Kazimir Malevich
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich 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 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 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 and The Non-Objective World.
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. 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, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, 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.
Early life (1879-1905)
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was born on either 23 February or 26 February 1879, to Severin Antonovich and Liudviga Alexandrovna. His parents, who were Polish, had fled Poland following the failed January Uprising of 1863 against Russian rule. Lucjan Malewicz, Kazimir's uncle, was a Catholic priest and one of the leaders of the 1863 insurrection. The family subsequently settled near Kiev in Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire. Kazimir was the first of fourteen children, only nine of whom survived into adulthood. His parents were Roman Catholic, though his father attended Orthodox services as well. The primary language spoken within Malevich's household was Polish, but he also spoke Russian, as well as Ukrainian due to his childhood surroundings.Malevich's father worked as manager at several different sugar refineries. Between 1889 and 1896, Malevich's family relocated multiple times due to his father's job. In 1889, they moved to Parkhomovka near Kharkov. In Parkhomovka, Malevich attended a two-year agricultural school and taught himself to paint in a simple peasant style, drawing inspiration from rural surroundings. About four years later, the family relocated to Voltochok near Konotop, which was near centers of Polish cultural activity at the time. There, Malevich met the composer Nikolai Roslavets. He later briefly attended classes at the Kiev School of Drawing under the encouragement of the realist painter Mykola Pymonenko.
Kursk and Moscow (1896-1905)
In 1896, the family moved to Kursk, where Malevich encountered several Russian artists, such as Lev Kvachevsky, with whom he often worked outdoors. By Malevich's own admission, his dedication to painting would make him the "black sheep" of the family. Through reproductions, Malevich also became familiar with the work of the Peredvizhniki, including Ivan Shishkin and Ilia Repin, two leading Russian Realist painters. In 1896, he began working as a technical draughtsman at the Moscow-Kursk-Voronezh railway company.Malevich would later describe 1898 as the year he began exhibiting his work, although there is no evidence for this claim. In 1899, he met his first wife, Kazimira Ivanovna Zgleits, who was eight years his senior. They had two children, Galina and Anatolii, the latter of whom dies of typhoid in his early childhood. His father died in 1902, at the age of fifty-seven, and in 1903, Malevich held an exhibition at the Society for the Support of Primary Education in Kursk.
Recognizing his style as increasingly more Impressionistic, Malevich intended to receive academic training in Moscow. By 1904, as more French art was being reproduced and discussed in Russia in the magazine Mir iskusstva, Malevich had also become acquainted with the work of Paul Gauguin. Malevich and other artists in Moscow gained an early exposure to Western modern art through the private collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. Their acquisitions ranged from French Impressionism to paintings by Paul Cézanne and Gauguin, and were later expanded to include the works of the key Parisian avant-garde artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
Malevich is said to have visited both collections soon after his first arrival in Moscow in the fall of 1904. Similarities between his Apple Tree in Blossom and Alfred Sisley's Villeneuve-la-Garenne, then in Shchukin's collection, have been cited as an early indication of the collectors’ influence on Malevich's oeuvre. In October 1904, Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader and political activist, returns to Russia from exile. At the time, anti-government sentiment in Russia was gaining momentum, intensifying after Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg in January 1905, when Tsarist forces killed numerous protesters. On October 17, 1905, Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto, granting limited voting rights to the middle class. In November, the government suppressed further revolutionary activity through military force. In his autobiography, Malevich later claimed to have taken part in the Battle of the Barricades in Moscow in December 1905, an attempt to sustain the revolution against the Tsarist regime.
Moscow and the avant-garde (1906-1915)
Early years in Moscow (1906–1910)
Malevich settled in Moscow, along with his family and his mother, in the spring of 1906. There, Malevich attended the studio of Fedor Rerberg, who was known to prepare his students for applications to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Despite Malevich's multiple attempts to apply to the Moscow art school, however, he was never offered admission. In 1907, the Blue Rose Exhibition of a group of Moscow Symbolist painters—part of a broader early 20th-century movement that rejected naturalism in favor of mystical themes and dreamlike imagery—left a deep impression on the artist. The impact of Symbolism on Malevich during that period is evident in paintings such as The Triumph of Heaven and The Shroud of Christ.By 1908, he developed a strong interest in Russian icons and Russian folk art. At the same time, more Western avant-garde influences reached Moscow, including through the activities of the Golden Fleece group, who in 1908 organized a major exhibition of Russian and Western European art that included works by Vincent van Gogh, Matisse, Georges Braque, Gauguin, and Cézanne. In 1909, the group also published in their journal a Russian translation of Matisse's treatise Notes on Painting and Shchukin opened his collection to the public. In September 1909, Malevich's planned visit to Paris was cancelled when a sale of his painting fell through. Later that year, he met his future second wife Sofia Mikhailovna Rafalovich.
''Knave of Diamonds'' and ''Donkey's Tail'' (1910–1912)
In December 1910, Malevich took part in the first of a series of exhibitions of an artistic collective Knave of Diamonds. According to Malevich the name "Knave" "stood for youth" and "diamonds" for "beautiful youth". The group was founded by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, leading figures of the Moscow avant-garde, who sought to combine the modernist Western vocabularies of artists like Cézanne with the traditions of Russian folk art. Years later, in 1924, Malevich claimed that the Knave of Diamonds exhibition "shook severely the aesthetic foundations and consequently the foundation of art in society and criticism". During that time, Malevich took on some commercial projects as a way to support himself financially. In 1911, he worked with the company Brocard & Co., designing a bottle for their eau de cologne called Severny, which was used by the company through the mid-1920s. The base of the bottle consisted of a jagged form resembling an iceberg and the stopper featured a small figurine of a polar bear.Also in 1911, Malevich participated in the second exhibition of the avant-garde group Soyuz Molodyozhi in St. Petersburg, where he showed some of his Cubist-inspired paintings. Other artists included Goncharova, Larionov, Vladimir Tatlin, and David Burliuk. That year, Goncharova and Larionov—both of whom had a strong influence on Malevich during that period—broke away from the Knave of Diamonds to establish the Donkey's Tail collective. Intending to focus more on Russian subject matter, they embraced a deliberately "primitive" approach, favoring flattened forms and simplified visual structures. Unlike their Western European counterparts—such as Picasso, whose turn to the "primitive" appropriated non-Western imagery mediated through French colonial conquests—the Moscow Neo-Primitivists drew on domestic sources, especially Russian peasant culture and folk imagery like the lubok. Art historians have since noted that even as Russian artists sought to ground their work in local traditions, they continued to rely heavily on the formal vocabularies of the Western avant-garde. In March 1912, Malevich took part in Donkey's Tail exhibition in Moscow that ran through April, which included his recent works, such as the figurative and peasant-inspired gouache paintings titled Floor Polishers and Washerwoman.