Kasimir Sewerinowitsch Malewitsch

Claude Monet brought Kazimir Malevich to modern art

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was born in Kyiv on 23 February 1878., to native Polish parents who had been driven to Kyiv by the January Uprising. As a child, Kazimir Malevich spoke Polish, Russian and Ukrainian, but otherwise received only a minimal education and lived in poor conditions. Whilst still young, he watched a house painter mixing green paint and realised it could be used to paint wonderfully realistic trees – and so one of the most important abstract painters discovered his love for fine art through nature. Malevich found a position as a technical draughtsman in Kursk and joined a like-minded group, who equally painted strictly according to nature. His chosen path was against his father’s wishes and so he had to finance his studies at an art school in Moscow himself, and it was during this time that, by his own admission, his encounter with the art of Claude Monet led him to Impressionism. 

Breakthrough as modern painter and the beginning of Suprematism

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich first had the opportunity to present twelve sketches at an exhibition in 1907, which also included works by artists such as Nataliya Sergeyewna Gontscharova, Michail Fedorovich Larionov and Wassily Kandinsky. Malevich founded the new association ‘Donkey’s Tail’ with his colleague Larionov, and also met Michael Vasilyevich Matyushin, who became a lifelong friend. In the years that followed, he explored Symbolism, Neo-Primitivism and Cubo-Futurism, becoming a formative figure on the Russian art scene, and even made it to the Armory Show in New York. He created the opera Victory over the Sun with the artists Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchonych and Mikhail Matyushin, which was performed only twice in St Petersburg, causing one of the biggest scandals in art history. Responsible for the lighting direction and stage design, Malevich painted the first of his famous black squares on a stage curtain, and the artist thus regarded the controversial opera as the actual beginning of the Suprematism he had invented. 

Directional dispute about art; late return to figuration

With his newly developed painting style of Suprematism, Kazimir Severinovich Malevich took abstraction to the extreme. He rejected any recognition of the representational world and denied reality, which he dissolved into its basic geometric forms. In 1915, he presented his epochal work Black Square on White Ground in the Last Futuristic Exhibition of Painting 0.10 (zero-ten) in the Dobytschina Gallery in Petrograd. Although the exhibition received scathing comments from the critics, it marked the breakthrough of Modernism. In the 1920s, the rise of abstract art was dampened by the onset of the Stalinist era, and Kazimir Malevich – who had previously shown little consideration for artists he disliked, such as Marc Chagall – now feared for his own position. Married three times, during the last years of his life he once again turned increasingly to figurative painting. 

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich died in Leningrad on 15 May 1935.