The third event that heralded a rekindling of interest in Russian art from the beginning of the twentieth century was the international rediscovery of Malevich. However, it would be an overstatement to suggest that the artist was entirely forgotten. His paintings in the MoMA collection were included in international exhibitions of highlights from the collection. In 1952, the same year Barr's article was published, MoMA sent a show to Paris as part of the festival Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century (L'œuvre du XXe siècle.) (25)
Cover of the catalogue of the exhibition L'œuvre du XXe siècle. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, 1952.
The arts festival was organized by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and financed by the CIA. Nicolas Nabokov, a composer and brother of the famous writer, was its director. (26) Lavish concerts, exhibitions, and public lectures had to stress the difference between the free European spirit and communist totalitarianism. (27)
James Johnson Sweeney, the former curator of MoMA who had been appointed in 1952 as the second director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, curated the exhibition. (28) Sweeney, a member of the ACCF (American Committee for Cultural Freedom) affiliated to the Congress of Cultural Freedom, included works by Malevich in the exhibition. Kandinsky, Mikhail Larionov, and Marc Chagall, “the world-famous art exiles” from the Bolshevik dictatorship, were not forgotten either. (29) Works by Russian modernists neighbored canvases by Post-Impressionists and German and Austrian painters like Franz Marc, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, George Grosz, and Oskar Kokoschka. The curator's selection followed the canon of the art “hated and feared” by totalitarian states introduced in Barr's article. It perfectly corresponded to the politically charged spirit of the festival.
James Johnson Sweeney, director of the Guggenheim Museum, standing next to Leger painting. Photo by Evelyn Hofer, 1960.
The North Americans brought to Europe their narrative of the history of European modernism, and Russians were part of this canon. However, the return of Malevich to postwar Europe in 1952 did not provoke widespread interest in the artist. This would happen when Suprematism came into vogue four years later.
In 1956 the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam received on loan from Hugo Herring eighty-six works by Malevich left in Germany by the artist in 1927 when he had to leave the country and return to the USSR. The museum exhibited the paintings in December of 1957 and purchased them in 1958 for 30,000 U.S dollars. (30) However, in November of 1957, one month before the opening of the Stedelijk exhibition, some works by the artist left in the custody of the Dutch museum had already been shown in Paris as part of the exhibition Précurseurs de l'art abstrait en Pologne at Galerie Denise René. (31)
Cover of the catalogue of the exhibition Précurseurs de l'art abstrait en Pologne at Galerie Denise René. Paris, 1957.
The exhibition included works by painters such as Henryk Stazewski, Wtadystaw Strzemiriski, and Katarzyna Kobro. Julian Przybos, the famous poet and curator of the show, claimed that Malevich was “a Polish artist.” (32) Przybos was not only the first to introduce the newly discovered works of Malevich to a Western audience, he also pioneered interest in radical Russian modernism in the Eastern Bloc. (33) If the Paris show did not provoke huge attention, the exhibition of Malevich's paintings at the Stedelijk (December 1957-January 1958) laid the foundations for the international recognition of the artist. (34)
In 1958, paintings by Malevich traveled to the Kunstverein Braunschweig and later to the Brussels World's Fair, the first World Expo after the end of the war, (35) There they were included in the exhibition 50 ans d'art moderne (Fifty Years of Modern Art) at the Palais des Beaux-Art. (36)
Cover of the catalogue of Malevich exhibition in Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, 1958.
Cover of the catalogue of the exhibition 50 ans d'art moderne at the Palais des Beaux-Art, Brussels, 1958.
The Soviet Union also participated in the show. Moscow officials, for the first time, agreed to send abroad some French modernist paintings from the Shchukin and Morozov collections on the condition that examples of Socialist Realism would also be included in the exhibition. Malevich's paintings came to be in the neighborhood of such “icons” of Socialist Realism as Lenin in Smolny (1930) by Isaak Brodskii and Letter from the Front (1947) by Aleksandr Laktionov. Surprisingly, the Soviets did not protest or comment on the presence of the Suprematist paintings by the disgraced formalist.
Reproductions of Socialist Realist paintings in the catalogue of the exhibition 50 ans d'art moderne at the Palais des Beaux-Art, Brussels, 1958.
The Brussels World Expo proved to be a triumph for the Soviet Union, whose exposition was awarded a Grand Prix. The focus of public attention, and the centerpiece of the Soviet pavilion, was an exact replica of Sputnik, successfully launched by the USSR on October 4, 1957.
Soviet pavilion at the World’s Fair, Brussels 1958.
As fate would have it, Malevich's pupil Rozhdestvenskii was the pavilion's chief designer. (37) The World Expo, which had introduced the international public to both Malevich and Sputnik, heralded a new epoch of Soviet openness and became the paramount manifestation of the period of political “thaw.” (38) The triumphal tour of Malevich's works did not stop in Belgium. The following year Suprematist paintings were included in an exhibition of highlights from the Stedelijk collection and traveled to the United States. In the autumn of 1959, a solo exhibition of the artist opened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. (40)
The title page of the catalogue of Malevich exhibition in the Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1959.
