away my Moonlight Night without my permission. The owner of the shop was amazed by this picture. With pleasure, he took my work and, as my friend said, displayed it in a window of the shop. I went to take a look at my first exhibition too, but I was afraid that others might find out that I was the artist. Officials stopped, looked and looked… The picture was not displayed for long; it was purchased for five roubles. It was a fortune: it was possible to eat sausages – a ring daily – for a whole month. The owner of the shop asked me to bring another Moonlight Night but this time with a windmill. Actually, I painted a different picture, double the size of my first one. It represented a grove with storks. It was sold too.”
It is interesting to watch Malevich come out of his shell and be less defensive about his peasant status. Through his own talent, he managed to raise his self-esteem to the level of the artists he admired. He had painted for people he did not know, who were not relatives, and had admired and paid good roubles for his efforts. His success only fired his need to learn more.
By 1896, Severyn Malevich moved his sizeable family to even more permanent quarters in Kursk and went to work for the railway as a clerk in the management office. While there, he made a journey to Kiev and Kasimir accompanied him, remembering the trip later.
“Once a year all sugar factories met in Kiev. At the same time a great fair was arranged and merchants from all countries came there. Sugar-factory owners or managing directors came to the fair to make new contracts and hire different specialists or experts in sugar refining. That is why among barracks dwellers and famers the fair was important to receive future contracts. My father, as a highly skilled sugar maker, came to get these contracts too and took me with him. Consequently, I got acquainted with the city and its life as well as with art which was shown in show-windows of stationery shops.”
Kasimir wasn’t much interested in the fair although it was a remarkable event. While his father tended to business, Kasimir hurried from shop to shop and looked for hours at pictures. Thus, little by little, Kiev became a new environment that influenced him and opened a new appreciation of art.
He understood nothing then about the difference between the art of the Kiev painters and the folk art of the villagers, but emotionally he accepted them both – with excitement and a great desire to draw the same skilfully-done pictures himself. He did not know that there were many art schools where people were trained in painting, but thought that all those pictures were drawn in the same manner as peasants drew flowers, horses and cocks – by rote and repetition without any schools or studies.
“One displayed picture impressed me strongly. In Kiev art, everything was represented very vivid and natural. The picture that bewitched me was of a girl who sat on a bench and cleaned a potato. I was astounded with the plausibility of the potato and peelings which, like ribbons, lay on the bench near an excellently painted pot. This picture was real revelation for me, so I remembered it for a long time. The style of the expression powerfully disturbed me.
The potatoes and peelings looked so natural that this made a lasting impression, as did nature itself… So I was able to stay in Kiev where, I learned later, there were such ‘great’ artists as Pymonenko, and Murashko. “
Kiev forever left its imprint in Malevich’s mind: the hills, the Dnieper River and its houses constructed of coloured bricks, the distant horizon and the bustle of steamships and dockside activity. He loved to watch the village women who came to town in small boats to sell their butter, milk and sour cream. These colourfully dressed peasants were everywhere along the river banks and streets of Kiev and gave to the city its special atmosphere.
“My father did not like me being keen on art,” Malevich wrote. “He knew that there were many artists around painting pictures, but never talked on this theme. He nevertheless expected that I would follow his way in life. Father told me that an artist’s life is really bad and many of them are in prisons. He didn’t want that lifestyle for his own son. My mother had mastered different embroidery styles and the weaving of laces. She taught me and I learned to embroider and knit with a hook.”
Woman Ironing, c. 1906–1907.
Oil on cardboard, 28.8 × 18.5 cm. Private Collection.
Peasant Head, end of 1911.
Gouache on cardboard, 26.7 × 32 cm.
Musée national d’Art moderne, centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.
Argentine Polka, 1911. Gouache on cardboard, 117 × 70.5 cm. Private Collection.
The Chiropodist, 1911–1912.
Gouache on cardboard, 77.7 × 103 cm.
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Peasant Woman with Buckets and Child I, end of 1911-beginning of 1912. Oil on canvas, 73 × 73 cm.
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Earliest Art Student Days
Kasimir began his first formal art lessons at the Kiev Drawing School, studying under Mykola Pymonenko. To experience a complete foundation in the manipulation of paint and the effect of light on surfaces, Malevich could not have begun his career with a more capable painter.
In his mid-thirties, Pymonenko was at the prime of his realist skills. His seven hundred renditions of peasant life in the Ukraine were in keeping with the prevailing tastes of the time. He began his studies at the Kiev Drawing School at the age of sixteen, was accepted by the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts and then came back to teach at both the Kiev Drawing and Art Schools from 1882 to 1906. In 1909 he was elected a member of the Paris International Association of Arts and Literature and his work hangs in the Louvre as well as illustrating many of Taras Shevchenko’s published poems.
An even greater impression on young Kasimir had to be the work of Oleksander Murashko, an Impressionist painter who also both studied and taught at the Kiev Drawing and Art Schools as well as opening is own studio to students. Murashko’s style evolved from the realism of the Peredvizhniki School into a vivid, colourful Impressionism.
“Peredvizhniki” (Wanderers) was a name applied to members of the Russian Society of Itinerant Art Exhibitions. Ivan Kramskoi, Nikolai Ge, and thirteen other artists who had left the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts in protest against its rigid neo-classical dictates founded the society in 1870. In order to reach the widest audience possible, the society organized regular travelling exhibitions throughout the Russian Empire, including Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa in their tours. Murashko’s work was more widely exhibited than Pymonenko’s, appearing in Paris, Amsterdam and Munich, and there were one-man shows in Berlin, Cologne and Düsseldorf.[5] He was a co-founder of the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts in 1917 and served there as a professor and rector.
Kasimir’s exposure to these academic realist and Impressionist painters with their genre subject matter set him on a path that, though it would eventually veer away from realism and objectivity, remained true to its peasant roots. He began to learn the intricacies of oil and gouache painting. Gouache is a painting medium usually executed on paper that became popular in the mid-nineteenth century and is similar to watercolour, but heavier and more opaque because a gum substance is added to the mixture of ground pigment and water. Gradually, he set himself the goal of attending a Moscow art school to expand his understanding of artistic expression. Towards that end, with his family settled in Kursk, he took a job as a draughtsman in the
