Kazimir Severinovich Malevich 1915 creation of a painting. Malevich, whom you did not know: little-known facts about the life and work of the artist

The name of Kazimir Malevich is inextricably linked with the masterpiece of world art - “Black Square”. People often call the artist a Pole, forgetting where Kazimir Malevich was born. The master actually came from a Polish family. Place of birth - Kyiv (February 23, 1879). Although his origin is Polish, Malevich is Russian, Soviet artist. Heyday creative activity the artist coincided with the decline of the Russian Empire.

Kazimir Severinovich seriously influenced the development of the abstractionist direction of world art. Modern avant-garde artists should be grateful to Malevich's legacy. Malevich made abstractionism actually the key direction of art of the twentieth century, along with Kandinsky, Goncharova, Mondrian.

Biography

The artist's family was large (eight children). As a sixteen-year-old teenager, Kazimir began studying at art school, painted his first painting “Landscape in oils”. According to legend, the young man’s friends liked the picture. One of them took the canvas and, secretly from the author, sold the canvas for five rubles. A year later, the family moved to Kursk. Casimir continued his creative research. Combine artistic activity I had to deal with extremely boring work as a draftsman. The gray ordinariness and routine strained Casimir. Creativity has become a real outlet.

1899 - the time of the master’s meeting with Kazimira Zgleits. The latter will become his wife. They lived together for five years. Master driven by thirst creative development, left to conquer Moscow. Soon the artist had to return: two attempts at admission failed. Family quarrels intensified. As a result of the deterioration of the relationship, leaving the children, the woman went to her lover. While picking up the children, the artist met his second wife, Sofia Rafalovich.

1910 was marked by the rise creative career Casimir. The artist changed several cities: Moscow, Vitebsk, Petrograd. Married for the third (last) time to Natalya Manchenko, became director of the Leningrad State Institute artistic culture. Death overtook Malevich after long illness May 15, 1935. According to the will, he was buried near the village of Nemchinovka, Moscow region.

Kazimir Malevich: creative works

Having started creative path From traditionalism, cubic futurism, throughout his life, the artist Kazimir Malevich managed to develop his own direction of painting and find many followers. Avant-garde, which was gaining momentum, especially attracted Malevich. 1910-1915 - the era of neo-primitivism. The subjects of Kazimir Malevich's works were episodes of the simple life of provincial peasants and workers. Neo-primitivism, various shapes Cubism did not satisfy the artist’s creative impulses. The latter was looking for new forms, trying to cross the line of non-standard directions. 1915 became a landmark year: Casimir writes the famous “Black Square”, which begins the era of Suprematism.

Suprematism by Kazimir Malevich is a special direction. The fundamental pillars are complete non-objectivity, pure color. The term goes back to Latin language, based on the concept of supremacy (superiority). This is exactly the feeling famous paintings masters In paintings, the element that is superior to the rest is color, which is the central axis of the work.

1915 marked the beginning of the victorious march of Suprematism. Malevich is working hard on his paintings. Publishes a book. “From Cubism to Suprematism” is among the most interesting monographs on the theory of avant-garde painting. Kazimir Severinovich founded the Supremus society of artists. A few years later (1919), the group transformed, changing the name UNOVIS (“affirmers of the new art”).

The Soviet regime rather worsened the situation of the legendary artist. The master was repeatedly subjected to harsh criticism from government censors. Theoretical works began to raise many questions and contradicted the ideas of Soviet society. By 1926, the artist’s confrontation with the authorities had become extremely aggravated. The article “Monastery on State Supply” caused sharp rejection. The “soviet machine” began to pursue the master. The picture actually became the reason for the closure of the institute, where Malevich served as director. The article's circulation was immediately withdrawn. The last straw of the confrontation was the recognition of Casimir's talents by the Western community (Berlin Exhibition 1927). The artist was arrested twice and sent to prison. First they charged him with attempted espionage, then they added anti-Soviet propaganda.

Kazimir Severinovich wrote many the most beautiful paintings. Most of the paintings make up the golden fund of world painting of the early 20th century. The style of artfully layering one color on top of another allowed for extraordinary depth in every detail. This kind of technique is one of the recognizable features of the master’s works.

After Malevich's first arrest (1930), the Western artistic community widely publicized this outrageous fact. After pressure from influential friends, fearing reactions from the media, the artist was released.
The famous “Black Square” is part of a triptych. Here the artist included the works “Black Circle”, “Black Cross”.
Malevich rewrote the canvas four times, achieving virtually perfect condition. It is the fourth version, exhibited in the Hermitage, that is known to the world today.

