A black square on white snow

Abstract

This essay will concern Kasimir Malevich’s “Black Square” (Черный квадрат/Tcherni Kvadrat) and its historical aftermath. I am fully aware of the increasing demography of scholars both in the western and in the russian spectrum. Like many others avant-gardists and paraphrasing Peter Osborne in a different context, Malevich “breeds commentary like vaccine in a lab.”