Malevich and The Liberation of Art

Australia and New Zealand Slavists Association
Malevich and the Liberation of Art

Author(s): PETER STUPPLES
Source: New Zealand Slavonic Journal, w Zealand Slavonic Journal (2001), pp. 11-36, ii, 86
Published by: Australia and New Zealand Slavists Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40922063
Accessed: 26-12-2016 18:44 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Australia and New Zealand Slavists Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to New Zealand Slavonic Journal
This content downloaded from 128.59.222.107 on Mon, 26 Dec 2016 18:44:55 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
New Zealand Slavonic Journal

2001
PETER STUPPLES
Malevich and the Liberation of Art
1 Introduction
At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, i
rapid advance of technological innovations in the media of cultural productio
particular among the visual arts, sought to justify its continued existence by em
spiritual aura of the painter's vision, the autonomy of art as an objec
contemplation, the crafted nature of the picture made by the hand of a unique
opposed to the mechanical production of the multiple print, the photograph
narrative.1 Essentialist theories of the art of the avant-garde were neoplaton
garde rejected the conventional picture making of the academy, even the Im
whom Gauguin castigated as "shackled always to this world."2 The neoplatoni
their images on the mental world of the creating artist, seeking to express, thro
painterly semiotic strategies, the inner self or the soul of the artist, fears
harmonies and dissonances, profound aspirations and the way memory p
assessment of the present moment.3 In general terms, in his work between
Kandinsky, who can lay claim to being one of the pioneers of non-objective rep
twentieth-century art, was a neoplatonist, creating profoundly subjectiv

Kandinsky's images stemmed from his concern, among other things, wit
between good and evil. He utilised psychological sensations associated with th

of colours, their intensity and gradation of hue, the directional power of dark
the intersection of planes, to convey the sensations of harmony and destruc
movement. He evoked iconographic memories from his Slavonic cultural back
as Bavarian folk imagery.
By contrast, from some time in 1914, Malevich became the pioneer of w
termed projective imagery, coming by degrees to believe in the possibility of m

the confines of memory and the artist's inner world, beyond the denotative
colour, to create new plastic and painterly elements purged of all biogr
associative signification. He would then release these unshackled, freshly-min

the infinity of space.
Like Kandinsky, and that other pioneer of projective imagery, Mondria

wrote extensively about his work, not after the event but in the process of his
He became as much concerned with theoretical issues as with the psychologic

process of creating images. The notion of freedom itself played an important p
ideas and his image-making: he saw non-representational strategies as a way

artistic creativity, as Malevich understood the term, from the burden of h
particular from the burden of the European history of art.
The painting, and later the writing, of Malevich, like that of Kandinsk
slowly, in his case through Cubo-Futurism and alogicality, to the point where h
11
only through non-objectivity itself, through liberation from the object, could the artist achieve
a freedom hitherto unknown in the history of art. Through his own concepts and images of
Suprematism he believed he could avoid all the restrictions to liberty entailed by the representing of the world of nature, by being beholden to the history of art itself, or by giving
expression to fantasies and dreams. Through non-objectivity he could construct, in the words
of Anthony Hill, "a pure presentation from which nothing is to be interpreted as standing for
anything or expressing anything."7 Malevich claimed that the artist could now project out
onto the picture plane images that are entirely bound by their own self-referentiality and have
no associations with the lived-in world or with the memory, feelings or dream-worlds of the
artist. It is in this sense that Malevich's Suprematist images may be termed 'projective'.
This article will focus exclusively on Malevich as a liberator of Western art from its
historical aggregate of social functioning and from its own history.
2 The Paris-Moscow Axis
Malevich's evolution as an artist and writer did not take place in a cultural vac
ideas were informed, stimulated and quickened in the hot-house of the European a
at the beginning of the twentieth century. The very interconnectedness of the Eur
gardes over the period 1906-1914 contributed to the simultaneous emergence of

countries so seemingly distant from one another culturally and geographically
France. The artists of the Russian avant-garde were closely aware of French contem
from 1906 when a group of them was taken to Paris by Diaghilev, who exhibited t
the same time as putting on performances of Russian ballet and opera.9 From
mesh of French and Russian art became more and more closely woven so that b
was almost a seamless fabric linking particularly the two cities of Moscow and
contributions to this intricate pattern from the 'Blue Rider' in Munich and the Ital
in Turin.10 Some major works of the French avant-garde, particularly Matisse
were collected for Moscow clients, such as Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov,
appeared in Paris, sometimes with the paint scarcely dried from the studio.11 Oth
in considerable number at the 'Golden Fleece* Salons held in Moscow between 1908-1910.
Malevich claimed that this period, characterised in particular by Cubism and Futurism,
constituted a moment of accelerated evolution, not to say revolution in the arts in Europe.12
3 Evolution
The notion of the evolution of the history of art, the evolution of
specific image making, the evolution of ideas, the evolution of the human
self is essential to an understanding of Malevich's work and writing.
He went along with the notion of the great unfolding of the story
primitive in thrall to the world of nature to the sophisticated forms of im
by recent European artists such as Cezanne. Malevich did not see this s
incremental evolution but rather as an irregular series of revolutionary di
an overarching narrative of progress. However he believed that this h
slowed to the point of entropic sluggishness with mid-nineteenth century

symbolism, cubism, futurism and non-objective art were the revolutionary
had brought an end to that stagnation and once again impelled art forward
trajectory.
12
4 Malevich's Own Evolution
Malevich had lived through a similar evolution, working through that same se
revolutionary discontinuities in his own development as an artist. His early paintings, s

River in the Forest (1908),13 were derivative of images by French painters that he had
the Shchukin and Morozov collections - the works of Bonnard, Cezanne and Matisse
others. These were succeeded by a decorative style where the undiluted French influe
suddenly expunged by an Eastern mysticism and the introspective dream-worlds
Russian 'Blue Rose' group, seen in his fresco sketches of naked saints in 190714 and
of Christ,15 in 1908. French influence returned to combine with a vigorous Ru

'primitivism' in the series of gouache paintings of 1909-11, such as The Bather
Malevich later pointed out this was an 'apparent primitivism' - not a return to an id
past but the very opposite: "it is essentially ... a breaking down and a dissolution into se
elements of what had been brought together, an attempt to break away from the ensla
of the objective identity of an image, from idealism and pretence to spontaneous creativ
The same Russian primitivism, but now under the stylistic influence of N
Goncharova, informed Malevich's peasant series of 191 1-12, illustrated by Peasant
with Buckets and Child.19 This, in turn, was rapidly modified by his acquaintance with
Cubism and the more decorative aspects of Italian Futurism (such as Morning in the
after Snowfall) which lead directly to a Cubo-Futurist phase 1913-14, to which w

return, exemplified by Cubism- Musical Instrument before his images are finally
into Suprematism by the birth, as he called it, of the living Royal Infant, The
Suprematist Square of 1914/15.21
5 Biological and Social Evolution
In On New Systems in Art (1919) Malevich bound all stages of development in art t
evolution of social and biological life on the planet: "We grow and our growth chan
point of view, therefore a return to the past is inconceivable ... It appears that nature st
same, that landscapes are the same as they were last year and ten years ago ... bu
observe more closely we shall see that nature by no means remains the same. We s
villages have grown up among the fields, and towns have grown up amongst them.
towns are places of worship, palaces, factories, monuments. Railways have cut throu
fields, locomotives rush through them ... With each day nature emerges further and fu
from the old green world, the world of flesh and bone, and will approach the time wh
green world will be as extinct as the primeval landscape . . ."22 Malevich does not see a
end point, a final resting place, in this process of evolutionary development. Like
Kulbin, the Russian artist and writer from whom Malevich took a number of ideas,
stasis, a total lack of energy, a cessation of change, as death.23 Therefore the quest for
point in art is equally an illusion bound to failure.24 As Malevich put it "it is lik
blowing a soap bubble. He blows shifting colours in it and tries to blow the bubble bigg
bigger. At its peak the bubble bursts ... and the boy has to blow a new one. Thus one
bursts after another and there will never be any stasis ... every step [in the qu
perfection] ... causes disaster and the extinction of the existing world ... Culture and
change in this way ... it is useless to think of peace and comfort, for as soon as man ac
or is in the process of achieving perfection, intuition will take all that is human fro
turning it into a new sign . . ,"25
13
Malevich' s close friend and collaborator at the time, Mikhail Matiushin, believed that
human beings could be trained to see differently or could evolve, for example, so that "the
colour-receiving cones would spread from the centre of the retina to its periphery."26 In other
words not only could we be trained to use our present faculties better but also, in this process,
it was likely that our physical capacities would also change to enable new ways of seeing and
thinking.
6 Epistemological Duality
Malevich's creative endeavours were part of that ferment of ideas that extended
throughout Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century - ideas that stemmed from such
diverse sources as Nietzsche, Rudolf Steiner, Helen Blavatsky, Schopenhauer's The World as
Will and Representation in which the will is seen in an endless process of becoming,27
Uspensky's Tertium Organum (1912),28 Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (1905),
Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and his Three Essays on Sexuality, Jokes and Their
Relation to the Unconscious (1905) and Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory, which
appeared in Russian in 191 129 - all of these writers had in common the notion that the
universe is made up of both material objects and immaterial energy and sensation, that matter
and energy are not separate but related, and neither can space and time any longer be
considered separate entities.30 Ideas on spatial relativism were elaborated in a two volume
anthology edited by the poet Velimir Khlebnikov's mentor Aleksandr Vasiliev entitled New
Ideas on Mathematics (1913), which included Henri Poincare's essay 'Espace et temps'.31
Khlebnikov and his friend and fellow poet Aleksei Kruchenykh were associated with the
Russian Cubo-Futurists and both were close to Malevich in the period 1911-1917.
European painters from the Early Renaissance, Malevich was later to claim, were
predominantly occupied with one aspect of the duality - subject/object or human

consciousness/exterior reality. The study of the rules of perspective, ocular vision, colour,
light and shade, so-called objective figuration - were directed towards one end: the accurate
representation of exterior, visible, tangible actuality, seeing objects as they appear to the
eye - so-called realism. This attempt to pin down the exterior world of the artist, to make
images appear as if documents of the real world, and of the here and now, certainly
preoccupied the attention of Russian artists from the 1 850s.
In a reaction to this tendency the end of the nineteenth century saw a counter-movement
towards the representation of the other term of this duality, neoplatonic images, the inner
psychic world of the painter, such as the mind pictures and dream-worlds of the 'Blue Rose',
which made a considerable impression on Malevich in 1907. The singular pursuit of either
branch of this duality characterising Western epistemology ultimately seemed wrong-headed
to Malevich from 1914/5. Both branches were concerned with reproduction, one of exterior
reality, the other of interior experience. Neither was creative, in the sense that neither directed
their will to create a new form. As Malevich put it in the third edition of From Cubism and
Futurism to Suprematism "the artist can be a creator only when the forms of his picture have
nothing in common with nature ... colour and texture in painterly creativity are ends in
themselves - this is the essence of painting, but this essence has always been destroyed by the
subject."32
14
7 Sensation: Context of the Avant-garde

