Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918, oil on canvas, 79.4 x 79.4 cm (The Museum of Modern Art)
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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re in the Museum of Modern Art, looking at a painting by Kazimir Malevich, a type of painting that is called Suprematism.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:12] Suprematism was born during the years of World War I and the period of the Russian Revolution, which overthrew the absolutist czar and ultimately replaced it with a communist government, quite a tumultuous time in history.
Dr. Zucker: [0:27] This painting was made in 1918, one year after the October Revolution. The czar had represented not only corruption and autocratic rule, but also an ancient tradition.
Dr. Harris: [0:37] The hundreds of years of czarist rule, and the art that supported that, is upended.
Dr. Zucker: [0:42] This was a really utopian painting.
Dr. Harris: [0:44] Which is hard to see right now.
Dr. Zucker: [0:46] Because Soviet history is so discredited, it’s hard to regain the optimism that existed in 1918 among the intelligentsia, including painters like Malevich.
Dr. Harris: [0:56] Utopian, meaning that artists and art could pave the way and help support a better future.
Dr. Zucker: [1:03] Part of the idea was that painting like this would sweep away the naturalism that had been so much a part of bourgeois society in the 19th century, and would point to a future where everybody could participate, not only the wealthy.
Dr. Harris: [1:16] If you want everyone to participate and you want everyone to understand art, then you need to remove those culturally specific references that appear in still lives, in genre paintings, in landscapes…
Dr. Zucker: [1:29] Or in religious painting.
Dr. Harris: [1:31] …and go back to pure geometric shapes.
Dr. Zucker: [1:34] Malevich believed that pure geometry was an expression of scientific rigor that was also spiritually based, that could move every man at a fundamental level.
Dr. Harris: [1:44] He was appealing to feeling, which is hard to understand as we look at this painting of a square, slightly askew within another square.
Dr. Zucker: [1:52] It couldn’t be more reduced. Except, if you look at it closely, you see the warm white of the outer square and then that cooler blue, and you’ll notice that the blue and the white don’t really touch. There’s a reserve line, that is, the blue white and warm white are painted close to each other, but not next to each other.
Dr. Harris: [2:09] It asks us to look closely, but in some ways, it also doesn’t reward us all that much because this is so pared down.
Dr. Zucker: [2:17] It’s so conceptual. This painting was an embodiment of ideas. One of the ideas that Malevich was interested in at this time was ways of representing the three-dimensional that were not reliant on the Renaissance tradition that had ruled painting for hundreds of years.
[2:32] For example, when we first look at the canvas, it looks flat. It looks like two squares, but then because of the tilt of the inner square, it might actually seem to be moving towards us.
Dr. Harris: [2:41] I also get the sense of one flat object lying on top of another.
Dr. Zucker: [2:45] So, we have this idea of two dimensions, then three dimensions, and perhaps even a fourth dimension. The idea that the smaller square is moving either in or out over time.
Dr. Harris: [2:55] This moment of optimism and utopia for artists is really brief, because when Stalin comes in, there’ll be a demand for a new kind of art.
Dr. Zucker: [3:04] An art that rejects this radically utopian abstraction and instead calls for a realism that celebrates the state.
Dr. Harris: [3:11] That celebrates labor, the working classes that were supposed to benefit from the Communist Revolution. I think, for me, the lesson with Malevich is that we really need to go back to that historical moment.
[3:22] The sincerity of the early 20th century, of artists who with all their heart wanted to aid in a revolution that would transcend an old and corrupt order and give us a new world. That ambition, that desire, cannot be doubted.
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