47 icons actually became politicized in the 1920s, when
Soviet atheistic propaganda was obsessed with a primeval popular cult of Elijah
with pre-Christian roots still found among the peasantry: the thunder god
Perun. On that basis, much propaganda concerned a (supposedly obvious)
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 45

Figure 1.2 Vasily Kandinsky, Accent in Pink, 1926, oil on canvas. Musée National
d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (Donation Nina Kandinsky). Alamy
Ltd.

superstitious appeal to St. Elijah for relief from thunderstorms; some was a more
positive pitch for rural electrification.48 For Christian believers in the immortality
of the soul, however, the question of intercession (appealing to saved souls as
by definition in the company of God) cannot be taken so simplistically.
Notwithstanding objections of the Protestant reformers, for Orthodox Christians,
46 Faith in Art

Catholics and some Anglicans, intercession relates—as Kandinsky certainly

knew—to the “communion of saints” in the Apostles’ Creed, which underwrites
the entire cultic aspect of icons.
Yellow Center also inherits a wide range of images of Elijah in the Wilderness,
on Mt. Horeb, with a cave at the center, as possible sources for the structurally
kindred work of the modern artist. In this situation, simple sufficiency (sans
necessity) will allow for the potential availability of motifs existing in many
versions. Consider the cave looming large at the center of a remarkable late-
fifteenth century classic Russian icon, from Novgorod, of Elijah in the Desert
(Iconen-Museum, Recklinghausen, Germany; Figure 1.3).
Similar formal dispositions can be found in later icons of the same subject,
including a marvelous, retrospectively “Old Believers” example from Novgorod,
dating precisely to March 25, 1670, “written” (the proper verb for icon painting)
by a pair of artists known only as John and Boris (Figure 1.4).49 There, a bearded
Elijah seated at the entrance to his cave is likewise centrally enclosed by a roughly
circular surround. Tufts of weeds or small shrubs punctuate knolls of bare earth,
on one of which Elijah sits in this biblical “desert” setting (in the sense of
wilderness). The spots of plant life are compact nests of brushwork, while their
sky has patchy clouds consisting of a few white strokes. What appears in the old
Recklinghausen version as a dark triangle, fitted neatly into the lower left-hand
corner below Elijah’s foot is, for John and Boris, Elijah’s saving “brook” (1 Kgs.
17:4), rendered as a shallow diagonal slash across the bottom of the image.
Kandinsky likely knew this work in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (again, as a
museum official he might even have sent it there for safe keeping).
The modern image of Yellow Center does uphold having a fair-sized ring
centered in the pictorial field, surrounded by thin linear forms (a few suggesting
paintbrushes) projecting radially outward, along with two diagonal bands, one
light, one dark, inside the circle (bands that echo the position of Elijah’s arm in
some icons of this type). At the same time, the left half of Kandinsky’s ring,
curved on the outside with angled facets inside, agrees with the angled cave
entrance in the older Recklinghausen Elijah (as well as the unforgettable curve
around the face of the Virgin of Vladimir surrounded by its angular folds). Is this
enough to show connectedness? None of these Russian icons is an obvious
source for Yellow Center; but taking them together, they seem collectively and
artistically reclaimed by the modern artist.
Although an icon antiquarian might conceivably work out a more rigorous
genealogy, I mean to suggest something else by the logical plausibility of the
John and Boris icon as adumbrating Kandinsky’s painting: namely, how
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 47

Figure 1.3 The Holy Prophet Elijah in the Desert, late fifteenth-century icon,
Novgorod school. Iconen-Museum, Recklinghausen (Germany). Courtesy of the
Museum.

successive formalizations of a conception can actually accrue meaning as well as

beget it. In this case, that the “father of abstract painting” is seen to ally himself
with the Elijah who battled the false worshippers of Baal, by way of an “icon”
(certified in later Christian church history as no graven image), could hardly
have been more apt. Even if Kandinsky drew inspiration from what is now
48 Faith in Art

Figure 1.4 John and Boris (icon writers), Elijah in the Desert, icon, Novgorod school,
1670.

considered the conservative movement of the Old Believers, the point would
have been that as a modernist he was on John and Boris’ aesthetic side, having no
use for anything mistakenly supposed to be “progressively” naturalistic.50
Kandinsky’s writings do show him a theologically literate Christian of Russian
Orthodox persuasion. After a happy aesthetic romance with Bavarian peasant
painting, his more profound commitment to the Orthodox Christian icon was a
grounding influence for a new mode of painting that would escape narrative and
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 49

even symbology in the interest of nonobjective expressivity. The modality of the

Russian icon was not a superficial ethnicity that should have made Kandinsky
paintings look like tourist icons. Even genuine icons with conventional traits are
hardly archaic and rarely primitive. But in Kandinsky’s work, signs of the iconic
reveal themselves, based on a remarkable biblical literacy that acts as a generative
force guaranteeing coherence. The entire situation, including this painter’s
theological understanding, established an attitude of high seriousness in the

Figure 1.5 Vasily Kandinsky, Yellow Center, 1926, oil on canvas. Museum Boijmans-
Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Studio Tromp, courtesy of the Museum.
50 Faith in Art

early practice of abstract painting. By quite different but parallel means, the
works of Mondrian, Malevich, and Lissitzky will also show evidence of their
groundings in religious faith.

Appendix: A Thematic of Annunciation

Kandinsky’s nephew Alexandre Kojève (1902–68) was a Russo-French Left

Hegelian philosopher who, in 1936, wrote an essay (long unpublished) on the
painting of his uncle. Ten years before, at the time of the painter’s Point and Line
to Plane (1926), Kojève had finished a doctorate at Heidelberg with a dissertation
on The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, this work later revised and
published, between 1934 and 1935, as The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir
Solovyov—not long before his Kandinsky essay.
Kojève’s essay, “The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky,” shows a shrewd
Hegelian with no sense of painting but a relevant sense of Solovyov, who may
have influenced the painter’s understanding of the Annunciation as a principal
thought motif. This subject could become interesting all over again in the latter
part of the twentieth century when a new abstract painter drew attention to the
same theological theme, provoking a major historian of Constructivism and an
art critic to defend him on that basis.
Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), Kojève’s dissertation subject, has always
been popular as a Russian “mystic.” A practically trademarked element of his
thought is a concept that seems more a personage than a figure of speech: Sophia.
Notwithstanding her Greek name as suggesting Sophia as the personification of
Divine Wisdom, the beautiful Sophia was intuited directly by Solovyov, like an
apparition, and always addressed as female. She is the very fulcrum of Solovyov’s
so-called “Sophiology.”
There was a living conduit from Solovyov to both Kandinsky and Kojève:
Solovyov’s student, Sergei Bulgakov. A little younger than the painter, he had the
same thesis adviser.51 At the time of the 1905 Revolution, Bulgakov had belonged
to the Brotherhood of the Christian Struggle, a Russian Orthodox group that
included clergy and hierarchy and which called for a Church synod to deal with
social reform.52 In Karl Marx as a Religious Type: His Relation to the Religion of
Anthropotheism of Ludwig Feuerbach (1906), Bulgakov managed to detach Marx
from Marxist atheism. Kandinsky always held onto an autographed abstract of
his 1908 article “The Intelligentsia and Religion”; and he also hoped to publish
Bulgakov in a second Blaue Reiter Almanac, which never occurred.
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 51

I do not find “The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky” enlightening; but I find

it most fascinating that Kojève was quite taken by Bulgakov’s The Tragedy of
Philosophy (Philosophy and Dogma), published in Germany in 1927, too late for
his dissertation, though in time for his Kandinsky essay. That is also a year later
than Point and Line to Plane, in which the unexpectedly theological notion of
the Annunciation seems to crop up; but we are talking about ideas that likely
took time to germinate in a rather small circle. One particular idea, concerning
the Annunciation, was influenced by both Solovyov’s “Sophiology” and Bulgakov,
and would surely have interested Kandinsky.
In the dissertation, Kojève wrote that, for Solovyov, ideas are idealistically
“abstract subjects, endowed . . . with a kind of will,” as if “genuine people, self-
aware, concrete, and living” (25); not unlike the way a “Word made flesh”
understanding of the Incarnation makes for a “Divine Humanity” (31).53 Kojève’s
essay on Kandinsky also touches on this sense of an embodied idea, positing a
“tableau [picture] ‘Tree’ ”—painted from a concept without an empirical
referent—which supposedly “incarnates that abstraction.”54
Even today, most Orthodox icon theory goes back to the early medieval
iconoclast controversy to emphasize the distinctly incarnational argument that
when God took on human form, the Son of God, and prophets and saints, not to
mention ordinary people and all of Creation, might validly be represented. This
standard, incarnational narrative, however, can be taken to slight the Virgin (as
noted above, Theotokos, or “Mother of God” in Orthodoxy), as a mere accessory
to the Incarnation proper. In Bulgakov’s account, however, she has a considerably
more critical relation to the unfolding of Christology: she materialized the
connection between humanity and God before Jesus was born. No Annunciation,
no Incarnation; no Incarnation, no salvation. Because I believe that Kandinsky
knew and alluded to this view, I shall turn from Kojève—if not Bulgakov—to
affirm my speculation on Annunciational imagery in Point and Line to Plane
after the fact, by elaborating the importance of the Annuncation in the context
of modern painting with the help of a modern theologian, an abstract artist and
an modernist art historian.
In exploring the question of the Russian icon, the present-day theologian
Aidan Nichols has centered on Bulgakov’s understanding of it by resort to his
publications through the expatriate Russian community founded in Paris in
1925, the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute, which included Bulgakov.
Their press published his books in Russian, such as The Icon and Icon-Veneration
(1931). Certainly by that time, Kandinsky was aware of this new Russian
theological scholarship being published on his Parisian doorstep.
52 Faith in Art

From these Bulgakov works, Nichols has developed a sense of the newly vital
creative import of the Annunciation that goes along, in the 1920s, with what
seems alluded to in Point and Line to Plane, namely, an uncommon understanding
of the deep theological question, as projected into human history, of the
“hypostatic union” of Christ’s human and divine natures. Bulgakov amplifies the
already important Marian aspect of the Annunciation event as a posture of
divine inspiration. Is it even possible for him to have been stimulated by the
account of the painter confronting the empty canvas in the then recent Point and
Line to Plane?
Now Nichols elucidates Bulgakov’s theology of the icon as specifically not
resting on the conventional rationale of the Incarnation, where permissible
representability depends on the human birth of Jesus, the Second Person of the
Trinity, as (so to speak) miraculously naturalistic. Instead, Nichols first has
Bulgakov stepping back to take all of humanity as already in God’s image, as
Genesis literally says (1:27). That humankind is already “theomorphic” (76)
opens up a societal and churchly dimension of constructive appeal to the
spectator. Bulgakov can speak (almost as if to defend abstract painting) of
“ ‘the lordly power of man in the world as its eye, its ideal mirror.’ [The person] is
the being who sees the images . . . as well as the one who makes images”; and
artistic naturalism offends him as much as it does Kandinsky because it “ ‘replaces
by a subterfuge the fundamental task of the iconisation of being’ ” (78).55
Secondly, however, in explicating the Bulgakovian approach, Nichols illuminates
the huge importance of the Annunciation, which iconically permits the mother-
plus-child complex to illustrate “the totality of human hypostases
[as] not simply male but male and female.” For it is the “theomorphic” humanity
in Bulgakov’s “doctrine of divine imagehood” that “satisfies this precondition”
(77–8).56
This also permits Nichols to attack apophatic theology broadside, for taking
the divine as something of which we cannot speak (let alone depict). If Genesis
says we all resemble God, the latter cannot be so hopelessly unfamiliar. Thus, to
the apophatic “thesis, the proper . . . counter-thesis is not some claim about
Christ’s human nature. The counter-thesis should read: God is in himself sheer
relationship” (80)57 (as we understand through human relationships). Nichols
continues, in light of Bulgakov, that “apophatic theology, once brought into some
attempted relation with iconology, spells death to the icon. This is the truth that
the Iconodule Fathers [anciently in favor of icons but for incarnational reason]
failed to see . . . If the divine is absolutely beyond all images, it is plain that no
 An Orthodox Kandinsky 53

image of Christ’s humanity has any relation with his being as God, albeit God
incarnate” (82). For Bulgakov, “the sophianity of the entire created realm finds
voice” thanks to the Virgin of the Annunciation, who “remains herself, Mary of
Nazareth” (85).
More than a generation ago, Annunciation theology was introduced,
amazingly enough, into the discourse of contemporary abstract painting by a
suite of early works by Brice Marden, and immediately critiqued by Stephen
Bann, a leading scholar of constructivism. In 1978 Marden produced a suite of
five large paintings based on the theological stages of the Annunciation as
analyzed in a sermon by a late fifteenth-century friar, as recounted in Michael
Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972). Details
concern the successive mental states of the Virgin in interaction with the
archangel Gabriel.
Bann’s essay takes up the most widely important matter to which Marden’s
effort relates, in the face of a then new generation’s recourse to Walter Benjamin’s
essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility” (1935), to
declare painting a reactionary artistic modality—in effect, resuming the ever-so-
modern antimetaphysicalism with which Kandinsky himself had to contend.
Understanding how the Soviet anti-painting crusade once gave Kandinsky and
Malevich such a hard time, Bann saw that what Marden was not at all about
static materiality, but rather a dynamic sublimation (in Bann’s title) “From the
Material to the Immaterial.”
Bann puts the radical shoe on the other foot by observing that to consider a
painting only in “terms of the processes and materials used to fabricate [it]” is
precisely to “situate” it “in the realm of Utopia.” Marden himself is “on record as
having written, in 1971–2, that the effect of the practice of such ‘fundamental
painting’ [as his Annunciations] resides precisely in the dialectical reversal
which it produces—in its refusal to bow to the censorship of the ‘not
metaphysical.’ ” His own thinking has its Kandinskyan moments: “ ‘The rectangle,
the plane, the structure, the picture are but sounding boards for a spirit.’ ”58
Bann sees a new critical dogmatism forming in the early 1970s against
painting, especially against its openness to metaphysical, let alone religious,
meaning, which viewers were being trained to ignore or discount: this he reads
Marden’s “Annunciations” as essentially going against.59 A BBC television series
is quoted, using a crude paraphrase of Walter Benjamin to pronounce that
anything religious in an artwork must belong either to magic or “bogus
religiosity” (9–10).60 Answering this, Bann writes:
54 Faith in Art

We are obliged, surely, to act with the suppleness of a Houdini in order to extricate
ourselves from the constricting half-truths with which contemporary critical
discourse is beset. For example, Brice Marden paints a series of “Annunciations,”
each of which bears a title deriving from a 15th-century devotional formulation of
the Virgin’s response to the Angel Gabriel. Our immediate reaction, perhaps, is to
feel that this is not a “real” Annunciation . . . The separate “stages” are no doubt a
simple pretext for setting up a differential series, in which certain colour
combinations can be tried out in sequence . . . Yet when all is said and done, such an
interpretation quite fails to account for the distinctive quality of the work.
10–11

Quite aside from paintings that either attempt to rehearse traditional

iconography or “exploit culturally rich titles in the interests of a formalistic
exercise,” Bann writes,“Would it not be relevant to point out that the Annunciation
signifies, not simply a type of iconography or a particular formal scheme, but the
incarnation of spirit in the material world? . . . When . . . authors . . . talk vaguely
and disparagingly about ‘spiritual value,’ they entirely neglect the specificity of
the cultural context in which Western painting has developed.” The Annunciation
theme “is not a vaguely idealist direction, in which ‘spiritual’ values are preferred
to those of the material world, but a unique tradition of immanence. . . which . . .
provides the prototype for a paradoxical conjuncture of divine spirit and created
matter” (11). Even Kandinsky’s ultra-Communist nephew Kojève might have to
acknowledge that his uncle’s “materialist” Point and Line to Plane helps to make
it possible for Bann to say so.
This excursus on Annunciation has not proved definitively that Kandinsky
intended Point and Line to refer directly to the “mystery” of that theological
doctrine. A nonbeliever might take references to the Virgin’s hesitation, or to the
womb, as evidence simply of Freudian libido as the driving force of creativity
(though a believer could then manage to take that as all the more, rather than all
the less, to be sanctified). This is a perfect case where religious belief as such
deserves at least alternative theoretical space, especially in respect to an artist
whose religious convictions are a matter of record.
 2

A Protestant Mondrian

Background

Much has been written about the lingering interest of Piet Mondrian (1872–
1944) in Theosophy as a presumed source of spiritual-to-artistic intuition, while
too little has been written about the foundation of Mondrian’s faith, which was
Reformed Christianity.1 This religious underpinning is important for a painter
whose greatest works arose from the effort to liberate himself from nature. For if
nature and the divine are conceived as one thing in Theosophy, John Calvin
(1509–64), the founder of the Reformed tradition that bears his name, more
critically insists, in conjunction with St. Paul, that with the Fall, not only humanity
but all of Creation “groaneth and travaileth” (Rom. 8:22), the verb travail being
noteworthy as the origin of “labor pains”—taken, like all suffering and illness, as
one of the many punishments of the Fall.
The modern aesthetician Francis Sparshott quotes a statement from the
eighteenth-century English critic John Dennis’s The Grounds of Criticism in
Poetry (1704) that relates to Paul but is ramified aesthetically: “The great design
of arts is to restore the decays that happened to human nature by the Fall, by
restoring order: The design of logic is to bring back order, and rule, and method
to our conceptions. . . . Those arts that make the senses instrumental to the
pleasure of the mind, as painting and music, do it by a great deal of rule and
order.”2 Dennis’s aesthetic statement on Adam’s sin and the consequent Fall
shows a sense of correcting (by idealist-classical means) a wayward nature that
was once part of a common consciousness even in secular society, in his case, of
eighteenth-century Britain but also still widely understood as such even in
nineteenth-century Europe and America.
The Fall was the consequence of the apple mentioned in Genesis 3. Eve had
been instructed not to touch or eat the apple, but she plucked it and offered it to
Adam; the conclusive act came when Adam took a bite, making for unanimity in

55
56 Faith in Art

the offence. A contract between God and humankind was thereby broken: a
situation defined as inherited Original Sin in Catholic Western Christianity ever
since Augustine (represented here by Malevich), whereas Eastern Christianity
(represented here by Kandinsky) resembles Talmudic Judaism (represented here
by Lissitzky), prefering to speak of a human proclivity to sin rather than an
inherited Original Sin. But we are not yet finished with legalities here, because
Calvinistic Protestantism (represented here by Mondrian) developed its own
competing theologies concerning the mechanisms of salvation and damnation.
Given Mondrian’s background, his manifest interest in contemporary Calvinism,
and the prevalence of major discourse on this theme among well-read Calvinists
at the time, it is impossible to think that Mondrian never pondered it.
While Calvinists could surely appreciate traces of God’s glory in the natural
world, one can picture the young Mondrian sitting up straight to hear that nature
as well as humanity could only be restored thanks to the Resurrection of Christ.
Contemporaneous with Mondrian, the important Dutch theologian Herman
Bavinck (1854–1921) taught that all of God’s handiwork, including humanity,
will be eventually restored in view of the parousia, the Second Coming of Christ
(B1:501). Theosophists, Bavinck says, could not appreciate this because they “do
not comprehend sin” and “regeneration, which annuls and conquers sin” (B1:346).
For decades since Ringbom’s The Sounding Cosmos (1970), art history has
encouraged us to attribute Theosophical influence to both Kandinsky (see
Chapter 1) and Mondrian (and sometimes to Malevich), by complete indifference
to anything Christian.
Before considering the parallels between Calvinist theology and Mondrian’s
classic operational style as a painter, one needs to know how his approach to
painting came about, with its characteristic relational compositions—which is
to say, compositions in which elements of different sizes and colors are
combined with a view to constituting a wholly interrelated order.3 Thus I begin
by indicating the artistic background to this stage and its development, before
dealing with a neglected religious facet of Mondrian’s own theoretical writing;
and next I turn to the writing of an important contemporary Dutch theologian,
with attention to possible theoretical analogies. The theologian in question,
Bavinck, died just as Mondrian entered his classic phase, which, as open to
development as it proved to be, can be considered to have lasted through the
remaining twenty-three years of his life. Finally, by showing how Mondrian’s
basic style thrived well beyond Bavinck’s demise, I will point up the lasting
nature of his neo-Calvinist intellectual influence as something more enduring
than a passing period.
 A Protestant Mondrian 57

Approaching the Classic Phase

Art history is accustomed to taking Calvin’s iconoclasm negatively, as the reason

why the painting of religious subjects was disallowed, since the Reformation, in
the Protestant and Calvinist Netherlands. A significant project in Mondrian’s
juvenilia is an eight-foot-long figurative but uninhabited canvas Thy Word Is
Truth, its title taken from John 17:17. Painted between 1893 and 1894, when
Mondrian was twenty-one and just beginning to study art at the Amsterdam
Academy, the work was intended for display at the Christian national school
where his father was headmaster.4 The image is an allegorical still life, enshrining
a Bible with a big doubled drape that recapitulates a seventeenth-century Dutch
repoussoir device to provide internal framing just inside an image, like a “wing”
on a proscenium stage, and as sometimes seen in trompe l’oeil.5 But in Thy Word
Is Truth, young Mondrian’s quite literal anchor of faith has a chain whose end
points to a citation on the Bible’s cover to the Epistle to the Romans 5:1:
“Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our
Lord Jesus Christ”—a verse that can be considered the very cornerstone of the
Protestant Reformation.6
The iconoclasm of the Netherlands during the seventeenth century is well
typified by the whitewashed interiors of old Dutch churches, with their heraldic
and almost aggressively secular coats of arms, often in lozenge form, by artists
like Pieter Saenredam and Emanuel de Witte, such as the latter’s Interior of the
Nieuwe Kerk in Delft (1664; Residenzgalerie, Salzburg). In Dutch, the very word
for painting, Schilderij, is closely related to “shield”; and such escutcheons—
nonrepresentational paintings that displaced pre-Reformation holy pictures—
are a curious Calvinist adumbration of the lozenge paintings (square canvases
rotated by 45 degrees) of Mondrian’s classic phase, such as Lozenge Composition
with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray (1921; Art Institute of Chicago).7 Today,
such escutcheons seem to testify to wealth and earthly power, almost as if to
exalt the moneychangers in their temple; earlier on, they might have connoted
taking the Word of God into the world—though as differently as possible from
otherwise socially equivalent baroque paintings or statues dedicated to patron
saints of the wealthy in Catholic baroque churches.
The early Mondrian painting of religious but non-figurative subject matter
appears to be unique, unless one wants to count images of churches as religious
paintings—which indeed the early Calvinist church interiors were, by iconoclastic
default. It does seem relevant for modern Dutch art that Mondrian’s early Bible
still life came only a few years after Van Gogh, himself a failed Dutch Reformed
58 Faith in Art

lay preacher with ecumenical sympathies, had already painted still lifes not only
of a Bible but also—and also perhaps instead—of secular novels. Yet in early
maturity Mondrian took happily to painting a church exterior as a motif many
times, like repeated portraits of a favorite sitter.
Painted at home in the Netherlands, such works as the planar facade of the
Church at Domburg I (1911; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague) are essentially
post-impressionist until he begins to experiment with cubism in Paris, which
lasted until war broke out in 1914, when he went home. A drawing called Church
Façade I (1914; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague; Figure 2.1), is cubistic, its
oval field beautifully stuffed with vivid intersections and curves and featuring an
audacious semantic displacement of the steeple to the bottom of the field. Such
images portrayed Mondrian’s local, part-Gothic town church—Reformed, of
course. Already he is more at home with the stable, regulated relief of such a
geometrically interesting building façade—itself only a question of landscape by
omission—than with figuration.
It was back in the Netherlands after 1914, taking up this favored category of
landscape with architectural structures, that Mondrian would make his end run
to abstraction. From the seaside at Domburg come his “Pier and Ocean” images.
A clear dialectic is at work in them between the natural and the humanly made,
and between atmosphere and scope. The charcoal-and-watercolor drawing Pier
and Ocean 5; Sea and Starry Sky (1915; Museum of Modern Art, New York;
Figure 2.2), and the painting Composition 10 in Black and White (1915; Kröller-
Müller Museum, Otterlo), both deriving from a view of sky and sea seen from a
pier projecting toward the horizon, show something very great emergent.
Regarding the former work, I once responded spontaneously in a television
interview that it occurred to me how the setting and the observer’s viewpoint
evoke a famous remark of Immanuel Kant, near the end of The Critique of
Practical Reason (1788): “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing
admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the
starry heavens above and the moral law within.”8
Philosophy is indeed relevant here; and Yve-Alain Bois is right that Mondrian’s
development is inherently dialectical, though he is not alone in referring
anything philosophical, such as Kant or Hegel, to the contemporary Dutch
reactionary popularizer Gerardus Bolland.9 There is, however, a problem today
with Hegel himself, concerning the crucial notion of Aufhebung, that dialectical
principle whereby something is negated yet “sublated” in overcoming the
negation. Many Hegelians today are insufficiently dialectical about religion:
 A Protestant Mondrian 59

Figure 2.1 Piet Mondrian, Church Façade 1, 1914, charcoal and ink on paper.
Kunstmuseum Den Haag. The Hague. Courtesy of the Museum.

applauding only Left Hegelianism, they ignore the Right Hegelianism that claims
Hegel as a Lutheran believer.
Hence religion as such is also relevant. One might never have thought of
Luther’s philosophical horizon as encompassing the now seemingly Left Hegelian
notion of aufheben (to sublate), but the Luther Bible offers an astute use of the
60 Faith in Art

Figure 2.2 Piet Mondrian, Pier and Ocean (Sea and Starry Sky), 1915, charcoal and
watercolor on paper. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala,
Florence.

same verb in a stunning passage of the Epistle to the Romans: “Or is God the
God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since
God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of their faith and
the uncircumcised through their faith. Do we then overthrow the law by this
faith [Wie? heben wir denn dass Gesetz auf durch den Glauben]? By no means!
On the contrary, we uphold the law” (Rom. 3:29–31).10 The German version in
which I first noticed this is a British and Foreign Bible Society edition published
at Berlin in 1925; but as modern editions of the Lutherbibel sometimes alter
Luther’s original phraseology, I have verified this vital passage in several earlier
editions including a facsimile of the 1534 original.11
Mondrian’s work Composition in Line (1916–17; Kröller-Müller Museum,
Otterlo)—echoing his prior experience with cubism plus “Pier and Ocean”
works—brings the artist only a step or two away from his first paintings with
irregular ranges of color patches; Composition in Color B (1917; Kröller-Müller
Museum, Otterlo), has line and color zones that overlap and/or syncopate.
 A Protestant Mondrian 61

In Self-Portrait (1918; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague), the painter

identifies himself, by the painting behind his head, with his series “Compositions
with Color Planes” from the previous year. The painting-within-a-painting there
is a ghostly white-on-white summary version of the series. Composition with
Color Planes 3 (1917; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague; Figure 2.3), is a fine
example of the type, which relates better to the classic works to come than its
pastel colors might indicate, thanks to the highly intuitive placements of the
elements. In fact, the classic paintings favor not so much primary colors as what
could be called categorical colors, whereby a red is red enough to establish itself
in respect to anything categorically yellow or categorically blue.
Emphasis on the placement of such elements as astutely intuitive can be
inferred by comparing them to contemporary works of an altogether different
style but a similar compositional modality: witness the arrays of squarish
snippets, supposedly determined by chance, in the Dada collages of Jean Arp,
such as Untitled (Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance) (1917;

Figure 2.3 Piet Mondrian, Composition with Color Planes 3, 1917, oil on canvas.
Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague. Courtesy of the Museum.
62 Faith in Art

Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague). I have always admired this Arp series, but
except for Arp’s pulling the pieces out of a bag, I do not think they have much to
do with chance because their “arrangements” look artfully composed. Dadaists
don’t believe in predestination, do they?!12
Important for Mondrian, however, is that his series “Compositions with Color
Planes” already has something similar to the sort of electromagnetic field of his
classic paintings, wherein each form responds visibly to its neighbors, positioned
determinately in regard to multiple adjacent effects (up and down, left and right).
Yes, we can already say “determinate”—but uniquely determinate rather than
uniform, which has a certain acuity in this situation where Calvinist
predestination is to be seen as personally at stake. To begin, Mondrian will
include line, with asymmetrical lattices of first gray and then black lines, together
with rectangular color zones, to formulate his quintessential style.
Equally important is that in Mondrian’s mature work, the “determinate”
character never implies a uniform grid, which could limit the free exercise of
judgment. Were grids the case, one might speak of the simple “commutative”
equality of their constituent units. However, having nothing to do with the
commutative interchangeability of units in a grid (except for a few experiments
in 1918 and 1919), this painter’s compositions can instead evoke an Aristotelian
“distributive” proportionality.13 This very aspect of Mondrian, whereby the
qualitative aspect of proportion—instead of the fixed armature of a mechanical
grid—makes such compositions more than constructivist. Analogous is the way
Malevich’s suprematism manages to be virtually anything but “geometric art”
(Chapter 3).
Mondrian’s best-known classic phase of the 1920s and 30s developed when
the artist returned to Paris after the First World War.14 His compositions now
consist of black rectilinear lines upon a field of white, or whites, with interstices
between them, some as areas occupied by categorical colors. A wonderful
example is Tableau 2 (1922; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; see
Figure 2.5), which shows the painter’s rectilinear composition attaining an
extraordinarily active and vital equilibrium. Here one sees the relative weights of
the color patches in remarkable asymmetric balance as the three colors manage
to touch all four sides despite one entire corner being given over to a comparably
solid rectangle of black. The black patch, together with two discernibly different
whites, comprises something like a rival triad of non-colors. Slim partitioning
bands either do or decidedly do not touch—or exceed—the edge, while the
halving of the open zone at the top, split between white and yellow, is like the
halving at the left between white and blue, which also makes for a whole corner
 A Protestant Mondrian 63

wide open to white as counterpart to the similarly two-sided corner devoted to

black. However difficult to describe, the painting testifies to an incisive play of
visual intelligence, striking all at once, like a strong, pure chord. The practically
magnetic interdependence of parts is a pure form of that “relational composition”
which long served Western painting as an armature for standard pictorial
representation, now purged of descriptive reference. We will revisit this work
again.

Justification and the World to Come

Artists often write about their worldviews in the subjective modes of letters,
diaries, and notebooks, the intended destinations of which are sometimes
problematic. Fortunately, Mondrian addressed posterity with a great deal of
formal published writing, more of it touching on religion than people normally
notice, and some of it even seemingly analogically theological. As a lifelong
admirer of the artist, I have long retained a sense that his abstract Neo-Plastic
compositions of the 1920s and 1930s practically thematize theological
justification, which is to say, as a compensatory reversal of the Fall of Man. Often
Mondrian uses the term “equilibration” in his writings, as in, to bring into
equilibrium. Because this shift likely entails a justification out of a previous
disequilibrium, once the white canvas has been painted upon, the theological
terminology of justification in respect to the Fall seems apposite. And insofar as
what is justified may advance the ultimate utopia of the New Jerusalem, or the
Kingdom of God and His justice (an expression owed mainly to Isaiah),
Mondrian’s ongoing mentions of religion in published statements signal a
mission that was more than ordinarily altruistic for a painter and evokes
important contemporary Dutch theological parallels.
A markedly Calvinist point arises whenever Mondrian stresses that his
equilibrations are determined, thanks to the place of predestination in the
Calvinist frame of mind. The principle that the immortal destiny of everyone is
known in advance by God is not what Jews and other Christians have in mind
when they imagine God as having the freedom of an artist; it springs from a
wholly different attitude. In Mondrian’s first published essay, “The New Plastic in
Painting” (1917), written at home during the First World War (when the
Netherlands remained neutral), he says, “The abstract plastic of relationship
expresses [the] prime relationship [of extreme opposites] determinately15—by
the duality of position, the perpendicular. This relationship of position is the
64 Faith in Art

most equilibrated because it expresses the relationship of extreme opposition in

complete harmony and includes all other relationships” (M30; emphasis
original). Conspicuous in this statement, supporting the stress on rigorous
perpendicularity (and altogether unlike romantic notions of artistic creation), is
an overarching sense of right contrivance.
At the same time, Mondrian minimizes Theosophy as offensively occult, a
matter of the “veiled wisdom” that modern religion as well as science are right to
discourage. By associating the Theosophy problem with Kandinsky’s Concerning
the Spiritual in Art—as a categorically modern primary text—he can blast “the
old religion with its mysteries and dogmas” (a charge with special Calvinist
resonance) while parenthetically throwing Kandinsky a special lifeline for taking
Theosophy as more or less merely antimaterialistic and “not as it commonly
appears”; it might just be something merely spiritual in a broad sense, such as
any other “expression of the same spiritual movement we now see in painting”
(M44n.u; emphasis added). That is about the last we hear of Theosophy in
Mondrian’s writings.
Theologically, the crucial concept at work in Mondrian’s art is justification, for
which equilibration is the aesthetic stand-in. Justification, which atones for Adam
and Eve’s sin and forgives it by grace, is a matter of divine economy. One speaks
of the remission of sins, signifying that something is remitted through
justification like payment for a debt. In the Institutes of the Christian Religion,
Calvin’s sense of justification consists of a remission of the debit of sin thanks to
the gratuitous credit of the righteousness of Christ (III.xi.xx).16 We can surmise
that the play of variables in an abstract painting by Mondrian—including
proportions and colors of the rectangular areas and their positions and relative
distances apart—will seem, when attuned, “justified,” in a sense analogous to the
theological meaning of the term.
Speaking of justification as such: there is a point in the New Testament that
quotes the Old—a point that everybody aware of the Reformation is on the
lookout for—in which the RSV version shows a proliferation of the verb “to
reckon,” carrying decided connotations of accountancy or bookkeeping in
regard to humanity’s redemption from the Fall. I am referring to the fourth
chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, from just after the Luther reference made
above. It will be sufficient to give only the first and most momentous of no fewer
than eleven examples of forms of the word “reckoning,” establishing an affinity
with justification: “What then shall we say about Abraham, our forefather
according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something
to boast about, but not before God. For what does the scripture say? ‘Abraham
 A Protestant Mondrian 65

believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.’ Now to one who
works, his wages are not reckoned as a gift but as his due” (Rom. 4:1–4; compare
Gen.15:6 and other New Testament examples). In Luther’s German text, the
equivalent recurrent verb to this use of “justify” is gerecht, as in “to set right,” and
the equivalent of “reckoned . . . as righteousness” is zur Gerechtigheit gerechtet,
which seems doubly forceful, like saying “rightly set aright” or “rectified to
rectitude.” What is more, in the Dutch Statenvertaling (the original 1637 Dutch
equivalent of the Authorized Bible, as known to Mondrian), much of this same
emphasis is consistently true through the whole chapter, with obviously parallel
meanings. Looking so closely at this Protestant hot spot highlights something
important to Mondrian’s apperceptive religious outlook: namely, that whatever
comes to us is completely unreckoned (the Calvinist point being, it is certainly
not earned), acknowledging that even our own faith is itself a pure grace from
above.
A sense of justification as something more than what is merely repaired can
be imputed to Mondrian. The church politics of maintaining the justification
arguments of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation for 500 years are not
our concern here, especially in view of the great reconciliation finally
accomplished in our very day.17 On the long road to resolution, some already saw
grounds of agreement, such as philosopher Herbert Arthur Hodges (1905–76)
who, as an Anglican appreciating both Calvinist and Catholic views, believed
that once evenness and balance is restored to the relationship between
humankind and God, something better than the merely equitable holds sway.
Hodges even commends, on the Catholic side (always caricatured as good works
quite instead of faith), the Council of Trent’s decree on justification (Session 6,
Chapter 7) for proclaiming something more than the neutrality of returning to
zero-degree blame or error by insisting that justification “is not remission of sins
merely, but also the sanctification and renewal of the inward [person], through
the voluntary reception of the grace, and of the gifts whereby [one] unjust
becomes just, and . . . an enemy, a friend.”18 One could say that the composition
(or composure) of a person’s human relations is improved thanks to a general
“ ‘infusion’ of righteousness.”19
It is noteworthy that the theology of justification also has a common-sense
aspect, including respect for craft, which is not irrelevant to painting. Craftspeople
know justification as a setting right, getting things “squared away”: the carpenter
justifies edges by eliminating a discrepancy; the printer justifies type in respect
to column and page—both, no doubt, with a good feeling of making things right.
Mondrian must entertain disunity before making good on it; but once
66 Faith in Art

equilibrium has been achieved, some idealistic things prove to be worth the
effort, as if the painting could say, Now who’s being “realistic!” As a matter of fact,
Mondrian did like to say that—as against any spurious realism settling spiritually
for so much less. Cardinal Newman was still an Anglican when he wrote: “In the
abstract [justification] is a counting righteous, in the concrete a making righteous
. . . Serious men, dealing with realities, not with abstract conceptions, . . . not
refuting an opponent, but teaching the poor, have . . . taken it to mean what they
saw, felt, handled . . . When they speak of justification, it is of a wonderful grace
of God, not in the heavens, but nigh to them.”20
From the time of the formation of the De Stijl movement in Amsterdam in
1917 onward, Mondrian identified his artistic ideal as the achieved asymmetric
balance of an “equilibrated plastic” relationship. Eventually, in “The New Art—
The New Life: The Culture of Pure Relationships” (1931), he would allude to the
theological underpinning of the Fall of Man: since Adam enjoyed “perfect
equilibrium” before the Fall, afterward achieving justification became a struggle
that required “outside opposition”—no doubt, grace (M256). The necessity of
such (after Eden) may be seen to explain the sense of active equilibrium entailed
in a classic Mondrian composition: the reason why such a work appears rendered
to be asymmetrically perfect.
Mondrian’s wonderful asymmetric equilibrations were a revelation to me in
my youth. I have never forgotten looking at examples of Mondrian’s paintings in
New York’s Museum of Modern Art at age fourteen or fifteen while overhearing
a nearby docent highlighting the relational character of a certain painting’s color
patches. He must have pointed to red or yellow patches because, some sixty-five
years later, I remember him saying, “How much blue does the eye need?” I
understood that this was how I already saw Mondrian’s paintings; they had to do
with actively effecting an asymmetric balance, which before long I could
understand as a freshly perennial justification, with the Reformation in mind.
Let us then refer the constant refrain of plastic equivalence—found everywhere
in this painter’s writings—to the notion of justification in the mind of this
Protestant among the “fathers” of abstract painting, especially in respect to the
settled asymmetries of his characteristic works of the 1920s and 30s. If this view
of Mondrian’s work seems single-minded, it is, nevertheless, comprehensive.
As early as his essay “The New Plastic in Painting” (1917), it is clear that we
have a believer on our hands: “In abstract-real plastic man has an opposition to
the natural through which he can know nature and thus gains knowledge of the
spirit. In this way art becomes truly religious” (M50; emphasis original). Again:
“truly modern man sees things as a whole and accepts life in its wholeness: nature
 A Protestant Mondrian 67

and spirit, world and faith, art and religion—man and God, as unity” (M51;
emphases original). As the painter says, in the same the same text, the new “free”
painting developed as modernity brought recognition that “every expression
manifesting life—including art—is good and justified; that all expressions of real
life are completely justified, even in their imperfection” (M62; emphasis original).
Such a statement already compares with the most famous dictum of Dutch
neo-Calvinism: the claim of the renowned Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper,
which I will discuss further, that over “every square inch” of Creation the risen
Christ says, “This is mine!”? Here, too, Mondrian finds both pietistic religion
and secular Socialism inadequate to the spiritual requirements of humanity:
the one being too inward and the other too outward; “Thus true socialism
signifies equilibrium between inward and outward culture” (M66; emphasis
in original).
The philosopher Hendrik Mattes has raised the question of justice, aside from
religion, in elucidating what Mondrian meant by an “exact plastic of mere
relationship,” speaking of his “Neo-Plastic prophetic vocation” of heralding “the
realization of universal harmony.” He quotes him, from a 1918–19 issue of the
journal De Stijl, eponymous house organ of that movement, to the effect that
“equilibrated relationship in society signifies what is just.”21 But having already
heard Mondrian speak of religion, one wants to see how this notion related to
contemporary Reformed theology. In the “Dialogue on the New Plastic” (1919),
published a year after Mondrian’s Self-Portrait, the painter writes, “If . . . we see
that equilibrated relationships in society signify what is just, then one realizes
that in art too the demands of life press forward when the spirit of the times is
ripe. . . . All expressions of life—religion, social life, art etc.—always have a
common basis. We should go into that further: there is so much to say” (M78;
emphases original). In “The New Art—The New Life: The Culture of Pure
Relationships” (1931), he will note concerning people’s readiness to take on the
utopian morality of the world to come: “Today’s mentality is not capable of
realizing [it], but it is capable of observing the logic of justice” (M273; emphasis
original).
Begun in the Netherlands and finished after returning to Paris, Mondrian’s
text “Natural Reality and Abstract Reality: A Trialogue (While Strolling from the
Country to the City)” (1919–20) is a conversation between an “abstract-real”
painter, a naturalistic painter, and a layman. Shifting into his classic style, our
“abstract-real” painter here spells out the play of reciprocities in the new painting
as the principle of a harmonious society: “Pure plastic vision must construct a
new society, just as it has constructed a new plastic in art—a society where
68 Faith in Art

equivalent duality prevails between the material and the spiritual, a society of
equilibrated relationship” (M99; emphasis original). The future is seen
eschatologically: before the world to come, the abstract-real painter should
expect first to see “joy and suffering . . . opposed in equivalence”; only then, after a
“repose,” will come a “deepened beauty enabl[ing] us to experience the feeling of
freedom, which is joy” (M118; emphases original). The new society will integrate
material and spiritual human needs, but “we must begin by sacrificing ourselves
for an ideal, because at present the new society is no more than that. In everything
we do we must begin by creating an image of what society must one day make a
reality” (M119; emphases original). Hence, showing forth nothing but plastic
equivalences or “justifications,” the artist-author of those words makes the
utopian condition imaginable.
Mondrian composed the short book Neo-Plasticism: The General Principle of
Plastic Equivalence (1920) in French, while he was living in Paris, as a summary
theoretical statement applied to the plastic arts at the launching point of his
definitive Neo-Plastic phase. Basically, the plastic arts mean painting, sculpture,
and architecture as arts in which material accepts the forms imposed by the
artist. The equivalent Dutch term Nieuwe Beelding—which, with the advice of a
native speaker, I venture to translate as “New Rendition”—had some Dutch
cultural currency around the turn of the century, including in Theosophical
circles.22 But Neo-Plasticism, as Mondrian propounds in this robust position
paper, was now being framed almost as a trademark new approach to painting
and the other arts, of which he would be captain.
It seems important in this context to eliminate the idea that art has anything
to do with subjective sensibility, as associated with a romantically distasteful
sense of “tragedy.” It might seem that the tragic is derided in favor of a more
optimistic modernity, but what is bad is the unequilibrated tragic—that is, tragic
affect (emotion), which does not participate in a dialectic of equilibration. It is
interesting to see our Calvinist painter point out that, unfortunately, the general
population thinks profound art must be dour: “The old conception, which
desires the tragic, predominates in the masses. Because of this we have art as we
know it, our theaters, cinemas, and concerts such as they are. Tragic plastic is a
negative force by which the old conception imprisons us. It serves in moralizing,
preaching, and teaching” (M137).23
Again and again, this extended text comes out against description of any kind.
Description can only produce “morphoplastic” formalism—a stylization of
nature as given. Even Gregorian chant tries to “deepen the dominating natural by
simplification and purification,” which can only “achieve another form of
 A Protestant Mondrian 69

sentimental expression” (M145). Disdaining subjective effects, what Mondrian

seeks is the harmony between the individual “universal in us” and the social
“universal outside us” (M134; emphases original) as the grounding of Neo-Plastic
painting:

It can equally be called Abstract-Real painting because the abstract (just like the
mathematical sciences but without attaining the absolute, as they do) can be
expressed by plastic reality. In fact, this is the essential characteristic of the New
Plastic in painting. It is a composition of rectangular color planes that expresses
the most profound reality. It achieves this by plastic expression of relationships
and not by natural appearance. It realizes what all painting has always sought but
could express only in a veiled manner. The colored planes, as much by position
and dimension as by the greater value given to color, plastically express only
relationships and not forms.
M137; emphases original

While Mondrian’s 1920 book Neo-Plasticism does not talk about religion—
possibly because it is directed to the French—Mondrian soon afterward reveals
himself to be sufficiently at home with his Calvinism to joke familiarly about it.
Many will think about the famous late painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942–
3) on reading “The Manifestation of Neo-Plasticism in Music and the Italian
futurists’ Bruiteurs” (1921), where, hoping to extend his Neo-Plasticism to music,
Mondrian manages to effect two gentle insider blasphemies against Calvinist
strictness. The backstory here is Calvin’s wishing to confine church music to the
singing of psalms. Accordingly, the painter writes, “most people do not
understand that the ‘spiritual’ is better expressed by some ordinary dance music
than in all the psalms put together” (M151). Again: once our barbarous nature is
overcome, like the futurists, we will come to prefer citified sounds, and “with
regard to its timbre, the rhythm of a pile driver will affect [us] more deeply than
any chanting of psalms” (M153; emphasis original).
The 1922 essay “The Realization of Neo-Plasticism in the Distant Future and
in Architecture Today” voices one of Mondrian’s most Hegelian statements (that
is, in respect to the development of art in Hegel’s Lectures in Aesthetics): “Art
advances where religion once led.” He continues, however, with a Calvinist claim
about the fallenness of the world:

Religion’s basic content was to transform the natural; in practice, however,

religion always sought to harmonize man with nature, that is, with untransformed
nature.
M169; emphases original
70 Faith in Art

“Home—Street—City” (1926) testifies that fine art, in our intermediate

provisional state, can be a compensation during the construction of the world to
come (M200–01). A few years later, however, our painter becomes more political
about the unredeemed world, extending justification to an external sense of
social justice in “Pure Abstract Art” (1929): “Pure abstract art becomes completely
emancipated, free of naturalistic appearances. It is no longer natural harmony
but creates equivalent relationships. The realization of equivalent relationships is
of the highest importance for life. Only in this way can social and economic

Figure 2.4 Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray, 1921,
oil on canvas. Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague. Courtesy of the Museum.
 A Protestant Mondrian 71

freedom, peace, and happiness be achieved. . . . Inequivalent relationships, on the

other hand, the domination of one over another or over others, have always led
to injustices” (M224). In his great later essay “Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art”
(1936), dissatisfied with the public reception of his project, Mondrian wonders if
his aim is “attempt[ing] the impossible.” After all, attempting to make art
“comprehensible to everybody” is attempting the impossible. You cannot reach
everybody because “the content will always be individual”; besides, “Religion,
too, has been debased by that search” (M291).
Mondrian’s apparent belief in principles congruent in all but name with
justification and the Kingdom of God is striking in respect to contemporary

Figure 2.5 Piet Mondrian, Tableau 2, 1922, oil on canvas. Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York. Alamy Ltd.
72 Faith in Art

Dutch neo-Calvinism. We can now consider directly important religious goings-

on in the cultural setting of the painter’s religious formation, especially
contemporaneous neo-Calvinist writing. Such topics are also what was being
preached and talked about—including neo-Calvinist extramural applications of
Christian commitment.
But between the two textual parts of this discussion, let us juxtapose another
classic painting from the year before Tableau 2, namely Composition with Red, Blue,
Black, Yellow, and Grey (1921; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague; Figure 2.4), as
an equal and opposite to Tableau 2 (Figure 2.5). One can comprehend Composition
with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray as, in fact, a predecessor but also almost a
twin to Tableau 2. Most obvious are left-right and top-bottom compositional
inversions. Even black-and-white illustrations show, by their different tones, that
what affiliates in the first painting as a horizontal oblong, adjacent to or atop its
accompanying perpendicular lines in the upper left, appears in the later painting as
underneath the perpendicular lines in the lower right. Each work offers certain
alternative parallels to the other, subject not to negation but to exchange on par.
Aesthetically speaking, relationships of this kind, especially of color, imply
that the painter has brought into the rhythms of related paintings a concept like
the shifts in jazz (which Mondrian appreciated) from one instrument to another
in taking up more or less the same melodic device. At the same time, shifts from
one version (canvas) in such a series to another do not prioritize one version as
a master copy—as happens in classical theme-and-variation situations. Here
there is no logical priority for the first instance. This comparison makes for
something quite antihierarchical, which some might consider democratically
Calvinistic; but it is also characteristically Mondrianesque.
The temporal succession of these two paintings, however accidental, also
resembles the way we are about to take the theologian Bavinck as prior to, and
underlying, religious attentions we see Mondrian articulating. Meanwhile, the
relationships within and between many of Mondrian’s classic paintings also
become “meta-relationships,” without compromising the integrity (to make use
of another musical term) of either thematic rendition. Looking at one of these
two paintings is hardly neglecting the other.

