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Kazimir Malevich
OK, so this is my / our attempt to try and get to the bottom of
modern art, try to understand a bit more and generally feel less like fish out
of water when we see it. I randomly chose this artist as a case study because
the Boy with a Knapsack stumped us
most.
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (23rd of
February 1879, previously 1878 – 15th of May 1935) was a Russian
painter and art theoretician, born
of ethnic Polish parents. He
was a pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the Avant-garde
Suprematist
movement.
Early life: Kazimir Malevich was born near Kiev
in the Kiev
Governorate of the Russian
Empire. His parents, Seweryn and Ludwika Malewicz, were ethnic Poles
and he was baptised in the Roman
Catholic Church. His father managed a sugar factory. Kazimir was the
first of 14 children, only nine of which 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 centres of culture. Until age 12 he knew
nothing of professional artists, though 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.
Birth date:
Recently Ukrainian art historians established the precise birth date of
the artist: 23rd of February 1879. Professor D. Gorbachev, in his 2006 book
Malevich and Ukraine, (published in Kiev) reveals many new biographical
details. French art historian Andrei Nakov
re-established Malevich's birth year as 1879 (and not 1878), and argues for
restoration of the Polish spelling of his name. So even his birth date is an
issue and how his name is spelt.
Black Square, 1915, Oil on Canvas, State
Russian Museum, St.Petersburg
Work: From 1896 to 1904 Kazimir Malevich lived in Kursk.
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 to 1910). In 1911 he participated in the
second exhibition of the group 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
Cézanne 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.
Suprematist Composition: White on
White, 1918, Museum of Modern Art. We stood in front of this one and ......... felt nothing at
all.
Suprematism: In 1915, Malevich laid down the foundations of Suprematism
when 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 Moscow 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).
In 1918, Malevich decorated a play, Mystery
Bouffe, by Vladimir
Mayakovskiy produced by Vsevolod
Meyerhold. He was also interested in aerial
photography and aviation,
which led him to abstractions
inspired by or derived from aerial
landscapes. As Professor Julia Bekman Chadaga (now of Macalaster
College) 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, "Art, Technology, and Modernity in Russia
and Eastern Europe"). At this point I'll slip in a quick - my eyebrows are
now pinching closer together.....
Self portrait 1908 or 1910 or
1911
Post-revolution: 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 published in Munich 1926, only translated
into English in 1959. In it he outlines his Suprematist
theories.
In 1923, Malevich was appointed director of Petrograd State Institute of
Artistic Culture, which was forced to close in 1926 after a Communist party
newspaper called it "a government-supported monastery" rife with
"counterrevolutionary sermonizing and artistic debauchery." The Soviet state was
by then heavily promoting a politically sustainable style of art called Social
Realism - a style Malevich had spent his entire career repudiating.
Nevertheless, he swam with the current, and was quietly tolerated by the
Communists.
International recognition and banning: In 1927, he travelled to Warsaw
and then to Berlin
and Munich
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, was proven correct in a couple of years, when the Stalinist
regime turned against forms of abstraction, 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 saying that "art
does not need us, and it never did". 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.
Death: Malevich died of cancer in Leningrad on May 15, 1935. On his deathbed he
was exhibited with the black square above him, and mourners at his funeral rally
were permitted to wave a banner bearing a black square. 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 of
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."
Self-portrait, 1933
Malevich in popular culture: Malevich life inspires many references featuring events and the
paintings themselves as players. The smuggling of Malevich paintings out of
Russia is a key to the plot line of writer Martin
Cruz Smith's thriller Red
Square. Noah
Charney's novel, The Art Thief tells the story of two stolen
Malevich White on White paintings, and discusses the implications of Malevich's
radical Suprematist compositions on the art world. British artist Keith
Coventry has used Malevich's paintings to make comments on modernism,
in particular his Estate Paintings.
Posthumous sales: Black Square, the fourth version of his magnum
opus painted in the 1920's was discovered in 1993 in Samara
and purchased by Inkombank
for $250,000. In April 2002 the painting was auctioned
for an equivalent of one million dollars. The purchase was financed by the
Russian philanthropist Vladimir
Potanin, who donated funds to Russian Ministry of Culture and
ultimately to State
Hermitage Museum collection. According to the Hermitage website, this
was the largest private contribution to state art museums since the October
Revolution. On the 3rd of November 2008 a work by Malevich entitled Suprematist Composition (below) from 1916 set the world
record for any Russian work of art and any work sold at auction for that year,
selling at Sotheby’s
in New York City for just over $60 million U.S. (far surpassing his previous
record of $17 million set in 2000). He was awarded the highest category "1A - a world famous artist" in "United
Artists Rating".
I am trying not to sound completely ignorant but $60 million for this, I
have a serious problem with. If I was a multi-millionaire, would I buy something
like this? - no I would have fun painting it myself and giving the money to a
worthy cause. Perhaps there is a reason behind the purchaser wanting to be
Anonymous ???
ALL IN ALL WE ARE STILL NO FURTHER FORWARD IN OUR
UNDERSTANDING
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