Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Malevich, c.1900

Kazimir Malevich[20] was born Kazimierz Malewicz to a Polish family,[21][22][23] who settled near Kiev in Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire during the partitions of Poland.[18] His parents, Ludwika and Seweryn Malewicz, were Roman Catholic like most ethnic Poles,[2] though his father attended Orthodox services as well.[24] His native language was Polish, but he also spoke Russian,[25] as well as Ukrainian due to his childhood surroundings.[26] His mother Ludwika wrote poetry in Polish and sang Polish songs, and kept a record of the Polish families living in the area.[24] Malevich would later write a series of articles in Ukrainian about art, and identified as Ukrainian.[27]

Kazimir's father managed a sugar factory. Kazimir was the first of fourteen children,[18] only nine of whom survived into adulthood. His family moved often and he spent most of his childhood in the villages of modern-day 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.

Party, 1908

The Knifegrinder, 1912

Black Square, 1915.

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 (Union of Youth) 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-Futurist" style in 1912.[28] 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 (including Malevich) 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.[29][30] Later in that same year, he created a series of lithographs in support of Russia's entry into WWI. These prints, accompanied by captions by Vladimir Mayakovsky and published by the Moscow-based publication house Segodniashnii Lubok (Contemporary Lubok), on the one hand show the influence of traditional folk art, but on the other are characterised by solid blocks of pure colours juxtaposed in compositionally evocative ways that anticipate his Suprematist work.[31]

In 1911, Brocard & Co. produced an eau de cologne called Severny. Malevich conceived the advertisement and design of the perfume bottle with craquelure of an iceberg and a polar bear on the top, which lasted through the mid-1920s.[32]

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 (1915)[33] and White On White (1918).

Suprematist works by Malevich at the 0.10 Exhibition, Petrograd, 1915

Супрематизм» Suprematism, oil on canvas, 1915 Russian Museum

Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Suprematism of the Spirit , oil on canvas, 1919-1920, Private Collection, Vienna, Austria

Malevich exhibited his first Black Square, now at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, at the Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) in 1915.[28] A black square placed against the sun appeared for the first time in the 1913 scenic designs for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun.[28] The second Black Square was painted around 1923. Some believe that the third Black Square (also at the Tretyakov Gallery) 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 (though of smaller size) for the exhibition Artists of the RSFSR: 15 Years, held in Leningrad (1932). 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.[34]

While Malevich's ideas and theories behind Suprematism were grounded in a belief in the spiritual and transformative power of art, he saw Suprematism as a way to access a higher, more pure realm of artistic expression and to tap into the spiritual through abstraction.

Thus, the overarching philosophy of Malevich's Suprematism expressed in various manifestos[35] would be that he "transformed himself in the zero of form and dragged himself out of the rubbish-heap of illusion and the pit of naturalism. He destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of objects, moving from the horizon-ring to the circle of spirit". "Spirit" was the keyword and the center of his philosophy.

An example par excellence of this expression is the work "Suprematism of the Spirit".[36][37][38][39][40] [41]

Malevich's student Anna Leporskaya observed that Malevich "neither knew nor understood what the black square contained. He thought it so important an event in his creation that for a whole week he was unable to eat, drink or sleep."[42]

In 1918, Malevich decorated a play, Mystery-Bouffe, by Vladimir Mayakovskiy produced by Vsevolod Meyerhold. He was interested in aerial photography and aviation, which led him to abstractions inspired by or derived from aerial landscapes.[43]

Some Ukrainian authors argue that Malevich's Suprematism is rooted in the traditional Ukrainian culture.[44][45]

After the October Revolution (1917), Malevich became a member of the Collegium on the Arts of Narkompros, the Commission for the Protection of Monuments and the Museums Commission (all from 1918–1919). He taught at the Vitebsk Practical Art School in Belarus (1919–1922) alongside Marc Chagall,[46] the Leningrad Academy of Arts (1922–1927), the Kiev Art Institute (1928–1930),[47] and the House of the Arts in Leningrad (1930). 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 an idealized, propagandistic[48] 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.[49]

Boy, oil on canvas, 1928/1929

In 1927, Malevich traveled to Warsaw where he was given a hero's welcome.[22] There, he met with artists and former students Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro, whose own movement, Unism, was highly influenced by Malevich.[50] He held his first foreign exhibit in the Hotel Polonia Palace.[51] 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.[52] 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 government of Joseph Stalin 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.

