THE PROPHET.(Kazimir Malevich, painting, Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York)

In 1915, in Moscow, Kazimir Malevich painted a black square against a white ground on a canvas about two and a half feet square and called it a work of Suprematism. It was an extreme act of art and philosophy that has stayed extreme. "Black Square"makes its first appearance outside Russia in "Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism,"a concise, bewitching show at the Guggenheim. The painting looks terrible: crackled, scuffed, and discolored, as if it had spent the past eighty-eight years patching a broken window. In fact, it passed most of that time deep in the Soviet archives, classed among the lowliest of the state's treasures. Malevich, like other members of the Revolutionary-era Russian avant-garde, was thrown into oblivion under Stalin. The axe fell on him in 1930. Accused of "formalism,"he was interrogated and jailed for two months. He had been trying, in vain, to regain official favor with pictures of mildly abstracted figures. When he died, at the age of fifty-seven, in Leningrad in 1935, his friends and disciples buried his ashes in a grave marked with a black square. They didn't fulfill his stated wish to have the grave topped with an "architekton"--one of his skyscraper-like maquettes of abstract forms, equipped with a telescope through which visitors were to gaze at Jupiter.

The generation of Russian artists, designers, poets, and thinkers who caught fire just before the First World War, rose to institutional privilege under the 1917 Revolution, and then were crushed is characterized by grandiosity and grandeur--and tragedy, in abundance. "When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake,"Plato wrote. Artists who transformed all given modes of visual art while the walls of Russia more than shook could hardly avoid hubris. They had an unfortunate habit of scheming against one another, as well as against any artists whom they deemed outmoded. Realist painters stored up resentments for a day of vengeance. When the day came, Malevich proved luckier in his posterity than such colleagues as his arch-rival Vladimir Tatlin, the crack artist-engineer who had opposed Suprematism with what briefly seemed the politically impeccable doctrines of Constructivism. The Constructivists rejected pictorial composition in favor of machinelike structure, and dedicated their art to socially useful purposes. Most of Tatlin's work disappeared from the world's view. The fluke of a retrospective in Warsaw and Berlin in 1927 left nearly seventy works by Malevich in the West--among them the Museum of Modern Art's talismanic "White on White"(1918), a cool white square on a warm white ground. Malevich's work is a modern touchstone. But there remains something incomprehensibly bizarre about his achievement and his personality, as if he hailed, indeed, from Jupiter.

Malevich was born in 1878 to Polish-speaking parents in Ukraine. (His father worked as an administrator in sugar refineries.) He received an art education in Kiev, moved to Moscow in his late teens, and was soon active in avant-garde circles, including the Moscow Art Theatre. He became known for Cubist paintings on themes of Russian folk culture. In 1913, he designed sets and costumes for a legendary "Cubo-Futurist"opera, "Victory Over the Sun."(I once saw a conjectural re-staging of that work in Los Angeles; it was noisy and perfectly opaque.) Such was his personal charisma that he attracted many talented followers, who carried Suprematist motifs into decorative, functional, and architectural specialties. By 1919, he had established a power base at the art school in Vitebsk, where his faction had rudely ousted Marc Chagall from the directorship. (Chagall envisioned a school that was open to all tendencies; the new order would have none of that.) Malevich's most important ally, El Lissitzky, transposed Suprematism into a jazzy, superficial formal repertoire. Travelling often to Western Europe, Lissitzky helped to popularize the new Russian aesthetics under the general rubric Constructivism, producing a lasting confusion about an avant-garde whose dynamism was inseparable from its profound philosophical disagreements.

At the Guggenheim, thirty-eight paintings and many drawings and architektons track the flowering of Suprematism from 1915 into the early nineteen-twenties. The first works consist of single shapes--square, circle, cross, rectangle--in black and white. ...