Eduard Steinberg

Matthew Cullerne Bown, Contemporary Russian Art, Oxford: Phaidon Press Limited, 1989
Eduard Steinberg, St. Petersburg: The State Russian Museum and Place Editions, 2004
"Eduard Shteinberg," in Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell, Soviet Dissident Artists: Interviews after Perestroika, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995, pp. 204-210
Norma Roberts, ed., The Quest for Self-Expression: Painting in Moscow and Leningrad, 1965-1990, Columbus, Ohio: Columbus Museum of Art, 1990

Among all the artists associated with the nonconformist movement, perhaps none was more directly inspired by the legacy of Kazimir Malevich than Eduard Steinberg. The largely self-taught Steinberg began his profound engagement with Malevich around the late 1960s, when he began holding his "metaphysical conversations" with the avant-garde pioneer that culminated in his 1981 letter to the artist. In the early 1970s, Steinberg started working in a geometric style indebted to Malevich's Suprematism, in which he deployed six shapes frequently seen in Malevich's work (the circle, prism, triangle, square, sphere, and cross), positioning them atop light backgrounds in free-floating arrangements. These compositions both affirm the flatness of the picture plane and articulate zones symbolizing the earth, the Church, and the heavens.