Geometry in the 20th and 21st centuries was adventurous – and apocalyptic

Almost a decade ago, David Cameron informed Tony Blair, unkindly but accurately, ‘You were the future once.’ A visitor to the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition, Adventures of the Black Square, might mutter the same words in front of the first exhibits.

It is now a century since Kazimir Malevich painted the starkest abstractions in the history of art: one simple geometric shape painted on a background of another colour. It was not, one might have thought, an idea with much mileage. Yet those early geometric abstractions had the compressed power of revolutionary manifestos.

For good or ill, there has followed 100 years of modernist, post-modernist, and now post-post-modernist geometry in art. This is the theme of the exhibition. It is the Whitechapel’s misfortune that this follows hard on a comprehensive Malevich blockbuster at Tate Modern last year and also a fine survey of Latin American abstraction at the RA.

Nonetheless, Adventures of the Black Square has an intriguing tale to tell. Essentially, Malevich’s masterpiece stood for the future, because it depicted nothing in particular. It was an icon — not in the loose, contemporary sense but in a precise, art-historical one. It was derived from the religious images of the eastern Church in its head-on clarity. Of course, it represented no holy figure or political doctrine. It was simply geometry. But that in itself was a kind of message, suggesting order, reason, harmony.

Away with the clutter of the past! That was the appeal, and also the big mistake that one sees being made in architectural schemes by Malevich and others, such as ‘Architechton’ (1924) by his associate, Ilya Chashnik. The error was that the nice clean rectangular forms in the drawing clearly came before much thought as to how human beings were going to live inside them.