WLADISLAW STRZEMINSKI AND XENIA ELDER
I want to finish by evoking two painters who are quite outside the Gleizes school or circle of connections - the Polish or Byelorussian painter (the borders of that part of the world being rather moveable), Wladislaw Strzeminski, and the Russian painter Xenia Elder.
Strzeminski I would place on the side of 'intensity' He presents us with a series of clearcut shapes and powerful and simple colour contrasts, though there is an idea of mobility in his idea that these paintings should be seen as a sequence, with the effect of each painting modified by the after-image of the one before it:
Although Xenia Ender did not have a method for the mobility of the eye in any way comparable to that of Gleizes I would nonetheless situate her more on that side of the question. She was a pupil in the early days of the Soviet Union of Mikhail Matyushin, a musical composer as well as a painter though what I've seen of his paintings, mainly conceived to illustrate various points about the operations of the eye, seems to me much less interesting than Xenia's. Matyushin composed the music for the opera Victory over the Sun with sets by Malevich which are often seen as the beginning of non-representational art in the Russian Empire. He is also of interest to me as having, during the war, translated and published extracts from Du "Cubisme".
There is something in this interweaving of apparently arbitrary shapes that may remind us of the textile from the Congo we saw earlier:
And here to finish with, just as a visual treat, two more from Xenia Ender, perhaps one of the loveliest minds in the history of twentieth century painting:
