Kasimir Malevich, 1878-1935

Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne
Galerie Piltzer, Paris
Edelman Arts Inc., New York

Cologne, Galerie Gmurzynska, Malevich Suetin Chashnik , 1992

Galerie Gmurzynska, Malevich Sueten Chashnik, 1992, no.28. p.76, Ill. in colour
Andrei B.Nakov, Kazimir Malewich Catalogue Raisonné, Paris 2002, No.S-647-a, p.329, Ill.

The paper is a little undulated and slightly discoloured, with a crease running vertically down the centre. There are repaired losses to the lower left corner, top left of the upper horizontal edge and centre of the lower horizontal edge - i.e. at the base of the crease. There are minor tears to the edges and some light wear. There are a few spots of media staining in places. Held in a simple modern frame and under glass. Unexamined out of frame.
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After the mid-1920s Kasimir Malevich wanted to demonstrate the power of Suprematism to create new, vital space. His architectural projects, 'architectony', were archetypes of the Suprematist order: a new, all-encompassing style analogous to the artist's notion of contemporary society. It should be noted that Malevich had already introduced 'Suprematist ornaments', as he called his non-objective fresco compositions, into his 'architectony'.

Malevich's architectural projects were impossible to realise under the prevailing socio-political conditions of Soviet Russia. For that reason, the artist took his commission for the Krasny Theatre in early 1931 as an opportunity to confirm the influence of geometric non-objectivity in creating a new tone in public buildings.

He received the commission at a difficult time. Arrested in the autumn of 1930, he had spent more than two months in custody. His time in prison seriously affected his health, but not his creative spirit, as his Suprematist sketches for the Krasny Theatre murals clearly demonstrate.

The theatre, which had been a Narodny dom until the Revolution, was a building in the eclectic style from the end of the 19^th Century. Malevich was faced with the difficult task of transforming its interior with the aid of 'Suprematist ornaments'.

This sketch was for the ceiling of the Krasny Theatre. It is clear that the overlapping rectilinear forms were to be arranged on the ceiling in a whimsical configuration. The individual vaulted segments are drawn in faint pencil lines, which explain the symmetrical arrangement of the 'Suprematist ornaments'. This is uncharacteristic of Malevich, but he uses the regular, stable composition to increase the predominance of the frescoes over the curved surface.

This sketch has great artistic worth in its own right. The large-scale composition preserves Malevich's sweeping, freehand brush strokes; one assumes the fresco itself would have had more precise lines. We should not forget that Malevich had usurped the word "red" from the Bolshevik ideologues long before the 1917 revolution, and assigned to it his own meaning: for him, energetic red was filled with power. Three colours - black, red and white - corresponded to Malevich's theory of three levels of Suprematist development, emphasised by him in Black Square and Red Square (both 1915) and White Square (1918). The colour scheme of the geometric composition for the Krasny Theatre was linked to the artist's personal semiotics of colour, rather than to any coincidental, political connotations.

Malevich has combined dynamism, expressed in the freely painted features of right-angled elements, and the stillness characteristic of symmetrical structures into a virtuosic equilibrium. His representative project for the ceiling of the Krasny Theatre is full of harmony of shape and depth of symbolic shades of meaning.

We are grateful to Alexandra Shatskikh for providing this note.