MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
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] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
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.
More from this author
ANGUS REID applauds the ambitious occupation of a vast abandoned paper factory by artists mindful of the departed workforce
ANGUS REID calls for artists and curators to play their part with political and historical responsibility
ANGUS REID recommends a landmark work of aural history that follows the intertwined lives of four International Brigaders
ANGUS REID reviews a book that is an important and comprehensive work of documentation
