Origin and Family of Malevich

Kazimir Malevich’s paternal ancestors belonged to the Polish nobility (szlachta) who moved to Ukraine approximately three centuries before his birth, i.e., in the 16th century. They lived in the town of Turbiv, in what is now the Vinnytsia region, and engaged in various professions – including military service and the clergy. They were middle-ranking nobles, possessing a family coat of arms and a family estate.

Almost nothing is known about his mother. We know that before marriage, she was of the Galynovsky family – also a Polish surname. And we know she came from the Kyiv district. But no other information about her origin survives.

His parents married a year before Kazimir was born. They were wed in the Church of St. Alexander – the church overlooking European Square in Kyiv, which is still functioning today. Records of their wedding survive in this church. At that time, it was the only Roman Catholic church in Kyiv. Therefore, all Poles in Kyiv were married and had their children baptized there. Indeed, Kazimir Malevich was baptized in this church after his birth on February 23, 1879 (Old Style), corresponding to March 11.

The Malevich family did not live in Kyiv for long. The first 2–3 years of Kazimir’s life were spent in the city, after which the family began moving. At that time, at the end of the 19th century, the sugar industry “exploded” in Ukraine. Sugar factories began opening en masse across the country. Because these factories required skilled workers, many impoverished Polish nobles went to work at them. Malevich’s father also worked at these factories as an engineer, deputy director, or technologist. Since this work was seasonal – contracts were signed for one, two, or three seasons – the family had to move constantly. Malevich’s entire childhood was spent in various Ukrainian villages, immersed in folk art.

Within the Circle of Ukrainian Intellectuals: Malevich, Lesya Ukrainka, and the Drahomanovs

Kazimir Malevich was born at 63 Zhylianska Street. At the time, it was the newest street in Kyiv. For a long time, an incorrect address – 15 Bulion Street – appeared in the literature. Malevich never lived there. His house was discovered during work on the film “Malevich. Born in Ukraine.” Together with colleagues, we even reconstructed the exact location of this property. Unfortunately, nothing survives to this day except the site itself.

It is very interesting to realize where Malevich was born, where his family lived, where he grew up, to see what surrounded him, and who his neighbours were. I have a hobby: I try to find, and almost always do find, connections between Malevich and other important figures of Ukrainian culture. And it turned out that Malevich’s house was across the street from the house where the Kosach-Drahomanov family lived. Effectively, one could say that Malevich and Lesya Ukrainka were neighbours for some time.

Not only were they neighbours, but they were also connected by one degree of separation. When Malevich worked at the Kyiv Art Institute in the late 1920s, he was already a famous artist. One of his colleagues was Svitozar Drahomanov, the son of Mykhailo Drahomanov. Svitozar was an architect, art historian, and photographer. He and Malevich were colleagues, working at the same institute. Moreover, there is evidence that Drahomanov even photographed a Malevich exhibition for magazines.

We have documentary proof – a letter from Malevich to his friend, the artist Lev Kramarenko, in which Malevich asks Kramarenko to go to Drahomanov and ask him to do something. So we have confirmation that Malevich and Lesya Ukrainka’s cousin were acquainted and even worked together. Lesya Ukrainka loved Svitozar dearly, treated him like family, and they were quite close. Svitozar Drahomanov lived in Ukraine until World War II, after which he left. So effectively, he served as a link between Malevich and Lesya – if not directly in space, then across time.

There are other interesting facts. For example, Kazimir Malevich attended the Kyiv Drawing School of Mykola Murashko. At the time, this was the only secular, non-church, non-monastery school for art education. Around the same years, Lesya Ukrainka also took lessons at the Murashko School. So they might even have met in the same classroom on Volodymyrska Street.

Ukrainian Folk Art as the Basis of His Creative Work

Kazimir Malevich twice undertook to write his autobiography. The first time, he wrote a short fragment; the second time, he nearly completed a whole book. He did not finish it due to illness, which interrupted his work. The most interesting part of these memoirs for us is the artist’s Ukrainian childhood and youth. From these writings, we can understand who Malevich considered himself to be.

In his work, Malevich analyzed how he constructed his own self-image, who he was, and what Ukraine meant to him. He wrote that his first teachers of art were Ukrainian peasant women. Malevich admired them, considering their world to be ideal. In his view, the peasants lived in paradise, harmoniously interacting with nature, and everything they created was the best. This love influenced the formation of Malevich’s worldview. He observed how people painted and decorated their homes, how they dressed, and how they prepared food. This inspired him, and he began to imitate what he saw. Malevich’s first artistic attempts were imitations of the Ukrainian folk art he saw around him.

Art historians compare Malevich’s later works, particularly his Suprematist cycle, with Ukrainian folk art and find common features: geometricity; the use of open colours; the use of a white background as unfilled space; forms such as squares, circles, and crosses.