By the end of the 1950s, the prohibited “formalism” was attracting attention on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The British art historian Camilla Gray, who was interested in Russian art of the first half of the twentieth century, was already working on research for her book The Great Experiment. The first article on the subject published by her was an expose on Malevich that appeared in The Times of London in 1958. (41) In 1959 Gray prepared the Whitechapel show catalogue, and the following year she traveled to the Soviet Union to visit archives and interview surviving artists who would eventually feature in The Great Experiment.
Camilla Gray. Early 1960s.
Gray was lucky in gaining access to the repositories of the State Russian Museum and the State Tretyakov Gallery and even succeeded in obtaining images of hidden paintings. That same year, the existence of a secret hoard of modernist canvases was to provoke a large international scandal.
In the summer of 1959, the American National Exhibition was held in Sokolniki Park in Moscow. The exhibition, which became famous because of the so-called “kitchen debate” between Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon, included an art show. (42) Abstract Expressionist paintings, such as Cathedral (1947) by Jackson Pollock, provoked the indignation of the Soviet press and became a revelation for young artists trying to escape the suffocating embrace of Socialist Realism. (43)
So-called "kitchen debate" between Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon, American National Exhibition, Sokolniki Park, Moscow, Photograph by AP, 1959.
Visitors enjoying the art section of the American National Exhibition. (On the left Parson Weems’ Fable (1939) by Grant Wood, on the right Cathedral (1947) by Jackson Pollock, Sokolniki Park, Moscow. Photograph by F. Goess, 1959.
During the exhibition, Alfred H. Barr returned to Moscow for the first time since 1927 with the intention of negotiating possible loans for MoMA. (44) After his lecture on American abstract art, Barr engaged in a heated discussion with Aleksandr Zamoshkin, director of the Pushkin Museum and a seasoned cultural bureaucrat. Zamoshkin commented on the American exhibition, stressing that Soviet art had left abstraction behind a long time ago and cited Malevich's Black Square as an example. Barr rebuffed his Soviet colleague, stating that “each generation must paint its own Black Square.” (45)
Aleksandr Zamoshkin, 1950s.
At the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960, the American journalist Alexander Marshack visited Moscow and Leningrad to work on an article about the unofficial Soviet art which had started to blossom during the Khrushchev Thaw. Marshack was hoping to see the original Black Square and to find its descendants among the new generation of artistic rebels. He paid a visit to Costakis and with his help met some representatives of the art underground. (47)
During his trip to Leningrad, the journalist secured permission to see the repository of modernist paintings at the State Russian Museum. Marshack, who was not permitted to take photographs openly, allegedly used a Minox “spy camera” to document what he saw. In March 1960, Life magazine published Marshack's article titled The Art of Russia that Nobody Sees. (49)
The first double-page spread juxtaposed an image of the official Socialist Realist painting depicting Lenin giving a speech at the Congress of Soviets by Vladimir Serov, a member of the Art Academy and winner of two Stalin Prizes, with an expressionist self-portrait by Anatoly Zverev, an underground painter whom Costakis had nicknamed “the Russian Jackson Pollock.”
The double-page spread of Alexander Marshak Article The Art of Russia That Nobody Sees, Life, March 28, 1960.
To add insult to injury, Marshack included in the article a section called Modern masters banished to storerooms, featuring a photograph of the State Russian Museum repository, which the journalist named the “cold storage”. In the shabby room, overflowing with canvases, were works by Natalia Goncharova, Chagall, and Kandinsky. Marshack's photographs of paintings by Malevich, Kandinsky, and Pavel Filonov (who was practically unknown outside the USSR before the appearance of the article) illustrated the section.
The “cold storage” in the State Russian Museum photographed by Alexander Marshack.
In the Soviet Union, its publication provoked the perfect storm. The generals of Socialist Realism raved at the meetings of the Union of Artists and the Art Academy. Serov, insulted by the desecration of his masterpiece by its comparison with the “daubery” of the “unofficial” painter Zverev, was especially vocal in his denunciations. The scandal triggered the beginning of a new political campaign against “formalism,” crowned by Khrushchev's visit to a show by artists from the modernist New Reality group at the Moscow Manege exhibition hall in December 1962. (51) During his visit the Soviet leader, wound up by Serov and other conservative cultural officials, went ballistic, screaming obscenities at the artists. After the publication of Marshack's article, the repositories of Soviet museums were put under lock and key and became practically impenetrable for both foreign visitors and Soviet art historians. (53)
25. "U.S. Collections of Art by Europeans are Shown at Paris Festival," The New York Times, May 7, 1952.
