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Malevich Biography – A brief history

In 1904-5 he visited Moscow, trying unsuccessfully to gain admittance to the city’s School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and later recalled being involved in the violent events of the 1905 revolution in the city. Sometime after moving to Moscow permanently, he began studying in the private studio of the Impressionist painter Ivan Rerberg. In 1907, he showed his work at the exhibition of the Moscow Association of Artists, alongside artists like David Burliuk, Wassily Kandinsky and Aleksei Morgunov. He also became friends with Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, who became the acknowledged leaders of the Russian Avant-Garde in the years just prior to the First World War. In 1909, he divorced his first wife and married Sofia Rafalovich, who died in 1923 from tuberculosis, but with whom he had a daughter Una. In 1910 he exhibited with the Jack (Knave) of Diamonds group and participated in the exhibitions of The Donkey’s Tail (1912) and Target (1913). In 1913, he became associated with the Union of Youth group in St. Petersburg and became close to the artist and musician, Mikhail Matiushin.

His early work explored numerous styles, including Divisionism, Impressionism (Portrait of a Member of the Artist’s Family, c. 1904, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), Symbolism (The Shroud of Christ, 1908, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow), Art Nouveau (Relaxing: High Society in Top Hats, 1908, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg) and Fauvism (Self Portrait, 1908 or 1910-11, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg). Subsequently, under the influence of Goncharova and Larionov, he developed a Neo-Primitivist style (The Bather, 1911, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), which was characterized by planar compositions, dark outlines and crudely applied pigment. The style was clearly influenced by the native wood print (the lubok), and ancient Russian icons, as well as by the Post-Impressionist and Fauvist works that he was able to study in the Moscow collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov.

In 1912 Malevich, like many of his Russian colleagues, began to experiment with Cubism. Although he continued to employ a frontal organization and depict provincial and peasant themes, his vocabulary became more geometric (Taking in the Rye, 1912, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam). By the following year, his explorations of Futurism resulted in a work like The Knife Grinder (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT., USA) in which the circular motion of the wheel and the movements of the hands and legs are depicted through small, geometrically facetted forms.

The combination of a Cubist vocabulary with Futurist ideas became known as Cubo-Futurism in Russia. The style became associated with notions of the fourth dimension (as time, space and an elevated state of consciousness), as well as with the poetic concept of zaum [beyonsense], which discarded established linguistic and grammatical structures in favor of a universal language of sounds. Such ideas underlie Malevich’s Simultaneous Death of a Man in an Airplane and on the Railroad (1913, illustration for Aleksei Kruchenykh’s book Explodity), in which a network of lines intersect with fragments of an aircraft, a train, railway lines and telegraph poles. This way of thinking also inspired Malevich’s designs for the opera Victory over the Sun, produced in St. Petersburg in December 1913 (prologue by Velimir Khlebnikov, libretto by Kruchenykh and music by Matiushin). For this, Malevich devised three-dimensional costumes (which distorted the appearance of the actors’ bodies) and backdrops that dislocated the space, while employing lighting to intensify these effects. One backcloth relating to the capture of the sun (depicting a square, divided diagonally so that the lower half was black and the upper half white), may have inspired Malevich’s Black Square of 1915.

Malevich continued to explore these ideas in paintings (Woman at a Poster Column, 1914, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) which were based on the Synthetic Cubist practice of combining lettering, collage elements, and figurative fragments with simple geometric shapes, although he developed the latter into large planes of color. At the same time, he used a similar structure to produce what he called Alogist works, like The Englishman in Moscow (1914, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) in which identifiable objects, depicted figuratively, are placed in illogical combinations (e.g. a diminutive church placed against a large fish), while letters emphasize the relationship with zaum by spelling out the phrase “Partial Eclipse”. The painting included a red wooden spoon, like the one he had sported in his lapel in February 1914, while promenading as a Futurist in Moscow.

On 1 August 1914, Russia entered the First World War and Malevich subsequently produced six anti-German posters (also reproduced as postcards) in the style of the lubok. As a reservist of the second class, he was worried about being conscripted into the Tsarist army, and this anxiety seems to have fuelled his creative activity. In early 1915, he exhibited Alogist and Cubo-Futurist works at Tramway V: The First Futurist Exhibition in Petrograd, but by June that year he had already developed a new, radically objectless style of painting, Suprematism.

