Quadrado negro (1924)

This is not the black square of 1915. That first one, hung high across the corner of a Petrograd gallery, had already cracked and darkened badly by the early 1920s. So around 1923 a new one was made, more than a metre across, as part of a set with a black circle and a black cross meant to travel to the Venice Biennale. The three were painted at Malevich's institute in Petrograd by his closest students, Nikolai Suetin, Konstantin Rozhdestvensky and Anna Leporskaya, working under him, and arguments about how much of the surface is his own hand have never quite stopped. They never reached Venice. The Soviet organisers left them out and the set stayed where it was. It entered the Russian Museum in 1936, the year after Malevich died, and hangs in the Benois wing.