2015 marks one hundred years since the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) painted Black Square (1915). Its pure form—a plain black square painted on a white background—was ground-breaking, and the artist’s rejection of figuration absolute. Malevich had created a new art for revolutionary times and knew it, claiming ‘I have transformed myself in the zero of form and have fished myself out of the rubbish slough of academic art’. Black Square was a watershed moment in art history: it heralded, to some, a radical new beginning for art, paralleling the political and social upheaval of revolutionary Russia, yet to others it represented the death of painting.1
‘Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde featuring selections from the Khardziev and Costakis Collections’ is the Stedelijk Museum’s largest survey of Malevich’s work in more than twenty years. The exhibition traces the artist’s trajectory through over five hundred paintings, drawings, sculptures, costume designs and film. It is an intelligent and considered exhibition, contextualising his work chronologically and within his artistic, social and political milieu. Over twelve thematic rooms, Malevich’s development as an artist, theorist and educator is revealed. His early experiments in Impressionism, Symbolism and Cubo-Futurism show a rapacious explorer rapidly adopting, synthesising, and then abandoning artistic styles. However you can also see, through the works on display, that some stylistic elements were retained. For example, the artist had seen Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, Afternoon (1893) in a private collection in Moscow in 1903 and, while it spurred him to paint several canvases in the Impressionist style, it was the Impressionist’s interest in the materiality of paint that became a recurring element, especially in his later Suprematist work.
The performance work Victory over