In December 1915, at the '0,10 — The Last Futurist Exhibition' in Petrograd, Kazimir Malevich showed 39 paintings; in the corner of the highest wall — the 'krasnyy ugol' (red corner) reserved by tradition for an Orthodox icon — he hung a square. It was a black block, deliberately roughly brushed, on a white ground. *Chernyy Kvadrat* (Black Square). There was no subject, no symbol, no landscape, no figure.

Malevich set out his position openly in the manifesto *From Cubism to Suprematism* published alongside it: 'I declare that artists have been freed from the imitation of the object. The supremacy of pure feeling.' Suprematism — meaning 'supremacy' — was the abandonment of figurative subject in painting and the depiction of geometric forms invested directly with emotional value.

The square was not new — abstraction had been moving forward in parallel between 1910 and 1913 in Kandinsky, Kupka, and Mondrian. But the Black Square did something else: it left no reference at all. Kandinsky's abstraction still carries music, emotion, or the rhythm of a landscape. Malevich kept from figurative painting only the most plainly defined geometric figure — the square — and erased the rest. The subject of the painting is now the painting itself.

From 1915 on Malevich continued to hang Black Square in the top corner of later exhibitions. In the early Soviet period, when radical cultural politics was at its strongest, Suprematism for a moment looked likely to become state art; but with the doctrinal turn to Socialist Realism in 1932, Malevich was persecuted and his works hidden. The *Square* is today at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.