Kazimir Malevich

The square that changed art

A black square on a white ground. No people, no landscape, no objects. In 1915 Kazimir Malevich showed this painting and announced a new movement, Suprematism: an art of pure geometric form and color. Black Square became a symbol of 20th-century abstract art.

A boy from Kyiv

Malevich was born in 1879 in Kyiv to a family of Polish origin and studied at Mykola Murashko’s Kyiv Drawing School. He went on to work in Moscow, Petrograd and Vitebsk, and in 1923–1926 he headed the Institute of Artistic Culture in Leningrad. He wrote theoretical books and articles, and El Lissitzky was among his students.

Ukraine kept pulling him back. In 1928–1930 Malevich was a professor at the Kyiv Art Institute, and in 1930 he had a solo exhibition in Kyiv. He often painted peasants, and scholars see traces of folk art and icon painting in his work. When the repression of the intelligentsia began in Ukraine, he went back to Leningrad, where he died in 1935.

Debates and assessments

Whose artist he is remains disputed. Malevich was born in Kyiv to a Polish family (sources differ on his mother’s origin) and did most of his work in Moscow and Petrograd, so for a long time he was seen mainly as a Russian avant-garde artist. The Polish tradition stresses his Polish roots; Ukrainian scholars stress his Kyiv roots, his work in Ukraine and the influence of folk art. He himself described himself at different times as Polish and as Ukrainian. Since 2022 a number of Western museums have revised their labels for his works, but art historians have not reached a consensus.

Why it matters today

Malevich showed that a painting need not depict anything at all: it can be pure form and color. His ideas still shape painting, design and architecture. In 2012 a street in Kyiv was named after him.