Kazimir Malevich, 8

How did Suprematism differ from Constructivism?

The term constructivism stems from the Working Group of Constructivists, founded in Moscow in March 1921 by Karl Ioganson, Konstantin Medunetski, Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, and Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg.   The movement was concerned with literally and figuratively constructing a better world through collective action of creators, in contrast to visual works created by individual artists [Lodder 2003].  Suprematism (in its manifestation in painting as well as writing and architecture) was not motivated by utilitarian goals.[1]

However, during the 1920s Malevich turned his energies to teaching, writing, and models and sketches for architectural works, and even “Suprematist designs for fabric and ceramics” [Guiliano 2013].  He began to argue that Suprematism could be applied in utilitarian ways[2]:  “The utilitarian constructions of technology, which develop out of the skillful pitting of one natural force against another, have in them no trace of an ‘artistic’ imitation of natural forms;  they are new creations of human culture” [Malevich, trans. by Dearstyne 1959: 30].

Lazar (“El”) Lissitzky (1890-1941), twelve years younger than Malevich, became a pivot between Suprematism and Constructivism.  Rather than focusing specifically on utilitarian creations to further the building of a socialist society, “for Lissitzky, the essential task at hand was to use art as a symbolic, ideological vehicle with which to assist in the transformation of consciousness both in communist Russia and in the capitalist West;  for the Moscow constructivists, the imperative was to contribute in a direct, hands-on manner to the building of the new society that had actually come into being in Russia” [Lodder 2003: 30]. 

In late 1921, the Soviet government sent Lissitzky to Berlin “to establish cultural contacts between Soviet and German artists” [Perloff 2003: 7]. In 1922, he was a founding member of the International Faction of Constructivists, based in Berlin.He served as a bridge among Suprematist ideals, Russian Constructivist practical goals, and the International Constructivist use Constructivism’s aesthetic and formal ideals with Suprematism’s focus on personal psychological effect. 

Below, I attempt to relate Suprematism (for which Malevich (1878-1935) was the chief theorist), Russian Constructivism, International Constructivism, and the work and tenets of El Lissitzky, who was active in all three movements.

Suprematism (1913-21]: Art drives interior consciousness;  best achieved through a vocabulary of simple, flat shapes and limited colors.

Russian Constructivism [1921-34]: “Art” is irrelevant;  creators must design and build to improve the collective, communist future;  this requires movement into the third (and fourth) dimensions.  Followed Marx’s dictum that “Art must not explain the world, but change it” [quoted by Lodder on p. 37].

Lissitzky [esp. 1921-34]: Art is a means to increase collective consciousness in the pursuit of socialist ideals.

International Constructivism [1922-1950s]: Embraced total abstraction via visual and actual three-dimensionality of simple forms.  The IFC’s Statement also emphasized the role of art in social progress, but this was not evident in all manifestations of International Constructivism.

This characterization emphasizes the contrast of Suprematism, which mirrored the anarchy of the period surrounding the Russian Revolution, versus Russian Constructivism, which considered thoughtful and ambitious design as a driver of a new order. However, the Soviet state had other purposes for art. Rather than a tool for creating a new order, visual, written, and musical arts were to glorify the worker, peasant, and the nation.

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[1] However Shatskikh [2012: 94-8] emphasized that the very first exhibition of Malevich’s Suprematist works was at the exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Verbovka, Ukraine in November 1915, and that the catalog listed the artworks as designs for a scarf and for a pillow.  Thus, while the motivation for the work was not utilitarian, from the beginning, Malevich seemed willing for them to be the design basis for everyday objects.

[2] Compare the previous footnote.  Malevich’s written emphasis on Suprematist design as the basis for objects and buildings began during the 1920s, but his recognition of this seems to have been present from the start.

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Guiliano, Charles.  2013.  Review of Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 13 May – September 7 2003.  Berkshire Fine Arts (20 September).  https://www.berkshirefinearts.com/09-20-2013_kazimir-malevich-suprematism.htm, accessed 5 Nov 2020.