Herman Bavinck and the Kingdom

For a long time, anything supposed to be spiritual in Mondrian’s art was swept
under the carpet of a supposedly extensive dalliance with Theosophy; so much
 A Protestant Mondrian 73

so that Mondrian’s is sometimes taken as the strongest case for direct theosophical
influence. The basic evidence for this is that the painter always held onto a
printed 1908 lecture by Rudolf Steiner. But that is irrelevant in that Steiner was
beginning to formulate his alternative to Theosophy: Anthroposophy (see
Chapter 1), specifically to avoid intimations of false worship. It is possible that
the treasured lecture was already not orthodox Theosophy; and even that
becomes a red herring if the artist was basically a committed Reformed Christian.
It is not surprising for the private Mondrian to have been a more reflective
Calvinist, or rather neo-Calvinist, than has been generally supposed.
Different artists had different views, of course, though sometimes compatibly.
A minor Dutch painter and nearly exact contemporary of Mondrian’s, who took
a different route away from symbolistic mysticism to become a Catholic and a
Benedictine monk, with church art as his special calling: Jan (Dom Willibrord)
Verkade (1868–1946). Raised a Mennonite Protestant, he had his Symbolist
curiosity stirred early by one Édouard Shuré’s cult book Les grandes initiés
(1889). Interestingly, when eventually he came to write in Yesterdays of an Artist
Monk (1930), Dom Willibrord voiced a comment on grace that Mondrian might
have assimilated to Calvinist “common grace”: “Theosophy does not reckon with
the soul’s need of grace . . .”24
It is widely known that Mondrian left his pious father’s Dutch Reformed
Church. What is barely known at all is that when he moved to Amsterdam to
study art, in November 1892, he joined a new church, the Gereformeerde Kerken
in Nederland (Reformed Churches in the Netherlands), which included parishes
attached to the celebrity preacher and politician Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920).25
Kuyper was a liberal hero who became prime minister on the strength of his
antirevolutionary party, thanks to a policy of segregating Protestants, Catholics,
and others (which sounds rather like apartheid to me). Mondrian’s father was a
friend of Kuyper’s, though not a member of his church. On moving to the
cultural capital, the twenty-year-old Mondrian began confirmation classes in the
new church; and from July 1893, he was listed as confirmed. Five months later, he
started to paint Thy Word Is Truth. Only some twenty years later, on moving to
Paris, was Mondrian’s church membership “de-registered”—an administrative
procedure not implying withdrawal.
The new Gereformeerde Kerken were a hotbed of a tendency called neo-
Calvinism, in which all worthy contributions to social life and culture could be
considered practically churchly. Much less well known than Kuyper, however, is
his protegé Herman Bavinck, who was in the next generation of clergy and closer
to Mondrian in age. Like Kuyper, he too studied modern culture at the University
74 Faith in Art

of Leiden, though on finishing his doctorate, he reflected that while such secular
studies had benefits, they might also lead to a “spiritual impoverishment” (B1:13;
intro.). Kuyper was the celebrity, while the younger Bavinck was more like the
introspective Mondrian.
Scholars have already brought the popular Kuyper into the orbit of the
painter;26 but though he pioneered the notion of culture as part of a Christian
mission, Kuyper was more of a nineteenth-century figure. His response to
impressionist painting in 1894—“At first sight one sees . . . bubbles and daubs of
paint, and even tints and lines, but not the image; and only after repeated attempts
a view is finally obtained”27—amounts to visual fundamentalism. He was better
on the more traditional aesthetic question of external relations, the
representational coordination between a subject and the outside world.
That he was also bound to literature, practically over and against the fine arts,
permitted Kuyper to approach a certain threshold—almost to a notion of visual
abstraction—without having the sufficiently visual imagination to cross over it.
Thus in his Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology (1893–4), he arrives at an independent
visual sign—“ahead of ” nature, if you will—but he expects even that to be capable
of being cashed in, in natural terms: “The artist created harmonies of tints, which
presently are seen to be real in flowers that are unknown to him. And more
striking than this, by our abstract thinking we constantly form conclusions,
which presently are seen to agree entirely with actual relations.”28
This was also a problem of stylistics because Kuyper’s modernity got stuck in
literary Symbolisme. The more widespread critical problem here is that before
post-impressionism was named as such (1910) or became widely understood,
the default category for that incipient style was the exorbitantly literary
Symbolisme, which for Kuyper connoted decadent aestheticism and even Anglo-
Catholic churchmanship.29 Speaking on “Calvinism and Art” in his 1898 Stone
Lectures in America, Kuyper wanted to react against all that, so he praised the
triumph of ordinary folks in Dutch realism, but the closest his text comes to
anything modern is Rembrandt30—about whom there was, in fact, a conservative,
antimodernist cult at the turn of the century. Actually, Bavinck would follow his
predecessor’s anti-Symbolist cue, writing in “Modernism and Orthodoxy” (1911)
of a vast modern gnosticism. He views the entirety of this present state as “the
result of symbolism, which is akin to pantheism, having confused religion with
art and religious representation with atheistic sentiment. In art, and to a certain
extent in worship, there is a place for symbolism, but religious representations
cannot survive without faith in their truth”31—a potential stimulus to our faithful
Reformed Christian painter two steps away from abstraction.
 A Protestant Mondrian 75

Bavinck, the newer theologian of the new church, took over the chair of
theology at the Free University of Amsterdam after Kuyper and also went
to deliver Stone Lectures in America, in 1908 and 1909. In his lecture on
“Revelation and Culture,” art is not a special theme, but Bavinck is
decidedly more culturally discerning than Kuyper.32 Besides, artists were
likely to be interested in Bavinck because he champions a sense of divine
“creativity” in the face of the fallen world, with his “trinitarian idea that
grace restores nature” (B1:18). This view allows Christians—and anyone else
receiving what Calvinists call “common grace”—to remake the fallen world,
“creat[ing] no new cosmos but rather mak[ing] the cosmos new” (B1:19). In this
cerebral younger theologian, we discover a brilliance that would have attracted
Mondrian.
Admittedly I am drawn to Bavinck by preferring not to take the easy route
via the public-intellectual Kuyper—but my intuition is also that Mondrian,
who dropped out of one Calvinist church only to be confirmed in another,
was not necessarily a constitutional liberal and may well have been interested
in the most serious Reformed Dutch theologian of his age. In Mondrian’s
maturity, I can even imagine him in accord with Bavinck’s opposition to
Theosophy. Kuyper did not like it either, but Bavinck attacked it directly,
saying point-blank that the theosophical founders Madame Blavatsky and the
younger Annie Besant, in London, were apostate Christians drawn to Buddhism
(B1:200).
With Mondrian’s artistic thought in mind, one can inquire into the themes of
individual justification and the more social dimension leading into the Kingdom
of God in Bavinck’s definitive Reformed Dogmatics (1895–1901), published
while Mondrian was a student. One must be selective, faced with a 3,000-page
treatise, but Bavinck gives certain key themes, such as justification, the
prominence and repetition of musical refrains.
We have acknowledged how, in painting, all of Mondrian’s unremitting
compositional adjustments, each relative to the others, advance an effect of
successive resolutions. Insofar as compositional justification is indeed actively
compositional, it is reconstitutive. (Such is an obvious theological analogy,
though not particularly Bavinckian, being the doctrine of felix culpa: the Fall
of Man as “fortunate” [Latin, felix] in that it occasioned sublime salvific things to
come, preeminently the Passion and resurrection of Christ.). Mondrian’s
compositional adjustments do seem to produce a sense of successive resolution,
much more so than if everything had been equal at the start. Bavinck brings out
justification’s special asymmetric reciprocity as a concept:
76 Faith in Art

In the gospel God brought to light a righteousness apart from the law. . . . This
righteousness, therefore, is not opposed to his grace, but includes it as it were and
paves the way for it. It brings out that God, though according to the law he had
to condemn us, yet in Christ has had different thoughts about us, generally
forgives all our sins without charging us with anything. . . . Justification, therefore,
is not an ethical but a juridical (forensic) act; nor can it be anything other than
that because all evidence of favor presupposes favor and every benefit of grace
presupposes grace.
B4:206

So “the word as such allows us to understand by it the entire work of redemption.

Just as the work of re-creation . . . can in its totality also be called a rebirth . . . so
it is also from beginning to end a justification, a restoration of the state and the
condition of the fallen world and humankind in relation to God and to itself ”
(B4:208).
The asymmetry that is conspicuously important to Mondrian’s modus
operandi has a Bavinkian counterpart. It has been said that a symmetrical
arrangement of objects on a mantelpiece shows the maid’s idea of order, and the
same is true for the drill sergeant; in both cases, it is because symmetry is a
default position of orderliness in situations where no one knows (or cares about)
a more aesthetically engaged order or has the power or authority to effect it. But
Bavinck projects a Mondrianesque sense of ex post facto asymmetrical
reciprocity in his principle of justification: “Before the elect receive faith they
have already been justified. Indeed, they received this faith precisely because
they have already been justified beforehand,” thanks, according to Scripture, to
“the decree of election when they were given to Christ and Christ was given to
them, when their sin was imputed to Christ and his righteousness was imputed
to them” (B3:583). After all, what could be a more profoundly asymmetric
reciprocity than one’s puny sins versus the righteousness of the Son of God.
For Bavinck, Calvin’s sense of justification “gained a double advantage” over
Martin Luther’s by separating faith and repentance: “Faith could now be much
more closely related to justification, and justification could now be viewed in a
purely juridical sense as an act of acquittal by God. . . . Reformed theology owed
to Calvin its clear insight into the religious character of justification.” This, too, is
where we can begin to see how the Mondrian of “equivalent plastic relationships”
hoped that comprehending his paintings might actually inspire people towards
effecting God’s kingdom. That might seem a pipe dream unless one heard
something like this in a sermon: “Faith and justification . . . are not the sum and
substance of the order of salvation. Luther tended to favor stopping there.”
 A Protestant Mondrian 77

However, “since repentance was included in the Christian life, Calvin could do
justice also to its active side . . . faith cannot stop at the forgiveness of sins but
reaches out to the perfection that is in Christ, seeks to confirm itself from works
as from its own fruits, girds itself with courage and power not only to live in
communion with Christ but also to fight under him as king against sin, the
world, and the flesh, and to make all things serviceable to the honor of God’s
name” (B3:527–8).
At the end of his mammoth Reformed Dogmatics, Bavinck links personal
justification with the Kingdom, since after the Second Coming and the Last
Judgment, a general “Renewal of Creation” is to occur. This event ought to
surpass even such secular hopes for an optimistic conclusion as “the extravagant
. . . expectations of the Socialists [surely this does not apply to the small number
of religious socialists at the time, given the next phrase], these millennialists of
unbelief, who think that in the future state of their dreams all sin and struggle
will have vanished, and a carefree life of contentment will be the privilege of
everyone” (B4:646). What then does await the blessed? In the end, believers and
fellow travelers “enter into” a “fellowship” that, “though in principle it already
exists on earth, will nevertheless be incomparably richer and more glorious
when all dividing walls of descent and language, of time and space, have been
leveled, all sin and error have been banished, and all the elect have been assembled
in the new Jerusalem” (B4:723). At this point, “the organism of creation is
restored,” and “the great diversity that exists among people . . . is . . . made
serviceable to fellowship with God and each other” (B4:727).
What could be more Mondrianesque than the sense of a finally perfectly
balanced, abstract composition, offering a world in which all men and women
are uniquely justified and enjoy a happy society that is by no means without
contradiction yet is reciprocally cooperative? To consider this world a utopian
pie-in-the-sky dream must be wrong because the promised Kingdom of God, or
the New Jerusalem, ought to be as material as the present world—in fact, it is this
world, transformed. And note: “All this spells the collapse of spiritualism”
(B4:718).
Fine art may actually bring us part of the way to the Kingdom in Bavinck’s
Reformed Dogmatics. If it “cannot close the gap between the ideal and reality,” it
can, at least, give “distant glimpses of the realm of glory.” Bavinck’s very hesitations
on this large point are marks of his candor (and his freedom from the
metaphysical hoax of Symbolism) in his assertion that art “does not induct us
into that realm and make us citizens of it” (B1:267). Yet even that remark may
entail a higher aspiration along the revolutionary lines of “we have our citizenship
78 Faith in Art

in heaven” (Phil. 3:20), so that it is possible to maintain that perhaps Mondrian’s

painting does go the step farther of offering less distant glimpses of sheer
justification than most representational art—surely all deliberately illusionistic
art—manages to do.
Here is a passage from the Reformed Dogmatics which is applicable to the
implicit social relationality symbolically built into this compositional relationality
of Mondrian’s painting:

In short, the counsel of God and the cosmic history that corresponds to it must
not be pictured exclusively . . . as a single straight line describing relations only of
before and after, cause and effect, means and end; instead, it should also be
viewed as a systemic whole in which things occur side by side in coordinate
relations and cooperate in the furthering of what always was, is, and will be the
deepest ground of all existence: the glorification of God. Just as in any organism
all the parts are interconnected and reciprocally determine each other, so the
world as a whole is a masterpiece of divine art, in which all the parts are
organically interconnected. And of that world, in all its dimensions, the counsel
of God is the eternal design.
B2:392; emphasis added19

Can we pair such a sense of parts that so actively participate in an “orchestral”

whole in Mondrian’s Tableau 2 with something as comprehensively Bavinckian
in theology? Between 1919 and 1920, when Mondrian wrote “Natural Reality
and Abstract Reality: A Trialogue . . . ,” the painter’s preoccupation with the
internal relations of the work were established: “Yes, all things are a part of the
whole: each part obtains its visual value from the whole and the whole from its
parts. Everything is expressed through relationship. Color can exist only through
other colors, dimensions through other dimensions, positions through other
positions that oppose them. That is why I regard relationship as the principal
thing” (M86; emphases original). There is a beautiful passage in the Reformed
Dogmatics that could almost have inspired the then implicit social ideal of
relationality in Mondrian’s classic paintings: “The image of God can only be
displayed in all its dimensions and characteristic features in a humanity whose
members exist both successively one after the other and contemporaneously side
by side” (B2:577).
In imagining the New Jerusalem of the world to come, Bavinck blames
Theosophy for, in effect, a symboliste blurring of reality that produced bad
theology, if not bad Hegelianism, by positing an intermediate form of corporeality
and fudging the opposition between matter and spirit with a so-called immaterial
 A Protestant Mondrian 79

corporality that “seeks in vain to reconcile the false dualism of spirit and matter
. . . of thesis and antithesis” (B4:620). Bavinck thinks no worldly or naturalistic
detail has a place in prophecy: “The error of the old exegesis was not
spiritualization as such but the fact that it sought to assign a spiritual meaning to
all the illustrative details,” so that “the realistic interpretation . . . becomes self-
contradictory” (B4:659)—an idea that Mondrian, who liked to think of his own
abstract paintings as really realistic, would have enjoyed. Mondrian would also
have liked Bavinck’s discussion of the essentially symbolic ideas in Ezekiel’s
vision of the future (B4:660) and the way, in regard to the last days described in
the Book of Revelation, the fate of Satan as scourge of humanity departs from
realism in a narrative that is “not in chronological sequence” but rather has “a
logical and spiritual sense” (B4:684).
In the same passage where he “spells the collapse of spiritualism,” Bavinck
writes, “Whereas Jesus came the first time to establish . . . [the] kingdom of God
. . . in a spiritual sense, he returns at the end of history to give visible shape to it.
Reformation proceeds from the inside to the outside. The rebirth of humans is
completed in the rebirth of creation. The kingdom of God is fully realized only
when it is visibly extended over the earth as well” (B4:718). In this light,
Mondrian’s justifiably utopian view of the Kingdom as a projection of the Neo-
Plastic culture of equivalent relationships, in one or another diagrammatic,
hardly seems far-fetched as a Christian destination. The external way things will
look in the End Time is far from Bavinck’s mind: the point is the finally just and
logical armature by which by the new world’s details are organized. As the
theologian says, “But although these are ideas interpreted . . . by images, they are
not illusions or fabrications, but this-worldly depictions of otherworldly realities.
All that is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, and commendable in the whole of
creation, in heaven and earth, is gathered up in the future city of God—renewed,
re-created, boosted to its highest glory” (B4:719–20). What an obvious point of
departure for projective utopian thinking on the ultimate relation of artistic
representation to a changed surrounding world, such as we find in Mondrian’s
own more utopian prophesies. Bavinck summarizes:

More glorious than this beautiful earth, more glorious than the earthly Jerusalem,
more glorious even than paradise will be the glory of the new Jerusalem, whose
architect and builder is God himself. The state of glory (status gloriae) will be no
mere restoration (restoratie) of the state of nature (status naturae), but a re-
formation that, thanks to the power of Christ, transforms all matter (ύλη, hylē)
into form (είδοs, eidos), all potency into actuality (potentia, actus), and presents
80 Faith in Art

the entire creation before the face of God, brilliant in unfading splendor . . .
Substantially, nothing is lost. . . . But in the new heaven and new earth, the world
is as much as restored.”
B4:720

Or, one could say, finally justified.

Continuity and Afterlife of the Classic Phase

Mondrian was still in Paris during the second decade of his classic phase in the
1930s until, in 1938, he moved to London to escape the Nazis.33 A surprising artistic
development of this time—which would not have been momentous for a less
rigorous composer—was his twinning, now and again, of the black line.34 Over time
he moved from linear singularity to duality and plurality, but the first momentous
move was at or about the moment of Composition with Yellow and Double Line
(1932; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Edinburgh; Figure 2.6).
It is tempting to consider relating this new feature of otherwise consistent and
homogeneous compositions to one or another statement by Bavinck concerning
dualities, as will soon be discussed. On more worldly terms, the double-line
device could conceivably derive from a British painter known to the artist in
Paris, Marlow Moss (1889–1958),35 who, at the time, was emulating Mondrian’s
Neo-Plasticism—itself an act of doubling. However, the twinned line belongs to
a development within Mondrian’s oeuvre of attending to line as much as to color.
On the threshold of the classic period, we find contiguous irregular color patches
separated by gray lines that look like bands scored on either side by finer black
lines, as in several “Compositions” of 1920. But a more obvious provocation for
the twinning of lines derives from practice. Mondrian shows a habit of speedily
doubling his lines in sketching out compositions, even in his little off-the-cuff
drawings on opened cigarette packets, where folds in the thin cardboard suggest
formal divisions in painting. This impulse seems as reflexively unintentional as
when construction workers hastily plan out what they need to sketch in fast
parallels on the nearest flat surface; the artist, in likewise executing his own
working drawings, could easily have provoked the twinning idea.
In any case, the Edinburgh work—bought from the studio by another British
painter, Winifred Nicholson (1893–1981), wife of the painter Ben Nicholson
(1894–1982)—is excellently concise, not simply “reductive” (Figure 2.6). A violin
sonata is not necessarily more reductive than a violin concerto. It also stands at
the start of a group of several other significant works. Composition with Yellow
 A Protestant Mondrian 81

Figure 2.6 Piet Mondrian, Composition with Yellow and Double Line, 1932, oil on
canvas. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Alamy Ltd.

and Double Line has only four lines. Two are in a tidy parallel pair, with a white
space between them that is wide enough to be a band. The two other lines could
not be more different: forming a perpendicular, of different lengths, the bottom
one is split in two as it skirts the very edge of the canvas, half atop the surface and
half along the stretcher edge—as if it wants to be “(½ + ½)” instead of just “1.”
Also, the resulting slim right angle along the bottom edge, makes, with so few
lines, certain clear partitions on the canvas: the top edge is divided into three
fields by the one vertical line; the left side is divided into three fields by two lines;
and the right side also appears to be divided into three by three lines (as if that
were possible!). Then at the bottom edge, we could almost say there is a line that
82 Faith in Art

goes on, infinitely long and undivided. And there is also a diagonal relation: the
edge of the half-on/half-off line at bottom-right affiliates with the yellow color
patch at the upper left, which also bleeds over two edges of the stretcher on the
side as well as at the top (almost as if to suggest an enamel compartment in
metalwork).
Once I happened to show this work to my cousin Donna Reihing, who asked
with authentic inquiry what was particularly interesting about it. This happily
provoked me to answer that in an artistic situation with so few variables, every
one may become important for its potential sign value; so that if Mondrian
shows us that he can take one of his lines over the stretcher edge, a range of
alternatives opens up about whether to do that or not, and we get to see that an
intellectual decision has been made before our eyes. Some reserve is also called
for, too, because to treat more edges in the same way, or to the same degree,
might well produce a run-on, unforeseeably decorative effect, instead of a
structurally considered one.
This last point, which concerns the painter’s reserve, may also concern how or
why there can be no simply linear genealogy to Mondrian’s work. It is as if, as
soon as one noticed the repetition of a certain characteristic, arrangements
involving it became more complicated by noticing previously discrete collateral
traits. The Edinburgh painting has a slightly younger sibling: Composition with
Yellow, Blue, and Double Line (1933; private collection, Basel). There the half-line
at the bottom becomes slightly wider, with a blue area below it. This situation
often develops in the classic phase: the painter has an essentially variable formula
as his basic idea and renders it repeatedly, as if with alternative turns of phrase.
The widening of a line, for example, as here, may take on a categorical aspect as
a source of conceptual variability, moving from a line to a stripe or a band.
Such distinctions take on great subtlety, as in—five years after the Edinburgh
painting—Composition of Lines and Color, III; Composition with Blue (1937;
Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague). In this work, no fewer than three line or
stripe widths surround the vertical blue rectangle and the similar white rectangle
above. A similar manipulation is evident by a thematic of yellow (multiple
rhizomes can often thus be followed) in the painting Painting (sometimes
called Composition) No. 9 (1939–42; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.;
Figure 2.7), which was begun in London and finished in New York, where
Mondrian went to live after barely escaping a Nazi bombing raid on London.
This work has almost no line variation but it does insert tabs between twin
and triplet lines, which serve to connect the Edinburgh Mondrian with the
later work.
 A Protestant Mondrian 83

Figure 2.7 Piet Mondrian, Painting No. 9, 1939–42, oil on canvas. Phillips Collection,
Washington, D.C. Alamy Ltd.

Mondrian was a doyen of abstract painting in New York from 1938 until his
death in 1944 (he is buried there in Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn). His
understanding of other artists’ entirely different notions of abstract painting was
on such a broad-church basis that he was one of the earliest to affirm the
importance of Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), with his utterly different approach
to abstraction.36
In 2012, the gallery of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London mounted a
dual exhibition of Mondrian and the British painter Ben Nicholson, which
occasioned a review in the Guardian by Frances Spalding, accompanied by a
strange photograph: a detail—a mere detail—of a classic Mondrian painting,
84 Faith in Art

Composition B (No. II) with Red, 1935 (Tate Modern, London).37 This partial
image was stunning evidence that there is something hopelessly inadequate
about any detail a Mondrian composition. A mere part of a Mondrian,
however large, can only prove essentially unjustified or unjustifiable, but
understanding this fully would require a modicum of theology. That said, the
way his works show such a wonderful intellectual vitality, precisely as integral
totalities, indicates to me that they may be considered religious in a specifically
Bavinckian light.

A Calvinist Trope in Light of Mondrian

Since the time of Calvin’s immediate followers, some Calvinists have scrutinized
what is termed “the logic of God’s decrees.” Bearing in mind God’s omniscience,
some have felt it presumptuous to track divine “decrees,” meaning judgments as
to the election (salvation) or reprobation (damnation) of souls in the next world.
But owing to the importance of predestination in Calvinism, as well as the
principle that divine logic must be perfect, some Calvinist theologians developed
a deep scrutiny of two opposed views on this “lapsarian” question. What was at
stake in this theological controversy concerning alternative forms of lapsarianism
may still seem highly technical to non-Calvinists, but the basic principles may
have known to Mondrian because they would likely have been at least touched
on in his confirmation course, if not also in talks with his father, who himself was
an active neo-Calvinist.
The lapsarian question arose early on in the Calvinist reformation, when it
was first posited that, well before the Fall of Man, God might have preordained
some souls to attain salvation while others would be damned. Supralapsarianism
(also called antelapsarianism or prelapsarianism) was defined to pertain to all of
time, even before Adam and Eve were created. What became the opposite
position, infralapsarianism (also called sublapsarianism or postlapsarianism),
held that, after Adam and Eve were created and then committed their initial sin,
God would save some souls and condemn others. Eventually, our modern
Bavinck attempted to synthesize both theories, undertaking the investigation
with the hopes of making denominational peace.
Bavinck begins simply: “Generally speaking, the formulation of the ultimate
goal of all things as God’s will to reveal his justice in the case of the reprobate and
his mercy in the case of the elect, is overly simple and austere” (B2:391). Soon
after that, he makes a more complex statement that plausibly resembles
 A Protestant Mondrian 85

Mondrian’s dialectic of “equilibrated relationships” in painting and, as he hoped,

in social life:

Given our limitations, we can only put ourselves in one or the other position, so
that the proponents of a causal and the proponents of a teleological world-and-
life view may at any time clash with each other. But for God the situation is
different. . . . His counsel is one single conception, one in which all the particular
decrees are arranged in the same interconnected pattern in which, a posteriori,
the facts of history in part appear to us to be arranged now and will one day
appear to be fully arranged. This interconnected pattern is so enormously rich
and complex that it cannot be reproduced in a single word such as “infralapsarian”
or “supralapsarian.” It is both causally and teleologically connected. . . . The whole
picture is marked by immensely varied omnilateral interaction.
B2:392; emphasis added

Beyond attending to Bavinck’s meaning in relation to a general sense of Mondrian’s

classic paintings, one can also be struck by a formal similarity in Bavinck’s own
phraseology. Here a “whole picture” is adduced, which, thanks to “immensely
varied omnilateral interaction,” produces a “single conception” where elements
“arranged in” an “interconnected pattern” (here related to another such pattern as
“causally and teleologically connected”) become something “so enormously
rich and complex that it cannot be [summarized] in a single word” (ibid.). As
complex as Bavinck’s statement must be, one can imagine it as structurally
resembling the typical Mondrian abstraction to which it can be referred.
Bavinck’s analysis of the problem manages to make peace between the two
traditionally opposed theological positions predicated on the Calvinist sense of
predestination. Mondrian would likely have appreciated Bavinck’s parallel
between two effectively similar but opposite approaches: that is, his parallel
between the opposed extremes of (a) an unrepresentable chaos in an already
utterly fallen world versus (b) an equally demanding wealth of possibilities
confronting one creating from scratch. I am prepared to believe that even
something like the dynamic content of the Calvinist dispute—the opposed
forms of lapsarian before-ness and after-ness—has a certain application to
painting where one thinks of Mondrian’s penchant for painting compositionally
close alternative versions of more or less the same composition with more or less
consequentially equivalent or alternative (or “opposite”) color positions. In the
abstract, what is closest to the two disputing Calvinist views here is an interplay
between temporal sequence—in both painting and the sequence of thought—
and logical priority.
86 Faith in Art

A good example occurs if Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray
(1921; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague) is also brought into juxtaposition
as another close match to the composition of Tableau 2 of 1922, discussed above.
That the earlier measures 39.5 by 35 centimeters and the latter 55.6 by 53.4
centimeters hardly matters proportionally, since both canvases are just slightly
taller than a true square. What matters are the significant inversions: in
Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray, a small red horizontal
oblong is adjacent to or atop its accompanying perpendicular lines in the upper
left, while in Tableau 2, a small red horizontal oblong is underneath the
perpendicular lines accompanying it in the lower right. Another inversion
consists of a black square plus narrow equal rectangles of yellow and white along
the bottom of the first painting, as countered by a sequence of narrow equal
rectangles of white and yellow plus a black near-square along the top of Tableau
2. Something like an algebraic equivalence is posited by such affiliated paintings,
and Mondrian’s classic oeuvre has many of them.
Could one ever expect to find a closer visual counterpart to Bavinck’s discussion
of the two opposite theories as equal-and-opposite complementary deployments?
Each painting offers certain alternative parallels to the other, as if in exchange at
par value. We may think of their temporal succession of 1921 to 1922 (even as
constructivist denunciations of composition grew conclusive in a sealed-off
Russia) as similar to the way we are taking Bavinck as here logically prior to, and
underlying, religious considerations that we already find Mondrian articulating.
Relations within and between such kindred classic paintings as these also
contribute toward meta-relationships without compromising the integrity of the
unique renditions. Not unlike the twin Calvinist theories, either, is that to engage
one of the paintings compositionally, in such a pair, is hardly to neglect the other.
Certain conclusions rise up out of the speculations of this chapter. It is
encouraging that scholars have begun to lose patience with the placebo
Theosophical view of Mondrian, as if one of the great painters of the West had no
spiritual mother tongue and had to make do with Esperanto. I have tied to identify
the tongue in question as then contemporary Dutch neo-Calvinism, especially as
articulated comparatively more closely by the newer theologian Bavinck rather
than the popular Kuyper. We have seen important parallels with the general idea
of justification in the Protestant, and especially the Calvinist, sense, and we have
traced approximations of the very mechanisms of justification in Bavinck’s neo-
Calvinist reckoning in Mondrian’s paintings. Thinking of this theological order
was demonstrably at stake in Mondrian’s Reformed generation in the Netherlands,
and it ought to be admitted into our hermeneutics of interpretation.
 A Protestant Mondrian 87

Mondrian may even help to sharpen a sense of the “spiritual” that Kandinsky
always left somewhat fuzzy. I find similarly problematic appeals to the
“transcendental” in art, especially nonobjective art. However, that term holds
some promise if we take a second look at Kant. Even those at odds with Kant’s
aesthetics may appreciate, in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), how the
transcendental, as such, is by no means something floating above us inaccessibly
in the ether, but, quite otherwise, it is that which underlies our every
presupposition. A foundation of that kind is what has been sought here in
scrutinizing Mondrian’s mature thinking, where a certain sublimation of
religion—real theological religion—would hardly have meant its abandonment.

Appendix: Beyond Iconography

Some art historians observe a convention of terminology which distinguishes

between “content,” in terms of semantic specificity, and “meaning,” in terms of
symbolic scope. Both entail communication between art object and viewer, and
both can warrant affective response—general in the former case, specific in the
latter. As a stalwart defender of abstract art, I was long consoled by Nelson
Goodman’s notion that art is not necessarily a matter of communication at all.
Not that it was supposed to be merely formalistic (form versus content); but on
the positive side, it was to glory in the “cognitive in and for itself.”38 I still respect
what Goodman was saying, but obviously my attending to “the Bavinck in
Mondrian” is more specific than cognition per se. It is what can be called the
meaningful “contentlessness” of Mondrian and kindred abstract artists that
needs to be acknowledged.
In the common culture, Mondrian’s essentially Protestant approach has
sometimes subjected his paintings to an obsessive reading of many an innocent
perpendicular intersection as a supposed Christian cross of the plain type. Now,
it is supposedly one thing for Protestants to accuse the often heavily figurative
crucifixes of the Catholics and Orthodox of unseemliness, if not superstition,
but somehow not so to “think” the Cross of Christ “into” the carpentry of
ordinary domestic doors.39 With Mondrian, this difficulty arises mainly in
paintings of the 1930s having parallel orthogonals sufficiently far apart to suit
the gestalt of a simple “Christian” (in the French sense of Protestant) cross.
Mondrian himself likely knew that populistic cross-fetishism ought not to be
blamed on Calvin, who refused to fetishize the cross any more than anything
else. In the Institutes he says that people may learn more about Christ’s
88 Faith in Art

justification of humankind by reading the Gospels than from “a thousand crosses

of wood or stone” (I.xi §87). Cross motifs purportedly imputed to paintings
come up against the intentional fallacy; or better, a sort of “reverse-intentional
fallacy,” thanks to the painter’s repeated cautions against it. Mondrian had already
written in 1917, “Ancient wisdom represented the fundamental inward-outward
relationship by the cross. Neither this symbol, however, nor any other symbol,
can be the plastic means for abstract-real painting: the symbol constitutes a new
limitation, on the one hand, and is too absolute, on the other” (M45–6). In 1919
or 1920, he cautioned that seeing right-angular forms in themselves is violated
by deferring their formal significance in preference to the “literary” aspect of a
Christian cross or even “the arms of the windmill” (M99). If a painter cannot
control the interpretation of single motifs, he can at least foreswear motifs as
such: under the title “No Axiom But the Plastic Principle,” in 1923, the cross
becomes a form spoiled by conversion into any external statement, true or false
(M178).
In 1965, the French critic Michel Butor tried to be chivalric by defending as
“tragic,” especially in Mondrian paintings from 1935 to 1939, forms that struck
him as Christian crosses—just what I am rejecting here.40 His effort would
attempt to override the painter’s penetrating sense of his own work, as early as
1917: “The artist sees the tragic to such a degree that he is compelled to express the
nontragic” (“The New Plastic in Painting,” M53n.b, emphasis original). The limits
of signification in painting’s content, especially abstract painting, are not so
readily demarcated.
Can semi-mistaken contentlessness support appropriate affective meaning?
With the right context, it would seem. I am prompted to pose this question
by a major Christian theological misprision attached, since 1890, to an important
old master painting. The account about to be assessed has been read incorrectly
as to theological content by two learned philosophers (unless one posed a
narratological ploy), yet with little compromise of overall aesthetic meaning.
My own teacher William Lyons’ essay “On Looking at Titian’s Assumption”
(1997), is based on a principal text by William James, dealing with affective
reports on painting. Lyons responds to an extended anecdote of the philosopher
and psychologist James in his Psychology (1890), about an event supposed to
have occurred in the Accademia Gallery, in Venice. In James’s narrative, an
“English couple” is overheard conversing about Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin,
on which the woman comments, “What a deprecatory expression her face wears!
What self-abnegation! How unworthy she feels of the honor she is receiving!”41
 A Protestant Mondrian 89

The operative context here is Professor Lyons’ concern with the question of
emotions in painting, from production to reception. James’s amusing if
patronizing remarks set the scene:

Their honest hearts had been kept warm all the time by a glow of spurious
sentiment that would fairly have made old Titian sick. Mr. Ruskin somewhere
makes the (for him terrible) admission that religious people as a rule care little
for pictures, and that when they do care for them they generally prefer the worst
ones to the best. Yes! in every art, in every science, there is the keen perception
of certain relations being right or not, and there is the emotional flush and thrill
consequent thereupon. And these are two things, not one. In the former of them
it is that experts and masters are at home. The latter accompaniments are bodily
commotions that they may hardly feel, but that may be experienced in their
fulness by crétins and philistines in whom the critical judgment is at its lowest
ebb.42

Lyons’ concern is for emotion as affective response to stimulation by the work

of art. Communicated content, however, may be as mistaken as it proves to be
here; and one has to wonder how much control either James or Lyons had over
objective error in this fictional communication. For the limited intellectual
enthusiasm of the English couple turns out to be largely, though not entirely,
misplaced: the emotional reactions noted by James simply do not comport with
an Assumption, which, for one glaring thing, is gloriously sky-bound, not
privately earth-bound.43 Yet James’s comments just quoted are altogether typical
and correct for an earth-bound and introverted Annunciation (“deprecatory
expression,” “self-abnegation,” “unworthy . . . of the honor”). Is James being
satirical, even as he makes his point?
Why should that matter here? Only thus do the woman’s affective comments—
pronounced as if reading from the objective evidence of a Baedeker guide book,
but a wrong page!—have any importance to the case, whether ironically or
straightforwardly.44 Tellingly, affects expressed by the English couple do manage
to agree, from a certain distance of engagement, with the iconographically (or
semantically) different content of having the Blessed Virgin Mary as central
figure of an Annunciation instead of the bargained-for Assumption. That is what
highlights the aptness with which the image the couple is viewing has a literally
mistaken identity but nevertheless proves a serviceable conduit—at least for a
receiver with no more churchly or iconographic finesse—for fortuitously
sympathetic content.
90 Faith in Art

Was there any mistake? If this is in effect a joke by William James, it is no

mistake at all, despite supplying a hermeneutical impediment. Even that would
be not be sufficiently mistaken to impede understanding of Lyons’ overarching
concern with the nonverbal conveyance of emotion by works of art, despite
erroneous inferences regarding the content, if not the overall meaning, of the art
object in question.
A generation after James, another philosophical psychologist, C. G. Jung,
wrote of James’s framing of a dual personality typology in such a way as to evoke
the present ambiguity: “The empiricist finds similarities frankly tiresome and
disturbing, something that actually hinders him from recognizing the object’s
singularity”; whereas, “The abstract thinker seizes on similarities quickly, puts
general characteristics in the place of individual objects, and shapes the stuff of
experience by his own mental activity . . .”45 One could take this as practically an
algorithm by which a perhaps impatient empiricist James supplied promising
material to Lyons as an abstract thinker working on a more comprehensive
problem.
I have had to bring up the art-historical iconography not because it really
matters either to James’s or to Lyons’s argumentation, but because only that
testifies that there is a kink in James’ message at all. Only the iconographical
discrepancy shows that despite (or because of) the invalidity of its specific
“communicational” message, the painting managed to relay an affective sympathy,
even to a limited extent generally appropriate (given that both doctrines
inherently concern the body of the Virgin as maternal vehicle of the Incarnation,
one being preparatory and the other her departure from earthly life). As wrong
as the target theological principal proved to be, it was within emotional range for
a pair of visiting low-church British Protestants on holiday in Italy, with only a
nodding acquaintance with the Blessed Virgin.
However fictitious James’s narration (“a glow of spurious sentiment” might be
a giveaway), the mistaken subject matter of the painting as object to which the
couple responds with charmingly semi-appropriate affect, does suggest a
burlesque framing the feelings of a caricaturally Anglican “English couple.”46
That must have amused James’s Boston high-church Anglo-Catholic friends
from the Church of the Advent, on Beacon Hill, all the more for its confusing
two “mysteries” of the Blessed Virgin—a topic on which Advent people would
still to this day probably be theological sticklers.
The whole James story might only have been interesting background here,
had not Professor Lyons called Mondrian to the witness box to show that art can
demur from demonstrable specific emotional expression and yet sustain a flow
 A Protestant Mondrian 91

of emotion between feeling-invested object and beholding subject. In art history

such a characteristic often points to a classical style, which Lyons touches upon;
but he is more concerned with affectivity as something that can be “on” or “off ”
(like communication in general), so that just being on is already significant—and
in Mondrian, sentient. Thus Lyons can “tak[e] some steps back from any clearly
articulated communication with the viewer,” to accommodate such a Mondrian
as “Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue” as being “designed to make it clear
that no particular response is expected or overly sought.”47 Lyons is on a cusp
here, and a lofty one: without implying that any response will do, or even that
only people who know about the Annunciation or the Assumption of the
Virgin—or for that matter, Herman Bavinck—will understand. His pursuit of
meaningfulness, in the face of contentlessness, is much in the spirit of Mondrian.
As for the likes of Bavinck: obviously no one could understand the elements
of Calvinist justification as a determinant of Mondrian’s classic paintings for the
first time “without a program”; though once one had understood it, he or she
might recognize its shadow, and even agree that it paralleled the dynamic content
of Bavinck’s thought, with appropriate meaningful (if not content-laden) affect.
I would agree further that Mondrian’s classic paintings do take up Bavinck’s
“vibe,” even perhaps contributing something to its dissemination, like a musical
accompanist. That very contention gains support, specifically for Mondrian,
from Lyons’ emphasis on meaning.
Early in life, William James—whose father, Henry James, Sr., was a
Swedenborgian—studied painting. Then he went to study medicine in Berlin,
attending lectures by, of all people, Virchow, the very physiologist despised by
Kandinsky for saying he could not find the soul in a human body (see Chapter
1). After a personal crisis, James went on to become the humane founder of
American philosophical psychology that we know (as well as a card-carrying
Theosophist). His analysis of the “wrong” painting begins to clear a space for
nonobjectivity as a site of artistic meaningfulness quite apart from specifiable
content. The ex-painter in James who understood the “perception of certain
relations being right or not” in painting, might well have appreciated Mondrian’s
advance into a realm where an artist’s communication—not to say, communion—
of purely visual relations, might be meaningfully but also emotionally manifest.
92
 3

