Kazimir Malevich, set design for act 2, scene 5,
Victory over the
Sun, 1913.
Leningrad State Museum of Theatrical and Musical Arts.
Kazimir Malevich, set design for act 2, scene 5,
Victory over the
Sun, 1913.
Leningrad State Museum of Theatrical and Musical Arts.
The theater has offered painters, writers, and musicians a unique forum for collaborating 
on single works of art, and this multidisciplinary environment has given rise to some of the
most fantastic and unusual projects in the history of the arts. But none has more fully embodied the spirit of abstraction than the Russian Futurist opera 
Victory over the Sun. With sets and costumes designed by Kazimir Malevich, prologue by Velimir Khlebnikov, music composed by Mikhail Matiushin, and libretto by Aleksei Kruche
nykh, the opera was first performed at the Luna Park Theater in St. Petersburg in 1913.The plot, which symbolizes the human conquest of natural forces and the conquering of the old by the new, revolves around a group of 
strongmen who capture the sun and enclose it in a square container for destructive or constructive purposes. Dissonant music and sound effects accompany the actors movements and speech. 
The libretto was written in zaum (transrational language), a linguistic device developed by Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh that relies on puns, neologisms, and the free association of
sounds and images; divesting words of any predictable meaning, it was
thought to communicate the inner state of the speaker more directly.
Malevich s abstract black-and-white sets, consisting of cloth sheets painted wit
h geometric forms, were cited by the artist as his first non objective works.
The Museum of Non-Objective PaintingAbstraction in the Twentieth Century
Abstraction in:
Photography