I FOUND MALEVICH

“When you raise the dead, they bring their baggage.” 

- William Gibson

“Look,” I bent down and picked up a rock. “A stone tool,” I said, holding the palm-sized rock out to show my wife. I gripped the fractured stone against the pad of my hand. My wife looked at me skeptically as I handed it to her. “What makes you think it’s a tool?” she asked. 

“Feel it,” I said, “feel the way it fits in your hand, look at the cleaving along the edge.” Fractured along one side, the pattern, created by percussion strikes, meant that it likely had been shaped thousands of years ago by human hands. 

“Look around,” I said, gesturing to the ground, “All of the other stones here are soft and weathered. This is an outlier, and besides that, look where we are.” We looked up and scanned the vast open ocean of the Great Plains. “This spot would have been a perfect place to keep an eye out for game. From here, you can see forever.” From the tiny hill where we were standing, the undulating surface of the earth went on for miles in all directions. To the West, the vast spine of the Rocky Mountains, to the East, hundreds of miles of this same emptiness. Looking South, one could barely make out the tip of Pikes Peak poking over the horizon. Whether due to a rise of the land, or the curvature of the earth, the fourteen thousand foot mountain barely made its way into view on this crystal clear day, playing peek-a-boo from a hundred miles away.

Holding the stone in her hand, I asked, ”Do you feel it?” Her skepticism seemed to melt away as she cradled the rock in her palm, then moving her arm in a hammering motion. “See,” I said, “Who knows, maybe it was fashioned here on this very spot thousands of years ago. It may have been used to crack bones to extract the marrow.” 

We separated, both scanning the sandy soil for more clues to a lost past. “I think I’ve found something!” my wife called from a hundred feet away.

The tires of the FedEx truck made a crunching noise as they rolled across the frozen slush, squeaking brakes, then the hiss of the air-break. It was a frigid, moonless mid-December night. The package made its way towards our front door, the driver’s flashlight a beacon heralding the arrival of yet another painting from Aachen, Germany. 

This shipment was special. For the past three months, I’d been working with my brother and his friend Brad, divvying-up the offerings made to us by the mysterious German seller. Ever since we’d received the thumbs-up from an art conservator that the paintings we’d purchased from him were without question genuine, period works, we’d made a pact to pool our resources and attempt to acquire every work the seller offered.

Two weeks earlier, over my morning coffee, I’d stared in disbelief at my computer screen, looking at what appeared to be a painting by the Russian artist Kasimir Malevich. Now here it was, sitting in my doorway. My palms were sweaty with anticipation as I signed the waybill. 

I’d told my brother over the phone, “If the paintings arrive, and they’re too perfect, they’re wrong.” I’d seen an extensive exhibit of Russian avant-garde art in the mid-1980s, where I was struck by the immediacy and provisional nature of much of the work. These artists were poor. They were pioneers and explorers of new forms, desperate to make their ideas visible. Their work almost always had a strong sense of urgency.  

I’d become aware of Malevich’s work as an undergraduate art history student. His theories, steeped in an arcane mysticism, had baffled and compelled me; the thousand-yard stare of his Black Square, his colorful and weightless geometric forms, his embrace of complete formal abstraction as poetic nothingness. He’d singlehandedly created an entire twentieth-century art movement called Suprematism. His legend cut a wide swath through the spiritually-oriented sector of the art world. As one of the many artists, poets and intellectuals who were censored under Stalin’s repressive totalitarian regime, his surviving works were few and far between. The vast majority of his life output, it was assumed, was either lost or destroyed. 

Using a box cutter, I began the delicate task of extracting the painting from its chrysalis of bubble wrap and tape. At first glance, the edge of the canvas appeared, weathered with grime, possibly from years of dank storage. The wooden strainer that supported the canvas was painted a dirty white and was clearly very old. Slipping the painting slowly out of its plastic cocoon, it revealed itself. My first impression was of a relic or ancient talisman. I placed the painting on a shelf and stood back. Its occult presence seemed to envelop the entire house. It wasn’t just me who was experiencing this; my wife felt it too. We stood side by side, she covered her mouth, shaking her head, and turned away. “You’re not keeping that painting in this house. That thing gives me goosebumps.”

I gently lifted the painting off its perch and began examining it. The strainer wasn’t the only thing that had been covered with a wash of dull white paint — the entire reverse of the canvas had been painted. The whitewash was obscuring what appeared to be a second painting, glimpses of which could be seen in a few spots where the brittle paint was flaking. On one of the wooden supports, there was a small paper label, which appeared to be an inventory tag.

