Quadrato nero (1915)

Malevich first showed this black square in Petrograd in December 1915, at an exhibition with the odd title 0,10, and he hung it in a way every Russian in the room would have felt in the gut. He placed it high, bridging a corner of the room, in the exact spot where an Orthodox household hangs its holy icon. He called it a bare icon without a frame. The idea was to sweep away every recognisable thing, no faces, no objects, no sky, and leave painting at zero, which is what the exhibition's title pointed to. The black has since dried and cracked into a fine web, and under a microscope conservators at the Tretyakov found faint writing beneath the paint, apparently a joking title borrowed from an old French cartoon, a battle of figures in a dark cave.