Modern Age
Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935)
Russian Early Abstraction painter.
Kazimir Malevich pushed painting to its zero point and called what he found there Suprematism. Born near Kyiv to a Polish family, he worked through Impressionism, Symbolism, Cézanne-derived Cubism, and Russian Cubo-Futurism in the years before the First World War, absorbing the European avant-garde as fast as reproductions could reach Moscow. Then, in 1915, he did something no one had done: he exhibited a black square on a white ground and declared that the object had been abolished.
At the '0,10: The Last Futurist Exhibition' in Petrograd that December, 'Black Square' hung across the upper corner of the room, in the place a Russian home reserved for its holy icon. Malevich meant the parallel: this was to be the icon of a new, non-objective art built not on things but on 'the supremacy of pure feeling.' In his 1915 manifesto 'From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism' and later writings he worked out a whole cosmology of floating coloured planes, ending in the near-blank canvases of the 'White on White' series.
The Russian Revolution briefly made his abstraction public doctrine: he taught, ran the radical UNOVIS group at the art school in Vitebsk, and helped shape early Soviet design. But as the state turned toward Socialist Realism his non-objective art fell out of favour; in his last years he returned, strangely, to figurative painting, sometimes signing the new canvases with a tiny black square. He died in Leningrad in 1935 and was buried under a Suprematist monument, his coffin marked with the black square.
The words the record keeps using: radical, austere, utopian, elemental, absolute, mystical.
At a glance
- Lived 1879–1935
- Origin Russian
- Worked in Moscow, Vitebsk
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Early Abstraction, Suprematism
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Geometric abstraction
Works in the archive
- Black Square, 1915 (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)
The founding icon of abstract art: a black square on a white ground, nothing more. First shown at the '0,10' exhibition in Petrograd in December 1915, hung high across the corner of the room in the place a Russian… - Red Square (Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions), 1915 (State Russian Museum, St Petersburg)
A red quadrilateral, slightly off-square and tilted, on a white ground — shown alongside 'Black Square' at '0,10' in 1915. Its provocative subtitle, 'Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions', claims that… - Suprematist Composition, 1916 (Private collection)
One of the most dynamic of the coloured Suprematist canvases: bars and quadrilaterals of red, blue, black, and yellow drift and tilt across a white void, seeming to accelerate through a weightless, infinite space. It… - Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918 (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
The furthest reach of Suprematism: a tilted white square set within a slightly warmer white field, colour and object almost dissolved entirely. Malevich associated white with infinity and with liberation from the…
What was said
By Suprematism I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling.
In his 1915 manifesto Malevich declared the break past Cubism and Futurism to a wholly non-objective 'new painterly realism', in which forms would live like the living forms of nature precisely because the depicted realism of hills, sky, and water was gone.
Malevich recalled that when he exhibited a picture consisting of nothing but a black square on a white field, critics and public mourned that everything they loved was lost and that they faced only a desert — but he answered that the desert was filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling, which penetrates everything.
What would Kazimir make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Kazimir Malevich", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Kazimir · Keep a life moment the way Kazimir would · Pictures made after Kazimir