5

Theosophy and the Fourth Dimension:
Malevich's Suprematism

The abstract painter Kazimir Malevich epitomized the mystical element in the Russian avant-garde. His fascination with geometric shapes became nothing less than a religious cult. In 1920, El Lissitzky, then a Malevich follower, wrote that the square was “the source of all creative expression,” and that Malevich’s movement, “suprematism,” was “a clear sign and plan for a definite new world never before experienced” and a new “cosmic creation.”¹ During the early 1920s Malevich collected his followers into an Institute for Artistic Culture, which was at once an art school, a movement, and a religion that promised a revolution more sweeping than the Bolshevik Revolution. Proclaimed Lissitzky:

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 Kazimir 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.²

In 1924 Malevich proposed the cube as the proper form for the mausoleum in Red Square that would immortalize Lenin after death. For the cube symbolized the “fourth dimension” of life, which, in the eyes of theosophists, survives our bodily demise. Like other artistic utopias, Malevich’s fell victim to the authority of the Communist Party in the late 1920s. But for a time his Suprematism contributed an important mystical dimension to Russian avant-garde art.

Malevich’s moment of innovation antedated the 1917 Revolution. By 1915 the European avant-garde was proclaiming that art was dead. The feverish journey of European art through cubism, expressionism, futurism, and vorticism led finally to the dead end of anti-art and Dada. The swirling canvases of Vasily Kandinsky, the geometric shapes of Piet Mondrian, the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, and the corner reliefs of Vladimir Tatlin all proclaimed the divorce between art and reality, between the abstract and the representational. It appeared that every innovation had been tried; there was nothing left for an artist to do. “Merely breaking up some object or placing a red or yellow square in the middle of his canvases will not make him original,” wrote the French painter Fernand Léger, a leader of the La Ruche painters, in 1914. “He will be original by virtue of having caught the creative spirit of an external manifestation.”³ Yet this was precisely the road taken in 1915 by Malevich. At the so-called “last futurist exhibit,” entitled “0.10” and held at the Dobychina Gallery in Petrograd from December 17, 1915, through January 19, 1916, Malevich hung a series of canvases consisting of brightly painted squares and rectangles. As Léger had predicted, Malevich’s creative spirit was external to his art. Western theosophy helped inspire his moment of innovation.

If the birth of Suprematism, as Malevich called his art, marked the death of all art in the eyes of some viewers, it also signified the rebirth of Malevich himself. At thirty-seven, he was a middle-aged painter who had moved through Russian neo-primitivism and futurism without the fame of Larionov or Mayakovsky. Soon afterward, almost overnight, he became the high priest of a new religion. His powerful canvases were covered with bright geometric shapes that seemed to float in space; they bore mysterious titles: “Square,” “Red Masses in the Fourth Dimension,” “Self-Portrait in Two Dimensions.” Malevich had absorbed second hand the ideas and writings of European and American theosophy, which enabled him to visualize on canvas the “fourth dimension” of life beyond death.

I

Many intellectual historians consider theosophy a fad, a minor eddy in the philosophical currents of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century thought. Yet theosophy had phenomenal popularity in the decades before World War I in both the United States and Europe. The psychologist Carl Jung has noted the “unbelievable rise of occultism in every form in all cultured parts of the western world since the late nineteenth century,” and has argued that people have flocked to such movements because these “modern gnostic systems meet the need for expressing and formulating wordless occurrences going on within ourselves better than any of the existing forms of Christianity, not excepting Catholicism.”⁴ The new faiths, including Christian Science and theosophy, all revolved around the premise that this world is not the only one, that there is a spiritual reality beyond the visible material one, and that it is possible for the living to communicate with the dead. Many believed quite literally in the existence of ghosts, the possibility of photographing spirits of the dead, and their ability to communicate with those on “the other side” via table-rapping and seances. Theosophy in particular offered an escape from death through a belief in a scientifically knowable life after death.

In 1900, theosophy was appealing but not new. After the American Civil War, the Russian mystic Elena Blavatsky, together with Colonel Henry Steele Olcott, had founded a Theosophical Society in the United States. The Society’s teachings quickly spread to England. The TS, as its members referred to the Society, and Blavatsky’s own voluminous writings—Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888)—claimed to hold the key to the world’s secret and primal wisdom, bequeathed by ancient Tibetan mahatmas to the esoteric elite of the TS. In England the Society passed into the hands of Mrs. Annie Besant, a Fabian socialist and biologist turned mystic, and the Reverend C. W. Leadbeater, a hanger- on of dubious religious and intellectual credentials. Through spiritualism, table-tipping, seances with the dead, and the esoteric secret doctrine understandable only to the initiates, the TS offered solace to the bereaved and confused in an increasingly secular society. According to theosophy, we live not only on a material plane but also on a spiritual plane; there are several such planes, the most important of them being the “ethereal” and the “astral.” The astral body survives the death of our worldly body. Theosophy also saw society as a whole evolving toward a higher type of race. Around 1900 believers in theosophy predicted that a new cycle of world history would soon usher in a new type of human being, the sixth sub-race of the fifth root-race.⁵ Secrecy and complexity of doctrine served to make theosophy seem important to insiders and confusing to outsiders.

By 1914 theosophy was an important worldwide religious movement. In 1879 the TS had established its headquarters at Adyar, India. By the outbreak of the First World War it claimed thirty thousand members. Among them were a number of first-rate artistic and scientific minds who cannot be dismissed as mere crackpots; they included the inventor Thomas Alva Edison, the poet William Butler Yeats, the composer Cyril Scott, and the Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian. Many others who did not actually join the movement attended its lectures, read its books, and gave it more credence than they would publicly admit. Among these theosophical fellow-travelers was the Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky, whose breakthrough to abstract painting around 1912 occurred under the strong influence of Munich theosophy. Indeed, members of the Munich Russian colony associated with the Blue Rider exhibits played an important role in bringing theosophy to Russia.

The central figure in Munich theosophy before 1914 was the Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner.⁶ Steiner was a specialist in the writings of Goethe and Nietzsche, and the author of many books. He claimed to have had spiritual visions since childhood, although he began attending theosophical lectures in Berlin in 1900 at age thirty-nine. Steiner was deeply critical of organized Christianity. Yet he accepted the mystery of Christ’s resurrection as the pivotal fact in human history and found distasteful the English emphasis on eastern Buddhist and Hindu wisdom. He hoped to reconcile science and religion through a “spiritual science” of his own. In 1902 Steiner founded a German branch of the TS in Berlin together with his future wife, Marie von Sievers, a Baltic German. At the International Theosophical Congress in Munich in 1907, however, a rift appeared between the Christ-centered mysticism of Steiner and the eastern mysticism of the TS president, Mrs. Besant. When in 1910 she presented an Indian boy, Krishnamurti, as Christ reincarnate, Steiner’s patience came to an end. In the winter of 1912-1913 he seceded from the TS and established his own movement known as anthroposophy; its headquarters was the idyllic village of Dornach near Basle. By 1914 theosophy was thus deeply divided into warring Anglo-American and German factions.

