Black Square Casualty

As it relates to the Ukraine-Russia War (2022), Vladimir Putin (President of Russia), the United States and NATO have destroyed Tom R. Chambers’ working relationships with artists and curators in Russia re: Suprematism. This makes him angry.

Artists throughout the millennia (plus) have been under the influence of a power base. Contemptibility in society coupled with political insensitivity quells the creative spirit.

In Kazimir Malevich's case (founder of the Suprematism art movement):

After the October Revolution (1917), Malevich became a member of the Collegium on the Arts of Narkompros, the Commission for the Protection of Monuments and the Museums Commission (all from 1918/1919). He taught at the Vitebsk Practical Art School in the USSR (now part of Belarus) (1919/1922), the Leningrad Academy of Arts (1922/1927), the Kyiv State Art Institute (1927/1929), and the House of the Arts in Leningrad (1930). He wrote the book, The World as Non-Objectivity, which was published in Munich in 1926 and translated into English in 1959. In it, he outlines his Suprematist theories.

In 1923, Malevich was appointed director of Petrograd State Institute of Artistic Culture. He painted his "Black Cross" the same year. The institute was forced to close in 1926 after a Communist party newspaper called it "a government-supported monastery rife with counterrevolutionary sermonizing and artistic debauchery." The Soviet state was by then heavily promoting a politically sustainable style of art called Socialist Realism - a style Malevich had spent his entire career repudiating.

Malevich's assumption that a shifting in the attitudes of the Soviet authorities toward the modernist art movement would take place after the death of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky's fall from power was proven correct in a couple of years, when the Stalinist regime turned against forms of abstraction, considering them a type of "bourgeois" art, that could not express social realities. As a consequence, many of his works were confiscated and he was banned from creating and exhibiting similar art.

Critics derided Malevich's art as "a negation of everything good and pure: love of life and love of nature." The Westernizer artist and art historian Alexandre Benois was one such critic. Malevich responded that art can advance and develop for art's sake alone, saying that "Art does not need us, and it never did". (Wp)

As it relates to the attack on Ukraine by Russia (2022):

Chambers states, "This is an unspeakable act that stops the world, and my condolences re: all of those suffering and lost."

"Black Square Casualty"

“Black Square” has been crumpled/crushed to represent Chambers’ dilemma and symbolize the destruction of Ukraine, Malevich’s birthplace (Kyiv).

Chambers is now working on the sculptural aspects of “Black Square”.