(1878-1935)
Malevich was inspired by the Italian Futurists
and French Cubists. Creating a new philosophy called Supermatism, he left a permanent mark
on modern art. His writings indicate his feeling of being free of the material world that
exists throughout 20th century art.
MALEVICH'S THOUGHTS ON ART
"My new painting does not belong solely to earth. The earth has been abandoned like a worm-eaten house. And an aspiration toward space is in fact lodged in man and his consciousness, a longing "to break away from the globe of the earth." Futurism was almost exclusively concerned with space, but because its form was linked with objectivity, it did not even provide the imagination with a sense of present universal space. Its space was confined to the space separating objects on earth. On the other hand, a suspended surface of painted color on a sheet of white canvas imparts direct to our consciousness a strong sensation of space. It transports me to desert where one perceives around one the creative points of the universe. [1916]
But we will discover something else, we will
disclose on earth that which cannot be disclosed in heaven. Christ disclosed heaven on
earth, having put an end to space, and established two limits, two poles, so that they
should exist in themselves-or "over there." But we will pass by a thousand
poles, just as we pass over billions of grains of sand on the shore of a sea or river.
Space is greater than heaven, stronger and more powerful, and our new book is the teaching
of the desert's space. [1916]
"It has become clear to me that new frameworks of pure color-painting should be created, constructed at color's demand; and, secondly, that color should leave the painterly mixture and become an independent factor, entering the construction as an individual of a collective system and individual independence."
"The system is constructed in time and space, independently of all aesthetic
beauties, experiences, and moods: it is more a philosophical color system for realizing
the latest achievements of my ideas, as knowledge. At the present time man's path lies
through space, and Suprematism is color semaphore in its infinite abyss. The blue color of
the sky has been defeated by the Suprematist system, has been broken through, and entered
white, as the true real conception of infinity, and therefore liberated from the color
background of the sky. The system, hard, cold, and 
unsmiling, is brought into motion by philosophical thought, or else within
the system its real strength is already moving."
"All the colorings of utilitarian intention are insignificant and narrow, having the
already completed purely applied significance of what was found by cognizance and the
result of philosophic thought, on the horizon of our vision of little corners either
serving a Philistine taste or else creating a new one In one of its stages Suprematism
has, through color, a purely philosophical movement, and in a second, as a form which may
be applied, formed a new style of Suprematist decoration. But it can appear on things as a
transformation or incarnation of space in them, banishing from consciousness a thing's
wholeness. Through Suprematist, philosophical color thinking it has been made clear"