Kazimir Malevich Boxed Notecards

Kazimir Malevich (Russian, b. Ukraine, 1878–1935) was born near Kiev and studied art at Kiev School of Art and Moscow Academy of Fine Arts. He began his career experimenting with a number of Postimpressionist styles, emulating the Cubists, Fauvists, Futurists, and other elements of art’s avant-garde. But after 1914 he abandoned representational art altogether, launching a new style he called “Suprematism”—nonobjective compositions consisting of geometric shapes and blocks of pure color. This put him on the cutting edge of modern art, where he found himself buffeted by the volatile winds of Russian politics. Initially praised and honored after the Russian Revolution of 1917, he began teaching at major art schools and expanding his theories of art into architectural design. In 1927, he traveled to Berlin for a major exhibition of his work. There he met Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and professor-photographer Lßzl? Moholy-Nagy. He shared ideas with them, and on his return to Russia wrote a series of articles on modern art and architecture. Unfortunately, his views didn’t coincide with those of the Stalinist government, which by 1929 had become a repressive regime supporting artists depicting socialist realism and actively squelching others, including Malevich. In 1930 he was arrested and interrogated about his ideology, and for the rest of his life he was relegated to obscurity by government fiat. At the end of his career he returned to representational work—portraits and landscapes now imbued with principles of color and form carried over from his Suprematism phase—before dying in poverty at the age of fifty-seven. This notecard assortment bookends Malevich’s oeuvre with two of his early works and two painted in his later years.