UNIT 6
Black Square
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a painter and art theoretician, pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the Avant-garde Suprematist movement. The name of the new style refers to the supremacy of pure feeling in art over art's objectivity. The simplest geometric forms -- a square, a triangle, a circle, and intersecting lines -- composed into dynamic arrangements on the flat surface of the canvas or into spatial constructions (sometimes called architectons) -- are to express the sensation of speed, flight, and rhythm.
Malevich attempted to eliminate all superfluous elements, including the color; since in 1918 he virtually gave up painting, perhaps these experiments convinced him that he had reached his goal and could not develop his Suprematist ideas any farther. Nevertheless, Malevich's ideas were so bold and innovative that despite the initial shock and fear, Suprematism quickly became a dominant style, espoused by both the public and the other artists.
“Black Square” (1915) is a picture which consists of nothing more than a black square on a white field. The artist considered the square to be the original cell of Suprematism. As he said: “This was no "empty square" which I had exhibited but rather the feeling of nonobjectivity. . . . Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art that, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of "things" . . . . The black square on the white field was the first form in which nonobjective feeling came to be expressed.” The square according to Malevich means feeling, the white field is the void beyond this feeling. But feeling has here assumed external form. The Suprematist square and the forms proceeding out of it can be likened to the primitive marks (symbols) of aboriginal man which represented, in their combination, not ornament, but a feeling of rhythm.
Suprematism did not bring into being a new world of feeling but, rather, an altogether new and direct form of representation of the world of feeling. The new art of Suprematism, which has produced new forms and form relationships by giving external expression to pictorial feeling, Suprematism has opened up new possibilities to creative art, since by virtue of the abandonment of so-called "practical consideration”, a plastic feeling rendered on canvas can be carried over into space. The artist (the painter) is no longer bound to the canvas (the picture plane) and can transfer his compositions from canvas to space.