Who is the author of the famous painting black square. The painting "Black Square" - a masterpiece or quackery? Malevich's black square is not black

In St. Petersburg, on December 3 and 5, 1913, the premiere of Mikhail Matyushin’s futuristic opera “Victory over the Sun” took place. Three authors of the opera - Mikhail Vasilyevich Matyushin, Kazimir Severinovich Malevich and Alexey Eliseevich Kruchenykh - are photographed in a photo studio like Archimedes: they turn the backdrop with a photograph of a piano upside down, claiming to be turning the art itself upside down, and in the end they even stand on end, changing the physical world and the law of the Universe. The lever of Archimedes was not to be the music or the abstruse poems of Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, the author of the prologue to the opera, but the event of the spectacle as a whole, which was shaped by the geometric scenery and costumes of Malevich. Of particular importance were the drawings of the backdrop to one of the paintings of the second act and the curtain, which in May 1915 appeared to Malevich as non-objective compositions with a square. Malevich writes prophetic letters to Matyushin: “This drawing will have great importance in painting. What was done unconsciously is now yielding extraordinary results"; “The curtain is a black square, the germ of all possibilities - in its development it acquires terrifying power.” In December 1915 in Petrograd, at the exhibition “0.10”, Malevich for the first time showed “Black Square”, placed among other abstract compositions not like a painting on the wall, but like an icon - in the red corner. Malevich's masterpiece is a painting not only about geometry on a plane, but also about depth. The square is not depicted in a straight line: its edges are curved, giving the impression of a spasm. This is a square pulsar.

At the “0.10” exhibition, Malevich’s manifesto “From Cubism to Suprematism. New pictorial realism”, recording the emergence of a new self-name in the history of art - Suprematism, which, like Cubism, will be destined for a long life and memory. Thus, from 1913 to 1915, the idea of ​​“Black Square” matured - one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century, which even today causes fierce controversy. We will turn to how Malevich himself explained the “Black Square,” who for twenty years returned to this simplest and at the same time “abstruse” form closed to unambiguous understanding.

But before we talk about the painting, we must talk about the artist. Who was the revolutionary painter Kazimir Severinovich Malevich in December 1913, where we started our story from? Firstly, an adult and decisive man: Malevich was born in 1878, and in two months he will turn thirty-six years old (according to other sources, his year of birth is 1879). Secondly, he is known only in a very narrow circle as an experimental and self-taught artist. Having been born in Kyiv and having spent early childhood in the provinces, Malevich studied at an agricultural school until he entered the Kyiv Drawing School. Since the mid-1890s he has lived in Kursk, working as a draftsman in the technical department of the administration. railway. Occasionally travels to Moscow, where he attends the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture as a volunteer and private school I.F. Rerberg. In December 1905, twenty-seven-year-old Malevich takes part in barricade battles on the streets of Moscow: an armed uprising and the first Russian revolution dramatically collide in his mind the natural world, the peasant world and the urban world of metal, brick and cobblestones. This tragic confrontation marked the artist’s entire work from the 1910s to the 1930s, until the very end. It is probably not worth reminding that it is this confrontation that cuts the root of Russian history in 1917 and becomes the essence of the process of Bolshevik modernization of Russia.

At the end of the first Russian revolution in 1907, the Russian avant-garde made its debut: Malevich showed his paintings for the first time at the exhibition of the peaceful and apolitical “Moscow Association of Artists”, where the younger Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov and the older Wassily Kandinsky were exhibiting at the same time. Three years later - at the end of 1910 - Malevich moved to a more modernist circle of exhibitors in the painting circle of the “Jack of Diamonds” society. Time has changed: in three years, at the “Wreath” and “Golden Fleece” exhibitions, Muscovites saw avant-garde Frenchmen from Cezanne to the Fauvists and Cubists. Malevich, who had never learned to be an “academicist,” quickly abandoned the fashion for symbolist painting with elements of blue impressionistic “colorization” and began to paint 6 paintings about peasant life, edged and highlighting forms with pure color in imitation of the French, as if the edges of his hewn with an axe, and the figures are covered with spots of red paint like the handprints of a painter. It is these paintings that Malevich presents at the first radical exhibition of Moscow avant-garde artists, which was collected in the spring of 1912 by Larionov and Goncharova under scandalous name“Donkey's tail”, threatening painting as a “fine art”. At the same time, Malevich met in Moscow Mikhail Matyushin, a musician and artist from St. Petersburg, who became his senior friend, patron (Matyushin sponsored the publication of Malevich’s manifesto “From Cubism to Suprematism. New Pictorial Realism” in 1915), interpreter and, in the Soviet years, collaborator State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINKHUK). In January 1913, Malevich joined the Youth Union, a St. Petersburg organization of avant-garde artists, in the creation of which Matyushin took part.

Here, in Matyushin’s house-salon, the influence of his wife, the mystically oriented poetess and artist Elena Guro, who dies of consumption in the summer of 1913, is most palpable. E. Bobrinskaya quotes from Gouraud’s diaries, which indicates that avant-gardeism in the artist’s mind is a real path to immortality: “The moment of salvation is beyond time and space - the cubists. The prospect is eliminated. Victory over time and space as immortality. People have already appeared who see through the eyes of angels, combining space and time in one moment. They contribute to salvation." E. Bobrinskaya connects Guro’s dreams of immortality with the ideas of the popular Russian sect of “immortalists” at the beginning of the 20th century, who believed that people die only because they believe in death or are superstitious. Guro wrote in her diaries: “And even if we die, we will fully believe in the immortality of the body and open spaces! And our death is only a mistake, a failure of the incompetent - because we are the heirs of inertia." Gouraud creates his own visionary world, where things are oscillatory circuits of invisible energies freely crossing space and time; and Matyushin says goodbye to her far from the materialistic city, on rural cemetery holiday village Uusikirkko. About forty days after Guro’s death, Matyushin, Malevich and the poet Kruchenykh meet in the Karelian forests near Uusikirkko, where Guro was buried, and in three days they begin to write the opera “Victory over the Sun.”

This meeting goes down in history under the name “The First All-Russian Congress of Futurists.” The futurists, first of all, in accordance with the old Russian tradition of “I’m coming to you!”, composed a manifesto that announced the beginning of the creation of a new opera and, most importantly, that they were ready to “arm the world against themselves” and that “the crackling of explosions and the carving of scarecrows will stir coming year art! . And so it happened, although Malevich and Matyushin had little time to prepare their performance. The opera was accompanied by a piano, most of the characters were represented by non-professional student actors, but the tearing of the curtain into two halves that followed the reading of the prologue, the appearance of Budutlyan strongmen sewn into cubes and prisms taller than human height, and a military song made of only consonants made a strong impression on the audience, which went wild during the performance, nevertheless listened to the opera to the end, partly, probably, due to the fact that the futurists presented the New Testament metaphor - the catastrophic beginning - in a very understandable way for all Christian viewers new era: everyone remembered under what circumstances the curtain of the Jerusalem Temple was torn in two by itself. An eyewitness to the premiere in St. Petersburg Luna Park, poet Benedict Livshits, compared Malevich at the moment of the implementation of “Victory over the Sun” with Savonarola: “The only reality was an abstract form that absorbed without a trace all the Luciferic vanity of the world. Instead of a square, instead of a circle, to which Malevich was already trying to reduce his painting, he had the opportunity to operate with their volumetric correlates, a cube and a ball, and, having seized on them, with the mercilessness of Savonarola, he began to destroy everything that lay outside the axes he had outlined.” Past the axes of the world abstraction that was born in these moments lay all the “material” and, due to this origin, short-lived objective forms of the world. The avant-garde revolution led to their fragmentation and disappearance, expanding from the object into the matter of the field - time and energies, light and color.

Russian futurism has become a reality of today in just a year and a half, reaching its peak at the Petrograd “Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings,” otherwise called “0.10,” which opened on December 17, 1915 at No. 7 on the Field of Mars in the “Art Bureau " NOT. Dobychina. The numbers in the title of the exhibition read as “zero - ten”, and not as “zero point one”. This one of the many semantic riddles of the futurist speechmakers stands for “going beyond the zero of creativity”, for the “ugliness of real forms” into the pointless future of art, which is carried out by the exhibition participants, shaking off the nullified ashes of the old culture. Malevich in his manifesto claimed that he “was transformed into zero forms and went beyond 0-1.” He thus transformed the counting of the participants in the “Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings” into a ritual, truly last counting, which transformed his own fate into that of a prophet. In a public lecture at the closing of the 0.10 exhibition, Malevich called the square, his second ideal self, “a living royal baby, a child of the fourth dimension and the risen Christ.” Later, in March 1920, in Vitebsk, where the main philosophical works Malevich about Suprematism, the artist is building a new religious philosophy, renouncing the main European confessions, represented in this city by the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church and the synagogue. “It occurred to me,” he writes to M.O. Gershenzon, “that if humanity painted the image of the Divine in its own image, then perhaps the Black Square is the image of God as the being of his perfection in the new path of today’s beginning.” After the exhibition “0.10”, Malevich from an artist who had two followers - I. Klyun and M. Menkov, turns into the leader of avant-garde art. Around him, the painters I. Pugni, O. Rozanova, N. Udaltsova, L. Popov, whose names in the near future will become the glory of the Russian avant-garde, unite, and his own association “Supremus” arises. In Latin, this adjective means “highest” and “last,” that is, Malevich claims to create a philosophical, aesthetic and quasi-religious pictorial system, which becomes the highest and last before the transformation of human creativity into a different spiritual and material reality. Time rushes at full speed: Malevich goes through a cubist figurative phase and is completely immersed in suprematist non-objectivity, which, in his opinion, surpasses the visible world.

To most viewers of Malevich and other avant-garde artists of the 1910s, abstraction, and before it Cubism, seemed to be a violation of the nature of vision and representation, of the “givenness” of the world, seemed a threat to art, dangerous nonsense.

The consciousness of the artist himself, on the contrary, finds in non-objectivity an equal picture of the universe: a picture of an endlessly changing Universe that has removed the finitude of individual existence and thus conquered death. “In my youth,” he recalls in a private letter to Gershenzon in 1919, “I entered into high places as if in order to hear everything that is happening in the distance; I saw how the painted surface of the earth ran in all directions in ribbons of color. I wrapped myself in them from head to toe, these were my clothes, in them I entered the great city; I smelled it, like an animal senses it with its scent<запах>iron, the smell of herbs, stone, leather. And I, like an animal, came in my clothes to the catacomb cities, where the sky, rivers, sun, sand, mountains, forests disappeared, in it I hung my colored dresses, these were the canvases of the fields.<...>The whirlwind of the city, unwinding colorful clothes, reaches distant places; iron, concrete, black, gray, white - differences in shapes.<...>Coming new world, his organisms are soulless and mindless, without will, but powerful and strong. They are alien to God and the church and all religions, they live and breathe, but their chest does not move apart and their heart does not beat, and the brain that has moved into their body moves them and itself with a new force; So far, I consider dynamism to be this force that has replaced spirit.”

Malevich summarizes all these thoughts in the theoretical treatise “On New Systems in Art,” which was also written in Vitebsk in 1919: “With my new being, I stop the wastefulness of the energy of rational force and stop the life of the green animal world. Everything will be directed towards the unity of the skull of humanity as a perfect instrument for the culture of nature.<...>Not to see the modern world of his achievements is not to participate in the modern celebration of transformation. In our nature, creatures live in the old world, but we do not pay attention to them, we go our own way, and our path will eventually erase them.<...>There is nothing in the world that stands on the same thing, and therefore there is no one eternal beauty. Were different beauties, holidays and celebrations: Perun, Kupala and there was the Colosseum of the Greeks and Romans, but we have new celebrations and new art - the celebration of the depot.<...>The composition of a creative sign, which will be a living picture, will be a living member of the entire living world, but any image of nature in an artistic frame will be likened to a dead man, decorated with fresh flowers.” Consequently, Malevich is ready to say goodbye to the green part of the Universe, because with the entire course of history it, like the peasant world, is being squeezed out to the borders of life, and he sees his task in finding a sign, an emblem of change: a sign of the triumph of the technogenic world, which, as he dreams Malevich, will open the exit from the city’s catacombs to unearthly spaces. He sets a goal for the technogenic world that significantly exceeds the “triumph of the depot”, which is also destined, as he clearly understands, to rust and perish, and the found sign of precisely this superhuman goal of dynamism, that is, an eternal chain of changes, becomes the “Black Square”, which in the godless the warring world of the 1910s represents a new epiphany of eternity, a new slip of divine perfection.

