Kazimir Malevich. Black square

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

In the history of world art, there are sometimes peculiar milestones that mark the turning points of the general movement. In this sense, such an artist as Kazimir Malevich was pretty lucky, whose "Black Square" became just such a landmark work. For a variety of historical and aesthetic reasons, this strange work has been at the center of public attention for almost a whole century. This is also curious because the provocative meaning and content was invested in this work by its commentators rather than by Malevich himself. "Black Square" has become a symbolic red rag in the hands of the bullfighter. But he does not tease the bull at the bullfight. It irritates the consciousness and aesthetic feelings of several generations of critics and ordinary people. They feel a particularly heavy aesthetic insult when they look at the number that experts from the world's leading auction houses indicate the approximate cost of this work of art.

"Black Square" by Malevich. History of its creation

Petrograd artist Kazimir Severinovich Malevich is the author of by no means the only painting that later became so famous. Without exaggeration, he can be called the founder of the wholetrends in Russian painting of the twentieth century. The direction was called "Suprematism", it was a completely logical stage in the development of such a leading trend in the avant-garde as cubism. It was Kazimir Malevich who put a peculiar end to these formalistic searches. "Black Square" for many meant the ultimate dead end, beyond which it was impossible to move, and there was simply nowhere to go. In the apt and somewhat venomous definition of one art critic, this was "the suicide of painting as an art." But the author himself did not even mean anything of the kind. And he did not work on his famous painting for several minutes, as one might assume, but for several long months in 1915.

According to one version, the painter intended to say and do something completely different. But it turned out what happened. And the success of the picture was, albeit peculiar, but with the passage of time, everything is growing. It can be called simply enchanting. The artist Malevich is known to the whole world today. "Black Square" is included in all catalogs, textbooks and theoretical monographs on Russian and world modernism.

What is Malevich's "Black Square" famous for?

Very many are haunted by this question. Is it just your stupidity? Is it only at an exorbitant price? Far from it. Many find in this work the deepest philosophical and religious meanings. Divination of the future and a foreshadowing of the decline of human civilization on planet Earth. In this context, the Petrograd suprematist Kazimir Malevich grows to the size of an apocalyptic prophet who explained to everyone what lies ahead for us. But for most of the general public, the "Black Square" only infuriates: "Give me at least a fraction of its price … I will buy a big brush, a bucket of liquid tar and draw a lot of black squares … "Try to say that such an idea never occurred to you.