Kazimir Malevich

"Malevich" redirects here. For the surname, see Malevich (surname).
In this name that follows Eastern Slavic naming customs, the patronymic is Severinovich and the family name is Malevich.

Kazimir Malevich
Казимир Малевич
Born(1879-02-23)23 February 1879
Kiev, Russian Empire
(now Kyiv, Ukraine)
Died15 May 1935(1935-05-15) (aged 56)
Leningrad, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia)
Nationality
  • Russian Empire (1879–1917)
  • Soviet Union (1922–1935)
EducationMoscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture
Notable workAn Englishman in Moscow, 1914; Black Square, 1915; White on White, 1918
MovementSuprematism

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich[nb 1] (23 February [O.S. 11 February] 1879[1] – 15 May 1935) was a Russian avant-garde[nb 2] artist and art theorist, whose pioneering work and writing influenced the development of abstract art in the 20th century.[2][3][4][5] He was born in Kiev, modern-day Ukraine, to an ethnic Polish family. His concept of Suprematism sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms (objectivity) and subject matter in order to access "the supremacy of pure feeling"[6] and spirituality.[7][8] Active primarily in Russia, Malevich was a founder of the artists collective UNOVIS and his work has been variously associated with the Russian avant-garde and the Ukrainian avant-garde, and he was a central figure in the history of modern art in Central and Eastern Europe more broadly.[9][10]

Early on, Malevich worked in a variety of styles, quickly assimilating the movements of Impressionism, Symbolism and Fauvism and, after visiting Paris in 1912, Cubism. Gradually simplifying his style, he developed an approach with key works consisting of pure geometric forms and their relationships to one another, set against minimal grounds. His Black Square (1915), a black square on white, represented the most radically abstract painting known to have been created so far[11] and drew "an uncrossable line (…) between old art and new art";[12] Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), a barely differentiated off-white square superimposed on an off-white ground, would take his ideal of pure abstraction to its logical conclusion.[13] In addition to his paintings, Malevich laid down his theories in writing, such as "From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism" (1915)[14] and The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism (1926).[15][16]

Malevich's trajectory in many ways mirrored the tumult of the decades surrounding the October Revolution in 1917.[17] In its immediate aftermath, vanguard movements such as Suprematism and Vladimir Tatlin's Constructivism were encouraged by Trotskyite factions in the government. Malevich held several prominent teaching positions and received a solo show at the Sixteenth State Exhibition in Moscow in 1919. His recognition spread to the West with solo exhibitions in Warsaw and Berlin in 1927. From 1928 to 1930, he taught at the Kiev Art Institute, with Alexander Bogomazov, Victor Palmov, Vladimir Tatlin and published his articles in a Kharkiv magazine Nova Generatsiia (New generation).[18] But the start of repression in Ukraine against the intelligentsia forced Malevich return to Leningrad (Saint Petersburg). From the beginning of the 1930s, modern art was falling out of favor with the new government of Joseph Stalin. Malevich soon lost his teaching position, artworks and manuscripts were confiscated, and he was banned from making art.[19][20] In 1930, he was imprisoned for two months due to suspicions raised by his trip to Poland and Germany. Forced to abandon abstraction, he painted in a representational style in the years before his death from cancer in 1935, at the age of 56.

His art and his writings influenced contemporaries such as El Lissitzky, Lyubov Popova and Alexander Rodchenko, as well as generations of later abstract artists, such as Ad Reinhardt and the Minimalists. He was celebrated posthumously in major exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art (1936), the Guggenheim Museum (1973) and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1989), which has a large collection of his work. In the 1990s, the ownership claims of museums to many Malevich works began to be disputed by his heirs.[20]


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  1. ^ Запись о рождении в метрической книге римско-католического костёла св. Александра в Киеве, 1879 год // ЦГИАК Украины, ф. 1268, оп. 1, д. 26, л. 13об—14.(in Russian)
  2. ^ Milner and Malevich 1996, p. X; Néret 2003, p. 7; Shatskikh and Schwartz, p. 84.
  3. ^ Kazimir Malevich at the Encyclopædia Britannica
  4. ^ "Malevich, Kasimir, A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art". Encyclopedia.com. Archived from the original on 8 August 2014. Retrieved 18 March 2014.
  5. ^ "Casimir Malevich, The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition". Encyclopedia.com. Archived from the original on 5 November 2013. Retrieved 18 March 2014.
  6. ^ Malevich, Kazimir. The Non-Objective World, Chicago: Theobald, 1959.
  7. ^ Chave, Anna. Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction. Yale University Press. p. 191.
  8. ^ Hamilton, George. Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1880–1940, Volume 29. Yale University Press.
  9. ^ "Ukrainian Avant Garde". Ukrainian Art Library. 26 January 2017. Archived from the original on 7 April 2019. Retrieved 7 April 2019.
  10. ^ Schulz, Bernhard (31 May 2014). "It's complicated: Tate on Kazimir Malevich and the West". The Art Newspaper. Archived from the original on 19 March 2024. Retrieved 19 March 2024.
  11. ^ Chipp, Herschel B. Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968, p. 311-2.
  12. ^ Tolstaya, Tatiana. "The Square," Archived 22 March 2018 at the Wayback Machine New Yorker, 12 June 2015. Retrieved 21 March 2018.
  13. ^ de la Croix, Horst and Richard G. Tansey, Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 7th Ed., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, p. 826-7.
  14. ^ "Kazimir Malevich, "From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism", 1915". Archived from the original on 13 June 2018. Retrieved 31 May 2018.
  15. ^ "Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism, 1927" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 26 November 2017. Retrieved 31 May 2018.
  16. ^ Matthew Drutt, Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism, 2003. Catalog of an exhibition held at Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, 14 January – 27 April 2003; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 13 May – 7 September 2003; the Menil Collection, Houston, 3 October 2003 – 11 January 2004.
  17. ^ Bezverkhny, Eva. "Malevich in his Milieu," Archived 22 March 2018 at the Wayback Machine Hyperallergic, 24 July 2014. Retrieved 21 March 2018.
  18. ^ Filevska, Tetiana. "Five unknown facts about Malevich" Archived 2 August 2020 at the Wayback Machine. Opinion, 23 February 2019. Retrieved 30 January 2020.
  19. ^ Nina Siegal (5 November 2013), "Rare Glimpse of the Elusive Kazimir Malevich" Archived 6 November 2017 at the Wayback Machine. The New York Times.
  20. ^ a b Wood, Tony. "The man they couldn't hang". The Guardian, 10 May 2000. Retrieved 21 March 2018.