Auteur/autrice : Jean-Claude

IBONNE FÊTE DE SAINT SPYRIDON DE TRIMYTHONTE!

BONNE FÊTE DE SAINT SPYRIDON DE TRIMYTHONTE!

ALEXANDRE STOLIAROV, ICONOSTASE DE LA SKITE SERBE SAINT-SPYRIDON À,GEILNAU AN DER LAHN

THÉOPHANE LE GREC, SAINT SPYRIDON (NOVGOROD, XIVè S.)

SAINTS BLAISE ET SPYRIDON

MOINE GRÉGOIRE (KRUG) ÉGLISE DE LA SAINTE TRINITÉ SUR LE MONT DES MOINEAUX À MOSCOU

ST SPYRIDON, ICÔNE D’ADEL GORGHY

Prière à Saint Spyridon, tapuscrit du moine Maxiane (le sculpteur Maxime Arkhanguelski)

ALEXANDRE STOLIAROV, ICONOSTASE DE LA SKITE SERBE SAINT-SPYRIDON À GEILNAU AN DER LAHN

25 décembre 2024
JOYEUX NOËLET BONNE ANNÉE MMXXV À TOUS MES AMIS!

BONA HESTA DE NADAU! BONA ANNADA MMXXV!

Joyeux Noël! Fröhliche gesegnete Weihnachten!

Merry Christmas!>

С Рождеством Христовым!>

З Різдвом Христовим!>

Καλά Χριστούγεννα!> >

BONNE ANNÉE MMXXV!

FROHES NEUES JAHR 2025!

ΕΥΤΥΧΙΣΜΕΝΟ ΤΟ ΝΕΟ ΕΤΟΣ!

С НОВЫМ 2025 ГОДОМ!

Afanassi Fet

Ночь тиха. По тверди зыбкой
Звезды южные дрожат.
Очи Матери с улыбкой
В ясли тихие глядят.
Ни ушей, ни взоров лишних, –
Вот пропели петухи – С Рождества
И за ангелами в вышних
Славят Бога пастухи.

Ясли тихо светят взору,
Озарен Марии лик.
Звездный хор к иному хору
Слухом трепетным приник, –

И над Ним горит высоко
Та звезда далеких стран:
С ней несут цари Востока
Злато, смирну и ладан.

PÉGUY

Chaque poutre du toit…

Chaque poutre du toit était comme un vousseau.
Et ce sang qui devait un jour sur le Calvaire
Tomber comme une ardente et tragique rosée
N’était dans cette heureuse et paisible misère
Qu’un filet transparent sous la lèvre rosée.

Sous le regard de l’âne et le regard du bœuf
Cet enfant reposait dans la pure lumière.

Et dans le jour doré de la vieille chaumière
S’éclairait son regard incroyablement neuf.
Et ces laborieux et ces deux gros fidèles
Possédaient cet enfant que nous n’avons pas eu.

Et ces industrieux et ces deux haridelles
Gardaient ce fils de Dieu que nous avons vendu.
Et les pauvres moutons eussent donné leur laine
Avant que nous n’eussions donné notre tunique.

Et ces deux gros pandours donnaient vraiment leur peine.
Et nous qu’avons-nous mis aux pieds du fils unique ?
Ainsi l’enfant dormait sous ce double museau,
Comme un prince du sang gardé par des nourrices.

Et ces amusements et ses jeunes caprices
Reposaient dans le creux de ce pauvre berceau.
L’âne ne savait pas par quel chemin de palmes
Un jour il porterait jusqu’en Jérusalem

Dans la foule à genoux et dans les matins calmes
L’enfant alors éclos aux murs de Bethléem…

Conversations avec Edmond Husserl (1931-1938)

EXTRAITS DES CONVERSATIONS AVEC EDMOND HUSSERL (1931-1936)

Adelgundis Jaegerschmid, O. S. B.

En septembre 1938, cinq mois après le décès de Husserl, sa veuve Malvine m’adressa le père franciscain belge H. L. van Breda (le fondateur des Archives Husserl à Louvain), qui était à la recherche d’informations sur la personne de Husserl pour sa thèse de doctorat. Au vu de ce qu’avait d’inquiétant le contexte politique mondial à l’époque, le père van Breda m’a incitée catégoriquement à taper ces souvenirs le soir même. Ces souvenirs sont un document historique, une ressource modeste, dépourvue de tout vernis littéraire – et ne souhaitent pas non plus être autre chose.

1931-1938

Visite en soirée, durant presque deux heures. J’essaie très rapidement de faire en sorte que ce soit Husserl qui mène la conversation. J’émets parfois des objections et le force ainsi à clarifier certains problèmes difficiles.

« La vie monastique, la vie religieuse chrétienne en général, se déroule toujours sur le fil du rasoir. Elle chute aisément, mais se relève toujours. Elle n’a qu’un but : voir le monde en Dieu, mais elle ne nie pas le monde. Le risque est alors, bien sûr, que l’âme s’enracine par trop dans le monde ou bien que la charité active ainsi que la piété deviennent de simples routines ».

=========

Il parle ensuite de la religion indienne. Il me recommande chaleureusement le livre de Romain Rolland sur Gandhi1, qu’il venait de lire.

« Par opposition au christianisme, la religion indienne a le Nirvana ; elle nie le monde. Toute activité suscite de la passivité et court ainsi le risque de la stagnation. Mais toute passivité – le repos en Dieu conçu comme aboutissement – requiert de nouveau l’activité : la charité active ».

– AJ : « C’est exactement ce que dit Thomas ».

– Husserl :

« Oui, tous les grands hommes de la Terre parlent ainsi. Toute résolution est déjà une activité de la volonté. Tout ce qui est acquis comme un résultat de l’activité produit de la passivité et, par conséquent, un risque. Ce qui signifie donc que tout ce qui a été acquis doit toujours être réactivé ».]

==========

Nous parlons de la vie religieuse et de la vocation [Berufung] à une vie au sein d’un ordre. AJ :

« Pour vivre la vie religieuse, il faut en avoir la vocation [berufen] ».

– Husserl :

« Mieux : il faut y avoir été appelé [gerufen]. Cela relève purement de la grâce. Je n’ai pas accès à cette sphère, bien que j’aie toujours été l’un des plus fervents chercheurs de Dieu depuis ma jeunesse. La science authentique est honnête et pure ; elle a l’avantage de la véritable humilité, et pourtant, elle a en même temps la capacité d’être critique et de faire des distinctions. De nos jours, le monde ne connaît plus la science véritable ; elle est tombée dans la spécialisation la plus étroite. C’était différent à notre époque. L’amphithéâtre était notre église et les professeurs étaient les prédicateurs ».

========

Je lui racontai comment, durant notre jeunesse, nous avions cherché à l’université la science authentique au-delà des examens et de la question des moyens de subsistance, et comme nous l’avions servie dans un pur enthousiasme. Bien sûr, seuls quelques-uns, en très petit nombre, adoptaient un point de vue qui visait par-delà les examens. J’ai alors conclu en disant :

« Il nous est arrivé, à nous aussi, de brûler pour la science. Mais comment pensez-vous que la science puisse sauver notre monde et l’élever davantage ? Car ce n’est toujours que pour quelques-uns qu’elle est disponible ».

Husserl :

« La science authentique rend désintéressé et bon. Aujourd’hui, même les savants intégralement matérialistes ou naturalistes (les savants dans les sciences naturelles) peuvent consacrer leur vie à leur science, même les mathématiciens chez qui on ne trouve pas une once de foi. Dans ces conditions, la science est bonne même si elle ne conduit pas à la religion. D’un autre côté, pourtant, il est impossible de prétendre qu’une science conduisant ultimement à la religion et à Dieu ne soit pas une science authentique. La pédagogie, sous toutes ses formes (pas seulement à l’école) doit porter plus loin les résultats de la science authentique et les mettre en pratique de sorte que le monde en soit renouvelé. C’est ce que vous devez faire, sœur Adelgundis ; la détresse de l’âme est grande. Ce qu’il y a de meilleur sera toujours l’amour – l’amour authentique et pratique de son prochain, qui est fondé dans l’amour de Dieu, lequel ne se trouve pas toujours au sein des confessions. Il arrive souvent que la religion soit discréditée parce que les personnes religieuses ne sont pas du tout intérieurement religieuses. Il s’agit si souvent d’une simple apparence, si souvent de convention et de superstition !

« La science authentique doit être science universelle, embrassant la totalité des évidences sur le fondement de l’autonomie, totalité au sein de laquelle la religion est elle aussi incorporée. Le christianisme a sa place dans cette sphère. En partant de cette science universelle telle que la phénoménologie l’a élaborée, on parvient finalement à un développement théologique qui conduit ultimement à Dieu, à l’absolu ».

===============

En réponse à ma question de savoir s’il croyait donc réellement en l’absolu (il l’avait dénié précédemment), il me dit :

« Ce sont là des relativités, et nous devons avoir le courage de voir ces relativités en face. Elles peuvent elles aussi être des évidences ; par exemple : pour des peuples primitifs, la logique contient des évidences complètement différentes des nôtres. En dernier ressort, nous pouvons restreindre notre perspective et comprendre cet état de fait ; nous pouvons nous y plonger en pensée. C’est bien aussi de cette façon que je vis dans ma conscience la douleur d’autrui sans en faire l’expérience dans mon propre corps. La phénoménologie comme science est là pour ceux qui n’ont pas d’accès à la foi comme celui que vous avez. Que peuvent faire tous ceux qui ne rencontrent la religion que tard dans la vie ? Ils ne parviennent plus à entrer dans une relation personnelle avec elle ».

1936

« Ces derniers jours, j’ai reçu d’Amérique un journal dans lequel un Jésuite – donc l’un des vôtres, sœur Adelgundis – m’a présenté comme un philosophe chrétien. Je suis consterné par cette initiative précipitée et excessivement zélée, dont je ne savais rien. Comment peut-on faire une chose pareille sans me poser la question ?! Je ne suis pas un philosophe chrétien. S’il vous plaît, veillez à ce qu’après ma mort on ne me fasse pas passer pour tel. Je vous ai déjà souvent dit que ma philosophie, la phénoménologie, est censée n’être rien d’autre qu’un chemin, une méthode, destinée à montrer justement à ceux qui se sont éloignés du christianisme et des églises chrétiennes le chemin qui reconduit à Dieu ».

21 décembre 2024
Russian Icons and the Russian Avant-garde, Two Major Facets of Universal Art

Russian Icons and the Russian Avant-garde, Two Major Facets of Universal Art

Jean-Claude Marcadé

« The invisible world of divine glory is not the only one to have found its expression in Russian icons. Two planes of being, two worlds dwell there in a dynamic, living way. On one side, the eternal peace of the hereafter, and on the other side, a world that seeks God but has not yet found Him, a chaotic, sinful, suffering existence that nevertheless aspires to the peace of God. As a parallel to these two worlds, the icon reflects and opposes two Russias. One is already anchored in eternal peace, and resounds ineffably to the cherubim’s hymn, « Let us now lay down all the cares of this world’. The other presses against the temple, aspires to it and expects intercession and help. It is around the temple that this Russia builds its secular and ephemeral edifice. »

Eugène Troubetzkoy, Trois études sur l’icône (1916)[1][i]

« The art of icon painting made me understand the emotional nature of peasant art. I had loved it before, but had not elucidated its scope. My eyes were opened by the study of icons […]. Icon painters, with great technical skill, transmitted an entire content in an anti-anatomical truth, without any aerial and linear perspective. They used colour and background within a purely emotional perception of the theme. »

Malévitch, Autobiographie (1933)[2]

Russian plastic arts were long the poor relation of art history, owing to a deeply ingrained notion that Russia undoubtedly produced an impressive body of literature, and original music and ballet, but that it was not a country of painters. Despite a huge exhibition of Russian art organised by Diaghilev at the Autumn Salon in Paris, in 1906, despite the Slavic element in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes which strongly influenced an entire period, despite Louis Réau’s book L’Art russe des origines à Pierre le Grand, published in 1921[3], this opinion was upheld by many people who saw no seat of learning other than European studios, believed that Western training was essential to become an artist, and occulted Russia’s history.[4] Until the day in the 1960s when art historians (Camilla Gray, Troels Andersen, Valentine Marcadé) revealed the extent of Russian pictorial art movement in the first quarter of the twentieth century, showing Russia to be an artistic centre that was just as original and universal as it was during the flowering of icon painting from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century.

Icons played a key role in the liturgical, theological and intellectual life of Russia, in the same way as music did.[5] It is well known that Eastern Orthodoxy, in Rus’ before the fourteenth century, then in Muscovy and the Russian Empire, gave a special place to the liturgy, developing and amplifying it until it not only provided religious and mystic nourishment, but became the impetus for philosophical thought, and the wellspring of spiritual and aesthetic beauty. The sumptuousness of the Russian Orthodox liturgy leaves few of our contemporaries unmoved. Remember that Kandinsky, that quintessential twentieth-century modernist, said that he had experienced the synthesis of the arts, the phenomenon that in the late nineteenth century was known as Gesamtkunstwerk or synaesthesia, in the izbas of the Volgda region and in the « churches of Moscow, particularly in the Assumption Cathedral and at St Basil the Blessed »:

« In these extraordinary izbas, I discovered for the first time the miracle which I later included in my work. That is where I learned to walk right into the picture myself, not just give it a sidelong glance, but live in it. I clearly remember that I stopped on the threshold before this startling sight. The table, the benches, the enormous great stove, the cupboards, the dressers, everything was painted with rich, colourful decorations. On the wall there were lubki [popular Russian woodcuts]: a symbolic representation of a gallant knight, a battle or a song rendered in colour.

