Among the various documents displayed at the State Museum of Vladimir Mayakovsky in Moscow there are also a series of art projects and works such as the "Black Square" by Russian painter and art theoretician Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, the pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the avant-garde Suprematist movement.
The most interesting thing about him is that, as Natalia Goncharova highlighted, he moved from one art genre to the next, changing his style and getting influenced by different genres, from Impressionism to Symbolism, Fauvism and Cubo-Futurism.
Born in Kiev in 1879, Malevich studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and in the studio of Fedor Rerberg until 1910. A year later he took part in the second exhibition of the group Soyuz Molodyozhi (Union of Youth) in St. Petersburg, that also featured Vladimir Tatlin and, in 1912, to the third exhibition of the group, that also included Aleksandra Ekster’s works.
First inspired in his art by Russian avant-garde painters Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, from 1913 Malevich was deeply influenced by the exhibition of Aristarkh Lentulov's cubist paintings that opened in Moscow.
In the same year he developed costumes and sets for the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun by composer Mikhail Matyushin and writer Alexei Kruchenykh that featured characters clad in costumes (that, for the performance, were made of cardboard and wire) composed of geometric figures such as triangles and tori.
In 1914, he exhibited his works in the Salon des Independants in Paris together with Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay, Aleksandra Ekster and Vadim Meller.
The following year the artist moved on and published his manifesto From Cubism to Suprematism: examples of his Suprematist works include "Black Square on White", first exhibited to the public at the 1915 "0-10" exhibition in St. Petersburg, though the artist referred to it as having originated in 1913.
Malevich saw the Black Square as a basic form full of potentialities; he then produced the monochromatic "White on White", an off-white square angled against a larger white square.
The artist was also interested in aerial photography and aviation and worked on rendering familiar landscapes into abstractions (he later on translated the shapes of his paintings into 3D architectural models, which he called "architectonics" or "planity", from the Russian word aeroplan – these works were then exhibited at the 1924 Venice Biennale).
In 1918, Malevich designed the sets and costumes for Mayakovsky's Mystery Bouffe (1918) produced by Vsevolod Meyerhold.
After the October Revolution, he taught at different schools and academies and wrote the book The World as Non-Objectivity (published in Munich 1926) that outlined his Suprematist theories.
Confiscated and banned since the Stalinist regime conceived forms of abstraction as "bourgeois" art, Malevich died of cancer in Leningrad in 1935. An image of the black square was hung above his deathbed and the mourners at his funeral rally were permitted to wave a banner bearing a black square.
Fashion-wise the "Black Square", considered as a synthesis of geometric forms, can still be used as an interesting source of inspiration.
Malevich wrote about its creation: “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 is lost. We are in a desert…Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!’ (…) But a blissful sense of liberating nonobjectivity drew me forth into the ‘desert’ where nothing is real except feeling…and so feeling became the substance of my life. This was no ‘empty square’ which I had exhibited but rather the feeling of nonobjectivity…Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art that, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of ‘things’”.
I do feel that time has come to strip fashion of "the accumulation of things" Malevich stated had obscured real art and create a new and purer vision, maybe employing the speed and direction of movement of geometric figures in space. How do you feel about it? Do you agree?
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