Suprematism
(1915 - 1935)
   Suprematism considered the first systematic school of purely abstract pictorial composition in the modern movement, based on geometric figures and was the expression "of the supremacy of pure sensation in creative art". It is Russian art movement founded (1913) by Kazimir Malevich in Moscow, parallel to constructivism.

   The Suprematist project was above all the brainchild of the painter and theoretician Malevich. According to him, Suprematism sought "to liberate art from the ballast of the representational world." The work of the painter no longer involved representing and creating chromatic harmonies or formal compositions, but rather attaining the limits of painting. It consisted of geometrical shapes flatly painted on the pure canvas surface. The pictorial space had to be emptied of all symbolic content and all content signifying form. It had to be decongested and cleared, so as to show a new reality where thought was of prime importance.

   In 1915 Malevich exhibited Black Square on a White Ground. For this show he also published From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, a tract in which he described a sequence of avant-garde movements within a historical perspective. Three years later, Malevich painted White Square on a White Ground, part of his famous White on White series. Here, the abstraction of painting attained and fully revealed the abstraction of thought and embodied the movement's principles. Malevich was given a cold shoulder by the Stalinist regime, but he carried on his exploratory work by returning to figurative forms and subjects drawn from the everyday life.

   Suprematism changed the future of modern art, architecture, and industrial design, through its dissemination by the Bauhaus and today continues to inspire artists throughout the world.