When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed, "Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert. . . . Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!"
"Withering" words were sought to drive off the symbol of the "desert" so that one might behold on the "dead square" the beloved likeness of "reality" ( "true objectivity" and a spiritual feeling).
The square seemed incomprehensible and dangerous to the critics and the public... and this, of course, was to be expected.
The ascent to the heights of nonobjective art is arduous and painful... but it is nevertheless rewarding. The familiar recedes ever further and further. into the background... The contours of the objective world fade more and more and so it goes, step by step, until finally the world-"everything we loved and by which we have lived" becomes lost to sight.
No more "likeness of reality," no idealistic images-nothing but a desert! But this desert is filled with the spirit of nonobjective sensation which pervades everything.
Even I was gripped by a kind of timidity bordering on fear when it came to leaving "the world of will and idea," in which I had lived and worked and in the reality of which I had believed. But a blissful sense of liberating nonobjectivity drew me forth into the "desert," where nothing is real except feeling... and so feeling became the substance of my life.
This was no "empty square" which I had exhibited but rather the feeling of nonobjectivity. I realized that the "thing" and the "concept" were substituted for feeling and understood the falsity of the world of will and idea. Is a milk bottle, then, the symbol of milk?
Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art which, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of "things."
It appears to me that, for the critics and the public, the painting of Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt, etc., has become nothing more than a conglomeration of countless "things," which conceal its true value the feeling which gave rise to it. The virtuosity of the objective representation is the only thing admired.
If it were possible to extract from the works of the great masters the feeling expressed in them-the actual artistic value, that is-and to hide this away, the public, along with the critics and the art scholars, would never even miss it.
So it is not at all strange that my square seemed empty to the public. If one insists on judging an art work on the basis of the virtuosity of the objective representation-the verisimilitude of the illusion and thinks he sees in the objective representation itself a symbol of the inducing emotion, he will never partake of the gladdening content of a work of art.
And so the Constructivists working with the surface plane, despite themselves, confirmed the representational, of which their constructions were an element. And when the artist really wanted to get rid of representation, he achieved this only at the cost of destroying painting and only at the cost of destroying himself as a painter. I am referring to the canvas which Rodchenko offered to the attention of an astonished public at one of this season's exhibitions [5x5 = 25, 1921]. This was a smallish, almost square canvas painted entirely in a single red colour. This canvas is extremely significant for the evolution of artistic forms which art has undergone in the last ten years. It is not merely a stage which can be followed by new ones but it represents the last and final step of a long journey, the last word, after which painting must become silent, the last 'picture' made by an artist. This canvas eloquently demonstrates that painting as a figurative art - which it has always been - is outdated. If Malevich's Black Square on a White Background, despite the poverty of its artistic meaning, did contain some painterly idea which the author called 'economy', 'the fifth dimension', then Rodchenko's canvas, which is devoid of any content, is a meaningless, dumb and blind wall. However, as a link in the chain of development, viewed not as a self-contained value (which it isn't) but as a stage in evolution, it is historically significant and 'marks an epoch.â
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