26. Giles Scott-Smith, "The 'Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century' Festival and the Congress for Cultural Freedom: Origins and Consolidation 1947-1952," Intelligence and National Security 15, no. 1 (May 2000), 121-43.
27. Janet Flanner, "Letter from Paris," The New Yorker, February 2, 1952.
28. James Johnson Sweeney records, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Online:https://www.guggenheim.org/finding-aids/collection/AO 001.
29. "U.S. Collections of Art by Europeans are Shown at Paris Festival."
30. Ines Katenhusen, "A Crate in the Basement: On Works of Kazimir Malevich Loaned to the Hanover Museum," in Museum and Restitution: New Practices, New Approaches, eds. Kostas Arvanitis and Louise Tythacott (London, New York: Routledge, 2014), 158.
31. Précurseurs de l'art abstrait en Pologne. Kazimierz Malewicz, Katarzyna Kobro, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Henryk Berlewi, Henryk Stazewski, exh. cat., Galerie Denise René (Paris, 1957).
32. Malevich's name appears in the show's catalogue spelled in the Polish manner as "Kazimierz Malewicz."
33. Prybos also initiated the unfortunate competition between Poland, Russia, and Ukraine to claim Malevich as a part of their national legacy.
34. No catalogue of the first exhibition of Malevich's works at the Stedelijk was published. 35. Kasimir Malewitsch, exh. cat., Kunstverein Braunschweig (1957).
36. 50 Ans D'Art Moderne. Exposition universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles 1958, exh. cat., Palais International des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (Brussels: Expositions de Beaux-Arts, 1958).
37. Irina Kostareva, "Sovetskii dizain v Brussele: ot 'Ekspo 58' do vystavki 'Soviet design red Wealth.'" DesignMate.ru. Online: https:// design-mate.ru/read/megapolis/soviet-design-in-brussels.
38. Susan E. Reid, "Cold War Cultural Transactions: Designing the USSR for the West at Brussels Expo '58." Design and Culture: The Journal of the Design Studies Forum 9 (2017), 123-45.
39. The exhibition was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Milwaukee Art Center, Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
40. Kasimir Malevich, 1878-1935, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery (London, 1959).
41. Camilla Gray, "The Art of Malevich: A Rare Exhibition at Amsterdam," The Times of London, January 11, 1958. The article is a laudatory review of the Stedelijk exhibition of Malevich paintings. It was published anonymously and signed "from our correspondent."
42. John W. Larner, "Judging the Kitchen Debate," OAH Magazine of History 2, no. 1 (Summer 1986), 25-27.
43. Marilyn S. Kushner, "Exhibiting Art at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959," Journal of Cold War Studies 4, no. 1 (Winter 2020), 6-26.
44. Simo Mikkonen, "Soviet-American Art Exchanges during the Thaw: from Bold Openings to Hasty Retreats," in Art and Political Reality, ed. Merike Kurisoo (Tallinn: Art Museum of Estonia, 2013), 57-76.
45. David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 561.
46. Alexander Marshack, who started his career as a journalist and press photographer later became an important expert on the Ice Age and a renowned paleo-archeologist. See, Paul G. Bahn, "Alexander Marshack, 1918-2004," Antiquity 79, no. 304 (June 2005), 489-90.
47. Kostaki, Moi avangard, 102-3.
48. Mikhail Zolotonosov, "Kak amerikanets nashel Malevicha | Shagala v zakrytykh khranilishchakh Russkogo muzeia," 812'OLINE, December 11, 2015. Online: http://www.online812.ru/2015/12/11/007/.
49. Alexander Marshack, "The Art of Russia. . That Nobody Sees," Life, March 28, 1960, 60-71.
50. Zolotonosov, "Kak amerikanets nashel Malevicha | Shagala v zakrytykh khranilishchakh Russkogo muzeia."
51. Susan E. Reid, "In the Name of the People: The Manege Affair Revisited," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 4 (2005), 673-716.
52. Ibid.
53. "There were mild re-percussions: official criticism of those involved, the dismissal of some sixteen people directly responsible for Marshack's access to the museum funds, and the closing of these treasures to foreigners, especially Americans, to avoid repetitions of such incidents." Igor Mead and Paul Sjeklocha, "The Varvaristy' Soviet Unofficial Art," The Russian Review 25, no. 2 (April 1966), 125. Szymon Bojko, a well-known Polish art historian tried to visit the repository of the State Russian Museum in the beginning of the 1960s. Despite the fact that he was invited to the USSR by the Union of Soviet Artists and his status as a member of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PUWP), his request was firmly denied. David Crowley, “Staging of the End of History: Avant-Garde Visions at the Beginning and the End of Communism in East Europe," in Patryk Babiracki and Austin Jersild, eds., Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War: Exploring the Second World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 112.