Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, June 17, 2024: Kazimir Malevich, an Ukrainian avant-garde painter (#2052)

Monday, June 17, 2024

Artist of the Day, June 17, 2024: Kazimir Malevich, an Ukrainian avant-garde painter (#2052)

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (1879 – 1935) was a Russian (Ukraine) avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose pioneering work and writing influenced the development of abstract art in the 20th century. He was born in Kiev, modern-day Ukraine, to an ethnic Polish family.

Kazimir Malevich was the founder of the artistic and philosophical school of Suprematism, and his ideas about forms and meaning in art would eventually constitute the theoretical underpinnings of non-objective, or abstract, art. Malevich worked in a variety of styles, but his most important and famous works concentrated on the exploration of pure geometric forms (squares, triangles, and circles) and their relationships to each other and within the pictorial space. Because of his contacts in the West, Malevich was able to transmit his ideas about painting to his fellow artists in Europe and the United States, thus profoundly influencing the evolution of modern art.

Malevich worked in a variety of styles, but he is mostly known for his contribution to the formation of a true Russian avant-garde post-World War I through his own unique philosophy of perception and painting, which he termed Suprematism. He invented this term because, ultimately, he believed that art should transcend subject matter -- the truth of shape and color should reign 'supreme' over the image or narrative.

More radical than the Cubists or Futurists, at the same time that his Suprematist compositions proclaimed that paintings were composed of flat, abstract areas of paint, they also served up powerful and multi-layered symbols and mystical feelings of time and space.

Malevich was also a prolific writer. His treatises on the philosophy of art addressed a broad spectrum of theoretical problems conceiving of a comprehensive abstract art and its ability to lead us to our feelings and even to a new spirituality.

From 1919 to 1921 Malevich taught painting in Moscow and Leningrad, where he lived the rest of his life. On a 1927 visit to the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, he met Wassily Kandinsky and published a book on his theory under the title Die gegenstandslose Welt (“The Nonobjective World”). Later, when Soviet politicians decided against modern art, Malevich and his art were doomed. He died in poverty and oblivion.

Malevich was the first to exhibit paintings composed of abstract geometrical elements. He constantly strove to produce pure cerebral compositions, repudiating all sensuality and representation in art. His well-known White on White (1918) carries his Suprematist theories to their logical conclusion.

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