GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
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]
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
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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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