In autumn 1930, he was arrested and interrogated by the KGB in Leningrad, accused of Polish espionage, and threatened with execution. He was released from imprisonment in early December.[26][53]

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".

Sensation of an imprisoned man, oil on canvas,1930–31

When Malevich died of cancer at the age of fifty-seven, in Leningrad on 15 May 1935, his friends and disciples buried his ashes in a grave marked with a black square. They didn't fulfill his stated wish to have the grave topped with an "architekton"—one of his skyscraper-like maquettes of abstract forms, equipped with a telescope through which visitors were to gaze at Jupiter.[54]

On his deathbed, Malevich had been exhibited with the Black Square above him, and mourners at his funeral rally were permitted to wave a banner bearing a black square.[49] Malevich had asked to be buried under an oak tree on the outskirts of Nemchinovka, a place to which he felt a special bond.[55] 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 Nazi Germany his works were banned as "Degenerate Art".[52][56][57]

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.[55]

According to an observation by radiologist and art historian Milda Victurina, one of the features of Kazimir Malevich's painting technique was the layering of paints one on another to get a special kind of colour spots. For example, Malevich used two layers of colour for the red spot—the lower black and the upper red. The light ray going through these colour layers is perceived by the viewer not as red, but with a touch of darkness. This technique of superimposing the two colours allowed experts to identify fakes of Malevich's work, which generally lacked it.[58]

Girl with a Comb in her Hair, 1933, oil on canvas, Tretyakov Gallery

Signature of Kazimierz Malewicz in Polish on the back of his self-portrait entitled "Artist" (1933)

Malevich's family was one of the millions of Poles who lived within the Russian Empire following the Partitions of Poland. Kazimir Malevich was born near Kiev[18] on lands that had previously been part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth[59] of parents who were ethnic Poles.[2]

Both Polish, Ukrainian and Russian were native languages of Malevich,[60] who would sign his artwork in the Polish form of his name as Kazimierz Malewicz.[61] In a visa application to travel to France, Malewicz claimed Polish as his nationality.[59] French art historian Andrei Nakov, who re-established Malevich's birth year as 1879 (and not 1878), has argued for restoration of the Polish spelling of Malevich's name.

In 1985, Polish performance artist Zbigniew Warpechowski performed "Citizenship for a Pure Feeling of Kazimierz Malewicz" as an homage to the great artist and critique of Polish authorities that refused to grant Polish citizenship to Kazimir Malevich.[62] 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.[59]

Russian art historian Irina Vakar gained access to the artist's criminal case and found that in some documents Malevich specified his nationality as Ukrainian.[26][53] It is sometimes claimed that he self-identified as a Ukrainian throughout his life.[27]

Most academic literature and museum collections identify Malevich as a Russian painter, based on the fact that he achieved prominence while working in Russia. However, in the 2010s, and especially after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 there was a strong push to reconsider this identification. In particular, there was pressure from some Ukrainian parties to instead list Malevich as Ukrainian painter. This push resulted in the Metropolitan Museum of Art relabeling him as Ukrainian painter, and later Stedelijk Museum labeling him as "Ukrainian painter of Polish origin". The relabeling caused a backlash from Russia, including a statement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, the consensus among art historians, including those of Ukrainian origin, is that whereas the discussion (related to the Russian colonialism) clearly needs to take place among all involved parties, it has not yet occurred, and the question concerning the identity of Malevich has not been solved as of 2023.[63]

Malevich, Portrait of Mikhail Matyushin, 1913

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.[64]

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.[64] However, most of Malevich's work and the story of the Russian avant-garde remained under lock and key until Glasnost.[18] In 1989, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam held the West's first large-scale Malevich retrospective, including the paintings they owned and works from the collection of Russian art critic Nikolai Khardzhiev.[18]

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[18] and the Guggenheim Museum. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam owns 24 Malevich paintings, more than any other museum outside of Russia.[18] Another major collection of Malevich works is held by the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki.[18]

Suprematist composition 1916, sold for US$85,812,500

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.[65] 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,[66] and ultimately, to the State Hermitage Museum collection.[65] According to the Hermitage website, this was the largest private contribution to state art museums since the October Revolution.[66]

In 2008, the Stedelijk Museum restituted five works to the heirs of Malevich's family from a group that had been left in Berlin by Malevich, and acquired by the gallery in 1958, in exchange for undisputed title to the remaining pictures.[67]

On 3 November 2008, one of these works 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 (surpassing his previous record of US$17 million set in 2000).

