Anna Savoskina

The first version was done in 1915. Malevich made four variants of which the last is thought to have been painted during the late 1920s or early 1930s. Black Square was first shown in The Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in 1915. The work is frequently invoked by critics, historians, curators, and artists as the "zero point of painting", referring to the painting's historical significance and paraphrasing Malevich.

History

A section of Suprematist works by Malevich exhibited at the 0,10 Exhibition, Petrograd, 1915

The Black Square first appeared as part of a design for a stage curtain in the 1913 Russian Futurist/Cubo-Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchyonykh, and Mikhail Matyushin, for whom he did the costume and stage designs.

Malevich painted his first Black Square in 1915. He made four variants, of which the last is thought to have been painted during the late 1920s or early 1930s, despite the author's "1913" inscription on the reverse. The painting is commonly known as Black Square, The Black Square or as Malevich's Black Square.

The painting was first shown in The Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in 1915. It's location in the icon corner emphasized the collision with the traditional orthodox culture.

Forensic detail reveals how Black Square was painted over a more complex and colorful composition.

Historical context

A plurality of art historians, curators, and critics refer to Black Square as one of the seminal works of modern art, and of abstract art in the Western painterly tradition generally.

Malevich declared the square a work of Suprematism, a movement which he proclaimed but which is associated almost exclusively with the work of Malevich and his apprentice Lissitzky today. The movement did have a handful of supporters amongst the Russian avant garde but it was dwarfed by its sibling constructivism whose manifesto harmonized better with the ideological sentiments of the revolutionary communist government during the early days of Soviet Union. Suprematism may be understood as a transitional phase in the evolution of Russian art, bridging the evolutionary gap between futurism and constructivism.

The larger and more universal leap forward represented by the painting, however, is the break between representational painting and abstract painting—a complex transition with which Black Square has become identified and for which it has become one of the key shorthands, touchstones or symbols.

Perception

The work is frequently invoked by critics, historians, curators, and artists as the "zero point of painting", referring to the painting's historical significance as a paraphrase of a number of comments Malevich made about The Black Square in letters to his colleagues and dealers.

Malevich had made some remarks about his painting:

"It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins."

"I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation, that is, to Suprematism, to the new realism in painting – to non-objective creation."

"[Black Square is meant to evoke] the experience of pure non-objectivity in the white emptiness of a liberated nothing."

Photograph of Malevich

Peter Schjeldahl wrote:

The brushwork is juicy and brusque: filling in the shapes, fussing with the edges. But the forms are weightless, more like thoughts than like images. You don't look at the picture so much as launch yourself into its trackless empyrean. Beyond its obvious design flair, the work looks easy because it is. Malevich is monumental not for what he put into pictorial space but for what he took out: bodily experience, the fundamental theme of Western art since the Renaissance. His appeal to Americans isn’t surprising. Apart from a peculiarly Russian mystical tradition, which he exploited—evoking the compact spell of the icon, as a conduit of the divine—his work amounts to a cosmic "Song of the Open Road." It conveys sheer, surging, untrammelled possibility. This quality seemed in synch with the Revolution of 1917. It wasn't—which Malevich was painfully made aware of, first by his rivals in the Russian avant-garde and then, conclusively, by the regime of Joseph Stalin.

Tone Roald and Johannes Lang wrote that Black Square "is an act of iconic rupture from a Russian-Orthodox Christian tradition, just as Ruben's The Death of Seneca, or Kiefer's Sulamith, can be understood as acts of iconic suture."

Conservation

The painting's quality has degraded considerably since it was drawn.

Peter Schjeldahl writes:

The painting looks terrible: crackled, scuffed, and discolored, as if it had spent the past eighty-eight years patching a broken window. In fact, it passed most of that time deep in the Soviet archives, classed among the lowliest of the state's treasures. Malevich, like other members of the Revolutionary-era Russian avant-garde, was thrown into oblivion under Stalin. The axe fell on him in 1930. Accused of "formalism", he was interrogated and jailed for two months.

Contemporary discovery

In 2015, while viewing the Black Square with a microscope, art historians at the Tretyakov Gallery discovered a message underneath its black paint. It was believed to read as "Battle of negroes in a dark cave." The reference was linked to an 1897 comic by French writer Alphonse Allais with the caption: "Combat de Nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit" or "Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night." The researchers at the State Tretyakov Gallery speculated that Malevich was responding to the joke within Allais' popular work.

