Two years before the train carrying Lenin pulled in at the Finland Station in Petrograd and decanted the man who then precipitated the Russian Revolution, Kazimir Malevich had instigated an artistic revolution in the city. In 1915, at a show entitled “The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting 0, 10”, he had shown a picture of a plain, black square on a white background. Hung high in the corner of the gallery, just below the ceiling – the place in Russian homes usually reserved for an icon – Malevich’s Black Square announced, he said, the end of traditional art.
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