Kazimir Malevich: Quotes about art

“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

“.. [that] the overturning of the old world of arts will be etched across your 'palms”

Kazimir Malevich

recto
admonition from the cover of Malevich's 'novykh sistemakh v iskusstve' (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1919); the cover is reproduced in Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art, Larissa A. Zhadova, (trans. Alexander Lieven); London: Thames and Hudson, 1982
the notice on the verso reads: 'Work and edition by the workshop [artef] of artistic labor at the Vitebsk Svomas'
1910 - 1920

World , Art

“I too was filled with a sort of shyness and fear, as I was called to leave 'the world of will and idea' in which I had lived and created, and in whose reality I had believed. But the happy liberating touch of non-objectivity drew me out into the 'desert' where only feeling is real.... and so feeling became the content of my life. It was no 'empty square' I had exhibited but the feeling of non-objectivity. I perceived that the 'thing' and the 'idea' were taken to be equivalents of feeling, and understood the lie of the world of will and idea. Is the milk bottle the symbol of milk? Suprematism is the rediscovery of that pure art which in the course of time, and by an accretion of 'things', had been lost to sight.”

Kazimir Malevich

As quoted in Artists on Art; from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 453
1921 - 1930

Life , Lie , World , Fear

“The principal element of Suprematism in painting, as in architecture, is its liberation from all social or materialist tendencies. Through Suprematism, art comes into its pure and unpolluted form. It has acknowledged the decisive fact of the nonobjective character of sensibility. It is no longer concerned with illusion.”

Kazimir Malevich

As quoted in Marc Chagall, – a Biography, Sidney Alexander, Cassell, London, 1978, p. 194
1921 - 1930

Art , Decision , Painting

“By Suprematism, I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in the pictorial arts. From the Suprematist point of view, the appearances of natural objects are in themselves meaningless; the essential thing is feeling – in itself and completely independent of the context in which it has been evoked. Academic naturalism, the naturalism of the impressionists, of Cézannism, of Cubism, etc., are all so to speak nothing but dialectic methods, which in themselves in no way determine the true value of the work of art.”

Kazimir Malevich

Quote of Malevich, 1927 in: Artists on Art; from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 451
Malevich valued Cezanne's art as a temporarily necessary but still 'provincial art' in the long developing line of modern art
1921 - 1930

Art , Way , Feeling , Nature

“.. 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

“Everywhere there is craft and technique, everywhere there is artistry and form. Art itself, technique, is ponderous and clumsy, and because of it awkwardness it obstructs that inner element… All craft, technique, and artistry, like anything beautiful, results in futility and vulgarity.”

Kazimir Malevich

critical quote on Constructivism artists
1910 - 1920
Source: 'On poetry'; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 65

Beauty , Art , Quotes

“By Suprematism I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling.”

Kazimir Malevich

In 'The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism', 1926; trans. Howard Dearstyne [Dover, 2003, ISBN 0-486-42974-1], 'part II: Suprematism', p. 67
1921 - 1930

World , Art , Feeling

“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

“The representation of an object, in itself (the objectivity as the aim of the representation), is something that has nothing to do with art, although the use of representation in a work of art does not rule out the possibility of its being of a high artistic order. For the Suprematist, therefore, the proper means is the one that provides the fullest expression of pure feeling and ignores the habitually accepted object. The object in itself is meaningless to him; and the ideas of the conscious mind are worthless. Feeling is the decisive factor.... and thus art arrives at non-objective representation – at Suprematism.”

Kazimir Malevich

Quote of Malevich, 1927 in Artists on Art; from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 452
1921 - 1930

Art , Feeling , Idea , Decision

“When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field. The critics and, along with them, the public sighed, 'Everything which we loved was lost. We are in a desert... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!”

Kazimir Malevich

But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling.. ..which penetrates everything.
In 'The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism', 1926; trans. Howard Dearstyne [Dover, 2003, ISBN 0-486-42974-1], 'part II: Suprematism', p. 68
1921 - 1930

Love , Art , Feeling

“The world as a sense, independent of the image, of the idea - this is the essence of the content of art. [My] square is not an image, just as a switch or socket are not the current.”

Kazimir Malevich

Malevich
Quote of Malevich, in his letter to Konstantin Rozhdestvenskii, 21 April, 1927, private archive, Moscow (transl. Todd Bludeau); as quoted by Vasilii Rakitin, in The great Utopia - The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1992, p. 27
1921 - 1930

World , Art , Idea , Sense