KAZIMIR MALEVICH: inside the black square
Kazimir Malevich in front of his paintings at the Museum of Artistic Culture. Petrograd, 1924 / wikipedia.org
He ignored the simple pencil, and his first brushes were pharmacy ones used for throat treatments during diphtheria. He introduced Suprematism into painting (colored geometric shapes connected without any logic), faceted glass, and «paint layering». Almost every work features jagged strokes, crosses, ovals, and circles, with an emphasis on color and form.
Kazimir Malevich (February 23, 1879 — May 15, 1935) loved Ukrainian cuisine, especially borscht with beans and cherry dumplings. He spoke Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. He created paintings that are now valued at tens of millions of dollars, including «Black Square», worth four hundred and fifty million. In his leisure time, he would hum «Hude víter vélmi v polí», singing it in a bass voice.
KONOTOP DEBUT
In Konotop, as always, the air was thick with the scent of lard and garlic. At the markets, plump women selling lard clustered together, offering round headcheese, ham, blood sausage, and grain sausage. Kazik would buy a small piece of sausage and dried fish (two kopecks each). He picked the largest fish, with a fatty backbone and roe.
While his father, an engineer and sugar refining specialist, was busy at the factories, and his mother took care of the household and fourteen children, Kazimir wandered with friends, copied illustrations from the magazine Neva, and absorbed the landscapes around him.
Konotop had two significant problems: in the fall, thick, sticky mud would spread everywhere, and in the summer, fine, powdery dust would rise. Whenever a man on a wagon passed by, the dust would cover the driver, his horse, and the roofs of nearby houses. The main street was called Nevsky Prospect, where pigs and their piglets often rested.
Kazik painted Moonlit Night in Konotop. The canvas depicted twilight, a sad river, and a boat tied to the shore. Friends secretly took the painting to a stationery store on Nevsky, and soon, the little boat appeared in the shop window. Passersby looked at it with interest and evaluated it while Kazik stood nearby, terribly nervous.
He worried that someone would recognize him as the artist. A week later, Moonlit Night was sold for five rubles (enough to buy a ring of sausage every day), and the shop owner asked him to paint another «night», but with a windmill. The young artist then painted a grove with storks, which was also quickly sold.
Kazik’s father, Severyn, refused to hear anything about a career in art. He believed that, sooner or later, all artists ended up in prison. Therefore, Kazik was expected to finish agricultural school and make something of himself. Yet Kazik didn’t give up on his dream and begged his father to write to the Moscow School of Painting. Severyn pretended to take the letter to the post office but instead put it away. Months later, he faked a response, claiming there were no available spots.
Kazik lived in Ukraine until adulthood and was deeply moved by its splendor. He watched the brightly dressed girls weeding beets, the bride and her bridesmaids adorned with colorful ribbons. He saw Kyiv when his father took him to the contract fair. There, he was struck by a special painting depicting a woman peeling potatoes, with a pot and peelings curling like ribbons beside her.
The city itself was enchanting: tall brick buildings, the ancient Dnipro River, pale steamships. Peasant women crossed the wide river in boats, bringing butter, milk, and sour cream. They lined up in rows, adding a unique vibrancy to the scene.
Kazik lived a rural life. He often rubbed a crust of bread with garlic and ran barefoot, leaving his shoes at home. Between sugar and honey, he always chose honey. Together with the peasants, he decorated stoves, skillfully drawing grasshoppers and violets. He delighted in his mother’s gift: a paint box containing fifty-four colors, including emerald, green, and ochre…
KURSK — LEFORTOVO — MESHCHERSKOYE
Soon, the family moved once again, this time to Kursk. There, the eighteen-year-old Kazimir got a job as a draftsman at the Moscow-Kursk Railway Administration and joined an art circle. Every morning, the young painters went out to do studies, no matter the season — winter, autumn, or summer. On the way, they argued about everything imaginable and fondly remembered Ukraine.
Lunch consisted of a pound of lard, a head of garlic, smoked brisket, and French rolls. To whet the appetite — a flask of homemade liquor. For dessert — a jug of baked milk, which was tastier than any doughnuts or marzipan.
He married Kazimira Zgleits (his fiancée shared his name) in January 1902 at the Church of the Assumption. The couple already had a child, a boy named Anatoliy, and the bride was pregnant with their second child, Georgiy, who was born in June of that year. Life was tough. With two small children, no money, and the burden of daily chores, Kazimir’s wife had her hands full. Meanwhile, her husband wandered around with paintbrushes instead of earning a living.
For some reason, his paintings — depicting flimsy fences with pillowcases and bolsters — seemed more important to him than Tolik’s first tooth. The woman was torn between cooking, peeling potatoes, doing laundry, and dealing with children’s cries while her husband kept on painting.
Two years later, Kazimir went to Moscow, where he continued to burn through paint, depicting women smelling of ripe rye, slender birch groves, and a church hidden under drifting snow.
That’s how they lived: sometimes together, sometimes apart. In 1905, their daughter Galya was born, and Malevich moved to a commune in Lefortovo. There, the artists painted, idled, and collected money for soup bones. The butcher always asked, «Is this for dogs or for people?»
The separation lasted for six months. During that time, Kazimira became convinced that their marriage had been a mistake. Despite having children, her husband continued to paint yellow houses and naked women with triangles covering their private parts. So, she gathered the children and left, traveling far away to the village of Meshcherskoye, near Linden alleys, old estates, and a psychiatric hospital.
