I first heard about the Black Square in my childhood from my mother. She used to drag me to art exhibitions. Many years have passed, and I can now say, "OK, it's cool."
I won’t explain why—it’s something anyone can look up or come up with on their own. As of today, four Black Squares are known. The first one, the "original" from 1915, is the one currently hanging at the exhibition Avant-Garde, List #1. It was the one placed at the head of Malevich’s coffin during his funeral, and it was the one displayed at the first Suprematist exhibition. The second was made for the 1923 Venice exhibition. The third is a copy of the first, created in 1929, as Malevich realized during his lifetime that the first one was cracking and would need a copy. The fourth, discovered in 1993, is the Samara one. Unknown distant relatives brought it to the local branch of Inkombank as collateral. All four squares are owned by Russian museums—two in the Tretyakov Gallery, and one each in the Hermitage and the Russian Museum. None of them have ever been properly auctioned. The last one, the Samara one, was bought by Potanin and transferred to the Hermitage for 1 million dollars. So, the price of a square can only be estimated based on the conditional market situation and demand for Russian Avant-Garde and Malevich in particular. Conditionally, anywhere from 1 to 80 million dollars.
And yes, of course, its value is not in the stylish black-and-white or the straight angles (by the way, the squares are different, and not all of them have straight edges). It’s a philosophical concept, a question and answer to years of artistic search, a new word, infinity, the sum of all colors, shapes, and dimensions, the boundary of worlds, and a portal. And while other countries gave the world Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, etc., when it comes to the Avant-Garde, Russia is ahead of the rest of the world. After the List #1 exhibition ends, the Tretyakov Gallery promises to hang two squares—the 1915 and 1929 ones—next to each other (this was briefly done last year). Stay tuned for reports!
#blacksquare #malevich #listnumberone #tretyakovgallery #russianavantgarde #suprematism
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