Kazimir Malevitch

In December 1915, with Russia two years into a war it was losing and revolution not far off, Malevich hung a small painting of a black square on a white ground high across the corner of a Petrograd gallery. That corner was where a Russian home traditionally kept its holy icon, and everyone in the room caught the gesture. He called the show 0.10, the last Futurist exhibition, and argued that painting had to be dragged back to zero and begun again.

He named the new art Suprematism: flat coloured shapes drifting on white, answerable to pure feeling rather than to trees, faces, or things. For a few years after the 1917 revolution this radical work rode the wave, and Malevich taught, published, and built his squares and crosses into a whole system of forms.

Then the politics turned. Under Stalin the state wanted realism that ordinary people could read, and abstraction was pushed to the margins. In 1930 Malevich was arrested and questioned for weeks, and in his final years he went back to painting recognisable peasants and portraits, though he often tucked a small black square in as a private signature. When he died in 1935 his friends laid him out beneath a black square, and marked his grave with one.