Kazimir Malevich: paintings with titles

To better understand what direction in art was founded by Kazimir Malevich, let’s look best works artist:

Kazimir Malevich triptych “Black Square – Black Circle – Black Cross”

Kazimir Malevich "Red Square"

Kazimir Malevich "White on White"

Kazimir Malevich "Four Squares"

Kazimir Malevich "White Cross"

Kazimir Malevich "The Red Cavalry is Galloping"

Kazimir Malevich "Athletes"

Kazimir Malevich "Head of a Peasant Girl"

Kazimir Malevich "Morning after a blizzard in the village"

Kazimir Malevich "Samovar"

Kazimir Malevich “To the Harvest (Martha and Vanka)”

Kazimir Malevich “Spring” Category

Many modern researchers believe that this Russian artist was a great storyteller and mystifier, although he never composed fairy tales or engaged in spiritual practices in his life. It is believed that Kazimir Severinovich Malevich deliberately created fog in his biography in order to give himself that same aura of mystery and incomprehensibility. Actually about early years Little is known about his life, and the information is extremely contradictory, but historians are still gradually collecting pieces of the puzzle and finding out the details of the biography of this amazing person, who came up with a whole new direction in fine arts- Suprematism.

Biography and years of Malevich’s life: the beginning of the journey and a brief affair with impressionism

Starting to figure out who Malevich is and who he was, many are trying to squeeze him into an invented framework into which his personality does not want to fit. He was a man of discovery, in whom the thirst for creation burned with an unquenchable spark. If we talk about the twentieth century as a whole, then it is his paintings that can be called a curatorial-representational project, only the creator himself had the opportunity to make adjustments to central ideas, which is no longer available today. But let’s not get into the professional jungle, but rather find out what kind of person he was, when and in what family he was born and what he gave contemporary art, what a mark he left not only in history, but also in our souls.

It was Kazimir Severinovich Malevich who invented the style of painting called Suprematism. The word itself comes from the Latin definition supremus, which literally means highest or highest. This is what he himself called the direction in avant-gardeism, which he discovered at the dawn of the twentieth century, that is, approximately in the first half of the 1910s.

To better understand who Malevich is and what he was trying to convey to those who would look at his paintings, we should look at his paintings and the new style he invented in more detail. Experts call Suprematism one of the varieties of abstractionism, which is expressed in various combinations and combinations of planes different colors in the simplest geometric figures, the starting point for which can be a square as a basis. Circles, triangles and straight lines can also serve as such a basis.

At the beginning of the century it was Suprematism that became the central, dominant driving force Russian avant-garde art, but from the very beginning this style meant dominance, dominance over all other types of fine art. Without any image of the subject on the canvas, according to the artist himself, the paint itself comes to the fore, freeing itself from the captivity of the framework imposed on it by the author. It does not serve other purposes, does not perform a secondary function, and is precisely the dominant part of the canvas.

In 1915, Kazimir Severinovich even created a special group of avant-garde artists called “Supremus”, who were keen on the completely new style he invented. True, the group did not exist for long, only about a year, but it managed to provide such advanced programming not only for Russian, but also for world art as a whole, that its value is undeniable. The group consisted of fifteen people, among whom one can find such names as Arkhipenko, Khlebnikov, Udaltsova, Yurkevich and many others.

Relatives of the Russian avant-garde artist

Parents

In order to understand who Malevich was, it doesn’t hurt to find out who his parents were. The character and attitude to life, not to mention the inclinations and heredity, will largely depend on what kind of people raised him. For Kazimir Severinovich, everything here is as silent as in a tank. Severin Antonovich Malevich, born in 1845, is an ethnic Pole-gentry by origin, registered in the Volyn province of Zhitomir district. He was originally from the small town of Turbov, where he later served as manager at the sugar factory of the famous industrialist and entrepreneur Nikolai Tereshchenko.

He was a progressive man, so he invited foreign specialists to work with him, among whom was the father of the future artist. The artist’s mother was Ludviga Alexandrovna, born in 1858, née Galinovskaya, and was a real housewife. There were fourteen children in the family, of whom little Casimir was the very first, but most of them died in infancy or childhood. The family spoke Polish, Ukrainian at home, and Russian with officials, so all the children knew three languages from childhood.

Wives and children

Living in Kursk, Kazimir Severinovich finds his first wife in 1899, who, by a strange coincidence, has the same name as himself - Kazimir Ivanovna Zgleits. Deciding that this is a sign of fate, he immediately gets married, but decides to get married only three years later, when his first child has already been born. However, despite this, in 1904 Malevich, leaving his family, went to Moscow to study. Meanwhile, the artist’s mother also moves to Moscow, opens a dining room there and takes in her daughter-in-law, now with two offspring. However, life did not work out and Kazimira, having collected the kids, leaves her husband and goes to the village of Meshcherskoye, where she gets a job as a paramedic.

Anatoly, born in 1901, was illegitimate child. He subsequently died at the age of fourteen during a typhus epidemic.
George, who is believed to have been born in 1902. The existence of such a descendant in the Malevich family is questioned, since nothing more than the record that a baby was baptized in the Kursk Roman Catholic parish church was ever discovered by historians.
Galina, who was born in 1905. She lived a long and happy, eventful life, saw the revolution and went through the cruel and terrible years of the Great Patriotic War. She died only in 1973.

