Page 26 - Studio International - March April 1975
P. 26
The Black Square was the mo
uncompromisingly abstract, non-
THE twentieth century had yet produced.
referential painting that the
It helped to usher in a new and
dazzling phase in Russian art, a
phase in which Russia undisputedly
took her place at the forefront of the
BLACK avant garde. And it was to launch its
creator on a path of exploration that
lasted one brief but meteoric decade,
a decade during which he posed and
faced some of the most burning
SQUARE issues that are alive in the minds
issues of twentieth-century art —
and work of some of the most
revolutionary and significant young
artists of today.
And yet the origins of the Black Square
lie surrounded in a certain mystery, as
JOHN GOLDING does its very whereabouts.' There can be
no doubt at all that Malevich and his
followers saw the Square as a tabula rasa,
the starting point of Lissitsky's 'new
world never before experienced', a blank
cheque made out to the future of art. 'I
have transformed myself into the zero of
form . Malevich had declared towards
the beginning of his manifesto. And yet
subsequently he was to make it equally
clear that if the Square marked the
departure of a totally new phase in art, it
also represented the embodiment and
summation of a whole tradition in modern
art that had been initiated by Cezanne
and brought to fruition in the twentieth
century by the Cubists and the Futurists.
But the enormous visual chasm that
separates the Black Square from even the
most radical innovations of Malevich's
contemporaries working in Western
Europe has never been satisfactorily
explained; and the work itself, for all its
boldness and simplicity (or perhaps by
very virtue of these qualities ?) has defied
analysis.'
As with the emblem, so with its author.
Of all the major figures in twentieth-
century art Malevich remains one of the
most enigmatic. This may in part be
because he appears to have been in certain
respects a secretive man, but it is mainly,
of course, the result of the internal
situation in Russia, where the
government, after the declaration of the
doctrine of Social Realism in 1932,
Malevich, Black Square, i915 deliberately thrust its greatest artists
into oblivion — an oblivion from which
Towards the end of the first Suprematist manifesto, they have only recently begun to emerge.
Malevich was one of the most vocal
which appeared in Petrograd in December 1915,
artists of his age, both in debate and in
Malevich introduced a brief but passionate ode to the print, but until relatively recently his
Black Square. 'It is', he declared, 'the face of the new only significant text known in the West
was 'The Non-Objective World,'
art. The Square is a living, royal infant. It is the published in Germany in 1927 as volume
first step of pure creation in art'.1 Some years later, eleven of the Bauhaus Books (even this
Lissitsky, Malevich's most brilliant disciple, paid a achieved publication in English only in
1959). It was only in 1968, with the
similar tribute to the Black Square when he wrote: publication of two volumes which include
`. . . here stood revealed for the first time in all its all the major texts published in Russia
purity the clear sign and plan for a definite new during Malevich's lifetime,' that art
historians could begin to put his
world never before experienced - a world which extraordinary achievement into
issues forth from our inner being and which is only perspective and attempt to come to terms
now in the first stages of its formation. For this with his genius.
Malevich was born in the country,
reason the square of suprematism became a near Kiev, in 1878. And it is revealing of
beacon . . .'2 the nature of early twentieth-century
abstraction that, like the other two great
pioneer abstractionists, Kandinsky and
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