Get it over with. Head straight for the halfway point of this show. Go and see that Mona Lisa of modernism: Kazimir Malevich’s iconic Black Square. You are unlikely to find it displayed so evocatively again in your lifetime. Tate Modern, in a major retrospective of a radical innovator who can probably be counted the first creator of a completely abstract canvas, takes “the zero of form”, as he described his now legendary picture, and sets it as nearly as possible back in the context in which it was first displayed.
In 1915, when the landmark Last Exhibition of Futurist Paintings 0.10 was put on in Petrograd, visitors were completely unprepared for the shock. Here was nothing they recognised: no portraits, still lives or