Kazimir Malevich and Suprematism

Suprematist Composition: White on White

"Color and texture in painting are ends in themselves. They are the essence of painting,
but this essence has always been destroyed by the subject."

-Kazimir Malevich 

Kazimir Malevich's Suprematist Composition: White on White was probably the most radical painting of it's time. (1917) A white square on a white background, White on White makes no effort to mimic anything in the visible world. This was a fundamental theme of Suprematism, a movement Malevich pioneered. He laid the foundations of Suprematism in his manifesto From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting in 1915:

"...only a cowardly consciousness and meager creative powers in an artist are deceived
by this fraud and base their art on the forms of nature, afraid of losing the foundation on which
the savage and the academy have based their art. 

To reproduce beloved objects and little corners of nature is just like a thief being
enraptured by his legs in irons. 

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

Things have disappeared like smoke; to gain the new artistic culture, art approaches
creation as an end in itself and domination over the forms of nature."

The painting, not completely devoid of color, makes very little use of cool and warm values in the two separate whites. The surface is very worked with repeating brushstrokes. Malevich wanted the painting to bring attention to the materiality of itself and focus more on the process of it being painted rather than the actual subject of the painting -- a theme also covered in Malevich's manifesto:

"A painted surface is a real, living form.
Intuitive feeling is now becoming conscious, not longer is it subconscious.
Or even, rather, the other way round—it was always conscious, only the artist was unable
to interpret its demands. 

The forms of Suprematism, the new realism in painting, are already proof of the
construction of forms from nothing, discovered by Intuitive Reason"

Malevich has directly credited the birth of Suprematism to Aleksei Kruchenykh's Victory Over the Sun,  a Futurist opera production for which he [Malevich] designed the sets and costumes (right) in 1913. Another important influence on Malevich was Russian mystic-mathematician and philosopher P. D. Ouspensky's book The Fourth Way in which he wrote of "a fourth dimension beyond the three to which our ordinary senses have access."


Sources:
http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=80385
http://www.mariabuszek.com/kcai/ConstrBau/Readings/MlevchSupr.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprematism
http://www.messagefrommasters.com/Ebooks/The-Fourth-Way-OUSPENSKY.pdf