ART

By ROBERT HUGHES

! Sometimes, as though by a benign but unforeseen planetary conjunction, exhibitions in New York City will light one another up. So it is with the present retrospectives of two of the leading figures of Russian modernism: Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Liubov Popova (1889-1924) at the Museum of Modern Art.

Malevich, inevitably, comes out as the more powerful artist (which is not at all to denigrate the brilliant gifts of Popova). His show was seen in Moscow, Amsterdam, Washington and Los Angeles before arriving in New York, but it has special resonance in Manhattan because of the city's history as a forcing bed of abstract art. No single artist "invented" abstraction, but Malevich was certainly one of the first to set forth its claims as a visual language. It was Malevich who did for abstract painting what Picasso, in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, did for the figure. His emblematic work (for Americans) was White Square on White, 1918 -- that unreproducible, fierce, magical white square, canted on a slightly warmer white ground, which has been in the Museum of Modern Art since the '30s and has become a central icon of the reductive impulse. But now we see in depth what went before and came after it: a fascinating spectacle.

One should think of Malevich as an iconmaker. He did. He was a very Russian Russian, a kind of starets, or holy man, filled with chiliastic dreams of the future of art, with an eye for promotion and a remarkable ability to get under the skin of other artists. His decisiveness was amazing. A weak start -- some feeble pastiches of Impressionism, and then a brief phase of yearning Symbolist mystagogy. But then the impact of Fauvism kicked in around 1910, and there was no stopping him. With a kind of relentless metabolic energy, Malevich started grinding through the styles of the Parisian avant-garde, producing unmistakably Russian paintings as he did so. "I remained on the side of peasant art and began to paint in the primitive spirit," he wrote later. The bulky twisting serfs in Floor Polishers, 1911-12, are the laboring cousins of the ecstatic figures in Matisse's La Danse, 1909, and the red-hot metallic forms of The Woodcutter, 1912, are a Tolstoyan version of Leger's "tubism." Aviator, 1914, plays with the standard emblems of Cubism -- printed words, a hat, an ace of clubs. But it has to be the only Cubist painting with a sturgeon in it.

A vigorous partisan in the art groups of Moscow before, during and after the ^ revolution, Malevich invented a new art movement, consisting essentially of himself: Suprematism. It was based on a slippery idea with vast meaning to him, zaum. It meant "beyond reason": zaum stood for a dismantling of artistic conventions, for putting imagination into free fall and thus, Malevich believed, becoming one with nature: "Nature's perfection lies in the absolute, blind freedom of units within it." One joined nature in its absoluteness by painting abstractly. However cloudy Malevich's voluble theories are, his Suprematist paintings are as decisive as razors: those forceful, exquisite arrangements of planes, asserting their aesthetic self- sufficiency on a white ground (which was also the celestial white background of Moscow icons) have an almost heroic daring, which he would push still further in the plain black crosses and black squares of the '20s.

And then came the ice of Stalinism, the crushing of the cultural avant- garde. Malevich retracted; he went back to painting cutouts of peasants in the field; his last picture, from 1933, is a realist self-portrait in which the primary colors of Suprematism are shifted into the panels of the costume he wears. He looks like Christopher Columbus, as well he might.

Unlike Malevich, Liubov Popova died young -- scarlet fever got her in 1924, before Stalin's purges could. She was only 35. At least she was spared the miseries of censorship and persecution visited on other Russian avant-gardists by Stalin. Moreover, she died at a time when it was still possible for an idealistic, exuberantly gifted young artist like herself to believe in the promise of Leninism. Her last works, such as the 1923 collage stage design for a play about the revolution called Earth in Turmoil -- showing a helmeted aviator, prototype of the new Soviet Man, gazing at a gaggle of photographs of Czars and White Russian officers pasted on upside down and annulled by a white X -- are hopeful agitprop, infused with the same clean sharp humor that ran through the work of her German contemporary, the Dadaist Hannah Hoch.

All the same, Popova's talents as a painter could hardly have grown as fast and as confidently as they did without the security of her liberal, upper- middle-class background, the way of life the revolution mercilessly crushed. She was the adored child of a rich Moscow textile merchant, whose money enabled her to go to Paris in 1913 and study under those secondary Cubists, Jean Metzinger and Henri le Fauconnier. Even her student work -- the big studio nudes in a Cubist idiom represented in the show -- has striking analytic toughness. Its painted planes, jutting and curling in imagined space, become literal in 1915: painted cardboard still-life sculptures inspired by Archipenko.

But sculpture was basically too material an art for Popova. A gifted colorist, she wanted to explore what illusions of visual depth and energy a flat surface could contain. One sees this ambition unfolding phase by phase with a steadfast, though unprogrammed, logic. Malevich catalyzed her in 1915, but her series of "Painterly Architectonics" is by no means an imitation of the look of his Suprematism. They are equally inspired by the planes and colors of ancient Russian and Islamic architecture; she married an architectural historian and went as far afield as Samarkand. Occasionally her work strikes an apocalyptic, Kandinsky-like note. One example is the great Painterly Construction of 1920, with its jagged black shapes and whirling cones of force playing across a landscape in turmoil. But generally the keel of feeling is even, the track straight as an arrow. Here was a determined young painter following her nose, with a passionate sense of the edge where formal research bursts into sparks and arpeggios of lyric feeling.