Charlotte Douglas – Supremus – The Dissolution of Sensation

ZAHA HADID
AND
SUPREMATISM
GALERIE GMURZYNSKA

Charlotte Douglas
Supremus—The Dissolution
of Sensation
The painting considered here is one of only two known works of this type
by Kazimir Malevich. An image of a single plane of color, it is exceptional in
its size, color intensity, and emotional impact. Historically, it documents
and clarifies an important moment in the development of Suprematism,
the time when the artist inaugurated a reinterpretation of his abstract
forms as visible signs of immaterial sensations.
Title
The title on the reverse side of the painting under consideration is
Supremus, written by the artist in the Roman alphabet. After 1916
Malevich often gave his Suprematist paintings this title. He chose a
non-Russian, Latin word in order to universalize the nature of his abstract

style. A later related drawing bears the more descriptive title, Suprematist
Element at the moment of dissolution of sensation (objectlessness). An old
reproduction of the painting is annotated, “The first basic plane of color
energy at the moment of dissolution.”
Description
This simple painting seems to be full of motion. A dark red plane appears
to descend toward the viewer from above, moving swiftly down and toward
the left. We see the plane as it advances, its lower corner has not yet
reached the bottom of the canvas. The strong red color adds to its weight
and momentum. The formal subject of the painting, a flying plane, is
created by visually opposing a sharply defined edge to an edge that is less
well defined, a common schematic device that is read as motion by
modern Western viewers. The planar form seems barely to fit on the
canvas—a favorite device of Malevich—which creates the impression of
an object of massive size.
The red plane is very carefully positioned on the canvas. Its two
leading corners are the only corners completely present. The entire trailing
edge is not quite visible to the viewer; its upper and lower corners
somehow are felt to be present, but nevertheless not fully in view.
Malevich worked diligently to orient the large form precisely on the
canvas. Pencil sketches show that he experimented with revealing the
upper right corner of the image, as well as the lower right corner. He tried
increasing the angle of approach to forty-five degrees, and attempted
to incorporate two parallel planes or two intersecting planes into the
composition. He tried devising arrangements of three or four planes at
once. The colorful pencil sketches—unusual for Malevich—testify to the
great significance that the artist placed on the color of the planes.
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Composition
Although Malevich may have been the primary Russian artist to use a
“dissolving” edge in a programmatic way within an abstract style, he was
not the only one. The same device appears in the work of his close friend,

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Ivan Kliun. In his Study for Suprematist Composition, black and green
flying elements streak across an orange trapezoid. Quite a different effect
may be seen in Composition. Here raspberry and lime-green planes hover
motionless in space, a result of the soft top edge of the red plane and its
narrowing at the bottom to a point.
In spite of the similarities, however, both of these works seem
decorative and devoid of emotional power in comparison with Malevich’s
Supremus—The Dissolution of Sensation (see illustration p. 93 under
Nakov title Dissolution of a Plane). There is only one known painting of a
single color plane that is closely comparable to it, and it is Malevich’s own
painting of a yellow plane with a dissolving edge. Suprematist Painting 1
was brought to Berlin by the artist in 1927, where it was exhibited at the
Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung. It is now in the Stedelijk Museum in
Amsterdam. Somewhat smaller than Supremus—which is about eleven
inches higher and three inches wider than Suprematist Painting—it is
nevertheless a similarly strong and important painting.
Malevich did not paint or position the yellow plane of Suprematist
Painting in the same way. Its fading edge is distinctly lighter in color than
its approaching sharp edge, and all four corners are visible on the canvas.
The fading trailing edge does not appear quite as straight. We see the
yellow plane in sharper perspective; although the angle of the leading edge
to the bottom of the canvas is similar, the top and bottom edges are not
parallel, which makes the plane appear somewhat skewed.
There is reason to suppose that Suprematist Painting and Supremus—
The Dissolution of Sensation were conceived at the same time. They bear
strikingly similar inscriptions of the artist’s name on the reverse. One of
Malevich’s many pencil sketches for these paintings shows a composition
of two planes with their leading edges parallel to one other. The lower
edge of the plane on the left angles sharply up and toward the center of
the composition, while the plane on the right appears to be “flatter,” that
is, oriented almost parallel to the plane of the canvas.
These two planes are very close to the forms in each of the two
paintings. Superimposition of the two paintings produces a configuration

