Ivan Kliun

He was born in 1873 in the Russian Empire, the son of a carpenter. His family moved to Kiev in 1881, then to Russian Poland. He received his first artistic training at the Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in Warsaw while working as an accountant. In 1907 he met Kazimir Malevich, the encounter that drew him into the Russian avant-garde.

His career passed through Realism, Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubo-Futurism and Suprematism in roughly twenty-five years, a progression that reads like an index of early twentieth-century art movements. At the landmark 0,10 exhibition in Petrograd in 1915 to 1916, he showed Cubist and non-objective sculpture alongside Malevich's first Suprematist paintings. He became a member of the Supremus group and helped decorate Moscow for the first anniversary of the Revolution in 1918.

He taught at various state art workshops through the early 1920s. As the Soviet cultural climate turned against abstraction, his later work returned to representational subjects. He died in Moscow in 1943, at seventy.