The Stedelijk Museum was founded in 1874 by a group of private citizens in Amsterdam, led by C.P. van Eeghen, who donated funds and their art collections to establish a museum in the capital of the Netherlands that would be devoted to modern art. The collection, housed at first at the Rijksmuseum, was moved in 1895 into the Museum’s own building, designed by A.W. Weissman.

For its first decades, the Stedelijk maintained a diverse collection, which included works of contemporary Dutch and French masters but also period rooms and even the banners of citizens’ militias. Beginning around 1920, however, the collection was culled and the focus concentrated more rigorously on modern and contemporary art, including pioneering collections and exhibitions of design and photography.

Already known to visitors from around the world because of its paintings by Vincent van Gogh (many of them later transferred to the Van Gogh Museum upon its creation), the Stedelijk began its rise to international prominence after 1945, when curator and designer Willem Sandberg became the Director. In addition to expanding the collection and working directly with many artists, Sandberg initiated an ambitious and far­sighted exhibition program that put the Stedelijk at the forefront of contemporary art institutions—a program that continued under Edy de Wilde (Director 1963– 1985), Wim Beeren (1985–1993), Rudi Fuchs (1993–2003) and Gijs van Tuyl (2005–2009) and that contributed greatly to the development of the Stedelijk’s collection.

An Englishman in Moscow ( Dimensions (cm):57.0 x 88.0)

In 1914, Kasimir Malevich, the original creator of the Suprematist movement, created ‘An Englishman in Moscow’, an oil painting on canvas. Malevich had moved away from his traditional geometric shapes and cold, stern structures, and had begun introducing vibrant colors and interesting forms to his art work.

‘An Englishman in Moscow’, a busy scene consisting of a man partially covered by a bold white fish, a sword and a candle, is a collection of objects, letters, and signs, which could possibly represent a Moscow market place or some crowded street of the historic city. Regardless of the location, the painting is a flurry of symbols and meanings uniquely significant to the artist.

Analysis and Quotes

Some theorists, critics, and viewers believe that ‘An Englishman in Moscow’ is an approach to the idea that nothing in reality is what it seems; others have suggested it implies that something is always concealing something else. Each symbol in this painting possesses a purpose. The ladder is known to symbolize the attainment of a higher truth or perspective, while the religious symbols, the candle, the church, and the cross created by the sword could indicate a renewal of faith. The writing at the bottom of the canvas is a broken word meaning hourly, a symbol for time. The fish is often associated with knowledge, and the violent images such as the saw, scissors, and sword, could possibly represent the cutting away of the garbled lies and confused information fed to human kind in order to reveal the knowledge of truth.

In a review of a Kasimir Malevich show in the early 1990’s, Michael Brenson wrote a special article for the New York Times: “Malevich did not want to be nature, unlike many artists in the tradition of Monet and van Gogh. He did not move step by step from nature to abstraction, like Mondrian. He wanted to get beyond nature and define a new reality in which the part would merge with the whole and human and cosmic laws would be combined. His Suprematism is a sudden, jolting leap.”

‘An Englishman in Moscow’ by Kasimir Malevich is currently located at the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918) is an abstract oil-on-canvas painting by Kazimir Malevich. It is one of the more well-known examples of the Russian Suprematism movement, painted the year after the October Revolution.

Part of a series of "white on white" works begun by Malevich in 1916, the work depicts a white square, portrayed off-centre and at an angle on a ground which is also a white square of a slightly warmer tone. The work measures 79.5 by 79.5 centimetres (31.3 in × 31.3 in). Malevich dispenses with most of the characteristics of representational art, with no sense of colour, depth, or volume, leaving a simple monochrome geometrical shape, not precisely symmetrical, with imprecisely defined boundaries. Although the artwork is stripped of most detail, brush strokes are evident in this painting and the artist tried to make it look as if the tilted square is coming out of the canvas. Malevich intended the painting to evoke a feeling of floating, with the colour white symbolising infinity, and the slight tilt of the square suggests movement.

A critic from the rival Constructivist movement quipped that it was the only good canvas in an exhibition by Malevich's UNOVIS group: "an absolutely pure, white canvas with a very good prime coating. Something could be done on it."

