Which artist's Black Square of 1915 founded Suprematism?

Malevich, and he hung it in the corner of the room at its first exhibition - the position traditionally reserved in a Russian home for the icon. That placement is the argument: a black square where the sacred image goes, offered as the zero point of painting, from which everything could start again.

It is not one painting. He made four versions, and the first has cracked with age to reveal coloured paint underneath and, under infrared, a pencil inscription that has been read as a reference to a French joke picture from 1882 - a black rectangle captioned as a night battle in a cellar. Whether that is Malevich acknowledging a precedent or something else is argued.

The Soviet state then closed the door. Abstraction was declared bourgeois formalism, socialist realism became compulsory, and Malevich was arrested and interrogated in 1930 and returned to figurative painting - though he signed some of those late works with a small black square. He died in 1935 and was buried under a monument marked with one, and his followers carried the coffin in a car painted with a black square on the bonnet.