When Kazimir Severinovich comes to pick up his children in Meshcherskoye in 1906-1907, it turns out that the daughter of the local manager, Sofya Mikhailovna, nee Rafalovich, is looking after them. They immediately realized that they were perfect for each other, but for several years Malevich could not get a divorce from his legal wife. As a result, he managed to conclude a new alliance only in 1909. The bride's father turned out to have a rich dowry for his only daughter; it was he who owned the village of Nemchinovka, not far from Moscow, where Malevich subsequently often traveled to work and relax his soul in the bosom of lush Russian nature, silence and pastoral landscapes.

In 1927, after the death of his beloved Sofia in 1925, Kazimir Malevich married again, to a young twenty-five-year-old girl, Natalya Andreevna Manchenko, with whom he remained until his death. The artist himself was already forty-nine or fifty years old at that time, so it is quite natural that no children were born in this marriage. But all this will come later, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Casimir's childhood and youth

The childhood of the future inventor of a new style in fine art is all shrouded in fog, which, apparently, was cast by the artist himself, wanting to remain mysterious and incomprehensible. He was born, according to various sources, on February 11, either 1878 or 1879. This date remains unclear to this day. He spent his entire early childhood in the village, but which one exactly is where confusion arises again. According to the official version, it was Moevka in the Chernivtsi region, according to others, Parkhomovka in the Kyiv region, and according to others, in Parkhomovka, Kharkov region.

It is known for certain that at the age of fifteen or sixteen he ended up in Konotop, where he already painted his first canvas using the technique oil painting. It was called " Moonlight night", depicted a river, a boat and a lunar path on the water. Malevich’s friend took it to the store without asking and earned as much as five rubles. Further fate this painting is unknown.

They say that first, as a child, he saw a picture at the market in which a girl was peeling potatoes, and he simply received an electric shock, such an impression did she make on him. After this, his father gave him for the first time a brush, bought at a pharmacy; it was used to smear the throat of those with a sore throat, as well as a set watercolor paints, but there was still nothing better for the young talent. In 95-96, Malevich studied at the Kyiv drawing school of Nikolai Ivanovich Murashko.

The formation of Malevich's artistic talent

After completing a year's training at a drawing school, the whole family moved to Kursk, where young talent gets a job in the Office of the Moscow-Kursk railway for the position of an ordinary draftsman. All this time, he continues to experiment and paint, at first giving preference to large strokes inherent in impressionism. He even manages to organize a real art circle and arrange an exhibition of his and other works in 1998. He will soon get married and rent a house on Pochtovaya Street, number 13, which can still be seen today. There is no museum there, but it was decided to hang a memorial plaque, which was done in 2011.

Not a youth, but a husband

In the fifth year of the twentieth century, the young artist Malevich first applied for admission to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, but was refused. Kazimir did not want to go back to Kurs to his disgusted wife, who only wanted money, so he stayed in the house of the artist Kurdyumov, whom he found in the art commune that existed at that time in Lefortovo. However, a year later, the pitiful reserves of money that he still had ran out completely and he had to go to Kursk. In the summer of the same year, he tried to enroll again, but was rejected again.

In nineteen hundred and seven, Malevich’s mother rented an apartment in Moscow and took in her daughter-in-law and grandchildren, which Kazimir himself was not particularly happy about. He could not provide a decent standard of living for his wife; he had to live on his mother’s means, so Kazimira gathered her children and went looking for better life to the village of Meshcherskoye, having found a position as a medical worker there. At the same time, after a couple of years, she abandons her children to complete strangers and rides off with one of the doctors. This was the reason Malevich met his second wife Sophia, who looked after the young children.

Further career of the future master

In 1910, having almost found himself as an artist, he took part in the exhibition art society, called "Jack of Diamonds". In early spring next year The works of the young talent could already be seen in the Moscow Salon gallery, and in April they also took part in the exhibition of the Youth Union of the city of St. Petersburg. Around the twelfth year, he made acquaintance with a real art theorist, musician and artist Mikhail Vasilyevich Matyushin, after which he went to an exhibition in Munich. There he brought more than two dozen neo-primitivist paintings, which were highly appreciated by experts.

Most famous work The artist’s “Black Square” was born in 1915, but it received its final implementation and completed form only in the twenty-fourth. But even before that, in the seventeenth year, Kazimir Malevich, after the report “Cubism - Futurism - Suprematism,” was invited to the post of chairman of the Art Section of the Moscow Council of Soldiers’ Deputies, at the same time he also took the reins of the “Jack of Diamonds” society. In 1919 he moved to Vitebsk, where he managed a class at the People's Art School under the supervision of no less famous artist Marc Chagall. By the age of twenty, Kazimir Malevich was seriously interested in the theory of art, which is why he began to write his own research papers.

