Suprematism

Suprematism, Russian artistic movement which developed in 1913 and remained active officially until 1919. It played a vital role in the creation of geometric abstraction.

Suprematism was almost single-handedly formulated by Kasimir Malevich, who initially painted in a Cubo-Futurist figurative style. In 1913 he executed his first Suprematist composition a pencil drawing of a black square on a white background (Russian State Museums, St Petersburg), which was intended to express “pure artistic feeling” beyond the world of appearances. In 1915 Malevich published a manifesto and for the first time displayed his Suprematist compositions at the “0.10.The Last Futurist Exhibition” in Petrograd.

His earliest Suprematist works were among his most severe, consisting of basic geometric shapes, such as circles, squares, and crosses, painted in an extremely restricted range of colours. In the following years he gradually extended his palette and began to introduce triangles and fragments of circles into his formal repertoire. He also began to restore some illusion of depth to his compositions. Despite this apparent enrichment of his pictorial language, in 1918 he produced the extraordinary Suprematist Composition: White on White (Museum of Modern Art, New York), a painting consisting of a tilted white square on a white field: only the variation in the brushstrokes allows the viewer to distinguish the different parts of the picture. Having attained this ultimate point of abstraction, it was perhaps not surprising that, in 1919, Malevich declared that the Suprematist experiment had finished.

Any attempt to interpret Suprematism inevitably draws upon Malevich's own explanation of the movement. Malevich distinguished his work not only from depictions of external reality, but also from any art that attempted to represent the emotions of its creator. In contrast, Suprematism was intended to express “the metallic culture of our time”, and indeed occasionally made direct references to technology. In Suprematist Composition Expressing the Feeling of Wireless Telegraphy (1915), for example, Malevich incorporated a visual expression of the dots and dashes of telegraphy. In general, perfect abstract shapes such as the square were used by Malevich as symbols of man's ability to transcend the natural world. Like other geometric abstractionists such as Mondrian, Malevich was extremely interested in theosophy, and in expressing a spiritual reality beyond the physical. In this context the black square of his first Suprematist work was not empty, as his critics claimed, but “filled with the spirit of non-objective sensation”, while he described the areas of white in his compositions as “the free white sea” of “infinity”. This liberation from finite earthly existence reached a fitting climax in the “White on White” paintings, where the square finally lost its physical presence and merged with its brilliant white background.

Despite announcing the end of Suprematism in 1919, Malevich in fact continued to produce Suprematist works in the 1920s, although he returned to figurative art towards the end of his life. The most important of his followers were El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy, who helped to spread his ideas throughout Western Europe and North America.