Partielle Finsternis

In 1914 cheap printed reproductions of famous paintings were suddenly everywhere in Russia, and none was copied more than Leonardo's Mona Lisa. Malevich took one of those prints, glued it to his canvas, and struck two red crosses through her face. Around her he pasted scraps of real newspaper, one an ordinary classified ad, and scattered them among floating geometric planes. He called the tangle Partial Eclipse. It was a joke aimed at reverence itself, made in the last months before the war swallowed the calm world it had mocked. The next year Malevich showed his Black Square in Petrograd, a picture with nothing in it left to recognize.