Kazimir Malevich: The Climax of Disclosure

The painter Kazimir Malevich rose to instant prominence among the Russian avant‑garde when, in December 1915, he contributed to an exhibition in Leningrad thirty‑nine paintings which were of such a sophisticated abstract quality that even today they seem to prossess a hidden and ineffable conceptual power. Malevich's sudden and starling realization of a nonobjective way of painting, which he called Suprematism, stands as a seminal moment in twentieth‑century art. Against the historical background of Russian progressive cultural and scientific movements, Rainer Crone and David Moos trace the close relationship between Malevich's writings and work and other contemporary nonpolitical revolutions: relativity and quantum theory in physics; the work of Roman Jakobson and the “Prague School” in linguistics; and the exploration of language in the writings of poet Velimir Khlebnikov. The authors define influences that shaped the dramatic shift in Malevich's oeuvre — from his early examination of Cézanne and his involvement in Futurist circles to his rejection of mimesis and the final works following 1927. They draw explicit analogies between vanguard structuralist poetry and the postcubist works of Malevich and between breakthroughs in theoretical physics, with its profound philosophical propositions, and the artist's radical departure into nonrepresentational painting. In particular, they examine Malevich's late figurative paintin, demonstrating that this widely misunderstood work solidifies his extraordinarily inventive stance. The authors elucidate Malevich's increasing concern with the central question of meaning, regarding how his work contributes to both the undermining of traditional modes of knowledge and the understanding of elaborate and more complex, indeterminate models of communication. They situate the artist within the fundamental epistemological shift away from nineteenth‑century ideas of truth and objectivity to an all‑pervasive modernist subjectivity, relying upon Malevich's contribution to illustrate various ways cultural production is mediated through modes of transmission.