A Catholic Malevich

Background

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (1879–1935), born to a Polish family living in

Ukraine, was baptized as an infant into the Roman Catholic Church at the
cathedral of St. Alexander at Kyiv. His father, who came from the lesser Polish
nobility (or Volynian, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), was a middle-
class engineer who managed a succession of sugar refineries in Ukraine. On his
father’s side was a model of radical republicanism: an uncle (Lucjan Malewicz)
exiled to Siberia for twenty years for participating in the 1863 rebellion against
Russian imperial rule in Poland.
Malevich acquired his religious basics from his mother, Liudviga. In a
notebook notation from about 1917, she illuminates the sort of instruction she
conveyed: basic prayers, a sense of moral rectitude, and pity. Alluding to a letter
from her deceased husband (or his will), she writes of the alienating effects of the
Fall and at the end paraphrases a verse from the Lord’s Prayer, which she surely
taught to young Kazimir (she also exhibits same ever-meandering rhetoric of
her son):

Your Father asks that there be love among you Brothers and Sisters; when he
wrote this, times were such that God still lived within people; but now, when He
has gone far away from people, and people declare themselves Princes, man is
God. But I explain it differently; maybe my reasoning is wrong, it just seems to
me that Man can really cultivate only good in himself, and if he succeeds in
being a good person, only then can he call himself a worthy creature, but he
cannot award himself such a great title; however, I won’t take it upon myself to
judge, for things turn out differently in my philosophy, because despite all his
long years of science, man has still not achieved anything to explain his oppressed
nature. . . . And yet I will go to the grave with my heart broken to pieces, with
these wounds, because I don’t see what I taught. . . . Everything in the world has

93
94 Faith in Art

died away, and I will close my eyes with pain in my heart . . . because [my will]
will not be done, they will forget one another.
MS2:55; emphasis added

We do know that the childhood home, despite the parents not being Orthodox
Christians, did have a so-called “red corner” for icons. But a crucial passage by
Malevich describing this nook can be read in more than one way: “The furnishings
were simple, there were icons that were hung up more for the sake of tradition,
for others, than out of religious feelings . . . Thus icons had no associations for
me” (MS1:41; emphasis added). It is clear from many related statements that this
is not a pretense of atheism. What is being conveyed is how the icon corner of
this assimilated Catholic family was simply not a matter of Orthodox Christianity:
being Christian, there was nothing irreligious about it, but since the family was
not Russian, and especially, not Orthodox, it was literally for the neighbors.
The painter’s sister, Wictoria Zaicev, testifies that their parents wanted him to
become a Catholic priest, like one of his uncles. Andrew Spira writes: “She
maintained that their family was more religious than Malevich admitted and
that he had understated the case in his autobiographical writings for philosophical
and political reasons.”1
Irina Vakar’s overview of Malevich’s life points up much of religious pertinence
and establishes a sense of the wider religious grounding. She emphasizes that, for
example, from quite early, Kazimir’s “imagination gravitated toward limitlessness,
in which earthly antinomies would be overcome.”2 At home, where “like most
people of his time, Malevich knew both the Christian rites and the Holy
Scriptures from childhood,” his mother was the boy’s main religious source.
Some of this early knowledge would come to be “reflected in his writings.” But
Vakar also suggests more sophisticated later understanding when she notes
that Malevich eventually used a biblical term, architekton (master blacksmith,
craftsman, or architect), for his later experimental architectural sculptures,
underscoring the religious overtones of this choice: “Surely the teaching of a
simple, uneducated carpenter [tecton] of Galilee could not have gone around
and captured the entire universe, if there did not bodily reside in this tecton the
celestial Architecton?” (MS2:569b, with ref.).
It is important to consider a family story that Malevich told more than once,
likely with differences subject to exaggeration in retelling and translation; he
probably also repeated it frequently since he was amused by it, but it has serious
logical content. For these reasons I shall first simply give the set-up of the story
myself, to bring out its contradictory points of view. It seems that Malevich’s
 A Catholic Malevich 95

father, Seweryn, liked to invite to dinner two local priests, both Catholic and
Orthodox, in order to hear them argue at the table. Some people think this is
wildly funny, likely assuming utter detachment from religious concern on
Seweryn’s part. Others, including myself, find it amusing but also think that it
also indicates a definite modicum of interest in theology, since it is unlikely that
such dinners would occur more than twice without both priests and Malevich’s
father saying anything of theological substance.
Among biographical events relevant to Malevich’s religiosity is an early but
enduring relationship that entailed some ten years of liturgical activity. In about
1894 or 1895, the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old artist-to-be met an important
Russo-Ukrainian composer-to-be, Nikolai Roslavets, at Konotop, now in
Ukraine, one of the towns with a sugar refinery where the Malevichs lived.
Eventually both families moved to Kursk; and years later, the two men kept in
touch in Moscow. Malevich’s late unpublished text “Konotop” recounts how this
long-lasting friendship had involved his pal organizing a choir of as many as
forty people, in which, he says, “I took a big part.” Sometimes this choir sang
secular music, but Malevich was proud when they “sang in the main cathedral in
Konotop.”3 If that meant the Orthodox cathedral of the Ascension, then this act
was also an ecumenical gesture on the young Catholic’s part that would have
pleased his father.
Vakar posits a crisis during Malevich’s time in the provincial city of Kursk,
when he was between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five: he “turned from a
well-behaved youth to a rebel and a nihilist” (57) while working as a railroad
clerk, studying art part-time, and consorting with artists. During this time he
also got married and even decided not to baptize his children—despite the fact
that doing so would eventually cause them much bureaucratic trouble (MS2:571).
This period can be considered the artist’s beatnik stage, a time when many an
artist has allowed religious fidelity to dissipate. Note that since Malevich’s first
marriage to Kazimira Zgleits (from 1902 to 1909) ended in divorce, his marriage
to Sofia Rafalovich could not be celebrated in a Catholic church, and hence was
purely civil. But this second marriage, to Sofia, could well have been celebrated
in an Orthodox church. This is a major point for the abiding institutional
Catholicity of Malevich.
In 1909, he is also known to have been excited by the “iconoclastic” play
Anathema by Leonid Andreev, performed at the Moscow Art Theater—a drama
condemned by the censor of the state church (MS2:572), which of course was
not Malevich’s. He likewise had nothing personal at stake in a contemporary
cultural kerfuffle over the Orthodox excommunication of the anarchist Leo
96 Faith in Art

Tolstoy (MS2:575–6). Malevich himself found anarchism quite sympathetic: he

wrote “every few days” for the journal Anarchy until it was closed down in 1918;4
and although it is almost never discussed, The Back Square, Malevich’s most
famous painting, also resembles the design of the official Anarchist party flag.
By the time Malevich died in 1935, Russians were already accustomed to
considering any obvious cross form a “mystical symbol,” and thus the committee
of suprematists that arranged the painter’s wake (consisting of Ivan Kliun,
Nikolai Suetin, Anna Leporskaia, and Konstantin Rozhdestvensky) decided not
to follow his direction to hang a cross painting (of equal-armed, “Greek”-cross
type) above his head as part of a set of three large early black-on-white paintings:
on the left the circle, in the center the square, and on the right (distinctly not the
center) the cross, even though, as Kliun would recall, they had hoped to execute
Malevich’s last wishes as accurately as possible. Vakar writes that in this decision,
“They all perceived the cross motifs in Malevich’s painting as formal elements.
But Malevich never thought in purely formal categories” (MS2:606).5
Malevich occasionally spoke of making suprematism a “new religion.” A
hundred years ago, literate adults were much more careful about saying such
things than they are now: virtually anyone who made such a claim would have
understood that they were proposing to violate the First, and most serious,
Commandment. Given what else we know about his Christianity, such remarks—
which are few—must have been facetious. Practically everybody knew that
starting a new religion was playing with fire; and when the postrevolutionary
government began their “God-Building” campaign to do just that, it flopped
(sorry to say that the otherwise intelligent Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar for
Education, was for it). Vakar negotiates such new-religion outbursts by Malevich
skillfully by taking remarks like “Art requires truth, but not sincerity” (MS2:590)
along the lines of Oscar Wilde’s witticisms. More telling is the case of Malevich:
according to an unpublished text on his funeral, written by Ivan Kliun within a
year’s time, at the actual interment of the artist’s ashes, both his Catholic mother
and his then Jewish mother-in-law grumbled together, “We hadn’t buried him
properly”—obviously lamenting that the ceremony lacked a true religious aspect
(MS2:97).
Despite Malevich’s often erratic writing, he seems to have understood—not
clearly but deeply—something that many academic leftists, at least in America,
prefer to ignore: that any properly dialectical materialism necessitates idealism—
religion being the prime source of precisely that for most people. I venture to say
that Malevich would likely have understood well the present situation in the
United States where so many bourgeois academics want to seem tough by
 A Catholic Malevich 97

projecting a “pure” but scrupulously theoretical (hence hardly dialectical)

“Marxist” materialism, while decrying anything like hearing the Torah or the
Gospel preached as hopelessly idealistic. Personally, I think Malevich would
have hated that.
Unlike the well-educated Russian Orthodox Kandinsky, whose writings are
peppered with scriptural references and allusions, or Mondrian, who seems to
have been apprised of up-to-date Dutch Reformed theology, Malevich was a
foreigner whose pre–art school education was confined to a vocational school
for agriculture. He was an autodidact in everything but studio art. He never
pretended to be learned in philosophy but liked to pose what he considered
philosophical questions and then try to think them through, however raggedly.
Yet we now know, thanks to Aleksandra Shatskikh’s work in the Malevich
archives, that Malevich “reacted” to readings that engaged him by copying many
passages out in notebooks and commenting on them. Moreover, Alexandra
Shatskikh’s scrupulous perusal of those notations has revealed something
extraordinary: “The longest excerpts that he copied were from the Gospels.”6

The Eastern Root of Suprematism

The famous Black Square (1915; N/S-116, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)7—
which exists in several autographic versions and is reproduced in huge numbers
of books and easily accessible on the internet—is by far the best-known
suprematist painting. But not the first. Malevich made many in that pioneering
year. But Black Square is a sort of emblem of that radically nonobjective
movement. Moreover, it was a conspicuous presence at the first suprematist
exhibition, the 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, in Petrograd (later
Leningrad, now St. Petersburg), from December 19, 1915, to January 17, 1916.
The work consists of an entirely black square, created with painterly brushwork,
on a surrounding white field, with the white showing as a border. It hardly looks
like an Orthodox icon as an image, and in some ways, it is not a typical suprematist
painting either.8 Curiously, one way in which this image does resemble an icon is
that there are several presumably equal versions of it, painted as late as 1930 or
1932: after all, many Orthodox icons have been copied innumerable times over
centuries. But at the 0.10 show, Malevich hung the work in a conspicuously iconic
manner, high in the corner of the room, fastened to the two adjacent walls so as to
resemble, for any Russian, the red corner (“red” also means “beautiful” in Russian)
in a home where a family would hang its best icons (Figure 3.1). Hanging Black
98 Faith in Art

Figure 3.1 Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, oil on canvas, as shown in “The
Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting: 0.10,” Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), 1915–16.
Alamy Ltd.

Square this way is said to have occasioned a fistfight on the exhibition’s opening
day between Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, who displayed his radical “Corner
Reliefs” also in corners at the exhibition. By mimicking the hanging of an icon,
Malevich was putting forth the idealism of his new form of abstract painting in
analogy with sacred painting and as against the flagrant (if also beautiful)
materialism of Tatlin’s abstract sculpture (normally all sculpture is considered too
categorically material to count as an Orthodox icon). Ironically, given that he was
Russian Orthodox to begin with, Tatlin himself had studied icons more familiarly
than Malevich. It was Black Square’s hanging that made it such a succès de scandale
at this first important exhibition of works in the new style.
Natalia Goncharova is understood as a more nationalistic “neoprimitivist”
progenitor of suprematism, but who did approach the matter of icons as an
Orthodox believer. She wrote: “Others argue—and argue with me—that I have
no right to paint icons. I believe in the Lord firmly enough. Who knows who
believes and how?”9 Malevich did have some knowledge of Russian icons, which
he had more naively admired since boyhood, but he also seems to have been
stimulated by Goncharova (MS2:577), whose maternal grandfather was an
Orthodox priest and church historian. Her work The Evangelists (1910–11),
 A Catholic Malevich 99

exhibited at the Moscow group Donkey’s Tail side by side with Malevich in 1912,
is related stylistically to icons. In fact, it looked enough like an icon to be
confiscated by the censor as blasphemous. (Yet, interestingly enough, Spira
claims Goncharova’s iconic style is somewhat too Western to be exemplary,
stating “much of [her] Christian iconography is related to later Catholicizing
icons [from Ukraine], that had themselves departed from the Byzantine
tradition.”10)
Finally I must add that suprematism is not called suprematism for the sake of
the absolute finality of the Black Square: if it were, it would not apply to all the
other truly suprematist works that do not resemble it. Anyone can see that the
term implies superiority, but its etymology is problematic. Its implicit idea is of
an absolute ultimacy of the style—which by definition must pertain to more
than one object. Shatskikh would seem to be on the right track when she writes:
“The word had its roots in Malevich’s native language, Polish, to which it had
come, in turn, from the Latin of the Catholic liturgy. Supremacia meant
‘superiority,’ ‘dominance’; for the artist in this initial stage, ‘suprematism’
established the supremacy of color energy in painting. In time, suprematism
fully revealed its morphogenic power and the potential of its all-encompassing
style.”11
The notion that the term suprematism derives from the liturgy of the actual
Mass as such is untrue. No cognate of supremus, suprematism, or similar, occurs
in the Orthodox liturgy, and no form of any such word is found in the pre-1962
form of the western Latin Mass either, which would have been Malevich’s basic
Mass of memory.12 I can only point to the adjective suprémae in the first line of
the third stanza of the Pange Lingua (“Sing, My Tongue”), a famous Catholic
hymn of the thirteenth century written by St. Thomas Aquinas, which is sung on
Holy Thursday and on the feast of Corpus Christi, celebrated by Catholics,
Anglicans, and Western Orthodox.Yet even that only supplies the unprepossessing
“last” in “Last Supper,” without sense of superiority, only indicating the end of a
sequence. Not that the tune of the hymn wouldn’t have pleased Malevich, insofar
as it is supposed to follow from a Roman army march, “Behold, The Caesar Now
Triumphs Who Subdued Gaul.”13
Nevertheless, Malevich’s own sense of this image is interesting, for by its white
edge it has the containment of an image, though a housepainter could have
painted it (true, the surface is not in good condition): this is palpably not true of
most suprematist paintings, where “touch” matters a good deal. But his referencing
it as “a living, royal infant” makes it sound, sight unseen, like some form of
Catholic “holy picture,” perhaps as kitschy as an “Infant of Prague” image. The
100 Faith in Art

“royal infant” quip derives, early on, from a passage in the artist’s From Cubism
and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting:14 “The square is not
a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. It is the face of the new
art. The square is a living, royal infant. It is the first step of pure creation in art”
(MK1:38). The last part here is an exaggeration because Malevich had been
working on suprematism for the previous year, but it is a great trademark of this
important new abstract modality of painting.
Now that suprematism is detached from automatic affiliation with Orthodoxy,
it deserves to be understood on its own nonconfessional terms before attempting
to affiliate it with Malevich’s confession. What is aesthetically at stake in
suprematism is not mysterious, but it is subtler than it looks to those who think
they are looking at pure and simple plane geometry. Given that in Malevich’s
teaching suprematism in general follows “intuitive reason,” with general emphasis
on what he is said to have called “feeling,” one wants to know what was entailed
in the painting process. On this, Charlotte Douglas has written definitively:

It is important to make quite explicit just what Malevich understood by

oshchushchenie (sensation). At times this has been translated into English as
“feeling,” and it has given added emotional coloring to Malevich’s statements. By
sensation Malevich meant an ultimately material phenomenon but one which is
subliminal. That is, an inner physiological separation which is so slight, so subtle,
that it does not reach the threshold of physical consciousness. He saw the artist’s
task as cultivating these direct experiences and making them available to the
intuition in the role of true creator. The representation of these experiences
upon the canvas is partly a product of the ability to perceive sensation and partly
a product of the state of development of the intuition, the intuitive reasoning.15

(May we not even draw a similar distinction with religion, insofar as feeling has
less than one might think to do with faith?)
One must obviously pass beyond the Black Square to appreciate what Douglas
means; but when one does, her explanation puts warranted emphasis on sensation
in the philosophical sense of empiricism, of knowledge gained by direct sensory
interplay with the outside world—not only from “nature” but even in respect to
an artist’s procedures. Douglas’s insight likely extends even to the very moves
made in the realization of a work: in drawing, what sort of stroke should be made
next in view of those already drawn?; in improvisational jazz, what note should a
saxophonist intone next in relation to those already sounded.
Even if one cannot call the first Black Square “suprematist painting number 1,”
it might well make sense to call it “suprematist painting number 0” because, as
 A Catholic Malevich 101

Malevich implied and as his protégé El Lissitztky sought to spell out (see Chapter 4),
this work opened up a new realm beyond the old art, even including cubism as
subjected to the natural world. Beyond the 0 of Black Square is the infinite
freedom of -1, -2, -3, -n. This is already clear in quite a concrete manner with
some of Malevich’s other early relations of this piece: some are not black, and
some are not square because the four angles are almost conspicuously not right
angles, charging the so-called square form with sufficient vitality to slightly flex
or shimmy (early examples include N/S-126 of 1915 and N/S-127 of probably
1916–17).
It seems extremely suprematistic here to have to face up to what to do next.
One can go on from a black square(-ish) form to a black oblong form, in two
clear examples (N/S-129 and N/S-139, both with the motif of 1915 as rendered
in 1920). Or else (fasten your seatbelt!), one can be more phenomenological and
note that, on second thought, we have failed to recognize that a couple of earlier
Black Square iterations were already slightly “alive,” too, which one may not have
recognized due to our rational desire to preserve the tidy category of “square.”
Two fine examples of this involve “vital” red squares: a small Pictorial Realism of
a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions; Red Square, 1915 (N/S-126) and a larger,
similarly titled version of approximately 1915–16 (N/S-127; State Russian
Museum, St. Petersburg).
There is no need to illustrate either example because I am addressing a general
idea that holds true for many suprematist paintings. It would be wrong to reduce
what we are discussing here to simple geometric “irregularity,” as such, but such
slight enlivening deviations from regularity apprise us of a certain kind of
human irregularity that involves the sensibility of the spectator: the spectator
cannot be as passive as many viewers of even secular art are and expect to have
the aesthetic message of this art come through. In my opinion, this necessity of
spectator engagement concerns the primary reason for taking a painting as
“spiritual,” namely that it presents itself as the work of a soul. If perhaps one
could combine St. Thomas Aquinas’s definition of the soul as the capability of
movement in a thing with Baruch Spinoza’s early modern understanding of vital
metaphorical movement as voiced in his Ethics (1677), we might be well prepared
to understand the irregularities of suprematism.
Explaining this phenomenon of Malevich’s significant geometric irregularity
to students over many years, it helped, visually speaking, to defer to the great
nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin, who deals with aesthetically
advantageous imprecision in The Laws of Fésole (1877–8). There Ruskin diagrams
and describes a device derived from a composition by the early Renaissance
102 Faith in Art

painter Cimabue: a lectern with slanted top, on the sides of which a diagonal
ornamental quadrangle must be irregular owing to the slant. So what would
ideally have been a diagonal square, like a diamond, is instead un-square, because
it has to suit the nonrectangular side of the slanted lectern. But for Ruskin this
situation is not at all regrettable: it is downright aesthetically advantageous since
the artist has been able, by careful adjustment, to cooperate with circumstances
to make something more imaginatively responsive than any standardized result:
“You may thus for yourself ascertain the accuracy of this outline, which otherwise
you might suppose careless, in that the suggested square is not a true one, having
two acute and two obtuse angles . . . But this is one of the first signals that the
[work] is by a master.”16 A good reason to think that Ruskin would have
understood and appreciated suprematist intuition.
Still in 1915, Malevich added to the square single-image motif, two or three
more black “fundamental elements” of suprematist painting, making for a triad
of related elements: a so-called circle or disk and a thick-limbed, symmetrical
Greek cross. Malevich seems to have sought to add a fourth element to this set, a
single wide lateral oblong—an “extended plane”—within the square format. This
last motif, however, never seemed logically reciprocal with its siblings, for its
length looked arbitrary compared with the centralizing bilateral symmetry of
the others.
By itself, the extended plane could be said to have morphed into the black
crossbar of an often reproduced Latin-type Christian cross painting with an
equally wide red vertical staff, Suprematist Hieratic Cross (1920–1; N/S-564), and
as also subsumed into a similar White Suprematist Cross (1920–1; N/S-565), both
in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. While the fundamental elements of
suprematism do not concern religion, howbeit “iconically” representing basic
geometric forms, it is curious that the extended plane (rejected, one can say, as
impossibly absolute) comes to take part in these two decidedly vertical Latin-
cross paintings, differing from the symmetrical Greek crosses with their
fundamental elements.
Malevich’s couple of sets of square, cross, and circle motifs, with or without an
extended plane, were first painted in 1915 on 32-inch-square (more or less)
canvases, then repainted on a larger scale of about 42-inch-squares in 1924, so
that they appear like large church icons (perhaps for the Venice Biennale?).
Interesting for the development of suprematism is how the triplet of motifs is
differently managed. A square simply recapitulates Black Square. A cross becomes
thick, with less rigid, almost flexing edges. Most radical, in response to the
challenge of allowing a circle to be somehow irregular without ruining it, a circle
 A Catholic Malevich 103

or disk bobs up within the white field like a blimp, in the upper-right-hand
corner of the canvas. The result for the circle is that, as opposed to a steady square
with regular white border, it is now the surrounding field that becomes irregular.
Especially as ensembles, these formal fundamentals prove a tour de force of
suprematist thinking.
A complex but wonderfully iconic suprematist abstraction is Malevich’s
Suprematism: Abstract Composition (1915; N/S-420; Yekaterinburg Museum of
Fine Arts, Russia; Figure 3.2). Despite, of course, lacking human figuration, it
evidences a feature that is fairly exceptional in icon painting, a vitally asymmetric
composition (anyone can arrange things tidily A-B-C-D-A). The painting is
obviously flat and carries only regular forms; it is also obvious that it shows

Figure 3.2 Kazimir Malevich. Suprematism: Abstract Composition, 1915, oil on

canvas. Yekaterinburg (Russia) Museum of Fine Arts. Alamy Ltd.
104 Faith in Art

repeated forms in different colors—patently identical back and red squares and
wide black and yellow bands—in a composition with both symmetrical and
asymmetrical features. I approach this painting as oriented with its pair of
squares to the lower right, as I have seen it hung at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, and in books. (I have sometimes seen it reproduced on its side, but
Malevich’s suprematist paintings are so compositionally self-contained that
some were hung even by the artist with different orientations.) Presented this
way, the image has a distinct similarity to the many icons in which a half-length
figure holds a Gospel book open to a two-page spread in the lower-right corner.
To suggest a parallel without implying that Malevich necessarily used it: I am
thinking of an icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker from the twelfth or
thirteenth centuries (State Tretyakov Gallery), in which the held rectangle in the
lower right is a single framed rectangle, representing a closed Gospel book and
appearing surprisingly abstract, even if other Nicholas icons more closely
resemble Suprematism: Abstract Composition by showing a two-page spread of
the book. As in all icons of St. Nicholas, the bishop’s white collar is adorned with
thick dark crosses, not unlike the two wide crosses in Malevich’s painting, which
also has a black half-circle motif that can be considered structurally equivalent
to Nicholas’s white halo.17 Needless to say, we are not talking about specific
painting-to-painting influence here but about parallel pictorial devices that can
reveal the closeness of some elements of “[articular” modernism to the “Eastern”
icon tradition.
A compositionally simpler work by Malevich, but perhaps all the more
profound, is the marvelous Suprematist Painting: White on White, 1918 (also called
White Square; N/S-477), in the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Figure 3.3). It
is easy to think of it as opposed to Black Square, but it is completely different and
quite ingeniously composed. Suprematist Painting: White on White is a formal
marvel in which the inner and outer “squares” are distinguished only as two
different whites, with the rotated inner “square” not square at all: it only has one
right angle, while its four corners all touch the edges of the field at different
distances. By the way, Malevich said he associated white with pure action; relatedly,
in the Orthodox icon tradition, a square halo (like a mortarboard) identifies a
saint depicted still living his or her active earthly life.
Might it be possible to consider this extremely iconic suprematist Malevich in
a Marxist vein, and might that be considered, in a way, “ecumenical,” too?
Malevich might have read some Marx, at least later, when he had to defend
himself against the apparatchiks (bureaucrats) as things came to a political head
in the Twenties. (Should it even have mattered to the sophisticated artist, not
 A Catholic Malevich 105

Figure 3.3 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting: White on White, 1918, oil on
canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Alamy Ltd.

reading Marx would have had nothing to do with being a Catholic, because
Marx was never listed on the Counter-Reformational “Index of Prohibited
Books.”) What would have been most important in Marxist theory concerned
alienation, which it is the office of art (and some would say, of religion, as well)
to absolve. Unfortunately, until the aesthetically important “humanistic” works
of Marx’s early years became widely circulated in the 1960s, Communists were
as dogmatic about abstract art as many churchgoers. Recently, however, Allison
Leigh has written an excellent critical reclamation of this splendid painting in a
Communist history journal, calling attention to the “dyadic incongruity” of
Suprematist Painting: White on White. It is impossible for me to quote any less
than the following from Leigh’s astute essay, which I take to be fully in the
suprematist spirit:
106 Faith in Art

But the title suppresses something that is just barely perceptible in person—a
thin gray line that separates the two from each other. The white square swimming
in the limitless abyss is bounded by a sinewy charcoal contour. It is the firmest
sign of the artist’s hand, his presence forever in the painting, at the site of its
revolutionary making. That line takes us forever back to 1917 and to the
questions asked in that moment: “What will the new Nation ask of Art and of the
artist?” The man who asked such questions is long gone. The line is all that
remains of him. White on White is therefore an object utterly outside of time,
free of it in a way that we will never be. It promises instead the infinity of a space
beyond human fear or perception, a universe of colorless neutrality, beyond
politics or aesthetics. At least initially then, instead of red, there was only the
boundlessness of white.18

The painting shown on the cover of the present book is Malevich’s Suprematism
of the Spirit (1919; N/S-570), in oil on wood panel, in the Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam. Panel painting—resembling the format of an Orthodox icon much
more than does anything on canvas—is exceedingly rare in Malevich’s oeuvre;
one other example, also suprematist in style, is one of the paintings titled Mixed
Sensations, this with motifs of 1916 but executed in around 1921 or 1922 (N/S-
382), featuring several crosses.
Our Suprematism of the Spirit, on the cover, consists of a slender cross, with thin
doubled stem against a white field with a white square obscuring its center. The
square is an application of the singular image of White on White, which substitutes
as a cypher for nothing less than the corpus of the holy suffering body of Christ. In
Suprematism of the Spirit, the central white “square” is also, in the suprematist
manner, just slightly taller than it is wide and surrounded by cross slats of different
sizes. This motif of White on White is prominent on slim Latin-type crosses in four
Malevich drawings (executed 1919–27) and the present painting, plus a matrix for
a wood engraving of 1920; all being called Suprematism of the Spirit (N/S-568-71bis,
572). This rare panel painting is indeed on wood, which is to say the prescribed
material format of an authentic Orthodox icon, and it also has a Russian-style
suppedaneum (footrest) even though the suppedanea of the related drawings go
every which way. Possibly this variation in this unusually “iconic” case is due to
Malevich’s non-Orthodoxy, since, as a Catholic, he may not have been able to recall
in which diagonal direction a Russian suppedaneum properly slants.
Given its white center in place of the corpus of a crucifix, Suprematism of the
Spirit is a more specific counter to the generality of the Black Square, created
only four years earlier, which some have taken as apophatically theological,
meaning concerned exclusively with what cannot be said about God, as Lyons
 A Catholic Malevich 107

has discussed.19 But Christian theology can convert the black square of general
negation concerning divine representation into the positively white Incarnation
of the fully human son of God, as beheld by Moses and Elijah in the
Transfiguration, arguably the most important theme in Orthodox icon painting,
partly because it concerns visibility as such. Shatskikh is right to invoke the
Transfiguration in respect to Malevich’s White on White canvases: Christ’s
garments became “white as light” (Mt. 17:2), “glistening, intensely white, as no
fuller on earth could bleach them” (Mk 9:3), and “dazzling white” (Lk. 9:29).20
Much of the same significance devolves onto Suprematism of the Spirit.
Further details in Suprematism of the Spirit are worth exploring. The
horizontal beam is black (not unlike Suprematist Hieratic Cross, above), while its
vertical shaft is twinned with a band of creamier white visible along its left edge,
starting below the top and ending below the bottom (like the two whites in
White on White). The attachment of these twinned stripes recalls Malevich’s
interest in magnetism as an invisible force inseparable from electricity, a new
twentieth-century modality, as opposed to the mechanical “forces” of the
nineteenth century. (The cubo-futurist opera Victory over the Sun of 1913, which
had provoked Malevich’s first suprematist moves, concerns the liberation of
electric lighting instead of dependence on sunlight.) Below and behind the
twinned shaft appears a traditional Russian Orthodox suppedaneum, tilted from
upper left to lower right, which, at least today, is a dark orange in color. But the
twinned shaft, as a paired dark-and-light form, may also relate to an intriguingly
Jewish image on the back cover of Lissitzky’s famous suprematist-into-post-
suprematist artist’s book Of Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale of Two Squares in
Six Constructions, of 1922 (Figure 4.8; see Chapter Conclusion).21
Appropriate to the spare rectitude and grace of Suprematism of the Spirit,
which would make many think of the Crucifixion, are two reminiscences of the
Russian constructivist sculptor Antoine Pevsner (1886–1962). Pevsner recalls,
around 1918, a “deathly pale” Malevich saying, in the time of his white
suprematism, “I feel a wilderness around me. Lost in the jungle, I found only one
path to salvation. It is what you see and admire: the white square on the white
ground. These are my very latest works, my ideal” (MS2:162). Additionally, when
Malevich’s gifted suprematist associate Rozanova (1886–1918) died that
November of diphtheria, at age thirty-two, Pevsner said, “With tears covering his
haggard face he was a tragic and pitiful sight. When he saw me, he said, quite
softly: ‘We will all be crucified. I have prepared my cross already. You have noticed
it in my works, of course’ ” (163). The following year, 1919, the year of Suprematism
of the Spirit, Malevich also said, “The cross is my cross.”22
108 Faith in Art

Of Malevich’s other, obviously Christian cross paintings, a few have interesting

specifics. Mystical Suprematism (1920–2; motif of 1916–19; N/S-612), features a
solid, halo-like disk tending toward the upper right, and a different Mystical
Suprematism (1920–2; motif of 1918–19; N/S-613), has an oval mandorla. The
well-known Latin cross with a wide red vertical bar and wide black overlaid
horizontal staff, called Suprematist Hieratic Cross, already mentioned, may
remind either a Catholic or an Orthodox Christian of beginning prayer by
making the sign of the cross on one’s torso, first by moving the right hand from
forehead to breast and then, from shoulder to shoulder, either from to left to
right (Catholic) or right to left (Orthodox), to identify oneself with Christ. It is
possible that such an ecumenical ambiguity occurred to Malevich while
executing this painting with his own arm, which would have entailed being
conscious of the painting’s own left and right.
Any personal interest Malevich may have had in icons began to wane at a
certain point, to some extent along with painting itself. In a letter dated April 3,
1920 from Vitebsk to the critic Pavel Ettinger, Malevich complains that Igor
Grabar was spending too much public money restoring icons. Yet he can still
frame current realities in religious terms: “I know, Suprematism arrived at
‘objectlessness’ in order to construct a new spiritual and ‘utilitarian world,’ but
here too an enormous speech could be unfurled and it really should be unfurled,
because it contains the development of the new testament of the world”
(MS1:127). This “unfurling” may already portend the germination of his lecture
and small book, God Is Not Cast Down (1922). But he may have also discussed
this notion of a new New Testament with Lissitzky, at the Peoples Art School, in
Vitebsk. On the very next day after Malevich wrote to Ettinger, April 4, Lissitzky
also wrote to the critic, speaking of Malevich’s greatness in begetting a grand
style but also either anticipating, influencing, or confirming his own great text
“Suprematism in World Reconstruction” (1920; see Chapter 4): “Here before us,”
Lissitzky wrote, “is the ascension that will culminate in the stupremat [sic] of the
Spirit—religion. Here comes the SUPREMATIST TESTAMENT to replace the
Old and New Testaments” (M2:212; emphasis original).23

The Western Root of Suprematism

I have been skeptical about the Eastern root of Malevich’s Suprematist painting
for a simple compensatory reason. Malevich obviously understood the
ecclesiastical function as well as the formal nature of the Russian Orthodox icon,
 A Catholic Malevich 109

and its exalted place in Orthodox culture. This understanding likely came up for
discussion during either of the revolutions of 1917, when he was first elected
chairman for art by the Moscow Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies and then appointed
to supervise the national art collections in the Kremlin, including its four
cathedrals with their many icons.
The neglected side of the story, however, concerns a great ethnically Polish
modernist who grew up accustomed at least as largely to Western artistic
stimulation, even for religious painting. The greatest contradiction between
tradition and modernity in Malevich’s artistic education must have been his
initial Moscow stint in the private school of Fedor Rerberg, in 1906–10, where
the immediate lessons concerned how to make a typical Western perspectival
painting even as any contemporary excitement, in the world outside school, was
new but also equally Western, impressionism.24
Malevich’s attitude toward the Orthodox icon may have been more oblique
than one might think, being accustomed to the visual aspects of two churches.
From around the time of suprematism’s public emergence in 1915, Malevich
wrote in an unpublished long poem called “I Am the Beginning . . .” (compensating
for what seems a badly translated first sentence): “I am a great beginning, will I
be capable of [covering] my face with the wisdom of oecumenical glory?”—with
the word ecumenical used twice on the same page (MK4:12), revealing its
importance for one whose Christianity crossed church lines. This free-verse
poem is largely religious, Trinitarian in fact. But it also rather gives away its
Catholicity in a line—“Cleanse your hearing and wipe away the old days”
(MK4:13)—that resembles the priest’s invocation before reading the Gospel in
the pre-Vatican II Catholic Mass: “Cleanse my heart and my lips” (as God
cleansed Isaiah’s lips).25 Malevich continues: “Christ has died and his spirit has
not returned again to his body—so it has built itself another: the church”
(MK4:26).
Because Malevich’s suprematism has such artistic affinities with Russian
icons’ flatness, stylized forms (like drapery folds in icons), and quite often,
autonomy of color, we are perhaps too accustomed to the analogy with the icons
of the national church, in a country where the painter was, in fact, an immigrant,
failing to consider that Malevich was a “cradle” Catholic. That is why we need to
scrutinize his reliance on his own tradition.
I think there are multiple levels to the more general problem of “the Russian
icon” and Malevich. The most fundamental concerns religion versus irreligion.
On this level, religion is considered at best “mystical,” that is, incomprehensible
and likely delusionary but harmless when not standing in the way of progress.
110 Faith in Art

But here the icon can be entertained as charmingly folkloric, even though, to
both simple and sophisticated Orthodox believers, such a view is practically
blasphemous. In the early twentieth century this attitude was supported by the
abolition in philosophy of whatever could be considered metaphysical, blaming
the problem on Kant (despite his pioneering efforts to solve it) and forcing too
many Christian thinkers into sterile Scholasticism. Before long there would be
no reason, whether in the Stalinist East or under Western capitalist “materialism,”
not to equate the learned icon tradition with lubki— ordinary popular graphics—
in order to take the icon’s metaphysical status down a peg.
The Orthodox icon-painting tradition seems at first to have been serviceable
to our artist, not merely formally but as a means of conveying “semi-abstractly”
a directly apprehensible diagram of metaphysical principles, according with
religiosity. The government promotional campaign for atheism of the new Soviet
Union in the 1920s was pointedly anti-iconic, by often mocking the icon’s sacred
character. Comic strips by the great proletarian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky
contributed to this campaign. Endless versions trade on the all-too-easy easy
parity between St. Elijah and the old Slavic pagan god Perun. In one, the first
panel of a sequence depicts a thin, bearded man crouching down to the floor
with awkward absurdity to address or kiss an icon of Elijah before a hanging
candle or lamp; in the next panel, the man kneels before the icon to pray; and in
the next, his house burns down. At the end, the same fellow, in hardier physical
condition, sits on a log reading a likely scientific book while a wrathful old God
the Father in the sky is frustrated in directing a lightning bolt onto his rebuilt
house because it is now equipped with a lightning rod. This extremely popular
vein of humor is completely beholden to the nineteenth-century trope of science
being necessarily at odds with faith, proceeding by utterly simplistic substitution.
One would, of course, have to put paganism on par with revealed Judaism and
Christianity in order to countenance the replacement of Perun (considered
responsible for the sky, thunderstorms, war, and such) by the great prophet
Elijah—himself an esteemed crusader specifically against paganism—merely as a
holy man with metaphorical access to heaven. Indeed, the whole Perun/Elijah
project was as ethically as well as logically bad as any capitalist propaganda
campaign predicated on the fact that stupidity really does sell.
In the mid- and latter part of the last century, some Western scholars and
critics became attuned to the fact that the painting style of Malevich, in particular,
had qualities in common with specifically Christian art in Russia. The émigré
sculptor Naum Gabo, in his Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery, Washington,
D.C., in 1959, juxtaposed part of a fourteenth-century mural icon from Novgorod
 A Catholic Malevich 111

with Malevich’s Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles (1915; N/S-45;

Museum of Modern Art, New York).26 This was one of those books that every
artist had, mainly for its visual juxtapositions, but nobody ever read.
But in 1971, the painter Marjorie Welish, reviewing Troels Andersen’s still-
standard English edition of Malevich’s Essays on Art (1968), which made
American artists aware of Malevich, invoked the similar embroidered semiotic
“cross” patterns on Russian Orthodox liturgical vestments on view in the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as a parallel to Malevich’s suprematism, without
sidestepping religion. Citing the historian Nicholas Vakar, Welish called attention
to German idealism’s having “penetrated” modern Russian “aristocratic circles
and the intelligentsia”; hence “the ground was prepared for the theories of Hegel
and Marx whose acceptance, paradoxically, can be seen as the final consequence
of the old Russian religious impulse.” Thus, “the work of Malevich should be
analyzed . . . not only in terms of a European art tradition he was fully aware of ”
(and to which we shall return here) “but in terms of the dilemma of the Russian
intelligentsia of which he was a part. What appears to us now as some of the
clearest statements in European art history take on a double significance—a
hidden, tradition-rooted dimension,” markedly theistic.27 For once the “religious
impulse” was not being dismissed.
Today, some fifty years later, the question of Malevich’s suprematism in regard
to the Russian Orthodox icon tradition has become a widespread art-historical
cliché, with religion reduced to an antiquarian sidebar. Now it is time to
acknowledge that that religious affinity was one of two strong and no doubt
competing art-historical influences from Christian representational art on
Malevich’s abstraction, the other being his own, pictorially quite different,
Catholic visual background, specifically as Baroque-derived. Western influence
is bound to seem exaggerated in the following account because it is the one
which, without ever having been taken for granted, has disappeared (many
Catholics still manage to abhor abstract art). What deserves to be kept in mind
is that there is no reason not to think of Malevich as not being as artistically
ecumenical in practice as his father taught him to be ecclesiastically.
Malevich held to a similar dichotomy regarding the artistic modalities of Old
Master and modern painting. In a letter written on July 23, 1924, to his former
student from Vitebsk, Lev Iudin, he mentions Rubens and Cézanne in the same
breath, bespeaking the opposition between old art and modernity on such
opposed terms that he can say, “take as a measuring stick Rubens as the aphelion
and Cézanne as the perihelion”—the aphelion being when earth is at its farthest
point away from the sun, occurring around (however counterintuitively) the
112 Faith in Art

summer solstice, and the perihelion being when earth is at its nearest point,
around the winter solstice. Given that Malevich and most other modernist
painters have taken Cézanne as their artistic prophet, it is easy to infer how this
might lock Rubens out altogether—and Malevich is not usually one to let that
name pass without an allusion to obese nudes. Nevertheless, Malevich so
appreciated Rubens on his own terms, not to mention as a Catholic (likely unaware
of Cézanne’s Catholicism), that in the same letter to Iudin, he advises, “I suggest
that you work more intensely in the Hermitage [museum] studying the painterly
structure of Rubens” and other great masters (MS1:169; emphasis added).
When the subject of default realism in Western European Catholic art comes
up around Malevich, the bugbear is indeed normally the great Flemish Catholic
painter of the baroque, Sir Peter Paul Rubens. Prince Evgenii Trubetskoi, a
Russian Orthodox religious philosopher, is responsible for a notorious instance
of this recurrent critical trope in a 1915 essay on icon painting, where he reports
that, on visiting the Hermitage Museum soon after visiting an icon collection,
the sight of a bacchanal by Rubens “made me feel sick to my stomach.” That the
subject was “gorging on meat and necessarily killing in order to gorge,” and
Trubetskoi had the vivid impression that Rubens’s baroque painterliness was all
too attuned to “fat shaking flesh, delighting in itself.”28 In a 1918 essay, Trubetskoi
formulates his objection to this entire aspect of Westernizing taste—aptly
represented by Rubens—as “the dreary spiritual meshchanstvo [Russian for
genteel petty-bourgeois vulgarity] that has engulfed the modern world,”
including “the forgotten icon.”29
It is unlikely that Malevich would have thought all Western religious painting,
including Rubens’s baroque, as necessarily bad, even if he did occasionally join
in local Rubens-bashing (perhaps to be a good sport). As a theoretician of art,
Malevich surely knew that his own declared commitment to the aesthetic party
of color was a commitment to the painters’ politico-aesthetic party of Rubens
(versus Poussin). And while we understand the modern appeal of the icon, it
seems unlikely that one so ambitious as a painter and alert to art history would
not also have looked for masterly examples within his own league.
A major revelation took place in 1977, thanks to Alan Birnholz. He proposed
that another Malevich white-on-white painting, Construction in Dissolution (1918;
N/S-501; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) derived from a small sketch called
Suprematist Composition: Expressing the Feeling of Fading Away (1916–17;
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Figure 3.5), with this image
based on the composition of likely Rubens’s single most celebrated painting, the
Elevation of the Cross (1610–11; Antwerp Cathedral).30 For a generation after this
 A Catholic Malevich 113

Figure 3.4 Anonymous carte-de-visite photograph, c. 1858–66, of Peter Paul Rubens,

Elevation of the Cross, 1610–11. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Courtesy of the Museum.

