Suprematism

Suprematism. A Russian abstract art movement, created by and chiefly associated with Malevich. He claimed that he began Suprematism in 1913, but he coined the name in 1915 in a pamphlet manifesto accompanying the exhibition in Petrograd (St Petersburg) at which the movement was officially launched, ‘0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition’ (see POUGNY). The pamphlet was originally called From Cubism to Suprematism in Art, to New Realism in Painting, to Absolute Creation, but it was republished in expanded form the following year as From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting. As these titles suggest, Malevich acknowledged a debt to Cubism and Futurism, but he aimed to go beyond them in abandoning all reference to the visible world and expressing the supremacy of pure form: ‘Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art which, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of “things”.’ His Suprematist paintings were indeed the most radically pure abstract works created up to that date, for he limited himself to basic geometric shapes—the square, rectangle, circle, cross, and triangle—and a narrow range of colours. Although he somewhat softened his approach for a time, allowing pastel colours and introducing elliptical shapes, Malevich then returned to complete austerity and reached the ultimate distillation of his ideas in a series of paintings of a white square on a white ground (c. 1918), after which he announced the end of Suprematism.

The spiritual ideas that Malevich attempted to embody in Suprematism are difficult to summarize, for his writing is often vague and mystical. In his original manifesto he wrote that ‘Forms must be made which have nothing in common with nature', but also that he sought through Suprematism ‘a world in which man experiences totality with nature'. He stated that ‘The Suprematists have deliberately given up the objective representation of their surroundings in order to reach the summit of the “unmasked” art and from this vantage point to view life through the prism of pure artistic feeling'. In spite of his wish to create an abstract art that was pure and independent, some artists applied Suprematist designs to functional objects, such as textiles and pottery, and Malevich's work was influential for a time even on scientifically-minded artists such as Rodchenko. Suprematism, indeed, made a powerful impact on the avant-garde in Russia until the Soviet regime demanded work that was socially useful (see CONSTRUCTIVISM) and later had great influence on the development of art and design in the West.