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Kazimir Malevich
Kasimir Severinovich Malevich was born near Kiev, Kiev Governorate of Russian Empire. His parents, Seweryn and Ludwika Malewicz, were ethnic Poles, and he was baptised in the Roman Catholic Church. His father was the manager of a sugar factory. Kazimir was the first of fourteen children, although only nine of the children survived into adulthood. His family moved often and he spent most of his childhood in the villages of Ukraine amidst sugar-beet plantations, far from centers of culture. Until age 12 or 13 he knew nothing of professional artists, though peasant art had surrounded him in childhood. He delighted in peasant embroidery, and in decorated walls and stoves. He himself was able to paint in the peasant style. He studied drawing in Kiev from 1895 to 1896.
In 1904, after the death of his father, he moved to Moscow. He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1904 to 1910 and in the studio of Fedor Rerberg in Moscow (1904-1910). In 1911 he participated in the second exhibition of the grop Soyuz Molodyozhi (Union of Youth) in St. Petersburg, together with Vladimir Tatlin and, in 1912, the group held its third exhibition, which included works by Aleksandra Ekster, Tatlin and others. In the same year he participated in an exhibition by the collective Donkey’s Tail in Moscow. By that time his works were influenced by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, Russian avant-garde painters who were particularly interested in Russian folk art called lubok. In March 1913 a major exhibition of Aristarkh Lentulov’s paintings opened in Moscow. The effect of this exhibition was comparable with that of Paul Cezanne in Paris in 1907, as all the main Russian avant-garde artists of the time (including Malevich) immediately absorbed the cubist principles and began using them in their works. Already in the same year the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun with Malevich’s stage-set became a great success. In 1914 Malevich exhibited his works in the Salon des Independants in Paris together with Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay, Aleksandra Ekster and Vadim Meller, among others.
It remains one of the great mysteries of 20th century art, how, while leading a comfortable career, during which he just followed all the latest trends in art, in 1915 Malevich suddenly came up with the idea of Suprematism. The fact that Malevich throughout all his life was signing and re-signing his works using earlier dates makes this u-turn in his artistic career even more ambiguous. Be that as it may, in 1915 he published his manifesto From Cubism to Suprematism. In 1915-1916 he worked with other Suprematist artists in a peasant/artisan co-operative in Skoptsi and Verbovka village. In 1916-1917 he participated in exhibitions of the Jack of Diamonds group in together with Nathan Altman, David Burliuk and A. Ekster, among others. Famous examples of his Suprematist works include Black Square (1915) and White on White (1918).
Malevich also acknowledged that his fascination with aerial photography and aviation led him to abstractions inspired by or derived from aerial landscapes. Harvard doctoral candidate Julia Bekman Chadaga writes: “In his later writings, Malevich defined the ‘additional element’ as the quality of any new visual environment bringing about a change in perception …. In a series of diagrams illustrating the ‘environments’ that influence various painterly styles, the Suprematist is associated with a series of aerial views rendering the familiar landscape into an abstraction…” (Excerpted from Ms. Bekman Chadaga’s paper delivered at Columbia University’s 2000 symposium, Technology, and Modernity in Russia and Eastern Europe’).
After the October Revolution, Malevich became a member of the Collegium on the Arts of Narkompros, the commission for the protection of monuments and the museums commission (all from 1918-1919). He taught at the Vitebsk Practical Art School in the USSR (now part of Belarus) (1919-1922), the Leningrad Academy of Arts (1922-1927), the Kiev State Art Institute (1927-1929), and the House of the Arts in Leningrad (1930). He wrote the book The World as Non-Objectivity (Munich 1926; English trans. 1959) which outlines his Suprematist theories.
In 1927, he traveled to Warsaw and then to Berlin and Munchen for a retrospective which finally brought him international recognition. He arranged to leave most of the paintings behind when he returned to the Soviet Union. Malevich’s assumption that a shifting in the attitudes of the Soviet authorities towards the modernist art movement would take place after the death of Lenin and Trotsky’s fall from power, were proven correct in a couple of years, when the Stalinist regime turned against formes of abstractism, considering them a type of “bourgeois” art, that could not express social realities. As a consequence, many of his works were confiscated and he was banned from creating and exhibiting similar art.
Critics derided Malevich for reaching art by negating everything good and pure: love of life and love of nature. The Westernizer artist and art historian Alexandre Benois was one such critic. Malevich responded that art can advance and develop for art’s sake alone, regardless of its pleasure: art does not need us, and it never needed us since stars first shone in the sky.
