*The following passages are presented for educational purposes and do not necessarily reflect the views of the absurdly attractive blogger tgirlmaomao
From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting
Only with the disappearance of a habit of mind which sees in pictures little corners of nature, madonnas and shameless Venuses, shall we witness a work of pure, living art.
I have transformed myself in the zero of form and dragged myself out of the rubbish-filled pool of Academic art.
I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring which confines the artist and the forms of nature.
This accursed ring, which opens up newer and newer prospects, leads the artist away from the target of destruction.
And only a cowardly consciousness and meagre creative powers in an artist are deceived by this fraud and base their art on the forms of nature, afraid of losing the foundation on which the savage and the academy have based their art.
To reproduce beloved objects and little corners of nature is just like a thief being enraptured by his legs in irons.
Only dull and impotent artists screen their work with sincerity.
In art there is a need for truth, not sincerity.
Things have disappeared like smoke; to gain the new artistic culture, art approaches creation as an end in itself and domination over the forms of nature.
Black Square (1915)
K. Malevich
The masters of Rome and Greece, once they had attained a knowledge of man's anatomy and produced an image which was to a certain extent real: were knocked down by aesthetic sense, and their realism was pomaded and powdered by aesthetic taste.
Whence trueness of line and the prettiness of paint.
Aesthetic taste diverted them from the realism of the world, and they entered the blind alley of idealism.
Their painting is a means of ornamenting a picture.
Their knowledge was taken from nature into closed workshops, where pictures were manufactured for many centuries.
This is why their art was cut short.
They shut the doors behind them and so destroyed their contact with nature.
And that moment when the idealisation of form took hold of them should be considered the downfall of real art.
For art should not proceed towards reduction, or simplification, but towards complexity.
The Venus de Milo is a graphic example of decline. It is not a real woman, but a parody.
Angelo's David is a monstrosity:
His head and torso are as if carved from two contradictory forms.
A fantastic head and real torso.
In copying or tracing the forms of nature we have fed our consciousness with a false understanding of art.
The work of the Primitives has been taken for creation.
That of the Classics - also creation.
Standing one and the same glass twenty times on a table is creation, too.
Art, as the ability to reproduce what is seen on canvas, was called creation.
Is placing a samovar on the table really also creation?
I think quite differently.
The transferring of real objects onto canvas is the art of skillful reproduction, and only that.
And between the art of creating and the art of copying there is a great difference.
Creating means living, eternally creating newer and newer forms.
And however much we distribute furniture about rooms, we do not enlarge them or give them a new form.
And however many moon-lit landscapes the artist paints, however many grazing cows and sunsets, they remain the same cows and the same sunsets. Only their appearance is much worse.
And still the greatness of the artist is determined by the number of cows he paints.
The artist can be a creator only when the forms in his picture have nothing in common with nature.
For art is the ability to construct, not on the interrelation of form and colour, and not on an aesthetic basis of beauty in composition, but on the basis of weight, speed and the direction of movement.
Forms must be given life and the right to individual existence.
Nature is a living picture and we may admire her. We are the living heart of nature.
We are the most valuable construction in this gigantic, living picture.
We are the living brain which magnifies her life.
To imitate her is theft, and her imitator is a thief; a nonentity who cannot give, but loves to take things and pass them off as his own.
Counterfeits.
An artist is under the obligation to be a free creator, but not a freebooter.
An artist is given talent in order that he may give to life his share of creation and increase the flow of life. Only in absolute creation will he acquire his right.
And this is possible when we free all our art from vulgar subject-matter and teach our consciousness to see everything in nature not as real forms and objects, but as material masses from which forms must be made, which have nothing in common with nature.
Thus the habit of seeing Madonnas and Venuses in pictures, with fat, playful cupids, will disappear.
Colour and texture in painting are ends in themselves.
They are the essence of painting, but this essence has always been destroyed by the subject.
And if the masters of the Renaissance had discovered the surface of painting, it would have been much more exalted and valuable than any Madonna or Giaconda.
And any carved-out pentagon or hexagon would have been a greater work of sculpture than the Venus de Milo or David.
Quadrilateral and the Circle (1915)
K. Malevich
The intuitive, it seems to me, should reveal itself in forms which are unconscious and without response.
