MALEVICH / Malewich: art quotes & biography facts of the artist, founder of Russian Suprematism
KAZIMIR MALEVICH (Malewich) (1879 – 1935), his biography facts and quotes on Suprematist art. Malvich was the founder of Suprematism, a Russian modern art style developed from Constructivism, Futurism and Cubism. In 1915, Malevich laid down the foundations by publishing his famous manifesto ‘From Cubism to Suprematism’. Also Italian Futurism inspired him. After 1927 Malewich moved to a more representational, almost ‘classical’ painting style. At the bottom more biography facts and some useful art links for information on Kazimir Malevich and his Suprematism art.
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Malevich: ‘Black Cross’, painting c. 1923 |
KAZIMIR MALEVICH, his quotes on Russian Suprematism & painting
- We have rejected reason because we have found another reason that could be called transrational, which has its own law, construction and sense… …This reason has found a way-Cubism-of expressing the object.
* Kasimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: a letter to the composer Matiushin, June 1913; as quoted in “Futurism”, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 266 (the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, famous for his writings theory and manifesto ‘From Cubism to Suprematism’ and ‘Cubo-Futurism’; biography facts at the bottom)
- The rectangular picture-plane indicates the starting point of Suprematism; a new realism of color conceived as non-objective creation. The forms of suprematist art live like all the living forms of nature. This is a new plastic realism, plastic precisely because the realism of hills, sky and water is missing. Every real form is a world. And any plastic surface is more alive than a (drawn or painted) face from which stares a pair of eyes and a smile. (1914, fh) .
* Kasimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: “Artists on Art; from the 14th – 20th centuries”, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 452.
- I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation, that is, to Suprematism, to the new realism in painting – to non-objective creation. (1915, fh).
* Kasimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: “Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism”, Kasimir Malevich, 1916.
- At the present time man’s path lies through space, and Suprematism is a colour metaphor in its infinite abyss. (1916, fh). .
* Kasimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: ‘On space and Suprematism’; as quoted in “Abstract Art”, Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson, London 1990, p. 58.
- Matiushin’s (Russian composer of the Futurist opera: ‘Victory over the Sun’, fh) sound shattered the object-word. The curtain was torn, by the same token tearing the scream of consciousness of the old brain.
* Kasimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: ‘Theatre’, Malevich, 1917; as quoted in “Futurism”, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 266.
- I have broken the blue boundary of color limits, come out into the white, besides me comrade-pilots swim in this infinity. I have established the semaphore of Suprematism. I have beaten the lining of the colored sky, torn it away and in the sack that formed itself, I have put color and knotted it. Swim! The free white sea lies before you.
* Kazimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: ‘Catalogue 10th State Exhibition’, Kasimir Malevich, Moscow, 1919; as quoted in ‘Autocritique, – essays on art and anti-art 1963 – 1987’, Barbara Rose, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, New York, 1988, p. 71.
- Man’s skull represents the same infinity for the movement of conceptions. It is equal to the universe, for in it is contained all that sees in it. Likewise the sun and whole starry sky of comets and the sun pass in it and shine and move as in nature… .Is not the whole universe that strange skull in which meteors, suns, comets and planets rush endlessly?.
* Kazimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: “God is not cast down”, Malevich, 1922; as quoted in “Futurism”, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 65.
- Only when the habit of one’s consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes… …has disappeared, shall we see a pure painting composition. I have transformed myself into the nullity of forms and pulled myself out of the circle of things, out of the circle-horizon in which the artist and forms of nature are locked… (remark on non-objective painting, fh).
* Kasimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: “Marc Chagall, – a Biography”, by Sidney Alexander, Cassell, London, 1978, p. 178.
- The principal element of Suprematism in painting, as in architecture, is its liberation from all social or materialist tendencies. Through Suprematism, art comes into its pure and unpolluted form. It has acknowledged the decisive fact of the non-objective character of sensibility. It is no longer concerned with illusion. .
* Kazimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: “Marc Chagall, – a Biography”, by Sidney Alexander, Cassell, London, 1978, p. 194.
- Everywhere there is craft and technique, everywhere there is artistry and form. / Art itself, technique, is ponderous and clumsy, and because of it awkwardness it obstructs that inner element… All craft, technique, and artistry, like anything beautiful, results in futility and vulgarity. .
* Kazimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: “On poetry”; as quoted in “Futurism”, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 65.
- Dynamism is also the forming formula for Futurists works; i.e. dynamism is the additional element that transforms the perception of one state of phenomena to another, for example, from a static to a dynamic perception.
* Kazimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: ‘Cubo-futurism’, Kasimir Malevich, in “Essays on Art”, op. cit., vol 2; as quoted in “Futurism”, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 59.
- …the art of … …achieved great momentum in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century and remains a basic stimulus in the following forms of new art: Suprematism, Simultaneism, Purism, Odorism, Pankinetism, Tactilism, Haptism, Expressionism and Lég[erísm (referring Fernand Léger)
* Kazimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: ‘Cubofuturism’, Kasimir Malevich, in “Essays on Art”, op. cit., vol 2; as quoted in “Futurism”, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 59.
