Malevich, Casimir

Malevich, Casimir or Kasimir

(both: kä`sĭmēr mälyā`vĭch), 1878–1935, Russian painter. Moving to Moscow in 1906, he became involved in avant-garde artistic circles. He worked first in a style related to fauvismfauvism
[Fr. fauve=wild beast], name derisively hurled at and cheerfully adopted by a group of French painters, including Matisse, Rouault, Derain, Vlaminck, Friesz, Marquet, van Dongen, Braque, and Dufy.
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 and then turned to a mixture of cubismcubism,
art movement, primarily in painting, originating in Paris c.1907. Cubist Theory

Cubism began as an intellectual revolt against the artistic expression of previous eras.
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 and futurismfuturism,
Italian school of painting, sculpture, and literature that flourished from 1909, when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's first manifesto of futurism appeared, until the end of World War I.
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 before founding his own movement, suprematismsuprematism,
Russian art movement founded (1913) by Casimir Malevich in Moscow, parallel to constructivism. Malevich drew Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitzky to his revolutionary, nonobjective art.
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, in 1913. Malevich created nonobjective paintings composed of bare geometric forms—often just a single square on a flatly painted surface. Characteristic is his famous White on White (Mus. of Modern Art, New York City). His written theories were published in Germany in 1928 as The Non-Objective World (tr. 1959). His controversial work was influential in the development of abstract art. Officially praised after the 1917 revolution, from about 1930 on his work was condemned by Russia's Stalinist regime.

Bibliography

See A. Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute (4 vol., 2010); A. Shatskikh, Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism (2012); S. Tates et al., ed., Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde (museum catalog, 2014).