Resurrector: Black Square

In 1915, long before the release of Spinal Tap, and longer still before sculptor Anish Kapoor purchased the rights to Vanta­black, the Polish Russian artist Kazimir Malevich first exhibited Black Square in Saint Petersburg, at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10 (called simply “zero-ten”). The number indicated a “point zero” for a new arts movement, suprematism—from whence all possibility might begin—and for the ten featured artists. “Up until now… painting was the aesthetic side of a thing, but never was original and an end in itself,” Male­vich wrote in a handout accompanying the exhibition.

Malevich’s very first black square appeared in the design of a stage curtain for the production of a 1913 cubo-futurist opera called Victory Over the Sun, for which Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov wrote the text, Mikhail Matyushin composed the music, and Male­vich designed the set and costumes. Written in Zaum—a phonetic, trans-rational language created by Russian futurist poets—the work attests to the values of suprematism, setting it against the artistic movements that preceded it, as well as its utilitarian, technologically charged contemporary, Soviet constructivism. In the opera, the characters seek to abolish discursive reasoning by capturing the Sun (encasing it in concrete, to be given a lavish burial by the Strong Men of the Future) and ending time as it is known; the play culminates in an aviation catastrophe, with the world in darkness. The opera was not well received by the public at Luna Park, the amusement park in Saint Petersburg where it premiered in 1913, or by critics, but it announced the genesis of a uniquely Russian approach, one unbound by the traditions of Western Europe.