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ABSTRACT This article presents the eminent avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevic, particularly in the context of Suprematism. The starting point of the discussion, which explores the artistic creativity of this Ukrainian artist, is that different levels of human consciousness, ontogenetic and phylogenetic development, are accompanied by distinctive artistic expression. Within the spectrum of consciousness, the domain of the transpersonal is very important and it has frequently been the origin of artistic expression in human history. This article attempts to prove the thesis that Malevic's non-objective Suprematism drew its roots from the transpersonal. In this article, Malevic's Suprematist creation is interpreted as Transpersonal Symbolism and Transpersonal Expressionism.
KEY WORDS Kazimir Malevic, transpersonal, Suprematism, non-objectivism, symbolism, expressionism
More than a century has passed since the appearance of Kazimir Malevic's Suprematist art. Today, Suprematism is still, for the most part, misunderstood or unexplained. That is, the very essence of Suprematism is explained in many different ways, but a large number of those interpretations are rather distant from the artist's original ideas. Apart from the passage of time, it should also be stressed that Malevic and his art were for a long time unknown to the wider public, particularly beyond the borders of his homeland of the former Soviet Union, where his work was banned from his death until 1979 (Vidmarovic, 2002). Beyond two solo exhibitions of Malevic's work in Warsaw and Berlin, and several incomplete exhibitions, the public beyond the former Soviet Union only became more familiar with his artistic production in 1957, when a detailed analysis and interpretation of the Suprematist idea began. His theoretical works, in which he expounded the very essence of the Suprematist philosophy (Mijuskovic, 1980), suffered a similar fate. Hence, my intention with this article is to contribute to a better understanding of the essence of the Suprematist idea, and to do so with the help of an anthropological discourse that has, as far as I know, not yet been applied to Malevic's work, and which can point to a transpersonal origin of his Suprematist creations. Of course, the transpersonal origins of Malevic's Suprematism has already been pointed to by some authors, either directly or indirectly (e.g., Douglas, 1975; Golding, 2000; Lipsey, 2011; Wilber, 1990, 2001), but I think that this hypothesis...