Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich ; ; ; ; .|group=nb}} ( – 15 May 1935) was a Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose pioneering work and writing influenced the development of abstract art in the 20th century. He was born in Kiev, modern-day Ukraine, to an ethnic Polish family. His concept of Suprematism sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms (objectivity) and subject matter in order to access "the supremacy of pure feeling" and spirituality. Active primarily in Russia, Malevich was a founder of the UNOVIS artist collective. His work has been variously associated with the Russian avant-garde and the Ukrainian avant-garde, and he is a central figure in the history of modern art in Central and Eastern Europe more broadly.

Early in his career, Malevich 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 collaborated with other avant-garde Russian artists, including Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. After World War I, Malevich gradually simplified his approach, producing key works of pure geometric forms on minimal grounds. His abstract painting ''Black Square'' (1915) marked the most radically non-representational painting yet exhibited and drew "an uncrossable line (…) between old art and new art". Malevich also articulated his theories in texts such as ''From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism'' (1915) and ''The Non-Objective World'' (1926).

His trajectory mirrored the upheavals around the October Revolution of 1917. Malevich held prominent teaching posts and had a solo show at the Sixteenth State Exhibition in Moscow (1919). His reputation spread westward with solo exhibitions in Warsaw and Berlin in 1927. 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'' (New Generation). Repression of the intelligentsia soon forced him back to Leningrad. By the early 1930s, modern art had fallen out of favor under Stalin: Malevich lost his post, his works and manuscripts were seized, and he was banned from practicing art. Arrested in 1930 after returning from Poland and Germany, he later painted in a representational style until his death from cancer in 1935 at age 56.

His art and his writings influenced Eastern and Central European contemporaries such as El Lissitzky, Lyubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko and Henryk Stażewski, as well as generations of later abstract artists, such as Ad Reinhardt and the Minimalists. He was celebrated posthumously in major exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art (1936), the Guggenheim Museum (1973), and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1989), which has a large collection of his work. In the 1990s, the ownership claims of museums to many Malevich works began to be disputed by his heirs. Provided by Wikipedia