Photo By Gail

Kazimir Malevich (February 23, 1879 – May 15, 1935) was a Russian painter and art theoretician. He was a pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the avant-garde, Suprematist movement, which he founded in December of 1915.

Suprematism, named thus because Malevich’s new style claimed supremacy over the forms of nature, unveiled a radically new mode of abstract painting that abandoned all reference to the outside world in favor of colored geometric shapes floating against white backgrounds. Since Suprematism rejected the deliberate illusions of representational painting, Malevich saw it as a form of realism — “new painterly realism” was his term — and understood its subject to be the basic components of painting’s language, such as color, line, and brushwork. The basic units of this visual vocabulary were planes, stretched, rotated, and overlapping. For the artist, the white backgrounds against which they were set mapped the boundless space of the ideal.

Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Painting (1916 – 17) is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.