Kazimir Malevich Quotes

#1. 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 ...

Kazimir Malevich

#2. 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.

Kazimir Malevich

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

Kazimir Malevich

#4. 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?

Kazimir Malevich

#5. 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 ...

Kazimir Malevich

#6. Man, as a form, bears within him the eternal principle of being, and by economic movement along his endless path his form is also transformed, just as everything that lives in nature was transformed in him.

Kazimir Malevich

#7. Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert ... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!

Kazimir Malevich

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

Kazimir Malevich

#9. 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.

Kazimir Malevich

#10. 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.

Kazimir Malevich

#11. I tell you, you will not see the new beauty and the truth, until you make up your minds to spit.

Kazimir Malevich

#12. 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.

Kazimir Malevich

#13. 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.

Kazimir Malevich

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

Kazimir Malevich

#15. A painted surface is a real, living form.

Kazimir Malevich

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

Kazimir Malevich

#17. I realized that the "thing" and the "concept" were substituted for feeling and understood the falsity of the world of will and idea

Kazimir Malevich

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

Kazimir Malevich

#19. Aestheticism is the garbage of intuitive feeling.

Kazimir Malevich

#20. Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without "things" (that is, the "time-tested well-spring of life").

Kazimir Malevich

#21. 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.

Kazimir Malevich

#22. A face painted in a picture gives a pitiful parody of life ... but a painted surface lives.

Kazimir Malevich

#23. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.

Kazimir Malevich

#24. In art there is a need for truth, not sincerity.

Kazimir Malevich

#25. 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?

Kazimir Malevich

#26. The square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling.

Kazimir Malevich

#27. 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.

Kazimir Malevich

#28. By suprematism I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art.

Kazimir Malevich

#29. Being a painter, I ought to say why in pictures people's faces are painted green and red.

Kazimir Malevich

#30. The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. The face of the new art. The square is a living, regal infant. The first step of pure creation in art.

Kazimir Malevich

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

Kazimir Malevich

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

Kazimir Malevich