Consisting of geometric planes of saturated colour floating against white grounds, his Suprematist works emphasized the language of painting itself (the role that color, line and plane could play in articulating the composition on the flat plane of the two-dimensional canvas), while evoking spatial and metaphysical associations and sensations (Airplane Flying, 1915, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Alongside his Black Square, he produced The Black Circle and The Black Cross. He showed at least three Suprematist paintings in November 1915 at the Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art: Embroidery and Carpets from Artists‘ Designs in Moscow. A month later he contributed thirty-nine Suprematist canvases to the Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting 0.10 (Zero-Ten) in Petrograd, where he presented The Black Square across the corner of the room in the position occupied by icons in a Russian Orthodox home. At the same time, Malevich published a text in support of his new approach, which he revised in 1916 and issued as From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism. In early 1916, he worked with colleagues on preparing a journal, entitled Supremus, which was unfortunately never published. He also continued to develop Suprematism, creating a range of more complex compositions in a wider range of pastel tones (Supremus No. 57: Dynamic Suprematism, 1916, Tate Gallery, London), before he was conscripted into the army at the end of July 1916, and posted to Krivichi and then Smolensk (both in Belorussia, now Belarus).

After the February Revolution of 1917, Malevich joined the Federation of Leftist Artists and in August was elected chairman of the Arts Department of the Soviet of Soldier Deputies in Moscow. In November 1917, soon after the Bolshevik coup, he joined the Commission for the Preservation of Valuable Art and Antiquities in the Kremlin. Between March and June 1918, he also wrote a series of articles for the Anarchist journal, Anarchy. He designed the sets for Vladimir Mayakovsky’s play Mystery Bouff and won first prize for his design of the poster, program, and grandstand for The First All-Russian Congress of Committees on Rural Poverty, held in November 1918 at The Winter Palace, Petrograd.

Over this period, Malevich continued to paint, and his compositions developed into single shapes dissolving into space (Suprematism: Yellow Rectangle, 1917-18, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam). In 1918 he saw himself “disappearing into the gulf of infinity” (Declaration, 15 June 1918) and produced five “White on White” paintings, including The White Square on White (1918, Museum of Modern Art New York), which represented a counterpart to his original Black Square. He subsequently announced that he had abandoned painting and would henceforth devote himself to writing and developing the philosophy of a Suprematism.

During 1919, Malevich worked in Moscow at the Department of Fine Arts within the Commissariat of Enlightenment and taught at the State Free Art Studios. In order to escape the irritations and difficulties of life in the capital, including the acute shortages of food and fuel (caused by the Civil War), he moved to the Belorussian city of Vitebsk, arriving on 5 November 1919. There, he taught in the People’s Art School, which had been set up by Marc Chagall.

Malevich rapidly attracted admirers from among the students and the staff (Vera Ermolaeva and El Lissitzky) and in early 1920, they formed Unovis (Champions of the New Art). Based on collective principles, Unovis sought to apply Suprematism to the task of reconstructing everyday life. The group designed propaganda posters, devised a ration card, designed fabrics and clothing, produced various decorative schemes for buildings and executed some of these for various anniversaries in Vitebsk, designed a speaker’s tribune for Smolensk, published an almanac and issued a newssheet. The group’s utopian aspirations were complemented by a new approach to artistic training, in which students were encouraged to develop their own abilities and deepen their understanding of the creative process by experimenting with the styles that had preceded Suprematism, before engaging with objectless art itself. Unovis soon dominated the school, encouraging Chagall to leave. In Vitebsk, Malevich managed to do some writing and publish several texts, including On New Systems in Art; Suprematism: 34 Drawings; and God is not Cast Down.