Malevich was fascinated with technology and particularly with the airplane. He studied aerial photography and wanted White on White to create a sense of floating and transcendence. White, Malevich believed, was the color of infinity and signified a realm of higher feeling, a utopian world of pure form that was attainable only through nonobjective art. Indeed, he named his theory of art Suprematism to signify “the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts”; and pure perception, he wrote, demanded that a picture’s forms “have nothing in common with nature.” In 1918, soon after the Russian Revolution, the connotations of this sense of liberation were not only aesthetic but also social and political. Malevich expressed his exhilaration in a manifesto one year later: “I have overcome the lining of the colored sky. . . . Swim in the white free abyss, infinity is before you.”

Malevich took the work to Berlin in 1927, where it was displayed at the Große Berliner Austellung. When he returned to Leningrad later that year, Malevich left it with the architect Hugo Häring; in 1930 he passed it on to Alexander Dorner, director of the Provinzialmuseum in Hanover, who put it into storage after the Nazi party came to power in 1933. Malevich did not ask for the work to be returned, and died in 1935 without leaving instructions on the inheritance of his estate. It was put on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1935, and added to the Museum's collection in 1963, and the acquisition was confirmed by the estate of Kazimir Malevich in 1999, using funds from the bequest of Mrs. John Hay Whitney.

The term suprematism refers to an abstract art based upon "the supremacy of pure artistic feeling" rather than on visual depiction of objects.

Founded by Kazimir Malevich in 1913, Supremus (Russian: Супремус) conceived of the artist as liberated from everything that pre-determined the ideal structure of life and art. Projecting that vision onto Cubism, which Malevich admired for its ability to deconstruct art, and in the process change its reference points of art, he led a group of Russian avant-garde artists — including Aleksandra Ekster, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Ivan Kliun, Ivan Puni, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Nina Genke-Meller, Ksenia Boguslavskaya and others — in what's been described as the first attempt to independently found a Russian avant-garde movement, seceding from the trajectory of prior Russian art history.

To support the movement, Malevich established the journal Supremus (initially titled Nul or Nothing), which received contributions from artists and philosophers. The publication, however, never took off and its first issue was never distributed due to the Russian Revolution. The movement itself, however, was announced in Malevich's 1915 Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10, in St. Petersburg, where he, and several others in his group, exhibited 36 works in a similar style.

Birth of the movement

Kazimir Malevich developed the concept of Suprematism when he was already an established painter, having exhibited in the Donkey's Tail and the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) exhibitions of 1912 with cubo-futurist works. The proliferation of new artistic forms in painting, poetry and theatre as well as a revival of interest in the traditional folk art of Russia provided a rich environment in which a Modernist culture was born.

In "Suprematism" (Part II of his book The Non-Objective World, which was published 1927 in Munich as Bauhaus Book No. 11), Malevich clearly stated the core concept of Suprematism:

Under Suprematism I understand the primacy 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, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.

He created a suprematist "grammar" based on fundamental geometric forms; in particular, the square and the circle. In the 0.10 Exhibition in 1915, Malevich exhibited his early experiments in suprematist painting. The centerpiece of his show was the Black Square, placed in what is called the red/beautiful corner in Russian Orthodox tradition; the place of the main icon in a house. "Black Square" was painted in 1915 and was presented as a breakthrough in his career and in art in general. Malevich also painted White on White which was also heralded as a milestone. "White on White" marked a shift from polychrome to monochrome Suprematism.

Distinct from Constructivism

Malevich's Suprematism is fundamentally opposed to the postrevolutionary positions of Constructivism and materialism. Constructivism, with its cult of the object, is concerned with utilitarian strategies of adapting art to the principles of functional organization. Under Constructivism, the traditional easel painter is transformed into the artist-as-engineer in charge of organizing life in all of its aspects.

Suprematism, in sharp contrast to Constructivism, embodies a profoundly anti-materialist, anti-utilitarian philosophy. In "Suprematism" (Part II of The Non-Objective World), Malevich writes:

Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without "things" (that is, the "time-tested well-spring of life").

Jean-Claude Marcadé has observed that "Despite superficial similarities between Constructivism and Suprematism, the two movements are nevertheless antagonists and it is very important to distinguish between them." According to Marcadé, confusion has arisen because several artists—either directly associated with Suprematism such as El Lissitzky or working under the suprematist influence as did Rodchenko and Lyubov Popova—later abandoned Suprematism for the culture of materials.

