In my opinion, Malevich- the great Russian minimalist and supremacist was the father of what I am calling conceptual art. "Conceptual " is a broad term. As it is used here, it refers to the significant presence of thought relative to emotion. Braque and Picasso's synthetic cubism figured heavily, to be followed by an impossibly broad global swatch of painters (e.g. Mondrian, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Matisse), The surrealists, the modern painters (including the great De Stael) and or course Rauschenberg, Johns, Motherwell, Kine, and a myriad of others interpenetrated with expressionists, minimalists, pop artists, neo-dadaists, realists, post modernists etc. The taxonomy has no meaningful beginning, middle or end.