Kazimir Malevich Quotes

Famous artists from the 19th and 20th centuries are generally well documented in terms of quotes and opinions from their lives and Kazimir Malevich is no different in that regard.

Literature was highly significant within this artist’s life meaning that many quotations from his life were actually from written form rather than spoken. Fortunately some recent effort has been made in order to translate these citations from their original Russian into English so that many more can learn additional information about his life.

Famous Quotes by Kazimir Malevich

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?

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

I ripped through the blue shade of the constraints of color.

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

Every real form is a world. And any plastic surface is more alive than a (drawn or painted) face from which stares a pair of eyes and a smile.

I recommend that you should work actively... and study the artistic structures of Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Watteau, Poussin, and other painters, even Chardin, where he is an artist. Study very closely their dabbing manner of execution and try to copy a small piece of canvas, just one square inch.

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.

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

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

I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation, that is, to Suprematism, to the new realism in painting - to non-objective creation.

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

For the Suprematist, the proper means is the one that provides the fullest expression of pure feeling and ignores the habitually accepted object. The object in itself is meaningless to him, and the ideas of the conscious mind are worthless.

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?

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...

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

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.

Quotes and Opinions on Kazimir Malevich by Artists and Art Historians