SIMON DUFF relishes the cross contamination of Damien Hirst’s greatest hits by street artists from France and the US
The Black Square of contention
ANGUS REID argues that what might have been impersonal for Kazimir Malevich has had a profound practical application for artists who embraced the October Revolution
A section of Suprematist works by Malevich exhibited at the 0,10 Exhibition, Petrograd, 1915
[Public Domain]
In view of the grooming gangs inquiry, SIMON PARSONS feels the relevance of this powerful examination of trauma suffered at Medomsley Youth Detention Centre
JOHN GREEN doubts the motivations of a US war photographer who never questions why, or for whom, she is producing images of imperialist conflict
MARIA DUARTE reviews Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Hedda, The Mastermind, and Regretting You
TONY CONWAY welcomes a thrilling and concise history of Hope not Hate, that is also a manual full of tactical advice
PAUL DONOVAN welcomes an inspiring account of living with deafness that has important lessons for the treatment of deaf people in today’s UK
Foreshadowed: Malevich’s Black Square and its precursors
by Andrew Spira
Reaktion Books £16.95
ANDREW SPIRA must be an inspiring art history lecturer. His book on Malevich unfolds as much as a visual argument as a verbal one and is recounted in one breath, as it were, without chapters or headings.
And you feel the canny strategies of a scholar playing to an audience of students.
He opens by asserting that Black Square, 1915, changed art and introduced monochrome painting as a genre that remains “an avant-garde right of passage.” Yet his argument will show the opposite — many images that came before and employ black squares from 17th-century Ethiopian Christian miniatures, to optical experiments, comic novels, cartoons, acts of censorship and the original anarchist flag.
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