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| Bathing Women, 1908 |
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| Desk and room, 1913 |
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| The Aviator, 1914 |
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| Black Square , 1913 |
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| Black Circle , 1913 |
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when, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed, "Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert .... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!"
"Withering" words were sought to drive off the symbol of the "desert" so that one might behold on the "dead square" the beloved likeness of "reality" ("true objectivity" and a spiritual feeling).
The square seemed incomprehensible and dangerous to the critics and the public ... and this, of course, was to be expected.
The ascent to the heights of nonobjective art is arduous and painful ... but it is nevertheless rewarding. The familiar recedes ever further and further into the background .... The contours of the objective world fade more and more and so it goes, step by step, until finally the world "everything we loved and by which we have lived" becomes lost to sight.
No more "likenesses of reality," no idealistic images nothing but a desert!
But this desert is filled with the spirit of nonobjective sensation which pervades everything.
Even I was gripped by a kind of timidity bordering on fear when it came to leaving "the world of will and idea," in which I had lived and worked and in the reality of which I had believed.
But a blissful sense of liberating nonobjectivity drew me forth into the "desert," where nothing is real except feeling . . . and so feeling became the substance of my life.
This was no "empty square" which I had exhibited but rather the feeling of nonobjectivity.
I realized that the "thing" and the "concept" were substituted for feeling and understood the falsity of the world of will and idea.
Is a milk bottle, then, the symbol of milk?
Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art which, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of "things."
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| Suprematism #55 , 1915 |
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'Under Suprematism I understand the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.
The so called "materialization" of a feeling in the conscious mind really means a materialization of the reflection of that feeling through the medium of some realistic conception. Such a realistic conception is without value in Suprematist art .... And not only in Suprematist art but in art generally, because the enduring, true value of a work of art (to whatever school it may belong) resides solely in the feeling expressed.
Hence, to the Suprematist, the appropriate means of representation is always the one which gives fullest possible expression to feeling as such and which ignores the familiar appearance of objects.'
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| Suprematism #56 , 1916 |
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'...The Suprematist square and the forms proceeding out of it can be likened to the primitive marks (symbols) of aboriginal man which represented, in their combinations, not ornament but a feeling of rhythm.
Suprematism did not bring into being a new world of feeling but, rather, an altogether new and direct form of representation of the world of feeling.
The square changes and creates new forms, the elements of which can be classified in one way or another depending upon the feeling which gave rise to them.
When we examine an antique column, we are no longer interested in the fitness of its construction to perform its technical task in the building but recognize in it the material expression of a pure feeling. We no longer see in it a structural necessity but view it as a work of art in its own right ' |
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| White on White, 1918 |
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'..If one insists on judging an art work on the basis of the virtuosity of the objective representation the verisimilitude of the illusion and thinks he sees in the objective representation itself a symbol of the inducing emotion, he will never partake of the gladdening content of a work of art.
The general public is still convinced today that art is bound to perish if it gives up the imitation of "dearly loved reality" and so it observes with dismay how the hated element of pure feeling abstraction makes more and more headway ....
Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without "things" (that is, the "time tested well spring of life").
But the nature and meaning of artistic creation continue to be misunderstood, as does the nature of creative work in general, because feeling, after all, is always and everywhere the one and only source of every creation.'
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| The Red Cavalry, 1928 |
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| Self Portrait , 1933 |
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| Girl with Red Pole, 1932-33 |
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