Suprematism does not embrace a humanist philosophy which places man at the center of the universe. Rather, Suprematism envisions man—the artist—as both originator and transmitter of what for Malevich is the world's only true reality—that of absolute non-objectivity.

...a blissful sense of liberating non-objectivity drew me forth into a "desert", where nothing is real except feeling...

— "Suprematism", Part II of The Non-Objective World

For Malevich, it is upon the foundations of absolute non-objectivity that the future of the universe will be built - a future in which appearances, objects, comfort, and convenience no longer dominate.

Influences on the movement

Malevich also credited the birth of Suprematism to Victory Over the Sun, Kruchenykh's Futurist opera production for which he designed the sets and costumes in 1913. The aim of the artists involved was to break with the usual theater of the past and to use a "clear, pure, logical Russian language". Malevich put this to practice by creating costumes from simple materials and thereby took advantage of geometric shapes. Flashing headlights illuminated the figures in such a way that alternating hands, legs or heads disappeared into the darkness. The stage curtain was a black square. One of the drawings for the backcloth shows a black square divided diagonally into a black and a white triangle. Because of the simplicity of these basic forms they were able to signify a new beginning.

Another important influence on Malevich were the ideas of the Russian mystic, philosopher, and disciple of Georges Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, who wrote of "a fourth dimension or a Fourth Way beyond the three to which our ordinary senses have access".

Some of the titles to paintings in 1915 express the concept of a non-Euclidean geometry which imagined forms in movement, or through time; titles such as: Two dimensional painted masses in the state of movement. These give some indications towards an understanding of the Suprematic compositions produced between 1915 and 1918.

The Supremus journal

The Supremus group, which in addition to Malevich included Aleksandra Ekster, Olga Rozanova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Ivan Kliun, Lyubov Popova, Lazar Khidekel, Nikolai Suetin, Ilya Chashnik, Nina Genke-Meller, Ivan Puni and Ksenia Boguslavskaya, met from 1915 onwards to discuss the philosophy of Suprematism and its development into other areas of intellectual life. The products of these discussions were to be documented in a monthly publication called Supremus, titled to reflect the art movement it championed, that would include painting, music, decorative art, and literature. Malevich conceived of the journal as the contextual foundation in which he could base his art, and originally planned to call the journal Nul. In a letter to a colleague, he explained:

We are planning to put out a journal and have begun to discuss the how and what of it. Since in it we intend to reduce everything to zero, we have decided to call it Nul. Afterward we ourselves will go beyond zero.

Malevich conceived of the journal as a space for experimentation that would test his theory of nonobjective art. The group of artists wrote several articles for the initial publication, including the essays "The Mouth of the Earth and the Artist" (Malevich), "On the Old and the New in Music" (Matiushin), "Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism" (Rozanova), "Architecture as a Slap in the Face to Ferroconcrete" (Malevich), and "The Declaration of the Word as Such" (Kruchenykh). However, despite a year spent planning and writing articles for the journal, the first issue of Supremus was never published.

El Lissitzky: Bridge to the West

The most important artist who took the art form and ideas developed by Malevich and popularized them abroad was the painter El Lissitzky. Lissitzky worked intensively with Suprematism particularly in the years 1919 to 1923. He was deeply impressed by Malevich's Suprematist works as he saw it as the theoretical and visual equivalent of the social upheavals taking place in Russia at the time. Suprematism, with its radicalism, was to him the creative equivalent of an entirely new form of society. Lissitzky transferred Malevich’s approach to his Proun constructions, which he himself described as "the station where one changes from painting to architecture". The Proun designs, however, were also an artistic break from Suprematism; the "Black Square" by Malevich was the end point of a rigorous thought process that required new structural design work to follow. Lissitzky saw this new beginning in his Proun constructions, where the term "Proun" (Pro Unovis) symbolized its Suprematist origins.

Lissitzky exhibited in Berlin in 1923 at the Hanover and Dresden showrooms of Non-Objective Art. During this trip to the West, El Lissitzky was in close contact with Theo van Doesburg, forming a bridge between Suprematism and De Stijl and the Bauhaus.

