Kazimir MALEVICH
(Kiev, 1879 – 1935, Leningrad)
Nemchinovka. Winter landscape
1929
Oil on canvas, 36.8 x 34.5 cm
After nearly a ten-year break, Kazimir Malevich had finally returned to painting around 1928. The founder of Suprematism was now once more creating not abstract but figurative works, and along with a cycle of post-suprematist works he now had a collection of landscapes painted from nature using Impressionist methods.
An external incentive for the creation of these works was the preparation of a personal exhibition, timed to coincide with the artist’s fiftieth birthday and the thirtieth anniversary of his creative career. The anniversary exhibition opened on November 1, 1929 in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
The late Impressionist paintings of Kazimir Malevich, although pre-dated with earlier years, were in fact of a conceptual nature far ahead of their time. In her analysis, Dr. Alexandra Shatskikh (Doctor of Art History and researcher on the Russian avant-garde, specialist in Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall’s vast oeuvre) highlights the importance of the landscape, pictured below, describing it as a unique work primarily because it depicts not the usual summer landscape but a winter scene. The choice of a winter landscape in general provided relatively more opportunity to demonstrate the rich colours of the Impressionist language. Despite the natural character and improvisational nature of the painting, Winter Landscape contains complex formal features – primarily thanks to the spatial rhythm of the carefully thought-out composition, with its verticals of tree trunks and the diagonals of shadows.
It was most likely painted in October 1929, in the vicinity of his beloved Nemchinovka. On 21 October, 1929 Malevich travelled to Moscow for the opening of his personal exhibition in the State Tretyakov Gallery, which was held on November 1. He stopped at Nemchinovka, where his daughter from his second marriage, Una, lived with her grandmother (Una’s mother, Sofia Mikhailovna Rafalovich, had died of tuberculosis in 1925). “Nemchinovka. Winter Landscape” has a nearly square format, a form which had inspired Malevich, creator of the Black Square, from a young age.
Condition report:
The painting is in excellent condition.
Provenance:
The painting was donated in the early 1930s by the artist to Natan Semenovich Puterman (a brilliant surgeon, urologist and clinician, who treated the artist);
By descent to Leonid Natanovitch Puterman (Academician of the Russian Academy of Architecture and Building Sciences, Professor of the International Academy of Architecture)
Important private collection, Zürich, Switzerland
Bibliography:
The Russian Museum’s catalogue, Russian Winter/ Almanac, Palace Editions, Saint Petersburg, 2010, p. 75 (with colour illustration);
A. Shatskikh. The exhibition catalogue Kazimir Malevich. Not only the “Black Square”. – Moscow: Artguide Editions, 2017, p. 174-175 (with a color illustration)
Kunstberatung Zurich. Old masters and Modern art catalogue: private treasures, Zurich, 2019
Kunstberatung Zurich. Kazemir Malevich. Winter Landscape, Zurich, 2019
Exhibitions:
The Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, 2010;
Exhibition of Russian avant-garde paintings. Kandinsky and his contemporaries. On the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Wassily Kandinsky. 16 December, 2016 – 31 December, 2017, ‘Artcentre. Moscow’, Moscow, Russia;
The “Kazimir Malevich. Not Only the “Black Square” exhibition dedicated to the life and work of the World Famous Russian Artist. Presented by Museum and Exhibition Center “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” (“Rabochiy i Kolkhoznitsa”), VDNH. Curator: Dr. Aleksandra Shatskikh. November 24, 2017 – February 25, 2018. Moscow
La Biennale Paris – GRAND PALAS – 13 – 17 September 2019
RAAF – Russian Antique & Art Fair – MOSCOW MANEGE – 16 – 21 April 2019
Masterpiece London – 2017
BRAFA – the Brussels Art Fair – 2017
