Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (23 February [O.S. 11 February] 1879 – 15 May 1935) was a Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose work and writings pioneered the development of abstract painting in the 20th century. He is best known as the founder of Suprematism, a radically non-objective form of painting he introduced in 1915.
Born in Kiev, modern-day Ukraine, to an ethnic Polish family, Malevich worked primarily in Russia and became a leading figure of the Russian avant-garde. His work has also been associated with the Ukrainian avant-garde. Early in his career, he worked in multiple styles, assimilating Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism through reproductions and the works acquired by contemporary Russian collectors. In the early 1910s, he exhibited alongside other Russian avant-garde artists, including Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. In 1915, working in a Cubo-Futurist mode, Malevich developed Suprematism, a system of pure geometric abstraction on monochromatic grounds. His Black Square (1915), first shown at the Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in Petrograd, marked a decisive break with representational painting. He set out his theory in the brochure From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, published to accompany the exhibition.
His trajectory mirrored the upheavals around the October Revolution of 1917. In 1918, Malevich began teaching in Vitebsk along with Marc Chagall. In 1919, he founded the UNOVIS artists collective and had a solo show at the Sixteenth State Exhibition in Moscow. His reputation spread westward with solo exhibitions in Warsaw and Berlin in 1927, the only time he ever left Russia. From 1928 to 1930 he taught at the Kiev Art Institute alongside Alexander Bogomazov, Victor Palmov, and Vladimir Tatlin, while publishing in the Kharkiv magazine Nova Generatsiia. In 1930, he was briefly arrested and interrogated by the OGPU in Leningrad. By the early 1930s, Stalin's restrictive cultural policy and the subsequent imposition of Socialist Realism had prompted Malevich to return to figuration and to paint in a representational style. Diagnosed with cancer in 1933, he was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union to seek treatment abroad. While constrained by his progressing illness and Stalin's cultural policies, Malevich painted and exhibited his work until the end of his life. He died on 15 May 1935, at age 56.
His art and his writings influenced Eastern and Central European contemporaries such as El Lissitzky, Lyubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko and Henryk Stażewski, as well as generations of later abstract artists, such as Ad Reinhardt and the Minimalists. He was celebrated posthumously in major exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art (1936), the Guggenheim Museum (1973), and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1989), which has a large collection of his work. In the 1990s, the ownership claims of museums to many Malevich works began to be disputed by his heirs.
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was born on either 23 (O.S. 11) February or 26 (O.S. 14) February 1879, to Severin (Seweryn) Antonovich and Liudviga (Ludwika) Alexandrovna. His parents, who were Polish, had fled Poland following the failed January Uprising of 1863 against Russian rule. Lucjan Malewicz, Kazimir's uncle, was a Catholic priest and one of the leaders of the 1863 insurrection. The family subsequently settled near Kiev (modern-day Kyiv, Ukraine) in Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire. Kazimir was the first of fourteen children, only nine of whom survived into adulthood. His parents were Roman Catholic, though his father attended Orthodox services as well. The primary language spoken within Malevich's household was Polish, but he also spoke Russian, as well as Ukrainian due to his childhood surroundings.
Malevich's father worked as manager at several different sugar refineries. Between 1889 and 1896, Malevich's family relocated multiple times due to his father's job. In 1889, they moved to Parkhomovka near Kharkov (modern-day Ukraine). In Parkhomovka, Malevich attended a two-year agricultural school and taught himself to paint in a simple peasant style, drawing inspiration from rural surroundings. About four years later, the family relocated to Voltochok near Konotop, which was near centers of Polish cultural activity at the time. There, Malevich met the composer Nikolai Roslavets. He later briefly attended classes at the Kiev School of Drawing under the encouragement of the realist painter Mykola Pymonenko.
In 1896, the family moved to Kursk (modern-day Russia), where Malevich encountered several Russian artists, such as Lev Kvachevsky, with whom he often worked outdoors. By Malevich's own admission, his dedication to painting would make him the "black sheep" of the family. Through reproductions, Malevich also became familiar with the work of the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers), including Ivan Shishkin and Ilia Repin, two leading Russian Realist painters. In 1896, he began working as a technical draughtsman at the Moscow-Kursk-Voronezh railway company.
Malevich would later describe 1898 as the year he began exhibiting his work, although there is no evidence for this claim. In 1899, he met his first wife, Kazimira Ivanovna Zgleits, who was eight years his senior. They had two children, Galina and Anatolii, the latter of whom dies of typhoid in his early childhood. His father died in 1902, at the age of fifty-seven, and in 1903, Malevich held an exhibition at the Society for the Support of Primary Education in Kursk.
Recognizing his style as increasingly more Impressionistic, Malevich intended to receive academic training in Moscow. By 1904, as more French art was being reproduced and discussed in Russia in the magazine Mir iskusstva, Malevich had also become acquainted with the work of Paul Gauguin. Malevich and other artists in Moscow gained an early exposure to Western modern art through the private collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. Their acquisitions ranged from French Impressionism to paintings by Paul Cézanne and Gauguin, and were later expanded to include the works of the key Parisian avant-garde artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
Malevich is said to have visited both collections soon after his first arrival in Moscow in the fall of 1904. Similarities between his Apple Tree in Blossom (1904) and Alfred Sisley's Villeneuve-la-Garenne (1872), then in Shchukin's collection, have been cited as an early indication of the collectors’ influence on Malevich's oeuvre. In October 1904, Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader and political activist, returns to Russia from exile. At the time, anti-government sentiment in Russia was gaining momentum, intensifying after Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg in January 1905, when Tsarist forces killed numerous protesters. On October 17, 1905, Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto, granting limited voting rights to the middle class. In November, the government suppressed further revolutionary activity through military force. In his autobiography, Malevich later claimed to have taken part in the Battle of the Barricades in Moscow in December 1905, an attempt to sustain the revolution against the Tsarist regime.
Moscow and the avant-garde (1906–1915)
Early years in Moscow (1906–1910)
Malevich settled in Moscow, along with his family and his mother, in the spring of 1906. There, Malevich attended the studio of Fedor Rerberg, who was known to prepare his students for applications to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Despite Malevich's multiple attempts to apply to the Moscow art school, however, he was never offered admission. In 1907, the Blue Rose Exhibition of a group of Moscow Symbolist painters—part of a broader early 20th-century movement that rejected naturalism in favor of mystical themes and dreamlike imagery—left a deep impression on the artist. The impact of Symbolism on Malevich during that period is evident in paintings such as The Triumph of Heaven (1907) and The Shroud of Christ (1908).