“Kazimierz Malewicz 1876–1935” by Władysław Strzemiński: Artist’s Book as Hommage

In 1936, the year after Kazimir Malevich’s death, Polish artist Władysław Strzemiński and his students in Łódź produced an album in honor of the Russian avant-garde master. Malevich’s legacy in Poland was well established by that time: his radical work in abstraction and Suprematism was embraced by artists and architects in the 1920s, many of whom had met him while visiting his exhibition of paintings and architectural propositions (Architectons) in Warsaw in 1927. Strzemiński, a leader within Poland’s Constructivist avant-garde, was a key part of that legacy, having studied under Malevich in Moscow in 1918 and worked with him in the art school in Vitebsk, in the Soviet Union, before moving to Poland in 1921.

This 1936 album of the utmost rarity—one of only two known extant copies—offers a fascinating perspective on the critical exchange between the Russian and Polish avant-gardes. Opening with a vintage photograph of Malevich (an enlarged fragment of a photograph taken of Malevich and artist peers at GINKhUK [Petrograd State Institute of Artistic Culture]), the album is distinguished by an original four-color lithograph by Strzemiński, composed in Malevich’s “Suprematist style.” The following pages contain twenty-five lithographs made by Strzemiński’s students after Malevich’s canonical portfolio 34 Drawings (1920/21), a series that Strzemiński knew firsthand from the Soviet Union and of which he likely had a copy. The 34 Drawings portfolio had great resonance in Poland, where elements were reproduced in magazines such as Blok and Forma, and it served as an inspiration for many artists’ works, including Mieczysław Szczuka’s photomontages of the 1920s. The album concludes with ten vintage photographs of Malevich’s Architectons. Presenting his Suprematist ideals in three dimensions, Malevich’s Architectons were highly influential as both sculpture and architecture, understood as avant-garde art objects and as blueprints for a new urbanism. During his trip to Warsaw in 1927, Malevich left one of his Architectons (“Zeta”) with the architect couple Helena and Szymon Syrkus in Łódź, allowing Strzemiński and his students close access to this example. In the album, five of the Architecton photographs were made from the few existing reproductions in Polish journals at the time (such as those in the 1926 issue of Praesens), and five were directly printed from negatives. According to Strzemiński’s letters, Malevich sent him these negatives of his Architecton images in about 1930 or 1931. Combined from these elements, this album—an unusual pedagogical exercise—highlights the means of distribution that facilitated the circulation of Malevich’s progressive ideas among Polish Constructivists and is extraordinary testament to the artist’s long-lasting influence.

This artist’s book was acquired for the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in 2012 after Magdalena Moskalewicz undertook a research trip to Łódź in Poland to examine the other known copy, which is held in the collection of Muzeum Sztuki Łódź (established through the efforts of Strzemiński and his peers as early as 1931). The Łódź copy differs in details. It was executed with different paper and features another portrait of Malevich (a larger frame taken from the same original photograph) on its first page as well as a slightly different order of lithographs. These particularities speak to the level of freedom that Strzemiński might have given his students in the execution of the album. The copy acquired by MoMA once belonged to one of those students, the artist Samuel Szczekacz (Zur), who left Łódź for Belgium, and later Palestine, just before the outbreak of World War II, saving the book from possible destruction.

The new acquisition was exhibited at MoMA immediately, in the exhibition Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925 (December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013). A few years earlier, the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books acquired another book designed by Strzemiński, together with Katarzyna Kobro, a collection of poems Z ponad (From above, 1930) by a Polish avant-garde poet Julian Przyboś. Together these two books establish an important bridge between the Museum’s growing knowledge of Polish modern art and MoMA’s renowned collection of Russian avant-garde material.