Chapter One: Part One

The Journey of Kazimir Malevich: Questions You Must Ask

Yourself in Order to Better Understand Art

I think I have always been an artist. I started drawing as soon as I was

able to hold a pencil, and have been drawing and painting ever since.
As a child, I also liked looking at art. But not all of it mind you, and
initially I only appreciated representational work. (Representational
art is any work of art that seeks to resemble the world of natural
appearances.)
For example, as a 13 year old I loved Norman Rockwell. Now here
was somebody whose work I understood. The people in his paintings
looked like real people, and looking at one of his paintings was like
reading a little story, a story that sometimes could make you laugh, and
other times make you cry.

The kind of work that I could not wrap my head around was this so called modern or contemporary art – you know
what I am talking about. I remember going with my parents to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston when I was
about 14 or 15. Hanging on the wall in the front gallery of the museum was this nonrepresentational painting by
Kazimir Malevich entitled Suprematist Composition: White on White, painted in 1918. (Non-representational or
non-objective art is art that makes no obvious reference to the natural world, and that has no recognizable subject
matter.

Suprematist Composition: White on White confounded me. Why was it in the museum? What made it important? I
thought, I could paint that, anybody could. I stood as close to it as I possibly could, trying to figure out what made a
white square on a white background a work of art. If I only stared at it long enough, surely the answer would come
to me.
I bet you feel like that sometimes.
It took me years before I grew to appreciate and actually really love this creation of Malevich’s. Before I could gain
a better understanding of it, I had to find out the answers to a lot of questions.
1
In order to appreciate a work of art, you need to go beyond the visual stimuli
and think about how the work of art came about.
You need to ask a lot of questions. For example:
During what period and in what culture did the artist live?
What kind of art was the artist exposed to as a child and as an adult?
Did the artist always paint like this, and if not, what kind of changes in
their own life or in the world around them, led the artist to change his or
her style or way of creating things?

So, when and where did Malevich grow up?

Kazimir Malevich was born in the Ukraine in Russia in 1879 to Polish parents. His father was a sugar mill
worker, and the family worked on beet farms, often moving around to find work. Like many parents, his
dad hoped that his son would follow in his footsteps, but Malevich wasn’t interested. He wanted to be an
artist.

What kind of artwork was Malevich exposed to as a child?

Most likely as the child of poor migrant workers living in the Ukraine in the late 1880’s, Malevich did not
go to museums and galleries as young boy.

2
What he did see were the folk art traditions of his community, such as:
Traditional Ukrainian embroidery

Russian Religious Icons

Lubki prints

What do these three examples have in common with the Suprematist Composition, White on White?

3
Another question you might ask is: What were Malevich’s artistic influences or inspirations when
he was learning to become an artist?
With his mother’s encouragement, Malevich began studying art when he was 12, and attended several art schools,
including Kiev School of Art and the Moscow School of Art. These were two very traditional schools that taught
their students to paint in what was considered at the time a Modern Western fashion, which mimicked the styles of
the European Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and Symbolists. 1
Here are some examples of the Modern Western styles that initially influenced Malevich:

Impressionist Painting by Camille Pissarro (on left)

Impressionism was an art movement that originated

out of France in the 1860’s.

Impressionist artists were interested in painting

candid glimpses of everyday life, capturing the
effects of light on color during different weather
conditions. They often used very noticeable
brushstrokes. Artists in this group included Pierre –
August Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Claude
Monet, among others.

Post-Impressionist work by Vincent Van Gogh (on right)

Post-Impression was an art movement that

immediately followed Impressionism. These artists
rejected naturalism, and weren’t so concerned with the
fleeting effects of light. They showed a greater concern
for structure and form, as well as expression or
feelings, and often the colors they chose for their
paintings could be arbitrary. Some of the artists in this
group included Vincent Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec,
and Paul Gauguin.

1 Theartstory.org/artist-malevi ch-kasimir.html

4
 Symbolist Painting by Odilon Redon

Symbolism was an art movement that rejected the purely

visual realism of the Impressionists, and the rationality of
the Industrial age, in order to depict the symbols of ideas,
which were not meant to be deciphered, but were instead
intended to be full of mysterious, ambiguous meanings.
Closely associated with the Symbolist writers, these artists’
works were influenced by the Bible and mythology, and
were full of imagery such as severed heads, monsters and
glowing or smoking spirits. Among this group were Odilon
Redon, Gustave Moreau, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.2

Below is a painting that Malevich did in 1904 that very

much reflects the Modernist Western trend, only rendered
in extremely pastel colors.

