![]() ![]() In the seventeenth century, this mourning tradition was perpetuated in a secular context. The image is not simply symbolic the totality of its bleakness, contained only by the edges of the page, has a positively traumatic effect, albeit a miniaturised one. While concentrating the painter’s infinite anguish at the suffering of Christ into a moment of unyielding blackness, the image also serves as a trigger for the viewer. Each page is overlaid with an evenly spread web of red beads, depicting the drops of blood that fell from his wounds. For instance, a book of devotions in the British Library from around 1500 includes several hand-painted black pages, suggesting the utterly desolate state of the world following the crucifixion and death of Christ. As a memorial, its black page stands at the tail end of a tradition of “mourning pages”, which were occasionally included in books from the fifteenth century onwards as signs of abject grief. In fact, Tristram Shandy represents something of a turning point in the history of Malevich’s precursors. And in 1759, Laurence Sterne inserted an entirely black page into his rambling novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman as a self-consciously exaggerated acknowledgement of the death of the parson Yorick. Some of these precedents are reasonably well known - for instance, the astrologer-physician Robert Fludd used a black square to represent the universe before the world was created, in his 1617 Utriusque Cosmi (or History of Two Worlds). ![]() It was the “final” work of art but it was also an iconic and magical object, intended to propel viewers beyond themselves, and beyond all difference in the world, into a state of undifferentiated non-objectivity. Black Square was a sign that this philosophical task had been accomplished. Eventually even the convention of art could be dispensed with: creative consciousness would stand free - immediately, or unmediated. Malevich took this process a step further by claiming that not only should “pure art” be free of any dependence on subject matter for its expressive effect, but that creativity no longer needed art through which to manifest. Following centuries of naturalistic representation, during which the visual arts had revolved around their subject matter, artists now became interested in the language of art itself, eventually reducing it to its bare essentials - colours and forms - at the expense of subject matter. It consummated a process that was started by the Impressionists in the 1870s - the dismantling of art’s visual language into its component parts. On the other hand, Black Square seemed to bring the history of art to a conclusive end. Hence his name for the style: Suprematism. As an unremitting expanse of the darkest colour, it offered the maximum possible visual experience there was no work of art that was not somehow implicitly present in it. On the one hand, Malevich considered the picture to be the ultimate work, taking the practice of art as far as it could possibly go. Kasimir Malevich’s 1915 Black Square is surely one of the most extraordinary paintings ever produced.
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