Suprematist Composition

Working in oil on canvas, Kazimir Malevich painted this arrangement of floating geometric shapes in 1916, building on the radical abstraction he had unveiled the previous year. Colored rectangles and lines seem to hover over a white ground, tilted at dynamic angles. There is no subject, no reference to the visible world.

Malevich called his approach Suprematism, meaning the supremacy of pure feeling in art. He first showed these works at "The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10" in St. Petersburg in 1915, where his Black Square hung in the corner of the room like a religious icon.

When Malevich left the Soviet Union for a 1927 exhibition in Berlin, he entrusted about 70 works to a German architect. They were hidden during the Nazi era and eventually some reached the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where this painting now hangs.