Kazimir Malevich — painter (suprematism) with roots in the Russian Empire
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was born in Kiev, in the Russian Empire, on 23 February (11 February, Old Style) 1879; some sources give 26 February 1878 and place the birth near the city. His parents, Severin and Ludwika Malevich, were ethnic Poles who had left Poland after the failed January Uprising of 1863, and he was the first of their fourteen children, baptised a Roman Catholic. He lived and worked all his life in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and is claimed today as a Russian, a Ukrainian and a Polish artist.
His father intended him for the priesthood, but he drew and painted from an early age, studied drawing in Kiev in 1895-96, and in 1904 moved to Moscow, where he studied at the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and in the studio of Fyodor Rerberg until 1910. He showed peasant paintings in the Primitivist manner at the Donkey's Tail exhibition in 1912, then absorbed Cubism and Futurism, and in 1913 drafted a manifesto for the First Futurist Congress with the composer Mikhail Matyushin and the poet Alexei Kruchenykh.
At the Last Futurist Exhibition, 0,10, in Petrograd in 1915 he showed thirty-nine works under the title Suprematism of Painting, among them Black Square, and published From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism. White on White followed in 1918.
From 1919 he taught at the art school in Vitebsk, soon becoming its head, and with his students formed the UNOVIS group; that year he had a solo show at the Sixteenth State Exhibition in Moscow. From 1922 to 1927 he worked in Petrograd, later Leningrad, where he directed the State Institute of Artistic Culture and made architectural models with his students. In 1927 he travelled with an exhibition of his work to Warsaw and Berlin, the only time he left the country, and taught at the Kiev Art Institute from 1927 to 1929.
In 1930 he was arrested in Leningrad and held for about two months, under suspicion arising from his journey abroad. He died of cancer in Leningrad on 15 May 1935, aged fifty-six; the Leningrad Union of Artists paid for his funeral.
Tracing the roots — Kiev, Kiev Governorate (now Kyiv, Ukraine)
Born in Kiev (Russian Empire, now Kyiv, Ukraine) in February 1879 to Severin and Liudviga Malevich, ethnic Poles who, according to Wikipedia, had left Poland after the failed January Uprising of 1863. He worked in Moscow, Vitebsk, Petrograd/Leningrad and Kiev, and died in Leningrad (USSR) in 1935.
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Kiev, Kiev Governorate (now Kyiv, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Under Suprematism I understand the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art."