Kazimir Malevich. Dynamic Suprematism.

Forms drifting on white

Dynamic Suprematism is an oil painting on a nearly square canvas, about eighty centimetres a side. The ground is off white. At the centre is a large pale blue triangle, tilted slightly to the left.

Painted over the triangle and gathered around its three points is a sequence of geometric forms in many colours, each at its own angle. Most prominent are a small deep blue triangle near the top, a bright yellow rectangle right of centre, and a larger cream rectangle just below it.

There is no horizon. No clear up or down. The forms rest on no ground and are not pulled by gravity. Tate describes them as clear geometric forms activated in space against white. Standing in front of the painting, you sense they have paused for a beat and might move on.

Number 57

The back of the canvas reads in Latin script: Supremus N 57, with the year 1916. The artist's name and the word Moskva are in Cyrillic. Supremus was the title Malevich gave his Suprematist paintings, made between 1915 and 1922. The logic of the numbering is still unclear.

There is an attractive theory. At the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd, from 20 December 1915 to 19 January 1916, Malevich's works numbered 48 to 59 were grouped under the title Painterly Masses in Movement. Numbers 60 to 77 were the opposite: Painterly Masses in Two Dimensions in a State of Rest. Number 57 falls in the moving group.

But the back of the painting says 1916, while the show opened in mid December 1915. And the painting does not appear in surviving installation photographs. So Tate dates it 1915 or 1916 and leaves open whether it hung at 0.10 at all.

It was at 0.10 that Malevich hung Black Square in the corner. If the black square is absolute rest, works like Supremus 57 are the moment the masses of colour begin to leave their places.

Painted straight onto canvas

The painting is one even layer of paint. X rays confirm there is nothing underneath and no underdrawing. The composition seems to have been fully worked out beforehand, then the forms drawn directly onto the cloth.

A related pencil drawing, about thirty four centimetres across, once existed. In 1935 it went on extended loan to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and by 1938 it had disappeared. It has not been traced. It had fewer shapes and slightly different colours and placings, so it may have been a study or a later variant.

The curator Nicholas Cullinan wrote in 2014 that works like this brought a richer and subtler range of colour, marking a shift from so called static Suprematism to the livelier, more intricate compositions of dynamic Suprematism. The title says exactly that.

In a 1919 text Malevich explained that new frameworks of pure colour had to be created, based on what colour itself demanded. Colour had to stop serving an object and stand as a structure of its own.

The journey of a painting

The painting was shown at the Jack of Diamonds exhibition in Moscow in November 1916. The Soviet state bought it, and in 1929 it entered the State Tretyakov Gallery. In 1932 to 1933 it appeared in the large exhibition Artists of the RSFSR over 15 Years in Leningrad, under the title Dynamic Colour Composition. That exhibition's stamp is still on the stretcher.

It stayed at the Tretyakov for more than forty years. In December 1975 it was granted permission to leave the Soviet Union and passed to the company Comvalor Finanz AG. Tate bought it in 1978 with help from the Friends of the Tate Gallery.

Malevich studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1904 to 1910. His early works were portraits and landscapes. After Suprematism he made architectural models he called architectons, and in the late 1920s returned to figurative painting, above all rural life.

Dynamic Suprematism belongs to a short moment between those periods, when colour was released from every object and allowed to move on its own.