Suprematism: Seeds of Modernism

Suprematism

SUPREMATISM Seeds of Modernism Developments in Design History 1850-1930 James Volks & Susan Harrison

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Suprematism

Contents:

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Suprematism

Kazimir Malevich

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The Black Square

0.1

Eight Red Rectangles

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El Lissitzky

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Conclusion

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Suprematism

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Suprematism

Kazimir Malevich 5

Suprematism

Suprematism was founded by a Russian man, Kazimir Malevich. Born in Kiev in 1879, Malevich grew up in an unstable Russia, therefore he was making works of art while the country was in a revolutionary state. This greatly impacted Malevich’s work.

Design is the will of the age. He founded a radical movement to combat the unease in Russia, this movement was Suprematism. The state also started limiting the freedom of many people including artists. In 1934 a year before Malevich’s death, Stalin imposed the Doctrine of Social Realism, which banned abstraction and the divergence of artistic expression. This stopped Suprematism for many years.

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Suprematism

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Suprematism

“To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling.�

Kazimir Malevich

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Suprematism

It was to be art superior to all other art before it. Malevich said it would lead to “supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts.� He wanted to get rid of realism and telling the truth in his work, and head towards full abstraction ultimately of feeling - the feelings in the pieces to be perceived differently from individual to individual by using simple geometric shapes of squares, circles and crosses. The way the paint was applied on the canvas was also a very important aspect of it, it created another dimension since they were just made up of flat geometric shapes and it provoked audience’s perception because of this.

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Suprematism

The Black Square 10

Suprematism

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Suprematism

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of Peace

The most important piece of this movement by far is Malevich’s Black Square. It would appear to look like something a child could make with its simplicity but it is much more than simple. He used it as a sign of the new era of art. It’s revolutionary, the first of its kind. As I mentioned earlier, we can see here how important the application of paint was to Malevich. He made this piece on top of another painting which he wasn’t very happy with, this has effected the drying of the paint, making a cracked appearance over the corpse of the original painting. This cracking is most likely from the aging of the painting.

If you look close enough you can see tints of colour that remain.

He then painted around the black square in white paint making a border. If put with a frame, the piece would technically be two squares, Malevich probably intended this to happen. It was a vision of modernity compared to all other art made at this time.

It is interesting because he destroyed the contented nature of realist art at the time, like the revolution destroyed the peace in the country.

Suprematism

Destroyer

It may have been made during frustration but it could mean so many different things.

To me it means several different things, it just depends on how you look at it. I see the colours underneath as Russia before the revolution, the square stamped upon it as the revolution stunts the growth of the country, blackness leaving only behind a faint part of what was there before. The colour underneath could also mean the happiness that was once there has now been made into a strict bordered black square because of the restrictions laid upon the people. The cracking of the paint is just like the cracking of the country’s empire. This is what Malevich meant when he wanted it to be all about feeling and perception. I think he achieved that from what I can take from the piece myself.

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The Last Futurist Exhibition 0.1

Suprematism

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Suprematism

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Suprematism

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Eight Red Rectan_ gles

Suprematism

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Suprematism

This is another piece by Malevich to aid in his rebellious art revolution. It is eight red rectangles slightly varying in size and shade of red in a sequence moderately tilting relative to each other in a parallel way in one direction. Malevich did make figurative paintings before his ascent into Suprematism, he called his leap of faith going into “the empty wilderness.” He didn’t know where he was going but he could no longer do what others were doing.

ZERO DEGREE 18

Suprematism

He wanted to go to the zero dimension of painting, he called it the “zero degree” of painting. He wanted to reduce what was in his paintings into simplicity and take out the unnecessary to make pure abstraction.

He brought it to the level where critics didn’t even consider it art, it was where painting could not go without ceasing to be art. Malevich divided Suprematism into three sections, ‘The Black Square’ was part of the first section, the black phase, this was the very beginning for Suprematism. Then there was the coloured phase which was meant to focus on the sensation of movement and the white phase. The coloured section featured a painting of eight red rectangles entitled ‘Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles.’ This stage has the primary colours of magenta, yellow and cyan. The coloured phase was sometimes referred to as Dynamic Suprematism.

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Suprematism

This piece has a cryptic composition, leaving us with many questions. The rectangles look like they are floating in a sky full of clouds like giant red balloons in a worm’s eye view of the world. Interestingly enough they also look like it could be from an aerial view looking down on these shapes from space. Another possibility is that these rectangles are just hung on a wall. Not many paintings can have this effect but it’s the simplicity of the forms and the colours that make the perception of it differ so much. He most likely planned for it to be from an aerial view, looking down on these rectangles. This is most probable because of Malevich’s enthusiasm for aerial photography at the time. It greatly inspired him in making this group of work for Suprematism. He was interested in aeronautics

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before Suprematism, so it can be seen somewhat in his other figurative works preSuprematism. I could presume this is where he got the certain shapes and the compositions in his pieces, from seeing them in flight or from aerial photography. His environment stimulated his work. I think it is a very successful painting with many different perspectives of the rectangles creating depth to the piece in terms of meaning.

Suprematism

“Colour is the essence of painting, which the subject always killed.�

Kazimir Malevich

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Suprematism

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Suprematism

This is a monochrome painting by Kazimir, entitled White on White, made in 1918. It is a simple piece, again the most important aspect of it, is the texture of the paint on the canvas.

If you look closely you will see horizontal strokes of built up paint. This was part of the third phase of Suprematism, the white phase.