In the circles in which Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian moved there was an
emphasis on the observation that the most reliable information we have about the outside
world is within us. Not that objects do not have an independent existence but that indeed we
know only what our senses tell us about them. We know only the experience of sensation. In
Du Cubisme, published in Paris in December 1912, Gleizes and Metzinger wrote: "There is
nothing real outside ourselves; there is nothing real except the coincidence of a sensation and
an individual mental direction. Far from us is any thought of doubting the existence of the
objects which strike our senses; but being rational we can only have certitude with respect to
the images which they produce in the mind."33 A review of this book was published in
Russian in March 1913 by Matiushin. In that review Matiushin quoted from Uspensky's
Tertium Organum and it is through Matiushin that Malevich was to come into contact with a
whole set of new ideas that he was to add to those already absorbed from Kulbin, Kandinsky
and the Futurists. In Tertium Organum Uspensky clearly elaborates a view similar to Gleizes
and Metzinger: "We know nothing about things separately from ourselves; and we have no
means of verifying the correctness or incorrectness of our cognition of the objective world
apart from sensations."34 Indeed Uspensky closely follows Kant's precepts as outlined in The
Critique of Pure Reason. The novelty of these views for artists lies in their opposition to the
positivism of the Impressionists and those Post-Impressionists following Seurat. With the
emphasis on the psychology of perception of Kulbin and Kandinsky and the restatement of
Kant's logical exploration of the mechanism of cognition there was, as it were, a sense of a
return to first principles, a clearing of the ground that appealed to the quest of the Russian
Cubo-Futurists for an honest, veridical discourse for art.
The Russian avant-garde was also interested in the physiological reception and reaction
to sensations such as energy and colour, colour freed from any subservience to representation,
colour, that is, free to create an unambiguous sensation in its own right. The major authority
was Wilhelm Wundt, whose principle work Physiologische Psychologie was recommended to
the Russian artist Sonia Terk as early as 1904.35 Kulbin was also familiar with Wundt's
* psycho-physics' and had himself made a study of colour sensations and their effect on what
Gustav Fechner termed * subliminal consciousness'.36 He was also interested in the psychic
apprehension of harmony or dissonance in colours in close combination or placed at

intervals.37 Kulbin's essays on art were influential with Malevich, Kruchenykh and
Kandinsky, with whom Kulbin corresponded in the crucial period 1909-12. As we have seen
Matiushin became preoccupied with the possibility of developing a greater capacity for seeing
with the human eye, particularly seeing colour, and thus gaining a fuller understanding of the
nature of 'reality'.38 Kulbin and Matiushin both saw art and research as interlocking activities
and were thus the precursors of theory-driven and theory-developing constructivism or what
Anthony Hill would later call * structuralist art.'39
8 Evolution and Intuition
In 191 1 Boccioni claimed that the Italian Futurists were "the primitives of a completely
transformed sensibility."40 Malevich also subscribed to the basic propositions of Bergson and
Uspensky that, by analogy with biological evolution, there is also an evolution of the human
psyche. These developing levels of perception, as demonstrated through advances in art
literature and philosophy, enable cognition to be extended through transcendental intuitions.41
Matiushin believed that an extended consciousness was only possible through study and
training. Malevich's concept of intuition' was not that of a woolly serendipity. He held that
15
intuitions could only develop from a rigour of study and training combined with the energy of
will. As we have seen the work of Henri Bergson was much in vogue in Russia at the time.
Malevich probably came to Bergson through Uspensky but his contemporaries were
also reading Bergson and may well have directed Malevich' s attention to passages in the
works of the French philosopher. Bergson distinguished between the orderly evolution of
matter and the development of a free, individual, unpredictable intelligence, able to make
sudden shifts and attain enlightenment by intuition, not dissimilar in its functioning to the
preconscious of Freud. Malevich also uses the word 'intuition', taken probably from its use
by Uspensky in Tertium Organum, that is an actively seeking and creating^nergy, based upon
sound analytical principles and evolving out of, not separate from or unrelated to, mental
systems of ordering experience.42 For Malevich, Uspensky and Bergson intellectual creativity
was a question of freeing the mind from conscious parameters, dismissing the subconscious
as incorrigible, but engaging the preconscious through the operation of mind. In Bergson's
own words: "In order to reach intuition it is not necessary to transport ourselves outside the
domain of the senses and of consciousness ... I recommend a certain manner of thinking
which courts difficulty; I value effort above everything."43
Uspensky, and those from whom he gathered many of his ideas, the Canadian physician
Richard Bucke, the American Charles Hinton and the British socialist Edward Carpenter,
maintained that as the human psyche or soul evolved, advanced human beings were appearing
who were indeed more sensitive, capable of detecting more and more subtle immaterial
sensations. Helen Blavatsky was quoted by Uspensky in Tertium Organum: "The progress of
evolution may be destined to introduce us to new characteristics of matter."44 Kruchenykh
argued that the history of artistic style paralleled the evolution of the human psyche.
Uspensky was careful to distance himself from his predecessors on one important particular,
that the transcendental arch would not be built by religious experience or by mystical powers
but by art. "In art we already find the first experiments in a language of the future. Art
marches in the vanguard of inner evolution, anticipating the forms it is to assume

tomorrow."45 The work of what may be termed this psychic avant-garde produced, and was
produced by, certainly it was a means of growing towards, intuitions of hitherto unknown
'future' consciousness. The result of such insight, such enlightenment was often labelled the
'fourth dimension'.46 Malevich' s Cubo-Futurist colleagues took it as a central tenet of all their
writing at the time that they were the most advanced of the newly advanced human beings47
and Malevich's Suprematism developed out of this cultural background: sensation is the only
reality, our knowledge of the world is entirely subjective and in our expression of any
cognition we can only display a subjective view of the present or impose a subjective
interpretation upon our cognition of the past, of history.
9 The Rejection of Reason

Among these artists and poets there was a belief that a central problem in advancing
into the new knowledge lay with what Foucault would later call the positivity of the Western
epistemological duality itself and, going one step further, with a rejection of reason as so far
formulated. The way in which artists and thinkers in the past believed that they had cognition
of the world was no longer tenable. Mind must adapt itself to the new comprehension. In
1912 Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Vladimir Maiakovsky and David Burliuk signed a manifesto
that advocated the total abandonment of the history of art in order to turn attention to the
present and the future.48 In November/December 1912 Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov rapidly
moved to break up the rules of received syntax. As 'new people of the new life' they claimed,
16
in February 1913, to be in thrall to "superfluity, meaninglessness, the mystery of authoritative

insignificance."49
In July 1913 Matiushin, Malevich and Kruchenykh spent some time together at
Matiushin's summer cottage at Uusikirkko in Finland.50 For two days they grandiloquently
constituted themselves as 'The First All-Russian Congress of Bards of the Future'.51 The
Congress issued a 'Chronicle' in which the delegates outlined plans to continue, and even to
intensify, their radical rejection of post-Petrine Russian culture, to liberate the Russian
language from its 'smoothing out' by Western influenced grammarians and writers, "to
destroy the antiquated movement of thought according to the laws of causality, the toothless
commonsense, the 'symmetrical logic'", to establish a Futurist theatre.52 "Better to sweep
away the old ruins and erect a sky-scraper as tenacious as a bullet."
In September 1913 Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov launched one of their most considered
manifestos, 'The Word as Such', freeing language from all previous restraints, in order, as
they understood it, to release the infinite meanings of the word itself, to place words together
in hitherto unutilised combinations in order to free up both language and the imagination of
the writer and reader, that is to use language with an 'artistic' rather than 'a grammatical
intention'.53 In that manifesto only Malevich and David Burliuk are inscribed as painters
working in the analogous field of the visual arts. Malevich designed the cover and provided
images that illustrated this contiguity. The cover depicts a much faceted Reaper showing the
lines of her construction in much the same way as Larionov had offered the viewer the
scaffolding of his proto-rayist images in 1912. Reaper referred to a previous stage of

development, as it were, retrospective to the text. That same month Matiushin claimed that
"perhaps the day is not far off when the vanquished phantoms of three-dimensional space, of
seemingly droplike time, of melancholy causality and many other things will prove to be for
all of us exactly what they are: the annoying bars of a cage in which the human spirit is
imprisoned - and that is all."54
Indeed the freedom to be able to think differently lay at the root of the Cubo-Futurist
quest. Not, that is, to think falsely. Kant's rigorous rationality was still the basis of their
investigation. However they saw the development of Kant's ideas not in the fictive wishful
thinking of Schelling, Hegel and Marx but, with Uspensky and Charles Hinton, claim that
"the true successors of Kant are Gauss and Lobachevsky."55 Such thinkers, Hinton and
Uspensky imply, "free us from a great many deep-rooted illusions, which are very harmful for
right knowledge."56 On February 19, 1914, at a meeting of the art group 'The Knave of
Diamonds' Malevich proudly proclaimed that he rejected reason, declaring in 1916 that "the
highest artwork is created where there is no reason."57
10 Zaum
Russian Cubo-Futurists believed that all previous modes of verbal and vis
should be discarded in favour of a new transcendental language or systems of sig
Russian as zaum, that is, transrationalism or beyond-reason.58 Richard B
Uspensky 's sources,59 had already pointed out that changes in language would b
evolving new consciousness, indeed it is a truism that new intellectual speculatio
the need to elaborate new terms, special uses of commonly used words or even
explore their conceptual territory. Kruchenykh advocated the elaboration