Architecture

Lazar Khidekel (1904–1986), Suprematist artist and visionary architect, was the only Suprematist architect who emerged from the Malevich circle. Khidekel started his study in architecture in Vitebsk art school under El Lissitzky in 1919–20. He was instrumental in the transition from planar Suprematism to volumetric Suprematism, creating axonometric projections (The Aero-club: Horizontal architecton, 1922–23), making three-dimensional models, such as the architectons, designing objects (model of an "Ashtray", 1922–23), and producing the first Suprematist architectural project (The Workers’ Club, 1926). In the mid-1920s, he began his journey into the realm of visionary architecture. Directly inspired by Suprematism and its notion of an organic form-creation continuum, he explored new philosophical, scientific and technological futuristic approaches, and proposed innovative solutions for the creation of new urban environments, where people would live in harmony with nature and would be protected from man-made and natural disasters (his still topical proposal for flood protection – the City on the Water, 1925).

Nikolai Suetin used Suprematist motifs on works at the Imperial Porcelain Factory, Saint Petersburg where Malevich and Chashnik were also employed, and Malevich designed a Suprematist teapot. The Suprematists also made architectural models in the 1920s, which offered a different conception of socialist buildings to those developed in Constructivist architecture.

Malevich's architectural projects were known after 1922 Arkhitektoniki. Designs emphasized the right angle, with similarities to De Stijl and Le Corbusier, and were justified with an ideological connection to communist governance and equality for all. Another part of the formalism was low regard for triangles which were "dismissed as ancient, pagan, or Christian".

The first Suprematist architectural project was created by Lazar Khidekel in 1926. In the mid 1920s to 1932 Lazar Khidekel also created a series of futuristic projects such as Aero-City, Garden-City, and City Over Water.

In the 21st century, architect Zaha Hadid had 'a particular interest [in] the Russian avant-garde, and the movement known as Constructivism,' and 'as part of their work on the Russian avant-garde, Hadid’s unit studied Suprematism, the abstract movement founded by the painter Kazimir Malevich.'.

Social context

This development in artistic expression came about when Russia was in a revolutionary state, ideas were in ferment, and the old order was being swept away. As the new order became established, and Stalinism took hold from 1924 on, the state began limiting the freedom of artists. From the late 1920s the Russian avant-garde experienced direct and harsh criticism from the authorities and in 1934 the doctrine of Socialist Realism became official policy, and prohibited abstraction and divergence of artistic expression. Malevich nevertheless retained his main conception. In his self-portrait of 1933 he represented himself in a traditional way—the only way permitted by Stalinist cultural policy—but signed the picture with a tiny black-over-white square.

Suprematist Composition (blue rectangle over the red beam) is a painting by Kazimir Malevich, a Russian painter of geometric abstraction.

The painting was created in 1916 and stayed with the artist until June 1927. Malevich exhibited his work in the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung in Berlin, but soon left for the Soviet Union. The painting came into the possession German architect Hugo Häring, who sold it to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, where it remained for the next 50 years. It was shown at various expositions, mostly in Europe.

After an extended legal battle over the painting's ownership, which endured for 17 years, the painting was returned to heirs of the artist. A few months later, in November 2008, the artist's heirs sold it at a Sotheby's auction for $60 million to the Nahmad family. In 2018 it was sold at a Christie's auction for $85.8 million with fees to art dealer Brett Gorvy. It was the highest price paid for a work in the history of Russian art.

Collections

Malevich's works are held in several major art museums, including the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and in New York, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam owns 24 Malevich paintings, more than any other museum outside of Russia. Another major collection of Malevich works is held by the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki.

Family Life

Kazimir's father died in 1902. Although he had previously studied art in Kiev, the inheritance he received made it possible for he and his family to move to Moscow to further his art studies. Information about Malevich's personal life is patchy at best. He was married three times. From 1899-1909 he was married to Kazimira Zgleits whom left him. From 1909-1923 (when she died after contracting tuberculosis) he was married to Sofia Rafalovich and from 1927 until his death in 1935 Natalia Manchenko was his wife. In total 5 children are attributed to him: Georgy (1901), Anatoly (1902), Galina (1905) Una (1920) and Ivanna (unknown). Sadly only Galina and Una survived to adulthood; Una having worked to restore his reputation after his death.

Malevich in Moscow

The move to Moscow allowed Kazimir to study art at the Stroganov School of Art and to take private lessons from Ivan Rerburg. He next went on to train at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture where he was taught in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist techniques. These played a significant part in his early work, until the Symbolist and Art Nouveau styles changed his direction. Malevich became acquainted with the artists Wassily Kandinsky and Mikhail Larionov from 1907, hailing a change in his style towards the avant-garde from this time onwards. In 1910 he was invited to join the Jack of Diamonds (an exhibition collective) by Larionov. In addition he was also a member of the Donkey's Tail and Target artistic groups.

