Supremus Nr. 58: Gelb und Schwarz

By 1916 Kazimir Malevich had stripped painting down to what he called pure feeling: floating bars and slivers of colour on white, no landscape, no figure, nothing to name. This one, a diagonal drift of yellow and black, belongs to a series he numbered Supremus. The name came from a magazine he was planning with a small circle of artists in Moscow, a journal that would announce their discoveries to the world. The magazine never appeared. The paintings kept the title. He made them while Russia was at war and a year before the revolution that would, for a time, put abstract artists like him near the centre of official culture. Here there is only the tilt of the shapes, held in balance as if caught mid-fall.