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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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…
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