In essence Malevich was showing his interest in abstract ways of expressing himself. Primitivist, Cubist and Futurist art theories were brought into focus by these alliances. Malevich fell out with Larionov, leaving the Jack of Diamonds and instead became a key figure in the Futurist artist group called Youth Union or Soyuz Molodezhi. Between 1912-1913 most of his work was Cubo-Futurist in nature, mixing the styles of Italian Futurism with Synthetic Cubism.

From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism

Ultimately Cubo-Futurism was not abstract enough to satisfy Malevich. In his 1915 essay 'From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism' he outlined his ideas of pure abstraction, paving his own way forward in art. It was also in 1915 that Malevich produced one of his best known paintings: Black Square. Today it is still an iconic work, often discussed and referred to. It is exactly what it says it is, a black square with a white background painted on top, but it is also much more than that.

The black square has depths of brush strokes, fingerprints and colour that are visible to the viewer. In addition Malevich saw the black square as a representation of something- of feeling- whilst the white background was nothingness. The idea behind this (and other Suprematist works) is to remove form from the work in order to remove logic and reason. This freed the viewer to be able to concentrate on pure feelings instead, and to formulate this into absolute truth. The Black Square, and by association Malevich, mark a turning point in twentieth century art. It has been referred to as a zero point in painting, both for the ideas of pure abstraction that it represented and because of its impact on art.

The October Revolution

Malevich was a supporter of the revolution, and the era immediately after the revolution was one of new opportunity and possibility for him. He took up teaching posts at the Free Arts Studio in Moscow, the Kiev State Art Institute, the Leningrad Academy of Arts, the Vibetsk Practical Art School in Belarus and was a member of the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment. He continued to encourage his students to abandon the painting of form in order to explore pure abstraction. He also tried to relate his ideas of Suprematism to the new state order through his book O Novykh Sistemakh v Iskusstve (On New Systems in Art).

Interestingly Malevich was not blind to the volatility of the times he was living through. Whilst he and the UNOVIS group that he had formed produced propaganda for the new regime, he believed that post-Lenin and Trotsky state interest in art would move away from Modernist theories, and this was proved true.

Malevich in Europe

In 1927 Malvich was given permission to travel and exhibit his works. He was given a hero's welcome in Warsaw, meeting former students and being influenced about the new art movement of Unism. He also visited Berlin and Munich where he showed a retrospective that brought him international recognition. It was because of this trip that there is so much of Malevich's work to enjoy still. Having recently been arrested and interrogated by the state he arranged to leave much of the work for his show behind in Germany, in expectation of a change in his popularity back in Russia. He was right- within a short period the tide had turned and his style was more than out of favour.

The Later Years

The Stalinist regime was not kind of Malevich. In a very short period he fell very hard. By the time of his death he was not allowed to produce or exhibit the art that had brought him to prominence or to teach his theory of art. Social Realism was Stalin's preferred art movement and everything else was superfluous. Many of his works were confiscated and destroyed and he was imprisoned and interrogated again. His works were included in a state-funded exhibition, but were labelled with slogans that suggested his work was degenerate and anti-Soviet.

Malevich continued to paint, but his work reflected the changing times. Instead of the abstraction he had espoused he now produced works of peasants and genre scenes, whilst also producing portraits of family and friends. Kazimir Malevich died of cancer in 1935, obscure and overlooked. His ashes were buried, according to his wishes, at his home at Nemchinovka. He had requested to have an architekton to mark his grave, but this was not permitted. Instead it was marked by a white cube with a black square until this was destroyed during the Second World War.

Legacy

The humility of his passing has long been eclipsed by the influence that his work has extended over the art world. There have been major exhibitions in recent years, including one at the Tate Modern in 2015 to celebrate the centenary of the Black Square. His revolutionary work continues to influence artists today.

Born in Kyiv to an ethnic Polish family, his concept of Suprematism sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms (objectivity) and subject matter in order to access "the supremacy of pure feeling" and spirituality. Malevich is considered to be part of the Ukrainian avant-garde (together with Alexander Archipenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Sonia Delaunay, Aleksandra Ekster, and David Burliuk) that was shaped by Ukrainian-born artists who worked first in Ukraine and later over a geographical span between Europe and America.

