Kazimir Malevich, Black Square (1915)


The Revolution of the Black Square from HENI Talks on YouTube.

Black Square, 1915. Kazimir Malevich’s small masterpiece is one of the most shocking and influential paintings in the history of art. What does it mean and what impact has it had around the world?

Iwona Blazwick begins the story in the dramatic turbulence of early 1900s Tsarist Russia, where a group of young artists began to rethink the possibilities of art and overturned traditional ideas of representation. The art movements they founded—Constructivism and Suprematism—focused on pure colour, shape and line, and reflected a world undergoing social and political revolution.

Blazwick follows the trail from western Europe to 1950s Latin America and beyond, looking at how Kazimir Malevich’s deceptively simple Black Square reverberated amongst artists in various countries throughout the following decades, creating a universal language that continues to shape art to this day.

Cite this page as: HENI Talks, "Kazimir Malevich, Black Square (1915)," in Smarthistory, April 11, 2023, accessed March 19, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/kazimir-malevich-black-square-1915/.