— Malevich was born near Kiev. He studied at the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in 1903. During the early years of his career, he experimented with various Modernist styles and participated in avant-garde exhibitions, such as those of the Moscow Artists’ Association, which included Vasily Kandinsky [04 Dec 1866 – 13 Dec 1944] and Mikhail Larionov, and the Jack of Diamonds exhibition of 1910 in Moscow. Malevich showed his Primitivist paintings of peasants at the exhibition Donkey’s Tail in 1912. After this exhibition, he broke with Larionov’s group.
In 1913, with composer Mikhail Matiushin and writer Alexei Kruchenykh, Malevich drafted a manifesto for the First Futurist Congress. That same year, he designed the sets and costumes for the opera Victory over the Sun by Matiushin and Kruchenykh. Malevich showed at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1914. At The Last Futurist Exhibition in Petrograd in 1915, Malevich introduced his non-objective, geometric Suprematist paintings. In 1919, he began to explore the three-dimensional applications of Suprematism in architectural models.
About 1914, after two years of painting in a Cubo-Futurist style, Malevich began to work in an abstract style, which he called Suprematism. For Malevich, the guiding principle of Suprematism was “the supremacy of pure sensation in creative art,” best represented by the square, which he considered the most elementary, basic, and thus supreme formal element; but he increasingly combined the square with the circle, other geometric shapes, and even curved lines. He began by limiting himself in his Suprematist paintings to black, white, gray, and red, but he expanded his palette as his compositions became more complex.
Malevich, like other artists of his time, believed that the external world could no longer serve as the basis for art, which had, instead, to explore pure non-objective abstraction in the search for visual analogues to experience, both conscious and unconscious. As he wrote in 1915, “Nothing is real except sensation . . . the sensation of non-objectivity.” He first showed his Suprematist works at The Last Futurist Exhibition in St. Petersburg in December 1915. The exhibition, which included a broad sampling of then-current tendencies in Russian avant-garde painting, has become famous for inaugurating the two directions that would largely govern artistic production in Russia (including architecture, graphic design, theater, and the decorative arts) for the next seven years: Suprematism, and the closely related (although more socially oriented) movement Constructivism [more]. Other artists affiliated with Suprematism include Ilya Chashnik, Ivan Kliun, El Lissitzky [23 Nov 1890 – 30 Dec 1941], Liubov Popova, Ivan Puni, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, Nikolai Suetin, and Nadezhda Udaltsova.
Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Malevich and other advanced artists were encouraged by the Soviet government and attained prominent administrative and teaching positions.
Malevich began teaching at the Vitebsk Popular Art School in 1919; he soon became its director. In 1919–20, he was given a solo show at the Sixteenth State Exhibition in Moscow, which focused on Suprematism and other non-objective styles. Malevich and his students at Vitebsk formed the Suprematist group Unovis. From 1922 to 1927, he taught at the Institute of Artistic Culture in Petrograd, and between 1924 and 1926 he worked primarily on architectural models with his students.
In 1927, Malevich traveled with an exhibition of his paintings to Warsaw and also went to Berlin, where his work was shown at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung. In Germany, he met Jean Arp [16 Sep 1886 – 07 Jun 1966], Naum Gabo, Le Corbusier, and Kurt Schwitters [20 Jun 1887 – 08 January 1948] and visited the Bauhaus, where he met Walter Gropius. The Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow gave Malevich a solo exhibition in 1929.
Using the pretext of Malevich's connections with German artists, Soviet
authorities, who repressed any non-realist art, arrested him in 1930 and
destroyed many of his manuscripts. In Malevich's final period, he was forced
to paint in a representational style. Malevich died Leningrad. This artwork had been among the Russian avant-garde artwork and writings collected by Nikolai Khardzhiev [1903-1996], which, when he left the Soviet Union in 1993, was plundered by corrupt officials, confidence men, and crooked art dealers. Malevich died in poverty in Amsterdam, where the Stedelijk Museum has the best collection of his work, acquired, as by other museums and collectors, under questionable circumstances.
[1933 photo: Malevich, left, with Khardzhiev, in Moscow >]
— LINKS
— Self Portrait (1933, 73x66cm) — An Englishman in Moscow (1914, 88x57cm)
— The Aviator (1914, 125x65cm) — Complex Presentiment: Half-Figure in a Yellow Shirt (1932, 99x79cm).
— Morning in the Village after Snowstorm (1912, 81x81cm) _ The paintings of the Russian avant-garde have, in general, elicited two types of interpretation: one focuses on issues of technique and style; the other concentrates on social and political issues. The former method is usually applied to Kazimir Malevich’s early paintings, grounded as they are in the forms of Cubism, Futurism, and other contemporaneous art movements; the latter largely avoids Malevich in favor of more politically engaged artists such as El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Vladimir Tatlin.
From the formalist’s standpoint, Morning in the Village after Snowstorm is, in its mastery of complex colors and shapes, a perfect example of the newly created Russian style, Cubo-Futurism. The figures have been called a continuation of the genre types Malevich portrayed in his Neo-primitive paintings, their depiction seemingly reliant on Fernand Léger’s work, which Malevich could have known from an exhibition in Moscow in February 1912 or through reproductions. This phase in Malevich’s career has been seen as his formidable stopover on his journey toward abstraction and the development of Suprematism.
But to ignore the political and social dimensions of Malevich’s art would be a disservice. Malevich came from humble circumstances and it is clear in autobiographical accounts that vivid memories of his country childhood compensated for his lack of a formal art education. Morning in the Village after Snowstorm demonstrates that his hard-won skills as a sophisticated painter were rooted in an unmistakably Russian experience. If art can be said to augur the future, then Malevich’s repeated decision—on the brink of the October Revolution—to depict peasants cannot have been merely coincidental.
— Untitled [RFD mailbox?] (1916, 53x53cm) _ Kazimir Malevich proposed the reductive, abstract style of Suprematism as an alternative to earlier art forms, which he considered inappropriate to his own time. He observed that the proportions of forms in art of the past corresponded with those of objects in nature, which are determined by their function. In opposition to this he proposed a self-referential art in which proportion, scale, color, and disposition obey intrinsic, nonutilitarian laws. Malevich considered his non-objective forms to be reproductions of purely affective sensations that bore no relation to external phenomena. He rejected conventions of gravity, clear orientation, horizon line, and perspective systems.
Malevich’s units are developed from the straight line and its two-dimensional extension, the plane, and are constituted of contrasting areas of unmodeled color, distinguished by various textural effects. The diagonal orientation of geometric forms creates rhythms on the surface of the canvas. The overlapping of elements and their varying scale relationships within a white ground provide a sense of indefinitely extensive space. Though the organization of the pictorial forms does not correspond with that of traditional subjects, there are various internal regulatory principles. In the present work a magnetic attraction and repulsion seem to dictate the slow rotational movement of parts.
