Suprematist Composition: White on White

Malevich painted this in 1918, the year after the Russian Revolution, when a lot of artists in Moscow believed painting itself was about to be remade along with everything else. He had already reduced a picture to a single black square a few years earlier. Here he went further and took away colour too, setting a white square slightly tilted on a ground of a marginally warmer white, so the two shapes separate almost by temperature alone. Look closely at the edges and you can see they are painted by hand, not ruled, with the brushwork left visible. He showed the White on White pictures for the first time in Moscow in 1919, alongside a written statement about a new freedom in art. The canvas is a little under 80 centimetres square.