Was Malevich a racist?

In 2015, researchers from the Tretyakov Gallery, which houses one of the several versions of Malevich's Black Square, examined the painting through microscopic analysis and uncovered an inscription hidden beneath layers of paint: "Battle of negroes in a dark cave."

The inscription may have been written by Malevich himself as a reference to a drawing by the French so-called "humorist" Alphonse Allais, a black rectangle published under the title Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night. It may equally have been scrawled by a vandal during one of the painting's exhibition.

While this inscription is highly spoiling the "Black Square", its authorship is disputed and its potential to serve racial slurs isn't proven by any art historian.

I would not be running this project if I would believe Malevich was racist or promoting a racist ideology through his art. I highly believe he wasn't. In the early century, a time of rising nationalist movements, Malevich did not engage in any ideology. He opposed the totalitarism of the sovietic "socialist realism" imposed by Lenin and Stalin.

His Suprematist philosophy brought a visual world of freedom and pure possibility, far to any nationalist, colonialist and violent ideology, that consumed so many artists of his time.

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