ART REVIEW : Armand Hammer Museum Opens : First Exhibit Tracks Career of Malevich

Westwood’s new Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center opens to the public today. Its main-stage events are the umpty-eighth reintroduction of Hammer’s collection, the official unveiling of the building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes and an unprecedented retrospective of the art of the Russian avant-garde visionary Kazimir Malevich.

Sunday night, Hammer celebrated with a gala bash. You’d never have guessed at the controversy and bad blood surrounding the genesis of the place from seeing this jolly, bedizened bunch.

Never mind. Have an hors d’oeuvre and stroll the building.

Barnes’ design is not a disaster. But there are things wrong with it that can’t be fixed. The horizontally striped marble facade is too aggressive. Despite nice architectural bits, inside detailing feels rushed. In short, it has more flash than finesse.

Never mind. Have a canape and look at the art.

The first painting one encounters in the lobby does not bode well. It’s a disaster of an official corporate portrait of Armand Hammer himself. Things don’t get better when one notes that recent additions to the collection are mainly Victorian potboilers that do not enhance a trove that will always run well behind other area museums in quality, passion and cohesiveness.

“Kazimir Malevich 1878-1935,� by welcome contrast, is an only slightly mitigated triumph. The landmark show also visited the National Gallery and will go to New York’s Metropolitan Museum after closing here Jan. 13. That is good company for the fledgling museum.

The exhibition’s largely abstract contents and radical posture are completely out of whack with the conservative spirit of the institution. That’s exactly why it’s a show that must be seen. Some withdrawn pictures notwithstanding, it is the most comprehensive U.S. retrospective of the artist widely regarded as the theoretical godfather of the Russian avant-garde, that brave band of innovators that rose with the Bolshevik revolution and sank when communism hardened into brutal bureaucracy.

Malevich is not easy to figure. The exhibition might be called “The Four Faces of Kazimir Malevich� so distinct are the phases of his art. What sort of chap could this have been?

He was born in Kiev in 1878. His father was a manager in a sugar refinery who would take the boy along to work. Young Kazimir was fascinated by the machinery, especially its “hissing and groaning.� His father told him that one day man would invent machines that would eliminate labor. Icons fascinated the boy although the family was not especially religious. But what really got to him was nature. Like Baudelaire, he loved scudding clouds.

Just a simple country kid.

Not exactly. Moving to Moscow in 1904 to study art, he joined striking workers in the Battle of the Barricades of 1905 after that bloody Sunday in which demonstrating citizens were massacred.

It’s a wonder any of the avant-garde found time to make art. It’s a wonder Malevich found time for three wives. First he was called up for World War I and ordered to the front. Then, like other Russians, he found himself in the middle of a revolution and civil war.

Artists operated with the same radical fervor as militant revolutionaries, and Malevich was in the thick of it. A tireless dialectical pamphleteer and teacher, he participated in exhibitions and events that sometimes had a Dada flavor. For awhile he and his mates wore red wooden spoons on their lapels. He had himself photographed with fellow artists under what appeared to be an upside-down grand piano suspended in thin air. None of this was frivolous. Russian artists were as unfrivolous as Ninotchka before Melvyn Douglas got his hands on her. Everything had a serious dialectical point.

One of the most serious was the artists’ determination to destroy conventional art and unify all the arts in the service of the revolution. For Malevich the most crucial of all these pan-arts projects was the 1913 Cubo-Futurist opera “Victory Over the Sun.� The artist later said that his collaboration in the project gave him the ideas for his central style, Suprematism.

His art came a long way. The earliest work on view finds Malevich a kind of woolly provincial Impressionist-cum-Symbolist. There is little to see beyond awkwardness, unless you look again. Everything in the pictures is trying to blend into a pleasant colored floating nothingness. The work is naively impelled by Malevich’s early urge to merge with nature.

Then the beast emerges.