Oleksandra Ekster and Malevich: An Artistic Partnership that Merged the Avant-Garde with Folk Tradition

Malevich’s connection with Ukrainian folk art was not limited to his early childhood. Even after creating Suprematism and the “Black Square,” and proclaiming a new artistic reality, he returned again to collaboration with Ukrainian peasants, but now in a different role.

This collaboration materialized in a specific story. In the village of Verbivka in the Cherkasy region (Smila district), a landowner named Natalia Davydova (née Hudym-Levkovych), who came from an old Cossack family, opened an artisan cooperative (artil). This was a kind of “startup,” aimed at helping peasants in the period after the abolition of serfdom, when ways to adapt the economy to new conditions and implement reforms were being sought throughout the empire.

Artistic cooperatives were a response to the economic demands of the time and also reflected a fashion coming from abroad (the British experience of reviving traditional crafts on an industrial level). Traditional embroidery methods, patterns, and designs were reproduced within larger productions, bringing them back to life. The cooperative in Verbivka embodied these principles.

Natalia Davydova invited several dozen peasants (both men and women), as well as her friend, the artist Oleksandra Ekster, to become the artistic director of the cooperative. Oleksandra Ekster was an avant-garde artist. She was friends with Malevich, and it was she who invited him and other artists to create modern sketches that the embroiderers of Verbivka would then transfer onto various objects. These products were later exhibited in Kyiv and Europe.

Today we know for certain: before Malevich first showed the “Black Square” and Suprematism at an exhibition in St. Petersburg in December 1915, he created sketches for the Verbivka cooperative in the summer of that same year. Based on these sketches, the peasant women embroidered pillows, shawls, and other items. That is, the first people to see Suprematism and even reproduce it with their own hands were not the visitors to the St. Petersburg exhibition, but Ukrainian peasant women.

The "Black Square" – A New Dimension in World Art

“Black quadrilateral on a white background” is the more precise title of Malevich’s painting known as the “Black Square.” In fact, the artist depicted several black squares, and even visually it is noticeable that the shape is slightly “wobbly”: drawing without a ruler or auxiliary tools, the angles are not exactly 90 degrees. Therefore, he called the work “Black Quadrilateral on a White Background.”

I like the interpretation that this is the “most honest” painting in the world. It does not depict anything else – it is not a portrait, not a landscape, not a sign or a reflection of something that already existed. Everything before the “Black Square” can be defined by the category of mimetic art – a term from Aristotle meaning imitation. Aristotle argued that art essentially reflects nature, and that is its only function. The better it reproduces a portrait, landscape, historical events – anything real – the more valuable it was considered.

Malevich, however, insisted that this definition of art is wrong. By the time he lived, photography and the video camera had appeared, which capture reality better than any artist. So what then is the role of art? The artist argued that art must create new dimensions, interpret reality, but by no means copy it. That is why his work became a turning point in art history. Indeed, the “Black Square” became the manifesto of a new approach.

Kazimir Malevich showed that for art, a white canvas, colour, and form are sufficient. Through imagination and one’s own creative potential, one can create worlds unlike those that surround us. He freed art from the obligation to repeat what is seen and showed that with form and colour, something original can be created. Moreover, he initiated the idea of minimalist form, which later influenced art, design, and architecture. Malevich showed the beauty of simplicity and functionality, stripping art of superfluous decorations and excess.

For various reasons, Malevich often repainted the same works. The first work, created without proper technique, cracked. And this was not an artistic intent – he simply lacked money for canvas and paint, as well as time to wait for the primer to dry and the layers of paint to be applied correctly. Considering the work ruined, he created a new one. Another version, approximately from 1928–1929, was made for the artist’s last lifetime exhibition, which took place at the Kyiv Picture Gallery.

The “Black Square” has no price. It is a priceless painting – it has never been offered for sale and, I suspect, never will be. Unfortunately, all of the “Black Squares” are located in Russia. Only once was a notional value assigned to one of them – at the level of several million dollars, for which the state bought the work from a bank. But that was a symbolic sum.

If we look at actual works by Malevich from the same period, we can find an analogy: lesser-known, less significant works, but painted by the same artist at the same time, sell on the market for hundreds of millions of dollars (based on the last recorded sales). Malevich is one of the most expensive artists of the 20th century. And at the same time, one of the scarcest. His works appeared for sale from the 1990s to the end of the 2000s approximately once every few years. There were never many of his paintings on the market, and so they sold quickly. Therefore, today he is a scarce artist.

Return to Ukraine: A New Stage of Creativity

Malevich’s return to Ukraine as a specialist, teacher, and artist occurred in the late 1920s. This was a period when the persecution of avant-garde artists began in Russia. The aesthetic paradigm of the Soviet Union was shifting from revolutionary and avant-garde to conservative, with a return to the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki) and realism. To the Soviet Union as a new empire, revolutionary art seemed harmful and dangerous, because avant-garde art calls for overcoming obstacles and fighting for one’s rights. The empire, conservative and authoritarian, no longer granted the promised freedoms – the regime had found its feet and did not want anyone to rise against it.

