Suprematism Begins

Malevich gave his approach a name: Suprematism, painting boiled down to pure shape and color. He kept pushing. In 1918 he made White on White — a pale square tilted on an off-white ground, almost too faint to see. He was hunting for the vanishing point of visible content, the least an image could be and still exist.

This was not giving up on meaning. Malevich believed that once you removed every recognizable thing, what remained was pure feeling — sensation with no object attached. The square was not empty to him. It was so loaded that no single picture could ever hold it. The blankness was the point, not a lack of one.