The Beautiful Red Corner [where the icons are kept] was covered with painted and printed icons, and in front of them a night-light glowed red as if it knew something in its heart and had its own inner life, a proud and humble star, whispering mysteriously to itself. When at last I stepped into the room, the painting encircled me and I walked right into it. Ever since, that feeling has lived unconsciously within me, although I have had the same experience in Moscovite churches and particularly in the Assumption Cathedral and in St Basil the Blessed. »[6]

The last two Moscovite churches were not a random choice, for they are both still lined with frescoes or murals, and the wall of the iconostasis is covered with icons, and therefore with paintings. The liturgy and various services were celebrated in these prestigious parts of the Kremlin. Anyone who attends the liturgy of St John Chrysostom in the Russian orthodox rite is inevitably struck by its resemblance to total theatre. The procession of priests, acolytes and deacons moves in obedience to a changeless symbolism from either side of the iconostasis, around the altar, passing at times through one of the side doors of the iconostasis, going from the church to the sanctuary and vice versa, spilling out into the area set aside for the congregation. These movements are accompanied by the marvellous, familiar music that has been played for centuries. Then there is ample use of incense, especially in front of the icons or the faithful who are, in a way, archetypal icons since

« God made man in his image at the time of creation. »[7]

Lastly, the congregation moves, too, since there are no seats in the centre of a traditional orthodox church: the faithful move towards the various icons, put candles before them, kiss them, cross themselves but not in unison, bend over to touch the ground with their right hands to seek forgiveness and as a sign of submission to God’s will, and prostrate themselves in some parts of the liturgy. Although the gestures made by the celebrants follow a changeless pattern, the movements of the faithful are more random. Thus, group and individual movements are reconciled.

Christian Rus’ was plunged into Byzantine theological culture from the outset, and therefore was deeply involved in the intense iconographic culture which followed the « triumph of Orthodoxy », meaning the triumph of the veneration of icons over Iconoclasm, after the seventh ecumenical council, at Nicaea, in 787 (the Early Church’s last ecumenical council). The Rus’ first iconographic masters were Greek and their art had a profound influence on iconography in Rus’ from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Gradually, specifically Slavic features began to appear in the conventional Byzantine models. The Tatar invasion and the capture of Kiev in 1240 hastened the city’s decline as a great artistic centre.[8] Henceforth, the Vladimir and Rostov schools developed in the East, whereas Novgorod,

« after the sack of Kiev, became the representative of Byzantine art in Rus’; that is why the Novgorod school is venerated as the oldest Russian school. »[9]

The Moscovite state witnessed a flowering of icon painting in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The political climate was conducive to such a development, with the loosening of the Tatar yoke, the « reunification of the lands of Rus’ » and the extraordinary religious revival, under the influence of Hesychasm, led by Saint Sergius of Radonezh in the late fourteenth century.

Saint Sergius of Radonezh was of incalculable importance for Russia. He set in motion

« the moral, then political, renaissance of the Russian people. »[10]

From this time on, the close link between the fervent life of the monasteries and civil society became a key fact in understanding Russian life and its political, intellectual and artistic manifestations up until the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The spiritual thinking of Dostoyevsky, among others, stems from this. The great theologian, thinker, art theorist and scholar Father Pavel Florenskij said:

« The notion of morality, the idea of the State, painting, architecture, literature, Russian education and science, all these great lines of thought converge on our saint [Sergius of Radonezh]. In his person, the Russian people became aware of itself, of its place in history and culture and of its cultural task. It is only then that it earned the right to independence. »[11]

In the orthodox world, the fourteenth century was the time of the controversy between the Hesychasts, partisans of uninterrupted prayer (the Jesus prayer) which led to communion with the Holy Spirit and a vision of the uncreated light that once appeared on Mount Tabor, and the humanists, who upheld the rationalist principle.[12] The triumph of Heyschasm, from St Sergius of Radonezh onwards, had major repercussions for Russia, notably the fact that it did not experience a phenomenon similar to the Western Renaissance. The Heyschast thread is apparent throughout Russian icon painting, dominated by the quest for divine harmony, gentleness, tenderness, and the search for the essential stripped of all psychologism, anecdotal detail and the noise and bustle of time.

The Trinity is another image which dominates Russian iconographic spirituality after St Sergius. The laura founded by the

« first teacher of the Russian popular mind » (in the words of the historian Ključevskij)

was dedicated to the Trinity and remained the heart of Russia for centuries. Similarly, the most famous icon, one of the highest achievements of all Russian art, is the Trinity of the Old Testament by St Andrei Rublev. Tradition holds that it was painted to the glory of the saintly founder of the monastery in the first half of the fifteenth century, some time after his dormition (1392). It stayed near his tomb for over five hundred years until it was taken to the Tretyakov Gallery in 1929, where it is still admired, and even venerated, by visitors.

Mahmud Zibawi, one of the specialists in icons among the new generation, neatly defined the specific nature of Russian iconography:

« Now the ‘Third Rome’,[13] Russia carries art towards the quietness of the heyschia. The abstract wins over the concrete. All dramatisation is swallowed up. Men are ‘earthly angels’. Light, tranquillity, joy, peace and love abound. ‘The new, non composite world’ replaces the fallen world. The image reveals « God’s dwelling place among men. » (Apoc. 21:3).[14]

Unlike the Western religious painting, an icon is not an individual creation, even if each icon painter adds his personal touch, and makes his own choice in the treatment of the subjects and colours from among the canonical archetypal models. An icon can be created only with an ecclesiastical consensus, within the prophetic movement and spiritual experience of the church community.

The apparent uniformity of icons is constantly belied by various traits in the work of icon painters who closely follow the canons in the composition of the subjects, and the handling of colour. Then, as Bruno Duborgel explains:

« Depending on whether it is intended for a church or for private use, depending on the material and the style, depending on the religious practices associated with it, etc…, the ‘same’ image (thematically speaking) represents faces and lifestyles that are differentiated by myriad details. »[15]

Although, at first glance, icons may seem repetitive and monotonous, close scrutiny soon dissipates this impression. Admittedly, it is unthinkable to invent new iconographic archetypes, based on the individual imagination of a particular artist rather than on the assent of the entire church community. Yet, what diversity we see in isolated figurative elements, apart from the attributes that are obligatory for recognising the icon, and in the subtle colour variations permitted by the symbolism! Often the painter adds a scene from everyday life, inserting it in the mystical world of the main subject. Or else, there is a pronounced taste for ornamentation, floral in particular. Although it started to spread in the seventeenth century, in the work of painters such as Simon Uchakov, the trend towards elaborate decoration and miniaturisation flourished with the Stroganov school.

Russian scholars who have studied Russian icons have pointed out that it represents a cosmos in itself, an order that is inscribed within the cosmos of the temple, which is the earthly prefiguration of a transfigured cosmos. Here there is obviously no place for naturalistic, « living » gestures. The hieratic character and apparent immobility of the icon transports us into another dimension that has nothing to do with everyday life; it is a dimension midway between the human and the divine, between the hereunder and the transcendent. The best Russian icons have managed to bring out the divine nature of humanity, the fusion of the divine and the human, the crest between the invisible and the visible, the hidden and the apparent. The barrier that separates these two worlds inside the church is the iconostasis:

« The iconostasis is the border between the visible world and the invisible world […] The iconostasis is the manifestation of saints and angels: firstly the Mother of God and Christ Incarnate – witnesses proclaiming the reality of the world beyond flesh, » writes Father Pavel Florenskij.[16]

The specifically Russian use of the iconostasis developed and was consolidated between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The double Royal Doors in the centre give the celebrant access to the altar; they are covered with icons representing the Annunciation, at the top, and the four Evangelists, while the door posts are covered with a procession of the local saintly bishops and deacons.

The side doors of the iconostasis, one leading to the prothesis (the table on which the Eucharist is prepared) and the other where the liturgical vestments are kept, are traditionally decorated with icons of the archdeacons St Stephen and St Lawrence.

The Eucharist is represented above the Royal Doors (two full-length figures of Christ, giving the bread and wine to the apostles).

The rows of icons above the doors in a Russian iconostasis have been added over the centuries. From Byzantium, there remains the changeless first row with a Deisis in the centre, that is the Mother of God and St John the Precursor (the Baptist) imploring Christ, usually shown as Christ in Majesty; in the fourteenth century, icons of the archangels Michael and Gabriel and those of Peter and Paul were shown on either side of these three central figures.

The row above the Deisis was added in the fourteenth century: the Twelve Great Feasts representing scenes in the life of Christ and Mary.

At the end of the fifteenth century, another row was added above the feasts, the row of the Prophets, from Moses to Christ, arranged around the central icon of the Mother of God of the Sign [Znamenie] (Mary has her hands together in prayer and enfolds Christ Emmanuel in her breast).

Lastly, in the sixteenth century, a row of Patriarchs completed the screen. It presents Old Testament figures from Adam to Moses and usually has a representation of the Trinity in the centre, in the form of the three angelic Travellers who appeared to Abraham. That is the overall pattern, but variations have been introduced at different times and in response to local traditions.

Icon painting in general, and Russian icons in particular, follow the archetypal models set out in the painters’ manuals only in their essential conformity to ecclesiastical canons. A comparison of the works of three famous icon painters of the heyday of Russion icon painting – Theophanes the Greek (late fourteenth century), St Andrei Rublev (early fifteenth century) and Master Denis (Dionisij) (late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) show that their styles are as marked as styles in the history of Western painting. Egon Sendler analyses the differences between the various schools in the treatment of the background:

« Green predominates at Pskov; in Novgorod, we find red backgrounds (St Elijah and St George). In Moscow, from the sixteenth century on, backgrounds become quite dark, even brown. In the work of the Stroganov school, there are often dark olive green tones. These colours correspond to the style of icon painting. »[17]

The recognition of Russian icons, as distinct in spirit and style from all the Eastern and Byzantine branches, began in Russia itself in the second half of the nineteenth century and was fully accepted in the twentieth century. The writer Leskov did much to make icons known « as the beginning of Russian painting. »[18] His short story The Sealed Angel (1873) which Bernard Berenson ranked alongside Balzac’s Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu as one of the few literary masterpieces to have treated art in a pertinent way, contains technical details on the art of icon painting and an aesthetic appreciation of icons, based on an analysis of their characteristics. This fostered a return to the roots of this liturgical art, that had been disfigured since the end of the seventeenth century by the « European manner », that is by Western painting with its search for mimetic sensuality and its overriding concern for « scientific » perspective. Leskov set his story in the milieu of the Old Believers, because they had maintained the purity of the ancient tradition of icon painting until the seventeenth century, when Italian influences coincided with its slow decline into decadence.

The leader of the Old Believer schism (raskol), the archpriest Avvakum (1620-1682), who was opposed to the Moscovite patriarch Nikon and was burnt at the stake by the official church, raged:

« God has allowed sinful icon painting to proliferate in Russia […] Emmanuel the Saviour is portrayed with a puffy face, scarlet mouth, curly hair, thick muscles and arms, and the overall look of a German except that they have not stuck a sword in his belt […] Good painters in olden times painted the saints differently: they fined down the face and hands and everything that has to do with the senses, and showed them emaciated by fasting and labour and countless afflictions. Whereas now, you have changed the face of the saints, you paint them as you are yourselves.[19]

Avvakum could well have been thinking of his contemporary, Semen Ushakov, whose icons sometimes had a softer, more carnal and realistic look than earlier works. Ushakov’s icons are closer to Western easel paintings, even though he still used the conventional architectonic structure. He remains the great religious painter of the second half of the seventeenth century, without having all the virtues of a traditional icon painter.

The severity that the vehement archpriest Avvakum demanded of holy images is only one of the aspects of icon painting. A very rich spectrum of iconic expression developed in Russia, ranging from the outward austerity of the monks, whose bodies bore witness to the struggle against evil impulses, to the finesse of the angels’ bodies in Rublev’s work, and included the portrayal of a « national Russian character », simultaneously physical and spiritual, in many icons of Christ. Andrei Tarkovskij shows this clearly in this film Andrei Rublev, a grandiose fresco which traces the very incarnate and highly spiritual itinerary of the Russian character in the fifteenth century. Contamination by profane painting robbed icon painting of its true meaning, which is theological and philosophical as much as aesthetic.

In our century, the scholar Father Pavel Florenskij has strongly accentuated the opposition between icon painting, such as it is perpetrated in Orthodox countries, and the development of profane and religious painting in Catholic countries (dominated by oil painting) and Protestant countries (dominated by engraving). He sees in the techniques themselves an indication of their « ontological » divergence; on the one side, the panel of living wood, the surface of which was worked for days and months before outlines were drawn and colours applied, with egg yolk and water, then highlights of white lead, gold dust, etc.; and on the other side, oil paints, canvas or paper. Father Florenskij stated:

« Iconography is the metaphysics of concrete existence. Although oil painting is better suited for reproducing the sensory data of the world and engraving captures its rational schema, icons bring out the metaphysical essence of what they represent. Although the pictorial and graphic techniques developed in response to cultural needs and appear to be a résumé of the period, the technique used for icons is a response to the need to express the metaphysics of the world. What is portrayed on the icon is in no way fortuitous, either empirically or metaphysically. »[20]

In another short story by Leskov, At the Confines of the World (1875), one of the characters says that, contrary to Western religious art, there is an absence of sensuality in the Russian Orthodox representation of the face of Christ, which

« has an expression but no passion […].His features are scarcely suggested but the impression we have is complete. Admittedly, he looks rather like a peasant, but despite that, veneration is due to him. » The bishop, who is defending icons before a group of educated but more or less sceptical listeners, adds, « How did our old masters achieve such charm in this representation? The secret died with them and their despised art. It is clearly impossible to want a simpler form of art; the features are scarcely shown but the impression is complete. He looks a little rough, I know, and you would not invite him into a winter garden to listen to the canaries, but there is no great harm in that. »

Leskov and Dostoyevsky also refuted the new interpretations of Christ in the committed realistic painting of the « Ambulants ». The Ambulants’ religious painting (Repin, Nikolaj Gay, Victor Vasnecov…) has little to do with the tradition of Russion icon painting.