Steiner’s views were especially important for Kandinsky and the Munich Russians, but they also reached into Russia where people like Malevich absorbed them second hand. According to Steiner, during the Age of Atlantis man had lived a spiritual life guided by a group of Initiates who expressed their truths through various mystery centers and oracles. After a great flood, the Initiates who survived moved to Central Asia, where they maintained their methods for training successively higher levels of consciousness in those desiring to know true reality on the spiritual, astral, or ethero-physical planes. These ancient truths had eventually been lost; only now could they be rediscovered, articulated by Steiner in his lecture cycles delivered throughout Europe before 1914.

Steiner was significant to artists because he saw art as a means to the spiritual. In a lecture given in Vienna in March 1910, he said that “there are definite methods which a man may apply to his life of soul and which enable him to awaken certain inner faculties slumbering in normal daily life, so that he is finally able to experience the moment of Initiation.” Physical reality is merely a veil “drawn over everything that man would behold were he able spiritually to see through the spectacle presented to him in space.” The “vibrations” which produce colors in a painting, for example, make us “experience and feel inwardly as a result of the impressions made upon us by the red, violet, or yellow color.” This deeper “soul-and-spiritual reality” is accessible only to the “seer,” a man of vision who “directs his gaze into the Imaginative world; there he has the impression, let us say, of something blue or violet, or he hears a sound or has a feeling of warmth or cold. He knows through the thinking of the heart that the impression was not a mere vision, a figment of the mind, but that the fleeting blue or violet was the expression of a soul-spiritual-reality, just as the red of the rose is the expression of a material reality.”⁷ The artist, too, was a seer who could paint spiritual reality.

Steiner also claimed to have a scientific knowledge of life after death. In a lecture series in 1912-1913 he described to his audiences “life between death and rebirth.” Life after death, he claimed, was real. Our consciousness after death can be maintained if, and only if, we remember the mystery of Christ’s resurrection. Those who have reached the age of thirty-five are more likely to have consciousness after death, to be deeply involved in the cosmos. Death is in fact a rejuvenation, a becoming young again at spiritual birth, as suggested by Goethe in Part Two of Faust, the section that so fascinated Lunacharsky. Our astral body survives the death of our physical body and draws new strength from the stars and the planets. As man ascends into higher spiritual worlds after death, he expands into the planetary system itself. The “supreme” principle is the Christ Principle—that we are all gods. The experience of death itself is akin to being expanded and spread out into space. Those with clairvoyant powers can in fact visualize what happens between death and rebirth in the world of cosmic space. Our normal waking ego-consciousness cannot perceive this spiritual world; only our subconscious astral consciousness can give us glimpses of it. In short, said Steiner, “death does not exist in the world beyond,” a world which can be visualized by a few capable of astral perception.⁸

Theosophy and anthroposophy began to penetrate Russia on the eve of World War I, although symbolism and the philosophy of Soloviev and “god-seeking” had prepared the way. In 1908 a Russian section of the TS was founded in St. Petersburg by Anna Kamenskaia, who had met Mrs. Besant in London in 1902. The easing of censorship restrictions that followed the 1905 Revolution made this possible for the first time, since theosophy was anathema in the eyes of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1906 the theosophists set up the Lotus Press in Kaluga and published a journal, Vestnik teosofii. Two years later they were allowed to incorporate as a public organization. Still, the movement remained small and isolated, attacked by radical intellectuals as obscurantist and by the church and government as blasphemous. In 1911 the censor suspended the journal and charged Kamenskaia with blasphemy; she was acquitted after an unpleasant courtroom trial in 1912.⁹ Yet as in Europe and the United States, the importance of the TS lay not in its formal membership but in its remarkable appeal to many intellectuals, readers, and sympathizers.

In the wake of the 1905 Revolution a number of Russian intellectuals and artists became fascinated with theosophy and anthroposophy. The composer Scriabin had read Blavatsky’s Key to Theosophy in 1905 and found it very close to his own thinking. He predicted a coming spiritual revolution directed by the “consciousness of geniuses,” which would render the masses “more perceptive of finer vibrations than usual” and would “shake the souls of peoples and force them to perceive the idea hidden behind the outer event.”¹⁰ After 1909 theosophy became popular at Ivanov’s “Wednesdays” with the encouragement of Steiner’s main Russian follower, Anna Mintslova. Poets began to see themselves as keepers of the word, Logos, the “microcosm” that reflected the universal truth of the “macrocosm.” The poet Andrei Belyi followed Steiner to Munich and then to Dornach as a convert. “In 1912-1913,” his wife later recalled, “our entire life was under the sign of Rudolf Steiner’s lectures.”¹¹ The painter Margarita Voloshina was another Russian Steinerite who moved from Paris to Munich in early 1909 in the hope of discovering a “new landscape painting” that would express “cosmic reality.”¹² In September 1912 she helped form a branch of the new Anthroposophical Society in Moscow.

The Russian painter Kandinsky was among those who came under Steiner’s spell. Art historians now generally accept that his earliest abstract works were done around 1912 under the direct influence of theosophy and anthroposophy.¹³ Since his 1906 visit to Paris, Kandinsky had painted primarily in a fauvist manner, utilizing bright colors, deforming his landscapes, but maintaining identifiable objects in his works. In 1908 Kandinsky attended some of Steiner’s lectures in Munich. He also read and annotated Steiner’s 1909 book on Goethe’s aesthetics, which argued that the artist knows the “secret laws” of the cosmos and is therefore destined to raise the world to a new spiritual level through an “aesthetics of the future.” Kandinsky also read the 1908 German translation of Besant and Leadbeater’s book on art entitled Thought- Forms; here they argued that people’s thoughts and feelings give off an aura of free-floating lines and colors through vibrations that reveal their deepest inner emotions. Finally, in his own work Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), Kandinsky also called for a “spiritual revolution” in art, where the artist would seek to establish “vibrations” in the soul of the observer or listener, express his own “inner necessity” through his work, and synthesize sight, sound, and even temperature into a unified “nonrepresentational, abstract” work of art. Kandinsky also specifically praised theosophy as “one of the most important spiritual movements” which seeks to “approach the problem of the spirit by way of inner knowledge.””¹⁴

Kandinsky was the most important example of the influnce of theosophy on the Russian avant-garde before World War I. His abstract paintings of 1912-1914 revealed his conversion, not only in their physical resemblances to some of the auras in Thought-Forms, but also in their religious motifs and titles: “The Deluge,” “The Last Judgment,” and so on. He probably never actually joined the TS or Steiner’s movement, but he found in both groups a religious dimension for his art and a justification for removing the visual object from his painting. Kandinsky’s views were as well known in Russia as in Munich. Even before its publication in Germany, Concerning the Spiritual in Art was read by Nikolai Kulbin to an all-Russian Congress of Artists in St. Petersburg in December 1911.¹⁵ Other members of the Blue Rider circle in Munich also exhibited with the Jack of Diamonds painters in Russia in the winter of 1910-1911. The influence of Munich theosophy on Russian artists was thus probably well established before 1914.

