I’m not a very artsy person, but I don’t see any real symbolism behind the black square. It’s just a black square. Even if there is meaning, why is it known as an Avant Garde? Surely something impactful deserves the title, and this is literally a black square; I know everything can be art but does a black square deserve to be an Avant Garde?
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ok so just in general its almost impossible to convey the context and culture in which the paintings were made so anyone’s understanding today is gonna be pretty surface level but i did go to art school and learn about this stuff so – the black square and all the other russian suprematist’s pieces of the time are basic and fundamental visual art, they are intentionally limited and unassuming, they are not meant to depict anything. you look at it and say “it’s just a black square” and it is. At the time (these guys were born in the 1800s) this was a “new or experimental idea” so yes to those classifying it, it is avant garde even though anyone could easily recreate it on their phone in seconds.
A lot of art is significant not because of what it depicts, but what it represents in the history of art, and how it shaped the course of this history.
In the 19th century, the visual arts moved away from ever more realistic depictions of people or landscapes (something that the upcoming art of photography could do much better and more accurately), and experimented with different forms of abstraction and symbolisms.
You can see this very e.g. in the way that cubists dissolved the view of the world into blocks, and then how abstract painters like Kandinsky let go of all references of the outside world and only painted abstract shapes.
In this context, a plain black picture is just the next logical step. It reduces the abstraction to the ultimate end point. Nothing could be *more* abstract than this.
By this, it also defines an end point. Since nobody could more to even more abstraction, they had to go another way. This route was blocked now.
So this was the equivalent of, in a game of chess, placing a pawn into a very, very strategically advantageous position, thus forcing the other player to completely abandon this half of the chess board. The rest of the game has to be played on the other side…
Reductio ad absurdum. Absurdity and audacity of it is the point.
Abstract artists of the time were angry with amateurs and scammers trying to pass off randomly painted shapes as art; this also extended to “friendly fire” accusations against prospective real artists who just weren’t famous. So Malevich, someone already critically acclaimed, drew the Black Square to protest and poke fun at the situation, and his joke worked too well and went down in history as one of the most famous works of art.
For a modern equivalent you could look at the situation with AI art. Some artists are called out for using AI just because their art feels too good to be true, and others win AI “art” contests as a form of protest.
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