Lecture “On New Art”.
UNOVIS manifesto in the Vitebsk magazine.
Theoretical and philosophical work “Suprematism. Peace as non-objectivity or eternal peace.”
Brochure “God will not be thrown off. Art, church, factory."
Collection of works “Introduction to the theory of the surplus element in painting.”
Report "On the surplus element in painting."

Starting from the twenty-eighth year, Malevich worked as a teacher at the Kiev Art University, exhibiting his works in both individual and collective exhibitions. In 1930 he was accused of spying for Germany, but he led the case honest Alexander Kishkin, that’s why he insisted on justifying and clearing the artist’s name. Already in 1932, Malevich’s paintings were presented at the exhibition “Artists of the RSFSR for XV Years”, for which he specially painted another, fourth version of his famous “Square”.

Death of the founder of Suprematism

Kazimir Malevich has always been a silent and rather secretive person, therefore nothing is known about his state of health, except that in nineteen thirty-three he became seriously ill - prostate cancer, which slowly “ate up” the not-so-old full of strength a man. He was very painfully ill, although he continued to try to do something. On May 15, 1935, the artist Kazimir Severinovich Malevich died, leaving behind an unequivocal will regarding the funeral, which was only partially carried out.

He wanted to be buried in a coffin, which was made in the shape of a Suprematist cross, with outstretched arms different sides hands. However, the box was made rectangular, albeit in the spirit of Suprematism. The remains were cremated in the crematorium of the Novo-Donskoye cemetery and buried under the artist’s favorite oak tree near the village of Nemchinovka. However, in difficult times war time the grave was destroyed and lost, and a group of enthusiasts found its location only in 1988; there was an ordinary arable collective farm field. Therefore, the memorial sign had to be moved to the edge of the forest. Now this entire territory is almost completely built up, and Malevich’s ashes rest under the houses and avenues of the Romashkovo-2 residential complex in the city of Odintsovo.

In memory of Malevich: circles, squares and colored spots

On St. Isaac's Square in St. Petersburg, in the former noble mansion of the Myatlevs, in the twenties of the last century the State Institute of Artistic Culture was located, where Malevich worked. Moreover, he lived there from the age of 26 until his death. Now there is a commemorative plaque there. In 2012, the street in Kyiv, where, according to one version, the future genius of Suprematism was born, was renamed after him. The artist society The Malevich Society exists even in the United States.

The original title of this painting was “Quadrangle”. This perfectly reflects its essence, since purely geometrically, the depicted figure does not have right angles. Moreover, initially it was a triptych, consisting of three images - red, black and white squares. Red meant revolution, black meant economy, and white meant pure action.

The red cavalry is galloping.

This painting was the only one that was recognized Soviet art. It is conventionally divided into three parts: heaven, earth, and people, that is, the red cavalry itself. In general, there are exactly twelve red horsemen in the picture, and the earth is depicted with the same number of colors, which is hardly a coincidence.

Suprematist composition

According to statistics, this particular painting can be called the most expensive work Russian art, since at an auction in New York it was sold for $85,812,500, and no one knows the name of the buyer, he chose to remain incognito.

Interesting facts about the father of the Russian avant-garde

However, in addition to the fact that Malevich turned out to be an artist, with a special vision and his own view of art in general and the development of his own trends in it, he was also an unusual person, whose life was filled with oddities. Many descendants are keenly interested in his life and fate, so let's look at some interesting facts in his biography.

In the 14th year of the twentieth century, coupled with illegitimate son famous landscape painter Alexei Savrasov, Alexei Morgunov, Malevich took part in a shocking action, walking along the Kuznetsky Bridge with spoons in his buttonholes.
According to one version, it was Kazimir Malevich, while in prison, who came up with the idea of making a glass with edges so that it would not burst from boiling water and would not burn his hands. They say that he told his idea to the sculptor Vera Mukhina, who brought it to life. There is no confirmation of this, therefore the hypothesis cannot be considered proven.
As is known, the artist wanted Suprematist symbols to be used at his funeral, which was only partially fulfilled by the heirs.

The most expensive painting by an artist from Russia is his Suprematist Composition, sold in 2018 to an unknown person for a fabulous sum. Today it is completely unknown whether anyone else will be able to see the original painting.

Born into a family of immigrants from Poland, he was the eldest among nine children. In 1889-94. the family often moved from place to place; in the village of Parkhomovka near Belopolye, Malevich graduated from a five-year agronomic school. In 1895-96. studied for a short time at the Kyiv drawing school of N. I. Murashko. From 1896, after moving to Kursk, he served as a draftsman in the technical department of the railway. In the fall of 1905 he came to Moscow, attended classes at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and the Stroganov School for educational purposes; lived and worked in the house-commune of the artist V.V. Kurdyumov in Lefortovo. Attended classes in the private studio of F. I. Rerberg (1905-10). Spending the summer in Kursk, Malevich worked in the open air, developing as a neo-impressionist.

