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Suprematist Composition: White on White? More like white on beige.
Malevich and many other artists hoped that the October Revolution was gonna be their time to shine. The October Revolution (also called the Bolshevik Revolution or the Great October Socialist Revolution) was the last phase of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Bolshevik Party seized power and inaugurated the Soviet regime, the world's first constitutionally socialist state with the ideology of Communism. Malevich saw the revolution as the start of a new society, in which materialism would eventually lead to ultimate spiritual and material freedom. Malevich was all about spiritual and material freedom. He was the first artist to fully engage in geometric abstraction and by fully, I mean FULLY. Kazimir single handedly started a new movement called Suprematism. Suprematism focused on the essence of painting, reducing the pictorial means to a bare minimum. The movement got rid of all the conventional definitions of art, creating full artistic freedom. Which technically means you can do whatever right? Well Kazimir had a thing for geometric and monochrome compositions.
Suprematist Composition: White on White is one of the most revolutionary works. As I said, he loved geometric figures and monochrome colors and that’s what it is. A white square on a white square, that's what I call "a bare minimum!" He stripped his painting of the seemingly last essential attribute, color. Ok fair enough he used two different white tones, but they do kind of blend in if you look at them long enough.
A critic from the rival Constructivist movement once said: "The only good canvas in the entire Unovis exhibition is an absolutely pure, white canvas with a very good prime coating. Something could be done on it." BURN!
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Here is what Wikipedia says about White on White
Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918) is an abstract oil-on-canvas painting by Kazimir Malevich. It is one of the more well-known examples of the Russian Suprematism movement, painted the year after the October Revolution.
Part of a series of "white on white" works begun by Malevich in 1916, the work depicts a white square, portrayed off-centre and at an angle on a ground which is also a white square of a slightly warmer tone. The work measures 79.5 by 79.5 centimetres (31.3 in × 31.3 in). Malevich dispenses with most of the characteristics of representational art, with no sense of colour, depth, or volume, leaving a simple monochrome geometrical shape, not precisely symmetrical, with imprecisely defined boundaries. Although the artwork is stripped of most detail, brush strokes are evident in this painting and the artist tried to make it look as if the tilted square is coming out of the canvas. Malevich intended the painting to evoke a feeling of floating, with the colour white symbolising infinity, and the slight tilt of the square suggesting movement.
A critic from the rival Constructivist movement quipped that it was the only good canvas in an exhibition by Malevich's UNOVIS group: "an absolutely pure, white canvas with a very good prime coating. Something could be done on it."
Malevich took the work to Berlin in 1927, where it was displayed at the Große Berliner Austellung. When he returned to Leningrad later that year, Malevich left it with the architect Hugo Häring; in 1930 he passed it on to Alexander Dorner, director of the Provinzialmuseum in Hanover, who put it into storage after the Nazi party came to power in 1933. Malevich did not ask for the work to be returned, and died in 1935 without leaving instructions on the inheritance of his estate. It was put on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1935, and added to the Museum's collection in 1963, and the acquisition was confirmed by the estate of Kazimir Malevich in 1999, using funds from the bequest of Mrs. John Hay Whitney.
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