Figure 2 Kazimir Malevich, Spring Garden, 1904

Both Malevich’s and the other paintings above are drastically different than the type of artwork he
was used to seeing as a child. What sort of differences do you notice?

2
All three definitions from http://www.artlex.com/
5
 But wait a minute, Spring Garden, is still nothing like
Suprematist Composition: White on White, is it?
How did he get from a pastel colored garden to two
white squares?
Although it might sound like a detour, let’s see
what is going on in the world around Malevich:
As was mentioned previously, Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935)
was from Ukraine. At that time, Ukraine was part of Russia.
Russia was ruled by Tsar Nicholas II (on our left, born Nikolai
Aleksandrovich Romanov), a cousin of King George V of Great
Britain, and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.
In general, the Russian government led by Nicholas was weak
and ineffective, with too many important appointments decided by his wife Alexandra, under the
influence of a charismatic mystical faith healer named Grigori
Rasputin, (seen on right) who had cemented his sway over her when
he “cured” the royal couple’s hemophiliac son Alexi.
At the turn of the 20th century, Russia was a predominately rural
society with little industrialization, and with wide economic gaps
between the peasant/working class, and the ruling class. The
Romanov dynasty, truth be told, was also out of date – everything that
supported it were holdovers from
medieval times, such as the church
and the country’s codified class
system.
The Tsar, with support of the secret
police (the Okhrana) and the military
(the Cossacks, as seen on the next
page), ruled a gigantic nation that
stretched 4,000 miles across, and was inhabited by over 125 million
people who spoke innumerable languages.
Even with a strong ruler, this would be a hard country to govern. To make
his job even harder, the country was undergoing both drought and
famine, and had recently capitulated in its battle against the much smaller
Japan in the Russo-Japanese War. All this added together made for a very
unpopular Tsar Nicholas II3.

Change was in the air.

3
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/russia/longtermcausesrev_print.shtml
6
Peasants, students, industrial workers, anarchists, and the rising middle class all
had grievances against the Tsar’s autocratic rule. Some wanted to overthrow
the monarchy, others desired modernization; others better working conditions
and pay; and still others a Socialist government and equality for all
Increasingly threatened by calls for change, the Tsar resisted reform4. The
breaking point came on January 22 in the 1905 massacre known as “Bloody
Sunday”, when in front of the Tsar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, over 1000
peaceful demonstrators, including women and children, were killed and
wounded by Nicholas’ troops.5 This, many believe, was the catalyst that lead to
the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Because nobody lives in a vacuum, this desire for change affected

everyone, even the artists, who were eager to move into the future.
During the five years after Bloody Sunday, Kazimir Malevich made the acquaintance of and exhibited with
a number of ground breaking artists, whose work had begun to make drastic and rather rapid ‘shift[s] toward
[the} avant garde6. Some of these Russian artists were inspired by the newest innovations in European art
such as Cubism and Futurism, while others began developing innovations of their own, such as
Constructivism, Cubo-Futurism, Primitivism, and Rayonism.
Here are some of the artists Malevich associated with during that time:

Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian who was leader of the Munich Germany-based Der Bleu Reiter group, and
an early innovator in abstraction and non-representational art.
On the left, Kandinsky’s Improvisation 20, 1910

This is an abstract painting of mountains and landscape.

Just three years later Kandinsky painted Composition VII.

This is a nonobjective painting – there are no recognizable figures or

objects in it. The artist is more concerned with color and movement.

What do you notice that is different

about the two paintings?

4
http://www.biography.com/#!/people/nicholas-ii-21032713#japan-attacks
5
http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/%E2%80%98bloody-sunday%E2%80%99-st-petersburg
6
Avant garde – favoring or introducing experimental or unusual ideas
7
Lyubov Popova, a widely traveled artist who voraciously studied all types of art; she was the cofounder of
Constructivism, and the inventor of another Russian art form known as “painterly architectonics”. These
two pieces of hers are rendered in a style known as Cubo-Futurism, a Russian art form which combines
aspects of Cubism and Futurism, two European art movements.

Head, 1910 Composition of Figures, 1913

Notice the big difference in just three years?

Cubism was a style of art developed by Pablo Picasso and George Braque in the first decade of the 20th century. It
was noted for its geometry of form, fragmentation of objects, and increasing abstraction. In Cubism, the subject
matter is broken up (fragmented); analyzed or looked at all points of view- the side, the front, on top, etc.); and
reassembled.