In May 2018, the same painting Suprematist Composition 1916 sold at Christie's New York for over US$85 million (including fees), a record auction price for a Russian work of art.[68]

Original Malevich-designed frost glass bottle with craquelure for "Severny eau de cologne" (1911–1922)

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. At the Closing Ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Malevich visual themes were featured (via projections) in a section on 20th century Russian modern art.

• 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
• 1915 – Red Square †
• 1915 – Black Square and Red Square ††
• 1915 – Suprematist Composition
• 1915 – Suprematism (1915)
• 1915 – Suprematist Painting: Aeroplane Flying
• 1915 – Suprematism: Self-Portrait in Two Dimensions
• 1915–16 – Suprematist Painting (Ludwigshafen)
• 1916 – Suprematist Painting (1916)
• 1916 – Supremus No. 56
• 1916–17 – Suprematism (1916–17)
• 1917 – Suprematist Painting (1917)
• 1918 – White on White
• 1919–1926 – Untitled (Suprematist Composition)
• 1928–1932 – Complex Presentiment: Half-Figure in a Yellow Shirt
• 1932–1934 – Running Man

† Also known as Red Square: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions.
†† Also known as Black Square and Red Square: Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension.

• List of Russian artists
• Sergei Senkin
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• UNOVIS

• Crone, Rainer, Kazimir Severinovich Malevich and David Moos. Kazimir Malevich: The Climax of Disclosure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
• Dreikausen, Margret, Aerial Perception: The Earth as Seen from Aircraft and Spacecraft and Its Influence on Contemporary Art (Associated University Presses: Cranbury, NJ; London, England; Mississauga, Ontario: 1985). ISBN 0-87982-040-3
• Drutt, Matthew; Malevich, Kazimir, Kazimir Malevich: suprematism, Guggenheim Museum, 2003, ISBN 0-89207-265-2
• Honour, H. and Fleming, J. (2009) A World History of Art. 7th edn. London: Laurence King Publishing. ISBN 9781856695848
• Malevich, Kasimir, The Non-objective World, Chicago: P. Theobald, 1959. ISBN 0-486-42974-1
• Malevich and his Influence, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, 2008. ISBN 978-3-7757-1877-6
• Milner, John; Malevich, Kazimir, Kazimir Malevich and the art of geometry, Yale University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-300-06417-9
• Nakov, Andrei, Kasimir Malevich, Catalogue raisonné, Paris, Adam Biro, 2002
• Nakov, Andrei, vol. IV of Kasimir Malevich, le peintre absolu, Paris, Thalia Édition, 2007
• Néret, Gilles, Kazimir Malevich and Suprematism 1878-1935, Taschen, 2003. ISBN 0-87414-119-2
• Petrova, Yevgenia, Kazimir Malevich in the State Russian Museum. Palace Editions, 2002. ISBN 978-3-930775-76-7. (English Edition)
• 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
• Shkandrij, Myroslav (2019). Avant-Garde Art in Ukraine, 1910–1930: Contested Memories. Boston.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Tedman, Gary. Soviet Avant Garde Aesthetics, chapter from Aesthetics & Alienation. pp 203–229. 2012. Zero Books. ISBN 978-1-78099-301-0
• Tolstaya, Tatyana, The Square, The New Yorker, 12 June 2015
• Das weiße Rechteck. Schriften zum Film, herausgegeben von Oksana Bulgakowa. PotemkinPress, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-9804989-2-1
• The White Rectangle. Writings on Film. (In English and the Russian original manuscript). Edited by Oksana Bulgakowa. PotemkinPress, Berlin / Francisco 2000, ISBN 3-9804989-7-2

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Kazimir Malevich.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Kazimir Malevich.

• Malevich works, MoMA
• Kazimir Malevich, Guggenheim Collection Online
• Kasimir Malevich Works Online, Artcyclopedia
• Floirat, Anetta. 2016, The Scythian element of the Russian primitivism, in music and visual arts. Based on the work Goncharova, Malevich, Roerich, Stravinsky and Prokofiev
• Peter Brooke, Deux Peintres Philosophes - Albert Gleizes et Kasimir Malévitch and Quelques Réflexions sur la Littérature Actuelle du Cubisme, both Ampuis (Association des Amis d’Albert Gleizes) 1995
• History of Malevich-designed Perfume bottle of the eau de cologne “Severny”