Malevich's critics were dominated by those who were not ready to take his pictorial and written prophecies seriously. Many blithely rejoiced at yet another shocking happening of the Russian avant-garde. One famous art critic believed that Malevich’s statements were like a “twisted telegram.” To this day, even people associated with art and literature, who know the history of the 20th century, allow themselves to think that anyone could have become the author of “Black Square”: even an unintelligent child, even just a slacker scribbling paper. However, the first professional review of the appearance of “Black Square”, written by A.N. Benoit testified that the telegram could still be immediately and adequately deciphered. Benoit wrote in the newspaper Rech on January 9, 1916: “Without a number, but in the corner, high near the ceiling, in a holy place, a “work” was hung.<...>Mr. Malevich, depicting a black square in a white frame. Undoubtedly, this is the “icon” that Messrs. Futurists offer instead Madonnas and shameless Venuses, this is that “dominion over the forms of nature”, to which not only futurist creativity with its crumbs and scraps of “things”, with its crafty, insensitive, rational experiments leads with complete logic, but also all our “new culture” with its means of destruction and even more terrible means of mechanical “restoration”, with its machineness, with its “Americanism”, with its kingdom of Ham, not the future, but the one who has come. A black square in a white frame is<...>not a random little episode that happened in a house on the Champs de Mars, but this is one of the acts of self-affirmation that beginning, which has as its name the abomination of desolation and which boasts that through pride, through arrogance, through the trampling of everything loving and tender, it will lead everyone to destruction.” Benoit remembers the coming Hama after D.S. Merezhkovsky, and in May 1916, Malevich responded with one letter to both of them: “Merezhkovsky stands on the square of the new century, among the frantic whirl of engines in heaven and earth, looks with crazed eyes and still holds Caesar’s bone over his gray head, and shouts about beauty.” Merezhkovsky and Malevich are united by a persistent search for new spiritual foundations of existence that can withstand the destructive consequences of progress. But if Merezhkovsky hopes to save the old, Malevich a priori considers the protective position a lost one and chooses a radical rejection of any artistic and general cultural traditions. Which does not negate the opportunity in this refusal to rethink the spiritual quest of our time.

One of the main directions in the spiritual search of the 1900-1910s were theosophy and anthroposophy - new quasi-religious systems. Early abstract art is often interpreted through theosophy, since this tradition placed exceptional importance on the symbolism of geometric shapes. In 1913, second-generation American architect and theosophist Claude Bragdon (1866-1946) published Firstborn of Supreme Space: The Fourth Dimension. In this book there was a chapter “Square Man”, where the author reminded the reader that in the “Secret Doctrine” of Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), the founder of Theosophy, the “mystical square” is considered as a projection of a cube, symbolizing the ideal man, the immortal self. , located in the fourth dimension. This book (its most important part were illustrations, which the researcher of the Russian avant-garde Robert S. Williams directly compares with the first Suprematist exposition at the exhibition “0.10”) in the same 1913 fell into the hands of Pyotr Demyanovich Uspensky, the author of the mystical and philosophical books “The Fourth dimension" (1910) and "Tertium Organum" (1911), and "became the message of community of thought and understanding." Uspensky joined the Russian Theosophical Society back in 1911 and spent several months in a theosophical camp in India in the winter of 1913-1914. Returning to Petrograd, he lectured on the fourth dimension in the spring of 1915, just during the first futurist exhibition “Tram B”, in which Malevich participated.

Bragdon and Ouspensky had a common predecessor - the American mathematician and mystic Charles Howard Hinton (1853-1907). It was Hinton, who studied non-Euclidean geometry, who wrote about the highest spatial sense, which is capable of making visible the fourth dimension, that is, time. To develop this feeling, Hinton invented mental exercises with colored cubes. His book was called “The Fourth Dimension”. It was published in 1904. Einstein’s teacher Hermann Minkowski lectured on the four-dimensional continuum of space and time in Cologne in 1908. By the 1910s, the theme of the fourth dimension and its geometric projections had become a hit in avant-garde circles. Apollinaire, Gleizes and Metzinger, Léger spoke and wrote about the fourth dimension. But for Apollinaire, for example, the main thing was precisely the spatial characteristics: “In plastic arts the fourth dimension is created by three already known: it represents the innumerability of space, one in all its extent at a given moment in time. It is space itself or the dimension of infinity; it is what gives objects their plastic properties.” In 1915, Uspensky’s translation of Hinton’s book, entitled “The Education of the Imagination and the Fourth Dimension,” was published in Petrograd. According to Uspensky's theory, geometric figures are projections of perfect bodies unknown to us, residing in the fourth dimension, which symbolizes absolute time and opens the way to immortality. In Uspensky’s theory, Malevich could well see the development of the theme of immortality, which Gouraud dreamed of on the eve of her untimely death. For us, the essential circumstance is the tension of conquering the “fourth dimension” as immortality, demonstrated by Malevich and Uspensky.

The indirect influence of Theosophy, which seeks to unite the most important religions into one creed, that is, first of all, to synthesize a new metaphysics from Christianity and Buddhism, West and East, is obvious in Malevich’s very attempt to create Suprematist painting, and in his comments on the concepts of “alogism”, “abstruse "or "nonsense", which describes non-objective creativity and at the same time the sphere of a new divine principle - a new absolute. It is in “Victory over the Sun” that Malevich for the first time, with such pathos, begins to deny the importance of reason, the symbol of which is the Sun, or the light of enlightenment, leading to the aggravation of contradictions, strife and wars. Consciousness, Malevich argues, cannot be trusted, because “all the buttons are mixed up in it, like in a Petrograd telephone.” What is important is intuition, which is always higher than the internally contradictory “grub business of the mind”: flying, Malevich argues, is contrary to human nature, nevertheless, a person rises into the sky, where his real home is. In his 1922 work “Suprematism as non-objectivity, or Eternal Peace,” Malevich defines the providential meaning of the Suprematist system, which opens an exit to a unique visual and semantic nirvana of abstruse weightlessness, white on white, after the curtain of black on white has already been revealed: “God is not may be meaning, meaning always has the question of “what” - therefore, God cannot be human meaning, for reaching it as the final meaning will not reach God, for in God the limit, or, rather, before God stands the limit of all meanings, but beyond the limit stands God, in whom there is no longer any meaning. God is not meaning, but nonsense. Its nonsense must be seen in the absolute, the final limit as non-objective. Achieving the finite is achieving the pointless.<...>Thought finishes its physical work, and the kingdom of the unthinking begins, peace comes, i.e. God, freed from his creation, in absolute peace.<...>Having created the world, he went into a state of “non-thought”, or into nothingness of peace.<...>Spirit, soul, matter are only differences of the dark, non-objective... So all the signs and marks of scientific society are the same differences of the dark, which in no way explain the dark. All efforts of the human mind, reason, reason to make the human world clear, bright, understandable remain impracticable, because it is impossible to realize what is not in the universe<...>Culture<...>remains the Tower of Babel, whose builders thought to reach the stronghold of heaven, that which does not exist. Such aspirations distinguish him<человека>from the silent dynamic wisdom of cosmic excitement. This is a pure aimless, impractical, pointless action, and it seems to me that the human order of wisdom should join and create life in the same wisdom as it.<...>The surface of the Earth must be covered with an area of ​​eternal excitement as the rhythm of the universe of infinity of dynamic silence. In contrast to all other areas of world celebrations, I place the white World as Suprematist non-objectivity.”

It is obvious that Malevich is able to energetically “represent” the fashionable theosophical idea of ​​white color/light, which, like a prism, collects the colored rays of previous religious systems, so that this idea becomes his complete figurative property. It makes sense to compare works of abstraction created under the influence of theosophy by such famous artists as Malevich, Kandinsky or Mondrian with direct examples of “theosophical abstractionism”. These are, for example, paintings by the Swedish artist-medium Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), who was part of the circle of anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner. Her earliest works are close to the symbolist compositions of Elena Guro. From 1907 to 1908 and from 1912 to the 1920s, she used automatic writing to depict geometric shapes - color diagrams that were “dictated” to her by the spirits Amiel, Esther and Georg. The comparison shows that in the diagrams of Hilma af Klint, the artist’s personality does not distort the “pictorial message”, leaving neutral geometry on the sheet of paper, while the geometry of Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian, on the contrary, surprises with the power of the personal, essentially incomparable with anything figurative. plastic expression. Malevich’s painting amazes with the dynamism that permeates all Suprematist forms and, above all, the outwardly static “Black Square”. Malevich's innovation is not only ideological, but also of the actual artistic, plastic level. He creates his own semantic sequence from squares: black on white (meaning the connected beginning and end of the creativity of forms and the inevitable finitude of creativity in each specific form); red (peasant, later revolutionary); white on white (representing “nonsense”, that moment when creativity manages not to “slip overboard of the absolute”) and thus gives the geometric figure a new, its own and living “body”, creates a new pictorial texture. Malevich believes that he managed to isolate the painterly gene, the very active substance of painting: to disperse all the extracted wealth “into elements for the new formation of the body.” Faith in pictorial texture, which, like living matter, will go towards the construction of a higher form of life, is the second faith of the avant-garde after faith in dynamism, speed, separation from the Earth and objectivity, which together lead to a new spiritual cosmos.

The idea of ​​pictorial texture was fundamental in the European avant-garde of the 1910s. The first theorist of texture in the history of the Russian avant-garde was Voldemar Matvey (Vladimir Markov), author of the text “Principles of creativity in the plastic arts. Faktura", published by the Youth Union in 1913 in St. Petersburg. It was Matvey who called texture “noise” produced by colors, sounds and perceived “in one way or another by our consciousness,” that is, he took a step from a static perception of the surface of the world to a dynamic one, permeating objects with energy fields and waves. Matvey described three types or states of textures: textures of nature, textures obtained as a result of human creativity, and textures made by machines. Matvey's reasoning shows that texture in his view includes all the material diversity of the world, from painting and architecture to souvenirs made from hair, feathers, to bouquets of flowers from butterfly wings (exhibits of the Kunstkamera), landscapes made from sand and dust, necklaces made from eyes, special way of preparation, and other things of the same kind. However, Matvey is not interested in the varied attractiveness, the rich and interesting “surface” of the world, but in the proto-surreal fusion of life and forms, the struggle and natural selection of textures, the element of chance in this struggle, which can make the self-expression of life art, or can choose something else for this channel

In an earlier article “Russian Secession” of 1910, Matvey expresses the key idea of ​​modernism about the need to free paint from the “slave duties” imposed by nature itself - the duties to represent not even the plot, but the material phenomena themselves: the sky, plants, etc. Matvey’s words reveal how much the then nascent abstraction is burdened with symbolic content, how exorbitant for art and for the artist the task that Malevich set for himself at the same time was to take the entire space in all its objectless whiteness, to represent the world at once and in its entirety, without wasting paint even to such grandiose parts of it as the sky. In 1913, Matvey defined the actual pictorial texture negatively - as a “violation of the smoothness and silence” of the surface. It can be understood that the silent surface, undisturbed by the artist’s touch, is valuable because it protects the formless as a reserve of form, protects what does not fit into any form, that in relation to which the form is external and inexpressive.

In January 1916, in the almanac “The Enchanted Wanderer,” Mikhail Matyushin proposed his own understanding of Malevich’s Suprematism. Matyushin pointed out to Malevich exactly the path that came from Matvey: “The idea of ​​the independence of paint in painting, revealing the intrinsic nature of each material, has its own history, but Malevich felt this idea in a very new way. How he dealt with “New” is another matter. The enormous value of his aspiration is a plus. The downside is the failure to maintain the “sign of concealment” to a highly protected body and the lack of understanding of the conditions of the new measure. The whole difficulty of carrying out his idea lies in the denial of form, which comes at the expense of color. The color should rise above the form so much that it does not blend into any squares, squares, etc. In addition to this difficulty, it is necessary to express the dynamics of the paint, i.e. her movement. And if not everything is accomplished here, then it is the fault of Moscow artists, who strive to give everything for a moment of primacy<...>Moscow is full of abortionists and all sorts of “isms”. At least put them in alcohol for edification.” And after 1916, Malevich, following the behest of Matvey, finally freed paint from its slave chains, “tied the colors in a knot and hid them in a bag” for the sake of the last sacred whiteness, on the threshold of which art ended and preaching began. The artist Varvara Stepanova in November 1918 recorded Malevich’s words that “perhaps there is no need to paint anymore, but only to preach.” In 1919, at the exhibition “Objectless Creativity and Suprematism” in Moscow, Malevich’s final Suprematist painting from the “White on White” series was shown.

The Russian avant-garde developed rapidly and already in the early 1920s solved the problem of “going beyond the canvas” (N.N. Punin), leaving painting and abstract art as such in the past. In December 1920, in the explanatory text for the album “Suprematism: 34 Drawings,” Malevich writes: “The black square defined economy, which I introduced as the fifth measure of art. The economic question has become my main tower from which I examine all the creations of the world of things, which is my main work no longer with a brush, but with a pen. It turned out that you couldn’t reach with a brush what you could with a pen. She is disheveled and cannot reach into the convolutions of the brain, the pen is sharper.<...>There can be no talk of painting in Suprematism; painting has long been obsolete, and the artist himself is a prejudice of the past.” In 1922, Malevich, together with the UNOVIS group (Approvers of New Art): N. Suetin, V. Ermolaeva, I. Chashnik, L. Khidekel and others, who took root in different ways or did not take root at all in Soviet art of the 1920-1930s , but all without exception became famous, moved to Petrograd, where in 1923 he became director of the avant-garde research and educational State Institute of Artistic Culture. Actually, the Museum of Artistic Culture was transformed into GINKHUK, which is what Malevich did during 1923. Working with the first systematic collection of Russian-Soviet avant-garde, with the still living history of the revolution artistic form, Malevich only strengthened on his path to pointlessness as nonsense and non-representation. In May 1923, the Petrograd weekly “Life of Art” published Malevich’s last manifesto, “The Suprematist Mirror,” in which the artist argued that our knowledge of the world, religion and art are limitless and, therefore, equal to zero, and “there is no being in me.” , neither outside of me, nothing can change anything, since there is nothing that could change, and there is nothing that could be changed.” The manifesto accompanied the group exhibition of UNOVIS at the “Exhibition of paintings by Petrograd artists of all directions,” which opened at the Academy of Arts and presented the achievements of art over the five full years of Soviet power. The exhibition created by Malevich ended with empty canvases. Abstraction in Russia in the 1920s ends with a blank canvas - Nothing like a readymade - Malevich's "Suprematist Mirror", which testifies to the impossibility of a stable combination of the symbolic and material on the fragile and material abstract pictorial plane.

