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Polish painter Kazimir Malevich played a major role in the upheaval of modern art. A pioneer of abstract art in the 20th century, he founded Suprematism, a movement that radically changed the way people thought about painting. With his famous Black Square on a White Background, Malevich distinguished himself through his quest to find the pure essence of art.
Kazimir Malevich was born in 1879 in Kiev to a family of Polish origin. His father was the director of a sugar refinery and his mother was a housewife. Malevich spent a year at the school of painter Nikolay Pymonenko, then studied at the Par Hromovka College in Russia. Despite his studies, he was largely self-taught, drawing inspiration from European avant-garde movements such as realism, symbolism, impressionism, and cubism.
His early work was figurative, including La fille aux fleurs (The Girl with Flowers) in 1903 and Le baigneur (The Bather) in 1910, which was clearly inspired by Fauvism. But in 1915, he shook up the art world with Black Square on White Background. This oil on canvas painting is considered the manifesto of the emergence of the Suprematist movement.
During 1915, Russia was in turmoil. At the dawn of World War I, art was also changing. In Saint Petersburg, at an exhibition organized by the avant-garde group “0.10,” Kazimir Malevich presented a painting: a black square on a white background. No reference points. No subject. A radical gesture.
Malevich does not seek to shock or make people laugh. He no longer imitates reality, tells stories, or uses perspective. He creates a void. And in this void, he seeks a new form of expression. He wants the viewer to feel his work rather than understand it. This black square, suspended in white space, becomes for him the starting point for a liberated art.
But this gesture did not come out of nowhere. For several years, Malevich had been evolving within the Russian avant-garde circle, alongside figures such as Tatlin, Larionov, Goncharova, and Kandinsky. He had already explored symbolism, impressionism, fauvism, cubism, and then cubo-futurism.
He was therefore already well known in Russian artistic circles. In 1913, he even designed the sets for Victory Over the Sun, a futurist opera. It was while working on the costumes for this show that he drew a black square for the first time, not yet knowing that this shape would become his manifesto.
Through his research, Malevich felt that he had to go further. For him, Cubism was not radical enough, as it still broke down the visible world. He wanted to go beyond that. No longer representing things, but transcending them. The Black Square, in 1915, marked this leap forward.
This black square is a symbol for Malevich, almost akin to a religious icon. Malevich placed it in a corner of the wall, in the same way that sacred paintings are displayed in Russian homes.
Suprematism is characterized by its complete detachment from the real world. Indeed, this artistic movement is based on the primacy of pure sensation. In other words, the goal is to evoke emotion through basic geometric shapes (squares, circles, rectangles, crosses) and primary colors. Suprematist paintings are distinguished by their stunning simplicity.
This almost metaphysical artistic practice seeks to elevate the spirit as purely as the work itself, thereby separating the being from all materiality.
This spirituality is also reflected in his writings. In 1927, he published a theoretical book entitled Suprematism: The World Without Objects. In this work, he asserts that artists must free themselves from matter in order to reach a level of pure intuition. According to him, Suprematism is not just a style, it is like a philosophy, in short, a way of looking at the world.
After the shock of Black Square, Malevich continued his research with works such as Black Cross, Black Circle, and Red Square. He developed a minimalist pictorial vocabulary, which he himself called “pictorial architecture.” He pushed reduction to the extreme, creating what he called “the zero degree of painting.”
But with time, and especially with the political upheavals in Russia, Malevich was forced to evolve. After the revolution, abstract art was initially encouraged by the Bolsheviks, who saw it as a break with the old regime. Malevich taught and exhibited his work. He ran the Vitebsk School of Art, where he trained young artists and developed his concept of Suprematist architecture.
His teaching was innovative: he encouraged his students to experiment, to think about form in relation to space, and to view art as a field of research. He also set up a collective of artists called UNOVIS (the Affirmers of New Art), with whom he attempted to integrate Suprematism into architecture, design, and everyday life.
When Stalin came to power after Lenin’s death in 1924, art was now required to serve the people and the government. A standard of modern realism was imposed in Russia. Social realism became the official norm, and abstraction was rejected. Malevich’s works were censored. The artist then temporarily returned to more figurative forms, while continuing to slip abstract symbols into his paintings, as nods to his Suprematist language. For example, he painted Young Girls in the Fields in 1928 and At the Grape Harvest, Martha and Vanka in 1929.
Unlike abstract artists such as Kandinsky, who attempted to represent emotions through visual forms, or Mondrian, who sought an almost mathematical harmony, Malevich took a different path. He did not seek to charm or maintain balance. What attracted him was stripping painting of everything that was not essential.
He wants to eliminate the objects and erase the landmarks. He states this unequivocally:
“I converted the square and the cross into sacred figures.”
According to him, art has no decorative function. It is a way of escaping the material world and getting closer to what he perceives as purer. Suprematism is not limited to a simple aesthetic.
Malevich died in 1935, isolated and marginalized. He requested that his black square be engraved on his tomb.
For decades, his work was forgotten in Russia. But in the West, starting in the 1960s, it was rediscovered. And there, the shock began again.
His influence can be seen in artists such as Yves Klein and Ad Reinhardt, as well as in architecture, design, and even the philosophy of art. In the 1960s and 1970s, Suprematism was rediscovered in the West, and Malevich’s name once again became central to the history of abstraction.
Kazimir Malevich did not seek to represent the world. He wanted to detach himself from it. With Suprematism, he made a radical choice: to remove objects, narrative, and references, leaving only the essential. He does not ask us to analyze, but to look differently. To accept a painting that tells us nothing, but questions us. If his black square continues to make such an impression, it is because it challenges our relationship with images, meaning, and what we expect from a work of art.
The painter Kazimir Malevich is the artist behind the famous painting depicting a black square on a white background. Considered the starting point of Suprematism, it was created in 1915 and was followed by other works such as a red square on a white background.
Le carré noir sur fond blanc peint par Kazimir Malevitch peut avoir plusieurs interprétations. Il représente le tout et à la fois le rien. Il ne représente aucun objet ou personne, il n’y a pas de modèle et cela permet une interprétation pleinement libre de ce qu’il peut représenté.
In a Suprematist work, there appears to be no subject, yet it questions the dimensions and elementary forms familiar to everyone. Malevich’s shapes, depicted against a white background, float, perhaps falling, dropping, or rising. It is the reign of abstraction over realism.
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Often referred to as an enigma, Malevich was a revolutionary even during the Russian Revolution; shattering conventional thought and exposing a new experimental understanding of reality. Artsper invites you to discover 10 facts about the man behind the infinite Black Square.
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