Kazimir Malevich and the Art of Geometry

Kazimir Malevich  (1879-1935)

During 1915, in the midst of the war years that preceded the Russian Revolution, Kazimir Malevich devised and displayed a completely unprecedented geometric style of painting that he called Suprematism. By the 1920s, geometric art was an international phenomenon. In this book John Milner examines Malevich's art of geometry, analyzes its sources of inspiration, its methods, and its meanings, and, arguing persuasively that it is based not on the decimal system but on an obsolete Russian unit of measurement, finds a new way to look at this art.

Milner describes Malevich's early work, pointing out his sensitivity to Russian and West European art, with their diverse traditions of depicting time and space, and to developments in physics and mathematics. He closely examines Malevich's designs for the 1913 futurist opera Victory over the Sun, the first major public manifestation of the artist's remarkable synthesis of proportion, perspective, mathematics, and peasant imagery, and he finds that many elements—including the sizes of the canvases—proved to be significant. Moving to Malevich's display of purely geometric paintings in 1915, Milner shows how it was based on an elaborate system of space and proportion that even determined the hanging of the exhibition. According to Milner, Malevich and his contemporaries used this proportional system, derived from the ancient Russian measures of arshin and vershok, to create some of the earliest and most coherent and dynamic non-objective paintings of the century.