Malevich's Black Square declared painting without objects
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (23 February 1879 – 15 May 1935) founded Suprematism in 1915 as pure geometry on monochrome fields. Black Square at Petrograd's Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 broke representation; later Stalinist taste forced him back toward figures before cancer ended his life at fifty-six.
Born near Kiev to Polish parents who fled the 1863 uprising, he was the eldest of fourteen children (nine surviving), speaking Polish at home with Russian and Ukrainian outside. Sugar-refinery moves across Ukraine and Kursk, peasant self-teaching, and failed Moscow School applications preceded Symbolist and folk-icon phases, Knave of Diamonds shows, and Cubo-Futurist experiments. Shchukin and Morozov collections fed him Cézanne, Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse second-hand in Moscow before the war.
In 1915 he theorized the leap in From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, hanging frameless color masses that refuse up-down gravity—Painterly Realism of a Football Player among them. After 1917 he taught in Vitebsk with Chagall, founded UNOVIS in 1919, showed in Moscow, and in 1927 alone left Russia for Warsaw and Berlin solo exhibitions. Kiev Art Institute teaching from 1928 to 1930 and a brief OGPU arrest in Leningrad in 1930 marked the closing vise of cultural policy.
Socialist Realism pushed him into late figurative work; denied foreign medical care after a 1933 cancer diagnosis, he still exhibited until death on 15 May 1935 at age fifty-six. Influence ran through Lissitzky, Popova, Rodchenko, and later Minimalists; MoMA in 1936, the Guggenheim in 1973, and Amsterdam's Stedelijk in 1989 restaged the non-objective shock, even as heirs disputed museum titles to many Suprematist works across European collections in the 1990s.
Source: Kazimir Malevich
