Art World Context

During the early years of the Revolution, Malevich and other avant-garde artists held influential positions on state commissions to establish the art institutions of the new Soviet government.

By the end of the 1920s, Suprematism, the pioneering nonobjective style of painting for which Malevich was best known, particularly in the West, was losing ground in the battle for official Soviet aesthetic doctrine. Aggressive, conservative voices within the Soviet art world successfully silenced the few remaining voices of the avant-garde who had not emigrated, including Malevich. In particular, the artists’ organization AKhRR (Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia) mounted systematic ideological assaults on Soviet arts administrators who remained sympathetic to avant-garde ideas. Their primary argument maintained that the artwork of the avant- garde was no longer able to address the needs of contemporary society.

One such assault effectively closed the State Institute of Artistic Culture in Leningrad, where Malevich served as director: its closure in 1926 elim­inated his employment and source of income. At this institution, he had supervised the last few departments remaining in Russia where avant-garde artists could conduct arts-based research and inquiry.

Malevich was no stranger to controversy; arguably, he had even invited it when he introduced the art world to Suprematism in late 1915, at the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings ‘0,10’ (Zero-Ten), a group exhibition in Petrograd. Avant-gardists including Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and Olga Rozanova presented their perspectives on what art would become follow­ing the end of Futurism, an artistic movement that had defined the avant- garde in Russia for the previous decade. One might interpret the “zero” of the exhibition’s title as a reduction of the past (specifically Futurism) to nothing in order to make way for what would ensue in the future. At 0,10, Malevich placed his soon-to-be infamous Black Square (Malevich, 1915a) in the “beautiful corner,” the upper corner of the room where traditionally the most important icon in a home would be hung. But Black Square repre­sented the antithesis of the representational form of a holy figure. A single, deliberately imperfect square, painted black, occupied the majority of the picture plane, placed ambiguously within or upon a white painted back­ground or frame within the unframed canvas.

At 0,10, on the walls surrounding Black Square, Malevich exhibited a variety of other Suprematist paintings. Some consisted of similar solitary geometric forms: a red square, a black cross, a black rectangle, and non- rectangular quadrilaterals in other colors. Others, such as Suprematism (Lady: Color Masses in the 4th and 2nd Dimensions) (Malevich, 1915b) and Suprematism (with Black Trapezium and Red Square) (Malevich, 1915c), presented multicolored conglomerations that carefully balanced variations upon these simple geometric forms. His artistic statement at 0,10 was bold: he declared, “I have transformed myself in the zero of form and have fished myself out of the rubbishy slough of academic art” (1915d, p. 118), thereby declaring his emancipation from the expectations of academic tradition. He continued, “only cowardly consciousness and insolvency of creative power in an artist yield to this deception and establish their art on the forms of nature” (p. 118), a direct attack on artistic representation of visible objects, which epitomized for him impotence and deceit on the part of the artist. The only solution to this, in his opinion, was the complete abandonment of representation and a leap into pure form, which was how he interpreted his own nonobjective work.