An acquaintance with theosophy and anthroposophy is essential for an understanding of the origins of Malevich’s Suprematism. Malevich himself read no German, did not visit Europe before 1914, and therefore had no direct contact with Steiner’s ideas. But through intermediaries such as Kandinsky and Kulbin, he could easily have absorbed the rudiments of the doctrine. When Malevich himself became interested in theosophy, it was not so much in its German as in its Anglo-American form. Here he found not simply a push toward abstraction or a surrogate religion, but a model for painting the “fourth dimension” of life after death.

II

Anglo-American theosophy before World War I was distinguished in part by its mathematical and geometrical dimensions. The mystical connotations of number and form, of course, were well known to the ancient Greeks and were never really lost to the Western tradition. The Cabala, the astronomer Kepler, the Rosicrucians, and the Free Masons all exhibited a certain fascination with number lore and with squares, circles, and triangles as evocative of universal and divine significance. We have seen how the intellectual revolution of 1890-1914 led to a crisis of faith and of science over disbelief in absolutes. Time, for example, now appeared to be either intuitive experience or the “fourth dimension” of four-dimensional space, and many writers who were not theosophists used the term and the concept. But for theosophists the fourth dimension carried more mystical connotations.

What would a space of more than three dimensions look like? In the 1880s an English writer and Shakespearean scholar, Edwin A. Abbott, tried to answer this question in a book entitled Flatland. Writing under the pseudonym “A. Square,” he described a two-dimensional, planar world, whose inhabitants could imagine three-dimensional bodies only as the traces they left behind when passing through a plane; for example, a sphere appeared as a circle and a cube as a square:

Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows—only hard and with luminous edges—and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen.¹⁶

The narrator, A. Square, visits three-dimensional space, learns the nature of a cube, and then concludes by analogy that four-dimensional space must also exist. He returns home, tries to explain the world he has visited, and is thrown in jail for insanity. The story concludes with the hope that ultimately three-dimensional beings “may aspire yet higher and higher to the secrets of four, five, or even six dimensions.”¹⁷

At the turn of the century America produced several little-known thinkers who concerned themselves with the fourth dimension. The most prolific was Charles Howard Hinton (1853-1907) an untenured mathematics instructor at Princeton University in the 1890s (and the inventor of a gun to pitch baseballs), whose main intellectual sympathizer appears to have been the philosopher William James. As early as 1892 Hinton complained to James that “nobody here will print anything which I have written,” namely, his work on the development of a “higher space sense” for visualizing the fourth dimension. Hinton’s main interest was non-Euclidean geometry. In 1895 he wrote James that he was working on a “flat four-dimensional space”; this was many years before Minkowski’s definition of time as the fourth dimension became known to either Einstein or the general public. Hinton himself was not uninfluenced by Bergson and believed that “matter has another dimension which is experienced by us as duration.” His geometry in fact had a mystical dimension. He sought in higher dimensional space a means to “apprehend the higher reality, the higher personality, the actual being.” “We must train ourselves to apprehend a series of changing forms as a single thing,” Hinton wrote to James; for example, three-dimensional pyramids or cubes passing through planes change form by leaving twodimensional traces. To imagine one form from another would require mental exercises with the help of colored cubes, which for Hinton would produce “the sensation of the higher world.”¹⁸

Hinton’s published works reiterated these privately expressed views. He gave the term “fourth dimension” a mystical connotation as a higher consciousness accessible only to those who could “cast out the self” by ridding themselves of the “apparent facts of the objects.” In A New Era of Thought (London, 1885), Hinton provided a series of mental exercises with colored cubes for developing the “higher space sense.” Gauss and Lobachevsky, he announced, had inagurated the era of the fourth dimension. “I shall bring forward,” he proclaimed, “a complete system of four-dimensional thought—mechanics, science, and art. The necessary condition is that the mind acquire the power of using four-dimensional space as it now does three-dimensional.” In 1904 he provided another handbook of higher space in The Fourth Dimension, where he observed: “As our world of three dimensions is to a shadow or plane world, so is the higher world to our three-dimensional world.”¹⁹ Hinton died in 1907 after a career at the U.S. Patent Office.

Hinton’s work was well known, particularly among artists, in both Europe and Russia before 1914. Although Hinton’s illustrations bore little outward resemblance to the work of Mondrian, Kandinsky, the cubist painters, or Malevich, many artists of the period were attracted to his writings. The “fourth dimension” became a kind of cliche, a term used loosely to describe time, or a higher, spiritual dimension of life. Steiner lectured on the theme in 1904-1905 but never made it central to his doctrine. Some cubist painters in Paris imagined that intersecting planar surfaces portrayed time by showing an object simultaneously from several points. The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire used the term in a lecture in the autumn of 1911, Léger employed it in his lectures in 1913 and 1914, and the painters Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger also wrote about it in their book Du Cubisme, which appeared in Paris in 1912 and was translated into Russian the following year.²⁰ But much of this was largely rhetorical, a way of describing what painters were already doing. Hinton’s writings provided no visual glimpse into the fourth dimension.

Another American writer, Claude Bragdon, did translate Hinton’s ideas on the fourth dimension into visual form. Bragdon, who was born in Rochester, New York, was both an architect and a theosophist. Because his father had been a theosophist, he was exposed to Isis Unveiled and other theosophical literature at an early age. Around 1900 he met Leadbeater’s Indian protégé, C. Jinarajadasa, with whom he founded the Genesee Lodge of the TS. In addition, Bragdon applied theosophy to his architecture with a theory of “projective ornament,” which used mathematical “magic squares” to generate decorative shapes and designs for his buildings and to illustrate his many books. Bragdon called for a “rhythmic subdivision of space” through basic geometric forms such as squares, triangles, and “root rectangles”; well versed in both mathematics and architecture, he argued that “geometry and number are at the root of every kind of formal beauty.”²¹

Bragdon soon began to visualize the fourth dimension theosophically. Around 1910 he helped Jinarajadasa by doing some drawings for the latter’s lantern slide lectures on theosophy. Jinarajadasa elaborated Blavatsky’s theories and the esoteric doctrine for the uninitiated.²² But he also felt that art could make divine archetypes visible to human beings through symbol, intuition, and a portrayal of the “supreme moment.” Visually, Jinarajadasa provided only some photographs and charts of evolution and cosmic planes. Consequently, in 1912 Bragdon decided to write a book in which he would make visible the geometric world of higher dimensions. Published in 1913, it was entitled A Primer of Higher Space: The Fourth Dimension and contained an essay on “Man the Square,” illustrated by Bragdon with the aid of an American mathematician, Philip Henry Wynne.