Figure 3.5 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: Expressing the Feeling of

Fading Away, 1916–17. Pencil on paper, sheet: 6 1/16 × 4 3/16 inches (15.4 × 10.64 cm).
Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Gift of Marlborough-Gerson
Gallery, 1968 (RCA1968:6). Photo: Tom Loonan for Albright-Knox Art Gallery,
Buffalo, New York.
114 Faith in Art

article appeared, I presented and discussed this comparison in my modern art

survey courses, but I have never met another art historian who paid any attention
to it. I think they thought it was a fluke, but I have an answer to that.
The immense repute of Ruben’s Antwerp altarpiece must be acknowledged.
Malevich never saw it; but Rubens’s Elevation of the Cross was considered a
masterpiece of European art deserving to be published as such in photo-
reproduction as early as the mid-nineteenth century. For instance, the
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, preserves an anonymous carte-de-visite photograph
of the central composition dating from between 1858 and 1866 (Figure 3.4).
Having a tiny drawing in Buffalo reflect the influence of one of Rubens’s most
monumental paintings upon an important Malevich suprematist work probably
seemed too improbable for people to handle, especially in light of the prevalent
view that Rubens personified the worst elements of Western religious painting
by virtue of his extreme painterly fleshliness. Knowing that all too well, Birnholz
quotes Trubetskoi’s scornful comments and writes: “It was Rubens above all
other western European artists who was scorned as the clearest example of what
an artist portraying religious subjects should not do.” But Birnholz adds: “The
Buffalo drawing appears as possibly a modernized and purified version of such
celebrated works by Rubens as his Elevation of the Cross,” especially insofar as
“the shoulders, waist, and thighs of a human form” in the Rubens inform the
concentric axes of the top, middle, and bottom of the Malevich composition.31
The Rubens scholar John Rupert Martin comments on Ruben’s original figural
disposition in such a way as would have appealed to Malevich: its diagonal
heaving up of the weighty cross bearing Christ, instead of a normal perpendicular
Crucifixion, was something that Rubens employed on other occasions as well
because he “obviously enjoyed working out solutions posed by the formal
problem of this subject.”32
In his Malevich Catalogue raisonné, Andréi Nakov dates the Malevich painting
in question to 1918 (NS-501), and the five related drawings, including the Buffalo
one, as after the fact; however, he dates their “motif ” to 1917 and 1918, surely as
studies for the versions of suprematist painting of 1920 (NS-502–04) and 1927
(NS-505, 506). Malevich must have been as fascinated and enthralled with his, in
effect, quite “ecumenically” abstract painting as Rubens had been with his
unusual figural device for the Crucifixion. For with just the addition of a small
extra crossbar for the feet (the suppedaneum)—in formal agreement with the
concentric radial curves of the crossbeam and the corpus’s torso—Malevich
might be seen thinking how, in Construction and Dissolution, he has converted a
Catholic Rubens Crucifixion into a more compatibly Orthodox crucifix type.
 A Catholic Malevich 115

Malevich was quite familiar with the very feel of a Russian icon, but there is
no reason to think him ever unmindful of his own kind of high Catholic
Counter-Reformation religious art—quite beyond familiarly deriding it along
with Orthodox friends. Many writers discussing Malevich’s relationship to icons
are modernists hoping to sway aesthetic conservatives toward Malevich as
formally allied with Russian holy images. But Malevich was too insightful a
student of art history to be limited by that polemic to a total exclusion of the
whole all Catholic baroque. Is it possible to detect other aspects of Rubens, in
particular, as germane to his suprematist painting?
Yes, Rubens’s name was practically a swearword in the sophisticated Russian
artistic milieu. Then again, Malevich always had one foot out of that circle since
he was not Orthodox. Some works of Rubens that are, in a sense, all the more
Catholic than the Elevation of the Cross altarpiece are his ceiling paintings of
1620–1 for the Jesuit church in Antwerp (later dedicated to St. Charles Borromeo).
This project featured “holy pictures” in the most blatantly realistic Western sense,
including martyrdoms, as well as the near-martyrdom of Isaac. The actual
paintings perished in a 1718 lightning fire, but their compositions were preserved
not only in the form of preparatory drawings and oil sketches but also in prints.
These I find suggestive of Malevich—obviously not as motifs, but as radically
projected bodily axes and masses, and architectural forms, especially projected
sharply upward—a baroque technique called di sotto in sù, or worm’s-eye view,
that Rubens absorbed from the Venetian Renaissance.33 As against the otherwise
modern-compatible refusal of icons to deal with conventional Western
perspective (even indeed to reverse it), such pictorial dispositions give a decidedly
uplifting, aspirational character to the structures portrayed, especially against a
high white sky. (The worm’s-eye perspective was used in film by younger Sergei
Eisenstein, whom Malevich knew.34)
These skyward views of Rubens adumbrate not only Malevich’s suprematist
white fields as a way of overcoming the earth-mindedness of a blue sky but also
speak to his later ambition, with its science-fictional cast, of seeking to penetrate
the wider cosmos, a goal that would include architectural experiments projected as
space stations. Curiously, in 1898 Jacob Burckhardt (teacher of the great formalist
art historian Heinrich Wölfflin) was anxious about just such a wild aspect of these
very Rubens compositions, not to mention their shocking popularity (!): “I find
some difficulty in believing that he, whose composition was so perfect and so
absolutely adequate to a vertical surface, can have found great pleasure in handing
these figures, all of which had to be violently foreshortened. Yet commissions for
such things must have poured in upon him because of a universal preference for
116 Faith in Art

his ideas, composition and style.”35 Such heavenward compositions are as

characteristic of suprematism as the birdseye view of Impressionism or, for that
matter, the 30°-60°-90°-angled graphics of constructivism.
A telling example from the church project is Rubens’s Saint Athanasius
Overcoming Arius, of which there is a drawing in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg,36
as well as an engraving by Jan Punt from 1753, also in the Hermitage (Figure 3.6),
after a drawing by Jacob de Wit. In a general way, this Rubens composition,
preserved and disseminated in print form, can compare with Malevich’s Supremus
No. 58: Black and Yellow, 1916 (N/S-438; State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg;
Figure 3.7). Besides Malevich’s sweeping gray C-curve as broadly relating to the
saint’s billowing cape seen from below, shared compositional elements include
the similar axes of Athanasius’s bishop’s crook and Malevich’s long black diagonal,
and the jutting position of the recumbent Arius’s right leg and Malevich’s white
bar; also, Athanasius’s hooded head in relation to Malevich’s stack of four or five
black bands eclipsed by a face-like white rectangle.
Conceptually as well as formally speaking, such a source would provide a
peculiarly vivid example of an extremely Catholic baroque and absolutely anti-
iconic, artistic practice, whereby what might have been worldly baroque
naturalism in extreme form is employed as visible grounds of overtly metaphorical
truth.37 In Rubens’s Saint Athanasius Overcoming Arius, few adults would assume
that Arius is intended to be conquered physically by Athanasius: most would
grasp that Athanasius’s conquest was intellectual, even before finding out that he
triumphed specifically in metaphoric combat against a priest who did not accept
the divinity of Christ. However interesting it would be to know whether Malevich
had recourse to any of the Rubens prints of this image when conceiving and
rendering Supremus No. 58, one can already see that, in this case, he employed
something like an ordinarily naturalistic, Catholic-style compositional modality,
quite at odds with an Orthodox iconic view, in the negotiation of his own
suprematist composition.
Other possible parallels of this type appear among the Rubens’s Antwerp
ceiling panels. The Sacrifice of Isaac, featuring splayed, slat-like forms of the
angel’s and Abraham’s angular limbs silhouetted against the white sky, is
suggestive of the both wonderful and popular early suprematist canvas
Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying (1915; N/S-48; Museum of Modern
Art, New York), with its two sets of smaller and larger irregular rectangles in
yellow and black (suggestive of a then still futuristic biplane silhouetted against
the sky). In the panel of Saint Ambrose, the saint’s hefty body, standing on a
symmetrically angular cloud bank, is seen from nearly directly underneath,
 A Catholic Malevich 117

Figure 3.6 Peter Paul Rubens. Saint Athanasius Overcoming Arius, 1620–1; engraving
by Jan Punt after drawing by Jacob de Wit, 1753. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Photograph courtesy of the Museum.

Figure 3.7 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism (Supremus No. 58); or, Suprematist
Composition: Black and Yellow, 1916. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Alamy Ltd.
118 Faith in Art

while putti (cherubim) unfurl his dark robe in loose symmetrical triangles, like
a giant winged bird against the light sky. In the Martyrdom of Saint Eugenia,
corner blocks of a collapsing classical temple to a pagan deity are seen from
below, as partly occluded rotated squares.
I am not arguing for point-to-point sourcing here, but for something that is
both more generic and also both formidable and overlooked. These exciting
compositions from among Rubens’s destroyed ceiling paintings of prophets and
saints in the Antwerp church, disseminated in the form of prints publicly
available in Russia, are most striking for their aspirational, upward-looking—let
us say, Malevichian—point of view.
Rubens was also considered all too Catholic by Pavel Florensky (1882–1937),
art theorist and iconographer—as well as electrical engineer, Orthodox priest, and
martyr. The problem again was Rubens’s supposedly merely worldly fleshiness, as
well as Florensky’s belief, not uncommon in Orthodox circles, that engraving and
similar forms of printmaking—as modes of mechanical reproduction—are far
too rationalistically Protestant. In Iconostasis, his treatise on the icon, written in
1922 (though unable to be published in the Soviet Union until 1972), Florensky
compares Catholic and Protestant art modalities, each being found wanting as
compared with the Orthodox icon, of course. On the Catholic side, Rubens is
taken to follow a general stream of Germanic mysticism, which encouraged
“pantheistic phosphorescence” and “a shining instance of the self-luminescence of
large heavy flesh.” Such is part of “the practice in Catholic countries . . . a ceaseless
attempt to slip the sensuous into the logic of affirmation and negation.” At the
same time, “there is this inner affinity between Protestant rationalism and the
figurative linearity of engraving,” unlike the “inner affinity with between Catholic
esthetic imagination and the sensuous techniques if oil painting.”38
In our day, Boris Groys has accused Malevich, who, after all, had already been
elected to secure state art by the soldiers in revolutionary Moscow, of wishing to
destroy the museums in order to advance a better future for art by referring to
Malevich’s essay “On the Museum.”39 But in that essay, dated February 23, 1919,
of the futurist journal Iskusstvo Komuny (Art of the Commune), under the
editorship of the aggressive atheist Osip Brick, Malevich is being outrageously
Marinettian and futuristic (MK1:68–72). Two issues earlier, Malevich had
written on the bad results of Lenin’s monument competition (which Lissitzky
wished to enter; see Chapter 4), under the semi-blasphemous title (influenced by
Brik?) “Monuments Not Made by Human Hands.”40 Now, on February 23,
Malevich sounds more rhetorically like an Italian futurist than ever. He states
that we do not need museums nor churches either, what with their “droning of
 A Catholic Malevich 119

vaults and candle soot,” and he adds an absurdist, Marinettian affront to the
pope: “Is the Roman pope’s cap necessary to a two-six-four engine racing like
lighting over the globe and trying to take off from its back” (MK1:69). What is
telling about the degree of seriousness here is a remark both equating Rubens
with the Great Pyramid of Cheops and dismissing both as superfluous (ibid.)!
Unless I am beholden to a defective translation, it would seem that Groys, who
himself cannot resist indulging the trope of Rubens’s “fat asses,” does not seem to
appreciate Malevich’s fairly gentle witticism about religion.
Every mature Christian, and doubtless every Russian Orthodox adult in 1917,
has thought about the problem of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God
and how, in the End Times, the earthly institutional church becomes ultimately
superfluous. A priest I know said recently in a sermon that when the Kingdom
of God comes, faith and hope will no longer be necessary, only caritas, love. How
shall that affect art? It is justifiable to hold that art, too, including that created by
Rubens, could finally go by the boards, as well as (unless for joyous praise)
churches. But it is also plausible to take the likes of Rubens—and now Malevich—
as already gifts from above that everybody, not just an elite, are able to share. By
not being able to envision the world so transformed, Groys risks one of the only
two unforgiveable sins—despair—whereas the Bolsheviks flatly proceeded to
commit the other—presumption.
Nevertheless, the radical worm’s-eye point of view of the Rubens compositions,
which would horrify devotees of Orthodox icons even today for their excessive
reliance on the worldliness of (what many consider) objectively scientific
perspective,41 plausibly adumbrate a whole utopian aspect of Malevich’s work
concerning earthly sky as an intimation of the vast cosmos. Malevich’s interest in
the Russian icon is no surprise, but the extended domestic aspect of his Western
Catholicism (recall his devout mother living with him for his whole life) and the
easygoing ecumenism of his father would also seem to have been lasting
influences. This painter, a dreaded “formalist” in the time of Productivism, who
survived several Soviet government attempts to curtail his work and teaching,
had reasons never to disavow the formal resources of Rubens and perhaps other
Western masters of religious painting as well.
However circumstantial or coincidental, it seems appropriate to observe that
Rubens’s own management of a corps of engravers for making just such
reproduction prints as Saint Ambrose is hardly dissimilar from the way Malevich
surrounded himself at the Vitebsk school with student printmakers from his
UNOVIS club. In Malevich’s case, these printmakers were devoted to the more
modern medium of lithograph. Rubens had hired some dozen engravers from
120 Faith in Art

the studio of the Dutch painter Hendrick Goltzius, “trained . . . to a more athletic
line and more flashing contrasts”; as A. H. Mayor states, “By retraining the pupils
of one man, Rubens united his engravers under one epoch-making style that
liquefied undulations from light to dark in an inspiring new splendor. . . . [He]
had learned . . . to dramatize . . . a design so rugged that it survives execution by
others.”42
Aesthetically speaking, what Mayor implies here by the dramatization of a
design or composition allows for appeal to the interesting—to interestingness, as
such—as going altogether against the centrality of beauty in the classical
Mediterranean tradition. Despite its aesthetic unorthodoxy as characteristic of
northern European art, such an attitude was effectively struck in the 1580s, during
the Catholic Counter-Reformation, by St. Robert Bellarmine, writing on how
holy images ought to “hold people’s attention lest they be distracted by empty
reveries.”43 There is no denying that this would effectively have violated the
(ultimately neo-Platonic) contemplative restraint of the Eastern icon and assisted
in opening up the wider field of baroque “holy pictures,” such as those by Rubens.44
The exaggerated upward perspective in the Antwerp ceiling paintings, and the
widely diffused prints derived from them, bring to mind another important
interpretation of a Rubens affiliation. Walter Benjamin appreciated precisely this
optical point of architectural view as specifically Catholic baroque. In the closing
pages of his book The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), he gives an
extensive citation from Karl Borinski’s 1914 work on antiquity in European art
theory down to romanticism, including the remark: “The impression of
supernatural forces is supposed to be aroused in the powerfully projecting and
apparently self-supporting structures precisely in the upper regions . . . What else
can be the purpose of the . . . violence of the supporting and supported forces, the
enormous pedestals, the doubly and triply augmented projecting columns and
pilasters, the strengthening and reinforcement of their interconnecting elements
. . . What other function have they than to emphasize the soaring miracle above.”45
Our painter’s frequent irreverent comments on Sir Peter Paul Rubens become
so commonplace as to approach fraternal banter—even knowingly, Catholic to
Catholic. Undoubtedly, not everything Malevich has to say about Rubens is
dispassionate aesthetic critique. Being able to target extremes of baroque
naturalism in Rubens was an easy pedagogical trick even as the well-heeled
Rubens, with his social standing and powerful patrons, was the best artist it was
most fun to hate. Yet once, near the end of his life, Malevich actually turned this
critical slapstick around, in a letter to an unknown artist written on September 5,
1931: “Rubens is good, and Raphael’s no dummy either” (MS1:242).
 A Catholic Malevich 121

Letter to a Jewish Friend

Malevich’s friendship, as a Catholic, with the Jewish philosopher, cultural

historian, and critic Mikhail Gershenzon (1869–1925) is engaging in terms of
faith because the two men were fellow “others” to each other, as both different
from the Russian Orthodox around them. Gershenzon was also ten years older,
learned and culturally sophisticated, but he appealed to the intellectual anarchist
in Malevich: “The originality and independence of his worldview with its denial
of intelligentsia nihilism and Christian orthodoxy alike placed Gershenzon in
the position of a lone thinker, not fully understood by his contemporaries”
(MS1:109n).46 I think their considerable commonality entailed not only a shared
feeling of religious otherness in the new Russia but also some basic fidelity to
their remembered faiths. Vakar writes, in her afterword to the omnibus edition
of Malevich’s papers (2015), that “without Gershenzon, the world would never
have seen either God Is Not Cast Down or The World as Objectlessness” (MS2:583).
Gershenzon, the first president of the Moscow Union of Writers after the
Revolution, also knew the religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, who was
devoted, however eccentrically, to the Orthodox Church. Gershenzon held onto
Judaism as a “pantheistic religion of the cosmos.”47 Eventually, this happy
ecumenical circle, consumed with faith, broke up once Gershenzon finally
“rejected institutionalized religion, relying on cosmic thinking.”48
Without being interested much in painting, Gershenzon otherwise had a
generally cultivated aesthetic outlook, with an impetus that suggests something
of a Kamdinskyan sense of interior motivation. Brian Horowitz provides an
overview of it:
Gershenzon’s aesthetics parallel his metaphysics. In the concept of “vision” we
find all the elements of cosmic consciousness; we discover the idea that the
source of art is an outside (cosmic) force, that it enters the poet through the will,
and that inspiration occurs exactly when the poet is visited by these forces,
which denote revelation [emphasis added]. Thus, to derive the source of art, the
poet [or presumably artist] should not look outside, but within, in order to
glimpse the ideal vision of the universe. In this way, the creation of art is a
religious act, since by witnessing the vision, and sharing it, the poet [or
presumably, artist] makes unconscious experience (the link between the
individual and the cosmic will) clear and perceptible to consciousness.49

Howowitz is aware that the sources of this outlook trace, through contemporary
Russian religious philosophy, back to Friedrich Schelling in German idealism
(and, let us add, contemporaneously in the history of art, with Wilhelm
122 Faith in Art

Wackenroder’s Outpourings from the Heart of an Art-Loving Monk, of 1797). If

one could imagine Mondrian lecturing Kandinsky on how artistic insight is a
gift from God—a grace that is neither innate nor earned and hence is something
put into the heart—I would venture to say that that is something Malevich tacitly
understood.
Of Malevich’s letters, the most engrossing I have read in respect to religion
belong to an extended interreligious correspondence that Malevich carried on
with this “soul brother” Gershenzon, especially a long and rather confessional
one from Vitebsk, written on December 21, 1919. It could be called the Christmas
letter, having been written on the Sunday four days before the Catholic (but not
Orthodox) Christmas Day, which was also during Chanukah; and Malevich may
have been feeling homesick. In it, he analyzes his feelings at length on his
seemingly recent visits to services in three “temples”—namely, of the Catholic,
Orthodox, and Jewish faiths, in that order. In the letter, the artist seems to be
accounting for his own religious affects and orientation.
The Catholic church building, discussed first. Abbreviating here, it seems like
“velvet against the background of a ray of sun, full of life united with a field and
people,” built as vertical “wedge [an important suprematist motif], which
stubbornly dissects the cupola and goes [further upward] . . . It is not standing on
the ground anymore, but is on its way over it” (MS1:116–17). We shall return to
this characterization below, which may derive from the old Catholic Cathedral
of St. Barbara and St. Paul, in Vitebsk, built in a Neo-Romanesque style in the
1880s, with two lofty faceted towers.
Second, the Orthodox church building, “thick with mahogany-colored
sunlight, that is not touched, sated,” has an air of “finality,” of “nowhere to go, it is
under the lid of the sky that is holding onto the Earth, so that the wind will not
turn it over [implying a dome], it is sinking into the ground, being lit by a
mournful wooden torch” (MS1:116–17). This may or may not refer to the
domical eighteenth-century Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Assumption in
Vitebsk, apparently originally built as Uniate (that is to say, Orthodox in form
but Catholic in church polity).
The third temple, the synagogue, is “crystal, colorless, no temple at all,
illuminated by a small bright sun, not a live sun but a reflected one, which gleams
strong and tremulous, does not warm and is not colorful, it illumines the same
gray, faceted world, covered by mountains on which neither plants, nor animals,
nor people are visible” (MS1:116–17). This characterization cannot be linked to
a specific building because, of more than fifty synagogues in Vitebsk at the
beginning of the twentieth century, only a ruin of one survives; many old Jewish
 A Catholic Malevich 123

places of worship were made of wood. In the letter, the synagogue “stands to the
side, but one cannot say where exactly. Its structure cannot be called a structure,
rather, it is not present at all [this may conceivably imply it was a product of folk
woodwork, not striking Malevich as architectural], there is only its reflection.”
There follows a mostly inscrutable stream-of-consciousness sentence that, in
noting a multitude of biblical inscriptions on the walls and likely the thought of
sacrificial blood (apropos of the Jerusalem Temple), may have put Malevich the
Catholic in mind of the old Catholic-versus-Protestant dichotomy of the Mass
pitted against Bible: “Its world is filled with letters as if it had absorbed all the
plants and lives,” while there “glides” through its spaces “the spiritual bloodless
action of ringing, which needs neither suns nor plants, [and which] . . . does not
leave the cavity of countless letters” (MS1:117). Such “bloodless action” points up
a distinction: “Catholic is spicy, soft, velvety with a small quantity of blood.
Orthodox is full of blood revolving in the soil, aspiring to rise and ascend, but the
cupola of the sky oppresses. When I was attending religious services, I sensed in
myself a journey such as I briefly described: in the synagogue I flew along the
letters, having lost my body and blood—or else I would not have been able to see
that sun and that World” (ibid.; emphasis added).
For Malevich as artist, the most important theme in the Vitebsk synagogue
was the striking abundance of inscriptional lettering, and some ornamentation,
rather than any figural mural painting, a method chosen to satisfy the
commandment against natural image making. The young Lissitzky may already
have told Malevich, as early as 1919 at the Vitebsk School, about this aspect of his
study trip to the old wooden synagogue at Mogilev, Belarus, which also featured
plant and animal ornamental murals and inscriptions, in particular fictive,
hybrid animals like gryphons (see Chapter 4).
Visiting his three temples was a typically ecumenical mission for Malevich.
(So also is the omission of Protestantism, which the Orthodox also tend to
avoid.) His own Catholicism is affirmed when, in saying that he visited the
Orthodox church in the company of the religious philosopher Sergei Bulgakov—a
longtime friend of Gershenzon and a former Marxist who became an Orthodox
priest—he can only wonder why Bulgakov has not converted either to
Catholicism or Judaism since he “yearns for one Deity.” Actually, it might be
wrong to imply that Bulgakov has quite “left the religious church” (MS1:117),
because three or so years later, he would be exiled on the “Philosophers’ Ship” to
continue his priesthood and theology in Paris. Malevich goes on and on about
Bulgakov, despite having met him “only once and hav[ing] never read a single
one of his books” (MS1:119).
124 Faith in Art

As if coming up for air, he tells Gershenzon:

I will return to the church . . . Something different hangs over spirituality now,
the spirit has been defined as strength by summing up the entire universe of
spiritual materialism, the perfection of the breathing world culminates in it. The
moment is coming when this world will be no more [a phrase that probably
amalgamates John 16:16, “A little while, and you will see me no more . . .,” with
Revelation], its forms are old, worn out. The new world is coming, its organisms
are soul-less and mind-less, will-less, but mighty and strong, they are alien to
God and church and all religions, they are living and breathing, but their chests
are not moving, and their hearts are not beating, and the brain which has
migrated into their bodies moves them and itself using with a new force. . . . You
asked me to write about the other-worldly, of course such writing is the most
real, real in that it must be understood not by the mind, it is great scripture, it is
great for it describes or studies nothing, there was no such scripture, every
scripture wrote about God and perfections and meanings and truths, it wrote
about origins, and about what I am, and what happened in me and how, and in
general everything in it concerns this world.
MS1:119

At almost its end, the letter closes with a peculiarly insistent biblical device
whose import concerns the world’s ending and then starting again with the
coming of the Kingdom, as prophesied by Isaias, Daniel, and others. The painter
writes (somewhat crudely concerning the negative and positive aspects of his
apocalyptic dialectic), “The moment is coming when this world will be no more,
its forms are old, worn out. The new world is coming, its organisms are soul-less
and mind-less, but mighty and strong, they are alien to God and church and all
religions” (MS1:119). Such prophetic words are an allusion to an extended
discourse in the Gospel of John, beginning with Jesus saying, “Yet a little while,
and the world will see me no more, but you will see me; because I live, you will
live also” (Jn. 14:19), and continuing, “A little while, and you will see me no more;
again a little while, and you will see me” (Jn. 16:16). Shortly thereafter Jesus says,
“Truly, truly I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice;
you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy” (Jn. 16:20). Two other
sorrow-to-joy motifs follow (Jn. 16:21, 22), and finally Jesus ends: “I have said
this to you in figures; the hour is coming when I shall no longer speak to you in
figures but tell you plainly of the Father” (Jn. 16:25). All this is an extraordinary,
extended biblical riff, even for Malevich. Even this brief discussion of the letter
reveals Malevich’s depth of feeling for the Roman Catholic Church at the age of
forty, after the Bolshevik Revolution and toward the end of the Civil War.
 A Catholic Malevich 125

Malevich could be politically candid with his great friend Gershenzon when
persecution set in, and both were ecumenical. On February 11, 1922, he wrote
from Vitebsk, on Pablo Picasso’s cubism as something superseded by
suprematism: “Picasso struggled with the objective world, getting tangled up in
its fragments, but that was good, it was already easier for me to remove the
objective garbage and display infinity, non-practicality, non-expediency, and for
which the Moscow INKhUK [State Institute of Artistic Culture] is persecuting
me for not being a materialist. At one of the meetings, all of them ganged up at
on me, but if they were all innovators, and not objectivists, then they would
never have exchanged Art for the depiction of a saucepan for cooking grub”
(MS1:161). Driven here to express his frustration to his learned Jewish friend,
Malevich’s last phrase carries an allusion that Gershenzon would surely have
recognized. He is referencing Psalm 106:20, a wonderful verse against idol
worship: “They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats
grass,”50 a verse also echoed in the New Testament by St. Paul: “Claiming to be
wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for
images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles” (Rom. 1:22–3).
In a letter to Gershenzon two years later, written on October 13, 1924,
Malevich, at his wit’s end with his critics, quotes John the Evangelist (except
confusing him with John the Baptist, and to a rather twisted pont): “They are all
gravediggers who want to bury such semi-literate people as myself in the grave
of their documents; . . . we are darkness for them and they are the light; thus John
the Baptist spoke, ‘God is light, in which there is no darkness’ ” (1 Jn. 1:5). Another
New Testament allusion in the same letter is apparent where the painter writes:
“I was expelled from the Academy, but the Christians did not expel Paul, even
though he was not always in the same place, but I was expelled, therefore I am
thinking of shaking the dust from my feet” (MS1:175)—the figure of shaking the
dust from one’s feet is from Matthew 10:14.51
Gershenzon was an important friend whose understanding of religion
Malevich knew he could rely on. Much later, on June 15, 1931, he began a letter
to the Jewish painter Lev Antokolsky: “I had one other person who understood
what I am writing about. This was Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon, who wrote
The Trinary Image of Perfection” (1918) (MS1:240).
126 Faith in Art

God Is Not Cast Down: Art, Church, Factory

The insistent current of Malevich’s 1922 book God Is Not Cast Down: Art, Church,
Factory52 is a justification of the modern factory that attempts to equate devotion
to perfection in both factory and church, making for a somehow both heartening
and socially fulfilling result. Malevich never minded being counterintuitive: the
point is an idealist one that insists on making room for the godly dimension of
life even under the industrial system. Under a title sounding more attuned to
revolution when rendered as “God Is Not Overthrown,” the artist considers both
the church and the factory effectively as shrines of perfection, with that as a
divine attribute; the church being productive in its way, and the factory beholden
to divine creation in the form of science. The very idea of elaborating such a
scheme would prove a field day for a twenty-first-century cynic, but the important
thing to recognize in the present context is that the whole effort depended on
Malevich knowing full well what good can come from “church.”
Much had happened in Malevich’s artistic development and in the life of
Russia between his stage designs for the futurist opera Victory over the Sun,
mounted in prerevolutionary St. Petersburg in 1913, and this post-Civil War
lecture on God “not being cast down” at the postrevolutionary Museum of
Artistic Culture in what was now the city of Petrograd in June 1922. Subsequently
these ideas were published in one of Malevich’s small books (calling them
“booklets” trivializes these theoretically important missives) by the UNOVIS
club.
As for UNOVIS: The students had already founded a suprematist activist club
called MOLPOSNOVIS, acronym for “Followers of the New Art,” in 1920; on
Malevich’s joining it, it was renamed UNOVIS, “Champions [or Affirmers or
Exponents] of the New Art.”53 Members wore a badge consisting of a small black
square sewn onto their cuffs. Shatskikh suggests that the many Jewish students
from Vitebsk in the school would have appreciated the UNOVIS sleeve patch
as a two-dimensional counterpart to the small black box-shaped tefillin
(phylacteries) worn by Orthodox Jewish men for morning prayer.54 UNOVIS
did hold Jewish meaning for El Lisitzky (see Chapter 4). But to the tefillin
association I might add, as an ecumenical tit-for-tat, a different element of
religious haberdashery with which of Malevich, as the privately Catholic leader,
may have been aware: a certain small white-upon-white cross badge that
Catholic—but apparently not Orthodox—priests have embroidered on the cuffs
of their liturgical albs.
 A Catholic Malevich 127

UNOVIS published the book version of God Is Not Cast Down as one of
Malevich’s small “artists’ books.” The manuscript is dated 1920; publicly, the text
began as a pair of lectures, first at the Latvian Club (renamed Communist
Club),55 in Vitebsk, on April 9, 1922, and then in the first week of June at the
Petrograd Museum of Artistic Culture. Malevich designed a poster for the June
lecture in Petrograd (N/S-641), also produced by UNOVIS at the lithographic
workshop of the school. The poster is extraordinary for resembling the reverse
of an Orthodox icon, with two lateral horizontal slats called shponki, meant to
brace a wooden panel to prevent warpage. Such a “material allusion” is already
interesting because it shows Malevich managing to fight back against arrogant
constructivist, antimetaphysical materialism—just what he disputes in the
lecture—by overcoming any onus of being so idealistic as a formalist painter as
not to think or care about the material and structural peculiarities of an icon’s
physical chassis.
In this text as a whole, the word God so proliferates that one would never
know that Russia was at the start of its huge atheistic campaign—that speaking
of God would effectively be forbidden—and hardly because of the commandment
against taking the Lord’s name in vain (the name of God is never used derisively
here). A single paragraph uses “God” or “Godly” fourteen times; “Christ” appears
only twice, and “the Trinity” only twice, likely in deference to the Jewish majority
of the students and Malevich’s protégé Lissitzky, who was now on the faculty;
Lissitzky organized and helped with the printing of the book and posters. Too
dense for synopsis, the text can be “test-drilled” for key points.
When the Trinity is first mentioned, God’s unity is stressed. As ordinarily
Christian as that is, it is more profoundly theological that Malevich addresses the
Trinitarian “procession” (conceived as occurring outside of time): “Man’s
reasoning built God in the three principles of God [the Father], the Spirit, and
the Son” (§22; KM1:209). This is the Orthodox sequence of procession, not the
Catholic one of Father to Son to Spirit: Malevich may have been taking his
audience into account. The same passage is accompanied by a definite Catholic
topos, almost as if in compensation: an allusion to Christ’s commission to Peter
as the “rock” (Mt. 16:18), which Catholics appreciate as a pun because “Peter” is
from the Aramaic for “rock”—a fact touched on no fewer than three times here
by Malevich, in addition to the use of “rock-like.”
Malevich argues again and again, mainly by example, that factory and church
should be equal because both are devoted to “perfection,” especially with regard
to human progress. He claims industrial perfection can be as inspiring and even
aesthetically rewarding as divine creation. He may or may not know that he is
128 Faith in Art

skirting a serious theological issue on the progress side, the Pelagian heresy,
though by not being central, this need not bring down the whole argument.
Pelagianism holds that humanity can save itself without God’s grace, by its own
progressive secular means. Instead of acting like an inquisitor accusing Malevich
of Pelagianism, however, I would give him some benefit of the doubt by quoting,
from our own historical moment, a line from Pope Francis’s 2013 encyclical on
behalf of the environment, Laudato si’: “Technoscience . . . can also produce art
and enable men and women immersed in the material world to ‘leap’ into the
world of beauty. Who can deny the beauty of an aircraft?” (§103).56
In this important text by Malevich, the word “art” hardly appears. The triad in
question boils down operationally to an opposition between church and factory,
as industrial perfection vies, in modern times, with divine creative perfection,
while, here and there, “spirit” stands in for art. Late in the essay are the only three
sections in which the word “art” appears at all. But as art takes center stage, as if
in a finale, much of the entire exposition becomes clearer, especially how
Malevich hoped aesthetico-politically to assuage the constuctivists, who sought
to abandon the felt humanity of suprematism as insufficiently rational and
modern.
In section 27, life’s three paths are given as “the spiritual or religious, the
scientific or factory, and that of art,” all separately signifying perfection and
advancing “towards the absolute” or God. Beauty might be taken (unfortunately,
I think) as an embellishment for both religion and the factory, though it is
possible to read this as having nothing to do with superfluous embellishment
because the factory is equally serious: “Like religion, so equally the factory moves
solemnly in art” (MK1:216).
Section 28 praises religion, including as strong a defense as the painter can
muster of the immortal soul, which he considers “nothing other than a particle
of immortal God” (MK1:216), an idea originating before Christianity with the
Stoics and which Malevich believes quite firmly. However obscure it might seem,
a Catholic might also associate this figure of a particle of God with the “Fraction”
or fractio panis (bread-breaking) in the Mass, where the priest breaks his own
host before distributing Communion.
Art—which Malevich suddenly reminds himself ought to be “most
important”—comes up again in section 29 but only in the form of one word,
indeed a name. A personification of art speaks here, from such a wholly
advantageous position of complete harmony that sin is impossible. In terms of
the painter’s situation in Russia from 1920 to 1922, this concerns the tremendous
advantage of liberation from alienation and beyond social class: “All the rest are
 A Catholic Malevich 129

still divided into ranks, great and small, holy and sinful; they still make war and
suffer in blood and chains. Let anyone that wishes to listen to the harmony of
rhythms follow my path” (MK1:217–18). He speaks of a socially efficacious
formalism far beyond art for art’s sake. How can we not note that Kandinsky,
Mondrian, and Lissitzky (to come) all had such religiously inspired and not
necessarily merely “utopic” concerns.
In section 31, both art and religion “make bliss” (which I believe might
better be translated as “happiness”), indicating that both concern abolishing
alienation:

Making happiness is making truth, for truth in factory production has not yet
attained the happiness achieved by Religion and art, for here everyone makes his
[or her] own happiness, and develops [their] spiritual basis. Factory workers
make happiness for the enjoyment of others and therefore the new teachings of
socialism are striving to make people produce their own happiness and to see
that whoever does not make it does not enjoy it either. Therefore the church says:
“He who does not pray and make [happiness] will not enter the kingdom of
heaven”; the factory has produced a similar slogan, “He who does not work does
not eat.”
MK1:218–19

Only Malevich’s typically Catholic, and ever shaky knowledge of scripture

allows him to say that! He had touched on the same theme in a letter to Pavel
Ettinger of April 3, 1920, from Vitebsk, where he writes about how much effort it
is to produce his small books: “There is a hell of a lot of work invested in them,
but, as the current saying goes, ‘he who does not work will not eat,’ while a second
one says ‘he who does not pray will not enter into the kingdom of heaven,’ so the
priest is in accord with the proletarians” (MS1:127). Between the 1920 draft of
God Is Not Cast Down and its lecture delivery and publication in 1922, Malevich
produced a long tract on Sloth—The Real Truth of Humanity (1921), in which he
speculates that “in order to get rid of death,” Socialism and Communism outdo
earlier systems by keeping everyone busy; however confusedly, he adds, “This is
why the cruelest of laws in this inhuman system stated: ‘He who does not work,
does not eat,’ this is why it fights Capitalism, because Capitalism gives rise to ‘lazy
people,’ . . . so that the highest curse given by God to man—work—receives the
highest blessing in the Socialist system” (MK4:74). One appreciates the irony,
despite the confusion, but this awkward effort to make Christian and Marxist
principles agree seems to forget the more powerful evidence of 2 Thessalonians
3:10–13: “If anyone will not work, let him not eat,” which was said in order to
130 Faith in Art

admonish those living idly off the labor of others. More fascinating, too, while
Malevich was likely working on Sloth, one M. M. Adamovich, a designer (1921–
2) for the state porcelain factory (formerly the Imperial Lomonosov factory),
produced a hefty, popular dinner plate, of what Americans call Buffalo chinaware,
in a modernist design, including Natan Altman’s portrait of Lenin along with the
inscription, “He Who Does Not Work Does Not Eat.” Malevich himself would
have surely seen the design when he went to work there in 1923, by which time
he might have been reminded of the missed chance of citing the Epistle.
In God Is Not Cast Down, Malevich also draws from church teachings to
describe a man or woman in heaven, free of pain and suffering, “seat[ed] . . . on
one side of God’s throne; in eternal prayer, he will be free from any bodily cares,
for in the Kingdom of heaven perfection has been reached: there is no need to
feed the body, or to overcome anything, for everything has been done and
overcome—only spiritual action remains. What then, does the factory or
industrial plant expect to attain? It expects by labour to attain liberation from
labour” (MK1:219). Summarizing: “It is clear in all these comparisons both
church and factory are moving towards the same thing (God, [though] I am not
saying the [same] place)” (MK1:220).
Who can say what might have happened in Russia had decent elements of the
state church chimed in with non-Bolshevik socialists not dogmatically
committed to atheism, so that the Christian social conscience might have made
common cause even with the nonaggressively unchurched. Horrors of church
suppression might have been avoided, and great social advances could have been
made in a spirit of blessings for all—“blessings” as if to obviate gratuitous
Pelagianism. Having Marxists overcome dogmatic atheism might almost have
been easier than the lurking problem on the churchly side in an ostensibly
Christian but selfishly capitalist society. We cannot solve this problem here, but
Malevich’s younger colleague Lissitzky would push it further by becoming a
Communist for ultimately religious reasons, as we will discuss in the following
chapter.
When Malevich does eventually get to art, he writes, “[Humanity] has divided
. . . life into three paths, the spiritual or religious, the scientific or factory, and that
of art,” these being “the three paths along which [people move] towards God. In
art God is conceived as beauty simply because in beauty there is God.” Insofar as
beauty is associated with art, Malevich implies that truth is associated with
science and that goodness (especially productiveness) is associated with factory.
These homegrown transcendentals make it possible for him to also say, “Religion
and the factory summon art to adorn them with a cloak of beauty”—the most
 A Catholic Malevich 131

unmodern statement I have ever seen imputed to Malevich. The paths are in
competition with one another but at one in their commitment to perfection, a
word that Malevich drives home at every opportunity for its aspirational quality
(§27; KM1:216).
Remarkably, our painter hopes, near the end, to make peace with the new
society, equating social happiness with the divine. Significantly, religion is, as
much as permitted, generally superior because all three ways to God are deemed
forms of “church”: “Factory workers make [happiness] for the enjoyment of
others and therefore the new teachings of socialism are striving to make people
produce their own [happiness] and to see that whoever does not make it does
not enjoy it either” (§31; MK1:218). Here, once again, Malevich shows that he
does not quite understand that 2 Thessalonians 3:10 adumbrates Marxism on
the lazy bourgeoise (MK1:218–19). Yet he does reintroduce the notion of the
Kingdom of God: “Religion’s [happiness] consists of attaining the Kingdom of
heaven”—described conventionally enough but with the kind of telltale mistake
of memory that a trained believer would make: the believer “will seat himself at
one side of God’s throne” (MK1:219). Although the saved are traditionally seated
to the right of God the Father in Western as well as Eastern iconography, here
Malevich seems instead to be misremembering the Apostle’s Creed, where it is
specifically Jesus who is “seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.”
The misprision strongly suggests that Malevich had once known the Creed word
for word, a prayer ordinarily learned in childhood from one’s mother.
Over all, Malevich’s pronouncements in God Is Not Cast Down do register the
influence of being the baptized son of two Catholics, with a father who was a
supervising engineer in a factory with a known amateur interest in theology. A
conclusive passage occurs close to the end of the book, as Malevich makes his own
faith known while being as conciliatory as possible and perhaps as complicated as
possible to the new atheist state: “Hence, in order to destroy God one must prove
the death of the soul, or the body as matter; but since the sciences and various
other attempts have failed to prove the latter, it is impossible to cast God down.
Thus God is not cast down.” Since modern physics shows that matter is never
destroyed but only takes on a different constitution, he reiterates, “Appearances are
destroyed, but not the essence . . . Thus God is not cast down” (§33; KM1:223).
By the post–Civil War time of this publication, in 1922--when the Soviet
Union was inaugurated on December 30,--the great ideological dispute in
Russian art, between purportedly advanced, materialistic “construction,” on one
side, and purportedly reactionary, idealistic formal “composition” on the other,
had come to a head. Christina Lodder expects to make a clean-cut materialist
132 Faith in Art

point by maintaining that Lenin’s New Economic Policy of 1921 made “this
struggle . . . necessary”; but I find it counter-intuitive to suppose that it should
have been the new “limited market economy . . . foster[ing] the re-emergence of
wealthy bourgeois social elements who could exercise patronage” that closed
down fine art once and for all.57 At that moment Kandinsky, for one, was
decidedly employing both terms, “composition” and “construction,” sometimes
in the same sentence, in his writings—though perhaps defensively. Aesthetically
speaking, this opposition still has consequences in art and criticism at the
beginning of the twenty-first century. But in God Is Not Cast Down, the religious
question of Pelagianism arises as it had to once Russian culture was being totally
laicized. Now that our current Western culture is so secular, few understand that
it used to be possible not only to believe in God but also to believe that a
revolution, even the October Revolution, might be a portent of just what the
prophets had hoped for. What a tremendous disappointment must have set in for
progressive leftist believers circa 1921.
The lecture alone would have constituted a major addition to Malevich’s
police dossier once religion was legally forbidden, especially for someone
on a state salary as teacher and researcher. Charlotte Douglas writes that the
book received generally “harsh criticism . . . as soon as it was published” (an
important journalistic aftereffect is soon to be specified); and then, when
Lenin died, in 1924, “Malevich’s open philosophical idealism was increasingly
vulnerable to attack, as right-wing artistic opinion gained ascendency, and
lent its support to the popular AKhRR—the Association of Artists of
Revolutionary Russia—a large aggressive network of realist artists that
advanced its nineteenth-century derivative styles as the only genuinely
‘proletarian’ art.”58 Malevich actually wrote a heartfelt eulogy to Lenin, which
would not likely have been politically motivated because it could only confirm
his scorned idealism.59
In June 1926, an exhibition of his experimental architectural forms in
Leningrad at GINKhUK, the State Institute of Artistic Culture, where he had
been heading the Formal and Theoretical Section of the research studios,
provoked devastating criticism. A young radical critic named Grigory Seryi
published a “deliberately crude” review in the Leningrad Communist newspaper
Pravda on June 10, 1926, under the headline, “A Government-Supported
Monastery”—proclaiming its damning pseudo-religious accusation of Malevich’s
studio. Seryi wrote:
 A Catholic Malevich 133

A monastery has taken shelter under the name of a state institution. It is

inhabited by several holy crackpots who, perhaps unconsciously, are engaged in
open counterrevolutionary sermonizing, and making fools of our Soviet
scientific establishments . . . .
The Control Commission and the Workers and Peasants Inspection should
investigate this squandering of the people’s money on the state support of a
monastery.
Now, when gigantic tasks are towering before proletarian art, and when
hundreds of really talented artists are going hungry [so was Malevich], it is
criminal to maintain a huge, magnificent mansion so that three crazy monks
can, at government expense, carry artistic debauchery or counterrevolutionary
propaganda that is not needed by anybody.60

This effort was successful: this campaign, based solidly on clichés casting
Malevich as a religious airhead, resulted in the artist losing his job and the
institute being closed.
In 1927, after returning from showing his work in Warsaw and visiting Berlin
and the Bauhaus, Malevich was detained by the police. In 1929, the art historians
of the State Institute for the History of Art had him and his associates expelled.
A longstanding consensus held that when he was imprisoned for over two
months and questioned on his views on modern art in 1930, friends burned
many of his papers, presumably including anything incriminatingly religious.
That view is now considered exaggerated.61 Yet, as far as religion is concerned, in
the standard Troels Andersen edition of the artist’s writings, which came out in
1968 for texts published in the artist’s lifetime (MK1 and 2), and in 1976 and
1978 for unpublished texts (MK3 and 4), the unpublished group includes
approximately twice as many references to God, religion, or the church—a
seeming indication of increasing state censure of religion. In any case, Malevich
was undoubtedly brave to stage the lectures and promulgate the book.

