TRETYAKOV GALLERY, Malevich's Black Square

The famous Black Square by Kazimir Severinovich Malevich is considered as one of the most important works not only of abstract painting, but of 20th-century Western art. The work is frequently invoked by critics, historians, curators and artists as the "zero point of painting", referring to the painting’s historical significance.

Malevich was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1879 and died in Leningrad, present-day St. Petersburg, in 1935. He painted the first version of this unusual artwork in 1915. The painting was first exhibited in the same year in Dobychina, a private gallery in St. Petersburg as part of the Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10.

You should know that Malevich also painted four other variants on this piece, the last of which was probably painted in the late 1920s or early 1930s, and not in 1913 as the painter wrote on the back of the canvas....