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Approaching the Modern: Montessori, Bauhaus and Suprematism at the Juncture of the
Avantgarde 1915-2015

What is Montessori? What is the Montessori Classroom? What characterizes her approach?
100 years following Dr. Maria Montessori’s one-person show at the Pan American Exhibition in
San Francisco, The Vienna Montessori Institute and Bauhaus Dessau Foundation ponder the
question of archetypes, particularly the geometric form in both the fine arts and children’s
teaching which created generative explosions in education and art, with new Manifesti appearing
in 1913 on the new geometry. Whether Malevich or Kandinsky and the Blauer Reiter, a
paradigmal break with the figurative and the concurrent emphasis on pure color and form act to
express a new perception in education and the arts whose validity finds its very essence in the
new geometry of form. We are witness to the paradox of first forms and the force of change they
bring to society, from simplest apprehensions like those of a square to the most complex artistic
forms as evidenced in art and architecture. It is the leap from prayer to perception.

Can one live without a Manifesto? Or is it precisely the ability of the educator/artist to formulate
a new consciousness that inspires a new way of perceiving? When Malevich discussed the
square in 1913, there were three people present: Malevich, Mikhail Matiushin and Alexei
Kruchenykh. Malevich stated in his Manifesto, “If one insists on judging an art work on the
basis of the virtuosity of the objective representation the verisimilitude of the illusion and thinks
he sees in the objective representation itself a symbol of the inducing emotion, he will never
partake of the gladdening content of a work of art.”1 If we see creativity as a new way of
perceiving, then Malevich and Kandinsky both lend a particular force to the new education and
the new art. We are not trying to capture something, give a representation of it; we rather
engage in a process in which the perceptive-creative capacity emerges from within. “Under
Suprematism I understand the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist the
visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is
feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth…. An objective
representation, having objectivity as its aim, is something which, as such, has nothing to do with
art, and yet the use of objective forms in an art work does not preclude the possibility of its being
of high artistic value.”2 This universal inheritance for all of humanity is where Montessori’s
adaptation of these principles to the child’s classroom experience is of such a revolutionary
nature. Only in departing from the old system are we given the chance to create a new vision,
one not devoid of history and elements of the past but one which focuses on creativity, joy and
cognition as inherent to human nature as opposed to modeled by it.

Noemi Smolik writes of Malevich, “As long ago as the beginning of the 20th century, Malevich
therefore inaugurated a post-modern debate which has still not been recognized as such. What
distinguishes the post-modern debate, if not the critique of Western reason, the critique of the
faith in the explicability and malleability of the world based on this reason and the critique of the
1
Kazimir Malevich, Suprmatism Manifesto, www.moodbook.com/history/modernism/malevich-supremtism
2
Ibid.
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Western feeling of cultural superiority? Malevich was indeed the first post-modern artist. If he
is regarded as a post-modern artist, then it is suddenly possible to understand his career as an
artist which took its course beyond any claim to a linear, continuous, forward-facing
development guided by reason. Rather, it is distinguished by repeated breaks, regressions and by
cyclical processes…”3

Zaum or alogism is the new creation. According to zaum theory, art opens up connections of
phenomena in the world unavailable to ordinary consciousness from new positions. Zaum is
neither stylistics nor linguistics. It is an attempt to introduce intuition into creation and artistic
practice. According to Matiushin’s definition, ‘zaum’ means ‘a new creative intuitive reason
that replaced an unconscious intuition.’4 The new art and education do not deny the figurative
but see the space and locus of that activity in perceptive intuitive rather than historical terms.
This is where a century comes to a close and a new one opens, the richer for its forbears. The
new art and education are neither ancestral nor archaeological in nature, for that would reduce
understanding to content inputs, objects all civilizations gather, make and use, akin to an IKEA
choice. In contrast, look at the cube of the Italian mathematician Gaetano Kanisza. Given its
outlines, through the power of our intellect and curiosity, we are able to affirm our own
perspective. Likewise with Montessori’s Pink Tower, which is created of a series of algebraic
formulae and is found in every Montessori classroom throughout the world:
x 3+ ( x+0.1 ) 3 y , y =1−9. The primacy of the human being over his environment is a principle
which the new art and education evidence, a primacy as valid as dominion in the sixth day of the
Book of Genesis.

Wassily Kandinsky stated that “the spiritual life, to which art belongs and of which she is one of
the mightiest elements, is a complicated but definite and easily definable movement forwards
and upwards. This movement is the movement of experience. It may take different forms, but it
holds at bottom the same inner thought and purpose.” 5 The fundamental characteristics of vision
and the ability to transmit that vision to art and applied art do not lie in the primitive. There are
no limits to the complexity of color and form. It is like an echo of the sets of Malevich’s
“Victory over the Sun,” each titled ‘Doing’. Suprematism and Bauhaus employed not just
manifesti but artistic programmes. It was Kandinsky in Moscow who worked out the
programme of the Institute of Artistic Culture (Inkhuk) in 1920 which both Kazimir Malevich
and Vladimir Tatlin were engaged with in Vitebsk and Petersburg. Following disagreement with
the Constructivist faction of Inkhuk, Kandinsky was invited to join Bauhaus in a teaching
capacity. Bauhaus in the areas of color and geometry gave rise to a new educational agenda.
Already as early as 1911 in ‘Whither’ in “The New Art” Kandinsky stated that “An object… is,
as it were, merely an illusion to the real, an allusion or aroma in the composition. So that’s why

3
Noemi Smolik, Malevich: The First Post-Modern Artist”, p. 65
4
Evvgeny Kovtun, “Victory over the Sun” Kazimir Malevich: Before and After the Square”, State Russian Museum,
Palace Editions, 2013), p. 21.
5
Wassily Kandinsky, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”, Dover Publications (1977), p. 4
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there is no need for the object (the real object) to be reproduced with precision. On the contrary,
its imprecision only intensifies the purely painterly perspective.”6

The square changes and gives rise to new forms, the elements of which can be expressed in
different ways depending on the feeling inspired; it departs from a copy of nature to a new
language of non-ornament which impacted the entire avant-garde’s vision, whether in theater,
art, music, or architecture. London, New York, Paris, Munich, Zurich, Moscow, Milan and
Vienna all bear witness to the fruitfulness of non-ornament as central to the concept of art and
artistic performance. Gesamtkunst or Total Art is introduced in a way which calls for not only
change in detail but change in structure, spiritual perceptions and applications, placing new
demands on the individual which the mapping of earlier systems could not adequately address.

Just as feeling is not predetermined, the creative act in each child is not conditioned by
availability of materials. It is the child’s creative act which employs materials in a unique way to
make for an expression of joy. We are witness to a paradox of material abundance – the so-
called supply-side approach of so many schools and to the fact that were we merely to select
materials we would remain in the process of creating rather than take the step which is the act
itself.

Malevich met with two colleagues to draft his Manifesto in 1913. Precisely in that he trusted
that the masses do not make for art, that mass appreciation does not make for artistic value, he
was a proponent of and catalyst for de-materialization of art. The philosophy of Suprematism
“has every reason to view both the mask and the “actual face” with skepticism, since it disputes
the reality of human faces (human forms) altogether.”7 Here he is reconfiguring the figurative,
and here Montessori concurred with the introduction not of type – but of form and color into the
classroom. . New spatial forms change the frame of canvas or print to an a-real or otherwise
space-defining art. This marked a departure from contained notions of “art as art”, and further
led to artistic developments best termed simulacra, happenings in more than one place at one
time.

The work of Oskar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus, so Franz Anton Cramer, gave rise to physical
movement free of the human being. “The effects of de-materialization lent themselves to a new
concept of theater; the staged works he produced on the Bauhaus stage together with his students
, of which there were a large number, were not conceived as works of the theatre in the strict
sense but as spatialisations of compositional strategies.”8 Whether Malevich’ “Victory over the
Sun” in 1915, the Ballets Russes with “Parade” in 1917, or Hindemith-Schlemmer with their
“Triadic Ballet” in 1923, the new theater followed the course of dematerialization.

6
John Bowlt, The Secret of Seeing: Vasilli Kandinsky and the Secret Doctrines, in “Avant-Garde: Masterpieces of
the Costakis Collection, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, 2001, p. 69
7
Malevich, op. cit.
8
Bauhaus 6, Die Zeitschrift der Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, January 2014, p. 24
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When Arnold Schönberg was published by Piper in 1912, the same year as the Blauer Reiter
Almanach, Kandinsky wrote that “the purpose of painting is to give an outward expression to an
inner impression through the medium of painting. That may seem like a well-known definition!
If we can follow it to its logical consequence, that a painting actually has no other purpose, then I
should like to ask: how many paintings are perfectly clear examples of works unsullied by what
is unnecessary? Or, how many paintings actually remain paintings when measured by this very
harsh and inflexible test, and not mere “objets d’art” that deceitfully simulate the necessity of
their existence?”9

When we speak of the new art and education 100 years after its explosive thematisation by
Montessori, Bauhaus and the Suprematists, these giants tell us that eternals lie within.
Discovering them anew is a responsibility which does not fit into a century but a lifetime. For
their perceptions we can only express the greatest thanks and hope that the viewing public finds
inspiration as high as in its onset.

9
Wassily Kandinsky “The Paintings” in Arnold Schönberg, Catalogue Raisonée, Thames & Hudson, 2005, p.54
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Maria Montessori, color tablets

Maria Montessori, Geometric Tray

Maria Montessori, First Geometric Forms Maria Montessori, Spatial Forms

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r
Auguste Rodin, Les Mains Prieants (1908) Maria Montessori Pink Tower

Gaetano Kanisza Cube

Malevich, self-portrait in two-dimesions 1915 Malevich, Suprmatism

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The Children of the

International Montessori Preschool
Vienna
Proudly Present

A
2013 Graduation Concert
On Color
Thursday, June 27th , 2013, 4:30 p.m.

The Fabiani House, Ungargasse 59-61, 1030 Vienna

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Kazimir Malevich Torso 1928-29 Palace Editions p.92

Ina Conzen’s “The Mission of the New Art” in Bauhaus Schlemmer. Picture of Schlemmer Geteilte Figur 1915/18, p. 49

Malevich, Knife-Sharpener 1912 Malevic MV Matiushin Portrait

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Montessori, Suprematism and Bauhaus

At the Juncture of the Avantgarde 1915-2015

April 7th-30th, 2015

The International Montessori Preschool Vienna
www.montessori-preschool-vienna.com
Ungargasse 59-61, 1030 Vienna
Tel. +43 1 533 2024
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Working Bibliography:

1. Wassily Kandinsky: Concerning the Spiritual in Art

2. Wassily Kandinsky: Essays über Kunst und Künstler
3. Cezanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde
4. Magdalena Droste: Bauhaus 1919-33
5. Johannes Itten: Design as Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus and Later
6. Weber: The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of of Modernism
7. Forgacs: The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics
8. Gropius: Bauhaus 1919-28
9. E.M. Standing: Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work
10. Thomas Muller and Romana Schneider: Montessori: Educational Material for Early Childhood
and Schools
11. Maria Montessori: The Montessori Elementary Material
12. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Remarks on Colour
13. Arnold Schoenberg, Catalogue Raisonné
14. Andres Brinner et al.: Paul Hindemith
15. Magnar Breivik: Musical Functionalism: The Musical Thoughts of Arnold Schoenberg and Paul
Hindemith
16. Jelena Hahl-Koch: Arnold Schoenberg/Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures, Documents
17. Wassily Kandinsky: Point and Line to a Plane
18. Klaus Lankheit: Blauer Reiter Almanac
19. Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years 1915-33
20. Stephen Kurz et al: Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Movement and Balance
21. Manifesto: A Century of Isms
22. Alex Danchev: 100 Artists’ Manifestos
23. Kasimir Malevitch: The Non-Objective World. The Manifesto of Suprematism
24. Malevich catalogues and Manifesto
25. Cubo-Futurist catalogue of the Costakis Collection
26. Ernest Cardullo: Theater of the Avantgarde 1890-1950
27. Frantisek Deak: Symbolist Theater: The Formation of an Avantgarde
28. Juliet Bellow: Mondernism on Stage: The Ballet Russes and the Parisian Avantgarde
29. Theater in Revolution: Russian Avantgarde Stage Design 1913-35