39 Facts About Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Malevich was born in Kiev, modern-day Ukraine, to an ethnic Polish family.

Active primarily in Russia, Malevich was a founder of the artists collective UNOVIS and his work has been variously associated with the Russian avant-garde and the Ukrainian avant-garde, and he was a central figure in the history of modern art in Central and Eastern Europe more broadly.

Early on, Kazimir Malevich worked in a variety of styles, quickly assimilating the movements of Impressionism, Symbolism and Fauvism and, after visiting Paris in 1912, Cubism.

Kazimir Malevich held several prominent teaching positions and received a solo show at the Sixteenth State Exhibition in Moscow in 1919.

Kazimir Malevich's recognition spread to the West with solo exhibitions in Warsaw and Berlin in 1927.

Kazimir Malevich soon lost his teaching position, artworks and manuscripts were confiscated, and he was banned from making art.

Kazimir Malevich was celebrated posthumously in major exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which has a large collection of his work.

Kazimir Malevich was born in 1879 Kazimierz Malewicz to a Polish family, who settled near Kiev in Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire during the partitions of Poland.

Kazimir Malevich was the first of fourteen children, only nine of whom survived into adulthood.

Kazimir Malevich's family moved often and he spent most of his childhood in the villages of modern-day Ukraine, amidst sugar-beet plantations, far from centers of culture.

Kazimir Malevich delighted in peasant embroidery, and in decorated walls and stoves.

Kazimir Malevich was able to paint in the peasant style.

Kazimir Malevich studied drawing in Kiev from 1895 to 1896.

From 1896 to 1904, Kazimir Malevich lived in Kursk, where he encountered several Russian artists, including Lev Kvachevsky, with whom he often worked outdoors.

Kazimir Malevich described himself as painting in a "Cubo-Futurist" style in 1912.

In March 1913, Kazimir Malevich participated in the Target exhibition in Moscow together with Goncharova and Larionov, continuing to reinterpret Futurist vocabularies to "suggest movement by breaking cone shapes into almost unrecognizable forms".

In 1914, Kazimir Malevich exhibited his works in the Salon des Independants in Paris together with Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay, Aleksandra Ekster, and Vadim Meller, among others.

Kazimir Malevich conceived the advertisement and design of the perfume bottle with craquelure of an iceberg and a polar bear on the top, which lasted through the mid-1920s.

In 1915, Kazimir Malevich laid down the foundations of Suprematism when he published his manifesto, From Cubism to Suprematism.

Kazimir Malevich exhibited his first Black Square, now at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, at the Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in Petrograd in 1915.

In 1918, Kazimir Malevich decorated a play, Mystery-Bouffe, by Vladimir Mayakovskiy produced by Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Kazimir Malevich was interested in aerial photography and aviation, which led him to abstractions inspired by or derived from aerial landscapes.

Kazimir Malevich taught at the Vitebsk Practical Art School in Belarus alongside Marc Chagall, the Leningrad Academy of Arts, the Kiev Art Institute, and the House of the Arts in Leningrad.

Kazimir Malevich wrote the book The World as Non-Objectivity, which was published in Munich in 1926 and translated into English in 1959.

In 1927, Kazimir Malevich traveled to Warsaw where he exhibited his work at the Polish Arts Club housed in the Polonia Hotel.

Kazimir Malevich arranged to leave most of the paintings behind when he returned to the Soviet Union.

Kazimir Malevich responded that art can advance and develop for art's sake alone, saying that "art does not need us, and it never did".

When Kazimir Malevich died of cancer at the age of fifty-seven, in Leningrad on 15 May 1935, his friends and disciples buried his ashes in a grave marked with a black square.

On his deathbed, Kazimir Malevich had been exhibited with the Black Square above him, and mourners at his funeral rally were permitted to wave a banner bearing a black square.

Kazimir Malevich had asked to be buried under an oak tree on the outskirts of Nemchinovka, a place to which he felt a special bond.

Kazimir Malevich's ashes were sent to Nemchinovka, and buried in a field near his dacha.

Kazimir Malevich's family was one of the millions of Poles who lived within the Russian Empire following the Partitions of Poland.

However, the consensus among art historians, including those of Ukrainian origin, is that whereas the discussion clearly needs to take place among all involved parties, it has not yet occurred, and the question concerning the identity of Kazimir Malevich has not been solved as of 2023.

In 1989, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam held the West's first large-scale Kazimir Malevich retrospective, including the paintings they owned and works from the collection of Russian art critic Nikolai Khardzhiev.

Kazimir Malevich's works are held in several major art museums, including the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and in New York, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum.

Kazimir Malevich's life inspires many references featuring events and the paintings as players.

The smuggling of Kazimir Malevich paintings out of Russia is a key to the plot line of writer Martin Cruz Smith's thriller Red Square.

Kazimir Malevich's work is featured prominently in the Lars von Trier film, Melancholia.

In 2015, a local businessman in Konotop, Sumy Oblast, Ukraine commissioned Yurii Vedmid to create a monument of Kazimir Malevich, who lived there from 1894 to 1895.