similar to the drawing. One can imagine the artist being guided by the
individual planes in this preliminary sketch for the two paintings.
Exhibitions
The most likely date for the painting is 1917 or 1918, that is, after Malevich’s
initial elaborations on Suprematism that were seen in 0.10 and other
1916 exhibitions, and before his series of White on White canvases, first
shown in 1919. We do not have definite evidence that Supremus—The
Dissolution of Sensation was exhibited, but probably it was, since Malevich
showed Suprematist works in two major exhibitions in Moscow during this
period: the Jack of Diamonds exhibition of November–December 1917 and
the Tenth State Exhibition: Objectless Art and Suprematism, which opened
in the spring of 1919.
Theory
During 1917–19, the Russian Revolutionary period, Malevich’s geometric
forms underwent a conceptual transformation. The artist stopped
thinking of them as modular objects seen in another dimension, and
began to understand them as emblems of physical sensations.
In so doing, Malevich was creating a new context and defense for his
art. He hoped that the shift would make sense of Suprematism on a more
sophisticated, and a more widely valued scientific and philosophical
basis. In a series of publications, he positioned Suprematism as the artistic
correlative of the “New Science,” the initial revisions of classical physics
that by the turn of the century seemed to many people to define the
twentieth century and modernity itself. The latest science, as Malevich
understood it, was the non-Newtonian, sensation-based physics and
physiology put forward initially by Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius, and
further developed by the energetics of Wilhelm Ostwald and Alexander
Bogdanov in Russia.
Mach in particular provided the artist with a vocabulary and a number
of the fundamental concepts for thinking about Suprematism. He
maintained that sensations are the only things that we truly know, and that
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based on them we construct the rest of the world in our minds. The
world of objects, as such, did not exist for Mach. 2
Malevich came to look upon Suprematism as a style that mirrored
Mach’s world without objects, a world that was known or imagined only
from our sensations. Malevich considered Suprematism an “art of pure
sensation,” an art which denies the existence of matter and objects, and
whose only content is the sensations that impinge upon us from an
unknowable external world.
Malevich made changes in the early Suprematist style of painting to
correspond to his evolving ideas. In this period, the forms in the paintings
started to dematerialize, dissolving into the surrounding space. In both
Supremus and Suprematist Painting, the single planes of color are
Malevich’s vision of energetic sensations. They seem to approach the
viewer edge on, as if coming in from a cosmic distance, a notion that
connects the viewer with the physical cosmos, while complementing the
artist’s earlier themes of floating and flight. In several other works, white
forms painted on a white background seem to completely dematerialize. In
both cases, individual edges are indistinct and simply fade into the canvas.
History
The markings on the reverse side of Supremus reveal something about the
history of the painting. Apparently, Malevich sold the painting in 1919 to
the State Art Fund, which at that time had begun to collect works of art
for a series of projected new museums of modern art to be opened in
Moscow, Petrograd, and several provincial cities. After selecting the
paintings, the Museum Bureau’s Purchasing Commission numbered
them and marked their size on the reverse of the canvases, and noted
the work in a registration book.
On the reverse of the Supremus canvas is written in black paint,
“N 187” and “18 x 31.” The numbers 18 x 31 refer to the size of the canvas
in vershki, an older Russian unit of measurement (one vershok equals
4.445 cm or 1.75 inches). This measurement—137.8 x 80.0 cm—comes
very close to the actual size of the painting—133 x 78 cm.

The “N 187” on the reverse of the canvas indicates that the registration
number of the painting was 187. The notation for this number in the
Commission’s registration book is as follows: “Inventory 187. 18 x 32.”
It is listed as a work intended for distribution to provincial museums. The
decisions to buy the painting and to assign it to a provincial museum were
taken at a meeting of the commission that took place on August 12, 1919.
No particular museum is specified. 3 Suprematist Painting, by contrast,
was apparently retained by the artist and brought to Berlin in 1927, and so
does not have the Purchasing Commission’s notations on the reverse.
This circumstance establishes an outside limit for the date of the
painting, that is, the painting cannot have been done after the summer
of 1919. And it would probably not have appeared in any exhibition held
in Moscow or Petrograd after that date. It should be noted that many
avant-garde paintings were deaccessioned by provincial museums
during the Stalin era.
1 There is no title indicated on the reverse of this painting, nor are there inscriptions
on sketches related to it. It is therefore called merely Suprematist Painting by the
Stedelijk Museum.
2 Mach’s best known book in Russia, and the work most directly related to Malevich’s
ideas, The Analysis of Sensations, appeared in Russian editions in 1904, 1905, 1907,
1908, and 1911.
3 Information about the contents of the Purchasing Commission’s registration book
is available in N. Avtonomova, “K istorii priobreteniia proizvedenii K. Malevicha v
rossiiskie muzei v 1919–1921 goda,” in Russkii avangard; problem reprezentatsii i
interpretatsii (Saint Petersburg, 2001). The author of this article, however,
unconvincingly identifies this registration entry with a different painting. The lack of
exact correspondence between the size as indicated on the reverse of the painting
and the entry in the registration book is typical of these entries.
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