Black Square

The obliteration of art

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, oil on linen, 79.5 × 79.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Working in secret for two years, from 1913, Kasimir Malevich—a Ukrainian-Russian artist—was on the verge of turning the art world upside down. He did this with a medium-sized black square. What did the black square represent? Nothing. It was a negation of all the art which had come before. A zeroing of history. This negation, this non-art was the most radical art of the 20^th century. 

Modernism had been altering the concept of art for some time. Since at least the late 19^th century. However, at the start of the 20^th century things started to heat up: With Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism. In Russia, circa 1913 Malevich was influenced by a vein of Cubo-Futurism. It was the main school of painting and sculpture for Russian Futurists. Cubo-Futurism wasn’t however able to meet his revolutionary goal to free art. The Black Square and the art movement it spawned—Suprematism—did. In 1927, Kasimir Malevich released a book called The Non-Objective World. ‘Non-objective’ being a precursor to the word ‘abstract’. In it, he wrote the following about how the genesis of Black Square was received: 

When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed, "Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert. . . . Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!”

A side note about the date 1913 in the quote above. Kasimir Malevich misdated Black Square to 1913. It should have been 1915. There’s speculation about why he did this. The most plausible reason is that he wanted the Black Square painting to be the clear origin of Suprematism. The first Suprematist artwork from which all others followed.

The Black Square was Malevich’s contribution to revolution! With strokes of a brush, Malevich had created Russia’s own avant-garde art, which rivalled France’s Cubism and Italy’s Futurism. 

In the introduction to The Non-Objective World there’s an explanation as to the origin of Black Square, and indeed Suprematism: 

When Malevich created Suprematism in 1913 he was already an established painter in Russia. He turned his back on all of his earlier accomplishments. His Suprematism compressed the whole of painting into a black square on a white canvas. "I felt only night within me and it was then that I conceived the new art, which I called Suprematism.” This was expressed by a black square on a white square. "The square of the Suprematists . . . can be compared,” he said, "to the symbols of primitive men. It was not their intent to produce ornaments but to express the feeling of rhythm.” 

The reference to feeling in the quote is important. The introduction follows with: 

Malevich himself felt, as he said, "a kind of timidity bordering on fear when I was called upon to leave 'the world of will and idea’ in which I had lived and worked and in the reality of which I had believed. But the blissful feeling of liberating non-objectivity drew me into the 'desert’ where nothing is real but feeling and feeling became the content of my life. This was no 'empty square’ which I had exhibited but rather the sensation of non-objectivity.” 

This is to say, as outlined on Wikipedia: 

The term suprematism refers to an abstract art based upon "the supremacy of pure artistic feeling" rather than on the visual depiction of objects. 

The impact of the Black Square—and thus Suprematism—can be looked at from a number of angles. Malevich used broad strokes in his 1915 manifesto, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, to waxy lyrical about the achievement:

The square is a living, regal infant. The first step of pure creation in art. Before it there were naive distortions and copies of nature. Our world of art has become new, nonobjective, pure.

Malevich considered his achievement progress:

Forms move and are born, and we are forever making new discoveries. And what we discover must not be concealed. And it is absurd to force our age into the old forms of a bygone age. The hollow of the past cannot contain the gigantic constructions and movement of our life. As in our life of technology: We cannot use the ships in which the Saracens sailed, and so in art we should seek forms that correspond to modern life. The technological side of our age advances further and further ahead, but people try to push art further and further back. 

The reference to technology is common in much of modernism. As one engine of change, technology was an aspect of modernity which artists responded.

Malevich not only championed progress he also poured scorn onto those holding back said progress:

The mire of the past, like a millstone, will drag you into the slough. This is why I hate those who supply уоu with monuments to the dead. The academy and the critics are this millstone round your neck. 

Within the negative sentiment is an echo of the Futurist agenda of progress through the destruction of the outmoded.