In 1921, the effective end of the Civil War, the institution of the New Economic Policy (NEP), and the Party’s imposition of control over cultural life made life less easy in Vitebsk. The following year, therefore, Malevich moved to Petrograd along with his students, Nikolai Suetin, Lazar Khidekel, Ilya Chashnik and Lev Yudin. Malevich joined the staff of the Museum of Artistic Culture, which he was instrumental in reorganizing and reinventing as the State Institute of Artistic Culture (Ginkhuk) in 1924. The previous year, he had made some designs for the State Porcelain Factory, including his famous Teapot. He had also begun to make plaster models of potential Suprematist architectural ensembles, which he called “architectons”. These developed ideas that he had earlier elaborated in his drawings of residential structures in space, which he called “planits”. Like the planits, some of the architectons were essentially horizontal constructions (Alpha and Beta), while others were built up around a vertical axis (Gota and Zeta).

Following a virulent attack on Malevich and his institute in Leningradskaia Pravda, on 10 June 1926 (‘A Cloister at the Expense of the State’), Ginkhuk was closed down that December, and moved to the State Institute for the History of Art (GIII). In March 1927, Malevich left for Germany, stopping in Poland where he organised an exhibition in the Polish Artists’ Club at Warsaw’s Hotel Polonia. At the end of March, he travelled to Berlin where he showed his work as a separate display within the Novembergruppe’s section of the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung. On 7 April 1927, he visited the Bauhaus and as result, a German version of his text on Suprematism was published as a Bauhaus book. Called back to the Soviet Union, Malevich left his work on show in Berlin and his manuscripts in the charge of Gustav von Reisen, with whom he had been staying. Eventually, those works that had not been lent to MoMA’s Cubism and Abstract Art show of 1936, and that had survived Fascism and the bombing of Berlin ended up in the care of the architect, Hugo Häring, who sold them to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in the 1950s.

On his return to the Soviet Union, Malevich married Natalia Manchenko, but his personal happiness was marred by the fact that he continued to be attacked as a formalist and counter-revolutionary by realist groups supported by the government. He published a series of articles in the Kharkov journal Nova Generatsiia, and, after being expelled from GIII, he began to teach for two to two and a half weeks every month at the Art Institute in Kiev. In November 1929, his solo exhibition opened at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. For this show, Malevich had produced many new paintings, some of which were Realist, Cézannist or Impressionist in style, but he gave them earlier dates (e.g. Bathing Women, dated 1908, State Russian Museum). He also executed works in a figurative idiom that combined a Suprematist freedom of color and form with an identifiable subject matter that was acceptable to the regime (Sportsmen, 1928-1932, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg). While his desire to make Suprematism accessible to the masses was genuine, he was also reconstructing his artistic career to make it more acceptable to officialdom. This tactic was not successful, and in 1930 Malevich was arrested and imprisoned for three months.

In 1931, he designed a painting for the interior of the Red Theatre in Leningrad and the following year was allowed access to a laboratory in the State Russian Museum. His work, including a large number of architectons, was included in the exhibition Fifteen Years of Soviet Art, which opened in Leningrad in November 1932 and then in Moscow as Artists of the RSFSR over Fifteen Years. During this period, Malevich continued to paint in a figurative idiom, but stretched its potential. He sometimes treated officially sanctioned subjects, such as the Civil War, (Red Cavalry, 1928-1932, State Russian Museum), but often, as in this painting, he employed only a minimum of recognisable components within an essentially abstract format He revisited peasant themes (Woman with a Rake, 1928-1932, State Russian Museum), and evoked the helpless condition of Russian peasants under collectivisation, showing them without arms or faces (Suprematism. Female Figure, 1928-1932, State Russian Museum). His final Self-Portrait of 1933 (State Russian Museum) shows him dressed in the clothing of a Renaissance thinker presenting his ideas. The painting is signed with a black square, recalling the 1915 canvas and the insignia that Unovis members carried on their sleeves, attesting to his enduring commitment to Suprematism.

On 15 May 1935, Malevich died in Leningrad from cancer, surrounded by his mother, his daughter Una and his third wife Natalia. Even his requests to return to the West for medical treatment had been refused. He lay in state in a Suprematist coffin, in his apartment in the former Ginkhuk building, before being transported to Moscow, where he was cremated, and his ashes buried in an open field next to the dacha in Nemchinovka, which had belonged to the Rafalovich family and where he had spent so many happy hours. The site was marked by a black square on a white cube. Unfortunately, this disappeared during the ensuing decades, and the burial site has not yet been definitively identified, although a memorial has been erected in what is believed to be the vicinity of the original monument.

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