Kazimir Malevich

• 1. Introduction

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  Kazimir Malevich hung a black quadrilateral painting in the upper corner of a room in Petrograd, the very spot Russian households reserved for sacred icons. The year was 1915, and the work was Black Square. It marked a break with painting that depicts anything at all. His student Anna Leporskaya later recalled that he 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. How does a self-taught painter from a Polish family near Kiev arrive at pure geometric abstraction? And why, decades later, would three governments quarrel over whether he was Russian, Polish, or Ukrainian? This is the story of an artist who tried to drag himself, in his own words, out of the rubbish-heap of illusion.

• 2. A Polish Family In The Empire

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  Severin and Liudviga Malevich had fled Poland after the failed January Uprising of 1863 against Russian rule, and one of that insurrection's leaders was Kazimir's own uncle, the Catholic priest Lucjan Malewicz. The family settled in Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, where Kazimir was born in February 1879, the first of fourteen children. Only nine survived into adulthood. The primary language at home was Polish, though he also spoke Russian and Ukrainian from his surroundings. His parents were Roman Catholic, while his father attended Orthodox services as well. His father worked as a manager at several sugar refineries, and the job kept the family moving. Between 1889 and 1896 they relocated repeatedly, first to Parkhomovka near Kharkov, where Malevich attended a two-year agricultural school and taught himself to paint in a simple peasant style. Near Konotop he met the composer Nikolai Roslavets. In Kursk he worked outdoors with Russian artists such as Lev Kvachevsky, and by his own admission his dedication to painting made him the black sheep of the family. He began working as a technical draughtsman at the Moscow-Kursk-Voronezh railway company in 1896, the same year the family reached Kursk.

• 3. Learning From Collections

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  Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, two private collectors in Moscow, gave Malevich and his peers an early window onto Western modern art. Their holdings ranged from French Impressionism to Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, and later the Parisian avant-garde of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Malevich is said to have visited both collections soon after arriving in Moscow in the fall of 1904. Critics have linked his Apple Tree in Blossom of 1904 to Alfred Sisley's Villeneuve-la-Garenne, then in Shchukin's collection. Malevich settled in Moscow with his family and mother in the spring of 1906, and he attended the studio of Fedor Rerberg. Despite repeated attempts, he was never admitted to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. The Blue Rose Exhibition of Moscow Symbolist painters in 1907 left a deep impression, visible in works like The Triumph of Heaven and The Shroud of Christ. By 1908 he had developed a strong interest in Russian icons and folk art, just as the Golden Fleece group brought more Western work to Moscow, including pieces by Vincent van Gogh, Georges Braque, and Cezanne. A planned visit to Paris collapsed in September 1909 when a sale of his painting fell through.

• 4. Knaves And Donkeys

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  Knave of Diamonds was the name of the artistic collective Malevich joined in December 1910, and he explained that Knave stood for youth while diamonds stood for beautiful youth. The group had been founded by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, who wanted to combine Western vocabularies like Cezanne's with Russian folk traditions. Years later Malevich claimed the exhibition shook severely the aesthetic foundations and consequently the foundation of art in society and criticism. To support himself he took commercial work. In 1911 he designed a bottle for Brocard and Company's eau de cologne called Severny, with a base resembling a jagged iceberg and a stopper shaped like a small polar bear. Goncharova and Larionov broke away that same year to found the Donkey's Tail collective, embracing a deliberately primitive approach drawn from Russian peasant culture and folk imagery like the lubok. Unlike Picasso, whose primitivism appropriated non-Western imagery through French colonial conquest, these Moscow Neo-Primitivists looked to domestic sources. At the Donkey's Tail exhibition in March 1912, Malevich showed peasant-inspired gouaches such as Floor Polishers and Washerwoman.

