Malevich

"We have worked very closely with colleagues from the State Russian Museum, whom we thank for the chance to bring masterpieces by Malevich to the region for the first time."

In 1923 Malevich, who had been teaching art in Vitebsk, came to Petrograd to take charge of the Museum of Artistic Culture, soon renamed with the acronym GINKhUK (State Institute of Artistic Culture).

Valaya proposes a new approach to this collection in which mainstream painters like Rothko, Mondrian or Malevich can express their feelings in a similar way as a Turkmen, Kurdish or Luri tribeswoman.

In terms of influences, they cite modernist visionaries like James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and the Russian abstract painter Kazimir Malevich, whose Suprematist Manifesto of 1926 called for the rediscovery of "pure feeling in creative art" (and whose geometric symbols are peppered throughout the opening episodes of Life and Times).

Here his familiar referencing of Malevich's 1915 exhibition of Suprematist paintings, which Diao first begun in 1984, is paired with an image taken from Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov's studio.

This volume is published in conjunction with a dazzling 2011 exhibition organized at the Gagosian Gallery, New York--a special exhibition featuring six pivotal paintings by the Russian pioneer of abstract art, Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935).

The 12 "masterpieces" cited--works by Matisse, Seurat, Durer, Gris, Malevich, Rousseau and others--are worthy of note.

In addition, several essays offer sophisticated theological analysis, most notably Vrudny's engagement of torture and the sacramental imagination in the paintings of Ricardo Cinalli; Charles Pickstone's reflections on the transcendentals of beauty and truth in Kasimir Malevich's Black Square; Cather Weaver's theological apologetics of outsider art; and Cindi Beth Johnson's treatment of esthetics and ecclesiology.

John Humphrys invites four contestants to take to the black chair and answer questions on their specialist topics of John Wesley, Seinfeld, Kazimir Malevich and the Wars of the Roses.