It was Bragdon, rather than Hinton, who fused geometry and theosophy into a new mysticism of the fourth dimension. In his essays, Bragdon argued that one could in fact visualize four-dimensional space by analogy. Consider the relationship between three and two dimensions in terms of a cube passing through a plane at various angles so that it produces traces as lines, squares, rectangles, triangles, and polygons: “If the cubes be taken to represent the higher selves of individuals in a higher-space world, the plane our phenomenal world, the cross-sections would then represent the lower space aspects of these higher selves—personalities.” The square in particular, wrote Bragdon, is the most perfect plane figure. In the Revelation of St. John, he reminded the reader, the city of the New Jerusalem “lies foursquare, its length is the same as its breadth”; he also quoted Blavatsky’s comment in The Secret Doctrine that man is the “mystic square—in his metaphysical aspect— the Tetraktys; and becomes the cube on the creative plane.” The square, as we perceive it, simply represents the archetypal cube projected in a perfect way on a plane. The cube symbolizes our higher and immortal self existing in four dimensions; the square is its visible three-dimensional earthly projection on the physical plane.²³ The fourth dimension for Bragdon thus, by analogy, symbolizes a world beyond death.

Bragdon elaborated on the fourth dimension in a subsequent volume, Four-Dimensional Vistas (1916). Only the mystic, he wrote, could see into the world of four dimensions. Only he “represents super-humanity in the domain of consciousness” and therefore is aware of “dimensionally higher worlds.”²⁴ Both Bragdon’s language and Wynne’s drawings bear a striking resemblance to Malevich’s writing and painting after 1915. We shall see how Malevich, who had no command of English, was able to acquire knowledge of that work. For the moment it is sufficient to note that by 1913 Claude Bragdon had fused the Anglo-American theosophical tradition with the more general mathematical tradition of Hinton and others to produce a visual expression of life after death as the fourth dimension. In order to understand how this doctrine came to influence Malevich, we must first consider his own career within the context of the Russian avant-garde prior to 1915.

III

In recent years art historians have written about Malevich’s painting without generally recognizing the influence of theosophy on his work.²⁵ In terms of his innovations in painting, Malevich had encouraged the view that suprematism originated as early as 1913 in Moscow. This view was accepted by the art historian Camilla Gray in her pioneering study of Russian painting in 1962. It suggests the work of a solitary genius in a uniquely Russian environment, an interpretation which Malevich’s oracular and often obscure pronouncements did nothing to dispel. More recently, the Danish art historian Troels Andersen has concluded that “the first suprematist paintings were executed in 1915, no matter when the concept arose.”²⁶ There is in fact no photographic or other evidence of a Malevich suprematist painting before December 1915. Malevich himself probably did not visit Europe before World War I. But he was familiar with the latest in European easel painting, borrowed liberally from it, and was only able to break free to his own innovative style with the aid of theosophy.

The center of the revolution in painting before 1914 was Paris. In 1905 at the Salon d’Automne, Henri Matisse showed his first canvases in which strokes of pure bright color gave tones to objects quite unlike their accepted counterparts in the visible world. In 1908 Georges Braque exceeded the deformation of shapes and space begun by Paul Cezanne and produced works in which objects were cut by planar sections and lost their accepted shape when viewed from several angles simultaneously. The French art critic Louis Vauxcelles quickly coined the term “fauves,” the wild beasts, for Matisse and his friends and the term “cubistes” for Braque and his young friend Pablo Picasso. Within several years Europe was experiencing a visual revolution in form and color that broke down standards accepted since the Renaissance.

Russian easel painters responded quickly to Parisian trends. The generation of the aesthetes had been influenced particularly by Munich, as we have seen; the younger futurist generation of the avant-garde was under the spell of Paris between 1905 and 1914. Hundreds of young Russians in their late teens and twenties lived and studied in Paris in those years. The Blue Rose painter P. V. Kuznetsov greatly admired the Gauguin retrospective during his 1906 visit, Kandinsky returned to Munich from Paris the same year inspired by the fauves, and the Kiev painter Alexandra Exter returned to Russia from her annual trips to Paris laden with photographs of the latest works. Russians unable to travel abroad heard about the new painting from friends and often saw photographic reproductions; they could also visit the private Moscow collections of the wealthy art patrons Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, the exhibits organized by Alexander Mercereau of the journal Zolotoe runo (The Golden Fleece), or the traveling International Art Exhibitions established by the Odessa art patron Vladimir Izdebsky. Without leaving Moscow, a young Russian painter could see first hand, or in magic lantern slides and photographs, the latest canvases by Picasso, Braque, Delaunay, or Matisse.

Exposure bred imitation. No matter how talented a painter might be, nor how many Byzantine or Russian icons he might have seen in churches or at the Tretiakov Gallery, there was a frantic desire to keep up with the latest European fad. Some painters produced Russian scenes in a European manner, as in the series of paintings of the Kirghiz Steppe by Kuznetsov with its debt to Gauguin. When Braque and Picasso began doing collages, pasting newspaper clippings and other objects on wood, so did their Russian followers. When Vladimir Tatlin saw reliefs and constructions in Picasso’s studio in Paris in 1913, he immediately returned to Russia to produce his own. The 1910 Jack of Diamonds art exhibit probably took its name from a Paris street exhibit; the Donkey’s Tail exhibit of 1912 was inspired by the work of Lolo, a Montmartre cabaret mascot. It was not surprising that some critics called the Jack of Diamonds painters pikassiti and matissiati and charged that the Russian painters “only copy their teachers, the French, simplifying and carrying to absurdity their theses and methods.”²⁷

In their attempt to be innovative in Russia, many artists thus found themselves imitative of Paris. No matter how nationalist or primitive the motif, the technique often appeared to be Parisian. The Jack of Diamonds painter P. P. Konchalovsky admitted in his memoirs that “Cezanne’s methods gave me the possibility to see nature in a new way”; but while Russian viewers considered him a French painter, visiting Frenchmen commented on the purely Slavic character of his work.²⁸ The Russian futurist poets proclaimed the national character of their zaumnyi yazyk or trans-sense language, but found that Marinetti considered them a branch of the Italian movement when he visited Russia in 1914. Like the European avant-garde, the Russians declared themselves creative geniuses, broke the rules of form and color, and established their own “isms” and movements.

The influence of Paris on the Russian avant-garde from 1905 to 1914 did not mean that Russian painters were not often extremely talented, or that none worked virtually apart from that influence. Russian easel painting in these years was rich, original, and often national. The Wanderers and the World of Art painters persisted in their own styles and trends. The portraits of Serov, the landscapes of Levitan, the realism of Repin, and the grotesque line drawings of Filonov all suggest both artistic talent and artistic diversity. But it was precisely this established artistic world embodied in the Academy, the World of Art, and the Union of Russian Artists against which the avant-garde set itself. For the young provincial art students of the avant-garde who streamed into the capitals after the turn of the century, European modernism provided the weapon with which to attack the middle-class artistic establishment and its patrons. To the philistines, their painting was not imitation at all, but shocking novelty, and novelty could well lead to public recognition. Perhaps this desire for recognition in an increasingly sophisticated and competitive art market in Russia was what produced, in the words of one critic, “rayonnism, Suprematism, and other provincial ism-creations” in these years.²⁹

IV

Malevich deliberately veiled his early life in mystery. Both of his parents were Poles who had fled to the Ukraine in the wake of the Polish uprising of 1863. His brief autobiography states only that his father worked in a sugar refinery near Kiev, that there was “no mention of art” in the house, and that neither of his parents was especially religious.³⁰ His father apparently opposed his artistic desires to the point of hiding his letters of application to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. His mother was obviously the dominant figure in his life, from the time she bought him his first paints when he was fifteen until his death in 1935. For most of Malevich’s later life, his mother lived with him and encouraged his work. Other than this, we know little about his family and his early years.

Malevich was a somewhat older member of the futurist generation of the avant-garde. Bom in 1878 near Kiev, he belonged to the age cohort of the Blue Rose painters, but he became artistically active only after 1905 and especially just before World War I. By nationality he was Polish and Ukrainian (some friends called him “Pan Kazimir”). He was therefore more typical of the provincial southerners who in vaded Moscow after 1900 and took up positions in the front line of the avant-garde: the Burliuk brothers, David and Vladimir, from the Ukraine; Mikhail Larionov from Tiraspol; and Alexandra Exter from Kiev. In the mid-1890s the Malevich family moved to Konotop, a district town of about 28,000 located on the railway line between Kiev and Kursk. By 1898 Malevich left home for Kursk, where he lived for three years and began painting his first landscapes. In 1902, when Malevich was twenty-four, his father died. Malevich then moved to Moscow, where he successfully passed the entrance examinations to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture.

The Moscow School, founded in the mid-nineteenth century, was the center of the Russian easel painting avant-garde between 1905 and 1912. Its history was bound up with the Wanderers, the young painters who had seceded from the Academy in 1863 to paint national themes in a realistic manner, and who now dominated the Academy itself. At the turn of the century the Moscow School had a distinguished faculty, which included the well-known landscape painter I. I. Levitan, the portraitist V. A. Serov, and the graphic artist L. O. Pasternak, the father of Boris. All were familiar with impressionism and Art Nouveau, and many had studied or traveled in Europe. Despite the long course of study (eight years in painting and in sculpture, and ten years in architecture), the Moscow School provided a more open and democratic alternative to the rigorous and less experimental Academy. Here a creative mixture of prosperous young Muscovites and more indigent provincials like Malevich—“the same raznochintsy whose circumstances were such that they often had no money for supper”—provided fertile ground for planting the seeds of an avant-garde after 1905.³¹

The first sign of Moscow’s artistic rebellion against the St. Petersburg Academy and the World of Art came in 1903 with the founding of the Union of Russian Artists in Moscow. In 1905 the Union itself was attacked by a group of younger painters from the Moscow School, who organized an independent painting exhibit under the name Blue Rose in the spring of 1907. The Blue Rose painters were mainly students from the Volga town of Saratov who had come to Moscow in the late 1890s. Their light and speckled canvases reflected the work of their Saratov teacher Viktor Borisov-Musatov, the French Nabis (the Hebrew word for prophet) painters Paul Sérusier and Maurice Denis, the pastel murals of Puvis de Chavannes, and the Tahitian and Breton scenes of Gauguin. Many of their works were highly symbolic. Malevich’s canvases of this period, the lovely “Flower Girl” of 1903 and the summer landscapes done around Kursk before 1908, also reflected the established vogue of French impressionism and the Nabis. The Blue Rose painters may be said to mark the transition from the generation of the aesthetes to that of the futurists. Malevich’s early work lacked their direct contact with Paris but was not dissimilar.³²

Malevich himself did not exhibit with the Blue Rose painters in 1907 but with another organization, the Moscow Association of Artists. At this exhibit his paintings hung alongside the canvases of two other Moscow School students about to become leaders of the avant-garde, Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, together with works by Kandinsky and Vladimir Burliuk. All of these artists were from the south (Kandinsky grew up in Odessa), and Burliuk came from a remarkable family that had both money and artistic interests. During the following years, Russian art exhibits were favored with the patronage of Burliuk’s father, the bailiff on an estate north of the Crimea belonging to Count Mordvinov, and with the catalytic enthusiasm of Vladimir’s brother David. The Garland (Venok) exhibit in Moscow in the winter of 1907-1908, the Link (Zveno) exhibit in Kiev later that year, and the Jack of Diamonds (Bubnyi valet) exhibit in Moscow in December 1910 all brought Burliuk money together with the emerging avant-garde. Most of the participants had come from the provinces, had studied at the Moscow School, in Munich, or in Paris, and were in their twenties or thirties. Although Malevich did not exhibit widely until the Jack of Diamonds, he absorbed the trends around him, especially the neoprimitivism of Larionov and Goncharova. Like them, he explored in his paintings popular themes suggested by the icon and the lubok woodcut, emulated the forms of Gauguin and the colors of Matisse, which he saw in Shchukin’s collection, and gave his Russian or Ukrainian peasants the heavy eyes and elongated noses characteristic of Picasso’s enthusiasm for African and Oceanic masks.³³

The Jack of Diamonds exhibit, held in Moscow during the winter of 1910-1911, united for the first time the diverse elements of the Russian avant-garde. The neo-primitivists of the Moscow School, led by Larionov and Goncharova, joined with the newer followers of Cezanne (Robert Falk, P. P. Konchalovsky, and Ilya Mashkov) and the Munich Russians of the Neue Kúnstlervereinigung (New Artists’ League), led by Kandinsky, Alexei Yavlensky, and Marianne Verefkina.³⁴ But their unity soon dissolved into rival factions. In the spring of 1912 Larionov seceded from the Jack of Diamonds group and, with Goncharova, exhibited independently under the name of the Donkey’s Tail, proclaiming his own art movement, rayonnism (luchizm). While Malevich also hung some of his paintings at the Donkey’s Tail, he never succumbed to Larionov and Goncharova’s use of light rays, suggested by the “force lines” of Boccioni and the Italian futurists. Instead he found a source of inspiration in the work of Fernand Léger, the La Ruche painter whose canvases were first shown in Russia at the second Jack of Diamonds exhibit in February 1912.³⁵

Malevich’s French source was not really French. Léger provided an important contact with Italian futurism. In his own painting Léger combined the Italians’ enthusiasm for machines with the reduction of visual objects to tubes, cones, and cylinders. Under Léger’s influence Malevich now began to paint in this manner; canvases such as “Taking in the Rye,” “The Woodcutter,” and “Morning in the Village after Snowfall” all indicate Léger’s influence on Malevich in 1912-1913, although Malevich’s figures are heavier and more compact. Malevich also explored the possibilities of collage à la Braque and Picasso in 1913 in “Desk and Room,” with its pasted objects, newspaper clippings, and lettering. Finally, he followed the futurist technique of painting “cinematic” motion in his “Knife Grinder,” as Goncharova had in “The Bicyclist.”