The Significance of Malevich for Ukraine and the World

Malevich is one of the most controversial and mythologized figures. He is an artist who turned his entire life into an act of art – including his own death. He left a will specifying what should happen after him. The only thing he wanted was for all the basic elements of Suprematism – the black square, the cross, and the circle – to be depicted on his coffin. Since the cross was prohibited in the Soviet Union at that time (although Malevich’s cross had nothing to do with Christianity), its use was not allowed.

Although Malevich lived a short life, he left a huge legacy. The Arkhitektons – architectural models that Malevich, together with his students, developed in the 1920s. These were how they envisioned the cities of the future. Moreover, they believed that the people of the future would be so advanced that these cities would be located not even on Earth, but in space. Malevich called these models “aerocities” because he dreamed that people would break free from the Earth’s gravity, stop looking down at their feet, and become true inhabitants of the universe – every single one of them a creator.

Malevich inspired the architect Zaha Hadid, recognized as the most outstanding female architect of her time. There is a two-part film about her in which she confesses her admiration for Malevich and explains how everything she does stems from his philosophy and his teachings. She spent her entire life studying his work and considered him her greatest teacher.

Even modern QR codes – those are many little black squares, and the phone screen is an embodiment of Suprematist ideas: a simple geometric form that breaks down into a multitude of forms and colours.

Cultural Autonomy of Ukraine: How Art Was Preserved

Interestingly, in the period between 1924, when changes were already taking place in the Soviet Union and avant-garde artists had nowhere to work, Ukraine retained cultural autonomy. Why did this happen? Partly because “the hands did not reach” Ukraine, but also because the local art school already had its own tradition and institutional strength.

Founding of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts

The artists who worked at the start of the revolution gained strength, support, and were all known, loved, and respected. Some arrived from Munich, some from Paris, some from St. Petersburg. They all came together, although they had different views and were not even very friendly with each other. But they united for the sake of building an institution.

Thus, the Ukrainian Academy of Arts was created. This was a turning point in the history of Ukrainian art.

The Kyiv Art Institute – “The Eastern European Bauhaus”

When Soviet power arrived, it was afraid to touch the local art school, knowing that it would provoke a rebellion. Therefore, the authorities did not close the art academy, but transformed it (renaming it to eliminate any connection with “national-bourgeois” forces) into the Kyiv Art Institute. It was headed by the art historian Ivan Vrona.

In the period from 1924 to 1930, this once small academy became one of the most powerful art schools in Eastern Europe. In 1927, a journalist from Belgium arrived in Kyiv. She dedicated an entire issue of the magazine “La Nervie” to Ukrainian art. A separate section in it was about the Kyiv Art Institute. In the magazine, she wrote that the rector aimed to create “his own Bauhaus” in Kyiv. The Bauhaus was the most famous avant-garde school in Europe at that time.

Thus, in Kyiv, a similarly progressive centre was being formed. And this was at a time when Kyiv was not even the capital.

The Final Years of Kazimir Malevich’s Creative Work

To develop the school, Ivan Vrona invited other outstanding artists. Thus, in the Kyiv Art Institute found themselves, for example, Volodymyr Tatlin – another leader of the avant-garde movement – and Kazimir Malevich.

During 1928–1930, Malevich returned to Kyiv (not moving permanently, although he planned to) and spent half of his working time there. Together with a galaxy of outstanding Ukrainian artists – Mykhailo Boychuk, Volodymyr Tatlin, Oleksandr Bohomazov (the most outstanding Ukrainian Futurist), Krychevsky, Nalepinska-Boychuk, and many others – he created a new Ukrainian artistic reality.

They all worked together and argued, but nevertheless together they taught students, mounted exhibitions, and created this reality.

How Russia Tried to Appropriate the Work of Ukrainian Artists

The Russians and the Soviet Empire always tried to erase Ukrainian history and art. A few years before the full-scale invasion, there were many exhibitions around the world where Russian museums showed avant-garde artists, including Malevich. They presented it as if the Russian Revolution, the Russian avant-garde, and Russia were one and the same, and that this was supposedly a beautiful utopia about the future.

We spent a lot of effort explaining to our Western partners that one cannot attribute all these artists to the Russians, because they were not Russians. For example, at an exhibition at the MoMA museum in New York, it was indicated that Oleksandr Dovzhenko was a Russian director and Vasyl Yermylov a Russian artist. We tried to explain to them that these are Ukrainian artists, and that it is important to correct this.

Only after the full-scale invasion, when countries saw the true face of Russia, did we manage to begin serious work. We are trying to defend the rights and explain that Ukrainian artists cannot be called Russians.

Malevich – A Ukrainian Artist: Historical Evidence

Malevich had a complex identity, like everyone born in an empire, who experienced wars and the collapse of a state. But we know for certain that he called himself a Ukrainian. In his autobiography, he writes: “My friend and I went on plein airs, remembered Ukraine, he and I were Ukrainians.” Moreover, his passport also stated that he was Ukrainian.