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.