Artist of the Week: Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935)
Female Portrait, c. 1928
oil on plywood, 58 x 49 cm.
Leningrad: State Russian Museum

Something about this painting struck me as simply profound at first glance. I found this print at the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse, about a year ago when they got a ton of prints from the UC Berkeley History of Art dept. They had scanned all their images for archiving, and no longer needed the prints apparently. I was just rummaging through hundreds of images and selecting a few that I liked for display at home.

Here is what I found out about the artist, Kazimir Malevich...
(Excerpt taken from the Web Museum Paris) Born near Kiev; trained at Kiev School of Art and Moscow Academy of Fine Arts; 1913 began creating abstract geometric patterns in style he called suprematism; taught painting in Moscow and Leningrad 1919-21; published book, The Nonobjective World (1926), on his theory; first to exhibit abstract geometric paintings; strove to produce pure, cerebral compositions; famous painting White on White (1918) carries suprematist theories to absolute conclusion; Soviet politics turned against modern art, and he died in poverty and oblivion.