1935 Acquisition confirmed in 1999 by agreement with the Estate of Kazimir Malevich and made possible with funds from the Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by exchange)
The Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist, Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, pioneered the developement of abstract painting in the 20th century. Malevich's set designing project "The Opera Victory over the Sun, 1913", is considered by historians to be the precursor of suprematism. While doing this project, he created bold geometric forms that possibly opened him up to the idea of using boundless abstraction to express himself. Initially, he was influenced by cubism and futurism and worked along these styles. Soon after, he turned away from conventional notions according to which art had to imitate nature or represent the visible world, and founded Suprematism. Malevich described Suprematism as the "supremacy of pure feeling in art" and believed that art should transcend the material world and express the unseen through forms and colours. An instance of a suprematist composition is the above work, titled "Suprematist Composition : Airplane Flying 1915". Malevich's interest in aerial photography and aviation led him to centre a major portion of his body of work around the same. In this composition we see the use of squares and rectangles using bold colours with black being the most dominant, followed by yellow, red and blue. There is no defining quality in the composition that allows us to point out certain objects, rather it hints at the view seen from an airplane window. Inspite of the absence of a central focal point, the dynamic arrangement of geometric shapes creates a sense of movement and balance. This reflects the central ideals of Suprematism, where emotion, intuition and pure visual experience take precedence over literal depiction and invite the viewer to experience the work intuitively.
The artwork on the canvas canvas holds a loose constellation of rectangles, triangles, and bars in yellow, black, blue, and a few muted tones set on a white background. The different shapes are placed haphazardly and everything is tilted giving the impression that it has been stopped mid-motion. There is no single focal point or hierarchy among the shapes and the refusal to anchor the eye is deliberate as the painter Malevich wanted the painting to feel like a field of forces rather than a picture of a thing. The diagonal thrust and scattering of these different shapes and forms across the white background evoke the sensation of a flight with velocity, disorientation and the loss of a fixed horizon. Malevich and his circle were fascinated by aviation as a symbol of humanity breaking free of earthbound limits and he uses that association loosely, as a mood or vector rather than a subject to depict. Malevich has described Suprematism as reaching "the zero of form" stripping painting down past recognizable objects to its bare elements of colour, line, and plane. The white background isn't empty space behind the shapes it represents something closer to infinity or the void an unbounded field the geometric forms could float and act within unconstrained by gravity, perspective, or the "horizon-ring" that representational painting had always assumed.Paradoxically, Malevich insisted this abstraction was more real than representational painting, not less. Depicting a landscape or a face, in his view, was an illusion a trick played with paint. Paintings like this one isn't "about" an airplane in the way a landscape is about a landscape; it's an honest object made of its own true materials, with the airplane serving only as an evocative title, almost a poetic cue.
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By: Sabana Parveen
The study of Kazimir to completely leave behind the importance of form and develop concept to the maximum in his paintings, to create a kind of conceptual art, as well as his deconstruction of reality, is the reason for his success. Although the viewer may be confused at first, after learning more about his artistic practice a new form of art develops, waiting to be discovered and appreciated.
