suprematism

Russian abstract art movement launched in St Petersburg in 1915 by Kasimir Malevich, who was virtually its only member. It was the most radical abstract art movement up to this date; suprematist paintings used only a few colours and a few basic geometric shapes, such as the square, the circle, the cross, and the triangle.

Malevich, who was a deeply spiritual man, thought that by using such strict, simple shapes and colours, he could go beyond superficial appearances to attain a deeper level of meaning. In about 1918 he took his ideas to their most extreme form when he created a series of paintings featuring a white square on a white background (the square is visible only through variations in the brushwork); after this he abandoned suprematism. Although the ideas that lay behind it were rather obscure, suprematism proved highly influential on abstract painting and on design. Malevich had intended it to be a mystical form of expression, but in fact designers applied suprematist patterns to functional objects such as pottery and textiles.