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.’

Malevich, Kasimir (b nr. Kiev, 11 [23] Feb. 1878; d Leningrad, 15 May 1935). Russian painter, designer, and writer, with Mondrian the most important pioneer of geometric abstract art. He began working in an unexceptional Post-Impressionist manner, but by 1912 he was painting peasant subjects in a massive ‘tubular’ style similar to that of Léger, as well as pictures combining the fragmentation of form of Cubism with the multiplication of the image of Futurism (The Knife Grinder, 1912, Yale Univ. AG). 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. 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 made public in Moscow 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, c.1915, Stedelijk Mus., Amsterdam); there is sometimes even a degree of painterly handling (Yellow Parallelogram on White, c.1917, Stedelijk Museum). 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, c.1918, MoMA, New York). 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 important in the growth of Constructivism. In 1919, at the invitation of Chagall, he started teaching at the art school at Vitebsk, where he exerted a profound influence on Lissitzky, and in 1922 he moved to Petrograd (Leningrad), where he lived for the rest of his life. He went to Warsaw and Berlin in 1927, accompanying an exhibition of his works, and during this trip he visited the Bauhaus. In the late 1920s he returned to figurative painting, but he 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—which he had designed 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 significance: ‘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.’

Kasimir Malevich

The Russian painter Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) founded suprematism and is credited with having painted the first geometric, totally nonrepresentational picture.

The son of a foreman in a sugar factory, Kasimir Malevich was born on Feb. 11, 1878, in Kiev. He received only a rudimentary formal education, but through his own energies he was well read. Even so, his writings reveal his lack of schooling. They are often disorganized and their ideas are crudely expressed, especially when they are compared with the essays of Wassily Kandinsky, whose concepts parallel Malevich's.

In 1895 Malevich became a student at the Kiev School of Art. He settled in Moscow in 1904, and 5 years later he had his first one-man show. He had been painting in the impressionist style, but his work by 1909 suggests a strong dependence on contemporary French art for direction, notably that of the post-impressionists, the Fauves, and the Nabis, whose paintings he had seen in the remarkable collections of Ivan Morosov and Sergei Shchukin (Stchoukine). Malevich became acquainted with Michael Larionov and Nathalie Gontcharova in Moscow and assumed an active role in the exhibitions of the Jack of Diamonds group.

By 1911 Malevich was working in a cubist manner that was closer to Fernand Léger in style than to Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. An example of Malevich's cubist period is Morning in the Country after the Rain (1911). In it he abstracted a landscape in which cylindrical figures of peasants are featured prominently. He had dealt with similar themes the year before, but more graphically. By 1913 he had so transformed his material that recognizable imagery had disappeared, though inferences of light, bulk, and atmosphere had not. Later that year he carried abstraction to its ultimate limit: he painted a black rectangle on a white ground. This, the first suprematist work, according to the artist, expressed "the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art."

Thereafter Malevich confined himself to arrangements of geometric shapes with the goal of suggesting such sensations to the beholder as flight, wireless telegraphy, and magnetic attraction. In 1918 he painted a series of white-on-white suprematist compositions. The following year he had a retrospective exhibition in Moscow and also took over the directorship of the School of Art in Vitebsk, which he renamed the College of New Art. He spent more and more time teaching and writing. In 1922 he moved to Leningrad, where he was provided with a studio and living quarters in the newly reorganized Museum of Artistic Culture.

In the 1920s Malevich made several sculptures which look like models of modern buildings. These he called "arkhitectonics." In the early 1920s the Soviet government began to assume a negative attitude toward abstract art, since it was ineffectual as a tool for propaganda, and started to support "socialist realism." Despite this, Malevich was permitted to go to Germany in 1927 to exhibit his work and to lecture at the Bauhaus. One of his books, The Nonobjective World (written in 1915), was published in German by the Bauhaus that year.

In 1929 Malevich had a retrospective exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. During the last years of his life he painted fewer pictures, and those he did were portraits, mostly of his family and friends. He died of cancer in Leningrad and was buried in a coffin that he himself had decorated with suprematist motifs.

Further Reading

Malevich's writings, expertly translated, were collected in a two-volume work, Essays on Art, edited by Troels Anderson (trans., 2 vols., 1968). Camilla Gray, The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863-1922 (1962), traces the development of Malevich's art and contains handsome plates of his work, several in color.

