⇑KM
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Suprematist Artist, whose most famous works include the startling abstract painting Black Square on White, first time exhibited in December 1915. This synthesis of geometric forms and the spirituality of icons was meant to end the narrative art, to eliminate the subject in favor of the pure painting. "The square is a vivid and majestic newborn," I said, "the first step of pure creation in art". However, in the late 1920s I abandoned abstraction and returned to a figurative style in order to meet the demands of the Communist Party. After my death my works were not exhibited in the Soviet Union for decades. My declamatory writings, not always easy to understand, were widely read by Russian artists of my time."All past and recent painting before Suprematism (as sculpture, verbal art, music) has been subjugated by the shapes of nature, waiting to be liberated, to speak its own language, independent of reason, common sense, logic, philosophy, psychology, laws of causality, and technological changes." (Malevich in 'From Cubism to Suprematism', 1915, from Art of the 20th Century, ed. by Jean-Louis Ferrier and Yann Le Pichon, 1999).
I was born of Polish parents near Kiev. My parents had fled to the Ukraine in the wake of the Polish uprising of 1863. Most of my childhood years I spent in the rural environment around Kiev. With my father, who worked at sugar refineries, I made long walks in the countryside. Many of my painting later were inspired by rural life.I started to paint at the age of fifteen when my mother bought me my first paints. In the mid-1890s the family moved to Konotop, a town on the railway line between Kiev and Kursk. From 1898 to 1901 I lived in Kursk, where I painted my first landscapes. In 1901 I married a Polish woman, Kazimira Ivanova Zgleits. For a few years I worked as a draftsman for the railroads. After my father died, I settled in Moscow with my wife, daughter, and my mother.I changed my style several times, from Impressionism to Symbolism, and from Fauvism to Kubism, or Cubo-Futurism. "Here is an artist," said my friend Natalia Gontcharova, "who skips steps in art evolution." Although I absorbed Western influences, my monumental peasant figures, painted in manner of Legér's work, were definitely Russian. Their large, almond-shaped eyes were those of Russian icons, staring into the true reality. "The art of the icon is the superior form of peasant art," I defined.In the collage Partial Eclipse with Mona Lisa (1914) I pasted a torn and crossed-out picture of Mona Lisa, anticipating Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), a reproduction of Leonardo's portrait, to which Duchamp had added a beard, moustache, and the inscription "L.H.O.O.Q.", pronounced in French as "she has a hot ass". My own incriptions read "vacant apartment" and "in Moscow".In 1909 I married Sofia Rafalovich, the daughter of a psychiatrist. Between 1912 and 1915 I moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg and joined the Russian Futurist group, whose first manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, had appeared in 1912. Its writers included the poets Alexei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, who announced that the past masters of Russian literature "must be thrown overboard from the steamer of the Present Time."The summer of 1913 I spent in Uusikirkko, Finland, with the composer and painter Mikhail Matyushin and Kruchenykh. The friends composed a Futurist opera, Victory over the Sun (1913), for which I designed costumes and backdrops in a non-naturalistic style. The opera, staged at the Luna Park Theater in St. Petersburg, was performed again in 1980 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts. The group also developed the concept of "alogism". Their aim, presented in a jointly published manifesto, was to free themselves from the outdated law of causality and bounds of logic. "For the artist," I said, "reason is a form of imprisonment."In addition to painting, I created litographs, decorations for revolutionary festivals, illustrated and designed booklets. With Nikolai Kulbin and Olga Rozanova I illustrated Futurist books, and during the war I made patriotic litographs, which followed the style of luboks, popular folk prints. Some of them were probably worded by Mayakovsky.My search for an absolute beyond the images found in nature culminated in my 39 Suprematist compositions, exhibited in Petrograd in December 1915 under the title "0.10". My exhibition room was dominated by the Black Square, painted entirely freehand. As traditional religious images in Russian Orthodox homes, it was hung high up across a corner. I myself was a Roman Catholic and I had a mystical bent, but I was not conventionally religious. Outside his room Malevich put a sign proclaiming "suprematist painters". Vladimir Tatlin, my rival, responded with a sign that read "professional painters".With the exhibition I declared: "Suprematism is the beginning of a new civilization." However, reviews were crushing: "Everything is dry and monotonous, without art and without individuality," said B. Lopatin in Day. During the exhibition I published 'Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu' (1915, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism), the first of my major essays. "Creation exists only where paintings present shapes that take nothing from what has been created in nature," I wrote. With my nonfigurative program I went even further than Kandinsky in About the