However, the “Suprematist Mirror” reflected not only the inevitable exit of non-objective painting from the canvas. This manifesto was polemically addressed to the newest form of the Soviet avant-garde. In 1921 or early 1922, Malevich wrote: “If the materialist consciousness in objective structures sees only a tower from which it is possible to see the world, to ensure that matter sees all its modifications, then this is the same simple lady’s curiosity to examine oneself in the mirror . Materialistic thinking is busy building a mirror to see the world of matter itself in all its modifications. But this “if” also lacks perfection, because the mirror still will not show all sides of matter.” Malevich, therefore, contrasts his empty canvas-mirror with the “materialistic” one, and in this he is very close (one might even say, anticipatingly close) to Heidegger’s negative image of the “picture of the world”, in which the “saving of the world” takes place, reality turns into an object. Around 1920, the pathos of the materialist vision, the pathos of “possessing the world as an extended thing” finds a new form of embodiment.

Malevich’s main opponents in the first years of Soviet power were no longer the old connoisseurs of beauty, figurative artists like Benois, but materialistically oriented production workers and constructivists. Back at the end of 1915, at the exhibition “0.10,” Vladimir Tatlin turned out to be Malevich’s opponent, who understood texture much more materialistically, as “the truth of the material,” demonstrating this material principle in his counter-reliefs. Later, Malevich, in a letter to his main Vitebsk collaborator and colleague El Lisitsky, who made a career as a constructivist designer in the West, speaks of Tatlin’s “Tower” as follows: “This is a fiction of Western technology<...>he can also build a reinforced concrete urinal so that everyone can find a corner for themselves.” Fellow workers considered Tatlin a materialist and almost a positivist, although he placed the same sacred cube and prism inside his “Tower,” the same iconic building as Malevich’s architects. Tatlin’s technique was attracted by faith, not scientific interest, this is noticeable to anyone who has at least once thought about the meaning of the construction of “Letatlin” in the era of aviation. And yet, it was the example of Tatlin, since 1914 more of a designer than an artist, that really inspired the exit through the “zero forms” into standardization and design. Since 1918, Malevich has fiercely defended his - metaphysical - understanding of the zero of forms, mainly in disputes with Tatlin and Rodchenko. In the spring of 1919, at the exhibition “Objectless Creativity and Suprematism,” Rodchenko showed “Black on Black,” a painting that, although it went back to “Black Square,” looked in the context of the exhibition as an antithesis to the works of Malevich himself, his “White on White.” If Malevich was interested in “weightlessness,” the flight of Suprematist forms, the ability to “shake off the earth,” then Rodchenko, in the black circles of 1919, explored the purely material features of color rendering - the relationship between density and weight. Developing the plastic textured ideas of the Gatlin counter-reliefs, Rodchenko unexpectedly demythologizes this pretentious work with surfaces. His “Last Paintings” (N.M. Tarabukin), small-sized canvases, absolutely evenly painted over with now faded local colors, were shown at the exhibition “5x5 = 25” in Moscow in November 1921. Rodchenko thinks of himself not as an artist, but as a production worker. In February 1922, Malevich wrote to Gershenzon: “Picasso struggled with the objective world, however, he got stuck in its fragments, but that’s good, it was easier for me to remove the objective garbage and expose infinity, non-practicality, non-expediency, for which the Moscow Inkhuk persecutes me as not a materialist. At one of the meetings, everyone turned against me, but if they were innovators, and not subject specialists, they would never have exchanged the Arts for a grub image of pots.”

It is significant that this split in abstractionism along the lines of understanding texture and going beyond the canvas happened soon after the First World War, precisely at the moment when abstraction became a universal pan-European artistic ideology, when completely academic institutions of abstract art emerged (GINKHUK or Bauhaus), when “spiritual vision » undergoes formalization. It is also significant that it was at this time that the intellectual life of European Theosophy was rapidly losing its pre-war energy. The forces composing it seem to diverge back to their poles: to applied scientific research, special philosophical studies, quasi-scientific experiments in biological rejuvenation, new social forms of religious feeling, and finally - to industrial design, which replaces Wagnerism and Steinerism as another synthetic form of life and art, as a new Gesamtkunstwerk. It was a crisis of the philosophy of life, a crisis of the great systems of European spirituality, in which religion, science, philosophy and art had not yet undergone division and specialization. The confrontation between “metaphysicists” and “productionists” occurs not only in the USSR, but also in the Bauhaus, where in 1923 Johannes Itten, a Zoroastrian mystic, was replaced by designer Moholy Nagy, despite the fact that such influential people as Kandinsky belonged to Itten’s party and Klee. In 1924-1925, Mondrian broke with Theo van Doesburg. The reason for the gap was the different interpretation of “elementaryism”: van Doesburg’s design was built on an illusionistic distortion of space, while Mondrian fought with space as such for a pure plane, the final limit of painting, beyond which truly metaphysical infinity begins. Gabo said that even white seemed to Mondrian not flattened enough, “he thought that the picture should be flat, and that color should in no way indicate space.” Painting, striving for metaphysics, steadily reduced itself. In Paris or Holland, where, unlike the USSR or Germany, there was no persecution of abstract art, geometric abstraction slowly slid to the periphery of artistic life in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The main sign of the growing decline of abstraction in the 1930s was the curtailment of its messianic claims and the shallowing of ideology.

And in the early 1920s, when Malevich openly stood against Rodchenko, the dispute about the ways of developing art vulgarly turned into a battle for influence on state ideology. In this battle, Malevich initially loses to Rodchenko, and by the mid-1920s they both succumb to the new communist culture, which returns to “preserving the world in a picture,” objective and understandable to a non-professional viewer who has never heard of the discussions of the creators of non-objective art. The result of going through the crisis of the early 1920s is the formation of a pluralistic Soviet art, from which by the end of the 1920s an active ideological product emerged - socialist realism. In 1919, not the artistic, but the political history of Suprematism begins. At this time, in his work “On New Systems in Art,” published in Vitebsk, Malevich argued that cubism and futurism predetermined the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. So he makes an insane attempt, in his own way, to equate the pen to the bayonet and promote the “Black Square” as a state symbol. In this, Malevich is strongly supported by the most politicized of his students, El Lissitzky, who in his 1920 article “Suprematism and Reconstructions of the World” states that from Suprematism as the primary source of creative creativity, a step was taken to communism, that is, to labor as the true source of human existence. Malevich’s ideas about God the Meaningless, only at first glance, were in complete contradiction with communist rhetoric about the victory of labor. Indeed, in fact, in the version of communism that fed the consciousness of the masses, it was precisely about the liberation of labor as liberation from labor. And Malevich thinks in line with these aspirations of the people, suggesting that the origin of the pseudonym Lenin comes from the word “laziness.” He, of course, was not a primitive political strategist and staged this language experiment in 1924 precisely because Lenin could become something like a reincarnation of the “Black Square”, behind which peace, non-thought and the absolute were revealed. Malevich was still attracted by immortality, and it was Lenin who was then the undisputed candidate for entering the fourth dimension. The archives of the Stedelijk Museum contain a text by Malevich, dated January 25, 1924, in which the artist proposes his design for a mausoleum in the shape of a cube and develops ritual objects of the new Soviet cult: “Every Leninist worker should keep a cube at home as a reminder of the eternal, unchanging lesson of Leninism to create a symbolic material basis for the cult.<...>The cube is no longer a geometric body. This is a new object in which we are trying to embody the eternal<...>Lenin's eternal life, conquering death." Malevich’s attempt was doomed to failure, because it was completely inconsistent with the real tasks of Soviet propaganda, which Lissitzky was so successfully accomplishing at the same time. Malevich, in all likelihood, was reminded of it in June 1926, when an article by the critic G. Sery, “A Monastery on State Supply,” appeared in Leningradskaya Pravda, trashing the State Institute of Chemistry and Culture as an institution ideologically harmful to the Soviet regime, after which Malevich’s institute and the last stronghold of the Russian avant-garde was liquidated.

In the struggle for political influence, Malevich failed, but in the struggle to create an artistic ideology, he was ahead of all his Soviet rivals, entering the world history art. During his years of work at GINKHUK, Malevich concentrated his efforts on creating a theory of modern art that would promote the ideas of Suprematism and give it a central place in the development of modernism. He creates the concept of the “surplus element,” identifying the graphic formula that determines the structure of the modernist painting at each stage of development from Cezanne to Suprematism. The graphic formulas of the avant-garde are distinguished from previous painting of the 19th century by the growing importance of a self-sufficient formal technique, that is, the actual pictorial perception and representation, which, according to Malevich, reach their full measure in Suprematism, in the sphere of free pictorial texture, which simultaneously represents both the “idea” of painting and her material. Malevich summarizes graphic formulas in several tables. He captures the moment of self-sufficient Suprematist form in table XIX entitled “Ideological independence of new art,” where a black square on a white background centers an area of ​​art, outlined by a red square frame, into which religion enters on the left side, and the art of life on the right. Avant-garde painting in Malevich’s system for a short moment of Suprematism coincides with itself, completely transforming into a visible form-symbol of the universe, but in the next moment the impossibility of continuing artistic creativity limits practice and opens up the theory of art.

Malevich initially strived for universalism and therefore, with the first glimpses of freedom of movement in 1922, he tried to establish contacts with European and American artists and collectors. It was the strategic decision to export Suprematism that brought him international posthumous fame in the second half of the 20th century. At the end of 1922, the First Russian Art Exhibition took place in Berlin, which in 1923 moved to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Malevich sent her several Suprematist compositions and one futurocubist painting “The Grinder. The principle of flickering”, which is bought from the exhibition by K. Dreyer, who together with M. Duchamp founded the “Anonymous” society - a foundation for contemporary art. In 1923, the USSR was preparing for a large-scale display of Soviet art at the 1924 Venice Biennale. Malevich in GINKHUK specially repeats Suprematist black figures for the Biennale: square, circle, cross, dating them on the back to 1913. It is not known whether his paintings were on display in Venice or remained in storage, but they knew about Suprematism in Europe in the mid-1920s thanks to Lissitzky’s activities in Germany. In the spring of 1927, Malevich went through Poland on a private business trip to Berlin and from there to Dessau, to the Bauhaus, where he talked about Suprematism, showing paintings and 22 explanatory tables. In Berlin, Malevich's paintings are exhibited as part of the Great Berlin Art Exhibition from May to October. Returning to Leningrad, Malevich left all his luggage to two German acquaintances, G. von Riesen and the secretary of the Union of Architects, G. Hering: theoretical works to one, artistic material to the other. In 1930, part of this collection, kept by Hering, was shown in the Hannover Museum by the avant-garde connoisseur and collector A. Dorner, who formed the world-famous Kästner-Gesellschaft Museum.

Meanwhile, Malevich himself spends these three years after his trip abroad wandering around Moscow, Kyiv and Leningrad, doing temporary work. In 1930, in Leningrad, he was arrested and spent several months in prison. In 1932, Malevich’s paintings were shown for the last time during his lifetime at the public exhibition “Artists of the RSFSR for 15 Years,” which first took place in the Russian Museum, then moved to Moscow, where the Suprematist section was included among the artistic movements of bourgeois culture and, therefore, Malevich receives a final ban on the profession. In 1933, repression extended to his abstractions in Germany, where the Nazis came to power, labeling this painting as degenerate and Bolshevik. But in early 1935, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Alfred Barr Jr., smuggled several Malevich paintings out of Hanover, hiding them inside a folded umbrella to avoid inspection at Nazi customs. The monstrous method of smuggling paintings is reminiscent of how the Venetians secretly transported the relics of St. Mark in barrels of corned beef. And in the USA, where in the late 1940s abstraction was established as a national style, Malevich’s prophetic painting is finally given the full measure of glory.

