Shape in art is a flat area set off by an outline or by a change of color. It comes in two families: geometric shapes, which have names and rules, like the circle, the square and the triangle, and organic shapes, which are irregular and borrowed from living things, like a leaf, a cloud or a body.
The work where shape is easiest to see is Kazimir Malevich's Black Square, painted in 1915, a single black shape and nothing else.
Shape is flat by definition. Give it depth, so that a circle turns into a ball, and the word changes to form. A shape appears wherever a line closes on itself or one color stops against another, so every painting is full of them. Geometric ones look made by people, and organic ones look grown.
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Black Square looks like the cleanest shape ever painted, a start from nothing. In November 2015, ahead of the painting's centenary, researchers at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow announced that it sits on top of two earlier pictures.
X-rays showed a brightly colored Cubo-Futurist composition at the bottom, and over it a second composition that the gallery's researcher Yekaterina Voronina calls proto-Suprematist. Only then came the black. The colors of that middle layer can still be seen in the cracks.
So the picture that stands for a blank slate was never blank. And beneath the paint there is something else, a line of handwriting that reads like a joke.
Is the Black Square really a square?
Not quite. None of its sides runs parallel to the frame, and the shape is not a true square…
What You'll Discover
Whose joke hides under the paint.
Where geometric ends and organic begins.
Who put his name on the silhouette.
What a stockbroker saw in Matisse.