Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Malevich was born in Kyiv in 1879 to a Polish family and worked through Impressionism, blocky peasant subjects and Cubo-Futurism before his break of 1915. At an exhibition in Petrograd that December he hung Black Square high across a corner of the room, where an icon would go, among canvases of coloured rectangles and bars floating on white. He called it Suprematism, the supremacy of pure feeling over the depiction of things, and took it to its limit in White on White (1918).

From 1919 he taught in Vitebsk, where his group UNOVIS won the students away from Marc Chagall's more figurative teaching. Under growing Soviet pressure against abstraction he returned to figures in the late 1920s: faceless peasants in bright bands of colour. He died in Leningrad in 1935.