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.