Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying. 1915 (dated on reverse 1914). Oil on canvas, 22 7/8 x 19" (58.1 x 48.3 cm). 1935 Acquisition confirmed in 1999 by agreement with the Estate of Kazimir Malevich and made possible with funds from the Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by exchange)
In December 1915, at the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 (zero-ten) in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), Malevich unveiled a radically new mode of abstract painting that abandoned all reference to the outside world in favor of colored geometric shapes floating against white backgrounds. Because his new style claimed supremacy over the forms of nature, he called it “Suprematism.” In a leaflet distributed at the exhibition, Malevich wrote, “I transformed myself in the zero of form, I destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring that confines the artist and forms of nature.” All of the works on this wall were included in this landmark show. Since Suprematism rejected the deliberate illusions of representational painting, Malevich saw it as a form of realism—"new painterly realism" was his term—and understood its subject to be the basic components of painting’s language, such as color, line, and brushwork. The basic units of this visual vocabulary were planes, stretched, rotated, and overlapping. For Malevich, the white backgrounds against which they were set mapped the boundless space of the ideal.