- There is movement and movement. There are movements of small tension and movements of great tension and there is also a movement which our eyes cannot catch although it can be felt. In art this state is called dynamic movement. This special movement was discovered by the futurists as a new and hitherto unknown phenomenon in art, a phenomenon which some Futurists were delighted to reflect.
* artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: ‘Cubofuturism’, Malevich, in “Essays on Art”, op. cit., vol 2; as quoted in “Futurism”, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 59.
- (Balla), he advanced Dynamic Futurism… …drawing closer, not to the human body but to the machine, as contemporary muscles of a man of today… …The actual structure of each of Balla’s works tells us that the dynamic power sensed by the artist is incomparable greater than the actual bodies of the machines, and the content of each machine is only a small part of this dynamic power, since each machine is a mere unit from the sum total of the forces of contemporary life.
* Kasimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: ‘Cubofuturism’, Malevich, in “Essays on Art”, op. cit., vol 2; as quoted in “Futurism”, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, pp. 59, 60.
- I recommend (students and followers, fh) that you should work actively at the Hermitage (art museum in Leningrad) and study the artistic structures of Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Watteau, Poussin, and other painters, even Chardin, where he is an artist. Study very closely their dabbing manner of execution and try to copy a small piece of canvas, just one square inch.
* artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: a letter to his student Yudin, Summer 1924; as quoted in ‘Marc Chagall – the Russian years 1906 – 1922’, ed. By Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 66.
- By Suprematism, I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in the pictorial arts. From the suprematist point of view, the appearances of natural objects are in themselves meaningless; the essential thing is feeling – in itself and completely independent of the context in which it has been evoked. Academic naturalism, the naturalism of the impressionists, of Cézannism, (Malevich valued Cézanne’s art as a necessary but ‘provincial art’ in the long development of modern art, fh) of Cubism, etc., are all so to speak nothing but dialectic methods, which in themselves in no way determine the true value of the work of art.
* Kazimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: “Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries”, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 452.
- The representation of an object, in itself (the objectivity as the aim of the representation), is something that has nothing to do with art, although the use of representation in a work of art does not rule out the possibility of its being of a high artistic order. For the suprematist, therefore, the proper means is the one that provides the fullest expression of pure feeling and ignores the habitually accepted object. The object in itself is meaningless to him; and the ideas of the conscious mind are worthless. Feeling is the decisive factor… …and thus art arrives at non-objective representation – at Suprematism. (1927, fh)
* Kazimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: “Artists on Art; from the 14th – 20th centuries”, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 452.
- When in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square, and exhibited a picture that represented nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and with them society – sighed: ‘Al that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert. Before us stands a black square on a white ground’… But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling, which penetrates everything. (1927, fh) )
* Kasimir Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: “Artists on Art; from the 14th – 20th centuries”, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 453.
- I too was filled with a sort of shyness and fear, as I was called to leave ‘the world of will and idea’ in which I had lived and created, and in whose reality I had believed. But the happy liberating touch of non-objectivity drew me out into the ‘desert’ where only feeling is real… …and so feeling became the content of my life. It was no ‘empty square’ I had exhibited but the feeling of non-objectivity. I perceived that the ‘thing’ and the ‘idea’ were taken to be equivalents of feeling, and understood the lie of the world of will and idea. Is the milk bottle the symbol of milk? Suprematism is the rediscovery of that pure art which in the course of time, and by an accretion of ‘things’, had been lost to sight.
* K. Malevich, artist quotes on Suprematism, the Russian modern art style: “Artists on Art; from the 14th – 20th centuries”, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 453 (Russian artist Kasimir Malevich, famous for his writings theory and manifesto ‘From Cubism to Suprematism’ and ‘Cubo-Futurism’)
Biography facts of Kazimir Malevich; founder of Russian Suprematism
Kazimir Malevich was a Russian artist, born near Kiev; his parents were ethnic Poles. He studied drawing in Kiev from 1895 to 1896, at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1904 to 1910. later in the studio of Fedor Rerberg in Moscow (1904–1910). In 1911 Malevich participated in the second exhibition of the group Soyuz Molodyozhi (Union of Youth) in St. Petersburg, together with Vladimir Tatlin. Around 1912 his art got influenced by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, Russian avant-garde painters who were particularly interested in Russian folk art. Already in the same year the Cubo-Futurist opera ‘Victory Over the Sun’ – with Malevich’s stage-set- became a great success.
In 1913 Malevich painted his famous painting ‘Black square’, which he called himself an ‘abstract icon’. 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. Around 1919 he and Lissitsky were invited by Marc Chagall to teach on the new Art Academy in Vitebsk; in 1920 already they had different political opinions and Chagall left the Academy he founded. Later in his life (around 1927) Malevich himself turned back to figurative painting; perhaps by pressure of Stalinism or for finding back his own roots in painting. Renaissance painting became then an important inspiration for him. Famous for this style period of Malevich are the portraits of his wife he made in 1933 and his self-portrait.
Links for more information on the Russian painter Malevich and his biography
* biography of the painter Kazimir Malevich and information on Russian Suprematisme , on Wikipedia
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* biography facts & 128 artworks by Kazimir Malevich; Suprematism
