In the Black Square

In December 1915, in Petrograd, Kazimir Malevich exhibited a black square painted on a white ground. Kandinsky spent the revolutionary years that followed in Moscow, among artists pushing painting toward flat geometric forms, and in June 1923 he painted this. The arrangement is reversed here. Black fills the surround, and on it floats a tilted white shape with four unequal sides. His German title, Im schwarzen Viereck, names a four-cornered figure rather than a true square. The Guggenheim reads that white plane as a nod to Malevich, and much of what happens inside it as landscape that never fully left Kandinsky's painting. Yellow scallops along the top read as clouds, a striped arc on the left as a rainbow, jagged black points in the middle as mountains, and a large circle as a sun. The painting has belonged to the Guggenheim since 1937, part of the founding collection given by Solomon Guggenheim himself.