The Politics of Soviet Portraiture

Malevich and the “pictorial culture of human face”

Thyago Marão Villela

1. the return of the repressed

References to the past are constant in Malevich's final work, after 1927. Invoking the history of
Western art as well as his own career, the visual citations undertaken by the painter characterized the
"return to figurative painting" that he then operated. Besides being re-dated by the painter as from 1913
or 1914, several paintings of Malevich’s 1928-1932 cycle on mujiks emulated the pictorial procedures of
pre-revolutionary Russian cubo-futurism. Similarly, the Impressionist or Cezannist paintings developed
between 1927 and 1933 referred back to the beginning of his career, from 1900 to 1911. Through the
eclecticism of his final production, Malevich seemed to quote and rework Russian artistic past.

From 1933 to 1935, however, there is a substantial inflection in the painter's work. Not only did
Malevich's paintings progressively leaned towards a kind of “naturalism”; also, their visual references
changed. For instance, in 1933 "Self-portrait", one of the last works he exhibited during his lifetime, he
stands majestically, wearing garments that allude to Pietro Bembo, Raffaelo Sanzio’s celebrated 1506
work. The reference is explicit.

The greater historical retreat did not point directly to the Russian past or to any moment of
Malevich's career. Such pictorial device was not an isolated case. In fact, in works that were not exhibited
by the painter during his lifetime, such as "Portrait of Nikolay Punin" (1933), "Portrait of the Artist's
Daughter" (1934) and "Portrait of the Artist's Wife" ( 1934), the recurrence of this "naturalistic" figuration
reveals that the bulk of Malevich's final output was centered on the development of this visual pattern. A
substantial part of these portraits possessed the disturbing mark of the black square. The suprematist
symbol was present even in works that did not refer to the Renaissance, ether as a signature or as an
element of the scene. For instance, in the picture "Portrait of a Woman" (1933-1934), the black square is
in the background, hanging on the wall.

The mode of reference to the past Malevich established in his final production seems to diverge
substantially from the manner he had put in place until 1932. Whilst the cycle of paintings on mujiks, for
example, features works "dated backwards" and fixed in the past, his final works produced after 1932 are

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interventions in the present, structured by the clash of profoundly different times. Each of Malevich's
works until his 1933 naturalistic redirection seemed to be conceived from a single artistic style (cubo-
futurism, Impressionism, or Cezannism). His final portraits, however, articulated in the same canvas
references to Raffaelo with, for example, suprematism. How is that conjunction of such disparate
historical moments, which Malevich symbolically undertook, to be interpreted?

2. the “sensation of emptiness” and the “pictorial culture on human face”

Though not all portraits between 1933 and 1934 were signed with the suprematist square or
referred to it, these signatures or mentions are exclusive to them. Notably, it appears in most
"naturalistic" portraits. The black square is not in the landscapes Malevich painted or in any other theme
represented. One might suppose there was some kind of reflection on the portrait form or on the portrait
practice that was linked to the procedures of historical citation Malevich developed. In the transcriptions
made by his student Anna Leporskaja, he is quoted as having said that his portrait production consisted of
a sort of investigation into the "pictorial culture of the human face". 1 Hence, it served an evident reflexive
purpose with eminently historiographical orientation.

In fact, Malevich’s investigative process and its transformations are remarkable. From 1928 until his
naturalistic redirection, most of the painted portraits centered on the geometric representation of mujiks
and were based on chromatic reduction procedures. They were often faceless - only with a monochrome
disc to suggest a head. All the portraits after 1933 represented inexpressive or featureless characters.
Thus, in "Portrait of a Worker" (1933), as in "Worker" (1933) or "Blacksmith" (1933), figures are portrayed
with empty physiognomies and displaying uncertain intimate states. In "Triple Portrait" (1933) and
"Portrait of a man" (1933-34), the emphasis is on the eyes. None of the characters glance at the other.

