Composition with the Mona Lisa

Kazimir Malevich was a pioneer of geometric abstraction. He wrote a manifesto, From Cubism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting, and founded the Suprematist movement in 1915. For Malevich, painting had to be free of political or social content, purely aesthetic, and concerned only with formal issues of line, shape, and color. Declaring his Black Square (1915) the "zero of form," Malevich signaled an end to pictorial conventions and the origin of a new, modernist language of content-free forms. While Suprematism began before the Revolution of 1917, its influence was pervasive in the early Soviet period until the rise of Social Realism. Although Malevich eventually returned to representational painting, Suprematism had a huge impact on the development of abstract art in the both Soviet Union and in Western Europe.