Kasimir Malevich

Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935), Ukraine-born Russian painter, considered one of the founders of abstract art. Malevich was born near Kiev and studied art in Moscow. His earliest work was figurative, with tubular human forms and geometric backgrounds that showed the influence of two early 20th-century movements in modern art: cubism and futurism. He also picked up collage techniques from cubism and futurism.

In 1913 Malevich began to develop his own abstract style based strictly on geometric elements, chiefly squares and rectangles. This style became known as suprematism, referring to supremacy of “artistic feeling” over all other considerations. Malevich hoped to create art that was completely devoid of references to objects and that could be understood by all people, no matter what their cultural background. In the first suprematist paintings he presented geometric forms in a limited range of colors, sometimes in black alone, against a white background. Later he introduced a broader range of colors as well as triangles, circles, and curved shapes. His Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), one of a series of paintings, took suprematism to its ultimate conclusion by merging the geometric element (a white square) with its all-white background. Only variations in the brush strokes enable the viewer to distinguish the form of the square. During the 1920s Malevich gradually abandoned suprematism and returned to painting the human figure.

Malevich’s theories on suprematism, set out with the help of Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, first appeared as brochures from 1915 on and were published in German in 1928 as Die Gegenstandslose Welt (The World Without Objects). Malevich’s work was suppressed by the Soviet government during the 1930s and was little known in the West. But interest in his work revived during the 1950s with the development of geometric abstraction in the work of Ad Reinhardt and other American painters. In 2003 the Guggenheim Museum in New York City held a large-scale exhibition of his work, focusing on the suprematist paintings.