Iconisation at Work. Malevich’s Black Square, the Modern Icon at Tate Modern

The exhibition Malevich at Tate Modern in London in 2014 is analysed in an attempt to discern how Kazimir Malevich’s artistic trajectory was presented as “groundbreaking, iconic, innovative” and his painting Black Square (1915) was emphasised as “an icon for a modern age.” It is pointed out what was underlined and what was understated at the exhibition; how Malevich’s work was de-contextualised, exempted from the context of the eventful Russian avant-garde, and re-contextualised into the neater development of Western modernist painting. The use of vocabulary pertaining to the images of a holy person is shown to be congruent with the modernist history of modern art.