Suprematism

Suprematism

Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935)  was born near Keiv, Ukraine.  He's art and his Suprematist manifesto are amongst the most vital artistic developments of this century. Most of his paintings are limited to geometric shapes and a narrow range of colors, but the pinnacle of his Suprematism was his White on White series.

Kasimir Malevich  founded art movement; Suprematism.  Suprematism was one of the earliest and most radical developments in abstract art. Its name derived from Malevich's belief that Suprematist art would be superior to all the art of the past, and that it would lead to the "supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts." Heavily influenced by avant-garde poets, and an emerging movement in literary criticism, Malevich derived his interest in flouting the rules of language, in defying reason. He believed that there were only delicate links between words or signs and the objects they denote, and from this he saw the possibilities for a totally abstract art.
 It was a radical and experimental project that at times came close to a strange mysticism. Although the Communist authorities later attacked the movement, its influence was pervasive in Russia in the early 1920s, and it was important in shaping Constructivism, just as it has been in inspiring abstract art to this day.

The Suprematists' interest in abstraction was fired by a search for the 'zero degree' of painting, the point beyond which the medium could not go without ceasing to be art.
"Suprematism has advanced the ultimate tip of the visual pyramid of perspective into infinity.... We see that Suprematism has swept away from the plane the illusions of two-dimensional planimetric space, the illusions of three-dimensional perspective space, and has created the ultimate illusion of irrational space, with its infinite extensibility into the background and foreground." Though much  Suprematist art can seem highly austere and serious, there was a strong tone of absurdism running through the movement. One of Malevich's initial inspirations for the movement was zaum, or transrational poetry, of some of his contemporaries, something that led him to the idea of 'zaum painting    
 `The object in itself is meaningless. the ideas of the conscious mind are worthless''. What he wanted was a non-objective representation, ``the supremacy of pure feeling.'' Malevich had initially been influenced by Cubism and primitive art,  but his own movement of Suprematism enabled him to construct images that had no reference at all to reality, the artist's main theme being the internal movements of the personality. The theme has no precise form, and Malevich had to search it out from within the visible expression of what he felt.
( Black Quadrilateral, by Kazimir Malevich)
Hundred years, abstract painting began, a revolution created by Malevich, Liubov Popova, Kandinsky, Rodchenko , Mondrian etc