Black Square

For other uses, see Black Square (disambiguation).

Black Square (Russian Чёрный квадрат) is a 1915 oil on linen canvas painting by the Kyiv-born artist Kazimir Malevich. The first version was completed in 1915 and was described by the artist as his breakthrough work and the inception for the launch of his Suprematist art movement (1915–1919). In his manifesto for the Suprematist movement, Malevich said the works were intended as "desperate struggle to free art from the ballast of the objective world" by focusing only on pure form. He sought to create paintings that could be understood by all, that would have an emotional impact comparable to religious works.

Black Square
Artist	Kazimir Malevich
Year	1915
Medium	oil on canvas
Dimensions	79.5 cm × 79.5 cm (31.3 in × 31.3 in)
Location	Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

The 'Black Square 1915 was the turning point in Malevich's career and defines the aesthetic he was to follow for the most of remainder of his career; his other significant paintings include variants such as White on White (1918), Black Circle (c. 1924), and Black Cross (c. 1920–23). Malevich painted three other versions of the Black Square, in 1923, 1929, and between the late 1920s and early 1930s. Each version differs slightly in size and texture.

The original Black Square was first shown at The Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in 1915. The last is thought to have been painted during the late 1920s or early 1930s. Malevic described the 1915 painting is as the "zero point of painting"; since then it and it has had a significant nfluence on minimalist art.

Conception

Malevich, c. 1900

A self-taught artist, Kazimir Malevich's early works, created while still a teenager, incorporate the style and motifs of Ukrainian and Russian folk art and Eastern Orthodox icons. In the early 1900s, when he was heavily influenced by late 19th-century Impressionism. He moved from his birthplace of Kyiv to Moscow in 1907, where he came into contact with the leading Russian avant-garde artists such as Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov.

He first used the motif of a black square while working as the stage designer for the premiere of the Cubo-Futuristic opera Victory over the Sun by the painter and composer Mikhail Matyushin's (1861–1934), staged at the Luna Park Theater in Saint Petersburg on 3 December, 1913. Although the opera is ostensibly a comedic farce, the plot satirises the religious dogma and Tsarist autocracy then dominating pre-revolution Russia. Its libretto was written by the poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922), and follows protagonists seeking to "abolish reason" by capturing the sun and destroying time. The opera ends with a world in darkness, which Khlebnikov intended to represent the a future after the destruction of Russian tradition. These ideas resonated with Malevich's year zero views on the purpose of contemporary Modernist art.

Malevich's sketches for the costumes seem largely influenced by Cubism and Futurism. However a number, including those known today as Futurist Strongman, Grave Digger and A Certain Evil Intender, are in colour but contain distinct black squares and rectangles. During the pivotal scene depicting the death of the sun, black squares appear eight times: on a curtain and the backdrops, and on the coats and hats of the sun's pall bearers.

According to the art historian Frances Spalding, the square on the curtain "suggests the sun's coffin", while others critics view it as an expression of the victory of active human creativity over the passive form of nature: a black square appeared instead of a solar circle. He was immediately aware of the design's potential, wrote pleading letters to Matyushin to retain it when the composer was planning a 1915 performance of the opera. In the letters, Malevich claimed that the square "will have great significance in painting" and is the "embryo of all possibilities; in its development it acquires a terrible strength."

Composition

Malevich created the first version in 1915 when he applied broad stokes of thick black oil paint onto the center of a 79.5cm x 79.5cm linen canvas to form a black square. The wide border and edges are painted using various shades of white and grey paint.

Suprematist works by Malevich at the 0,10 Exhibition, Saint Petersburg, 1915

Triptych at the Russian Museum, featuring the 1924 version

Malevich was a prolific and talented self-publicist and has been described as a both a "brilliant, grandiose, messianic figure" and a "a fanatic pamphleteer". Sensing that he had made a breakthrough, he declared the painting as a milestone in both his oeuvre and "in the history of art". He later wrote that he was so excited at the break through that he was unable to "sleep, eat, or drink for an entire week after".

The painting was first shown at the 1915 The Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 at the Field of Mars square in Saint Petersburg (then Petrograd). Its hanging in the icon corner emphasised the collision between Modernism and traditional Eastern Orthodox culture. Over the following decades, Malevich made three other oil on canvas on canvas variants (in 1924, 1929, while the final version thought to date from the late 1920s or early 1930s). In addition, he created numerous lithographs of the image, used it to decorate his signature, and applied it to lapels he gave to his students.

The reverse contains the inscription "1913", however this is though to refer to the year of the design's conception that year for Victory over the Sun. He continued in his writings to refer to it as The main Suprematist element. Square. 1913. According to an overview of the work by Tate Modern, Malevich may have given an earlier date so as to appear more ahead of the curve during the early years of Abstract art.