Unemployed

Woman

Malevich participated in exhibitions initiated by M. F. Larionov: “Jack of Diamonds” (1910-11), “ donkey tail"(1912) and "Target" (1913). In the spring of 1911 he became close to the St. Petersburg society “Youth Union”, of which he became a member in January 1913 (left in February 1914); in 1911-14 he exhibited his works at association exhibitions and participated in debate evenings.

Apple tree in bloom

Reaper on a red background

Decorative and expressionistic paintings by Malevich from the turn of the 1900s to the 1910s. testified to the assimilation of the heritage of Gauguin and the Fauves, transformed taking into account the pictorial tendencies of Russian “Cézanneism”. At the exhibitions, the artist also presented his own version of Russian neo-primitivism - paintings on the themes peasant life(canvases of the so-called first peasant cycle) and a number of works with scenes from “ provincial life"("Bather", "On the Boulevard", "Gardener", all 1911, Stedelijk Museum, etc.).

Two women in the garden

Woman in a yellow hat

In the hayfield

Man

His painting of these years demonstrated the domestic version of futurism, called “cubo-futurism”: a cubist change in form, designed to affirm the intrinsic value and independence of painting, was combined with the principle of dynamism cultivated by futurism [“The Grinder (The Principle of Flickering)”, 1912, etc.]. Work over the scenery and costumes for the production at the end of 1913 of the futuristic opera “Victory over the Sun” (text by A. Kruchenykh, music by M. Matyushin, prologue by V. Khlebnikov) was subsequently interpreted by Malevich as the emergence of Suprematism.

Female worker

First Division Soldier

In painting at this time, the artist developed themes and plots of “abstruse realism”, which used alogism and irrationality of images as a tool for the destruction of ossified traditional art; illogical painting, expressing an abstruse, transrational reality, was built on a shocking montage of heterogeneous plastic and figurative elements that formed a composition filled with a certain meaning that shames the ordinary mind with its incomprehensibility (“Lady at a Tram Stop”, 1913; “Aviator”, “Composition with Mona Lisa”, both 1914; “An Englishman in Moscow”, 1914, etc.).

Composition with Gioconda (Partial eclipse in Moscow)

Swimmers

After the outbreak of World War I, he executed a number of propaganda patriotic popular prints with texts by V.V. Mayakovsky for the publishing house “Modern Lubok”. In the spring of 1915, the first canvases of the abstract geometric style appeared, which soon received the name “Suprematism”. Invented direction - regular geometric shapes, painted in pure local colors and immersed in a kind of “white abyss” where the laws of dynamics and statics prevailed, Malevich gave the name “Suprematism”. The term he coined went back to the Latin root “suprem”, which formed in native language artist, Polish, the word “suprematia”, which translated meant “superiority”, “supremacy”, “dominance”. At the first stage of the existence of the new artistic system, Malevich, with this word, sought to fix the primacy, the dominance of color over all other components of painting.

Portrait of the artist's daughter

Runner

At the exhibition “O.10” at the end of 1915 he showed for the first time 39 paintings under common name“Suprematism of Painting,” including his most famous work, “Black Square (Black Square on a White Background)”; At the same exhibition, the brochure “From Cubism to Suprematism” was distributed. In the summer of 1916 Malevich was called up to military service; demobilized in 1917.

Two male figures

A carpenter

In May 1917, he was elected to the council of the professional Union of Artists and Painters in Moscow as a representative from the left federation (young faction). In August he became chairman of the Art Section of the Moscow Council of Soldiers' Deputies, where he conducted extensive cultural and educational work. In October 1917 he was elected chairman of the Jack of Diamonds society. In November 1917, the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee appointed Malevich Commissioner for the Protection of Ancient Monuments and a member of the Commission for the Protection of Artistic Treasures, whose responsibility was to protect the Kremlin’s valuables.

Harvesting

Peasant woman

In March-June 1918 he actively collaborated in the Moscow newspaper Anarchy, publishing about two dozen articles. Participated in the work on the decorative decoration of Moscow for the May 1st holiday. In June he was elected a member of the Moscow Art Collegium of the Art Department of the People's Commissariat for Education, where he joined the museum commission together with V. E. Tatlin and B. D. Korolev.

Pilot

Cow and violin

As a result of differences with members of the Moscow board, he moved to Petrograd in the summer of 1918. In the Petrograd Free Workshops, Malevich was entrusted with one of the workshops. He designed the Petrograd production of V. V. Mayakovsky’s “Mystery-Bouffe” directed by V. E. Meyerhold (1918). In 1918, canvases of “white suprematism” were created, the last stage of Suprematist painting.

