Aviator

Description

Painting Name: Aviator
Artist: Malevich, Kasimir
Medium: Oil Painting on Canvas

The Aviator and the Concept of "Zero State." Like the Englishman, the Aviator possesses the Futurist prophetic white fish and saw of the trans-rational language. The aviator is a free man of the future who reveals new worlds, breaks the laws of space and time, and, therefore, embodies the Cubo-Futurist ideal. Malevich's metallic hero paradoxically

hangs in the air without an airplane, as if embracing the idea in the Victory over the Sun that the destruction of the sun and the past results in freedom from the laws of gravity. It is significant that the Cubo-Futurist poet Kamensky was an aviator.

In the painting, the aviator is a gambler, as made clear by the fact that he holds the ace of clubs in his left hand. The poem A Game in Hell by Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, illustrated by Goncharova in 1912 and by Malevich and Rozanova in 1914, describes hell as an eternal card game–a cynical world of lust and bluff. The game is played by devils and brave sinners, these last the Futurist heroes (outcasts) who reject the world of love, choosing instead "the destiny of rebellions and thunders; /The destiny of the broken Law, /And of the flight into the realm of strange dreams." As the card game progresses, it becomes more and more senseless and tedious so that, in the end, boredom destroys hell. Kruchenykh called this poem an "ironic gibe at the archaic devil, done in the style of a lubok [folk print]." Further, in his 1913 essay, The Devil and the Speech-Creators, Kruchenykh criticized Russian writers from Nikolay Gogol to the Symbolists for their fear of Satan and the end of the world, declaring that he himself had descended into hell and defeated the devil. The Futurists saw the world as an empty place and believed that hell would perish "in its principal lust for torment and chance." In A Game in Hell, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov tackled the subject of the devil and hell, while Goncharova's cover for its first edition portrays the grotesque head of a devil with three aces, omitting the ace of clubs, which is represented by the demon himself. Malevich painted his aviator holding the ace of clubs in his hand to manifest the victory of the Futurists over the devil.