Suprematism: The Avant-Garde of Russian Art
In 1913, there was an advent of pure abstraction in the Russian history of art which came to be known as Suprematism. This was the first movement to execute the idea of absolute geometrical representation of abstract art. Deconstruction became a popular concept in art to construct or formulate new ideas. Apart from the geometricity used in creating artworks, artists also experimented with use of colors and focused on the visual simplification.
Coining of the term
Kazimir Malevich, the chief artist of Suprematism, was greatly fascinated by the works of Russian avant-garde writers and poets. These literary works helped him to reject the notion of copying visuals from nature or the outer world and start a whole new form of thinking. Thoughts became the supreme priority and that is how the style got its name “Suprematism” where pure feelings in creative art were given the utmost importance. Malevich also published a journal called Supremus along with other artists and philosophers to support the ideologies of the movement. However due to the Russian Revolution the first issue did not get distributed. He also edited a manifesto called “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: New Painterly Realism “ with the contributions of many writers, especially Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Use of colors and shapes
Both color and shape have a huge significance in the style of Suprematist art to provide the perfect visual balance of the simplified fundamental concepts. Artists were mostly using black, white and primary colors red, blue and yellow. Use of black and white conveyed the phenomena of dark and light while other colors represented how light works in space as per the laws of the prismatic spectrum. The color palette was very limited and not elaborate or exaggerated because they were painting simple shapes with a single color. Shapes like rectangles, triangles, squares, circles, and crosses are mostly seen as a subject of this style. Simplification was the supreme goal and hence fundamental shapes of geometry were opted for representation of ideas. In the writings of Malevich we find him mentioning about the power of colors. He considered color as an important essence of painting which gets diminished when there is a representation of the subject involved in a painting. He believed that both color and texture itself are ultimate ends of an artwork.
The white background used in paintings is a depiction of light and the colorful squares painted on the white pictorial area gave an illusion of floating shapes. Malevich described these visuals as awakening of the spiritual awareness of viewers that was beyond any logic; free from the realms of realism.
The Father of Suprematism
Russian artist, Kazimir Malevich is entitled as the Father of Suprematism style of art because he was the first to formulate the ideas of the movement followed by his fellow artists. He was not only a painter but a good theorist who is also renowned for his publications about different concepts of new art styles and their evolution with the passage of time. After visiting Paris, his work reflected the styles of Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism and Cubism. Eventually he developed a style of his own which was extremely minimal and simplified in terms of representation and using a limited range of colors. Apart from creating these abstractions in oil paints he was also publishing his written works to support the movement and wrote a number of Manifestos to elaborate his ideas regarding the style. He was actively engaged with works of Russian poets and authors and that had a positive impact on his work. The aesthetic notion in literary works, changed his ways of seeing and he was also inspired by Vladimir Markov’s concept of “faktura” which describes the idea of searching the divine. Malevich believed that art had the power to transform humans to a divine state and he wanted to achieve that pure form of spirituality through abstraction.
The first Suprematist artwork of Malevich “Black Square” became the turning point in his career after the launch of the movement in 1913. Painted with oil colors on canvas, this work of Malevich has been described by the artist himself as a deliberate attempt to free art from the boundaries of the objective world and focus merely on the representation of form. This approach towards minimal depiction continues to be visible in his other iconic works such as “Black Cross” and “White on White”. He claimed his paintings to be pointing towards zero; detached from the representations of the objective world and bringing the new form of reality where simplification of thoughts formed a new perspective in painting. He employed the use of mainly two colors black and white though sometimes we also see the use of blue, red and greens in his works. He preferred a lighter background against vivid colors due to which all the shapes he painted seemed to appear as floating on the canvas.
Few examples of early works of Kazimir Malevich:
Suprematist works by Kazimir Malevich:
Suprematist ideas of Lazar Markovich Lissitzky
Russian artist and designer Lazar Markovich Lissitzky also known as El Lissitzky was a notable painter of the Russian avant garde who with his mentor Kazimir Malevich helped to develop the movement of Suprematism. He designed and curated many displays of exhibitions and his works had a great impact on the 20th century art movements such as the Bauhaus and Constructivism. He studied architectural engineering and started his career as an illustrator of children's books. He also took up teaching as a profession at a very young age. He was also practicing outdoors, studying landscapes and greatly fascinated by Jewish art. He was invited by Marc Chagall to Vitebsk to teach architecture and graphic design. At this point Lissitzky had already started to experiment with different art domains like photography, typography, graphic design and photomontage. After meeting Kazimir Malevich, he was inclined towards the concept of Suprematism. Initially it was difficult for him to give up the technicalities of figurative study works that he was doing. It was Malevich who took Lissitzky through the ideals of Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism and slowly infused the theories of Suprematism. Lissitzky gave up traditional Jewish art and started to look at the fundamentals of shapes and colors. With the mentorship of Malevich, he further developed the movement and started actively with the concept of minimal art. His suprematist works are also a reflection upon the political scenario as the Civil war broke in Russia during the 1920s. He infused elements of graphic design and used the symbolic meaning of colors which helped to create his own style in the history of Suprematism. Such an example is the lithographic poster called, “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” which became extremely popular due to the symbolic portrayal of the contemporary situation. The colors have been used metaphorically; ‘red wedge’ represents the communists, socialists and ‘white’ is the anti-Communist white army who opposed the Bolshevik Revolution during the Russian Civil War. This political symbolism became like a logo of war in Western publications and was used in albums and advertisements.
Few examples of works by El Lissitzky
The art of the Non-Objective creation by Alexander Rodchenko
Russian painter, sculptor and photographer Alexander Rodchenko is also the founder of the Constructivist art movement. However his philosophies had a huge impact on the modern abstraction of visual art. He worked initially as a painter and graphic designer and later photomontage and photography became his supreme domains. He was fascinated by the concept of multiple perspectives and preferred juxtaposing multiple angles of a subject to create different ways of seeing. His experiments with photography began in 1923 where he was using photography as a medium to create illusion in black and white. His compositions were mostly diagonal showing subjects in movement and how they appear from an unusual angle. He eliminated unnecessary detail in his photographic works and emphasized more on the dynamic representation of the arrangements. During the late 1940s he started his journey of creating abstract art and stopped photography in 1942.
Examples of photographic works done by Alexander Rodchenko
Rodchenko drew his inspiration from poster designs and magazines and he was also greatly influenced by Cubism, Futurism as well as Suprematist compositions by Malevich. His work titled “Black on Black” was exhibited opposite Malevich’s “White on White” at the Tenth State Exhibition. Rodchenko had been creating a series of paintings that he named as “Non Objective Paintings” and this Black on Black was his Non-Objective Painting number 80. He was also using ruler and compass unlike Malevich to eliminate the expressive quality of brushstrokes in his paintings. The use of textured colors and symbolic representations reflected continuity in space and infinite correlation between geometric shapes. Malevich’s and Rodchenko’s works are often comparatively studied as both were working on a new aesthetic of art and trying to create a new stylization in the history of Western Art.
Examples of painting done by Alexander Rodchenko
Decline of Suprematism:
Due to the suppression of artistic expression by the Soviet Union the movement gradually started to decline. Malevich was forced to stop abstract painting. He had to go back to painting landscapes in his later years. Gradually he completely stopped creating art and focused more on his theoretical deductions. Other artists were also facing strong criticism from the higher authorities and they were all restricted from creating geometric abstractions which deviated from the Socialist Realism. However the ideologies of Suprematism generated new pathways leading to the Bauhaus, Abstract Expressionist and Constructivist movements and it continues to inspire contemporary art and architecture till date.
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