Quattro quadrati

In December 1915, with the war grinding on, Malevich hung a room of strange paintings in Petrograd at a show he called The Last Futurist Exhibition. He put a plain black square high in one corner, the place a Russian home kept its holy icon. That was the debut of what he named Suprematism, painting stripped down to bare geometry and feeling. This canvas belongs to that moment. Four squares, black and white, split the surface into a checker with nothing in it to recognize, no figure, no landscape, no story. Malevich wanted to clear all of that away and start from zero. He showed 39 of these abstractions there, and visitors argued about whether they counted as pictures at all.