In the country

Portrait of Ivan Klyun

In December 1918 he returned to Moscow. He took over the leadership of painting workshops in the Moscow I and II State Art Museums (in the first, together with N. A. Udaltsova).
In July 1919 he graduated from the first big theoretical work“On new systems in art.” At the beginning of November 1919 he moved to Vitebsk, where he received the position of head of a workshop at the Vitebsk People's Art School, headed by Marc Chagall.

Non-stop station. Kuntsevo

Portrait of Una

At the end of the same year, Malevich's first solo exhibition took place in Moscow; representing the artist's concept, it unfolded from early impressionistic works through neo-primitivism, cubo-futurism and alogical canvases to Suprematism, divided into three periods: black, colored, white; The exhibition ended with stretchers with blank canvases, a clear manifestation of the rejection of painting as such. The Vitebsk period (1919-22) was devoted to the composition of theoretical and philosophical texts; Almost everything was written in those years philosophical works Malevich, including several versions of the fundamental work “Suprematism. The world is like non-objectivity."

Three women

Gardener

As part of the activities of the association “Approvers of the New Art” (Unovis) he created, Malevich tested many new ideas in the artistic, pedagogical, utilitarian and practical spheres of Suprematism.

Bathers

Lumberjack

At the end of May 1922 he moved from Vitebsk to Petrograd. From the fall of 1922 he taught drawing at the architectural department of the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineers. He created several samples and designed Suprematist paintings for porcelain products (1923). He executed the first drawings of “planites”, which became the design stage in the emergence of spatial-volumetric Suprematism.

Suprematism

Samovar

In the 1920s headed the State Institute of Artistic Culture (Ginkhuk). He also headed the formal theoretical department in Ginkhuk, which was later renamed the department of pictorial culture. As part of the experimental work of the institute, he conducted analytical research and developed own theory surplus element in painting, and also began the production of volumetric Suprematist structures, “architectons”, which, according to the author, served as models of new architecture, the “Suprematist order”, which was to form the basis of a new, comprehensive universal style.

Head

Portrait of the artist's wife

After the defeat of Ginkhuk in 1926, Malevich and his staff were transferred to the State Institute of Art History, where he headed the committee for the experimental study of artistic culture.

Peasant

Red figure

In 1927 he went on a business trip abroad to Warsaw (8-29 March) and Berlin (29 March - 5 June). An exhibition was held in Warsaw, at which he gave a lecture. In Berlin, Malevich was given a hall at the annual Great Berlin art exhibition(May 7 - September 30). On April 7, 1927, he visited the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he met V. Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nady; in the same year, Malevich’s book “The World as Non-Objectivity” was published as part of the Bauhaus publications.

On the boulevard

Spring

Having received a sudden order to return to the USSR, he urgently left for his homeland; He left all the paintings and the archive in Berlin in the care of friends, as he intended to make a large exhibition tour with a stop in Paris in the future. Upon arrival in the USSR, he was arrested and spent three weeks in prison.

High society in top hats

Portrait of a family member

In 1928, the publication of a series of articles by Malevich began in the Kharkov magazine “New Generation”. From this year, preparing a personal exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery (1929), the artist returned to the themes and subjects of his works from the early peasant cycle, dating the newly painted paintings to 1908-10; Post-Suprematist paintings made up the second peasant cycle.

With stroller

Scenery

At the end of the 1920s. A number of neo-impressionist works were also created, the dating of which was shifted by the author to the 1900s. Another series of post-Suprematist paintings consisted of canvases where the generalized abstract forms of male and female heads, torsos and figures were used to construct an ideal plastic image.

Reaper

Athletes

In 1929 he taught at the Kiev Art Institute, coming there every month. The personal exhibition in Kyiv, which ran in February-May 1930, was harshly criticized - in the fall of the same year, the artist was arrested and imprisoned for several weeks in the Leningrad OGPU prison.

Yellow chaos

Suprematism

In 1931 he created sketches of the paintings of the Red Theater in Leningrad, the interior of which was decorated according to his design. In 1932-33 headed the experimental laboratory at the Russian Museum. Malevich's work last period life gravitated towards the realistic school of Russian painting. In 1933, a serious illness arose that led to the artist’s death. According to his will, he was buried in Nemchinovka, a holiday village near Moscow. Painter, graphic artist, teacher, art theorist. In 1895-1896 he studied at the Kyiv Drawing School, in the mid-1900s he attended classes at the Moscow School of Sculpture and Architecture and the Stroganov School, and studied in a private studio in Moscow.

Landscape with white houses

Red Cavalry

He participated in many exhibitions initiated by Mikhail Larionov, as well as in the events of the St. Petersburg society "Youth Union" (1911-1914).

In 1915, at an exhibition in Petrograd, he showed thirty-nine paintings under the general title “Suprematism of Painting,” including his most famous work, “Black Square.” Suprematist non-objectivity was considered as a new stage of artistic consciousness.

