Malevich, Casimir or Kasimir [key], 1878–1935, Russian painter. Moving to Moscow in 1906, he became involved in avant-garde artistic circles. He worked first in a style related to fauvism and then turned to a mixture of cubism and futurism before founding his own movement, suprematism, in 1913. Malevich created nonobjective paintings composed of bare geometric forms—often just a single square on a flatly painted surface. Characteristic is his famous White on White (Mus. of Modern Art, New York City). His written theories were published in Germany in 1928 as The Non-Objective World (tr. 1959). His controversial work was influential in the development of abstract art. Officially praised after the 1917 revolution, from about 1930 on his work was condemned by Russia's Stalinist regime.
See A. Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute (4 vol., 2010); A. Shatskikh, Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism (2012); S. Tates et al., ed., Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde (museum catalog, 2014).
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