Kazimir Malevich in the context of "Blinky Palermo"

Hilma af Klint (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈhɪ̂lːma ˈɑːv ˈklɪnːt]; 26 October 1862 – 21 October 1944) was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings are considered to be among the first major abstract works in Western art history. A considerable body of her work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. She belonged to a group called "The Five", a circle of women inspired by Theosophy who shared a belief in the importance of trying to contact the "High Masters", often through séances. Her paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, were a visual representation of complex spiritual ideas.

Suprematism (Russian: супремати́зм) is an early 20th-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 the figurative depiction of real-life subjects.

Founded by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich in 1913, Supremus (Russian: Супремус) conceived of the artist as liberated from everything that predetermined 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 has been described as the first attempt to independently found a Russian avant-garde movement, seceding from the trajectory of prior Russian art history.

The Russian avant-garde was a large, influential wave of avant-garde modern art that flourished in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, approximately from 1890 to 1930—although some have placed its beginning as early as 1850 and its end as late as 1960. The term covers many separate, but inextricably related, art movements that flourished at the time; including Suprematism, Constructivism, Russian Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Zaum, Imaginism, and Neo-primitivism. In Ukraine, many of the artists who were born, grew up or were active in what is now Belarus and Ukraine (including Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandra Ekster, Vladimir Tatlin, David Burliuk, Alexander Archipenko), are also classified in the Ukrainian avant-garde.

The Russian avant-garde reached its creative and popular height in the period between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and 1932, at which point the ideas of the avant-garde clashed with the newly emerged state-sponsored direction of Socialist Realism.

The grid format has been an important component of avant-garde visual art throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. Early appearances of the grid format include work by Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich and other artists belonging to the De Stijl and Constructivist movements. The grid format also features prominently in minimalist and conceptual art of the 60's and 70's. The art theorist Rosalind Krauss writes,

"In the temporal dimension, the grid is an emblem of modernity by being just that: the form that is ubiquitous in the art of our century, while appearing nowhere, nowhere at all, in the art of the last one. In that great chain of reactions by which modernism was born out of the efforts of the nineteenth century, one final shift resulted in breaking the chain. By "discovering" the grid, cubism, de Stijl, Mondrian, Malevich . .. landed in a place that was out of reach of everything that went before. Which is to say, they landed in the present, and everything else was declared to be the past."

Black Square (Russian: Чёрный квадрат) is a 1915 oil on linen canvas painting by the Russian avant-garde artist and theorist Kazimir Malevich. There are four painted versions, the first of which was completed in 1915 and described by the artist as his breakthrough work and the inception of his Suprematist art movement (1915–1919).

In his manifesto for the Suprematist movement, Malevich stated that the paintings were intended as "a desperate struggle to free art from the ballast of the objective world" by focusing solely on form. He sought to create paintings that all could understand and that would have an emotional impact comparable to religious works. The 1915 Black Square was the turning point in his career and defined the aesthetic he was to follow for the remainder of his career; his other significant paintings include variants such as White on White (1918), Black Circle (c. 1924), and Black Cross (c. 1920–23). Malevich painted three other versions in 1923, 1929, and between the late 1920s and early 1930s. Each version differs slightly in size and texture.

El Lissitzky (Russian: Эль Лиси́цкий, born Lazar Markovich Lissitzky Russian: Ла́зарь Ма́ркович Лиси́цкий, listen; 23 November [O.S. 11 November] 1890 – 30 December 1941) was a Russian and Soviet artist, active as a painter, illustrator, designer, printmaker, photographer, and architect. He was an important figure of the avant-garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the Soviet Union.

Lissitzky began his career illustrating Yiddish children's books in an effort to promote Jewish culture. He started teaching at the age of 15, maintaining his teaching career for most of his life. Over the years, he taught in a variety of positions, schools, and artistic media, spreading and exchanging ideas. He took this ethic with him when he worked with Malevich in heading the suprematist art group UNOVIS, when he developed a variant suprematist series of his own, Proun, and further still in 1921, when he moved to Weimar Republic. In his remaining years he brought significant innovation and change to typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and book design, producing critically respected works and winning international acclaim for his exhibition design. This continued until his deathbed, where in 1941 he produced one of his last works – a Soviet propaganda poster rallying the people to construct more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany.

Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin (28 December [O.S. 16 December] 1885 – 31 May 1953) was a Russian and Soviet painter, architect, and stage-designer. Tatlin achieved fame as the architect who designed The Monument to the Third International, more commonly known as Tatlin's Tower, which he began in 1919. With Kazimir Malevich he was one of the two most important figures in the Soviet avant-garde art movement of the 1920s, and he later became an important artist in the constructivist movement.

Ukrainian avant-garde is the avant-garde movement in Ukrainian art from the end of 1890s to the middle of the 1930s along with associated artists in sculpture, painting, literature, cinema, theater, stage design, graphics, music, and architecture. Some well-known Ukrainian avant-garde artists include: Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Archipenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Sonia Delaunay, Vasyl Yermylov, Alexander Bogomazov, Aleksandra Ekster, David Burliuk, Vadym Meller, and Anatol Petrytsky. All were closely connected to the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, and Odesa by either birth, education, language, national traditions or identity. Since it originated when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire, Ukrainian avant-garde has been commonly lumped by critics into the Russian avant-garde movement.

The first formal Ukrainian artistic group to call itself "Avangarde" (Avant-garde) was founded in Kharkiv in 1925. The term, "Ukrainian Avant-Garde", concerning painting and sculpture during Soviet censorship, was used during discussion at Tatlin's dream exhibition. Curated by Parisian art historian Andréi Nakov, in London, 1973, the exhibition showcased works of Ukrainian artists Vasyl Yermylov and Alexander Bogomazov. The first international avant-garde exhibitions in Ukraine, which included French, Italian, Ukrainian and Russian artists, were presented in Odesa and Kyiv at the Izdebsky Salon; the pieces were later exhibited in St. Petersburg and Riga. The cover of "Izdebsky Salon 2" (1910–11) contained abstract work by Wassily Kandinsky.