Happiness Quote by Kazimir Malevich

Malevich throws a Molotov cocktail at the polite idea of the painter as a charming multi-tool. The list is the point: attorneys, botanists, engineers. It reads like a resume for respectable bourgeois usefulness, a catalog of trades that translate the world into facts, cases, classifications, and solutions. Then he snaps the trap shut: for all that competence, “there were no creative painters.” Not “few.” None. It’s not an insult to skill; it’s an indictment of an era where painting had become an all-purpose service industry for reality.

The subtext is Suprematism’s war on illustration. By the 1910s and 20s, Malevich is trying to liberate art from narrative, symbolism, and even representation itself. His Black Square isn’t a gimmick; it’s a refusal. In that light, “happy storytellers of anecdote” lands as a particularly acidic jab: anecdote is entertainment, the easy sugar high of recognizability. Psychology, natural science, archaeology: all ways of making the canvas prove something about the world. Malevich wants the canvas to be its own world.

Context matters: revolutionary Russia, where both the state and the avant-garde demanded that art justify itself. Malevich insists on a different justification: creation as a new reality, not a better depiction of the old one. The line performs what it argues, using the straight-faced authority of a manifesto to mock authority’s favorite demand: be useful, be legible, be something we can file.