Kazimir Malevich and Early Abstraction

Suprematism
simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprematism

Suprematism is an abstract art movement started in Russia, 1915/1916. It focussed on basic geometric forms such as the square and circle. It is an example of geometric abstraction.

Suprematism was founded by Kazimir Malevich. In his book The Non-Objective World, published abroad as a Bauhaus Book in 1927, Malevich described the inspiration which brought about the powerful image of the black square on a white ground:

I felt only night within me and it was then that I conceived the new art, which I called Suprematism.

Suprematism by Kazimir Malevich
www.tomrchambers.com/mal_state.html


Everything which determined the objective ideal structure of life and of "art' ideas, concepts, and images all this the artist has cast aside in order to heed pure feeling. The art of the past which stood, at least ostensibly, in the service of religion and the state, will take on new life in the pure (unapplied) art of Suprematism, which will build up a new world the world of feeling .... when, in the year 1915, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed, "Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert .... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!"

El Lissitzky
www.moma.org/artists/3569

Piet Mondrian | TateShots