ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - After a half-century of political exile and a decade in a private collection, one of the signature works of 20th-century art has been given a public place of honor here.
In the State Hermitage Museum, where the walls are crammed with Rembrandts, Michelangelos and other masterpieces, Black Square by Kazimir Malevich hangs in a room by itself with its own uniformed guard.
Many visitors looking for Renoirs or Picassos wander in, glance at the 21-inch-square painting of a black square on a white background and shrug.
But the work, experts say, is more than just a depiction of a simple geometric form.
"The painting of the Black Square is the event in the history of 20th-century art," says Yelena Basner, a curator with the State Russian Museum here.
It prophesied, she says, both the brave beginning and the tragic end of Russia's rich avant-garde art movement. And as one of the first abstract works, it shocked the art world and influenced much of the Western art that followed.
The painting is one in a series of four similar Black Squares, executed by Malevich and first exhibited in 1915. (The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore will be showing three works by Malevich, including Red Square, in a major exhibition from Feb. 13 to May 25, 2003, called Origins of the Russian Avant-Garde.)
When Black Square was put up for sale this spring for a bankruptcy, some feared there were plans to sell it abroad.
Considered lost after the artist's death in 1935, the painting turned up in the early 1990s, when a relative of Malevich's wife brought it in a bag to the Samara branch of Russia's Inkombank. The family said the painting, as the work of an artist considered an enemy of the state, had been hidden for decades. At one point, it was kept in a KGB safe, at another in a potato crate.
Inkombank's president, Vladimir Vinogradov, reportedly paid $320,000 for the work, which became the crown jewel of an extensive collection of 20th-century art. The former engineer had launched the private bank in the kitchen of his communal apartment during the era of perestroika in the 1980s. It became the centerpiece of a conglomerate that held major interests in oil, steel, aircraft, candy and timber companies.
Vinogradov's business empire collapsed in the financial crisis of 1998, and the art collection was scheduled to be sold this spring to help settle the bank's debts.
As the sale approached, Black Square was valued at $1 million, alarming art specialists who said it was actually worth up to $20 million. The fire-sale appraisal prompted speculation the auction had been rigged - that the painting would be sold at a low price, cheating creditors, then resold abroad for closer to its market value.
The situation was resolved when the Ministry of Culture declared the painting a "state cultural monument" and one of Russia's tycoons, Vladimir O. Potanin, paid $1 million to buy it for the Hermitage.
The impulse, Potanin said, came "from the soul."
Just as the Black Square became symbolic of the Russian avant-garde, so has its acquisition signaled a new era for the Hermitage, considered one of the world's great museums of traditional art.
It was the first time a private donor had given the museum a painting, suggesting that other wealthy Russians might consider patronizing the arts, too.
And, until now, the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg have been the great repositories of Russian art. The Hermitage, housed in a five-building complex here that includes the sumptuous Winter Palace of the czars, has been known for its spectacular collection of pre-Revolutionary, non-Russian art.
In 2000, it entered into a collaboration with the Guggenheim, and last fall the two organizations opened the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas, where works from both are displayed.
Last month, the museums announced plans to open another branch, here on Palace Square. The Hermitage-Guggenheim Foundation (Potanin is chairman of the board and became a Guggenheim board member in January) plans to turn the 450,000-square-foot General Staff building into a showcase for modern art.
Malevich's influential painting will hang there.
After the 1920s, Malevich fell afoul of Soviet authorities, who favored "socialist realist" pictures of workers marching with upturned faces. But his work had a tremendous impact on important Western artists, such as the American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko.
"He is certainly one of the most important artists of the Russian avant-garde," says Timothy Harte, an expert in modern Russian art who teaches at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. "He is incredibly important."
Born in the countryside near Kiev, Malevich was the son of a Polish engineer in a factory that produced sugar from beets. While still a child, he began painting rural scenes in a rustic style. When his father died in 1904, Malevich, then 20, went to Moscow to attend art school.
In rapid succession, he worked his way through the fashionable isms of his era: impressionism, fauvism and cubism. But by 1915 he had broken completely with tradition, producing a number of geometric abstract canvases - including his first Black Square. Malevich had decided, with mystical chutzpah, that his non-representational works represented the ultimate artistic development of Western art, which he called "suprematism."
"All of a sudden, he produced just amazing work, which was so unlike art being produced in the West," Harte says.
What was needed, Malevich declared in a 1916 manifesto, was a clean break with the natural and realistic paintings of the past. "We will not see a pure painting before the habit to see in canvases depictions of nature, Virgins or shameless Venuses, is abandoned," he wrote.
When the Bolshevik Revolution swept across Russia, Malevich and other avant-garde artists were enthusiastic supporters. Many were rewarded with prominent positions. Malevich became the director of the State Institute of Fine Arts, stopped painting and began writing theoretical works.
As the Soviet authorities became the establishment, they became increasingly uncomfortable with anti-establishment avant-garde art. By 1926, Malevich had fallen from favor. An article in a Leningrad newspaper that year denounced his State Institute of Fine Arts and Malevich under the headline, "A Monastery on State Budget."
Malevich was removed as director of the institute, and a month later it was closed. With some difficulty, Malevich persuaded Soviet authorities to let him travel abroad. Packing up 70 of his paintings, drawings and charts, he traveled to Berlin in 1927 and staged a retrospective of his work.
The exhibit created a sensation, introducing Soviet avant-garde art to the West even as it was in the process of being smothered at home. Ordered back to Leningrad, he left his artworks in the care of a German architect, hoping to exhibit them in other European cities.
Malevich was never allowed to leave the Soviet Union again. He was arrested in 1930 and questioned for three months about his political beliefs and his suspect artistic tastes.
Part of the collection he left behind in Berlin was sent to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Part had to be hidden from the Nazis, who also hated modern art.
During this miserable period, Basner says, Malevich "began the reconstruction of his evolution as a painter." He began once again to paint scenes of peasants, reapers and woodcutters like those he had made as a young man. But they had a surrealistic quality and were painted against stark landscapes.
Then, in a 1932 exhibit, two of Malevich's abstract squares appeared: a Red Square and a fourth Black Square.
To many, that exhibit marked the symbolic end of the avant-garde movement in the Soviet Union. That year, authorities abolished all independent art organizations. Many of the country's most famous artists were imprisoned, exiled or executed.
Malevich died of cancer in Leningrad in 1935. According to one family legend, one of the mourners carried his final Black Square behind his coffin. After Stalin's great purges began in 1937, he was posthumously declared a "bourgeois formalist" and an enemy of the people. Relatives say they were terrified even to whisper his name.
"His end is the end of the idea of utopia in Russian avant-garde art," says Bastner. "This is his tragedy, and the tragedy of the Russian avant-garde."
Yelena Ilingina of The Sun's Moscow bureau contributed to this article.