A Note on “Suprematism”

A short text on suprematism by Malevich, called “Non-Objective Creation and

Suprematism,” appeared in April 1919 in the catalogue of the Tenth State
Exhibition: Non-Objective Creation and Suprematism, in Moscow. It touches
religion at one point, by recourse to the term “incarnation”—for the sake of
comprehending the space inside things (MK1:121).62 But the principal text on
the subject is Malevich’s essay on “Suprematism,” published in German at the
134 Faith in Art

Bauhaus in 1927, in an official Bauhaus book titled Die gegenstandlöse Welt

(The Nonobjective World). It consists of two essays, “Introduction to the Theory
of the Additional Element in Painting” and “Suprematism.” The former prepares
the reader by covering pre-Suprematist modern painting and how Suprematism
came to be, while the latter presents this “supreme” style of our age.
“Suprematism” opens with the stirring definition: “Under Suprematism I
understand the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art” (67).63 Here religion is
not hidden, but it has become politically problematic. It is no longer possible to
expect religion and the state to stand side by side under the good graces of art,
which is what Malevich wished could happen, so that the Suprematist way of
thinking could encourage people to think about life in a spiritually utilitarian
manner: “The art of the past which stood, at least ostensibly, in the service of
religion and the state, will take on a new life in the pure (unapplied) art of
Suprematism, which will build up a whole new world—the world of feeling” (68;
emphasis original). This statement brings out precisely what is problematic
about Malevich’s intersections with religion: Malevich’s great lesson is that the
pure abstraction of suprematist art inculcates a state of working creativity with a
spiritually utilitarian viewpoint. The problem is that to defend this proposition,
as he states repeatedly here, he needs to show religion, twinned with the state, as
somehow playing second fiddle to art. At most, this effort is to support the notion
that suprematism—as a view of life being revealed visually in art and not a mere
style of painting—is really an dynamic mode of creativity which could benefit
persons active in both church and state, as well as others who might be able think
more inventively.
Here Rubens is also implicated, with his occidental equals Raphael and
Rembrandt, as all too accommodating of the (can we say—) capitalistic cult of
material thingliness (an opposite Eastern caricature might be a Russian peasant
mesmerized by a church icon in a precious metal riza embellished with
gemstones). For—”Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art which, in the
course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of ‘things.’ ” Even the
painting of Rubens and his peers “has become nothing more than a conglomeration
of countless ‘things,’ which conceal its true value—the feeling which gave rise to
it. The virtuosity of the objective representation is the only thing admired. If it
were possible to extract from the works of the great [Western] masters the feeling
expressed in them—the actual artistic value, that is—and to hide this away, the
public, along with the critics and the art scholars, would never even miss it. So it
is not at all strange that my square seemed empty to the public.” (74).
 A Catholic Malevich 135

A certain unapologetic idealist element here also concerns religion. Art may
gain in seriousness when it resembles religion; but obsessive thingly likeness and
fanaticism are similarly offensive. The contemporary idealist philosopher Ortega
y Gasset elucidates an analogy of both art and religion to sport, in an essay “Signs
of the Times” (1923): “If the final aim of the task which gives sense and value to
effort is to be found in work, the spontaneous effort which dignifies the result is
to be found in sport. . . . Tasks that are valuable are only completed through the
mediation of this anti-economic type of effort: scientific and artistic creation,
political and moral heroism, religious sanctity, are the sublime results of ‘sporting’
efforts.”64
Religion, for its part, ought to be pleased that the new art categorically avoids
idolatry by avoiding representation, even as iconoclasm toward past art can be
helpfully restrained by attention to formal beauty, over and against pagan or
irreligious content. As Malevich says in the same place: “An antique temple is not
beautiful because it once served as the haven of a certain social order or of
religion associated with this, but rather because its form sprang from a pure
feeling of plastic relationships. The artistic feeling which was given material
expression in the building of the temple is for us eternally valid and vital but as
for the social order which once encompassed it—it is dead” (78). At that point,
formalism saves Malevich from paganism. But then there may even be an
element of Catholic partisanship in his defense of Amiens Cathedral as a great
work of art that succeeds in being somehow “objectively” other than the feudal
system that erected it and that otherwise still historically infuses it. Malevich
does keep to himself a notion that the Gothic cathedral may be exceptionally
appropriate for prayer. After all, he wants Marxism itself to take on more a
suprematistic-humanistic scope—more than the rapacious capitalists could ever
do—because the feudal system is indeed quite dead, even as Amiens’s artistic
splendor, as affiliated with suprematist aspirational formalism, manages to live
on. So a small but hardly incidental episode, reminiscent of the Gershenzon
letter, with the ancient pagan temple poised against the prayerful pre-reformation
cathedral, already puts the reader in mind of Malevich’s aiming for higher,
broader social horizons without being divorced from faith—in state, church,
and art.
The revelation now is that, after Malevich entered a wider world of
international secular modernity, excused, as it were, by his aesthetic sympathy
for the Russian icon, there was always “more to it” than that, even if, two
generations later, students would no longer even know what is meant by referring
136 Faith in Art

to God. There is a tendency to blame the Bauhaus itself for some of the West’s
cultural turn away from religious faith; but the school was actually “all right”
with belief. Malevich’s in-house editors had more faith left in them than one
might think: Walter Gropius was basically Lutheran, and László Moholy-Nagy
successively converted to the Hungarian Reformed Church in 1918 and
supported the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. One can only wonder if
Malevich could have gone as far as to speak of suprematism as a vehicle of grace?
His cosmopolitan editors did permit him various forms of the term “religion.”65
In a curious coda to this essay published by the Bauhaus—though reminiscent
of God Is Not Cast Down—Malevich writes: “Both the Church and industry tried
to monopolize those artistic abilities which, being creative, are constantly finding
expression, in order to provide effective bait for their products (for the ideal-
material as well as for the purely material).” Even faith has become curiously
fickle: “The aggregated reflections of feelings in the individual’s consciousness . . .
determine his ‘view of life.’ Since the feelings affecting him change, the most
remarkable alterations in this ‘view of life’ can be observed: the atheist becomes
pious, the God-fearing, godless, etc.” (88). Finally, the painter adds: “We have
seen how art, at the turn of the century, divested itself of the ballast of religious
and political ideas which had been imposed upon it and had come into its own—
attained, that is, the form suited to its intrinsic nature and become, along with
the two already mentioned, a third independent and equally valid ‘point of view’ ”
(94, 98). No one had to tell Malevich, who likely considered himself sort-of-
religious as well as quite political, even as he was thoroughly devoted to art, that
such a statement would hardly mollify the powers that be.
 4

A Jewish Lissitzky

Background

This book has thus far had to face up to the conventional wisdom of referring
anything suggestive of faith as a grounding of “spiritual” value in the cases of
three Christian painters—Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich—simply to
Theosophy. Happily there is nothing of that to deny in the case of the important
Russian Jewish abstract painter, architect, designer, and photographer El Lissitzky
(1890–1941). Indeed, many of his devotees would never be tempted to consider
him “spiritual” at all. Lazar Markovich Lissitzky was born in Lithuania when it
was part of the Russian empire. Like his Russian colleagues he strove to carry
over the artistic high-mindedness of abstract painting into the next generation
of constructivist art, notwithstanding that their ever more dogmatic
constructivism became the nemesis of his older mentor and colleague Malevich.
But Lissitzky’s outlook was not so indifferent to organized, as well as revealed,
religion as has been supposed.
When Lissitzky visited Paris as a young man in 1911, he met up with Osip
Zadkine, a friend from Yu Pen’s art school in Vitebsk, where he had taken art
lessons as a boy. As involved in debates about the future of Jewish art as Zadkine
was, it might seem odd to defer as an authority on Jewish culture to one whose
mother is supposed to be “Scottish” and whose father may have converted to
Christianity. But from him Lissitzky learned of two polarizing views at the time
regarding contemporary Jewish art. First was the notion that a people whose
homeland was in the Near East ought to look to the art of the ancient Near East,
such as Assyrian and Egyptian art, alongside European modernists who were
interested in such. Then there was the more Jewish, antiquarian view of the
Russian Empire. Adherents of this latter group produced a simple visual
publication named Makhmadim (Treasure) by pre-photocopy means; Shatskikh
describes it as “textless, it was made up of drawings and graphic illustrations of
subjects from the Bible and Jewish folklore—in their stylized decorativeness it

137
138 Faith in Art

was easy to recognize an affinity with modernism.”1 Lissitzky was adept enough
to be inspired by the challenge of engaging with but also overcoming the
folkloric, in order to advance his becoming both genuinely Jewish and modern.
In Lissitzky’s case, conventional wisdom expects to consider his Jewish book
illustration, especially for children’s books, as a charming ethnic prelude to his
important career, which somehow managed to expand design concerns even to
the interior architecture of exhibition spaces but whose devotion to the
Communist state is either ignored or made to seem oddly inexplicable. I believe,
instead, that Lissitzky’s art and its implications encouraged a sense of basic and
enduring religiosity that led quite naturally into Communism as a conceivable
fulfillment of age-old Jewish aspirations for the Kingdom of God and divine
justice. Even one as Orthodox Christian as Pavel Florensky (finally killed by
Stalin in 1937), considered every icon, Old Testament or New, as “the image of the
future age” (emphasis original).2
Lissitzky grew up in a middle-class Jewish family; his mother was observant
but his father, a white-collar railroad employee, was not. A significant, collectively
religious feature of their home life, nevertheless, was that the family liked to read
the biblical book of Ecclesiastes together. At age twenty-one, Lissitzky wrote a
letter to a friend while reading Ecclesiastes by himself: “I . . . have been working
from six in the morning till six at night. Now, I’m sitting on a sofa at home,
reading Ecclesiastes and thinking that there is more sense in this hour of sitting
and reading than in a week of my work. If I’m finally convinced of this I’ll send
it all to hell.”3
In 1921, Lissitzky became a cultural attaché for revolutionary Russia in Berlin,
where, in 1922, with the also Russian Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenberg, he started the
Russian-German-French constructivist journal Veshch / Gegenstand / Objet,
which lasted for three issues, with the last one banned from the U.S.S.R. This
moment is often regarded as a tipping point, when Lissitzky stopped being in
harmony with suprematism and came to support a more categorically materialist
constructivism, though even that would now no longer be good enough back
home.
In an article titled “The Victory over Art” (also translated as “Overcoming
Art”) in the Yiddish journal Ringen, in the same year of 1922, he affirms his
loyalty to Malevich and to suprematism as one who, rather than being beholden
to the engineering in which he himself was expert, “believe[s] more in creative
intuition, which creates its method, its system outside of mathematics and
drawings but according to laws which are also as organic as the shape of a
flower.”4 Yet in the same article, he says (as observed above), “Just as we were
 A Jewish Lissitzky 139

victorious over religion, so we are fighting with our new accomplishments for
victory over art.” The possibly rhetorical remark raises a question: since Lissitzky’s
practice did not abandon art in 1922—especially in comparison with the more
severely anti-aesthetic productivist standards of Alexsi Gan, who in his book
Constructivism, also of 1922, voiced utter hatred of religion—couldn’t Lissitzky’s
own more dialectical spirit then have accommodated a view of religion as an
abiding antithesis? Any such thing had become impossible.

An Old Synagogue in Modern Time

It was in 1923 that Lissitzky published a searching text on his relation to the
Jewish artistic and architectural past: his article “The Mohilev Synagogue:
Reminiscences,” on the Mogilev (or Mohilev) Synagogue, in the twin Berlin
journals Milgroim (Yiddish) and Rimon (Hebrew). The fascinating essay concerns
Lissitzky’s expedition with his student friend, the painter Issachar Ber Ryback, in
approximately 1916. The friends sought out this seventeenth-century timber
synagogue in Mogilev, Belarus, only about fifty miles from Russia, and saw a
number of related works as well (Figure 4.1).5 The article is often cited for Jewish
folkloristic reasons, but at least as strongly it evinces religiosity in a modern
cosmopolitan situation. True, early modernism had a reserved place for a certain
amount of folklore, especially of a romantic national or liberationist nature, and
the repute of this fabled building to this day depends on its folkloric murals,
executed around 1740 by one Chaim, son of Isaac Segal. Lissitzky and Ryback’s
report on the murals and their own drawings and watercolors became inestimably
important from an antiquarian viewpoint once the building, which had first
been landmarked after the Revolution, was dismantled for its materials under
Stalin in 1938. At the time of the 1923 article, however, the Mogilev Synagogue
seems also to have had a distinctly nonfolkloric, not to say modernist, appeal for
Lissitzky, as by no means compromising its great Jewish interest.
When patronizing artistic admirers of the folkloric find charming or exotic
whatever religiosity may be close to the surface in folk art, anything like an
exercise of faith in the form of worship, scripture reading, prayer, or charity is
today, as a rule, out of the question. It is almost as if sheer lack of faith has become
a more socially acceptable substitute for belief, despite the negative valence.
What, then, could even survive of a supposedly unspoiled folkloric “spirituality”
besides its own exclusionisms: we saw much the same problem with the
aggressively secularist attitude toward Kandinsky’s interest in Vologda peasant
140 Faith in Art

Figure 4.1 Mogilev (or Mohilev) Synagogue, c. 1680 (destroyed c. 1938);

photograph by Solomon Yudovin, 1913. Courtesy of the Russian Ethnographic
Museum, St. Petersburg.

culture, as discussed in Chapter 1. Similarly, some writers on Lissitzky’s interest

in the Mogilev Synagogue cannot use the word “Jewish” in a sentence without
adding the word “national,” which, perversely enough (if you expect to consider
your artist assimilated), would have to mean other-than-truly Russian.
Contrast with that viewpoint a modernist painter and architect who seems to
have felt close to God in a landmark synagogue while also trying his best as a
decent Communist to effect the Kingdom of God’s justice in the ever problematic
present. This will not sound so counterintuitive if one thinks of people as divided
between those who manage to believe in God along with some form of social
harmony making for divine justice and those who cannot project beyond
themselves in either direction. It seems quite possible that Lissitzky was able to
negotiate on both sides of the matter and that he was not as conflicted as one
might think. If conservatives might not wish to countenance Lissitzky’s up-to-
date materialist constructivism, even as radicals would prefer not to countenance
his residual idealist suprematism, how surprised can a critical person be?
As for the elaborate old mural paintings in the Mogilev Synagogue, they were
perhaps most interesting in a quasi-conceptual way. Through their antinaturalistic
 A Jewish Lissitzky 141

figuration—not in the sense of depiction but, on the contrary, of recourse to

tropes that violate nature (such as a lion with human face)—they not only
circumvented the important biblical commandment against representing created
beings but had a sort of invented modern interest on a collage principle.
But it is possible that giving so much attention to these essentially folkloristic
murals has completely overshadowed a likely more penetratingly modernist
architectural response to what must have been a magnificent early building of
about 1680. Lissitzky himself sets the scene by situating his own youthful,
provincial artistic ambitions and those of his Jewish friends: “Searching for our
identity, for the character of our times, we attempted to look into old mirrors and
tried to root ourselves in so-called ‘folk-art.’ Almost all the other nations of our
time followed a similar path” (149). But Lissitzky also says that, on first sight, he
saw this building as “resembling a granary”—a remark that needs scrutiny, given
the interest European modernist architects were taking in Western Hemisphere
grain elevators at this historical moment, as expressed especially in Le Corbusier’s
Towards a New Architecture (1923). Several huge grain elevators (boxy and
noncylindrical in form) from North and South America had already been
published by Gropius in a German Werkbund journal in 1913, where they could
easily have been consulted by our architectural-engineering student in Germany,
before being reused, a decade later, in Corbusier’s instantly classic book.6 And on
wider theoretical terms, there was the modern notion that the progress of
architecture depended on the sublimation of utility. For instance, this line of
thinking held that the Gothic cathedrals would have been impossible without
the development of the bay system for ordinary barns, developed around the
year 1000.
I am speculating that in the article on the synagogue, Lissitzky may have been
toning down a more extreme modernist admiration that might have caused
trouble in the journalistic (not to mention religious) press: namely, that the
beauty of the timber synagogue resembles a particularly beautiful contemporary
factory—not just any factory, but Erich Mendelsohn’s great Steinberg, Herrmann,
and Company Hat Factory in Luckenwalde, Germany, which was built only
thirty-five miles from Berlin, between 1921 and 1923. This structure is a
longitudinal, hip-roofed, volumetric prism with similarly chunky chamfering of
the ends in the manner of the venerable synagogue. One can easily sympathize
with young Lissitzky, asking townsfolk where to find this splendid synagogue,
only to be directed instead to “some ‘beautiful’ stone synagogues with boudoir
lamps and freshly painted cornices and panels in the style of a provincial movie
palace[!]” (ibid.). Relevantly, the first building built by Mendelsohn, Lissitzky’s
142 Faith in Art

Jewish contemporary, was probably thanks to his father, a small Jewish liturgical
space: a funerary washing and enshrouding hall (Bet Tahara) in his hometown
of Olsztyn, Poland, in 1913. By about the time of the article, Mendelsohn and he
were colleagues.
Also on the religious side of the matter is a minor yet extraordinary detail in
Lissitzky’s article. In describing the synagogue interior, Lissitzky as much as
ritually identifies with it by calling subconscious attention to wearing a yarmulke,
or else to having forgotten it (which amounts to the same thought motif), in his
description: “The synagogue has a square ground plan which passes into an
octagonal vault closely resembling a skull-cap. The transition between the square
and the octagon is achieved by triangular pendentives. The walls and the ceiling
are articulated with a powerful sense of composition. This is the very opposite of
the primitive. It is the product of great culture” (150).
Mendelsohn likely saw Lissitzky’s article. Whether the construction of his
wonderful factory at Luckenwalde was still sufficiently unfinished for the roof of
its monumental dyeing hall to be influenced by it or possibly even by the still-
standing synagogue itself, one cannot say. The specific point of comparison is
formal, to be sure, but it is also the major element in both cases: the manner in
which a low-pitched surrounding roof frames the taller upper roof of either the
sanctuary of the synagogue, in the one case, or a ventilation attic, in the other
case.7 Regardless, Lissitzky had a demonstrably modern interest in a building,
religious and Jewish at that, which is still only celebrated for its “heritage” value,
a condition that resembles taking Russian icons merely as folkloric pictures, not
to mention Malevich on “art, chruch, factory.”

Books “For all, all children”

Hiding in plain sight in Lissitzky’s early career are his illustrated books ostensibly
for children—but not only—as thought-provoking manifestations of religious
faith. Unlike his mentor Malevich, whom Catholics don’t even bother to identify
with, Lissitzky has the peculiar distinction of being a celebrated modernist while
also being a celebrated Jewish artist. Judaism is never hidden in the realm of his
illustrated books, especially his children’s books in Yiddish. We may briefly
consider Lissitzky’s illustrated books to uncover, more than is usually stressed,
evidence of the artist’s religious faith.
Even before the first Russian Revolution, many Russians sought both
modernization and the overcoming of Western European cultural dominance by
 A Jewish Lissitzky 143

identifying with Russia’s Slavic roots. Well-known writers, musicians, and artists
flaunted local nationalist pride in language and folk arts. It was natural for Jews
to do so especially after the 1905 revolution, when Yiddish publications were
legalized in Russia. After the October Revolution, however, it even became
politically opportune for an increasingly atheistic state to encourage Yiddish
culture as a harmless marginalization of the Jewish religion per se, converting
faith into hardly more than ethnology.
Lissitzky was also involved with secularly oriented Yiddish cultural groups,
including the Kultur Lige (culture league), headquartered at Kyiv, which came to
displace religion with ethnicity, supporting a new Yiddish secular culture. In
1922, Lissitzky illustrated Ukrainian Folktales; the fact that it was published
directly by the Jewish Section of the (still only Russian) Commissariat for
Education, just as Ukraine was being brought into the new Soviet Union, would
seem to make this publication, together with a similar White Russian Folktales
(1923), one of a pair of early semi-propaganda projects by Lissitzky—using that
term innocently, in the changing social context.
Although Lissitzky produced too many illustrated Yiddish books to survey
here, it is important to think of them as more than a childhood concern in the
postrevolutionary period, when they paralleled the government’s “Likbez”
(Elimination of illiteracy) campaign. The disgraceful condition of public
schooling under the tsars meant that, just before the turn of the century, only
about one-quarter of the Russian Empire’s population could read; this provoked
Lenin’s remark: “Without literacy, there can be no politics; there can only be
rumors, gossip, and prejudice.” Of course there was also political advantage to
the Communists in disenfranchising Judaism as a religion by repackaging it as
just another ethnicity deserving of merely ethnological attention: a religion
without theology—paralleling the situation of icons in the state church. But the
situation was more politically serious to the powers that be because Yiddish
publishing, thriving since 1905, could be conveniently politically leftist; and the
language itself also had an inherently internationalist aspect.
More to the point at present is the question of the extent to which the
otherwise worthy activity of producing books about Jewish folk culture was
itself a matter of religious practice. Our artist did love the way that the Hebrew
letters used for Yiddish can be rendered in boxy forms, which could count as
authentic, if ancillary, modern approval. We need to look at some examples of
the illustrated books to see just what was religiously at stake.
In 1916, Lissitzky produced his first book design, the cover for a book of
poetry by the important Russian poet Konstantin Batyushkov (1787–1855). And
144 Faith in Art

in 1917, he accompanied his illustrations of Moyshe Broderzon’s A Legend of

Prague (or Small Talk: A Legend of Prague) with a most creative binding of sorts:
a premium edition of the book issued as a scroll rolled into a wooden box,
recalling the Torah scroll. One would think a literate Christian audience would
have understood the principle of the scroll in its case, given the Jewish content,
but a newspaper reviewer described this book as “in the Japanese style and . . .
very exquisite.”8 The amusing misunderstanding inspires certain queries: the
lingering question of whether A Legend of Prague (which is not a children’s book)
is thematically Jewish enough or sufficiently theological to count as a religious
book. Also the fact that the first edition of Had Gadya (One Kid)—Lissitzky’s
best-known illustrated book—could well look “Japanese,” with its binding of
boards tied together with ribbons. On the inside of A Legend of Prague, in both
the codex and scroll editions, the pages are single- or double-columned, with
brightly colored, exuberantly figural images above, below, or across the columns
of type, like colored fifteenth-century book illustrations yet also rather like the
wildly popular nineteenth-century French mass-produced images d’Épinal,
which included Catholic holy pictures as well as secular historical subjects.
Had Gadya (1919) is surely religion in plain sight even though it is meant to
appeal to children as a bouncy “cumulative song” (like “Alouette” or “The Twelve
Days of Christmas”). But, coming at the end of a most sacred ritual, the Passover
Seder, its child-friendliness has a profundity that concerns the passing on of the
religious tradition to the next generation, even as the “adult” wording of the
ritual hopes to extend the tradition of freedom to the whole world. Had Gadya
is on a cusp between a traditional old style and a new modern one, with figures
and animals of a doll-like character but with flattened forms of black, red, ochre,
and white, against a white field. The colors have a tight, enameled look, and the
figures are disposed imaginatively (a black-and-white edition was published in
1923). Narratively speaking, it is often noticed that the last panel, in which the
hand of God smites the Angel of Death, shows the death angel as wearing what
is presumed to be the tsar’s crown.
True, the postrevolutionary government was keen on Yiddish folklore as a
way of placating the Jewish population—given a history of anti-Semitism in
Russian society, including a contemporary pogrom in Kyiv in 1919—though
quite without actually encouraging Jewish religion. In that functionalist sense,
Lissitzky’s “Jewish” books were really more “Yiddish” books, helpful to the
government for camouflaging Judaism as one among many minorities. One of
the less artistically advanced books that contains religious practice is Lissitzky’s
illustrated Yingl-Tsingl-Khvat (The Mischievous Boy), written in verse by Mani
 A Jewish Lissitzky 145

Leib, who immigrated to New York in 1906 (Lissitky’s mother was dissuaded
from doing the same only by her rabbi). The first edition was published at Kyiv
and Petrograd in 1919; the second, at Warsaw in 1922. The Mischievous Boy is
about a brave little boy who is given a horse and the magic power to cause
snow during an unusually bleak and rainy winter when people were thinking of
spring and Pesach (Passover). It is important to the book that the setting for the
tale is a town where Jews and Christians live together worshipfully and
harmoniously, as “brothers” who “share” and “help” each other. But this year,
spring does not seem to be coming, and to illustrate a verse describing how the
Jewish boys studied until into the winter darkness, Lissitzky shows them around
a table, all in skullcaps, with their rabbi at the head, before having to go home in
the dark and cold. Appropriate parallel religiosity is also indicated by the audible
singing inside the Jewish synagogue and the church bells of the Christian
church.9
Lissitzky’s Of Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale of Two Squares in Six
Constructions (1922), which the artist had been thinking about for two years, his
major work in print, is illustrated in most accounts of Lissitzky. As the source of
the phrase “For all, all children” (an American would say, “For children of all
ages”), this book demonstrates that it was always intended to be more than a
picture book for young readers. Most significant: it entails profound similarities
and differences, especially stylistic, between Malevich and Lissitzky—particularly
in regard to the irrepressibly individualistic “idealism” of suprematism and the
ever-honed, machined, and “materialist” look of constructivism (of which, to
give credit where it is due, this is one of the most important early exemplars).
As for what may be hiding not quite in plain sight: the cover illustration of
our present book shows Malevich’s so-called Suprematism of the Spirit of 1919,
just before such antisuprematist, proconstructivist impulses as we have begun to
observe became manifest. But the back cover of Lissitzky’s Of Two Squares
displays a stripped-down version of a similarly slim, doubled vertical, set at an
angle but without either crossbar—hence simply not a cross (Figure 4.8).
Considering the same device in a more positive way, however, it can be thought
of as quite like a Jewish mezuzah: the small case intended to be mounted on
every Jewish house’s doorpost, as here set properly at an angle, within which one
could expect to find a transcription of Deuteronomy 6:4–9 and 11:13–21. We
can notice, in addition, a faraway planet towards the upper left of the cover,
which may seem to intimate a cosmic, Malevichian surrounding space.
The notorious ultimate panel of Had Gadya, often understood to show the
tsar as an angel of death, deserves a further comment. The fact of the hand of
146 Faith in Art

God is of course generally significant for Lissitzky owing to the Bible. The single
book of the Bible that we know affected him deeply from early on is Ecclesiastes,
and this manus Dei motif occurs twice in Ecclesiastes, almost but not quite
contradictorily (which would only have piqued Lissitzky’s interest). First there is
Ecclesiastes 2:24–6: “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat
and drink, and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of
God; for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? For to the
man who pleases him God gives wisdom and knowledge and joy; but to the
sinner he gives the work of gathering and heaping, only to give to one who
pleases God. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.” The second instance,
all the more stoical, points to what would become the last and otherwise
inscrutable sentence of the artist’s “Reminiscences” essay on the Mogilev
Synagogue:

But all this I laid to heart, examining it all, how the righteous and the wise and
their deeds are in the hand of God; whether it is love or hate man does not know.
Everything before them is vanity, since one fate comes to all, to the righteous and
the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to him who
sacrifices and him who does not sacrifice. As is the good man, so is the sinner;
and he who swears is as he who shuns an oath. This is an evil in all that is done
under the sun, that one fate comes to all; also the hearts of men are full of evil,
and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead.
But he who is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a
dead lion.
Eccl. 9:1–4

Let us leave the crypto-revolutionary last sentence to speak for itself, as young
Lissitzky did, what with the animal dualities of the synagogue.

Revolutionary Works

Malevich and Lisitzky’s avant-garde student association at the People’s Art

School in Vitebsk, became, on Malevich’s joining it, UNOVIS: once again, a
Russian acronym for “Champions of the New Art” (see Chapter 3). It lasted only
from 1919 or 1920 (sources differ), when Lissitsky became head of architectural
design and graphics at the school, until 1922. For a revolutionary art club, the
name has a certain mock-militant air, like the acronym of a military unit (such
as “COMSEC,” for Communications Security, in the U.S. Navy). Similarly
 A Jewish Lissitzky 147

abridged is the term Lissitzky chose for his extended personal project in painting
and related design: “Proun.”
Remarkably, “Proun” (pronounced pro-oon) may have had Jewish religious
overtones. Birnholz has pointed to the Cabbalistic (mystical-Jewish) device of
making a word up out of initial or terminal letters of words of a phrase—which
so far would be no more religious than “UNOVIS”—but in this case, Birnholz
sees the conjunction as managing to imply a Cabbalistic sense of divine
expansion and contraction in Creation, even to the point of expressing Lissitzly’s
effort to expand art beyond easel painting. If few would have understood that,
Birnholz also notes that anyone who knew Hebrew, as many of the students in
this famously Jewish town did, the term could still suggest words for “light-
tower” and “to support or maintain a lead,” not to mention a Yiddish word for
“trying or attempting”—all tending to validate the outward-bound, forward-
looking, experimental nature of Lissitzky’s “Proun.”10
Famously, Lissitzky always characterized the Prouns as “transfer stations”
between painting and architecture; but in light of Birnbolz one might also
consider transfer between Hebrew and Russian, not to mention faith and
humanity. Most Prouns are abstract and in the orbit of suprematism. Their
embrace of volume employs axonometric drawing (whereby parallels remain
parallel and do not diminish in space), a system not in accordance with normal
Western artistic perspective practice. However, Western engineers have long
used it in order to preserve equal measurements in planes not parallel with the
picture plane (as Chinese painting had already used it for millennia).
I shall first adduce two early works that both concern Lissitzky’s ideological
faith in Communism and then compare a later, nonpolemical Lissitzky painting
with a painting by Malevich. Happily, the two early Marxist-affiliated pieces do
not fall into the pointless game, pursued far too often in the West during the
Cold War, of pretending that Communism was a religion with scriptures,
prophets, and so on. I believe that the reason why Lissitsky never succumbed to
that view—even Malevich was tempted to when Lenin died—was the strength of
his commitment to the Talmudic version of the first half of the Second
Commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (not to mention the
second half, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”).
The two early works in question are a celebrated poster from the Civil War—
doubtless Lissitzky’s best-known work—and a probable study for a painting
memorializing the martyrdom of a great humanist-socialist, whose moral
influence was felt even in Christian theology. Although the first, which is also the
most famous political poster of the Russian avant-garde, poses an interesting
148 Faith in Art

problem of sources, I will focus primarily on the second for its politico-religious
implications.
Many people would recognize Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (sometimes
dated to 1919 and sometimes to 1920), with its sharp, acutely triangular red
wedge coming from the left and penetrating a white disc or globe—the whole
not unlike an animated newsreel of a battle, with the red wedge standing for the
Red Army, supporting the Bolsheviks, and the round white quarry, for the
Whites, or White Guard, meaning practically everybody else. It is such a forceful
design that one may be disappointed to learn how close its basic geometric
configuration is to two Italian futurist works, a 1914 or 1915 diagrammatic line
drawing from early in the First World War, Syntesi Futurista della Guerra
(Futurist Synthesis of the War), designed synthetically by five different Italian
futurists while in jail for a political demonstration, though it may ultimately
derive from a dream by Marshal Joseph Joffre about his winning a battle. In book
form, the diagram was plausibly passed on to Lissitzky by Malevich at the Vitebsk
School. But Birnholz also notes that Beat the Whites would also have connoted
for Russian Jews a striking back against Christian antisemitism, thanks to the
resemblance of the phrase Bei zhidov (Beat the Jews) to Bei byelikh (Beat the
Whites), but also “the promise of a better world.”11
But the diagram was only the basis of a more simplified and composed
futurist color print of 1918, which looks much more like Beat the Whites. In the
diagram, the big wedge is marked “Futurism” while the penetrated disc or globe
is marked “Past-ism” (Passatismo). The print, which is titled Sintesi della Guerra
Mondiale (Synthesis of the World War, 1918), and often attributed to Carlo
Carrà (one of the original five artists), is much closer to Lissitzky’s work and has
a red wedge marked “Liberty” penetrating, however, a green disc or sphere
marked “Barbarism.”
It was the true believer in Lissitzky who was capable of combining the formal
materials of the futurist sources with the pithy black, white, and red (basically
suprematist) color scheme to produce such a forceful visual polemic for his side
in the ongoing Civil War. Admittedly, this has nothing to do with religion; but it
can be mentioned that the Italian Futurist sources for Lissitzky’s famous poster
relate to the sometimes quasi-religious sense of palpable hope with which
Malevich often invested the very notion of futurism. It also seems fitting, in light
of UNOVIS, that Beat the Whites was from its very beginning, in the prison
diagram, a collective artistic effort and, as such, would become an important
transitional project between the suprematist and the constructivist outlooks.
Curiously, a century ago Beat the Whites was so completely taken for granted as
 A Jewish Lissitzky 149

a mere poster that the copy in what is now the Russian State Library may be the
only known preserved example of the original edition.12
The second work exists in just two preparatory drawings, as an unfinished
project. The fact that the work could be by nobody other than Lissitzky is a
telling example of how Prouns can evidence the “pure” Lissitzky, where
remarkably singular forms are “applied” to life. Just such a spirit must have
moved the painter to enter a government competition for a painting that would
have been part of Lenin’s “monumental propaganda” program, started in 1918,
on the first anniversary of the October Revolution. As a faithful Communist,
Lissitzky’s response would be a painted abstract composition concerned with the
Polish Jewish Communist Rosa Luxemburg, active in Germany and one of the
great political orators of the age. In that sense, this work presaged the later, more
purely propagandistic art commissioned directly by the Soviet state, which for
the time being was still only the Russian Soviet Republic.
The first version is known as Untitled (Memorial of Luxemburg) or Untitled
(Rosa Luxemburg) (1919–21; Costakis Collection, State Museum of
Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki; Figure 4.2), a roughly four-inch square. The
second, larger version is called Proun (1922–3; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven),
just under a twenty-inch square, which was presumably closer to being the
modello for the painting. The latter is the larger and more finished version of the
same, shall we say, compositional construct of a black square placed off-center in
a red circular disk, surrounded by segmental concentric rings and one or two
other forms. This second work reiterates the first but does not bear the name of
Rosa Luxemburg, which is almost obliterated but still visible, and extremely
important, in the first.
Formally, these two almost-identical constellations of elements seem more
suprematist in the earlier case and more constructivist in the later incarnation,
while the same radial structure seems remarkably balanced between the
categories of composition and construction. In both, the black square within the
central red disk seems a suprematistically asymmetric pair of Malevichian forms,
while the surrounding irregular but segmental red, white, and black broken rings,
their beginnings and endings radially determined, have a smooth, tightly fitted
character, like machined bearings and, as such, they seem of more constructivist
ilk. Note: if there are any disk-shaped Russian icons, they are rare, though there
are other disk-shaped Prouns; many a rectangular Russian icon of Elijah in his
fiery chariot rising to heaven does, however, contain a large red disk for the sun.
As similar as the two dispositions are, the small first one has a suprematist
look as it appears more handmade, while the second has a more constructivist
150 Faith in Art

Figure 4.2 El Lissitzky, Preliminary Study for a Project Commemorating Rosa

Luxemburg, 1919[–20?], gouache, ink, pencil. State Museum of Contemporary Art,
Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki. Alamy Ltd.

look, appearing spiffy and machined, like the pilot wheel of a ship. For that
matter, it anticipates the cameraman Eduard Tisse’s thrilling, perfectly centered
shot of the naval canon that may or may not fire at the end of Sergei Eisenstein’s
Battleship Potemkin (1925). Additionally, the square-upon-disk disposition in
both works appears atop a Malevichian brace of similar yet different diagonal
bands, while small triangles pokily invade the outer orbital reaches in a way
reminiscent of Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.
It is the small but more fascinating earlier study that offers an unusual
opportunity to see Lissitzky possibly engaging with the Russian icon tradition, in
memorializing, on a broad Russian basis, an international socialist martyr. But it
 A Jewish Lissitzky 151

also evokes a liberationist element in Judaism that has a universal dimension,

insofar as there is something implicitly universal in the Haggadah, at the Passover
Seder, proclaiming: “Everyone who discusses the exodus from Egypt at length is
praiseworthy.”
Luxemburg had first been a member of the German Social Democratic Party,
and she became a Communist only when her own party refused her strongest
pleas for peace and insisted on proving their patriotism by beating the drums for
the First World War. She and her political colleague Karl Liebknecht (a descendant
of Martin Luther, whose Lutheran godfathers, by proxy, were Marx and Engels),
founders of the Spartacus League who then joined the Communist Party of
Germany, and had their skulls crushed by the rifle butts of paramilitary veterans
in Berlin on January 15, 1919. When the Soviet competition for monumental art
was announced, Lissitzky apparently initiated his unfinished project in response.
Despite its modest size, the first study is charged with an urgency of inspiration:
something uplifting must be carrying the artist along. The manner in which the
large red disk is inscribed with the name of the fallen socialist-humanist hero can
almost be considered balanced between composition and construction in that the
base line of the inscription hovers just above the horizontal center of the red
square, and the superimposed black square also hovers, decentered and higher
than expected. Both features seem suprematistic in their intuitive placement,
giving a pneumatic, aspirational sense of uplift. This feeling becomes all the more
vivid in comparison with the appreciably more normalized constructivist design
to follow. One could rationalize the change as having a more “advanced industrial”
character appropriate to the subject, who had written her doctoral dissertation on
The Industrial Development of Poland (1898).
T. J. Clark writes that for the first drawing, in which the honoree’s name
remains visible if somewhat obscured, “The symbolism is more or less
transparent.” But he is so concerned with its word-and-image format as a
statement that he considers the disappearance of the lettering (which he
describes as “script,” though it is in Latin letters, befitting a public memorial) in
the larger second version as merely optically determined: “The letters float, and
take on airy substance. They sink back into the black square.”13 But any
“symbolism” here does not seem so “transparent.” The lettering does not just
happen to “sink into the black,” which simply blocks it out, as much as it visibly
sinks only partway into the red, which is incapable of submerging it. Did Lissitzky
suppress Luxemburg’s name for political reasons? That would have been a major
move, entailing a certain violence to the pasty gouache of the little drawing,
which may have indicated that the Luxemburg project was off.
152 Faith in Art

Both preliminary designs for the commemorative memorial are close to the
UNOVIS emblem that meant so much to Lissitzky: a square rising upward in a
circle, with the more Malevichian black square up front, rather than the more
Lissitzkian red. But the design also carries some appropriateness to Luxemburg’s
identity. The repeating concentric structure and strong sense of inside/outside
interface in the relation of the black square to its surrounding red disk might
well evoke a main point in Luxemburg’s theoretical contribution to Marxism:
her criticism of Marx’s failure to grasp that capitalism demanded an outside into
which to expand, so that imperialism is of its essence. This core belief is why her
treatise The Accumulation of Capital (1913) was long thought heretical by
Marxist theoreticians.
But there may also be, built in, an expressive appropriateness to Luxemburg’s
outlook, as caring for the status of the individual even in great social enterprises.
As early as her 1897 Zurich dissertation, she finds Polish factory workers not
only more likely to be literate, and “more individualized in [their] way of life
than Russians,” whose confinement to barracks can “[lead] to the stunting of
individuality.”14 For the tsarist imperial system seeks not only by Russification “to
spiritually level the various parts of the Empire,” but also to “give the unity of the
Empire a firm material frame by this economic welding process, and to press the
whole thing together in the iron clamps of absolute power.”15 How similar, yet
significantly different, from such clamps is the way this same design suggests
willful social engagement with the heavy-duty machinery—cams, pistons and
such as ship’s equipment—on which the camera lingers admiringly in Battleship
Potemkin.
The earlier form of the Luxemburg memorial idea also materially refers to the
Russian icon tradition, quite apart from the many icons of Elijah. For occasionally
icons are inscribed with the depicted saint’s name in letters protruding from
either side of the head, as if interrupted by neck or torso—an uncommon but not
eccentric device. I have in mind a particular sixteenth-century icon from
Novgorod in the State Russian Museum, at St. Petersburg, of, appropriately
enough, a third-century woman preacher clothed in the red of martyrdom—
St. Paraskeva Payanitsa. Had Luxemburg had reservations about Mikhail
Alpatov’s description of the Paraskeva icon as an “image of lofty femininity,
chastity and piety,” she would have been more politically pleased by the rest of
his statement: “There are no grounds for thinking that as he prayed to St.
Paraskeva a Novgorodian had only the next market day in mind.”16
We might not expect to turn so readily from such a politically engaged and
potentially official work as the abstraction honoring Luxemburg to religion, but,
 A Jewish Lissitzky 153

thanks to the background of the Christian Socialist movement in nineteenth-

century Europe, the great Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth found himself,
by 1915, “entirely in sympathy with Rosa Luxemburg,” notwithstanding that the
revolutionary, build-the-Kingdom-right-now position did not constitutionally
suit him. In early 1919, a month after Luxemburg’s assassination, Barth—whom
Pius XII is said to have called the greatest Christian theologian since Thomas
Aquinas17—preached a sermon on Matthew 9:20–2, telling of the miraculous
healing of the hemorrhaging woman after touching the edge of Jesus’s cloak
(“Your faith has saved you”). In addressing the coming of the Kingdom of God
as by no means contingent on our managing to attain perfect personal faith,
hope, and charity—nor even perfect liberty, equality, and fraternity in society—
Barth acknowledged what had been happening “in Russia and here and there in
Germany” as in some sense an attempt to establish the Kingdom.18 After another
month, preaching on what comes just before and after the Matthew text (verses
9:18–19 and 23–6, the reviving of the synagogue official’s child and the return to
her house, where revelers could not believe she was alive), Barth spoke of the
dread currently attached to Bolshevism, the Spartacus League, or Communism.
With Luxemburg’s assassination on January 15, 1919, one wonders at what
stage of production Barth was on his great book The Epistle to the Romans (1919),
which speaks critically of revolution in a very Protestant way. I say this because
revolution can mean tyrannicide writ large, and tyrannicide has never been
sinful in Catholic tradition, whereas the Calvinist Barth worries about
presumptuous tampering with the social order as divinely ordained. Still, the
idea does engross him. In condemning a Christian for going after “high things,”
including even “ideals,” because the Christian is only—only—“to condescend to
things that are lowly,”19 Barth’s ethical extremism reminds me of Luxemburg’s
writing, famously, a shortly before her death: “A world must be overturned, but
every tear that has flowed and might have been wiped away is an indictment; and
a man hurrying to perform a great deed who steps on even a worm out of
unfeeling carelessness commits a crime.”20 This memorable topos which
characterizes Luxemburg’s humanistic radicality, actually inherits classical
German humanistic culture by deriving from Goethe’s The Sorrows of the Young
Werther (1774).21
It is not difficult to imagine Luxemburg (or even Bertolt Brecht) agreeing
with the spirit of Karl Barth’s writing as inspired by Paul: “Christianity knows
itself at least more akin to ascetics and pietists, strange though their behavior
may be, than to ‘healthy evangelical national piety’; more closely related to the
‘Russian Man’ than to his western brothers. . . . Christianity displays a certain
154 Faith in Art

inclination to side with those who are immature, sullen, and depressed, with
those who ‘come off badly’ and are, in consequence, ready for revolution. There
is, for this reason, much in the cause of socialism which evokes Christian
approval.” Not that the tables cannot turn wrongly, if and when “the Proletariat
may have become blunderingly and coarsely dogmatic.”22 But Luxemburg did
not shrink from telling Lenin that he was not giving the proletariat much of a
chance to take that risk. It would be fascinating to know whether Barth had been
able to retouch the following passage in his text after the murders of January 15:
“To us, at least, the reactionary presents little danger; with his Red brother it is
far otherwise.” Better to let him finish with this heartier Pauline irony: “The
revolutionary Titan is far more godless, far more dangerous than his reactionary
counterpart—because he is so much nearer to the truth.”23 No one can accuse
religious activists of being irreligious when believers are forever being asked by
their most sacred revelational texts where their activism is.
Lissitzky stands in his own right as a pivot or transfer point—using his own
favorite figure—to the constructivist-materialist from the suprematist-idealist.
The question becomes, Can aesthetics carry over? Rosa Luxemburg was willing
to forgive Dostoevsky’s political reaction and Tolstoy’s “mystic teachings” which
“at least only play around with reactionary tendencies” in the interest of the
“rousing, edifying” liberation that art can give. She even wrote, idealistically, that
“for a true artist the social medicine that he prescribes is of secondary importance:
it is the source of his art, its animating spirit, not the aim which he consciously
sets for himself, which is of paramount importance.”24
“Spiritual” here, would seem simply too weak and “mystical,” practically coy,
for anyone willing to face up to religion in such a Barthean—but also
Luxemburgian, not to mention Lissitzkyan—manner. Lissitzky’s Luxemburg
project is vital for a problem in constructivism that can be posed from both
extremes, once the new outlook of productivism sought to eliminate even
constructivist art in the interest of purely utilitarian design. It became possible
to accuse constructivism of being merely geometric art—mere art vis-à-vis
productivism but merely geometric (a subtler charge) vis-à-vis suprematism.
There is no denying that Lissitzky’s second and more finished Luxemburg
design looks more perfect and more efficient, but it also looks somewhat glibly
graphic, more like something Rodchenko would do. The first work aspired to
something arguably spiritual, namely memorialization; it visibly carried
conviction, as if the always ethical Socialism preached by Luxemburg really
meant something to the painter in, can we say, a more suprematist-affective way.
Something of faith does seem conveyed there, as if speaking of divine justice
 A Jewish Lissitzky 155

were by no means a socialist absurdity. In fact, it seems to convey that only a

socialist of some sort would be capable of doing so. Lissitzky made it possible to
imagine this socialist as precisely an artist, seconding the definition of faith
given by St. Paul—that great pivot or hinge or transfer station between Judaism
and Christianity: “The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things
not seen” (Heb. 11:1–2).
We cannot pass by this pair of artworks, especially the inspiring smaller first
version, without deeming it a high achievement of twentieth-century “faith in
art.” Did anyone perform a greater sacrifice for the Kingdom than Luxemburg?
And is any artistic commemoration of one who worked for justice more suitably
progressive in style? Luxemburg outdid so many believers who might dismiss
her as an atheist; for how many times did Rabbi Jesus say that it is those who go
out and do it who are the blessed? Lissitzky’s larger, more finished version, which
lacks the hypothesized prophet’s inscribed name, seems to leave the conception
of the whole project in abeyance. Maybe even that is suitable, as so much
spiritually as well as ideologically unfinished business.
Parallels between Malevich and Lissitzky’s Prouns are apparent, not only in
terms of socially “applied” projects, like Malevich’s graphics for the Congress of
Committees on Rural Poverty, in 1918 (N/S-622–8), but also in “pure” painting.
For example, Proun (Study for Proun S.K.) (1922–3; Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York; Figure 4.3) is a mature work that invites comparison with
Malevich’s Suprematist Composition (1916–17; Museum of Modern Art, New
York; Figure 4.4). Both have a similar formal vocabulary of regular ovoids cut off
by the edge of the support, strong diagonal axes toward the center, plus affiliated
parallel diagonal bands. Malevich’s forms inhabit an orthodox suprematist
white-painted field, whereas Lissitzky’s paper field with white-painted ovoids
upon it, makes a constructivist point of its materialities: besides two kinds of
paint (watercolor, gouache), there is ink, graphite, waxy conté crayon, with
varnish on what may or may not have been buff paper to start—as if the paper
too refers to yet another material property to come, unbleached linen. The
principal forms of Lissitzky—geometrically similar ovoids set, quite statically, at
similar angles from the corners—display a virtually engineered rigor in
comparison with Malevich’s looser suprematist arrangement. All the forms in
the Malevich are unique, even when paired, whereas in the Lisitzky almost all the
forms are doubled—rhymed, let us say.
This comparison demonstrates a problem of constructivist aesthetics to
which Lissitzky and Ehrenburg point without comment in their editorial in the
first issue of Veshch / Gegenstand / Objet. They call up “eternal laws of clarity,
156 Faith in Art

Figure 4.3 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting, 1916–17, oil on canvas. Museum
of Modern Art, New York. Alamy Ltd.

