Kazimir Malevich, set design for act 2, scene 5,
Victory over the Sun, 1913.
Leningrad State Museum of Theatrical and Musical Arts.


The theater has offered painters, writers, and musicians a unique forum for collaborating on single works of art, and this multidisciplinary environment has given rise to some of the most fantastic and unusual projects in the history of the arts. But none has more fully embodied the spirit of abstraction than the Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. With sets and costumes designed by Kazimir Malevich, prologue by Velimir Khlebnikov, music composed by Mikhail Matiushin, and libretto by Aleksei Kruche nykh, the opera was first performed at the Luna Park Theater in St. Petersburg in 1913.The plot, which symbolizes the human conquest of natural forces and the conquering of the old by the new, revolves around a group of strongmen who capture the sun and enclose it in a square container for destructive or constructive purposes. Dissonant music and sound effects accompany the actors movements and speech. The libretto was written in zaum (transrational language), a linguistic device developed by Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh that relies on puns, neologisms, and the free association of sounds and images; divesting words of any predictable meaning, it was thought to communicate the inner state of the speaker more directly. Malevich s abstract black-and-white sets, consisting of cloth sheets painted wit h geometric forms, were cited by the artist as his first nonobjective works.

Abstraction in the Twentieth Century

Total Risk, Freedom, Discpline

The Pioneers

Between the Wars

Abstract Expressionism

Monochrome Painting

Minimal Sculpture

Post-Minimal Sculpture

The Museum of Non-Objective Painting

Abstraction in:

Photography

Music

Architecture

Poetry

Film

Dance