Kazimir Malevitj
The creator of Suprematism.
Kazimir Malevich painted Black Square in 1915 and declared that art should be freed from objects.
Kazimir Malevich was born in 1879 in Kiev, then in Russia and today in Ukraine, into a family of Polish origin. He grew up in rural Ukraine, where his father worked at sugar factories. Both Russia and Ukraine today claim him as their artist. He studied in Kiev and from 1904 in Moscow.
In his early years he tried out the new movements in rapid succession: Impressionism, Symbolism and a kind of Neo-Primitivism with peasants in powerful, simplified forms. Around 1912–1913 he combined Cubism and Futurism. In 1913 he designed the sets and costumes for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun, where a black square appeared in one of the designs.
In December 1915, at the 0,10 exhibition in Petrograd, he showed a series of completely abstract paintings. Black Square hung high up in a corner, the place where the icon traditionally hangs in Russian homes. He called his art Suprematism and maintained that it should express pure feeling, freed from objects. Black Square is in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. White on White of 1918, with a white square on a white ground, is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
After the 1917 revolution Malevich received influential posts and taught in Vitebsk, among other places, where he founded the UNOVIS group with pupils such as El Lissitzky. In 1927 he travelled to Germany and visited the Bauhaus, where his book The Non-Objective World was published. He left a large collection of works in Berlin, and many of them are today in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Under Stalin abstract art became suspect. Malevich was arrested for a time in 1930, and in his last years he again painted peasants and portraits, now in an austere, almost Renaissance-like style. He died in Leningrad in 1935 and was buried in a coffin decorated with Suprematist forms. He is regarded as one of the most important pioneers of abstract art.