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Black Square: Hommage à Malevich
HAMBURGER KUNSTHALLE, HAMBURG
SINCE ITS INTRODUCTION to the public in 1915 at "The Last Futurist Exhibition '0.10'" in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), Kazimir Malevich's Black Square has intrigued and bewildered artists and critics searching for its meaning. Varvara Stepanova, Malevich's fellow avantgardist, conveyed the painting's conceptual instability when in 1919 she concluded in her diary: "If we look at the square without mystical faith, as if it were a real earthy fact, then what is it?" This reluctance to accept Black Square on a strictly formal basis has endured. Indeed, any hope that the recent exhibition in 1 Limburg would finally clear Malevich's famous canvas of all charges related to mysticism was dispelled by a press release in which curator Hubertus Gassner described Black Square as a "passage into another, spiritual world," equating it with "the traditional conception of the icon as a visual representation of the next world in this world."
"Black Square: I lommage à Malevich" featured more than one hundred works, roughly half by Malevich and his contemporaries-theoretical allies such as his students (including El Lissitzky) and Constructivist adversaries such as Aleksandr Rodchenko-and half by postwar Western artists influenced by or responding to Malevich's painting. But by positioning Black Square as a new icon rather than as the "icon of the new art" (as Malevich called it), the show diluted the original ambitions of this controversial canvas, which directly concern the goals of early modernism. Black Square marked...