Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian painter and art theoretician.
He was a pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the avant-garde, Suprematist
movement.
Early life Kazimir Malevich was born Kazimierz Malewicz
to a Polish family, who settled near Kiev in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire
during the partitions of Poland.
His parents, Ludwika and Seweryn Malewicz, were Roman Catholic like most ethnic Poles.
They both had fled from the former eastern territories of the Commonwealth to Kiev in
the aftermath of the failed Polish January Uprising of 1863 against the tsarist army.
His native languages were Russian and Polish.
Kazimir's father managed a sugar factory.
Kazimir was the first of fourteen children, only nine of whom survived into adulthood.
His family moved often and he spent most of his childhood in the villages of Ukraine,
amidst sugar-beet plantations, far from centers of culture.
Until age twelve he knew nothing of professional artists, although art had surrounded him in
childhood.
He delighted in peasant embroidery, and in decorated walls and stoves.
He was able to paint in the peasant style.
He studied drawing in Kiev from 1895 to 1896.
Artistic career
From 1896 to 1904 Kazimir Malevich lived in Kursk.
In 1904, after the death of his father, he moved to Moscow.
He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture from 1904 to 1910
and in the studio of Fedor Rerberg in Moscow.
In 1911 he participated in the second exhibition of the group, Soyuz Molodyozhi in St. Petersburg,
together with Vladimir Tatlin and, in 1912, the group held its third exhibition, which
included works by Aleksandra Ekster, Tatlin, and others.
In the same year he participated in an exhibition by the collective, Donkey's Tail in Moscow.
By that time his works were influenced by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, Russian
avant-garde painters, who were particularly interested in Russian folk art called lubok.
Malevich described himself as painting in a "Cubo-Futuristic" style in 1912.
In March 1913 a major exhibition of Aristarkh Lentulov's paintings opened in Moscow.
The effect of this exhibition was comparable with that of Paul Cézanne in Paris in 1907,
as all the main Russian avant-garde artists of the time immediately absorbed the cubist
principles and began using them in their works.
Already in the same year the Cubo-Futurist opera, Victory Over the Sun, with Malevich's
stage-set, became a great success.
In 1914 Malevich exhibited his works in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris together
with Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay, Aleksandra Ekster, and Vadim Meller, among
others.
Malevich also co-illustrated, with Pavel Filonov, Selected Poems with Postscript, 1907–1914
by Velimir Khlebnikov and another work by Khlebnikov in 1914 titled Roar!
Gauntlets, 1908–1914, with Vladimir Burliuk.
Suprematism
In 1915, Malevich laid down the foundations of Suprematism when he published his manifesto,
From Cubism to Suprematism.
In 1915–1916 he worked with other Suprematist artists in a peasant/artisan co-operative
in Skoptsi and Verbovka village.
In 1916–1917 he participated in exhibitions of the Jack of Diamonds group in Moscow together
with Nathan Altman, David Burliuk, Aleksandra Ekster and others.
Famous examples of his Suprematist works include Black Square and White On White.
Malevich exhibited his first Black Square, now at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, at
the Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in Petrograd in 1915.
A black square placed against the sun appeared for the first time in the 1913 scenery designs
for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun.
The second Black Square was painted around 1923.
Some believe that the third Black Square was painted in 1929 for Malevich's solo exhibition,
because of the poor condition of the 1915 square.
One more Black Square, the smallest and probably the last, may have been intended as a diptych
together with the Red Square for the exhibition Artists of the RSFSR: 15 Years, held in Leningrad.
The two squares, Black and Red, were the centerpiece of the show.
This last square, despite the author's note 1913 on the reverse, is believed to have been
created in the late twenties or early thirties, for there are no earlier mentions of it.
In 1918, Malevich decorated a play, Mystery Bouffe, by Vladimir Mayakovskiy produced by
Vsevolod Meyerhold.
He also was interested in aerial photography and aviation, which led him to abstractions
inspired by or derived from aerial landscapes.
As Professor Julia Bekman Chadaga writes:
In his later writings, Malevich defined the "additional element" as the quality of any
new visual environment bringing about a change in perception...
In a series of diagrams illustrating the "environments" that influence various painterly styles, the
Suprematist is associated with a series of aerial views rendering the familiar landscape
into an abstraction...
Some Ukrainian authors claim that Malevich's Suprematism is rooted in the traditional Ukrainian
culture.
Post-revolution After the October Revolution, Malevich became
a member of the Collegium on the Arts of Narkompros, the Commission for the Protection of Monuments
and the Museums Commission.
