Selbstbildnis

Malevich painted himself like this in 1933, and the costume is a deliberate throwback: the robes and cap of a Renaissance grandee, in a style that borrows from Italian frescoes. By then abstract art had no place in the Soviet Union. The state had made Socialist Realism official, and the pure geometry Malevich had pioneered was treated as a dead end. He had spent time under arrest a few years earlier. So he turns figurative, presenting himself with an almost saintly gravity, one hand raised. But down in the lower right corner, where a painter signs his name, he put a tiny black square, the emblem of the abstract art he had unveiled back in 1915. He died two years after this, in 1935.