I asked my wife,“Did you bring your laptop home from work?” “Yep,” she said.  I laid a towel on the table and placed the painting face-down. Using a magnifying glass, we began deciphering the Cyrillic font and typing it into the keyboard of the translation tool, П-р-о-в-е-р-е-н-о 1939-r. The machine spit out the answer — “Retrieved 1939r.” “Holy shit,” I gasped, “That’s the last year of Stalin’s Great Terror, that’s the last year this type of experimental art would have been allowed to see the light of day.” It felt like a gut-punch. People were killed because of this art. I walked over to the window and, looking out onto the frozen street, I closed the curtain.

“That’s a hundred and twenty-million dollar painting,” Issac said. We were standing in a large bank vault, the White Cross lying on a viewing table, as I lifted and leaned it against the wall. “Hold it, I said, examine it,” I said. “No, no, no,” shaking his head, “I’m not touching that thing.”

Issac was a dealer I’d met in New York. His specialty was American Minimalism, an art movement that some claim owes fealty to the work and ideas espoused by Malevich. “Now you see what I’ve been talking about,” I chuckled. He pulled his phone out and snapped a couple of pictures. “I can’t believe what I’m looking at,” he said. Issac was born in Latvia, he’d emigrated to America as a teenager. He told me that he'd grown up under Soviet occupation and learned at an early age to be wary of Russians. "Americans are so lucky, you have the rule of law and democracy. If you were born here you basically won the lottery."  

"Do you miss Latvia at all?" I asked. "Yes," he said, "Latvia is my home, I tried going back but it was just impossible. Everything that I owned that was of any value was stolen, my computer, my watch.” He refocused on the art. “That's probably how you got these paintings, somebody probably dragged them out of some abandoned storage depot.” As he looked at me I sensed a kind of dread. “It’s really scary if you think about it, really, it’s just crazy that you have these.” 

Issac cradled his phone in his hands and reviewed the pictures he’d just taken. “For posterity?” I asked. “I guess so,” he said, his eyes darting between the image on his phone and the actual painting. “I just can’t believe what I’m looking at.” Not intending to be ironic, I asked, “Does its picture on your phone make it seem more real?” I could tell that he felt like someone who was trapped inside a cage with a tiger. Eager to leave, he offered his immediate thoughts, “You’re fucked,” he said with a nervous smile, “if there’s one person on earth that I wouldn’t want to be, it’s you.”

Issac was right. These paintings, especially this one, had made my life something of a living hell. They were my ticket to a journey that, had taken me down some of the darkest corridors of the art world. There was the appraiser who told us that she could sell our collection for millions of dollars, the cash deal she said would likely take place on a remote airport runway. There was the Marxist professor of Russian culture who taught at an elite private university, who sported a giant full-length image of Stalin on his office wall, proclaiming, “Doesn’t he look wonderful!” The same professor later told me that I was lucky to be alive, implying that there are some who’d kill me to stop my collection from ever becoming public. There was the curator from one of the country’s most prestigious museums who, after viewing a few of the more important works in the collection, told me, “You’d better have your passport ready in case you have to flee.” Then, of course, there was the FBI agent who’d asked if I'd consider involving myself in a sting operation against the Russian mafia if it turned out the paintings were stolen. 

I’d met and crossed paths with grifters and hustlers in both professional and amateur guise, Museum curators and directors, dealers, collectors and pickers, basically every manner of art world charlatan imaginable. So when Issac told me that I was fucked, I agreed. I'd already been fucked over a hundred times. 

It had been nearly fifteen years since these paintings had entered my life. The White Cross was special, it had become the poster child for our shared collection of over a hundred and seventy orphaned Russian artworks. Opaque, disinterested, and eternal, they sit in a vault awaiting visitors. 

The gallery was packed, shoulder to shoulder. It seemed more like a New York subway than a museum. I was in Washington, DC, photographing franchised bagel shops, and I’d built an extra day into the schedule for sightseeing. The only place that I was really interested in visiting was the National Gallery. I’d made the mistake of starting my self-guided tour in the modern wing, where there happened to be a retrospective of the American artist Edward Hopper. The gallery was packed; I’d never seen more tortoiseshell glasses, Patagonia fleece vests, and penny loafers in one place. The contemplative pictures were literally un-viewable amongst the bustle. The patrician class who ogled the works were tripping over each other, the silverbacks among them competing for the best spot to have an unobstructed look.