Around 1912 the center of the Russian avant-garde shifted from Moscow to St. Petersburg and from painting to poetry. Malevich moved to the capital, where he joined the Union of Youth, a group of painters, musicians, and poets.³⁶ Under the influence of the Russian futurist poets, Malevich began to employ the terms zaumnyi (trans-sense) and sdvig (displacement) to describe his painting. In December 1913 he designed the costumes and backdrops for the futurist opera Victory over the Sun, with music by the Union of Youth leader, the violinist Mikhail Matiushin, and lyrics by the poet Alexei Kruchenykh.

Malevich’s painting prior to 1914 revealed a continuing involvement with the Russian avant-garde and its European sources. But it did not mark him as an innovator. By about 1912 Russian painting appears to have suffered a crisis of imitation brought on by widespread enthusiasm for artistic trends emanating from Munich and Paris. The Russian futurists attempted to disavow their Italian origins by naming their original circle Hylea, after the ancient Greek colonies in the Crimea, and by shifting their emphasis from easel painting to poetry, where the Russian language would by definition stamp their work as national. Larionov and Goncharova soon gave up rayonnism and joined Diaghilev in exile in Paris. There was also a crisis of aging. By 1912 the art students of a few years back were no longer young. The leaders of the Union of Youth—the doctor Nikolai Kulbin, Matiushin, and his wife, the poet Elena Guro—were forty-five, fifty-one, and thirty-five respectively. In Munich the Russians of the Blue Rider movement, who proclaimed themselves “healthy youth” uniting the “young forces” of international art, were headed by Kandinsky, forty-six; Verefkina, fifty-two; and Yavlensky, forty-eight.³⁷ With the exception of Falk, twenty-six, and Exter, twenty-eight, the Jack of Diamonds painters were now all over thirty.

By 1914 Kazimir Malevich, at thirty-six, had achieved little artistic success. He was a not very original Polish-Ukrainian painter with little formal artistic training who joined the futurists in wearing wooden spoons in their lapels on street comers. Although he had never been to Europe, his entire career reflected European trends in painting, including impressionism, cubism, and futurism. He had created no style and founded no movement. He had not even graduated from a higher art school. To be sure, Malevich had been doing some interesting and even innovative painting before World War I, but he had failed to achieve much of a reputation. It was only in 1915 that theosophy helped him become a recognized innovator at age thirty-seven.

V

In 1914, the Russian avant-garde was divided into a number of warring factions, including the Jack of Diamonds group, the futurists, cubo-futurists, and ego-futurists, the Blue Rider circle, and the Donkey’s Tail. Each sought to outdo the others in creating a new style, a new rhetoric, and a new artistic public. In January 1914 there was a secession from the Union of Youth in Petersburg. Its leader was the twenty-two- year-old painter Ivan Pougny, a wealthy Petersburg art student who in 1912 had worked in Paris with Vasileva. There he had fallen in with the La Ruche painters, including Léger and the Russians, and had married another wealthy young Russian art student, Xenia Bogoslavskaya. Upon their return to St. Petersburg, their apartment became a gathering place for the Russian futurists and the Union of Youth. Pougny left the Union in 1914, and Malevich soon became the beneficiary of his patronage.³⁸

During the winter of 1914-1915 Pougny, Vladimir Tatlin, and Malevich organized an exhibit of their own, independently of the futurists and the Union of Youth. Pougny provided the money. The result was Tramway V, held in Petrograd in March 1915 and named after a Moscow streetcar line. The exhibit attracted nearly two thousand visitors, but it also drew considerable criticism: while Russian soldiers were dying by the thousands in the trenches of Galicia during the first winter of World War I, a handful of frivolous bohemians was exhibiting pseudo-Parisian canvases. In the eyes of the critics, Exter’s paintings of Florence, Tatlin’s reliefs, and Pougny’s collages all bore the unmistakable stamp of Gris, Léger, and Picasso. Malevich’s painting “An Englishman in Moscow” contained, as one reviewer wrote, “neither an Englishman nor Moscow.”³⁹

Mysticism also flourished in Petrograd during the dark winter of 1914-1915. Scriabin returned from England and planned his ultimate musical performance. Entitled Mysterium, it was to be performed in the open air near Darjeeling, India, at the foot of the Himalayan Mountains, creating a divine experience of ecstasy through the use of incense, smoke, dancing, and bells hung somehow from the clouds. Scriabin was not the only intellectual intrigued by the mystery of the East. The director Alexander Tairov, back from Paris, performed the Indian religious play Sakuntala. The painter Nikolai Roerich, a member of the Russian Section of the Theosophical Society and the librettist of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, planned to import a Buddhist shrine from India. Most important, the Russian mystic philosopher P. D. Uspensky returned from India via London in November 1914, and in February and March 1915, during the Tramway V exhibit, delivered lectures to large audiences in Petrograd on Indian philosophy, theosophy, and the “fourth dimension” under the titles “In Search of the Miraculous” and “The Problem of Death.”⁴⁰ Uspensky appears to have provided Malevich with his first exposure to the ideas of Hinton and Bragdon and to theosophical conceptions of the “fourth dimension.”

Peter Demianovich Uspensky (1878-1947) had been a member of the Russian Section of the Theosophical Society since 1911. In 19131914 he spent several months at the TS headquarters at Adyar. But his horizons were not limited to theosophy, and as a mathematician he had for many years been interested in the general topic of the “fourth dimension.” He was familiar, if not entirely in accord, with the writings of both Hinton and Bragdon. He later recalled that around 1913 “Mr. Bragdon’s Man the Square reached me in Petrograd” and “carried the message of a common thought, a common understanding.”⁴¹ In 1915 he also translated Hinton’s book The Fourth Dimension into Russian. His early works, The Fourth Dimension (1909) and Tertium Organum (1911), revealed a thorough familiarity with the writings of Hinton, which he summarized for Russian readers. In his later works in emigration—A New Model of the Universe (1931) and In Search of the Miraculous ( 1949)—Uspensky continued to refer to the books on theosophy and the “fourth dimension” that had inspired him in Russia before World War I. Many English intellectuals considered Uspensky and another mystic Russian philosopher, George Gurdjeff, to be Eastern seers offering solace and religious truth in a troubled postwar world. But in Russia Uspensky was more important as a popular philosopher who transmitted to many Russians unable to read English a tradition of both theosophy and the “fourth dimension” as a way out of the confines of death.

