MALEVICH'S BLACK SQUARE

Michael Glover's recent review of Kasimir Malevich's painting Black Square in the Independent (16th July) justifies comment. 

It is accompanied by a photograph of a young woman studying it on the gallery wall: there it is - hung, lit and framed as if its secrets could only be revealed by scrutiny; by a connoisseurial gaze.

Photo: Independent

Glover does not like its current situation in the Tate Modern: "Why not be given the opportunity to see it as clearly as possible?", he asks; "Would it not have been more sensible to lift Black Square ... into a space of its own, so that we could subject it to the kind of contemplative scrutiny it surely merits?" ... and so on, and so on. 

Glover wanted the work to be treated with the respect of a Rothko, and he went on to refer to a conversation he had with Stella (as one does) remarking about the potential of abstraction in art.

What mid-century American abstract painters like Rothko or Stella - operating decades later in utterly different circumstances - can add to our understanding of the Malevich's suprematist piece, I fail to understand.

He got up close to the painting, and thought he could see "strange, small, wispy hauntings of spectral forms flitting across its surface", as if peering into Malevich's mind, or more likely as if looking at tea leaves at the bottom of a cup.

The point is, that Black Square is one of the greatest moments in twentieth century art because of what it was, rather than what it is now.