• 5. Victory Over The Sun

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  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism had reached Russia in excerpts as early as 1909, calling on artists to reject the past and glorify speed and machines. Malevich and David Burliuk adapted that rhetoric toward language and cognition rather than violence. One technique was zaum, a transrational language built from invented sounds and words meant to bypass reason. In a spring 1913 letter to the composer Mikhail Matyushin, Malevich wrote that we have come to reject reason, but we have rejected reason because a different kind of reason has arisen within us, one which might be called transrational if compared with the one which we have rejected. At the Target exhibition in March 1913, alongside Goncharova and Larionov, he showed Morning in the Country after Snowstorm and Knifegrinder, describing his style as Cubo-Futurist. That same year the opera Victory Over the Sun debuted at the Luna Park Theater in St. Petersburg, with a zaum libretto by Aleksei Kruchenykh, dissonant music by Matyushin, and stage and costume designs by Malevich. The plot shows the Sun, symbol of the old order, captured and buried. For one scene Malevich designed a curtain bearing the outline of a square, which he later identified as the first appearance of his Black Square.

• 6. The Birth Of Suprematism

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  On the 19th of December 1915, Malevich presented thirty-nine abstract oil paintings at the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10, held at the Art Bureau of Madame Nadezhda Dobychina in Petrograd. He hung the black quadrilateral in the upper corner, echoing the place reserved for icons in Russian homes. To accompany the show he published a brochure, From Cubism to Suprematism in Art, to New Realism in Painting, to Absolute Creation, later expanded as From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism. Vladimir Tatlin exhibited his corner reliefs in the adjacent room, and the exhibition drew more than 6,000 visitors. Suprematism was, for Malevich, a way to access a higher and more pure realm. He wrote 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. The first Black Square now hangs at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. A second followed around 1923, and a third, possibly painted in 1929 for a solo exhibition because of the poor condition of the original. The radiologist and art historian Milda Victurina noted that Malevich layered paints to create special colour spots, putting black beneath red so the eye reads the red with a touch of darkness. That technique helped experts identify forgeries, which generally lacked it.

• 7. Teaching Through Revolution

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  Marc Chagall taught alongside Malevich at the Vitebsk Practical Art School in Belarus, where Malevich worked from 1919 to 1922 after the October Revolution of 1917. He founded the UNOVIS collective in 1919 and had a solo show at the Sixteenth State Exhibition in Moscow. His students and contemporaries carried his ideas outward, among them El Lissitzky, Lyubov Popova, and Alexander Rodchenko. In 1923 he was appointed director of the Petrograd State Institute of Artistic Culture, which a Communist party newspaper attacked as a government-supported monastery rife with counterrevolutionary sermonizing and artistic debauchery, forcing it to close in 1926. His one journey abroad came in 1927. He traveled to Warsaw, exhibited at the Polish Arts Club in the Polonia Hotel, and met former students including Wladyslaw Strzeminski and Henryk Stazewski. With the Polish poet Tadeusz Peiper he then left for Berlin, visiting the Bauhaus in Dessau, where they met Walter Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. At the Great Berlin Art Exhibition he displayed over seventy works spanning his whole career, and he arranged to leave most of the paintings behind when he returned to the Soviet Union. Those abandoned canvases became a primary source of knowledge of his work in the West for the next fifty years.

• 8. Censorship And A Black Square Funeral

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  Joseph Stalin's government turned against abstraction as bourgeois art, and many of Malevich's works were confiscated while he was removed from his teaching position. In autumn 1930 he was arrested and interrogated by the OGPU in Leningrad, accused of Polish espionage and threatened with execution, then released in early December. The critic Alexandre Benois derided his art as a negation of love of life and love of nature. Malevich answered that art does not need us, and it never did. In 1934 Socialist Realism was imposed as the only permissible form of expression, and by then Stalin's policies had pushed Malevich back toward figuration and representational painting. Diagnosed with cancer in 1933, he was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union to seek treatment abroad. He died of cancer in Leningrad on the 15th of May 1935, at age 56. On his deathbed he had been shown with the Black Square above him, and mourners at his funeral rally were permitted to wave a banner bearing a black square. He had asked to be buried under an oak tree on the outskirts of Nemchinovka, a place to which he felt a special bond. His friend Nikolai Suetin designed a white cube with a black square to mark the grave. That memorial was destroyed during World War II, and in 2013 an apartment block was built on the burial site. Decades after his death, his Suprematist Composition of 1916 sold at Christie's New York in May 2018 for over 85 million US dollars, a record auction price for a Russian work of art.