Kazimir Malévich (1879-1935) was an intellectual revolutionary, a kind of messiah -the father of minimal and conceptual art- that influenced the development of abstract art in the 20th century.
His emblematic Black square (1915) was a radical simplification, the most minimal canvas produced up to that time. That black square on white represented an uncrossable line between «old art» and «new art».
Malevich held several prominent teaching positions and received a solo show at the Sixteenth State Exhibition in Moscow in 1919. His recognition spread to the West with solo exhibitions in Warsaw and Berlin in 1927.
From 1928 to 1930, he taught at the Kiev Art Institute, with Alexander Bogomazov, Victor Palmov, Vladimir Tatlin and published his articles in a Kharkiv magazine Nova Generatsiia .
In 1915, Malevich laid down the foundations of Suprematism when he published its manifesto, From Cubism to Suprematism.
Famous examples of his Suprematist works include Black Square (1915) and White On White (1918).
Malevich exhibited his first Black Square at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, at the Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) in 1915.
The second Black Square was painted around 1923.
Some believe that the third Black Square -also at the Tretyakov Gallery- was painted in 1929 for Malevich's solo exhibition, because of the poor condition of the 1915 square.
One more Black Square, the smallest and probably the last, may have been intended as a diptych together with the Red Square for the exhibition Artists of the RSFSR: 15 Years, held in Leningrad (1932). The two squares, Black and Red, were the centerpiece of the show.
After the October Revolution (1917), Malevich became a member of the Collegium on the Arts of Narkompros, the Commission for the Protection of Monuments and the Museums Commission (all from 1918–1919).
He taught at the Vitebsk Practical Art School in Belarus (1919–1922) alongside Marc Chagall, the Leningrad Academy of Arts (1922–1927), the Kiev Art Institute (1928–1930), and the House of the Arts in Leningrad (1930).
He wrote the book The World as Non-Objectivity, which was published in Munich in 1926 and translated into English in 1959. In it, he outlines his suprematist theories.
The Suprematist Manifesto has an oracular quality, a biblical grandeur.
It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being, begins.
Only dull and impotent artists veil their work with sincerity. Art requires truth, not sincerity.
In 1923, Malevich was appointed director of Petrograd State Institute of Artistic Culture, which was forced to close in 1926 after a Communist party newspaper called it «a government-supported monastery rife with counterrevolutionary sermonizing and artistic debauchery.»
