Kazimir Malevich

Malevich hung Black Square in the corner of the room where Russians traditionally hang religious icons. This was in 1915, at the Last Futurist Exhibition in Petrograd. A black square on a white ground, placed where the icon should be. He called it the zero of form.

He was born in 1879 near Kyiv, to parents of Polish origin, the eldest of fourteen children. Nine survived to adulthood. He moved through Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism before arriving at Suprematism, a system of pure geometric abstraction that he invented in 1913. White on White (1918) pushed the principle to its logical end: a white square, barely visible, tilted on a white background.

In 1927, he took approximately seventy paintings to Berlin for an exhibition. Soviet authorities recalled him abruptly. He left the entire cache with a German architect named Hugo Haering and never saw them again. The works eventually ended up at MoMA in New York and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

In 1930, the secret police arrested him, accused him of Polish espionage, and threatened execution. He was imprisoned for two months. His teaching position was taken away. Artworks and manuscripts were confiscated. He was banned from making art and forced to return to figurative painting under Stalin.

He died of cancer in 1935, aged fifty-six. On his deathbed, Black Square was hung above him. His ashes were buried at Nemchinovka. He had requested a Suprematist sculptural form to mark his grave. Instead, it was marked with a white cube bearing a black square, which was destroyed during the war.