Lodder, Christina.  2003.  El Lissitzky and the export of Constructivism.  Ch. 2 (pp. 27-45) in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. by Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed.  Los Angeles:  Getty Research Institute.

Malevich, Kazimir,  trans. by Howard Dearstyne.  1959.  The Non-Objective World.  Chicago:  P. Theobald.  (Originally written and translated into German in 1927.)

Perloff, Nancy.  2003.  The puzzle of El Lissitzky’s artistic identity.  Ch. 1 (pp. 1-25) in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. by Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed.  Los Angeles:  Getty Research Institute.

Shatskikh, Aleksandra, trans. by Marian Schwartz.  2012.  Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism.  New Haven:  Yale University Press.

Kazimir Malevich, 7

Scandal, 100 years later

Shatskikh [2012] placed the creation of Black Square on June 8 (old calendar), 1915, or 21 June in the Gregorian calendar.  Malevich’s insight to eclipse all non-objective figuration with a black square, creating the “zero point” for painting, came suddenly.  Indeed, he painted over a non-objective composition.  His later comments to colleagues and students included “fiery lightning bolts crossing the canvas in front of him” and afterwards “he could not eat, drink, or sleep for a full week” [Shatskikh 2012: 45]. 

Black Square, 1915

Malevich’s self-reported impact of this insight helped Shatskikh respond to the uproar that occurred in 2015.  The director of Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery announced that new analyses of Black Square (housed in the gallery) revealed penciled-and-erased writing in the white border of the painting:  “A battle of negroes”[1] [Nueendorf 2015;  Shatskikh 2017;  Grovier 2018;  Vakar 2018].  The director noted that the handwriting was that of Malevich.  Vakar [2015, translated 2018] concluded that Malevich penciled this inscription shortly after completing the painting, and erased it when he recognized the significance of the painting.  Shatskikh [2017] vehemently disagreed, arguing that Malevich immediately recognized the significance of the painting, and that the painting, painted in oil over another Suprematist painting[2] that had not yet fully dried, would not have been dry enough for penciling and erasing for years.  She implied that the penciled comment was an act of “inscribed vandalism” during the 50 years when Malevich was a non-entity and avant-garde art was officially reviled in the Soviet state.

[1] The phrase almost certainly alludes to a late- nineteenth century French satirical painting, titled A Battle of Negroes at Night and, in a reprinting, A Battle of Negroes in a Cave on a Dark Night.

[2] which itself was painted over an earlier painting by Malevich.  Painting over a not-fully dry oil painting is probably what caused the severe cracking of the black paint in Black Square.

Grovier, Kelly.  2018.  The racist message hidden in a masterpiece.  BBC Culture, 12 March.  https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180312-the-racist-message-hidden-in-a-masterpiece, accessed 22 Nov 2020.

Grovier, Kelly.  2018.  The racist message hidden in a masterpiece.  BBC Culture, 12 March.  https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180312-the-racist-message-hidden-in-a-masterpiece, accessed 22 Nov 2020.

Neuendorf, Henri.  2015.  X-ray analysis gives shocking new insights into Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square.  Artnet, 13 November.  https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/kizimir-malevich-black-square-363368, accessed 22 Nov 2020.

Shatskikh, Aleksandra, trans. by Marian Schwartz.  2012.  Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism.  New Haven:  Yale University Press.

Shatskikh, Aleksandra.  2017.  Inscribed vandalism: The Black Square at one hundred.  e-flux journal #85 (October).  https://www.e-flux.com/journal/85/155475/inscribed-vandalism-the-black-square-at-one-hundred, accessed 21 Nov 2020.

Vakar, Irina, trans. by Antonina Bouis.  2018.  Kazimir Malevich: The Black Square.  Köln:  Verlag der Buchlandlung Walther König.

