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.

Kazimir Malevich, 4

Transcending representation, even in abstracted form

In Chapters from an Artist’s Autobiography [Malevich 1933, trans. by Upchurch 1990: 174], Malevich described his dissatisfaction with naturalistic painting:

“…the emotional energy of painting would not let me see images in their representational nature…  The naturalism of objects didn’t stand up to my criticism…. I expected that the painting eventually would provide the form deriving from the properties of painting, and would avoid any vital connection with the object…. My acquaintance with icon painting convinced me that the point is not in the study of anatomy and perspective, not in depicting the truth of nature, but in sensing art and artistic reality through the emotions.”

Such a move from careful reproduction of what the eye sees toward careful expression of the emotion (or psychological state) that objects (or ideas) bring to the artist, underlies centuries of artistic movements in East and West.  Most of these movements and styles (such as mannerism, Impressionism, Expressionism) make objects and figures into vehicles for expressing mood, emotion, internal psychology.  Non-objective painting relies on formal elements (shape, color, texture, and their intersections) to convey mood, emotion, and ideas.  The precise language that Malevich developed in Suprematism is but one such language for non-objective expression.

Once we recognize that our consciousness is limited and limiting, it follows that the phenomena of which we are conscious are limited.  One role of artists is to explore the unconscious, and manifest elements from the unconscious so that viewers or readers might be able to lift the veil of their consciousness. 

“Everything which we call nature, in the last analysis, is a figment of the imagination, having no relation whatever to reality.  If the human being were suddenly able to comprehend actual reality – in that very moment the battle would be decided and eternal, unshakeable perfection attained.  [Until then], the fact that our nervous systems and our brains do not function always and absolutely under the control of our conscious minds but rather, are capable of acting and reacting outside of consciousness, is left out of account. …To the human being, the conscious mind is always the decisive factor. …But what is the essence and content of our consciousness? The inability to apprehend reality!” [Malevich 1927, trans. by Dearstyne 1959: 20]

Malevich, Kazimir, trans. by Allan Upchurch.  1990.  Fragments from Chapters From an Artist’s Autobiography (1933).  Pp. 173-5 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.)