without a fixed meaning (not congealed), but zaumny [beyond-reason]."60
17
For the publication Troe [Three Men], September 1913, which included an extended
discussion of zaum by Kruchenykh, Malevich provided a lithographic cover design and three
images.61 The cover depicted, in brooding black, the monumental figure of a peasant woman,
with her back to the viewer, as if a conveyor of knowledge deliberately withheld or

unreachable by normal discourse.62 Below the figure, and equally insistent on our attention, is
a reversed comma, as if placing the contents in parentheses, divided off from current
discourse, yet also joined to it - the avant-garde existing side-by-side with contemporary
Russian culture, in a state, as it were of creative interruption or interpolation. The three
letterpress images - Woman Reaping,63 Horse-Driven Coach in Motion and Pilot - literally
belong to Cubo-Futurism, the Cubist breaking up of the surface of the subject into faceted
planes, the suggestion of action around a central point, hinting at simultaneous movement and
the complexity of multiple view-points.
In his article 'New Ways of the Word' Kruchenykh describes his group as baiachi
budushchego - poet-speaker-singers, bards of the future. Following his reading of Uspensky
Kruchenykh declared that "in art we already have the first experiences of the language of the
future. Art marches in the vanguard of psychic evolution. At the present time we have three
units of psychic life: sensation, representation, cognition (and the idea), and a fourth unit is
beginning to be formed- 'a higher intuition' {Tertium Organum, P Uspensky) . . ."M
On the visual arts Kruchenykh added:65 "Contemporary painters have grasped the secret
1) that movement gives expression to relief (a new dimension) and that conversely relief gives
expression to movement and 2) incorrect perspective gives expression to a new fourth

dimension (the essence of cubism). The modern bards have therefore discovered that the
incorrect construction of sentences . . . gives expression to movement and a new perception of
the world and conversely - movement and a change in the psyche give rise to strange
'meaningless' combinations of words and letters."66 With this tool of zaum Kruchenykh,
making a fatal shift, like Uspensky, from plausible discourse and careful elaboration of the
problem to unverifiable belief, states that "we have begun to see here [in our present world of
psychic reality] and there [beyond that limitation]. The irrational (zaumnoe) is given just as
directly as the rational."67 Of particular importance to Kruchenykh, and later Malevich, was
the fact that zaumny words and images did not standing in for anything, were not signs but the
direct experience of beyond-reason.68 "Symbolism cannot sustain the opinion of the

contemporary philosophy of cognition and the direct spirit. The more truth is subjective - the
more objective is subjective objectivity - our path. There is no need to be afraid of complete
freedom - if one does not have faith in man - it is better to have nothing to do with him! . . .
We are serious and solemn, and not destructively-uncouth . . . "^
This new language, this system of signs, would be both the outward manifestation of the
artist's evolutionary change in consciousness and a vehicle for conveying an altered

apprehension, cognition, a means of discovering and grasping the reality of sensation by
graphic means. As Malevich pointed out in 1919: "Intuition pushes our will to the source of
creation. But in order to reach it is essential to free oneself from the objective, and it is
necessary to create new signs, and to leave the new arts of photography and cinematography
to concern themselves with objectivity."70 Through the sensations of the greatly evolved
psyche of the modern artist, and their expression through zaum, it would be possible to
achieve a level of consciousness that would free the mind of archaic conventions and
prejudices. It would create conditions to stimulate a greatly expanded sense of logic and
reason, not unrelated to the superconscious states of yoga and of the Russian mystics who
practised speaking in tongues, both of which had been discussed in a book known to the
18
Russian avant-garde, M V Lodyzhensky's The Superconsciousness and Ways to Achieve It

(St Petersburg, 1912).71 Heightened consciousness, it was claimed, is an inevitable product of
organic evolution. Malevich wrote to Matiushin in 1913: "We have come so far as the
rejection of reason, but we rejected reason because another kind of reason has grown within
us, which in comparison with what we have rejected can be called zaumny, beyond-reason,
which also has law, construction and sense ... not one line should be drawn without the
consciousness of its law; only then are we alive."72
In 1913 Kruchenykh published a book of zaum verse entitled Vzorval' (Explodity) for
which Malevich contributed three images. One of these shows a peasant bent in prayer, the
subject almost overwhelmed by 'tubist' modelling, another entitled 'Arithmetic' and the third
conveying the narrative of 'The Death of a Person Simultaneously in an Aeroplane and on the
Railway'. There is some ambiguity in the title of this last piece as the Russian could equally
well mean 'Man' rather than 'a person'. This illustration demonstrates the way that Russian
Cubo-Futurism, at this time, wanted to look in two directions at once. There was an urge to
reject the post-Petrine Russian association with Western Europe and hence rationalism. In 'A
Slap the Face of Public Taste' it was Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoi they wanted to throw
overboard from the ship of contemporary life, but not the Russian bylina or the historical
songs. It was a peasant woman that Malevich placed on the cover of Troe. It was the
aeroplane and the railway that were destroying 'man', together with fat-bellied, devilish
arithmetic. In this respect Russian Cubo-Futurism was the exact reverse of the Italian
celebration of the machine.73 Yet at the same time there was a desire to be of the
contemporary world, to make art relevant in the new technological age. Zaum was both a
freedom 'from' as well as a freedom 'to(wards)'. However at this point Malevich's debt to
Italian Futurism in terms of pictorial composition is still manifest but by June 1915 he had
relegated Cubo-Futurism to history, as "we will not find the main thing [there], a painted form
as such."74
Kruchenykh's notion that poets could be free to create only when they divested
themselves of the limitations of the conventional meanings of words, conventional syntax and
word and letter order, was underpinned by Benedikt Livshits's essay entitled Treeing the
Word', published in the autumn of 1913 in the collection Dokhlaia luna. Livshits directly
addressed the problem of freedom from a projective perspective. "Almost every new direction
in art began with a declaration of the principle of freedom of creative activity. We would have
repeated the basic methodological error of the majority of these declarations if we had
attempted to speak about freedom of creative activity without establishing our comprehension
of the interrelationship between the world and the creative consciousness of the poet. We
cannot conceive of creative activity in 'a space without air', creativity 'out of oneself, and, in
this sense, every word of a work of poetry has a double cause - conditional and consequential,
is doubly unfree: first of all in the sense that a poet consciously seeks and finds in the world
an occasion for creativity: secondly that however much the selection of this or that expression
of his poetic energy may feel free and the result of chance, this choice will always be
determined by some unconscious process, in its turn conditioned by an aggregate of external
causes. But if one understands by creative freedom- the supposition that the criteria of value
are determined not in the plane of the interrelationship of the world as it is in consciousness,
but in the field of the autonomous word- our poetry, would be, of course, free solely and for
the first time, we are indifferent as to whether our poetry is realistic, naturalistic or fantastic:
with the exception of its starting point it does not bear any relationship with the world
whatsoever, has no coordinates with it, and all other points of possible intersection with it
must already be acknowledged as accidental."75
19
Malevich accepted the general thrust of Kruchenykh's and Livshits's discourse.

However, though he sympathised with the overarching Slavonic specificity of Kruchenykh's
linguistic play, his own visual conceptual thought, whilst causing him to turn his back on
French art, on Cubism and upon Italian Futurism, led him inexorably to images that, perhaps
for the first time in art, were entirely free of any cultural referents. Malevich saw the potential
to think differently visually through a new system of image-signs. These new verbal and
visual systems of signs would be both outward manifestations of the artist's evolutionary
change in consciousness and vehicles for conveying an altered apprehension, an altered
cognition, a means of discovering and grasping the reality of sensation by linguistic and
graphic means.
11 Malevich and zaum
What precise meaning does Malevich inscribe within the term zaumny realism, beyond-
reason or transcendental realism? Both Malevich and Kandinsky were much more cautious
than those around them in committing themselves to esoteric cults- unlike Mondrian,
Kandinsky never became a card-carrying member of the theosophy movement, and Malevich
was very wary about following all of Kruchenykh's ideas on the development of zaum and
was never tempted by the mystical aspects of number as elaborated by the poet Velimir
Khlebnikov. It was as if the movement towards abstract art developed within both Malevich
and Kandinsky a high degree of caution, foreseeing the objections, even the potential charge
of madness. Essentially Malevich saw the new sensibility of the abstract thinker in terms of
the exercise of will, of projective thinking in the absence of any preconditioned rationality, a
breaking away from the confines of conventional wisdoms.
At the heart of all the writing of Michel Foucault lies the puzzle of how to think
differently, how to free the mind from the confines of conventional ways of thinking in order
to realise oneself as an authentic being. He experimented with drugs and the practice of sado-
masochism, and believed that they assisted in disorganising the body itself. Foucault often
talks about * unreason' and nearly always has in mind the physical means, drugs or physical
pain, that may be used to change the chemistry of the mind. Foucault' s * unreason', it seems to
me, has to do only with the physical experience of losing oneself. Unreason is an ordeal
(epreuve).76 That ordeal Malevich envisioned as the effort in exercising the will 'to become',
Nietzsche's 'the will to power*. Foucault uses the word franchissement, which has been
translated as 'transcendence'. The French word may also mean 'clearing', 'jumping over',
'crossing', 'spanning' and hence is close to the sense of the Russian prefix za meaning
'beyond' which forms part of the neologism zaum.
However Foucault ultimately held that the outcome of such practices was always in
doubt. In other places Foucault uses 'unreason' to describe the 'counter-discourse' of what is
repressed, not unlike Freud's subconscious.77 Perhaps we should rather return to Kant - and
Malevich would have come across Kant's 'Copernican revolution' through Uspensky, if from
no other source. Kant distinguished between empirical knowledge that came through
experience of the world and transcendental ideas, such as mathematics, formed from
speculative reason that lay outside all experience. The speculative effort, energy expended in
developing ideas, driven by desire (as Uspensky and Freud would have it), can be
transformed into action by the will, turning speculation into objects of possible experience,
bridging the gulf between the empirical and the transcendental. Kant comments: "How great a
gulf may still have to be left between the idea [of reason] and its realisation [in practice], are
20
questions which no one can, or ought, to answer. For the issue depends on freedom; and it is
in the power of freedom to pass beyond any and every specified limit." 78
Literally the Russian neologism zaum indicates 'beyond-mind' However this seems to
imply that we merely receive sensations to which we may respond instinctively but without
exercising intellect, not unlike the way animals behave according to Uspensky in Tertium
Organum. There is sometimes a sense that this is precisely what Kruchenykh has in mind.
The second part of this neologism, lum' also indicates in Russian 4the ability to think'.
Bearing in mind the quest of the 'bards of the future' to experience the fourth dimension, it
was not a lower order of functioning to which they aspired but a higher one, 'beyond rational
intellectualising to a higher degree of mental functioning', that is 'beyond-reason'. To use

