MOSCOW — Sophisticated X-ray technology revealed a mysterious inscription on Kazimir Malevich’s renowned 1915 “Black Square” painting, offering insights into the work’s cultural origins and meaning, experts at the Tretyakov Gallery said at a news conference here on Wednesday.
The three barely visible words, written in Russian on the lower left edge of the white border that surrounds the black square itself, seem to be part of the phrase “Negroes Battling at Night,” an apparent reference to an earlier painting by the French writer and humorist Alphonse Allais.
Russian researchers are still deciphering the phrase, which previously was thought to be Malevich’s signature. They believe that the artist made the inscription himself on a dry surface some time after the painting was finished.
The researchers do not know whether Malevich made the inscription while working on the painting or later.
“There is no doubt that the creation of Allais became the source of inspiration for Malevich,” Konstantin Akinsha, a Malevich expert, said in an email. “Some commentators in Russia hurried to accuse him of plagiarism, but in reality the situation is much more complicated,” he added. “Malevich used Allais’s prank, but turned it into the realm of high art. The discovery is also interesting because it demonstrated how closely Russian avant-garde representatives were following the developments in France.”
Apart from the inscription, the investigation that was conducted for the work’s centenary this year discovered earlier layers of paint under the monochrome surface of cracked black paint. Experts already knew of the existence of other imagery underneath the black surface, but scanning revealed some further details.
“It was believed that this work was done spontaneously, but the results of our investigation reveal that the process of its creation was complex and took a long time,” Irina Vakar, the Tretyakov’s chief researcher of the Russian avant-garde, said at the news conference. “He knew a lot about what was going on in the art world.”