This book examines the artistic life of Vitebsk during the years 1917-1922, when a great burst of creative experimentation transformed the modest Russian town into one of the most influential gateways to the art of the twentieth century. Spurred by native son Marc Chagall, who returned home after the October Revolution in 1917 to take the position of art commissioner, Vitebsk rose to a pinnacle of fame as an artistic laboratory for the avant-garde. It was here that such luminaries as El Lissitzky, Yuri Pen, Kazimir Malevich, Nikolai Suetin, Mikhail Bakhtin, and others worked, inspired one another, and made distinctive contributions to modernism. Art historian Aleksandra Shatskikh surveys the entire 'Vitebsk phenomenon', drawing on an array of archives in Russia and Amsterdam, many of which have never been open to Western scholars. She discusses Chagall's Academy of Art and its major teachers and students; the founding of the artists' group, UNOVIS; Malevich's architectural experiments; Bakhtin's circle; and important developments in theater and music in Vitebsk. With more than two hundred outstanding illustrations, the book brings Vitebsk to life at a fascinating and transformative moment in art history.

Vitebsk: The Life of Art

Arts & Photography

Shatskikh, Aleksandra

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

An in-depth exploration of Malevich’s pivotal painting, its context and its significance Kazimir Malevich’s painting Black Square is one of the twentieth century's emblematic paintings, the visual manifestation of a new period in world artistic culture at its inception. None of Malevich’s contemporary revolutionaries created a manifesto, an emblem, as capacious and in its own way unique as this work; it became both the quintessence of the Russian avant-gardist's own art—which he called Suprematism—and a milestone on the highway of world art. Writing about this single painting, Aleksandra Shatskikh sheds new light on Malevich, the Suprematist movement, and the Russian avant-garde.
Malevich devoted his entire life to explicating Black Square's meanings. This process engendered a great legacy: the original abstract movement in painting and its theoretical grounding; philosophical treatises; architectural models; new art pedagogy; innovative approaches to theater, music, and poetry; and the creation of a new visual environment through the introduction of decorative applied designs. All of this together spoke to the tremendous potential for innovative shape and thought formation concentrated in Black Square.
To this day, many circumstances and events of the origins of Suprematism have remained obscure and have sprouted arbitrary interpretations and fictions. Close study of archival materials and testimonies of contemporaries synchronous to the events described has allowed this author to establish the true genesis of Suprematism and its principal painting.

Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism

Book by Goodman, Susan Tumarkin, Petrova, Evgenija, Shatskikh, Aleksandra

Marc Chagall: Early Works from Russian Collections

Petrova, Evgenija

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Third Millenium Pub.

Unable to leave Russia and return to Paris at the outbreak of World War I, Marc Chagall returned to his roots in his hometown of Vitebsk. "Chagall: Love and the Stage" focuses on this turbulent yet fruitful period in Chagall's artistic development, which culminated in 1920 with a set of monumental murals painted for the State Yiddish Chamber Theater in Moscow. 80 illustrations, 60 in color.

Chagall: Love and the Stage 1914-1922

Royal Academy of Arts (Great Britain)

COMPTON, Susan P.

Individual Artists

Merrell Pub Ltd

In 1915, Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935) radically transformed the course of twentieth-century art with his "Black Square" painting and his manifesto "From Cubism to Suprematism." These works espoused a new art of pure geometricism, intended to be universally comprehensible regardless of cultural origin. Although he is famed for his rigorous pursuit of the "non-objective," Malevich in fact explored many strands of painting, embracing at various stages Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism and Cubism, as well as traditional Russian folk art. Drawing on the collections of Nikolai Khardzhiev and Georges Costakis--the two leading collectors of Russian avant-garde art, whose collections were largely assembled at a time when abstract art was banned in the Soviet Union--this catalogue traces the breadth of Malevich’s career through his oil paintings, gouaches, drawings, sculptures and designs for opera and film. All phases of his development are represented here, from his early Impressionist-style work to his iconic Suprematist pieces, as well as his lesser-known figurative paintings and works on paper. These are contextualized alongside work by Malevich’s contemporaries, such as Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Natalia Goncharova, Vera Pester, Ivan Puni and Mikhail Meno.

Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde: Featuring Selections from the Khardziev and Costakis Collections

Boersma, Linda

Rutten, Bart

Walther König, Köln/Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

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