In 1915, at the "0,10" exhibition in Petrograd, Malevich hung a black square on a white ground in the red corner — the place where an icon traditionally hangs. A provocation? Certainly. But something more as well: he had taken the place of the sacred.
The Black Square is not a painting. It is a manifesto. Malevich called it the "zero form," the "living, regal infant." He demolished everything painting had accumulated over five hundred years — perspective, the figure, the subject, color as a description of nature — and left only the relation of forms and planes. He named it Suprematism, from supremus, the highest.
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was born in 1879 in Kyiv, into a Polish family. In his youth he painted Impressionist landscapes, quite traditional ones. Then came Moscow and the avant-garde, Larionov and Goncharova; then Cézanne, Cubism, Futurism — he swallowed it all within a few years and pressed on, to where no one had yet gone.
After the revolution of 1917 he stood at the summit: museum director, professor, ideologue of the new art. In 1919 he moved to Vitebsk and there met Chagall — they quarreled at once. Malevich lured away the students and renamed the school. It was his habitual stance: he always occupied the whole of the space.
In 1930 he was arrested. He was interrogated and then released; the case was formally closed. In fact, it was the end. Socialist Realism had won, and Suprematism became "formalism," a term of abuse.
Before his death in 1935 he asked to be buried in a coffin shaped like a cross, bearing a black square. His gravestone was a white cube with a black square on it. The artist died without having retreated.
Today his Black Square is among the most expensive paintings in history — and still among the most contested. What it actually is, no one has yet managed to say for certain.