post-structural language we might say that through zaum poets and painters attempted to
break free of their culture's net of discursive practices. In parenthesis it should be noted that
Malevich and Kruchenykh seemed unaware, in their conscious minds, of social and
biographical factors operating at a preconscious level, that limit the free play of their
functioning in advance. Yet perhaps it was indeed precisely with this limit in mind that
Malevich sought so strenuously to dehistoricise his images in Suprematism, in an attempt to
transcend all limits of cultural and historical entrapment, even any teleological tendency in his
artistic praxis.
Zaum, as Malevich seems to have understood it, is a stretching beyond the conventional
sign systems of reason, a turning back, perhaps, to see those 'languages' for the limits that
they impose and then to extend new sign systems to explore other potentialities for discourse.
It seems that Foucault's physical experimentation had only a marginal value in his
development as a philosopher, that it was not 'unreason' that was so fruitful in his work so
much as his ability to think- to think 'beyond reason'. This is a vital distinction that perhaps
Foucault himself did not see clearly. However in 1983 Foucault summarised a view to which
Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian would all have subscribed: "The critical ontology of
ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even a permanent
body of knowledge that is accumulating; the critique of what we are is at one and the same
time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and the ordeal of their possible
transcendence,"79 what the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet called "the fight to the death between
order and freedom, the insoluble conflict between rational classification and subversion,
otherwise known as disorder."80
To summarise, Malevich did not see transcendence effected by physical agents, such as
drugs or the deprivations of ascetics that could but lead to a temporary dis-organising of the
body, but as the result of a permanent extension of the mind, the result of natural psychic
evolution, that was in itself dynamic, constantly evolving. There is a clear distinction between
religious experiences, socially conditioned by cultural practices or the result of some

experiential Gestalt, and Malevich's notion of the natural evolution of mind, but a mind that
has potentially no limits to its freedom to comprehend.
12 Alogical Paintings
Malevich scripted himself into that transcendence, tihatfranchissement, through a series
of works painted in 1913-1914, and first exhibited in 1915, works of alogical, zaumny
realism. One of the first of these was Malevich's Portrait of Ivan Kliun*] The composition of
this painting synthesises two recently explored styles. Firstly the so-called 'tubist' works of
1912-13, which represent peasant themes, but reduce both figures and ground to a series of
21
rounded planes, volume being conveyed not by gradations of light and shade but by colour
contrast. There is no consistent external light source, planes adjacent to each other are
themselves contrasted simply by a reversal of their compositional strategies.82 Secondly the
* simultaneous' movement works of early 1913 under the direct influence of Italian Futurism,
such as The Knife-Grinder. In Portrait of Ivan Kliun such embodying volumes as are hinted
at - the beard, cheeks, hair - follow the strategy of the 'tubist' series but at the same time
there is, as it were, an attempt to get inside the head, to see the mind's eye by peeling back
sections of the upper face and hair. This sense of breaking up/breaking in is reinforced by two
seemingly arbitrary images of serrated planes, reminiscent of saw blades. The whole image is
then given a monumental solidity by filling the background with associated planes
constructed in the same manner. This solidity is enhanced by the fact that portrait and ground
are not in any way differentiated. Indeed parts of the portrait, flicks of hair, and parts of the
ground are capable of interchanging their representational significance. Yet there is a logical
necessity to the placement of each sector of the work that can be 'explained', especially with
the aid of a preparatory sketch entitled Cubism. Portrait of a Builder}1 One eye of the
builder/constructor is opened up to reveal a split image, the corner of a Russian wooden house
and a segment of a city house, part of which is fragmented in the Cubist manner. The other
eye is also disjunctive and this duality of focus may refer to conflict for the village carpenter
obliged to seek employment in the city. The smoke coming from the head is clearly also
smoke from the chimney of the wooden house, with the left 'eyebrow' of the portrait
doubling as an overhanging roof. This painting is a transitional work, between the long series
of peasant studies, in which the Futurist Knife-Grinder may be included, and the alogical
works that follow.
Malevich painted a series of experimental panels and canvases in 1913 as he struggled

to assimilate or to throw off the legacy of Cubism and began to play with the possibility of
alogism, artistically under the influence of Picasso's montage pieces. The last of these
experiments, at the very end of 1913, by which time the ideas of Kruchenykh and Matiushin
had been further assimilated, was the panel Cow and Violin!" Clearly a programme work,
Malevich has written on the reverse of the panel "alogical comparison of two forms 'violin
and cow' as an instance of the conflict with logicality, naturalness, philistine meaning and
prejudice." Here the cow and violin are placed one on top of the other without regard to their
relative size in nature and without placing them in a space ordered by the rules of one point
perspective. In addition to this disruption of the logic imposed upon images by the history of
art they are placed on top of a series of intersecting planes, some given volumetric value by
gradation of tone, others being flat, parallel to the picture plane.
At the end of 1913 and beginning of 1914 these experiments were succeeded by two
mature works combining elements of alogical representational images with differentiated and
undifferentiated colour planes. Both incorporate saw blades and red arrows, which have now
become emblems of 'authoritative insignificance.' These objects have been lifted from
Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov's The Word as Such: "We really believe that language must
above all be language and if it should remind you of anything then it would most probably be
a saw or the poisoned arrow of a savage."85 Both images also have the face and figure of the
subject partly obscured by a white fish, the dorsal fins of which echo the serrated edge of the
saw
The first of these images is a portrait entitled The Aviator.96 The image of th
defying the pull of gravity, extending the physical capacities of earth-bound huma
man of the future, had been a common motif of Russian Cubo-Futurism from a
22
The allegorical image found its actual personification in the Futurist poet Vasily Kamensky,
who was also an aviation pioneer. David Burliuk called him an * aviator-poet'. Kamensky was
a dynamic, excitable, furiously energetic and charismatic figure who had declared, at the time
of the publication of the first Sadok sudei: "The world is just beginning, its youth is our youth.
The wings of the Wright brothers, of the Farmans and Bleriot are our wings. We, budetliane?1
must fly, must know how to operate an aeroplane, as we can a bicycle or the intellect."88 He
also stated that "if we are indeed futurists ... if we are people of motorised modernity, poets
of a universal dynamism, newly-arrived messengers from the future, masters of deed and
action, enthusiast-constructors of new forms of life, - we must, we are obliged to be

aviators."89 In November 1913 Kamensky was in Moscow, after recovering from a serious air
accident, and appeared at the Polytechnic Museum in a performance dedicated to 'An

Affirmation of Russian Futurism.' There is some internal evidence to suggest that Malevich's
portrait is of Kamensky himself.90 Malevich's attitude towards aviation may serve to

enlighten the difference between his own assimilation of Italian Futurism and Italian Futurism
itself.
In Englishman in Moscow (1914) Malevich most successfully of all breaks up the

mimetic representation and the conventional structure of the image by alogical composition to
create the possibility of beyond-reason, freeing the image from rationality. Objects are
released from the conventions of both one-point and relative perspective, destroying both any
logical sense of space and the relative size of objects to each other within that space. As
Charlotte Douglas has pointed out "spectators are refused their usual point of view outside of
the painting and [are] forced, like Alice, merely to accept an ambiguous position in a topsyturvy world of objects which do not behave properly."91 Any narrative viewers may impose
upon the image is derived from their subjective experience. One phrase written on the canvas
means * partial eclipse', the partial eclipse of reason by sensation. This phrase is repeated in
Partial Eclipse. Composition with Mona Lisa, 1914.
In Woman at a Poster Column (1914) there is a more radical attempt to disintegrate the
traditional notion of the picture itself. Pictorial composition, with its implications of
symmetry, the coordination of parts, hierarchies of significance, dominance and

subordination, give way to parataxis - the unrelated placement of elements.
13 Victory Over the Sun

During the period in Uusikirkko, when they were co-operating in the writing and design
of Troe Malevich, Kruchenykh and Matiushin also worked on the composition of a CuboFuturist opera, Victory Over the Sun, which would include passages of zaum.92 Matiushin
wrote the music, Kruchenykh the libretto and Malevich designed the sets and costumes. It
was performed in the Russian capital on 3 and 5 December 191 3.93 The opera centres on the
capture of the sun, "the sun of cheap appearances" as Matiushin described it.94 The sun, he
went on, "is understood to be the creator and the symbol of everything visible . . . giving
objects the illusion of reality. It is Apollo, the god of rationality and clarity, the light of logic
and thus the arch-enemy of all 'bards of the future'." The sun was associated, in the opinion
of Matiushin and Kruchenykh, with earth-bound logic, an unimaginative rationality. "We tore
the sun up by its fresh roots . . . they were plump, reeking of arithmetics."95 After the capture
of the Sun off-stage, an Aviator, recalling the alogical figure of Malevich's portrait, falls from
the sky and pieces of his crashed aeroplane land on the stage. The Aviator makes light of his
experience, after all he is the Messiah of the New World, a man who is learning to free
himself from gravity's constraints and he sings, in zaum, seemingly of a violent breakthrough
23
from the earth to the stars.96 The new man of the future glows from within, "all sentiment is
gone, there are no memories, no dreams, no love." In Scene Five the chorus proclaims "We
are free/The sun is broken ... Hail darkness." The dramatis personae are now free of
causality, free of reason and free of time. It is an uncomfortable world for those used to the
limitations of three dimensions, as the audience made clear.
Malevich designed a curtain, a backdrop, six stage designs, geometric objects97 and the
cover for the libretto, as well as a considerable number of costumes or cut-out figurines.98 The
curtain is very much in the style of his 'partial eclipse', but both more chaotic and more
dense. There are segments from seemingly unrelated narrativities abutting one on another, all
overlaid with quadrilaterals of undifferentiated colour. There is indeed a black square

