Supremus No. 38

In 1916 the world was two years into the First World War, and Kazimir Malevich, then in his late thirties, was called up into the Russian army. Only a year earlier he had shown the first Suprematist pictures in Petrograd, hanging a plain black square in the corner where a Russian home would keep an icon. Supremus No. 38 belongs to that new language: coloured bars, rectangles and a disc drifting on a white ground, with no horizon, no ground line, nothing to say which way is up. Malevich meant these forms to float free of gravity and of the visible world altogether. 'Supremus' was also the name he gave to a circle of artists around him, among them Olga Rozanova and Liubov Popova, and to a journal they planned that never appeared. The picture carries a number in a series whose order he never explained, and it now hangs in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, home to one of the largest collections of his work outside Russia.