Painting. Russian artists. Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935)

Russian painter and designer, one of the most important pioneers of geometrical art, Kasimir Malevich was born near Kiev. He was trained at Kiev School of Art and Moscow Academy of Fine Arts. He began working in an unexceptional Post-Impressionist manner, but by 1912 he was painting peasant subjects in a massive 'tubular' style similar to that of Linger as well as pictures combining the fragmentation of form of Cubism with multiplication of the image of Futurism (The Knife Grinder, 1912). Malevich was eager to free art to a radical geometric simplicity. In 1913 Malevich devised abstract geometric patterns which he called supramatism - "pure aesthetic feeling" - proposing a secular equivalent to a religious experience. The painter claimed that he made a picture consisting of nothing more but a black square on a white field as early as 1913. However, the Supermatist paintings were first made public in Moscow in 1915, and it is very difficulty to date its beginning. Morover, it is also very difficult to find out which of his paintings were hung, as photographs of early exhibitions provide conflicting evidence.

Malevich reconciled folk art and abstraction. It should be noted that the iconic tradition also influenced his art. In the Russian Orthodox Church more than in Western Christian church pictures are the means of intercession. In the presence of a holy icon the worshipper feels transported to heaven. For many Russian artists abstraction was the spiritual art of the new scientific Communist age, in which man, and not God, was the controlling force. It is regrettable that this ideal did not survive the days of the Revolution. The infinite freedom and hopes which avant-garde art expressed actually flourished under the Christian Tsar.
 

Literature: Book "Russian art" A.P. Minyar-Belorucheva