Kazimir Malevich
Black Cross, 1915
Oil on canvas
Musée national d’art moderne,
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Kazimir Malevich
Alpha Architekton, 1925–1926
Plaster
State Russian Museum,
St. Petersburg.
Kazimir Malevich
Suprematist Painting, 1916
Oil on canvas
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
“A flight into the abstract defined in new detail
by this revolutionary exhibition.” —The New York Times
Kazimir Malevich has long been celebrated as one of the seminal founders of nonobjective art in the 20th century. Between 1915 and 1932, he developed a system of abstract painting that he called “Suprematism,” an art of pure form meant to be universally comprehensible regardless of cultural or ethnic origins. Like his contemporaries Piet Mondrian and Vassily Kandinsky, Malevich created an artistic utopia that became the secular equivalent of religious painting, creating works meant to evoke higher states of spiritual consciousness—in his case to replace the ubiquitous icon of the Russian home.
“Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism” is the first exhibition to focus exclusively on this defining period in the artist’s career, bringing together approximately 100 paintings, drawings, and objects from public and private collections around the world. Included in the exhibition are works that have never been shown in the West before, as well as several recently rediscovered masterpieces.The exhibition opens with Malevich’s Alogisms, paintings and drawings composed of signs, symbols, and word fragments that form a bridge between his earlier Cubist phase and the breakthrough to non-objective art. That watershed occurred in 1915, when he exhibited a black square on a white field, setting in motion a series of artworks that became the focal point for the pre-revolutionary years of the Russian avant-garde. Notably, this exhibition marks the first time that the original version of Black Square has traveled outside of Russia.Malevich’s formulation of Suprematism’s ideals evolved quickly. By 1916, Suprematism was no longer an aesthetic of static composition, but a dynamic expression of the artist’s desire to render visually different states of feeling. The next year, he returned to a simple vocabulary less anchored in concrete form, creating ethereal works that seem to dissolve into imaginary space. Soon after, in plaster studies he called Architektons, Malevich began experimenting with Suprematism as a means for social transformation through radical architectural form. He also ventured into the decorative and applied arts. By the late 1920s, Malevich had folded Suprematism into an investigation of the figure, before completely abandoning the abstract system in 1932 for an art steeped in Renaissance portraiture. The exhibition closes with a small group of these late Suprematist figures, whose studies definitively link them to the abstract painting of the preceding 15 years.