The composition is made of up one single tilted square in a shade of white, sitting on top of a base colour of off white. It is simply white on white like its title. It is technically two squares taking into account the shape of the canvas being square also. Malevich began this series in 1916. As we can see from other pieces by Malevich, the square appears to be lifted off the canvas and floating.

“The square = feeling, the white field= the void beyond this feeling�

Kazimir Malevich

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Suprematism

El Lissitsky

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Suprematism

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Suprematism

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Suprematism

Another great artist of this movement was El Lissitzky. He is important as he made the movement popular in Western society. Lissitzky was slightly different to Malevich as he would often make a political statement about Russia and its beginning Soviet Union with his Suprematist art.

Design is the will of the age, Russia’s political state intrigued Lissitzky enough to want to make awareness of what was being neglected because of it. He mixed architecture in with his abstraction of two dimensional shapes to hopefully show the rest of Russia the need for industrialisation that Lissitzky thought they needed at the time. He made his own original Suprematist style, he called this collection of work “Proun or Prouen”.

He said it was where he departed “the way station between art and architecture.”

This was an acronym for “Project for the Affirmation of the New” in Russian. He used architecture in his pieces to bring about renewal of buildings, bridges etc. in Russia. He often had different perspectives within the one painting, they were three dimensional unlike the usual two dimensional Suprematist work. Around 1925 there were two parts to Suprematism, one part idolised idealistic concepts and the other favoured practical goals like industrialisation. His ideas from the Suprematist movement influenced the development of the Bauhaus and the Constructivist movements.

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Suprematism

“Do not read. Take paper, columns, blocks…fold, colour, build.”

This is a children’s book called “About Two Squares” that El Lissitzky made. It is a very abstract book, one that a child most likely won’t understand but can still read. It is the tale of two squares renewing the world together.

It is to teach children about El Lissitzky’s ideas of art and practice and the social change in Russia in the 1920’s. Design is the will of the age, Lissitsky desired that the soon to be future of the country would understand Russia’s history and politics so he designed this book to show them how. It was to help them to understand the revolution and understand where they stood in it. He thought it was very important to teach children about it for their development. He leaves instructions on how the book should be read which is revolutionary in itself as ‘normal’ books don’t come with instructions. The book itself asks you to create like El Lissitzky creates, but it only tells you how with one sentence. If you give these instructions to a child with some materials and the book to look at, the child will make their own story about a square in the colour of whatever paper you give them. Experimenting like this is letting them be part of social change at such a young age.

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Suprematism

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Suprematism

It is a very modern book in which the reader is involved in the book and is basically told to create their future with the simple instructions included. The book ends on “and then” this lets the reader do what they want for the end, an unfinished story the reader’s imagination can finish. The two squares are the only things in the book in colour, the rest is colourless. One is red and one is black. Why these colours? It could be said that the black square in this book is most likely the same black square from Kazimir Malevich which I spoke about earlier. It was the image of Suprematism, as for the red in red square, it normally means communism. They symbolised the superiority of the red square over the black square, i.e. the Soviet Order over the old order. Around this time El Lissitzky was taking Suprematism and moving it along with politics in his pieces, he later moved into the movement of Constructivism, which is probably why in this book he said he constructed the images of the squares on the page rather than making them.

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Conclusion

Suprematism

To conclude Suprematism was made during the Russian revolution, a time of unease. Malevich used it to battle to bring Russia back to normalcy. Design is the will of the age, he willed to bring feeling back to people, to bring about “The Non-Objective World.” Malevich said “Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art which, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of “things”.” He wanted it to not be about substance.

Malevich made a new icon for the people to worship for the new era of art, the salient piece, The Black Square. He tore away the propaganda art that was being made to show the leaders in the country their greatness to the world. He took the realism out of art and made it pure feeling and perception. El Lissitzky made a political statement with his Suprematist work. Lissitzky used design to bring practical solutions and ideas to Russia, he wanted industrialisation for his country to move on from the revolution.

That is why there is a mix of architectural,shape and form in his collection titled Proun. Lissitsky was also determined to introduce social change to the youths to teach them of their future and past.

Hence Design is the Will of the Age.

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Bibliography Books

Malevich- Paintings, Architektons, Writings, Suprematism and The Avant-Garde, by Catherine Cooke, Crowther and Dudakov.

Kasimir Malevich, Life and Work, by Kolja Kohlhoff and Jeannot Simmen https://www.e-flux.com/journal/47/60047/becoming-revolutionary-on-kazimir-malevich/ By the editors of the encyclopaedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/editor/The-Editors-of-Encyclopaedia-Britannica/4419 https://www.britannica.com/event/Russian-Revolution-of-1917 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273294421_Malevich_Suprematism_and_Aerial_Photography https://www. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03087298.2004.10441285

Journals Kazimir Malevich. ‘The Black Square’ circa 1914-1915, Malevich- Paintings, Architektons, Writings, Suprematism and The Avant-Garde,

by Catherine Cooke, Dudakov and Crowther, inside cover.

Kazimir Malevich, The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10, Courtesy of the Fondation Beyeler Kazimir Malevich. ‘Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles’ 1915 from Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, from Andrew GrahamDixon archive https://www.andrewgrahamdixon.com/archive/itp-97-suprematist-painting-eight-red-rectangles-by-kazimir-malevich El Lissitzky, About Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale of Two Squares in Six Constructions, 1922, Michael Takeo Magruder http://www.takeo.org/nspace/sl003/

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