Kazimir Malevich: News

“I have not invented anything, only the night I have sensed, and in it the new which I called Suprematism.”

Kazimir Malevich

Quoted in Dokumente zum Verständnis der modernen Malerei, Walter Hess, (Hamburg, 1956), p. 98
1921 - 1930

Sense , Night

“The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. The face of the new art. The square is a living, regal infant. The first step of pure creation in art.”

Kazimir Malevich

Quote in 'From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting', Kazimir Malevich, November 1916
1910 - 1920

Art

“There is movement and movement. There are movements of small tension and movements of great tension and there is also a movement which our eyes cannot catch although it can be felt. In art this state is called dynamic movement. This special movement was discovered by the futurists as a new and hitherto unknown phenomenon in art, a phenomenon which some Futurists were delighted to reflect.”

Kazimir Malevich

Quote c. 1915, in: 'Cubofuturism', Malevich, in his Essays on Art, op. cit., vol 2; as quoted in Futurism, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 59
1910 - 1920

Art

“I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation, that is, to Suprematism, to the new realism in painting – to non-objective creation.”

Kazimir Malevich

Quote of Malevich, November 1916, in: 'From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting'
1910 - 1920

Painting

“.. the art of futurism…. achieved great momentum in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century and remains a basic stimulus in the following forms of new art: Suprematism, Simultaneism, Purism, Odorism, Pankinetism, Tactilism, Haptism, Expressionism and Légerísm [referring to Fernand Léger in the last… ism, mentioned]”

Kazimir Malevich

1910 - 1920
Source: 'Cubofuturism', Malevich, in Essays on Art, op. cit., vol 2; as quoted in Futurism, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 59

Art , Future

“.. [to gather] under a new banner.... [that the poets of yesterday's Futurism ] change the means of battle with thought, content, and logic.... advance Alogism after Futurism.”

Kazimir Malevich

Quote of Malevich, Nov. 1915; as cited by Vasilii Rakitin, in The great Utopia - The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1992, p. 26
1910 - 1920

Change , Future

“The rectangular picture-plane indicates the starting point of Suprematism; a new realism of color conceived as non-objective creation. The forms of Suprematist art live like all the living forms of nature. This is a new plastic realism, plastic precisely because the realism of hills, sky and water is missing. Every real form is a world. And any plastic surface is more alive than a (drawn or painted) face from which stares a pair of eyes and a smile. [1914]”

Kazimir Malevich

Quote of Malevich, cited in Artists on Art; from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 452
1910 - 1920

World , Smile , Art , Color

“Painting has turned back from the non-objective way to the object, and the development of painting has returned to the figurative part of the way that had led to the destruction of the object. But on the way back, painting came across a new object that the proletarian revolution had brought to the fore and which had to be given form, which means that it had to be raised to the level of a work of art... I am utterly convinced that if you keep to the way of Constructivism, where you are now firmly stuck, which raises not one artistic issue except for pure utilitarianism and in theater simple agitation, which may be one hundred percent consistent ideologically but is completely castrated as regards artistic problems, and forfeits half its value... If you go on as you are.... then Stanislavski will emerge as the winner in the theater and the old forms will survive. And as to architecture, if the architects do not produce artistic architecture, the Greco-Roman style of Zyeltovski will prevail, together with the Repin style in painting..”

Kazimir Malevich

Quote of Malevich from his letter 8 April 1932, to Meyerhold, in 'Two Letters to Meyerhold', in Kunst & Museumjournaal 6, (1990), pp. 9-10; as quoted by Paul Wood in The great Utopia, - The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1992, p. 24 – note 112
This quote clarifies Malevich's famous return to the figuration of the Russian peasant life, in the time of forced collectivization of Russian agriculture: 'for him [= Malevich] the return to figuration was not a break with the Revolution but a way of safeguarding it and preventing the return of Classicism and Naturalism' (Paul Wood in The great Utopia; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1992, p. 24 – note 112)
1931 - 1935

Art , Way , Problem , Parting