Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (23 February 1878 – 15 May 1935) was a painter, art theoretician, pioneer of geometric abstract art and one of the most important members of the Russian avant-garde. He was also the founder of the art movement Suprematism.

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• The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. The face of the new art. The square is a living, regal infant. The first step of pure creation in art.
  • "From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting" (November 1916)

• By "Suprematism" I mean 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.
  • The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism (1926), trans. Howard Dearstyne [Dover, 2003, ISBN 0-486-42974-1], part II: Suprematism (p. 67)

• 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 was lost. We are in a desert...Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!"
  • The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism (1926), trans. Howard Dearstyne [Dover, 2003, ISBN 0-486-42974-1], part II: Suprematism (p. 68)

• I have not invented anything, only the night I have sensed, and in it the new which I called Suprematism.
  • Quoted in Walter Hess, Dokumente zum Verständnis der modernen Malerei (Hamburg, 1956), p. 98