马列维奇随笔集

During the 1910's Malevich shared and drove the magnificent adventure of the early Russian avant-garde. As a major artist, he expressed his creative genius from the Neo-Primitive period onwards, through to Cubo-Futurism. Overtaking the Neo-Primitive, Cubo-Futurist and alogical phases allowed for the genesis of an art in which forms and colors became moving, colored masses. By 1916, Suprematism had become a revolution at the heart of the avant-garde itself, a singular path upon which Malevich was joined by several disciples including Olga Rozanova, Ivan Kliun, Ilya Chashnik and Nikolai Suetin. He founded the Supremus group and became the most radical and charismatic avant-garde leader to date. In 1917, Nikolay Punin noted that Supermatism was blossoming like an opulent flower all over Moscow; from signboards and exhibitions to cafés, everything was suprematist. The famous black square was exhibited in 1915, shown in a niche in which Russians place their icons for worship, we notice that on these sketches and watercolor drafts the colored quadrangle is, objectively speaking, the foundation of the composition. It is from this form that the other elements spring, before finding their position in the pictorial space. In confirming that his Black Square, or Black Quadrangle, dates from 1913, Malevich was linking this affirmation to his costume designs for the opera Victory over the Sun. In December 1913, Malevich, Matyushin and Kruchenykh staged an opera, the importance of which was due to much more than the fact that it represented the birth of futurist opera in Russia: it opened the doors to a way of perceiving the world. Kazimir Malevich himself said that it was his work on the costumes and sets that had engendered the discovery of the suprematist system. During the Summer of 1915 alongside the publication of his pamphlet, he wrote to Matyushin, asking to include some of his sketches: “regarding the drawings, something made in total unconsciousness has borne unexpected fruits.” Matyushin decided to publish a new version of the pamphlet, including sketches by Kazimir Malevich selected with this in mind, one of which was a black square destined for the stage curtain. Malevich explained his choice: "the black square is the source of all possibility. In its actualization it contains the colossal force of the cube and the sphere; its disintegration brings a remarkable culture to painting. It is the ancestor of both the cube and of the sphere." As the drawing had a real existence, Kazimir Malevich was entitled to consider the year 1913 as the birth date of the black square. Even though, strictly speaking, there was no curtain with a black square, a sketch featuring white and black squares certainly exists in the eyes of several experts, containing within it the artistic genesis of the black quadrangle. In the inscription for the drawing, tableau 5, tableau 1, act 2, square, act 2, the word ‘square’ seems to have been inserted when Malevich later modified the date. And so the black square’s reign began: "the appearance of the ‘black square’ in the work of Malevich and in 20th century art in a wider sense, is striking for its abrupt, unexpected, unpredictable nature.” (J.Cl. Marcadé, Cahier I, p. 115) Malevich adopted a trilogy for the squares according to their color and often quoted them grouped in the same order: black, red, white (Suprematism: 34 Drawings). In its historical development All three of these periods of development took place between 1913 and 1918. They were all played out under the conventional signs of surface-planes, that go some way to express the planes of the future bodies, in volume. Remember, as Malevich wrote, the space of a painting is not that of the earth and the relationship with the shapes that we know in the space of the earth and the shapes contained in the pictorial space of his paintings, have nothing in common. They do not obey the same rules. The three suprematist squares represent the establishment of visions and constructions of the world that are very precise. In daily life, these squares carried yet another meaning: the black square was a sign of the economy, the red square a sign of revolution and the white square a sign of pure movement, pure action. The presence of the squares in the Sketchbook receives the same, constant interpretation in the writings of Kazimir Malevich; the circular lines that figure in these pencil and watercolor drawings numbered 8, 11, 12, 13, seem to be an allusion to the opera Victory over the Sun. Some sketches are likely to have been preliminary work for oils on canvas (K.Malevich, Suprematist Composition, 1916, oil on canvas, 80.5cm x 71cm, MNR, JB-1421) , others were made to demonstrate, support and analyze the journey of an artist-teacher who was still searching for his truth. / Archive of Dr. Yevgeny S. Levitin /