On the other hand, all the innovative Russian artists of the first quarter of the twentieth century (Natalia Goncharova, Larionov, Malevich, Tatlin, Filonov) were influenced by icons. Icons played a primordial role in the aesthetic revolution led by the « Russian avant-garde » in the 1910 and 1920s. It made these painters realise what a formal treasure it represented. Moreover, it drew easel painting towards the icon, that is, towards an independent space with its own construction and rhythm.

Natalya Goncharova caused a scandal at the « Donkey’s Tail » exhibition in Moscow in 1912 with a panel representing The Four Evangelists (Russian Museum, St Petersburg), resembling the icons in the apostolic row on the iconostasis. The censorship committee refused to accept that works on a sacred subject (there was also a work entitled God in the exhibition) could be shown in an exhibition with such a facetious and provocative name. But Natalya Goncharova’s works were not icons; they were paintings on a religious theme. The same applies to another painting by Goncharova, The Ancient of Days, or to her sets for the ballet Liturgy designed (but never made) for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1915. The artist also painted « real » icons, but it must be admitted that few painters in this field have achieved the spiritual perfection of ancient icon painting. In areas where there is no confusion between icon painting and easel painting, icons give decisive clues for understanding easel painting. Goncharova included figurative elements derived from the icon – almond-shaped eyes, a mystic squint, symbolic colours – in a series of paintings on work in the fields, and rustic activities. Larionov gave his Venus Katsape (Nijni-Novgorod Museum) the eyes of an icon. In the work of all the artists in all the currents of the Russian school in the twentieth century, the human face was influenced by iconic faces: portraits are frontal, eyes gaze on another reality, with mystical intensity (sdvig), traversing the visible world without focusing on it, and the overall impression is hieratic and meditative: for example, Self Portrait by Lentulov, Portrait of the Futurist Poet, Vasily Kamiensky by David Bourliuk (1917), Head of an Usbek Boy (1921) or Portrait of Anna Akhmatova (1922) by Petrov-Vodkine (all in the Russian Museum, St Petersburg). Jawlensky was deeply influenced by Russian Byzantine aesthetics in the representation of human faces. He gave them mystic nuances through the use of a sumptuous, refined palette, and achieved a balance between the strong emotional power of the colours and expressive ascesis, which bordered on abstraction in the last meditations of the 1930s.

Jawlensky and Malevich, each with his own pictorial schema and iconological view, took the human face as a metonymic paradigm of the Face of the World throughout their work.

The hieratic aspect of the work of Larionov, Natalya Goncharova, Tatlin and Malevic is derived from the icon as much as from lubok, archaic art, or from the Nabis. A single gesture sums up in the image the myriad gestures repeated over years, or even centuries, in our everyday life or work. Filonov, in his Promethean project of recreating the entire world on the surface of the painting, borrows formal and thematic procedures from icon painting. Thus in the Formula of the Proletariat from Petrograd (early 1920s) in the Russian Museum, he uses the combination of an unusual number of parts of the body (as in the icons of The Mother of God with Three Hands or The Holy Trinity in the shape of three eyes), hieratic poses, and the representation of two feet separately or faces only (as in icons with a metal overlay or riza).

Tatlin was trained in the technique of icon painting and integrated this skill into his paintings from 1911 to 1913: an impression of eternity in faces and poses, coloured light emanating from within the forms, as in The Sailor in the Russian Museum, and the flesh tones of the Nudes painted in 1913. The levkas, a mixture of chalk and animal glue which forms the first luminescent white background on the icon panel, was used in Tatlin’s relief constructions in 1914-15. In the Nudes (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, and the Russian Museum, St Petersburg), the contours, especially the curves, are treated with the straight line found in Picasso and Braque’s early cubist work, with the same aim of constructing the picture in an architectural way. In Tatlin’s work, an extra impetus comes from Michelangelo’s imposing Sibyls in the Sistine Chapel, with a leaning towards sculptural forms in the Nude in the Russian Museum. In these paintings, he seems to be already preparing for the synthesis of painting, sculpture and architecture that he achieved the following year, in 1914, by creating the genre of Painted Reliefs, Relief Constructions and Corner Reliefs.

We should not lose sight of the fact that Tatlin started his career as an icon painter. Admittedly, the female nude is hardly a subject for ecclesiastical icons, one of the main principles of which is the elimination of all sensualism, and even sensuality. The nudes of the icons representing St Mary the Egyptian or mad devotees (jurodivye) (such as St Basil the Blessed) are completely asexual (we find the same asexual nudes in Filonov’s work). The sex of Tatlin’s Nudein the Russian Museum is show in a blatantly realistic manner (Gabo’s sculpture Torso later used the same procedure). Yet, these works could not be called erotic, in the way that some European works are, such as the female nudes of Cranach the Elder, Goya or even Manet in which the flesh trembles with the loving touch of the artist’s brush.

Perhaps Father Pavel Florenskij was right to say that oil painting, by its consistency, solidity and carnal nature, its oily, gleaming strokes, is linked to the Catholic culture focused on « phenomenological sensibility »[21] that emerged from the Renaissance.

« Although oil painting is better suited to reproducing the sensorial data of the world, and engraving, its rational schema, icons, by contrast, bring out the metaphysical essence of what they represent. »[22]

Nikolaï Punin, in another context, remarked that icon painting

« used colour as a pictorial material, as the result of colouring pigments […] Icon painters never understood colour as relationships in the chromatic range, as values. Hence the magnificent traditions of a powerful, healthy art, traditions which have been preserved until quite recently in icon painting schools and decorative workshops. »[23]

The background of Tatlin’s two Nudes is utterly « iconic ». The coloured background on which the outline of the subject is drawn is called the sankir[24] in the technical language of Russian icon painting. Its composition varied according to the period and the school.

« Modern sankir, » writes Pavel Florenskij, « is made from burnt Sienna, light ochre, a small amount of Dutch soot, etc. »[25]

This layer, which is applied once the wood has been prepared with glue and chalk (levkas), brings out all the beauty of the model through the contour line (opis’) which is coloured to remove all trace of drawing. The artist thus obtains a fusion of the model and the « ontological background » which led Punin to say, with slight exaggeration, that

« the influence of the Russian icon on Tatlin is undoubtedly greater than the influence of Cézanne or Picasso. »[26]

In Tatlin’s Nudes, the flesh is carried into a dimension that is other than that of the senses, a purely pictural dimension. The dominant reddish ochre colour is a quintessence of all flesh colour, not an imitation of any one in particular. To quote Punin again:

« For Tatlin, colouring means above all studying the pigment; colouring particularly means working the surface picturally. The colour is given objectively, it is a reality and it is an element; the relationship between the colours does not depend on the spatial relationships that exist in reality. Red is red, whatever the amount of light between it and the eye; the ochre on the plank of a palisade and the ochre on the tip of the brush do not differ qualitatively, any difference between them lies only in their chemical composition and the way they are laid down. »[27]

Likewise, there is no face in Tatlin’s two Nudes. There is, therefore, no personalisation, no reference to an ephemeral living state. Although we cannot help thinking of the « non-erotic » nudes painted by Picasso and Braque after the Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907-1909), we can also see the conceptual influence of Neo-Primitivism in which nudes (those of Larionov, for instance), even if sexual, have a function other than erotic and are, in any case, beyond eroticism.

The distinctive feature of Tatlin’s iconographic system, which runs throughout his work, is what David Bourliouk, in 1912, called « Roundism. »[28] Roundism opposes rounded surfaces to units formed by straight lines. It is a trait found in Leger, and even in Malevich in 1911-1912. But in Tatlin’s work it is dominant and conditions all the artist’s output up to and including the Monument to the Third International in 1920 and his Letalin in the early 1930s.

This procedure, which consists in putting a full length figure across the entire canvas, dominating, by its stature, all the other figurative elements which are represented in a smaller size, obviously comes from the structure of the « biographical » icons which show a saint surrounded by compartments (klejma) that recount episodes in this life (see, for example, in diametrically opposed styles: Boris Koustodiev’s famous Portrait of Chaliapine and many of Malevich’s post-Suprematist paintings).

The « inverted perspective » taught by icon painting was of capital importance for innovative Russian artists in the twentieth century in their refusal to be bounded only by the « scientific perspective » inherited from the Renaissance.

At the end of the 1920s, Malevich drew on the archetypes of « Christ Acheiropoietus » (Christ the Saviour) and « Christ Pantocrator » (Christ in Majesty) to create his own icon-paintings. He did not imitate any particular icon. He constructed an image from the elements of icon painting, elements that he thought out afresh and made his own for the needs of his painting. Several of Malevich’s post-Suprematist faces suggest icons, and yet they have no precise model in icon painting as a whole.

The link between icons and the Russian avant-garde was revealed in a stunning, even « exoteric » way during the « Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0 to 10 » in Petrograd, at the very end of 1915. Malevich installed his « Suprematism of Painting » like the « beautiful red corner » of Russian orthodox houses, with The Quadrangle (later commonly known as « Black Square on a White Field ») as the central icon, which he called « the icon of our time ». This did not mean that it was an orthodox icon that is an object of liturgical worship, as understood by the seventh ecumenical council at Nicaea (Nicaea II), a tradition kept intact in the Eastern Church, because an ecclesiastical icon has no meaning without the fusion of the human and the divine in the incarnation of Christ. From this orthodox point of view, Malevich’s icon, which shows only the deus absconditus, is incomplete and smacks of monophysitism[29]

For Malevich, the Suprematist icon had to create a new pictural relationship, going beyond the orthodox icon and easel painting, by developing a new site. It was the expression of an essential image, rid of all figurative clutter, which could be opposed to the imago, the effigy. Its uniqueness was thus restored. Malevich was not only influenced by the formal aspect of icons; he had a brilliant intuition of the philosophical and theological principle of the icon, namely that the real presence is not in the symbolic image represented, but in the relationship between this image and the absent model:

« The invisibility of the image is the source of the visibility of the icon. »[30]

The Quadrangle oscillates between iconoclasm and iconicity, between the effacement of carnal reality and the manifestation of the only authentic world, the non-objective world (bespredmetnost’). We see a « Hesychast » leaning here, for example, in the Suprematism of Malevich whose great work is called The Non-objective World or Eternal Repose [Mir kak bespredmetnost’ ili večnyj pokoj], which brings to his canvases the silence, minimalist ascesis and harmony of the absence of object.

Through the holy image, the icon painter accomplishes an act which enters into the liturgical life of the Church. The easel painter makes visible the invisible being of the world. A similar aim but a different approach.

Note the extent to which Russian avant-garde art, reputed to be materialistic, was obsessed by the Judeo-Christian tradition. Two events are worth mentioning: in 1912, a discussion in St Petersburg and the publication in German of Kandinsky’s book Concerning the Spiritual in Art,[31]; and in 1922 – the publication in Vitebsk of Malevich’s treatise God is not Dethroned. Art. The Church. The Factory. [Bog ne skinut. Iskusstvo. Cerkov’. Fabrika].

Kandinsky-Malevich: two figureheads of universal art, two pillars of the avant-garde, two founders of Abstraction, who inaugurated and concluded, to put it succinctly, the adventure of the most radical modernity, a modernity which, let us not forget, put a definitive end to over four centuries of ever-recurring codes. Kandinsky and Malevich, who inaugurated and concluded this period by a demonstration of the « spiritual in art, and in painting in particular » and by the statement that « God is not dethroned. »

Although Kandinsky was the first to formulate, in German and Russian, the principle of the independence of artistic creation and the shaping of artistic material, like all Russian artists in the avant-garde, he categorically refused the temptation of art for art’s sake. Art for its own sake appears only in periods when the « soul has been abandoned and stifled by materialistic ideas and unbelief. »[32] In a note added during the revolution to his autobiography Stages [Stupeni], Kandinsky similarly said that such an attitude, that is attached only to the exterior of things, is « atheistic » (bezbožnoe).[33]

In 1910, in his article « Form and Content » published in the catalogue of the « Second Salon » of Izdebski in Odessa, Kandinsky proclaimed the advent of the « Era of High Spirituality » (Epoxa Velikoj Duxovnosti) founded on the « Principle of Inner Necessity » (Princip Vnutrennej Neobxodimosti).[34] Art « serves the spiritual »,[35] that is, « serves the divine ».[36] The creative act is a « total mystery »;[37] the artist is not a frivolous creator, « his work is difficult and often becomes a cross to bear. »[38]

In the 1918 edition of his memoirs, published in German in 1913, by Rückblicke, he adds anti formalist and anti materialist remarks such as:

« Now I know that ‘perfection’ is only apparent and ephemeral, and that there cannot be perfect form without perfect content: the mind determines matter, not the contrary […] The great Broom of History which will sweep the inner mind clean of the rubbish of outward appearance will appear, here too, as the impartial final judge. »[39]

It is precisely the relationship between an inner and an outer sphere which was part of the core of Marxist-Leninism, vulgarised through all the media that were possible at the time. Alongside repetitive slogans such as « Workers of the world unite! » and, less often, « Religion is the opium of the people », we find the famous Marxist truism: « Das gesellschaftliche Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein » [The social being determines the conscious being] which sounded like a proverb in the Russian translation: « Bytie opredeljaet soznanie » [Being determines consciousness]. What Kandinsky says is exactly the opposite: he makes an absolute claim for the primacy of the mind.

