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.)

Kazimir Malevich, 3

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).

Kazimir Malevich, 2

What does “Suprematism” mean?

Malevich first wrote the term Suprematism, in reference to his 1915 works, in a letter dated 24 September (old calendar) 1915.  In 1927 Malevich wrote “Under Suprematism I understand the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art [italics added].  To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless;  the significant thing is feeling [that[ is called forth.” Art historians suggest that Malevich selected the term to claim superior conceptual ground for totally abstract painting. 

Malevich’s Suprematist paintings and drawings eschew any representation of objects, people, or landscapes, except for his own visual interpretation of the feelings that such things invoke – in him, but his writing suggests that he perceived those feelings to be widespread.  Instead of visual representation, his work relies on rectilinear forms (occasionally circles or half circles) rendered in solid (or nearly solid) color (especially black, reds, and white) on a white background. (More about these colors in future posts.)

Kazimir Malevich, 1

Kazimir Malevich was born in Kiev in February 1878, to parents of Polish descent.  He took drawing and painting classes in his late teens, and began painting scenes in the Ukrainian countryside.  He moved to Moscow in 1904 and studied at the Moscow School of painting, Sculpture, and Architecture through his late 20s.  During these years his style developed from naturalism to neo-impressionist to expressionist.  Exposed to Cubist and Futurist paintings in 1909-10, he developed affinity for and mastery of those artistic approaches over the next five years.

 In December 1915, 0.10, The Last Futurist Exhibition was held in Petrograd (St. Petersburg).  Malevich exhibited 39 “completely nonrepresentational works for the first time, presented as the ‘new painterly realism’” including Black Square (1915).  He followed that exhibit with brochures and lectures extolling “Suprematism” as “the New Realism of Painting, to Absolute Creation” and “The New Painterly Realism.”  

During the Russian Revolution (1917-23), the Tenth State Exhibition: Nonobjective Art and Suprematism was held in Moscow (1919).  Malevich exhibited 16 Suprematist paintings in the exhibit, including Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918).

From 1928, Malevich’s painting shifted to highly stylized depictions of farmers and workers, almost certainly motivated by political pressure.  Between 1929 and 1934, increasing resistance to artistic pluralism in general and non-representational art in particular culminated in a statement from the Congress of Soviet Writers claimed “Socialist Realism as the exclusive style for Soviet writers and artists.”  Indeed, in 1934 socialist realism became the only painting style that could be taught or publicly exhibited in the Soviet Union.

On 15 May 1935, Malevich died of cancer at home in Leningrad (St. Petersberg).  In the words of Russian scholar Aleksandra Shatskikh, “From the mid-1930s to the late 1980s, there was [and had been] no artist in the Soviet Union by the name of Kazimir Malevich.”

Why did Malevich embrace completely “non-objective” art?  What led Malevich to the Black Square, which he termed “the zero point” for painting?  Why call his new insight “Suprematism”?  How did Suprematism relate to Russian Constructivism?  What awful discovery was made about Black Square, 100 years after its creation?