Ilya Chashnik
1902-1929
Ilya Chashnik was born in Lutsyn, Latvia, and studied in Vitebsk under Chagall’s former teacher Yehuda Pen in 1913. In 1919 he entered SVOMAS (Free Art Studios) in Moscow, returning to Vitebsk in September of the same year. In November, Malevich replaced Chagall as Director of the Vitebsk Art Practical Institute, and Chashnik joined UNOVIS (Champions of New Art) where, in 1920, Malevich formulated the departmental organisation. From 1920-21 Chashnik edited the UNOVIS journal before leaving Vitebsk for Petrograd in 1922, together with Malevich, Suetin, Yudin, Ermolaeva, Khidekel and others.
That year, Chashnik began work at the Lomonosov State Porcelain Factory and became a member of INKHUK (Institute of Artistic Culture). By 1923, he, Malevich and Suetin were the only practitioners of Suprematism. In 1924 he helped Malevich with the construction of his architectural models, ‘architectons’. Two years later he began working on a series of his own.
In 1925 Chashnik took part in the Paris ‘Exposition Internationale des arts decoratifs et industriels modernes’ and in 1928, together with Suetin, with whom he is most closely associated, designed the residential quarters for the Bolshevik Factory in Leningrad.
He died in 1929 in Leningrad, while undergoing an appendix operation.
‘If Ilya Grigorievich Chashnik had not died prematurely, and if he lived his life in Paris or New York, there is no question that his name would now enjoy wide and distinguished recognition among collectors, scholars, museum curators and gallery owners – the acclaim normally reserved for great, original talent. The sheer energy and spectacle of Chashnik’s work – the clarity of his abstract painting and design, the inventiveness of his reliefs, the prefiguration of future forms contained within his architectural projects – arrest our attention and cause us to wonder how, within a single decade of artistic practice, Chashnik managed to produce so much of extraordinary worth; and we wonder further how Chashnik would have developed his abstract systems had he lived into the 1930s and 1940s.’ John E. Bowlt (reproduced with kind permission)
From the James Butterwick exhibition catalogue 2011.