The artist himself did not live to see the international triumph of Suprematism, but in the last years of his life, despite all the persecution, he remained faithful to the “Black Square” as himself, moving further and further in his own special way. This path at the turn of the 1920-1930s leads Malevich to figurative painting. The figures of peasants again appear on his canvases, and in 1933 - portraits of loved ones and associates, gathered around a self-portrait. His wife and daughter depicted in the artist’s latest paintings, art critic N.N. Punin and Malevich himself stand before something majestic, like saints at the divine throne. In the lower right corner of the self-portrait, Malevich leaves a barely noticeable icon - a black square, a tiny icon - as a reminder of the goal of all his work, to which he is now physically close. His life ended on May 15, 1935. Malevich died at home, in Leningrad, in a former service apartment at GINKHUK. The students arranged an exhibition of paintings at his deathbed, the main one of which was, of course, “Black Square”. A Suprematist coffin was prepared for the funeral, and when the artist’s body was transported first to the funeral service and then to the Moscow station, the symbolic “Black Square” was also attached to the hood of the car. This was the last public Suprematist exhibition in the USSR. Malevich was cremated in Moscow and buried in the village of Nemchinovka, where his second wife’s house stood, in a field under a Suprematist monument. During the war of 1941-1945, Malevich's grave disappeared.

The artist's relatives donated more than 80 paintings to the Russian Museum in the spring of 1936. Keeping Suprematist painting at home in Moscow and Leningrad was just as dangerous as in Germany. The museum accepted the paintings, but received a ban on their public display. In Germany, Dorner returned the remaining paintings by Malevich back to Hering, who endured numerous ordeals and persecutions, but saved the collection and transferred it for storage to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1957, when the staff of this museum, in the wake of the second, post-war fashion for abstraction, came to him to Germany to find out the fate of the Malevich collection. And in his homeland, Malevich remained under a strict ban until 1962, then under a flexible ban until his first posthumous retrospective in perestroika 1988. It is not surprising that some owners of the artist’s works in the 1930s not only did not take care of them, but tried to get rid of them or hide them forever in the most inappropriate places for painting.

This is exactly what happened with the last of Malevich’s Black Squares, which eventually entered the Hermitage collection. By the 1990s, three versions of the famous painting were known: “Black Square”, traditionally considered to be the one that hung at the “0.10” exhibition, and its version made for the exhibition “Artists of the RSFSR for 15 Years”, are stored in Tretyakov Gallery; The painting, painted for the 1924 Venice Biennale, was donated by the Malevich family to the Russian Museum. And then one day in 1993, the office of the Moscow organization “Art-Myth”, which was involved in organizing contemporary art fairs, received a call from the Samara branch of Inkombank and, according to one of the creators and experts of “Art-Myth” Georgy Nikich, they asked to see a painting by “the artist Malich." It turned out that they were talking about Malevich’s paintings, which were kept in the family of Igor Leiko, the head of the Samara branch of the bank. Among these paintings was “Black Square,” which Leiko’s relatives hid at the bottom of a basket of potatoes.

Inkombank acquired “Black Square” for its collection, and after the default and bankruptcy of the bank in 1998, it turned out that Malevich’s painting became the main asset in settlements with creditors. In 2002, by agreement with the Russian government, “Black Square” was removed from open bidding and was purchased for $1 million by businessman Vladimir Potanin with the aim of transferring it to the Hermitage for permanent storage. At the same time, the capitalization of the Hermitage collection has increased by a much larger amount, since on international markets prices for Malevich reach tens of millions of dollars, only the domestic price for him still lags behind the world price. The circumstances of this purchase were heated up by the press of both capitals to such an extent that the “Black Square” became a unit for measuring financial success. Few people since then remember that the suprematism of one of the Zemshar Chairmen was a statement of “the lofty principles of anti-money.”

With all the endless variety of the Hermitage collections, Malevich’s painting was not lost in the string of museum halls among the many famous exhibits. The status of this painting, which is perceived not only as a painting, but also as a symbolic object, was excellently described by Velimir Khlebnikov. Before us is an “exploded artistic commandment,” a reminder that any world, and even the world of art, goes through birth and death. A reminder that, thanks to Malevich, became immortal once and for all.

Notes

Quote By: Shatskikh A. Kazimir Malevich - writer and thinker // Malevich K. Black square. St. Petersburg, 2001.S. eleven.

Quote By: Sharp D. Malevich, Benois and the critical perception of the exhibition “0.10” / Great Utopia: Russian and Soviet avant-garde. 1915-1932. M., 1993. P. 53. Shatskikh and Sharp refer to the first publication of letters made by E.F. Kovtun in the book: Yearbook of the Manuscript Department of the Pushkin House. 1974 L., 1976.

. Matvey V. Articles. Catalog of works. Letters. Chronicle of the activities of the “Youth Union” / Comp. I. Buzhinska. Riga, 2002. P. 43.

. Matyushin M. About the exhibition of the “last futurists” // Enchanted Wanderer. Spring almanac. 1916. P. 17. The original spelling has been preserved. Matyushin himself and his followers from the ZorVed group created at GINKHUK in 1923 developed several samples of “paint movement” that represent cosmic painting. In Matyushin’s case, painting becomes a semblance of the color-light orbit of the Earth. In fact, Matyushin’s abstractions were not tied to the surface of the canvas; they slid across the pictorial plane like colored shadows and reflections, since the object of representation for Matyushin, as for Malevich or Matvey, was the whole world, in its physical and metaphysical unity exceeding the art of painting.

S. Douglas proves that it was the theory and practice of design in the 1860s that laid the foundations of formalism and abstractionism. Roger Fry, whose views S. Douglas describes, believed that quality design indicates the spiritual health of a nation. This remark allows us to draw a line between the metaphysics of abstractionism and the “spirituality” of design, which presupposes a perfect arrangement of physical life. See about it :Douglas S. Decorativeness and modernism: The formation of the aesthetics of abstractionism // Issues of art criticism. 1997. No. 2. P. 148.

. Malevich K. Black square. P. 455.

Quote By: Bois I.-A. Painting as Model. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990. P. 169. In the late 1910s, when Mondrian's system of views was formed, the flatness of artistic form symbolizes ideal space or "spirit in the world of infinity." The figures located in such a space represent “projections of ideas.” It is in such expressions, based on the already established linguistic experience of modern art, that Max Dvorak describes the early Christian painting of the catacombs (see: Dvorak M. The history of art as the history of spirit. St. Petersburg, 2001. pp. 22, 23, 25-27).

Quote By: Williams S. R. Artists in Revolution. P. 124-125.

It is curious that Malevich interprets the experience of the formation of abstract art - the pure art of modernism - in parallel and in the same way as at the same time E. Panofsky interprets the development of European painting from antiquity to modern times. In Panofsky’s study “Idea. On the history of the concept in the theories of art from antiquity to classicism,” which was published in 1924, marks a moment if we take into account the duration of the historical interval from Plato to Mannerism, when the idea is equal to itself in the art of the Renaissance, identical to two worlds: the world of metaphysical reality and the inner world of the artist. At this historical moment, a work of art is a strict artistic construction and a pure artistic concept, a form adjacent to the life-work, like skin, in the words of G. Simmel. Panofsky characterizes this moment not only as harmonious, but also as the peak of absolute freedom of art, which makes the situation of the near future “shaky,” soon leading to the destruction of the unstable balance. Panofsky in his research is interested not only in the possibility of harmonizing the potential conflict between art (form) and its philosophical or religious content context, but also in the fact that this conflict is renewed with inevitability and creates conditions for self-knowledge of art, which has already passed the peak of perfection, the peak of absolute self-equality. Self-knowledge of art develops from the awareness of the impossibility of artistic creativity: “Since<...>it seems self-evident that this "idea"<...>cannot be something wholly subjective, purely “psychological,” then for the first time the question arises of how it is at all possible for the mind to create such an internal representation, since it cannot simply be extracted from nature and cannot originate only from man, a question that boils down to , ultimately, to the question of the possibility of artistic creativity in general. Just for this autocratic-conceptualistic thinking<...>which understood artistic representation as a visual expression of spiritual representation<...>which again called for a universally binding justification and establishment of norms for all artistic creativity, for the first time something that the previous era had not yet doubted at all would become problematic: the relationship of the spirit to sensory reality” ( Panofsky E. Idea: On the history of concepts in theories of art from antiquity to classicism / Transl. Yu.N. Popova. St. Petersburg, 1999. pp. 62-63).

The painting “Black Suprematist Square,” which has been in the Tretyakov Gallery since 1929, hung upside down. Only 86 years later did art historians manage to figure this out. /website/

The controversial painting “Black Square” by Kazemir Malevich has been the subject of controversy among art critics for 100 years. Now she also finds herself at the center of a scandal.

Exploration and discovery

Museum staff examined the painting using X-rays and microscopic analysis and found that there were two other drawings under the image of the square.

So far, researchers cannot determine what is drawn in the first two paintings. It also remains unclear why the artist painted his images on top of each other. Art historians believe that he may not have had a canvas. According to another version, the artist created a black square based on the previous composition, gradually remaking it.

While studying the painting, scientists encountered another discovery. It turns out that there was an inscription on the painting. It turned out to be erased, but with the help of a microscope it was possible to see some of the letters. Art historians are also confident that the handwriting in the painting undoubtedly belongs to Malevich.

Experts have deciphered the inscription allegedly left by Malevich on the “Black Square” https://t.co/dJZELrFqnV

The inscription reads "Battle of the Negroes at Night." “Battle” is read perfectly, in the word “blacks” you can make out two letters in the middle, from “night” only “yu” is clearly readable.

What does controversial art lead to?

When deciphering the inscription, experts were in for another sensation - all this time the “Black Square” was hanging upside down. This is indicated by the location of the inscription.

The mysterious inscription is a reference to the most famous painting by the Frenchman Alphonse Allais, which was called “The Battle of the Negroes in a Cave in the Dead of Night.” The Frenchman also painted an absolutely white painting “Anemic maidens going to their first communion in a snowstorm” and a red one “Apoplectic cardinals picking tomatoes on the shores of the Red Sea.” Previously, art historians did not directly connect Malevich and Allais.

In total, Malevich wrote four “Black Squares” - the original and three repetitions. The original hangs in the honorary center of the Suprematist hall in the Tretyakov Gallery. At the same time, museum staff noted that the art of the 20th century is visited very poorly. About 4,500 people a day come to this building to look at a completely different artist - Valentin Serov.

The third “square” is also located in the Tretyakov Gallery. The second is exhibited in the Russian Museum, the fourth in the Hermitage. The success of this primitive and unoriginal work is shrouded in mystery. However, for 100 years now the painting has been popular and discussed and is estimated at $20 million.

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was born in 1878 into the family of a sugar manufacturer and a housewife in Kyiv. He had Polish roots, his family spoke Polish, but Malevich considered himself Ukrainian. The artist spent his childhood in the Ukrainian outback, and, as he himself wrote, folk culture influenced all of his work. He watched as village women painted stoves, dishes, and embroidered geometric patterns on shirts.

In the future, the artist many times in his works described childhood memories, which later influenced his choice of profession. The father took little Casimir with him to Kyiv. Looking at store windows, he saw a canvas on which a girl was peeling potatoes. Malevich was shocked by how realistic the peel was depicted. Or, seeing a painter painting a roof green, he was amazed how it gradually became the same color as the trees.

At the age of 15, his mother gave him paints, and already at 16 he painted his first picture: a landscape with a boat, a river and the moon. The artist’s friend took the canvas to a store, where they bought it for 5 rubles - average salary worker in 2 days. Further fate paintings unknown.

Then many interesting events happened in Malevich’s life: work as a draftsman, failure of entrance exams to the art academy, exhibitions, teaching at the university, disfavor of the Soviet regime - but now we will talk about his main works.

"Cow and Violin", 1913

It was probably from this painting that Malevich declared war on traditional art. It was painted in 1913 in Moscow, when the artist was sorely short of money. So he dismantled the closet and painted 3 paintings on the shelves. They even had holes for fastenings on the side. Hence the unusual size of the canvas.

Malevich came up with “alogism” - a new style of painting that contrasts itself with logic. Its essence was in combining the incongruous. The artist challenged academic art and all philistine logic. Art has always been created according to certain rules: in music there is a clear structure, poetry was tailored to traditional rhythms such as iambic and trochee, in painting pictures were painted as the masters bequeathed.

In the painting “The Cow and the Violin,” Kazimir Malevich brought together things from two opposite banks. A violin as a piece of classical art, also one of Picasso’s favorite subjects, and a cow, which the artist copied from a butcher shop sign. On the back he wrote “An illogical comparison of two forms - “a cow and a violin” - as a moment of struggle against logicism, naturalness, petty-bourgeois meaning and prejudices.” There he also put the date “1911” so that no one would have any doubts about who first came up with the alogism.

Subsequently, the artist developed this direction, for example in his work “Composition with Gioconda”. Here he depicted famous work Leonardo da Vinci crossed it out and pasted an advertisement for the sale of the apartment on top. His performance on the Kuznetsky Bridge, the gathering place of today's golden youth, is famous: he walked along it with a wooden spoon in the buttonhole of his jacket, which became mandatory attribute in the clothes of many avant-garde artists of that time.

Kazimir Malevich became the founder of alogism, but did not develop it for long. Already in 1915 he came to his famous black square and Suprematism.

Everything in this picture is mysterious - from origin to interpretation. Malevich's black square is not actually a square at all: none of the sides are parallel to each other or to the frame of the painting, it is simply a rectangle that resembles a square to the naked eye. For his work, the artist used a special solution of paints, which did not contain any black paints, so the title of the painting does not quite correspond to reality.

