Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

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Chapter V
field of art theory.8 A remarkable example of this is a concise book entitled The Byzantine Malevich, by Yannis Ziogas, who states that “it would be impossible for the modern aes- thetics, a product of the most savage cultural aggressiveness of the Western-European domain, to accept that one of its main symbols (Black Square) is a product of a chain of complexities which to a high degree also relate to Malevich’s Byzantine roots, and not only to a linear development of Western painting.”9
Thus, as also stated by Ziogas, even art theorists who recognised the similarities be- tween Modern and Byzantine art, such as Clement Greenberg, hesitated “to recognise the umbilical cord which connects Malevich (as well as the Russian art elite generally) to Byzantine art.”10 In the case-studies that follow, we aim to provide an adequate perspec- tive on the specific relationship between Malevich’s painting and the painting of the Late Byzantine period.
Case Study 1: Reinventing the Late Byzantine iconographic tradition
We shall firstly address some of Malevich’s works which precede his abstract or as he termed it Suprematist – “non-objective” style of painting. Our main argument in this first case-study is that Malevich’s obsession with the mystic properties of geometry and the fact that he achieved abstraction, as noted by Golding, through his apprehension of the human body,11 reveal his inspiration from Russian Orthodox iconography as well as his borrowing from the geometric approach to both composition and figure in Late Byzan- tine painting.
This becomes especially intelligible when in some of his early works, which entail anthropomorphic presentations, one considers the religious themes, the geometric in-
8 Also, as clarified in the introductory remarks of this book, our present work has been available as a PhD disser- tation at several university libraries since 2012. Uros T. Τodorovic, “The Diachronic Character of Late Byzantine Paint- ing: The Hermeneutics of Vision from Mistra to New York” (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2012).
9 Γιάννης Ζιώγας, Ο Βυζαντινός Μάλεβιτς (Αθήνα: Εκδόσεις Στάχυ, 2000), 85. (Our translation) «Η μοντέρνα αι- σθητική, το προϊόν της πιο άγριας πολιτισμικής επιθετικότητας του δυτικοευρωπαϊκού χώρου, θα ήταν αδύνατο να δεχτεί ότι ένα από τα κύρια σύμβολά της (Black Square) είναι προϊόν μιας σειράς προβληματισμών που σχετίζονταν σ ́ ένα μεγάλο βαθμό και με τις βυζαντινές καταβολές του Μάλεβιτς και όχι μόνο με τη γραμμική εξέλιξη της δυτικής ζωγραφικής.»
10 Ibid., 85. (Our translation) «...αδυνατούν να αναγνωρίσουν τον ομφάλιο λώρο που συνδέει τον Μάλεβιτς (αλλά και τη ρωσική πρωτοπορία γενικότερα) με τη βυζαντινή αισθητική.»
11 John Golding, Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko and Still (Thames & Hudson, 2000), 47.
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