Malevich: Peasant Woman with Buckets and Child, 1912

Malevich: Peasant Woman with Buckets, 1912	Leger: The Stairway, 1913

Malevich: Taking in the Rye, 1912	Malevich: Knife Grinder, 1912-13

Challenging the "Logic" of Cubism: alogic; zaum

Malevich: Cow and Violin (oil on wood, 1913)

In this work, Malevich juxtaposed a violin, presented in the language of synthetic cubism, against a realistic violin and a realistic cow.  Malevich wrote of this work that "the above picture represents a moment of struggle through the confrontation of two forms: that of the cow and that of the violin in a cubist construction.  Logic has always placed a barrier against new subconscious movements.  The 'Alogical' movement has been created to free it [logic and art] from preconceptions."  In other words, we should read this painting as a commentary on cubism's willingness to violate form but its reluctance to violate traditional content.

Malevich's use of the term "alogic" related to Russian futurist poetry, called "zaum," which concerned the goal of freeing words from constraints imposed by the need to mean something.  Both the idea of the zaum and Malevich's alogic were influenced by Uspensky's ideas about transcending three-dimensional reality.  As Uspensky had written, three-dimensional reality is governed by logic.  Therefore, in order to reach higher realities, one had to abandon logic, and art was the path for doing this.
 

Malevich: Woman at a Kiosk (oil and collage, 1914)

In the Woman at a Kiosk, Malevich begins to give us elements and essences: the letters alluding to the posters and signs which would be placed on a kiosk and the pink rectangle becoming the representational essence of a woman.
 

Malevich: An Englishman in Moscow, 1914 (oil on canvas)	Malevich: Aviator, 1914 (oil/canvas)

Without reviewing the more detailed analysis of the symbols in the above paintings, we can note that central to both were references to symbols of the past and of the future, or more specifically, of the "old" human and the new.  We should also note that in both paintings, we can make out the figure and other recognizable objects.  Since these were done in the same year as the Woman at the Kiosk (and other similar collages), we have a visual clue that for Malevich, the figure may not have left the painting, even when it is replaced by a rectangular essence.

View of the 0.10 exhibition, the suprematist section with the Black Square directly in the corner, 1915	Malevich: costume design for the pall bearer, Victory over the Sun (1913)

By 1915, Malevich was ready to assert the supremacy of the picture plane.  He wrote: "Any painting surface is more alive than any face from which a pair of eyes and grin jut out.  A face painted in a picture gives a pitiful parody of life, and this illusion is only a reminder of the living.  But a surface lives, it has been born.  .... The square is a living royal infant." The black square in this sense must be understood as a celebration of creation.  It is also, in its allusion to the production of Victory over the Sun (the play for which he first painted a black square as a symbol of the eclipse), a celebration of the triumph of the future.  In the Victory over the Sun, the sun stood for logic and dependence on nature, and by implication, an attachment to the past and the present.  The eclipse signified the victory of the future.
 

Malevich: Pictorial Realism (Boy with Knapsack), 1915	Malevich: Suprematist Painting, 1917-18
Malevich: Suprematist Painting, 1917-18	Malevich: Supremus No. 50, 1915

Malevich’s suprematism consisted of three phases.  He referred to the first, the black phase, as the “economic” phase, by which he meant the idea of synthesizing many truths into a single new idea.  The red or second phase had to do with the revolution, while the white phase, the third, corresponded to the idea of purity of action.  Although this might suggest that Malevich eliminated all other color from his paintings, he did not.  But what was color for him?  It isn’t structure, it isn’t nature, it isn’t form, it isn’t a path to the spiritual.  It is
something which exists and in that existence, it is essentially an absence or a void.

What we seem to end up with in Malevich is a complete rejection of primitivism, of reality, of any style that retains vestiges of nature.  He wrote: "Objects have vanished like smoke; to attain the new artistic culture, art advances toward creation as an end in itself and toward domination over the forms of nature."  By rejecting everything that has previously existed in art, by starting with the "zero" of form, only then would it be possible to create.  Yet, Malevich’s zero of form is not a zero without content or origins; the essentially invisible synthesis of the primitive and the spirituality of the zero is based on the belief that in the 4th dimension everything meets and becomes its opposite.  But the phrase "creation as an edn in itself" is intriguing.  Is he referring to artistic creation as something which should be valued as a pure creative act without any reference to the real world?  Or is he referring to creation as a more spiritual act, something which art can lead to only by becoming less materialistic and less representational?
 

Malevich: Head of a Peasant, 1928, oil on plywood

This painting, characteristic of his last period of work, looks enough like photographs of him (and his painted self-portrait) to be considered another self-portrait.  But how should we respond to this return of what seems to be figural representation?  Is it a regressive response to the increasing pressure for socialist realist compositions?  Is it a reflection of the anguish of the artist who has been increasingly harassed by the soviet government and eventually dies, probably in part from starvation, in 1935?  Or is it a triumphal vision which unites the unseen presence of the spectator with the suprematist planes of color?  If we can be bold enough to accept the last possibility, it would suggest that all along Malevich was engaged in a dialectical argument in his work and that the idea of the 4th dimension was an idea which held out the utopian possibility of resolving the dialectic.