Kyiv has remained marvelous in my memory. The houses built of colored brick, the hilly landscape, the Dnipro, the distant horizons, the steamboats. Its life influenced me more and more. Peasant women rowed across the Dnipro in small boats, bringing butter, milk, and sour cream, filling the banks and streets of Kyiv and giving the city its distinctive character.
It is impossible to understand the phenomenon of Malevych the artist, Malevych the theorist, and Malevych the thinker outside the Ukrainian context. Kazymyr Severynovych Malevych (1879–1935) was born in Kyiv, on Zhylianska Street. He was baptized in St. Oleksander’s Church, where, incidentally, Taras Shevchenko went to worship. Until the age of 18, he lived in various Ukrainian villages: his father was a sugar production engineer, so the family moved around a lot. It was during that time that Malevych began to draw.
He had 2 native languages: he spoke Polish at home, and Ukrainian outside. He learned Russian later, but until the end of his life he continued to use countless distorted Ukrainian and Polish words. Malevych studied at Mykola Murashko’s Kyiv Drawing School, which was funded by the philanthropist, Ivan Tereshchenko. There, he was taught by the renowned painter Mykola Pymonenko, whose painting Hopak was acquired by the Louvre.
Malevych also came to Kyiv to teach after moving to Leningrad: from 1929 to 1930 he was a professor at the Kyiv Art Institute, teaching alongside Fedir Krychevsky, Mykhailo Boichuk, Oleksandr Bohomazov, and Viktor Palmov. His last solo exhibition was also held in Kyiv, at the Kyiv Art Gallery, where Black Square was on display, among other works.
Malevych regularly called himself a Ukrainian — both in his diaries and in the arrest records of the NKVD. Moreover, he was perhaps the only contemporary artist to respond to collectivization and the Holodomor with his work. His painting Peasant Between a Cross and a Sword (also known as Running Man), along with nearly the entire “peasant” cycle of the late 1920s–early 1930s, best proves this.
Peasants mattered to him enormously: it was among them that he first practiced art, helping decorate woodburning ovens. It is believed that his key artistic innovation — Suprematism (geometric painting) — also has roots in folk art: the abstractions of Suprematism draw on traditional Ukrainian non-figurative ornamentation.
As an avant-garde artist and Suprematist, Malevych created universal, transnational art. Yet the roots of this art grew in Ukraine.
At Ukraine WOW we invite you to look at Suprematist Composition, painted by Malevych in 1916. 102 years later, this work was sold at Christie’s in New York for $85,000,000.
