Malevich
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (23 February [O.S. 11 February] 1879 – 15 May 1935) was a Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose pioneering work and writing influenced the development of abstract art in the 20th century. His concept of Suprematism sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms (objectivity) and subject matter in order to access "the supremacy of pure feeling" and spirituality. Born in Kiev, modern-day Ukraine, to an ethnic Polish family, Malevich was active primarily in Russia and became a leading artist of the Russian avant-garde. His work has been also associated with the Ukrainian avant-garde, and he is a central figure in the history of modern art in Central and Eastern Europe more broadly.
Early in his career, Malevich worked in multiple styles, assimilating Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism through reproductions and the works acquired by contemporary Russian collectors. In the early 1910s, he collaborated with other avant-garde Russian artists, including Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. After World War I, Malevich gradually simplified his approach, producing key works of pure geometric forms on minimal grounds. His abstract painting Black Square (1915) marked the most radically non-representational painting yet exhibited and drew "an uncrossable line (…) between old art and new art". Malevich also articulated his theories in texts such as From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism (1915) and The Non-Objective World (1926).
His trajectory mirrored the upheavals around the October Revolution of 1917. In 1918, Malevich began teaching in Vitebsk along with Marc Chagall. In 1919, he founded the UNOVIS artists collective and had a solo show at the Sixteenth State Exhibition in Moscow in 1919. His reputation spread westward with solo exhibitions in Warsaw and Berlin in 1927. This marked the first and only time Malevich ever left Russia. From 1928 to 1930 he taught at the Kiev Art Institute alongside Alexander Bogomazov, Victor Palmov, and Vladimir Tatlin, while publishing in the Kharkiv magazine Nova Generatsiia (New Generation). Repression of the intelligentsia soon forced him back to Leningrad. By the early 1930s, Stalin's restrictive cultural policy and the subsequent imposition of Socialist Realism had prompted Malevich to return to figuration and to paint in a representational style. Diagnosed with cancer in 1933, he was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union to seek treatment abroad. While constrained by his progressing illness and Stalin's cultural policies, Malevich painted and exhibited his work until his death. He died from cancer on 15 May 1935, at age 56.
His art and his writings influenced Eastern and Central European contemporaries such as El Lissitzky, Lyubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko and Henryk Stażewski, as well as generations of later abstract artists, such as Ad Reinhardt and the Minimalists. He was celebrated posthumously in major exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art (1936), the Guggenheim Museum (1973), and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1989), which has a large collection of his work. In the 1990s, the ownership claims of museums to many Malevich works began to be disputed by his heirs.
Our Hollow
- 2019-10-23T00:00:00.000000Z
Only the Flies
- 2016-08-12T00:00:00.000000Z
Into Bliss
- 2025-07-30T00:00:00.000000Z
Inalienable
- 2024-04-12T00:00:00.000000Z
Irène Jacob
- 2024-03-19T00:00:00.000000Z
Impedance
- 2021-11-01T00:00:00.000000Z
Split
- 2018-05-21T00:00:00.000000Z
Similar Artists