declaring itself on the lower left-hand side. The various stage designs incorporate musical
notes, scrolls, views through windows, organ pipes, aircraft wheels and oft repeated
punctuation marks, full-stops, more frequently commas - all of which had appeared in
different company in his images published for Troe. As the opera was put together in the
summer of 1913 so we can date these theatre designs to a similar period. The black square, as
a decorative or compositional device, with others, made its first appearance in the visual
vocabulary of Malevich' s imagination that summer and the idea of the eclipsing of mimetic or
even symbolic representations with rectilinear planes of uniform colour followed from these
designs, towards the end of 1913. There has been much debate as to whether the design for
the backdrop to Act 2 Scene 5 is in fact the ' first' Suprematist drawing but in the context of
the opera this cannot be the case. The quadrilateral is divided by a slightly curved line,
indicating the sun against the blackness of space. When Malevich later claimed that he
invented Suprematism in 1913 he meant, perhaps, that the ideas of the eclipse of mimetic
images by rectilinear figures, of black cutting out light, of the need to reject the old in order to
usher in the new, of a fourth dimension and of the use of beyond-reason to create the
conditions for thinking in a new way, had all come together for him and his colleagues in
1913, but the focus that he was to give to these diverse formulations was missing until the
following year.
Set and costumes were not the end of Malevich's innovative contribution to Victory
Over the Sun. As a gesamkunstwerk of Futurist theatre it included novel lighting and
incorporated the subject of light itself, the heart of the subject matter of the text, into the
visual presentation. It was this aspect of the opera that most intrigued Livshits: "Out of the
primal night the tentacles of the projectors snatched part of first one and then another object
and, saturating it with colour, brought it to life ... The innovation and originality of
Malevich's device consisted first of all in the use of light as a principle which creates form,
which legitimises the existence of a thing in space . . . The figures themselves were sliced by
the blades of the beams; alternately hands, feet, head, were eliminated, since for Malevich
they were only geometrical bodies subject not only to decomposition into component parts,
but also to complete dissolution in pictorial space . . . Instead of the square, instead of the
circle, towards which Malevich was already trying to bring his painting, he had the possibility
of using them as their volumetric correlatives, the cube and the sphere."99
14 The Launching of Suprematism

Malevich did not take Kruchenykh's path in response to the ideas he and his colleagues
had been considering over the past two years. Kruchenykh explored a proto-dada, 'folk'
inspired collective unconscious, in his poetry and writing into 1914, to which Malevich
himself had been attracted in 1912-13. 'A Slap in the Face of Public Taste' implied that pre24
Petrine Russian culture contained truths, insights that might be harnessed in order to find the
way forward: forward through the absurd built upon the commonality of a collective
unconscious. Kruchenykh's creative inspiration is, as it were, subjective even when ' folkcommunal ' and neoplatonist in the sense that zaum is an affirmation of something out there, a
higher, superior Other. Though Kruchenykh's zaum stressed the value of the word and the
letter itself there was, nevertheless, an agenda of getting back to something that was ancient,
primordial, the racially inscribed roots of unconscious functioning, the very essence of
budetlianstvo.
For Malevich, driven by a harsher logic, the path began to lie in a different direction. In
1914 Malevich drew a little away from Kruchenykh, whilst retaining Matiushin as an
invaluable sounding board for ideas that were still in need of focus.
Having dismissed figurative art as just so much subjective cant, thrall to the social
forces of political and religious authority, Malevich believed that art should explore and make
manifest images, as he put it, from nothing, from the prefigural tensions he was able to
sustain, in order, from a seemingly creative disharmony, to make way for an elegant, more
satisfying, new order which would serve as a foundation for the operation and the
investigation of visual thinking. Uspensky, as we have seen, maintained that only art has the
capacity to push the boundaries of conventional thinking into previously unperceived

possibilities, conceptual potentialities. Bergson, on the other hand, warned against the
difficult of overcoming our habits of visualisation in order to explore the essentially unstable
concepts of space and time.100 The encouragement of Uspensky and the caution of Bergson
decided between them much of the thrust of Malevich's development towards non-objective
image making. Malevich realised that he would have to eliminate as far as possible the
conventional constraints of self-hood, of interiority, to eliminate finitude and causality, and
any sense of acquiescence with the exterior world. Forms - art could not operate without
forms - should neither stand in for introspective feelings nor empirical observation, but
should be merely the stuff of sensation, of experience. In a sense Malevich wanted to replace
Descartes's "I think therefore I am" and Bergson's "I endure therefore I am" with "I
experience sensation therefore I am." To avoid interiority and the world of empirical
experience Malevich was left with undifferentiated colour that would not stand in for
something else but would simply 'be' and the activity of constructing, using the intuitions of
projective geometry.101 Malevich announced this radically new comprehension in the third
edition of From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting.
The need to exclude all reference to interior and exterior worlds and to construct anew
on that basis was clear to Malevich by the end of May 1915. He wrote to Matiushin "we
intend to reduce everything to zero" and "we ourselves will then cross beyond zero."102 It was
on this crucial point that Malevich found both Cubism and Futurism wanting: "distortion was
driven by the strongest people to the vanishing point but did not leave the limits of
nothing."103
The role of the artist, as Malevich had now newly conceived it, was to create freely, to
unfold images evoking sensation within a non-affective, non-objective sphere that would
ultimately be driven by intuitional mathematics.
Malevich became more and more convinced of the implacable logic of his position
towards the end of 1915. This radical position seemed so extreme, even amongst those
working with him, and who saw themselves as at the very cutting edge of the avant-garde,
25
that they could not agree to unite under his banner.104 He was aware that there was a danger of
being misunderstood. Futurism was dead. On that all his colleagues could agree. However
what constituted the next step was unclear to all of them but him. To make his own position
clear he handed out a pamphlet at the launch of his new art, at '0.10' - the Last Futurist
Exhibition, at which Suprematism was launched in Petrograd in December 1915.
15 From Cubism ...
The pamphlet entitled From Cubism To Suprematism in Art, To The New R

Painting, To Absolute Creation, had been written in June 1915 before, in fact, S
had become fully crystallised in Malevich's mind and painterly praxis.105 The ideas,
of the phrases of this essay, had certainly been rehearsed by Malevich in his cor
with Matiushin in May. The influence of Kruchenykh's concept of zaum was stil
declared his break with representation in the first paragraph: "All former and con
painting before Suprematism, as well as sculpture, the word, and music were enslav
form of nature and await their liberation in order to speak in their own tongue
dependent on reason, meaning, logic, philosophy, psychology, the various laws o
and the technical transformations of life."106 Malevich praised Futurism for aw
spectator to the modern world but Futurism "was not able to part with objectness
and only broke up objects to achieve dynamism."107 The breakthrough came w
Cubo-Futurism: "the violation of the integrity of objects, their breaking and t
coming close to the annihilation of objectness in the art of creativity."108 It is
Suprematism that Malevich has finally rid himself of the object. "I have transform
into a zero of form and gone beyond '0' to ' 1' ... I am crossing over to Suprema
new realism in painting, to objectless creation."109
In the third edition of this pamphlet, published in Moscow in 1916, Malevi
stride.110 His highly idiosyncratic prose was more self-confidant and assured, evid
honing of his ideas in response to discussions and disputes in the second half of 191
most extraordinary of all the extraordinary statements written by European ar

avant-garde at the beginning of this century. Malevich emphasised the evolution of
the artist's consciousness. He elaborated four stages in this evolution. Firstly pr
culminating in the art of the Renaissance he characterised as "the conscious imit
forms of nature."111 Secondly "in Cubism the attempt to disfigure the forms of rea
break-up of objects represents the striving of the creative will towards the indepen
the forms which it has created,"112 but as he later pointed out in On New Syst
"Whoever feels painting, sees the object to a lesser degree; and whoever sees the
less what is painterly."113 Thirdly "all honour to the Futurists ... they took an eno
forward, they gave up flesh and glorified the machine ... "ll4 Futurism opened up
technological extensions to modern life, trying, among other things, to depict spee
and, "in the depiction of movement the wholeness of things vanished."115 Yet
pointed out in the first edition, Futurism was ultimately flawed because of its a
things: "in pursuing the form of aeroplanes and automobiles we shall always be
new cast-off forms of technical life ... in pursuing the form of things we cann
painting as an end in itself, the way to direct creation."116 Finally and triu
Suprematism overthrows utilitarian reason and creates intuitive forms that
nothing, discovered by Intuitive Reason.117
Malevich showed thirty-eight works at '0.10', all painted in 1915118 - includ

Square, that "empty place where nothing is perceived but sensation."119 In a sp
26
entirely characteristic, defence of Suprematism that he wrote in response to the dismissive

criticism of Aleksandr Benois he called the Black Square "the single bare and frameless icon
of our times . . . But my happiness in not being like you will give me the strength to go further
and further into the empty wilderness. For it is only there that the transformation can take
place ... And I would like to ask you and your friends: have you a clear picture of what you
are seeking? ... It is art's duty to execute essential forms ... Art does not ask whether you like
it or not, any more than the question was asked when the stars of the firmament were being
created . . . Your art is the art of illustrating anecdotes ... But by no stretch of the imagination
is it creative work."120
Malevich appended titles to three of these first manifestations of Suprematism that gave
clues as to how they might be read, such as Suprematism: Painterly Realism of a Football
Player. Colour Masses of the Fourth Dimension121 and Red Square: Painterly Realism of a
Peasant Woman in 2 Dimensions.122 This seems a curious and somewhat defensive strategy
given the inexorable logic of the theoretical position outlined in the two editions of his
pamphlet and in all his subsequent statements. It seems to reflect the perceived need still to
hold the hand of Cubo-Futurism, that he had so decisively, in theory, rejected. Freedom was
heady. He needed to cast an eye back to the prison of objects to grasp in fbll measure the steps
he was determined to take. Or perhaps, like Kandinsky before him, he felt the need to stretch
a hand to incredulous viewers and the critics.
Soon after the exhibition Malevich wrote to Matiushin reiterating the necessity of
freeing art from objectness and creating the sensation of a liberated space: "The keys of
Suprematism lead me to the discovery of the still unrealised. My new painting does not
belong to the earth exclusively. The earth is thrown away like a house eaten up by termites.
And, in fact, in man, in his consciousness, there lies a striving towards space, the pull of a
'take-off from the earth. [In] Futurism, in Cubism, space, almost exclusively, is cultivated,
but its form, being connected with objectness, does not convey, even to the imagination, the
presence of world space; its space is limited to the space shared by things on the earth. The
hung plane of painted colour on a white canvas gives a strong sensation of space directly to
our consciousness. I am transported into endless emptiness, where you sense around you the
creative points of the universe."123
16 Anti-Aesthetics
In the third edition of his pamphlet Malevich radically rejected the significance of
'aesthetic taste' in relation to non-representational images, - "the masters of Rome a
Greece ... were crushed by aesthetic taste, and their realism was anointed and powdered b
the taste of aestheticism ... aesthetic taste diverted them from the realism of the world a
they entered the cul-de-sac of Idealism ... and that moment, when the idealisation of for
took hold of them must be considered the downfall of real art."124 This of course implied t
the artist must be freed from the burdens of history both of art history and of the historica
mediated tasks of the artist: "an artist is under the obligation to be a free creator . . . this i
possible when we free all of our ideas from vulgar thoughts . . . colour and texture in painter
creativity are ends in themselves125 . . . each form is free and individual."126
17 Liberator or Enslaver?
Was Malevich a liberator of the mind or did he want to enslave all future art to h
concept of modernism? In part because of the self-assertive and dominating personalit

