When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed: 'Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert .... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!'

Kazimir Malevich

Categorized in : White Squares Black

With the most primitive means the artist creates something which the most ingenious and efficient technology will never be able to create.

Kazimir Malevich

creativity mean art

Only dull and impotent artists screen their work with sincerity. In art there is need for truth, not sincerity.

Kazimir Malevich

dull art needs

Man's skull represents the same infinity for the movement of conceptions. It is equal to the universe, for in it is contained all that sees in it.

Kazimir Malevich

skulls infinity men

Color is the essence of painting, which the subject always killed.

Kazimir Malevich

painting color essence

I have broken the blue boundary of color limits, come out into the white; beside me comrade-pilots swim in this infinity.

Kazimir Malevich

color white blue

To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.

Kazimir Malevich

significant-things feelings world

The square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling.

Kazimir Malevich

squares white feelings

I perceived that the 'thing' and the 'idea' were taken to be equivalents of feeling, and understood the lie of the world of will and idea. Is the milk bottle the symbol of milk?

Kazimir Malevich

taken lying ideas

When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square... the critics... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert"... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling.

Kazimir Malevich

objectivity squares art

In art there is a need for truth, not sincerity.

Kazimir Malevich

sincerity art needs

The appearances of natural objects are in themselves meaningless; the essential thing is feeling - in itself and completely independent of the context in which it has been evoked.

Kazimir Malevich

independent essentials feelings

By suprematism I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art.

Kazimir Malevich

creative mean art

Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal.

Kazimir Malevich

painting goal sides

Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes... has disappeared, shall we see a pure painting composition.

Kazimir Malevich

shameless painting consciousness

Shouldn't it give us pause that the oldest works of art are as impressive today in their beauty and spontaneity as they were many thousands of years ago?

Kazimir Malevich

giving years art

There is movement and movement. There are movements of small tension and movements of great tension and there is also a movement which our eyes cannot catch although it can be felt. In art this state is called dynamic movement.

Kazimir Malevich

movement eye art

Everywhere there is craft and technique; everywhere there is artistry and form. Art itself, technique, is ponderous and clumsy, and because of its awkwardness it obstructs that inner element.

Kazimir Malevich

elements technique art

Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.

Kazimir Malevich

zoologist anecdotes creative

The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. The face of the new art. The square is a living, regal infant. The first step of pure creation in art.

Kazimir Malevich

squares faces art

I have established the semaphore of Suprematism. I have beaten the lining of the colored sky, torn it away and in the sack that formed itself, I have put color and knotted it. Swim! The free white sea, infinity, lies before you.

Kazimir Malevich

color sea lying