Blacked Out

Malevich continues to stoke debate

Just as 2015 – the centennial of Kazimir Malevich’s iconic painting Black Square – was coming to an end, art historians dropped a bombshell: the black square is not actually all black, and the painting has probably been hanging upside down for decades.

Malevich painted several “black squares,” but the first one was done in 1915, and the work almost never leaves the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow because of its fragile state. It is a seminal work at the heart of the artist’s vision of “suprematist” art – a new, pure form of expression not limited to the depiction of objects.

Now, in a sensational announcement, the Tretyakov has said that the black square is actually painted over other art, and even has writing underneath. Researchers concluded after x-ray analysis that there could be two paintings beneath the black square, one a finished painting with pink, green and orange colors.

The second painting was of an abstract set of figures and is discernible to eagle-eyed museum-goers through cracks in the black square. But that work apparently did not please the painter, and he finally made the black square – whether because he saw it as the artistic evolution of the previous work, or, equally possible, because there was no other canvas available.

Experts also found Malevich’s handwriting beneath the black paint: “Battle of negroes at night.” The phrase is the name of an 1897 work by the French painter Alphonse Allais, and it is this inscription that led the museum to realize that the painting has been hanging upside down.

Other findings suggested that Malevich was far more meticulous than previously thought about the precise blackness of his square, using a wider range of paints, both glossy and matte, to get the shade and depth just right, rather than impulsively slopping black paint over a previous painting he had grown tired of. And his artistic search was apparently happening within the confines of one canvas, for lack of any spares.

The splash of interest in Malevich led to a round of media commentary, some of which suggested that paintings like Black Square cannot be considered art. Ironically, Malevich faced the same sort of criticism in his lifetime. “If someone wants to paint his beloved in the form of a black square, that’s his business,” the painter Ilya Glazunov, known for his giant panneaux on religious and historical themes, commented in Argumenty i Fakty weekly. The paper’s headline pondered: “Can we consider modern art to be art?”

Black Square was a manifesto for Malevich, a Kiev-born artist with Polish roots who died in what was then Leningrad in 1935. When it was first exhibited, it was hung not as a piece of art in a museum, but in the manner that an icon might be hung in a peasant izba corner.

The exhibit “Under the Sign of Malevich” will run at the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val through mid-February.