Figure 4.4 El Lissitzky, Proun (Study for Proun S.K.), 1922–3, watercolor, gouache,
ink, graphite, conté crayon, and varnish on paper. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York. Alamy Ltd.
 A Jewish Lissitzky 157

economy, and proportion,” praising the great baroque classical painter Nicolas
Poussin (1594–1665).25 That points to a larger problem, how to negotiate the
rhythmic satisfactions of geometric order without fomenting retreat into the
pseudo-classical, semi-modernism of politically conservative rappel a l’ordre
(call-to-order) art, architecture, and design, including art deco, after the First
World War.

Religio-Utopianism

Hovering between his two studies for the Rosa Luxemburg memorial paining, in
1920 Lissitzky produced a major speculative text concerning the role of the new art
in, one can almost say, salvation history: his article, “Suprematism in World
Reconstruction,” which dares to offer a practically redemptive promise for humanity
in suprematism, has an especially grand conclusion. Needless to say, Lissitzky’s
spirited closing lines, concerning an ultimate supersession of Communism itself (as
supposedly the finally perfect form of Socialism), would have upset Communists of
the day. No matter that in Lissitzky’s eschatological projection, no such wonder can
occur before Communism should come to fruition:
and if communism which set human labour on the throne and Suprematism
which raised aloft the square pennant of creativity now march forward together
then in the further stages of development it is communism which will have to
remain behind because suprematism—which embraces the totality of life’s
phenomena—will attract everyone away from the domination of work and from
the domination of the intoxicated senses. It will liberate all those engaged in
creative activity and make the world into a true model of perfection. this is the
model we await from Kasimir Malevich.
AFTER THE OLD TESTAMENT THERE CAME THE NEW—AFTER THE
NEW THE COMMUNIST—AND AFTER THE COMMUNIST THERE
FOLLOWS FINALLY THE TESTAMENT OF SUPREMATISM.
L334

From the Christian point of view, as from the Jewish before it, this tack runs
some risk of blasphemy (not something that would trouble the autodidact
Malevich in his swashbuckling writing), a strong defense being that the infraction
was for the sake of the good, which was true for both Malevich and Lissitzky. In
a sense, this was a recasting of Marx’s Communism as fulfillment of Socialism as
a secular, would-be scientific, perfect state, wherein it would seem rather lame to
158 Faith in Art

imagine keeping a utopian “ought” alive, as increasingly hard-nosed

constructivism vied for supremacy over idealistic suprematism.
The rousing conclusion of the previous statement follows in the footsteps of
the father of abstract art, Kandinsky—that faithful Orthodox Christian whom
the Bolsheviks rejected as a hopeless bourgeois idealist in his attempt to stay on
and work with the new state. In his “Reminiscences” (1913), Kandinsky declares
that, unlike the field of science where established truth is negated by new
discoveries, both art and religion develop by insights of “new perspectives.”
“Would the new testament,” he asks rhetorically, “have been possible without the
old? Would our epoch, the threshold of the ‘third’ revelation have been
conceivable without the second? . . . Christ, in his own words, came not to
overthrow the old law. When he said, ‘It was said of you, . . . and I say unto you’ he
transformed the old material law into his own spiritual law.” Such then also
became “the more abstract form of sins of the mind” (K1:378), In a footnote to
Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), Kandinsky had already written, “The way
to the spiritual lies through the natural” (KS38n.20), a strong paraphrase of the
great (proto-dialectical) principle of St. Paul, now all the more meaningfully in a
Marxist context: “Take note: the spiritual was not first; first came the natural and
after that the spiritual” (1 Cor. 15:46; NAB).
Now where has one heard such a phraseology of supersession even before
Marx? What bears repeating here from the chapter on Mondrian (Chapter 2)
is the momentous Pauline “Q and A” on the Second Covenant (Christian) upon
the First (Jewish) as something quite other than displacement or mere
substitution. For Paul also says, “Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the
God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one; and he will
justify the circumcised on the ground of their faith and the uncircumcised
through their faith. Do we then overthrow the law by this faith (heben wir
denn dass Gesetz auf durch den Glauben)? By no means! On the contrary,
we uphold the law” (Rom. 3:29–31). As early as its employment in Luther’s
Bible, finds that Paul’s wording engages none other than the great dialectical
term aufheben (as defined in Chapter 2). Aufhebung, the nominal form,
indicates “sublation,” that active form of negation that both modifies and
upholds: it may not be farfetched, in the spirit of Lissitzly, to extrapolate Paul’s
argument to cover a Communism that does the Lord’s work of building the
Kingdom of God.
On the Orthodox Christian side of the fence, Lissitzky’s remarkable argument
also distantly echoes an analogy of the two testaments and the promised
Kingdom explicitly in terms of painting, framed by St. John Chrysostom in
 A Jewish Lissitzky 159

regard to the Epistle to the Hebrews, which was itself quoted later in an anti-
iconoclast treatise of St. John Damascene (c. 675–749):

In a certain way the first is an image of the second, Melchisedek [an image] of
Christ, just as one might say that a sketch of a picture is a shadow of the picture
in colors; therefore the law is called a shadow, grace truth, and reality what is to
come. So the law and Melchisedek are preparatory sketches of the picture in
colors, and grace and truth are that picture in colors, while reality belongs to the
age to come, just as the Old [Testament] is a type of a type, and the New
[Testament] a type of reality. I.5326

Whether Malevich or Lissitzky knew either text is unimportant because they

were participating in a living discourse: even today the Damascene’s writings
are known and discussed among laypeople in the Orthodox church. His
theorization that the icon is to Christ (or one step further away, a Christlike
saint) as Christ is to the Father is a notion intended to inspire the viewer to
become more Christlike, by prayer and doing social good; as a Jewish artist,
Lissitzky would have been all the more interested in the way the Christian
argument may be a special case of the general principle of all persons already
being icons of God. The Damascene view, with its Jewish basis, could rationalize
even Malevich’s occasional monomania, allowing for a potential socialist
universalism, a possibility that has been noted by others besides Kazimir
Malevich.
But we have yet to appeal here to an important figure of the later Middle
Ages, for the eschatological point of view taken in this major statement by
Lissitzky. It is in close accord with a utopian eschatology of the high Middle
Ages: namely, “third-ageism,” from the theory of history of the Italian monk
Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202). Joachim is not considered to be part of the
prehistory of Socialism only because his thought is entirely religious (what
kind of reasoning is that?). His writings have quasi-Communist consequences
insofar as his third and last phase of society, beyond the Christian and
previously Jewish covenants, would be governed monastically by those with
vows of poverty, hence without private property, who would administer
everything to the community. Joachim has had a lasting religious influence
on utopian thought on the Left. The theologically inclined Jewish Marxist
cultural philosopher Ernst Bloch, in his marvelous book The Principle of Hope
(1954–9), refers to Joachim’s sense of the End Times by “teach[ing] that there are
stages of history, and each one of them comes closer to the Kingdom,” meaning
the Kingdom of God.27
160 Faith in Art

For Joachim of Fiore, it was a synthesis of the two covenants that would lead the
human race into the heavenly third stage (status) of history. Thus in Chapter 8 of
his Book of Concordance, “the letter of the Old Testament was committed to the
Jewish people, the letter of the New to the Roman people. The spiritual
understanding that proceeds from both Testaments has been committed to the
spiritual [people].” In Chapter 20, he reiterates: “The first tempus [of the first
Testament] is reckoned from Abraham to Zachary, [and] the second from Zachary
to the consummation of the age, . . . there is one person who proceeds from the
two [ages], and he is called the Holy Spirit.” In table 14, “The Seven-Headed
Dragon,” of Joachim’s Book of Figures, the communal society of the third age is
described: no one will be idle, which would harm both the individual and those
who depend on him; each will have his craft, “and the individual trades and
workers shall have their own foremen,” who censure those who have not done
enough work; clothing will be simple; and women will spin wool to benefit the
poor and give tithes to support the clergy. Tithes are given “in case they have more
than they need and the rest have less, . . . the surplus will be taken from those who
have more and given to those who have less so that there may be no one in need
among them but all things held in common” (Table 12, “The Arrangements of the
New People of God Pertaining to the Third State After the Model of the Heavenly
Jerusalem”).28 But Joachim of Fiore had Jewish counterparts.
Lissitzky’s Judaism could never have been merely ethnic if he was this attached
to the notion of a profoundly Jewish origin as the starting point of a future utopian
age. In this lineage, Socialism would have been derived through the New Testament
as itself derived scripturally from the Old Testament. A purely Jewish third-ageism
consists of the three progressive world ages of “Chaos, Torah, and Messiah,”29
which has an historical sequence has an independent medieval Christian parallel:
ante legem (before the Law), sub lege (under the Law), sub gratia (under grace).
Insofar as Lissitzky’s ideas were neither simply Jewish nor simply Christian, but
understandable as a synthesis of both, some would say they became secularized;
others could say they were only the more ineradicably religious.
Christianity, of course, believes in a better world to come thanks to Judaism.
In the first faith such is expressed by Joachim’s great philosophical counterpart
and almost exact contemporary, Moses Maimonides (1138–1204). Additionally,
thirteenth-century Spanish Kabbalistic Judaism saw a similar contemporary
development to Italian Joachimism, with its three ages and final “jubilee.”
Gershom Scholem thought this was not a matter of influence but a parallelism.
In the Jewish version—“although the Torah was read in different ways during the
various successive periods, without however being changed in its literal content
 A Jewish Lissitzky 161

as the secret name of God, i.e., that it is capable of revealing more than one
meaning.” The present age is one of “stern judgment, i.e. that which is dominated
by the . . . the divine quality, of rigor, . . . in accordance with the present reading
of the Torah. But in the coming aeon . . . Torah will no longer contain prohibitions,
the power of evil will be curbed, etc., in brief, Utopia will at last be realized.”30 It
seems fair to say that any awareness of this on Lissitzky’s part would only have
encouraged an appreciation of both historical systems.
Igor Dukhan has broached the fascinating notion that around the time of
Marc Chagall’s departure from the Vitabsk school in 1920—often considered to
signal more than a shift in pedagogy—not to mention an in-house political win
for Malevich as a progressive—Lissitzky’s attitude changed. It became more
profoundly Jewish. It is as if the Christian teacher had released something
religious for which there had been no room in modern secular Jewish culture, in
particular a religiosity that must have been altogether missing in Chagall’s
romantic naïvete.31
Lissitzky’s Jewish third-ageism was on Malevich’s mind when he wrote, in the
first issue of the UNOVIS Almanakh, in 1920, the politically heretical statement:
“The Suprematist gospel is coming to replace Communism” (MS2:159n)?

The Last Suprematist “Victory”

The ultimate origin of suprematism had appeared in Malevich’s stage designs for
the futurist opera Victory over the Sun, performed at St. Petersburg in 1913. The
opera was revived—with noise music—at the People’s Art School in Vitebsk in
1920, but the “last gasp” of Victory over the Sun consisted of Lissitzky’s costume
designs for an electrified puppet version which was never performed but was
published in 1923 as a suite of lithographs by the artists’ association Kestner-
Gesellschaft at Hanover under the title Figurines: The Three-Dimensional Design
of the Electro-Mechanical Show “Victory over the Sun.”
Christine Poggi has critically pondered this set of Lissitzky prints, analyzing
their relation to Malevich’s quite differently costumed figures of mostly, but not
quite the same male characters, dressed according to their working occupations.32
The nine prints in question derive from a set of gouache-and-ink drawings with
collage that Lissitzky had made between 1920 and 1921 in Vitebsk. Lissitzky’s
characters bear subtly different but parallel titles to Malevich’s.
In 1922, the year before the prints, Lissitzky had announced to the world, “In
precisely the same way that religion was overcome, we are now struggling to
162 Faith in Art

overcome art using our newfound abilities”33—a much less subtle formulation
than Malevich employed in his “Suprematism” essay. This was an exaggerated
fanfare, insofar as his work would be “art” anyway; and the statement itself was
published in Ringen (Warsaw), the Yiddish literary magazine that might be
considered part of the ethnicity-quite-instead-of-religion campaign, though it
would publish his important article on the Mogilev Synagogue a year later.
Neither Malevich’s nor Lissitzky’s Victory over the Sun figures has anything
ostensibly to do with religion as such, but Poggi brings to a head the way a residual
pre-revolutionary humanism was finally cresting at the time into something else.
Malevich’s costumed figures are stocky and somewhat overbearingly bodily,
whereas Lissitzky’s tend to look robotic or machinelike, like stand-ins for human
figures. The best known one looks like completely prosthetic body, and can be said
to parody “bourgie” humanism by resembling the most (capital “H”) Humanistic
figure in the Italian Renaissance artistic tradition: Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian
Man, the famous male nude with limbs outstretched so as to encompass both a
circle and a square. Appropriately, Lissitzky’s version is called simply The New: one
could imply “new man” (in a terminology associated with St. Paul) or “new human.”
It has a red square for the torso, like a secular Communist version of Malevich’s
Christlike Suprematism of the Spirit (in Chapter 3): with limbs like tensed wire, it
is an industrially modern individual who is as prepared for action as a taut bow.
Poggi takes Lissitzky’s Victory Over the Sun players as a revisiting of the early
Malevichian avant-garde with a certain progressivism evident but radicalized.
“The critical space opened by the reenactment of a pre-revolutionary theatrical
model allowed Lissitzky to reflect on the legacy and aporias of Russian futurism’s
earlier myths of triumphs over natural law, tradition, reason and ‘femininity,’ ” in
the new postrevolutionary world of Lissitzky and Ehrenburg’s Veshch /
Gegenstand / Objet, where “Malevich’s Suprematist art appeared, but merely as a
precursor to the newer Constructivism” (122).34 Despite the fact that the puppets
were not produced, “Converted into miniatures, they quite reconceive [the
librettist Aleksei] Kruchenykh’s Victory over the Sun in the register of children’s
play” (122–3), not unlike Lissitzky’s illustrated books for children of all ages.
If there is nothing ostensibly religious in this final putting-to-bed of Malevich’s
inaugural “Victory,” it might be taken as at least standing against irreligion, by
serving to eradicate the pseudo-sanctity (if not crypto-paganism) of Renaissance
Humanism. And speaking of dialectic: Poggi has taken the residual set of prints
and shown how what, style for style, could have been a mere Oedipal reaction to
Lissitzky’s honorable teacher as anachronistic, proves to be something his mentor
could have been proud to have had a hand in.
 A Jewish Lissitzky 163

Theory in 1925

Lissitzky’s effort to advance from suprematism is expressed in his notion of the

Proun, often defined as a “transfer station” between painting and architecture.
What he had in mind is a new method—actually, only new for the Western
world—for the pictorial representation of constructed space. As a term, the
“transfer station” was an up-to-date literary figure of speech in 1925, when John
Dos Passos published the novel Manhattan Transfer. The title refers to a special
railroad station in the New Jersey Meadowlands (from 1910 to 1937) that was
used only for transfer from the steam trains of the Pennsylvania Railroad Main
Line to an electric train traveling a short distance under the Hudson River
to Manhattan. But Dos Passos’ term also had a political aspect by an overall
socialist viewpoint.
Lissitzky’s chief theoretical support for superseding conventional Western
Renaissance perspective by means of his Proun is his essay “A. and Pangeometry”
(1925), in which “A.” is simply an objectifying substitute for “art.” The text is a sort
of prelude to pangeometry (which means modern geometry, anything other
than the ordinary Euclidean version). Divided into four sections on “planimetric,”
“perspectival,” “irrational,” and “imaginary” space, it is, in fact, an important
statement on the pluralism of viewpoints in a most literal sense (which could
also be applied to religion).
Let us take “planimetric space” last, for it has broader relevance to this chapter
and book, and begin with “perspectival space.” In that section, a triple diagram
compares (a) a table in reverse perspective, noted as “Chinese,” (b) a square with
diagonals as “the perspective representation of a pyramid,” and (c) a diagram of
Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, as if extending the length of the refectory
where it is seen (L353). By “Chinese,” Lissitzky must not mean the style of the table,
but rather the non-Western (anti-Renaissance) perspectival system to which it
submits.
What Lissitzky called “irrational space” was important to him. Owed to
Malevich’s suprematism, Lissitzky took it to have “swept away from the plane the
illusions of two-dimensional planimetric space, the illusions of three-
dimensional perspective space, and has created the ultimate illusion of irrational
space, with its infinite extensibility into the background and foreground” (L354).
Whether or not that the mathematics necessary to comprehend this cannot be
visualized, “the achievements of the futurists and the Suprematists are static
surfaces which indicate the dynamic (by symbols). . . . We are standing now at
the beginning of a period in which A. is on the one hand degenerating into a
164 Faith in Art

pastiche embracing all the monuments in the museums, and on the other hand
is fighting to create a new expression of space . . . . There now arises the task of
forming imaginary space by means of a material object” (L356).
“Imaginary space” has so far encompassed actual movement by means of
film. Here Lissitzky speaks out against any form of monumentality except “the
perpetual expansion of human achievement.” Having “traced the variability of
our conception of space and the corresponding forms of A.,” Lissitzky writes, “I
have arrived at an a-material materiality. That sounds paradoxical. Yet facts
prove that ‘progression consists in our being led to consider certain views as
obvious and necessary which our forefathers considered incomprehensible, for
they were incapable of comprehending them’” (L357).
I have long surmised that this “planimetric space” part of Lissitzky’s text was
likely stimulated by a major art-historical essay on pluralistic viewpoints by Aloїs
Riegl, first published posthumously in 1906.35 Riegl was concerned with a pair of
gold Bronze Age cups from Crete or Greece, each decorated with a frieze of
captured bulls. These so-called Vapheio Cups became a famous problem in art
history thanks to his article, which relates to Lissitzky’s later essay in a number of
ways, including an offhand remark apropos of icon painting. But the closest point
of contact with Riegl is a pair of diagrams where Lissitzky first shows a row of
three bulls as processing to the right, first one after the other—as “1 + 2 + 3”—and
then overlapping as parallel in space—as “1, 1½, 2.”
It is not possible to explore here Riegl’s astute concern with the repercussions of
what he is saying relative to the contemporary art of his own time (around 1900).
But it is quite possible to come close to Lissitzky’s modern Russian concerns, first,
by inference to the icon and, then, by an unexpected secularist note, namely an
interest in the remarkable lack of religion in the ancient art at hand. Riegl speaks
of a bull whose head is turned away from the spectator as an “instance of
objectivism,” such as classical art would adopt first and that the late antique icon
would repeat more deliberately, since “it was Christian art that first firmly
established the rule of direct dialogue between the head and the viewer” (120).36
This analysis of the ancient cup departs from the centuries-old convention that
“images of religious belief dominated all conceptions of nature and all
conditions of life, and art and religion were essentially identical, the idea behind a
work of art has the least to contribute to a purely artistically critical evaluation,
because the artist had little or no latitude for individual design” (120). What
seems so premature here is the abandonment of the ancient Near Eastern “identity
of all art with religion, that is, of the identification of all appearances and all
events with the working of an objective personal deity” (124). Only much later,
 A Jewish Lissitzky 165

when the northern European peoples without an ancient Near Eastern legacy
became dominant, “perspective, painterly composition, representations of
phenomena not purely for the sake of religious meaning—won the upper hand”
(126). Lissitzky may well have known this classic essay in early modern art history,
which was also reprinted soon after “A. and Pangeometry.”
Lissitzky had already published the 1922 essay “The Victory over Art,” praising
Malevich’s invention of suprematism for having more “modernity” than Kandinsky,
thanks to “its organization and . . . the new painterly expression of space which
it has provided”—which “chopped down the arched blue sky and went off
into white infinity”—and also as the basis for his own practice of the Proun. The
Proun “describes nothing, it constructs only volumes, planes, and lines for its
own sake, in order to create a system of the new composition of the real world.”
Note his striving for political coexistence between composition (supposedly
rightist) and construction (leftist) that flexibly allows for blatant contradiction:

Proun—this is the way by which we will arrive at the new composition. If science
and the engineer have come, at present, to create their realities by mathematical
tables, by drawings of projects, we do not categorically consider this the only
way. We believe more in creative intuition, which creates its method, its system
outside of mathematics and drawings but according to laws which are also as
organic as the shape of a flower. Proun does not compose, it constructs. This is
the basic difference with [mimetic] represention. . . . Proun has no single axis
which is perpendicular to the horizontal, as in traditional painting. It is
constructed and brought to an equilibrium in space. . . . Proun is made of
material [= leftist] and not of any aesthetic [= rightist].37

At this point, Lissitzky had been representing the Russian government since the
previous year as something like a cultural attaché in Berlin. He had to watch his p’s
and q’s concerning the endless dispute at home, where the constructivist and then
the ultra-constructivist “productivist” side was winning. Lissitzky also needed to
stay in the good graces of the government, in which he fundamentally did believe.
But in “The Victory over Art,” Lissitzky makes a remark we have heard before: “Just
as we were victorious over religion, so are we fighting with our new accomplishments
for victory over art.” He continues, “We are far removed from the period of the
hunter who chased the animal and captured it.”38 The second statement, I think,
shows that Lissitzky not only knew Riegl’s essay but had it on his mind, even as the
first statement unexpectedly raises the subject of religion in order to pack it away.
What does this rather surprising antireligious statement really mean? As an
artist and architect for whom formal aesthetics did necessarily matter, Lissitzky
166 Faith in Art

had to try to make a public point of maintaining a proconstructivist,

anticompositional stance. In 1928, when anything aesthetic was considered
bourgeois, Lissitzky could be found testifying before a governmental Building
Committee that constructivism itself was simply the offspring of capitalism.39
Knowing that by his title, “The Victory over Art,” Lissitzky meant there could
now be real and possibly better art after the “anti-art,” I could not initially
understand why that should not also be true of religious faith, on much the same
basis. Then I realized that “The Victory over Art” was published only in the
Warsaw Yiddish journal Ringen. There, the statement “Just as we were victorious
over religion, so are we fighting with our new accomplishments for victory over
art” had the prominence of a stand-alone paragraph at the start of a section, in
an article whose outside political purpose must have been to display publicly
that Lissitzky was concerned with Yiddish culture rather than the Jewish religion.

A Quasi-Liturgical Exhibition Space

In the mid-1920s, Lissitzky also worked on an expansion of the Proun idea to

encompass entire interior architectural spaces. Dutch painters of the De Stijl
movement had been designing entire rooms even before the end of the First
World War. But most of their projects simply expanded what were essentially
painting compositions onto adjacent walls and ceilings; and between the mid- to
later 20s, they went largely unexecuted. In a note to his “A. and Pangeometry,”
Lissitzky, praising Mondrian’s paintings for their “utter flatness,” remarks: “When
the De Stijl [artists] transpose the Mondrian principle to the three planes of
space, they become interior decorators” (L358n5). Mondrian’s own studios were
a unique and private case.
In 1919 Malevich had speculated on taking on a whole room as a singular
suprematist work, as a sort of “model universe,”40 but it was Lissitzky’s own Proun
idea, as a deliberate intermediary between painting and architecture, that
inspired him to take up the special problem of fitting out galleries in such a way
as to encourage interaction with his Prouns, with other related contemporary
paintings, and with the compatibly designed surrounding room itself.
Frankly, these galleries always struck me as so completely utilitarian that it
had never occurred to me that they could pertain to the artist’s faith outlook,
least of all in terms of divine liturgy. Nonetheless, it happens that the most radical
and comprehensive of these spaces is related to the spatial, kinetic, and even
prayerful social experience of worship in a synagogue. So, while it is indeed
 A Jewish Lissitzky 167

correct that Lissitzky had no interest in contemporary German artists of

“mystical” ilk,41 that had little to do with his operative sense of faith.
The executed De Stijl spaces are basically normal static rooms compared with
the flexible, even surprisingly phenomenological exhibition spaces that Lissitzky
designed in 1923 at Berlin (Proun Room), in 1926 at Dresden (Space, or Room,
for Constructive Art), and most extraordinarily, between 1927 and 1928 at
Hanover: the Abstract Cabinet.42 As a spatial ensemble, this last is a marvel in its
own right—of what could be called contemplatively applied painting.
Here an important design element carries over from a simpler wood format in
the second design (the Space for Constructive Art), to painted sheet metal in the
final Abstract Cabinet, namely, a wall treatment that accommodates the spectator’s
movement across it in space. It consists of closely parallel vertical slats that serve
to surround changing exhibits of various abstract paintings and graphic artworks
arranged in asymmetrical rectilinear clusters. These slats, like vertical blinds,
might be taken for granted; but they are so carefully modulated to this space that
they appear to be of one color from the left (white), another from head-on (gray),
and a third from the right (black), like those two-way novelty photos giving what
is known as the “Wilson-Lincoln effect” (Figure 4.5).43

Figure 4.5 El Lissitzky, Abstract Cabinet, c. 1920–31 (destroyed 1936), Getty

Research Institute, Los Angeles (950076).
168 Faith in Art

There is discussion about the extent to which this remarkable project was a
collaboration with Alexander Dorner, the progressivist director of the Provincial
Museum at Hanover. Dorner’s quasi-ideological enthusiasm must have been
part of the mix. On the other hand, the slat device has sources in new Russian
constructivist architecture and scenography. Lissitzky had conceived of
something similar in his 1922 lecture “New Russian Art,” where he called
attention to a new generation of designers after the Revolution, especially
architects for whom there was no building work, applying their talents the
theater, such as the constructivist brothers Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg and
Kazimir Myedunyesky, as a matter of innovative stage design using vertical
wood moldings, like vertical Venetian blinds, with attention to the bodily
movement of actors (L343). Lissitzky had used similar vertical slats in his Proun
gallery spaces in Germany, without any hint of religious connotation.
With the Abstract Cabinet, however, Lissitzky has produced a considerably
more than normally experiential realm where colloquies of independent and
changeable paintings, drawings, and prints, all in frames that themselves are
organized in a perpendicular yet also asymmetric and irregular manner,
as contemplative complexes on a non-predetermined path of other such
things, itself more like a field of possible relations than a simply linear path.
This unusual way of engaging the beholder and actively enjoining him or her to
make decisions that determine a subjective experience of interaction, in what is
also a social experience, is what originally made Alan Birnholz analogize
the experience of the Abstract Cabinet to a liturgical experience of identifiably
Jewish form.
On a mundane level, an outsider might be surprised that in an Orthodox
Jewish service, people may come and go (if not, of course, at every moment).
Birnholz generalizes, with the Abstract Cabinet in mind: “emphasis on the
participant making discoveries by himself [or herself], as . . . mov[ing] through
[Lissitzky’s] room at [their] own pace, parallels the ritual of the Jewish service, in
which within a general structure of communal worship there remained the
opportunity to proceed as one wished.”44
But Birnholz was pointing to something considerably more religiously specific
as well. A central prayer of many Jewish liturgies, daily and additionally on the
Sabbath or a Holy Day, is the Amidah (or Tefilat HaAmidah), meaning “The
Standing Prayer” (implying posture but also, metaphorically, standing before
God). Also called the Shemoneh Esreh (“The Eighteen”), for its successive
benedictions, the Amidah integrates separate individual and collective voiced
responses.45 The worshipper recites it quietly at his or her own pace, addressing
 A Jewish Lissitzky 169

God with personal as well as familial and social intentions, after which the entire
prayer is repeated for the whole congregation by the cantor. Important from the
Lissitzkian point of view—corresponding with his views on the theater in the
“New Russian Art” lecture—is the fact that the individual worshipper’s body
moves in space. For, in reciting the Amidah, one stands and then walks three
steps forward when reciting the prayer, in order to give God royal respect (and
then back up). This rocking recitation—suggestive of the lateral coloristic
variations of the slats—is no obedient, drill-like, linear regime. There is a
murmur as different worshippers recite more or less quietly, at different rates.
Birnholz’s analogy between the Abstract Cabinet and actual liturgy illuminates
how the disposition of the gallery encourages phases of distinctly private
contemplation with specific works of art as deliberately separate episodes in the
social flow, even as it underscores a surprising remnant of religiosity late in
Lissitzky’s life.
Maria Gough calls attention to the fact that this later and most important of
Lissitzky’s “Demonstration Spaces,” engaging the populace through spatial
movement in the experience of art, also drew on the good graces of Dorner.46 In
that situation in particular, Lissitzky was working with a museum director whose
museological stance would still be considered activist today.47 The synagogue
interpretation of the Hanover Abstract Cabinet by Birnholz (who has done much
still unacknowledged for the art-historical reinterpretation of Malevich as well
as Lissitzky), now renewed and developed by Gough, is almost the last to be
heard of religion in the present narrative.

Government Work

By the end of the 1920s, Lissitzky had gone over to constructivism. That there
might be two great “plastic” modalities, even of geometric art, that of visual space
(conducive to metaphor) and that of tangible materiality (conducive to
metonymy), might to be have accommodated Malevich’s planits, which were not
altogether unlike the contemporaneous Lissitzky Prouns and possibly even the
applied formalism of Malevich’s architectons. But in his impressive picture book
on new Soviet architecture, known in English as Russia: An Architecture for
World Revolution (1929), Lissitzky as much as discredits his own UNOVIS
mentor as somebody left over from the so-called Dark Ages: “The leader of color
perception, . . . a painter (Malevich), could not recognize the facticity of the
world; he only ever looked at it through the eye and remained captive to the non-
170 Faith in Art

objective.”48 Saying that is tantamount to politically capitalizing on architecture

as concrete formality! I like to think that, as Malevich himself had turned to
architecture as a matter of pedagogically justifiable formalism, this interest of the
architecturally trained Lissitzky was yet a new “transfer station,” carrying him
over, in new circumstances, to a more productivist artistic practice, when
acknowledging Malevich would not have been opportune.
Lissitzky had become adept at the constructivist-to-productivist medium of
photocollage during the Twenties, and by the time of his architecture book, he
also enjoyed a new career as an exhibition designer for the Soviet state, which
enabled him to escape Stalin’s outright repression of modernist art and artists.
His poster and catalogue cover for a Russian exhibition at the Museum of
Applied Arts in Zurich in 1929 is not his only example of the device of overlapping
faces, so that two faces share three eyes, fusing the figures in an image of solidarity
(Figure 4.6). This device is adumbrated in the Russian icon tradition, even if it
tends to make Western viewers think first of Giotto’s Meeting at the Golden Gate
in the Arena Chapel; an iconic example is the relation of the two faces of Christ
and one of the Marys in a fifteenth-century icon of the Entombment, now in the
State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.
Eventually, however, the spirit departs from even Lissitzky’s socially applied
art. He had given everything to the cause, but the cause was proving itself
unworthy, aesthetically as well as ethically, what with Stalin’s antimodernism
and the imposition of socialist realism as the state’s official painting style as of
1932. Having invested much of his later thinking into astute forms of exhibition
design, it must have been devastating to have his designs for the Soviet Pavilion
at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York rejected. In addition, his health was
failing.
The photograph in Lissitzky’s Second World War poster Make More Tanks!
(Figure 4.7), produced posthumously in 1942, disappointingly naturalizes and
normalizes the paired heads of the more structurally astute photomontage used
on the Zurich catalogue cover (Figure 4.6). In the Zurich design, a male and
female couple, as detached from nature as a pair of dolls (though based on the
artist’s photograph called Lenin Youth, where the structural overlap of one eye of
each is already apparent) rises up, as if metaphorically, from the base of a giant
abstract constriction of concrete, likely a dam. In Make More Tanks!, the
structural ambiguity of the eyes is dispensed with, and everything else is put
metonymically in place for as much normalcy as possible: tank below, airplane
above, and a factory floor as “connective tissue” behind the two workers. Well, at
least Lissitzky did not wind up taking official photographs of slave labor, like
 A Jewish Lissitzky 171

Figure 4.6 El Lissitzky, cover of catalogue for the Russian Exhibition at the
Kunstgewerbe Museum, Zurich, 1929. Alamy Ltd.

Figure 4.7 El Lissitzky, Give Us More Tanks (poster), 1942. Alamy Ltd.
172 Faith in Art

another former avant-gardist of constructivist ilk. And yet, even here, with
Malevich already dead for seven years and Lissitzky himself recently passed
away, one can detect a remnant of suprematist vitality in Make More Tanks! in
the trimming down of the rather old-fashioned photograph in a rhombus shape
that puts up some formal Malevichian resistance to being taken for granted
as a square.
 Conclusion

The ambiguous title of this book—Faith in Art—is deliberate. One is invited to

settle on the nuance of one or another preposition for oneself. No ambiguity,
however, clouds its wider purpose, which is to depose of the prevailing idea that
whatever might seem at least vaguely “spiritual” here is surely unconcerned with
biblical truth and the social, institutional life of what Durkheim called “church.”
By countering assumptions about supposed irreligion of early modern artists
(not to mention the thoroughly mistaken sense of its dependence on Theosophy),
the book may more broadly also serve to introduce readers largely ignorant of
religion to certain basic theological concepts that were known to all educated
people at the time when abstract painting first took off.
Our four abstract pioneers, however, had in childhood and youth been
encouraged to take up their own basic presumptions of faith in revealed religion,
meaning religion based on Holy Scripture (and the complex hermeneutic and
historical interpretations of it that account for denominational differences). We
today might presume secularism as every modern person’s basic script, but the
first questions that stump us all as we grew up are more metaphysical. And just
as one’s mother tongue is a singular language, with not only a special vocabulary
but a special grammar and even intonation, one’s religious ideology likely has a
confessional aspect, specifiable as to creed.
Later in their lives, three of our four artists had to deal with Marxist political
ideology in Russia as well—not necessarily instead of, but in addition to, their
bedrock faith. Even the fourth artist, Mondrian, was in his own solitary way
sufficiently concerned with biblically based social justice to allow justification as
such to condition his pictorial compositions, and even how to explain them. In
his case—and in Lissitzky’s late Abstract Cabinet—religion can be seen to visibly
inform abstract painting,
Obstructing or ignoring the question of religion is a prevalent aversion in
modern art, which did after all arise in secularist circumstances; but the positivist,
scientistic extreme was as dogmatic as any creed (see Kandinsky, in Chapter 1).

173
174 Faith in Art

Even today, many intelligent religious folk are so culturally reactionary that
abstract painting strikes them as categorically transgressive. True, some devotees
of abstraction want to avoid metaphysics entirely, in the interest of a certain kind
of “purity”; they may still wish to approve certain works as more “spiritual,”
however vaguely, at least instead of being “merely decorative.” Thus this book,
concerned with religious faith, tends to abjure the word “spiritual” almost
completely (despite Kandinsky’s special attachment to it).
Nevertheless, all four of these artists are noteworthy for their concerns,
however differently inflected, with a biblically promised “Kingdom of God,”
which we are told will be more just than the present world; and which we are also
often encouraged to help bring about. We know that these artists knew all about
that because in one way or another they wrote about it. Liberals now call such a
belief utopian, sometimes dismissively; cynics now call it “utopic”—apparently,
all the more farfetched, just in order to guarantee that the rest of us don’t think
they are foolish enough to believe it.
Kandinsky’s Christian Orthodoxy can probably be said to have a more private
side than any of the others: his otherwise altogether quite “institutional” church
affiliation still has a distinguished meditative tradition that has been encouraged
for centuries among religiously inclined laity as well as clergy. It also has a sense
of communion designed to engender contemplation of the Kingdom to come.
There no mystery in Kandinsky’s always writing about the inner significance of
his work. Orthodoxy’s long and vital icon tradition is also radically personal,
involving personal communion with, and the kissing, of holy images. This
special, practically sacramental role of images, I argue, continues to impact
Kandinsky’s abstractions.
The Calvinist Mondrian seems, from early on, to be averse to figural images,
in favor of such motifs as the exterior of his parish church, where he would go to
hear the Word of God preached, or unpopulated landscapes, before developing
into a most rigorous abstractionist. Mondrian’s case practically intersects with
theology because his own thinking is so akin to an important contemporary
theologian of neo-Calvinist ilk, Herman Bavinck, whose theology dwells
extensively on the Kingdom of God to come.
Malevich is not generally recognized as a Catholic. The unfortunate reason
for this seems to be that Catholics don’t care about him or, for that matter, any of
the other abstractionists since—with the enormously important exception of
Continental Europe—the Catholic Church is largely uninterested in abstract art
(a more provincial American reason to write this book). At the same time,
because the matching of Malevich to the flat and stylized Russian icon has, in the
 Conclusion 175

new millennium, become as much as a critical cliché, Faith in Art attempts to

show that Malevich actually has, besides a certain iconic modality, a more
Roman Catholic aspect.
The Jewish aspect of El Lissitzky also pertains to an ultimately religious
emphasis on the coming Kingdom of God, foretold by the prophets—
notwithstanding Lissitzky’s compatibly enthusiastic Marxism, which can be
considered to be Jewish at a “universalistic” instead of ethnic extreme. To employ
one of his own notions: Lissitzky functioned knowingly as a kind of “transfer
station” between the irreducibly idealistic abstraction of Malevich’s suprematism
and the practicalities and materialist emphasis of constructivism; and he was
likewise interested in a Jewish universalism, for his purposes transcending
Christianity by way of an idealistic Communism.
Inspiration drawn from religion surely did inform the early abstract
modernists: this is a fact. That religious faith and abstract art, each with some
claim to universality, both tended to be denied by repressive regimes is not
surprising; nor that positivism could not tolerate any (other) sort of faith as
valid. But this does not obliterate the presence of faith in abstract painting,
where it did inform modern abstraction from the start as this study has shown.
The principal parallel between all four artists here is indeed their common, but
surprising, familiarity with the Word of God and, second, their distinct knowledge
of their characteristic denominational practices in liturgy. Only Mondrian, the
Calvinist, seems not to have been affected by liturgical practice (a fairly common
Calvinist position). Malevich not only understands both Western and Eastern
modalities of holy images (especially the liturgical involvement of images in the
East), but he proves capable of negotiating between them and was even brave
enough to speak out publicly on the forbidden topic of God. Even the most
Communist Lissitzky, as declaredly engaged in thoroughgoing world
reconstruction, loved Ecclesiastes. He it is, who would seem to have left anything
religious quite behind, who most calls to my mind the activism of the Lutheran
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “It is the theme of the whole Bible that . . . God’s
kingdom is to be upon the earth, that his will be done on earth.”1
The preceding chapters have explored how embedded religious motifs,
themes, and behaviors were taken for granted as given, sometimes as material to
be transmuted into abstraction, by means of form as a cultural birthright. That
presumption needs to be revisited now because it was first ignored and then
forgotten
In the course of their unfolding, the chapters demonstrate that religion was
very much at hand for these founding modernists. This is of some intellectual
176 Faith in Art

significance after negotiating postmodernity. It is no betrayal of principle to

articulate the more idealist motivations that served to bring about distinctly
modern modality in painting. Indeed, the wider critical contribution of Faith in
Art is to show critical art theory had overcompensated when it seemed necessary
to articulate the validity of form on exclusively its own terms: we can now
presuppose a formalism of cosmopolite richness.
The marketplace has now created shell games of supposed alternative
“value”—and many art people care primarily or wholly about investing to
increase their portfolios—but even art-world manipulation does not change the
integral knowledge informing art, its conceptual substance. If that is permitted
to defend itself, then a further significance of this study would be to provide us
all with a depth of knowledge on early abstract painting that could liberate
studio practice, freeing us that much more from the prevailing clichés that
sustain the consideration of art as a mere commodity.
Most affirmatively as well as specifically, this study has concerned itself with
the religions that helped inform these artists’ highly singular senses of abstraction;
these can now be understood to have been concomitants of initial abstraction
itself. Without being remotely uniform, these four abstract modernists found
ways of thinking about abstraction and their religious place in the social world
that served to generate creativity within their diverse frames of reference. This
book strives to give us a view into that privileged perspective, a century later.
 Conclusion 177

Figure 4.8 El Lissitzky, About Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale of Two Squares in Six
Constructions (in Russian), 1922 [back cover], Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
(85-B4897). © El Lissitzky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn.
178
 Notes

Introduction

1 Sixten Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos: A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and
the Genesis of Abstract Painting (Åbo: Åbo akademi, 1970), 183.
2 Quotations in this paragraph are from a present-day relative of the painter identified
only by an initial: G. af Klint, “Hilma af Klint: A Short Memoir,” in Hilma af Klint
(Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin), 6–9.
3 Åke Fant, “The Case of the Artist Hilma af Klint,” in The Spiritual in Abstract
Painting: 1890–1985, ed. Maurice Tuchman (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, 1986), 156–7.
4 Ibid., 157.
5 Getting off the rails with respect to Abrahamic faith can explain why Klint began to
feel out of harmony with Rudolf Steiner’s reservations about false worship (touched
on in Chapters 1 and 2).
6 One hopes that the philistine attempt to reduce this genius to the level of
dressmaking and linoleum design, in line with a productivism that he was entitled to
hate, is over.
7 Furthermore, “N/S” identifies a Malevich in the Nakov catalogue: “N” from the list of
abbreviataions; “S” as a Suprematist work.
8 Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (New
York: Harper and Row, 1975), 15.
9 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields
(1911; repr., New York: Free Press, 1995), 44.
10 Jacobus de Voragine, La légende dorée, trans. Téodor de Wyzewa (Paris: Ferrin,
1923), xvi.
11 Simon Dixon, “Orthodoxy and Revolution: The Restoration of the Russian
Patriarchate in 1917,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 28 (2018): 166–7.
12 Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (London: Allen and Unwin,
1921), 97.
13 Anatoly Lunacharsky, “Dostoyevsky’s ‘Plurality of Voices’ (Re: The Book Problems of
the Works of Dostoyevsky by M. M. Bakhtin)” (1929), in On Literature and Art, ed.
A. Lebedev (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 130.

