1: A Great Leap Forward
Although we associate Piet Mondrian as the father of abstract geometric art, a somewhat earlier pioneer, paralleling his development through Cubism, was Malevich. This book may have its central thesis of describing the influence of the old Russian spatial measure of the arshin, 16 of which consist a vershok, but what is more important to this reader is how Russian artists learned what was happening in Paris, with the Impressionists and later the Cubists, and how the solid tones of Paul Gauguin brought forth Malevich's producive experiments in geometric conical solids of Suprematism, that in turn was reduced to the radically minimalistic black square on white square canvas. From this single element, the subsequent proportional arrangements of square, rectangle, and line elements upon the canvas offered psychological studies of form and space. As so well described, the importance of rich Russian merchant collectors of contemporary novel art and the exhibition of these work cannot be underestimated. In the turbulent times of late Czarist and early Bolshevik Russia, artists were far from the Parisian center of innovation, but from this backwater came a new vision: pure abstraction of forms. The book is a tad dry in prose, with perhaps too much emphasis on the author's pet concepts of measure and proportion, but the information on the artistic development of this pioneer painter is exceedingly worthy.
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