Futurism developed in Italy in 1909, until approximately 1918. It was characterized by its desire to glorify the
speed and movement of modern machinery, particularly those machines associated with war - airplanes, tanks,
etc.

Cubo-Futurism is a synthesis of both styles adopted by many Russian avant garde artists.

8
 Mikhail Larionov, founder of the short lived
Rayonism (1912-1914), a type of abstract art in
which the artist, rather than painting objects– if
I understand this correctly – paints the rays that
emanated from these objects. Crazy, right?
His painting on the right is done in a
Russian style known as Neo-Primitivism, which
is inspired by Russian Folk or Primitive Art.
Primitive Art refers to the art work of people
who are self-taught and who often do not even
consider themselves as artists.
The painting below was created in his Rayonist
style just three short years later.

Mikhail Larionov, Peasant Dance, 1910 ←

↓Mickhail Larionov, Red Rayonism, 1913

Whoa, whoa, slow down

with the style changes
already! You’re making
me dizzy!

9
Like his fellow artists, Malevich’s work was too quickly evolving. In 1910, he had adopted the style of
Neo- Primitivism, as can be observed in his 1910 painting Woman with Bucket and Child (below left),
and by 1913, he had amped up his style with the Cubo-Futurist Knife Grinder (below right).

Do you see how, in the painting above, the

individual elements- i.e. the head’s of the figures,
the buckets, the landscape are slowly evolving into
geometric shapes (ovals, triangles, squares) ?
And how on the painting on the right, the objects and the figures are breaking up into geometric shapes ?
And what do geometric shapes remind you of? Squares, right?
So now it is starting to make sense, as the work slowly evolves toward Malevich’s 1918 star of the show,
Supremits Composition: White on White, right?

Meanwhile back on the Russian Ranch

10
 In Russia, the situation was going from bad to worse, with the
nation entering World War I in 1914. Rather than appoint a
qualified Commander-in-chief, Tsar Nicholas gave the post to his
great uncle, the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich (on the left). The
inexperience of the Tsar and Grand Duke led to massive shortages
of military food, equipment, and medical supplies, indirectly
resulting in the deaths of
over 2 million Russian
soldiers.
By 1917, the country
faced economic collapse,
with further massive
food shortages caused by
the conscription of
millions of peasant
farmers. This in turn was
aggravated by an
undeveloped rail system –resulting in the spoilage of food long
before it could be delivered across this incredibly large country.
Food prices soared well beyond the means of most people.7 The instability resulted in riots, and ultimately
an over throw of the government by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, a civil war, a Communist regime, and
ultimately the assassination of Tsar Nicholas and his family.
So as one can see, not only is there change in the air, but the
country is in a state of massive chaos.

7
www.bbc.co.ub/bitesize/higherhistory/russia/february/revision2/
11
Imagine yourself in a terrible situation, such as the Russians were, with one bad thing
happening after the other. Wouldn’t you wish you were magic, and could not only wipe
the slate clean, but figure out new and better ways of doing things?
That’s how Malevich and his fellow artists felt. The old ways of doing things hadn’t worked,
and it was time to move on to a new world, a new way of doing things.
Malevich’s contribution to the new order was to develop a previously unheard of style of
art. In December 1915 Malevich laid forth in a manifesto the tenets of

Suprematism,
Which
Focused on "the supremacy of pure artistic feeling" rather than on the visual depiction of
objects, rejecting any reference to the natural world;
And
Relied on the use of geometric forms (primarily the circle, square and cross), a limited color
palette, and an emphasis on texture.
Although he formally announced Suprematism to the world in 1915, he had actually started
making Suprematist works two years earlier, the very first of which appeared as a stage set
for a Futurist opera called “Victory Over the Sun”. The majority of his works for the opera
were his typical Cubo-Futurist offerings, with the exception of this one backdrop, which no
longer exists, but of which we see his sketch below:

What do you see my friend?

You see a SQUARE!!!!!!!

12
Here are some examples of Suprematist paintings that Malevich made over the years.

Black Square, 1915 (or 1913)

Supremist, No, 56, 1916

Untitled, 1919

Black Cross on Red Oval, 1927

By the 1920’s Suprematism lost its appeal in Russia as an art

movement, especially after it was condemned by the Stalinist
government. By 1927, Malevich abruptly stopped painting in this
nonobjective fashion, and suddenly began painting figurative works
once again. However, its influence spread throughout Europe and the
United States, with a number of artists taking up the style.

And that my friend is the amazing journey of Kazimir Malevich.

I hope it was the beginning of your amazing journey to having a better
understanding of the world of art.

13