Kasimir Malevich

Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935), Russian abstract painter. His earliest work shows the influence of Neo-Impressionism and Fauvism, and later of Cubism, distinguished by a great clarity of line. In 1912 he began to develop his own style, which, in 1915, led to his launch of Suprematism, an abstract movement which advocated that painting should be limited to geometrical elements (the rectangle, triangle, circle and cross). Within this framework, Malevich used geometric elements first with some colour then with black and white (e.g. a black square on a white ground) and white on white. His Suprematist Composition: White on White (c. 1918, Museum of Modern Art, New York), one of a series of white-on-white paintings, took Suprematism to its ultimate conclusion.

With Mondrian, Malevich was the most important figure in the development of geometrical abstraction. His theories on Suprematism, set out with the help of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, first appeared as brochures from 1915, and were published in German in 1928 as Die Gegenstandslose Welt (The World Without Substance).