I previously shared how I accidentally discovered a photograph of my great-grandfather and his brother in a MoMA catalog dedicated to the Russian Avant-Garde and Futurism collection (text about catalog and video about George Kuzmin). Between 1910 and 1914, my great-grandfather, George Kuzmin, actively supported and funded Futurist poets and Avant-Garde artists. Together with his friend Sergey Dolinsky, they published over a dozen books featuring works by Aleksei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, David Burliuk, and others. The very first Futurist anthology, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, even included texts by Wassily Kandinsky. The visual side of these historic editions was crafted by artists like Kazimir Malevich, Olga Rozanova, Lev Shekhtel, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova.
While exploring digitized public-domain editions from that era, I became fascinated by the poem "Game in Hell" (Игра в аду), co-authored by Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov.
The first edition was published in Moscow in a limited run of just 300 copies, featuring hand-lithographed text and illustrations by Natalia Goncharova. Critics heavily attacked the authors — partly because co-authoring poetry was virtually unheard of at the time. The poem itself was an ironic, stylized mockery of archaic folk concepts of hell and devils, drawing inspiration from traditional Russian lubok (popular woodblock prints).
The second edition was published in St. Petersburg in 1914 — without any punctuation marks — and featured illustrations by Kazimir Malevich and Olga Rozanova. Malevich designed the cover and created three illustrations. One of them is titled "Devils Sawing a Sinner" (Черти пилят грешницу).
In a simplified, crude style, it depicts three devils and a nude sinner suspended over a bonfire. One devil pins her arms to the ground while the other two cut her in half with a two-man crosscut saw. Monstrous in subject, yet visually astonishing.
I realized that today, over a century later, this imagery could still deeply resonate. Since the artwork is relatively obscure and in the public domain, I decided to experiment by bringing it to life through animation. The response was overwhelming and unexpected. Using Malevich’s devil characters, I created a series of digital works reinterpreting "Game in Hell".
In a February 2026 episode of 60 Minutes on CBS exploring the AI art market, former MoMA director Glenn Lowry compared Refik Anadol’s work to Van Gogh’s in terms of audience retention time. In today’s era of retention metrics, one of the author's key skills is creating an undeniable "hook."
As it turns out, Malevich’s image of devils sawing a sinner was such a powerful visual hook in 1914 that it continues to capture human attention across entirely new media formats 110 years later.