179
180 Notes

1 An Orthodox Kandinsky

1 Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
(1886, 1888), in Collected Works, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 26:383. Engels credits Joseph Dietzgen, a workman
(elsewhere called a “leathermaker”) for first saying so (384).
2 Religious subjects include St. Francisca, St. Vladimir, All Saints (three times),
St. George (three times), St. Gabriel, the Resurrection (twice), the angel of the Last
Judgment, two versions of Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the Deluge.
3 Viktor Shklovsky, “The Resurrection of the Word” (1914), in Russian Formalism:
A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation, ed. Stephen Bann and John E. Bolt,
trans. Richard Sherwood (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 45–6
(quotation uncited).
4 Viktor Shklovsky, “The Connection Between Devices of Syuzhet Construction and
General Stylistic Devices” (1919), trans. Jane Knox, in ibid., 49.
5 Boris Uspensky, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, ed. Stephen Rudy, PdR Press
Publications in Semiotics of Art 3 (Lisse: Peter de Ridder, 1976), 29.
6 Normal, nonrigid continuity of type is seen in the 200-year gap between our two
icons of Elijah in the Desert (Figures 1.3 and 1.4). A classic example of an icon that
has been repeatedly imitated as perfectly as possible is the late eleventh- to early
twelfth-century Byzantine Virgin of Vladimir, which belongs to the State Tretyakov
Gallery, Moscow, but now hangs in the church of St. Nicholas Tolmachi. The most
famous case of fixity is St. Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity, from the 1420s,
now also in the State Tretyakov Gallery, which “the Orthodox Church accepted [as]
the ‘iconographic dogma’ of Rublev’s image of the Holy Trinity in the mid-16th
century when the ‘Stoglavy Sobor’ (the One-Hundred-Head Council . . .) canonized
it as the authorized model image obligatory for other icon-painters to copy and
paint.” Natalya Sheredega, “Andre Rublev: Image of the Holy Trinity,” Tretyakov
Gallery Magazine 40, no. 3 (2013), https://www.tretyakovgallerymagazine.com/
articles/%E2%84%963-2013-40/andrei-rublev-image-holy-trinity.
7 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1975), 1:101, for these several quotations.
8 In our own time, Arthur C. Danto’s several versions of his theory of the end of art
took off from this sequence in Hegel’s Aesthetics by assuming art gave rise directly to
philosophy. Knowing almost nothing of Hegel compared to my late friend, I wish I
could ask him why that is not considered as unorthodox as, in Marxism, expecting
to go from feudalism to socialism without bourgeois capitalism in between (not that
that hasn’t been tried). Hegel does vary his tripartite sequence, though he still
expects art to emerge out of religion. (What would it mean to emphasize that
religion begets art?)
 Notes 181

9 I do not dwell on Symbolism as such because I consider it part of the problem rather
than part of the solution. Putting religion to work on behalf of poetic evocation—
preferably the most exotic forms of religion, remote from problems of social life—is
an obstacle to anyone seeking religion, which Durkheim reminds us is always social.
Mark Roskill deftly describes Kandinsky’s break with the general-purpose,
spiritualistic proto-modernism of the later nineteenth century by renouncing “the
kind of painting that seeks to render ‘states of mind (Seelenzustände),’ in favor of an
art that ‘speaks in its own unique way to the soul about things that are for the soul its
‘daily bread’ and communicates ‘by means of this language of the soul’ with the
spectator.” Following a Russian line of thought connecting Dostoyevsky with
Solovyov, this requires the individual “to maintain a bond with the universal cosmic
order, . . . attained by an adherence to both Christian revelation and scientific
method. Rather than being influenced, then, by any particular representation of
Russian Symbolism, Kandinsky had early on absorbed this religious philosophy,
claiming the insufficiency of rational thought alone.” Mark Roskill, Klee, Kandinsky,
and the Thought of Their Time (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 41–2,
with refs.
10 I have never seen attention called to possible religious connections with the
contemporary work of the great early modern British formalists, in Sadleir’s
Edwardian context. But Clive Bell’s concept of “significant form,” developed in his
Art (1914), approaches the terminology of the Anglican mystic Evelyn Underhill.
She, also in 1914, writes about meditationally fixing attention on one object and so
finding that “a perpetual growth of significance keeps pace with the increase of
attention you bring to bear on it” (Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism: A Little
Book for Normal People (New York: Dutton, 1960), 52). One wants to know about
possible influence here.
11 Vasili Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular, trans.
Michael Sadleir, Francis Golffing, Michael Harrison, and Ferdinand Ostertag,
Documents of Modern Art 5 (New York: Wittenborn, 1947). This version
incorporates unpublished memoranda by the artist in response to the first German
edition.
12 This idea also used by Hegel, in the Aesthetics, for the laboriousness implied by
meticulous naturalism in art. The effort to delineate that “poverty of nature” by
which the “non-uniformity” of human skin, with its “indentations, wrinkles, pores,
small hairs, little veins, . . . proves to be sensitive everywhere, and displays the
morbidezza [delicacy], the tints of colour in flesh and veins, which are the artist’s
cross” (Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:146). “Delicacy” is Knox’s translation (is it correct to
think that something more pejorative seems warranted: picayune, punctilious?).
13 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E .F. J. Payne
(Indian Hills, CO: Falcon’s Wing Press, 1958), 1:153.
182 Notes

14 Henri Matisse, “Notizen eines Malers,” Kunst und Künstler 7 (1909): 345, https://digi.
ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kk1909/0361. Matisse is supposed to have replied to the
query, “Do you believe in God?,” with the answer, “When I am painting, I do” (quoted
from memory).
15 The Angelus prayer is: “Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our
hearts, that we to whom the incarnation of Christ thy Son was made known by the
message of an angel, may by his passion and cross be brought to the glory of his
resurrection. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.”
16 The evening bell is immortalized in Jean-François Millet’s painting of a farm couple
in sight of a church tower, praying at dusk: The Angelus, 1857–9 (Paris, Musée
d’Orsay), a favorite of Vincent van Gogh.
17 This essay was added to his book The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, in its
third edition (1888).
18 Novalis, Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Margaret Mahoney Stoljar (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1997), 72, 163.
19 Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1988), 29.
20 Vasili Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, insbesondere in der Malerei, 3rd ed.
(Munich: Piper, 1912), 117. Luther’s “unser täglich Brot gib uns heute” translates as
“give us this day our daily bread.”
21 Vasili Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art (Painting), trans. John E. Bowlt, in The Life
of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian Art: A Study of On the Spiritual in Art, ed. John E.
Bowlt and Rose-Carol Washton Long (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners,
1980), 63–125. Further internal citations are from this text.
22 Vincent Tomas, “Kandinsky’s Theory of Painting,” British Journal of Aesthetics 9, no. 1
(January 1969): 19–38.
23 Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London:
Penguin, 1995). Further internal citations are from this edition.
24 The question of the Orthodox icon is for Tolstoy ethical as well as aesthetic. He
is not alone in finding icons repetitious but also not alone as a Russian in deriding
the Catholic art of the West, especially of the Renaissance and baroque, as
hedonistic and criticizing its influence in Russia. For Tolstoy, Western decadence is
inseparable from the rise of Renaissance capitalism: if the Catholics “ostensibly . . .
still kept to the forms of the Church’s teaching, they were no longer able to believe
in it and held to it only by inertia, or for the sake of the people, who continued to
believe blindly in the teaching of the Church, and whom those of the upper classes
considered it necessary to support in their belief for the sake of profit. . . . Essentially,
these people did not believe in anything, just as the educated Romans of the first
centuries did not believe in anything. And yet the power and wealth were in their
hands, and it was they who encouraged and guided it. And so it was among these
 Notes 183

people that art began to grow up which was evaluated not by how well it
expressed [N.B.] feelings resulting from the people’s religious consciousness,
but only how beautiful it was—in other words, how much pleasure it afforded” (ibid.,
45, 47).
25 It is often said she received at a higher salary, perhaps because she was the daughter
of an army officer.
26 This connectivity is seen by Christians and expressed by the Church; see Myles M.
Bourke, A Study of the Metaphor of the Olive Tree in Romans XI (Washington, D.C.:
Catholic University of America Press, 1947).
27 The text says “even,” no doubt a typographical error.
28 See Charles Darwent, Josef Albers: Life and Work (London: Thames and Hudson,
2018); reviewed by the present writer in Religion and the Arts 24 (2020): 678–81.
29 Vasili Kandinsky, Punkt und Linie zum Fläche: Beitrag zur Analyse der malerischen
Elemente (Munich: Langon, 1926), 47.
30 Along the lower edge of Mellan’s plate are two Latin inscriptions: “Formatus unicus
una” (Uniquely singularly formed) and “Non alter” ([like] no other”).
31 His example is “zincography” as a metallic variant of lithography.
32 Ironically the color of mourning would change to white later in the century after the
Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church.
33 It is impossible that such a well-educated Russian Orthodox as Kandinsky was
unaware that in the First Epistle to the Corinthians (15:12–19), St. Paul says that if
you do not believe in the Resurrection of Christ (and his believers), you might as
well not bother with anything else.
34 Shirley A. Glade, “A Heritage Discovered Anew: Russia’s Reevaluation of Pre-Petrine
Icons in the Late Tsarist and Early Soviet Periods,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies
26 (1992): 145–95.
35 Lothar Schreyer, Erinerrungen am Sturm und Bauhaus (Munich: Müller, 1956), 232,
233; quoted slightly differently in Lilia Sokolova, “Abstraction as Expression of
Religious Truths in Wassily Kandinsky’s Painting,” in The Destinies of Abstract
Expressionism: For the Centenary of Guy de Montlaur’s Birth (1918–1977), ed Evalina
Deyneka et al. (Moscow: Russian State University for the Humanities, 2018), 6.
Schreyer also reports that Kandinsky ordinarily said his night prayers in Dessau.
According to Howard Dearstyne and David Spaeth (Inside the Bauhaus (London:
Architectural Press, 1986), 155–6), Schreyer’s reports on Kandinsky are
“grandiloquent” and likely inaccurate, but because many now want to read all cultural
ambiguities in the most secular possible way, there was probably something there.
36 Such a civico-religious element may or may not persist: thus the first patron saint of
the City of New York is St. Nicholas, surely because New York was founded as Nieuw
Amsterdam and the patron of Amsterdam is Nicolas.
37 I am attempting to avoid the term “semiabstract.”
184 Notes

38 See the classic article on this subject, by Margaret Betz, “The Icon and Russian
Modernism,” Artforum 15, no. 10 (Summer 1977), 38–45. The present writer had the
pleasure to commission, edit, and publish this article, with an appropriate cover
illustration: Malevich’s Hieratic Suprematist Cross (1920–1; Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam; N/S-564)—on which see Chapter 3.
39 Dimitrii V. Sarabyanov, “Kandinsky and the Russian Icon,” Russia and the Christian
East, https://ros-vos.net/christian-culture/7/kandinsky/1. All quotations in this
paragraph from this source. The comment on Kandinsky’s high regard for the icon
relies, again, on Schreyer, Errinerungen, 250.
40 Wendy Salmond found references to Kandinsky’s “inner necessity” in a book on
icons published by the great Berlin art publisher Wasmuth in 1920. Wendy Salmond,
“Ellis H. Minns and Nikodim Kondakov’s The Russian Icon (1927),” in Modernism
and the Spiritual in Russian Art, ed. Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow
(Cambridge: Open Book, 2017), 177.
41 This concerns not only contemplation but also silent prayer directed to God.
42 The Philokalia: The Complete Text, ed. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and
Makarios of Corinth, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrad, and Kallistos Ware
(London: Faber, 1979), 1:63.
43 Ibid., 3:81.
44 Alexei Lidov, “The Iconostasis: The Current State of Research,” abstract, in The
Iconostasis: Origins, Evolution, Symbolism, ed. Alexei Lidov (Moscow: Progress-
Tradition, 2000), 713–17.
45 Alexei Lidov, introduction to “The Iconostasis: Origins, Evolution, Symbolism
(Abstracts of Papers),” in ibid., 712–13. See also Ludmila Schennikova, “The Russian
High Iconostasis at the Turn of the 15th Century: Results and Prospects of
Research,” in ibid., 733–4.
46 Photographs of the Virgin of Vladimir are readily accessible online.
47 The Hebrew prophets count as saints (after the Resurrection), in Christianity.
48 Bertolt Brecht pointed out that many Americans do not seem able to entertain two
different ideas in their heads at a time.
49 My comments, confined to the image occupying the central field of this Elijah in the
Wilderness, do not extend to the hagiographical inside fame with events of Elijah’s
life. For the surrounding frame see David Talbot and Tamara Talbot Rice, Icons and
Their History (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1974), pl. 153.
50 Other cross-motif paintings from the same year of 1926 include Cross Form
(Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster), a chunky and ornamented Latin cross that
otherwise compares with the Holy Virgin of Tolga, from the end of the thirteenth or
the beginning of the fourteenth centuries, in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; and
For Nina for Christmas (Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris).
The latter shows a pair of crosses, perhaps of burnished metal, each upon a
 Notes 185

triangular base. Insofar as the larger, on the left, is taken to refer to Kandinsky, the
smaller, on the right in the pitch-black space, must refer to his wife, Nina, with the
implication of a married Christian couple. More evidence of Christianity, but today
needing defense as such, is the ovoid painting Easter Egg (1926; Musée National
d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou [Nina Kandinsky Bequest]). Peg Weiss wants this
surface design to derive unambiguously from Siberian Shamanic drumheads,
notwithstanding the title (Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and
Shaman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 98–9). Such lack of intellectual
generosity precludes ecumenism, because the Christian Easter egg finds an obvious
analogue of sorts in the hardboiled “Beitzahd” egg of the Passover Seder; and
Christians do, after all, understand Easter (in an old formula) as “the Passover of the
gentiles from sin and death.”
51 He was also a friend of Malevich’s friend Mikhail Gershenzon; see Chapter 3.
52 See Dixon, “Orthodoxy and Revolution,” in note 11 of the Introduction, above..
53 Alexandre Kojève, The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solovyov, trans. Ilya Merlin
and Mikhail Pozdniakov (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 18. Further internal
citations in the appendix refer to this text.
54 Alexandre Kojève, “The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky,” trans. Lisa Florman,
appendix to Concerning the Spiritual and the Concrete in Kandinsky’s Art, by
Lisa Florman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 165. Mark C. Taylor,
in Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1992), 64, sees Kojève as having Kandinsky’s nonobjectivity
satisfy Hegel’s notion of the end of art while signaling a “third age”—indeed, a
“Kingdom” managing to connect with Kandinsky’s Christian sense of the
Kingdom of God (as above), but devoid of God and devoted to “leisurely play.”
The Christian nephew’s sense of the Kingdom was closer to the more orthodox
(religious-plus-socialist) third-ageist conception of the Jewish Lissitzky (see
Chapter 4).
55 Aidan Nichols, “Sergei Bulgakov on the Art of the Icon,” Chapter 4 in Redeeming
Beauty: Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 71–88.
Further internal citations are from this chapter.
56 Nichols continues: “So at the Annunciation to Mary, the Father who generated the
Son now appropriately sends him on his mission into the world, while the Holy
Spirit shares in the Incarnation by descending onto the Virgin so that the Logos may
become flesh in her womb.” Emphasis on the Virgin’s womb as a human organ is as
prominent in the Orthodox Church’s equivalent “Hail, Mother of God” or “The
Angelic Salutation,” as equivalent to the well-known Roman “Hail, Mary” prayer.
Protestantism drew a veil of categorical propriety over sexuality, so that the Council
or Trent had to forbid teaching that the Original Sin or Adam and Eve was sexual.
Hence Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa of Avila, 1647-52, has a history of Protestants
186 Notes

and rationalists responding to it quite naïvely, as if discovering a hidden layer of

imagery, whereas, in it, sexual joy, as an earthly human limit, is only the ostensive
basis of Bernini’s depicted metaphor of divine love.
57 Typically, Kojève loved these contradictions whereby the believers might be the most
profound atheists, or vice versa.
58 Brice Marden, Actualité d’un bilan (Paris: Galerie Yvon Lambert, 1972), 91, quoted
in Stephen Bann, “Brice Marden: From the Material to the Immaterial,” in Brice
Marden: Paintings, Drawings and Prints, 1975–80 (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery,
1981), 8. Subsequent internal citations refer to Bann’s essay.
59 Marden was also then using museum postcards of religious paintings in a series of
collage drawings called “Homages to Art”; for example, Homage to Art 14 (Fra
Angelico), 1974, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
60 Bann continues in the same place (n. 58): “It is hard to know where to begin in
unpicking this skein of suppressions. . . . Are we to presume that authors have some
concept of . . . bogus religiosity, or indeed of genuine religiosity, for that matter? No,
we are surely being asked to take that term as effectively synonymous with ‘religion,’
since religion (and magic) have ceased to be ‘a living force’ in ‘modern society.’ The
whole argument rests on this carefree and unexplained assertion about ‘modern
society’ which is assumed to be a generally received truth. Yet it might not be so. It
might, after all, be a flimsily based myth, at least as far as the profound interrelation
between ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ goes.” Writers such as these “would like to think of
this as mere archaism, as a pitiful and doomed survival in the ‘modern world.’ But
they do not actually persuade us of anything except their strenuous determination to
reinforce this view in bold type and at considerable length. One might reasonably
prefer to this stridency the honesty of Roland Barthes, a not insignificant influence
on [such critics], who wrote in his last book, . . . [Camera Obscura, 1980], of ‘the
religious substance from which I am kneaded.’ One might wish, not for elaborate
disavowals, but for a serious examination of the Western, Judaeo-Christian tradition,
in so far as it determines not only our response to the ‘Old Masters’ but also our
awareness of the art of our own times (9–10).”

2 A Protestant Mondrian

1 Charles Pickstone suggests that Theosophy around 1900 “neatly filled the gap left by
the failure of orthodox Christianity to appear intellectually respectable, promising
admittance into occult secrets and an escape from the scientific materialism which
was associated with what was seen as the vulgarity of commercial bourgeois culture”;
it purported to address “the dilemma of educated and scientific people who,
alienated from Christianity and unversed in theology, could so easily fall into the
 Notes 187

maw of gnosticism dressed up in scientific clothes.” Charles Pickstone, “Mondrian,

Don Cupitt, and the Cheshire Cat,” Theology 89, no. 729 (May 1986): 189. Theosophy
is only the most serious distortion of this painter’s supposed proclivities. Others
include an exaggerated notion of his ubiquitous perpendicular vertical and
horizontal intersections as supposedly symbolic of sex, on which, see Joseph
Masheck, “A Christian Mondrian,” Bavinck Review 6 (2015): 37–72 (esp. 40 and
40n5). There is an equivalent problem with the architect Adolf Loos; see Joseph
Masheck, “Epilogue: Critique of Ornament,” in Ornament and Crime: Thoughts on
Design and Materials, by Adolf Loos, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin,
2019), 267–343 (esp. 297–8, 334–6).
2 John Dennis, quoted in F. E. Sparshott, The Structure of Aesthetics (1963; repr.,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 329–30 (orthography modernized).
3 This older term from the aesthetics of painting has nothing to do with a current
usage of “relational art” as applied to an artist in direct social interaction with an
audience, especially an audience constituted from different social races, classes,
religions, and so on.
4 This early work, difficult to find reproduced, appears in Herbert Henkels, “Mondrian
in Winterswijk,” in Mondrian from Figuration to Abstraction (Tokyo: Seibu Museum
of Art, 1987), 151–2 (with color ill.).
5 A good example is Emanuel de Witte’s Interior of the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, c.
1653, Michaelis Collection, Cape Town.
6 In 1999, the Catholic and Lutheran churches signed a “Joint Declaration on the
Doctrine of Justification”; and in 2017—500 years after Luther began the
Reformation—the same declaration was also signed by the World Communion of
Reformed Churches. Not signing then, however, were Scottish Calvinist churches
that still dispute what they consider heretical Arminianism among the Dutch,
allowing too much latitude for free will and hence (supposedly) credit for good
works.
7 After thinking this myself for many years, my thought was confirmed by my teacher
Meyer Schapiro: “Mondrian: Order and Randomness in Abstract Painting,” in
Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries; Selected Papers (New York: Braziller, 1978),
233–61, esp. 259n7.
8 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott
(Project Gutenburg, 2004), conclusion, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5683/5683-
h/5683-h.htm#link2H_CONC. Joseph Masheck, “Mondrian Exhibit,” interview by
Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose, January 4, 1996, https://charlierose.com/videos/8944.
9 Yves-Alain Bois, “The Iconoclast,” in Piet Mondrian, 1872–1944, by Yves-Alain Bois,
Angelica Zander Rubenstine, Joop Joosten, and Hans Janssen (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1994), 338. One hardly trusts a supposed Kantian writing a book with
the misguided title of Bolland’s Pure Reason: A Book for the Friends of Wisdom
188 Notes

(1904). Bois says that, despite his readings, Mondrian “never completely discards
Schoenmaekers’ use of the concept of ‘determination,’ which is rigorously antithetical
to that of Hegel” (369n97); but what about Calvinist predestination? He also
develops a telling Hegelian theory of Mondrian’s development, with the painter—
perhaps informed about Hegel through Bolland (who may have used the term
“equilibrated relationship”)—in accord with a grand algorithm of progressive formal
development, followed by retrenchment, in a sense of what could next be done
without. Bois, too, plays down Theosophy and M. H. J. Schoenmaekers. See also
Harry Cooper, “Mondrian, Hegel, Boogie,” October 84 (Spring 1998): 118–42.
10 Das Neue Testament unsers Herrn und Heilandes Jesu Christi nach den Deutschen
Übersetzung D. Martin Luthers (Berlin: Britische und Ausländische Bibelgesellschaft,
1925), 153. Although the text of the Lutherbibel has been altered over time, this
word does occur early on. I first made this point in 2012: Joseph Masheck,
“Convictions of Things Not Seen: A Change from Suprematism to Constructivism in
Russian Revolutionary Art” (keynote lecture, Art and Christianity Enquiry
conference on “Art and Christianity in Revolutionary Times,” Boston, July 2012); see
also Joseph Masheck, “El Lissitzky: On the Side of Faith,” Art and Christianity
(London) 71 (Autumn 2012): 5.
11 And other editions. The facsimile is unpaginated: Die Lutherbibel von 1534, ed.
Stephen Füssel (Cologne: Taschen, 2002), 2 vols.; vol. 2; Rom. 3:31.
12 Perhaps in Zurich they did!
13 I borrow these terms from Aquinas’ Commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics on the
suggestion of Peter McNamara. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Nicomachean
Ethics, trans. Charles I. Litzinger (Chicago: Regnery, 1964), https://isidore.co/
aquinas/english/Ethics.htm.
14 To retrieve the now problematic term classic (then all too attached to the reactionary
rappel à l’ordre, or call to order), I cite, above all, the Erechtheum, on the Acropolis,
as evocative of Mondrian owing to its astute asymmetries in ground plan as well as
elevation. Nicolas Calas, the Greek surrealist poet and New York art critic, writing
for me as editor in chief of Artforum, in January 1978, stated, “When Mondrian
substitutes equivalence for symmetry, the replacement is a model of perfection
unknown before him.” Nicolas Calas, “Bodyworks and Porpoises,” in
Transfigurations: Art Critical Essays on the Modern Period (Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1985), 241.
15 By employing the Dutch word bepaalaheit (literally, determination), Mondrian
implies the specification of one thing as against another.
16 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. John Allen (Philadelphia:
Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, 1936), 1:818. A few other quotations use
simple book/part/chapter citations for a classic, based on this edition.
17 See note 6, above.
 Notes 189

18 Herbert Arthur Hodges, The Pattern of Atonement (London: SCM, 1955), 67, 72–3;
The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent, trans. James
Waterworth (London, 1848), 34.
19 Hodges, Pattern of Atonement, 74.
20 John Henry Newman, Lectures on Justification (1838; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), 70, 109.
21 Hendrik Matthes, “Mondrian’s ‘Exact Plastic of Mere Relationship’,” Kunst &
Museumjournaal 6 (1994/95): 71.
22 Given the general notion of the “plastic arts” as visual arts where form endures in
virtue of the physical properties of materials, the Theosophist Madame Blavatsky had
written rather implausibly that “the origin of everything is the ‘plasticist’ essence (de
plastishe essentie) that fills the universe”; in Dutch in Marty Bax, Mondriaan compleet
(Blaricum: Atrium, 2001). But we are not after mystical natural history but a new—
and, if anything, unnatural—artistic plasticity. Mondrian’s De Stijl colleague Theo van
Doesburg, whose 1917 publication De Stijl advanced the single-minded name of the
Dutch movement as a comprehensive modern style—“The Style”—knew the
mathematician and ex-Catholic priest Schoenmaekers, whose The New Worldview
(Het nieuwe wereldbeeld; 1915) had been followed by Principles of Visual [sometimes
rendered as “Plastic”] Mathematics (Beginselen der beeldende wiskunde; 1916). Thanks
to Joop Koopman for discussing these translations. In Mondrian’s 1920 Neo-
Plasticism, “plastics” even extends to concepts: “Since truth and beauty are basically
one, it is not logical to deny the obvious kinship of these two plastics” (M143).
23 Roger Lipsey says that Mondrian “gave an idiosyncratic but fascinating value to the word
tragic.” Roger Lipsey, The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art (1989; repr. Mineola, NY:
Dover, 2004), 76. He used it as Buddhists use the term dukkha, pain or suffering, to refer
to the obviously painful things in life and to all transient experiences, however joyful:
“Nature and man’s life insofar as they are not touched by the universal are tragic” (ibid.).
Lipsey also quotes Mondrian himself here in “The New Plastic in Painting” on seeing the
tragic so forcefully as (in accord with Butor, above) to have to“express the nontragic”
(M53n.b., emphasis original). Six months before Mondrian died in New York, several of
the new, more existentialist abstract expressionist painters (Adolf Gottlieb, Mark Rothko,
and Barnett Newman [Newman helped to draft the letter but did not sign it]) published
a famous statement in the New York Times (June 13, 1943) that—memorably enough—
“We assert that only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.” What
Mondrian was after was serious, like what the abstract expressionists sought, though it
could also not be simply caricaturized as Calvinistically dour.
24 Willibrord Verkade, Yesterdays of an Artist Monk, trans. J. L. Stoddard (New York:
Kenedy, 1930), 32. Here Verkade sums up Theosophy as “a halfway station for the
better class of pagans, . . . a fencing school for religious dilettantism. If its devotees
would employ only one half of the time and effort which they use to initiate
190 Notes

themselves into the doctrines of Brahma and Buddha in gaining a deeper

understanding of the Christian mysteries, what a splendid increase both in quantity
and quality the Church would soon be able to rejoice over. For there is no doubt that
among the theosophists there are some rare spirits.”
25 J. M. de Jong, “Piet Mondriaan en de gereformeerde kerk van Amsterdam,” Jong
Holland 5, no. 3 (1989): 20–3. Thanks to Dirk Jongkind for translating.
26 Studies of Mondrian in the context of Kuyper include Graham Birtwistle, “Evolving a
‘Better’ World: Piet Mondrian’s Flowering Apple Tree,” in Art and Spiritual Perception: Essays
in Honor of E. John Walford, ed. James Romaine (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 225–37;
James D. Bratt, “From Neo-Calvinism to Broadway Boogie-Woogie: Abraham Kuyper as the
Jilted Stepfather of Piet Mondrian,” Kuyper Center Review 3 (2013): 117–29. Bratt thinks
Mondrian was influenced by Theosophy, not Calvinism, but his only alternative is Kuyper.
See also James D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), as well as Jonathan A. Anderson and William A. Dyrness, “Piet
Mondrian: Figuring the Immutable,” in Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, Studies in
Theology and the Arts (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2016), 174–85.
27 Abraham Kuyper, Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology: Its Principles, trans. Jan H. de
Vries (1894; repr., New York, 1898), 479.
28 Abraham Kuyper, Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology (London, 1899), 83 (see also
67–83, 87, 93).
29 Kuyper also lectured in America. Abraham Kuyper, The Antithesis Between
Symbolism and Revelation: Lecture Delivered Before the Historical Presbyterian
Society of Philadelphia, Pa. (Amsterdam, 1898).
30 Abraham Kuyper, “Calvinism and Art,” in Calvinism: Being the Six Stone Lectures
Given at Princeton Theological Seminary, U.S.A. (1898; repr., London: Sovereign
Grace Union, 1932), 216–57.
31 Herman Bavinck, “Modernisme en Orthodoxy: A Translation” (1911), trans. Bruce R.
Pass, ed. John Bolt, Bavinck Review 7 (2016): 99.
32 Herman Bavinck, “Revelation and Culture,” in The Philosophy of Revelation: The
Stone Lectures for 1908–1909 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1909), 242–69.
33 In deriving from a published lecture: Classic Mondrian in Neo-Calvinist View
(Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2018), this section closes by touching on
more contemporary painters, including Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, and,
today, Alan Johnston (33–9).
34 Some take this superficially as decorative, perhaps in the manner of art deco automobile
grilles. Bois says that the critic Tériade was wrong to raise a charge of decorativeness
against classic Mondrians. Yves-Alain Bois, “Piet Mondrian, ‘New York City’,” in Painting
as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 161, 303n13. I have sometimes thought
that such a charge was at least premature, regarding, as Bois says, “Everything that was
woven around ‘the double line’ from 1932 onward” (ibid., 161, 303n13).
 Notes 191

35 Robert Welsh, “The Place of Composition 12 with Small Blue Square in the Art of Piet
Mondrian,” Bulletin of the National Gallery of Canada 29 (1977): 26.
36 Of the many abstract painters influenced by him in the “New York school” in his
lifetime—and one singularly associated with a Calvinist frame of mind—was the
Canadian-born painter Agnes Martin (1912–2004). Mondrian was still a presence in
town when Martin graduated in art from Teacher’s College, Columbia University, in
1942. An admittedly thin but firm connection relates her faith to his. A typical, if also
typically non-“relational” comparison: a 1960 Untitled painting in the DIA Art
Foundation in Beacon, NY, with a broad black horizontal central band and wide
light-gray and white bands symmetrically placed above and below; see https://www.
diaart.org/about/search/search/keyword:agnes-martin/section/collection, accessed
September 29, 2022. Martin was raised by Scottish Presbyterians in western Canada.
An art world consensus that she was not religious yet somehow “mystic” is based on
her impenetrable writings, of which probably the most referenced is the lecture-essay
“On the Perfection Underlying Life” (1973). There she talks about having panics, with
“fear and dread.” Agnes Martin, Writings/Schriften, ed. Dieter Schwarz (Winterthur:
Kunstmuseum Winterthur and Edition Cantz, 1991), 70–1, https://archive.org/stream/
AgnesMartinWritings/Agnes%20Martin%20-%20Writings%20-%20Agnes%20
Martin_djvu.txt (29–30). “Fear and dread,” however, proves a Calvinist cliché: it
sounds biblical, but it isn’t, occurring only once in the Authorized Version of the Bible
(Ex. 15:16) and nowhere in the RSV. Nevertheless it occurs in many a scriptural
commentary by Calvin as well as in his Institutes, and hence in his preaching.
Obviously Calvinism was to however small an extent still a living tradition for Martin.
37 See Frances Spalding, “Mondrian and Nicholson: An Aesthetic Journey Along
Parallel Lines,” Guardian (US), February 3, 2012, www.theguardian.com/
artanddesign/2012/feb/03/mondrian-nicholson-parallel-lines.
38 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 258. I still
think this, but in looking this up again I see that Goodman gives the obsessive and
the superstitious some latitude.
39 In popular American carpentry, the design of a standard door that goes back to
British Colonial times, with small and large pairs of panels assumed to describe a
Latin cross, plus a pair of medium-sized panels below, became, apparently under
Evangelical influence. a “cross-and-bible door.”
40 Michel Butor, “Mondrian: The Square and Its Inhabitant” (1965), trans. William
Brown, in Inventory: Essays, ed. Richard Howard (London: Cape, 1970), 235–52
(esp. 246–7). On the word “tragic,” see above in this chapter and n. 23.
41 William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890; repr., New York: Holt, 1904), 2:472.
42 Ibid. The subject of James’ chapter is “The Emotions,” and that is Lyons’ theme as
well. Although it does not concern the present discussion, I think James (once a
student of painting)—does not acknowledge an essential continuity between the
192 Notes

“keen perception of relations” by the artist and the gross “emotional flush and thrill”
that cretins and philistines can derive from a finished painting. To reverse the, to
some extent social, terms: phase two rightly includes sophisticated “bourgies” as well
as “proles” without education. Craft need not be so divorced from connoisseurship:
the feedback of a painter’s application of her next stroke is a form of connoisseurship
entailing critical assessment of what was already there; on the other hand, decent
critics are sufficiently concerned with craft to have no truck with the stupid “like”
and “dislike” buttons on the internet. Fortunately, James allows himself to contradict
his own two-step art process insofar as a “keen perception of [formal] relations” may
well occur in the craftsmanship phase.
43 Here is the description of Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin in the Venice Accademia
from the Baedeker’s North Italian guidebook of 1886: “Like the bees with their queen
this swarm of angels rises with the beauteous apparition of the Virgin, whose noble
face is transfigured with gladness, whose step is momentarily arrested as she ascends
on the clouds, and with upward face and outstretched arms longs for the heaven out
of which the Eternal looks down.” Karl Baedeker, ed., Italy: Handbook for Travelers,
pt. 1, Northern Italy, 9th ed. (Leipzig, 1886), 224.
44 The critical remark recited by the supposed spectator in the Accademia reads like a
caricature of remarks on masterpieces borrowed from “C. & C.” in the Baedeker
guidebooks, meaning, works of the pair of art historians Giovanni Battista
Cavalcaselle and Joseph A. Crowe.
45 Carl Gustav Jung, Psychological Types, trans. Helton Godwin Baynes and R. F. C.
Hull. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Bollingen Series XX), 6. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1974), 306.
46 Considered as a deliberately insoluble ambiguity, this might compare with a fictional
technique of James’ brother Henry.
47 William Lyons, “On Looking into Titian’s Assumption,” in Emotion and the Arts, ed.
Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 147.

3 A Catholic Malevich

1 Andrew Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting
Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 66.
2 Irina A. Vakar, “Kazimir Malevich and His Contemporaries: A Biography in
Personalities,” in Kazimir Malevich, Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism,
ed. Irina A. Vakar and Tatiana N. Mikhienko (London: Tate Publishing, 2015)
2:566–609.
3 Kazimir Malevich, “Konotop,” quoted in Aleksandra Shatskikh, Black Square: Malevich
and the Origins of Suprematism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 191.
 Notes 193

4 Shatskikh, Black Square, 315n10.

5 The notion that Malevich wanted to be buried with his arms outstretched in the
form of a Crucifixion may have been inferred from a hypothetical idea (“a person”)
about burials expressed by Malevich (see MS2:89, 209, 374, 606 etc.).
6 Alexandra Shatskikh, “Aspects of Kasimir Malevich’s Literary Legacy: A Summary,”
in Rethinking Malevich: Proceedings of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th
Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Birth, ed. Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder
(London: Pindar, 2007), 323; with reference to Malevich, see Sobranie socheinenii v
piati tomorov, ed. Alexandra Shatskikh (Moscow: Gileia, 1995–2004), 5:399–404.
7 The “N” in references to Malevich’s works cites Andréi Nakov’s first catalogue
raisonné of the artist.
8 Frankly, it looks most like an icon when taken as a predecessor of the American
painter Ad Reinhardt’s (1913–1967) “Black Paintings,” when it seems like a negative-
theological “apophatic” icon of God is missing; see Joseph Masheck, “Where Thomas
Merton’s Friend Reinhardt Was Coming From,” in Texts on (Texts on) Art, 2nd ed.
(New York: Brooklyn Rail, 2011), 64–87. On the apophatic, see William Lyons, “Ad
Reinhardt and ‘Apophatic’ Art,” special issue, Brooklyn Rail, (January 2014), https://
brooklynrail.org/special/AD_REINHARDT/ad-and-spirituality/ad-reinhardt-
theology-and-apophatic-art.
9 Spira, Avant-Garde Icon, 139, quoting an album in the in the Khardzgiev Archive,
published in Evgeniia Petrova, John E. Bowlt and Mark Konecny, eds., A Legacy Regained:
Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-Garde (St. Petersburg: Palace, 2002), 215.
10 Spira, Avant-Garde Icon, 138.
11 Shatskikh, Black Square, 54.
12 More than one Polish-speaking colleague of mine has had difficulty with this
formulation. The Polish word in question, spelled supremacja, simply has no
apparent cognate in the old Mass. Maria Godwod-Rozanska kindly informs me
(email of August 27, 2021), “There are many Latin terms used in Polish to refer to the
parts of the Mass, which end in ‘-acja,’ like ‘Prefacja,’ ‘Konsekracja,’ ‘Adoracja’; but
nothing with ‘supremacja.’ ” My statement here is also beholden to two liturgical-
scholar friends: Andrew Attaway on the Catholic side, and Professor William
Baumgarth on the Orthodox.
13 “Pange Lingua: Sing, My Tongue,” Thesaurus Precum Latinarum, https://www.
preces-latinae.org/thesaurus/Hymni/Pange.html. Attaway, has also found a single
reference in the Roman Breviary: in line 4 (“Pater supremus edidit”) of a hymn
(“Jesu Redemptor Omnium”) used only once a year at Christmas Vespers.
14 This book, which first appeared in December 1915, saw two rewritten editions in
1916; the citation is from the very rewritten third edition.
15 Charlotte Douglas, “Suprematism: The Sensible Dimension,” Russian Review 34, no. 3
(July 1975): 278.
194 Notes

16 John Ruskin, The Laws of Fésole: A Familiar Treatise on the Elementary Principles and
Practice of Drawing and Painting as Determined by the Tuscan Masters; Arranged for
the Use of Schools (New York, 1886), 9–10, figs. 1, 2.
17 Aleksei Nikolaevich Svirin, introduction to La peinture de l’ancienne Russie:
Collection de la Galerie Nationale Tretyakov (Moscow: Éditions d’État d’Arts
Plastiques, 1958), pl. 12.
18 Allison Leigh, “Between Communism and Abstraction: ‘White on White’ in
America,” American Communist History 18, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 14–15.
19 Lyons, “Ad Reinhardt, Theology, and ‘Apophatic’ Art” (note 8, above).
20 Shatskikh, Black Square, 260.
21 A few years later, Malevich made a similar color drawing in a letter to the Jewish
painter Lev Antokolsky (1872–1942), on April 16, 1931: a long red band flanked by
narrower black stripes (see MS1:312, Fig. 8).
22 Malevich to Antoine Pevsner, as quoted in Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in
Art, 1863–1922, World of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 240, cited in
Spira, Avant-Garde Icon, 149.
23 Here Lissitzky also discounts some of the early suprematists around Malevich,
equating them with King Solomon’s Shamir the worm (!). He must have been talking
with Malevich because he employs some of the terminology of architectural style
that Malevich had used in his Christmas letter to Gershenzon: “Thus we are standing
on the threshold of the birth of new style just as exceptional as the horizontal East,
the spherical Classical, and the vertical Gothic” (MS2:212).
24 See John E. Bowlt, “Kazimir Malevich and Fedor Rerberg,” in Douglas and Lodder,
Rethinking Malevich, 1–26. Bowlt does not point up pan-Western roots of the
academic tradition taught by Rerberg (and thousands of others), including its
idealization of Italian Renaissance figuration; not to mention the implicit ideology of
classicism: that the best art belongs to a “golden age” in the past. But he does
demonstrate that Rerberg’s thinking entailed basic analytical elements of painting
that may have been food for thought for his student Malevich.
25 This practice is not followed in the Orthodox Church, where the priest makes an
allusion to the same verse of Isaiah 6:6–7 after receiving Communion. Thanks to
Rev. Ignumen Silouan and Professor Joachim Pissarro for explaining.
26 Naum Gabo, Of Divers Arts, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1959, Bollingen
Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), esp. 173 (ill.).
27 Marjorie Welish, “The Spiritual Modernism of Malevich,” Arts Magazine (November
1971): 46.
28 Eugene N. Trubetskoi, “A World View in Painting” (1915), in Icons: Theology in
Color, trans. Gertrude Vakar (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press,
1973), 27.
29 Eugene N. Trubetskoi, “Two Worlds in Old-Russian Icon Paintings,” in Icons, 66.
 Notes 195

30 Alan C. Birnholz, “Forms, Angles, and Corners: On Meaning in Russian Avant-

Garde Art,” Arts Magazine 51 (February 1977): 101–09. I responded to some extent
in “Pictures of Art,” Artforum 17 (May 1979): 26–37.
31 Birnholz, “Forms, Angles, and Corners,” 104.
32 John Rupert Martin, The Ceiling Paintings for the Jesuit Church in Antwerp, Corpus
Rubeniandum Ludwig Burchard 1 (London: Phaidon, 1968), 93. Insofar as the
hefting motif derives from a second-century pagan Roman sarcophagus: “Rubens’
genius reveals itself not merely in the skillful adaptation of an antique relief, but in
the metamorphosis of a formalized pagan ritual into an heroic episode full of drama
and passion” (88–9).
33 Horst Gerson and Engelbert H. ter Kuile, Art and Architecture in Belgium, 1600 to
1800 (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1960), 89.
34 And who only in the middle of his college years abandoned the Russian Orthodox
faith of his converted father.
35 Jacob Burckhardt, Recollections of Rubens, ed. Horst Gerson, trans. Mary Hottinger
(London: Phaidon, 1950), 120.
36 See Martin, Ceiling Paintings, pl. 108.
37 See Chapter 1, note 56.
38 Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (Crestwood,
NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 149, 107, respectively.
39 See Boris Groys, “Editorial: On the New,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 38
(Autumn 2000): 5–17.
40 The essay appeared in issue number 10 (February 9, 1919), 65–7. The title references
the prototypical acheiropoieta, icons “not made by human hands,” though it also
borrows from Pushkin.
41 As a modernist, I, too, have written against the Albertian perspective of the
Renaissance. See Joseph Masheck, “Alberti’s ‘Window’: Art-Historiographic Notes on
an Antimodern Misprision,” in Modernities: Art Matters in the Present (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 15–32.
42 A. Hyatt Mayor, Prints and People: A Social History of Prints and People (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972), no. 429.
43 Robert Bellarmine, quoted in Staale Sinding-Larsen, Iconography and Ritual: A Study
of Analytical Perspectives (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1984), 102.
44 Adrian Barr, “Vozbuzhdenie to Oshchushchenie: Theoretical Shifts, Nova Generatsiia,
and the Late Paintings,” in Douglas and Lodder, Rethinking Malevich,, 203–20, esp.
216–17, speaks of “a strong Baroque chiaroscuro” in Malevich’s late peasant
paintings (which are sometimes discussed as iconic).
45 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne
(London: Verso, 1977), 234–35.
46 Vakar and V. Rakitin, editorial comment.
196 Notes

47 Citations from Brian Horowitz, “A Jewish-Christian Rift in Twentieth-Century

Russian Philosophy: N. A. Berdiaev and M. O. Gershenzon,” Russian Review 53, no. 4
(October 1994): 497, 501.
48 Ibid., 508. Much later, Berdyaev admitted that he hadn’t been “completely right”
about Gershenzon’s enthusiasm for the Revolution, which split the two friends apart.
Gershenzon had been concerned with past injustices, nevertheless, “the Soviet
structure of that time was still not worked out completely and organized, it was
impossible to call it totalitarian . . .” (513).
49 Brian Horowitz, “Pushkin’s Modernist Aesthetics: Gershenzon and the Philosophical
Interpretation of Pushkin,” In The Myth of A. S. Pushkin in Russia’s Silver Age: M. O.
Gershenzon, Pushkinist (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 40.
50 Apropos of which, I wish to remember a marvelous conversation with the late art
dealer Ivan Karp (1926–2012) on this verse.
51 “Gospel associations were for a certain time characteristic of Malevich’s sense of
himself,” according to Elena Basner, cited at MS1:175n.
52 Occasionally the subtitle is referred to as “Art, Factory and Church” (for instance:
MK1:255).
53 While I understand why some people think “exponents” is a more statically accurate
translation, circumstances, too, are part of translation, and I cannot imagine fellow
students at a football game standing up to cheer their “exponents.”
54 Alexandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art, trans. K. F. Tsan (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2007), 111.
55 Ibid., 264.
56 A philosophical and art-historical link between suprematism and Francis’s statement
is the German Catholic philosopher Romano Guardini, who also strongly influenced
the great German-American modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. See
Joseph Masheck, “Thoughts on Mies’s Lemke Houese: Architecture—Feminism—
Philosophy,” Brooklyn Rail (October 2018), https://brooklynrail.org/2018/10/1by1/
Thoughts-on-Miess-Lemke-House-ArchitectureFeminismPhilosophy.
57 Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 98.
58 Charlotte Douglas, Kazimir Malevich (New York: Abrams, 1994), 32.
59 An unpublished draft called “Appendix: From the Book on Non-Objectivity,” dated
January 25, 1924 (MK3:315–63), four days after the death of Lenin. It purports to
raise the deceased leader up as a parallel redeemer to Christ: this is all the more
amazing because Malevich had generally avoided the foolish game of drawing idle
equivalences between communism and religion. In this case, however, an already
historic literary exception suggests itself. Crushed as many were by the death of the
most eminent revolutionary leader, the painter likely recalled an established
prototype from the late Symbolist period which had managed, believe it or not, to
put Christ into the Revolution: The Twelve (1918), a long Symbolist poem, renowned
 Notes 197

but forever problematic, by Aleksandr Blok, wherein a detachment of Red Guards

comes to realize that it is Christ who leads them on. Nothing in “Appendix” is
sarcastic or blasphemous, but Malevich always did have a rhetorical problem of
Manichean oppositions by making forced parallels.
60 Douglas, Kazimir Malevich, 33–4.
61 Shatskikh notes that Anna Leporskaia, student, painter, and assistant to Malevich,
“told [Troels] Anderson that his wife had burned some bags of Malevich’s
manuscripts immediately after his arrest. I do not doubt Leporskaia’s information
(she was a devoted pupil and an artistic descendant of her great teacher), but even
she could not know everything for certain.” Shatskikh, “Aspects,” in Douglas and
Lodder, Rethinking Malevich, 318.
62 Integrated with Malevich’s famous pronouncement on painting’s conventional sky as
a blue lampshade: “The blue color of the sky has been defeated by the suprematist
system, has been broken through and entered white as the true, real conception of
infinity, and therefore liberated from the color background of the sky. . . .
Suprematism . . . can appear on things as a transformation or incarnation of space in
them, banishing from consciousness a thing’s wholeness. . . . I have torn through the
blue lampshade of color limitations and come out into the white; after me, comrade
aviators sail into the chasm—I have set up the semaphores of Suprematism”
(MK1:121–2). Likewise in Kazimir Malevich, “Suprematism,” trans. Xenia Glowacki-
Prus, in Malevich on Suprematism: Six Essays, 1915 to 1926, ed. Patricia Railing (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Museum ofArt, 1999), 45–6.
63 Citations in this section are to Kazimir Malevich, “Suprematism,” in The Non-
Objective World, trans. Howard Dearstyne (Chicago: Theobold, 1959), 65–102. Of
course, this use of “feeling” is what Charlotte Douglas has cautioned about.
64 José Ortega y Gasset, “Signs of the Times” (1923), in The Modern Theme, trans.
James Cleugh (New York: Harper, 1961), 83.
65 I have checked a facsimile of the unpaginated German original.