Flower girl

Veseny landscape

From the end of 1919 to the spring of 1922 he lived and worked in Vitebsk. After moving to Petrograd (1923), he headed the Museum of Artistic Culture, subsequently the State Institute of Artistic Culture (Ginkhuk, closed in 1926), where Nikolai Suetin, Konstantin Rozhdestvensky, Anna Leporskaya studied and worked under his leadership.

Black square and red square

Black cross

After a trip to Poland and Germany (1927) he returned to figurative painting. In 1928-32 created more than a hundred paintings and many drawings included in the “second peasant cycle.” He showed most of them at a personal exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery in 1929.

Black square

MALEVICH Kazimir Severinovich (1878-1935), Russian artist. The founder of one of the types of abstract art, the so-called. Suprematism ("Black Square", 1915). From the beginning 1920s was engaged in scientific and teaching activities. In the beginning. 1930s turned to realistic painting ("Self-Portrait", 1933).

MALEVICH Kazimir Severinovich Russian painter, graphic artist, teacher, art theorist, philosopher. The founder of Suprematism, the art of geometric abstraction.

In the fall of 1905 he came to Moscow, attended classes at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and the Stroganov School for educational purposes; lived and worked in the house-commune of the artist V.V. Kurdyumov in Lefortovo. Attended classes in the private studio of F. I. Rerberg (1905-10). Spending the summer in Kursk, Malevich worked in the open air, developing as a neo-impressionist.

Joining the circle of innovators

Malevich participated in exhibitions initiated by M. F. Larionov: "Jack of Diamonds" (1910-11), "Donkey's Tail" (1912) and "Target" (1913). In the spring of 1911 he became close to the St. Petersburg Youth Union society, of which he became a member in January 1913 (left in February 1914); in 1911-14 he exhibited his works at association exhibitions and participated in debate evenings. Decorative and expressionistic paintings by Malevich from the turn of the 1900s to the 1910s. testified to the assimilation of the heritage of Gauguin and the Fauves, transformed taking into account the pictorial tendencies of Russian “Cézanneism”. At the exhibitions, the artist also presented his own version of Russian neo-primitivism - paintings on themes of peasant life (canvases of the so-called first peasant cycle) and a number of works with subjects from “provincial life” (“Bather”, “On the Boulevard”, “Gardener”, all 1911, Stedelijk Museum, etc.).

Since 1912, a creative collaboration began with the poets A. E. Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov. Malevich designed a number of publications by Russian futurists (A. Kruchenykh. Blown up. Drawing by K. Malevich and O. Rozanova. St. Petersburg, 1913; V. Khlebnikov, A. Kruchenykh , E. Guro. St. Petersburg, 1913; A. Khlebnikov. 2nd ed. by K. Malevich and O. St. Petersburg. Roar! Gloves. Fig. K. Malevich, St. Petersburg, 1914; His painting of these years demonstrated the domestic version of futurism, called “cubo-futurism”: a cubist change in form, designed to assert the intrinsic value and independence of painting, was combined with the principle of dynamism cultivated by futurism [“The Grinder (The Principle of Flickering)”, 1912, etc.].

Work on the sets and costumes for the production of the futuristic opera “Victory over the Sun” at the end of 1913 (text by A. Kruchenykh, music by M. Matyushin, prologue by V. Khlebnikov) was subsequently interpreted by Malevich as the emergence of Suprematism. In painting at this time, the artist developed themes and plots of “abstruse realism”, which used alogism and irrationality of images as a tool for the destruction of ossified traditional art; illogical painting, expressing an abstruse, transrational reality, was built on a shocking montage of heterogeneous plastic and figurative elements that formed a composition filled with a certain meaning that shames the ordinary mind with its incomprehensibility (“Lady at a Tram Stop”, 1913; “Aviator”, “Composition with Mona Lisa", both 1914; "An Englishman in Moscow", 1914, etc.).

The emergence of Suprematism

After the outbreak of World War I, he performed a number of propaganda patriotic popular prints with texts by V. V. Mayakovsky for the publishing house "Modern Lubok".

