Modern & Postwar Artists

Kazimir Malevich

1879 - 1935

A pioneer of geometric abstraction, Kazimir Malevich wrote a manifesto, From Cubism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting, and founded the Suprematist movement in 1915.

For Malevich, painting had to be free of political or social content, purely aesthetic, and concerned only with formal issues of line, shape, and color. Declaring his Black Square the "zero of form," Malevich signaled an end to pictorial conventions and the origin of a new, modernist language of content-free forms. Suprematism had a huge impact on the development of abstract art in the both Soviet Union and in Western Europe.