It was written in 1915 for an exhibition, but Malevich himself put the date “1913” on the back. Perhaps this is due to the fact that in 1913 the opera “Victory over the Sun” was staged in which the artist painted the scenery. It was a production not accepted by the average person, consisting of slurred speech, avant-garde costumes and strange scenery. There, for the first time, a black square appeared as a background, blocking the sun.

So what is the meaning of this painting, what did the artist want to tell us? The complexity of an unambiguous interpretation was initially incorporated into the work by the author. Initially, many artists sought to depict the object of drawing as accurately and similarly as possible. Ancient man tried to show hunting in his rock art. Later, symbolism appeared, when, in addition to depicting reality, painters put some meaning into their works. By placing various objects in their paintings, artists sought to show their feelings or thoughts. For example, the image of a white lily implied purity, and a black dog in Christian culture meant unbelief and paganism.

During Malevich’s life, cubism was very popular, where the artist does not try to realistically depict the shape of an object, but shows its content with the help of geometric shapes and lines. Casimir went even further: he destroyed the form itself, depicting the zero of all forms - a square.

He created a new direction - Suprematism. This, he believed, was the highest manifestation of painting. The black square became the first letter of the alphabet with which his masterpieces were created. The artist called Suprematism a new religion, and the square its icon. It was not for nothing that at the exhibition the painting hung at the top in the corner where Orthodox Christians hung icons, the so-called red corner.

In addition to the black square, the exhibition featured “Black Circle” and “Black Cross”. And if “Black Square” was the first letter of the alphabet of new art, then the circle and cross were the second and third. All three paintings constituted a triptych, one whole, building blocks with the help of which the paintings of Suprematism would be built.

At least 4 versions of the black square are known, which Malevich painted later for various exhibitions. The first and third versions are in the Tretyakov Gallery, the second in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. The fourth black square became known only in 1993, when the lender brought the painting as collateral to the bank. He never took the painting, and after the bank collapsed, Russian billionaire Vladimir Potanin bought it for a symbolic million dollars and transferred it to the Hermitage.

In 2015, employees of the Tretyakov Gallery discovered complex geometric lines and patterns under the first black square. Experts claim that under the square there are paintings, not one, but two. In addition, they also found the inscription: “Battle of blacks in a dark cave.” This is a reference to the 19th century artists Paul Bilchod and Alphonse Allais, who had already painted black rectangles and given them similar names. So Malevich’s paintings still keep many secrets.

The most amazing thing about this picture is its history. Malevich exhibited it at an exhibition in Berlin in 1927, but he urgently had to leave. He left his works in the custody of the architect Hugo Goering, but fate turned out to be such that Malevich never saw the paintings again. When the Nazis came to power, all his works were supposed to be destroyed as “degenerate art,” but a friend of the artist took more than 100 of his paintings out of the country. Later, the architect's heirs sold them to a Dutch museum, which then for many years organized the largest exhibitions of Malevich's paintings in Europe. Much later, the artist’s relatives sued the museum for their inheritance, and 17 years later some of the paintings were returned to their rightful owners.

In 2008, this painting was sold for $65 million and became at that time the most expensive canvas among paintings by Russian artists. In 2018, “Suprematist Composition” updated its record and was sold at auction for 85 million to an anonymous buyer.

Developing the theme of pointlessness, Malevich created a white square, or “White on White.” If Suprematism stands above any other art, then the white square stands at the head of Suprematism itself. What could be more pointless than a white “nothing”, and even on a white background? That's right, nothing.

There is a legend that the artist, having painted a picture, lost sight of the square and decided to outline its borders and highlight the background more. This is how the work reached the viewer.

For the Suprematists, white was a symbol of space. Malevich considered whiteness to be the pinnacle of contemplation. In his opinion, a person seems to be immersed in a trance, dissolving in color. The artist himself was delighted with his work. He wrote that he broke the color barrier. After finishing work on the painting, Malevich was in a state of depression, because he could no longer create anything better.

The work was first shown at the exhibition “Objectless Creativity and Suprematism” in 1919 in Moscow. In 1927, she ended up at an exhibition in Berlin and never appeared in her homeland. Now located at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The canvas is one of the few paintings available to Western viewers. IN Soviet Russia the white square was strongly associated with the white movement. Perhaps this is why the painting is not as famous here as in the West. In the USA, the white square is comparable in popularity only to the black square in Russia.

The Soviet government was not very fond of Suprematism, or the entire work of the Russian avant-garde in general. The only painting by Malevich recognized by the Soviets is “Red Cavalry”. I think there is no need to say much why. Even on the back was the inscription “Red cavalry is galloping from the October capital to defend the Soviet border.” The artist put the date in the corner - “1918”, although the picture was clearly painted later.

There are 3 elements clearly expressed here - sky, horsemen and earth. But not everything is as simple as it seems at first glance; few critics interpret the painting as a tribute to the Red Army.

The horizon line runs exactly along the golden ratio - the standard of proportions: the earth relates to the sky in the same way as the sky to the whole. Such a division of the painting in those days was very rare; perhaps, Malevich’s work as a draftsman in his youth had an effect. By the way, the golden ratio is also present in the five-pointed star; whether this was a reference to Soviet power, one can only guess.

The numbers three, four and twelve often appear in the painting. On the canvas there are three groups of riders of four people each, which gives a total of 12. Each rider is, as it were, divided into 4 more people. The land is divided into 12 parts. Versions of interpretation are different, but most likely, Malevich encrypted a reference to Christianity here: 12 apostles, 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Holy Trinity... Although it could be anything: 12 zodiac signs, 12 months, 3 heroes. Perhaps the artist came up with these numbers by chance, but as you get to know Malevich’s work closer and closer, you don’t believe in such coincidences.

Where does Malevich's "Black Square" hang?

1. 
   
2. In the Tretyakov Gallery.
3. The original Black Square by Kazimir Malevich (1915) is in the State Russian Museum.
4. The first and third are kept in the Tretyakov Gallery, the second in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.
   The painting received by the Hermitage is the fourth Black Square by Malevich. After the exhibition of 1932-1933, Artists of the RSFSR for 13 Years, it was assumed that it was kept at Malevich’s home. And then the painting surfaced at a sale by Inkombank, which at one time bought the painting from a private individual.
5. Kazimir Malevich once decided that he could put an end to the development of painting. He succeeded and created the most famous of his masterpieces.

   The painting Black Square was exhibited in 1915. The masterpiece became a kind of manifesto of the new direction of Suprematism, the image of geometric figures painted in pure local colors and immersed in a kind of white abyss, where the laws of dynamics and statics reigned. By the way, Malevich composed the name of the new phenomenon himself.

   The black square appeared to the public at the exhibition O, 10, among 39 other paintings; it was located in the so-called red corner, where icons were located in an ordinary house.

   Many critics called Malevich an anarchist and argued that his painting is the icon that the Futurists put up to replace the Madonna. The artist stated that by painting this picture, he completely completed the development of world painting. A point in the history of this type of art, according to the Polish genius, the result was a rather large canvas, 53.5 by 53.5 cm, painted over with black oil paint.

   Audacity and undoubted skill instantly put Malevich on the same level as da Vinci, Vrubel, and other famous artists. True, even after the Black Square, the Polish artist continued to create.

   We can talk here about this canvas, about its dating, about how it relates to other versions of the “Black Square”. As far as I know, there were four in total. At the same time, I do not exclude that others still remain unidentified and unknown. I can assume that somewhere (they write a lot about Malevich now, both here and abroad) some new data has appeared that I have not followed. But for now, it seems to me, we can talk about four with complete certainty. The first one is in the Tretyakov Gallery. Its dimensions are 79.5x79.5. He entered the gallery in 1929 from the Museum of Pictorial Culture. It is he who is depicted in the famous photographs of the exhibition “0.10” hanging like an icon in the “red corner” of the hall (ill. 1). It was exhibited among 39 other Suprematist works by Malevich. The time of its creation can be considered proven - 1915, although Malevich himself dated all his “Black Squares” to 1913 on the basis that this plastic element, which then became almost a symbol of twentieth-century painting, appeared in his sketches for the set of the opera “Victory” Above the Sun", staged in 1913. The second “Black Square” (106x106) was created around 1923 - during the preparation of the Soviet section of the Venice Biennale exhibition, where it was shown along with two other paintings - “Cross” and “Circle”, also reproducing fundamental Suprematist forms (illustration .5-7). All three paintings were painted by Malevich's students Suetin, Leporskaya and Rozhdestvensky, but signed by Malevich. On the back, the date is again inscribed in his hand - 1913. And on the stretcher there is a mark "1". Let me immediately clarify that this numbering has nothing to do with the “2nd” mark on our version. Malevich designated “Square”, “Cross” and “Circle” as numbers 1, 2 and 3, intended for the Venice exhibition. This version, like “Cross” and “Circle”, are in the Russian Museum and got there in 1977 along with a large number of other works by Malevich from his heirs (“for temporary storage”). It is this “Square” that we see in photographs from 1935 above the artist’s coffin in his apartment. The third option takes us back to the Tretyakov Gallery. In size (80x80) it is close to the first, exceeding it by 0.5 cm in height and width. But the proportional relationships of white and black are somewhat shifted - the white stripes along the edges are slightly narrower. On the reverse is again the date "1913" and an indication that the "initial element" appeared in the opera "Victory over the Sun". This version, not without reason, dates back to 1929 - the time of the artist’s personal exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery. But he entered the Tretyakov Gallery in 1934. As for the personal exhibition in the gallery, as far as I know from

6. There are generally four of them, one in the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val, where post-revolutionary art is, there is also in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg
7. In the Tretyakov Gallery
8. In every school, in every classroom...the originals hang, but Malevich simply copied
9. Toli in the Hermitage, toli in the Tretyakov Gallery

El-Lissitzky owns a philosophical argument that even envisages the so-called Fourth Testament. Let us cite this thought, again associated with the name of K. Malevich: “...and if today communism, which has made labor the ruler, and Suprematism, which has put forward the square of creativity, go together, then in the further movement communism will have to lag behind, for Suprematism, having embraced all life, will lead everyone from the dominion of labor, the dominion of the beating heart, will liberate everyone in creativity and lead the world to the pure action of perfection. This is the action we expect from Kazimir Malevich.”

BACKGROUND

WHY and HOW did the need to “put pen to paper” arise?
Being professional artist knowing that on the part of the average person there is a misunderstanding in determining the dignity, work visual arts, entitled “Black Square” by Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, I did not dare to think that this problem, “the problem of misunderstanding,” equally applies to the entire creative community. Those who are listened to. Whose opinion is an irrefutable, authoritative truth for many. The only justification for the instilled opinion about the inaccessibility, simple and universal, of understanding the essence of all the work done by K. Malevich during the “creation” of the “Black Square” can only be “PR”. The desire to maintain an aura of mystery for the sake of attractiveness. Many articles have been written and a lot of research has been conducted on the meaning of the “Black Square” and the influence of the system of Suprematism born from it on artistic culture. A. Benois, a contemporary of Malevich, artist, art critic, wrote:
“The black square in the white frame is not a simple joke, not a simple challenge, not a random little episode that happened in a house on the Champ de Mars, but this is one of the acts of self-affirmation of that principle, which has the abomination of desolation as its name and which prides itself on the fact that it through pride, through arrogance, through the trampling of everything loving and tender, will lead everyone to death.”
Following the critical assessment given by the master, many “figures” from culture, arrogantly flaunting their superiority, began to smear everything that did not fit into the image of the image they created. cultural environment, which often raises doubts bordering on pseudo-culture and pseudo-art. With the appearance of Malevich, how frightened were those who formed and are shaping the image of salon painting? With the appearance of the “Black Square” they realized that the end had come for their touching philosophy of mermaids and rugs with swans, designed for the average person. These facts are a direct attack on their material well-being.
Greed, anger, hatred, levers of power, everything was involved in order to faster people forgot about this piece. So that for almost a hundred years people would not understand what happened. Understanding the merits of “Black Square,” you can easily evaluate any creative work and evaluate the merits of the author. Those who are drawn to art are well aware of their limitations, the threat of being able to “hang noodles” on the ears of gullible ordinary people.
If society's demands for evaluating works of art and the merits of their authors increase, artificial stars from various kinds of factories will become ordinary Christmas decorations. But in order to raise these demands, one must be willing and refuse to be cattle.
Malevich, by writing “Black Square,” gave everyone an accessible opportunity to understand art and the trend of its development.
I was outraged by a number of assessments regarding the “Black Square” given in the media by some cultural representatives I respect:
N. Mikhalkov, T. Tolstoy, A. Evtushenko, A. Shilov, M. Shemyakin, etc.
Answering a direct question about the merits of “Black Square,” they allowed themselves to disparage the work of their colleague, to humiliate him in the face of people who are naturally interested in the opinions of their “idols.” They did not have the courage to admit their ignorance when evaluating this work.
Malevich himself, in his article “The Axis of Color and Volume,” suppressing the attacks of critics, far-sightedly answered them and today’s spiteful critics:
“...The attitude on their part was the most destructive in art, as well as in the lives of creators.
Limitations, unconsciousness, and cowardice prevented (are preventing) them from taking a broad look and embracing the entire horizon of the race and growth of the transformation of art.
Both the system of royal bailiffs and cultural officials were (are) related to the ongoing idea creative art, were also booed (booed) by the sophisticated intelligentsia, by public opinion, which, led by the sophisticated press, whooped (whoops) at everything creative and innovative.
The creativity of innovators was driven by the conditions created by these sophisticated experts into cold attics, into squalid workshops, and there the “innovators” waited (are waiting) for their fate, relying on fate. And if, through the greatest efforts, it was (is) possible to go out into the street with revolutionary works, then they were (are) greeted with abuse, swearing, boos and ridicule. Only the old is beautiful, they shouted (shouted) from all sides...
This is how they characterized (characterize) all those... who are still making nests for themselves in cultural institutions, stubbornly presenting the old as a beautiful altar of truth, to which young people should bow and believe...
But where are the scientific art museologists (professional art critics), where is their scientific character, where is their artistry, where is their understanding, or did they, due to their scientific nature and concept, not find the artistry or value of the phenomenon in the innovators?...
They set time as the barometer of understanding. When a work fails in ugly, untalented brains public opinion for a considerable number of years, such a work, not eaten, but greasy with the saliva of society, is accepted...
It is recognized...

