Ilya Chashnik (1902-1929) - Architecton

Extremely rare relief by the Russian artist Ilya Chashnik. This work is one of the few examples of a three-dimensional "architecton", the works influenced by the architectonics of Chashnik's master, Kasimir Malevich. This piece measures 42.5 x 22.5 x 2 cm. The work is signed and dated on the back and was created in Vitebsk (now Belarus) where the art society UNOVIS (led by Kasimir Malevich) had gone from Moscow. This painting is accompanied by a photo book by American journalist John Bausman and a copy of the correspondence between George Costakis and John Bausman (see below).

Provenance

Ilya Chashnik family collection, Moscow
George Costakis collection, Moscow
John Watts Baer Bausman III, Greenwich, USA, gift from George Costakis (1973)
Dutch collector (2016, after the death of John Bausman)

COA
Alexander Arsamastev, who is currently working on the Catalogue Raisonné of El Lissitzky, examined the work in 2025 and issued a COA.

John Bausman
In 1973, American Associated Press journalist John Bausman was the first Western journalist to visit later-famous collector George Costakis. During this visit, Bausman photographed the works hanging in Costakis’s apartment and took notes that he later used to write his article. After his article was published, George Costakis sent John Bausman a thank-you letter. A (digital) copy of this thank-you letter and the accompanying envelope will be provided to the purchaser.

Ilya Chashnik
Il’ia Grigorievich Chashnik was born on June 20, 1902, into an ordinary Jewish family in Lyucite, Latvia. He spent most of his youth in Vitebsk and left school at eleven to work in a small clockmaker workshop.

From 1917 to 1919 Chashnik studied art with local artist Iurii (Yehuda) Pen, after which he moved to Moscow in 1919 to attend the newly opened VKhUTEMAS [Higher State Art and Technical Studios]. Only a few months later he switched to the Art Institute of Vitebsk to study with the Russian-Jewish folk painter and avant-gardist Marc Chagall. He quickly became fascinated by the work of Kazimir Malevich, the founder of Suprematism. Malevich happened to also teach at the institute before he was promoted and took the lead in the winter of 1919-1920. El Lissitzky was also briefly a mentor to Chashnik before he left for Western Europe.

When Chashnik began studying with Malevich, his paintings underwent a radical change. Chashnik developed his own distinctive style within the suprematist idiom and built on Malevich's ideas about abstraction and non-figuration to create floating geometric forms with intersecting planes. Whereas Malevich painted white-on-white works, shrouded in a delicate silence and simplicity, Chashnik evolved toward more dynamic works in which black was the predominant element.

Together with a number of other talented students from Malevich's class – Nikolai Suetin, Vera Ermolaeva, and Lev Iudin – Chashnik participated in organizing the group POSNOVIS [Followers of the New Art], later renamed UNOVIS [Affirmers of the New Art], and contributed to all of their exhibitions. He formed a particularly close friendship with Suetin, a friendship and creative collaboration that would continue until Suetin's early death in 1929.

Moreover, while still in Vitebsk, Chashnik helped Malevich in 1921 with drafting the curriculum for the Architecture and Technology department in Vitebsk.

When local authorities expelled UNOVIS from Vitebsk in 1922, Chashnik, Suetin, Ermolaeva, and Iudin followed Malevich to Petrograd to join GINKhUK. During the Petrograd/Leningrad period, Chashnik devoted himself to exploring possible applications of suprematist art in everyday life.

He worked as a designer with Suetin at the Lomonosov State Porcelain Factory and from 1923 collaborated with INKhUK [Institute for Artistic Culture] on textiles, posters, and buildings. From 1925 he also collaborated with Konstantin Rozhdestvenskii at the Institute of Decorative Arts. In 1927, Chashnik and Suetin both joined the architectural brigade of Aleksandr Nikolskii, where they worked on wallpaper designs and color schemes for painted buildings.

Toward the end of the decade Chashnik married Cecilia Gorodneva, who gave birth to their son (also named Il’ia) in 1929. Unfortunately, the great avant-garde painter and innovator died that same year during a failed appendectomy. Despite his early death, he remains one of Malevich's most prominent students and a memorable advocate of Suprematism.