27
Malevich amongst the Russian avant-garde and the self-proclaiming logic in his assertion that
Suprematism is the ultimate stage in non-representational art many have seen Malevich as an
enslaver. Though the rhetoric of Suprematism often appeared to exclude any other way of
thinking differently the reality, the actual arguments and praxis of Malevich, was quite the
opposite. His rhetoric was harsh in order to guard against a stepping back into what he called
the "inquisition of nature."127
Indeed Malevich, following Kandinsky, had made plastic art a totally new activity.
Where both aspired to the production of the pure icon free of any adherence to mimetic
representation they also produced their images within a matrix of theoretical texts. Though
Malevich was opposed to narrativity, in the sense of a picture telling a story, neither did he
want to wall "the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality ... defending them against the
intrusion of speech."128 Quite the contrary. For Malevich in particular art-making was part of
an overarching programme of research, speculation, psychic extension and discovery. The

subject of each painting, perhaps, only has meaning, 'says something', in verbal terms, within
the sequence of the image's own narrativity. His images did not articulate complex theoretical
concepts but sought to extend psychic operations beyond the frontiers of theory, where mere
words are inadequate descriptors: his images in sequence operate in a field of purely psychic,
pictorial discourse which verbal language was inadequate to articulate. This has nothing to do
with the physiology of vision, of interest to others like Matiushin, but with the articulation of
mind. The sequential nature of the work of Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian cannot be
overstressed. A single canvas, isolated in a gallery, dislocates the image from that sequent
discourse.
For Malevich art is a speculative activity. Art is research. Textual exegesis is significant
in putting forward the hypotheses from which that research is launched. The projecting of
non-representational images, writing about their making and creation, carrying out research
into media, methods, colour theory, the psychology of apprehension, are part and parcel of the
new functions of the artist in the new age. What Robert Morris has called 'the functional
entanglement of image and language'129 in the birth of abstract art certainly created in the
images and writing of Malevich an ideology free from all traditional comprehensions of
visual images, with the possible exception of the Russian icon.130
18 International Dimension of Malevich's Artistic Freedom
The freedom Malevich claimed for non-representational art was able to reach beyond
the frontiers of communal, regional and national cultures, to cross the barriers of race, class,
gender and other markers of difference. Suprematism launched the possibility of images that
were not culturally specific. Lissitzky was inspired by his contacts with Malevich to turn
aside from Jewish national art and Yiddish nostalgia for the exploration of his Suprematist
PROUNs, the 'interchange station between painting and architecture.' Naum Gabo claimed
that Malevich saw his work, and that of his brother Antoine Pevsner, at an exhibition in a
bandstand on Tverskoi Boulevard in Moscow in August 1920. When asked by his students
where the square was going Gabo claims that Malevich told them to go to the exhibition on
Tverskoi Boulevard.131 As that exhibition contained figurative works which Malevich

criticised132 he may rather have had in mind Gabo's 'Constructions in Space' of 1920-21,
which Malevich would certainly have endorsed.133 From 1920 all Gabo's work seemed to be
an extension of Malevich's principles. Indeed Gabo was to claim that "it is to him [Malevich]
and to him alone that Russia owes the credit of opening the new era in her art" and, as Martin
Hammer and Christina Lodder have pointed out "he [Gabo] would often remark that
28
Suprematism lay at the foundation of Constructive art."134 The work- both the images and the
writing - of Malevich, Lissitzky and Gabo acted as affirmations to the concurrent Dutch De
Stijl movement, to the British and American constructivists from the thirties onwards,
influenced aspects of American post-war post-painterly abstraction and minimalism, op art
and the experimentation of Bridget Riley in Britain, as well as the vigorous school of
contemporary Russian non-objective painters.135
Malevich's Suprematism, even in his own life-time, was never envisaged as a cul-desac, an end in itself - how could it be given his strongly held views on the never ending
process of evolution? - but as a liberating force, art not only liberated from the object but
from ideology, social utility, ethics, morality. As Samuel Beckett once remarked: "Moral
values are not accessible. It is not even possible to talk about truth, that is part of the anguish.
Paradoxically through form, by giving form to what is formless, the artist can find a possible
way out."136
It was this energy of free form making that Malevich wished to harness, so that the will
might indeed turn transcendental ideas into objects of potential experience. He envisaged the
world of art as a city to be built, for ever in the process of becoming.
Notes
1 On the autonomy of the work of art see Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde,
Minneapolis, 1984, 35-54.
2 Translated in Herschel Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, 1968, 67.
3 The term 'neoplatonism' is adapted from Mark Cheetham, see his The Rhetoric Of
Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting, Cambridge, 1991,
1-24.
4 Cheetham: 1991, 65-101.
5 Cheetham places Mondrian with the Neo-Platonists, see Cheetham: 1991, 48. Yet
Mondrian's neo-plastic work is almost free of any self-hood and referentiality, making
him rather a projective artist. Nevertheless Mondrian did not take his projective agenda
as far as Malevich and his writing is distinctly Neo-Platonic. The ambivalence of

Mondrian in this respect is emphasised by Anthony Hill, 'On Constructions, Nature and
Structure', Structure, 2nd series, 1: 1959, reproduced in Stephen Bann (ed), The
Documents of 20th-century Art: The Tradition of Constructivism, London, 1974,
274-5.
6 Cheetham emphasises that for this group of artists their writing on art constitutes as
much their 'work' as their image-making. Cheetham: 1991, xiii-xiv.
7 Bann: 1974, 274.
8 For a broad introduction to the work of Malevich see the books and articles by Charlotte
Douglas, particularly Swans of other Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the Origins of
Abstraction in Russia, Ann Arbor, 1980, as well as Rainer Crone, Kazimir Malevich:
The Climax of Disclosure, London, 1991, and John Milner, Kazimir Malevich and the
Art of Geometry, New Haven and London. 1996.
9 Russian artists were aware of the development of art in France well before 1906.
However there was a particular intensity of contact between Paris and Moscow avantgardes in the period 1906-1914.
10 This can be traced in more detail in the catalogue 'Paris-Moscou 1900-1930', Paris,
1979.
29
1 1 In 1906-07 Shchukin bought Fauvist works by Matisse and in 1908 became the French
artist's principle patron. Matisse himself visited Moscow in 191 1. Shchukin met Picasso
in 1908 and assembled an unrivalled collection of fifty Picassos, including key Cubist
works, before the end of 1914.
12 Malevich, Kazimir, 'O novykh sistemakh v iskusstve', in his Sobranie sochinenii vpiati
tomakh, vol 1, Moscow, 1995, 164. Abbreviated hereafter as SSvPT: 1.
13 River in the Forest, 1908, oil on canvas, 53 x 42 cm, Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
14 For example, Triumph of the Heavens, 1907, tempera on cardboard, 72.5 x 70, Russian
Museum, St Petersburg.
1 5 Shroud of Christ, 1908, gouache on cardboard, 23.4 x 34.3, Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.
16 The Bather. 1911. gouache on oaoer. 105 x 69. Stedeliik Museum. Amsterdam.
17 SSvPT: 1, 161.
18 Peasant Woman with Buckets and Child, 1912, oil on canvas, 73 x 73, Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam.
19 Morning in the Village after Snowfall, 1912, oil on canvas, 80 x 79.5, Solomon R
Guggenheim Museum, New York.
20 Cubism- Musical Instrument, 1913, 83.5 x 69.5, oil on canvas, Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam.
21 Black Suprematist Square, 1914-15, oil on canvas, 79.6 x 79.5, Tretiakov Gallery,
Moscow.
22 It needs to be pointed out that Malevich had no knowledge of the tradition of Western
philosophy, nor indeed had he any extensive formal education. He tended to think in
images. Often his train of thought is aphoristic, rhetorical. It is often difficult to follow
for the logically minded. SSvPT: 1, 158-9.

23 For a discussion of the ideas of Nikolai Kulbin see Douglas, Charlotte: 1980, 68-71 .
24 It is for this reason that I do not subscribe to Yves-Alain Bois's notion that Abstract art
could not but understand its birth as a calling for its end.' Y-A Bois, Endgame:
Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture, Boston, 1986, 30. See in
particular the section of this article entitled international Development of Malevich's
Artistic Freedom'.
25 SSvPT: 1, 171-2.
26 Douglas: 1980, 72.

27 Malevich's relationship with the work of Schopenhauer is well summarised by Paul
Crowther, 'Philosophy and Non-Objectivity', Art and Design Profile: Malevich,
London and New York, 1989, 51-7.
28 Douglas mentions that Uspensky's books 'were well known to Kruchenykh and
Malevich' [Doujlis: 1980, 29]. Certainly Uspensky's Tertium Organum, published in
St Petersburg 1911, was known to Matiushin, who quoted it in his review of Metzinger
and Gleizes's 'Du Cubisme', Soiuz molodezhi 3, March, 1913, 25, 28.
29 A Bergson, Tvorcheskaia evoliutsiia, Moscow, 1909, Vremia i svoboda voli, together

with the article 'Vvedenie k metafiziku', Moscow, 1911, Materiia i pamiat' St
Petersburg, 1912, Vospriatie izmenchivosti, St Petersburg, 1912, Psikhofiziologicheskii
paralogizm i snovideniia, St Petersburg, 1913, Vospominanie nastoiashchego, St

Petersburg, 1913, Intellektual'noe usilie: zametka o psikhologicheskom proiskhozhdenii
nashei very v zakon prichinosti, St Petersburg, 1913, Sobranie sochinenii, 5 vols, St
Petersburg, 1913-14.
30 Douglas: 1980, 52.

