Malevich, Kasimir

Malevich, Kasimir (1878–1935). Russian painter, designer, and writer, with Mondrian the most important pioneer of geometric abstract art. He was born in Kiev, where he studied at the School of Art, 1895–6. For a few years he worked for a railway company to raise money, then moved to Moscow, where he continued his studies at the School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1904–5) and elsewhere. At this time he also became involved in underground politics (he was once arrested for distributing banned literature), showing the left-wing sympathies that were to run throughout his life. His early paintings were in an unexceptional Post-Impressionist manner, but he began to absorb the influence of contemporary French art (partly through the superb collections of Morozov and Shchukin) and of Russian avant-garde artists, particularly Goncharova and Larionov (with whom he was a member of the Knave of Diamonds group). By the time of the Donkey's Tail exhibition in 1912 he was painting peasant subjects in a massive ‘tubular’ style similar to that of Léger and had also produced some exhilarating Cubo-Futurist pictures, combining the fragmentation of form of Cubism with the multiplication of the image of Futurism (The Knife Grinder, Yale University Art Gallery, 1912). Malevich, however, was dissatisfied with representational art or—as he put it—fired with the desire ‘to free art from the burden of the object'. He was a devout Christian, with mystical leanings, and he thought that by abandoning the need to depict the external world he could break through to a deeper level of meaning and ‘swim in the white free abyss’ (he often used the analogy of flight and space when discussing his paintings). His first abstract work was a backdrop for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun, produced in the Luna Park Theatre, St Petersburg, in December 1913; his original drawing (now in the Theatrical Museum, St Petersburg) shows a rectangle divided almost diagonally into a black upper segment and a white lower one. From this he developed Suprematism, which brought abstract painting to a geometric simplicity more radical than anything previously seen. He claimed that he made a picture ‘consisting of nothing more than a black square on a white field’ as early as 1913, but Suprematist paintings were first publicly exhibited in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) in 1915 (there is often difficulty in dating his work, and also in knowing which way up his paintings should be hung, photographs of early exhibitions sometimes providing conflicting evidence).

Over the next few years Malevich moved away from absolute austerity, tilting rectangles from the vertical, adding more colours, and introducing a suggestion of the third dimension by overlapping forms (Suprematist Composition, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, c. 1915); there is sometimes even a degree of painterly handling (Yellow Parallelogram on White, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, c. 1917). However, around 1918 he returned to his purest ideals with a series of White on White paintings, in which a tilted white square is placed on a background of the same colour, the difference between them being visible only through variations in the brushwork (Suprematist Composition: White on White, MOMA, New York, c. 1918). After this he seems to have realized he could go no further along this road and virtually gave up abstract painting, turning more to teaching, writing, and making three-dimensional models that were influential in the growth of Constructivism. In 1919, at the invitation of Chagall, he started teaching at the art school in Vitebsk, where he exerted a profound influence on Lissitzky, and in 1922 he moved to Petrograd, where he taught at the Institute for Artistic Culture from 1922 to 1927 and lived for the rest of his life. He went to Warsaw and Berlin in 1927, accompanying an exhibition of his work, and during this trip he visited the Bauhaus. In the late 1920s he returned to figurative painting, but the stylized work he produced was out of favour with a political system that now demanded Socialist Realism from its artists and he ran into trouble with the authorities. However, he remained a revered figure among artists and after his death he lay in state at the Leningrad Artists' Union in a coffin—designed by himself—bearing Suprematist designs.

Malevich wrote various theoretical tracts (several collections of his writings have been published) and his influence was spread through these as well as his paintings. In Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) Alfred H. Barr gave the following assessment of his importance in 20th-century art: ‘In the history of abstract art Malevich is a figure of fundamental importance. As a pioneer, a theorist and an artist he influenced not only a large following in Russia but also, through Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy, the course of abstract art in Central Europe. He stands at the heart of the movement which swept westward from Russia after the war and, mingling with the Dutch De Stijl group, transformed the architecture, furniture, typography and commercial art of Germany and much of the rest of Europe.’