The challenge of classical painting: "non-objective art" by Kazimir Malevich, author of "Black Square"

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Even people far from art know the name of this artist and the name of his most famous work. This is about Kazimire Malevich and his "Black square" … It was this painting in 1915 that became a declaration of aesthetics. suprematism - "non-objective art", which Malevich characterized as "superiority (supremacy) of pure sensation in the visual arts."

All his life the artist was in constant creative search: at the beginning he works in the style of primitivism, then - cubo-futurism. He became the founder of Suprematism, a revolutionary direction in painting at the beginning of the twentieth century. This term was invented by Malevich himself: supremacy is the supremacy, the dominance of color over all other components of painting.

While working on the set design for the opera Victory over the Sun, the idea of the famous Black Square emerged. Malevich decided to "eclipse" the sun with a black square on stage. The square for him is the primary form, all other figures are its derivatives. The black square overshadows not only the sun - it seems to absorb all the forms and colors of the world, all the traditional laws of painting, from which new art can potentially be born.

“Hanging a plane of pictorial color on a sheet of white canvas directly gives our consciousness a strong sense of space,” the artist wrote. - I am transported into a bottomless abyss, where you feel creatively the points of the universe around you. Disembodied geometric elements soar in a colorless, unknown cosmic dimension, representing pure speculation, manifested with one's own eyes."

Malevich denied the aesthetic value of forms and the rational aspect of art. In the catalog of the exhibition of his works, he shocked the public with the phrase: "The content of the picture is unknown to the author." Only color has true meaning for an artist: “Drop love, drop aesthetics, drop the bundles of wisdom, in a new civilization, wisdom does not matter. I unraveled the bonds of wisdom and liberated the consciousness of color."

Throughout his life, the artist had to put up with the lack of understanding of the public and critics, with the dissatisfaction of the Soviet regime. His only "ideologically correct" work - "Red Cavalry" - evokes very ambiguous feelings. In the right corner was the signature "18", and on the back - the phrase: "Red cavalry gallops from the October capital to defend the Soviet border." But most of the canvas is occupied by a white and blue haze - an endless void, against which the cavalry seems tiny and powerless, and the landscape looks truly apocalyptic.

Whatever contradictory feelings the work of Kazimir Malevich aroused, it cannot be denied that it was an attempt to blow up the traditional perception of painting, to release the irrational, to elevate sensations to the absolute. He argued: “Reason is for an artist convict handcuffs, and therefore I wish all artists to lose their reason.” Recently it became known that the “Black Square” has an “elder brother”, and more 10 fun facts about paintings by famous artists