Despite the differences in modes of representation, his paintings of mujiks also articulated anguish,
human portrait, and reference to the past. In 1932, for example, he wrote on the back of the canvas
"Complex Premonition: Torso in a Yellow Shirt" that "The Composition has coalesced out of elements, of
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the sensation of emptiness, of loneliness, of the hopelessness of life in 1913 in Kunzevo". Malevich
frequently reported "hopelessness of life" in 1932 after his arrest, torture, and dismissal, as well as in the
years that followed, when the painter was diagnosed with cancer and vigorously maligned by the Party.

1
Cf. BOERSMA, Linda. Kazimir Malévitch and the russian avant-garde. Köln: Walther König, 2014.
2
Cf. CHLENOVA, Masha, On display: Transformations of the Avant-Garde in Soviet Public Culture, 1928-1933. PhD
diss., Columbia University, 2010, p. 241.

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 Would we therefore be faced with a discursive resource that deals with the present by evoking the
past? The place of the past in Malevich's final work could accentuate the "sensation of emptiness"
experienced in the present. Why, however, would he have chosen to articulate such references only to
portraits?

3. “specially schooled machines”

A 1933 article published in Iskusstvo, the regime's art magazine, attributed the popularity of
portraiture in the USSR to the fact that the portraits were “one of the active types of political and
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ideological influence over the masses". In fact, portraiture exhibition was encouraged by the
government since the implementation of the First Five-Year Plan (1928) as a way to propagate the
supposed joy of the "new Soviet man", thus mobilizing the masses for work. The encouragement to
portrait production also seemed to be part of the rhetorical change undertaken by the government since
the promulgation of the First Five-Year Plan. After 1928, Stalinist leaders started to get into conflict with
the “factory specialists”, who criticized the fanciful nature of the government’s arbitrarily set productivity
goals. So, against the claim that there would be technical limits to the state policy of productive
expansion, the government conveyed a proactive discourse of mobilization for work, gradually ceasing to
celebrate the Taylorist work of the anonymous masses in order to celebrate the individual effort and
talent of the workers that were engaged in increasing productivity. 4

The rhetorical shift to emphasize individual effort was accompanied by the elaboration of a new
psychic model aiming to counter conceptions of psychism as centered on the unconscious or in societal
influences on psychic development. Thus the “new Soviet man” should be fully aware of his choices and
should be able to overcome any material constraints in order to construct socialism. As Bukhárin said in
the First Pedological Congress in 1928: “we need to direct our strength not into abstract chatter, but into
an effort to produce a certain number of living workers in the shortest time frame; qualified, specially
schooled machines that we can start up right away and set into motion”. 5

3
Apud KATSNELSON, Anna Wexler. “My leader, myself? Pictorial estrangement and Aesopian language in the late
work of Kazimir Malevich”. Poetics Today, vol. 27, 2006, p. 85.
4
See LUCAS, Marcílio Rodrigues. De Taylor a Stakhanov: utopias e dilemas marxistas em torno da racionalização do
trabalho. PhD thesis. Campinas: Unicamp, 2015.
5
Apud PROCTOR, Hannah. Revolutionary thinking: A Theoretical History of Alexander Luria’s ‘Romantic Science’. PhD
Thesis. Birkbeck, University of London, 2016, p. 145.

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 By 1935, when the stakhanovist movement was founded, such function of the portraiture was clear
enough. In the catalog of the "First Exhibition of Leningrad Artists", Malevich’s last exhibition, it was made
explicit that the visual arts should "create a full image of the new Soviet man."6

The optimism and the celebration of the workers and the leaderships, however, are not to be found
in Malevich's final works. Let’s take some of his last portraits. In all of them, the figures occupy almost all
the space of the canvas, and in some of the pictures they gesticulate as if they were speaking. In most, an
indeterminate black background emphasizes the inexpressiveness of the characters. These figures,
therefore, seem to evoke a kind of emptying of the self, also present in the series on the mujiks. The
"Portrait of a Worker" (1933), for example, seems to refer to "Soviet exhaustion", a result of extremely
long working hours that was diagnosed by some of the psychiatrists who were critical of the regime. Do
Malevich’s portrayed characters reveal the impact of the work rhythm of the Stalinist Five-Year Plan’s
implementation?