A 1908 gouache self-portrait shows Malevich as a blue-jawed slugger who may be about to bust his cravat by flexing his neck muscles. He does so in a series of powerful but ham-handed pastiches that reflect a young artist absorbing new influences. Figurative works like the 1911 “Bather� and “Floor Polishers� take all the elegance out of Matisse, transforming his figures into troglodytes. Then come such Legeresque works as “The Woodcutter� of 1912. In them, all forms look like they were cut by a tinsmith. They must embody Malevich’s memory of the sugar refinery and should be labeled “Tubo-Futurism.�

Had Malevich stuck to these guns he would have remained a compelling, powerful and offbeat modernist from the hinterlands.

Then the visionary emerges.

Today we are bloody sick of artists who put a black square on a white field and announce they have finally made the universal art. But Malevich did it first. There is no mixing up his Suprematist compositions with European Constructivism. That non-objective art was largely rational. Malevich’s was inspired and philosophical.

One Suprematist genre uses colored rhomboids obliquely arranged to create a dynamic sense of space. Some have risible titles like “Suprematism: Painterly Realism of a Football Player--Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension�--all, however, reward the eye. Their spare, coolly impassioned visual play offers a universe ordered by controlled irrationality. It’s a cosmos contrasting Kandinsky’s roiling romantic chaos.

A yellow-ochre wedge is painted as if fading into space. It’s both completely dumb and astonishingly predictive of everything from Minimalism to California light and space art.

But it is always the Absolutist Malevich that gets to you. Here, three paintings function as a kind of triptych. You see a black square, a black circle and a black cross. That’s it. Malevich manages to invest them with awesome presence. His was an era leading to symbols of absolute power--the hammer and sickle, the swastika, the rising sun. He managed greater symbolic effect with simple geometric forms.

It was a largely unrepeatable act. Subsequent abstract art has had great virtue, but next to Malevich’s sheer archaic power it looks a bit wimpy. He was able to invest the Suprematist work with what he called “the fifth meaning.� Beyond art’s function as a utilitarian, emotional, aesthetic or geometric object he saw that a cupboard is a cupboard and running is running. There is a simple presence to things. Malevich knew how to get that.

Then he lost it.

In the ‘20s he returned to a kind of figurative art. There is a dopey abstract composition with horses galloping across a stripe. There is a pathetic self-portrait as a Renaissance master. There are faceless, lathed figures that look like peasant pawns. All of it is laced with weary metaphysical sentimentality.

Maybe this most uncompromising of artists was trying to temporize with growing official demand for an art ordinary Soviets could understand. Maybe he was quietly satirizing the apparatchiks. Maybe he had just mined out Suprematism the way Pollock mined out drip painting.

We may never know.

Malevich’s last years were not happy. The government started closing schools that fostered the avant-garde. Malevich lost his teaching post. He got out of the country for awhile, visited the Bauhaus at Dessau and left a lot of work in Germany as if he knew what was going to happen to it.

In 1930 he was interned for two months while he was questioned about “the ideology of existing trends.� Imagine being grilled about aesthetics. But that was the Soviet Union, and it wasn’t funny.

Malevich died in 1935 at 57. He lay in state in a Suprematist coffin of his own design. His works were confiscated and hidden from the public until 1977.

There is paradox, pathos and puzzlement in seeing such a show in a multimillionaire’s monument to himself in capitalist Westwood. If the museum continues to bring such challenging and original fare it will serve the community well. If not it will just be a nice place for weary shoppers to get a little culture at lunch.

THE HAMMER MUSEUM

The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center at 10899 Wilshire Blvd. in Westwood opens with “Kazimir Malevich, 1878-1935,� featuring 170 paintings, works on paper and architectural models, through Jan. 13. In addition, the museum features a $450-million permanent collection amassed by Hammer over the last 50 years. Admission to the museum and the Malevich exhibition is $4.50 for adults, $3 for students and seniors 65 or older, and free for children 16 or younger. The 79,000-square-foot museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 7 p.m. Museum parking is $3 for two hours, and is available in the museum lot, which has entrances off Westwood Boulevard and Glendon Avenue. Tickets for the Malevich show are issued on an hourly basis and reservations can be made through the museum box office at (213) 443-7000 or through Ticketmaster at (213) 480-7676, (714) 740-2000 or (619) 278-TIXS.