Form

Black Square works at a formal level. The podcast Art History Happy Hour goes into detail about a number of these facets. There are two formal aspects in particular which cause the painting to have the effect it does:

• The colour, or lack of colour

• The figure/ground relationship

It’s debatable whether black is a colour. For the sake of the formal argument, black will be taken as non-colour. That’s to say, the lack of colour. This lack, this removal, this negation, this annihilation of colour creates a base state of zero. Painting’s unique quality is colour: To remove colour is to deny an essence of painting as such. This negation, this destruction creates space for something new.

A definition of figure/ground relationship from MoMA’s site:

The relationship between a depicted form (the figure) and pictorial space (the ground). Figure/ground relationships are often used to describe the construction of space in representational paintings, but the term can also be used to understand abstract paintings

At first blush, Black Square could be conceived as a black square figure on a white ground. However, due to the nature of the black paint, the square can also be read as receding. This is subversive as the figure/ground relationship is hierarchical. The figure is privileged within the dichotomy. The ground is secondary. By questioning what is the figure and what is the ground, the pictorial hierarchy is questioned. What is important, the black or the white? In the context of 1915 with the impending Russian Revolution, the question can be applied to society. Who is important, the ruling class or the proletariats?

In addition to philosophy and form, Malevich used another trick to sear the Black Square into the tumultuous world of 1915. This was the year he presented his Suprematist paintings to the world in the Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting 0.10 (pronounced zero ten). Here’s a description of the show from the University of Chicago:

One hundred years ago (December 1915-January 1916), one of the most significant exhibitions in the history of the pre-revolutionary Russian avant-garde was The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting 0.10 (Zero Ten). It marked an important moment of transition. Up to this point, Russian innovators had essentially been assimilating and developing the creative inventions of European artists. 0.10 revealed that Russian artists had caught up with their Western colleagues and now occupied a position at the forefront of avant-garde experimentation. From being followers, they had become leaders. At 0.10, Kazimir Malevich presented his famously iconic Black square along with thirty-eight completely non-figurative Suprematist canvases, which consisted of colored geometric shapes painted on white grounds… assemblages of everyday materials that were liberated from the wall and floor and slung across the corners of the room so that they defied gravity and existed fully in space. These twin innovations of non-figurative work in two and three dimensions posed fundamental questions concerning the nature of art itself, undermining traditional notions of painting and sculpture, and marking the beginning of a new phase in modernist explorations. [Any] attempt to reconstruct the original show would be well nigh impossible given the paucity of accurate information.

0,10 Exhibition, 1915, Petrograd

Along with having the paintings occupy 3D space, as stated in the quote above, there is also something special about the placement of the Black Square. In Tatyana Tolstaya’s bearish article in The New Yorker she explains:

As can be seen in one of the surviving photographs, the painting is displayed in the corner, under the ceiling—right where it is customary to hang Russian Orthodox icons. It’s doubtful it eluded Malevich—a man well versed in color—that this paramount, sacral spot is called the “red corner,” the word “red” here, in the original Russian, having the additional meaning of “beautiful.” Malevich quite consciously displayed a black hole in a sacred spot: he called this work of his “an icon of our times.” Instead of red, black (zero color); instead of a face, a hollow recess (zero lines); instead of an icon—that is, instead of a window into the heavens, into the light, into eternal life—gloom, a cellar, a trapdoor into the underworld, eternal darkness.

It was an anti-religious move. A political move. Something to counter the opium drip of the Russian-Orthodox Christian church. By some it was seen as blasphemy. From today’s secular point of view, it’s installation art. It was done to change the perception of the space—the corner. The space also changed the perception of the art. The Black Square become mythical.

Malevich died in 1935 and the Black Square disappeared. It wasn’t exhibited again until the late 20th century:

Within months of Malevich’s death in 1935, his work disappeared from public view and Stalin’s state-sponsored social realism was adopted as the ‘official art’ of Soviet Russia. The Black Square wasn’t exhibited again until the 1980s.

The Black Square demonstrated the radical potential of art. It negated all prior art. It was a minimal seed of Suprematism—an avant-garde movement that’s based in feeling, rather than depiction. The medium-sized Black Square engulfed form, philosophy, politics, and religion. Despite being stifled under Stalin, the Black Square re-emerged into public consciousness in the 1980s—maintaining its radical status. It negated the past in order to create a new future. Our future. The abstract future we live in today.