9 October 2004. One of the fathers of non-representational painting is the Russian, Casimir Malevitch (1878-1935). In Modern Painting (Skira: 1960), Maurice Raynal (as translated by Stuart Gilbert) says of him that "even when he carried abstract art to its highest pitch, Malevitch usually started out from reality, particularly the geometric lay-out of fields as seen from the air. By gradual degrees he came not only to strip the object of its poetic overtones, but to express what he termed 'the feeling of the absence of the object.'" His most famous painting was of a black square on a white ground. "He declared that a surface painted in this way is more 'alive' than the representation of a face with two eyes and a smile stuck on it." He named his procedure "Suprematicism, for "basic to (his) theories (was) his desire to attain the 'supreme aim' of art . . . by freeing painting and architecture 'from all sociological or materialist associations."

According to Raynal, "Malevitch was, it seems, outdone by his compatriot Rodchenko, who launched at Moscow an 'Anti-objectivist' movement and carried his exclusion of all artistic or emotive considerations to the point of using only a ruler and compass for his compositions."

It is telling that Modern Painting includes no work by either Malevitch or Rodchenko. I have to admit that I have never been able to appreciate such minimalism . . . as art. I admire the concepts behind it. It seems to me a kind of art that had to be done, a courageous descent to a final fundamentality. But I think you need either poetic overtones or some kind of design elements more interesting than a single square or the like--preferably building out of a tradition of visual designs in parallel with music's building out of a tradition of auditory designs.

Thinking about all this, I wondered what the literary equivalent of Malevitch's black square might be. The word, "word," and nothing else on a page would be too potent, I feel. Would "a word" do? I suspect any word or phrase is necessarily too articulate to act as minimalistically as Malevitch's square.

Th                                                                                                       .

The above is another failed attempt, but maybe getting closer to the idea. . . .