Kazimir Malevich

All past and recent painting before Suprematism [as sculpture, verbal art, music] has been subjugated by the shapes of nature, waiting to be liberated, to speak in its own language, independent of reason, common sense, logic, philosophy, psychology, laws of causality, and technological changes.

It was a Babel in the world of art.

The art of painting, the art of sculpture, and verbal art were until now a camel loaded with a jumble of odalisques, Egyptian and Persian emperors, Salomes, princes, princesses with their beloved mutts, hunts, and the lewdness of Venuses.

Up to now, there have been no pictorial attempts proper, that is, without constant recourse to reality.

Painting was a necktie on the starched shirt of a gentleman and a pink corset stretched over the inflated abdomen of a fat lady.

Painting is the esthetic side of the object, but it has never been original, has never been its own goal. Painters were examining magistrates, police, officers who wrote out assorted reports on spoiled merchandise, on thefts, on murders, and on bums.

Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdotes, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.

There was no painting constituting its own goal, there was no creation. Painting a composition showing a debauched woman cannot be called creation.

Nor is it possible to see the idealization in Greek statues as creation, for there was only a desire to improve the subjective Me.

Nor can we consider as creation the paintings that have an excessiveness of real shapes: icon painting by Giotto, Gauguin, etc., nor mere copies of nature.

Creation exists only where paintings present shapes that take nothing from what has been created in nature, but which proceed from pictorial matter, neither repeating nor modifying the original forms of nature's objects . . . .

Kazimer Malevich, From Cubism to Suprematism