Already at the beginning of the 19th century, the artist struggled with “lustful and depraved rubbish” in art.
I, communicating with young people of the early twentieth century, observe with horror the “picture” of lack of spirituality, rudeness and depravity imposed on them through new communication means.
Emptying from their brains the very idea of ​​a philosophically harmonious consciousness and the beauty of life, and not carnal, “lustful and depraved” sensations.
A special feeling of envy grips me every time I come into contact with the problems to which the Great Russian artist Kazimir Severinovich Malevich dedicated his life.
Minimizing a work of art and bringing it to perfection using all means is an excellent creative goal.
In one of his Vitebsk letters, Malevich wrote: - “At the end is another topic about the Suprematist quadrangle (preferably a square), on which it would be necessary to dwell on who it is and what is in it; no one thought about it, and therefore I, busy peering into the mystery of its black space, which has become some form of a new face of the Suprematist world, will myself elevate it into a creative spirit... I see in this what people once saw in the face of God, and all nature captured the image of his God in a form similar to that of a human, but if someone from hoary antiquity penetrated into the mysterious face of the black square, perhaps he would see what I see in it.”
The indignation that arose when professionals, one after another, gave a critical assessment of the picture, without thinking that their opinions were being listened to, forced me to write this work.
I selected and reviewed the materials:
- textbooks, specialized and “non-specialized” literature;
- I studied publications from the Internet, and this is a problem highlighted on the Internet;
- listened to the presentation of specialists in the cultural and artistic environment about this problem;
- I compared the described and heard idea of ​​the painting “Black Square” with my understanding and did not find any coincidence with my thoughts.
It became clear that there was a clear and obvious misunderstanding, and in rare cases, misunderstanding, no credit for creativity, K.S. Malevich, nor the merits of the work called “BLACK SQUARE”, nor the general significance of the appearance of this phenomenon in the fine arts. As information accumulated, this opinion only intensified.
Researchers of Malevich’s creativity in their articles and scientific works relying only on emotional perception, consider, criticize and discuss - they impose the wrong idea about the “BLACK SQUARE”.
If they have not correctly or not fully correctly determined the creative merits of this picture, all further reasoning is of almost no scientific value.
Art critics, students and Malevich himself, trying to characterize the painting, were unable to answer the questions - How? and why?
How? The process of creating a painting takes place.
Why? It is these values ​​that are the criterion for the dignity of any work.
Malevich, having created “BLACK SQUARE”, did not immediately realize the seriousness of the event, about which he wrote:
"What is this? Or a black hole, or maybe something can grow out of this?”
As stated by the researcher of Malevich’s work, A.S. Shatskikh: -
“Malevich approached the “Black Square” through a philosophical understanding of the world...
When the black quadrangle appeared, he could neither eat nor sleep for a whole week. This painting was such an important event in his work.
He went to her for many years. It was the culmination of his work, his synthesis of painting, sculpture, applied art and his philosophical speculations."
This phenomenon is the merit of a special mindset, the presence of charisma and great hard work of the author.
Malevich wrote:
"The Black Square" absorbed all the pictorial ideas that existed before, it closes the way to naturalistic imitation, it is present as an absolute form and heralds an art in which free forms - unrelated or interconnected - constitute the meaning of the picture."
The researchers note:
“According to the students, a new world has grown out of the square, alive and joyful. The square gathered around K.S. Malevich of new people, the generation of the future that they dreamed of.”
For the first time, the painting “Black Square” appeared in Petrograd, at the exhibition “0.10” (zero - ten) on December 17, 1915. According to the artist, he painted it for several months.
Malevich called one of the first paintings “Quadragon”, another - “Black Square on a White Background”, and, finally, the final name - “Black Square”, which does not define the relationship to the white canvas.
In the future, it should become clear to the reader why Malevich could not immediately decide on the title of the painting.
Having listened and looked closely at the general discussion on the topic of this picture, I was amused by the imagination and literary skill of people who call themselves experts in the field of art:

T. Tolstaya:
“Any draftsman can do such work,” and Malevich in his youth
worked as a draftsman - but draftsmen are not interested in such simple
geometric shapes. I could paint a picture like this
mentally ill - but he didn’t draw it, but if he did, it’s unlikely that she would have
there would be the slightest chance of getting to the exhibition at the right time and at the right time
place."

N. Semchenko:
“What is the merit and innovation of Malevich? Malevich was the first to exhibit
a drawn square as a work of fine art.
It is a fact. But the meaning of the event itself is that it has no
has nothing to do with fine art itself, and consider
It’s impossible for Kazimir Malevich to be a great artist.” ...

Nominated for the Booker Prize in 2005, St. Petersburg resident Sergei Nosov’s novel “The Rooks Have Flew Away”: One of the characters discovers that Malevich’s square is just just a square, without secret meanings.
Dear reader may ask me, does the author think too much of himself? Am I being ironic towards professional art critics?
Yes! This is exactly what I want to emphasize.
For me, Malevich is not an idol, but it is impossible not to pay tribute to his genius.
Without knowledge of his merits and heritage, the development of art in general is IMPOSSIBLE.
And when I am introduced to his work by people who know a lot of incomprehensible words, the use of which completely makes it impossible to understand anything, they talk and write about everything except the essence - I am indignant.
It is impossible to read this nonsense:

T. Tolstaya:
“It is impossible not to note that in several of Malevich’s works created
just before the discovery of Suprematism, suddenly begins
there is a tendency towards monumental significance and towards
human experience, breaking through the avant-garde
stylistics."

T. Tolstaya:
“Having performed this simplest operation, Malevich became the author of the most famous
the most mysterious, most frightening picture in the world -
"Black Square". With a simple movement of his wrist, he once and for all
an uncrossable line, marked the abyss..., between a person and his
shadow, between a rose and a coffin, between life and death, between God and
The devil. In his own words, he “reduced everything to zero.”
For some reason the zero turned out to be square, and this is a simple discovery -
one of the most terrible events in art in its entire history
existence."

T. Tolstaya:
“I am listed as an “expert” on “contemporary art” in one of the
funds in Russia, existing on American money.
They bring us "art projects" and we have to decide
give or not give money for their implementation. Together with me in
the expert council employs real experts in the “old”,
pre-square art, subtle connoisseurs.
We all hate the square and the “self-affirmation of that beginning,
which has for its name the abomination of desolation.” But they also bring us
carry projects of the next abomination of desolation, only abominations and
nothing else. We are obliged to spend the money allocated to us,
otherwise the fund will be closed. And it (the fund) feeds too many in our poor
country.
We are trying...”

Having assessed and realized that my idea of ​​the “Black Square” is more justified than that which is cultivated in society, I wrote this work and shared my thoughts with you.

The worldview of K.S. Malevich and mine.

“Kazimir Malevich is a more than significant name in the history of modern art.”
“This is the symbol and banner of all avant-garde creativity.”
"On his theoretical research refer to almost all directions of modern art, ... “Black Square” concentrates in itself everything intimate that fills the spiritual quest of authors and researchers of the aesthetic world of our time.”
“The name of Malevich is being put forward today as the foundation of a new, modern direction in art history, cultural studies and even philosophical thought, a direction filled with extraordinary depth and significance.”
“All this has already become an absolute, an axiom that does not require any proof, knowledge with which it is impossible to disagree, which is a shame to doubt and which is simply indecent to discuss.”
N. Semchenko and "K"

The virtues of the man who created the work of painting called “Black Square” will be glorified for centuries by everyone who strives even in the slightest degree for global perfection.

Malevich, “... quite obviously, is a Great Innovator who made a discovery that was fundamentally important for the technological civilization of the twentieth century.”
N. Semchenko and "K".

The purpose with which I took up the pen, the desire to explain - How? From the artist's perspective this picture could have arisen.

HISTORICAL PROCESS

The process of searching for the perfect.
In history, by creating material and spiritual values, man contributes to the progressive development of society.
As a result of this activity, the product of labor remains:
- tools:
stick, crystal axes, weapons, machines, spearheads, spear handles, stone axes, knives, fishing harpoons, hammers, etc.;
- Houseware:
dishes, clothes, furniture, books, etc.;
- buildings
menhirs, dolmens, cromlech at Stonehenge, St. Basil's Cathedral.
By getting to know himself and the results of his work, a person improves his understanding of the universe.
For descendants, values ​​remain that expand his worldview.
WORLDVIEW (worldview), a system of generalized views on the world and man’s place in it, on people’s attitude to the reality around them and to themselves, as well as their beliefs, ideals, principles of knowledge and activity determined by these views. There are three main types of worldview: everyday (everyday) worldview, which reflects ideas common sense, traditional views about the world and man; religious worldview associated with the recognition of the supernatural principle of the world; a philosophical worldview that summarizes the experience of spiritual and practical exploration of the world. Based on a rational understanding of the culture of philosophy, it develops new ideological orientations. The bearer of a worldview is an individual and a social group that perceives reality through the prism of a certain belief system. It has enormous practical meaning, influencing norms of behavior, life aspirations, interests, work and life of people.
(encyclopedic reference)
These values ​​also include works of fine art:
- cave drawings;
- architecture;
- painting.
Of the variety of figures, the one who brought something new and significant to the understanding of human essence remains in history:
Thinkers:
- Socrates;
- Galileo Galilei;
- Marie François Arouet, Voltaire.
Writers:
- William Shakespeare;
- Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy;
- Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.
Artists:
- Rafael Santi;
- Leonardo da Vinci;
- Kazimir Malevich.
Musicians:
- Johann Sebastian Bach;
- Ludwig van Beethoven;
- Tchaikovsky Pyotr Ilyich.
Scientists:
- Lomonosov Mikhail Vasilievich;
- Mendeleev Dmitry Ivanovich;
- Sakharov Andrey Dmitrievich.
Improve what has already been achieved:
- balloon;
- airship;
- helicopter;
- airplane;
- rocket launcher;
- spaceship.

Everything else is absorbed by time.
Search for ideals.
In search of the perfect, a person strives to define “the best”:
- best figure………………. - Venus Tauride;
- the best hunter...……………… - Perov “At a halt”;
- the best product …………………………… - Feberge;
- best performer…………………- Elvis Presley;
- the best lawyer ……………………… - A. Makarevich;
etc.
As in all other areas of human activity, in the fine arts there is a process of searching for the best work of art. Searching for a work that would meet the requirements of perfection - “IDEAL”.
If we can prove that Malevich created the most ideal work of fine art, and the ideal cannot but be beautiful, we will thereby rehabilitate his merit in the eyes of the ignorant.
Wanting to preserve the achievements of mental and physical labor, it is common for a person to record his thoughts in some way. Write down, sketch or depict the knowledge acquired by him/her:
- in science...:
- in painting...:
- in sculpture...:
- in architecture...:
By comparing some achievements with others, new, more advanced models are created.
For millennia, even better has been chosen from the best.

THE PROCESS OF CREATING A MAN-MADE MIRACLE

By the beginning of the twentieth century, in the field of fine arts, most of the consciously set goals and objectives for Artists, problems that the artist faced in the process of his creative activity. The basic laws of creativity were discovered and successfully used, including in painting:
Let's list some of them.
PAINTING:
- the law of beauty - "GOLDEN SECTION";
- laws of chiaroscuro;
- laws on color;
- laws of plasticity;
- laws of perspective;
- statics and dynamics, etc.
COMPOSITION:
- the law of unity of content and form;
- law of integrity;
- law of typification;
- law of contrasts;
- the law of novelty;
- the law of subordination of all laws and means
compositions to ideological intent;
- the law of vitality;
- the law of the influence of the “frame” on the composition of the image on the plane, etc.

