Publication: ‘Malewicz: Beyond Censorship’

16 December 2021

In 2021, KBF CANADA partnered with the Cracow-based IRSA Foundation for the Promotion of Culture to publish and promote an English and French version of Malewicz: Beyond Censorship, (Malewicz: au-delà des censures) by author and art historian Andréi Nakov.

Kazimir Malewicz (1879–1935) was one of the 20th century’s most significant artists – and also one of the most incomprehensible. Censored in Russia during his lifetime, and erased from the cultural scene for decades, his work survived the socio-political disasters of the last century. While his work was ‘rediscovered’ in the West in the late 1950s, it would be another three decades before it was accessible to the Russian public.

Nakov has published numerous theoretical studies, monographs and exhibition catalogues on the Russian avant-garde, Futurism, Dada, Constructivism, contemporary art and European abstract art.

He has also written extensively on Malewicz and the suprematist “Unovis” – the short-lived but influential group of artists he founded and led at the Vitebsk Art School in 1919. In Malewicz: Beyond Censorship, the author examines a number of myths about Malewicz’s ethnic background, his rapport with the religious culture of his Russian environment and his place in modern European art. Various interpretations of Malewicz’s oeuvre and ‘obsessions’ are also explored, along with a number of anti-modernist visual and cultural prejudices which uncover hidden layers of a creative process that is increasingly important in our comprehension of 20th-century modernity.

Malewicz: Beyond Censorship is a 180-page laminated hardcover with 109 colour illustrations and is available for 35€ on the Bibliotheca Artibus et Historiae website.