Suprematism is the Russian abstract painting movement that Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935) founded in 1915 with the publication of his manifesto From Cubism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism and the exhibition 0,10: The Last Futurist Exhibition at the Dobychina Art Bureau in Petrograd in December 1915. Malevich's Black Square, painted that year, was hung in the room's high corner, the position Russian Orthodox households reserved for icons. The work and the gesture together set the movement's terms.
The programme reduced painting to floating geometric forms on a white ground, beginning with primary colours and progressing in 1918 to the white on white compositions. Malevich treated the system as a complete philosophical project, arguing that pure feeling could be expressed only through non objective form. His circle included Ivan Kliun, Olga Rozanova, Lyubov Popova, Aleksandra Ekster, Nikolai Suetin, and Ilya Chashnik. From 1919 to 1922 Malevich led the UNOVIS group at the Vitebsk People's Art School with El Lissitzky, who absorbed the Suprematist vocabulary into his Proun series and into the international diffusion of Constructivism. Soviet authorities suppressed the movement after 1932 with the imposition of Socialist Realism.
