Head of a Peasant Girl

This head comes from just before Malevich threw the visible world out of his painting altogether. Around 1913 he was building his figures out of gleaming, metal-looking tubes and cones — a Russian answer to the Cubism and Futurism then arriving from Paris and Milan — and he kept returning to Russian peasants as his subject. Within about two years he would paint the Black Square and give up recognisable things for pure geometry. This girl belongs to a whole cycle of field-workers he made on the way there. Her face is assembled from those same hard, curved segments, more like machined parts than skin, the features flattened almost into a pattern of cones and light.