Eduard Steinberg, the painter who answered Malevich from a river town

Eduard Steinberg

Born	March 3, 1937 Moscow
Died	March 28, 2012 (75)
Occupation	Painter
Awards	Order of Friendship

For most of his working life Eduard Steinberg painted squares, circles and crosses floating in pale, chalky light for an audience that could fit into a Moscow kitchen. The Soviet art establishment would not let him join its union, and the geometry he took from Kazimir Malevich was precisely the vocabulary the state had spent a generation burying. What makes him hard to file is that he never used that vocabulary as a code for protest. He treated Suprematism the way an icon painter treats gold leaf: as a way of pointing at something that does not appear in the picture.

That conviction was formed in a small town on the Oka river rather than in an academy. His father, the poet and translator Arkady Steinberg, came back from the camps barred from living in Moscow, and the family settled in Tarusa, a river town outside the capital where ostracised intellectuals had gathered. The son had no formal art training. He learned to draw under his father’s eye and earned his living as a watchman, a navvy and a fisherman, which is roughly how the Soviet system classified a painter who would not paint what it asked for.

He was a Muscovite by birth, born on 3 March 1937, and lived in Tarusa from 1954 to 1961, and in May 1961 he took part in an exhibition there that the Great Russian Encyclopedia counts among the first public showings of Soviet nonconformist art. His younger brother Boris, born a year after him, also became a painter. By the 1970s Eduard belonged to the informal Sretensky Boulevard circle of Moscow studios, the same loose network that included Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov and Vladimir Yankilevsky.

His paintings of the early 1970s are bright, near-empty landscapes in which geometric bodies hang like objects in a still life above a low horizon. From 1980 he also worked in gouache and collage on cardboard. The German art historian Claudia Beelitz, author of a monograph on his metaphysical painting, has traced unexpected parallels between their light and space and the still lifes of Giorgio Morandi. The signs in them are not technological, as Malevich’s had been. The cross recurs more than any other, and the contemplative, religious charge critics read in them is never far from the surface.

The relationship with Malevich became explicit in 1981. When the founder of Suprematism’s Black Square was shown in Moscow, Steinberg saw it in person for the first time and answered with an essay addressed to the dead painter by his initials, Letter to K.S., which later gave its name to his first solo show in Poland at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź in 2009. He was just as frank about the older Russian source. “Yes, Rublyov is central for me,” he said in 2001 of the medieval icon painter. “In his Troica I see Byzantine and European tradition united.”

His father’s death in 1984 sent him further into the countryside and produced the work often described as the high point of his career, the village cycle, in which the faces of rural neighbours are only sketched in outline inside geometric fields, with canvases named after people and places. It was shown complete in Moscow in 1989, at his first solo exhibition in the city, and Museum Wiesbaden describes the response as an immediate success after decades as an underground secret.

The door to the West opened a year earlier, on terms that said a great deal about the system. Invited to exhibit in France in 1988, Steinberg was, as Russian accounts of his life record, rushed into the USSR Union of Artists on instructions from the Central Committee after twenty years of rejected applications, so that he could travel. From then on Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris represented him. In 1992 he won a competition to paint the staircase of the R+V insurance building in Wiesbaden, four wall-sized canvases that the city’s museum calls his first recognition in Western Europe. He settled into a rhythm of winters in a Paris studio and summers in Tarusa.

The awkward part of his reputation is that the story the West learned to tell about the Moscow underground was not built around artists like him. A Russian report on the handover of his studio put it plainly: the line of abstract symbolism that Steinberg shared with Mikhail Shvartsman proved less popular than conceptualism and Sots Art. Irony travelled; contemplation did not. Kabakov’s albums and Bulatov’s slogans travelled abroad as dispatches from inside the system, while a painter who answered Malevich with crosses and quiet light looked to some like an anachronism, and to others like Malevich’s dutiful heir. When the Frankfurter Allgemeine reviewed him in 1990, its headline said he had set Malevich on his feet, a compliment that also kept him standing in the older man’s shadow.

Official Russia caught up late. The Russian Academy of Arts made him an honorary member in 2008. He died in Paris on 28 March 2012 and, as he had asked, was buried in the old town cemetery of Tarusa, under a plain granite cube. His wife, the art and film critic Galina Manevich, whose memoir is the fullest account of his life, then placed his estate in museums. In 2013 she gave 83 paintings and collages to Museum Wiesbaden, which showed them in 2015 as East/West: Eduard Steinberg between Moscow and Paris, and in 2016 a late triptych from 2010 entered the Centre Pompidou’s collection as her gift.

That same summer the Tarusa studio he had built in 2001 passed to the Pushkin Museum, which turned it into a residency and a summer school for young art historians and committed to a catalogue raisonné. The Moscow Museum of Modern Art marked what would have been his 80th birthday in 2017 with drawings, watercolours and collages never shown before, and the State Tretyakov Gallery gave him a full retrospective, Moscow. Paris. Tarusa, from May to July 2022. This autumn his work reappeared at Bonhams in Paris among the Soviet nonconformist works a Swiss reporter had bought directly from Moscow studios.

Those journeys trace the shape of his life: a painter barred from the capital, then from the official union, then from travel, whose work now hangs in the museums of the two capitals he moved between. The geometry he defended in a river town was never meant as a style. It was an argument that abstraction could still carry faith, and the cube over his grave in Tarusa makes the same argument without a word.

Tags: art, artists, painters, Eduard Steinberg, Ilya Kabakov, Soviet nonconformist art