Early on, Malevich worked in a variety of styles, quickly assimilating the movements of Impressionism, Symbolism and Fauvism, and after visiting Paris in 1912, Cubism. Gradually simplifying his style, he developed an approach with key works consisting of pure geometric forms and their relationships to one another, set against minimal grounds. His Black Square (1915), a black square on white, represented the most radically abstract painting known to have been created so far and drew "an uncrossable line (…) between old art and new art"; Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), a barely differentiated off-white square superimposed on an off-white ground, would take his ideal of pure abstraction to its logical conclusion. In addition to his paintings, Malevich laid down his theories in writing, such as "From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism" (1915) and The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism (1926).

Malevich's trajectory in many ways mirrored the tumult of the decades surrounding the October Revolution (O.S.) in 1917. In its immediate aftermath, vanguard movements such as Suprematism and Vladimir Tatlin's Constructivism were encouraged by Trotskyite factions in the government. Malevich held several prominent teaching positions and received a solo show at the Sixteenth State Exhibition in Moscow in 1919. His recognition spread to the West with solo exhibitions in Warsaw and Berlin in 1927. From 1928 to 1930, he taught at the Kyiv Art Institute, with Alexander Bogomazov, Victor Palmov, Vladimir Tatlin and published his articles in a Kharkiv magazine, Nova Generatsia (New Generation). But the start of repression in Ukraine against the intelligentsia forced Malevich return to modern-day Saint Petersburg. From the beginning of the 1930s, modern art was falling out of favor with the new government of Joseph Stalin. Malevich soon lost his teaching position, artworks and manuscripts were confiscated, and he was banned from making art. In 1930, he was imprisoned for two months due to suspicions raised by his trip to Poland and Germany. Forced to abandon abstraction, he painted in a representational style in the years before his death from cancer in 1935, at the age of 56.

Nonetheless, his art and his writing influenced contemporaries such as El Lissitzky, Lyubov Popova and Alexander Rodchenko, 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.

"Diary of a Genius" stands as one of the seminal texts of Surrealism, revealing the most astonishing and intimate workings of the mind of Salvador Dalí, the eccentric polymath genius who became the living embodiment of the 20th century's most intensely subversive, disturbing and influential art movement.

Dalí's second volume of autobiography, "Diary of a Genius" covers his life from 1952 to 1963, during which years we learn of his amour fou for his wife Gala, and their relationship both at home in Cadaques and during bizarre world travels. We also learn how Dalí draws inspiration from excrement, rotten fish and Vermeer's Lacemaker to enter his ‘rhinocerontic’ period, preaching his post-holocaustal gospels of nuclear mysticism and cosmogenic atavism; and we follow the labyrinthine mental journeys that lead to the creation of such paintings as the Assumption, and his film script The Flesh Wheelbarrow.

Dalí opens the book with the statement: "At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily since." According to Time, Dalí wrote with a highly detailed, methodical style that layered words the same way as paint. For example, he states in an early section about his childhood home:

Behind the partly open kitchen door I would hear the scurrying of those bestial women with red hands; I would catch glimpses of their heavy rumps and their hair straggling like manes; and out of the heat and confusion that rose from the conglomeration of sweaty women, scattered grapes, boiling oil, fur plucked from rabbits' armpits, scissors spattered with mayonnaise, kidneys, and the warble of canaries—out of that whole conglomeration the imponderable and inaugural fragrance of the forthcoming meal was wafted to me, mingled with a kind of acrid horse smell.

Dalí states in the book:

At the age of five years, he encountered an almost dead bat covered with ants and then put it in his mouth, bit it, and then tore the bat almost in half.

As a young child, he wore a king's ermine cape, a gold scepter, and a crown and then posed for himself with a mirror. He tucked his genitals inside the outfit to look more feminine.

He stood out dramatically from the poor children in his school by carrying a flexible bamboo cane adorned with a silver dog's head figure and a sailor suit with gold insignia.

Due to a "refined Jesuitical spirit", he remained a virgin until age 25. As an adolescent, he resisted the sexual advances by his girlfriend for five years until he left her, doing so mostly out of his enjoyment of being in control.

He became interested in necrophilia, but was then later cured of it.

While walking down the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet in Paris in 1934, he became so disgusted at the sight of a blind double-amputee that he kicked him.

Reception.