“Why am I here?” I thought, “Why are they here?” Then a woman’s voice piped-up. She was standing next to a painting, her cashmere sweater draped over her shoulders, her manicured finger pointing at the wall label. “Here, honey,” she said to her husband, “this one, this is the painting owned by Steve Martin.” The gallery was noisy, and her move, I assumed, would be seen as déclassé amongst this bourgeois hoard, but I was wrong. The more I looked, the more I realized: a large contingent of these people were here hunting for that painting, the one owned by the celebrity Steve Martin.

I love watching people as they look at art, I love seeing them giving themselves over to something, if only for a brief moment. Art can open us up and make us vulnerable, it can provide a window into our humanity. Art can help us see and feel what others see and feel, and perhaps more importantly, empathize with what others have felt. 

I wandered into the old wing of the museum. A J.M.W. William Turner exhibit was on display, the gallery nearly empty. The paintings were enormous, almost too big. At that moment, I was having a difficult time relating to their grandiosity. Perhaps on another day or another period in my life, I’d see them differently. They were beautiful, but too much. I needed something simpler, something meditative, especially after walking through that blockbuster meat-grinder. 

I passed through the various galleries, Van Ike, Titian, Tintoretto, no, none of these would fit the head-space I was in as I thought about the White Cross sitting in dark storage back home. "Jan van Huysum, that’ll do it," I thought, the 18th-century Dutch painter of flowers. Inch for inch, for me, his paintings are some of the most beautiful artworks on earth, and the museum had one on view.

A bouquet of flowers sits on a table, a snail, a caterpillar, and a bee traverse the floral landscape of the still life. Jan van Huysum’s flower paintings are jaw-dropping, a celebration of the beauty of small things, hypnotic, executed with surgical precision. As a photographer, detail and resolution matter to me. I’m always trying in one way or another to do what van Huysum mastered three centuries ago: to create an image that fools people into believing that they can actually understand and make sense of this world. Nearly alone in the gallery, the masterpiece worked its magic, having a palliative effect on my soul.

The museum was closing in an hour, and I needed to make one more stop. I wanted to have a second look at Leonardo’s painting, Ginevra de’ Benci. I’d seen it years ago, before I owned the White Cross, and for some reason I felt that I needed to see it again. Leonardo’s painting of the young aristocrat is similar in size to the White Cross, and both are similarly opaque, stoic and distant. I wondered if the two pictures shared a commonality beyond being enigmatic and difficult to comprehend.

In the annals of art history, Malevich’s Black Square seems to represent some sort of gravitational collapse, an ideological cosmic vortex. The White Cross has a similar mojo — that’s why my wife wanted it out of the house. “Get it out of the house,” meant, “I don’t want it left here to swallow-up my entire house, then this city block, then my world.”  

Ginevra de’ Benci sits ensconced behind a layer of protective glass. She has her own wall, which rises in the middle of a room surrounded by other Renaissance masters. Leonardo’s painting of a young woman is singled out, given special status. Why?  

As I stood facing the princess I decided to give her a stare-down, see who would crack first. Ginevra de’ Benci had the advantage, she’d been staring off into space for the last five hundred years. Of course, I was bound to lose. Nonetheless, I began my exercise. I immediately noticed something odd. No matter where I moved in the gallery, her eyes never really meet my gaze — she was always looking somewhere else, past me into space. That distant thousand-yard stare looked past everything. At that moment, alone in the gallery with her, it was as if there was a larger presence in the room that only she could see. I turned around, “What are you looking at, Miss Ginevra de’ Benci?” I murmured. Then it struck me, I knew why she had her own wall, and why she was behind that self-contained bulletproof partition. It wasn’t to keep others out, it was to keep her in. Without all of that security and glass, she might just escape, of her own accord out into the cosmos. 

That human need to escape, to transcend, even if just to catch a break from life’s daily grind. I thought about all of the people I’d seen in the galleries, who, like me, were lost in thought and contemplation. I imagined Ginevra de’ Benci escaping, floating in space after our world had exploded. I thought about the White Cross floating there as well. Remnants of human existence, to tell others who we are. Much like that ancient stone tool, they were created out of necessity, then left to the world, to be rediscovered again and again.

Ron Pollard, November 25, 2019