Russian painter and designer born near Kiev. His earliest work shows the influence of cubism. In 1912 he began to develop his own style, known as suprematism The artist, in his volume of essays entitled The world of Non-Objectivity defined Suprematism as "the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art", consisting of simple geometrical forms painted in a limited palette,). In 1917-18 he created his well-known White on White series, austere, unearthly images of a white square floating on a white background. The creation of this simple square on a plain ground was a moment of spiritual revelation to Malevich. In his attempts to define this new Suprematist vocabulary, Malevich tried many combinations of rectangle, circle, and cross, oriented vertically and horizontally. Malevich has carried abstraction to an ultimate geometric simplification - the black square. It is noteworthy that Malevich is author of one of the two dominant wings of twentiethcentury abstraction - the hard-edge geometric purity, the other being the painterly Expressionism of Kandinsky. In 1919 he joined M. Chagall at his revolutionary art school in Vitebsk, where he exerted strong influence on E. Lissitzky. In the 1920s he returned to representational painting but could not accede to the government's demand for Socialist Realism. He died in poverty and oblivion in Leningrad. Malevich greatly influenced Western art and design.
