Precursors of Suprematism
In 1913, Malevich painted the stage sets and designed the costumes for the opera Victory Over the Sun – a collaboration with Mikhail Matiushin (music, composed from the piano) and Alexei Kruchenykh (libretto). The opera was conceived and produced in Zaum, a poetic form whose name translates as “beyond the mind.” The goal of Zaum was to “communicate directly with the subconscious” by sound rather than representation [Laskewicz 1995]. Bowlt [1990] cited Malevich’s letters to show that this experience explicitly led Malevich to his Suprematist painting and writing: Zaum poetry separated words and syllables from any specific objects or actions; Malevich recognized that painting could be separated from any specific objects, figures, or settings [Lunn 2020]. For this explicitly non-rational production, Malevich produced sets and costumes that contained large, geometric blocks of color.
In 1914, Malevich delivered a talk in Moscow, and later described it “On February 19, 1914, I rejected reason in a public lecture” [Shatskikh 2012: 4]. Reason and logic, applied to visual art, motivated attempts to order the world through carefully composed representations, whether idealized or dystopian. He developed a non-sense, anti-esthetic approach to painting he called Fevralism, referring to the month of the lecture.
Tupitsyn [2019] provided a 1918 quote of Alexander Rodchenko: “The present belongs to artists who are anarchists of art.” She also referenced the contemporaneous diary of the artist Vavara Stepanova to interpret non-objectivism as both a change in the formal nature of painting and an embrace of political anarchy after the fall of czarist Russia.
Malevich first used the term ‘nonobjective’ in his brochure ‘From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism’ (1916), writing in advance of—but also as though about—his later white paintings: ‘I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to . . . nonobjective creation.’ This endorsement of a ground-zero regime of painting amply corresponds to a post-revolutionary atmosphere marked by erasure of the toppled political system, including its cultural institutions [Tupitsyn 2019].
Bowlt, John E. 1990. Malevich and the energy of language. Pp. 179-86 in Kazimir Malevich, ed. by Jeanne D’Andrea. Exhibition catalogue. Los Angeles: The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center.
Laskewicz, Achar. 1995. Zaum: words without meaning or meaning without words? Paper presented at the International Summer Congresses for Structural and Semiotic Studies, Imatra, Finland, June 10-16, 1995. http://users.belgacom.net/nachtschimmen/zaumpaper.htm
Shatskikh, Aleksandra, trans. by Marian Schwartz. 2012. Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Tupitsyn, Margarita. 2019. The subject of nonobjective art. Post (1 May). https://post.moma.org/the-subject-of-nonobjective-art/ (Accessed 5 Nov 2020).