The achievements of artists of the past are consciously and worthily used, “MODERNISM” was born and is developing, including “AVANTGARDISM” and “SUPREMATISM”, as its variety. “Malevich, an irrationalist, believed that the latest artistic trends can be studied with the help of rational scientific tools. Experimental experiments and research should, in his opinion, clearly reveal how the development of art took place.”

Alexandra Shatskikh - “Kazimir Malevich – writer and thinker”

GOAL AND ITS ACHIEVEMENT

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, following the evolutionary process social development, creative pride forced artists to set themselves original, complex tasks and goals.
However, almost a century later, today's artists and art critics, endowed with a decent education and knowledge in the field of art, continue to be tormented by the problems of past centuries, wanting to perceive the evolution of creativity as some kind of inextricable process. This perception is indeed slowly evolving art, but in to a greater extent it improves what has been achieved, what is already known, studied and slows down progress. It does not allow, it prevents you from looking at achievements from the outside and assessing the achievements of “today.” They have great difficulty renouncing “plagiarism” and their academic heritage.
By assessing what is understandable, studied, and known, it is easier for them to express themselves, manipulate verbal “abracadabra,” and compete in intelligence. In no case do I want to specifically edit the works of respected researchers and analysts of Malevich’s work, A. Shatskikh, D. Sarabyanov, N. Semchenko and his company, who are unfamiliar to me, and Tatiana Tolstoy, who accidentally came here, who considers it her duty to speak out about the topic, in the understanding which has problems, but is forced to substantiate its idea based on their work. My greatest regret is the lack of understanding of Malevich’s merits on the part of M. Shemyakin and A. Shilov.
From an interview with Mikhail Shemyakin on Radio Liberty on December 1, 2005:
“... This is a coffin slab that crushes people... It is precisely this coffin slab that has turned into a huge square of Malevich that crushes modern Russian artists.”
“... Yes, this is interesting, from the point of view of psychiatry already...”
Personally, I had a better opinion of them.
D. Sarabyanov noted: “this was a risky step towards that position that puts a person in the face of Nothing and Everything.”
The later generation, on the contrary, does not fully or at all take into account the developments of the past. All this leads to “creative chaos,” which in most cases leads to primitivism.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a young man in the prime of his creative powers, actively participating in and imitating the latest trends and trends in art, could not help but be noticed among his colleagues.
“Sometimes it happens that when you first meet a person you don’t get any sympathy for him, you don’t like him, but when you live with him, you like him. So it is in another matter. Other ideas are not perceived, but if you live with them under their constant conversation, then they become acceptable; this happens with painters when they don’t like the type, but working on it, they begin to like it - then the feelings will love and create the image.”
"Treatises and theoretical writings." K. Malevich.

SEARCHING FOR A GOAL

Living, communicating and working in the midst of the active creative community of Russia of his time, Malevich, like other aspiring artists, for a long time was faced with the fact of searching and choosing a life path.
During this period of his life, the “provincial youth” studied:
He studied at an agricultural school, but showed an early interest in drawing. . At the age of seventeen, Kazimir attended the Kyiv drawing school of N.I. Murashko.
Since 1896, he and his family have lived and worked in Kursk. Together with local amateur artists, he organized an art club.
Since 1905 to 1907 Malevich made three unsuccessful attempts to enter the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. This means that all this time he was actively preparing to enter one of the best art educational institutions in Russia, mastering the “creative science”.
Malevich’s last (1907 – 1910) educational stage was classes at the school-studio of Ivan Fedorovich Rerberg, one of the founders of the Moscow Association of Artists. He worked in Moscow for some time.
“The era itself, saturated with technical and political transformations, powerfully dictated the emergence of a new attitude to beauty.”
"IN at a young age the future futurist went through a period of fascination with I. Repin and I. Shishkin and copied the works of Russian classics quite well. He worked quite professionally in the field of realistic painting, and during the First World War he created brilliant propaganda cartoons directed against the Kaiser’s army. There is no abstractionism in these works. Nothing foreshadowed contact with the supernatural.”
Quotes from the Internet.

The artist’s originality of thinking forces “non-thinking” researchers of Malevich’s work to give superficial reviews that lead away from the depth of understanding in the search creative path and in choosing a goal.
“...in this part of Malevich’s work...seems like a provincial re-drawing from a metropolitan magazine or the figment of the imagination of an inexperienced amateur who has seen enough of different paintings at exhibitions.”
D. V. Sarabyanov.

“We will not dwell on the early work of the artist, when he tried his hand at primitive art, when he “...switched to the naturalistic school, went to Shishkin and Repin,” when he was interested in impressionism, elements of modernism, Cezanism, Cubism, Fauvism , symbolism - all these are attempts to externally borrow foreign stylistic systems, which can be considered as school exercises for a novice artist"
The question arises, who are “We”? N. Semchenko and "K".

“And it immediately becomes obvious that Malevich’s attempts to get closer to the mastery of Shishkin, Ingres or Repin can never be realized simply because for this it is necessary to be able to draw. It's a little easier to imitate the Cubists and Futurists. Here, serious skill is no longer required, just audacity and pressure, which Malevich possessed in full.”
To whom is it obvious? N. Semchenko and "K".

“What is there to admire in this dubious provincial chic? For example, the painting “Cow and Violin” (1913. Russian Museum). Of course, everyone understands the absurdity of such a comparison and everyone can see the professional helplessness of the author in both the cow and the violin. And what’s so great about that?”
Who understands? N. Semchenko and "K".

Mastering the skills of the Great painters, Malevich came closer to understanding art. I was approaching the realization of the importance of setting correct, new goals in art. Studied heritage and artistic techniques. I set myself, as a novice artist, feasible tasks and solved them.
Is this really not enough to become “Shishkin”?
His creative hobbies can be clearly seen by studying his biography, literary heritage and paintings by the artist. It becomes clear how hard and creatively - painfully he “approached” the main goal of his work.
“Humanity moves through signs, each sign carries with it a certain degree of ascent, movement without a sign has no effect.” This is what Malevich wrote in one of his notebooks(private collection, p. 164, verso).
It was this phrase that guided researchers creative heritage Malevich on the wrong path. They perceived the concept of “sign” not as a phenomenon, a message, but literally as a simplified symbol. Malevich was thinking about... - something else.
The goal was to search for the image and form of such a work of art, which, in accordance with all the laws of creativity, approached the concept of an ideal painting. It is known that the main criterion for assessing the aesthetic merits of phenomena and objects in the surrounding world is visual perception. The knowledge gained from the study of science, history, the development of fine arts, aesthetics, ethics, etc. is associated with the knowledge of beauty and the search for ideals. If all the laws of creativity with optimal characteristics are applied to a work, such a work is called ideal.

Target:- create a professionally competent work
realistic art, taking into account those known at that time,
laws of painting and physiological capabilities of its perception
human.

Possessing professional knowledge and creative skill, Malevich decided to create a work of realistic art, the depicted object of which is the simplest geometric figure- a flat square, “painted” with uniform paint, devoid of directional lighting, that is, uniformly illuminated, on a white flat background. In this case, the object itself must be in the center of the canvas and when demonstrating it, the center must be perpendicular to the point of view.
When creating such a work, the artist would be obliged to use the maximum of laws that every professionally trained, competent artist used, was obliged to use, or take into account in his work. When the idea was determined in Malevich’s mind, the search for possibilities for its implementation began.
According to Malevich: “in the “suprematist mirror” all phenomena of the world are reduced to Zero.”
As A. Shatskikh noted: “The “Black Square” embodies the idea of ​​a new spirituality, is a kind of icon, a plastic symbol of a new religion...
The appearance of this painting revealed to the artist a comprehensive utopia of a new “objectless world”, which made him acutely feel his calling. For him, from the very beginning, it was obvious that the “Black Square” was not given to him, but given, to reinterpret the well-known formulation of the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen. For many years, Malevich sought to comprehend and put into words the meaning of his main work.”
(A. Shatskikh, pp. 11, 15, 17).

Artists of past generations found solutions to the problems associated with creating a painting. We decided on composition, proportions, lighting, perspective, movement. Patterns and trends, technical capabilities, painting techniques, etc. The Impressionists most successfully solved the problems of color perception and the influence of lighting.
As a result of Malevich’s successful achievement of his goal, Artists would have the opportunity for a concentrated, targeted, conscious, expanded search for new ways and directions in the development of art. Such a work became the starting point for all future generations of artists. I would call “Black Square” - “The ABC of Painting”. I would make an analogous comparison with the “D. Periodic table” or with the “scale” in music. Having mastered the ABC, knowing how to use it, you can begin to consciously “Create”, and then to whom God has given. Those creative problems problems that “Black Square” does not directly solve are easily explained from the perspective of this work.
Features of human physiology.
Let us pay attention to the imperfection of human vision.
Human vision (visual perception) is the process of psychophysiological processing of images of objects in the surrounding world, carried out by the visual system.

Vision.

GENERAL INFORMATION

“Due to the large number of stages in the process of visual perception, it individual characteristics are considered from the point of view of different sciences - optics, psychology, physiology, chemistry. At each stage of perception, distortions, errors, and failures occur, but the human brain processes the information received and makes the necessary adjustments.
These processes are unconscious in nature and are implemented in multi-level autonomous correction of distortions. This is how spherical and chromatic aberration, blind spot effects are established, color correction is carried out, a high-quality stereoscopic image is formed, etc.
In cases where subconscious information processing is insufficient or excessive, optical illusions arise.”
Nobel Prize winners 1981. David Hubl and Torsten Weisel, "Astrophilosophy".

“To this day, the problem of overcoming the boundary between the physical laws that organize the work of the physical apparatus of perception and the emergence of a mental phenomenon has not been solved: “Neither the Jung-Helmholtz theory nor the Hering theory can fully explain how signals are converted into a mental image of an object.”
Tonquist, 1983

A person cannot really see “flat”, “black”, “square”.

1. Instead of a geometrically regular square, human vision perceives (sees) a horizontally elongated rectangle.
2. Instead of a flat square, a person will see a biconvex volumetric rectangle with direct or reverse perspective.
3. Instead of black, human vision will perceive an unevenly colored plane.
Before Malevich, artists knew the problems associated with the imperfection of human vision:
“Color science disciplines began to develop especially intensively in the twentieth century, which is associated with the development of industrial production of aniline dyes, color photography and television. At the origins of modern representatives of the perception of color are truly famous names:
M.V. Lomonosov (1711-1765),
T. Jung (1773-1829),
G. Fechner (1801-1887),
G. Helmholtz (1821-1849),
J. Maxwell (1831-1879),
E. Goering (1834-1918).
However, the theoretical foundations of most of these disciplines were laid at the beginning of the eighteenth century.”
Doctor psychological sciences, P.V. Yanshin, “Psychology and psychosemantics of color.”

1. From science we know that humans see worse than animals and insects.
2. The sector of gaze perceived by human vision is approximately equal to -27*;
3. An object with an angular coverage of 90*,180,* 360* can be seen by a person when:
a) translation of the position of the pupils;
b) when turning the neck;
c) turning the torso;
d) when turning on your feet;
e) with mirror reflection. (I will not consider this topic for now, otherwise I will be distracted from the main thing for a long time).
Using this knowledge in their work, the artists did not think about the fact that the problem of vision itself, perception, could become the object of the main creative goal.
Malevich was lucky, he saw the purpose of creative expression in solving problems related to the peculiarities of human perception.. In my opinion, Malevich had extraordinary vision. He probably had problems with it. And on top of that, he spent a long time communicating with his blind mother, whom he loved very much.
This helped him in choosing a goal and setting creative tasks. Malevich, solving the problem of imperfect visual perception and the perception of a work of fine art through sensations, solved the most difficult problem - the problem of creativity.

Setting and solving creative problems.

On the way to achieving the goal, multiple creative tasks arose, which K. Malevich took on to solve.
Find, select, justify and force the professional community to unconditionally agree with the choice of the optimal canvas size on which the process will begin
creation of a work.
To solve the problem, it is necessary to take into account everything that has been developed over time, scientifically and practically, in this direction.

Object selection:

“BLACK SQUARE” - Malevich created it with the aim of exhibiting it at an exhibition. The Square first appears in Petrograd, at the “Last Futurist Exhibition “0.10” (zero - ten) on December 17, 1915, (in the catalog No. 39 under the name “Quadrangle”). He is clearly visible in the famous photograph and takes pride of place in the "red corner" as an icon. This first square was purchased in 1918-1919 by the Fine Arts Department of the People’s Commissariat for Education, the purchasing commission chaired by V. Kandinsky.”
(from art historical sources)

Now, having set a goal and determined the size of the canvas, we will answer the question “How?” Malevich created "Black Square".

Task 1.
Draw a square on a plane.
In the process of work, the artist encountered a complexity that requires encyclopedic knowledge and individual professionalism. In a geometrically regular square depicted on a plane, a person sees a horizontally elongated rectangle. This is due to the imperfection (features) of human vision.
Since a person does not have the ability to perceive a rectangle with equal sides as a square, Malevich had to change the proportions of a geometrically correct square so that the visually perceived square looks like a “square”.
Malevich’s merit lies in the fact that by means of visual deception, by enlarging the vertical sides of the square and depicting them as concave, he forced the viewer to see the rectangle as a square, and not as a horizontally elongated “barrel”. The difficulty is that these changes are not determined by anything other than individual sensations.
The main stream of eyewitnesses who were lucky enough to see this work claim that they saw a square. For greater persuasiveness, this image is inspired by the title of the painting - “Black Square”. Psychologically, Malevich does not allow one to doubt the elementary mathematical capabilities of the author, and makes the viewer see a geometrically correct square in a rectangle.
Conclusion - 1: Malevich forced the viewer to perceive a rectangle as a square. Nevertheless, he coped with this task.

