Malevich: Are Tate visitors ready for this master of modernism?

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) is one of the founding fathers of Modernism, and as such entirely deserves the in-depth treatment with which this massive new Tate show honours him. But it should be recognised from the start that this is a difficult exhibition, making serious intellectual and emotional demands on visitors, as art enters the realm of pure thought, utterly divorced from the comforting world of appearances. Malevich was one of the first great revolutionary practitioners of abstract art, a pioneer who made work of singular beauty and resonance, but his path is not always easy to follow. Perhaps with this in mind, the exhibition starts with a room of early, mostly figurative work, in which Malevich is shown experimenting with different ways of depicting. These range from the full but softly stated realism of ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Father’ (1902–3), to a more heavily textured and pointillist approach in ‘Church’ and ‘Houses in the City’, to the more decorative and folk art influenced ‘Little Village’ (1908), and the emblematic ‘Self-Portrait’ (1908–10).

This group of paintings is gathered to show the roots of Malevich’s art, but also to demonstrate that he was skilled in various accepted realist styles before he decided to seek what he believed was an alternative and more convincing truth. Two paintings here offer a taste of things to come: ‘Landscape’ and ‘Bather’, both of 1911. ‘Bather’ is a sophisticated version of primitivism seen (and absorbed) through the filter of the modern — specifically Matisse and Gauguin. But it has an unexpected Play-Doh Frankenstein’s Monster awkwardness about it as it flippers its way through an overheated world. Where will this strange figure lead? We follow it through a couple of rooms of avant-garde experiment, mostly in the curved planes and glowing colours of a hybrid called Cubo-Futurism — Futurist dynamism combined with Cubist fracturing — and then into Room 4 which explores Malevich’s involvement with poetry and the theatre.