Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was born on February 11, 1878 in Kiev. He was born into a family of immigrants from Poland, was the eldest of nine children.

From 1896, after moving to Kursk, he served as a draftsman in the technical department of the railway.

In the autumn of 1905 he came to Moscow, attended classes for introductory purposes at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and the Stroganov School; lived and worked in the communal house of the artist V. V. Kurdyumov in Lefortovo. Attended classes in the private studio of F. I. Rerberg (1905-10). Spending the summer in Kursk, Malevich worked in the open air, developing as a neo-impressionist.

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich participated in exhibitions initiated by M. F. Larionov: “The Jack of Diamonds” (1910-11), “Donkey’s Tail” (1912) and “Target” (1913). In the spring of 1911, he became close to the St. Petersburg society “Union of Youth”.

Malevich’s decorative expressionist canvases of the turn of the 1900s and 1910s testified to the assimilation of the legacy of Gauguin and the Fauvists, transformed taking into account the pictorial tendencies of Russian “Cézannism”.

At the exhibitions, the artist also presented his own version of Russian neo-primitivism – paintings on themes of peasant life (paintings of the so-called first peasant cycle) and a number of works with scenes from “provincial life” (“Bather”, “On the Boulevard”, “Gardener”, all 1911, Stedelijk Museum, etc.).

Since 1912, Malevich began a creative collaboration with the poets A. E. Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov. He designed a number of publications by Russian futurists.

His painting of these years demonstrated the domestic version of futurism, which was called “cubo-futurism”: the cubist change of form, designed to affirm the intrinsic value and independence of painting, was combined with the principle of dynamism cultivated by futurism [“The Grinder (The Principle of Flickering)”, 1912, etc.].

The work on the scenery and costumes for the production at the end of 1913 of the futurist opera “Victory over the Sun” (text by A. Kruchenykh, music by M. Matyushin, prologue by V. Khlebnikov) was subsequently interpreted by Malevich as the formation of Suprematism.

In the spring of 1915, the first canvases of the abstract geometric style, which soon received the name “suprematism”, appeared. Malevich gave the name “suprematism” to the invented trend – regular geometric figures painted in pure local colors and immersed in a kind of “white abyss” where the laws of dynamics and statics reigned.

The term he coined went back to the Latin root “suprem”, which formed the word “suprematia” in the artist’s native language, Polish, which translated meant “superiority”, “primacy”, “dominance”. At the first stage of the existence of the new artistic system, Malevich sought to use this word to capture the primacy, dominance of color over all other components of painting.

At the end of May 1922, he moved from Vitebsk to Petrograd. From the fall of 1922, he taught drawing at the architectural department of the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineers. He created several samples and designed Suprematist paintings for porcelain products (1923). He made the first drawings of “planits”, which became the design stage in the emergence of spatial-volumetric Suprematism. In 1927 he went on a foreign business trip to Warsaw (March 8-29) and Berlin (March 29 – June 5).

In Warsaw, an exhibition was opened, at which he gave a lecture. In Berlin, Malevich was given a hall at the annual Great Berlin Art Exhibition (May 7 – September 30). On April 7, 1927, he visited the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he met W. Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy; in the same year, Malevich’s book “The World as Non-Objectivity” was published as part of the Bauhaus publications. Having received a sudden order to return to the USSR, he urgently left for his homeland; He left all his paintings and archive in Berlin in the care of friends, as he planned to make a large exhibition tour with a stop in Paris in the future. Upon arrival in the USSR, he was arrested by the NKVD and spent three weeks in prison.

In 1928, Malevich’s series of articles began to be published in the Kharkov magazine “New Generation”. From that year, while preparing a personal exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery (1929), the artist returned to the themes and subjects of his early peasant cycle, dating the newly painted paintings to 1908-10; post-suprematist canvases made up the second peasant cycle. In the late 1920s, a number of neo-impressionist works were also created, the dating of which was shifted by the author to the 1900s.

Malevich’s work in the last period of his life gravitated towards the realistic school of Russian painting. In 1933, a serious illness arose, which led to the artist’s death. According to his will, he was buried in Nemchinovka, a summer cottage village near Moscow.