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 e ...