HAMBURGER
KUNSTHALLE
Black Square - Icon of Modernism Hommage a Malevich
Inaugural exhibition of the director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Prof. Dr. Hubertus GaIẞner
March-June 2007
When Kasimir Malevich first showed his Black Square at The Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10 in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in December 1915, the artist himself must have felt the need for a theoretical interpretation of this founding work of geometric abstract painting, as from then on he repeatedly provided new definitions and explanations for this "icon of the new art", as he himself described it:
"When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field ... This was no empty square which I had exhibited but rather the feeling of non-objectivity ...
The square = feeling
The white field = the void behind the square."
(1927)
This is a relatively precise definition by Malevich of what the black square, and the new concept of painting he developed from it - Suprematism (Lat. supremus, 'highest') - is meant to embody or evoke in the viewer: the feeling of non-objectivity and void.
The impression of a void, which Malevich also calls"nothingness", is generated by the white ground that appears to be a limitless expanse lying behind the colour planes. The feeling of non-objectivity, on the other hand, is evoked by the painted forms which seem to float and ascend like weightless masses of colour inside the empty pictorial space. The coloured surfaces deduced from the black square on a white ground do indeed convey the sensation of floating weightlessly in the endless void of the white image space. As Malevich equates the feeling of weightlessness with that of nonobjectivity, the flat units of colour floating in the empty white space represent a non-objective but nevertheless dynamically intense world.