Understanding the meaning of some world-famous paintings, such as Malevich’s Black Square, comes only with the study of the context of historical reality. For more than a century there have been debates about the artistic value of the painting. But the more the skeptics try to belittle the significance of the “black square” for art, the greater interest in this controversial masterpiece of the early twentieth century.
History of Creation
Distant from the art of people Malevich’s painting “Black Square” causes bewilderment. They scoff at what they don’t understand, concluding by stating something like “I could do that too!”
No one today would think of dropping everything, picking up paints and a canvas to start painting a black rectangle or a “Red Quadrangle.” Yes, yes, a painting with that name also exists. And it’s definitely not a square, because all corners have a slight deviation from 90°.
That would end interest in the Soviet artist’s work, and his paintings wouldn’t pay millions of dollars at auctions. If there was only “Black Square” and there was no “Red cavalry”, “Suprematic composition” and his other creations. But then the “great self-taught artist”, a Polish Jew from Kiev who moved to Moscow, would not have been included in the list of “Soviet geniuses”, who were ahead of their time and gave a new philosophy in understanding visual art.
Art historians assign a special role to this artist, comparing him with the brilliant architects of the Renaissance and the founders of fashion trends of the early twentieth century. A man with a peculiar sense of humor will remain incomprehensible to dilettantes.
For connoisseurs he will always be the founder of a new direction in art – Suprematism, where he mixed features of different currents, such as cubism, surrealism, expressionism and futurism. And he was preparing his famous painting for the Futurist exhibition “Zero, Ten” on the Field of Mars.
“Black square” was hung instead of the icon in the red corner. Malevich said at the time: “If mankind has drawn the image of the Godhead in his own image, then perhaps the Black Square is the image of God as a being of his perfection.” There is nothing to add to this.
Black squares in the history of painting
Modular paintings
There is also a trivial version – the artist hastily hid under the “black veil” of brush strokes his best masterpiece during an attempted robbery, having closed himself in the storeroom. That may have been the case. And then he was already experimenting with different directions in art.
However, Kazimir Malevich was not the inventor of the “Black squares”. In 1617, in England, Robert Fludd left “The Great Darkness” in his vaults. The canvas resembles an outline of horizontal and vertical lines.
Later, other authors, famous and not left their names to history, offered their versions:
“View of La Hoge (night effect)” (1843);
“A Twilight History of Russia” (1854).
Descendants continued the endeavor with humor:
“The Night Fight of the Negroes in the Basement” (1882);
“The Fight of the Negroes in the Cave in the Deep Night” (1893).
Today, anyone can leave a modern version of Malevich’s Square. For example, “A Black Cat in a Dark Room on the Night of the Eclipse of the Moon” or “Sleeping Dracula in a Coffin during a Fanning Blackout.”
It would be fun to give such a piece to an auction or exhibit at a metropolitan exhibition, watching the reaction of visitors. For this would not have given and one ruble without the “promoted” name of the author. But the historical masterpieces by famous artists are worth millions.
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich patiently explained to his students (and simply to those who were curious) that Suprematism was a special philosophy in art and that it created, not repeated. Indeed, when you look at the works of Dali, Malevich or Picasso, you realize that it’s hard to come up with such things or even find something similar to copy.
That’s the value of such paintings. They are unimaginable masterpieces, inaccessible to the average person. They can be considered, to study the background of the emergence of such trends in art, but understanding the essence – somewhere beyond the commonplace. You can take a canvas and oil paints and depict something similar, but that will be the end of it. Any masterpiece is a sublimation of some philosophy and aesthetics, a special view of the surrounding reality within a narrow historical framework.
Perhaps these artists represented to the adherents of mass culture a kind of “banter,” a parody of the reality of what is happening in an age of all general decadence or decadence. Kazimir Malevich, with his Black Square, expressed a mute protest, not accepting reality. He dated his “squares” 1913-1915, on the eve of the revolution and on the eve of the First World War. He himself said that these works were a “peculiar alphabet,” “zero forms,” and “a complete absence of emotion.”
Black, in his understanding, is all colors at once. So it is from the point of view of the laws of physics. Black absorbs all colors born of a beam of light. It is the total absence of light, or “total darkness. For Malevich, the square is the “first form”. Everything begins with the rectangle and closes on it, “the germ of all possibilities”. It is said that all his geometric shapes were made by hand.