4. the present of the past

Other artists in the period represented inexpressiveness and anguish. Aleksandr Drevin’s work, for
example, is even more explicit than Malevich’s one in that sense. In paintings such as “Portrait of a
Woman” (1930) and “Portrait of a Young” (1933), Drevin’s characters seem to drown in a world of distress
and apathy explicitly divergent from the visual grammar and optimism demanded by socialist realism. Like
Malevich, Drevin was persecuted by the government: in 1930, he was banned from teaching and in 1938
he was arrested and murdered by the State.

The visual reflection of the negative psyche the accelerated Soviet modernization engendered was,
therefore, a collective reflection. However, only in Malevich's paintings was this reflection articulated
through a series of visual references guiding to the past. In his final works, produced between 1933 and
1934, there seems to be the intuition that the problem of temporality was crucial to the understanding of
this psyche. No mention to the future, as required by the Stalinist creed, is to be found. There were also
no references to the industrialization or to the progress and joy that it supposedly promoted. There was
even no mention to the idea of socialism!

Malevich thus seemed to suggest another temporality model, opposed to the linear time of progress
allegedly directing to a socialist future. Walter Benjamin’s famous "On the Concept of History" (1940)
proposes criticism in the same sense. For Benjamin, one of the cornerstones of the failure of German

6
“Catalogue de la premiere exposition des artistes de Leningrad au Musee Russe”, In MALÉVITCH, K. S., Le mirroir
suprematiste. Trad. Jean-Claude e Valentine Marcadé. Lausanne, L’age d’homme, 1977, p. 190.

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Social-Democracy in combating the rise of fascism lays in this Party conception of history. For the Social-
Democrats, as for most of the Soviet nomenclature of the 1920s and 1930s, history is an empty,
homogeneous continuum determined by the productive forces’ unstoppable advance. Thus, the political
role of social democrats was to bet on the future and redemption of future generations, rather than to
mobilize the forces of the past. Benjamin defended a new understanding of history which would enable
the proletariat to blow up this so-called "empty and homogeneous time" in favor of a time “fulfilled by the
here-and-now”. The creation of a revolutionary “real state of emergency" would thus depend on this
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"awakening" of the past executed by the “final enslaved and avenging class”.

Both Benjamin and Malevich opposed the imperative of progress. If, however, Benjamin made such
a criticism with the concern of fighting fascism, Malevich's final work seemed to be concerned with the
elaboration of the defeat in the USSR. A "time fulfilled by the here-and-now" is nowhere to be found in his
final portraits; instead, time is fulfilled by pasts. Malevich seemed to suggest in his final portraiture that
the Soviet process of modernization, as opposed to giving a “present (…) in which time originates and
comes to a standstill", engendered a constantly-updated past. Malevich's historiographical model, like
that of Benjamin, seems indebted to the dynamics of the psychism established in Freud's works (1856-
1939), for whom the past is "present" at all times through analytical work. This notion of subjectivity
diverged, moreover, from the psychic model developed by the psychologists associated with the regime,
as in the case of Aleksandr Luria, for whom the psychism evolves linearly, from simpler to higher forms.

In fact, Malevich’s paintings do not refer to Benjamin’s revolutionary voluptuousness. On the

contrary, they were situated in the context of the formation of a new ruling class, which managed to
control the homogeneous and empty time of capitalist modernization in the USSR.

If the portraiture encouraged by the Soviet bureaucracy emphasized the joy produced by hope in
the future and by the advancement of the productive forces, Malevich's final portrayal emphasized the
anguish and the subjective emptiness produced by the maintenance of a temporality based on capitalist
relations of production. It does not seem to be fortuitous, for example, that all the visual references
mobilized by Malevich date back to the pre-revolutionary period. Or, still, that all the painted characters
do not take any action. In the characters painted by Malevich, "the past" comes back concretely, through
the reestablishment of authoritarianism and through the intense extraction of surplus value.

7
See BENJAMIN, Walter. "On the Concept of History". In: Selected writings Vol 4. Trans. Edmund
Jephcott. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 389-397.