After the
October Revolution (1917), the
Russian Civil War ensued. Between 1918 and 1919, Malevich became a member of the Collegium on the Arts of
Narkompros, the Commission for the Protection of Monuments and the Museums Commission. He taught at the
Vitebsk Practical Art School in
Belarus (1919–1922) alongside
Marc Chagall, the
Leningrad Academy of Arts (1922–1927), the Kiev Art Institute (1928–1930), and the House of the Arts in Leningrad (1930). He wrote the book
The Non-Objective World, which was published in
Munich in 1926 and translated into English in 1959. In it, he outlines his Suprematist theories. Following the
Bolshevik victory in the Civil War, the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established in 1922, led by
Vladimir Lenin. In 1923, Malevich was appointed director of Petrograd State Institute of Artistic Culture, which was forced to close in 1926 after a Communist party newspaper called it "a government-supported monastery" rife with "counterrevolutionary sermonizing and artistic debauchery." The Soviet state was by then heavily promoting an idealized, propagandistic style of art called
Socialist Realism—a style Malevich had spent his entire career repudiating. Nevertheless, he swam with the current, and was quietly tolerated by the Communists.
Stalinism and censorship Malevich's assumption that a shifting in the attitudes of the
Soviet authorities toward the
modernist art movement would take place after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924 and
Leon Trotsky's fall from power was proven correct in a couple of years, when the government of
Joseph Stalin turned against forms of abstraction, considering them a type of "
bourgeois" art, that could not express social realities. As a consequence, many of his works were confiscated and he was removed from his teaching position. In autumn 1930, he was arrested and interrogated by the
OGPU in Leningrad, accused of Polish espionage, and threatened with execution. He was released from imprisonment in early December.
Travel to Poland and Germany (1927) in Warsaw, with multiple Suprematist paintings seen hung on the wall in the back In March 1927, Malevich traveled to
Warsaw where he exhibited his work at the Polish Arts Club housed in the
Polonia Hotel. He met with several Polish artists, including his former students
Władysław Strzemiński (whose own theory of Unism was highly influenced by Malevich), sculptor
Katarzyna Kobro and
Henryk Stażewski, an abstract painter associated with the Polish Constructivist movement. While generally greeted with enthusiasm, Malevich faced criticism from some contemporary artists, including
Mieczysław Szczuka, who argued that Suprematism, as understood by Malevich, was no longer relevant for Polish utilitarianism-oriented avant-garde and that the artist was "a Romantic who loves painterly means for their own sake". At the end of March 1927, Malevich and
Tadeusz Peiper, a Polish poet and art critic who was the editor of the literary journal
Zwrotnica, left Warsaw for Berlin. In April that year, him and Peiper visited the
Bauhaus in Dessau, where they met with
Walter Gropius and
László Moholy-Nagy.
Death Malevich died of
cancer in Leningrad on 15 May 1935. On his deathbed, Malevich had been exhibited with the
Black Square above him, and mourners at his funeral rally were permitted to wave a banner bearing a black square. His ashes were sent to Nemchinovka, and buried in a field near his
dacha. Nikolai Suetin, a friend of Malevich's and a fellow artist, designed a white cube with a black square to mark the burial site. The memorial was destroyed during
World War II. The city of Leningrad bestowed a pension on Malevich's mother and daughter. In Nazi Germany his works were banned as "
Degenerate Art". In 2013, an apartment block was built on the place of the tomb and burial site of Kazimir Malevich. Another nearby monument to Malevich, put up in 1988, is now also situated on the grounds of a
gated community. File:Red Cavalry Riding.jpg|
Red Cavalry Riding (1928-1932,
Russian Museum) File:Malevich - Boy.jpg|
Boy (1928-1932, Russian Museum) File:Malevich - Mann in suprematischer Landschaft.jpeg|
Sensation of an Imprisoned Man (1930–31,
Albertina) File:Malevich142.jpg|
Mower (1930,
Tretyakov Gallery) File:Людина, що біжить. Казимир Малевич.jpg|
Sensation of Danger or
Running Man (1930–31,
Musée National d'Art Moderne) File:Девушка с гребнем в волосах.png|
Girl with a Comb in her Hair (1933, Tretyakov Gallery) ==Nationality and ethnicity==