PAINTERLY REALISM OF A BOY WITH A KNAPSACK
KAZIMIR MALEVICH, 1915
Okay so. The title of this thing is longer than the actual painting. You ready? "Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack. Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension." And the painting? A black square. And a little red one. That's it. That's the whole thing. So, uh, where's the boy. Where's the knapsack. Yeah, there's no boy. Never was gonna be one. He sticks this giant cosmic name on two little squares on purpose, and that gap, between the huge title and the two shapes, that's the bit. Except he's not kidding. He means every word. This is 1915. He's just cooked up a thing he calls Suprematism. His own description: he'd boiled himself down to "the zero of form" and "escaped from the circle of things." Which, translated out of guru, means a painting doesn't have to be a picture of anything anymore. No boy, no apple, no saint. Just shapes. Just color. Hanging there. And get this. He called it realism. Straight up. "New painterly realism," his phrase. Like, two squares are more real than a painting of a boy, not less. And, honestly? Kind of has a point. The squares aren't faking anything. They're not pretending to be a guy, or a window, or a nice day in the country. A square's just a square. Can't lie to you. So look at 'em. Big black square. Little red one. Tipped a bit, floating on all that white. He's not painting a thing. He's painting a thing with nothing in it. And here's the real move. The show where these first go up, 1915, he sticks a plain black square way up high in the corner of the room. Now, in a Russian house, that corner's got exactly one job. It's where the religious icon goes. The holy picture. So everybody who walks in just gets it. He's not hanging a painting. He's hanging a religion. A black square, right where God used to be. So, yeah. Either it's the most pretentious thing a person's ever done with a ruler and two colors. Or it's one of the gutsiest. With this guy, it's both. He looked at everything painting had ever done, all the kings and saints and bowls of fruit, and just went, nah. Start over. From a black square. And a name three sizes too big.