This is probably Malevich's most famous piece, and the painting that started the movement which he fathered: Suprematism. The main idea behind Suprematism was to try to distance art from the material world. In the past, art had been used as a tool by religion, by the government, and by the rich to portray what they wanted. Even in the same time period, there were others who saw art as a sort of functional skill, where artists were also engineers. However, Malevich instead simply wanted to capture the pure feeling of an artist. He wanted his art to become a pure expression of his creativity. This piece was considered to be so radical, as it was so different from anything else that existed at the time, even within modern art circles. 

Since there was a belief at the time that modern art should be very flat, many of Malevich's work did not have any sort of depth or much shading work at all. For his works of Suprematism, he painted only geometric shapes: lines, rectangles and circles. A lot of the works were about the negative space as much as the positive space, as the contrast between the vibrant shapes and the white empty base gives his work a very dynamic nature. As he was trying to move away from the material world, he did not portray anything that could have been something real. He simply wanted to evoke some sort of emotion.