A Quote by 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

Quote Topics

Along Art Attempt Background Ballast Before Black Critics Desert Desperate Everything Field Form Free Lost Loved More Nothing Objectivity Picture Public Refuge Square Than Them Took Us Which White Year

Quote Author

Kazimir Malevich
Polish - Artist
February 23, 1878 - May 15, 1935

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 was brought up in black neighborhoods in South Baltimore. And we really felt like we were very black. We acted black and we spoke black. When I was a kid growing up, where I came from, it was hip to be black. To be white was kind of square.

Jerry Leiber

The floor of ice cream parlor bothered me. It was black-and-white checkboard tile, bigger than supermarket checkboard. If I looked only at a white square, I would be all right, but it was hard to ignore the black squares that surrounded the white ones. The contrast got under my skin. The floor meant yes, no, this, that, up, down, day, night -all the indecisions and opposites that were bad enough in life without having them spelled out for you on the floor.

Susanna Kaysen

Perhaps more than ever before, there is that aggressive secularism and there are those who would indeed try to destroy our Christian heritage and culture and take God from the public square. Religion must not be taken from the public square.

Keith O'Brien

A painting is an object which has an emphatic frontal surface. On such a surface, I paint a black band which does not recede, a color band which does not obtrude, a white square or rectangle which does not move back or forth, to or fro, or up or down; there is also a painted white exterior frame band which is edged round the edge to the black. Every part is painted and contiguous to its neighbor; no part is above or below any other part. There is no hierarchy. There is no ambiguity. There is no illusion. There is no space or interval (time).

Jo Baer

Blacks don't square dance. If you see a black person square dancing, it is definitely the seventh sign.

Tommy Davidson

The virtual world is a 'public square' much more vast than Tiananmen Square. And you can't send in the tanks to crush the netizens.

Jared Cohen

Richard John Neuhaus, in his well-known book The Naked Public Square, tells us that in America, the public square has become openly hostile to religion.

Stephen L. Carter

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.

E. M. Forster

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

My computer background is a black and white picture I took of the Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum in Brazil.

Emma Ishta

I Use The Square To Begin My Solutions Because The Square Is A Non-choice, Really. In The Course Of Development, I Search For The Forces That Would Disprove The Square.

Louis Kahn

Persecution means an attempt to drive out, attempt to subjugate, and there are various ways that that can be done. Sarah Palin's opponents and her critics would like to see her leave the public square by insulting, degrading, demeaning, abusing and ridiculing her, and - by pretending that she has nothing to say.

Matthew Continetti

The first photograph I ever experienced consciously is a picture of my mother from before she gave birth to me. Unfortunately, it's a black-and-white photograph, which means that many of the details have been lost, turning into nothing but gray shapes.

Olga Tokarczuk

You had better be a round peg in a square hole than a square peg in a square hole. The latter is in for life, while the first is only an indeterminate sentence.