3 1 For details on Vasiliev see Linda Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and NonEuclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton, 1983, 242-4.
30
32 SSvPT: 1,40-1.
33 Gleizes, A, Metzinger, J, Cubism, London, 1913, 45-6. The final sentence has b
retranslated in the interests of clarity. Two translations appeared in Russian, one

St Petersburg by Matiushin and another in Moscow, both in 1913.
34 Ouspensky, P D, Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought: A Key to

Enigmas of the World, London, 1981, 3.
35 Wundt's book was published in St Petersburg in Russian translation in two volumes

1880-1.
36 Douglas: 1980, 68-70. Kulbin's ideas on this topic were published as Sensitivity:
Essavs on Psvchometry and the Clinical Application of Its Data in St Petersburg, 1907.
37 Douglas: 1980, 70-71.
38 Douglas: 1980,72.
39 Anthony Hill, 'A Structuralist Art?', Twentieth Century Studies, 3: 1970.

40 Umbro Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, London, 1973, 49.
41 Boccioni had used the term 'physical transcendentalism' in 191 1 . Apollonio: 1973, 48.
42 For a further discussion of 'intuition' in Malevich see Douglas: 1980, 54.
43 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, New York, 1 946, 1 03.

44 Ouspensky: 1981, 18. The quotation is from H P Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, 3rd
ed, London and New York, 1 893, 1, 27 1 .
45 Ouspensky: 1981,65.
46 In his notes of May 1915 Matiushin seems to conceive of the fourth dimension as little
more than transparency and the awareness of simultaneous, coexistent phenomena. This
would seem to be a very standard Futurist position and to indicate a very superficial
reading of Uspensky and no knowledge of Bergson. TsGALI, f 134, op 2, ed khr 24,
s2.
47 In the manifesto published in Sadok sudei II in February 1913 the signatories, who
included Kruchenykh, claimed that they were 'the new people of the new life!' In a
letter to the poet Vasily Kamensky Khlebnikov declared 'We are a new race of peoplerays. We have come to light up the universe.' V Kamenskii, Put' entuziasta, Perm, 1968
104. David Burliuk also claimed that "We are people of a new, modern humankind. We
are prophets, doves from the ark of the future." ibid, 139.
48 'A Slap in the Face of Public Taste', Moscow, 1912.

49 Untitled piece in the almanac Sadok sudei II, St Petersburg, 1913.
50 Matiushin's wife, the artist and poetess Elena Guro, died in 1 9 1 3, partly out of grief for
the early death of their infant son. Matiushin gave up his position in the St Petersburg
Court Orchestra and went to Finland to try to come to terms with this double blow. It is
highly likely that the turn towards a more extreme form of absurdity, of the victory of
darkness over light in the opera Victory Over the Sun, owes something to his own grief
process in that summer of 1 9 1 3 .
5 1 Pervyi vserossiiskii s"ezd baiachei budushchego, in Za 7 dnei, 28/122, St Petersburg,

15 August 1913, 605-6.
52 Malevich and Maiakovsky prepared the ground for such a theatrical performance in
Moscow in August 1913, asking Matiushin and Kruchenykh to use their influence with
the Union of Youth to register for the right to perform in public. V Maiakovsky, Polnoe
sobranie, vol 1, Moscow, 1935, 391.
53 A Kruchenykh, V Khlebnikov, Slovo kak takovoe, (The Word as Such), Moscow, 1913.
54 Matiushin, Troe, St Petersburg, 1913, 3.
55 Uspensky: 1981, 12.

56 Uspensky: 1981,21.
31
57 SSvPT: 1,56-1.
5 8 Kruchenykh, Aleksei, Deklaratsiia slova, kak takogo, pamphlet published 1913

Kruchenykh also listed the means of creating zaum utterances in 'Novye puti slova*,
Troe, St Petersburg, 1913. For an authoritative account of zaum see Gerald Janacek,
Zaum: The Transrational Poetrv of Russian Futurism. San Dieco. 1996.
59 R M Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, New York, 1901. Derrida would counter Buke's
seeming logic, of course, by pointing out that new language merely indicated the
playing of a new game by new rules.
60 Kruchenvkh, Aleksei. Deklaratsiia slova. kak takozo, oamohlet oublished 1913.
6 1 The miscellany Troe was announced as a forthcoming publication in the Chronicle of

the First All-Russian Congress of Bards of the Future, 20 July 1913.
62 In October 1913 Kruchenykh wrote to Matiushin in relation to their Futurist opera

Victory Over the Sun: ' ... it seems to me that it would be a good idea, perhaps, if the
actors were similar to the figure on the cover of Troe and spoke coarsely and low.'
Ezhegodnik rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma na 1974 god, Leningrad, 1976,
171.
63 This image was a refined and an elaborated version of the same subject was used on the
cover of Slovo kak takovoe.
64 Troe: 1913,24-5.
65 Both Kruchenykh and Matiushin had studied art. Kruchenykh had been an art teacher
and Matiushin was a practising artist.
66 Troe: 1913,29.
67 Troe: 1913, 33. Neither Kant nor Uspensky took rationality as a priori but coming out
of the ordering of experience of the world or the result of empirical knowledge.
68 It is important to remember that in his discussion of 'symbol' Kruchenykh is often

conducting two discourses simultaneously, or at least within the same sentence, one an
elaboration of zaum and the other an offensive against the Russian symbolist poets.
69 Troe: 1913, 34-5.

70 SSvPT: 1, 163.
7 1 Kruchenykh quoted with obvious approval the beyond-sense expressions of

V Shishkov, a member of the Khlyst sect, as 'the authentic expression of a disturbed
soul - religious ecstasy'. VzorvaV, St Petersburg, 1913.
72 Archives of the Tretiakov Gallery, f 25, no 9, 1.1 1-12. An English version of this letter,
and another with similar phrases, dated 3 July 1913, is in Troels Anderson (ed), K S
Malevich: The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism: Unpublished Writings 1913-33,
Copenhagen, 1978, 203-4.

73 There is a signal difference between the militaristic patriotism with which the Italian
Futurists later became associated, and the return to a deeply buried, collective, Slavonic
cultural memory to which the Hylea group of Russian Futurists, which included
Malevich, aspired.
74 SSvPT:',3'.
75 Livshits, Benedikt, 'Osvobozhdenie slova', Dokhlaia luna, 1913.
76 Foucault, Michel, Folie et deraison, Paris, 1 96 1 , 372.

77 Ibid, 381.
78 Kant Critique of Pure Reason, A3 1 7/B374.

79 The Foucault Reader, ed Paul Rabinow, New York, 1 984, 50.
80 Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ghosts in the Mirror, New York, 1 99 1 , 1 02
81 Portrait of I V Kliun, 1913, oil on canvas, 1 12 x 70, Russian Museum, St Peters
The relationship between Kliun and Malevich would reward further investigation. Th
32
are a number of sketches of Kliun's self-portrait making use of a saw and one with an
eye emitting rays. See The George Costakis Collection: Russian Avant-Garde Art, New
York, 1981, 149, 177 and 182.
82 See for example The Woodcutter, 1912-1913, o/c, 94 x 71.5, Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam.
83 Cubism. Portrait of a Builder, (the Russian may also be translated as 'Constructor1,

which may be relevant here). Pencil on paper, 49.6 x 33.4, Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.
The date on the drawing and painting, 1911, is certainly erroneous as the works,
stylistically, belongs to early/mid 1913. As the works were acquired in 1916 and 1929
respectively it could well be that the dates were added long after the paintings were
executed.
84 Cow and Violin, 1913, oil on panel, 48.8 x 25.8, Russian Museum, St Petersburg. This
is dated 1911 by the artist but was probably so dated in the mid- 1920s before being
acquired by the Russian Museum from the Museum of Painterly Culture.
85 Slovo kak takovoe, Moscow, 1913,56.

86 Aviator, 1914, oil on canvas, 125 x 65, Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow. Kliun also
completed an ink on paper sketch entitled Aviator and dated 1912. Costakis: 1981, 177.
87 On the use of budetliane to mean 'people of the future' see Vladimir Markov, Russian
Futurism, London, 1969, 27-8.
88 Kamenskii, Vasilii, Put 'eutuziasta, Perm, 1 968, 96.
89 Ibid, 107.
90 The Russian word apteka - a pharmacy - is written across the top of Malevich's
painting The Aviator. If we break this word up it is feasible to attach it to the figure of
Kamensky. The letter 'A' has a Roman V inscribed upon it thus making the French
word 'as' from which the English phrase 'an air-ace' is taken at precisely this time. The
figure, moreover, holds an 'ace' in his hand. The last two letters of apteka, inscribed on
the right edge of the painting are the first two letters of Kamensky 's surname. Of course
this evidence is circumstantial but not implausible. Malevich was to use the symbol of
the trefoil club to indicate 'Futureland Strongmen' in the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory
over the Sun.
91 Douglas: 1980, 33.