Uspensky was no mere borrower. As a mathematician and a theoso- phist, he was able to fuse both a scientific and a mystical tradition into his own unique philosophy, familiar to many artists among the Russian avant-garde. To Bragdon’s work, he added an important new emphasis on immortality. For Uspensky, the “fourth dimension” provided an escape from death into the real world of the spirit. Our entire life, he wrote, is merely a shadow of reality, a reality accessible only to a “new category of men, for whom there exist different values than for other people.” The mass of humanity consists of four-dimensional beings who are normally conscious only of three dimensions. Carrying Bragdon’s spatial analogy one dimension higher, Uspensky argued that “a cube, a sphere, a pyramid, a cone, a cylinder, may be projections or crosssections of four-dimensional bodies unknown to us.” There is not only a fourth dimension but a fifth. If the fourth dimension represents time, then the fifth dimension represents the “line of eternity,” the eternal present of Hindu philosophy, the “perpetual now for some moment,” time stopped, as in death. But the fourth and fifth dimensions are known only to a few capable of seeing beyond the apparent world of this life, dimensions in which we are all continually dying and being reborn.⁴²

For Uspensky, the fourth dimension was a world beyond death. We know that the world is three-dimensional, he wrote, but in fact we “see and touch only surfaces.” Our three-dimensional world is actually a projection from a four-dimensional one; to visualize this, we should imagine a plane surface on which solids are projected when passing through the plane:

We know that it is possible to represent a three-dimensional body upon a plane, that it is possible to draw a cube, a polyhedron, or a sphere. This will not be a real cube or a real sphere, but the projection of a cube or of a sphere on a plane. We may conceive of the threedimensional bodies of our space somewhat in the nature of images in our space of, to us, incomprehensible four-dimensional bodies.⁴³

This passage from Tertium Organum conjures up strong visual images, such as the ones that appear in Bragdon’s book. But Uspensky gave the fourth dimension even more of a religious and mystical significance. All life is a circle that moves from birth to death and then to rebirth, a “circle of the fourth dimension,” which is “inevitably escaping from our space.”⁴⁴ For the elite, life in the fourth and fifth dimension promises nothing less than immortality, a world beyond the limits of death.

Uspensky concluded Tertium Organum with a chapter on the “supra- conceptual” mind. In it he provided forebodings typical of the years after 1905, an apocalyptic sense of a coming new age, a new consciousness, a new humanity, and a new master. He also cited at length the work of R. M. Bucke, a Canadian psychiatrist and mystic friend of Walt Whitman. In his book Cosmic Consciousness (New York, 1901), Bucke argued that the human race was moving from simple consciousness through self-consciousness to cosmic consciousness, that is, a “sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but that he has it already.” Three imminent revolutions would “literally create a new heaven and a new earth”: first, a material revolution based on the attaining of “aerial navigation”; second, an economic revolution, which would eliminate both riches and poverty; third, a psychic revolution in which all men’s spiritual eyes would be opened to the truth at approximately the age of thirty-five—Bucke’s age when he discovered truth. Cosmic consciousness would come to the middle-aged at a moment of “supreme occurrence.” Bucke himself claimed to have had a “supreme moment” of illumination in 1872 at thirty-five, so that he too “passed through a new birth” and attained a “higher spiritual plane.”⁴⁵

Two illustrations by Claude Bragdon and Philip Wynne for Man the Square, 1913. From Claude Bragdon, A Primer of Higher Space: The Fourth Dimension, to which is added Man the Square, A Higher Space Parable (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923).

Suprematist paintings by Kazimir Malevich at futurist exhibition “0.10,” Petrograd, 1915. Courtesy of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

There is considerable evidence that Malevich was greatly influenced by Uspensky’s ideas in 1915. We know that Malevich was in Petrograd in the spring of 1915 in connection with Tramway V and that Uspensky was lecturing there on death and the fourth dimension. We also know that Uspensky was the Russian most familiar with the ideas of Hinton and Bragdon, and that he was disseminating those ideas through his books and lectures. We cannot say definitely that Malevich attended Uspensky’s lectures. But in the months following them there was a dramatic change, a “moment of innovation,” in Malevich’s painting. His new style of geometric abstraction involving colored plane figures bears a close resemblance visually to Wynne’s drawings in Bragdon’s Man the Square, and his new language to describe his painting abounds with talk about the fourth dimension and theosophic terminology. It is perhaps inappropriate to interpret the effect of Uspensky on Malevich as a sophisticated kind of intellectual influence. Uspensky’s ideas were popular in Petrograd, and they may well have suggested a new kind of abstract painting to Malevich.

Malevich’s first suprematist paintings along the lines suggested by Uspensky and Bragdon were hung at the “last futurist exhibit,” entitled “0.10,” in December 1915. In the summer and autumn of 1915, members of Pougny’s circle gathered at his family estate at Kuokalla to plan the exhibit. They obtained permission to use the private art gallery of Nina Dobychina near the Hermitage. Apparently, they wished to outdo Vladimir Tatlin, who had emerged more successfully from Tramway V than Malevich; Malevich’s work had not received equal critical recognition, and the patron Shchukin had even purchased one of Tatlin’s reliefs for 3,000 rubles. The rivalry between Tatlin and Malevich emerged openly at 0.10. Here Malevich exhibited his first suprematist paintings—canvases covered with bright colored squares, triangles, and rectangles. He hung a sign outside his exhibition room proclaiming “suprematist painters.” Tatlin responded with a sign at the door of his room that read “professional painters.” At one point a fist fight erupted between the two artists; it was stopped by Pougny, who explained to a policeman present that Tatlin simply had stomach cramps. In the end the exhibit achieved public notoriety but little financial success. Six thousand visitors viewed its work, but only one painting was sold. The art critic Lopatin found “no painting and no individuality,” while the newspaper Petrogradskie vedomosti called the painters “savages” playing at “anarchism in art.”⁴⁶

Ivan Pougny, Suprematist composition, 1915. Courtesy of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Nevertheless 0.10 gave Malevich a new reputation. He proclaimed himself head of a post-futurist art movement, Suprematism. His abstract, geometric canvases were highly innovative. In a pamphlet entitled From, Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, which Malevich handed out at the exhibit, he declared that “the forms of Suprematism, the new realism in painting, are already proof of the construction of forms from nothing, discovered by Intuitive Reason.” Painters should now abandon completely the physical object and create an entirely new painting of pure geometry based on the square. “The square is not a subconscious form,” he announced; “it is the creation of intuitive reason. It is the face of the new art. The square is a living, royal infant.”⁴⁷ Surrounded by his coterie of younger followers, notably the Pougnys and Olga Rozanova, Malevich became the high priest of a new artistic religion. “I am the royal infant,” he declared at a public lecture toward the end of the 0.10 exhibit in January 1916; “before me there have been only stillborn children. Tens of thousands of years have prepared my birth.”⁴⁸ As a thirty-seven-year-old Polish-Ukrainian painter was proclaiming himself man the square and Christ resurrected, many members of his audience got up and left the hall.