Examination using x-ray shows different outlines and shapes, while traces of red paint are visible under the craquelure. These findings indicate that the Black Square was painted over an earlier painting or sketch, likely an embryonic but abandoned Suprematism composition.

Interpretation

Black Square is widely regarded by art historians and critics as foundational in the development of both modern and abstract art. Malevich described the paintings as part of the Suprematism movement, which emphasised colour and shape. The title "Suprematism" is derived from the word supremus (Russian: Супремус), which translates as "superior" or "perfected", which Malevich said was intended to reflect his desire to "liberate" painting from mimesis (imitation) and representational art.

Although the movement gained many supporters among the Russian avant-garde, it was overshadowed by constructivism, whose manifesto better reflected the ideology of the early Soviet government, and which had a larger influence on later 20th century art. Today Suprematism is almost exclusively associated with Malevich and his apprentice El Lissitzky.

• 
  Red Square, 1915. Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
• 
  White Square (also known as White on White), 1918. Museum of Modern Art, New York City
• 
  Black Circle, c. 1924. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Versions

Malevich produced three oil on canvas copies of the original painting. The first copy was completed in 1923 The 1929 version is a near replica and the closest in size to the original, and may have been created

The second copy was painted around 1923 in collaboration with his students Anna Leporskaya, Konstantin Rozhdestvensky and Nikolay Suyetin. The third Black Square (also at the Tretyakov Gallery) was painted c. 1929 for Malevich's solo exhibition, perhaps as a stand in for a solo exhibition as the original was by then in poor condition.

The final Black Square is the smallest and may have been intended as a diptych along with the smaller again Red Square for the 1932 exhibition Artists of the RSFSR: 15 Years in Leningrad, where the two squares formed the centerpiece of the show.

• 
  Black Square, c. 1923, Russian Museum. Completed
• 
  Black Square, 1929
• 
  Black Square, date unknown, c. late 1920s–1930s

Influence

Avant-garde art fell from favour after Joseph Stalin took absolute control of the USSR in the late 1920s. Stalin was notoriously suspicion of people who traveled outside the Soviet Union, and Malevich came to the attention of Stalin's secret police as a possible dissident in early 1927 when he traveled to Berlin to attended the Grosse Kunstausstellung exhibition where around 70 of his paintings and drawings scheduled for display. Malevich was aware that progressive artist were likely to be suppressed in Russia, and made attempts to relocated to Germany, where the Nazi party was already targeting so called "degenerate art", that is art that did not conform to the idealised Aryan way of living, which was based around, according to the historian Tony Wood a dedication to "family, home and church", and was "ironically...a mirror image of the socialist realism of the hated Communists."

Malevich arrested for several days in 1930. His work was officially banned in the USSR shortly after his early death in 1935, after Stalin's favoured social realism was designated the official art of the union and many other art forms were suppressed.

Although Black Square wasn't exhibited again until the 1980s, today the work is frequently regarded as historical significant in Modern art, and one of the most recognisable 20th century paintings.

Malevich wrote that the painting was "from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins", and that he transformed himself "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." He said that the work was intended to evoke non-objectivity in "the white emptiness of a liberated nothing."

Tone Roald and Johannes Lang wrote that Black Square "is an act of iconic rupture from a Russian-Orthodox Christian tradition."

Condition

The painting has degraded considerably since its creation. According to the American art critic Peter Schjeldahl, "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."

Sources

• Blanshard, Frances Bradshaw. "Retreat from Likeness in the Theory of Painting". New York: Columbia University Press, 1949
• Drutt, Matthew. Malevich, Black Square, 1915. New York: Guggenheim, 2003. ISBN 978-0-89207-265-1
• Jakovljevic, Branislav. "Unframe Malevich!: Ineffability and Sublimity in Suprematism". Art Journal, volume 63, no. 3, Autumn 2004. JSTOR 4134488
• Kovtun, E. F.; Douglas, Charlotte. "Kazimir Malevich". Art Journal, volume 41, no. 3, Autumn, 1981. JSTOR 776564
• Naldi, Johann. Arts incohérents, discoveries and new perspectives. Paris: Lienart, April 2022. ISBN 978-2-3590-6366-0
• Meinhardt, Johannes. The Painting As Empty Space: Allan McCollum's Subversion of the Last Painting. AURA, Vienna: Wiener Secession, 1994.
• Pinkham , Sophie. Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine. Cornerstone Digital, 2016. ISBN 0-4340-2351-5
• Roald, Tone; Lang, Johannes. Art and Identity: Essays on the Aesthetic of Creation of the Mind. Rodopi, 2013. ISBN 978-9-4012-0904-5
• Shatskikh, Aleksandra. "Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism". Yale University Press, 2012