Additional Sources

Hilton, Alison, Kazimir Malevich, New York, N.Y.: Rizzoli, 1992.

Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich, Malevich: artist and philosopher, New York: H.N. Abrams, 1990. □

Malevich, Kasimir (1878–1935). Russian painter, designer, and writer, with Mondrian the most important pioneer of geometric abstract art. He began working in an unexceptional Post-Impressionist manner, but by 1912 he was painting peasant subjects in a massive ‘tubular’ style similar to that of Léger as well as pictures combining the fragmentation of form of Cubism with the multiplication of the image of Futurism (The Knife Grinder, 1912, Yale Univ. AG). 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 Mus., St Petersburg) shows a rectangle divided almost diagonally into a black upper segment and a white lower one. 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 made public in Moscow 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). For a time Malevich moved away from absolute austerity, tilting rectangles from the vertical, adding more colours, and introducing a suggestion of the third dimension and even a degree of painterly handling, but around 1918 he returned to his purest ideals with a series of White on White paintings. 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 important in the growth of Constructivism. In 1919, at the invitation of Chagall, he started teaching at the art school at Vitebsk, where he exerted a profound influence on Lissitzky, and in 1922 he moved to Petrograd (Leningrad), where he lived for the rest of his life. He visited Warsaw and Berlin in 1927, accompanying an exhibition of his works and visited the Bauhaus. In the late 1920s he returned to figurative painting, but he 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. Malevich wrote various theoretical tracts and several collections of his writings have been published. His influence on abstract art—in the West as well as Russia—was enormous.

MALEVICH, KAZIMIR SEVERINOVICH

(1878–1935), founder of the Suprematist school of abstract painting.

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was initially a follower of Impressionism. He was influenced by Pablo Picasso and Cubism and became a member of the Jack of Diamonds group, whose members were the leading exponents of avant-garde art in pre–World War I Russia. According to the Suprematists, each economic mode of production generated not only a ruling class but also an official artistic style supported by that dominant social class. Deviations from that official style were the products of subordinate classes. All art, prior to the rule of the proletariat, therefore, manifested the ideology of some class. But the revolution would bring about the destruction not merely of the bourgeoisie, but of all classes as such. Consequently, the art of the proletarian revolution must be the expression of not merely another style but of absolute, eternal, "supreme" values.

Constructivism was brought into Soviet avantguard architecture primarily by Vladimir Tatlin and Malevich. Malevich's "Arkhitektonica," Tatlin's Monument to the Third International (the "Tatlin Tower"), and El Lissitsky's "Prouns" shaped in large measure the conceptualizations of the modernist architects as they sought a means to combine painting, sculpture, and architecture. Tatlin's stress on utilitarianism was challenged by Malevich's Suprematism, which decried the emphasis of technology in art and argued that artists must search for "supreme" artistic values that would transform the ideology of the people. Malevich thus contrasted the work of engineers, whose creations exhibited simple transitory values, with aesthetic creativity, which he proclaimed produced supreme values. Malevich warned: "If socialism relies on the infallibility of science and technology, a great disappointment is in store for it because it is not granted to scientists to foresee the 'course of events' and to create enduring values" (Malevich, p. 36). His "White on White" carried Suprematist theories to their logical conclusion. With the turn against modern art under Josef Stalin, Malevich lost influence and died in poverty and oblivion.

See also: architecture; constructivism; futurism.

bibliography

Malevich, Kazimir. (1959) The Non-Objective World, tr. Howard Dearstyne. Chicago: P. Theobald.

Milner, John. (1996). Kazimir Malevich and the Art of Geometry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Hugh D. Hudson Jr.

Malevich, Kasimir (1878–1935) Russian painter, an important pioneer of geometric abstract art. Malevich absorbed ideas from cubism (Léger in particular), and futurism. His experiments with the fragmentation and multiplication of images include The Knife Grinder (1912). Malevich founded the suprematism movement (1913), and later concentrated on the development of constructivism.

Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich (1878–1935). Russian artist, he built many architectural models (arkhitektoniki) of projects that would have been difficult to show graphically. He was a pioneer of Suprematism. He influenced El Lissitzky, activities in the Bauhaus, and, indirectly, aspects of Deconstructivism.

Bibliography

Malevich (1959);
Zhadova (1982)