In 1922, in his treatise God is not Dethroned, Malevich took a similar stance in relation to the Marxist axiom; certainly the concept of being, (bytie) is more complex in the thinking of the founder of Suprematism, since what is, is nothing, that is, from another point of view, the lack of object, bespredmetnost’. But he concludes that « this ‘nothing’, as being, does not determine my consciousness. »[40] So Malevich, too, took the opposite stance from the Marxist formula. He repeated this position in his article « The Tumbler », in 1923[41] The tumbler, (in Russian: van’ka-vstan’ka) is a pot-bellied figurine from the far east, sitting cross-legged on a weighted half-sphere which brings it back to an upright position whenever it is pushed. The tumbler is God – constantly rejected, regularly dethroned, and yet always rocking back to an upright position, and never dethroned. The article « The Tumbler » is a highly ironic response to the attacks of the orthodox Marxist Issakov who had rather heavy-handedly denounced any religious deviation in avant-garde art, and had included in that category « the cock-and-bull story of God is not Dethroned« .

This diatribe was later followed by a commentary by the Marxist theorist of Constructivist-Productivist art, Boris Arvatov, who, among other compliments, called Malevich a « degenerate »!

In any case, Malevich retorted in his article « The Tumbler » by presenting the problem of the image in a very acute way. At its negative pole, the image feeds on false representations, those of God or anthropomorphic gods:

« All you Socialist revolutionaries are, without exception, in love with antique styles, just as women are in love with the hams of young Apollos. Look at the monuments to the proletariat: no sign of any proletarian, just Apollo wearing Minerva’s helmet. »

Taking up the Marxist formula that Issakov had thrown at him, Malevich remarked ironically:

« Does consciousness determine existence or existence, consciousness? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Does existence exist outside consciousness or consciousness outside existence? what you think, Comrade Issakov? »

So, at this stage, Malevich claimed, despite what Issakov and those who fought against « God in art » might think, that « God » is not dethroned, because he takes the shape of the idols and is everywhere to be seen in the form of the revolutionary substitutes on which art feeds – so many fake icons.

But nor is God dethroned in his apophatic site which is that of « eternal repose. »[42] It is from this impregnable site that every real image springs, that is to say, the true icon.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The discussion that has arisen in post-Soviet Russia focuses on the way to present and look at icons today. Starting from the obvious fact that an icon is not a work of art like any other, that it takes on its full meaning only in the ecclesiastical symphony-cum-polyphony, a number of Orthodox believers would like to see the most venerated images restored to the churches from which they were forcibly removed. Today, the remarkable Vladimir Mother of God icon [Vladimirskaja Boâ’ja Mater’] is located in the church alongside the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and people go into the museum to pray before the Trinity of the Old Testament by Andrei Rublev. The Monk Gregory, an icon painter who died in France in 1969, stated that the presence of icons in the profane world has a sense:

« In that way, the icons that are prayed to (molennye), whose purpose is to serve prayer, accomplish their saving action in the world, and can leave the church and dwell in a museum or in an art collection or join in exhibitions. Such conditions, apparently incongruous, are not fortuitous or absurd. »[43]

In fact, throughout the twentieth century, Russian icons have been a catalyst for the utopian and prophetic movement towards the metamorphosis and transfiguration of painting, and of life itself, into what Bruno Duborgel calls

« the iconophile obsession with approaching an experience of the non-figurable, »[44]

in reaction to « iconoclasm by an excess of naturalistic images. » In a handsome recent work, Bruno Duborgel sets up a dialogue between icons and Malevich’s art, and more broadly with easel painting in general, seeking to show a

« homology which at once preserves the distance between them, guarantees their differences and reveals that they nevertheless regard one another, and even interact at this elevated level, »[45]

proving their full contemporaneity.

==========

[1] Eugène Troubetzkoy, Trois études sur l’icône, Paris, Ymca-Press, 1986, p. 57-58

[2] K. Malévitch, « Autobiographie », in: Actes du Colloque International tenu au Centre Georges Pompidou, Lausanne, L’Âge d’Homme, 1979, p. 164

[3] Louis Réau wrote: « Russian art is interesting much less for what it borrowed than for what it adapted or created. It must not be viewed from the outside, but studied in itself as an independent organism, subjected to the laws of evolution, constantly modified by the action of its social and historical milieu and finally modelling itself on that milieu. » L’Art russe des origines à Pierre le Grand, Paris, Henri Laurens, 1921, p. 5

[4] The Russian artists who worked in Paris have helped maintain this idea of a lack of original painting in their native country. In the second half of the twentieth century, it was said that Russian icons were just a branch of the Byzantine tree, with only slight differences. I remember a paper given by the famous Soviet art historian Mikhaïl Alpatov, during a seminar run by Pierre Francastel at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, in which, referring to the problem of Byzantine art and Russian art in icon painting, he stated that anyone who did not see in them two modes of expression that were identical yet dissimilar made him think of someone who did not distinguish Bach from Mozart…

As late as 1956, André Salmon wrote: « It must be said that Russia has never had other plastic artists other than the craftsmen who painted icons, assiduously following the Byzantine tradition, and the marvellous painters of store signs, the baker with his golden loaves, the caterer with his dishes of cacha, his bottle of vodka and his napkin folded into an archimandrite’s hat, in a place where there was no napkin at all; and the printers of popular images inspired by national folklore, instinctive little masterpieces. And the only one who ever managed to use them for major art, all at once or turn about, was the innocent and crafty Chagal [sic], who was a Jew.

At twenty, in St Petersburg, when an early exile left me in ignorance of almost all French painting since Courbet, I did not need to be an expert to be astonished by the Russians’ total lack of pictural brilliance » André Salmon, Souvenirs sans fin. Deuxième époque (1908-1920), Paris, Gallimard, 1956, p. 228

[5] See Maxime Kovalevsky, « Chant liturgique – icône sonore », in: F. Boespflug, N. Lossky, Nicée II 787-1987. Douze siècles d’images religieuses, Paris, Cerf, 1987, p. 393-396

[6] V.V. Kandinsky, Stupeni [Stages], Moscow, 1918, p.27 (republished by Boris Sokolov, in: V.V. Kandinsky, Izdannye trudy po teorii iskusstva [Selected Writings on the Theory of Art], Moscow, « Gileja », 2001, p. 279

[7] Moine Grégoire (G.I. Krug), Carnets d’un peintre d’icônes, Lausanne, L’Âge d’Homme, 1994, p. 37

[8] Cf. Valentine Marcadé, Art d’Ukraine, Lausanne, L’Âge d’Homme, 1990, p. 25-36

[9] Fedor Buslaev, O russkoj ikone [On Russian Icons] [1866], Moscow, 1997, p. 5

[10] V.O. Kljuĉevskij, « Blagodetel’nyj vospitatel’ russkogo narodnogo duxa » [The gracious teacher of the Russian popular mind] [1892], in: Prepodobnyj Sergij Radonežskij , Berlin, 1922, p. 40

[11] Father Paul Florensky, La perspective inversée, suivi de l’Iconostase, Lausanne, L’Âge d’Homme, 1992, p. 33

[12] In Greek, hesychia means « repose ». About 1340, there was a clash between St Gregory Palamas, who developed a theory of divine light, which cannot be perceived in its essence, but only through the uncreated energy which is an emanation of it (the divine light on Mount Tabor), and Barlaam the Calabrian, who particularly condemned the practice of mystical prayer, (the Jesus prayer) among the monks of Mount Athos and fought for a more rational concept of the faith. See Jean Meyendorff, Saint Grégoire Palamas et la mystique orthodoxe, Paris, 1976

[13] Under the grand prince of Moscow Vasily III, about 1515, Philotheus, a monk from Pskov, developed the thesis of « Moscow – Third Rome« , since the « Second Rome« , that is, Constantinople, no longer existed as such after its capture by the Turks in 1453.

[14] Mahmud Zibawi, L’icône. Sens et histoire, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1993, p. 15

[15] Bruno Duborgel, L’icône, art et pensée de l’invisible, Saint-Étienne, 1991, p. 37

[16] Father Paul Florensky, op.cit., p. 140

[17] Egon Sendler S.J., L’icône, image de l’invisible, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1981, p. 204

[18] N. Leskov « Blagorazumnyj razbojnik (ikonografičeskaja fantazija) » [The Good Thief – An Iconographic Fantasy], Xudožestvennyj Žurnal, March 1883

[19] Cited by Eugène Troubetzkoy, op.cit., p. 24-25. For more about Avvakum and his period, see Pierre Pascal’s classic work, Avvakoum et les débuts du raskol, Paris-La Haye, Mouton et C°, 1963

[20] Father Paul Florensky, op.cit., p. 175

[21] Father Paul Florensky, op.cit., p. 167 ff.

[22] Ibidem, p. 175

[23] N. Punin, Tatlin (Protiv kubizma) [Tatlin-Against Cubism], St Petersburg, 1921

[24] See Father Paul Florensky, op.cit., p. 193sq.

[25] Ibidem, p. 194

[26] N. Punin, « Obzor tečenij v iskusstve Peterburga » [Panorama of Artistic Trends in St Petersburg], Russkoe iskusstvo, 1923, N°1; see, too: N. Khardjiev, « Appunti », Paragone(Arte), May 1965, vol. 16, N° 183

[27] N. Punin, op.cit., ibidem

[28] D. Burljuk, « Kubizm » [Cubisme], in Poščečina obščestvennomu vkusu [A Smack in the Face for Public Taste], Moscow, 1913

[29] On ecclesiastical icons, see: Leonid Ouspensky, Vladimir Lossky, Der Sinn der Ikonen, Berne, 1952 [published in English as The Meaning of Icons, Olton 1952, then in Boston,1969, and lastly in a version revised by Léonide Ouspensky, in New York, 1982, 1983 and 1989]; L. Ouspensky, La Théologie de l’icône dans l’Église Orthodoxe, Paris, 1982 [Russian edition, Moscow,1989]; F.Boespflug, N. Lossky, Nicée II (787-1987). Douze siècles d’images religieuses, Paris, 1987; Nicéphore, Discours contre les iconoclastes, Paris, 1989 (translation and presentation by Marie-José Mondzain-Baudinet); Ephrem Yon, Philippe Sers, Les Saintes Icônes. Une nouvelle interprétation, Paris, 1990; Mahmoud Zibawi, L’icône. Sens et histoire, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1993; Mahmoud Zibawi, Orients chrétiens, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1995; Maria Antonietta Crippa, Mahmoud Zibawi, L’art paléochrétien, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1998

[30] Marie José Mondzain-Baudinet, Preface to Nicéphore, Discours contre les iconoclastes, op.cit., p. 25; See too: Marie José Mondzain, L’image naturelle, Paris, Le Nouveau Commerce, 1995, and Image, icône, économie. Les sources byzantines de l’imaginaire contemporain, Paris, Seuil, 1996

[31] The basic version of Kandinsky’s founding text was written in German in 1909 under the title of Über das Geistige in der Kunst;Kandinsky wrote a Russian version in 1910 O duxovnom v iskusstve (not published until 1914 in Petrograd); the following versions, in German (1912) and Russia (1913, unpublished), contain additions.

[32] V.V. Kandinskij, « O duxovnom v iskusstve (Živopis’) », in: Trudy vserossijskogo s“ezda xudožnnikov v Petrograde, Petrograd, 1914, p. 71; this text has just been republished for the first time, by N. Podzemskaya, in: V.V. Kandinskij, Izbrannye trudy po teorii iskusstva, t.I, Moscow, « Gileja », 2001

[33] V.V. Kandinskij, Stupeni, Moscow, 1918, p. 36; this text has just been republished in Moscow, by B. Sokolov, in volume I of the publication mentioned in the note above.

[34] V.V. Kandinskij, « Soderžanie i forma », in: 1910-1911. Salon 2. Meždunarodnaja xudožestvennaja vystavka, Odessa, 1910, p. 16; this text has also been republished in Moscow in volume I mentioned above.