I consider that it was necessary to understand the intuitive in art as the aim of our selective feeling towards objects.
And it followed a purely conscious path, decisively forcing its way through the artist.
It appears as two levels of consciousness fighting between themselves.
But the consciousness, accustomed to the training of utilitarian reason, could not accord with the sense which led to the destruction of the world of objects.
The artist did not understand this aim, and, submitting to this sense, betrayed reason and disfigured the form.
Creation by utilitarian reason has a specific purpose.
But intuitive creation has no utilitarian purpose. Until now we have had no such manifestation of Intuition in art.
In art all pictures emerge from creative forms of a utilitarian order.
All the naturalists' pictures have the same form as in nature.
The intuitive form should emerge from nothing.
In the same way that Reason, which creates things for everyday life, takes them from nothing and perfects them.
Thus the forms of utilitarian reason are superior to any images in pictures.
They are already superior, because they are living and have come from material which has been given a new form for the new life.
Here is the Divinity ordering crystals to assume another form of existence.
Here is a miracle…
There should be a miracle also in the creation of art.
But the realists, transferring living things onto the canvas, deprive their life of movement.
And our academies are institutes of dead, not living art.
Until now intuitive feeling has been prescribed to drag newer and newer forms into our world from some kind of bottomless depths.
But there has been no proof of this in art, although there should be.
And I feel that it already exists in a real form and quite consciously.
The artist should now know what, and why, things happen in his pictures.
Formerly he lived by some kind of mood. He awaited the rising of the moon, twilight, put green shades on his lamps, and this all attuned his mood like a violin.
But when asked why this face was crooked, or green, he could not give an exact answer.
"I want it so, I like it like that … "
In the end this desire was ascribed to intuitive will.
Consequently the intuitive feeling did not speak clearly. And in that case, its condition was not only subconscious, but totally unconscious.
Paintings were a tangle of these concepts. The picture was half real, half deformed.
White on White (1917-18)
K. Malevich
The efforts of the artistic authorities to direct art along the road of common-sense reduced creation to nil.
And with the strongest people real form is distortion.
Distortion was driven by the strongest to the moment of vanishing, but it did not overstep the bounds of nothing.
But 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.
Suprematism is the beginning of a new culture: the savage is conquered like an ape.
There is no more love of little corners, there is no more love for
which the truth of art was betrayed.
The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason.
It is the face of the new art.
The square is a living, royal infant.
It is the first step of pure creation in art. Before it, there were naive deformities and copies of nature.
The new realism in painting is very much realism in painting, for it contains no realism of mountains, sky, water …
Until now there was realism of objects, but not of painted units of colour, which are constructed so that they depend neither on form, nor on colour, nor on their position relative to each other.
Each form is free and individual.
Each form is a world.
Any painting surface is more alive than any face from which a pair of eyes and a grin jut out.
A face painted in a picture gives a pitiful parody of life, and this allusion is only a reminder of the living.
But a surface lives, it has been born. The grave reminds us of a dead person, a picture of a living one.
Or on the contrary, a living face, a landscape in nature, reminds us of a picture, i. e. of something dead.
This is why it is strange to look at a red or black painted surface.
This is why they snigger and spit at the exhibitions of new movements.
Art and its new aims were always a spittoon.
But cats grow accustomed to a place and it is difficult to train them to a new one.
For such people art is absolutely unnecessary. As long as there are pictures of their grandmother and their favourite little corners of lilac groves.
Suprematism (c. 1920)
K. Malevich
The instrument of torture is idealism and the demands of aesthetic feeling.
The idealisation of the form of man is the mortification of much living sinew.
Aestheticism is the garbage of intuitive feeling.
You want to see pieces of living nature on the hooks of your walls.
Just as Nero admired the torn bodies of people and animals from the zoological garden.
I say to all: reject love, reject aestheticism, reject the trunks of wisdom, for in the new culture your wisdom is laughable and insignificant.
I have untied the knots of wisdom and set free the consciousness of colour!
Remove from yourselves quickly the hardened skin of centuries, so that you may catch us up the more easily.
I have overcome the impossible and formed gulfs with my breathing.
You are in the nets of the horizon, like fish!
We, Suprematists, throw open the way to you.
Hurry!
-- For tomorrow you will not recognize us.
titsay