He taught at the Vitebsk Practical Art School in the USSR, the Leningrad Academy of Arts,
the Kiev State Art Institute, and the House of the Arts in Leningrad.
He wrote the book The World as Non-Objectivity, which was published in Munich in 1926 and
translated into English in 1959.
In it, he outlines his Suprematist theories.
In 1923, Malevich was appointed director of Petrograd State Institute of Artistic Culture,
which was forced to close in 1926 after a Communist party newspaper called it "a government-supported
monastery" rife with "counterrevolutionary sermonizing and artistic debauchery."
The Soviet state was by then heavily promoting a politically sustainable style of art called
Socialist Realism—a style Malevich had spent his entire career repudiating.
Nevertheless, he swam with the current, and was quietly tolerated by the Communists.
International recognition and banning In 1927, Malevich traveled to Warsaw where
he was given a hero's welcome.
There he met with artists and former students Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro,
whose own movement, Unism, was highly influenced by Malevich.
He held his first foreign exhibit in the Hotel Polonia Palace.
From there the painter ventured on to Berlin and Munich for a retrospective which finally
brought him international recognition.
He arranged to leave most of the paintings behind when he returned to the Soviet Union.
Malevich's assumption that a shifting in the attitudes of the Soviet authorities toward
the modernist art movement would take place after the death of Vladimir Lenin and Leon
Trotsky's fall from power, was proven correct in a couple of years, when the Stalinist regime
turned against forms of abstraction, considering them a type of "bourgeois" art, that could
not express social realities.
As a consequence, many of his works were confiscated and he was banned from creating and exhibiting
similar art.
Critics derided Malevich's art as a negation of everything good and pure: love of life
and love of nature.
The Westernizer artist and art historian Alexandre Benois was one such critic.
Malevich responded that art can advance and develop for art's sake alone, saying that
"art does not need us, and it never did".
Death Malevich died of cancer in Leningrad on 15
May 1935.
On his deathbed he was exhibited with the black square above him, and mourners at his
funeral rally were permitted to wave a banner bearing a black square.
Malevich had asked to be buried under an oak tree on the outskirts of Nemchinovka, a place
to which he felt a special bond.
His ashes were sent to Nemchinovka, and buried in a field near his dacha.
Nikolai Suetin, a friend of Malevich’s and a fellow artist, designed a white cube with
a black square to mark the burial site.
The memorial was destroyed during World War II.
The city of Leningrad bestowed a pension on Malevich's mother and daughter.
In 2013, an apartment block was built on the place of the tomb and burial site of Kazimir
Malevich.
Another nearby monument to Malevich, put up in 1988, is now also situated on the grounds
of a gated community.
Polish ethnicity Malevich's family was like millions of Poles
who lived within the Russian Empire following the Partitions of Poland.
Kazimir Malevich was born near Kiev on lands that had been part of the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth of parents who were ethnic Poles and had fled to Kiev in the aftermath of the
January Uprising of 1863.
Both Polish and Russian were native languages of Malevich, who would sign his artwork in
the Polish form of his name as Kazimierz Malewicz.
In a visa application to travel to France, Malewicz claimed Polish as his nationality.
French art historian Andrei Nakov, who re-established Malevich's birth year as 1879, has argued
for restoration of the Polish spelling of Malevich's name.
In 2013, Malevich's family in New York City and fans founded the not-for-profit The Rectangular
Circle of Friends of Kazimierz Malewicz, whose dedicated goal is to promote awareness of
Kazimir's Polish ethnicity.
Nobel Prize laureate, Dr. James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA is an honorary member
of this not-for profit, and has attended meetings with his wife Elizabeth who is a historian
of architecture.
Posthumous exhibitions Alfred H. Barr, Jr. included several paintings
in the groundbreaking exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art” at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York in 1936.
In 1939, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting opened in New York, whose founder, Solomon
R. Guggenheim – an early and passionate collector of the Russian avant-garde – was
inspired by the same aesthetic ideals and spiritual quest that exemplified Malevich’s
art.
The first U.S. retrospective of Malevich’s work in 1973 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum provoked a flood of interest and further intensified his impact on postwar American
and European artists.
However, most of Malevich’s work and the story of the Russian avant-garde remained
under lock and key until Glasnost.
In 1989, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam held the West’s first large-scale Malevich
retrospective, including its own paintings and works from the collection of Russian art
critic Nikolai Khardzhiev.
