Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Kazimir Malevich
Russian; 20th-century
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum
95%
White Planes in Dissolution. 1917-18. Oil on canvas
One desideratum of painting is the achievement of difference without any subordination. To solve the problem of pictures would be to depict objects that simply are, without suffering the necessity of articulating their own being against that of other depictions, which is to say, without establishing a positional hierarchy of relation to the conditioning substance of that being: the picture plane. This painting doesn't quite solve paintings, but it comes as close as any has, or probably could. Malevich erects and eliminates distinction with an unreal elegance. His forms at once are one and many, apart from and involved with the painted surface. There are few moments in art's history as indescribable as the rectangle's passage, at right, from sharp definition into spectral nonform; the open triangle sits atop the rectangle, but it's also somehow inside and behind it. Much of the painting's success has to do with the masterful control of tones, and the careful attention to the treatment of the surface, and the balance of verticals and horizontals, and the indescribable geometries of each of the shapes. But as with all great art, this work's greatness can't be reduced to any one of its qualities or another. Rather, its quality lies in the way it seems, without exhausting or explaining itself, to destroy and embody painting in one stroke. (TFS, 2026)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum
84%
Yellow Plane in Dissolution. 1917-18. Oil on canvas
Few artists have ever sought out more and more difficult challenges than Kazimir Malevich did in the second half of the 1910s. This painting is not one of his best from the period, but it is among his most challenging. That's because it's at work somewhere in between the dichotomous figure/ground purity of the Black Square, and the symphonic disregard for such differentiation and distinction that characterizes the white-on-white paintings. I guess that that in-betweenness is contained in the title: this is a "plane" in "dissolution": the painting's whole point is to assert an absolute figure upon an eternal ground, and then to go about undermining any certainty in these terms. What executes this undermining is what makes this painting emphatically a painting. The interior of the yellow has an immense about of texture to it (the surface of the surrounding white has another feel entirely); there are greens — of all things — that creep in to limn the diamond; each corner of the plane is a slightly different distance from the edge of the canvas; and then what's that extra wedge of off-yellow doing along the bottom right side of the shape? There's less finality here than in Malevich's highest achievements, but such heights were unsustainable indefinitely. (TFS, 2026)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum
67%
Lamp/Musical Instruments. 1913. Oil on canvas
A complete misapprehension of Cubism's aims and import. But Malevich's sensibility is buried somewhere in here, so you could say that it's a "productive misreading." This painting is much closer to Léger or Severini than Picasso or Braque, which is a bad thing. Every plane is so corralled, every object so linearly contained, and within each punctiliously enumerated surface, there's all sorts of lavish facture that, because bounded, fails to make claims upon the overall character of the picture's surface. Malevich clings to the reality of what he depicts. This precludes him from realizing Cubism's potential to slough away all certainty in things. But it also points towards the recalcitrance of his best work from the end of the 1910s, wherein the refusal of forms to submit completely to the particularity of their situations in space results in pictures that are once (and without contradiction) dynamically motile as images, and staunch in the stillness of their objecthood. But this painting is too cramped, breathless, to ever achieve such grace. It can only suggest it. (TFS, 2026)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum
62%
The Woodcutter. 1912. Oil on canvas
Malevich's earlier work, like this painting, exhibits an addiction to volumes, which makes his most radical Suprematist achievements, which are almost anti-plastic, that much more surprising. Compared to his greatest paintings, this exercise in stalwart, reductive rendering is almost quaint; it verges on mere illustration. This is because there's not much intrigue to the way the paint's been handled (especially a liability in the numerous gradients, which are clunky and contribute little to the way weight moves through the arrangement) and because the composition is so dense that there's little room for space to define itself. When the painting does manage to breathe, as in the patches of green to either side of the woodsman's skirts, the result is a sense of depth that ramifies through the rest of the picture. But it's held back from developing into a spatial order by the crowding of the image, and by the colors that don't ever seem to be more than an experiment. (TFS, 2026)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum
43%
Supremus No. 50. 1915. Oil on canvas
Malevich staked out the perimeter of what paintings could be, and in so doing sometimes stumbled into things paintings maybe shouldn't be. The form-arranging in this piece is histrionic. It comes across as a mere placement of shapes, without the requisite implications of depth. All the tilt-countertilting and the coy overlapping of forms amounts to little more than, well, overlapping and countertilting. The white is simply not activated as a ground; the red bands fail to push the black bars backwards, the irregular outline of one shape fails to jibe with that of another. Malevich was always nearby the graphic arts, and occasionally, to his detriment, he entered their territory and didn't feel the need to come back to art. At his best he was Mondrian, at his worst, van Doesburg. (TFS, 2026)