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Movement

Suprematism

Early Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde

Suprematism was a Russian abstract art movement founded by Kazimir Malevich, first presented publicly at the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd in December 1915, where Malevich showed Black Square, a plain black square on a white ground he considered the zero point of painting, the total rejection of representation in favor of pure geometric form and feeling. Malevich held that basic shapes, squares, circles, crosses and rectangles, painted in flat, often primary colors and set adrift against white grounds, could express what he called the supremacy of pure artistic feeling over depiction of the visible world. The movement emerged from and briefly overlapped with Cubo-Futurism before pushing past it into total abstraction, and though short-lived as a defined group, its radical geometric vocabulary shaped Constructivism and, through El Lissitzky, the Bauhaus and international design.

Facts
Start Year
1915 1
End Year
1925 1
Founded In Place
Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), Russia 1
Key Principle
Total abstraction built from basic geometric shapes, square, circle, cross and rectangle, in flat color against white grounds, expressing pure artistic feeling with no reference to the visible world. 1
Connections

Associated With

Kazimir Malevich founded Suprematism, first exhibiting his Black Square manifesto painting in 1915.

Expressed In

Painting, Art Forms

Influenced

Movement Members

Black Square, Works

Founding work of Suprematism, 1915.

Founder of Suprematism.

Sources
1. Museum of Modern Art Collection
The Museum of Modern Art, New YorkView the Source

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