Kazimir Malevich, 6

From painting’s ground zero to the end of painting, in five years

According to the chronology Malevich wrote and published,

“Suprematism is divisible into three stages … – the black period, the colored period, and the white period.  The last denotes white forms painted white.  All three of these stages took place between the years 1913 and 1918.  These periods were constructed according to a purely planar development, and the main principle of economy lay at the basis of their construction – of how to convey the power of statics and of apparent dynamic rest by means of a single plane” [Malevich 1920: 1, quoted in Sarabianov 1990: 166].

However, Malevich displayed several color-dominated Suprematist paintings at the pivotal December 1915 0.10 exhibition.  Shatskikh [2012] used his correspondence and sketches to show that a number of them (including Suprematist Painting (with Black Trapezium and Red Square), below) were conceptualized and painted before Malevich arrived at the negation of color in Black Square.  Malevich declared his “stages” of Suprematism conceptually, superimposing that conception on the actual chronology of his painting.

Suprematist Painting (with Black Trapezium and Red Square), 1915

By late 1917, Malevich began producing paintings in which colored shapes dissipate into the white ground [Railing 2011].  He referred to this as “dissolution,” and related it to the ultimate dissolution of the cosmos [Shatskikh 2012: 253].  In mid-1918, color dissolution reached its apotheosis in White Square on White Background (below), which indeed features a white square painted at an oblique angle within the white ground on the canvas.  However, as Malevich wrote, “But even the color while is still white, and to show shapes in it, it must be created so that the shape can be read, so that the sign can be taken in.  And so there must be a difference between them but only in the pure white form” (quoted in Shatskikh [2012: 260]).  Malevich achieved these differences by using different white pigments:  lead white, zinc white, and titanium white [Railing 2011].

White Square on White Background , 1918

Four white-on-white paintings (employing different configurations of shapes) were the logical end of painterly Suprematism.  In a 1920 publication of drawings, Malevich wrote “There can be no question of painting in Suprematism, painting has long been outlived, and the artist himself is a prejudice of the past” [Shatskikh 2012: 269].

During the 1920s Malevich painted more black-on-white and black-and-red-on-white compositions, focused on Suprematist writing and teaching, and worked with his students to extend Suprematist principles into architectural drawings and models.  After Stalin’s rise to power, the near prohibition on Soviet abstraction, and his 1927 tour in Germany, he returned to his earliest subject, the everyday lives of rural peasants, via highly stylized figurative painting  [Joosten 1990;  Giuliano 2013;  Cumming 2014;  Preston 2014].  Had Suprematism been extinguished by the impossibility of public presentation, or had it come to its conceptual end?

In a perceptive essay, Preston [2014] argued that Malevich’s figurative painting in his last seven years contained much of the insights and symbolism he developed in Suprematism.  The peasants and their landscapes appear as colored geometric shapes, identifiable as people and landscapes, but stripped of any detail – even faces.  The compositions present only one, or at most two, planes.  The coloring often makes use of his dissolution technique.  Preston interpreted these compositions as:  a return to Malevich’s earliest subjects, perhaps motivated by the Soviet insistence on visual representation of heroic workers, informed by Suprematist principles (except, of course, the principle of non-representation), and a bitter observation of the facelessness and anomie of visual propaganda.

Cumming, Laura.  2014.  Malevich review: an intensely moving retrospective.  The Guardian, 29 July.  https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/20/malevich-tate-modern-review-intensely-moving-retropective  (Accessed 7 Nov 2020).

Guiliano, Charles.  2013.  Review of Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 13 May – September 7 2003.  Berkshire Fine Arts (20 September).  https://www.berkshirefinearts.com/09-20-2013_kazimir-malevich-suprematism.htm (Accessed 5 Nov 2020).

Joosten, Joop M.  1990.  Chronology.  Pp. 5-21 in Kazimir Malevich, ed. by Jeanne D’Andrea.  Exhibition catalogue.  Los Angeles:  The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center.

