Russian painter and designer, the
most important pioneer of, geometric abstract art, originator
of Suprematism. Born near Kiev; trained at Kiev School of Art and Moscow
Academy of Fine Arts; 1913 began creating abstract geometric patterns in style
he called suprematism; taught painting in Moscow and Leningrad 1919-21;
published book, The Nonobjective World (1926), on his theory; first to
exhibit abstract geometric paintings; strove to produce pure, cerebral
compositions; famous painting White on White (1918) carries suprematist
theories to absolute conclusion; Soviet politics turned against modern art, and
he died in poverty and oblivion.
He began working in an unexceptional
Post-Impressionist manner, but by 1912 he was painting peasant subjects in a
massive `tubular' style similar to that of Léger as well as pictures combining
the fragmentation of form of Cubism with the
multiplication of the image of Futurism (The Knife
Grinder, Yale Univ. Art Gallery, 1912). Malevich, however, was fired with
the desire `to free art from the burden of the object' and launched the
Suprematist movement, which brought abstract art to a geometric simplicity more
radical than anything previously seen. He claimed that he made a picture
`consisting of nothing more than a black square on a white field' as early as
1913, but Suprematist paintings were first made public in Moscow in 1915 and
there is often difficulty in dating his work. (There is often difficulty also
in knowing which way up his paintings should be hung, photographs of early
exhibitions sometimes providing conflicting evidence.)
Malevich moved away from absolute
austerity, tilting rectangles from the vertical, adding more colors and
introducing a suggestion of the third dimension and even a degree of painterly
handling, but around 1918 he returned to his purest ideals with a series of White
on White paintings. After this he seems to have realized he could go no
further along this road and virtually gave up abstract painting, turning more
to teaching, writing, and making three-dimensional models that were important
in the growth of Constructivism. In 1919 he started teaching at the art school
at Vitebsk, where he exerted a profound influence on Lissitzky, and in 1922 he
moved to Leningrad, where he lived for the rest of his life. He visited Warsaw
and Berlin in 1927, accompanying an exhibition of his works and visited the
Bauhaus. In the late 1920s he returned to figurative painting, but was out of
favor with a political system that now demanded Socialist Realism from its artists
and he died in neglect. However, his influence on abstract art, in the west as
well as Russia, was enormous. The best collection of his work is in the
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
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