[35] V.V. Kandinskij, « O duxovnom v iskusstve », op.cit., p. 48

[36] Ibidem, p. 49

[37] Ibidem, p. 70

[38] Ibidem, p. 48, 72

[39] V.V. Kandinskij, Stupeni, op.cit., p. 36

[40] See the pertinent comment on this sentence by Emmanuel Martineau, in the preface to K. Malévitch, Écrits II. Le Miroir suprématiste, Lausanne, L’Âge d’Homme, 1993, p. 13-15

[41] K. Malévitch, « Van’ka-Vstan ‘ka », Žizn’ iskusstva, 1923, N° 14

[42] See: Jiri Padrta, « Le monde en tant que sans-objet ou le repos éternel. Essai sur la précarité d’un projet humaniste », in: Malévitch. Cahier I, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 1983, p. 133 ff., and Emmanuel Martineau, op.cit., p. 10-11

[43] Moine Grégoire (G.I. Krug), Carnets d’un peintre d’icônes, Lausanne, L’Âge d’Homme, 1994, p. 44; in Russian: Inok Grigorij Krug, Mysli ob ikone, Paris, Ymca-Press, 1978, p. 22

[44] Bruno Duborgel, Malévitch. La question de l’icône, Université de Saint-Étienne, 1997, p. 35

[45] Ibidem, p. 9

43 Moine Grégoire (G.I. Krug), Carnets d’un peintre d’icônes, Lausanne , L’Âge d’Homme, 1994, p. 44 ; en russe : Inok Grigorij Krug, Mysli ob ikone, Paris, Ymca-Press, 1978, p. 22

44 Bruno Duborgel, Malévitch. La question de l’icône, Université de Saint-Étienne, 1997, p. 35

17 décembre 2024
UNOVIS in the History of the Russian Avant-Garde

UNOVIS in the History of the Russian Avant-Garde

Jean-Claude Marcadé

A New Approach to Art

Like the Bauhaus, formed a few months earlier in 1919, and the INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture), formed in Moscow in May 1920, Kazimir Malevich’s UNOVIS (late 1919–22) overthrew the age-old methods of artistic education in favor of what would henceforth be based on the study of five pictorial cultures, which, according to Malevich, formed the basis for the new art: Impressionism (Monet), Post-Impressionism (Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Pointillism), Cubism, Futurism, and Suprematism.

            Art was to be studied on an objective basis: with the phenomenon of art considered as a whole, as an ensemble—as a body—without distinguishing major arts from minor arts, artist from artisan, technique from creation, etc. Art was to be inserted into a multi- and interdisciplinary complex. Pictorial culture was to be understood as a particular case of artistic culture in this definition. At the very moment that the first “museums of modern art” in the world—the Museums of Pictorial Culture—were being established in Russia, Malevich showed himself to be the most radical of all regarding the relations between innovation and nostalgia for the past.

            One of the virtues of this “leftist art” in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine has been to disentangle the study of art from the magma of impressions, emotions, aesthetic subjectivism, psychologism, and the anecdotal.

“The influence of economic, political, religious, and utilitarian phenomena on art is the disease of art,” Malevich declared.^[1]

Modern art begins with Cézanne: this was the cornerstone of Malevich’s teaching that he dispensed at the UNOVIS collective in Vitebsk, then at the INKhUK of Petrograd / Leningrad (1922–26), and at the Art Institute of Kiev (1928–30),^[2] which consisted of studying the five main “pictorial cultures” of the “new art” and underscoring their essential elements. Impressionism, Cézannism (a general term covering Post-Impressionism), Futurism, Cubism, and Suprematism were analyzed according to the

“sensation of contrasting interactions, tonalities, colorful elements in each painting,”^[3]

but also according to

“the dynamic, the static, the mystical, and other sensations.”^[4]

The word sensation (oshchushchenie; Empfindung; aesthesis) occurs repeatedly in Malevich’s writing:

“the union of Universe and man is not in form but in the process of sensation.”^[5]

            The fact that his reflections start from the analysis of Cézanne’s paintings in the first place attests to the convergence between his thinking and the thoughts of the master of Aix, who considered that painting defined itself as the

“means of expression of sensation.”^[6]

Along the same lines, Cézanne wrote to Émile Bernard that he wanted to bring together nature and art, adding:

“Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting.”^[7]

            In affirming that color is “the place where our brain and the universe meet,”^[8] Cézanne can be seen as a precursor of Malevich. Indeed, in his pedagogy of the 1920s, the founder of Suprematism would analyze a work in terms of both form and color, without neglecting an analysis of sensation. A photomontage created under his leadership contained six columns in alignment and labeled Naturalism, Impressionism, Cézannism, Cubism, Futurism, and Suprematism—in other words, according to Malevich, the basic stages of the art of the left since its break with naturalism. Each column contained reproductions of paintings in contrast to photographs of real environments. Malevich titled this graphic presentation

Photomontage Showing the Pictorial Sensations and Environment of Naturalism, Impressionism, Cézannism, Cubism, Futurism, and Suprematism.^[9]

            The paintings in the Naturalism column are barely distinguishable from the photographs they are identified with, which are of landscapes, rivers, skiffs, peasant houses, scenes from daily life. In the Impressionism column, Auguste Renoir’s La Grenouillère (formerly part of the Morozov collection, now in The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow) is shown with a photograph of an open-air dance hall. The Cézannism column shows an image of Gardanne (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) and Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Les Lauves (formerly in the Shchukin collection, now in The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow), on one side, with photographs of villages in Provence on the other. Cubism displays works by Picasso and Braque with a montage of collages made from geometrical fragments, newspapers, views of industrial exhibitions, a violin, and pieces of material—all of them placed so as not to conform to the representational logic of the visible. Futurism shows a painting by Gino Severini titled The Pan Pan Dance at the Monico (Centre Pompidou, Paris) and a drawing by Umberto Boccioni after The States of Mind: The Farewells (first version: Museo del Novecento, Milan; second version: The Museum of Modern Art, New York), with photographs of crowds in a limited space, along with machines, obstacle courses, trains, and factories. As to the column devoted to Suprematism, it contains two lithographs by Malevich placed opposite aerial views of fields and clusters of buildings.

            In the example of Suprematism, one can see clearly that the environment that parallels the works of art does not condition them, contrary to the way this question is addressed in Hippolyte Taine, for example, or in Karl Marx. Malevich’s considerations are antipositivist and anti-Marxian. Suprematism does not “paint space.” It is space itself, a “liberated nothingness” that paints itself on the surface of the painting, and this is made possible precisely through sensation. One can say that a Suprematist painting is equal to the universe, that it is nature, and that the cosmic excitation that passes through it also passes

“inside man, without goal, without meaning, without logic.”^[10]

Pure Form, Freed of Content and Function

Malevich always insisted that art was independent of any utilitarianism. Starting with his writings from 1915–16, he contrasted utilitarian reason and intuitive reason, with the first in the service of the latter. In 1919, he engaged in polemics with his former followers, who were preparing to found Constructivism (especially with Aleksandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popova) and wrote that

“All colorations with utilitarian intent are insignificant.”^[11]

            Selim Khan-Magomedov has clearly described the process that led to Malevich’s objectless poetics.

“The deep space of white background (of unlimited depth, almost cosmic)—this is Malevich’s innovation (or discovery). All the early Suprematist work consists of colored geometric ornamentation, without reference, on a white background. From his earliest years, Malevich had observed the white of the walls and woodburning stoves of the Ukrainian khatas on which the peasant women made their colored drawings.”^[12] Describing “the assortment of geometric figures freely dispersed on the white background,” the Soviet art historian adds, “It was as if he were sending the flat kites of children aloft.”^[13]

            In his books from Vitebsk, the Ukrainian-Russian artist rejected any utilitarianism that resorts to figurative forms and colors. He proclaimed a new Suprematist utilitarianism that did not copy but that would instead create other constructions of objects, based on an economic principle that aimed at the complete rejection of the outward forms of the past, that would bring forth a new formal dynamic and a true spiritual energy.

            The example of Ukrainian peasant women from Verbivka [Verbovka], who transposed Suprematist and abstract themes into embroidery in 1915, constituted a first step.^[14] UNOVIS would further radicalize these first attempts through new forms, with objectless elements inscribed on them. There is no question that El Lissitzky played a crucial role in the broad participation of the Affirmers of the New Art in every domain known as the “applied arts.” But as early as January 1919, Malevich claimed that

“every art exhibition must be an exhibition of projects to transform the picture of the world.”^[15]

            It was no coincidence that Malevich declared in 1920, before the future Moscow Constructivists, that

“painting has long since outlived its time.”^[16]

But the pictorial (zhivopisnoe), as a way of organizing a space, continued its centuries-old existence.

            Khan-Magomedov has noted that the

“supergraphic [supergrafica] created in Vitebsk in 1919–20 by Malevich and Lissitzky (with their students) was an astonishing phenomenon at the scale of the Russian artistic avant-garde . . . Involvement in the supergraphic enabled Suprematism to feel out its points of contact with social practice.”^[17]

            Thus a number of domains were explored by Malevich, Lissitzky, Vera Ermolaeva, Nina Kogan, and their students (Ilya Chashnik, Nikolai Suetin, Lazar Khidekel, Ivan Chervinka, and Boris Tseitlin, among others). Their experiments concentrated at the outset on the facades of several buildings in the Belarusian town, on the interiors of public space (theaters, cafeterias), tribunes for orators, vehicles of urban transport, posters, or even on the staging of revolutionary festivals. In the fields of book design and scenography, UNOVIS members followed the prime Suprematist principle according to which the visual elements were to be autonomous in relation to the content.

            Work in ceramics was one of the high points of avant-garde design in Russia, comparable mutatis mutandis to the publication of Futurist books in the 1910s. One can claim, as does Khan-Magomedov, that the projects for tableware, as well as for fabrics, are part of the general evolution of Suprematist painting.^[18] The Suprematist pictorial existed outside easel painting, which Malevich downplayed in Vitebsk, preferring to concentrate on the publication of his texts and on pedagogy.

            Another step forward was taken by UNOVIS: the conquest of the cosmos, or at the very least, the will to pursue the Suprematist adventure into architecture. This was thanks to Lissitzky, himself an architect by profession, who conducted architecture studios in Vitebsk that were attended by Malevich’s students. The extraordinary group of Prouns (Projects for the Affirmation of the New), the first of which were created in Vitebsk, showed that Lissitzky was the first to have extended in his canvases and drawings, architectural volumes with Suprematist plans, creating

“stations on the way to constructing a new form.”

Quoting Khan-Magomedov once more,

“One can even say that in the general evolution of Suprematism, from painting to volume, the Prouns were the clearest manifestation . . . It is true that the Prouns were not architecture . . . but paintings pregnant with architecture.”^[19]

In that sense, Lissitzky anticipated not only Chashnik’s pictorial reliefs, but also Malevich’s Arkhitektons, which would take form after 1922, in Petrograd / Leningrad, within the framework of what would become the INKhUK.

            Nor can we pass over the work of David Yakerson, who directed a sculpture studio in Marc Chagall’s People’s Art School and joined UNOVIS. Aleksandra Shatskikh has written numerous articles about this Belarusian sculptor. In Yakerson’s monuments erected in Vitebsk in 1920 to the memory of Karl Marx and Karl Liebknecht (cat. pp. 58–59), she recognizes the seeds of the Arkhitektons that Malevich would begin to produce in Petrograd in 1923.^[20] Nonetheless, like the stone sculptures of Georges Vantongerloo titled Constructions of Volume Relations (1919), each a sort of pile of solid blocks (that Yakerson was perhaps acquainted with), these were all far from the complexity of Malevich’s own assemblages of Suprematist plans. It would no doubt be more judicious to consider as precursors the extraordinary Dynamic Cities by the Latvian-Russian Gustav Klucis [Klutsis], a student of Malevich and subsequently of Natan Pevzner (alias Antoine Pevsner) at the Moscow SVOMAS (Free State Art Studios) between 1919 and 1920.

Malevich and the Other Avant-Gardists

An artist who had been close to the Constructivists, Elizaveta Galperina-Zeldovich, would say in a later interview:

“The objectless. The objectless painting, that is to say the painting which is made up purely from composition, color, and craftsmanship, but without content. . . . Strictly speaking, in Malevich there is a content—a geometrical one. His work contained a regulated square, combinations of squares and triangles—and that was all. There were no, shall we say, finishing touches—none of these gradations such as we see in Kandinsky. There was nothing like that. There was an exact geometric construction of the surface of the painting, a solid relationship from one piece to another, such that nothing would break down.”^[21]

            The path that Malevich chose was completely different, not only from Vasili Kandinsky’s, but also from those of Mikhail Larionov, Vladimir Tatlin, Pavel Filonov, Mikhail Matiushin, and Aleksandr Rodchenko, to mention only a few of the luminaries of the Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde who founded schools of painting. The founder of Suprematist objectlessness kept his distance from artists who recklessly claimed to be proponents of nonfigurative bespredmetnost’.

            This is why, in the June 20, 1918, edition of the Moscow journal Anarkhiia (Anarchy), for which he had prepared a comparative analysis of the first exhibition of artists of the Left Federation after the Revolution, he expressed his ferocious criticism of certain artists who referred to objectlessness:

“At this point, after I had set out the basis of the Suprematist movement, whose influence has formed a whole number of individual artists, I wanted to separate out those who would adhere to the principles of Suprematism from the flood of those who claim objectlessness, to clarify the muddle that characterizes criticism, which considers objectlessness as Suprematist. / But here we encounter a difficulty, because the features of the flat surface emerge from objectlessness, which can introduce some confusion in the mind of the spectator, as was the case in the exhibition of the Union of Artist-Painters: Left Federation, where the treatment of various planar surfaces and the very facet of the planar surface coincide with what is Suprematist. But in their essence, they have nothing in common.”

