Origin: Founded by Kazimir Malevich in Russia during the First World War, with its inception dating back to 1913
Pioneers: Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova
Related Movements: Abstract Expressionism, Bauhaus, Constructivism, De Stijl
Suprematism is an early twentieth-century art movement focused on the fundamentals of geometry (circles, squares, rectangles), painted in a limited range of colors. The term suprematism refers to an Abstract Art based upon "the supremacy of pure artistic feeling" rather than on visual depiction of objects.
Founded by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich in 1913, Malevich's journal "Supremus" conceived of the artist as liberated from everything that pre-determined the ideal structure of life and art. Projecting that vision onto Cubism, which Malevich admired for its ability to deconstruct art, and in the process change its reference points of art, he led a group of Russian avant-garde artists—including Aleksandra Ekster, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Ivan Kliun, Ivan Puni, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Nina Genke-Meller, Ksenia Boguslavskaya and others—in what's been described as the first attempt to independently found a Russian avant-garde movement, seceding from the trajectory of prior Russian art history…
Malevich’s "Supremus" publication, however, never took off and its first issue was never distributed due to the Russian Revolution. The movement itself, however, was announced in Malevich's 1915 Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings in St. Petersburg, where he, and several others in his group, exhibited 36 works in a similar style...
In "Suprematism" (Part II of his book The Non-Objective World, which was published 1927 in Munich as Bauhaus Book No. 11), Malevich clearly stated the core concept of Suprematism:
“Under Suprematism I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.”
He created a suprematist "grammar" based on fundamental geometric forms; in particular, the square and the circle. In the 0.10 Exhibition in 1915, Malevich exhibited his early experiments in suprematist painting. The centerpiece of his show was the Black Square, placed in what is called the red/beautiful corner in Russian Orthodox tradition; the place of the main icon in a house. "Black Square" was painted in 1915 and was presented as a breakthrough in his career and in art in general. Malevich also painted White on White which was also heralded as a milestone. White on White marked a shift from polychrome to monochrome Suprematism...
Source: Wikipedia, photo credit: Russian Constructivism