Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Malevich invented Suprematism and painted a black square that is among the most consequential images in modern art. Born near Kyiv in 1879 to Polish parents — his father managed a sugar refinery — he was largely self-taught before studying in Moscow, and passed rapidly through impressionism, symbolism, cubism and futurism. In 1915 he exhibited thirty-nine works at the Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in Petrograd, including Black Square, hung across a corner of the room in the position traditionally reserved for an icon in a Russian home. It is a black quadrilateral on white, and he described it as the zero of form: painting emptied of objects entirely, leaving pure feeling. He had arrived at it while designing sets for the opera Victory over the Sun in 1913. Suprematism, as he named it, used flat geometric elements floating on white grounds, and it is one of the first sustained bodies of purely abstract painting. He pushed it to White on White in 1918. He taught at Vitebsk from 1919, where his followers formed the group UNOVIS and where he displaced Marc Chagall, and later at institutes in Petrograd. He wrote extensively, including The Non-Objective World in 1927. Stalin's cultural policy destroyed him. Socialist realism became compulsory, abstraction was condemned as bourgeois formalism, and Malevich returned in the 1930s to figurative paintings of peasants — faceless, blank-headed figures that read as anything but compliance. He was arrested in 1930 and held for weeks. He died in Leningrad in 1935. He was buried in a coffin he had designed, under a black square, and his followers carried the image through the streets.

• Lived: 1879 CE – 1935 CE
• Nationality: Russian
• Roles: painter