            After listing what he considered to be the principles of Suprematism (freedom in the interactions between form and color; surface tranquility; balance in the planes; energetic craftsmanship; immateriality), he concluded that “the entire structure of Suprematism represents a flat surface in tension . . . where on each planar surface we see a semantic ambulation [smyslovoi khod], a great ease and conservation of the sign. And what is displayed in the exhibition under the name of objectlessness, which is noted in the reviews as Suprematist, does not correspond to the truth [pravda], except [for the works of] Rozanova.”^[22]

            He then launched into a critique of abstract works that were labeled “objectless, but which could not be called Suprematist in the strict sense of the word. These included the work of Aleksandr Vesnin, of Liubov Popova (as lacking in unity between the different planes, and between form and color), and of Nadezhda Udaltsova (for piling on combinations without sufficient concern for equilibrium). This makes it clear why the Tenth State Exhibition in 1919 in Moscow was titled Objectless Creation and Suprematism. It appears that Malevich sought to distinguish his work from the group forming around Rodchenko (Stepanova, Vesnin, Popova) and which was breaking off from him, and would subsequently be joined by Ivan Kliun, who was moving away from Suprematism. Malevich would find new disciples through the Vitebsk UNOVIS and its different branches in the Soviet Federation. One can also understand why he was opposed to the artists who constituted the first Constructivist nucleus within the INKhUK in 1921.

            The distinguishing feature of the Constructivist experiment is that it identifies with the sociopolitical demands of revolutionary Russia, at first under the banner of anarchy and proletarian culture, and subsequently under the banner of Bolshevik Marxism-Leninism. The objective was to shape life in the new society through an ensemble of artistic experiments.

            In Suprematism, the experience is first of all the conceptual experience of living in an objectless world. Experimentation consists in deciphering, within the existing (the artist, the artwork, social organization), the truth of being of the objectless, which traverses this existing. The entire aim of Malevich’s Suprematism is to reorient the workings of the world toward “eternal rest.” He saw Suprematism as a new religion that would replace the old ones—the religion of the “pure white act”—and wanted to found a new figure of God, an objectless god. This began in the Vitebsk UNOVIS, where Malevich’s philosophical treatise God Is Not Cast Down: Art, Church, Factory was published in 1922.

Translated from French by Christian Hubert

[1] Kazimir Malevich, “Zhivopis i problema arkhitektury” (Painting and the Problem of Architecture), Nova Generatsiia 3, no. 2 (1928).

[2] On Malevich’s activity in his native Ukraine, at the Kiev Art Institute, see the new documents published in Tetyana Filevska, ed., Kazimir Malevich: Kyiv Period, 1928–1930 (Kiev: RODOVID, 2017).

[3] Kazimir Malevich, “Esteticheskii test dlia opredeleniia khudozhestvennoi i neartistskoi storony rabot” (Aesthetic Test to Determine the Artistic and Nonartistic Side of Works) (1928), in Kazimir Malévitch, Écrits, trans. Jean-Claude Marcadé (Paris: Allia, 2015), vol. 1, p. 548.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., p. 585.

[6] Letter from Paul Cézanne to Émile Zola, dated November 20, 1878, in Paul Cézanne, Correspondance, ed. John Rewald (Paris: Grasset, 1978), p. 177.

[7] Letter from Paul Cézanne to Émile Bernard, quoted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992), p. 13.

[8] Quoted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 141.

[9] See Troels Andersen, Malevich, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1970, p. 116-132; in french : Jean-Claude Marcadé, Malévitch (Paris: Casterman, 1990), pp. 202–11.

[10] Kazimir Malevich, Bog ne skinut: Iskusstvo, tserkov’, fabrika (God Is Not Cast Down: Art, Church, Factory) (Vitebsk: UNOVIS, 1922), in Écrits, vol. 1, p. 312.

[11] Kazimir Malevich, in Écrits, vol. 2, p. 193.

[12] Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, Suprematizm i arkhitektura: Problemy formoobrazovaniia (Suprematism and Architecture: The Problem of the Constitution of Forms) (Moscow: Arkhitektura-S, 2007), p. 113.

[13] Ibid., pp. 113–14.

[14] See Charlotte Douglas, “Suprematist Embroidered Ornament,” Art Journal 54, no. 1 (1995), pp. 42–45.

[15] Kazimir Malevich, “Novatoram vsego mira” (To Innovators Around the World), January 1919, in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Collected Works in Five Volumes), ed. Aleksandra Shatskikh (Moscow: Gileia, 2004), vol. 4, p. 141.

[16] Kazimir Malevich, Écrits, vol. 1, p. 263.

[17] Khan-Magomedov, Suprematizm i arkhitektura (Suprematism and Architecture), p. 218.

[18] Ibid., p. 245.

[19] Ibid., p. 294.

[20] See especially Aleksandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art, 1917–1922 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 169–75.

[21] Elizaveta Galperina-Zeldovich, interview with Viktor Duvakin, in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, ed. Irina A. Vakar and Tatiana N. Mikhienko (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), vol. 2, p. 213.

[22] Kazimir Malevich, “Vystavka professional’nogo soiuza khudozhnikov-zhivopistsev: Levaia Federatsiia–Molodaia Fraktsiia” (The Exhibition of the Union of Artist-Painters: Left Federation–Youth Faction), Anarchie, no. 89 (June 20, 1918), in Écrits, vol. 1, pp. 156–57.

12 décembre 2024
L’ACTIVITÉ UNIVERSITAIRE DE KANDINSKY (1885-1895)

L’ACTIVITÉ UNIVERSITAIRE DE KANDINSKY (1885-1895)

La période, peu connue, de la vie de Kandinsky consacrée à l’économie politique à la Faculté de Droit de Moscou, est mieux éclairée grâce à la publication de matériaux jusqu’ici inédits. Il s’agit de dix années d’activité du futur peintre, entre sa vingtième et sa trentième années, donc à un moment crucial de toute existence humaine, le moment, pourrait-on dire, de la jeunesse.

Dès 1981, S.V. Šumixin avait publié partiellement et commenté la correspondance de Kandinsky avec son Doktorvater, le célèbre professeur A.I. Čuprov (1842-1908)[1].

A.I. Čuprov et l’historien V.O. Ključevskij furent parmi les professeurs les plus populaires de l’Université de Moscou dans les années 1880-1890. Le rayonnement scientifique et humain de Čuprov est souligné par de nombreux témoignages[2]. La pensée économique de Čuprov était celle d’un libéralisme modéré, qui lui valut à la fois la désapprobation du ministre de l’éducation d’alors et la critique violente de Lénine.

Kandinsky ne fut pas seulement l’élève de Čuprov, il fut aussi son ami comme le montre la correspondance entre les deux hommes après la décision définitive de Kandinsky en 1895 d’abandonner sa carrière scientifique et universitaire.

Les documents nous apprennent que Kandinsky s’est inscrit à l’Université de Moscou en août 1885 et qu’il a obtenu son diplôme de fin d’études en 1893, qui prenait en compte huit semestres effectués. Il faut dire que Kandinsky s’était mis en congé d’université entre 1889 et 1892, pour raisons de santé (ou raisons de convenance ? Ou les deux à la fois ?), ce qui lui permit d’avoir un visa d’un mois au début 1892 pour aller se soigner en France[3]. Cela explique la longueur inhabituelle de huit années d’études pour obtenir l’équivalent de notre licence.

Pour avoir la possibilité de poursuivre son cursus universitaire, Kandinsky écrit en 1893 un « referat« , c’est-à-dire un rapport consacré à la conférence du vice-président de la Société d’économie politique de Bruxelles, Mgr. Sebastiano Nicotra. Cette conférence s’était tenue lors du Premier Congrès catholique des sciences politiques à Gênes en 1892. L’exposé de Mgr. Nicotra portait le titre « Le minimum de salaire et l’encyclique Rerum Novarum« . Le professeur Čuprov approuva le travail de Kandinsky[4]; c’est à ce moment-là que Kandinsky écrivit son « Exposé des théories du fonds ouvrier et de ce que l’on appelle la loi de fer », en vue d’une thèse qui devait porter sur « la question de la légitimité du salaire des ouvriers ». Le professeur Čuprov écrivit le 22 mai 1893 une recommandation pour que Kandinsky soit maintenu auprès de la Faculté de droit, étant donné la qualité de ses recherches scientifiques et « sa connaissance approfondie de trois langues modernes » (sans doute, l’allemand, le français et l’anglais, comme en témoignent ses lectures pour son « Exposé des théories du fonds ouvrier et de ce que l’on appelle la loi de fer » dont Čuprov souligne la bonne tenue)[5]). Cette attestation est jointe au document du 24 mai 1893 du Conseil de l’Université qui porte « sur le maintien sans bourse de Vasilij Kandinskij, qui a passé les épreuves devant la Commission des examens de droit de Moscou avec le diplôme de premier rang, afin qu’il se prépare à la fonction professorale, pour la chaire d’économie politique et de statistique, dans un délai de deux ans »[6]. Le document note que Kandinsky a toujours eu « une conduite excellente et que rien de répréhensible n’a été noté dans les murs de l’université. »[7] Le futur peintre n’a jamais été trop intéressé par la politique, il n’a jamais participé à des manifestations et même si, de toute évidence, il n’ a pas approuvé au cours de son existence les coercitions d’ordre politique d’où qu’elles viennent, il ne s’est jamais battu pour changer extérieurement le monde, il s’est battu, en revanche, passionnément pour changer l’homme intérieur, et ce au moyen de ses écrits et, par-dessus tout, au moyen de son art. En politique, le bourgeois Kandinsky restera toute sa vie, à ce qu’il appert de tous ses comportements, un « démocrate chrétien » alors que, dans le même temps, il opère une révolution en créant conceptuellement et par son œuvre picturale une nouvelle forme artistique totalement inédite depuis que l’art existe.

Dans sa lettre au professeur Čuprov du 7 novembre 1895, Kandinsky annonce sa décision irrévocable d’abandonner la recherche scientifique. Il en donne les raisons : 1) Il se dit incapable d’assurer un travail permanent assidu (et sa biographie confirme sa soif de voyages et de découvertes); 2) il n’a pas d’amour irrépressible pour la science; 3) il ne croit pas à la science; 4) il veut revenir à sa passion de toujours – la peinture[8].

Quel bilan tirer de ces dix années d’activité universitaire dont l’axe principal l’économie politique et le droit ? Le peintre a lui-même donné les éléments qui permettent de comprendre l’importance qu’ont eue sur sa poétique les disciplines scientifiques qu’il a pratiquées. Dans la version russe des Rückblicke, les Stupeni de 1918, il insiste plus clairement que dans la version allemande sur le fait que ces travaux lui ont donné la possibilité « d’exercer la capacité d’approfondir la sphère finement matérielle qui s’appelle la sphère de ‘l’abstrait’ » [9] : l’auteur emploie l’adjectif substantivé « otvlečënnoe » qui est le mot philosophique russe, calqué du latin « abstractum« ; c’est le même adjectif qu’il emploie plus loin lorsqu’il résume la place qu’ont eue pour sa formation intellectuelle ses études scientifiques :

« Dans l’économie politique que j’avais choisie, ce que j’aimais, outre la question ouvrière, c’est la pensée purement abstraite. »[10].

De même, il affirme que l’étude du droit romain l’a attiré « par sa ‘construction’ [ici, l’auteur utilise le mot européen « konstrukcija« ] » mais n’a pas « satisfait son âme slave à cause de sa logique rigide, schématiquement froide et trop rationnelle » [11] . Il se dit avoir été séduit, en revanche, par le droit ordinaire russe

« qui provoquait en moi des sentiments d’émerveillement et d’amour en tant qu’opposition au droit romain, en tant que solution libre et heureuse de l’essence de l’ application de la loi »[12].

Et ici, Kandinsky fait une note où il manifeste son enthousiasme pour le principe (d’une « totale humanité ») du droit populaire russe, selon lequel on juge les actes criminels « en considérant l’homme ». Et le peintre de conclure – et ce sera notre conclusion :

« Ce principe met à la base du verdict, non pas l’évidence extérieure de l’acte, mais la qualité de sa source intérieure – l’âme du prévenu. Comme cela est proche des bases de l’art! ».[13]

JEAN-CLAUDE MARCADÉ

MAI 2004

[1] S.V. Šumixin, « Pis’ma Kandinskogo k A.I. Čuprovu [Lettres de V.V. Kandinsky à A.I. Čuprov », in : Pamjatniki kul’tury. Novye otkrytija, Moscou-Léningrad, 1981, p. 337-344

[2] Le témoignage de Tchekhov est cité par S.V. Šumixin, op.cit., p. 337; le témoignage de Sergej Bulgakov, le futur grand théologien de la Sophia à Paris, qui s’était spécialisé autour de 1900 dans l’économie politique (« Sur les marchés dans la production capitaliste », 1897; « Le capitalisme et l’agriculture », 1900, cf. Serge Boulgakov. Bibliographie, Paris,Institut d’Etudes Slaves), est rapporté par Valerij Turčin, « V.V. Kandinskij v Moskovskom universitete » [Kandinsky à l’Université de Moscou], Voprosy iskusstvoznanija, 1993, N° 2-3, p. 206

[3] Cf. S.V. Šumixin, op.cit., p. 338, 340

[4] Ibidem, p. 339

[5] CIAM, fonds 418, inventaire 62, dossier 247

[6] Ibidem

[7] Ibidem

[8] Lettre de Kandinsky à A.I. Čuprov du 7 novembre 1895, in : S.V. « Šumixin, op.cit., p. 341

[9] V.V. Kandinskij, Stupeni, Moscou, 1918, p. 16

[10] Ibidem, p. 18

[11] Ibidem, p. 17

[12] Ibidem

[13] Ibidem

9 décembre 2024
Musique et arts de la couleur -1910-1925, Cité de la Musique, 27 mars 2014

Musique et arts de la couleur -1910-1925, Cité de la Musique, 27 mars 2014

Les rapports de la musique et des arts de la couleur dans l’Empire Russe de 1910 à 1925

Ivan Wyschnegradsky a quitté la Russie en mars 1920, il allait donc sur ses 27 ans. C’était donc un homme « fait », si l’on peut dire, profondément marqué par la culture russe, la vie intellectuelle, philosophique, artistique d’une période faste qui a vu naître, dès 1907, la notion d’art de gauche, que l’on a pris l’habitude de dénommer a posteriori « avant-garde ».

