A self-taught teenager near Kiev copying Orthodox icons and Ukrainian folk art grew up to paint a single black square so radical it cost him a week of sleep and landed him on the watch lists of both Soviet secret police and the early Nazi state. This episode traces Kazimir Malevich, born in 1878, through his 1907 move to Moscow, his rapid churn through Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Symbolism, and the realization that any picture of the physical world was a dead end.

We explore the 1913 Cubo-Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun, where his stage backdrops of black squares symbolized the capture of the sun and the death of rational thought, the 1915 canvas that launched Suprematism, and his decision to hang it in the sacred icon corner at the Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in Petrograd. The conversation covers the 2015 X-rays that revea ...