“Gallery-goers might have been outraged not only because of the work’s simplicity—it is a 79.5-centimeter-square canvas bordered thickly in gray and white, filled in with black paint—but because it was not even a square.”
A rotating guest column in which writers reexamine critically unacclaimed works of art
In 1915, long before the release of Spinal Tap, and longer still before sculptor Anish Kapoor purchased the rights to Vantablack, the Polish Russian artist Kazimir Malevich first exhibited Black Square in Saint Petersburg, at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10 (called simply “zero-ten”). The number indicated a “point zero” for a new arts movement, suprematism—from whence all possibility might begin—and for the ten featured artists. “Up until now… painting was the aesthetic side of a thing, but never was original and an end in itself,” Malevich wrote in a handout accompanying the exhibition.
Malevich’s very first black square appeared in the design of a stage curtain for the production of a 1913 cubo-futurist opera called Victory Over the Sun, for which Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov wrote the text, Mikhail Matyushin composed the music, and Malevich designed the set and costumes. Written in Zaum—a phonetic, trans-rational language created by Russian futurist poets—the work attests to the values of suprematism, setting it against the artistic movements that preceded it, as well as its utilitarian, technologically charged contemporary, Soviet constructivism. In the opera, the characters seek to abolish discursive reasoning by capturing the Sun (encasing it in concrete, to be given a lavish burial by the Strong Men of the Future) and ending time as it is known; the play culminates in an aviation catastrophe, with the world in darkness. The opera was not well received by the public at Luna Park, the amusement park in Saint Petersburg where it premiered in 1913, or by critics, but it announced the genesis of a uniquely Russian approach, one unbound by the traditions of Western Europe.
At 0,10 two years hence, the gallery-goer might first have been struck by the presentation of Black Square, in the upper right corner of the wall, at the sacred site traditionally dedicated to icons in Russian Orthodox households and known as “the red corner,” usually located in the eastern part of the building. They might have been outraged not only because of the work’s simplicity—it is a 79.5-centimeter-square canvas bordered thickly in gray and white, filled in with black paint—but because it was not even a square. Measure the piece in any direction and find nothing in the image that is truly orthogonal. Because it is not a picture of a square, per see, Black Square is free from the constraints of representation, an absolute zero.
According to Malevich, neither critics nor the Russian public understood the piece. “This was no ‘empty square’ which I had exhibited but rather the feeling of non-objectivity… Yet the general public saw in the non-objectivity of the representation the demise of art,” he wrote. His friend Matyushin (a painter as well as a composer) was especially harsh: in letters to Malevich he declared that the work demonstrated a “lack of restraint,” “lack of maturity,” “insufficient understanding,” and an “incomplete break with ‘Cubo.’” Alexandre Benois, a leading art critic of the day, “denounced Suprematism with biblical horror,” wrote Aleksandra Shatskikh in Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism. Benois, Matyushin, and Dmitry Merezhkovsky—who referred to suprematism as “another step of the coming Boor”—maintained such opinions. This would galvanize Malevich, who found such views outdated.
The curator Andrew Spira writes that, in fact, imperfect black squares—and even rhomboids—had long existed in art, from the English physician Robert Fludd’s attempt at capturing infinity in The Metaphysical, Physical, and Technical History of the Two Worlds (from 1617, nearly three hundred years earlier), to the black Yorick-death page in Tristram Shandy (1759), to Gustave Doré’s History of Holy Russia (1854). It is not clear how many of these works were known to Malevich, but if they relied on traditional black-and-white dualism—contrasting lightness with darkness to correspond respectively to good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, heaven and hell—Malevich stated definitively that Black Square indicated the beginning of life, of possibility, of true abstraction in art.
