Malevich's Black Square

delivered by Andrew Spira.

Russian Icons & Russian Avant-Garde Art

When Kasimir Malevich’s ‘iconic’ Black Square was produced in 1915, no one had ever seen anything like it before. And yet it does have precedents. In fact, over the previous five hundred years, several painters, writers, philosophers, scientists and censors – each working independently towards an absolute statement of their own – alighted on the form of the black square or rectangle, as if for the first time. This talk will explore the resonances between Malevich’s Black Square and its precursors, showing how a quasi-genealogical thread binds them together into an intriguing, and sometimes quirky, sequence of modulations. Each predecessor both foreshadows Malevich’s work and, paradoxically, throws light on it, revealing layers of meaning that are often overlooked but which are as relevant today as ever.

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