SuprematismThe Russian Avant-Garde

The basics• Russia c. 1915

• characterized by simple geometric shapes painted in a limited range of colors and associated with ideas of spiritual purity.

• Kasimir Malevich described Suprematism as "the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts,” he wanted to “free art from the burden of the object”

• Focused his art on pure geometric forms and their relationship to each other within the piece.

• Why?

• He viewed the Russian Revolution as having paved the way for a new society in which materialism would eventually lead to spiritual freedom.

Kazimir Malevich, SuprematistComposition: White on White, 1918 oil on canvas79.4 cm × 79.4 cm(MoMA)

• After the Revolution, Russian intellectuals hoped that human reason and modern technology would engineer a perfect society. Malevich was fascinated with technology, and particularly with the airplane, instrument of the human yearning to break the bounds of earth. He studied aerial photography, and wanted White on White to create a sense of floating and transcendence. White was for Malevich the color of infinity, and signified a realm of higher feeling. For Malevich, that realm, a utopian world of pure form, was attainable only through nonobjective art. Indeed, he named his theory of art Suprematism to signify "the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts"; and pure perception demanded that a picture's forms "have nothing in common with nature." Malevich imagined Suprematism as a universal language that would free viewers from the material world.

Black Square (1923) by KazimirMalevichOil on canvas, 105.5 x 105.5 cmState Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

El Lissitzky

• In 1920 Lissitzky announced a new type of artwork• “Proun”—“project for the affirmation of the new”

• working in Russia just three years after its revolution and during the Civil War, the new was a pressing concern.

• Lissitzky's style reflects his training as an architect in Germany before World War I as well as the inspiration of Malevich.

• Lissitzky's radical reconception of space and material is a metaphor for and visualization of the fundamental transformations in society that he thought would result from the Russian Revolution.

• He is challenging our perception of dimension.

• Blurring the distinctions between real and abstract space—a zone that Lissitzky called the “interchange station between painting and architecture”—the Prouns dwell upon the formal examination of transparency, opacity, color, shape, line, and materiality, which Lissitzky ultimately extended into three-dimensional installations that transformed our experience of conventional, gravity-based space.

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge