Russia, ca. 1914

Around 1914, after two years of painting in a Cubo-Futurist style, Russian artist Kazimir Malevich began to work in an abstract style, which he called Suprematism. For Malevich, the guiding principle of Suprematism was “the supremacy of pure sensation in creative art,” best represented by the square, which he considered the most elementary, basic, and thus supreme formal element; but he increasingly combined the square with the circle, other geometric shapes, and even curved lines. He began by limiting himself in his Suprematist paintings to black, white, gray, and red, but he expanded his palette as his compositions became more complex. Malevich, like other artists of his time, believed that the external world could no longer serve as the basis for art, which had, instead, to explore pure non-objective abstraction in the search for visual analogues to experience, both conscious and unconscious. As he wrote in 1915, “Nothing is real except sensation . . . the sensation of non-objectivity.” He first showed his Suprematist works at 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition in St. Petersburg in December 1915. The exhibition, which included a broad sampling of then-current tendencies in Russian avant-garde painting, has become famous for inaugurating the two directions that would largely govern artistic production in Russia (including architecture, graphic design, theater, and the decorative arts) for the next seven years: Suprematism, and the closely related (although more socially oriented) movement Constructivism [more]. Other artists affiliated with Suprematism include Ilya Chashnik, Ivan Kliun, El Lissitzky, Liubov Popova, Ivan Puni, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, Nikolai Suetin, and Nadezhda Udaltsova.

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