Task 2.
In the desired “square” (white canvas), you need to enter another square - black.
To solve this problem, the author did the same manipulation that was done earlier, only the color of the rectangle is black. The difficulty is in choosing the proportional relationship between the “canvas square” and the black square inscribed in it. Using knowledge of the mathematical meaning of the Golden Section proportions, it is not difficult to calculate these ratios.
Conclusion - 2: Malevich had knowledge of the “Law of Beauty” and knew how to apply it.

Task 3.
Bring encyclopedic knowledge into harmony with the imperfections of human visual perception.
We know that a person perceives white and black colors differently.
Let's conduct an experiment: - take two geometrically equal squares, - cover one of them with black paint. When we look at them at the same time, we will see that the black square will appear smaller than the white one. Malevich had to take this effect of imperfect vision into account when determining the proportions of the two “squares”. An artist can solve this problem experimentally, consciously distorting the meaning of the “golden ratio”, using knowledge, talent and charisma, achieving a harmonious, ideal relationship between given rectangles. As one of the researchers of the artist’s work correctly noted, “it was not the material side of creating a painting, but the refined stage of the spiritual process that was the idea of ​​​​Malevich’s work on the Black Square.”
Conclusion - 3: Using knowledge and talent, Malevich succeeded. Experimentally, those harmonious relationships between rectangles that can be called “ideal” were found. Reflecting on the solution to this problem, the reader can decide on the question that arises - Why? The artist did not rewrite or copy “Black Square”, but repeated it throughout his life.

Task 4.
Inscribe in the center of the desired “square” (canvas) - inscribed.
If we draw diagonals at both “squares” and align the centers, we will see that the inscribed rectangle will be perceived below the geometric center. To solve this problem, Malevich had to shift the geometric center of the inscribed “square” along the vertical axis, placing it above the geometric center of the canvas, so that the inscribed black square was visually perceived in the center of the canvas. The distance between centers is also a subject of complex creative and emotional search.
Most portrait artists use this knowledge when choosing options for the composition of a portrait.
Conclusion - 4: And Malevich coped with this task.

Task 5.
Draw a square relative to the “Law of Perspective”.
The painting is called “Black Square” for a reason. The author did not call it a black square in a white square. Malevich called one of his first paintings “Quadrangle”.
In one of his Vitebsk letters, Malevich wrote: “At the end of the day is another topic about the Suprematist quadrangle...”
A. Benois, a contemporary of Malevich, an artist, an art critic, wrote: “A black square in a white frame”
The shape of the white base cannot be square, since according to the Laws of Perspective, the two parallel, lateral sides of the canvas, in order to appear as straight vertical sides, must have a concave shape. Changing the shape of the canvas is a mechanical process not related to painting.
Malevich, moving towards achieving his goal, simplified as much as possible the possibility of extraneous, side tasks that would distract from solving the main one - to depict a flat, black, square, in ideal proportions, on a white background. Moreover, the area of ​​the canvas and the area of ​​the black square must be in ideal relationships to each other and in ideal possibilities for human perception. Therefore, we cannot consider the area of ​​the canvas to be a square and the goal of bringing it to visual perception as a square was not set. As for the perception of the black square, this is a question of the main goal. Since any point moving away from the X axis, up or down, acquires the properties of perspective reduction, and the sides of the square Ae - Cm and eB - mD relative to point of view 0, moving away from the X axis, during visual perception, tends to converge at one point on the horizon line, Malevich changed the shape of the line AeB to AsB, and CmD to CnD. Removes the perspective effect that distorts the shape of the square.
Determining the distances es and nm is a creative process based on sensations.
Conclusion - 5: The artist makes the viewer perceive the sides AB and CD as straight, and the figure ACDB as a square.

Task 6.
Using the knowledge of the “Laws of Painting”, remove airy, direct and reverse perspectives.
It is known that at the border of two contrasting colors there is an effect in which a light color is visually perceived as even lighter, and a dark color as darker. To remove this effect, the artist must use the skill of a painter. By mixing different colors, draw the boundaries of contrasting colors in such a way that the viewer has no doubt about the uniformity of the color - white and black. At the time of writing “Black Square”, the concept of computer resolution and filters did not exist, but in practice, to give the plane uniformity of color, artists use various techniques:
- change the size and shape of the brush;
- change the shape and size of the brush stroke;
- in various combinations, change the tonality of the color;
- apply “filters” - lising (writing with translucent paints
different shades, on top of the main color, giving the color nobility in perception);
- etc.
Only a very good painter can do this. Many Great Artists possessed these qualities. Leonardo da Vinci was a virtuoso of such techniques.
In impressionism, this technique is the basis of the method.
Conclusion - 6: Malevich also coped with this task.

Task 7.
Remove the perspective that arises when demonstrating a picture.
In the process of viewing a work of art, questions related to spatial perception inevitably arise.
We encounter the law of perception every day:
- looking at exhibits in museums;
- choosing a convenient place to watch TV shows;
- buying tickets with seats to the theater or stadium, etc.
We get upset if they are inconvenient for the full perception of the spectacle. The optimal convenient distance for human perception is considered to be a distance equal to approximately three diagonals of the object we are considering:
- TV;
- computer;
- book;
- a picture
and approximately equal to the value of the most favorable perception by the average person, approaching the ideal characteristics. This knowledge led the author to the “Golden Proportions”. Artists solve this problem every time they start new job from nature. Students “fight”, wanting to take the most comfortable place in the audience, before the performance.
Malevich, knowing what kind of work he did while working on the creation of “Black Square,” understood that according to the laws of creating exhibition displays, works of this kind should be hung slightly above the horizon, that is, above the line running parallel to the floor, through the centers of the viewer’s pupils. This means that if his picture were hung in this way, the center of the square would be above the line of sight (even slightly), and the viewer would have to lift his head a little to view the picture. In this case, according to the law of perspective, the parallel, side lines of the square would acquire the property of parallel lines and tend to converge at one point on the horizon line located above the level of vision.
Thus, the viewer again would not see the square, would not see the “Miracle”.
The MIRACLE effect can only occur in someone whose viewing angle is perpendicular to the center of the painting and the distance to the painting corresponds to the “Golden Proportions” in relation to the size of the canvas. “Black Square” has only one single point from which the viewer can perceive it as a “miracle”.
K. Malevich solving this problem. He himself puts together an exhibition of his works and hangs the “Black Square” in the corner at an angle towards the viewer, like an icon, thereby removing the effect of creating a perspective that is not necessary for viewing.
That's why the painting is called an icon!
Malevich himself described the painting as “a naked, frameless icon of my time.” The viewer, limited in the ability to maneuver in front of the painting located in the corner of the exhibition hall, finds the optimal point from which the “Black Square”, in combination with other feelings of people, is perceived as a “Miracle”.
Conclusion: - the effect of perceiving a MIRACLE may occur. Under normal conditions, a person cannot see this. A distorted object will not affect the senses of perception, this is commonplace, there is a lot of this around.
Based on the above, one more conclusion can be drawn: - no one since the time of Malevich has seen a miracle in a painting called “Black Square”. Hear - heard, but did not see. And now showing it as an ordinary picture, the audience is deprived of the opportunity to perceive the “MIRACLE”.
28.01.2008 In January-February 2008, by presenting the painting at an exhibition in Paris, they deceived the French. Showing “Black Square” as an ordinary painting is like leading someone to a miracle and blindfolding it, preventing them from looking at it. It’s like taking tourists to the Giza Valley and talking about the pyramids while looking at pictures in an album.
Why then take it out?
Malevich, at the 1915 exhibition “0.10” and in the exhibitions at the landmark 2004 exhibition at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw, “Warsaw - Moscow, 1900 – 2000”, “Square” from the Tretyakov Gallery was presented as the central exhibit of the exhibition. At the same time, it is posted in the “Red Corner”.
The presentation of the organizers of the exhibition and the owners of the painting is not clear:
- or is this a formal imitation of Malevich?
- or did you realize the importance of a special display of the painting?
From November 8 to December 4, 2005, at the Tretyakov Gallery, at the exhibition of graphics by contemporary artists from Central and Eastern Europe - “The Meaning of Life - the Meaning of Art”, “Black Square” was also exhibited in the “red corner”. Since it must be viewed by the viewer:
- in the corner, limiting the view of perception to the eye;
- at an angle, removing the perspective obtained if the center of the square is above the horizon line.
Then it becomes unclear again - Why?! at the exhibition on January 28, 2008, “Black Square” was presented as an ordinary painting. This is clearly visible in the photographs.
Conclusion - 7: - the creative elite does not have a reasonable, accurate understanding of the merits of K. Malevich and the special significance of the painting called “Black Square” in world art.

We have finished looking at the processes of creating a painting, creating a “Miracle” and assessing its merits. The question arises, “if a miracle has been created, why does it need to be duplicated?”

Task 8.
The most important - sensational task, coming from the above - described! Collect all versions of Malevich’s painting, “Black Square” together. When demonstrating a painting, take into account everything that was discussed above and make the most reasonable determination of both the merits of the artist and the dignity of the painting. It is known that Malevich created four or seven “Black Squares”.
Clearly aware of the process of creating a picture, it becomes clear that since the main creative problems faced by the author are solved by sensations, the artist cannot, for the purpose of self-control, rewrite an already created square. He is forced to try new options. While in the process of creative search, test those very sensations that cannot be measured by anything other than experiment and talent. One of the last conclusions that can be drawn is that in order to more deeply appreciate the dignity of this work, all the squares must be exhibited together, in one exhibition display.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1913 1915 1919-1920 1923 1927 1929 1932 1935
“We know of several picturesque squares, but we cannot say definitively how many, since it is possible that squares still unknown to us will emerge. They differ from the very first one, as a rule, in greater accuracy of execution, material, and, importantly, proportions. So far there is no study of these proportions, by which, in essence, sometimes it is only possible to establish which of the Squares known to us is captured in a particular photograph.”
It follows from this that the “Black Square” that the artist himself chose for demonstration is the most successful in relation to the implementation of creative ideas.
The square accompanied Malevich on his final journey. Researchers of Malevich’s work note that the artist painted the following paintings:
- “Red Square” (in two copies);
- “White Square” (Suprematist composition);
- “White on white” - one;
- “Black Square” (several copies), - without catching that copies
There cannot be a “Black Square”.
They write:
“It is reliably known that in the period from 1915 to the early 1930s, Malevich created: four copies of “Black Square”, which differ in design, texture and color.
“The plane forming a square signifies the beginning of Suprematism, a new color realism as non-objective creativity.”
“Suprematism is divided into three stages, according to the number of squares - black, red and white: the black period. Colored and white. All three periods developed from 1913 to 1918. The basis for their formation was: to convey the power of statics through economic essence plane or form visible dynamic rest. This was achieved in a purely planar form.”

Generalized conclusion.
The creation of this work is a historical milestone in the development of all art, including fine art. Malevich told his students: “We need to grow you, so that we can grow oak trees out of you, so that we can sow seeds, not words, all over the world.” According to the students, a new world, alive and joyful, grew out of the Square.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Square gathered around K.S. Malevich of new people, the generation of the future they dreamed of. He made it possible for the next generation of Artists around the world to realize the achievements of previous millennia. Starting from the “Black Square” as a launching pad to move creative thought forward, taking into account the achievements of previous generations as a passed stage.
Nowadays, many of those who masterfully mastered and imitated the historical heritage, by and large calling themselves “Artists,” in fact are not such. They can be called good craftsmen, no more. An artist with a capital “A” is one who, taking into account the achievements of his predecessors, brings something new, his own, into art.
It must be a great shame that until now among the so-called “creative intelligentsia” there has not been a sufficiently understanding, trained specialist who would popularly explain the merits of this work.
Having proved and explained that K. Malevich created a work that, from the point of view of creative laws, has no flaws, that is, an ideal work or as close as possible to an ideal work, in comparison with all that were created by artists, we can say that it is beautiful, so - as “ideal cannot but be beautiful.
All other works, including those of different genres, provide an opportunity for researchers, critics, “experts,” professional artists, and ordinary people to reason, doubt, and argue. “Black Square” deprives this public of the opportunity to “verbalize,” which is what irritates them.
Anyone who, having seen this picture, while exchanging impressions, claims that he did not see anything special except a flat, black square, does not understand that he saw a man-made “miracle”. What a person, due to his physical imperfection, cannot see.
This is the goal, the task that the artist sought to achieve. The painting “Black Square” is the property of all the people to whom it belongs and therefore, due to its significance, it is time to stop the periodic corporate speculation about the desire to sell the painting for short-term financial gain.
© Intellectual property is protected by copyright.