Biographies

Born near Kiev on February 26, 1878, Kasimir Malevich played a major role in the development of modern art in becoming with Mondrian the greatest pioneer of geometric abstract art.

Malevich first trained at Kiev School of Art and then studied at the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in 1903. During the early years of his career he painted works in a Post-Impressionist manner and then experimented with various Modernist styles participating in avant-garde exhibitions, such as those of the Moscow Artists' Association, which included Vasily Kandinsky and Mikhail Larionov, and the Jack of Diamonds exhibition of 1910 in Moscow.

Malevich showed his Primitivist paintings of peasants at the exhibition Donkey's Tail in 1912. Shortly after, he broke with Larionov's group. In 1913, with composer Mikhail Matiushin and writer Alexei Kruchenykh, Malevich drafted a manifesto for the First Futurist Congress and designed the sets and costumes for the opera Victory over the Sun by Matiushin and Kruchenykh. Malevich then showed works at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1914. At the 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition in Petrograd in 1915, he introduced his non-objective, geometric Suprematist paintings.

However, by 1912 he had already painted subjects, mostly peasants, in a strange`tubular' style, which Fernand Léger was soon to adopt in France, as well as works combining Cubism and Futurism such as in “The Knife Grinder” now at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Malevich, who was rapidly infused with the desire to free art from the burden of the object as he claimed, was the true inventor of the Suprematist movement, which led abstract art to pure geometric simplicity.

As early as 1913, Malevich started to create abstract geometric patterns in a style he called suprematism and was said to have painted that year a picture consisting of a black square on a white background, two years before Suprematist paintings were first shown publicly in Moscow.

Malevich however turned his back on absolute austerity for a while, showing rectangles oriented in many directions in several colors and introducing a suggestion of the third dimension. Still, around 1918 he returned to his purest ideals with a series of White on White paintings and eventually seemed to realize he had tackled everything in terms of abstract painting. This almost led him to give up his activity, turning instead more to teaching, writing, and making three-dimensional models that played an important role in the development of Constructivism.

His revolutionary paintings were so stunning that only a few collectors and art critics were in a position to fully understand his objective. Morever, his works were no longer shown to the public after he fell in disgrace and it was not before the early 1940's that he really emerged as a great master. As a result, it has often been difficult to determine how his paintings should be hung,

Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Malevich and other avant-garde artists were encouraged by the Soviet government and were given prominent administrative and teaching positions. In 1919 Malevich began teaching at the Vitebsk Popular Art School, where he exerted a deep influence on El Lissitzky. In 1919–20, he was given a solo show at the Sixteenth State Exhibition in Moscow, which focused on Suprematism and other non-objective styles. Malevich and his students at Vitebsk formed the Suprematist group Unovis. In 1922 he moved to Leningrad, where he lived for the rest of his life.

From 1922 to 1927, he taught at the Institute of Artistic Culture in Petrograd, and between 1924 and 1926 he worked primarily on architectural models with his students.

After becoming the very first artist to exhibit abstract works he attained celebrity with his painting “White on White” created in 1918, which made his suprematist theories culminate to absolute conclusion.

However, he became much criticised when the Soviet government went against modern art after 1925 calling on artists to turn to social-realistic scenes to glorify the Communist revolution and regime. In 1926, to explain his theory he published a book titled “ The Nonobjective World” but was no longer permitted to produce Suprematist works.

In 1927, Malevich traveled with an exhibition of his paintings to Warsaw and also went to Berlin, where his work was shown at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung. In Germany, he met Jean Arp, Naum Gabo, Le Corbusier, and Kurt Schwitters and visited the Bauhaus, where he met Walter Gropius. At that time, he had already returned to figurative painting under political pressure.

The Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow gave Malevich a solo exhibition in 1929. Because of his connections with German artists, he was arrested in 1930 and many of his manuscripts were destroyed. In his final years, he was much under the KGB surveillance and limited himself to painting figurative works, notably figures without faces, which in fact was a secret way to denounce the Soviet political system rather aimed at depriving people of their identities.