In 1935 a funeral procession moved through Leningrad carrying banners marked with a single black geometric square, and the grave was capped with a white cube bearing the same image. The man being buried was Kazimir Malevich, and this episode traces how a boy raised among rural sugar refineries created Suprematism, one of the most radical and controversial philosophies in modern art. Malevich did not just change how art looked; he tried to strip away centuries of visual tradition to reach the baseline of human perception.

We follow his path from an ethnic Polish Catholic family near Kyiv to Moscow, where private collections of Monet, Cezanne and Picasso shattered his perspective, and through the neo-primitive style, a polar-bear perfume bottle design, the trans-rational language of zaum, and the cubo-futurist opera Victory Over the Sun. We examine the 1915 debut of the Black Square in the icon corner, its layered pigments, the brief embrace by the Bolsheviks, and the brutal shift to socialist realism under Stalin that led to his arrest, his forced return to figurative painting, and his death in 1935. We close with the archive he strategically left in Berlin, an $85 million auction in 2018, and the ongoing debate over whether to call him Polish, Ukrainian or Russian.

• How a childhood between sugar refineries and peasant landscapes shaped a self-taught draftsman
• Zaum, geometric cardboard costumes and the opera that buried the sun
• Why a black square hung in the sacred icon corner was both a provocation and a liberation
• Abstraction as a threat to totalitarian control and the tiny squares hidden in his late signatures
• Restitution lawsuits, museum relabeling and the question of what Malevich would make of generative AI