Paris period.
Although he had been a German citizen since 1928, he emigrated to Paris when, in 1933, the Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close. The last, and one of the finest, of his German pictures is the sober “Development in Brown”; its title probably alludes to the Nazi brown-shirted storm troopers, who regarded his abstract art as “degenerate.” He lived for the remaining 11 years of his life in an apartment in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, becoming a naturalized French citizen in 1939.
During this final period his painting, which he began to prefer to call “concrete” rather than “abstract,” became to some extent a synthesis of the organic manner of the Munich period and the geometric manner of the Bauhaus period. The visual language that he had been aiming at since at least 1910 turned into collections of signs that look like almost-decipherable messages written in pictographs and hieroglyphs; many of the signs resemble aquatic larvae, and now and then there is a figurative hand or a lunar human face. Typical works are “Violet Dominant,” “Dominant Curve,” “Fifteen,” “Moderation,” and “Tempered Élan.” The production of such works was accompanied by the writing of essays in which the artist stressed the alleged failure of modern scientific positivism and the need to perceive what he termed “the symbolic character of physical substances.”
Kandinsky died in 1944. His influence on 20th-century art, often filtered through the work of more accessible painters, was profound.
Roy Donald McMullen Ed.
Additional Reading
Will Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work (1959), is a sympathetic biography by a friend of the artist. Hans K. Roethel and Jean K. Benjamin, Kandinsky (1979), is an illustrated treatment of his work, while Kandinsky: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil-paintings, 2 vol. (1982–84), is a comprehensive reference work. Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years (1979), studies the influences in pre-World War I Munich. Rose-Carol Washton Long, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style
Malevich, Kazimir
▪ Russian painter
born , Feb 23 [Feb. 11, old style], 1878, near Kiev
died May 15, 1935, Leningrad
Russian painter, who was the founder of the Suprematist school of abstract painting.
Malevich was trained at the Kiev School of Art and the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts. In his early work he followed Impressionism as well as Fauvism, and, after a trip to Paris in 1912, he was influenced by Picasso and Cubism. As a member of the Jack of Diamonds (q.v.) group, he led the Russian Cubist movement.
In 1913 Malevich created abstract geometrical patterns in a manner he called Suprematism (q.v.). From 1919 to 1921 he taught painting in Moscow and Leningrad, where he lived the rest of his life. On a 1926 visit to the Bauhaus in Weimar he met Wassily Kandinsky and published a book on his theory under the title Die gegenstandslose Welt (“The Nonobjective World”). Later, when Soviet politicians decided against modern art, Malevich and his art were doomed. He died in poverty and oblivion.
Malevich was the first to exhibit paintings composed of abstract geometrical elements. He constantly strove to produce pure, cerebral compositions, repudiating all sensuality and representation in art. His well-known “White on White” (1918; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) carries his Suprematist theories to their logical conclusion.
Suprematism
▪ painting
Russian Suprematism,
first movement of pure geometrical abstraction in painting, originated by Kazimir S. Malevich (Malevich, Kazimir) in Russia in about 1913. In his first Suprematist work, a pencil drawing of a black square on a white field, all the elements of objective representation that had characterized his earlier, Cubist-Futurist style, had been eliminated. Malevich explained that “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.” Referring to his first Suprematist work, he identified the black square with feeling and the white background with expressing “the void beyond this feeling.”
Although his early Suprematist compositions most likely date from 1913, they were not exhibited until 1915, the year he edited the Suprematist manifesto, with the assistance of several writers, most notably the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich). In these first Suprematist works—consisting of simple geometrical forms such as squares, circles, and crosses—he limited his palette to black, white, red, green, and blue. By 1916–17 he was presenting more complex shapes (fragments of circles, tiny triangles); extending his colour range to include brown, pink, and mauve; increasing the complexity of spatial relationships; and introducing the illusion of the three-dimensional into his painting. His experiments culminated in the “White on White” paintings of 1917–18, in which colour was eliminated, and the faintly outlined square barely emerged from its background. Finally, at a one-man exhibition of his work in 1919, Malevich announced the end of the Suprematist movement.
Suprematism had a few adherents among lesser known artists, such as Ivan Kliun, Ivan Puni, and Olga Rosanova. While not affiliated with the movement, the distinguished Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (Kandinsky, Wassily) showed the influence of Suprematism in the geometrization of his forms after 1920. This geometrical style, together with other abstract trends in Russian art, was transmitted by way of Kandinsky and the Russian artist El Lissitzky to Germany, particularly to the Bauhaus (q.v.), in the early 1920s.
Chagall, Marc
▪ Russian-French artist
Introduction
born July 7, 1887, Vitebsk, Belorussia, Russian Empire [now in Belarus]
died March 28, 1985, Saint-Paul, Alpes-Maritimes, France
Belorussian-born French painter, printmaker, and designer. He composed his images based on emotional and poetic associations, rather than on rules of pictorial logic. Predating Surrealism, his early works, such as I and the Village (1911), were among the first expressions of psychic reality in modern art. His works in various media include sets for plays and ballets, etchings illustrating the Bible, and stained-glass windows.
Early life and works
Chagall was born in a small city in the western Russian Empire not far from the Polish frontier. His family, which included eight other children, was devoutly Jewish and, like the majority of the some 20,000 Jews in Vitebsk, humble without being poverty-stricken; his father worked in a herring warehouse, and his mother ran a shop where she sold fish, flour, sugar, and spices. The young Chagall attended the heder (Jewish elementary school) and later went to the local public school, where instruction was in Russian. After learning the elements of drawing at school, he studied painting in the studio of a local realist, Jehuda Pen, and in 1907 went to St. Petersburg, where he studied intermittently for three years, eventually under the stage designer Léon Bakst (Bakst, Léon). Characteristic works by Chagall from this period of early maturity are the nightmarish The Dead Man (1908), which depicts a roof violinist (a favourite motif), and My Fiancée with Black Gloves (1909), in which a portrait becomes an occasion for the artist to experiment with arranging black and white.