92 Pobeda nad solntsem, St Petersburg, 1914. A translation of Victory Over the Sun, by
Ewa Bartos and Victoria Nes Kirby was published in The Drama Review, Fall 1979, vol
15, no 4, 137-50. A reconstruction of the opera was performed in Los Angeles in 1980
and in Finland in 1987, see Minna Tarkka, 'Reconstructing Victory Over the Sun',
Malevich, Art and Design Profile, London, 1989, 77-80. A note by Kruchenykh
recounting the writing of the opera and Malevich's vocal assistance, as well as
Matiushin's musical introduction and the motif of the budetliane, was published in
Troe, 41-2.
93 For further details on this ooera see Douelas: 1980. 35-47.
94 M Matiushin, 'Futurizm v Peterburge', Futuristy. Pervyi zhurnal russkikh futuristov,

1-2, Moscow, 1914, 156.
9 5 'Arithmetics' connotes negative feelings and recalls the pot-bellied, devilish

'Arithmetic' contributed by Malevich as an image to Kruchenykh's almanac VzorvaV.
'Arithmetics' stands for rational thought. As in English, the Russian word for roots also
denotes a mathematical root or radical.
96 This incident adds to the possibility that the Aviator was based upon the character of the
poet Vasily Kamensky, who had survived two air crashes and was, in late 1913 and
early 1914, closely associated with David Burliuk and Vladimir Maiakovsky in
33
performances by Futurist poets around Russian provincial centres. One of Kamensky's
lectures at this time was entitled 'Aeroplanes and the Poetry of the Futurists',
Kamensky: 1938, 140.
97 No drawings of these have survived but they appear to have been freestanding,
volumetric objects. Douglas suggests that they may have their origin in the Italian
Severini's Yellow Dancer. Douglas: 1980, 51.
98 Half of these are to be found in the Russian Museum, St Petersburg and the rest in the
St Petersburg Museum of Theatrical and Musical Arts.
99 Livshits, Benedikt, Polutorazlaznvi strelets* Leningrad, 1 933, 1 87-8.
100 Bereson: 1946. 103.
W7
101
On
Malevich
Geometry
and
It
Drawings,
Forest
102
Ezhegodnik
..
journal
to
be
call
Suprematist
secr
103 SSvPT. 1,52-3.
1 04 Ezhegodnik . . . : 1 976, 1 89.
1 05 The essay was probably put together as an article to be published in the stillborn journal
Zero. See note 102. This text is now known as the first edition of From Cubism ... and
was published by L A Ganzburg in Petrograd. It bears the publication date of 1916 but
had gone to press in the autumn of 1915. It was handed out at the opening of the
exhibition on 19 December 1915. Unsold copies of this first edition were later available
in a new cover as the second edition. The first two editions are therefore identical. I date
Malevich' s most mature ideas as a Suprematist to the texts produced at Vitebsk, in

particular 'God is Not Cast Down. Art, the Church, the Factory', 1920.
106 SSvPT: 1, 27. The only translation of the first edition appears as an appendix in
Douglas: 1980,107-110.
107 SSvPT: 1,29.

108 'h'('
109 SSvPT: 1, 34. The title of the exhibition '0.10' would seem to refer
binomial formula.
1 10 The third edition was published in Moscow in 1916 and was entitled Fr
Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting. It had been writt
part, before 12 January 1916 as two sections formed part of a public le
gave on that date in Petrograd. Matiushin, M, Ocharovannyi strann
vesenniL 1916, 18.

Ill SSvPT: 1.36.
112 SSvPT: L49.
113 SSvPT: 'A61.

114 SSvPT: 1.43-4.
115 SSvPT: 1, 45.

116 SSvPT: 1 ,44.
117 SSvPT: 1, 49.

1 1 8 There is no clear evidence for the dating of the first Suprematist paintings. The
information available would indicate that the earliest date could be October/November
1914 and the latest the early spring of 1915. Certainly most had been painted by
September. Malevich used the word 'Suprematism' for the first time in the First Edition
of From Cubism ... in June 1915. Never one to engage in half measures Malevich also
34
elaborated his ideas on Suprematist music and sculpture in October 1915. Ezhegodnik
...: 1976, 188 and Archives of Tretiakov Gallery, f 25, ed 9, no 20.
119 It was clear that the origin of the Black Square came to Malevich from his work on
Victory Over the Sun. In a letter to Matiushin, dated May 1915, Malevich calls it 'the
embryo of all possibilities - in its development it acquires a terrible strength. It is the
ancestor of the cube and the sphere; its disintegration brings an amazing standard in
painting.' In the opera it stood for the principle of victory. Ezhegodnik ...: 1976, 178,
180.
120 K S Malevich, Essays on Art 1915-1933, vol 1 ed Troels Andersen, Copenhagen, 1968,
45-7.
121 Suprematism: Painterly Realism of a Football Player. Colour Masses of the Fourth
Dimension, o/c, 70 x 44, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
122 Red Square: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in 2 Dimensions, 1915, o/c, 53 x
53, Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

123 Ezhegodnik: 1976, 192.
124 SSvPT: 1. 38-9.
125 SSvPT: 1.40-1.
126 SSvPT: 1, 53. Paul Crowther believes that Malevich's assertion, in The No
World, 1927, 'that nothing is real except feeling', makes it possible to equat
with 'the aesthetic'. Malevich's original oshchushchenie is closer to 'sen
English. Malevich is at pains to point out that 'sensation' is a psych
experience, not dependent, as I understand 'the aesthetic' to be, on a cu
developed sense of taste. Crowther does not say what he means by 'the aes
thus only muddies the water rather than making for clarity. Crowther: 1989, 5
127 SSvPT: 1,55.
128 Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modern Myths,
Cambridge, Mass and London, 1986, 9.
129 Robert Morris, 'Words and Images in Modernism and Postmodernism', Critical
Inquiry, vol 15, no 2: 1989, 341.
130 Oleg Tarasov, 'Ikona v tvorchestve K Malevicha', Istoriia kul'tury ipoetika, Moscow,
1994, 174-195.
1 3 1 Martin Hammer and Christina Lodder, Constructing Modernity: The Art and Career of
Naum Gabo, New Haven and London, 2000, 60.
132 Ibid.
1 33 Hammer and Lodder: 2000, 77 and 80.

1 34 Hammer and Lodder: 2000, 79.
135 Others influenced by Malevich's conception of the new tasks for an art freed from its
own history were Rodchenko and the Russian Architectonic objectless painters up to
1921, Kandinsky after 1916, and through him the Bauhaus artists Hans Richter and
Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, as well as Yves Klein and the Zero group, - Guenther Uecker,
Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, the Russian Sterligov group, and 'Dvizhenie', Nussberg,
see Lev Nussberg, Studio International 173: 886, Feb 1967, 60.
136 Charles Juliet, 'Meeting Beckett', TriQuarterly 77, Winter 1989/90.
35
Upper: Malevich, Front Cover of Troe, 1913

Lower: Malevich, Simultaneous Death of a Man in an Aeroplane and on the Railroad,
Vzorval' 1913
Above: Malevich, Englishman in Moscow, 1914

Cover: Malevich, Cubism: Study for the Portrait of Builder, c 1912
Malevich, Cubism. Musical instrument, 1913-4

Malevich and The Liberation of Art

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Malevich and The Liberation of Art

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Australia and New Zealand Slavists Association

Malevich and the Liberation of Art

New Zealand Slavonic Journal

Malevich and the Liberation of Art

spiritual aura of the painter's vision, the autonomy of art as an objec

twentieth-century art, was a neoplatonist, creating profoundly subjectiv

between good and evil. He utilised psychological sensations associated with th

By contrast, from some time in 1914, Malevich became the pioneer of w

termed projective imagery, coming by degrees to believe in the possibility of m

associative signification. He would then release these unshackled, freshly-min

Like Kandinsky, and that other pioneer of projective imagery, Mondria

He became as much concerned with theoretical issues as with the psychologic

ideas and his image-making: he saw non-representational strategies as a way

gardes over the period 1906-1914 contributed to the simultaneous emergence of

The notion of the evolution of the history of art, the evolution of

primitive in thrall to the world of nature to the sophisticated forms of im

incremental evolution but rather as an irregular series of revolutionary di

an overarching narrative of progress. However he believed that this h

slowed to the point of entropic sluggishness with mid-nineteenth century

4 Malevich's Own Evolution

revolutionary discontinuities in his own development as an artist. His early paintings, s

of Christ,15 in 1908. French influence returned to combine with a vigorous Ru

after Snowfall) which lead directly to a Cubo-Futurist phase 1913-14, to which w

5 Biological and Social Evolution

predominantly occupied with one aspect of the duality - subject/object or human

7 Sensation: Context of the Avant-garde

apprehension of harmony or dissonance in colours in close combination or placed at

8 Evolution and Intuition

psyche. These developing levels of perception, as demonstrated through advances in art

literature and philosophy, enable cognition to be extended through transcendental intuitions.41

marches in the vanguard of inner evolution, anticipating the forms it is to assume

9 The Rejection of Reason

in February 1913, to be in thrall to "superfluity, meaninglessness, the mystery of authoritative

scaffolding of his proto-rayist images in 1912. Reaper referred to a previous stage of

Russian as zaum, that is, transrationalism or beyond-reason.58 Richard B

explore their conceptual territory. Kruchenykh advocated the elaboration

with her back to the viewer, as if a conveyor of knowledge deliberately withheld or

expression to movement and 2) incorrect perspective gives expression to a new fourth

direct experience of beyond-reason.68 "Symbolism cannot sustain the opinion of the

artist's evolutionary change in consciousness and a vehicle for conveying an altered

Russian avant-garde, M V Lodyzhensky's The Superconsciousness and Ways to Achieve It

Malevich accepted the general thrust of Kruchenykh's and Livshits's discourse.

intellectualising to a higher degree of mental functioning', that is 'beyond-reason'. To use

otherwise known as disorder."80

religious experiences, socially conditioned by cultural practices or the result of some

Malevich painted a series of experimental panels and canvases in 1913 as he struggled

action, enthusiast-constructors of new forms of life, - we must, we are obliged to be

accident, and appeared at the Polytechnic Museum in a performance dedicated to 'An

portrait is of Kamensky himself.90 Malevich's attitude towards aviation may serve to

In Englishman in Moscow (1914) Malevich most successfully of all breaks up the

symmetry, the coordination of parts, hierarchies of significance, dominance and

13 Victory Over the Sun

overlaid with quadrilaterals of undifferentiated colour. There is indeed a black square

14 The Launching of Suprematism

capacity to push the boundaries of conventional thinking into previously unperceived

ultimately be driven by intuitional mathematics.

The pamphlet entitled From Cubism To Suprematism in Art, To The New R

In the third edition of this pamphlet, published in Moscow in 1916, Malevi

most extraordinary of all the extraordinary statements written by European ar

Malevich showed thirty-eight works at '0.10', all painted in 1915118 - includ

entirely characteristic, defence of Suprematism that he wrote in response to the dismissive

concept of modernism? In part because of the self-assertive and dominating personalit

an overarching programme of research, speculation, psychic extension and discovery. The