Malevich’s work only recently reappeared in art exhibitions in Russia after a long absence. Since then art followers have labored to reintroduce the artist to Russian lovers of painting. A book of his theoretical works with an anthology of reminiscences and writings has been published. Many stains on his reputation in Russia remain, however. Recently Ukrainian art followers established the precise birthdate of the artist: February 23, 1879. Malevich and Ukraine, by professor D. Gorbachev, 2006, Kiev, reveals many new biographical details.
Malevich died of cancer in Leningrad on May 15, 1935. On his deathbed he was exhibited with the black square above him. His ashes were sent to Nemchinovka, and buried in a field near his dacha. A white cube decorated with a black square was placed on his tomb. The city on Leningrad bestowed a pension on Malevich’s mother and daughter. “No phenomenon is mortal,” Malevich wrote in an unpublished manuscript, “and this means not only the body but the idea as well, a symbol that one is eternally reincarnated in another form which actually exists in the conscious and unconscious person.”
Read moreShowing 1–100 of 146 results
Suprematism, 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $269.00Black Square (Black Suprematic Square) 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Black Square
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Black Circle, 1923
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Red Square – Visual Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack – Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $319.00Hieratic Suprematist Cross 1920
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $269.00Suprematist composition 1916
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Suprematist Composition- Airplane Flying 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $269.00Painterly Realism of a Football Player – Color Masses in the 4th Dimension 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $319.00Suprematism. (Supremus 58. Yellow and Black) 1916
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $259.00Suprematism 1917
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $289.00White on White 1918
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00House under construction
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $379.00Suprematism 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $289.00Suprematism 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $259.00Suprematism 1916
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Supematise Composition with Plane in Projection 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Suprematism – Non-Objective Composition, 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Suprematism 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $269.00Suprematism No 65, 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $279.00Suprematism of the Spirit, 1919
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $299.00Suprematism with Blue Triangle and Black Square 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $269.00Suprematism, 18th Construction 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Suprematism. Two-Dimensional Self-Portrait 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $279.00Suprematism
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $289.00Suprématisme, 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $299.00Suprematist Composition 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $279.00Suprematist Composition 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Suprematist painting (with black trapezium and red square) 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $319.00Suprematist Painting
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $299.00Supremus No. 55 1916
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Supremus No. 67 1928
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $289.00Supremus No.50
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $299.00Untitled 1916
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Untitled
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $289.00Dynamic Suprematism 1916
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Eight Red Rectangles 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $269.00Black and White, Suprematist Composition
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Black circle 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $339.00Mystic Suprematism (black cross on red oval)
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $329.00Quadrilateral and the circle 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $299.00Red square on black background 1922
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $409.00Suprematismo, 1916
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $419.00Yellow Plane in Dissolution 1917
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $309.00Dissolution of a Plane 1917
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $329.00Pictorial Masses in Two Dimensions in a State of Rest 1915
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Untitled 1939
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $269.00Englishman in Moscow 1914
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $309.00The Knife Grinder 1913
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Morning in the Village after Snowstorm 1912
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Woman with Pails- Dynamic Arrangement 1912
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Woodcutter 1912
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $279.00Portrait of Ivan Kliun 1913
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $309.00The lady at the piano 1913
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $309.00Head of a Peasant Girl 1913
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $269.00Samovar 1913
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $289.00Aviator 1914
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $359.00Bureau and Room 1913
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Living in a big hotel 1914
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $299.00Vanity Box 1913
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $349.00Portrait of Mikhail Matjuschin 1913
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Composition with the Mona Lisa, 1914
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $269.00Reservist of the First Division 1914
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $269.00Lady on a Tram Station 1913
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Workers of all countries unite!
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $279.00Peasant Woman with Buckets and Child
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Reaper
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00Taking in the Harvest II 1912
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $249.00untitled
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $279.00Winter landscape
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $259.00Girls in the Fields 1932
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $269.00Boy
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $299.00Carpenter 1929
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $319.00Man in the Fields
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $319.00Mower
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $329.00To the Field II (Marthe and Jeannot)
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $289.00untitled
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $309.00Haymaking 1929
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $279.00Complex Presentiment- Half-Figure in Yellow Shirt 1931
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $279.00Female Torso, 1933
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $289.00Harvesting 1929
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $299.00Man in a suprematic landscape
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $279.00On Vacation
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $299.00Peasant 1932
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $269.00Torso
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $289.00Peasant Woman 1930
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $279.00Red Figure 1928
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $279.00Woman Torso
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $289.00Two Male Figures 1930
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $279.00Woman with a rake 1928
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $289.00Suprematist Figure 1932
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $319.00Three Girls 1932
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $269.00The Sportsmen
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $279.00Peasants 1930
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $289.00Three Woman Figures 1930
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $289.00Two figures in a landscape 1931
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $269.00Head of a peasant
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $289.00Head of a Peasant
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $269.00Head
By Kazimir MalevichSizes starting at $299.00