After His Untimely Death, Rutherford Chang’s Survey Rewrites What a Square Can Do

Art history has been punctuated by debates over what a square can mean or do. For Kazimir Malevich, the black square was, in a sense, painting’s building block—a way to strip art down to its most fundamental form. For Ad Reinhardt, it marked an endpoint: He described his black canvases as the last paintings that could be made, as though abstraction had reached its logical conclusion. Of course, his was not the final word. Josef Albers continued the inquiry, nesting colorful quadrilat