“Gallery-goers might have been outraged not only because of the work’s simplicity—it is a 79.5-centimeter-square canvas bordered thickly in gray and white, filled in with black paint—but because it was not even a square.”
A rotating guest column in which writers reexamine critically unacclaimed works of art
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.
