Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying by Kazimir Malevich, 1915 (page 404) and Mark Rothko`s No. 14 (page 422)

Art History Homework.

The two paintings compared are:

Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying by Kazimir Malevich, 1915 (page 404) and Mark Rothko`s No. 14 (page 422)

Kazimir Malevich painted in a suprematist style, he believed that reality is pure feeling and that was the reason why he painted shapes that were not related to objects in the visible world. This is the reason why he used a lot of shapes in his paintings, mostly squares. Malevich believed that his paintings would be easily understood because everybody could understand shapes and respond to them in any way.

First of all, at first glance it is quite hard to see an airplane in this painting since the shape and the color of the painting doesn't relate to a real life airplane. In this painting, Malevich only used a few colors which you could call bright, in contrast to the white background. The body of the airplane is black, the wings are dark and the tail is yellow and red. In order to draw the airplane Malevich only uses rectangles and squares which are placed parallel (to some extent) to each other. Perhaps he used some sort of a ruler to draw that. This painting is supposed to give a more of a feeling than an image of the airplane. This is the reason why I chose to compare this painting with Mark Rothko`s No.14, since both of the paintings are focused more on the feeling the painting is supposed to give rather than on the image which attached to the visible world.

Mark Rothko`s believed that attaching a painting to anything specific in the visionary world could destroy the "spirit of myth" in his work. He believed that this was the base meaning of art. He wanted paintings to be more mysterious and not certain. Mark Rothko`s "No.14" was an example of a calmer example of abstract expressionism compare to the wilder paintings, for example Jackson Pollock's "No.1".

Similar to Malevich, painting No.14 had two or three rectangles. The difference between "Airplane Flying" and "No.14" is that Rothko colored his rectangles in a more smokey and hazy way and the edges of the rectangles were not so sharp. Mark Rothko believed that coloring was really important since it could open up a door to other realities and feelings such as despair, happiness or sadness.

I chose to compare those two paintings because they are quite similar. If a viewer was asked to to identify what he sees on both of the picture, the viewer has to answer by relying on his feeling. Both of the paintings don't display anything that we see in the real world. Both of the artists are focused to deliver only feelings by their work. The difference between the two of the paintings is the coloring the two artist use. Malevich uses bright colors with sharp rectangles while Rothko uses more