Kazimir Malevich

Suprematism, the zero of form, and a painter who wanted art to stop describing the world

Kazimir Malevich at a glance

Born: 1879, Kyiv, Russian Empire
Nationality: Russian
Lives and works in: Kyiv, Moscow, Petrograd, Vitebsk
Medium: Painting, drawing, architectural models
Known for: Founding Suprematism
Education: Kyiv art school and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture
Notable project: Black Square (1915)

Early life and training

Malevich was born in Kyiv to a Polish-speaking family and grew up moving between provincial towns. He trained first in Kyiv, then in Moscow, where he absorbed Symbolism, Cubism and Futurism. Those early years taught him how to break objects into planes.

His peasant scenes from around 1911 show figures built from blocky, flattened forms. Viewers often see the influence of folk carving in them, and of the Cubist interest in fragmentation. Malevich kept pushing those ideas until the subject itself began to disappear.

Black Square and the birth of Suprematism

In 1915 Malevich exhibited Black Square at the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd, hung high in the corner where icons usually hang. The work reduced painting to a single geometric shape. He called the movement Suprematism, the supremacy of pure feeling over visible objects.

Later compositions moved rectangles, circles and crosses across the canvas. White on White, from 1918, pushed the idea furthest, with pale square shapes barely separated from their ground. The colour palette stayed narrow, and the edges stayed crisp, so the eye has to work to find anything at all.

Architektons and later years

After the revolution Malevich taught at Vitebsk and then at the Petrograd institutes. He later turned his forms toward architecture, building white plaster models he called Architektons. These models imagined weightless buildings floating above the ground, which never got built at full scale.

Political pressure in the 1920s and 1930s was strong, and his Suprematist work was seen as suspicious by Soviet authorities. In his last years he returned briefly to figurative portraits, painted in a style that recalled earlier periods. He died in Leningrad in 1935.

Why his work still matters

Suprematism is the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art.
Kazimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World, 1927

Malevich showed that a painting could be about its own surface and nothing else. Minimalism, colour field painting and later abstract design all owe a debt to his square. Seen in person, the Black Square still has a surprising texture, and the crackled paint reveals how much thinking went into a shape that looks simple.