Malevich, Kazimir.  1920.  Suprematism: 34 risunka.  Vitebsk:  Unovis.  Cited by Sarabianov, 1990.

Preston, Oliver.  2014.  Obliteration and affirmation: the language of Suprematism in Malevich.  The Yale Review of International Studies, posted January.  http://yris.yira.org/essays/1220 , accessed 1 Dec 2020.

Railing, Patricia.  2011.  Malevich’s Suprematist Palette: ‘Colour is light.’  InCoRM Journal 2 (Spring-Autumn): 47-57

Sarabianov, Dmitrii, trans. by John E. Bowlt.  1990.  Malevich and his art, 1900-1930.  Pp. 164-8 in Kazimir Malevich, ed. by Jeanne D’Andrea.  Exhibition catalogue.  Los Angeles:  The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center.

Shatskikh, Aleksandra, trans. by Marian Schwartz.  2012.  Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism.  New Haven:  Yale University Press.

Kazimir Malevich, 5

Formal elements of Suprematism

In The Non-Objective World Malevich described his struggle to free himself from any visual representation, whether naturalistic, Impressionist, Cubist, or Futurist.  He found liberation in the square, devoid of color.  During the 20th century, other artists developed other systems for expressing emotional response rather than identifiable objects or people.  For the pioneer Malevich, elemental geometric shapes “formed the basis for a new language that could express an ‘entire system of world-building’” [Sarabianov 1990: 166].

“The black square on the white field was the first form in which non-objective feeling came to be expressed.  The square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling” [Malevich, trans. by Dearstyne 1959: 76].

Malevich found that black against white gave a suggestion of space.  His white ground was not a simple, flat white, but a complex and slightly textured application of multiple pigments (typically lead white and zinc white) and other white materials (calcium carbonate and barium sulfate) [Railing 2011: 48;  Shatskikh 2012: 252].  To create the visual illusion of space, Malevich arranged certain colors – often white, black, red – in a particular manner.  This became a basic tenet of Suprematism [Walker 1990: xi]. 

 “…as planes all the Suprematist forms are units of the Suprematist square.  Most of them fall into line along diagonal and vertical axes…  They also attain their maximum intensity when the Suprematist forms are positioned horizontally. … The forms are built exclusively on white, which is intended to signify infinite space” [Malevich 1921, trans. Bowlt.  1990: 178].

Railing [2011] went further, arguing that these paintings reflected Malevich’s study and experience of the optical qualities of light:  “These are the phenomena of the pure sensation of seeing… when the eye, stimulated by a bright light such as the sun, produces luminous planes of color in the eye’s optical field, numerous shapes and colors floating in front of the closed eyes” [49].

Malevich, Kazimir, trans. by John E. Bowlt.  1990.  Futurism-Suprematism, 1921.  Pp. 177-8 in Kazimir Malevich, ed. by Jeanne D’Andrea.  Exhibition catalogue.  Los Angeles:  The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center.

Malevich, Kazimir,  trans. by Howard Dearstyne.  1959.  The Non-Objective World.  Chicago:  P. Theobald.  (Originally written and translated into German in 1927.)

Railing, Patricia.  2011.  Malevich’s Suprematist Palette: ‘Colour is light.’  InCoRM Journal 2 (Spring-Autumn): 47-57

Sarabianov, Dmitrii, trans. by John E. Bowlt.  1990.  Malevich and his art, 1900-1930.  Pp. 164-8 in Kazimir Malevich, ed. by Jeanne D’Andrea.  Exhibition catalogue.  Los Angeles:  The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center.

Shatskikh, Aleksandra, trans. by Marian Schwartz.  2012.  Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism.  New Haven:  Yale University Press.

Walker, John.  1990.  Foreword.  Page x in Kazimir Malevich, ed. by Jeanne D’Andrea.  Exhibition catalogue.  Los Angeles:  The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center.