With its purchase of Blue Poles, the gallery secured one of the masterpieces of modernism, a category which also includes its only Russian suprematist painting, Kasimir Malevich's .
He had hired two painters, Malevich and Lissitzky, members of the suprematist school of painting, to teach in Vitebsk's Free Academy.
The cenotaphs stick out horizontally from the wall, very much like the "architectons," the suprematist sculptural fantasies designed by the Russian Kasimir Malevich 60 years ago.