Black Square Unmasked (Scroll horizontally to view images and vertically to read text.)

BSU-1 (Art Nouveau - "F. Champenois Imprimeur-Éditeur" by Alfons Mucha, 1897)

BSU-2 (Barbizon School - "The Old Oak" by Jules Dupré, c1870)

BSU-3 (Biedermeier - "Corpus Christi Morning" by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, 1857)

BSU-4 (Cloisonnism - "Vision After the Sermon" by Paul Gauguin, 1888)

BSU-5 (Decadent - "Pornocrates" by Félicien Rops)

The premise for the project - according to Kazimir Malevich, the originator of Suprematism and creator of "Black Square": "To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth." Suprematism represents an anti-materialist, anti-utilitarian philosophy. Malevich continues to state, "Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without 'things' (that is, the "time-tested well-spring of life")." (Part II of The Non-Objective World, 1927)

To unmask "Black Square" is to remove this equalizer of all art movements, to reveal such (art movements) as insignificant in the mind of Malevich on behalf of Suprematism. The only true reality for Malevich - absolute non-objectivity. He states, "A blissful sense of liberating non-objectivity drew me forth into a 'desert', where nothing is real except feeling." (Part II of The Non-Objective World, 1927)

Click on above images to view in their entirety the art works for their respective art movements.