Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (23 February [O.S. 11 February] 1879 – 15 May 1935) was a Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose work and writings pioneered the development of abstract painting in the 20th century. He is best known as the founder of Suprematism, a radically non-objective form of painting he introduced in 1915.

Born in Kiev, modern-day Ukraine, to an ethnic Polish family, Malevich worked primarily in Russia and became a leading figure of the Russian avant-garde. His work has also been associated with the Ukrainian avant-garde. Early in his career, he worked in multiple styles, assimilating Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism through reproductions and the works acquired by contemporary Russian collectors. In the early 1910s, he exhibited alongside other Russian avant-garde artists, including Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. In 1915, working in a Cubo-Futurist mode, Malevich developed Suprematism, a system of pure geometric abstraction on monochromatic grounds. His Black Square (1915), first shown at the Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in Petrograd, marked a decisive break with representational painting. He set out his theory in the brochure From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, published to accompany the exhibition.

His trajectory mirrored the upheavals around the October Revolution of 1917. In 1918, Malevich began teaching in Vitebsk along with Marc Chagall. In 1919, he founded the UNOVIS artists collective and had a solo show at the Sixteenth State Exhibition in Moscow. His reputation spread westward with solo exhibitions in Warsaw and Berlin in 1927, the only time he ever left Russia. From 1928 to 1930 he taught at the Kiev Art Institute alongside Alexander Bogomazov, Victor Palmov, and Vladimir Tatlin, while publishing in the Kharkiv magazine Nova Generatsiia. In 1930, he was briefly arrested and interrogated by the OGPU in Leningrad. By the early 1930s, Stalin's restrictive cultural policy and the subsequent imposition of Socialist Realism had prompted Malevich to return to figuration and to paint in a representational style. Diagnosed with cancer in 1933, he was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union to seek treatment abroad. While constrained by his progressing illness and Stalin's cultural policies, Malevich painted and exhibited his work until the end of his life. He died on 15 May 1935, at age 56.