Foreshadowed: Malevich’s "Black Square" and Its Precursors

by Andrew Spira

An exploration of Kasimir Malevich’s radical 1915 artwork, its predecessors, and its continuing relevance.
 
When Kasimir’s Malevich’s Black Square was produced in 1915, no one had ever seen anything like it before. And yet it does have precedents. In fact, over the previous five hundred years, several painters, writers, philosophers, scientists, and censors—each working independently towards an absolute statement of their own—alighted on the form of the black square or rectangle, as if for the first time.
 
This book explores the resonances between Malevich’s Black Square and its precursors, showing how a so-called genealogical thread binds them together into an intriguing, and sometimes quirky, sequence of modulations. Andrew Spira’s book explores how each predecessor both foreshadows Malevich’s work and, paradoxically, throws light on it, revealing layers of meaning that are often overlooked but which are as relevant today as ever.

Genres: Art

144 pages, Hardcover

Published July 6, 2022

Reviews

[Michael Ewins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my ideal kind of book - a single-object study that furrows deep into archival histories and conjures speculative associations, allowing the chosen object to emerge in myriad subjects that, on the surface, would appear beyond its scope. In this case, that most perplexing of surfaces, Malevich's Black Square, leads us from Pavlov's Dog to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Adolf Loos to Edwin A. Abbott, and includes map-making, comics, theology, and much more besides. Spira's scholarship is obsessive and lucidly realised, but importantly he's not bound by what he 'knows' - at several key points he admits that there's no clear evidence to support a creative link between, say, Malevich and the work of Les Incoherents, but neither is there definitive proof to refute it, so he finds imaginative pathways to suggest where parallel histories might have entwined.

One of the reasons I love Reaktion as a publisher is the ample illustration in their books, and Foreshadowed simply wouldn't work without the litany of supporting images to Spira's text. Several times I actually gasped at the visual shock of seeing the Black Square in a 13th Century manuscript, silent film still, or in Spira's own street photography. A book that starts exactly where you expect - with an image of a black square - and leads you through centuries of humans reckoning with the presence of absence and the knowability of the unknown. Art history at its most entertaining and, ironically, illuminating.