Between Communism and Abstraction: Kazimir Malevich's White on White in America

Abstract

In the spring or summer of 1918, Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) began a painting which is now most often referred to as the Suprematist Composition: White on White (Fig. 1). Currently housed in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection in New York, it is a work that hovers just on the edge of monumentality without quite attaining it. Neither overly large nor altogether precious in scale, the canvas measures a perfect 79.4 79.4 centimeters; it is a geometry that feels like a reckoning in person. One is confronted first by this utter squareness; the simplicity of the barren form and the totality of its organizing principle within the four-sided frame. Within those four bounding right angles floats a square form. It is all murky, silvery gray whiteness, vibrating within the expanse of the bordering space. It is a ghostly form, like snow caught just as a shadow passed across it, making it ashen, drained, and bloodless. It is not transparent or pearly though, this white Malevich gives us; it does not have the sheen of ivory or frost. It is instead hoary cream, it has a waxen quality that is somehow both deathly and too alive. That lone square form is total presence in its absolute planarity, it faces us with an austerity that is slightly unsettling. And all around it is more whiteness, but of a different quality. The ground plane is pasty but natural; it lacks the steely ambiguity of the square shape; it is warmer and thicker than the pallid chalkiness of the square floating on its surface. Neither white can quite be described as achromatic or colorless though. Both are brought about vigorously; the hand of the artist is where present from the facture’s forthright transparency. One can see how Malevich hit the canvas with the loaded brush; the painting is a record of the weight with which he applied each mark, how he created a topography of restless energy. This is a painting that is notoriously difficult to describe. But it is an important work in the artist’s oeuvre. Some have said it represents the very end of painting, the limit