Art by Kazimir Malevich

Malevich's 1915 painting Black Square, a plain black square on a white ground and nothing else, was meant as a genuine zero point, the moment painting stripped itself of every subject, every reference to the visible world, down to pure feeling represented by pure form; he called the movement it launched Suprematism. He pushed the idea even further with White on White, a nearly indistinguishable white square painted on a slightly different white ground. Under Stalin, his work was suppressed as dangerously bourgeois and formalist, and he spent his final years largely forced back into a more conventional, representational style. He was buried, by his own design, in a coffin marked with a black square, in a grave later destroyed during World War II.