(suite…)

5 décembre 2024
С Введением во храм Пресвятой Богородицы!

С Введением во храм Пресвятой Богородицы!

5 décembre 2024
L’inconscient et l’alogisme dans l’art de gauche en Russie et en URSS dans les années 1910 et 1920

L’inconscient et l’alogisme dans l’art en Russie et en URSS dans les années 1910 et 1920

Quand André Breton publia en 1924 le “Manifeste du surréalisme” , il souligna que

” le surréalisme repose sur la croyance à la réalité supérieure de certaines formes d’associations négligées jusqu’à lui, à la toute-puissance du rêve, au jeu désintéressé de la pensée”[i].

On peut dire que Breton formulait là des idées qui étaient déjà bien ancrées dans les arts novateurs du premier quart du XXème siècle, entre autres, dans le cubisme et dans le cubofuturisme et alogisme en Russie et URSS. Comme cela se passe toujours lors de l’apparition d’un nouvel “isme”, celui-ci privilégie dans la pratiques des courants qui l’ont précédé ce qui lui est nécessaire pour définir sa propre voie.

Dans ce premier manifeste de 1924 Breton nomme, surtout, des écrivains ayant “fait acte de SURRÉALISME ABSOLU”[ii], comme, par exemple, Aragon, Crevel, Desnos, Éluard, Soupault, Vitrac etc. et seulement un peintre, dont l’œuvre est encore mal connue, le Russe Malkine[iii]. Mais l’auteur du Manifeste du surréalisme en cite d’autres qui ne sont pas directement des surréalistes mais qui entendent ou ont “entendu la voix surréaliste” “chassant dans les alentours” du surréalisme. C’est, par exemple, dans le passé – Uccello, et dans le passé récent – Seurat et Gustave Moreau, ainsi que les contemporains de Breton -Picasso, Braque, Matisse (dans son panneau La Musique), Derain, Duchamp, Picabia, Chirico (avant 1918!), Klee, Man Ray, Max Ernst, André Masson[iv].

Finalement, s’il l’on veut déduire une conception esthétique de la rhétorique littéraire dy premier manifeste surréaliste, elle se résume à la quête d’une nouvelle réalité qui n’est pas soumise au contrôle de la raison. Cela n’est pas nouveau en 1924. On sait bien que la révolution dans les arts plastiques comme en littérature a eu lieu entre 1910 et1915. L’imitation de la nature (mimèsis) aussi bien que du monde visible, tel qu’il nous est donné dans les sensations extérieures n’apparaît plus comme une loi de l’art, ce qui rend caduque l’obligation de tracer des contours, de respecter des proportions, une perspective qui ressemblassent aux contours, aux proportions, à la perspective de l’espace euclidien tridimensionnel. L’artiste-novateur du XXème siècle ne recherche pas la copie fidèle de l’original, il ne veut plus être démiurge, mais se fait plutôt Prométhée et désire conquérir les secrets des apparences, pénétrer jusqu’aux racines du visible, saisir les rythmes qui meuvent le microcosme et le macrocosme.

Ce qui distingue le surréalisme des autres “ismes” qui l’ont précédé, c’est sa méthode, son Kunstwollen. Selon la définition de Breton lui-même, le surréalisme est un

“automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se propose d’exprimer, soit verbalement, soit de toute autre manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l’absence de tout contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale”.[v]

Là aussi, il est possible de trouver dans la pratique et la théorie des arts du début du XXème siècle des visées analogues, surtout dans l’art de gauche en Russie et en URSS.

Je n’en donnerai que quelques exemples.

Commençons par Vassili Kandinsky et son idée de “la nécessité intérieure” (vnutrennaja neobxodimost’)[vi]. Dans l’introduction de son ouvrage principal Du Spirituel dans l’art, dont la première version allemande de 1909 (publiée à Munich en 1911) fut traduite par Kandinsky lui-même en russe à Moscou à l’automne de 1910 pour être lue au Congrès panrusse des artistes à Saint-Pétersbourg fin décembre 1911 (selon l’ancien calendrier russe) (cette version russe parut dans les Actes de ce Congrès en 1914), on trouve des déclarations analogues :

“Dans les obscurités profondes sont dissimulées les causes de la nécessité d’avancer et de s’élever, précisément ‘à la sueur de son front’, par la souffrance, le Mal, et ce que l’on appelle l’errement.”[vii]

Ou bien, dans l’avant-dernier chapitre du livre, intitulé “Théorie”, où l’artiste affirme que “la voie vers la peinture” “gît entre deux domaines”, celui de “l’abstrait” [abstraktnoe] et celui de la forme “corporelle” [‘telesnaja’ forma ] et ajoute :

“Au-delà de ces limites gisent […], à droite : la pure abstraction (c’est-à-dire une abstraction plus grande que les formes géométriques), et, à gauche : la pure réalistique (c’est-à-dire un fantastique plus grand que le fantastique – un fantastique dans la matière la plus dure). Et entre elles, un espace sans limites, la profondeur, la richesse, la vasteté des possibilités, et au-delà d’elles les domaines qui sont là (de la pureté abstraite et réalistique) – tout, aujourd’hui, est apporté par le moment d’aujourd’hui à l’artiste pour être à son service. Aujourd’hui, c’est le jour d’une telle liberté, laquelle n’est possible seulement que dans la haute époque qui commence. Et cette liberté est dans le même instant ce qui lie au plus haut point parce que toutes ces possibilités qui se trouvent entre les limites, dans les limites et au-delà des limites croissent à partir d’une seule racine : l’appel impérieux de la Nécessité Intérieure.”[viii]

Ce que Kandinsky appelle “la Nécessité Intérieure”, c’est sans aucun dout l’impulsion irrésistible qui s’impose à l’artiste créateur, l’oblige à choisir telle ou telle forme pour l’expression de l’essence des choses. Est-ce que cet “impératif catégorique” ne ressemble pas à la “dictée de la pensée” de Breton? Je pense que la source, consciente ou inconsciente, d’un tel mouvement qui naît de l’intérieur du processus créateur, remonte, selon toute vraisemblance à la “Wille zur Macht” nietzschéenne qui meut l’être lui-même, est l’être lui-même dans son “énergétisme”. C’est précisément dans ce sens qu’il faut comprendre chez Kandinsky des passages comme, par exemple, ce qui suit :

“Pleine de mystère est la naissance d’une création artistique. Oui, si l’âme de l’artiste est vivante, il n’y a plus alors le besoin de la soutenir, de l’aider par un travail cérébral et des théories. Elle trouvera elle-même, ce qu’elle doit dire, bien que, au moment de l’acte créateur, ce “quoi” n’ait pas été du tout clair à l’artiste lui-même. La voix intérieure de l’âme lui soufflera également de quelle forme il a besoin et où la chercher ( la “nature” extérieure ou intérieure). Tout artiste qui travaille, comme on dit, en suivant son sentiment, sait combien, tout soudain et pour lui-même de façon inattendue, lui répugne une forme inventée et comment”comme de soi-même” vient à la place de cette dernière une autre forme contraire, une forme juste.”[ix]

Traçant la ligne Nietzsche-Kandinsky-Breton du point de vue du processus créateur, je n’ignore pas le moins du monde ce qui sépare fondamentalement ces penseurs-créateurs. Tout d’abord, Kandinsky est un penseur chrétien pour lequel “Dieu” de façon générale, qu’il soit le Dieu ancien ou le Dieu nouveau, n’ est pas mort. Kandinsky affirme sans cesse Dieu et le Divin. S’il émet l’idée du surhomme[x] ou bien il ressemble lui-même à Zarathustra dans son rôle de prescient, entouré par “la méchanceté et les railleries”, qui “traîne à sa suite le lourd chariot de l’humanité toujours plus avant, toujours vers le haut[xi], ce n’est là qu’une enveloppe extérieure, car Kandinsky, en fait, professe l’idée de l’artiste – serviteur de Dieu, qui sait

” se détourner du corporel pour servir le spirituel“[xii].

Il est évident qu’une telle philosophie ne pouvait être acceptable pour l’athée Breton qui ne souffrait pas les moindres compromis avec l’idée de Dieu, surtout chrétienne. Même lorsqu’il cite la fameuse sentence de Braque : “La règle corrige l’émotion”, affirmant que lui, Breton, ne fait que renier avec la plus grande véhémence cette règle, il ajoute :

“Et cette règle – d’où il (Braque) la prend? Il doit y avoir une quelconque idée de Dieu là-dessous.”[xiii]

Et dans un texte tardif de 1941, où il énumère et décrit les peintres qui, selon lui, appartiennent au courant surréaliste, il accorde une place à l’œuvre de Chagall, indiquant que jusque là il avait ignoré Chagall “à partir d’une suspicion de mysticisme jetée sur Chagall”, ce qui dans les années 1920 et 1930 “avait un effet rédhibitoire”[xiv].

Si Breton avait mieux connu les idées des artistes russes de ce que l’on appelle “l’avant-garde”, il aurait été abattu, en prenant conscience que l’art de gauche en Russie et en URSS, à côté d’une ligne sans aucun doute possible théomachique, laquelle, à partir des Temps Modernes, est, de façon générale, un des aspects de la sécularisation de la vie dans toute l’Europe, est hanté par le principe spirituel qui se nourrit le plus souvent des sucs de la tradition judéo-chrétienne, et également des conceptions religieuses-philosophiques de l’Extrême-Orient.

Faisons attention à ce fait : En 1912, à Munich, paraît la version allemande du traité de Kandinsky Über das Geistige in der Kunst, – et, dix ans plus tard, en 1922, à Vitebsk en Biélorussie, est publié l’essai philosophique de Malévitch Dieu n’est pas détrôné. L’Art. L’Église. L’Usine, un des textes les plus profonds du XXème siècle où l’on peut lire dans le paragraphe 33 :

“Sont détruites les apparences, mais pas l’essence, et l’essence, selon la définition donnée par l’homme lui-même – Dieu, n’est anihilable par rien. Puisque l’essence n’est pas anihilable, Dieu n’est pas anihilable. Et ainsi, Dieu n’est pas détrôné. “[xv]

C’est là le bilan de la pensée malévitchienne. Dans un poème en prose, commençant par “Je suis le commencement de tout…”, Malévitch proclame encore plus clairement sa représentation apophatique de Dieu avec une tendance panthéiste (mais une telle tendance provient de l’Évangile lui-même quand l’ apôtre Paul écrit dans la Première Epître aux Corinthiens (XV, 28) :

“Que Dieu soit toute chose en tout”) :

“Ayant atteint le ciel, il reste devant nous à saisir toutes les Propriétés de Dieu, c’est-à-dire être omnivoyant, omnipuissant et omniscient. Cela veut dire qu’il est indispensable de se pulvériser dans les signes du monde, c’est-à-dire incarner à nouveau dans tout l’Univers, saturer tout de soi.”[xvi]

Et la fin de cette méditation ne laisse aucun doute concernant la pensée de Malévitch :

“Le Christ s’est transfiguré dans l’Église et l’ Église est sa nouvelle enveloppe. Ayant déjà vécu 2000 ans, elle peut encore vivre plus longtemps.

Dieu est immortel.”[xvii]

Toutes ces considérations paraissent nous éloigner quelque peu de l’objet de cet article mais il est indispensable d’avoir en vue ces idées essentielles pour comprendre en quoi consiste la distance qui sépare la notion d’inconscient et de représentation d’un monde non-logique chez les artistes en Russie et en URSS et, disons, dans le surréalisme occidental.

On sait que les poètes cubofuturistes russes rejetaient la raison et appelaient leur création “l’au-delà de la raison” (zaum’). Un jour, l’immense poète “transmental” Vélimir Khlebnikov déclara que Kant, quand il a établi les limites de la raison, n’a fait que démontrer les limites de la raison allemande! On sait que dans leur combat avec le sens logique les poètes transmentaux (zaumniki) ont eu recours à la glossolalie, à l’extase religieuse dans le milieu sectaire mystique russe[xviii]. Kroutchonykh cite le discours du flagellant (khlyst) Varlaam Chichkov comme modèle “de la langue transmentale libre” :

“Nossostoss léssontoss foutre liss natroufountrou kressfiré kréssentré. Fert tchérésantro oulmiri oumilisantrou.”[xix]

Et Kroutchonykh, citant en 1913, comme objectif de la création du “verbe nouveau” – “la vraie profession de foi, la dénonciation des choses invisibles”, donne comme exemple

“les simples paysans” qui “ont commencé à parler dans cette langue transmentale et dans de nombreuses langues étrangères qui leur étaient auparavant inconnues!

