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Kasimir Malevich, painter, designer and art theorist, was the founder (1915) of Suprematism, the first geometric abstract art style of the 20th century, and had a far-reaching influence on Western European art. Born in 1878 near Kyiv, he studied at the Kyiv School of Art (1895-7), the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1904-5) and the Reberg studio in Moscow (1905-10).
Influenced at first by the Impressionists and Fauvists, he participated in avant-garde exhibitions in Moscow, at which he displayed paintings in a neoprimitivist style, cubo-futurist works, and paintings which show the influence of Picasso and Braque’s synthetic cubism. Malevich was the first modern painter to work in a purely geometric, cerebral, nonfigurative manner. In the 1920s he began working in a constructivist style, in which he produced urban architectural models, and furniture, textile and china designs.
Malevich taught at the Vitebsk Art Institute in Belarus (1919-22), the Leningrad Academy of Arts (from 1922) and the Kyiv State Institute of Art (1927-9). During this latter period he also published articles in Kyiv magazines on the theory of art and created designs for a small embroidery co-operative in the village of Verbivka (in the vicinity of Kyiv).
In 1929 he left Ukraine for Russia to avoid the first wave of Stalinist repressions in Ukraine. His series of paintings and drawings Peasant between Cross and Sword, created in 1932-1933, echoed the horrors of the forced collectivisation of Ukrainian farmers and the Great Famine of the early thirties. He died in 1935 in Leningrad.