Malevich, Kasimir Severinovich 1878-1935
Russian painter and designer

Born and trained near Kiev, he worked in Moscow from c.1904. Around 1910 his work began to show Cubist and Futurist influences; however, he was above all interested in developing a totally non-objective art, and in Moscow c.1913 he launched Suprematism, a movement dedicated to the expression in painting of the absolute purity of geometrical forms. The austerity of the earliest Suprematist works had given way by 1917 to less rigid compositions, with a greater colour range and a suggestion of three-dimensional space; in 1918-19, however, he returned to his early ideals with the White on White series. After this he virtually stopped producing abstract paintings, and concentrated on expounding his theories through writing and teaching, first at Vitebsk, where he was highly influential, and later in St Petersburg, where he lived from 1922. In 1926 he published Die gegenstandlose Welt ('The Non-Objective World'), in which he outlined his theories.