The Black Square Kazimir Malevich from the collection of the State Hermitage

The avant-garde artist Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (1879–1935) was the founder of Suprematism, a type of geometric abstractionism. He was born into a Polish family not far from Kiev in Ukraine. In 1904–05, Malevich was an external student of the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. He was keen on Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism. In Munich he collaborated with Wassily Kandinsky in the Blauer Reiter artistic association. Malevich’s “Suprematist period” began in 1915. Many people even then regarded his Black Square not as a work of art but as a symbolic gesture, a nihilistic proclamation of “the end of painting”, which needed to be overcome in order to get away from both “naturalism” and “minimalism” in the visual arts. In 1916, Malevich published the manifesto From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism… The New Realism in Painting, in which he wrote: “The savage was the first to establish the principle of naturalism… when we  … teach our consciousness to see everything in nature not as real objects and forms, but as material, as masses from which forms must be made that have nothing in common with nature … the habit of seeing Madonnas and Venuses in pictures, with fat flirtatious cupids, will disappear.” Malevich considered himself an “apostle” of the art of the future. In 1920, with the support of Marc Chagall, he established a group of “Affirmers of the New Art” (Russian acronym – UNOVIS) in the Belorussian city of Vitebsk. Then in 1923 he became head of the State Institute for Artistic Culture in Petrograd. In 1926–27, Malevich worked at the Bauhaus in Dessau and organized exhibitions in Berlin and Warsaw. In 1929, Anatoly Lunacharsky appointed Malevich to take charge of the art section of the People’s Commissariat for Education, but already in the following year his planned exhibition in Kiev was banned.

The Black Square is Malevich’s most famous and iconic work. The black square on a white background became a symbol, the basic element in the artistic system of Suprematism, a step into the new art. Its title became a metaphor for radicalism in artistic thinking, when the non-figurative is elevated to the highest degree. Embodying as laconically as possible the idea of “absolute zero”, the beginning and end of all shapes, all phenomena, all worlds, the square in its philosophical aspect remained a not-fully-solved riddle even for its creator. Malevich saw in it a profound secret like the cosmos, the incomprehensible “image of God” that is impossible to rework, alter or surpass, but, like an icon, can be repeated. He called it his chief work, placed it on the cover of his book about Suprematism in 1916, and used it as a device instead of a signature on letters and his late figurative paintings.

The Black Square was first shown publicly at the “Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10” held in Petrograd in December 1915, although Malevich always asserted that it had been created back in 1913. It was then that, together with the artist Mikhail Matiushin and the poet Alexei Kruchenykh, he took part in the creation of the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. It was during his design work on the production and then the illustration of the published libretto of the opera that Malevich first drew a black square on a blank white ground, calling it “the germ of all possibilities”. Two years later, the seed of this “intuitive discovery” grew into Suprematism – the first non-figurative tendency in Russian avant-garde art. Since for Malevich it was evidently more important to record the birth of the idea of the square, and not the time of its embodiment on canvas, the artist dated all the replicas of the square 1913.

Today we know of four variants of the Black Square made by the artist himself, each of which is a development of the same theme but has its own characteristics of colour, design and texture. The first, which is now in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, was painted in 1915, on top of a previous Suprematist composition that had not been allowed to dry out sufficiently. For that reason, with time the work became covered with craquelure that significantly distorted its creator’s intention as the monolithic visual impression of the black colour was breached.

Malevich and his pupils produced a new replica of the Black Square, along with new variants of the Black Circle and Black Cross around 1923 with the intention of them being shown at the Biennale in Venice. All three parts of this triptych differ from the 1915 works in size and proportions. At present, those paintings are kept in the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg.

Malevich again returned to the repetition of his most famous composition in 1929, At that time, probably at the request of Alexei Feodorov-Davydov, then Deputy Director of the Tretyakov Gallery, he produced a new version for his personal exhibition in place of the one from 1915 that was already in the museum but was spoiled by severe cracking. Some people recalled the new painting being made directly in the museum halls.

Malevich painted the Black Square for the fourth and last time for the exhibition “Artists of the RSFSR over 15 Years” that was held in the Russian Museum in 1932, an event destined to be a final “summing up” for the Russian avant-garde. The sides of this painting are each 53.5 cm, making it smaller in format than all the previous versions, which measured 79.5 cm, 106 cm and 85 cm respectively. At the same time, the new format exactly matches the Red Square from 1913, together with which the Black Square was displayed at the 1932 exhibition. On the back of the new replica the artist again wrote the date 1913. This Black Square symbolically rounded off the cycle: the artist was repeating his Victory over the Sun.

After Malevich’s death, this last Black Square was among the few works that remained in the artist’s family. In the early 1990s, Incombank acquired the painting in Samara for its art collection. In 2002 the work was purchased by the State Hermitage with funds provided by Vladimir Potanin, a well-known art patron and friend of the museum.

The exhibition curator is Mikhail Olegovich Dedinkin, Deputy Head of the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art.