Shop art print and framed art The Woodcutter by Kazimir Malevitch

The Woodcutter (Russian: ????????) is a painting by Kasimir Malevich, dated 1912-1913, exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. It depicts a mechanised figure, arms raised, ready to strike, in tense immobility. The logs piled up behind him seem to be joined together by a series of falls to form the mechanical cogs of a machine. The interplay of circles and cylinders creates a powerful mechanical effect, reinforced by the metallic colours that form a contrasting mosaic. Wood is the very essence of Russian farming culture. It is abundant in Russia and is used for palaces and isbas alike. The longest trunks in the painting look as if they are ready to be used to build an isba. Yet the viewer feels outside time and space, in a universe other than that of nature. The pictorial space is as if "mechanised", and here we already find the seeds of Russian Constructivism in the 1920s. Malevich, starting from an iconographic structure of popular imagery, the loubok, created a "new Russian style", as he himself called his primitivist paintings. But he added the principles of geometric Cézanneism and the futuristic metallisation of colours. Cézanne's precepts in his letter of 15 April 1904 to Émile Bernard were: "Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, all set in perspective...". Malevitch gave a completely original interpretation of these principles compared with the French painters Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger - even though Malevitch was very close [...]

 

This artwork is a painting from the modern period. It belongs to the cubism styles and suprematism styles.

 

Find the full description of The Woodcutter by Kazimir Malevitch on Wikipedia.