Malevich's post-suprematist painting and the construction of history

Abstract

This dissertation discusses Kazimir Malevich’s post-abstract, post-suprematist figurative work by drawing upon semiotic and post-structuralist theories, addressing questions such as: Why did Malevich return to painting figures after adamantly abandoning them for pure abstraction? How do these figures re-figure or resist abstraction? Why did he paint inexact replicas of his own pre-Suprematist works, and why did he give them dates that were similar, or even prior, to the dates of their prototypes? How did he manage to put on an exhibition of his intellectually challenging, subversive works in 1929, at the first moments of sustained state support for protosocialist realism, at one of the most important museums of Russian art in the Soviet Union, the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow? How are contemporaneously contested identities of the artist, the Russian peasant, and the Soviet citizen reflected and refracted in the paintings displayed at this exhibition?