Works by Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Malevich went from village women built of shaded cones to Suprematism, flat shapes of pure colour on white, which he first showed in Petrograd in December 1915.

Nearly everything below is a painting from the 1910s, the decade in which Malevich moved from figures to pure abstraction. In 1912 he painted villagers and workers in a manner he called Cubo-Futurist, with forms built of shaded cones, tubes and wedges. Morning in the Village after Snowstorm and The Knife Grinder were first shown at the Target exhibition in Moscow in 1913. In the first, two women in red and pink skirts carry buckets between houses of shaded planes; in the second the grinder's fingers and feet repeat across the canvas, as if seen at several moments at once. In Samovar, which he sent to the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1914, a household object breaks into grey Cubist facets.

In summer 1915 he painted a black four-sided shape on white, and in December he showed it among thirty-nine abstract paintings at the 0,10 exhibition in Petrograd, hung high in a corner, where icons hang in Russian homes. In Suprematist Painting (with Black Trapezium and Red Square), bars of blue, yellow and red cross a tilted black field, and a red square rides on yellow strips near the bottom. According to the radiologist and art historian Milda Victurina, he laid some reds over black, giving them a touch of darkness that fakes usually lack. By 1917 a shape could thin out and fade at one edge, as in Yellow Plane in Dissolution.

Sources: Wikipedia, Yale University Art Gallery, Museum of Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.