Top 29 Quotes & Sayings by Kazimir Malevich

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Polish artist Kazimir Malevich.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Polish-Ukrainian Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose pioneering work and writing had a profound influence on the development of non-objective art in the 20th century. Born in Kyiv to an ethnic Polish family, his concept of Suprematism sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms (objectivity) and subject matter in order to access "the supremacy of pure feeling" and spirituality. Malevich is considered to be part of the Ukrainian avant-garde that was shaped by Ukrainian-born artists who worked first in Ukraine and later over a geographical span between Europe and America.

Polish - Artist | February 23, 1878 - May 15, 1935

Source: Wikipedia

Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.

Kazimir Malevich

Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal.

Kazimir Malevich

In art there is a need for truth, not sincerity.

Kazimir Malevich

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.

Kazimir Malevich

With the most primitive means the artist creates something which the most ingenious and efficient technology will never be able to create.

Kazimir Malevich

Man's skull represents the same infinity for the movement of conceptions. It is equal to the universe, for in it is contained all that sees in it.

Kazimir Malevich

Shouldn't it give us pause that the oldest works of art are as impressive today in their beauty and spontaneity as they were many thousands of years ago?

Kazimir Malevich

A painted surface is a real, living form.

Kazimir Malevich

Everywhere there is craft and technique; everywhere there is artistry and form. Art itself, technique, is ponderous and clumsy, and because of its awkwardness it obstructs that inner element.

Kazimir Malevich

I regard photography and film simply as new technical means which painters must absolutely make use of, just as from time out of mind they have made use of brush, charcoal and color. It is certain, however, that photography and film must become as evocative for the sensibility as pencil, charcoal and brush. (1927)

Kazimir Malevich

By suprematism I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art.

Kazimir Malevich

Color is the essence of painting, which the subject always killed.

Kazimir Malevich

I recommend that you should work actively... and study the artistic structures of Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Watteau, Poussin, and other painters, even Chardin, where he is an artist. Study very closely their dabbing manner of execution and try to copy a small piece of canvas, just one square inch.

Kazimir Malevich

There is movement and movement. There are movements of small tension and movements of great tension and there is also a movement which our eyes cannot catch although it can be felt. In art this state is called dynamic movement.

Kazimir Malevich

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.

Kazimir Malevich

When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square... the critics... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert"... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling.

Kazimir Malevich

I have established the semaphore of Suprematism. I have beaten the lining of the colored sky, torn it away and in the sack that formed itself, I have put color and knotted it. Swim! The free white sea, infinity, lies before you.

Kazimir Malevich

Every real form is a world. And any plastic surface is more alive than a face from which stares a pair of eyes and a smile.

Kazimir Malevich

Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes... has disappeared, shall we see a pure painting composition.

Kazimir Malevich

Only dull and impotent artists screen their work with sincerity. In art there is need for truth, not sincerity.

Kazimir Malevich

I ripped through the blue shade of the constraints of color.

Kazimir Malevich

I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation, that is, to Suprematism, to the new realism in painting - to non-objective creation.

Kazimir Malevich

I have broken the blue boundary of color limits, come out into the white; beside me comrade-pilots swim in this infinity.

Kazimir Malevich

For the Suprematist, the proper means is the one that provides the fullest expression of pure feeling and ignores the habitually accepted object. The object in itself is meaningless to him, and the ideas of the conscious mind are worthless.

Kazimir Malevich

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!'

Kazimir Malevich

The square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling.

Kazimir Malevich

A face painted in a picture gives a pitiful parody of life. . . but a painted surface lives.

Kazimir Malevich

The appearances of natural objects are in themselves meaningless; the essential thing is feeling - in itself and completely independent of the context in which it has been evoked.

Kazimir Malevich

I perceived that the 'thing' and the 'idea' were taken to be equivalents of feeling, and understood the lie of the world of will and idea. Is the milk bottle the symbol of milk?

Kazimir Malevich

Top 29 Quotes & Sayings by Kazimir Malevich

Related Authors