Olga Rozanova, Xenia Bogoslavskaia, and Kazimir Malevich at the futurist exhibition “0.10,” Petrograd, 1915. Courtesy of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

VI

Malevich’s moment of innovation in 1915 did not bring immediate fame and success. But he had found in the Anglo-American tradition of theosophy and the “fourth dimension” imported by Uspensky the key to a new art and a new beginning for himself as an artist. Uspensky’s Petrograd lectures undoubtedly contributed to the popularity of theosophy and Indian philosophy. In 1915 Scriabin, for example, proclaimed his interest in the “crisis of Euclidean geometry” and the idea of a “many-measured space” beyond three dimensions; he referred frequently to the sphota of the Rig Veda: the Supreme Being, Supreme Reality, or Supreme Truth.⁴⁹ Malevich described Uspensky at the time of the 0.10 exhibit (in a letter of May 1916) as a philosopher “seeking for a new man, for new paths,” although he did not entirely agree with him. “Reason,” Malevich wrote, “has now imprisoned art in a box of square dimensions. Foreseeing the danger of a fifth and sixth dimension, I fled, since the fifth and sixth dimensions form a cube in which art will stifle.”⁵⁰

Theosophy and the “fourth dimension” continued to influence Malevich in later years, although he avoided explicit reference to them in public. He soon ceased to employ the term “fourth dimension” in the titles of his paintings, as he had in 1915. But theosophical terminology continued to appear in his writings. After the 1917 Revolution, he wrote that Russia would some day be the “rotating creative axis and race” for a new kind of culture. Uspensky had described the fourth dimension as a way out of death. Malevich would employ the fifth dimension as the basis for his new art:

Theosophical centers, poles, rays, and dimensions continued to pervade Malevich’s writings long after his initial encounter with the doctrine in 1914-1915.⁵¹

Malevich’s real fame in Russia came only after the 1917 Revolution. In 1918 the forty-year-old painter went to work for the painting section of Lunacharsky’s Narkompros, designed the costumes and scenery for the first production of Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe, and brought the Pougnys to join him in Vitebsk in 1919, when he displaced Marc Chagall as head of the art school there. In Vitebsk Malevich, together with El Lissitzky, proclaimed another new art movement, Unovis, toward a new art. In the 1920s he headed the theoretical section of Inkhuk, the Institute for Artistic Culture, in Petrograd; he also moved away from painting to the design of architectural forms, which he called “planits.” His work became well known in Europe through the Van Diemen Gallery exhibit of 1922 in Berlin and his 1927 visit to the Bauhaus. He died of cancer in 1935 in Leningrad.

Malevich’s philosophy, with its emphasis on the fourth dimension as an escape from death, symbolized the mystical element in the Russian avant-garde. In 1924 the painter made a specific proposal to institutionalize that mysticism and theosophy by immortalizing the dead Lenin. Writing in January 1924, immediately after Lenin’s death, Malevich compared Lenin to Christ.⁵² Lenin, too, had been resurrected after death from “he” to “He,” from time-bound matter into immortal spirit. He had now departed this world for the world of true art and religion, the “supra-material kingdom of the ideal spirit.” Lenin’s body, wrote Malevich, should not be placed in any ordinary mausoleum, but “in a cube, as if in eternity. The cube of eternity should be constructed as a sign of its unity with the dead.” In death, Lenin should become the object of a new cult. “Every working Leninist should have a cube at home, as a reminder of the eternal, constant lesson of Leninism, which will establish a symbolic, material basis for a cult.” Music, poetry, and workers’ clubs with their Lenin corners (ugolki Lenina) should celebrate the dead revolutionary leader, especially through the symbolic cube, the Soviet version of an Egyptian pyramid.

Malevich considered the cube a proper symbol for the Lenin cult because it symbolized the eternal fourth dimension. “The cube, as the symbol of eternity; the chair, as an object to sit on; the icon, as a religious object—all can pass from one state to another. Material things depend on ideas and spirit.” The cube for Malevich meant metamorphosis, not death; a new beginning rather than an end. “The view that Lenin’s death is not death, that he is alive and eternal, is symbolized in a new object, taking as its form the cube. The cube is no longer a geometric body. It is a new object with which we try to portray eternity, to create a new set of circumstances to maintain Lenin’s eternal life, defeating death.” The cube would symbolize Lenin’s immortality. More than that, it would symbolize an entire new culture:

In the cube is the entire culture of human development; the cube symbolizes the first epoch or first cycle of the objective basis of ideas, and a new epoch which will move toward a new creation of form, conceived as the cube of its knowledge moves into a higher space (prostranstvo-dal’she); or as the cube, as a moving space, creates a new body, a new space.

In painting, the cube moving through two-dimensional space at an angle had created the patterns of Suprematism; in life, it would now help to build a new Soviet culture.

When one is aware of Malevich’s earlier journey through the fourth dimension of Hinton and the square of Bragdon, his arcane theosophical plans for a Lenin cult cease to confound. “Lenin has died,” wrote Malevich, “but his life remains for five minutes, like the eclipse of the sun (zatmenie sol’ntsa) during the death of Christ as life ceased.” Around 1913 Malevich had produced the painting “An Englishman in Moscow,” a symbol-laden combination of a fish, a man in a top hat, and the words “partial eclipse of the sun.” This painting can stand as a symbol of Malevich’s own metamorphosis and partial eclipse. For it was precisely at that time that Anglo-American theosophy and the interest in the “fourth dimension” began to transform Malevich into a new kind of painter.

Malevich on his deathbed, 1935. Courtesy of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

In an unpublished manuscript Malevich had expressed his own personal belief in immortality. “No phenomenon is mortal,” he wrote, “and this means not only the body but the idea as well, a symbol that one is eternally reincarnated in another form which actually exists in the conscious and unconscious of a person.” The artist also seeks fame at a “moment,” wrote Malevich, when he transforms himself from “nothing” into “something.” Eternal life is therefore possible “not only in my existence after death but in my every new step, as soon as I am transformed from one situation to another; it is then all the same whether I go to a graveyard or to the city of the future, where they expect my reincarnation.”⁵³ Much of this bears echoes of Ernst Mach, whom Malevich mentions in passing, as well as of theosophy. But Malevich’s notion of immortality was far more mystical than that of Mach or Lunacharsky, which amounted to little more than a permanent reputation in the memories of others. His was a quite literal escape from the confines of this three-dimensional world into the eternity of four dimensions.

Malevich’s doctrine of revolutionary immortality thus appears to have emerged from the prerevolutionary world of art and ideas. The Russian avant-garde was familiar with various theosophical notions, emanating from Munich and London, before the war. In early 1912 the theater director Sergei Volkhonsky told the Congress of Artists in Petersburg that “a theosophical principle has penetrated something close to me, i.e. art”; the members of the Union of Youth also employed theosophic terminology often to describe their art. In additìon, Matiushin was familiar by early 1913 with Hinton’s work on the broader topic of the fourth dimension, but through Uspensky’s Tertium Organum, rather than directly.⁵⁴ It is probably most accurate to view Malevich as a relatively uneducated painter who absorbed ideas from Russians around him, rather than from Western books or thinkers. His passing references to the “intuitive” of Bergson, the “I” of Mach, and the “fourth dimension” of Bragdon and Hinton were all part of the philosophical language of the time used by Russian artists. At any rate, in 1915 Malevich, at the age of thirty-seven, had found his own cosmic consciousness of the eternal square in his suprematist moment of innovation.