Stop and look: Black Circle by Kasimir Malevich
Kasimir Malevich was born in Kyiv, and considered himself Ukrainian, but was of Polish stock, and after his death was claimed as a Pole. But he is usually assimilated into the Russian avant-garde which emerged in the 1900s. These matters have come under close scrutiny since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but there’s no getting away from the fact that a painting like Black Circle refuses to be aligned with any single culture, and exists incontrovertibly as the boldest statement of a fundamental universal.
He gravitated, in 1911, from Kyiv to Moscow and subsequently showed his work in St Petersburg and Paris, alongside the international revolutionaries of his generation. He published a manifesto, From Cubism to Suprematism, in 1915 which set out his claim to belong to a movement that threw aside all the assumptions and priorities of traditional European painting. This picture, showing simply a large black circle, was the earliest of a sequence of works produced in the years around the First World War in which a single geometrical form is presented without accompanying figures or even colour: the most fundamental of statements about the nature of visual reality.
The forms he presented in this way are elementary, or perhaps we should say elemental: not only the circle but the square – a motif he repeated several times, once in red rather than black – the cross, or stripes. He sometimes executed his squares in white on white. These primal images were enormously influential on the aesthetics of the whole of the twentieth century, and still resonate today. In the 1920s he reverted to his earliest practice and produced more representational subjects, in which recognisable human forms inhabit three-dimensional spaces articulated with bright colour. But the single geometric shape remained closer to his ideal and when he died of cancer in 1935 he was buried under a monument bearing a black square.
Many of the early exponents of abstraction, whether in Russia, the Netherlands, France or elsewhere, argued that their work was an expression of spiritual values that transcended the everyday physical world. Malevich belonged to the persistent and profound Christian culture of his ancestral Poland, primarily Roman Catholic but with affinities to the Orthodox Church of Russia. It isn’t necessary to read specific doctrinal ideas into these abstractions, though it’s easy to equate a circle like this to a conception of the created universe, or the oneness of God – or of all matter. It also irresistibly suggests astronomical space – the eclipse of a giant planet, perhaps. Malevich himself preferred to think of his images as deliberately emptied of associational significance and existing for themselves alone – the thing in itself, representative of ‘pure feeling’, as he described it, the ultimate state of human consciousness.
This is a remarkable moment in the story of European art: a take-over of all existing assumptions as to the purpose of painting and the substitution of bold generalities: a denial of the elementary function of art in favour of uplifting, if vague, theories as to our place in the cosmos. The spectator becomes the protagonist of a debate to which the artist supplies only hints and suggestions. It’s a short step from here to the abolition of visual impediments altogether. During the twentieth century, that step was taken.
But for my part, I’m glad that the majority of artists have continued to want to engage with the world of human experience, and have continued to use their skills in that worthy cause. A black geometric shape may have been influential, but Malevich’s ideas really led nowhere except to repetitions by other artists who could hardly add to their already stripped-bare significance. The result has been a great deal of pretentiousness, which we can surely do without.
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