In the spring of 1915, the first canvases of the abstract geometric style appeared, which soon received the name “Suprematism”. Malevich gave the name “Suprematism” to the invented direction - regular geometric figures painted in pure local colors and immersed in a kind of “white abyss” where the laws of dynamics and statics reigned. The term he coined went back to the Latin root “suprem”, which formed the word “suprematia” in the artist’s native language, Polish, which translated meant “supremacy”, “supremacy”, “dominance”. At the first stage of the existence of the new artistic system, Malevich, with this word, sought to fix the primacy, the dominance of color over all other components of painting. At the exhibition "O.10" at the end of 1915, he showed for the first time 39 paintings under the general title "Suprematism of Painting", including his most famous work - "Black Square (Black Square on a White Background)"; At the same exhibition, the brochure “From Cubism to Suprematism” was distributed. In the summer of 1916, Malevich was called up for military service; demobilized in 1917. In May 1917 he was elected to the council of the professional Union of Artists and Painters in Moscow as a representative from the left federation (young faction). In August he became chairman of the Art Section of the Moscow Council of Soldiers' Deputies, where he conducted extensive cultural and educational work. In October 1917 he was elected chairman of the Jack of Diamonds society. In November 1917, the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee appointed Malevich Commissioner for the Protection of Ancient Monuments and a member of the Commission for the Protection of Artistic Treasures, whose responsibility was to protect the Kremlin’s valuables.

When mentioning such cliches as “ambiguous daub”, “unnecessary, abstract art“Images and faces of a whole galaxy of avant-garde innovators and futurists involuntarily grow in my memory, but the most vivid and at the same time big name Only he was always considered - the main architect and revolutionary, ideologist and philosopher, genius and madman - Kazimir Severinovich Malevich.

In May 2017, a painting by Kazimir Malevich "Suprematist composition with stripes in projection" became the most expensive lot of the oldest in the world auction house Sotheby's. It was sold for 21.2 million dollars with an estimated value of 12-18 million.

“Suprematist composition with a stripe in projection”, K. Malevich. Photo: Sothebys

In 2008, at the same Sotheby’s auction, another painting by Malevich was sold, with the same name, only without the stripe - "Suprematist composition" which has become one of the most expensive paintings in a story written by a Russian artist. The unknown buyer agreed to part with an amount exceeding $60 million.

“Suprematist composition”, K. Malevich. Photo: Sotheby

But perhaps the most famous and at the same time the most discussed painting by the Russian avant-garde artist is "Black square" . There are four “black squares” in total. The first and third are kept in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the second in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. The fourth hangs in the Hermitage. The approximate cost of each individually is more than 20-30 million dollars. The paintings are not for sale.

“Black Square” by K. Malevich. Photo: rma.ru

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This simple operation could be performed by any child - however, children would not have the patience to paint over such large area one color. Any draftsman can do such work - and Malevich worked as a draftsman in his youth - but draftsmen are not interested in such simple geometric shapes. A mentally ill person could have painted such a picture, but he didn’t, and if he had, it would hardly have had the slightest chance of getting to the exhibition at the right time and in the right place. Having completed this simple operation, Malevich became the author of the most famous, most mysterious, most frightening painting in the world - “Black Square”. With a simple movement of his brush, he once and for all drew an uncrossable line, marked the abyss between old art and new, between man and his shadow, between a rose and a coffin, between life and death, between God and the Devil.” Tatyana Tolstaya, writer, in the essay “Square”

According to the Russian art critic, art historian and great specialist in the Russian avant-garde and in particular the work of K. Malevich Tatyana Goryacheva:

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In the history of world culture there are not many works whose names went beyond their original meaning and acquired the character of a common noun... There is no picture with more loud fame"than Kazimir Malevich's "Black Square", there is no work that caused the appearance of so many other works,... there is no artifact that has such enduring relevance... "Black Square" became a real milestone in the history of Russian art of the twentieth century."

I am sure that the majority of experts and critics, and not only Russian ones, will agree with the opinions of the two Tatianas... Malevich is certainly an artist of world renown and, as we see, collectors without regret shell out impressive sums for the right to own paintings by the Russian avant-garde artist. BUT!

Most people, ordinary connoisseurs of painting, do not understand or are suspicious of Malevich’s work, distinguishing between normal art and degenerate art,* dividing the creators of painting into healthy artists and “mentally ill”... And this is not surprising. Case artistic taste. But it should be understood that the artist Malevich and his paintings for the same collectors are not an object of admiration and admiration, but a successful investment, an investment!

In 1927, Malevich exhibited his paintings at exhibitions in Warsaw and later in Berlin. After Kazimir Malevich’s urgent departure to the USSR in June 1927, he transferred the collection of paintings (more than a hundred canvases) to the German architect Hugo Goering for storage. Goering later took these paintings from Nazi Germany, where they were subject to destruction as "degenerate art"
"Degenerate art" (German: Entartete Kunst) – Nazi propaganda term for avant-garde art, which seemed not only modernist, anti-classical, but also Jewish-Bolshevik, anti-German, and therefore dangerous for the nation and for the entire Aryan race.
However, avant-gardeism was also unloved by the Soviet leadership, unnecessary and ugly.

You will be surprised, but the rich heritage of the avant-garde artist Malevich, in addition to masterpieces from his characteristic movements of Suprematism and Cubism, also includes “simpler” paintings, more understandable and familiar to the classical average connoisseur of painting... And today we will try to destroy the cliches formed in society about the extremely complex and incomprehensible Malevich.