Círculo negro

A plain black circle on a white ground, and yet it belongs to one of the sharpest breaks in the history of painting. Malevich first showed a black circle in Petrograd in December 1915, at an exhibition he called 0.10, where he hung geometric shapes on bare walls and gave the movement a name, Suprematism, art reduced to pure feeling and pure form. This particular canvas is the version he painted around 1924, remaking the motif years later. By then Russia had been through revolution and civil war, and Malevich had convinced himself that painting could start again from nothing but shape and colour. The circle sits slightly off to one side, not dead centre, so it reads as a thing placed rather than a hole. It hangs now in the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg.