“The Funeral of Suprematism,”
by Mieczysław Szczuka (1927),
& Malevich’s Suprematist funeral
.
Image: Malevich’s funeral procession,
his coffin carried by Suetin and others (1935)
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Burying Malevich: A Suprematist funeral
.
Translated by Wanda Kemp-Welch.
Between Two Worlds: A Sourcebook of
Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910-1930.
(The MIT Press. Cambridge, MA: 2002).
• • •
The retrospective of Kazimir Malevich in the Polish Art Club (end of March and beginning of April), its character and trends remind me vividly of the first steps of modernism in Poland which also made its debut in the Art Club. Personally, I feel very close to the period (1919-24), it was the period of the formation of Polish modernism, its emergence. Later, others (besides its artists) undertook to further the movement giving it different forms.
At that time “Formism” was breaking down. Leon Chwistek was leaving the scene, Tytus Czyžewski was falling into folk primitivism — only the most talented of the Formists, Kamil Witkowski stood by his principles, which he still develops today.
Back then the group of the youngest artists brought to an extreme some of the problems of form in plastic art which had existed in Formism and put forward, independently, slogans so far completely new to Polish art. In 1924 Teresa Žarnower took the initiative to unite the artists in the Blok group. (March 1924 — the first exhibition of the group and the first issue of programmatic periodical of the same name).
It is now 1927. The Blok group has split — there are different aims and tasks ahead of us. Continue reading







































































