KAZIMIR S.

MALEVICH: SUPREMATIST MANIFESTO UNOVIS (1924)

On 2 May 1924, Kazimir Malevich (1878 near Kiev, 1935 Leningrad) published his Suprematist Manifesto, to which he attached the abbreviation UNOVIS: Establishment of new forms of art. Already in winter 191516 Malevichs Black Square on White Ground hung in the Last Futurist Exhibition- 0.10 in St Petersburg as a guiding image for new forms, the Zero Form or naked unframed icon of my time (Malevich). His book Die Gegenstandslose Welt (first published by the Bauhaus in 1927 and published in an English translation in 1959 as The Non-Objective World) grew in the confusion of the years of war and revolution in Russia. Gabo and Pevsner, Kandinsky, Lissitzky, and Moholy-Nagy carried Suprematism into Europe with them as a catalyst.

The art of the present, and in particular painting, has been victorious on the whole front. Consciousness has overcome the flat surface and advanced to the art of creation in space. Henceforth the painting of pictures will be left to those who have been unable, despite tireless labour, to free their consciousness from the flat surface, those whose consciousness has remained flat because it could not overcome the flat surface. Through spatial consciousness painting has developed into the constructive creation of form. In order to find a system for the spatial orders, it is necessary to do away with all dying systems of the past, with all their accretions, by advancing unflaggingly along the new path... Our path will be difficult, very difficult! The vis inertiae of economic and aesthetic concepts is positively unshakable. Therefore Futurism too, with its dynamism, fought against all clinging to yesterday. This struggle was the sole guarantee of the timely dissolution of these things. But aesthetics too, that mendacious emotional concept, declared implacable war on the new art. Since 1913 this struggle has been carried on more intensely under the motto of Suprematism as the non-objective world-view! Life must be purified of the clutter of the past, of parasitical eclecticism, so that it can be brought to its normal evolution. Victory of today over fond habits presupposes dismissal of yesterday, the clearing of consciousness from rubbish . . . Everything that still belongs to yesterday is eclectic: the cart, the primitive plough, the horse, cottage industries, landscape painting, statues of liberty, triumphal arches, factory meals, and above all buildings in the classical style. Everything is eclecticism looked at from the age of the aeroplane and radio. Even the motorcar really belongs in the lumber room already, in the graveyard of eclecticism, like the telegraph and the telephone. The new dwellings of man lie in space. The Earth is becoming for him an intermediate stage; accordingly airfields must be built suited to the aeroplane, that is to say without columnar architecture. The new mans provisional dwellings both in space and on Earth must be adapted to the aeroplane. A house built in this way will still be habitable tomorrow. Hence we Suprematists propose the objectless planets as a basis for the common creation of our existence. We Suprematists will seek allies for the struggle against the outmoded forms of architecture [] We recognize the grandeur of classical art. We dont deny that it was great for its time.

Nor do we dispute that the proletariat must get to know classical antiquity and acquire the right attitude to it. But we dispute very emphatically that classical antiquity is still fitted to our modern world. Every new idea demands the new form appropriate to it. Therefore we refuse to recognize classical temples, which were adequate both for the pagans and the Christians, as now suitable for club houses or a House of Culture for the proletariat, even if these temples are called after the leaders of the Revolution and decorated with their pictures! We want to create new relations to the content of today, relationships that do not move on the plane of classical antiquity, but on the plane of present, today! We regard the form of aestheticizing representational painting as finished. Suprematism has shifted the emphasis of its activity to the architectural front and calls upon the revolutionary architects to join it.