Collections Malevich's works are held in several major
art museums, including the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and in New York, the Museum
of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum.
The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam owns 24 Malevich paintings, more than any other museum
outside of Russia.
Another major collection of Malevich works is held by the State Museum of Contemporary
Art in Thessaloniki.
Art market
Black Square, the fourth version of his magnum opus painted in the 1920s, was discovered
in 1993 in Samara and purchased by Inkombank for US$250,000.
In April 2002 the painting was auctioned for an equivalent of US$1 million.
The purchase was financed by the Russian philanthropist Vladimir Potanin, who donated funds to the
Russian Ministry of Culture, and ultimately, to the State Hermitage Museum collection.
According to the Hermitage website, this was the largest private contribution to state
art museums since the October Revolution.
On 3 November 2008 a work by Malevich entitled Suprematist Composition from 1916 set the
world record for any Russian work of art and any work sold at auction for that year, selling
at Sotheby's in New York City for just over US$60 million.
In popular culture Malevich's life inspires many references featuring
events and the paintings as players.
The smuggling of Malevich paintings out of Russia is a key to the plot line of writer
Martin Cruz Smith's thriller Red Square.
Noah Charney's novel, The Art Thief tells the story of two stolen Malevich White on
White paintings, and discusses the implications of Malevich's radical Suprematist compositions
on the art world.
British artist Keith Coventry has used Malevich's paintings to make comments on modernism, in
particular his Estate Paintings.
Malevich's work also is featured prominently in the Lars Von Trier film, Melancholia.
In 1911 Brocard & Co. produced eau de cologne called Severny, with the packing and label
designed by Malevich.
This cologne was produced until the beginning of the 1990s.
Selected works 1912 Morning in the Country after Snowstorm
1912 The Woodcutter 1912-13 Reaper on Red Background
1914 The Aviator 1914 An Englishman in Moscow
1914 Soldier of the First Division 1915 Black Square and Red Square
1915 Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension
1915 Red Square: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions
1915 Suprematist Composition 1915 Suprematism
1915 Suprematist Painting: Aeroplane Flying 1915 Suprematism: Self-Portrait in Two Dimensions
1915-16 Suprematist Painting 1916 Suprematist Painting
1916 Supremus No. 56 1916-17 Suprematism
1917 Suprematist Painting 1918 White on White
1928-32 Complex Presentiment: Half-Figure in a Yellow Shirt
1932-34 Running Man Gallery
See also
Footnotes
Citations
References Andrei Nakov Kasimir Malevich, Catalogue raisonné,
Paris, Adam Biro, 2002 Andrei Nakov vol. IV of Kasimir Malevich,
le peintre absolu, Paris, Thalia Édition, 2007
The Non-objective World, Kasimir Malevich, trans.
Howard Dearstyne, Paul Theobald, 1959.
ISBN 0-486-42974-1 Kazimir Malevich and Suprematism 1878-1935,
Gilles Néret, Taschen, 2003.
ISBN 0-87414-119-2 Dreikausen, Margret, "Aerial Perception: The
Earth as Seen from Aircraft and Spacecraft and Its Influence on Contemporary Art".
ISBN 0-87982-040-3 Drutt, Matthew; Malevich, Kazimir, Kazimir
Malevich: suprematism, Guggenheim Museum, 2003, ISBN 0-89207-265-2
Milner, John; Malevich, Kazimir, Kazimir Malevich and the art of geometry, Yale University Press,
1996.
ISBN 0-300-06417-9 Shatskikh, Aleksandra S, and Marian Schwartz,
Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism, 2012.
ISBN 9780300140897 Shishanov V.A.
Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art: a history of creation and a collection.
1918–1941.
- Minsk: Medisont, 2007.
- 144 p.Mylivepage.ru Kazimir Malevich in the State Russian Museum.
Palace Editions.
ISBN 978-3-930775-76-7.
Malevich and his Influence, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, 2008.
ISBN 978-3-7757-1877-6 Ivanov, Sergei."Unknown Socialist Realism.
The Leningrad School".
Saint Petersburg: NP-Print, 2007, ISBN 978-5-901724-21-7 Honour, H. and Fleming, J. A World History
of Art.
7th edn.
London: Laurence King Publishing.
ISBN 9781856695848 External links
All Paintings of Kazimir Malevich Andrei Nakov's works on Kazimir Malevich
Guggenheim: Kazimir Malevich Kazimir-Malevich.org - 128 works by Kazimir
Malevich "Victory Over the Sun" discussed