The Icon and the Axe

Thus, it seems appropriate that much of the initial impulse toward creating a new experimental Russian art in Russia should come from the collective attempt of a small circle of artists to rediscover and recreate the artistic forms and craft techniques of Old Russia near Moscow on the estate of a wealthy railroad baron, Sawa Mamontov.37 In 1882 they began by designing, building, and decorating a small church in the early Novgorod style, and then turned to fashioning stagings for the first private opera company in Russian history, which Mamontov established in Moscow the following year.

Mamontov's activities helped move the center of artistic gravity from St. Petersburg back to Moscow in the 1890's. Even painters like Surikov and Repin, who had been trained in the dominant St. Petersburg traditions of realism and social significance drifted to Moscow and the Mamontov estate, portraying in their masterpieces of the late eighties and nineties early Russian historical subjects on a vast fresco scale and with a richness of color that became characteristic of Muscovite painting. In 1892 a wealthy merchant, P. M. Tret'iakov, donated his vast collection of Russian art to the city of Moscow, where a gallery bearing his name was established-the first ever devoted exclusively to Russian painting. Two other Moscow merchants, Serge Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, subsequently brought to Russia more than 350 French impressionist and postimpressionist paintings: the greatest collection of Western art since Catherine the Great's massive importation of Rembrandts. Moscow became the major center inside Russia for experimental modern artists like Kandinsky, who made the city the subject of a number of his paintings.

Among the young painters in Moscow stimulated to fresh experimentation by the Shchukin and Morozov collections was Casimir Malevich, an artist in many respects even more revolutionary than Kandinsky. Like so many of the avant-garde, Malevich was influenced by a curious combination of primitive Russian art and the newest, most sophisticated art of the West. His development through a bewildering variety of approaches in search of

the basic elements of painting illustrates the peculiar Promethean passion that became characteristic of experimental modern art in Russia. Like Kandinsky, Malevich soon left the world of recognizable people and objects for the fresh start of his "black square on a white ground" followed by his famous "white on white" series of 1918.

As Malevich's art became more radical in form, it became more Promethean in purpose; for he sought to free the visual arts from "the tyranny of easel painting" and impose his new ideal forms on the wallpaper, the buildings, the plates-even the coffins-of the future. In what he called "my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of the objective world," he and his followers attempted to found in the year of Scriabin's death, 1915, an "art of pure sensation,"38 which he called Suprematism and later "the art of the fifth dimension."39 The latter phrase, used at a time when Einstein's fourth dimension was still known only to specialists, was no mere figure of speech. As he put it in one typical passage:

. . . man's path lies through space. Suprematism is the semaphore of color. . . . The blue color of clouds is overcome in the Suprematist system, is ruptured and enters white, as the true, real representation of infinity, and is therefore freed from the colored background of the sky.40

Thus even line and color, the last links which Kandinsky's art enjoyed with the real world, are severed in Malevich's doctrine. A reviewer described him as "a rocket sent by the human spirit into non-existence";41 and he himself insisted in a manifesto of 1922 that man

is preparing on the earth to throw his body into infinity-from legs to aeroplanes, further and further into the limits of the atmosphere, and then further to his new orbit, joining up with the rings of movement towards the absolute.42

Malevich stands as a kind of artistic prophet of the space age, practical preparations for which were already being undertaken by Constantine Tsiolkovsky, a sickly, self-taught genius from the Russian interior. As early as 1892, he had written about the scientific feasibility of a journey to the moon, and in 1903 he began a long series of amateur cosmic probes with his own small-scale, jet-propelled ballistic appliances. "This planet," he wrote, "is the cradle of the human mind, but one cannot spend all one's life in a cradle."43

Space tended to replace for twentieth-century Russia the symbol of the sea with all its symbolic overtones of purification, deliverance from the ordinary, and annihilation of self. The Russian Prometheans spoke no more of an ark of faith or a ship at sea, but of a new craft that would take them