The Icon and the Axe

Another important source of the new sensualism was the return to primitivism in the arts. Kandinsky had turned to the lubki, or popular wood cuts, of Old Russia for inspiration, and published in 1904 his Poems without Words, a portfolio of his own cuts, en route to his more abstract and experimental compositions. Malevich also went through a primitivist period; as did Michael Larionov, who turned to folk themes, simple figures, and distorted anatomies in a desperate effort to find a truly original Russian style of art. He eventually created a purely abstract style of "rayonism," which sought to base painting on "rays of color" rather than lines and fields of color. But in the experimental, interim period that followed the Revolution of 1905, Larionov championed the introduction of pornographic material into painting: salacious slogans in his "Soldier" series and ingenious improvisations on sexual shapes in his subsequent "Prostitute" series.86 These and other primitive and suggestive paintings were exhibited in Moscow early in 1912 by a group with the deliberately shocking name "The Donkey's Tail," which represented "the first conscious breakaway from Europe"87 within the artistic avant-garde. A similar movement through primitivism to modernistic innovation can be traced in music. Stravinsky's revolutionary "Rite of Spring" was suggested to him by an unexpected and erotic vision

of a solemn pagan rite in which a circle of elders watched a young girl dance herself to death to propitiate the god of spring and fertility.88

The bawdiness of Larionov endeared him to the literary futurists, who used him and his friends as illustrators for their works. The use of erotic motifs, infantile forms of expression, and vulgar epigrams became common to painters and poets alike of the "futurist" persuasion, who were in pre-war Russia generally more preoccupied with the sensuous and personal than the original Franco-Italian futurist Marinetti, who had been more interested in "the aesthetics of the machine." Russian futurism represented, in the title of its most famous manifesto, "a slap in the face of public taste." Rather in the manner of Oscar Wilde and the aesthetes and dandies of Edwardian England, the Russian futurists delighted in bizarre attire-appearing on the street with abstract signs painted on their cheeks and radishes in their buttonholes. The painter-poet Burliuk brothers, who organized the futurist tour of 1913-14, typified the egocentric exuberance of the movement. Vladimir, a professional wrestler, carried mammoth weights with him everywhere he went, and his equally gigantic older brother, David, appeared with the legend "I am Burliuk" painted on his forehead.

If one can speak of a synthetic proclamation of liberated sensualism comparable to Scriabin's Promethean proclamation, it would probably be the futuristic movie "Drama in Cabaret No. 13," which was filmed late in 1913. In contrast to the melodramas set in remote times and places which were the standard fare of the infant Russian movie industry, this film was simply an average bawdy day in the life of the futurists. Its actors were the artists themselves-the Burliuk brothers, Maiakovsky, and Larionov- behaving in particularly shocking ways as they satirized the movie industry, the society that patronized it, the world itself, and the entire subject of sex, through which one senseless generation leads on to another.

By late 1913, sensualism was giving way to Prometheanism, and the subjective side of futurism ("ego-futurism") to a more dispassionate and formal "cubo-futurism." Malevich was the harbinger of the new, designing cubistic sets and costumes in December, 1913, for the futurist opera with the appropriately Promethean title, Victory over the Sun. People were transformed into "moving machines" by costumes of cardboard and wire. Some actors spoke only with vowels, others only with consonants, while blinding lights and ear-splitting sounds rocked through the theater in an effort to give man "victory over the sun": freedom from all dependence on the traditional order of the world.89 Freud, too, make his impact on the new art; and plays were written in which the various roles did not represent different people but different levels and aspects of one person.90

In the manifesto that accompanied his first Suprematist exhibition in December, 1915, Malevich insisted:

Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes has disappeared, shall we see a pure-painting composition.91