Inscribed Vandalism: The Black Square at One Hundred

Phillip Dennis Cate, “The Spirit of Montmartre,” in The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor and the Avant-Garde, 1975–1905, eds. Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw (New Brunswick, NJ: State University of New Jersey Rutgers, 1996), 29–31.

Alphonse Allais, Album Primo-Avrilesque (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, éditeur, 1897). For color reproductions, see The Spirit of Montmartre, color plates on 8–9.

Kazimir Malevich, “To State Bureaucrats of Art” (“Gosudarstvennikam ot iskusstva”), Anarchy (Anarkhiya) 53 (1918). Republished in Kazimir Malevich, Collected Works in Five Volumes (Sobranie sochinenii v pyati tomakh), vol. 1 (Moscow: Gilea, 1995), 75–87.

For Z. I. Tregulova’s talk, see →.

The press conference was convened on November 18, 2015 and was run by Tregulova, along with the gallery’s senior research associate, I. A. Vakar, and a member of the department of scientific analysis, E. A. Voronina.

The investigation was performed by staff of the Tretyakov Gallery, under the leadership of I. A. Vakar, an art historian who has devoted many years to studying Malevich’s art. The team included members of the department of scientific analysis: Y. A. Voronina, I. A. Kasatkina, Ye. A. Liubavskaya, A. A. Mareev, and I. V. Rustamova.

The new discoveries that were outlined at the headline-making press conference were described in greater detail in I. A. Vakar’s book The Black Square, published by the Tretyakov Gallery to mark the picture’s hundredth anniversary. I shall base my subsequent comments in this article on the text of that book, oral presentations made by representatives of the gallery in October and November 2015, and the paper given by I. A. Vakar at the Malevich Society conference “100 Years of Suprematism,” held at the Harriman Institute in New York on December 11–12, 2015, together with the discussion that developed after it.

M. Vikturina and A. Lukanova, “A Study of Technique: Ten Paintings by Malevich in the Tretiakov Gallery,” in Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935 (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum of Art, 1990), 195.

Vakar’s note, number 54, to this phrase: “Here I offer my own authorial interpretation, a different reading is given in the Appendix.”

Note 55 in Vakar’s text gives the following reference: “Artistic Parodies” (“Khiudozhestvennye parodii”).

I. A. Vakar, Kazimir Malevich: The Black Square (Moscow: The State Tretyakov Gallery, 2015), 24–25. All emphasis added.

This is a failure of attention on the part of the authors or the editor—in this reading the inscription looks like “A Battle of nerves”: no comment is made here on the divergence from Vakar’s account. (Translator’s note: There is, of course, only partial correspondence between the putative Russian letters and the English rendition here—not to mention the fact that Russian has no articles.)

Ye. A. Voronina and I. V. Rustamova, “Results of a technological investigation of The Black Suprematist Square by K. S. Malevich,” in Vakar, Kazimir Malevich: The Black Square, 57.

Vakar, Kazimir Malevich: The Black Square, 24.

Cate, “The Spirit of Montmartre,” in The Spirit of Montmartre.

A. Kruchenykh, I. Kliun, and K. Malevich, The Secret Vices of Academics (Tainye poroki akademikov) (Moscow, 1915). Republished in Malevich, Collected Works in Five Volumes, vol. 1.

Vakar deliberately highlights the two letters written by Malevich and sent in June 1915 to Matiushin in Petrograd: “The letters repeat the same content; although this is standard practice in wartime, in this case the repetition appears strange, since drawings were included with one of the letters. But with which one? Shatskikh believes it was with the first letter, which is unlikely (in that case Malevich would not have used the phrase: ‘I have sent you the drawings.’)” It was the letter sent on the ninth that inlcluded the drawings. Note 37 to these phrases in Vakar’s book reads: “Shatskikh’s assumption that the second letter contains permission for publication does not stand up to scrutiny: in those times copyright was by no means strictly observed, as is testified, in particular, by the publishing practice of D. D. Burliuk, who printed the works of a number of authors (for instance, Kandinsky) without even informing them.” Vakar, Kazimir Malevich: The Black Square, 17. Permit me to point out that these statements by Vakar are incorrect. Matiushin believed—that is, he knew—that the drawings were sent with the first letter; he made a note on the envelope with a stamp from June 9, 1915: “Malevich’s sketches for the Opera Victory over the Sun.” (Shatskikh did not “assume,” but followed his indication.) As for copyright being, in Vakar’s opinion, “by no means strictly” observed “in those times,” the example adduced repudiates her claim: Burliuk could only publish the works of Kandinsky if they had been sent and provided to him by the inhabitant of Munich, who by this very act authorized their publication. However, the inclusion of Kandinsky in the team of leftist artists in the leaflet “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”—without his being informed that his name had been used—provoked an indignant response and crushing rebuff from Kandinsky, who broke off all relations with the shameless David Burliuk. But in the circle of Matiushin, Kruchenykh, and Malevich, copyright was in fact strictly observed: in May 1915 the transrational poet sent Matiushin repeated permission for the publication of the text of his libretto for Victory over the Sun, since he feared that the first letter had been lost. It is hard to understand why Vakar chooses not to take this circumstance into account, since it is hard to accept the idea that she is unaware of it, as these letters by Kruchenykh have been repeatedly published.

Aleksandra Shatskikh, “Kazimir Malevich in Poetry,” in K. Malevich Poetry, ed. Aleksandra Shatskikh (Moscow: Epifaniya, 2000), 9–61; Aleksandra Shatskikh, “Kazimir Malevich: The Will to Literature” (“Kazimir Malevich: volya k slovesnosti”), in Malevich, Collected Work in Five Volumes, vol. 5, 26–27.

See, e.g., →.

In internet search engines, a new chain of links appeared in which the key words were: “Malevich,” “Black Square,” and “racist joke.” The reaction of journalists and commentators can be defined in a single word: shock. From among the batch of publications I can name: Anna Khachiyan, “Racist conceptual joke discovered in Malevich’s Black Square,” Hope&Fears, November 12, 2015 →; and Carey Dunne, “Art Historians Find Racist Joke Hidden Under Malevich’s ‘Black Square,’” Hyperallergic, November 13, 2015 →. The authors of publications and commentaries, who at times say things that are very unjust about the Suprematist artist and his work, are absolutely certain that “a racist joke about negroes” was written by Malevich, since, after all, this was announced by the artist’s own compatriots, the collective of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Russia’s main museum of national art.

Malevich’s first one-man exhibition was prepared by him in person just before he left for Vitebsk. The exhibition remained in K. I. Mikhailova’s large salon from the end of October 1919, but the salon was closed because there was no firewood for heating; it only opened on March 25, 1920, and then closed in the summer, but not before June.

The conference was held while the exhibition “Kazimir Malevich 1878–1935” was running at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Communicated by Troels Andersen, a participant in the consultations between experts at this conference, in a telephone conversation with the author in October 2015. The experts instructed the inscription to be removed as not having been written by the artist’s own hand.

Cited in A. Krusanov, The Russian Avant-Garde (Russkii avangard), vol. 1, book 2 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010), 494.

Ibid.

However, the culprit, Mr. A. Brener, proved to have calculated correctly: his name will go down in history, although only in the small-print notes to the biography of Malevich’s picture White Cross on a White Background. The mischievous “action artist” spent a long time planning his only “creative achievement,” thoroughly studying the prison terms for vandalism in the US and Holland; in America he would have faced decades of imprisonment, so he chose Holland, knowing that there he would be given less than a year for an “artistic gesture.” The desecrator and vandal walked free after seven months.