Nearly five hundred kilometers now separated the former couple. Kazimira found work as a paramedic at the psychiatric hospital and fell in love with a doctor. In time, the lovers decided they were more needed in Ukraine, where an epidemic of either smallpox or cholera was raging. So, Kazimira left the children with the hospital manager’s daughter and set off to save the world.
THE ONE WHO WOVE NETS
Soon, Kazimir Malevich arrived in Meshcherskoye to be closer to his children and took a liking to twenty-year-old Sofia Rafalovich. She was a girl with wavy, unruly hair, large, inquisitive eyes, and perfect proportions. She cared for eight-year-old Tolik, seven-year-old Georgiy, and four-year-old Galya. She treated their colds and cooked borscht with zucchini, apples, and beans. She mended their clothes, sang lullabies, and made up fairy tales. The avant-garde artist was drawn to her femininity and proposed, and Sofia gladly accepted.
The young wife devoted herself entirely to the large family. While her beloved painted a burly gardener with bear-like paws and peasant women in full, bell-shaped skirts carrying buckets of water, she wove string bags and sold them at the market. She also wrote children’s stories, which even got published.
Sofia supported her husband in every way so he could peacefully depict harvesters, woodcutters, reapers, gravediggers, cowards, declaimers, athletes, travelers, seamstresses, and wrongdoers. Strong and vivid people. And, of course, the incomprehensible black square, the cross, and the circle. The lady at the train station is lost among schedules, tracks, stairs, clocks, and the sounds of steam whistles.
Thus, Malevich delved even deeper into Suprematism. He scattered red and blue rectangles on paper or perhaps into the void. He focused on abstract concepts, as well as color, shape, texture, and movement.
He participated in exhibitions like «Jack of Diamonds» and «Donkey’s Tail». He gave lectures, developed fabric prints, and designed Suprematist dresses that required matching Suprematist hairstyles. For this, hair was to be parted in two, one side dyed green, the other white.
Joy alternated with sorrow. At fifteen, Anatoliy died of typhus, and Kazimir’s works grew darker. Three years later, in the eleventh year of their marriage, Sofia gave birth to a daughter, Una, but the young mother didn’t get to enjoy her firstborn for long. Five years later, she passed away from tuberculosis.
A CHANCE THAT FILLED LIFE WITH MEANING
Kazimir Malevich found solace from despair in a new love with Natalia Manchenko despite a twenty-three-year age difference. The year was 1927, the decade of the October Revolution, the beginning of collectivization, the construction of the DniproHES, and the launch of the first five-year plan.
The artist felt happy and whole. He taught, visited several European countries, and participated in major exhibitions. He moved with his family to Kyiv, where he lectured at the Art Institute, wrote articles, and completed the painting Sviatoshyn. As always, he stood out with his vibrant and explosive character, along with his remarkable charisma.
He could ignite any group with his energy. He loved his Natalia passionately, wrote her romantic letters, and signed them as he had in his youth, «Kazik». He would emphasize: «I kiss you tightly, but I fear the bone might crack». Friends did not accept his new love; one was called Natalia a hen and the other was a mere coincidence, yet the couple felt happy and spent eight years together.
Natalia raised Una and supported Malevich during the hardest times: through the Stalinist terror and his suffering from cancer.
WHERE THERE’S A SICKLE AND HAMMER, THERE’S DEATH AND HUNGER
The clouds over Malevich gathered quickly. Comrade Stalin did not understand the avant-garde and demanded clear, comprehensible painting instead of a jumble of cubes, crosses, red silhouettes, and white house-gravestones. Furthermore, the founder of Suprematism dared to depict starving, armless figures with coffin-like features instead of brows and cheekbones.
He provocatively signed it: «Where there’s a sickle and hammer, there’s death and hunger». From that moment, arrests and repressions began. The artist was accused of espionage (his success abroad was unforgivable), and when filling out forms, he stubbornly wrote «Ukrainian» under nationality. Behind bars, he suffered from human rights abuses, including the humiliation of public defecation. He became deeply disillusioned with Soviet authority.
His first imprisonment lasted only three months but left a profound impact. The Bolsheviks, seeking «valuable information», resorted to torture: injecting water into his urinary canal, causing severe inflammation that later complicated into prostate cancer. Malevich’s new paintings acquired a tragic undertone.
Their works became infused with more red, likely symbolizing human blood. While pre-revolutionary peasants appeared sinewy and strong, the current figures had flat torsos, devoid of hair, eyes, and noses, yet remained resilient in spirit. Most were set against blue and yellow backgrounds or striped fields.
During his second imprisonment, Malevich developed the idea of faceted glass, having noticed behind bars how fragile the glassware was, often shattering in his hands. Upon his release, he shared the concept with sculptor Vera Mukhina, who brought it to production.
His final year was incredibly difficult. Kazimir could no longer get out of bed, grew a beard, and began referring to himself as Karl Marx. His hands trembled, and he leaned on a billiard cue for support. He lived in poverty, received no pension, and wrote his autobiography. He even drafted his burial plan and coffin design (requesting to be laid with outstretched arms).
On his grave, he wished for a tall column topped with a telescope so that passersby could gaze at Jupiter, the largest planet in the galaxy…
