Yes, Kazimir Malevich was a troll of the
artsy variety. His 1915 composition “Black Square” [oil on wood] is just that.
It’s a black square. It’s funny because regardless of the many people who don’t think that Black Square is art, it's one of the most recognized paintings in Russia for that very reason. He must've been laughing so hard, watching
artists talk over each other as they try to answer the question, “WHAT IS
ART?!” He totally pulled a Marcel Duchamp (The Frenchman who put this in an exhibition and played the art card)
More seriously, Black Square does hold historic significance. It's representative of the
beginning of the Russian avant-garde period where anything goes. Traditional
aesthetic values of the Romantic era disintegrates and artists begin to value
the unconventional. He studied and produced massive quantities of non-objective,
non-figurative (debatable) paintings. From one of his revolutionary series, he
developed the concept of suprematism in art, which is essentially the idea that
the elegance and conciseness of a simple geometric form is pleasurable to look
at. Malevich found minimalist interest in color, symmetry and balanced asymmetry,
space, line, and texture.
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