Kazimir Malevich

• 1. A Family Of Fugitives

  ›

  Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was born on the 11th of February 1879 in Kiev, a city that now belongs to Ukraine. His parents were ethnic Poles who had fled their homeland after the failed January Uprising of 1863 against Russian rule. Lucjan Malewicz, Kazimir's uncle, served as a Catholic priest and one of the leaders of that insurrection. The family settled near Kiev within the Russian Empire, where they lived among millions of other Poles. Kazimir was the first of fourteen children, though only nine survived into adulthood. His father worked as a manager at several sugar refineries, which forced the family to move multiple times between 1889 and 1896. They relocated to Parkhomovka near Kharkov, then later to Voltochok near Konotop. In these rural settings, young Kazimir attended an agricultural school and taught himself to paint in a simple peasant style. He drew inspiration from the surrounding countryside while speaking Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian within his household.

• 2. The Geometry Of War

  ›

  By 1914, the outbreak of World War I changed the trajectory of Malevich's career. He created a work titled Reservist of the First Division that incorporated collage elements like a postage stamp with Tsar Nicholas and a thermometer affixed to the canvas. This Cubo-Futurist piece scattered political, cultural, and military references across abstract geometric planes. It reflected his status as an army reservist during the conflict. That same year, he produced propagandistic chromolithographs supporting Russia's entry into the war. These prints featured bold blocks of pure color and captions by Vladimir Mayakovsky. The works relied on folk-art traditions known as lubok combined with modern abstraction strategies. A black square outline appeared in his scenic designs for the Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun in 1913. This production debuted at Luna Park Theater in St. Petersburg with dissonant music by Matyushin. The allegorical plot depicted the Sun being captured and buried, symbolizing the rejection of past traditions. Although poorly received by contemporary audiences, this prefigured his subsequent development of abstract painting.

• 3. The Zero Point Of Art

  ›

  In 1915, Malevich laid down the foundations of Suprematism when he published his manifesto From Cubism to Suprematism. He exhibited his first Black Square at the Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in Petrograd that same year. 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. His student Anna Leporskaya observed that Malevich neither knew nor understood what the black square contained. She noted that he thought it so important an event in his creation that for a whole week he was unable to eat, drink or sleep. The philosophy expressed in various manifestos stated that he transformed himself into the zero of form. He dragged himself out of the rubbish-heap of illusion and escaped from the circle of objects. This movement sought to access a higher realm of artistic expression through abstraction rather than natural forms. The second Black Square was painted around 1923, while another version may have been created in the late twenties or early thirties. These works became the centerpiece of exhibitions like Artists of the RSFSR: 15 Years held in Leningrad.

• 4. Teaching Under The Red Banner

  ›

  After the October Revolution of 1917, Malevich joined the Collegium on the Arts of Narkompros. He taught at the Vitebsk Practical Art School in Belarus between 1919 and 1922 alongside Marc Chagall. In 1919, he founded the UNOVIS artists collective and had a solo show at the Sixteenth State Exhibition in Moscow. His reputation spread westward with solo exhibitions in Warsaw and Berlin in 1927. This marked the first and only time Malevich ever left Russia. From 1928 to 1930 he taught at the Kiev Art Institute alongside Alexander Bogomazov, Victor Palmov, and Vladimir Tatlin. He published articles in the Kharkiv magazine Nova Generatsiia. The Soviet state promoted Socialist Realism as an idealized style that Malevich spent his entire career repudiating. Nevertheless, he swam with the current and was quietly tolerated by the Communists until political winds shifted against him.

• 5. The Black Square On The Wall

  ›

  Malevich died of cancer in Leningrad on the 15th of May 1935. On his deathbed, he had been exhibited with the Black Square above him. Mourners at his funeral rally were permitted to wave a banner bearing a black square. He asked to be buried under an oak tree on the outskirts of Nemchinovka, a place to which he felt a special bond. 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. His ashes were sent to Nemchinovka and buried in a field near his dacha. The city of Leningrad bestowed a pension on Malevich's mother and daughter. In Nazi Germany, his works were banned as Degenerate Art. An apartment block was built on the place of the tomb and burial site of Kazimir Malevich in 2013. Another nearby monument put up in 1988 is now situated on the grounds of a gated community.

• 6. A Name Without Borders

  ›

  Most academic literature identifies Malevich as a Russian painter based on his integral role in shaping the Russian avant-garde. However, his nationality has been a subject of scholarly dispute since his death. Based on surviving correspondence, some scholars suggest that Malevich considered Russia an adopted place to live and work rather than a true homeland. Both Polish and Russian were native languages of Malevich, who signed his artwork in the Polish form of his name as Kazimierz Malewicz. In a 1926 visa application to travel to France, Malewicz claimed Polish as his nationality. A secret police file from Malevich's arrest on the 20th of September 1930 indicates that he declared his nationality as Ukrainian. Scholar Marie Gasper-Hulvat notes this may have been motivated by a desire to avoid anti-Polish discrimination. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 there has been more political pressure to reconsider his identity. The Metropolitan Museum of Art relabeled him as a Ukrainian painter, while the Stedelijk Museum labeled him as a Ukrainian painter of Polish origin. The consensus among art historians remains that the question concerning his identity has not been solved.

• 7. The Global Canvas

  ›

  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. The first U.S. retrospective of Malevich's work opened in 1973 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. This event provoked a flood of interest and further intensified his impact on postwar American and European artists. Most of Malevich's work remained under lock and key until Glasnost. In 1989, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam held the West's first large-scale Malevich retrospective. Black Square, the fourth version painted in the 1920s, was discovered in 1993 in Samara and purchased for US$250,000. It sold at auction for an equivalent of US$1 million in April 2002. One of these works entitled Suprematist Composition from 1916 set the world record for any Russian work of art in November 2008. It sold at Sotheby's in New York City for just over US$60 million. The same painting sold again at Christie's New York in May 2018 for over US$85 million.