Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack – Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension
KAZIMIR MALEVICH
KAZIMIR MALEVICH, 1915
A world in turmoil and Malevich answers with two squares. Decades before Mondrian reduced modern art to geometry, the Russian Suprematists were liberating art from reality. The Suprematists above all were interested in feeling. The war was raging, Russia was in a period of immense change, and daily reality seemed an unappealing and tenuous construct. So they looked to emotion, unchained from anything else. Despite the tongue-in-cheek title, Malevich’s Black and Red Square is art in its barest form. There are no distractions, no memories, no allusions, there is only form and shape, and emotion. Not prescribed emotion, but engendered feeling. Malevich gives you almost nothing, and when you have nothing, the only option is to feel something.