"Malevich and his American Legacy' in NY

The New York exhibition season has featured several shows focused on 20th-century abstraction: the long-running show at the Museum of Modern Art, just concluding, of American Abstract Expressionists; the Guggenheim's show of the crisis in European art between 1910 and 1918, and a small but choice exhibit of Kandinsky's Bauhaus years; and the Gagosian Gallery's provocative "Malevich and the American Legacy," the best of the lot, which makes a serious and largely compelling argument for the idea that much of the American art of the past half century derives from the still-underestimated example of the Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935).

Three early 20th-Century painters, the Russians Malevich and Kandinsky and the Dutchman Piet Mondrian, all arrived at abstraction independently between 1910 and 1915, and all by different routes. Mondrian studied Cézanne closely, and took his planar forms the last step into a wholly nonrepresentational art; Kandinsky, for whom sound and plastic form were inseparable, evolved a gestural art of fluid, intersecting forms and colors that evoked dreamlike musical states; Malevich took Cubo-Futurism into geometrical abstraction.

Higher levels of being?

All of these painters were highly conscious of the revolutionary step they were taking in abandoning representation, and all of them felt themselves to be entering a new realm not only of art but also of the imagination itself.

Kandinsky, the most articulate of the three, claimed in The Spiritual in Art to have gained access to higher levels of being. Malevich, in creating the first of his so-called Suprematist paintings in 1915, declared that he had "destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the center of things." Pictorial space would never be the same.

Bolshevik optimism

Russia may have been closer to the West artistically and intellectually in the first decades of the 20th Century than at any point before or since, and its painters were well aware of the ferment happening in Paris, Berlin and Vienna. The Russians even considered themselves to be in the vanguard, and after the Bolshevik Revolution they believed themselves to be creating a new world tout court— politically, materially, and spiritually. There isn't a more poignant example of Utopian optimism in modern history than the sense that gripped painters such as Malevich, poets such as Mayakovsky and filmmakers such as Eisenstein that they had created the template of a new universe.

At the same time, the 1917 Revolution isolated Russia from the West and severed most diplomatic ties. Malevich's work was unknown outside the Soviet Union until he traveled to Europe in 1927 with 70 of his canvases. Here he captured the attention of Albert H. Barr Jr., then in the process of constructing the Museum of Modern Art.

Barr recognized Malevich as a key figure and acquired several of his works. But he remained a cynosure for many— an example not of art's new potential to affirm the world but of a willful dead end. This was particularly true of Malevich's notorious White on White, an angled square of white superimposed on a white ground, which attracted much philistine ridicule.

Rediscovered in the '70s

With the MOMA's revelatory Malevich show of 1973, a new generation of American artists took serious heed of him, seeing in his work the historical basis of Minimalism and Conceptualism. The New York School of the 1940s and '50s had derived its abstraction primarily from Kandinsky's free rhythms and biomorphic forms, as the current MOMA show makes obvious. Irving Sandler, in his influential study of the New York School, The Triumph of American Painting, refers to Malevich not at all. But the current Gagosian show argues that Malevich was already a force in American abstraction at mid-century.

The most obvious example of his influence is Barnett Newman, whose minimalist and geometric abstraction stood clearly apart from the Romantic gesturalism of Pollock and Gorky, even though the current MOMA show lumps Newman together with them. Unsurprisingly, the Gagosian features Newman.

A case could also be made for the later Adolph Gottlieb (who's in the MOMA show, but not the Gagosian's). But evidently Malevich's greatest influence was on sculptors such as David Smith, Donald Judd and Carl Andre, all prominently displayed at Gagosian, and the modeled canvases of Frank Stella.

Judd speaks directly of Malevich's influence, and Cy Twombly has a drawing in the show, To Malevich, that alludes to him with an uncharacteristically squared form. Until the 1973 show, however, Malevich's influence was probably more indirectly absorbed than consciously studied.

Precursor, godfather…what?

The case for Malevich's influence is also complicated, of course, by the later Kandinsky's geometric abstraction. Cross-pollination in the arts is complex and many-stranded, and clear lines can seldom be drawn. Call him precursor, godfather or what you will, however, the several dozen modern American paintings, drawings and sculptures on display here, whatever they may owe to others, couldn't have existed without Malevich.

He himself is represented at Gagosian by only six works— four from the family collection, and only four genuinely abstract— but, strategically placed, they illuminate the whole show. It sprawls over three floors of the Gagosian's gallery space, but the installation, by Andrea Crane and Ealan Wingate, is so elegant and so sensitive to the play of one work off another that it flows continuously.

Indeed, on the day I visited it, the Malevich show led me directly into an exhibit of Ellsworth Kelly drawings in a neighboring gallery that at first seemed an extension of it. Kelly, of course, is an artist critical to the Gagosian show; but so, among others, are Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt (who's due for a serious exhibit himself) and the conceptual artist Ed Ruscha, who may have extended Malevich further than anyone else. Contemporary artists such as Charles Ray, Mark Grotjahn, and Banks Violette show that the implications of Malevich's art are still developing.

Galleries vs. museums

Never, you might say, has so much come out of so little. But, as the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl remarks sagely, Malevich "is monumental not for what he put into pictorial space but for what he took out." In that void was truly the gestation of a new world.

It's hard to choose favorites in such a richly rewarding show, but I'd be remiss not to mention Dan Flavin's room-size installation of a neon-lit fire grate, and the four terrific, silver-toned Robert Rymans side by side on one gallery wall. Hans Hofmann isn't present, but he might be said to appear courtesy of Ryman, who shows Hoffman's influence clearly.

The best gallery shows, as I've said before, trump most museum exhibitions, and this one is a case in point. But probably only a museum could do full justice to the saga of modern abstract art and the diversity of its sources. New York has served it up in bits and pieces this year. Anybody want to give the whole thing a go?