The Black Square

...paintings by Kazimir Malevich are the subject of this article on the Hermitage Museum site, the result of a search that came out of nowhere. Last night, after I was called a square for using the browser I use and after I said ha!, the Black Square popped into my head. I suppose it was a natural square to square leap.

Kazimir Malevich and Suprematism continue to be the focus of my attention this afternoon. The Black Square comes up in "Kazimir Malevich: Beyond Figuration, Beyond Abstraction," a review by Donald Goddard on the exhibition that ran till July at the Museo del Corso in Rome, Italy. In it Goddard says "it was not until later in his career that Malevich recognized the motif’s origin in the opera, where it signifies the pure, nonobjective future, replacing the rational world of the sun under which humankind, and art, had been fated to live before that."

In his Guardian article "Marxism on a Plate," Jonathan Jones says this about Kazimir Malevich's painting: "By reducing painting to a black square, he released a new art of geometric forms, dynamic yet serene, prosaic yet sublime. This was a poetic and introspective abstraction, rejecting the visible world to enter imaginary space where motion and time are redeemed."