How to Read Paintings: Black Square by Kazimir Malevich
A revolutionary painting and a crucial step in the development of modern art
What is striking about this work, Black Square, painted by the artist Kazimir Malevich in 1915, is that virtually all of the standard techniques of traditional painting are omitted. There is no tonal shading, no attempt at perspective or any description of three-dimensional space. There are no recognisable forms except for the square itself. Colour itself has been rendered in its most binary form: a roughly painted black square on a white linen canvas, measuring just under a metre in each axis.
As such, it is a picture that deliberately represents nothing. It is not unlike the silhouette left behind when a picture is removed from a wall, where sunlight has bleached the surrounding space and left a lingering shadow in its wake. Black Square expresses a void, a removal of painterly method, an artistic clean slate. And that is precisely its point.
Kazimir Malevich was a Russian artist who was most active at the beginning of the 20th century. Over his painting career, he worked in a variety of styles over several decades, but his most important works occurred between 1915 and 1918 when he concentrated primarily on the exploration of geometric forms (squares, triangles and…
