Abstract

I.V. Kliun (1873–1943), one of the luminaries of the Russian avantgarde, took several decades to study the theory of color and the possibilities of working with color in practice. He considered color to be a key “element” of painting, which distinguishes it from other forms of art. At the same time, the artist was interested in the ways color interacts with other “elements” of painting — light, shape, texture, etc. The most fruitful result of this work is presumably a group of works that were created by Kliun in the first half of the 1920s on the principle of “light-color” and represented an original version of non-figurative art that stemmed from Suprematism. This part of the artist’s legacy has not yet attracted special attention of researchers. The article traces the prerequisites for Kliun’s transition to work based on the principle of “light-color” and investigates how he pursued and theoretically substantiated the trend of the “dispersal” of color, which appeared among Russian non-figurative artists around 1917, though for various reasons most of them did not support its long-term development. An attempt is made to place the group of works based on the principle of “light-color” into the artistic context of the era and compare it with the works of K.S. Malevich, O.V. Rozanova, A.M. Rodchenko et al. Th e article investigates Kliun’s conceptual substantiation of the principle of “light-color” and its roots in the worldview of the artist infatuated with the idea of a universal rhythm, which determines, as he believed, how the entire Universe develops and becomes apparent in works of art. Kliun programmatically contrasted his compositions, where geometric forms are filled with dynamics and light, lack sharpness and seem to be “dispersed” in space, with the “frozen forms” of Malevich’s Suprematism, with whom he entered into the controversy. Works based on the principle of “light-color” are interpreted as a distinct form of geometric abstraction, created by Kliun to oppose not only Suprematism, but also the industrial art of the early 1920s.