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| Ilyá Chashnik Composición suprematista 1923 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza |
"I have ripped through the blue lampshade of the constraints of color. I have come out into the white. Follow me, comrade aviators. Swim into the abyss."
– Kazimir Malevich (1919)
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| Liubov Popova Painterly Architectonic 1918 oil on linen-burlap Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza |
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| Liubov Popova Painterly Architectonic 1918 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza |
"My research has shown that color in its basic state is autonomous; that is, each ray has its own energy and characteristics . . . I think that freedom can be attained only after our ideas about the organization of solids have been completely smashed . . Nature's perfection lies in the absolute blind freedom of units within it – units which are at the same time absolutely interdependent."
– Kazimir Malevich (1921)
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| Nikolai Suetin Suprematism 1920-21 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza |
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| El Lissitsky Proun 4B 1919-20 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza |
"All the arts are mortal, and not just the individual artwork, but Art as a whole. One day Rembrandt's last portrait will cease to exist, even though the painted canvas will still be intact; because the eye that can apprehend this language of forms will have disappeared."
– quoted in 1920 by El Lissitsky from Spengler's Decline of the West
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| Nadeshda Udaltsova Cubism 1914 canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza |
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| Olga Rozanova Man on the Street (Analysis of volumes) 1913 canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza |
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| Varvara Stepanova Billiard Players 1920 canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza |
"The workers of the towns and some of the villages choke in the throes of hunger. The railroads barely crawl. The houses are crumbling. The towns are full of garbage. Epidemics spread and death strikes out right and left. Industry is mined from within."
– report in Pravda, 26 February 1920
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| David Kakabadze Untitled 1920 oil on cardboard Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza |
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| David Burliuk Landscape 1912 canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza |
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| Mikhail Larionov Street with Lanterns 1913 oil on burlap Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza |
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| Mikhail Larionov Blue Nude ca. 1908 canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza |
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| Wassily Kandinsky Picture with Three Spots No. 196 1914 canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza |
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| Wassily Kandinsky In the Bright Oval 1925 oil on cardboard Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza |
"The world is like a hole and the hole itself is not hollow. I can cut a section across the emptiness, a grid or a sieve . . . and maybe here – out of the grid – I can extract a point or a line . . . but once again Man will fall into the error of taking the point or line for reality, for things that exist . . ."
– from God is Not Cast Down, a 1922 essay by Kazimir Malevich, the English translation revised and published by T.J. Clark in Farewell to an Idea : Episodes from a History of Modernism (Yale, 1999), from which all quoted passages used here are drawn.
I am grateful to Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid for making these excellent reproductions available.