Rating and value of drawings and lithographs by Kasimir Malevich

If you own a work by or based on the work of Kasimir Malevich and would like to know its value, our state-approved experts and auctioneers can advise you.

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Artist's rating and value

A Russian artist who pioneered abstraction, Kasimir Malevich established himself as a major artist of his time. He produced works inspired by several twentieth-century currents and by his native country, mixing different media.

On the art market, his works sell for very good prices and maintain a stable quotation. For example, a work signed by the artist can fetch millions of euros at auction, as demonstrated by his oil on canvas Suprematist Composition, which sold for €63,992,000 in 2018, testifying to the growing interest of collectors in Malevicth's works.  

Order of value from the most basic to the most prestigious

The artist's works and style

The strength of Kasimir Malevich's style and technique lies precisely in his radicalism: how can we explain how an artist deeply influenced by the Russian avant-gardes came to abolish any mimetic relationship with reality, retaining only pure geometric forms?

With Carré noir sur fond blanc (1915), he inaugurated Suprematism, a visual language in which color and composition take precedence over figuration, relegated to the realm of the accessory.

This square, both dense and empty, is not a simple formal reduction, but an attempt to touch the absolute, to go beyond the visible to reach the spiritual essence of art. 

Far from anecdote or pictorial illusion, Malevich explores the possibilities offered by the purity of the plane and the contrast of surfaces. His deliberately limited palette sets off flat tints of white, black, red and blue in asymmetrical compositions that eschew any traditional hierarchy.

This quest for simplicity is accompanied by a precise technique: the canvas becomes a field of experimentation where the pictorial material almost disappears, replaced by a uniform, smooth application.

Yet the artist's gesture remains discreet, barely perceptible, affirming the human presence at the very heart of abstraction.

Through this rigorous aesthetic, Malevich invented a new pictorial space, suspended between art and metaphysics, where the visible becomes a springboard to the invisible.

The life of Kasimir Malevich   

Kasimir Severinovich Malevich (1879-1935) was a Russian artist born in Kiev (at the time part of the Russian Empire), often referred to as a Suprematist in view of the intellectual journey he made through his work.

Born of Polish parents, he was one of the first painters of his time to theorize and contextualize abstraction at its most total.

He trained in 1895 and 1896 at the Kiev School of Painting, where he studied with Nykolay Pymonenko. He then continued his training at the Imperial College in Parhomovka. After marrying and having two children, he moved to Moscow in 1904, where he began his career as an industrial draughtsman for the railroads.

In Moscow, Malevich had the opportunity to see the collections of the Morozov brothers and Sergei Shchukin, and to learn about the various European avant-gardes: Cézanne cubism, analytic then synthetic, futurism, impressionism and fauvism.

Theoretically, Malevich was already aware of all the experimentation going on in painting in Paris and Europe, and immersed himself in it to create a kind of theoretical synthesis that would enable him to see where he was heading. Suprematism was not yet born.

In Russia, the avant-gardes also organized themselves in order to be exhibited outside the academic context, which totally rejected their productions. From 1910 onwards, Malevich was a member of the Valet de Carreau, Queue d'Âne and Cible groups.

These exhibitions gave some visibility to the early experiments of the Russian avant-garde. He then joined the Futurists and the Zaoum trend, which linked poetry and painting in Russia - with elements of Futurism already born in Italy.

In 1913, he worked on the antagonisms of logic, which he transcribed in his drawings. Later, he was called upon to create a Zaoum opera, in which he also designed the costumes - which he wanted to be fairly geometric.

In Petrograd in 1915, he exhibited a group of 39 canvases that he called "Suprematies" for the first time.

His most famous creative process thus begins with Quandrangle, or Black Square on White Background, the first step towards his quest for total abstraction.

Unlike other artists of his time, Malevich did not leave Russia after the 1917 revolution. He was elected deputy and campaigned for democracy. While carrying out his duties as a politician, he taught painting at the Moscow Academy.

He was already noticed by various French artists, including Chagall, who invited him to teach in Vitebsk. He then became a researcher at Petrograd University.

In 1918, his quest for total abstraction culminated in Carré blanc sur fond blanc, considered to be the first monochrome in modern painting, even though the effects of texture and manner in a monochrome are recognized by art history.

Malevich thus established himself as one of the greatest artists of his time. He continued to produce for another ten years, before gaining international recognition in 1927, when retrospectives were organized in Warsaw and Berlin.

In addition to the 70 paintings he exhibited, he added to his work a manuscript entitled Le Suprématisme ou le Monde sans objet, which the Bahaus would republish some time later.

Focus on White square on white background, Kasimir Malevich, 1918

It is precisely in this ultimate work, Carré blanc sur fond blanc (1918), that Kasimir Malevich's audacity reaches its climax: how can we understand, in a context where even abstraction still seemed charged with meaning, this gesture of absolute pared-down simplicity?

This square, barely discernible on an immaculate canvas, goes beyond mere formal reduction to become a veritable philosophical statement. Malevich does not represent absence, but rather essence: the idea of an art totally freed from matter, a space of pure potentiality. 

The disarmingly simple composition challenges the viewer. The slightly tilted square suggests fragility, instability, as if this ethereal balance could at any moment dissolve into the background that encompasses it.

The work offers no detail or texture, apart from the subtle variations of the painted surface, where the light reveals the minute differences between the white of the square and that of the background.

It's not an image to look at, but an experience to live, a meditation on infinity and emptiness.

With this gesture, Malevich not only proposes a work of art, but a radical questioning of the expectations placed on art itself, a space where each viewer is invited to project their own visions, their own questions.

Kasimir Malevich's imprint on his period

Kasimir Malevich's ambition to redefine the very foundations of art left an indelible mark on his era: how is it that an artist evolving in the whirlwind of the Russian avant-garde was able to impose such a radical and solitary vision?

His Suprematism, by rejecting any anchorage in reality or narrative, was a complete break with the artistic and ideological conventions of his time.

In a Russia in the throes of revolution, where art was often at the service of propaganda or tradition, Malevich offered a daring alternative: that of a universal visual language, turned towards the absolute and transcendent. 

His influence extends far beyond Russia's borders, nourishing the thinking of the Constructivist and Minimalist currents to come. The square, the circle and the cross - the elementary shapes he erected as universal symbols - became tools of artistic liberation, freed from figurative expectations.

Although the Soviet Union eventually rejected his abstraction in favor of an imposed socialist realism, Malevich's impact persists in the history of modern art.

His work has opened up a space for reflection where art detaches itself from any decorative or narrative function to become an act of pure thought, a spiritual quest that continues to resonate in contemporary creations.

He would later influence artists such as Frantisek Kupka and Olivier Debré.

His signature

Not all of Kasimir Malevich's works are signed.

Although there are variations, here is a first example of its signature:

Appraising your property

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