Čiurlionio juodojo kvadrato transformacijos Malevičiaus suprematizme
Transformations of Čiurlionis’s Black Square in Malevich’s Concept of Suprematism

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the influence of M. K. Čiurlionis’s artistic legacy on the Kazimir Malevich’s famous painting, „Black Square“. In 1908, upon arriving in Saint Petersburg, Čiurlionis attracted significant interest among Russian avant-garde artists with his increasingly abstract paintings, which reflected the interaction between music and visual art characterized by a strong sense of musicality. Following Čiurlionis’s death in 1911, when the most influential Russian art critics, Alexander Benois and Sergei Makovsky, proclaimed him a genius, further intensifying the impact of his creative explorations on the Russian avant-garde. At one of the posthumous retrospective exhibitions, Malevich encountered Čiurlionis’s 1908 painting Vignette (Composition), which features a black triangle, a black circle, and a black square at its centre. This triad reappears, rendered in colour, in Čiurlionis’s final painting, „Ships“ (1909–1910), likely attesting to the conceptual importance of these symbolic forms for the Lithuanian artist. Malevich adopted this triad from Čiurlionis, replacing the triangle with a cross and transforming the black square into the core of his Suprematist theory.

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