Morning in the Village after Snowstorm

Kazimir Malevich painted this in 1912, during the short period when he worked in a manner called Cubo-Futurism. That style was a Russian fusion of two recent imports: Cubism, the French method of breaking objects apart into flat facets, and Futurism, the Italian movement preoccupied with speed and machinery. Malevich used the combination to rebuild ordinary rural subjects out of hard geometric solids — cones, cylinders and wedges — so that villagers and buildings take on the look of polished metal. He had developed a strong interest in Russian icons and peasant folk art around 1908, and he kept returning to village life as a subject even as his painting moved further from ordinary appearances. The picture was shown at the Target exhibition in Moscow in 1913. Within three years Malevich had abandoned recognisable subjects altogether and launched Suprematism, an art of pure geometric form, unveiling his Black Square in Petrograd in December 1915. He was born near Kyiv in 1879 and died in Leningrad in 1935, by which time official Soviet taste had turned decisively against the abstraction he helped invent.