Eh bien, les linguistes (les critiques également) passent à côté de tels à la vérité prophètes!…”[xx]

Et en peinture, la variante de “l’au-delà de la raison”, de la zaum’ poétique, est appelée par Malévitch en 1913 “le réalisme au-delà de la raison” [zaumnyj realizm], puis “l’alogisme”. Il semble que Malévitch a utilisé pour la première fois l’expression “alogisme des formes” en 1916 lors de l’ “Exposition futuriste Magasin”, organisée à Moscou par Vladimir Tatline : par là il désignait tout un groupe de tableaux de 1913-1914, comme : La Vache et le violon, L’Anglais à Moscou, L’Aviateur et une œuvre aujourd’hui disparue intitulée “Le joueur d’échecs”. et en 1919, sous la lithographie qui représente La Vache et le violon, il écrivit :

“La logique a toujours été une barrière pour les nouveaux mouvements subconscients et pour se libérer des préjugés, on mit en avant le mouvement de l’alogisme. Le dessin montré ici représente une phase du combat – par la juxtaposition de deux formes : une vache et un violon dans une construction cubiste.”[xxi]

Dès le tout début de son activité picturale et théorique, Malévitch mène un combat impitoyable contre la raison humaine qui

“organise des potagers étatiques sur des déductions culturo-humano-économiques pour la pitance et pense que lorsque le globe terrestre sera ceint de l’unité humaine, alors nous sèmerons beaucoup de seigle et de blé et nous créerons des fours culturels perfectionnés et ferons cuire des miches de pain”[xxii].

Déjà, en 1915, il délare en guise de “vœux de Pâques”:

“La raison est une chaîne de bagnard pour l’artiste, c’est pourquoi je souhaite à tous les artistes de se priver de raison.”[xxiii]

A la “Première exposition futuriste de tableaux Tramway V” à Pétrograd en mars 1915, en guise de dénomination de cinq de ses œuvres, Malévitch écrit dans le catalogue :

“L’auteur ne connaît pas le contenu de ces tableaux .”

Et dans la brochure publiée à la fin de 1915 pendant la “Dernière exposition de tableaux 0, 10 (zéro-dix)”, toujours à Pétrograd, il en appelle au subconscient pour sortir de la servitude de la raison, du sens et de la logique, et il proclame

“le sentiment qui, d’on ne sait quels vides, tire dans la vie réelle du toujours plus nouveau.”[xxiv]

Et plus loin :

“La création intuitive est inconsciente et n’a ni objectif ni réponse précise.”[xxv].

En 1916, dans le livre Les vices secrets des académiciens [Tajnye poroki akademikov], il s’exclame :

“L’œuvre d’art suprême s’écrit quand il n’y a pas de raison.

Extrait d’une telle œuvre :

j’ai mangé à l’instant des pieds de veau.

Il est admirablement difficile de s’adapter au bonheur après avoir traversé toute la Sibérie.

J’envie toujours le poteau télégraphique. Pharmacie.

Bien entendu, beaucoup penseront que c’est de l’absurde, mais ils ont tort, il suffit seulement d’allumer deux allumettes et de poser un lavabo.”[xxvi]

Il n’est pas difficile de remarquer que de telles positions annoncent pour beaucoup l’esprit dadaïste et le surréalisme, en tout cas coïncident avec eux, bien que, comme nous l’avons précisé plus haut, la veine métaphysique de Malévitch, comme de pratiquement tous ses contemporains, le sépare très nettement des dadaïstes et des surréalistes de l’Europe.[xxvii]

[i] André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme [1924], in : Œuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard, t. I, 1988, p. 328

[ii] Ibidem

[iii] Voir le catalogue

[iv] André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme [1924], op.cit., p. 329, 330

v Ibidem, p. 328

vi V.V. Kandinskij, ” Soderžanie i forma” [Le contenu et la forme], dans l’almanach 1909-1910. Salon 2. Meždunarodnaja xudožestvennaja vystavka, Odessa, 1909, p. 15-16 [Traduction en français, castillan et catalan dans les catalogues Le Symbolisme russe, El Simbolismo ruso, El Simbolisme rus, Bordeaux, Madrid, Barcelone, 2000-2001]. Voir aussi : V.V. Kandinskij, O duxovnom v iskusstve (Živopis’)[Du Spirituel dans l’art (peinture)], dans le recueil Trudy vserossijskogo s”ezda xudožnikov [Actes du Congrès des artistes de toute la Russie],Pétrograd, t. I, 1914, p. 47-76

vii V.V. Kandinskij, O duxovnom v iskusstve (Živopis’)[Du Spirituel dans l’art (peinture)], op.cit., p. 48

viii Ibidem, p. 70

ix Ibidem, p. 72

x Ibidem, p. 71 : “Cette liberté illimitée doit être basée sur le sol de la nécessité intérieure (qui s’appelle “honnêteté”). Et ce principe n’est pas seulement un principe d’art, mais c’est aussi la vie. Ce principe est comme l’ épée grandiose du surhomme pour son combat contre l’esprit petit-bourgeois.”

[xi] Ibidem, p. 48

[xii] Ibidem

[xiii] André Breton, Le surréalisme et la peinture[1928], New York, 1945, p. 34

[xiv] André Breton, “Genèse et pespective artistiques du surréalisme” [1941], in ibidem, p. 89

[xv] K. Malévitch, Bog ne skinut. Iskusstvo. Cerkov’. Fabrika, Vitebsk, 1922, p. 46

[xvi] K. Malévitch, “Ja načalo vsego…” [Je suis le commencement de tout…] [début des années 1920], dans: D. Sarabjanov, A. Šatskix, Kazimir Malevič. Živopis’. Teorija [Kazimir Malévitch. Peinture. Théorie ], Moscou, 1993, p. 376

[xvii] Ibidem, p. 377

[xviii] Cf. D.G. Konovalov, “Religioznyj ekstaz v russkom mističeskom sektanstve”[L’extase religieuse chez les sectaires russes mystiques], Bogoslovskij vestnik [Le Messager théologique], avril 1908

[xix] A. Kručenykh, Vzorval’ [Explosant], Saint-Pétersbourg, 1913

[xx] A. Kručenykh, “Novye puti slova” [Les nouvelles voies du mot], dans le recueil poétique Troe [Les Trois], Saint-Pétersbourg, 1913

[xxi] K. Malévitch, O novykh sistemakh v iskusstve. Statika i skorost’ [Des nouveaux systèmes en art. statique et vitesse], Vitebsk, 1919

[xxii] Ibidem , cité ici d’après K. Malévitch, Œuvres en 5 tomes (en russe), Moscou, Gileja, t. I, p. 173

[xxiii] K. Malévitch, Œuvres en 5 tomes (en russe), Moscou, Gileja, t. I, p. 26

[xxiv] K. Malévitch, Ot kubizma k suprematizmu. Novyj žipopisnyj realizm, Pétrograd, 1915, cité ici d’après K. Malévitch, Œuvres en 5 tomes (en russe),t. I, op.cit., p. 31

[xxv] Ibidem

[xxvi] Ibidem, p. 57

[xxvii] Si Malévitch peut aussi écrire en 1916 : “Pour inutilité, je renonce à l’âme et à l’intuition” (Les vices secrets des académicien, op.cit., p. 56), en revanche, en 1919, donc en pleine révolution bolchevique, il chante un hymne à l’intuition, mais à l’intuition “qui pousse la volonté vers le principe créateur” (Des nouveaux systèmes en art. statique et vitesse, op.cit., p. 163) : “L’intuition est la graine de l’infini, en elle se pulvérise tout le visible sur notre globe terrestre. Les formes provenaient de l’énergie intuitive, après avoir vaincu l’infini, d’où proviennent les variétés de formes comme instruments de déplacement

26 novembre 2024

Auteur/autrice : Jean-Claude

IBONNE FÊTE DE SAINT SPYRIDON DE TRIMYTHONTE!

BONNE FÊTE DE SAINT SPYRIDON DE TRIMYTHONTE!

Prière à Saint Spyridon, tapuscrit du moine Maxiane (le sculpteur Maxime Arkhanguelski)

JOYEUX NOËLET BONNE ANNÉE MMXXV À TOUS MES AMIS!

BONA HESTA DE NADAU! BONA ANNADA MMXXV!

Joyeux Noël! Fröhliche gesegnete Weihnachten!

Merry Christmas!>

С Рождеством Христовым!>

З Різдвом Христовим!>

Καλά Χριστούγεννα!> >

BONNE ANNÉE MMXXV!

FROHES NEUES JAHR 2025!

ΕΥΤΥΧΙΣΜΕΝΟ ΤΟ ΝΕΟ ΕΤΟΣ!

С НОВЫМ 2025 ГОДОМ!

Afanassi Fet

Ясли тихо светят взору, Озарен Марии лик. Звездный хор к иному хору Слухом трепетным приник, –

И над Ним горит высоко Та звезда далеких стран: С ней несут цари Востока Злато, смирну и ладан.

PÉGUY

Chaque poutre du toit…

Chaque poutre du toit était comme un vousseau. Et ce sang qui devait un jour sur le Calvaire Tomber comme une ardente et tragique rosée N’était dans cette heureuse et paisible misère Qu’un filet transparent sous la lèvre rosée.

Sous le regard de l’âne et le regard du bœuf Cet enfant reposait dans la pure lumière.

Et dans le jour doré de la vieille chaumière S’éclairait son regard incroyablement neuf. Et ces laborieux et ces deux gros fidèles Possédaient cet enfant que nous n’avons pas eu.

Et ces industrieux et ces deux haridelles Gardaient ce fils de Dieu que nous avons vendu. Et les pauvres moutons eussent donné leur laine Avant que nous n’eussions donné notre tunique.

Et ces deux gros pandours donnaient vraiment leur peine. Et nous qu’avons-nous mis aux pieds du fils unique ? Ainsi l’enfant dormait sous ce double museau, Comme un prince du sang gardé par des nourrices.

Et ces amusements et ses jeunes caprices Reposaient dans le creux de ce pauvre berceau. L’âne ne savait pas par quel chemin de palmes Un jour il porterait jusqu’en Jérusalem

Dans la foule à genoux et dans les matins calmes L’enfant alors éclos aux murs de Bethléem…

Conversations avec Edmond Husserl (1931-1938)

EXTRAITS DES CONVERSATIONS AVEC EDMOND HUSSERL (1931-1936)

Adelgundis Jaegerschmid, O. S. B.

1931-1938

Visite en soirée, durant presque deux heures. J’essaie très rapidement de faire en sorte que ce soit Husserl qui mène la conversation. J’émets parfois des objections et le force ainsi à clarifier certains problèmes difficiles.

Il parle ensuite de la religion indienne. Il me recommande chaleureusement le livre de Romain Rolland sur Gandhi1, qu’il venait de lire.

– AJ : « C’est exactement ce que dit Thomas ».

– Husserl :

Nous parlons de la vie religieuse et de la vocation [Berufung] à une vie au sein d’un ordre. AJ :

« Pour vivre la vie religieuse, il faut en avoir la vocation [berufen] ».

– Husserl :

« Il nous est arrivé, à nous aussi, de brûler pour la science. Mais comment pensez-vous que la science puisse sauver notre monde et l’élever davantage ? Car ce n’est toujours que pour quelques-uns qu’elle est disponible ».

Husserl :

En réponse à ma question de savoir s’il croyait donc réellement en l’absolu (il l’avait dénié précédemment), il me dit :

1936

Russian Icons and the Russian Avant-garde, Two Major Facets of Universal Art

Russian Icons and the Russian Avant-garde, Two Major Facets of Universal Art

Jean-Claude Marcadé

Eugène Troubetzkoy, Trois études sur l’icône (1916)[1][i]

Malévitch, Autobiographie (1933)[2]

« God made man in his image at the time of creation. »[7]

« after the sack of Kiev, became the representative of Byzantine art in Rus’; that is why the Novgorod school is venerated as the oldest Russian school. »[9]

Saint Sergius of Radonezh was of incalculable importance for Russia. He set in motion

« the moral, then political, renaissance of the Russian people. »[10]

The Trinity is another image which dominates Russian iconographic spirituality after St Sergius. The laura founded by the

« first teacher of the Russian popular mind » (in the words of the historian Ključevskij)

Mahmud Zibawi, one of the specialists in icons among the new generation, neatly defined the specific nature of Russian iconography:

The apparent uniformity of icons is constantly belied by various traits in the work of icon painters who closely follow the canons in the composition of the subjects, and the handling of colour. Then, as Bruno Duborgel explains:

Ясли тихо светят взору,
Озарен Марии лик.
Звездный хор к иному хору
Слухом трепетным приник, –

И над Ним горит высоко
Та звезда далеких стран:
С ней несут цари Востока
Злато, смирну и ладан.

Chaque poutre du toit était comme un vousseau.
Et ce sang qui devait un jour sur le Calvaire
Tomber comme une ardente et tragique rosée
N’était dans cette heureuse et paisible misère
Qu’un filet transparent sous la lèvre rosée.

Sous le regard de l’âne et le regard du bœuf
Cet enfant reposait dans la pure lumière.

Et dans le jour doré de la vieille chaumière
S’éclairait son regard incroyablement neuf.
Et ces laborieux et ces deux gros fidèles
Possédaient cet enfant que nous n’avons pas eu.

Et ces industrieux et ces deux haridelles
Gardaient ce fils de Dieu que nous avons vendu.
Et les pauvres moutons eussent donné leur laine
Avant que nous n’eussions donné notre tunique.

Et ces deux gros pandours donnaient vraiment leur peine.
Et nous qu’avons-nous mis aux pieds du fils unique ?
Ainsi l’enfant dormait sous ce double museau,
Comme un prince du sang gardé par des nourrices.

Et ces amusements et ses jeunes caprices
Reposaient dans le creux de ce pauvre berceau.
L’âne ne savait pas par quel chemin de palmes
Un jour il porterait jusqu’en Jérusalem

Dans la foule à genoux et dans les matins calmes
L’enfant alors éclos aux murs de Bethléem…