Spiritual in Art (1912), where the older artist rejected pure abstraction.From Symbolism I adopted the idea that behind the world of appearances is a higher reality. Art serves a vehicle in the divine communication between realities. The square a was for me a "zero form", behind which lies the way to new methods of creating. After a black square, full of the new potenialities, a red square was to give the signal of Revolution, in order to reach "the white square as pure movement."In search of supreme color, I produced White on White, a monochrome abstraction, in which an off-white square was angled against a larger white square. "I have cracked the links and the limitations of color," I said in the catalogue of the Tenth State Exhibition in 1918.After the February Revolution of 1917, I became politically active. I associated briefly with the anarchists, chaired the art section of the Moscow Council of Soldiers' Deputies, and taught at Svomas (Free State Art Studios). For a period Suprematism was the new artistic language of the new order. In Petrograd I designed the sets and costumes for Mayakovsky's Mystery Bouffe (1918) at the Theatre of Musical Drama. "I treated space not as illusionary but as Cubist," I wrote. "I saw my task not as the creation of associations but with a reality existing beyond the limits of the stage, but as the creation of a new reality." I also translated the shapes of his paintings into three-dimensional architectural models, which he called "architectonics" or "planity", from the Russian word aeroplan. Several of the designs were shown at the Venice Biennale in June 1924.At the Vitebsk Art Institute, where I taught from 1919 to 1922, I replaced Marc Chagall as director. In 1919 I wrote 'O novikh sistemakh v iskusstve' (On new systems in art). My essays on art, designed by Il Lissitzky, my colleague, were published at Vitebsk. My first one-man exhibition I held in 1919-20 in Moscow. It consisted of 153 works. For the Lomosov porcelain factory I designed among others cups and teapots. In 1923 I was appointed director of the Petrograd Museum of Artistic Culture, which was wholly devoted to contemporary art. The institute was forced to close in 1926 after it was called in a Communist party newspaper "a government-supported monastery" rife with "counterrevolutionary sermonizing". I was allowed to retain a small apatment, where I lived with my mother and my third wife, Natalia Andreyevna Manchenko, whom I had married in 1925.In the 1920s, a number of Russian avant-garde artist, including Kandinsky, Chagall, Gabo, and Pevsner, went into exile. Lenin, who did not appreciate avant garde art, said of his Commissar for Education and Enlightenment: "Lunacharsky should be flogged for his Futurism." Immediately after Lenin's death in 1924, I compared the revolutionary leader to Christ. His body, I suggested, should be placed "in a cube, as if in eternity. The cube of eternity should be constructed as a sign of its unity with the dead." I also wrote that every working Leninist should have a cube at home, "as a reminder of the eternal, constant lesson of Leninism".I made in 1927 a trip to Poland, and visited the Bauhaus in Dessau. The Non-objective World was published as a Bauhaus Book. Eventually I returned to home. However, I left my manuscripts and a group of paintings in Berlin, where my work was shown at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition in a separate section. Most of them became part of the collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In Russia I produced replicas of many of the paintings I had left in Germany. In 1929-30 I taught in Kiev, where an exhibition of my works was held in the city museum. I had also a solo exhibition at the prestigious Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow.In the last years of my life I was out of favor. During the 1930s, a wave of terror ran through the country. All arts were suppressed. The union of proletarian artist launced its attack against modernists, and Socialist Realism was established as the official and the only way of artistic expression. "The artistic endeavour of the abstractionists was worlds removed from real life," explained Oleg Sopotsinsky in Art in the Soviet Union (1978), "in fact they went to great lengths to seal themselves off from its influence, thus condemning themselves to a creative barrenness. It is only natural, therefore, that abstractionism very soon bought about its own end".In 1930 I was arrested for a short period because of his contacts in Germany. Meanwhile my frieds destroyed writings which could have been used against me. In 1933 I was accused of formalism. Returning to figurative art, I started to paint in the style which echoed Hans Holbein, the German Northern Renaissance Painter, and Italian Renaissance artists. Of these works, perhaps the most famous is Self-portrait (1933), in which my lips are tightly closed, but with my head I make a symbolic gesture, which casually refers to a square. I also portrayed faceless and armless peasants, who seem to be bound in straitjacket. My paintings I signed with my emblematic black square.I died of cancer in Leningrad on May 15, 1935. On my deathbed I was exhibited with the black square above me. My ashes were sent to Nemchinovka, and buried in a field near my dacha. A white cube decorated with a black square was placed on my tomb. The city on Leningrad bestowed a pension on my mother and daughter. "No phenomenon is mortal," I 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." ⇑KM