Time stated that Dalí's autobiography was "one of the most irresistible books of the year." The magazine called it "a wild jungle of fantasy, posturing, belly laughs, narcissist and sadist confessions", while also commenting that "[t]he question has always been: Is Dalí crazy? The book indicates that Dalí is as crazy as a fox."

Essayist, journalist, and author George Orwell wrote a notable criticism of the book titled Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí in 1944. Orwell categorized Dalí's book among other recent autobiographies that he considered "flagrantly dishonest", and he stated that "his autobiography is simply a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight". He denounced Dalí's accounts of physical abuse against various women in Dalí's early life. He wrote "[i]t is not given to any one person to have all the vices, and Dalí also boasts that he is not homosexual, but otherwise he seems to have as good an outfit of perversions as anyone could wish for" and "[i]f it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages, this one would". He also commented that "[o]ne ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being", defending aspects of Dalí's surrealist style.

In July 1999, an article by Charles Stuckey in Art in America stated that Dalí's book "arguably revolutionized a literary genre". He argued that Dalí's book had been intended as slapstick humor and has been generally misinterpreted by critics. He also wrote:

Indebted to the fanciful childhood-oriented writings by artists such as Gauguin, Ernst and de Chirico... Manically boasting about his weaknesses and vices no less than about his achievements and virtues, Dalí helped to initiate today's antiheroic mode of autobiography and, by extension, the sex-centered biographical interpretations of artists and art so prevalent since the 1960s, whether Cézanne and his apples or Johns and his Targets are at issue.

History.

Destino is unique in that its production originally began in 1945, 58 years before its eventual completion in 2003. The project was originally a collaboration between Walt Disney and Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, and features music written by Mexican songwriter Armando Domínguez and performed by Mexican singer Dora Luz. It was included in the Animation Show of Shows in 2003.

Destino (Spanish for "Destiny") was storyboarded by Disney studio artist John Hench and artist Salvador Dalí for eight months in late 1945 and 1946; however production ceased not long after. The Walt Disney Company, then Walt Disney Studios, was plagued by financial woes in the World War II era. Hench compiled a short animation test of about 17 seconds in the hopes of rekindling Disney's interest in the project, but the production was no longer deemed financially viable and put on indefinite hiatus.

In 1999, Walt Disney's nephew Roy E. Disney, while working on Fantasia 2000, unearthed the dormant project and decided to bring it back to life. Walt Disney Studios Paris, the company's small Parisian production department, was brought on board to complete the project. The short was produced by Baker Bloodworth and directed by French animator Dominique Monféry in his first directorial role. A team of approximately 25 animators deciphered Dalí and Hench's cryptic storyboards (with a little help from the journals of Dalí's wife Gala Dalí and guidance from Hench himself), and finished Destino's production. The end result is mostly traditional animation, including Hench's original footage, but it also contains some computer animation.

Plot.

The seven-minute short follows the story of Chronos and his ill-fated love for a mortal woman named Dahlia. The story continues as Dahlia dances through surreal scenery inspired by Dalí's paintings. There is no dialogue, but the soundtrack includes music by the Mexican composer Armando Dominguez. The 17-second original footage that is included in the finished product is the segment with the two tortoises (this original footage is referred to in Bette Midler's host sequence for The Steadfast Tin Soldier in Fantasia 2000, as an "idea that featured baseball as a metaphor for life").

Public screenings.

Destino premiered on June 2, 2003 at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in Annecy, France. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film of 2003. In 2004, Destino was released theatrically in a very limited release with the animated film The Triplets of Belleville, and also with Calendar Girls.

In 2005, the film was shown continuously as part of a major retrospective Dalí show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, titled The Dalí renaissance: new perspectives on his life and art after 1940.

The film was also shown as part of the exhibition Dalí & Film at Tate Modern from June to September 2007, as part of the Dalí exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from October 2007 to January 2008; at an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art called Dalí: Painting and Film from June to September 2008; also at an exhibit at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida in 2008. In mid-2009, it had exposure in Melbourne, Australia at the National Gallery of Victoria through the Dalí exhibition Liquid Desire, and from late 2009 through April 2010 at the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio, in an exhibit entitled Dalí and Disney: The Art and Animation of Destino.

In 2012, the film was featured in the "Dalí" exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France and at the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain.

In 2019, Destino was featured in the Dalí exhibition at Potsdamer Platz (Berlin).