Dynamic Suprematism
Kazimir Malevich (1879 to 1935) · 1915 or 1916
A large yellow triangle tilts across a white square canvas, and over it hover bars and rectangles of black, blue, red and green, some long and thin, some tiny, all set at slightly different angles. Nothing touches the edge and nothing rests on a ground; the shapes seem to be moving through weightless space. This is Suprematism, the style that Kazimir Malevich announced in Petrograd in December nineteen fifteen with his Black Square, and Dynamic Suprematism is one of its most complete statements.
Malevich wanted to free painting from any obligation to depict the world. The forms are geometric, but look closely and you will see they are painted by hand, with soft edges and small irregularities, and the white ground is not blank but brushed and varied. The apparent motion comes from the diagonals: the big triangle pulls one way and the cluster of smaller shapes drifts the other. Malevich spoke of these arrangements as sensations of flight, of cosmic space, and of a new world in which colour and form obey their own laws.
The painting dates from nineteen fifteen or sixteen, the most productive years of Malevich's life, when Russia was at war and revolution was a year away. It stayed in the artist's hands, then in the collection of the German architect Hugo Haring after Malevich's Berlin exhibition of nineteen twenty seven, and was acquired by the Tate in nineteen seventy eight. It is among the finest Malevich paintings outside Russia, and it usually hangs with other early abstraction, where you can compare it with Mondrian's calm grids and see two different ways of leaving the visible world behind.
Did You Know? Malevich left this and dozens of other works in Germany in nineteen twenty seven, expecting to return, and never saw them again.
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