Malevich, Kazimir

Malevich, Kazimir (Severinovich)

(born , Feb. 23, 1878, near Kiev, Russia—died May 15, 1935, Leningrad) Russian painter and designer. He discovered Cubism on a trip to Paris in 1912 and returned to lead the Russian Cubist movement. In 1915 he exhibited paintings more abstractly geometrical than any seen before, consisting of simple geometrical forms painted in a limited palette, a style he called Suprematism. In 1917–18 he created his well-known White on White series, austere images of a white square floating on a white background. In 1919 he joined Marc Chagall at his revolutionary art school in Vitebsk, where he exerted a strong influence on El Lissitzky. In the 1920s he returned to representational painting but could not accede to the government's demand for Socialist Realism. Though his career was doomed, he greatly influenced Western art and design.

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Malevich, Kazimir Severingvich 

Born Feb. 11 (23), 1878, near Kiev; died May, 15, 1935, in Leningrad. Soviet artist.

Malevich studied in Moscow at the School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in 1904 and 1905 and at the studio of F. I. Rerberg from 1905 to 1910. He participated in several exhibitions, including the Jack of Diamonds (1910), the Donkey’s Tail (1912), and the futurist 0.10 (1915-16). In the first decade of the 20th century, Malevich strove to combine the principles of cubism and futurism (Haymaking, 1909; A Station Without a Stop, 1911). He later became one of the pioneers of abstract art. Malevich explained his own work in a vague and mystical way. He reduced a physical object to combinations of the simplest geometric forms. These forms contrasted in color and were scattered about a plane. This artistic theory, which is known as suprematism, led from the very beginning to a denial of the social and cognitive tasks of artistic creation and painting proper (Black Square, 1913). In 1918, Malevich designed the set for the first staging of V. V. Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe.

In the early 1920’s, Malevich became interested in industrial and applied art. As a teacher in the People’s School of Art in Vitebsk (1919-22) and the director of the Leningrad State Institute of Artistic Culture (1923-27), he did research on the formal vocabulary of the plastic arts. He also worked out functional designs for dishes, designed textiles, and drew models for a new type of spatial organization. In the early 1930’s, Malevich made efforts to return to representational painting and to address himself to Soviet themes (The Girl With a Red Staff, 1932). All the aforementioned paintings are in the Tret’iakov Gallery.

WORKS

Ot kubizma k suprematizmy. Paris, 1916.
Suprematizm. Vitebsk, 1920.
Essays on Art: 1915-1933. New York, 1971.

REFERENCES

Fedorov-Davydov, A. Vystavka proizvedenii K. S. Malevicha. Moscow, 1929.
Reingardt, L. “Abstraktsionizm.” In the collection Modernizm. Moscow, 1973. Pages 112-15.
Kasimir Malevich: 1878-1935. An Exhibition. … London, 1959.

T. N. MAKAROVA