Gouache on paper. Featuring a cubist portrait of an instrumentalist playing the bass violin. Signed in the lower left corner. Attributed to Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935, Russian). 28 x 18.5 cm (11 x 7.25 in). PROVENANCE: Southern Ontario estate

Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) was a pionnering Russian painter and founder of the Suprematist movement. His seminal Black Square (1915) and Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), are often cited as some of the first abstract paintings ever produced. “The black square on the white field was the first form in which nonobjective feeling came to be expressed,” Malevich wrote. “The square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling.” Born on February 23, 1878 in Kiev, Ukraine, he studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture where he learned to paint in an impressionistic style. At school, he fell in with the Russian avant-garde group known as the Soyuz Molodyozhi, led by Vladimir Tatlin, and participated in their group shows. In 1915, the artist laid out his beliefs in an iconic manifesto, outlining Suprematism and the value of pure aesthetic feeling derived from geometric shapes. Malevich would briefly come into celebrity, with exhibitions throughout Europe, before being condemned as a bourgeois artist by the Stalinist regime. Forced to adapt, Malevich returned to his earlier style of depicting peasants and landscapes in a traditional Impressionist-like style. He died of cancer on May 15, 1935 in Leningrad, Soviet Union at the age of 57. Mourners at his funeral rally waved a banner bearing his Black Square. Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Albertina in Vienna, among others.

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American, 19th century : This work was executed by an unknown hand, and can only be identified by origin (i.e., region, period).