Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918, MoMa, New York.
“I have overcome the lining of the colored sky… . Swim in the white free abyss, infinity is before you.”
Malevich restricted his suprematist compositions to the three basic geometric shapes: the square, circle and triangle. Of these three, he believed the sqaure to be the ‘purest’ form.
White on white is maybe the ultimate suprematist composition— the supremacy of the basic forms and colours of painting to create a composition. Whereas black is the absence of colour (see Malevich’s Black Square paintings) white is the presence of all colours. White on White is therefore, at least to the artist, the perfect painting, containing the purest form and full of infinite possibilities.
Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), Black Square, 1915, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia.
“What Malevich’s painting does is ‘simply render – or isolate – this place as such, an empty place (or frame) with the proto-magic property of transforming any object that finds itself in its scope’, even a black square of pigment, ‘into a work of art’.6 Through its stark distinction between the void of creation (the white background/surface) and the material object (the dark, material stain of the square), Black Square thus ‘expresses the artistic endeavour at its most elementary’
Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), Le Berceau, 1872, Musée d’Orsay.
Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), The Raft of the Medusa, 1819, Musée du Louvre.
“Géricault drew his inspiration from the account of two survivors of the Medusa—a French Royal Navy frigate that set sail in 1816 to colonize Senegal. It was captained by an officer of the Ancien Régime who had not sailed for over twenty years and who ran the ship aground on a sandbank. Due to the shortage of lifeboats, those who were left behind had to build a raft for 150 souls—a construction that drifted away on a bloody 13-day odyssey that was to save only 10 lives. The disaster of the shipwreck was made worse by the brutality and cannibalism that ensued.”
Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547), The Daughter of Herodias, 1510, National Gallery, London.
Francois-Léon Benouville, The Wrath of Achilles, 1847, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France.
Caravaggio (1571-1610), Salome with the head of John the Baptist, 1610, National Gallery, London.
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), The Three Ages of Woman, 1905, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome.
It’s interesting to note that most reproductions of this painting focus solely on the mother and child, eliminating the older figure and completely changing the context of the image. Klimt explored the passage of time, and the cycle of life to death throughout his work, and this is another example of that theme.
Maurice Denis (1870-1940), The Annunciation, 1912.
Tom Thomson (1877-1817), Algonquin Park, 1915, Tom Thomson Art Gallery.
