Black Square (1930)

Malevich was arrested in Leningrad in September 1930 and held for about three months, questioned about his work. The last of his four black squares was painted around that time, the smallest of them at roughly 53 centimetres a side. It is usually connected with the anniversary exhibition Artists of the RSFSR: 15 Years, which opened in Leningrad in 1932, where a black square and a red one stood at the centre of the room given to him. That spring a Party resolution had dissolved the independent artists' groups and pointed everything toward a single official manner. In 1993 someone left this canvas at the Samara branch of Inkombank as security for a loan and never came back for it, and after the bank failed it was bought for the Hermitage in 2002 with money from the businessman Vladimir Potanin.