Considered a pioneer in all respects of the Russian avant-gardes and in particular of geometric abstractionism and supremacism, Kazimir Severinovic Malevic was a fundamental figure in the artistic history of the twentieth century. With a strong ideological position and an unforgettable production, here is his story from the beginning of his career to success as an academic professor.
Who was Kazimir Severinovic Malevic
Kazimir Severinovič Malevič (Kiev, February 23, 1879 – Leningrad, May 15, 1935) was a painter but also a teacher and set designer. He was born in the current Ukraine, then the Russian Empire, and then moved to Moscow once his father died. Here he studies with Fedor Rerberg in his atelier e approaches the world of art passing through different styles and also studying the work of avant-gardists such as Vissily Kandinsky and other exponents of the moment.
In fact, in 1912 he went through the phase of neoprimitivist paintings, that is, who combine the work of Cubist and Futurist artists with those that are the most traditional elements of Russian history.
He exhibits his peasant subject at the exhibition “The thing of the donkey” but then leaves the group of colleagues with whom he creates these works for get closer to futurism. He creates the manifesto of the First Futurist Congress with some artists and takes the opportunity to exhibit at the Salon des Independants in Paris in 1914.
The beginning of Kazimir Severinovic Malevic’s career
He overturns the artistic conception with “Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10” of 1915 in Petrograd where presents suprematism, a movement that sees art as a way to indulge the plastic sensibility freed from any aesthetic end. In fact, according to him, painting was, up to that moment, a mere aesthetic representation when in fact art is an end in itself. An avant-garde concept that will return again in history but that sees it in a premonitory position.
His art studies, now more geometric and abstract, continue in the years to come thanks also to the support of the Soviet government after the Bolshevik revolution. It also gets a assignment as a professor at the Vitebsk Art Institute later becoming also director. Together with his students he also creates “UNOVIS”, an influential group of supremacist artists of great success between 1919 and 1922. After this phase he moved to Leningrad for twelve years where he worked in theLeningrad Institute of Artistic Culture.
Kazimir Severinovic Malevich and Suprematism
His ideas were not always shared by everyone. In fact talk about suprematism it immediately allows us to understand what his desire was in the founding of this movement. He himself stated
“By suprematism I mean the supremacy of pure sensitivity in art. From the point of view of the supremacists, the outward appearances of nature offer no interest; only sensitivity is essential. The object itself means nothing. With supremacism, art reaches pure expression without representation ”.
Understanding this discourse in depth is not easy as it is there are not very many theoretical works come to us today and his documents and paintings have remained inaccessible for a long time and therefore only now are we trying to retrace the life of this period.