Black Square (painting)

A section of Suprematist works by Malevich exhibited at the 0,10 Exhibition, Petrograd, 1915

The Black Square first appeared as part of a design for a stage curtain in the 1913 Russian Futurist/Cubo-Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchyonykh, and Mikhail Matyushin, for whom he did the costume and stage designs.[5]

Malevich painted his first Black Square in 1915.[6] He made four variants, of which the last is thought to have been painted during the late 1920s or early 1930s, despite the author's "1913" inscription on the reverse.[7][8][9] The painting is commonly known as Black Square, The Black Square or as Malevich's Black Square.

The painting was first shown in The Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in 1915. Its location in the icon corner emphasized the collision with the traditional orthodox culture.[5]

Forensic detail reveals how Black Square was painted over a more complex and colorful composition.[8]

The work is frequently invoked by critics, historians, curators, and artists as the "zero point of painting",[2][3][4] referring to the painting's historical significance as a paraphrase of a number of comments Malevich made about The Black Square in letters to his colleagues and dealers.

Malevich had made some remarks about his painting:

• "It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins."[11]
• "I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation, that is, to Suprematism, to the new realism in painting – to non-objective creation."[11]
• "[Black Square is meant to evoke] the experience of pure non-objectivity in the white emptiness of a liberated nothing."[11]

Photograph of Malevich

Peter Schjeldahl wrote:

The brushwork is juicy and brusque: filling in the shapes, fussing with the edges. But the forms are weightless, more like thoughts than like images. You don't look at the picture so much as launch yourself into its trackless empyrean. Beyond its obvious design flair, the work looks easy because it is. Malevich is monumental not for what he put into pictorial space but for what he took out: bodily experience, the fundamental theme of Western art since the Renaissance. His appeal to Americans isn’t surprising. Apart from a peculiarly Russian mystical tradition, which he exploited—evoking the compact spell of the icon, as a conduit of the divine—his work amounts to a cosmic "Song of the Open Road." It conveys sheer, surging, untrammelled possibility. This quality seemed in synch with the Revolution of 1917. It wasn't—which Malevich was painfully made aware of, first by his rivals in the Russian avant-garde and then, conclusively, by the regime of Joseph Stalin.[12]

Tone Roald and Johannes Lang wrote that Black Square "is an act of iconic rupture from a Russian-Orthodox Christian tradition, just as Ruben's The Death of Seneca, or Kiefer's Sulamith, can be understood as acts of iconic suture."[13]

The painting's quality has degraded considerably since its creation.[14]

Peter Schjeldahl writes:

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.[3]

Paul Bilhaud (1854-1933), Combat de nègres pendant la nuit, Oil on Canvas, 1882.

In 2015, while viewing the Black Square with a microscope, art historians at the Tretyakov Gallery discovered a message faintly written in pencil on the white paint in the lower left corner of the composition.[15] The first part of the phrase appears to say "Battle of negroes"; the second part is illegible, but may say "during the night."[15] The inscription appears to allude to an 1893 comic by French writer Alphonse Allais with the caption: "Combat de Nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit" or "Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night."[16] Irina Vakar, the head researcher involved in the 2015 study, has stated that "it is highly unlikely that the phrase was written by Malevich himself, but probably by someone who was mocking The Black Square."[15] Vakar notes that the pencil marks were made after the underlying paint had dried, meaning that they may date from long after Malevich completed the work.[15]

Other scholars, however, have considered the possibility that Malevich added the inscription himself. In his book Arts incohérents, Discoveries and New Perspectives,[17] the French expert Johann Naldi explores the hypothesis that Kasimir Malevich was aware of the Combat de nègres pendant la nuit, and that Paul Bilhaud's monochrome (1882) may have influenced the Black Square. Recently, art historian Andrew Spira considered the resonance with Paul Bilhaud's painting, but expressed doubts about Malevich's role in the inscription, questioning "whether he was even responsible for its writing."[18]

• Red Square painting
• 1915 in art