It is amazing how seminal moments in art germinate from the simplest of ideas. In 1915, the Ukrainian painter, Kazimir Malevich took a medium-sized canvas, painted it white around the edges and filled the middle square with thick black paint. He titled the work appropriately enough, ‘Black Square.’ With this act, Malevich became the first artist to transform art from an activity that tries to represent some aspects of reality to one where symbols (here, the square) speak for themselves. As Malevich himself puts it:
Up until now there were no attempts at painting as such, without any attribute of real life… Painting was the aesthetic side of a thing, but never was original and an end in itself.
To see that Black Square was indeed transformative for art, we only have to trace the directions modern art took after 1915. First, there was Expressionism, an avant-garde style that began in Germany in the early 20th century and can be characterized by evocative and emotional pieces that are typically abstract. Taking cues from the dramatic post-Impressionist work of Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch among others, pioneer Expressionist artists sought to discard traditional representation in favor of using shapes and colors to express meaning or emotion behind the work. This ‘non-objective’ approach to art resurfaced later as Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s, with New York being the center of the movement, led by artists like Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning.
One of most famous early Expressionist, whose work greatly influenced Malevich was the Russian-born painter, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Kandinsky was inspired to create art that communicated a universal sense of spirituality. He found a powerful inspiration in music and invented a pictorial language consisting of circles, lines, and colors to evoke an emotional response, much as music does through the rhythm of musical notes. Kandinsky felt that music and color were inextricably tied to one another, and even associated each musical note with an exact hue.
The sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble.
Not surprisingly, Kandinsky gave many of his paintings musical titles, such as Composition or Improvisation. These paintings, filled with a riot of vibrant colors, lines, shapes, and textures, were Kandinsky’s way of creating the rhythmic visual language that he sought.
Malevich found Kandinsky’s geometric vocabulary refreshing. He was also inspired by Kandinsky’s belief that art could be a way to express the divine and connect with the spiritual world. Black Square was his way of expressing a sort of spirituality using the square as a sacred symbol. More generally, Malevich was hooked to the broader idea that pure geometric shapes painted with one color can evoke deep emotions in mystical ways.
While the desire for abstraction united Kandinsky and Malevich, the two artists diverged in important ways. Kandinsky was an experimenter and approached abstraction tentatively and gradually. Malevich on the other hand, was a conceptual innovator, who plunged into pure abstraction. To him, art was about using symbols to capture emotions, without the need for any pictorial image to represent reality. In particular, he believed the square to be the purest symbol of all art forms – the supreme symbol as it were. For this reason, Malevich is regarded as the founder of Suprematism, a term coined by Malevich himself and which has since entered the glossary of art history as “a movement characterized by the use of geometric shapes like circles, squares, lines, and rectangles painted in a limited range on a white background to convey the inner spiritualism of the human experience, and to break free of the limitations of the physical world.” As I alluded earlier, Malevich’s belief in the supremacy of symbols resonated with the Abstract Expressionist artists of the 1950s and 60s, and still does to this day as can be seen in the following works by two prominent American abstract artists in modern times: Theaster Gates (b. 1973) and Donald Judd (1928-1994)