4 A Jewish Lissitzky

1 Shatskikh, Vitebsk (Ch. 3, n. 54), 58.

2 Pavel Florensky, “On the Icon” (n.d., posthumous), ed. and trans. John Lindsay Opie,
Eastern Churches Review 8 (1976), 30.
3 Alexander Kantsedikas, ed., El Lissitzky: The Jewish Period (London: Unicorn, 2017),
15, 16–17, 27n16.
4 El Lissitzky, “The Victory over Art” (1922), trans. S. L. Wolitz, Tradition and
Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912–1928, 2nd ed.,
ed. Ruth Apter-Gabriel (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1988), 232.
198 Notes

5 El Lissitzky, “The Mohilev [sic] Synagogue: Reminiscences,” trans. Arkady Zeitser, in

Kantsedikas, El Lissitzky, 148–53. Internal citations below are to this translation of
the article.
6 See Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and Modern
European Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 206, 220ff.
7 For comparative illustrations, see “Friedrich Steinberg, Herrmann & Co. Hat
Factory,” Hidden Architecture, March 20, 2015: http://hiddenarchitecture.net/
friedrich-steinberg-herrmann-hat-factory.
In the United States, after the Second World War, Mendelsohn himself became
interested in modernist synagogue architecture, projected many synagogues in
drawings, and built four in the Midwest, though none resembling that at Moligev.
8 Kantsedikas, El Lissitzky, 20.
9 Mani Leib, Yingl—Tsingl—Khvat, trans. J. Shandler (Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell, 1987), n.p.
10 Alan C. Birnholz, “El Lissitzky and the Jewish Tradition,” Studio International 186,
no. 959 (1973): 130–6, at 132–3.
11 Maria Elena Versari, “Avant-Garde Iconographies of Conflict: From the Futurist
Synthesis of War to Beat the Whites with The Red Wedge,” Annali d’italianistica 33
(2015): 187–204; Birnholz, “El Lissitzky and the Jewish Tradition,” 133.
12 Peter Nisbet, ed., El Lissitzky 1890–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art
Museums, 1987), 182.
13 T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2001), 250–3.
14 Rosa Luxemburg, The Industrial Development of Poland, trans. Tessa DeCarlo (New
York: Campaigner Publications, 1977), 136.
15 Ibid., 165.
16 Mikhail V. Alpatov, Early Russian Icon Painting (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1978), 317 (with
ill.), pl. 166.
17 A significant but disputed claim. See Fergus Kerr, “Book Notes: Barthiana,” New
Blackfriars 79, no. 934 (December 1998): 550–4.
18 Karl Barth, Predigten, ed. Hermann Schmidt (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1974), 11:81.
19 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 6th ed., trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London:
Oxford University Press, 1957), 462–3.
20 Rosa Luxemburg, quoted from Die Rote Fahne (Berlin) (December 1918), in Paul
Fröhlich, Rosa Luxemburg: Ideas in Action (1939), trans. Johanna Hoornweg
(London: Pluto Press and Bookmarks, 1994), 198.
21 I thank my former Hofstra student Nick Alverson for recognizing the trodden-worm
image as anticipated in Goethe’s The Sorrows of the Young Werther (1774, 1787),
where it occurs at the end of Part I, under August 18.
22 Barth, Epistle, 464.
23 Ibid., 478.
 Notes 199

24 Rosa Luxemburg, quoted from her introduction to Wladimir Korolenko’s Geschichte

meines Zeitgenossen of 1919 (Berlin [East] edition, 1947), in Fröhlich, Luxemburg,
196.
25 El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg, “The Blockade of Russia Is Coming to an End,” in
The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephen Bann, Documents of 20th-Century Art
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 55.
26 John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, trans. Andrew Louth
(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 48–9.
27 Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 2:590–91.
I have written “Ernst Bloch: A Glaring Omission in Spe Salvi?,” Religious Socialism
31, no. 1 (2007–8): 12–13.
28 Joachim of Fiore, “Letter to the Abbot of Vaddona,” in Apocalyptic Spirituality:
Treatises and Letters, ed. and trans. Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist, 1979), 128,
133, 148.
29 Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Quadrangle, 1974), 198.
30 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1954),
178–9.
31 Igor Dukhan, “El Lissitzky—Jewish as Universal: From Jewish Style to Pangeometry,”
Ars Judaica 3 (2007), 8.
32 I am honored to say the essay was included in a festschrift for my seventieth
birthday: Christina Poggi, “Utopian Violence: El Lissitzky’s Victory over the Sun,” in
Mostly Modern: Essays in Art and Architecture, ed. Joseph Masheck (Stockbridge:
Hard Press, 2014), 118–36..
33 El Lissitzky, “Overcoming Art” (1922), trans. Steven Lindberg, in Between Worlds: A
Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910–1930, ed. Timothy O. Benson
and Éva Forgács (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2002), 186.
34 See Poggi, “Utopian Violence,” in Masheck, Mostly Modern. Other internal citations
here also to this article.
35 Aloїs Riegl, “The Place of the Vapheio Cups in the History of Art” (1900, posth.),
trans. Tawney Becker, in The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical
Method in the 1930s, ed. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone, 2000), 104–27.
36 Riegl citations in this paragraph are from his “Vapheio Cups” essay cited in the
previous note. Margaret Olin believes that Riegl’s attentiveness to such natural
phenomena as the represented bulls passing in space is something that has a
religious root for entailing “respect for the external world as legislated by Early
Christian ethics.” In an unpublished manuscript, Riegl calls such respectful
objectivity “attention to the Christian sense.” See Margaret Olin, “Forms of Respect:
Aloїs Riegl’s Concept of Attention,” Art Bulletin 71 (1989): 292.
37 Lissitzky, “Victory over Art,” in Apter-Gabriel, Tradition and Revolution, 232.
38 Ibid.
200 Notes

39 George Gibian and H. William Tjalsma, Russian Modernism: Culture and the
Avant-Garde, 1900–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 192, 197.
40 Éva Forgács, “Definitive Space: The Many Utopias of El Lissitzky’s Proun Room,”
in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed
(Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 50–1, crediting Larisa Zhadova with
the citation (71n12).
41 Ibid., 66.
42 My commentary is informed by two essays in Perloff and Reed, Situating Lissitzky:
Forgás, “Definitive Space,” 47–75, and especially Maria Gough, “Constructivism
Disoriented: El Lissitzky’s Dresden and Hannover Demonstratsräume,” 76–125.
43 (The term is based on a presidential election button for Woodrow Wilson which,
turned only slightly, showed the face of Lincoln instead of Wilson.) A useful
comparative photo of the same corner of the room shown here, but at a different
moment, helps to show the resultant ripple effect of the successive striations in passing
by: it is reproduced in Gough, “Constructivism Disoriented,” in Perloff and Reed,
Situating El Lissitzky, 103, Fig. 13, from an article by Alexander Dorner significantly
entitled “On Abstract Painting”: “Zur abstrakten Malerei: Erklärung zum Raum der
Abstrakten in der Hannoverischen Gemäldegalerie,” from Der Form (Berlin), 3 (1928).
44 Birnholz, “El Lissitzky and the Jewish Tradition,” esp. 134. See also his “El Lissitzky
and the Spectator: From Passivity to Participation,” in The Avant-Garde in Russia
1918–1930: New Perspectives, ed. Stephanie Barron and Maurice Tuchman (Los
Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum, 1980), 98.
45 At one confessional benediction, the worshipper strikes his or her breast as a visible
gesture of repentance for sin (likely origin of the breast-striking in a Catholic Mass
during the Confiteor (“I Confess”) prayer).
46 Gough, “Constructivism Disoriented,” in Perloff and Reed, Situating El Lissitzky, 78,
80–1. Dorner came from a theologically prominent Protestant family in Germany.
47 See Joan Ockman, “The Road Not Taken: Alexander Dorner’s Way Beyond Art,” in
Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America, ed. Robert E. Somol
(New York: Monacelli, 1997), 90–1; and Molly Nesbit, The Pragmatism in the History
of Art (Los Angeles: Inventory, 2020), 42–9.
48 El Lissitzky, Russland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion (1930;
repr., Brunswick: Vieweg and Sohn, 1989), 11.

Conclusion

1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1–3

(1937), trans. John C. Fletcher (London: SCM Press, 1962), 22. Bonhoeffer was
hanged on April 9, 1945, for attempting to assassinate Hitler.
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212
 Index

Page numbers in bold refer to figures.

“A. and Pangeometry” (Lissitzky), 163–5, artificiality, 3

166 artistic commemoration, 155
About Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale of artistic insight, 122
Two Squares in Six Constructions artists, role of, 27–9
(Lissitzky), 177 art-world, 176
absolute freedom, 27 Association of Artists of Revolutionary
Abstract Cabinet (Lissitzky), 166–9, 167, Russia, 132
173 asymmetric equilibrations, 66
abstract painting, 21 asymmetric reciprocity, 75–6
and music, 26–7 atheism, 33
Accent in Pink (Kandinsky), 42–4, 45 atheistic religion, 21
Adam, 55–6, 64, 66, 84 aufheben, 59–60
Adamovich, M. M., 130 Augustine, St., 56
aesthetic contemplation, 44
aesthetic meaning, 88–90 Bann, Stephen, 53–4, 186n60
Albers, Josef, 36 Barth, Karl, 153–4
All-Russian Congress of Artists, Second, Baruch, René, 23
29–30 basic plane, the, 38–9
Alpatov, Mikhail, 152 Basil the Great, St., 13–4
altruism, 7, 28 Battleship Potemkin (film), 150, 152
Amiens Cathedral, 135 Batyushkov, Konstantin, 143–4
anarchism, 96 Bauhaus, 17, 36, 41, 134, 136
angel of death, 145–6 Bavinck, Herman, 56, 72, 73–80, 86, 91,
Annunciation, the, 38–9, 50–4, 185–6n56 174
Annunciational imagery, 51–4 and the Kingdom of Heaven, 77–80
Anthroposophy, 24, 73 and the lapsarian question, 84–5
antimetaphysicalism, 7 “Modernism and Orthodoxy”, 74
antisemitism, 148 Reformed Dogmatics, 75–80
Antokolsky, Lev, 125 “Revelation and Culture” lecture, 75
Antwerp, 115 Baxandall, Michael, 53
Apostles’ Creed, 38, 46, 131 Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge
“Appendix: From the Book on Non- (Lissitzky), 147–9, 150
Objectivity” (Malevich), 196–7n59 beauty, 128, 135, 141–2
Arp, Jean, 61–2 Bell, Clive, 181n10
art Bellarmine, St. Robert, 120
Hegel’s phases of, 18 Benjamin, Walter, 53, 120
Malevich on, 128–9, 130–1 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 121, 196n48
meaning, 87 Besant, Annie, 75
and religion, 129, 135, 158, 164–5 Bible

213
214 Index

Book of Revelation, 79 Church Façade I (Mondrian), 58, 59

Deuteronomy, 145 Ciurlionis, Mikalojus, 5
Ecclesiastes, 138, 146, 175 Clark, T. J., 151
Epistle to the Romans, 35, 64–5 color, 25–6, 37–8, 61, 78
First Epistle to the Corinthians, 183n33 and death
Genesis, 52, 55–6 communication, 87, 88–90
Gospel of John, 124 communion of saints, 46
Gospel of Matthew, 41, 153 Communism, 157, 175, 196–7n59
Isaiah, 10–1 composition, 32–3
legalities, 35 Composition 10 in Black and White
Luther’s translation, 18–9, 59–60 (Mondrian), 58
Old Testament, 35 Composition B (No. II) with Red
“Parable of the Talents”, 26 (Mondrian), 84
Psalm 106:20, 125 Composition in Color B (Mondrian), 60
2 Thessalonians, 129–30, 131 Composition in Line (Mondrian), 60
translations, 26 Composition of Lines and Color, III;
Birnholz, Alan C., 114, 147, 148, 168, 169 Composition with Blue (Mondrian),
Black Square (Malevich), 97–100, 98 82
blasphemy, 157 Composition with Color Planes 3
Blaue Reiter Almanac (Kandinsky and (Mondrian), 61, 61
Marc), 31 Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow,
Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider),, 15 and Gray (Mondrian), 70, 86
Blavatsky, Helena, 3, 75, 189n22 Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue
Bloch, Ernst, 159 (Mondrian), 91
Bolland, Gerardus, 58 Composition with Yellow and Double Line
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 175 (Mondrian), 80–2, 81
Borinski, Karl, 120 Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Double
Bowlt, John E., 194n24 Line (Mondrian), 82
Brick, Osip, 118 compositional relationality, 78
Broadway Boogie-Woogie (Mondrian), 69 composition-into-construction aspect, 6
Broderzon, Moyshe, Legend of Prague, 144 Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Bulgakov, Sergei, 18, 50–1, 51–3, 123 (Kandinsky), 7, 15, 18, 20–31, 36, 64,
Burckhardt, Jacob, 115 158
Butor, Michel, 88 “About General Aesthetic”, 22–5
“About Painting”, 22, 25–9
Calvin, John, and Calvinism, 55–6, 57, 64, allusion to the Lord’s Prayer, 28
69, 76–7, 84–7 on blue, 26
Capitalism, 129–30 Chapter 1, “The Movement of the
Carrà, Carlo, 148 Triangle”, 22–3
Catholic art, 111–2, 113, 114–6, 117 Chapter 3, “Spiritual Revolution”, 23–5
Catholicism, 3, 6 Chapter 5, “The Psychological Working
celestial hierarchy, 38–9 of Colour”, 25
Cézanne, Paul, 24, 111–2 Chapter 6, “The Language of Form and
Chagall, Marc, 161 Colour,, 25–6
children’s art, 31 Chapter 7, “Theory”, 26–7
children’s book illustration, 138, 142–6 Chapter 8, “Art and Artists”, 27–9
Christian Socialist movement, 153 concept of spiritual, 20–1
Chrysostom, John, St., 158–9 introduction, 22
Church at Domburg I (Mondrian), 58 on orange, 26
 Index 215

parts, 22 Elijah and the fiery chariot motif, 40,

the spiritual triangle, 22–3 152
talent”, 26 Elijah in the Desert (John and Boris), 46–8,
title, 20–1 48
translations, 20, 21–2 emotions, in painting, 88–91, 191–2n42
Construction in Dissolution (Malevich), empiricism, 100
112, 114 Engels, Friedrich, 14–5
constructivism, 5, 6, 17, 50–4, 138, 140, Enlightenment, the, 8, 15
145, 154, 166, 169, 175 equilibrated relationships, 85
contradiction, 4 equilibrium, 63–4, 66–7
Council of Trent, 65 Essays on Art (Malevich), 111
Counter-Reformation, the, 65, 120 Ettinger, Pavel, 108, 129
Courtauld Institute of Art in London, Evagrios the Solitary, 41–2
83–4 Eve, 55–6, 64, 84
creativity, 75, 134 exhibition spaces, 166–9, 167
critical art theory, 176 extraterrestrial powers, 3–4
critical dogmatism, 53
cross motifs, 87–8, 106–8, 111, 184–5n50 faith, 154, 154–5, 175
Crucifixion, the, 107 lack of, 139
cultural background, 2–3 Malevich on, 136
cultural pyramid, 25 Fall, the, 55–6, 63, 66, 74
false worship, 4
Damascene, John , St., 159 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 14–5
dance history, 27 First World War, 16, 62, 63–4, 148
Danto, Arthur C., 180n8 Florensky, Pavel, 118, 138
De Stijl, 67, 189n22 folk literature, 16
De Stijl movement, 66 folk-art, 141
De Stijl spaces, 166–7 folklore, 139
Dennis, John, 55 form, 31–2
Der Sturm Gallery, 32 formalism, 68, 135
description, 68 Francis, Pope, 128
Dewey, John, 7 Francis of Assisi, St, 1
dialectical materialism, 96–7 Free University of Amsterdam, 6, 75
“Dialogue on the New Plastic” From Cubism and Futurism to
(Mondrian), 67 Suprematism: The New Realism in
distributive proportionality, 62 Painting (Malevich), 100
Divine Humanity, 51 functional atheists, 23
divine justice, 138, 140, 154–5 Futurism, 148
Dorner, Alexander, 168 futurists, 148
Douglas, Charlotte, 100, 132
Dukhan, Igor, 161 Gabo, Naum, 110–1
duoverie, 8, 8–9 Gan, Alexsi, 138
Durkheim, Émile, 8, 17, 173, 181n9 Gasset, Ortega y, 135
Dutch iconoclasm, 57 German Expressionism, 15, 18
German Idealism, 7, 111, 121
Ehrenberg, Ilya, 138 Gershenzon, Mikhail, 196n48
Elevation of the Cross (Rubens), 112, 113, Malevich correspondence, 121–5,
114 194n23
Elijah, St., 44–6, 47, 48 God, 7, 8, 21, 31, 52–3, 67, 84, 127, 131, 140
216 Index

God Is Not Cast Down: Art, Church, “Masterworks of Ecclesiastical History”

Factory (Malevich), 108, 126–33 exhibition, 39–50
God-Building, 21, 96 Nicholas icons, 104
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 5 Recklinghausen Elijah, 46, 47
Goltzius, Hendrick, 120 role of, 13–4
Goncharova, Natalia, 98–9 St. Elijah, 44–6, 47, 48
Goodman, Nelson, 87 St. George and the Dragon, 39–40
Gough, Maria, 169 status, 14
Grabar, Igor, 108 structure, 42–4, 44
Great Schism, the, 13, 14 style, 14
Greek Orthodox church, 14 Westernization, 14–5
Gropius, Walter, 136, 141 idealism, 96–7, 145
Groys, Boris, 118 idolatry, 4
gryphon, the, 4 images d’Épinal, 144
Guardian, 83–4 imaginary space, 164
impressionism, 6, 40, 109
Had Gadya, 144 infralapsarianism, 84
angel of death image, 145–6 inner content, 31–2
Hanslick, Eduard, 27 inner need, 18–9, 25, 30–1
harmony, 69 Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK), 17
Hegel, G. W. F., 7, 14–5, 18, 18–9, 20, 58–9, interior piety, 8
180n8, 181n12, 185n54 irrational space, 163–4
Hesychast tradition, 41 Iudin, Lev, 111
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future
exhibition, 3 James, William, 88–90, 91, 191–2n42
Hinterglasmalerei, 15–6, 18 jazz, 72, 100
Hodges, Herbert Arthur, 65 Jesus Christ, 31–2, 52, 56, 127, 159
Holy Communion, 20, 29 Jewish culture, 6
Holy Spirit, 20, 21–2, 23 Joachim of Fiore, 35, 159–60
“Home—Street—City” (Mondrian), 70 John and Boris, Elijah in the Desert, 46–8,
Horowitz, Brian, 121–2 48
Humanism, 162 John the Evangelist, 125
Judaism, 6, 7
“I Am the Beginning . . .” (Malevich), Jung, C. G., 90
109 justice, 67, 138, 140, 154–5
icon theory, 51 justification, 63–72, 76–7, 88, 91
iconoclasm, 7, 57, 135
iconoclast controversy, 51 Kandinsky, Vasily, 56, 129, 132, 139–40
iconography, 87–91 Accent in Pink, 42–4, 45
errors of, 4 allusion to the Lord’s Prayer, 28
iconostasis, 42 Annunciational imagery, 51–4
icons, 39–50, 94, 98–9, 108, 108–11, 119, on artists, 27–9
142, 150–1, 174–5, 182–3n24 background, 13–9
Annunciational imagery, 51–4 at the Bauhaus, 17, 36, 41
Christ in Glory structure, 42–4, 44 break with spiritualistic proto-
continuity, 180n6 modernism, 181n9
Elijah and the fiery chariot motif, 40, Collected Writings, 19
152 on color, 25–6
and Hinterglasmalerei, 16 on composition, 32–3
 Index 217

concept of inner need, 18–9 tree metaphor, 35

concept of spiritual, 20–1 virgin imagery, 34, 38–9
Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 7 “Whither the ‘New’ Art?”, 24
cross motifs, 184–5n50 writings, 48–9, 97
in early revolutionary period Russia, Yellow Center, 44–6, 49
16–7 see also Concerning the Spiritual in Art
education, 15 (Kandinsky)
“Empty Canvas, etc”, 39 Kant, Immanuel, 58, 87, 110
epiphany, 33–4 Karensky, Alexander, 9
family background, 15 Kierkegaard, Søren, 23
and God, 21 Kingdom of God, 77–80, 119, 124, 131,
Hinterglasmalerei, 15–6, 18 138, 140, 159–60, 174, 175, 185n54
iconic tradition, 17, 39–50, 43, 45, 47, Klint, Hilma af, 3–5
48, 49 Kliun, Ivan, 96
influences, 18 Kojève, Alexandre, 54, 185n54
interest in St. George, 40 “The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky”,
inward turn, 2 50–1
Ladder Form, 40–1 Kupka, František, 5
leaves Russia, 17 Kuyper, Abraham, 67, 73–5
likens art to religion, 34–5
Mountain, 40 Ladder Form (Kandinsky), 40–1
“Notes of a Painter”, 24–5 laicité, 8
“On the Artist”, 32 lapsarian question, the, 84–7
“On the Question of Form”, 31–2 Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, The,
“On the Spiritual in Art (Painting)” 97–8, 98
lecture, 29–30, 31 Last Judgement, the, 77
and paganism, 8–9 Latin Mass, 99
in Paris, 41 laziness, 129–30
Point and Line to Plane, 34, 36–9, 51–4 Le Corbusier, 141
political activities, 33 Legend of Prague (Broderzon), 144
prayer, 183n35 Leib, Mani, Yingl-Tsingl-Khvat (The
religiosity, 1–2, 19, 21–2, 174 Mischievous Boy), 144–5
and religious display, 29 Leigh, Allison, 105–6
“Reminiscences”, 32–6, 158 Lenin, V. I., 132, 154
return to Russia, 32 Lenin Youth (Lissitzky), 170, 171
and Russian Orthodox Church, 13–4 Leonardo da Vinci, 162, 163
on the Russian Revolution, 35–6 Leporskaia, Anna, 197n61
social identity, 5 libido, 54
on the soul, 19, 25, 27–8 Liebknecht, Karl, 151
on spiritual art, 31–2 Lindsay, Kenneth C., 21
on spiritual harmony, 24–5 Lipsey, Roger, 189n23
spiritualism, 5 Lissitzky, El, 4, 56, 101, 126, 129, 130
spirituality, 2, 19, 185n54 “A. and Pangeometry”, 163–5, 166
on talent, 25–6 About Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale
texts, 18–9 of Two Squares in Six Constructions,
theological themes, 19 177
theological understanding, 49–50 Abstract Cabinet, 167–9, 167, 173
and Theosophy, 3, 24, 56, 64 antireligious statement, 165–6
time of unbelief, 34 artistic ambitions, 141
218 Index

background, 137–9 Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black,

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, Blue, Red, and Gray (Mondrian),
147–9, 150 57
children’s book illustration, 138, 142–6 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 9–10
comparison with Malevich, 155, 156, Luther, Martin, 4, 18–9, 26, 59–60, 64–5
157 Luxemburg, Rosa, memorial project,
discredits Malevich, 169–70, 194n23 149–55, 150
exhibition spaces, 167–9, 167 Lyons, William, 88–91, 106–7, 191–2n42
government work, 169–70, 171, 172
and the icon tradition, 150–1 Maimonides, Moses, 160–1
ideological faith in Communism, 147 Make More Tanks! (Lissitzky), 170, 171,
involvement with Judaism, 6 172
Jewish messianic outlook, 1 Makhmadim (Treasure), 137–8
Lenin Youth, 170, 171 Malevich, Kazimir, 3, 53, 56, 138, 146, 147,
loyalty to Malevich, 138 148, 159, 166
Luxemburg project, 149–55, 150 “Appendix: From the Book on
Make More Tanks!, 170, 171, 172 Non-Objectivity”, 196–7n59
manus Dei motif, 146 arrest, 132–3
“The Mohilev Synagogue: on art, 128–9, 130–1
Reminiscences”, 139–42, 140, 146 artistic education, 109
“New Russian Art” lecture, 168–9 background, 93–7
Of Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale of Black Square, 97–101, 98
Two Squares in Six Constructions, burial, 193n5
107, 145 Catholicism, 1, 123
photocollage, 170, 171, 172 comparison with Lissitzky, 155, 156,
political posters, 147–9 157
Proun (Study for Proun S.K.), 155, Construction in Dissolution, 112, 114
156 cross motifs, 96, 106–8, 111
Prouns, 147, 149, 163, 165, 166 From Cubism and Futurism to
religiosity, 1–2, 138, 142–6, 160, 175 Suprematism: The New Realism in
religio-utopianism, 157–61 Painting, 100
revolutionary works, 146–55, 150, 156, death, 96
157 eastern root, 97–108
Russia: An Architecture for World Essays on Art, 111
Revolution, 169–70 eulogy to Lenin, 132
social identity, 6 on faith, 136
socialist outlook, 1 Gershenzon correspondence, 121–5,
“Suprematism in World 194n23
Reconstruction”, 108, 157–61 God Is Not Cast Down: Art, Church,
theory, 163–6 Factory, 108, 126–33
third-ageism, 159–61 God-Building, 96
“The Victory over Art”, 138–9, 165–6 “I Am the Beginning . . .”, 109
Victory over the Sun, 161–2 and icons, 94, 98, 108, 108–11, 174–5
view of religion, 139 “Konotop”, 95
literacy, 143 on laziness, 129–30
lithography, 37 letter to Pavel Ettinger, 129
Lodder, Christina, 131–2 Lissitzky discredits, 169–70, 194n23
London, 80 marriages, 95
Lord’s Prayer, 28 Mystical Suprematism, 108
 Index 219

“Non-Objective Creation and “Masterworks of Ecclesiastical History”

Suprematism,”, 133–6 exhibition, 39–50
perfection, 132–3 material stimulations, 2–3
persecution, 125 materialism, 21
philosophical idealism, 132 Matisse, Henri, 24
on Picasso, 125 Mattes, Hendrik, 67
Pictorial Realism of a Peasant Woman Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 110
in Two Dimensions; Red Square, 101 Mayor, A. H., 120
printmakers, 119–20 Mellan, Claude, 37
religiosity, 1–2, 95, 122–4, 136, 174–5, memorialization, 154–5
175 Mendelsohn, Erich, 141–2, 198n7
religious basics, 93–4 metaphysics, 174
religious pertinence, 94 Milgroim (Yiddish), 139
secular modernity, 135–6 modern versus classic art, 24
on the sky, 197n62 “The Mohilev Synagogue: Reminiscences”
Sloth—The Real Truth of Humanity, (Lissitzky), 139–42, 140, 146
129–30 Moholy-Nagy, László, 136
social identity, 6 Mondrian, Piet, 129, 166, 173
on suprematism, 133–6 approach to painting, 56, 57–63
Suprematism: Abstract Composition, artistic ideal, 66
103–4, 103 asymmetric equilibrations, 66
Suprematism of the Spirit, 106–7, 145 background, 55–6
Suprematist Composition, 155, 156 Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 69
Suprematist Composition: Airplane Calvinist trope, 84–7
Flying, 116 Church at Domburg I, 58
Suprematist Composition: Expressing Church Façade I, 58, 59
the Feeling of Fading Away, 112, 113, and color, 61, 78
114 Composition 10 in Black and White, 58
Suprematist Hieratic Cross, 102, 107, Composition B (No. II) with Red, 84
108 Composition in Color B, 60
Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Composition in Line, 60
Rectangles, 111 Composition of Lines and Color, III;
Suprematist Painting: White on White, Composition with Blue, 82
104–7, 105 Composition with Color Planes 3, 61, 61
Supremus No. 58, 116, 117 Composition with Red, Blue, Black,
Theosophical influence, 56 Yellow, and Gray, 70, 86
Victory over the Sun, 161–2 Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue,
western root, 108–20 91
on white, 104 Composition with Yellow and Double
White Suprematist Cross, 102 Line, 80–2, 81
writings, 96–7 Composition with Yellow, Blue, and
“The Manifestation of Neo-Plasticism in Double Line, 82
Music and the Italian futurists’ compositional adjustments, 74
Bruiteurs” (Mondrian), 69 “Compositions with Color Planes”
manus Dei motif, 146 series, 61–2
Marc, Franz, 31 on cross motifs, 88
Marden, Brice, 53 death, 83
Martin, Agnes, 191n36 “Dialogue on the New Plastic”, 67
Marx, Karl, 104–5 equilibrium, 63–4, 67
220 Index

“Home—Street—City”, 70 morality, 35
and iconography, 87–91 Moscow, 10
intellectual vitality, 84 Moscow Church Council, 9
interest in Theosophy, 55 Moscow Union of Writers, 121
on justification, 63–72 Moss, Marlow, 80
and the lapsarian question, 84–7 Mountain (Kandinsky), 40
lgebraic equivalences, 86 Munich, 15–6
Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Münter, Gabriele, 15–6
Black, Blue, Red, and Gray, 57 music, and abstract painting, 26–7
“The Manifestation of Neo-Plasticism Myedunyesky, Kazimir, 168
in Music and the Italian futurists’ Mystical Suprematism (Malevich),
Bruiteurs”, 69 108
move to London, 80
“Natural Reality and Abstract Reality: Nakov, Andréi, 114
A Trialogue (While Strolling from “Natural Reality and Abstract Reality: A
the Country to the City)”, 67–8 Trialogue (While Strolling from the
Neo-Plasticism: The General Principle Country to the City)” (Mondrian),
of Plastic Equivalence, 68–9 67–8
“The New Art—The New Life: The Naturalism, 23
Culture of Pure Relationships”, nature, move away from, 3
66, 67 neo-Calvinism, 72
“The New Plastic in Painting”, 63–4, Neo-Plasticism, 68–9, 79, 80
66–7, 189n23 Neo-Plasticism: The General Principle of
in New York, 82–3, 191n36 Plastic Equivalence (Mondrian),
“No Axiom But the Plastic Principle”, 68–9
88 “The New Art—The New Life: The Culture
“On the Museum”, 118–9 of Pure Relationships” (Mondrian),
Painting No. 9, 82, 83 66, 67
Pier and Ocean 5; Sea and Starry Sky , New Covenant, the, 35
58, 60 new perspectives, 158
“Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art”, 71 “The New Plastic in Painting” (Mondrian),
Protestant approach, 87 63–4, 66–7, 189n23
“Pure Abstract Art”, 70–1 New York, 82–3, 191n36
qualitative aspect of proportion, 62 New York school, 191n36
“The Realization of Neo-Plasticism in Newman, John Henry, 66
the Distant Future and in Newton, Sir Isaac, 8
Architecture Today”, 69 Nicaea, Second Council of, 14
relational compositions, 56 Nicene Creed, 38
and relationship, 78 Nichols, Aidan, 51–3, 159, 185–6n56
religiosity, 1–2, 55, 72–80, 174, 175 Nicholson, Ben, 83–4
return to Paris, 62 Nicholson, Winifred, 80
Self-Portrait, 60 Nikon of Moscow, Patriarch, 14, 15
social identity, 5–6 “No Axiom But the Plastic Principle”
Tableau 2, 62–3, 71, 72, 78, 86 (Mondrian), 88
and Theosophy, 3, 56, 64, 72–3 nonobjective arabesques, 27
Thy Word Is Truth, 57, 73 “Non-Objective Creation and
twinning of lines, 80–4 Suprematism,” (Malevich), 133–6
writings, 63 nonobjectivity, 41
Monet, Claude, 33–4 Novalis, 26–7
 Index 221

objective representation, 134 Pollock, Jackson, 83

occult, attraction to the, 3 position, relationship of, 63–4
Of Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale of positivism, 5
Two Squares in Six Constructions post-impressionism, 6
(Lissitzky), 107, 145 postmodernity, 176
Olcott, Henry, 3 Pravda, 132–3
Old Covenant, the, 35 prayer, 32–3, 41–2, 168–9
“On the Question of Form” (Kandinsky), predestination, 62, 63, 84, 187–8n9
31–2 printmakers, 119–20
original sin, 55–6, 64, 185–6n56 printmaking, 37
progressivism, 162
paganism, 8–9, 33, 110, 135 proportion, qualitative aspect of, 62
painting, emotions in, 88–91, 191–2n42 proto-abstractionists, 5
Painting No. 9 (Mondrian), 82, 83 Proun (Study for Proun S.K.) (Lissitzky),
pangeometry, 163 155, 156
Paraskeva icon, the, 152 Prouns, 147, 149, 163, 165, 166
Paris, 41, 137 pseudo-sanctity, 162
Passion of Christ, the, 22 “Pure Abstract Art” (Mondrian), 70–1
Pater, Walter, 26 pure creation, 100
Paul, St., 55, 155, 158, 183n33
Pelagianism, 128, 132 Rafalovich, Sofia, 95
perfection, 126, 127–8 Raphael, 134
perpendicularity, 64 “The Realization of Neo-Plasticism in the
perspectival space, 163 Distant Future and in Architecture
Peter of Damascus, St, 42 Today” (Mondrian), 69
Peter the Great, Tsar, 14 red discs, 40
Pevsner, Antoine, 107 Reformation, the, 7, 57, 64, 65
Philokalia, the, 41–2 Reihing, Donna, 82
philosophy, 58–9 relational compositions, 56, 63
photocollage, 170, 171 relationship, 78
Picasso, Pablo, 125 religion
Pickstone, Charles, 186–7n1 and art, 129, 135, 158, 164–5
Pictorial Realism of a Peasant Woman in cultural turn away from, 136
Two Dimensions; Red Square definition, 8
(Malevich), 101 inspiration from, 175
Pier and Ocean 5; Sea and Starry Sky as a moral impetus, 1
(Mondrian), 58, 60 question of, 173–4
Pius XII, Pope, 153 relevance, 58–60
planimetric space, 163, 164–5 religiosities, 6–7, 20
“Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art” religious activists, 154
(Mondrian), 71 religious display, 29
Poggi, Christine, 161–2 religious otherness, 121
Point and Line to Plane (Kandinsky), 34, religio-utopianism, 157–61
36–9 Rembrandt, 134
Annunciational imagery, 51–4 “Reminiscences” (Kandinsky), 32–6, 158
“Line” chapter, 37–8 Rerberg, Fedor, 109, 194n24
“Point” chapter, 36–7 resurrection, 37–8
“The Basic Plane” chapter, 38–9 revisionist theology, 6
political posters, 147–9 Riegl, Alois, 164–5, 199n36
222 Index

Right Hegelians, 20 secularization, 10

Rimon (Hebrew), 139 Self-Portrait (Mondrian), 60
Ringbom, Sixten, 2, 56 sensation, 100
Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 17, 17–8, 154 Seryi, Grigory, 132–3
Romanticism, 18 Shatskikh, Aleksandra, 96–7, 107, 137–8
Rosenblum, Robert, 8 Shklovsky, Viktor, 16
Roskill, Mark, 181n9 sin, 55–6, 64, 185–6n56
Roslavets, Nikolai, 95 Sintesi della Guerra Mondiale (Synthesis of
Rubens, Peter Paul, 111–2, 114–6, 118–20, the World War), 148
134, 195n32 Sloth—The Real Truth of Humanity,
Elevation of the Cross, 112, 113, Malevich, 129–30
114 social conscience, 130
printmakers, 119–20 social happiness, 131
Saint Athanasius Overcoming Arius, social justice, 70–1
116, 117, 118 social medicine, 154
Rublev, Andrei, 39–50 social relationality, 78
Russell, Bertrand, 10 Socialism, 67, 160
Russia, Imperial, 9, 152 Solovyov, Vladimir, 50–-1
Russia, revolutionary, 9 Sophiology, 50–4
atheism, 33 soul, the, 19, 25, 27–8, 37–8
early period, 16–7 Soviet atheism, 7
“Likbez” (Elimination of illiteracy) Spalding, Frances, 83–4
campaign, 143 Sparshott, Francis, 55
secularization, 10 Spartacus League, 151
Russian Civil War, 5, 16, 33, 147–9 spectator engagement, 101
Russian culture, Christianity in, 9–10 Spinoza, Baruch, 23, 101
Russian Orthodox Church, 9–10, 13, 17, Spira, Andrew, 94
33, 158–9 Spirit, 21–2
Russian Revolution, 9, 35–6, 143 spiritual art, 31–2
Ryback, Issachar Ber, 139 spiritual harmony, 24–5
spiritual triangle, the, 22–3, 30–1
sacrifice, 155 spiritualism, 3, 24, 79
Sadleir, T. H., 21–2, 25, 25–6, 28 spirituality, 2, 19, 35–6, 139, 185n54
Saenredam, Pieter, 57 spiritually utilitarian viewpoint, 134
Saint Athanasius Overcoming Arius Stations of the Cross, 22
(Rubens), 116, 117, 118 Steiner, Rudolf, 24, 73
salvation, 84 Stenberg, Vladimir and Georgii, 168
Sarabianov, Dmitrii, 40 Stepanova, Vavara, 17
Schelling, Friedrich, 121 Stoics, 128
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 8 sufficiency, 46
Schoenberg, Arnold, 24 supernatural, the, 26
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 22–3 supralapsarianism, 84
Schreyer, Lothar, 39–50, 183n35 suprematism, 6, 175
science, 21, 27 definition, 134
cult of, 7 eastern root, 97–108
Second Coming, the, 56, 77 first exhibition, 97
Second World War, 80, 170, 171, 172 fundamental elements, 102
secular modernity, 135–6 God-Building, 96
secularism, 16, 173 idealism, 145
 Index 223

Malevich on, 133–6 Ukraine, 6

meaning of term, 99 unbelief, 34
understanding, 100–1 Underhill, Evelyn, 181n10
western root, 108–20 universalism, 175
Suprematism: Abstract Composition UNOVIS, 126–7, 146–7, 148, 152,
(Malevich), 103–4, 103 161
“Suprematism in World Reconstruction” uplift, sense of, 151
(Lissitzky), 108, 157–61 utopianism, 157–61
Suprematism of the Spirit (Malevich),
106–7, 145 Vakar, Irina, 94, 96
Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying Vakar, Nicholas, 111
(Malevich), 116 Van Gogh, Vincent, 57–8
Suprematist Composition: Expressing the Vapheio Cups, 164
Feeling of Fading Away (Malevich), Venetian Renaissance, 115
112, 113, 114 Vergo, Peter, 20, 21
Suprematist Composition (Malevich), 155, Verkade, Jan (Dom Willibrord), 73,
156 189–90n24
Suprematist Hieratic Cross (Malevich), 102, Veshch / Gegenstand / Objet, 138
107, 108 “The Victory over Art” (Lissitzky), 138–9,
Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles 165–6
(Malevich), 111 Victory over the Sun, 161–2
Suprematist Painting: White on White Virchow, Rudolf, 23–4, 91
(Malevich), 104–7, 105 virgin imagery, 34, 38–9
Supremus No. 58 (Malevich), 116, 117 Virgin Mary, the, 38–9, 51, 53, 54, 88–90,
Swedenborg, Emanuel, 5 185–6n56, 192n43
Swedenborgianism, 5 Virgin of Vladimir, 44
Symbolism, 2–4, 21, 23, 44, 77, 181n9 Vitebsk temples, 122–3
synagogue decoration, 4, 139–42
Wackenroder, Wilhelm, 121–2
Tableau 2 (Mondrian), 62–3, 71, 72, 78, 86 Welish, Marjorie, 111
talent, 25–6 Westernization, 14–5
Talmudic Judaism, 56 What Is Art?, (Tolstoy), 30–1
terminology, 7–9 white, 104, 107, 183n32
theological questions, 4 White Suprematist Cross (Malevich),
Theophanes the Greek, 42, 43 102
Theosophy, 1, 2, 3, 5, 24, 55, 56, 64, 72–3, Witte, Emanuel de, 57
75, 78–9, 186–7n1, 189–90n24 Worringer, William, 18
third-ageism, 159–61 Wyzewa, Téodor de, 8
Thomas Aquinas, St, 101
Thy Word Is Truth (Mondrian), 57, 73 Yellow Center (Kandinsky), 44–6, 49
Tisse, Eduard, 149 Yiddish culture, 143
Tolstoy, Leo, 22–3, 154, 182–3n24 Yingl-Tsingl-Khvat (The Mischievous
What Is Art?, 30–1 Boy) (Leib), 144–5
Torah, the, 160–1
tragic, the, 68, 88, 189n23 Zadkine, Osip, 137
Trinity, the, 23, 127 Zaicev, Wictoria, 94
Trubetskoi, Prince Evgenii, 112 Zgleits, Kazimira, 95
truth, 158 Zwingli, Huldrych, 26
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