Why Malevich hung a black square where Russians kept their holiest icon
In 1915 Kazimir Malevich unveiled a plain black square and placed it high in a gallery corner, the spot Orthodox households reserve for their main icon. The gesture announced Suprematism, a movement that wanted art freed from objects altogether, with only pure feeling left and geometry as its alphabet.
Malevich was already an established painter, having shown cubo-futurist work in 1912 at the Donkey's Tail and Blue Rider exhibitions, when he launched the idea. He traced its birth to 1913, when he designed sets and costumes for Kruchenykh's Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun. There the stage curtain was a black square, costumes were built from simple geometric shapes, and flashing lights made limbs and heads vanish into darkness.
The movement went public at the 1915 exhibition in Petrograd known as 0,10, where Malevich and his circle showed 36 works. His own 'grammar' rested on the square and the circle, and a later canvas, White on White, marked a shift from colour to monochrome. In his book The Non-Objective World, published in Munich in 1927 as a Bauhaus volume, he argued that the visible world is meaningless in itself and only feeling counts. Titles like 'Two dimensional painted masses in the state of movement' hint at another influence: the mystic P. D. Ouspensky's talk of a fourth dimension.
A group including Olga Rozanova, Lyubov Popova and Ivan Kliun met to plan a journal. Malevich first wanted to call it Nul, since they meant to reduce everything to zero and then go beyond it. After a year of writing essays, the first issue never appeared, a casualty of the Russian Revolution. Suprematism also stood firmly against Constructivism, which turned the painter into an engineer serving useful ends, although artists who drifted from one camp to the other have blurred the line ever since.
Its reach grew through El Lissitzky, who worked in the style from 1919 to 1923, turned it toward architecture in his Proun designs, and in Berlin linked it with De Stijl and the Bauhaus. Lazar Khidekel, the circle's only architect, produced the first Suprematist building project in 1926. Designers even put the motifs on porcelain, including a teapot by Malevich, and generations later Zaha Hadid's students studied the movement.
Source: Suprematism
