Rating and value of drawings and lithographs by Kasimir Malevich

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

Our specialists will carry out a free appraisal of your work, and provide you with an accurate estimate of its value on the current market.

Then, should you wish to sell your work, we will direct you to the best possible arrangement to obtain the optimum price.

Artist's rating and value

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

On the art market, his works sell for very good prices and keep a stable quotation. Thus, a work signed by the artist's hand can fetch millions of euros at auction, as evidenced by his oil on canvas Suprematist Composition, fetched €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 a radicality: how can we explain that an artist, deeply influenced by the Russian avant-gardes, came to abolish any mimetic relationship to 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 any 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 or blue, in asymmetrical compositions that elude 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.

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

Through this rigorous aesthetic, Malevich invents an unprecedented 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 in the Russian Empire), often referred to as a Suprematist in view of all the intellectual progress 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 getting married, and having two children, he moved to Moscow in 1904, and really began his career as an artist 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 become acquainted with the various European avant-gardes : Cézannean cubism, analytic then synthetic, futurism, impressionism, and fauvism.

Theoretically, Malevich became aware very early on of all the experiments taking place in painting in Paris and Europe, and immersed himself in them in order to operate a kind of theoretical synthesis, enabling him to see where he might be heading. Suprematism was not yet born.

In Russia, the avant-gardes also organized themselves to be exhibited outside the academic context, which totally rejected their productions. Thus, from 1910 onwards, Malevich was part 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. Subsequently, he was asked to create an opera zaoum, in which he also designed costumes - which he wanted to be quite geometric.

In Petrograd, in 1915, he exhibited a set of 39 canvases which he named for the first time " suprématies ".

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

Contrary to 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, a work considered to be the first monochrome in modern painting, although the effects of texture and manner, art history admits, in a monochrome.

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

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

Focus on White Square on White Background, Kasimir Malevich, 1918

It is precisely in this ultimate work, White Square on White Background (1918), that Kasimir Malevich's audacity reaches its climax: how can we understand, in a setting where even abstraction still seemed charged with meaning, this gesture of absolute stripping down?

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

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

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

This is not an image to be looked at, but an experience to be lived, a meditation on infinity and emptiness.

With this gesture, Malevich proposes not just a work, but a radical questioning of expectations towards art itself, a space where each viewer is invited to project his or her own visions, his or her own interrogations.

Kasimir Malevich's imprint on his period

It was precisely through his ambition to redefine the very foundations of art that Kasimir Malevich made an indelible mark on his era: how can we explain that an artist, evolving in the whirlwind of the Russian avant-gardes, was able to impose such a radical and solitary vision?

His Suprematism, by rejecting any anchorage in reality or narrative, stands in total rupture with the artistic and ideological conventions of his time.

In a Russia in full revolutionary turmoil, 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 transcendence. 

His influence extended far beyond Russian borders, nourishing the reflections of the Constructivist and Minimalist currents to come. The square, the circle and the cross, the elementary forms he erected as universal symbols, became tools of artistic liberation, freed from figurative expectations.

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

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

Later, he would 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 his signature:

Expertise your property

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